Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, we get our knickers in a knot. Should we embrace a breast-beating white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of us learned in school? The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy. Whose day is it? Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples? Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other? Columbus day is, and will always remain, a paradox.
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By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2016- today is traditional Columbus Day. Two days was Columbus Day as officially observed, curiously coinciding with Double Ten, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew Imperial China’s Qing Dynasty. Today members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristóbal Colón, the adelantado, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island. From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach. In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag. The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like "now might be a good time to review our immigration policies."
The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus' arrival in the New World triggered the greatest Völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best. Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, Völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “Indians.” If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants. The term "Native American" is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Inuit as "First Peoples."
Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation. The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself. By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.
Within two centuries, all of this had gone. The westward migration triggered by Columbus' voyages had grown from trickle to flood. Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.
Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance. Is it Columbus Day? Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race? Is it Indigenous Peoples Day? Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called "half-a-millennium of resistance." As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man's-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled. Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors? Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?
The answer is: all of the above. We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the Völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place. The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent. Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy. The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos, caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.
The invasion has been a success. Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters. Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian. In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
Indeed, out of the Columbian encounter and the Columbian exchange that ineluctably followed it has come not merely an exchange -or at least a migration- of populations, but also an exchange of biodiversity as well. In 1492, the cuisine of Europe was innocent of any experience of such things as corn (by which I mean maize, not the grain which the British, who seemed unable to handle the English language, call corn and which the rest of the world calls wheat), tomatoes, potatoes, certain types of chile, vanilla, and those three essentials of decadent sex, chocolate, tobacco, and rubber. By the same token, the kitchens of America lacked citrus fruits, apples, mangoes, rice, onions, wheat, and that great staple of jittery people everywhere, coffee. Today, the Columbian exchange means that all of these foods have a place in the kitchens and on the dining tables of both Europe and the Americas.
But more to the point, the Columbian exchange ultimately produced on this continent “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln suggested so movingly at Gettysburg. And indeed, without Columbus, and before him, the Viking explorers, that new nation could never have come into being. And in a sense, that is the historical trade-off we have little choice but to accept. Our forebears did indeed bring forth on this continent a new nation.
And if that new nation did not initially live up to the grandeur of its conception, it still bequeathed to the world heritage of ongoing revolution. The American example has made a tour of the world; every national liberation struggle on the planet for the last 200 years has been a descendent of our American Revolution. Padre Hidalgo in Mexico, the angry, famished, Parisians who stormed the Bastille, Ilyich at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Gandhiji in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and a whole host of other revolutionaries bear some measure of debt to the the revolutionary rabble that found its courage and confidence at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
Yet a decent regard for the truth compels us to acknowledge that the American nation, conceived though it may have been with grandeur of vision, started life as a deeply flawed society with very real systemic faults. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln was right to refer to this country as “the last, best hope of Earth,” but the emphasis must still be on the word “hope,” as I believe it was for Lincoln himself. For Lincoln, with Jefferson one of the most formidable autodidacts ever to occupy the White House, must surely have been aware of Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker’s observation, repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Across more than 500 years, the long arc of our moral universe has bent toward justice, often imperceptibly and incrementally. The society we called forth on this continent has had to deal forthrightly and was often difficult honesty of self and purpose with its twin original sins of dispossession and slavery. For the arc of our moral universe to bend toward justice, we have had to dare to visualize and to realize a radical vision of a society in which everyone is created equal, including our First Peoples. A society in which everyone has a place at the table and an equal opportunity to participate in the life of the body politic.
We’re not there yet. If we are to keep bending that arc of the moral universe toward justice, we have no choice but to do right by those whom we have wronged. The long story of the post-contact encounter between the white migrants and the first peoples is one written in blood and tears. It is a grim tale of violence, dispossession, and the steady falling back of native peoples before the advance of the pale invaders from across the water. We cannot, as I suggested, reverse the pragmatic sanction of events. Yet we can and must insist that everyone, native and newcomer alike, have a place at our national table. Knowing as we do that the bones of the ancestors of both newcomer and native have become a part of this land, we have a responsibility to those ancestors to refrain from doing hurtful things like running pipelines through those sacred spaces which the bones of our ancestors have hallowed, far above our poor power to add or detract.
If we are to get a handle on Columbus Day, we have to be careful not to err too much on either side. Because in a sense, our approach to Columbus Day cannot be one of either/or. We cannot postulate of Columbus Day that it is a grim, zero-sum equation in which we can either speak of the triumph of the exploring spirit represented by Columbus and his voyage or of the history of “genocide,”a problematic term, because Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term in 1944, defined it as the intentional destruction of a people. Indeed, to the extent that some of the statistics of loss among the native peoples are horrifying, they must still be accounted more as negligence than as intentional conduct. Still, when vast swathes of humanity die as a result of absentmindedness, the result is equally horrifying.
Nevertheless, we should probably see Columbus Day, or as some commentators have suggested we call it, and as I tend to prefer, Encounter Day, as both a time to commemorate the European exploring spirit that enlarged the frontiers of Europe but also immeasurably enlarged the frontiers of the human mind, as well as a time to acknowledge and do penance for the horrors the European explorers so incontinently set in train. This Day of the Encounter should be a time for introspection without recrimination. It should be a time to teach and the time to learn, a time, as the Buddhist sangha might say to us, to meditate and seek enlightenment.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us. We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition. We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth. We confess many faiths, and none at all. We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America's queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too. We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.
Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world. It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...." Whose day is Columbus Day? It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we've been, and where we're going.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council. Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res. Go figure. The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
This post is a “revise and extend” of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
OUT, BUT DOMESTICATED
Summary: For gay men of a certain age, coming out used to be an experience carried out after careful introspection. Many of us of that certain age remember when our sexuality was fraught with the taint of implicit criminality, of the “abominable and detestable crime against nature.” Yet, in some ways, we managed to pull off a kind of collective fabulousness that seems to be disappearing as we have become more integrated, less exotic and more endotic. If at one time coming out was a declaration of independence leading to freedom, now it is become a high school rite of passage akin to getting one’s first driver’s license. In becoming endotic, are we losing touch with our fabulousness? Are we becoming the queer equivalent of the kitschy, plastic coyotes for sale in tourist traps throughout the American Southwest?
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Yesterday, October 11, was the annual repetition of the cultural phenomenon known as National Coming Out Day.
It is a time, perhaps, for queerfolk to contemplate the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. The series of steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.
I, for example, can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it -craved it, even- nearly 4 decades ago, when I was all of fifteen. I can remember my first same-sex encounter shortly after that, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. I remember what it felt like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen.
What I remember so particularly about those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy, is how fraught they were. Those first two underage encounters, could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution. As one senior deputy district attorney put it recently, “the position of this office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate in any way, shape, or form.”
The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My fraternity house fling with that other young man, also eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” a serious felony in Tennessee at the time, which could have led to a sentence of multiple years in a state penitentiary.
Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also took place against the backdrop of an impending or actual health crisis that, even today, I remember with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness, both fears and tears. For in truth, I came of age, both legally and sexually, at perhaps one of the most devastating times in the entire history of the queer community.
For what middle-aged queer man, “of a certain age,” then living in either New York or Los Angeles, does not remember two stories that appeared simultaneously in the July 3, 1981 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles times headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals?” Having kissed another boy, and having experienced the equivocal pleasures of my first blow job, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular attention to news coverage of what was then called simply “the gay community.”
