Summary: The news of the horrific mass shooting yesterday in San Bernardino causes one to fall back on invoking the deity, on offering anodyne “thoughts and prayers,” and also to begin pointing fingers, assigning blame, and jockeying for political advantage. Yet perhaps now should be a time for principled and considerate silence, as we take some time to ask ourselves what do we think, what do we know, and what can we prove.
When the news hit of yesterday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, just up the road from here, which left fourteen dead, and 17 injured, my first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is twofold. The first response, while somewhat laudable, is nonetheless largely meaningless. From all quarters, and particularly from the overcrowded field of Republican presidential candidates for 2016, there have come anodyne statements that “prayers and thoughts go out to” families, first responders, and just about everyone else involved.
The second response is equally ineluctable: to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 23 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, trolls, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we think? what do we know? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that 14 are dead and 17 have been wounded. We know that two suspected shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28 and significant other Tashfeen Malik, 27, perished in a shootout with police. We also know that the President of the United States (and presumably many of the law enforcement community) has not definitively ruled out the possibility that terrorism may have been involved. Certainly, the fact that the suspected shooters appear to have had Islamic names accounts for the president's reluctance to allow terrorism as a factor.
What we think is a more problematic issue. From yesterday’s events, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old trolls and bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy broad support across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots, if it turns out that the shooters were motivated by some type of extremism.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the sluggish tempo of the recovery in our American economy —a recovery where the vast majority of the tangible gains have gone to the One Percent, largely leaving the middle class behind— has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Add to that the deliberately demonizing and eliminationist rhetoric coming from the so-called pro-life movement, which appears to have been responsible for the Planned Parenthood clinic shootings in Colorado Springs last week, and it’s easy to understand why America manifests an almost suicidal willingness to appeal to violence to address our fears and insecurities.
Nevertheless, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Tucson yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooters, or whether they had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooters, their motives, whether there are additional accomplices, and whether yesterday’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short,, we think --perhaps-- too much, we know very little and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether yesterday’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of unbalanced individuals, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers, no matter how anodyne, be with the 17 people who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the 17 victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, however, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law, where he served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is a revised, extended, and adapted version of one he wrote in 2011, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was injured in a mass shooting in Tucson that claimed the lives of U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll and five others, and injured the Congresswoman and 13 others.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Thursday, November 26, 2015
GIVING THANKS FOR THOSE WITH THE HARDIHOOD TO CALL THE DONALD THE FASCIST HE IS
Summary: We can give thanks again this year for certain small mercies. That we should give thanks for families and friends almost goes without saying. Yet ironically, we should also give thanks, counterintuitively, for the Republican clown car of candidates. For as we move toward 2016, it becomes clearer that the Republican effort to elect a president may well prove unavailing, so yes, let’s give thanks for the unexpected gift of Donald Trump’s mouth.
________________________________
This Thanksgiving, it’s easy, as always, to get caught up in offering banal thanks for quotidian things. For me, to be thankful for family for friends, and for other similarly mundane blessings is to engage in an a most unenterprising and trite litany. Instead, let’s be thankful for other blessings at this time of year, remembering that the blessings of family and friends ought to go without saying, for we ought to be thankful for them always.
Instead, I’d like to give thanks this Thanksgiving for the Republican Party, particularly for the amazing clown car of candidates who, even now, are still seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.
In particular, I’d like to give thanks for one particular part of Donald Trump’s anatomy, specifically, his mouth, which is, if we Democrats have a hardihood to realize it, is the gift that keeps on giving, if we only were smart enough to unwrap it.
But, of course, we Democrats are too cowardly and inept to know how to unwrap the countless gifts the Republicans have given to us. We, along with much of the American news media, seem utterly reluctant to call out The Donald for the demonstrable lies he continues to tell on national television time after time after time. When The Donald went on record at a rally in Alabama claiming to have witnessed in person thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating when the twin towers fell, there was almost no pushback, either from the national media, or worse, from the Democratic National Committee.
The charge that The Donald has descended into the rhetoric of fascism has not come from the spineless and incompetent leadership of the Democratic National Committee. Instead, it has come from other Republicans, including his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
No, you did not misread. The attacks on Donald Trump are coming from his fellow Republicans, for whom we may perhaps give thanks this Thanksgiving. It has been people like John Kasich and others in the Republican Party who have dared to call out the Donald for his lies and his Fascist rhetoric.
