By: Paul S. Marchand
Summary: On May Day (or Beltane, if you prefer) we need to remember Lincon’s reminder that Labor is prior and superior to capital. The bankers at Bain Capital don’t bake bread to feed hungry people. Bakers do that, and today, we need to revive a preferential option for bakers and others who make real things over bankers and speculators who do not.
Happy Beltane.
If you didn’t know that tomorrow is Beltane, don’t feel bad; it’s a Celtic holiday that, until recently, had largely gone unnoticed in Christian and “post-Christian” Europe.
If you did not know that May 1 is Law Day and Loyalty Day in the U.S. you shouldn’t feel bad, either; you are not alone. They are obscure observances at best, and only exist because during the Eisenhower administration, the Federal government, skittish at the “socialist” overtones of the May Day celebrations of work and workers that happen throughout Europe and the rest of the world, metaphorically called out the forces of law and order to prevent a “socialist” holiday from gaining a beachhead on the shores of the New World.
Of course, the historic irony here is that May Day, as an international day of labor, got its start here in the United States, to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, where dozens of labor protesters were gunned down by police. Nonetheless, our almost obsessional fear of “socialism” has put the United States in the company of a number of right-wing governments that, over the years, have sought to repress or eliminate May 1 as a day dedicated to workers.
Now socialism -a concept of which almost no American has even a working understanding- has been, and remains, a bugaboo to most Americans. It is what the late semanticist (and sometime Republican U.S. Senator) S.I. Hayakawa would have called a “snarl word,” raising primitive, inarticulate, and angry passions. Yet, in reality, most Americans would not know a socialist if bit by one.
Names from the socialist pantheon -August Bebel, Jean Jaurès, Keir Hardie, and Eugene V. Debs, to name just a few- are unknown to the vast majority of Americans, who are taught little and care less about the social changes of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that established the social paradigms most of society now regards as normal.
Even today, to call something “socialist” is in many quarters to define it as wrong, perverse, and saturated with nameless evil. Ideologues of the American Right, those Beltway Bourbons who , as Talleyrand once observed of their namesakes, have learned nothing and have forgotten nothing --- “ils n'ont rien appris ni rien oublié” --- have been remarkably persistent and effective in tarring with the brush of socialism any person or school of thought who differs from their often remarkably retrograde -thoroughly Bourbon- ancien régime views of How Things Ought to Be.
One of the fundamental truths our Beltway Bourbons seem not merely to have forgotten, but to have actively rejected, is that “[l]abor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” These were not the words of a bomb throwing agitator; they were the carefully considered phrases of President Abraham Lincoln’s first Message to Congress.
At a time when the Beltway Bourbons and their Tea Party fellow travelers seem intent upon denigrating the dignity of work and workers by any means necessary, Lincoln’s words become all the more important. The American right has busily disseminated a narrative that the Ninety-nine percent of us who do not enjoy the spectacular success of the One Percent are, at best, mere slaves to class envy, and at worst, traitors to what should be the established order.
In fact, what angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not that some in our society have enjoyed spectacular success. Those whose skills or genius have changed the way we do things have earned their success. What the Ninety-nine Percent correctly resent are the sanctimonious and self-congratulatory posturings of those who -- as the late Texas governor Ann Richards once put it -- were born on third base yet believe they hit a triple, and who now seek to pull up the ladder of their vicarious success behind them.
What angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not necessarily that the system, if honest, may nonetheless produce disparate outcomes, but that increasingly, the system appears to be, and is, rigged. When it becomes clear that the deal has been crooked, and some of the players in the game have been unfairly disadvantaged by that crooked deal, those who have been cheated are justified in their anger and outrage.
On this May Day, which some in the party opposite would tar with the brush of “socialism,” or worse, we should ask the Beltway Bourbons and their useful idiots in the Tea Party what outcomes they think they should expect from their ongoing and systematic contempt for the workers who teach our children, walk our beats, fight our fires, harvest our crops, repair our cars, build our houses and offices, defend us at home and abroad, or otherwise do the work with which they themselves would not sully their lily white hands.
Eugene V. Debs used to point out that “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end.” America is what she is today because of the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of millions of workers who laid down their tools and took up arms in her defense. On May Day, we should remember that all of the financial speculation on the floors of all the securities exchanges of all the world will never produce one single tangible, useful object. Not any of the bankers at Bain Capital can perform the simple task of baking bread to feed hungry people.
Yet, the Bain bankers are often the first to express contempt for America’s workers, whom Mitt Romney so airily dismissed as the Forty-seven Percent. Certainly in Cathedral City, our reigning mayor has expressed her contempt for those who work for our city. When the mayor foists off on a colleague responsibility for work, travel, and representing the city because she herself is too lazy or personally obnoxious to others to do that work herself, and when she then attacks that colleague for actually doing the work in question, she demonstrates her contempt for work and workers.
On May Day, at Beltane, let us remember why we should always have a preferential option for the baker over the banker, and for those who work to advance the interests of their community over lazy, ego-driven sociopaths who won’t lift a finger to do any actual work.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any entity or organization with which he may be associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice, though common sense would suggest that if one were marooned on a desert island, one might prefer to be marooned with the baker rather than the banker, anc never with the sociopath. This post is an updated version of one published last year at May Day.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY ALL OVER AGAIN: WHY CATHEDRAL CITY ENDURES BAD GOVERNMENT
Summary: If we are, as Mahatma Gandhi once counseled, to be the change we seek, we must eschew and reject the temptation to fall out among ourselves, engaging in flame wars and testy exchanges. Political movements fail because their members seem more interested in policing each other’s tone than in coalescing to advance a commonly held goal. We are recapitulating in Cathedral City the later history of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The hatred Austria-Hungary’s squabbling nationalities bore each other prior to World War I exceeded their hatred of Vienna, and helped keep the fabulous Habsburg invalid alive into the closing days of that conflict. Where hypersensitive umbrage-takers and fight-pickers hijack a movement, no critical mass is possible, and what could have been a successful community-based movement or bloc fragments and dissolves. Bad politicians hold onto office when their opposition self-sabotages. I see this process fully at work in Cathedral City, and I beseech my brothers and sisters (in Oliver Cromwell’s “bowels of Christ”) to prove me wrong.
-----------------------
By: Paul S. Marchand
A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. Mark 6:4
No man is a hero to his mishpokhe. -Yiddish proverb
Bad government holds on when there is no effective movement out there to force it into competence. Opposition movements often enable bad government because they cannot effectively coalesce to advance commonly held goals. That has been the case in Cathedral City.
One of the saddest realities of politics is that almost any group, particularly a group seeking change, will ultimately fall out, as its members succumb to the inevitable temptation toward internecine backbiting and fights. Like-minded people flee from consensus and seek discord. Where no discord exists, it will be fabricated.
In almost any Usenet discussion thread, including threads on Facebook, the progress by which consensus breaks down can be easily detected just by reading the posts in the discussion thread. Commentor A will post or comment. Commentor B will take exception to the tone or content of A’s comment and the flame war will be well and truly underway. No matter how uncontroversial or anodyne A’s comment may have been, ineluctably there will be someone to take offense, and sadly, it is the hypersensitive umbrage-takers or fight-pickers who often wind up hijacking comment or Usenet discussion threads, indeed, entire movements.
Such tendencies particularly show up when there may be matters of public or political interest under discussion. The briefest visit to the discussion threads of the Los Angeles Times or the Desert Sun will disclose the inevitable tendency of comment threads to veer toward angry denunciations of the President, or toward off-topic personal attacks on other commentors on the thread. Moreover, the degree of emotional capital certain commentors will invest in their posts is often in inverse proportion to the relevancy or importance of the original news item. When a comment thread on the use of Wikipedia in schools degenerates into exchanges of threats of violence, it is not difficult to conclude that way too much emotional capital is in play.
Yet, my disappointment is not with the inevitable inability of participants in a Usenet discussion thread to stay focused on the original matter under discussion, any more than it is a function of my deep suspicion of any invocation of Godwin’s law, which postulates that as the length of any Usenet discussion group increases, the probability of comparisons involving Hitler or Nazis approaches one.
Rather, my disappointment is more in the way like-minded people flee from consensus and eagerly set up barriers to joint action by engaging in self-sabotaging infighting that inevitably breaks the consensus, undermines collegiality, and destroys friendships. Moreover, many participants in any kind of consensus or movement group find the courage of conviction somewhat difficult to muster, and their want of such courage often manifests itself in the form of prim little attacks upon the tone and manner in which others express their views.
Indeed, “I agree with you, but I don’t like your tone,” has become the bane of just about any effort to organize joint action. No sooner will a more zealous and intrepid soul venture an opinion than do more timid souls emerge to find fault, and to attempt police others’ tone. In fine, it is hard to muster any kind of commitment or conviction when one’s so-called friends are busy taking one to task.
A sentiment often attributed to Edmund Burke holds that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good persons to do nothing. (Originally, Burke is said to have used the word “men” in its all-inclusive and traditional signification. I changed it to “persons” precisely because I know that if I were to use the word “men” someone, somewhere would take umbrage and spin out of my word choice of whole lengthy attack on my sexist male chauvinist, piggery, flaming me in the process to a well done crisp, and utterly losing sight of the issue under discussion.) The corollary here is that evil triumphs when good people fight among one another over tone, word choice, or irrelevant, overwhelm-the-main-event sideshows.
So, if I sound a little despairing, it is because I am. I’m tired of unproductive flame wars and testy exchanges. In many communities, civic minded citizens attempt to coalesce, as Gandhi once counseled, to be the change they seek. Yet, such efforts often fail because group cohesion often takes second place to gratifying the felt need of specific individuals could be right, score points, and police the tone or thinking of other participants in the effort. Unpopular and embattled politicians often hold on to office not merely because their opposition splits in the run-up to the election, but because that opposition is never able to muster the will to cohesion upon which success and positive change depend. Call it the Austria-Hungary effect, thanks to which the Danubian Habsburg monarchy was able to hold itself together into the closing days of the Great War because the minority nationalities of the Monarchy hated each other more than they hated the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King in Vienna or Budapest.