Of course, since I did not want my parents to become aware that there might be something ... different about their son, I was very careful how I consumed such coverage. My discretion took the form of consuming the news while they were out of the house, and it was thus that I read the story in the Los Angeles Times.
And indeed, I read the story with great care, and as I did so, I found myself filled with the kind of nameless, inchoate dread, a sense that something awful was unfolding, that the metaphorical candy store was closing. The years of sexual liberation, I realized, were coming to an end.
And they were.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate, those of us who were teetering on the brink of disclosure took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few friends, redecorated our closets, and hunkered down for what promised to be a very long siege. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into the closet that we practically came out in Narnia.
Indeed, as the crisis grew larger, and the disease acquired a name, AIDS, it also assumed near mythic proportions. We were told many fearful things:
It might become airborne,
You could catch it from a toilet seat,
You could catch it from shaking hands or from a chaste peck on the cheek and, most bizarre of all,
Gay men with the disease were licking the fruit (!) in the produce displays in supermarkets in order to spread the disease.
The implication of all this fearmongering and mythmaking was that having any form of sex at all, or sharing the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy, meant that one was signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.
Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who did not propose to tolerate our presence in the body politic, the warnings were often delivered with ill disguised or undisguised schadenfreude. But worse than that was the fearmongering and mythmaking that came from our allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness that so many of us felt condemned to.
Like many queerfolk, my own coming out was delayed by the health crisis. Through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha. Yet, we survived. Like the Abbé Sieyès of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons vecu:” we lived.
And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.
And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.
I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy.
Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.
Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.
Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who is not been admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.
Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.
And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.
Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.
In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.
Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate, indeed, this is a homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
When Obergefell v. Hodges came down last year, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of last year,
"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."
And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.
Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.
And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens. Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?
We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?
Some months back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, still fabulous at 65. Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 70s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his living room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.
It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafū’s haiku, in rough translation, is
Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.
Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafū’s haiku:
Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.
His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.
I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap along a dark desert highway.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He is as queer as pink ink, and is not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice.
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Yesterday, October 11, was the annual repetition of the cultural phenomenon known as National Coming Out Day.
It is a time, perhaps, for queerfolk to contemplate the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. The series of steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.
I, for example, can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it -craved it, even- nearly 4 decades ago, when I was all of fifteen. I can remember my first same-sex encounter shortly after that, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. I remember what it felt like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen.
What I remember so particularly about those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy, is how fraught they were. Those first two underage encounters, could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution. As one senior deputy district attorney put it recently, “the position of this office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate in any way, shape, or form.”
The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My fraternity house fling with that other young man, also eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” a serious felony in Tennessee at the time, which could have led to a sentence of multiple years in a state penitentiary.
Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also took place against the backdrop of an impending or actual health crisis that, even today, I remember with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness, both fears and tears. For in truth, I came of age, both legally and sexually, at perhaps one of the most devastating times in the entire history of the queer community.
For what middle-aged queer man, “of a certain age,” then living in either New York or Los Angeles, does not remember two stories that appeared simultaneously in the July 3, 1981 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles times headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals?” Having kissed another boy, and having experienced the equivocal pleasures of my first blow job, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular attention to news coverage of what was then called simply “the gay community.”
Of course, since I did not want my parents to become aware that there might be something ... different about their son, I was very careful how I consumed such coverage. My discretion took the form of consuming the news while they were out of the house, and it was thus that I read the story in the Los Angeles Times.
And indeed, I read the story with great care, and as I did so, I found myself filled with the kind of nameless, inchoate dread, a sense that something awful was unfolding, that the metaphorical candy store was closing. The years of sexual liberation, I realized, were coming to an end.
And they were.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate, those of us who were teetering on the brink of disclosure took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few friends, redecorated our closets, and hunkered down for what promised to be a very long siege. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into the closet that we practically came out in Narnia.
Indeed, as the crisis grew larger, and the disease acquired a name, AIDS, it also assumed near mythic proportions. We were told many fearful things:
It might become airborne,
You could catch it from a toilet seat,
You could catch it from shaking hands or from a chaste peck on the cheek and, most bizarre of all,
Gay men with the disease were licking the fruit (!) in the produce displays in supermarkets in order to spread the disease.
The implication of all this fearmongering and mythmaking was that having any form of sex at all, or sharing the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy, meant that one was signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.
Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who did not propose to tolerate our presence in the body politic, the warnings were often delivered with ill disguised or undisguised schadenfreude. But worse than that was the fearmongering and mythmaking that came from our allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness that so many of us felt condemned to.
Like many queerfolk, my own coming out was delayed by the health crisis. Through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha. Yet, we survived. Like the Abbé Sieyès of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons vecu:” we lived.
And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.
And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.
I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy.
Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.
Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.
Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who is not been admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.
Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.
And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.
Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.
In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.
Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate, indeed, this is a homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
When Obergefell v. Hodges came down last year, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of last year,
"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."
And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.
Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.
And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens. Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?
We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?
Some months back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, still fabulous at 65. Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 70s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his living room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.
It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafū’s haiku, in rough translation, is
Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.
Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafū’s haiku:
Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.
His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.
I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap along a dark desert highway.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He is as queer as pink ink, and is not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice.
Monday, October 10, 2016
THE CAGED PANTHER PROWLS: DONALD TRUMP LOSES ANOTHER DEBATE
Summary: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton squared off again for their second debate. Though Republican supporters of Donald Trump are trying mightily to frame the debate as a Trump “win,” serious scientific polling, including the CNN/ORC poll taken last night suggests a very different outcome. Trump wasted no time ramping up his rhetoric, displaying his banana Republican tendencies, his penchant for Putin-like vengeance, and his absolute lack of command of the issues.
But worse even than that, as much as Donald Trump tried to present a more disciplined image of himself as a competent campaigner, his campaign appears to have targeted the wrong Clinton. Bill Clinton, the target of Trump’s hypocritical scorn, is not actually running for president of the United States. Trump’s effort to target the victimized spouse and to blame that victimized spouse for her husband’s alleged infidelities, together with his bizarre physical “manifestations” during the debate, can be regarded as nothing less than a master class in sexist bullying.
At all events, if Donald Trump thought that last night would reverse the irreversible decline of his campaign, he learned that Karl Marx was right to observe that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the stage last night for their second debate. To any reasonable person watching the performance, Karl Marx’s comment from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Trump’s farcical performance last night managed to veer unsteadily between grotesque physical bullying and creepy banana republic type threats. He prowled about the stage through most of the debate like a caged panther, standing at one point glowering behind Hillary as she responded to a question. As one woman commentator said later, if he had done that to her on the street, she would have had 911 ready to dial on her phone. He sniffled constantly, modeling the demeanor of a man intoxicated after having done several lines of cocaine in the green room.
And indeed, it is entirely possible that The Donald may have been under the influence of cocaine. His bluster, the misplaced self-confidence, and those endless, annoying, ostentatious, sniffles caused many observers of the debate, including former DNC chair Governor Howard Dean to wonder whether The Donald was not in fact coked off his ass
Moreover, cocaine as a drug is remarkable for making its users paranoid, horny... and impotent. Trump’s paranoia, and his dangerous, Putin-like penchant for vengeance were on ample display last night. His threat to appoint a special prosecutor and jail Hillary Clinton was the kind of thing that in normal circumstances we would expect from the dictator in some banana republics somewhere. Never did Donald Trump so resemble Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he did in that moment. Dictators imprison their political rivals; we do not expect, and are not disposed to tolerate, such behavior from an American presidential candidate.