But while I can give thanks for the fact that there are still principled Republicans who are unafraid to call Fascism Fascism, I have nothing but contempt for the people on my side of the aisle who will not call Donald Trump out for the Fascist he is. We Democrats are too nice to do so. So, when George Stephanopoulos confronted Donald Trump on Sunday morning, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie.” Hell, he couldn’t even bring himself to use a weasel word equivalent like Winston Churchill’s famous “terminological inexactitude.”
Just about the only national media outlet that had the hardihood to call out The Donald was the New York Times, which ran an editorial a few days ago entitled “Applause Lies.” So far, most of the rest of the American media have remained cowardly silent, presumably for fear of being sued by the hyperlitigious bully they have been covering.
That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, when Donald Trump lies to the faces of the American people, and neither the media nor the Democratic National Committee has the balls to call Donald Trump's performance what it is: a textbook example of Fascism.
Nonetheless, we can hope that a sufficiently large number of American voters begin to understand that The Donald is simply unfit to be President. Because, in truth, Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini’s soul brother. A Fascist, who, like Mussolini himself, will probably come to a bad end, executed by partisans and strung up by his feet in a gas station where the public can take notice of and be educated by the bad end of a bad man. And for that, should it occur, we should be truly thankful.
________________________________
This Thanksgiving, it’s easy, as always, to get caught up in offering banal thanks for quotidian things. For me, to be thankful for family for friends, and for other similarly mundane blessings is to engage in an a most unenterprising and trite litany. Instead, let’s be thankful for other blessings at this time of year, remembering that the blessings of family and friends ought to go without saying, for we ought to be thankful for them always.
Instead, I’d like to give thanks this Thanksgiving for the Republican Party, particularly for the amazing clown car of candidates who, even now, are still seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.
In particular, I’d like to give thanks for one particular part of Donald Trump’s anatomy, specifically, his mouth, which is, if we Democrats have a hardihood to realize it, is the gift that keeps on giving, if we only were smart enough to unwrap it.
But, of course, we Democrats are too cowardly and inept to know how to unwrap the countless gifts the Republicans have given to us. We, along with much of the American news media, seem utterly reluctant to call out The Donald for the demonstrable lies he continues to tell on national television time after time after time. When The Donald went on record at a rally in Alabama claiming to have witnessed in person thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating when the twin towers fell, there was almost no pushback, either from the national media, or worse, from the Democratic National Committee.
The charge that The Donald has descended into the rhetoric of fascism has not come from the spineless and incompetent leadership of the Democratic National Committee. Instead, it has come from other Republicans, including his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
No, you did not misread. The attacks on Donald Trump are coming from his fellow Republicans, for whom we may perhaps give thanks this Thanksgiving. It has been people like John Kasich and others in the Republican Party who have dared to call out the Donald for his lies and his Fascist rhetoric.
But while I can give thanks for the fact that there are still principled Republicans who are unafraid to call Fascism Fascism, I have nothing but contempt for the people on my side of the aisle who will not call Donald Trump out for the Fascist he is. We Democrats are too nice to do so. So, when George Stephanopoulos confronted Donald Trump on Sunday morning, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie.” Hell, he couldn’t even bring himself to use a weasel word equivalent like Winston Churchill’s famous “terminological inexactitude.”
Just about the only national media outlet that had the hardihood to call out The Donald was the New York Times, which ran an editorial a few days ago entitled “Applause Lies.” So far, most of the rest of the American media have remained cowardly silent, presumably for fear of being sued by the hyperlitigious bully they have been covering.
That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, when Donald Trump lies to the faces of the American people, and neither the media nor the Democratic National Committee has the balls to call Donald Trump's performance what it is: a textbook example of Fascism.
Nonetheless, we can hope that a sufficiently large number of American voters begin to understand that The Donald is simply unfit to be President. Because, in truth, Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini’s soul brother. A Fascist, who, like Mussolini himself, will probably come to a bad end, executed by partisans and strung up by his feet in a gas station where the public can take notice of and be educated by the bad end of a bad man. And for that, should it occur, we should be truly thankful.
Monday, October 12, 2015
WHOSE DAY? COLUMBUS DAY? DAY OF THE RACE? DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES?
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2014– Today is Columbus Day, as officially observed. It is also traditional Columbus Day. The day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristobal Colon, the adelantdo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who actually built one of them.