Scripture tells us in Mark’s Gospel that “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country.” Jesus having been Jewish, he might with a wry smile have agreed with the later Yiddish proverb “no man is a hero to his Mishpokhe (family).” Any movement, even if ultimately successful, ultimately falls prey to its own internal contradictions. When the internal contradictions arise before a given movement or community of interest can reach a critical mass of self-sustaining, long-term cohesiveness, the movement dissolves.
Here in Cathedral City, the unexpectedly strong opposition movement to our unpopular incumbent Mayor came within 13 votes of ending the nine long winters of her tenure. Sadly, that movement seems to have Balkanized end fragmented, and when Councilmember Greg Pettis came under attack in the pages of the Desert Sun, those who rallied to his defense found themselves under attack from others who claimed to support the Councilmember, but who --- curious to say --- spent more time criticizing Mr. Pettis’s defenders for their tone than they did actually defending Mr. Pettis. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
If we are to ensure meaningful, positive change in our community, we will need to coalesce into a broad-based community movement whose members understand the importance of vigorous, zealous advocacy, organization, and action. Unfortunately, the recent flurry of flame wars and testy exchanges among those who should be at the forefront of being the change we seek leaves me skeptical that such a movement or bloc can survive long enough to reach a political critical mass.
Brothers and sisters in Cathedral City, prove me wrong! In the bowels of Christ, I beseech you, prove me wrong!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City. The views herein are his own and not anybody else’s, and he expects to be roundly attacked by hypersensitive umbrage-takers. Given what has happened of late, Mr. Marchand finds himself increasingly emotionally constipated, and has difficulty giving a shit.
-----------------------
By: Paul S. Marchand
A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. Mark 6:4
No man is a hero to his mishpokhe. -Yiddish proverb
Bad government holds on when there is no effective movement out there to force it into competence. Opposition movements often enable bad government because they cannot effectively coalesce to advance commonly held goals. That has been the case in Cathedral City.
One of the saddest realities of politics is that almost any group, particularly a group seeking change, will ultimately fall out, as its members succumb to the inevitable temptation toward internecine backbiting and fights. Like-minded people flee from consensus and seek discord. Where no discord exists, it will be fabricated.
In almost any Usenet discussion thread, including threads on Facebook, the progress by which consensus breaks down can be easily detected just by reading the posts in the discussion thread. Commentor A will post or comment. Commentor B will take exception to the tone or content of A’s comment and the flame war will be well and truly underway. No matter how uncontroversial or anodyne A’s comment may have been, ineluctably there will be someone to take offense, and sadly, it is the hypersensitive umbrage-takers or fight-pickers who often wind up hijacking comment or Usenet discussion threads, indeed, entire movements.
Such tendencies particularly show up when there may be matters of public or political interest under discussion. The briefest visit to the discussion threads of the Los Angeles Times or the Desert Sun will disclose the inevitable tendency of comment threads to veer toward angry denunciations of the President, or toward off-topic personal attacks on other commentors on the thread. Moreover, the degree of emotional capital certain commentors will invest in their posts is often in inverse proportion to the relevancy or importance of the original news item. When a comment thread on the use of Wikipedia in schools degenerates into exchanges of threats of violence, it is not difficult to conclude that way too much emotional capital is in play.
Yet, my disappointment is not with the inevitable inability of participants in a Usenet discussion thread to stay focused on the original matter under discussion, any more than it is a function of my deep suspicion of any invocation of Godwin’s law, which postulates that as the length of any Usenet discussion group increases, the probability of comparisons involving Hitler or Nazis approaches one.
Rather, my disappointment is more in the way like-minded people flee from consensus and eagerly set up barriers to joint action by engaging in self-sabotaging infighting that inevitably breaks the consensus, undermines collegiality, and destroys friendships. Moreover, many participants in any kind of consensus or movement group find the courage of conviction somewhat difficult to muster, and their want of such courage often manifests itself in the form of prim little attacks upon the tone and manner in which others express their views.
Indeed, “I agree with you, but I don’t like your tone,” has become the bane of just about any effort to organize joint action. No sooner will a more zealous and intrepid soul venture an opinion than do more timid souls emerge to find fault, and to attempt police others’ tone. In fine, it is hard to muster any kind of commitment or conviction when one’s so-called friends are busy taking one to task.
A sentiment often attributed to Edmund Burke holds that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good persons to do nothing. (Originally, Burke is said to have used the word “men” in its all-inclusive and traditional signification. I changed it to “persons” precisely because I know that if I were to use the word “men” someone, somewhere would take umbrage and spin out of my word choice of whole lengthy attack on my sexist male chauvinist, piggery, flaming me in the process to a well done crisp, and utterly losing sight of the issue under discussion.) The corollary here is that evil triumphs when good people fight among one another over tone, word choice, or irrelevant, overwhelm-the-main-event sideshows.
So, if I sound a little despairing, it is because I am. I’m tired of unproductive flame wars and testy exchanges. In many communities, civic minded citizens attempt to coalesce, as Gandhi once counseled, to be the change they seek. Yet, such efforts often fail because group cohesion often takes second place to gratifying the felt need of specific individuals could be right, score points, and police the tone or thinking of other participants in the effort. Unpopular and embattled politicians often hold on to office not merely because their opposition splits in the run-up to the election, but because that opposition is never able to muster the will to cohesion upon which success and positive change depend. Call it the Austria-Hungary effect, thanks to which the Danubian Habsburg monarchy was able to hold itself together into the closing days of the Great War because the minority nationalities of the Monarchy hated each other more than they hated the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King in Vienna or Budapest.
Scripture tells us in Mark’s Gospel that “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country.” Jesus having been Jewish, he might with a wry smile have agreed with the later Yiddish proverb “no man is a hero to his Mishpokhe (family).” Any movement, even if ultimately successful, ultimately falls prey to its own internal contradictions. When the internal contradictions arise before a given movement or community of interest can reach a critical mass of self-sustaining, long-term cohesiveness, the movement dissolves.
Here in Cathedral City, the unexpectedly strong opposition movement to our unpopular incumbent Mayor came within 13 votes of ending the nine long winters of her tenure. Sadly, that movement seems to have Balkanized end fragmented, and when Councilmember Greg Pettis came under attack in the pages of the Desert Sun, those who rallied to his defense found themselves under attack from others who claimed to support the Councilmember, but who --- curious to say --- spent more time criticizing Mr. Pettis’s defenders for their tone than they did actually defending Mr. Pettis. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
If we are to ensure meaningful, positive change in our community, we will need to coalesce into a broad-based community movement whose members understand the importance of vigorous, zealous advocacy, organization, and action. Unfortunately, the recent flurry of flame wars and testy exchanges among those who should be at the forefront of being the change we seek leaves me skeptical that such a movement or bloc can survive long enough to reach a political critical mass.
Brothers and sisters in Cathedral City, prove me wrong! In the bowels of Christ, I beseech you, prove me wrong!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City. The views herein are his own and not anybody else’s, and he expects to be roundly attacked by hypersensitive umbrage-takers. Given what has happened of late, Mr. Marchand finds himself increasingly emotionally constipated, and has difficulty giving a shit.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE: The Desert Sun’s Hit Piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis
Summary: The Desert Sun’s hit piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis represents the latest salvo in incumbent Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s attempt to secure what amounts to a mayoralty for life in Cathedral City. Reporter Tamara Sone left herself get played by the mayor and her willing henchman Bud England, who spoonfed her every bit of negative information they could find on Greg Pettis. By relying heavily on Pettis’ political rivals, and glossing over or ignoring any information that might have put matters in a more truth-friendly context, Sone and the Desert Sun have effectively let themselves get drafted as foot soldiers in a nasty political battle that has gone on for years. By dwelling on the party affiliations of the dramatis personae, Sone has impliedly accused Democrats in the Coachella Valley of being dishonest spongers of taxpayer dollars; she has thus carried water for the Republican Party. All in all, a piss poor performance by a reporter and a newspaper whose sycophancy and toadying toward DeRosa have damaged what little reputation it had for being a reliable or trustworthy news source.
By: Paul S. Marchand
The Desert Sun ran a hit piece today headlined “Cathedral City Councilman Greg Pettis spent $92,000 using a city-backed credit card.”
The article is bylined Tamara Sone, but it bears all the hallmarks of having been conceived and put together by the incumbent mayor of Cathedral City, Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose entitled conceit of herself as “Mayor-for-life” has earned her reputation for vindictiveness, untruth, and divisiveness.
Certainly, the baleful effects of the Desert Sun’s policy of assigning beat reporters who do not know the beat they are covering have played themselves out in Cathedral City many times over the years, as reporters effectively allow themselves to be spoonfed by whatever politico is willing to give them a sound bite or by whatever politico TDS has decided it likes. This enables crafty and deceitful people like Kathleen DeRosa and her faithful henchman Bud England to play the Desert Sun and its reporters like a Stradivarius.
A number of features from this morning’s monstrosity merit being called out and held up for critical examination (an examination the Desert Sun should have done in-house before even allowing the piece to go to print --- Greg Burton, master of the art of self-congratulation, are you listening?)
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this morning’s monstrosity was its open failure of due diligence. The only council or quasi-council sources quoted extensively were DeRosa and England, whose detached sense of “Christian entitlement” --- to say nothing of his intellectual dishonesty in taking credit for my legislative initiatives as a councilmember--- cost him his council seat last November. See: “Somebody Thinks We’re Stupid: an Incumbent Councilman’s Effort to Take Credit for the Work of Another,” www.http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2012/11/somebody-thinks-were-stupid-incumbent.html (Full disclosure: I ran unsuccessfully to reclaim the seat on the council on which I served between 2002 and 2010. I know whereof I speak in these matters, and I take some pleasure in having drawn off some of the votes Bud England might otherwise have relied upon to hold on to his seat.)