Indeed, what we saw last night, in the starkest tones, was how Donald Trump, a serial sexual predator with an obviously diagnosable clinical psychopathology, proposed to govern if we Americans are foolish enough to entrust him with the chance. Never in the history of the United States has any victorious candidate threatened to, let alone attempted to, set the instrumentalities of the criminal law in train against his unsuccessful rival. Donald Trump’s threat to jail Hillary Clinton may well go down as the death knell of his campaign.
And quite right, too! Though many of Trump’s supporters will insist that Trump “won” last night’s debate, spamming online polls to skew the results, his “victory,” such as it may have been, will prove, in the event, to be as illusory as the “victory” of Mike Pence in last week’s vice presidential debate. Pence’s “victory” was soon undone and overshadowed by the devastating revelations concerning The Donald himself, which grabbed the American public’s metaphorical pussy, and haven’t let go. Already, new revelations of further deplorable sexual misconduct have begun to surface, with further adverse effects upon The Donald’s campaign.
Last night, The Donald had a chance to reverse, or at least arrest temporarily, the irreversible decline of his campaign. Yet through most of the ninety minutes of what CBS’s Bob Schieffer has characterized as one of the most “disgraceful” debates in history, Trump was charging willy-nilly around the stage campaigning against Bill Clinton, rather than against the actual Democratic candidate for president. In short, Donald the bully was pursuing the wrong Clinton.
Yet, with his physical “manifestations” on full display in front, as they say in the American South, “of God and everybody,” his creepy, fascistic threats, and his apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the questions put to him, The Donald managed to fling improvidently and incontinently away every single chance he had to use this debate to try to salvage his own campaign. Instead of coming across as presidential, a status he left by default to Hillary Clinton (who pulls it off so very much much better), The Donald came across as the sexist bully he is.
The Donald’s performance may have appealed to angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment, but this election has ceased to be about angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment. This election, more than any other in American history, is an election of color. The presidency of the United States will be decided by women, whom Trump is losing in droves, by communities of color, and by politically engaged queerfolk. Donald Trump’s nightmare voter in this election is an angry, motivated, fearful-of-Trump African-American lesbian.
In my analysis of the first presidential debate, I analogized it to George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the so-called “high water mark of the Confederacy.” This debate I would analogize to a less known pair of battles, the first at Franklin, Tennessee in at the end of November, 1864, and the second before Nashville fifteen days later. At Franklin, the Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, angry at his own army, and determined to punish it for what he saw as it shortcomings, flung his Confederate troops against union general John M. Schofield’s superior forces. Schofield, who had been withdrawing upon Nashville, remained in possession of the field and continued his withdrawal. Fifteen days later, Hood, still angry, attacked the union fortifications around Nashville, and was decisively beaten. With the defeat at Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville. D. Eicher Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War 775.
Trump, who now appears to have incontinently opened up a second front in his campaign by picking fights with his fellow Republicans, has managed to do for his campaign the same bad service that John Bell Hood, who was similarly notorious for his lack of impulse control, did for the dying Confederacy. If the debate first against Hillary Clinton mortally wounded his campaign, this debate may very well have killed it.
Of course, the postmortems may be premature. Trump may well be able to pull some semblance of a campaign back together, even in the face of the revelations of sexual misconduct which have dogged it in recent days. But that may be more of a miracle then can be imagined in the four weeks remaining of this campaign. The Donald would do well to remember the counsels of the Caroline divines, the Restoration theologians who set the Anglican faith on firm footings: “we sinners can pray for a miracle, but we cannot demand one.”
As the Trump campaign begins its endgame, it can be expected to go through the late stage death agonies common to all American political campaigns. Former McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt has opined that the election is over; the vote for Hillary Clinton is constitutionally required, but is now virtually superfluous. Other Republican operatives have said much the same thing; only a miracle can save Donald Trump now.
Yet, the Hillary Clinton campaign cannot afford to become complacent. There is, of course, always the risk that WikiLeaks, on orders from the Kremlin, will try some new, outcome determinative, data leak, or that something equally catastrophic might happen. But, at this late date, the Clinton campaign can but press forward, adjuring it supporters to vote, phonebank, engage in aggressive GOTV, and work as if Hillary were not five points up, but three points down. The election, at this stage, is Hillary’s to lose, and we must not permit that to happen.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND, Esq. is an attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served for eight years as a member of the city Council. He would consider it a badge of honor to be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. As Pat Conroy put it in The Lords of Discipline, he is willing to lead a revolt in the mountains if Trump becomes president and make a general out of the first national guardsmen who brings him Donald trumps nuts in a mason jar. The views herein are Mr. Marchand’s own and should not be construed as legal advice.
But worse even than that, as much as Donald Trump tried to present a more disciplined image of himself as a competent campaigner, his campaign appears to have targeted the wrong Clinton. Bill Clinton, the target of Trump’s hypocritical scorn, is not actually running for president of the United States. Trump’s effort to target the victimized spouse and to blame that victimized spouse for her husband’s alleged infidelities, together with his bizarre physical “manifestations” during the debate, can be regarded as nothing less than a master class in sexist bullying.
At all events, if Donald Trump thought that last night would reverse the irreversible decline of his campaign, he learned that Karl Marx was right to observe that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the stage last night for their second debate. To any reasonable person watching the performance, Karl Marx’s comment from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Trump’s farcical performance last night managed to veer unsteadily between grotesque physical bullying and creepy banana republic type threats. He prowled about the stage through most of the debate like a caged panther, standing at one point glowering behind Hillary as she responded to a question. As one woman commentator said later, if he had done that to her on the street, she would have had 911 ready to dial on her phone. He sniffled constantly, modeling the demeanor of a man intoxicated after having done several lines of cocaine in the green room.
And indeed, it is entirely possible that The Donald may have been under the influence of cocaine. His bluster, the misplaced self-confidence, and those endless, annoying, ostentatious, sniffles caused many observers of the debate, including former DNC chair Governor Howard Dean to wonder whether The Donald was not in fact coked off his ass
Moreover, cocaine as a drug is remarkable for making its users paranoid, horny... and impotent. Trump’s paranoia, and his dangerous, Putin-like penchant for vengeance were on ample display last night. His threat to appoint a special prosecutor and jail Hillary Clinton was the kind of thing that in normal circumstances we would expect from the dictator in some banana republics somewhere. Never did Donald Trump so resemble Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he did in that moment. Dictators imprison their political rivals; we do not expect, and are not disposed to tolerate, such behavior from an American presidential candidate.
And quite right, too! Though many of Trump’s supporters will insist that Trump “won” last night’s debate, spamming online polls to skew the results, his “victory,” such as it may have been, will prove, in the event, to be as illusory as the “victory” of Mike Pence in last week’s vice presidential debate. Pence’s “victory” was soon undone and overshadowed by the devastating revelations concerning The Donald himself, which grabbed the American public’s metaphorical pussy, and haven’t let go. Already, new revelations of further deplorable sexual misconduct have begun to surface, with further adverse effects upon The Donald’s campaign.