There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island. From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach. In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag. The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like “now might be a good time to review our immigration policies.”
The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus’ arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best. Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even Indians. If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants. The term “Native American” is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Eskimos as “First Peoples.”
Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation. The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself. By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups to complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.
Within two centuries, all of this had gone. The westward migration triggered by Columbus’ voyages had grown from trickle to flood. Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.
Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance. Is it Columbus Day? Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race? Is it Indigenous Peoples Day? Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called “half-a-millennium of resistance.” As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man’s-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled. Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors? Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?
The answer is: all of the above. We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place. The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent. Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy. The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos, caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.
The invasion has been a success. Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters. Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian. In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us. We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition. We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth. We confess many faiths, and none at all. We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America’s queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too. We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.
Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world. It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...." Whose day is Columbus Day? It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council. Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res. Go figure. The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
A PAPAL BLUNDER
Summary: Pope Francis improvidently cast away a huge reservoir of goodwill by receiving in audience at the Papal Nunciature militantly homophobic Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis earlier this week. The Pontiff’s ill considered action managed to dissipate overnight many, if not most, of the good feelings that had started to come his way and the way of the Vatican from American progressives, from non-Roman Catholics, and from queerfolk. Having been illusioned, many of us now regretfully knowledge being disillusioned. All of the old misgivings and suspicions have come roaring back, as we realize that the Roman church has actually changed very little from the stultifying neo-Pian, Republican-leaning days of Karol Wojtyła and Jozef Ratzinger’s papacies. The whole fiasco looks like the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partners in the criminal dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.
Given the “yooodge” (pace Donald Trump) magnitude of the Pope’s error, now might be opportune time to urge again the impropriety of having an American ambassador to the Holy See. Certainly, there is an Establishment Clause issue inherent in having official U.S. diplomatic representation at the headquarters of a religious organization. If an occasional official visit to the Apostolic Palace is necessary, it can be just as easily and just as economically handled by the American Ambassador to the Italian Republic.
The notoriously anti-clerical Italians, who have had the Roman Catholic Church on their backs for far too many centuries to allow it to ride their consciences as well, have a kind of Socratic joke for proving the existence of God. God must exist, the Italians assert, because only a truly loving and astonishingly merciful God could have allowed the Roman Catholic church to exist for so many centuries under such incompetent mismanagement.
Certainly, both the Vatican and the Roman Pontiff have themselves managed to provide the American public with an astonishing example of the kind of incompetent mismanagement that has kept Italians shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes for so many centuries.
When Pope Francis gave an audience to defiant, homophobic, marriage equality-denying Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, he managed, in one act of breathtaking improvidence, to fling away a huge reservoir of goodwill from American progresses, American queerfolk, and the majority of Americans who are not of the Roman obedience.
Romanist recusancy became the enabler of militant Nonconformity. Not only did it come across like St. Peter cuddling with a snake handler, but even worse, Pope Francis's meeting with Kim Davis puts many historically-literate Americans in mind of nothing quite so much as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact by which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became complicit conspirators in the dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.
Now, most Americans are profoundly reductive in their thinking. We are the kind of people who if an individual's track record contains 99 things and one bad one, we will allow one bad act to cancel out all of the other 99. Unfortunately, our reductive thinking is often justified. While conservative Americans have eagerly lambasted the first Jesuit Pontiff for "interfering" in areas in which he is ostensibly not well enough informed to opine, most liberal Americans have given Francis a pass, largely because he has so emphatically not been cast from the authoritarian, neo-Pian mold of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Under The aggressively conservative pontificates of Wojtyła and Ratzinger, The Roman Catholic Church in America skewed its allegiance decisively toward the Republican Party. It was easy for American conservatives, particularly for conservative Roman Catholics, to be ultramontane, and to solicit vigorous, muscular Vatican intervention in domestic American politics. Until the other day, American liberals had thought those days behind us. Having been illusioned, we must now regretfully acknowledge being seriously disillusioned.
Until the other day, most American liberals, most non-Roman Catholic Americans, and an awful lot of queerfolk had been prepared to think very well of Papa Bergoglio. After all, who could not think well of the pontiff who, when asked about queerfolk had responded by asking who he was to judge?
So, who are we to judge? The answer is very simple. We are Americans living through a Maoist time, in which every single act of every single public figure is routinely scrutinized for its political implications. If the Roman Pontiff had thought that the personal was not the political, then he has made a tragic mistake.