While Councilmember Sam Toles was apparently briefly consulted, his remarks received short shrift in the article, though Sone was at pains to identify his partisan affiliation.
With the exception of a single brief reference to city manager Andy Hall, the only other city employee quoted was administrative services director Tami Scott, whose federal felony record is a matter of public knowledge, and who was pled guilty to making a false statement to a federal investigator, which in the law of evidence, is considered non-recommending for a witness’s credibility. At least city clerk Pat Hammers, whose indiscreet e-mails to the incumbent mayor exposed her unneutral betrayal of the public trust during the 2012 election, had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. And, of course, Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet also gets in a sound bite; God forbid the Desert Sun should not slip in its own Palm Springs-centric bias.
Of course, it is common knowledge in Cathedral City that there is no love lost between Greg Pettis on one side and DeRosa/England on the other. That there is a political rivalry among them is as unsurprising as the fact that water is wet. Thus, for Sone to have relied heavily upon known rivals of the target, and to make no effort to have consulted with others, myself included, with some degree of institutional memory, constitutes journalistic malpractice.
It was equal journalistic malpractice to have accepted, without any apparent effort to corroborate it, England’s representation that Pettis’ travel on the city’s behalf was an ongoing, contentious issue, that “we’ve been fighting that fight for years.” I find myself searching for polite equivalent of the word “lie.” Yet there is none. What Bud England said to Tamara Sone was a flat-out lie. I served eight years on the city Council alongside both Greg Pettis and Bud England, and during that time, there was almost no substantive or substantial discussion of Mr. Pettis’ travel.
Indeed, the only discussion of council member travel came when I expressed reservations about the propriety of DeRosa’s having accompanied the high school band on a junket to New York City that brought no value added back to our community, and which no other California mayor would have undertaken. As is her style, DeRosa attacked me personally for questioning her waste of taxpayer dollars, and rounded up a few cronies from the community to show up at the next council meeting to gush enthusiastically about how “wonderful it was” that she had gone junketing to the Big Apple on the taxpayers’ dime, and while there guzzled down $11 glasses of wine at tony restaurants.
Indeed, Tamara Sone’s journalistic malpractice continued when she went out of her way to ignore Sam Toles’s observation that travel is an integral part of what we elect our public officials to do. Because DeRosa is both lazy and has an offputting personality, the default policy of the city during the nine bitter winters of her mayoralty has been to foist off on Greg Pettis many of the responsibilities that a less lazy and incompetent mayor would have taken upon herself. As either Clare Booth Luce or Oscar Wilde once observed: no good deed goes unpunished. Pettis busts his butt because the Dear Leader, the Mayor for Life, is too bloody lazy and disengaged to do her job, and she shivs him to an eager and uncritical reporter for having done so. Shameful, shameful.
Lazy narcissists like DeRosa and eager, willing dupes like England either cannot or will not understand that history is made by those who show up, and that when our destiny is being decided in places like Sacramento or Washington City, we need to be at the table and involved in the discussion, or the decisions made will be made without reference to, and often in derogation of, the best interests of the city. Having Greg Pettis at the table in those discussions may not produce the kind of revenue that a sanctimonious cynic like Bud England might expect, but Mr. Pettis’ presence at the table has often protected us from decisions being made at our expense, and contrary to our interests. If Bud England cannot understand that protecting the city from the foreseeable consequences of bad decisions made outside our presence is itself a form of value added, then he really is stranger to anything resembling true wisdom.
Of course, expecting wisdom ---or anything beyond shallow political nastiness--- from either Kathleen DeRosa or Bud England is a doomed enterprise. Both of those individuals live down to Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Bud England would not know the value of Greg Pettis’ contributions to the city if those contributions came up and bit him on the rear end. Indeed, during the 12 winters he served on the council, England developed a reputation for being remarkably ignorant and obtuse, having to have simple things explained to him multiple times. Not only did he not understand that there was a larger picture to see, he didn’t see the picture at all, and thus has remained a perfect unthinking and uncritical surrogate for a mayor who has little hesitation being confrontational, but who usually prefers to do her dirty work through third parties.
Having relied for the bulk of her story on Pettis’ political opponents, both of whom regard him as an enemy, and having essentially dismissed any comments or remarks that might have portrayed Mr. Pettis in a more positive light, Sone then went on to make much of, and to read much into, the fact that he sought protection in bankruptcy in 2010.
And here lies the great internal contradiction in Sone’s monstrosity. On the one hand, Sone implies that somehow Mr. Pettis is making himself rich on taxpayer dollars, yet on the other, she takes the contradictory position that Mr. Pettis, having filed for bankruptcy, must be some kind of dishonest ---even criminal--- operator. Yet, millions of Americans seek protection in bankruptcy every year. For Sone to take the position she does betrays either willful ignorance or a kind of privileged, entitled contempt for huge numbers of her fellow citizens. We do not expect our political leaders to enrich themselves at public expense, yet Sone apparently wants it both ways. If Pettis enriched himself at public expense, he is a bad man; if he did not he is a bad man. Catch-22.
If Tamara Sone cannot seem to understand that seeking bankruptcy protection is a right protected by the Constitution of the United States, she also seems to take a perverse delight in introducing partisanship into her hit piece. Here, her lack of due diligence and personal bias show nakedly through. The clear implication of the article is that somehow Democrats are not to be trusted, that Democratic hands should not be allowed anywhere near the municipal cookie jar. Of course, the briefest textual analysis of Sone’s hit piece also discloses clear partisan motive on England’s part to fabricate and score political points off someone not of his own party.
Of course, it would have been more honest of Ms. Sone had she bothered to include any of the back story behind why DeRosa and her running dogs have now taken out after both Chuck Vasquez and Greg Pettis. DeRosa came in for some well-deserved criticism after her unbelievably cynical performance on the recent Council vote to adopt a resolution supporting marriage equality, and she didn’t like that criticism one little bit. DeRosa has a reputation for vindictiveness, for striking back, usually below the belt, at her enemies, real or imagined. Today’s article represents nothing more than an effort at political payback, undertaken by a reporter who knows her beat so poorly that she can be played like that Stradivarius by a political operator who will stop at nothing to reward her friends, punish her enemies, and seek by any means available to consolidate political power and criminalize any opposition to her reign.
North Korea has its Kim Jong-Un and legions of sycophantic propaganda toadies to disseminate the boy dictator’s message. The Coachella Valley has Kathleen Joan DeRosa and the Desert Sun to accomplish similar purposes, and such sycophancy and toadying have only damaged what little reputation the Desert Sun had for being a reliable, trustworthy news source.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, where he served on the city Council from 2002 to 2010. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Riverside County Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is prepared to vigorously litigate against any person or entity which attempts to attack him on the basis of his expression of views herein. So, Kathleen, back the f--k off; you too, Bud.
By: Paul S. Marchand
The Desert Sun ran a hit piece today headlined “Cathedral City Councilman Greg Pettis spent $92,000 using a city-backed credit card.”
The article is bylined Tamara Sone, but it bears all the hallmarks of having been conceived and put together by the incumbent mayor of Cathedral City, Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose entitled conceit of herself as “Mayor-for-life” has earned her reputation for vindictiveness, untruth, and divisiveness.
Certainly, the baleful effects of the Desert Sun’s policy of assigning beat reporters who do not know the beat they are covering have played themselves out in Cathedral City many times over the years, as reporters effectively allow themselves to be spoonfed by whatever politico is willing to give them a sound bite or by whatever politico TDS has decided it likes. This enables crafty and deceitful people like Kathleen DeRosa and her faithful henchman Bud England to play the Desert Sun and its reporters like a Stradivarius.
A number of features from this morning’s monstrosity merit being called out and held up for critical examination (an examination the Desert Sun should have done in-house before even allowing the piece to go to print --- Greg Burton, master of the art of self-congratulation, are you listening?)
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this morning’s monstrosity was its open failure of due diligence. The only council or quasi-council sources quoted extensively were DeRosa and England, whose detached sense of “Christian entitlement” --- to say nothing of his intellectual dishonesty in taking credit for my legislative initiatives as a councilmember--- cost him his council seat last November. See: “Somebody Thinks We’re Stupid: an Incumbent Councilman’s Effort to Take Credit for the Work of Another,” www.http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2012/11/somebody-thinks-were-stupid-incumbent.html (Full disclosure: I ran unsuccessfully to reclaim the seat on the council on which I served between 2002 and 2010. I know whereof I speak in these matters, and I take some pleasure in having drawn off some of the votes Bud England might otherwise have relied upon to hold on to his seat.)
While Councilmember Sam Toles was apparently briefly consulted, his remarks received short shrift in the article, though Sone was at pains to identify his partisan affiliation.
With the exception of a single brief reference to city manager Andy Hall, the only other city employee quoted was administrative services director Tami Scott, whose federal felony record is a matter of public knowledge, and who was pled guilty to making a false statement to a federal investigator, which in the law of evidence, is considered non-recommending for a witness’s credibility. At least city clerk Pat Hammers, whose indiscreet e-mails to the incumbent mayor exposed her unneutral betrayal of the public trust during the 2012 election, had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. And, of course, Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet also gets in a sound bite; God forbid the Desert Sun should not slip in its own Palm Springs-centric bias.
Of course, it is common knowledge in Cathedral City that there is no love lost between Greg Pettis on one side and DeRosa/England on the other. That there is a political rivalry among them is as unsurprising as the fact that water is wet. Thus, for Sone to have relied heavily upon known rivals of the target, and to make no effort to have consulted with others, myself included, with some degree of institutional memory, constitutes journalistic malpractice.
It was equal journalistic malpractice to have accepted, without any apparent effort to corroborate it, England’s representation that Pettis’ travel on the city’s behalf was an ongoing, contentious issue, that “we’ve been fighting that fight for years.” I find myself searching for polite equivalent of the word “lie.” Yet there is none. What Bud England said to Tamara Sone was a flat-out lie. I served eight years on the city Council alongside both Greg Pettis and Bud England, and during that time, there was almost no substantive or substantial discussion of Mr. Pettis’ travel.