Last night, The Donald had a chance to reverse, or at least arrest temporarily, the irreversible decline of his campaign. Yet through most of the ninety minutes of what CBS’s Bob Schieffer has characterized as one of the most “disgraceful” debates in history, Trump was charging willy-nilly around the stage campaigning against Bill Clinton, rather than against the actual Democratic candidate for president. In short, Donald the bully was pursuing the wrong Clinton.
Yet, with his physical “manifestations” on full display in front, as they say in the American South, “of God and everybody,” his creepy, fascistic threats, and his apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the questions put to him, The Donald managed to fling improvidently and incontinently away every single chance he had to use this debate to try to salvage his own campaign. Instead of coming across as presidential, a status he left by default to Hillary Clinton (who pulls it off so very much much better), The Donald came across as the sexist bully he is.
The Donald’s performance may have appealed to angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment, but this election has ceased to be about angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment. This election, more than any other in American history, is an election of color. The presidency of the United States will be decided by women, whom Trump is losing in droves, by communities of color, and by politically engaged queerfolk. Donald Trump’s nightmare voter in this election is an angry, motivated, fearful-of-Trump African-American lesbian.
In my analysis of the first presidential debate, I analogized it to George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the so-called “high water mark of the Confederacy.” This debate I would analogize to a less known pair of battles, the first at Franklin, Tennessee in at the end of November, 1864, and the second before Nashville fifteen days later. At Franklin, the Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, angry at his own army, and determined to punish it for what he saw as it shortcomings, flung his Confederate troops against union general John M. Schofield’s superior forces. Schofield, who had been withdrawing upon Nashville, remained in possession of the field and continued his withdrawal. Fifteen days later, Hood, still angry, attacked the union fortifications around Nashville, and was decisively beaten. With the defeat at Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville. D. Eicher Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War 775.
Trump, who now appears to have incontinently opened up a second front in his campaign by picking fights with his fellow Republicans, has managed to do for his campaign the same bad service that John Bell Hood, who was similarly notorious for his lack of impulse control, did for the dying Confederacy. If the debate first against Hillary Clinton mortally wounded his campaign, this debate may very well have killed it.
Of course, the postmortems may be premature. Trump may well be able to pull some semblance of a campaign back together, even in the face of the revelations of sexual misconduct which have dogged it in recent days. But that may be more of a miracle then can be imagined in the four weeks remaining of this campaign. The Donald would do well to remember the counsels of the Caroline divines, the Restoration theologians who set the Anglican faith on firm footings: “we sinners can pray for a miracle, but we cannot demand one.”
As the Trump campaign begins its endgame, it can be expected to go through the late stage death agonies common to all American political campaigns. Former McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt has opined that the election is over; the vote for Hillary Clinton is constitutionally required, but is now virtually superfluous. Other Republican operatives have said much the same thing; only a miracle can save Donald Trump now.
Yet, the Hillary Clinton campaign cannot afford to become complacent. There is, of course, always the risk that WikiLeaks, on orders from the Kremlin, will try some new, outcome determinative, data leak, or that something equally catastrophic might happen. But, at this late date, the Clinton campaign can but press forward, adjuring it supporters to vote, phonebank, engage in aggressive GOTV, and work as if Hillary were not five points up, but three points down. The election, at this stage, is Hillary’s to lose, and we must not permit that to happen.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND, Esq. is an attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served for eight years as a member of the city Council. He would consider it a badge of honor to be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. As Pat Conroy put it in The Lords of Discipline, he is willing to lead a revolt in the mountains if Trump becomes president and make a general out of the first national guardsmen who brings him Donald trumps nuts in a mason jar. The views herein are Mr. Marchand’s own and should not be construed as legal advice.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
LET US MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
Sometimes, even relatively small cities seem to get hit upside the metaphorical head with terrible, heartbreaking news.
So it was in Palm Springs this afternoon. Two police officers have been killed in the line of duty and a third has been seriously injured.
Yet the life of the community continues. If memory serves, it was St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Starets and mystic, who observed that if in the midst of life, we are in death; it is equally true that in the midst of death; we are in life.
Under such circumstances, we can, and we must, as Seraphim Sarovsky might have said, offer prayers and intercessions for the officers whose lives were so tragically and incontinently taken, as well as prayers and intercessions for the recovery of the officer who was injured.
Yet beyond that, we can but make the Sign of the Cross and continue to go about the business of life to which God has called us. For this earthly life does not stop when one member of community passes into eternal life. Though, as a Christian, I must believe in a theology of resurrection --that this life is but a dress rehearsal, so to speak, for the eternal life that follows –- I also, as a Christian, have to believe that dying is an integral part of living.
So, the resurrection faith I profess and confess requires of me a willingness to look death in the face and say, without quibble, cavil, or demur, “God willing, not today.” We can render the fallen officers no greater tribute than to continue the life of the community they laid down their lives to serve. I do not believe it serves the community or their memory to shut down or start flame wars over timing.
For in the end, the power of the resurrection narrative lies in the fact that death is real, that it will happen to all of us eventually, and that it leaves gaps in the lives of those who have yet to experience its ineluctably. Yet the resurrection narrative also reminds us that in the end, the grave has no victory and death has no sting because the Lord we confess has been the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, rising from the dead, conquering death by death.
Let us make the Sign of the Cross as we offer intercession for the departed. Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. Amen.
-+++-
PAUL S. MARCHAND lives and practices law in Cathedral City. He is a practicing member of the Episcopal Church, which is not a synod of Saints, but a school for sinners. The views expressed herein are his own, and should not be taken as legal advice
So it was in Palm Springs this afternoon. Two police officers have been killed in the line of duty and a third has been seriously injured.
Yet the life of the community continues. If memory serves, it was St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Starets and mystic, who observed that if in the midst of life, we are in death; it is equally true that in the midst of death; we are in life.
Under such circumstances, we can, and we must, as Seraphim Sarovsky might have said, offer prayers and intercessions for the officers whose lives were so tragically and incontinently taken, as well as prayers and intercessions for the recovery of the officer who was injured.
Yet beyond that, we can but make the Sign of the Cross and continue to go about the business of life to which God has called us. For this earthly life does not stop when one member of community passes into eternal life. Though, as a Christian, I must believe in a theology of resurrection --that this life is but a dress rehearsal, so to speak, for the eternal life that follows –- I also, as a Christian, have to believe that dying is an integral part of living.
So, the resurrection faith I profess and confess requires of me a willingness to look death in the face and say, without quibble, cavil, or demur, “God willing, not today.” We can render the fallen officers no greater tribute than to continue the life of the community they laid down their lives to serve. I do not believe it serves the community or their memory to shut down or start flame wars over timing.
For in the end, the power of the resurrection narrative lies in the fact that death is real, that it will happen to all of us eventually, and that it leaves gaps in the lives of those who have yet to experience its ineluctably. Yet the resurrection narrative also reminds us that in the end, the grave has no victory and death has no sting because the Lord we confess has been the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, rising from the dead, conquering death by death.
Let us make the Sign of the Cross as we offer intercession for the departed. Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. Amen.
-+++-
PAUL S. MARCHAND lives and practices law in Cathedral City. He is a practicing member of the Episcopal Church, which is not a synod of Saints, but a school for sinners. The views expressed herein are his own, and should not be taken as legal advice
THE GANNETT THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT: THE DESERT SUN’S ANIMOSITY GETS THE BETTER OF IT
Summary: Yesterday, our local Gannett newspaper did something that didn’t surprise us at all. The editorial board saw fit to endorse Measure HH, the city charter for Cathedral City. But at the same time, the editorial board did not see fit to endorse councilmember Greg Pettis for reelection, opting instead to endorse the grossly unqualified Sergio Espericueta, a protgé/puppet of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her job back so badly she can taste it.
Never a group to let inconsistencies bother them, the Desert Sun’s editorial board chose to let itself be driven by antipathy, basing their decision to withhold endorsement from Mr. Pettis on unproven, over-the-top, three-year-old allegations made by former Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone, a young and credulous wannabe journalist who, at the time, allowed herself to be spoonfed a whole series of claims originating out of the sociopathic mind of our former mayor. The Desert Sun didn’t see fit to do any due diligence or fact checking then, instead accepting DeRosa’s allegations uncritically. Now, three years later, they compound their act of journalistic malpractice by repeating those allegations again in order to justify endorsing a manifestly unqualified candidate.
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Our local Gannett newspaper, which surprised us all by endorsing the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president of the United States, when most of us in this Valley had expected them to go through every sort of forensic contortion imaginable to endorse Donald Trump (becoming the only newspaper in the country to do so, had they done so), demonstrated the other day that their endorsement of Sec. Clinton was to all intents and purposes a fluke.
The Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight did manage to do the right thing when it endorsed Measure HH, the proposed Cathedral City charter. But the Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight then managed to go wildly off the rails by declining to endorse Greg Pettis, the councilmember whose support for a Cathedral City charter has been steadfast and unflagging for years.
Instead, the editorial board saw fit to endorse Sergio Espericueta, a Council wannabe with no serious qualifications for public office save for being a protgé/puppet/stalking horse of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her old job back so bad she can taste it.
Espericueta has become very much the public face of opposition to a charter in Cathedral City. Now the opposition to the charter is based on nothing more and nothing less than its provision for a rotating mayoralty. The Council and a large number of residents in Cathedral City, having before them the deplorable example of the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s misgovernment of Cathedral city as mayor, felt it best that the mayoralty rotate among the members of the Council.
By rotating the mayoralty, the Council was acting proactively to protect the city from another disastrous mayoralty like that of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. If, after all, a mayor has only a twelvemonth at the helm, she can’t do too much damage. But a directly elected mayor, who sets up a political machine that keeps getting her reelected over a ten-year period, can do a great deal of damage.
And Kathleen Joan DeRosa did, in fact, do a great deal of damage. The damage Kathleen Joan DeRosa inflicted on this community is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. Suffice it to say that Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disdain for this community is reflected in her opposition, and in the opposition of her fellow travelers and Donald Trump supporters, to Measure HH.
As much as I don’t intend to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the low points of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disastrous mayoralty, I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the merits of the charter, either. It’s not perfect, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey G. Gorshkov once out it, “good enough is best,” and the charter, with its faults, is good enough. As the New York World recommended Theodore Roosevelt for election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 with words of the immortal brevity: “Theodore! With all thy faults,” so too am I on record as supporting Measure HH by saying “yes on Measure HH! With all thy faults.”
Yet, if I find myself agreeing with our Gannett newspaper’s endorsement of Measure HH, I find myself regrettably forced to the conclusion that an editorial board that can see its way clear to endorsing a needful charter measure for Cathedral City cannot logically endorse the Council candidate who has made opposition to the charter his signature issue. I must conclude that this Gannett newspaper, which cannot seem to shoot straight, is once again making editorial decisions on the basis of its personal and institutional antipathies.
Three years ago, this Gannett newspaper tried its level best to embarrass Greg Pettis so badly that he would hopefully have been forced from office. Within weeks of Mr. Pettis having been installed as president of the Southern California Association of Governments, a powerful recognition of his notable service to the city, the region, and the state, this Gannett newspaper ran a breathless “exposé,” carrying Tamara Sone’s byline and consisting of information which those of us with some familiarity with Cathedral City’s political ins and outs knew immediately had been provided to her by Kathleen Joan DeRosa to form the basis of a journalistic hatchet job.
Tamara Sone, a relatively gullible and credulous baby journalist with skeletons in her own closet, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. She rushed into print with a breathless story whose evident purpose was to create a scandal that would force Mr. Pettis from office, put a journalistic feather in Tamara Sone’s cap, and gratify Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s burning antipathy, nay, her hatred, for Greg Pettis.
In rushing to print, neither Sone nor the editorial board which should have supervised her work bothered to do the slightest bit of fact checking or due diligence. These were shortcomings which I addressed in two posts in my blog which, I like to think, helped torpedo Ms. Sone’s career here in the Desert. The first, on Sunday, April 28, 2013, was entitled “Journalistic Malpractice: The Desert Sun’s Hit Piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis.:. The second, which followed on Saturday, May 4, 2013, was entitled “The Desert Sun’s Rabid Pursuit of Greg Pettis."
Not long after that, Tamara Sone left of the employ of our local Gannett newspaper. One might have thought after that that the powers that be at our local Gannett newspaper would have been chastened enough thought twice about invoking and trotting out these tiresome allegations to relitigate at a remove of three years. Perhaps our local Gannett newspaper thinks there has been enough voter turnover in Cathedral City that voters would be ignorant of its acts of malpractice three years ago. Unfortunately for our local Gannett newspaper, the memories of some of us in Cathedral City are long and unforgiving, just like those of our Gannett newspaper’s editorial board.
Because what is clear from our Gannett newspaper’s sorry endorsement of an unqualified candidate is 1) they are still carrying Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water in the service of her visceral antipathy, nay, hatred, for Greg Pettis, and consequently 2) they are not really interested in the future of Cathedral City. Given that our Gannett newspaper is headquartered in Palm Springs, it is hardly surprising that it would have a somewhat Palm Springs-centric disdain for what is seen as the poor Latino majority community to its east, whose very incorporation it opposed back in 1982.
The editorial board did acknowledge, in endorsing incumbent councilmember John Aguilar, that Cathedral City is a Latino-majority city. Unfortunately, as they have done so often in the past, the editorial board was more interested in its antipathy toward Greg Pettis than it was in doing right by Cathedral City. Endorsing Espericueta is, in effect, a slap in the face of Cathedral city’s Latino community. There are literally scores of more qualified individuals from the Latino community who the desert sun could have endorsed, had those individuals stepped forward to run. But none of them trimmed his sails so closely to Kathleen Joan DeRosa, the sometime darling of this Gannett publication.
This Gannett publication allowed itself to be blinded by antipathy and by misplaced loyalty to a scheming politician who was able to trade for a number of years on her close personal relationship with the Desert Sun’s editor. Apparently, the editorial board feels that she still has markers which they need to pay, or some other form of juice at 750 N. Gene Autry Trail.
Either way, the Desert Sun’s endorsement of Sergio Espericueta doesn’t bear any kind of serious scrutiny at all. Voters would be well advised to cast their vote for the most qualified councilmember in the Valley, Greg Pettis, and not heed the ridiculous antipathies of the Desert Sun’s editorial board, whose conduct has been reprehensible.