Indeed, the only discussion of council member travel came when I expressed reservations about the propriety of DeRosa’s having accompanied the high school band on a junket to New York City that brought no value added back to our community, and which no other California mayor would have undertaken. As is her style, DeRosa attacked me personally for questioning her waste of taxpayer dollars, and rounded up a few cronies from the community to show up at the next council meeting to gush enthusiastically about how “wonderful it was” that she had gone junketing to the Big Apple on the taxpayers’ dime, and while there guzzled down $11 glasses of wine at tony restaurants.
Indeed, Tamara Sone’s journalistic malpractice continued when she went out of her way to ignore Sam Toles’s observation that travel is an integral part of what we elect our public officials to do. Because DeRosa is both lazy and has an offputting personality, the default policy of the city during the nine bitter winters of her mayoralty has been to foist off on Greg Pettis many of the responsibilities that a less lazy and incompetent mayor would have taken upon herself. As either Clare Booth Luce or Oscar Wilde once observed: no good deed goes unpunished. Pettis busts his butt because the Dear Leader, the Mayor for Life, is too bloody lazy and disengaged to do her job, and she shivs him to an eager and uncritical reporter for having done so. Shameful, shameful.
Lazy narcissists like DeRosa and eager, willing dupes like England either cannot or will not understand that history is made by those who show up, and that when our destiny is being decided in places like Sacramento or Washington City, we need to be at the table and involved in the discussion, or the decisions made will be made without reference to, and often in derogation of, the best interests of the city. Having Greg Pettis at the table in those discussions may not produce the kind of revenue that a sanctimonious cynic like Bud England might expect, but Mr. Pettis’ presence at the table has often protected us from decisions being made at our expense, and contrary to our interests. If Bud England cannot understand that protecting the city from the foreseeable consequences of bad decisions made outside our presence is itself a form of value added, then he really is stranger to anything resembling true wisdom.
Of course, expecting wisdom ---or anything beyond shallow political nastiness--- from either Kathleen DeRosa or Bud England is a doomed enterprise. Both of those individuals live down to Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Bud England would not know the value of Greg Pettis’ contributions to the city if those contributions came up and bit him on the rear end. Indeed, during the 12 winters he served on the council, England developed a reputation for being remarkably ignorant and obtuse, having to have simple things explained to him multiple times. Not only did he not understand that there was a larger picture to see, he didn’t see the picture at all, and thus has remained a perfect unthinking and uncritical surrogate for a mayor who has little hesitation being confrontational, but who usually prefers to do her dirty work through third parties.
Having relied for the bulk of her story on Pettis’ political opponents, both of whom regard him as an enemy, and having essentially dismissed any comments or remarks that might have portrayed Mr. Pettis in a more positive light, Sone then went on to make much of, and to read much into, the fact that he sought protection in bankruptcy in 2010.
And here lies the great internal contradiction in Sone’s monstrosity. On the one hand, Sone implies that somehow Mr. Pettis is making himself rich on taxpayer dollars, yet on the other, she takes the contradictory position that Mr. Pettis, having filed for bankruptcy, must be some kind of dishonest ---even criminal--- operator. Yet, millions of Americans seek protection in bankruptcy every year. For Sone to take the position she does betrays either willful ignorance or a kind of privileged, entitled contempt for huge numbers of her fellow citizens. We do not expect our political leaders to enrich themselves at public expense, yet Sone apparently wants it both ways. If Pettis enriched himself at public expense, he is a bad man; if he did not he is a bad man. Catch-22.
If Tamara Sone cannot seem to understand that seeking bankruptcy protection is a right protected by the Constitution of the United States, she also seems to take a perverse delight in introducing partisanship into her hit piece. Here, her lack of due diligence and personal bias show nakedly through. The clear implication of the article is that somehow Democrats are not to be trusted, that Democratic hands should not be allowed anywhere near the municipal cookie jar. Of course, the briefest textual analysis of Sone’s hit piece also discloses clear partisan motive on England’s part to fabricate and score political points off someone not of his own party.
Of course, it would have been more honest of Ms. Sone had she bothered to include any of the back story behind why DeRosa and her running dogs have now taken out after both Chuck Vasquez and Greg Pettis. DeRosa came in for some well-deserved criticism after her unbelievably cynical performance on the recent Council vote to adopt a resolution supporting marriage equality, and she didn’t like that criticism one little bit. DeRosa has a reputation for vindictiveness, for striking back, usually below the belt, at her enemies, real or imagined. Today’s article represents nothing more than an effort at political payback, undertaken by a reporter who knows her beat so poorly that she can be played like that Stradivarius by a political operator who will stop at nothing to reward her friends, punish her enemies, and seek by any means available to consolidate political power and criminalize any opposition to her reign.
North Korea has its Kim Jong-Un and legions of sycophantic propaganda toadies to disseminate the boy dictator’s message. The Coachella Valley has Kathleen Joan DeRosa and the Desert Sun to accomplish similar purposes, and such sycophancy and toadying have only damaged what little reputation the Desert Sun had for being a reliable, trustworthy news source.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, where he served on the city Council from 2002 to 2010. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Riverside County Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is prepared to vigorously litigate against any person or entity which attempts to attack him on the basis of his expression of views herein. So, Kathleen, back the f--k off; you too, Bud.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
AN OCCASION FOR STUTTERING, SPLUTTERING, SPUTTERING, SPLENETIC, FULMINANT RAGE ON THE OPENING OF DUBYA’S LIBRARY:
Summary: Watching TV news coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library tempted me toward an Elvis moment of shooting my TV, but while I had motive and opportunity, means were lacking. There are almost no words to describe the universe of contempt in which I hold George Dubya, his administration, and all their works. From the lies we were fed to support the invasion of Iraq to the divisiveness of his words and policies, right on through to the enthusiastic embrace of policies and practices that were, at best, hateful and un-American, I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, but find myself instead reduced to stuttering, spluttering, sputtering, splenetic, fulminant rage, the anger of which causes me to pile on the alliterative adjectives. During the eight bitter winters of his reign, and at his urging, America abandoned her view of herself as being “a city on a hill,” and instead joined the league of ordinary nations. Our national honor is in tatters, and I blame George Dubya Bush.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Writing in Facebook today, The Rev. Canon Susan Russell of All Saints Pasadena observed that she had found “all the news on the opening of the Bush Library very inspiring. It's inspired [her] to turn off the news and go fold that laundry [she’d] been ignoring on the top of the dryer.”
Reading Mother Susan’s post, I had to acknowledge a strong temptation when seeing the TV coverage of the event to want to pull an Elvis and shoot the television. Fortunately, while I had both motive and opportunity, I lacked the means. For want thereof, I found myself obliged to fall back on the default response of millions of Americans, and unburdened myself of a stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, splenetic, fulminant tirade, piling on alliterative adjectives, as if by heaping verbal abuse on my uncomplaining TV, I could in some way to communicate to George Dubya the universe of contempt in which I hold him, his administration, its personnel, and all their works.
It is not just that George Dubya and his administration lied us into an aggressive and unlawful war in Iraq. It isn’t just that he and his krewe blasted the top off the national debt, any more than that he and his minions chose to cheapen our political discourse in this country by governing to and in the interest of resentful white conservatives who feel themselves victimized every time an African-American has the temerity to sit at the front of the bus.
Names like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Viet Dinh, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle, to name just a few, have come to form a well known rogues gallery of neoconservative practitioners of what Time Magazine’s Joe Klein aptly described as “unilateral bellicosity.”
Indeed, so complete and systematic was the damage that George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers did to the national interest of the United States, that future historians may well find themselves asking whether George Dubya was even on our side.
Withal, the eight winters of George Dubya Bush’s tenure exerted in many ways a more corrosive influence on our American polity than most of us had encountered in our previous lifetimes.
George Dubya’s presidency seemed to be not only driven by a visceral desire to punish the United States for having had the effrontery to elect William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency in 1992, but also by a sense of privileged entitlement that played itself out brilliantly in the way George Dubya and his krewe managed to appeal to all of the worst aspects of American human nature.
Commenting recently on CNN’s coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential Library, one anonymous poster observed approvingly that George Dubya had “punished the lazy and rewarded the industrious,” explicitly invoking Ayn Rand’s makers/takers narrative.
Indeed, the narrative that took root during George Dubya’s eight bitter winters was a simple, binary one. You were either a maker or a taker; you were “a loyal Bushie” or you were one of “them.” If you were a loyal Bushie, you subscribed to all the various harebrained notions to which the administration gave either explicit or implicit support, including climate-change denial, “intelligent design,” and the well-debunked notion that Saddam Hussein not only had had weapons of mass destruction, but that he had been the architect of the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001.
For 9/11 represented a godsend for an administration that, just months into its tenure was suffering a palpable crisis of legitimacy and popular confidence. While it might be a bit much to characterize 9/11 as a “Reichstag fire,” the Bush administration’s response to it was predictably paranoid and authoritarian. Watching Mr. Bush and his surrogates bang the drum for war and promulgate an insistent “if you are not with us, you’re against us” narrative left millions of Americans feeling an existential fear for the future of American democracy.
And if such fears may not have been misplaced. There is something fundamentally un-American about not merely using, but also celebrating, torture. The scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison not only embarrassed the nation but also damaged, perhaps irreparably, whatever support we had had among the communities of the Arab nation.
Indeed, the Bush administration managed to fumble the ball on Mideast issues within days after 9/11, when, in an address to Congress, Dubya described our effort to bring the terrorists to justice as “a crusade.” The word “crusade” may be unexceptionable in the zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman West, but in the Islamic community, it carries all manner of highly unpleasant baggage. Bush might as well have been channeling for Ann Coulter’s hyperventilating demand that we should invade their countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Such extremist talk, larded as it usually was by coded appeals to socially conservative evangelicals (sometimes known as “speaking Christian”) helped reinforce the right-wing narrative that American rightists were both a privileged people, God’s own elect, and also a quivering mass of victims under siege.
The concept of the privileged victim represents a unique and insidious form of cognitive political dissonance. It is a form of dissonance which George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers exploited brilliantly. Listen to an American conservative talk politics and you will hear on one hand a confident assertion of implicit (usually white or wealth-based or male) privilege, mixed with almost unbelievably whiny expressions of perceived victimhood. “They hate me because I’m white and wealthy and male and so they want to take all that away from me.” “I am a maker and all those takers are trying to victimize me.” “I’m straight and all those homos are gawking at me.” (Oh, please, honey! Not if you were the LAST man on earth!)
Indeed, so successful was George Dubya’s effort to build the base of militant, privileged victims that he was, to all intents and purposes, able to complete the transformation of our political culture that began in 1992, when Bill Clinton came to power and Bush loyalist heads began to explode. The Beltway Bourbons and Bush loyalists who took personally George H. W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 and the Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 midwifed a new political culture of confrontation and insult. Where we had had a political culture of conversation and compromise, movement conservatives quickly embraced a new dispensation of taunts, bullying, and schoolyard insults. Listening to the sniping back and forth in Washington D.C. simply reaffirms the success of this new, childish dispensation in American politics.
Look at the way in which Americans inside the Beltway and beyond it in a more authentic America interact with one another. Instead of taking a moment to consider whether the other person in the conversation might have a point, we now default immediately to snark, insults, and general nastiness. Indeed, Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its current successor Obama Derangement Syndrome have led to excesses of which a prior generation of opposition-identified Americans would have been ashamed.
In early 2009, for example, when the International Olympic Committee chose Rio de Janeiro over Chicago to host the 2016 Games, conservatives throughout the United States cheered loudly, because Chicago happens to be Barack Obama’s hometown, and they certainly didn’t want anything good coming to the president’s hometown. I belong to a generation that was brought up to believe it shameful and dishonorable to root against your own country. Sadly, too many of my own generation seem to have lost touch with that basic patriotic truth.
For many of these enormities, I place the blame squarely on George Dubya Bush. The man epitomized, embodied, and personified the arrogance of privilege, of the callow frat boy who glides through life not his own merits but on those of his forebears.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the worst attributes of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism without displaying a single one of the redeeming features that kept bringing the British public back to the Iron Lady through multiple general elections.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the masculine insecurities of straight white-collar macho, with its ridiculous posturing, its penchant for calling people by demeaning names, and the swaggering, phony bonhomie that only reinforces the homely wisdom of American womanhood that “[straight] men are pigs.”
Worse, George Dubya Bush epitomized, embodied, and personified America’s self-sabotaging disdain for the life of the mind and for things of the intellect. To the extent that the man prided himself on being “plainspoken,” George Dubya Bush simply came across as foolish and tongue-tied. To the extent that he tried to dance around the question of whether Charles Darwin had been right, George Dubya came across as a bloody fool.
But finally, what makes the opening of his library such a rage-triggering event in my household is that for eight long winters, the honor of the United States of America was prostituted and ignored. On George Dubya Bush’s watch, this country embraced a whole passel of practices we had formerly eschewed, considering them dishonorable and unworthy of our ideals.
Under George Dubya Bush, we abandoned even the aspiration of being John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and embraced, even eagerly, our descent into what West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has referred to as “the league of ordinary nations.”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, and they are certainly not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Angry Bush loyalists are free to vent whatever schoolyard insults they want, though they need to be cognizant of law of defamation in so doing.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Writing in Facebook today, The Rev. Canon Susan Russell of All Saints Pasadena observed that she had found “all the news on the opening of the Bush Library very inspiring. It's inspired [her] to turn off the news and go fold that laundry [she’d] been ignoring on the top of the dryer.”
Reading Mother Susan’s post, I had to acknowledge a strong temptation when seeing the TV coverage of the event to want to pull an Elvis and shoot the television. Fortunately, while I had both motive and opportunity, I lacked the means. For want thereof, I found myself obliged to fall back on the default response of millions of Americans, and unburdened myself of a stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, splenetic, fulminant tirade, piling on alliterative adjectives, as if by heaping verbal abuse on my uncomplaining TV, I could in some way to communicate to George Dubya the universe of contempt in which I hold him, his administration, its personnel, and all their works.
It is not just that George Dubya and his administration lied us into an aggressive and unlawful war in Iraq. It isn’t just that he and his krewe blasted the top off the national debt, any more than that he and his minions chose to cheapen our political discourse in this country by governing to and in the interest of resentful white conservatives who feel themselves victimized every time an African-American has the temerity to sit at the front of the bus.
Names like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Viet Dinh, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle, to name just a few, have come to form a well known rogues gallery of neoconservative practitioners of what Time Magazine’s Joe Klein aptly described as “unilateral bellicosity.”
Indeed, so complete and systematic was the damage that George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers did to the national interest of the United States, that future historians may well find themselves asking whether George Dubya was even on our side.
Withal, the eight winters of George Dubya Bush’s tenure exerted in many ways a more corrosive influence on our American polity than most of us had encountered in our previous lifetimes.
George Dubya’s presidency seemed to be not only driven by a visceral desire to punish the United States for having had the effrontery to elect William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency in 1992, but also by a sense of privileged entitlement that played itself out brilliantly in the way George Dubya and his krewe managed to appeal to all of the worst aspects of American human nature.
Commenting recently on CNN’s coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential Library, one anonymous poster observed approvingly that George Dubya had “punished the lazy and rewarded the industrious,” explicitly invoking Ayn Rand’s makers/takers narrative.
Indeed, the narrative that took root during George Dubya’s eight bitter winters was a simple, binary one. You were either a maker or a taker; you were “a loyal Bushie” or you were one of “them.” If you were a loyal Bushie, you subscribed to all the various harebrained notions to which the administration gave either explicit or implicit support, including climate-change denial, “intelligent design,” and the well-debunked notion that Saddam Hussein not only had had weapons of mass destruction, but that he had been the architect of the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001.
For 9/11 represented a godsend for an administration that, just months into its tenure was suffering a palpable crisis of legitimacy and popular confidence. While it might be a bit much to characterize 9/11 as a “Reichstag fire,” the Bush administration’s response to it was predictably paranoid and authoritarian. Watching Mr. Bush and his surrogates bang the drum for war and promulgate an insistent “if you are not with us, you’re against us” narrative left millions of Americans feeling an existential fear for the future of American democracy.
And if such fears may not have been misplaced. There is something fundamentally un-American about not merely using, but also celebrating, torture. The scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison not only embarrassed the nation but also damaged, perhaps irreparably, whatever support we had had among the communities of the Arab nation.
Indeed, the Bush administration managed to fumble the ball on Mideast issues within days after 9/11, when, in an address to Congress, Dubya described our effort to bring the terrorists to justice as “a crusade.” The word “crusade” may be unexceptionable in the zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman West, but in the Islamic community, it carries all manner of highly unpleasant baggage. Bush might as well have been channeling for Ann Coulter’s hyperventilating demand that we should invade their countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Such extremist talk, larded as it usually was by coded appeals to socially conservative evangelicals (sometimes known as “speaking Christian”) helped reinforce the right-wing narrative that American rightists were both a privileged people, God’s own elect, and also a quivering mass of victims under siege.
The concept of the privileged victim represents a unique and insidious form of cognitive political dissonance. It is a form of dissonance which George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers exploited brilliantly. Listen to an American conservative talk politics and you will hear on one hand a confident assertion of implicit (usually white or wealth-based or male) privilege, mixed with almost unbelievably whiny expressions of perceived victimhood. “They hate me because I’m white and wealthy and male and so they want to take all that away from me.” “I am a maker and all those takers are trying to victimize me.” “I’m straight and all those homos are gawking at me.” (Oh, please, honey! Not if you were the LAST man on earth!)
Indeed, so successful was George Dubya’s effort to build the base of militant, privileged victims that he was, to all intents and purposes, able to complete the transformation of our political culture that began in 1992, when Bill Clinton came to power and Bush loyalist heads began to explode. The Beltway Bourbons and Bush loyalists who took personally George H. W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 and the Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 midwifed a new political culture of confrontation and insult. Where we had had a political culture of conversation and compromise, movement conservatives quickly embraced a new dispensation of taunts, bullying, and schoolyard insults. Listening to the sniping back and forth in Washington D.C. simply reaffirms the success of this new, childish dispensation in American politics.
Look at the way in which Americans inside the Beltway and beyond it in a more authentic America interact with one another. Instead of taking a moment to consider whether the other person in the conversation might have a point, we now default immediately to snark, insults, and general nastiness. Indeed, Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its current successor Obama Derangement Syndrome have led to excesses of which a prior generation of opposition-identified Americans would have been ashamed.
In early 2009, for example, when the International Olympic Committee chose Rio de Janeiro over Chicago to host the 2016 Games, conservatives throughout the United States cheered loudly, because Chicago happens to be Barack Obama’s hometown, and they certainly didn’t want anything good coming to the president’s hometown. I belong to a generation that was brought up to believe it shameful and dishonorable to root against your own country. Sadly, too many of my own generation seem to have lost touch with that basic patriotic truth.
For many of these enormities, I place the blame squarely on George Dubya Bush. The man epitomized, embodied, and personified the arrogance of privilege, of the callow frat boy who glides through life not his own merits but on those of his forebears.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the worst attributes of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism without displaying a single one of the redeeming features that kept bringing the British public back to the Iron Lady through multiple general elections.
He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the masculine insecurities of straight white-collar macho, with its ridiculous posturing, its penchant for calling people by demeaning names, and the swaggering, phony bonhomie that only reinforces the homely wisdom of American womanhood that “[straight] men are pigs.”
Worse, George Dubya Bush epitomized, embodied, and personified America’s self-sabotaging disdain for the life of the mind and for things of the intellect. To the extent that the man prided himself on being “plainspoken,” George Dubya Bush simply came across as foolish and tongue-tied. To the extent that he tried to dance around the question of whether Charles Darwin had been right, George Dubya came across as a bloody fool.