Never a group to let inconsistencies bother them, the Desert Sun’s editorial board chose to let itself be driven by antipathy, basing their decision to withhold endorsement from Mr. Pettis on unproven, over-the-top, three-year-old allegations made by former Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone, a young and credulous wannabe journalist who, at the time, allowed herself to be spoonfed a whole series of claims originating out of the sociopathic mind of our former mayor. The Desert Sun didn’t see fit to do any due diligence or fact checking then, instead accepting DeRosa’s allegations uncritically. Now, three years later, they compound their act of journalistic malpractice by repeating those allegations again in order to justify endorsing a manifestly unqualified candidate.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Our local Gannett newspaper, which surprised us all by endorsing the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president of the United States, when most of us in this Valley had expected them to go through every sort of forensic contortion imaginable to endorse Donald Trump (becoming the only newspaper in the country to do so, had they done so), demonstrated the other day that their endorsement of Sec. Clinton was to all intents and purposes a fluke.
The Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight did manage to do the right thing when it endorsed Measure HH, the proposed Cathedral City charter. But the Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight then managed to go wildly off the rails by declining to endorse Greg Pettis, the councilmember whose support for a Cathedral City charter has been steadfast and unflagging for years.
Instead, the editorial board saw fit to endorse Sergio Espericueta, a Council wannabe with no serious qualifications for public office save for being a protgé/puppet/stalking horse of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her old job back so bad she can taste it.
Espericueta has become very much the public face of opposition to a charter in Cathedral City. Now the opposition to the charter is based on nothing more and nothing less than its provision for a rotating mayoralty. The Council and a large number of residents in Cathedral City, having before them the deplorable example of the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s misgovernment of Cathedral city as mayor, felt it best that the mayoralty rotate among the members of the Council.
By rotating the mayoralty, the Council was acting proactively to protect the city from another disastrous mayoralty like that of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. If, after all, a mayor has only a twelvemonth at the helm, she can’t do too much damage. But a directly elected mayor, who sets up a political machine that keeps getting her reelected over a ten-year period, can do a great deal of damage.
And Kathleen Joan DeRosa did, in fact, do a great deal of damage. The damage Kathleen Joan DeRosa inflicted on this community is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. Suffice it to say that Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disdain for this community is reflected in her opposition, and in the opposition of her fellow travelers and Donald Trump supporters, to Measure HH.
As much as I don’t intend to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the low points of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disastrous mayoralty, I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the merits of the charter, either. It’s not perfect, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey G. Gorshkov once out it, “good enough is best,” and the charter, with its faults, is good enough. As the New York World recommended Theodore Roosevelt for election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 with words of the immortal brevity: “Theodore! With all thy faults,” so too am I on record as supporting Measure HH by saying “yes on Measure HH! With all thy faults.”
Yet, if I find myself agreeing with our Gannett newspaper’s endorsement of Measure HH, I find myself regrettably forced to the conclusion that an editorial board that can see its way clear to endorsing a needful charter measure for Cathedral City cannot logically endorse the Council candidate who has made opposition to the charter his signature issue. I must conclude that this Gannett newspaper, which cannot seem to shoot straight, is once again making editorial decisions on the basis of its personal and institutional antipathies.
Three years ago, this Gannett newspaper tried its level best to embarrass Greg Pettis so badly that he would hopefully have been forced from office. Within weeks of Mr. Pettis having been installed as president of the Southern California Association of Governments, a powerful recognition of his notable service to the city, the region, and the state, this Gannett newspaper ran a breathless “exposé,” carrying Tamara Sone’s byline and consisting of information which those of us with some familiarity with Cathedral City’s political ins and outs knew immediately had been provided to her by Kathleen Joan DeRosa to form the basis of a journalistic hatchet job.
Tamara Sone, a relatively gullible and credulous baby journalist with skeletons in her own closet, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. She rushed into print with a breathless story whose evident purpose was to create a scandal that would force Mr. Pettis from office, put a journalistic feather in Tamara Sone’s cap, and gratify Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s burning antipathy, nay, her hatred, for Greg Pettis.
In rushing to print, neither Sone nor the editorial board which should have supervised her work bothered to do the slightest bit of fact checking or due diligence. These were shortcomings which I addressed in two posts in my blog which, I like to think, helped torpedo Ms. Sone’s career here in the Desert. The first, on Sunday, April 28, 2013, was entitled “Journalistic Malpractice: The Desert Sun’s Hit Piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis.:. The second, which followed on Saturday, May 4, 2013, was entitled “The Desert Sun’s Rabid Pursuit of Greg Pettis."
Not long after that, Tamara Sone left of the employ of our local Gannett newspaper. One might have thought after that that the powers that be at our local Gannett newspaper would have been chastened enough thought twice about invoking and trotting out these tiresome allegations to relitigate at a remove of three years. Perhaps our local Gannett newspaper thinks there has been enough voter turnover in Cathedral City that voters would be ignorant of its acts of malpractice three years ago. Unfortunately for our local Gannett newspaper, the memories of some of us in Cathedral City are long and unforgiving, just like those of our Gannett newspaper’s editorial board.
Because what is clear from our Gannett newspaper’s sorry endorsement of an unqualified candidate is 1) they are still carrying Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water in the service of her visceral antipathy, nay, hatred, for Greg Pettis, and consequently 2) they are not really interested in the future of Cathedral City. Given that our Gannett newspaper is headquartered in Palm Springs, it is hardly surprising that it would have a somewhat Palm Springs-centric disdain for what is seen as the poor Latino majority community to its east, whose very incorporation it opposed back in 1982.
The editorial board did acknowledge, in endorsing incumbent councilmember John Aguilar, that Cathedral City is a Latino-majority city. Unfortunately, as they have done so often in the past, the editorial board was more interested in its antipathy toward Greg Pettis than it was in doing right by Cathedral City. Endorsing Espericueta is, in effect, a slap in the face of Cathedral city’s Latino community. There are literally scores of more qualified individuals from the Latino community who the desert sun could have endorsed, had those individuals stepped forward to run. But none of them trimmed his sails so closely to Kathleen Joan DeRosa, the sometime darling of this Gannett publication.
This Gannett publication allowed itself to be blinded by antipathy and by misplaced loyalty to a scheming politician who was able to trade for a number of years on her close personal relationship with the Desert Sun’s editor. Apparently, the editorial board feels that she still has markers which they need to pay, or some other form of juice at 750 N. Gene Autry Trail.
Either way, the Desert Sun’s endorsement of Sergio Espericueta doesn’t bear any kind of serious scrutiny at all. Voters would be well advised to cast their vote for the most qualified councilmember in the Valley, Greg Pettis, and not heed the ridiculous antipathies of the Desert Sun’s editorial board, whose conduct has been reprehensible.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
WIKILEAKS’ JULIAN ASSANGE: CRYING “WOLF” IN A MASTERPIECE OF NARCISSISTIC SELF-PROMOTION
Fortunately for Donald Trump, Mike Pence is not the only weapon in his arsenal. Trump can always hold out hope that WikiLeaks will drop a so-called October surprise on Sec. Clinton. Yet, if Trump and his Trumpanzees were hoping for such an October surprise this week, they were disappointed. WikiLeaks poobah Julian Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in craven flight from sexual assault charges in Sweden, kept Trump supporters up all hours of the night for what amounted to a self-serving infomercial for Assange’s book. So much, at least this week, for a deus ex WikiLeaks that would rescue the Trump campaign from its own contradictions and apparently inevitable failure.
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Julian Assange promised a YUGE document dump this week that the Donald Trump campaign eagerly forecast would be the end of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Trump spokesslime Roger Stone tweeted about the possibility with all the excitement of a schoolgirl about to intentionally lose her virginity, and enthusiastically contract herpes in the process.
Of course, Clinton’s opponents have been hoping against hope for some campaign-ending revelation from WikiLeaks for some time. Indeed, the extreme Japanese-holdout-stranded-on-Pacific-island-after-the-end-of-the-Pacific-War militants in the Bernard Sanders campaign, the twentysomething Bernie-or-busters who could not reconcile themselves to Sec. Clinton’s primary victory, had for months been hoping against hope, salivating at the prospect, that Julian Assange would “save” America from the prospect of That Woman.
Hopes of both the Sanders holdouts and the Trump campaign for a deus ex WikiLeaks keep being raised and then dashed on the all too obvious rock of Julian Assange’s multitudinous character defects.
We know, from the public record, that Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice, wanted in the kingdom of Sweden on charges of sexually assaulting at least one, and possibly additional, underage girls. Assange, one of those Nietzschean creatures who fancies himself some sort of superior man, and thus, above the law, did not see fit to meet with Swedish authorities, even accepting for a moment the possibility that his doing so might corroborate his denial of the charges. Instead, Assange fabricated a paranoid conspiracy narrative that the Evil Swedes had Made It All Up and were acting as a stalking horse for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now Assange may be right to believe that DOJ would very much like to speak to him about his plundering forays into American intelligence, in which he was aided and abetted by Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning. The DOJ will certainly like to speak to Mr. Assange about a number of those issues, not least of which, of course, is how and why Julian Assange, that self-appointed, self-righteous Tribune of the Downtrodden, that self defined Moral Paragon, could have so cowardly abandoned Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning to his/her fate.
Of course, the indisputable facts are the Assange IS a coward. Instead of presenting himself in Stockholm to answer the Swedish charges, Assange broke bail and fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Relying upon the fact that Ecuadorian Pres. Rafael Correa is, like like Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, a reflexive hater of the United States, Assange believed, and rightly it has turned out, that the Ecuadorians would give him, a notorious fugitive from British, Swedish, and American justice, sanctuary within their Embassy. From there, Assange has been free to throw bombs, unsettling the political life of the West while identifying himself and WikiLeaks as an eager, uncritical supporter of Russia’s long-standing Kriegßpiel against the West.
Certainly, Assange and WikiLeaks have acquired an unsavory reputation for acting as an uncritical, un-curatorial laundromat for phony emails emanating from Russia’s powerful and sophisticated disinformation operation. Indeed, so serious was the problem of WikiLeaks un-curated data dump that even Edward Snowden -of all people- felt it necessary to criticize WikiLeaks’ complete lack of sophistication or discrimination in determining what they would release. And indeed, WikiLeaks has been so promiscuous in its un-curated data dumps that it has, for example, intentionally, recklessly, or negligently, outed queerfolk in backward countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.
All this in the name of some so-called virtue of “transparency,” which, when parsed, actually means revealing information that harms the West while advantaging Russia. Is it any surprise that a number of Western intelligence agencies, and a number of Western media outlets as well, characterize WikiLeaks as being essentially a propaganda arm of the Russian government, a part of Russia’s disinformation apparatus operating in and against the West? Is it any wonder that the patriotism and loyalty of Trump campaign supporters, Jill Stein zealous, and some of Bernie’s Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island “Bernie-or-bust” people should be questioned when they begin to hyperventilate and salivate with anticipation that WikiLeaks might release something harmful to Hillary Clinton.
Yet, to date, none of the much ballyhooed WikiLeaks data dumps have been what Assange claims they are. Every “this will finish Hillary Clinton” data dump has proved, in the words of one media commentator, to be “a whole lot of nothing,” or a “nothingburger” with a side of Russian dressing.
Thus, when Trump’s spokesslime Roger Stone began hyperventilating last week that Assange’s latest disclosures would be “the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Democrats understandably began preparing preemptive damage control against the possibility that some part of Assange’s data dump might require explaining and contextualizing. But, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the Breitbart people notwithstanding, Assange’s much vaunted data dump was another nothingburger: essentially a narcissistic infomercial plugging the tenth anniversary of WikiLeaks and pitching Assange’s new book.
Indeed, arguably the only beneficiaries of Assange’s ridiculous infomercial will be HM Crown Prosecution Service and the United States Department of Justice. Because it goes virtually without saying that self-made, self-righteous, self-important people like Julian Assange and Donald Trump will always destroy themselves with the most powerful instrument available, their own mouths and what emerges therefrom. Ninety percent of criminal defendants who take the stand for themselves convict themselves out of the words of their own mouth.
The Trump people, who had been up all night waiting for the revelations that would “end Hillary Clinton’s campaign” found themselves reduced to stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, apoplectic, vein-popping, friendship-sundering, lawsuit-inducing, bowel-evacuating, psycho-guano rage. The tweet storm that followed was breathtaking to behold. The great deus ex WikiLeaks moment for which the Trump supporters, the irreconcilable Bernie-or-busters, and the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer-anti-science aging hippies had been eagerly waiting, with bated breath, came and went with a sales pitch. Not with a bang, but with a tawdry tease.
Even Julian Assange, smarmy, want-to-take-a-skillet-to-his-smug-mug, narcissist that he is, must truly realize that one can only raise and dash expectations so many times before one’s credibility begins to run short. As the fable puts it, Julian Assange has cried “wolf!” once too often.
There is a virtue to institutional openness and transparency. But that openness and transparency must come from within the institution in question. Assange, and the Russian government for which he works, don’t accept that proposition. For them, transparency is a concept that is useful only to the extent that it can be weaponized in the service of the Russian State. That, of course, is NOT how transparency is supposed to work in a liberal, Western, democracy. And because Julian Assange is such a coward and so obvious a water-carrier for the Kremlin, we may, with justification, wonder what will happen to him in future.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and his ambassador in London should be confronted with a simple choice by HM Foreign and Commonwealth Office: give up Assange or be expelled from the United Kingdom for actions inconsistent with the ambassador’s diplomatic status. This is not the equivalent of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty taking refuge in the United States diplomatic mission in Budapest in 1956 and remaining there for the next fifteen years.
For Mindszenty, for all the rumors have swirled about him, had at least been, for a time, the courageous voice of Hungarian resistance to fascism and communism. By that token, Mindszenty represented the authentic voice of a persecuted church and people. What does Assange represent? He represents nothing but his own ego, pressed into the service of the Russian State and the anti-American hatred of the Rafael Correa/Evo Morales/Nicolas Maduro breed of anti-American caudillos for whom anti-Americanism is nothing but a convenient device to deflect attention from their own failures of leadership.
Julian Assange is a coward, and he will meet, in due course, a coward’s end, dying not from a drone strike, as the Hillary haters fondly imagine and like to accuse her of plotting, but alone, probably in a dismal council flat in a depressed neighborhood of South London with no one to mourn his passing, having spent his declining years cadging charity from a dwindling number of supporters and besieging the Australian High Commission in London for assistance.