But finally, what makes the opening of his library such a rage-triggering event in my household is that for eight long winters, the honor of the United States of America was prostituted and ignored. On George Dubya Bush’s watch, this country embraced a whole passel of practices we had formerly eschewed, considering them dishonorable and unworthy of our ideals.
Under George Dubya Bush, we abandoned even the aspiration of being John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and embraced, even eagerly, our descent into what West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has referred to as “the league of ordinary nations.”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, and they are certainly not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Angry Bush loyalists are free to vent whatever schoolyard insults they want, though they need to be cognizant of law of defamation in so doing.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
TIME TO ROTATE CATHEDRAL CITY’S MAYORALTY
Summary: The rotation of the mayoralty in the cities in West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage reminds us that here in Cathedral City, we have been ill served during the last nine winters by a system that has enabled a divisive and arrogant mayor with no real talent for governing to indulge her monarchical conceit of herself and her office. The time has come for Cathedral City to look very seriously at rotating the mayoral office. Cathedral City’s incumbent mayor has managed to embody the worst aspects of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism with none of the redeeming qualities that left even many of Baroness Thatcher’s critics compelled to recognize that the Iron Lady had been one of Great Britain’s most consequential prime ministers. A year as mayor is all the time a good mayor needs to get a city on the right track, even if that same 12 month is usually too short a period for a bad mayor to screw things up the way Kathleen Joan DeRosa has done in Cathedral city.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Over the last couple of days, my Facebook newsfeed has contained updates about the changing of the mayoral guard in both West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage.
In West Hollywood, Mayor Jeffrey Prang passed his mayoral gavel to Abbe Land, whom I first met the better part of 30 years ago.
Next door, in Rancho Mirage, the mayoralty has rotated from Scott Hines to Richard Kite.
Here in Cathedral city, where we directly elect a mayor for two-year terms, we are now into the fifth term of a mayor who in the nine long winters of her reign has managed to embody all of the worst aspects of the late Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism and not a single one of Baroness Thatcher’s redeeming qualities, qualities which made the late Iron Lady one of the most consequential British prime ministers of the latter half of the 20th century.
Kathleen Joan DeRosa has become a living, breathing, argument for rotating mayoralty. Cathedral City should consider changing its council structure and abolishing its current mayoral system, a system by which we have been horribly ill served for the last nine years.
The practice of having a directly elected mayor makes little sense in most council-manager cities. In a council manager city, the day-to-day running of the municipality lies not in the hands of the mayor, as it does in a traditional strong-mayor system, but in the hands of an appointed city manager.
The advantage of the Council-manager system is that it allows for a greater degree of professionalism in the running of what is, to all intents and purposes, a multimillion dollar corporate operation.
Here in Cathedral city, the current mayor has displayed a remarkably monarchical conceit of herself and a disturbing willingness to do whatever it takes to hold on to her power, including using public safety as her “muscle.” The current mayor certainly seems to be a devotee of the maxim that “politics is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.” Our politics has been cheapened and degraded during the nine winters of the incumbent mayor’s tenure, and she has thoroughly discredited the very concept of a directly elected mayor.
A rotating mayoralty could potentially spare us the unseemly spectacle of an incumbent mayor who, as this one has done, seems more interested in rewarding friends, punishing enemies, pursuing power, and building a cult of personality than in actually governing in the interests of the community. Indeed, given the large amounts of time this mayor has spent at vacation homes or other residences outside the city, it is questionable whether the incumbent mayor has any commitment at all to Cathedral City, or whether being mayor is just an ego trip.
A city can survive one year of a bad mayor, but nine winters of bad governance and divisive politics is simply too much. What we do know is that Kathleen DeRosa is no Margaret Thatcher, and indeed I almost feel constrained to apologize to Baroness Thatcher’s family for being so gauche as to link the two women. Margaret Thatcher got things done, even if untidily. Kathleen Joan DeRosa can point to at best an appallingly thin record of achievement for Cathedral City. Where is the influx of business and development we were promised for our now barren downdown? Where? Bueller? Bueller?
Isn’t it time we set in train the steps necessary to ensure that the mayoralty rotates among council members, and that no single individual gets more than a 12 month window of opportunity to screw things up as badly as Kathleen DeRosa has done?
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member the city Council. During six of those years, he had to deal with the misgovernment of the incumbent mayor, and is more than ever convinced that Cathedral city needs a rotating mayoralty. The views contained herein are his own, and not anybody else’s. They are not intended to constitute legal advice. To the extent that the mayor or any of her supporters may seek to institute any form of proceedings against him for daring to say that the empress has no clothes, just remember that for every SLAPP suit, there may well be a SLAPPback.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Over the last couple of days, my Facebook newsfeed has contained updates about the changing of the mayoral guard in both West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage.
In West Hollywood, Mayor Jeffrey Prang passed his mayoral gavel to Abbe Land, whom I first met the better part of 30 years ago.
Next door, in Rancho Mirage, the mayoralty has rotated from Scott Hines to Richard Kite.
Here in Cathedral city, where we directly elect a mayor for two-year terms, we are now into the fifth term of a mayor who in the nine long winters of her reign has managed to embody all of the worst aspects of the late Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism and not a single one of Baroness Thatcher’s redeeming qualities, qualities which made the late Iron Lady one of the most consequential British prime ministers of the latter half of the 20th century.
Kathleen Joan DeRosa has become a living, breathing, argument for rotating mayoralty. Cathedral City should consider changing its council structure and abolishing its current mayoral system, a system by which we have been horribly ill served for the last nine years.
The practice of having a directly elected mayor makes little sense in most council-manager cities. In a council manager city, the day-to-day running of the municipality lies not in the hands of the mayor, as it does in a traditional strong-mayor system, but in the hands of an appointed city manager.
The advantage of the Council-manager system is that it allows for a greater degree of professionalism in the running of what is, to all intents and purposes, a multimillion dollar corporate operation.
Here in Cathedral city, the current mayor has displayed a remarkably monarchical conceit of herself and a disturbing willingness to do whatever it takes to hold on to her power, including using public safety as her “muscle.” The current mayor certainly seems to be a devotee of the maxim that “politics is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.” Our politics has been cheapened and degraded during the nine winters of the incumbent mayor’s tenure, and she has thoroughly discredited the very concept of a directly elected mayor.
A rotating mayoralty could potentially spare us the unseemly spectacle of an incumbent mayor who, as this one has done, seems more interested in rewarding friends, punishing enemies, pursuing power, and building a cult of personality than in actually governing in the interests of the community. Indeed, given the large amounts of time this mayor has spent at vacation homes or other residences outside the city, it is questionable whether the incumbent mayor has any commitment at all to Cathedral City, or whether being mayor is just an ego trip.
A city can survive one year of a bad mayor, but nine winters of bad governance and divisive politics is simply too much. What we do know is that Kathleen DeRosa is no Margaret Thatcher, and indeed I almost feel constrained to apologize to Baroness Thatcher’s family for being so gauche as to link the two women. Margaret Thatcher got things done, even if untidily. Kathleen Joan DeRosa can point to at best an appallingly thin record of achievement for Cathedral City. Where is the influx of business and development we were promised for our now barren downdown? Where? Bueller? Bueller?
Isn’t it time we set in train the steps necessary to ensure that the mayoralty rotates among council members, and that no single individual gets more than a 12 month window of opportunity to screw things up as badly as Kathleen DeRosa has done?
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member the city Council. During six of those years, he had to deal with the misgovernment of the incumbent mayor, and is more than ever convinced that Cathedral city needs a rotating mayoralty. The views contained herein are his own, and not anybody else’s. They are not intended to constitute legal advice. To the extent that the mayor or any of her supporters may seek to institute any form of proceedings against him for daring to say that the empress has no clothes, just remember that for every SLAPP suit, there may well be a SLAPPback.
Monday, April 8, 2013
MARGARET, BARONESS THATCHER OF KESTEVEN, an Ambiguous Appreciation
Summary: Margaret Thatcher’s passing reopens many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been fully and fairly litigated a generation ago. It will take a long time to figure out Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy. Those of us who swing more Labour than Tory will bring our own severe critique of her domestic performance to bear, but we may still remember with some pleasure and amusement the sheer vivacity and joie de vivre she brought to the cut and thrust of politics in the House of Commons. Yet, as much as we remember her effervescent personality, her sheer joy of combat, and her almost Saxon pleasure in wordplay, we also remember that it was Margaret Thatcher who stood up to the Argentine junta and said in effect “no, we’re not going to let the Falklands become the Malvinas.” By making the decision to fight for, and ultimately liberate, the Falklands, Thatcher sent a signal to both Buenos Aires and Moscow that the long retreat of the West was over, and that the West would be willing to take up arms against further incursions and adventurism. It was an act of great political courage, for which the West owes Margaret Thatcher a debt of gratitude. Britain will not see her like again.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, died this morning at 87.
Though Benjamin Franklin wryly and rightly pointed out that life’s only two certainties are death and taxes, the passing of Great Britain’s first woman prime minister certainly serves to reopen many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been thought fully and fairly litigated a generation ago.
I was in high school, in the 10th grade to be exact, in the spring of 1979 when embattled Labour PM James Callaghan went to the Queen and asked for a dissolution. The general election that followed became as much a referendum on gender as it did on the divide between Labour and the Tories. I can recall, in an in-class discussion of the upcoming vote, the teacher opining that Labour would carry the day because Britain was not yet ready for a female prime minister.
Of course Britain was ready for a female prime minister, and the Tories performed quite creditably at the polls. Watching the results of the British election come in, I can remember prescient political pundits here in America predicting that Ronald Reagan would be the next President of the United States.
As much as my teacher was wrong, the pundits were right; Ronald Reagan masterfully played --- as Mrs. Thatcher had done --- to the pervasive sense of discontent palpable in both the British and American bodies politic. Both Thatcher and Reagan were masterful politicians, skilled in the art of framing issues and challenges in such a way as to convince their electorates that they, and they alone, stood between the West and the looming menace of aggressive Soviet adventurism.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher certainly benefited from James Callaghan and Labour’s serious charisma gap. The generation of Labour leaders that had emerged under Clement Attlee following the Second World War had largely played itself out. Callahan himself appeared grim and gray against the effervescent Mrs. Thatcher.
While Jim Callaghan never made Jimmy Carter’s mistake of speaking of a national “malaise,” he offered the British public little more than a vision of plodding forward into certain doom.
Once installed in Number 10 Downing Street, the Iron Lady wasted little time in applying what she considered a dose of strong conservative medicine to British society. The baleful effects of Margaret Thatcher’s domestic legacy will no doubt be debated for generations. Even today, the very mention of Margaret Thatcher’s name is enough to provoke both here and across the pond often visceral, eye-bulging, vein-throbbing, table-pounding rage from those who remember Mrs. Thatcher’s apparent indifference to the North of England, and her apparent antipathy toward the party opposite.
That Mrs. Thatcher possessed an effervescent personality and seemed to truly enjoy the cut and thrust of political combat in the House only enraged her opponents more. Though, on principle, they were more often right than she, the prime minister handled them with a deft expertise of a matador working a bull in an afternoon corrida, often reducing them to spluttering, sputtering, splenetic and inarticulate paroxysms of peevishness.
From the standpoint of one who tends to have a preferential option for Labour and not for the Tories, my view of Baroness Thatcher’s legacy and accomplishments is necessarily a critical one. Those of us who swing Labor more than Tory will bring our own fairly sharp critique of her performance to bear. Nonetheless, I could appreciate the vivacity and even playfulness with which Mrs. Thatcher did politics. Unlike her Labour predecessor James Callaghan, or her Conservative successor, the breathtakingly dour and colorless John Major, Margaret Thatcher was fun. Not funny, fun.
You didn’t have to approve, as I didn’t, of her politics to appreciate the way in which she livened things up “around the old place.” One could appreciate the joyful deftness of her utterly English, Saxon wordplay, beautifully exemplified at a Conservative party conference when, in response to suggestions that she might have taken a U-turn on a policy issue, responded “you turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” Thatcher’s riff on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 romantic comedy the Lady’s Not for Burning brought the house down.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher was about a lot more than clever wordplay in the House or the sheer joy of political combat. There are other aspects of Thatcher’s legacy worth appreciating, not least of them her ironclad determination not to allow the Falkland Islands to become the Malvinas. Thatcher’s decision to use force to expel the Argentine troops who had attempted an April, 1982 coup de main against Britain’s isolated colony at the bottom of the South Atlantic came as something of a shock in both Buenos Aires and other Western capitals.
For the West had been perceived to be in retreat for a long time. Since the end of World War II, the West had had its collective nose bloodied in a series of often humiliating retreats and withdrawals. Beginning with the dismantling of the British Raj in India and Pakistan, to France’s humiliation at Dien Bien Phu, the fiasco of Suez in 1956 and Aden in 1967, right to the final frenzied retreat from Saigon in 1975 (and who can forget the immortal image of refugees frantically clambering from a rooftop onto a hovering helicopter as Saigon collapsed?), the West had suffered a generation of very public, very humiliating, reverses. Was it any surprise that, given the perception of Western weakness, Soviet adventurism should have reached its apogee during the 1970s?
The apparent impotence of the West emboldened regimes in the third world and the global South to want to try conclusions with the former imperial powers. In Argentina, an unpopular military junta, facing a domestic crisis of confidence and legitimacy, cynically appealed to the natural tendency of a divided public to unify around national leaders in wartime. The decision of the Argentine junta ---Lt. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, Adm. Jorge Anaya, and Air Force brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo--- to invade the Falklands was driven entirely by domestic political considerations.
Buenos Aires no doubt imagined that the British lion had been declawed and de-balled, and that its roar would be little more than a tame meow betokening tacit acquiescence. Even were Argentina to undertake a coup de main against the Falklands, the junta assumed that London’s response would take the form of an appeal to the UN and a few tepid economic sanctions, coupled with some handwringing and a few embarrassing questions for the prime minister in the House.
Buenos Aires certainly did not expect Mrs. Thatcher to unleash the still considerable power of Her Majesty’s armed forces to undo the effects of Argentina’s aggression.
Indeed, had Argentina waited just six more weeks to act, Defense Minister John Nott’s planned draconian cuts to the RN would have left the Navy without resources to contest the Argentine invasion. Mirabile dictu, the UK let it be known that it would fight, and that it was sending ships and troops to chastise the uppity Argies.
Though the uppity Argies knew, like Paul Revere, that the British were coming, their defense of the Falklands proved insufficient, and by mid-June, 1982, the Falkland Islands were “once again under the form of government desired by their inhabitants (God save the Queen.)”
Admiral Sir John Woodward, the RN task force commander during the Falklands conflict, has suggested with considerable justice that the retaking of the Falklands sent a message not only to Buenos Aires but to Moscow as well that the long and humiliating retreat of the West had come to an end, and that further incursions against it would provoke a military response.
In retrospect, the Falklands represented a foreign-policy triumph for Margaret Thatcher and HM Government. Certainly, Thatcher adroitly exploited the victory in the South Atlantic when she secured a dissolution and went to the country at elections the following year, elections that returned an even larger Tory majority than she had enjoyed.
It would overstate the case to say that Margaret Thatcher saved the West, but having sent the Argentines packing, she certainly faced the Soviet Union with enhanced credibility, and, to some extent, may have put a certain fear of God into the old men who made up the Soviet leadership. After all, if she was crazy enough to stand up to the Argentines, what would she not be crazy enough to do?
Yet, for all of the anger that Margaret Thatcher and her often objectionable policies engendered, we can still say that she did make at least one supremely right decision, and for her choice to resist, and for demonstrating that the British lion could still roar, and that it is still muster sharp teeth and testicular fortitude, she deserves the appreciation not just of Britain, but of the West at large, for it was an act of great political courage, for which the West still owes Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a debt of gratitude.
Britain will not see her like again.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral city, California. He remembers being in London at the beginning of 1982, shortly before the invasion of the Falklands, and remembers the down at heel, post-postwar seediness of the place, and a sense of morale deficit. Things have changed greatly since then. The views contained herein are his own, and will certainly get some of his fellow Democrats (particularly thin-skinned fight-pickers and umbrage-takers) wanting to read him out with bell, book, and candle for not subscribing closely enough to the so-called party line. The views herein set forth are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, died this morning at 87.
Though Benjamin Franklin wryly and rightly pointed out that life’s only two certainties are death and taxes, the passing of Great Britain’s first woman prime minister certainly serves to reopen many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been thought fully and fairly litigated a generation ago.
I was in high school, in the 10th grade to be exact, in the spring of 1979 when embattled Labour PM James Callaghan went to the Queen and asked for a dissolution. The general election that followed became as much a referendum on gender as it did on the divide between Labour and the Tories. I can recall, in an in-class discussion of the upcoming vote, the teacher opining that Labour would carry the day because Britain was not yet ready for a female prime minister.
Of course Britain was ready for a female prime minister, and the Tories performed quite creditably at the polls. Watching the results of the British election come in, I can remember prescient political pundits here in America predicting that Ronald Reagan would be the next President of the United States.
As much as my teacher was wrong, the pundits were right; Ronald Reagan masterfully played --- as Mrs. Thatcher had done --- to the pervasive sense of discontent palpable in both the British and American bodies politic. Both Thatcher and Reagan were masterful politicians, skilled in the art of framing issues and challenges in such a way as to convince their electorates that they, and they alone, stood between the West and the looming menace of aggressive Soviet adventurism.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher certainly benefited from James Callaghan and Labour’s serious charisma gap. The generation of Labour leaders that had emerged under Clement Attlee following the Second World War had largely played itself out. Callahan himself appeared grim and gray against the effervescent Mrs. Thatcher.
While Jim Callaghan never made Jimmy Carter’s mistake of speaking of a national “malaise,” he offered the British public little more than a vision of plodding forward into certain doom.
Once installed in Number 10 Downing Street, the Iron Lady wasted little time in applying what she considered a dose of strong conservative medicine to British society. The baleful effects of Margaret Thatcher’s domestic legacy will no doubt be debated for generations. Even today, the very mention of Margaret Thatcher’s name is enough to provoke both here and across the pond often visceral, eye-bulging, vein-throbbing, table-pounding rage from those who remember Mrs. Thatcher’s apparent indifference to the North of England, and her apparent antipathy toward the party opposite.
That Mrs. Thatcher possessed an effervescent personality and seemed to truly enjoy the cut and thrust of political combat in the House only enraged her opponents more. Though, on principle, they were more often right than she, the prime minister handled them with a deft expertise of a matador working a bull in an afternoon corrida, often reducing them to spluttering, sputtering, splenetic and inarticulate paroxysms of peevishness.
From the standpoint of one who tends to have a preferential option for Labour and not for the Tories, my view of Baroness Thatcher’s legacy and accomplishments is necessarily a critical one. Those of us who swing Labor more than Tory will bring our own fairly sharp critique of her performance to bear. Nonetheless, I could appreciate the vivacity and even playfulness with which Mrs. Thatcher did politics. Unlike her Labour predecessor James Callaghan, or her Conservative successor, the breathtakingly dour and colorless John Major, Margaret Thatcher was fun. Not funny, fun.
You didn’t have to approve, as I didn’t, of her politics to appreciate the way in which she livened things up “around the old place.” One could appreciate the joyful deftness of her utterly English, Saxon wordplay, beautifully exemplified at a Conservative party conference when, in response to suggestions that she might have taken a U-turn on a policy issue, responded “you turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” Thatcher’s riff on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 romantic comedy the Lady’s Not for Burning brought the house down.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher was about a lot more than clever wordplay in the House or the sheer joy of political combat. There are other aspects of Thatcher’s legacy worth appreciating, not least of them her ironclad determination not to allow the Falkland Islands to become the Malvinas. Thatcher’s decision to use force to expel the Argentine troops who had attempted an April, 1982 coup de main against Britain’s isolated colony at the bottom of the South Atlantic came as something of a shock in both Buenos Aires and other Western capitals.