And that is how it should be.
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Julian Assange promised a YUGE document dump this week that the Donald Trump campaign eagerly forecast would be the end of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Trump spokesslime Roger Stone tweeted about the possibility with all the excitement of a schoolgirl about to intentionally lose her virginity, and enthusiastically contract herpes in the process.
Of course, Clinton’s opponents have been hoping against hope for some campaign-ending revelation from WikiLeaks for some time. Indeed, the extreme Japanese-holdout-stranded-on-Pacific-island-after-the-end-of-the-Pacific-War militants in the Bernard Sanders campaign, the twentysomething Bernie-or-busters who could not reconcile themselves to Sec. Clinton’s primary victory, had for months been hoping against hope, salivating at the prospect, that Julian Assange would “save” America from the prospect of That Woman.
Hopes of both the Sanders holdouts and the Trump campaign for a deus ex WikiLeaks keep being raised and then dashed on the all too obvious rock of Julian Assange’s multitudinous character defects.
We know, from the public record, that Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice, wanted in the kingdom of Sweden on charges of sexually assaulting at least one, and possibly additional, underage girls. Assange, one of those Nietzschean creatures who fancies himself some sort of superior man, and thus, above the law, did not see fit to meet with Swedish authorities, even accepting for a moment the possibility that his doing so might corroborate his denial of the charges. Instead, Assange fabricated a paranoid conspiracy narrative that the Evil Swedes had Made It All Up and were acting as a stalking horse for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now Assange may be right to believe that DOJ would very much like to speak to him about his plundering forays into American intelligence, in which he was aided and abetted by Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning. The DOJ will certainly like to speak to Mr. Assange about a number of those issues, not least of which, of course, is how and why Julian Assange, that self-appointed, self-righteous Tribune of the Downtrodden, that self defined Moral Paragon, could have so cowardly abandoned Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning to his/her fate.
Of course, the indisputable facts are the Assange IS a coward. Instead of presenting himself in Stockholm to answer the Swedish charges, Assange broke bail and fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Relying upon the fact that Ecuadorian Pres. Rafael Correa is, like like Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, a reflexive hater of the United States, Assange believed, and rightly it has turned out, that the Ecuadorians would give him, a notorious fugitive from British, Swedish, and American justice, sanctuary within their Embassy. From there, Assange has been free to throw bombs, unsettling the political life of the West while identifying himself and WikiLeaks as an eager, uncritical supporter of Russia’s long-standing Kriegßpiel against the West.
Certainly, Assange and WikiLeaks have acquired an unsavory reputation for acting as an uncritical, un-curatorial laundromat for phony emails emanating from Russia’s powerful and sophisticated disinformation operation. Indeed, so serious was the problem of WikiLeaks un-curated data dump that even Edward Snowden -of all people- felt it necessary to criticize WikiLeaks’ complete lack of sophistication or discrimination in determining what they would release. And indeed, WikiLeaks has been so promiscuous in its un-curated data dumps that it has, for example, intentionally, recklessly, or negligently, outed queerfolk in backward countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.
All this in the name of some so-called virtue of “transparency,” which, when parsed, actually means revealing information that harms the West while advantaging Russia. Is it any surprise that a number of Western intelligence agencies, and a number of Western media outlets as well, characterize WikiLeaks as being essentially a propaganda arm of the Russian government, a part of Russia’s disinformation apparatus operating in and against the West? Is it any wonder that the patriotism and loyalty of Trump campaign supporters, Jill Stein zealous, and some of Bernie’s Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island “Bernie-or-bust” people should be questioned when they begin to hyperventilate and salivate with anticipation that WikiLeaks might release something harmful to Hillary Clinton.
Yet, to date, none of the much ballyhooed WikiLeaks data dumps have been what Assange claims they are. Every “this will finish Hillary Clinton” data dump has proved, in the words of one media commentator, to be “a whole lot of nothing,” or a “nothingburger” with a side of Russian dressing.
Thus, when Trump’s spokesslime Roger Stone began hyperventilating last week that Assange’s latest disclosures would be “the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Democrats understandably began preparing preemptive damage control against the possibility that some part of Assange’s data dump might require explaining and contextualizing. But, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the Breitbart people notwithstanding, Assange’s much vaunted data dump was another nothingburger: essentially a narcissistic infomercial plugging the tenth anniversary of WikiLeaks and pitching Assange’s new book.
Indeed, arguably the only beneficiaries of Assange’s ridiculous infomercial will be HM Crown Prosecution Service and the United States Department of Justice. Because it goes virtually without saying that self-made, self-righteous, self-important people like Julian Assange and Donald Trump will always destroy themselves with the most powerful instrument available, their own mouths and what emerges therefrom. Ninety percent of criminal defendants who take the stand for themselves convict themselves out of the words of their own mouth.
The Trump people, who had been up all night waiting for the revelations that would “end Hillary Clinton’s campaign” found themselves reduced to stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, apoplectic, vein-popping, friendship-sundering, lawsuit-inducing, bowel-evacuating, psycho-guano rage. The tweet storm that followed was breathtaking to behold. The great deus ex WikiLeaks moment for which the Trump supporters, the irreconcilable Bernie-or-busters, and the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer-anti-science aging hippies had been eagerly waiting, with bated breath, came and went with a sales pitch. Not with a bang, but with a tawdry tease.
Even Julian Assange, smarmy, want-to-take-a-skillet-to-his-smug-mug, narcissist that he is, must truly realize that one can only raise and dash expectations so many times before one’s credibility begins to run short. As the fable puts it, Julian Assange has cried “wolf!” once too often.
There is a virtue to institutional openness and transparency. But that openness and transparency must come from within the institution in question. Assange, and the Russian government for which he works, don’t accept that proposition. For them, transparency is a concept that is useful only to the extent that it can be weaponized in the service of the Russian State. That, of course, is NOT how transparency is supposed to work in a liberal, Western, democracy. And because Julian Assange is such a coward and so obvious a water-carrier for the Kremlin, we may, with justification, wonder what will happen to him in future.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and his ambassador in London should be confronted with a simple choice by HM Foreign and Commonwealth Office: give up Assange or be expelled from the United Kingdom for actions inconsistent with the ambassador’s diplomatic status. This is not the equivalent of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty taking refuge in the United States diplomatic mission in Budapest in 1956 and remaining there for the next fifteen years.
For Mindszenty, for all the rumors have swirled about him, had at least been, for a time, the courageous voice of Hungarian resistance to fascism and communism. By that token, Mindszenty represented the authentic voice of a persecuted church and people. What does Assange represent? He represents nothing but his own ego, pressed into the service of the Russian State and the anti-American hatred of the Rafael Correa/Evo Morales/Nicolas Maduro breed of anti-American caudillos for whom anti-Americanism is nothing but a convenient device to deflect attention from their own failures of leadership.
Julian Assange is a coward, and he will meet, in due course, a coward’s end, dying not from a drone strike, as the Hillary haters fondly imagine and like to accuse her of plotting, but alone, probably in a dismal council flat in a depressed neighborhood of South London with no one to mourn his passing, having spent his declining years cadging charity from a dwindling number of supporters and besieging the Australian High Commission in London for assistance.
And that is how it should be.
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