For the West had been perceived to be in retreat for a long time. Since the end of World War II, the West had had its collective nose bloodied in a series of often humiliating retreats and withdrawals. Beginning with the dismantling of the British Raj in India and Pakistan, to France’s humiliation at Dien Bien Phu, the fiasco of Suez in 1956 and Aden in 1967, right to the final frenzied retreat from Saigon in 1975 (and who can forget the immortal image of refugees frantically clambering from a rooftop onto a hovering helicopter as Saigon collapsed?), the West had suffered a generation of very public, very humiliating, reverses. Was it any surprise that, given the perception of Western weakness, Soviet adventurism should have reached its apogee during the 1970s?
The apparent impotence of the West emboldened regimes in the third world and the global South to want to try conclusions with the former imperial powers. In Argentina, an unpopular military junta, facing a domestic crisis of confidence and legitimacy, cynically appealed to the natural tendency of a divided public to unify around national leaders in wartime. The decision of the Argentine junta ---Lt. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, Adm. Jorge Anaya, and Air Force brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo--- to invade the Falklands was driven entirely by domestic political considerations.
Buenos Aires no doubt imagined that the British lion had been declawed and de-balled, and that its roar would be little more than a tame meow betokening tacit acquiescence. Even were Argentina to undertake a coup de main against the Falklands, the junta assumed that London’s response would take the form of an appeal to the UN and a few tepid economic sanctions, coupled with some handwringing and a few embarrassing questions for the prime minister in the House.
Buenos Aires certainly did not expect Mrs. Thatcher to unleash the still considerable power of Her Majesty’s armed forces to undo the effects of Argentina’s aggression.
Indeed, had Argentina waited just six more weeks to act, Defense Minister John Nott’s planned draconian cuts to the RN would have left the Navy without resources to contest the Argentine invasion. Mirabile dictu, the UK let it be known that it would fight, and that it was sending ships and troops to chastise the uppity Argies.
Though the uppity Argies knew, like Paul Revere, that the British were coming, their defense of the Falklands proved insufficient, and by mid-June, 1982, the Falkland Islands were “once again under the form of government desired by their inhabitants (God save the Queen.)”
Admiral Sir John Woodward, the RN task force commander during the Falklands conflict, has suggested with considerable justice that the retaking of the Falklands sent a message not only to Buenos Aires but to Moscow as well that the long and humiliating retreat of the West had come to an end, and that further incursions against it would provoke a military response.
In retrospect, the Falklands represented a foreign-policy triumph for Margaret Thatcher and HM Government. Certainly, Thatcher adroitly exploited the victory in the South Atlantic when she secured a dissolution and went to the country at elections the following year, elections that returned an even larger Tory majority than she had enjoyed.
It would overstate the case to say that Margaret Thatcher saved the West, but having sent the Argentines packing, she certainly faced the Soviet Union with enhanced credibility, and, to some extent, may have put a certain fear of God into the old men who made up the Soviet leadership. After all, if she was crazy enough to stand up to the Argentines, what would she not be crazy enough to do?
Yet, for all of the anger that Margaret Thatcher and her often objectionable policies engendered, we can still say that she did make at least one supremely right decision, and for her choice to resist, and for demonstrating that the British lion could still roar, and that it is still muster sharp teeth and testicular fortitude, she deserves the appreciation not just of Britain, but of the West at large, for it was an act of great political courage, for which the West still owes Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a debt of gratitude.
Britain will not see her like again.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral city, California. He remembers being in London at the beginning of 1982, shortly before the invasion of the Falklands, and remembers the down at heel, post-postwar seediness of the place, and a sense of morale deficit. Things have changed greatly since then. The views contained herein are his own, and will certainly get some of his fellow Democrats (particularly thin-skinned fight-pickers and umbrage-takers) wanting to read him out with bell, book, and candle for not subscribing closely enough to the so-called party line. The views herein set forth are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
INVOKE THE THIRTEENTH: AN ANTI-SLAVERY ARGUMENT AGAINST DOMA
Summary: Most of the arguments against DOMA and for marriage equality derive, and quite rightly, from the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection. Yet, to the extent that laws and policies intended to prevent queerfolk from marrying impose upon queerfolk a badge and incident of slavery, they may also fall afoul not only of the 13th amendment, but also of the Congressional intent underlying the amendment of eradicating badges and incidents of slavery.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Many of the arguments advanced to support marriage equality and to justify striking down DOMA derive quite rightly from the Equal Protection guarantee contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Perhaps overlooked in the sound and the fury has been the question of whether a sustainable argument in favor of marriage equality can be advanced under the Thirteenth Amendment as well.
Invoking the Thirteenth may seem counterintuitive, even perverse. After all, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and, on its face, appears to have nothing to do with equal protection or the right to marry.
Nonetheless, the concept of the right to marry --- and particularly of the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act --- may be more bound up in the 13th amendment than is immediately obvious. Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment confides to Congress the power to enforce the amendment by “appropriate legislation.” Moreover, it is well settled that part of the remedial intent of the Thirteenth Amendment is to do away with so-called badges and incidents of slavery.
Here is where the Thirteenth Amendment becomes relevant to the issue of marriage equality. In the antebellum South, marriages of slaves were not considered valid. Slaves might go through a form of marriage ceremony, but the contingent and transitory nature of such weddings was well expressed in the alteration of the vow to have and to hold “until death us do part.” The modified vow expressed in slave weddings contained the significant additional words “or distance.” Thus, a slave couple plighting to one another their troth did so “until death or distance” did them part.
As I have noted before, a government law or policy that categorically denies to me the right to marry if my intended spouse is not of the gender the government has decreed, to some degree reduces me to the status of slave; if I were to plight my troth to another man, United States law would deny both the validity and the existence of my marriage.
Consequently, to the extent that my state and my country see fit to deny me the faculty and freedom of marital contract, they have imposed upon me a badge and incident of slavery, contrary to Congress’s intent in enacting the Thirteenth Amendment. Moreover, to the extent existing law creates a patchwork of jurisdictions where an LGBT couple can be married in one state, but possess no juridical relationship worthy of the name in a neighboring state, another badge and incident of slavery has been implicated.
Prior to the Civil War, American states enacted a crazy quilt of often inconsistent, even contradictory, laws relating to the status of free persons of color. Some states acknowledged the free personhood of people of color, other states denied it. An African-American traveling from New Orleans to Boston would have to navigate that journey carefully, avoiding jurisdictions in which the law denied his free black status and considered him nothing more than a legitimate target for capture and re-enslavement.
Today, married queerfolk find themselves confronting similar geographical challenges: married here, mere strangers there. For a citizen to be unable to rely upon a uniform civil state (single, married, or divorced) throughout the country reflects an antebellum “badge and incident of slavery” reality. To the extent that DOMA helps to establish and entrench such a reality, it enforces upon queer couples the kind of uncertainty the Thirteenth Amendment was designed, at least in part, to overcome, as well as enforcing upon queer couples a kind of second-class status which the Congressional framers of the Thirteenth Amendment plainly intended to eradicate.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a member of the city Council. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Many of the arguments advanced to support marriage equality and to justify striking down DOMA derive quite rightly from the Equal Protection guarantee contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Perhaps overlooked in the sound and the fury has been the question of whether a sustainable argument in favor of marriage equality can be advanced under the Thirteenth Amendment as well.
Invoking the Thirteenth may seem counterintuitive, even perverse. After all, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and, on its face, appears to have nothing to do with equal protection or the right to marry.
Nonetheless, the concept of the right to marry --- and particularly of the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act --- may be more bound up in the 13th amendment than is immediately obvious. Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment confides to Congress the power to enforce the amendment by “appropriate legislation.” Moreover, it is well settled that part of the remedial intent of the Thirteenth Amendment is to do away with so-called badges and incidents of slavery.
Here is where the Thirteenth Amendment becomes relevant to the issue of marriage equality. In the antebellum South, marriages of slaves were not considered valid. Slaves might go through a form of marriage ceremony, but the contingent and transitory nature of such weddings was well expressed in the alteration of the vow to have and to hold “until death us do part.” The modified vow expressed in slave weddings contained the significant additional words “or distance.” Thus, a slave couple plighting to one another their troth did so “until death or distance” did them part.
As I have noted before, a government law or policy that categorically denies to me the right to marry if my intended spouse is not of the gender the government has decreed, to some degree reduces me to the status of slave; if I were to plight my troth to another man, United States law would deny both the validity and the existence of my marriage.
Consequently, to the extent that my state and my country see fit to deny me the faculty and freedom of marital contract, they have imposed upon me a badge and incident of slavery, contrary to Congress’s intent in enacting the Thirteenth Amendment. Moreover, to the extent existing law creates a patchwork of jurisdictions where an LGBT couple can be married in one state, but possess no juridical relationship worthy of the name in a neighboring state, another badge and incident of slavery has been implicated.
Prior to the Civil War, American states enacted a crazy quilt of often inconsistent, even contradictory, laws relating to the status of free persons of color. Some states acknowledged the free personhood of people of color, other states denied it. An African-American traveling from New Orleans to Boston would have to navigate that journey carefully, avoiding jurisdictions in which the law denied his free black status and considered him nothing more than a legitimate target for capture and re-enslavement.
Today, married queerfolk find themselves confronting similar geographical challenges: married here, mere strangers there. For a citizen to be unable to rely upon a uniform civil state (single, married, or divorced) throughout the country reflects an antebellum “badge and incident of slavery” reality. To the extent that DOMA helps to establish and entrench such a reality, it enforces upon queer couples the kind of uncertainty the Thirteenth Amendment was designed, at least in part, to overcome, as well as enforcing upon queer couples a kind of second-class status which the Congressional framers of the Thirteenth Amendment plainly intended to eradicate.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a member of the city Council. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
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