If the Roman Pontiff had thought that by giving an audience to a huckstering woman who has become the poster child for Christian Persecution Syndrome, a woman who has come to personify everything a majority of Americans don’t like about self-pity, self victimization, and self-promotion, he was making some kind of anodyne statement in favor of “religious liberty,” then he has managed to set back the Roman Catholic cause in this country by generations.
Because when Papa Francesco received in audience the voice of militant Nonconformity that Kim Davis has become, it really did represent a slap in the face not only to millions of progressive American Roman Catholics, but also to the estimated three quarters of the population of the United States that is not Roman Catholic. Recusancy and Nonconformity came together in a mutually enabling love feast.
Sadly, the bloom is now off the rose with this Pontiff. In one ill considered audience, but Francis has managed to resurrect all of the suspicion and doubt so many American progressives had come to entertain about the good faith and good intentions of the Roman Catholic Church.
God must love the Roman Catholic Church, and must look out after saints and fools especially, because while Pope Francis may have the makings of a saint, he also was a great fool to have met with Kim Davis. It will take American progressives of very long time to find it possible to forgive the Holy Father for what may be one of the most rash and impolitic acts ever committed by a visiting Roman Pontiff on the soil of a host country.
Indeed, so serious is the magnitude of what The Donald might call the “yoooodge” papal transgression in this matter that a serious case can, and should, be made for discontinuing US diplomatic relations with the Holy See, on the grounds and accrediting and ambassador to the Vatican represents a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. We’ve done quite well across more than two centuries without a Papal Nuncio in Washington. Our relations with the Vatican can certainly be handled just as well by informal visits to the Apostolic Palace by our ambassador to the Italian Republic.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
LOCAL GOVERNMENT OF THE ONE PERCENT, BY THE ONE PERCENT, FOR THE ONE PERCENT.
Summary: that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors has been able to raise nearly $150k in campaign contributions during the first six months of this year is a tribute to his skill at political fundraising, but also raises significant questions about the extent to which access to elected public service in Palm Springs is hedged about with class and racial accessibility barriers. When a council campaign in a city smaller than Cathedral City can be expected to cost on the order of $300,000, there is a very clear message that public service is only for the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Latinos and other people of color, working people and the middle class, need not apply. Will Palm Springs be shocked by the price tag for public service and enact "reforms?" Will those "reforms" have the usual-for-Palm Springs effect of rigging the system in favor of incumbents and wealthy candidates? Will the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs, as before, pull the ladder of success up behind them?
Last week, our local Gannett newspaper reported that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors had received $147,343 in campaign contributions during the first six months of calendar 2015.
Obviously, Kors is very, very good at raising money. Props to him from a purely pragmatic political perspective; certainly he shows mad skills at political fundraising. To be able to raise that kind of money, even from a Palm Springs demographic where residents simply have more discretionary money to throw around, is not unimpressive. I have some personal experience from which I can speak; during my first and victorious run four city Council in Cathedral City, in 2002, I was victorious on a grand total of roughly $10,000 in cash and $3000 in in-kind contributions. On 13K, I was able to run a successful campaign.
But as effective as Geoff Kors is in raising money, it’s still fair to ask what kind of message the substantial campaign price tags we routinely encounter in Palm Springs elections may be sending. If we extrapolate the rate at which Mr. Kors has been raising money out till November, he will have raised nearly $300,000 in order to secure election to a city Council seat in a smaller city than Cathedral City, where the salary is still quite nominal.
When city Council races begin to cost of that kind of money, public service begins to look very much like a One Percent proposition; public service looks like an occupation of One Percenters. Running for public office looks very much in Palm Springs like an enterprise limited by its nature to the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. When a council race comes in at close to $300,000, it becomes pretty clear that Latinos and other persons of color, working people, and the ordinary middle-class need not apply. What kind of race and class messages are being sent?
Now would be a good time for the residents of our Western neighboring city to take a long hard look at the extent to which they, themselves, have rigged the system in such a way that the body politic in Palm Springs has come to resemble government of the One Percent, by the One Percent, and for the One Percent.
Because there does seem to be something more than a little offputting about small town Council races being so expensive. Again, one hesitates to analogize to one’s own political experience, but it certainly goes without saying that a city council hopeful in Palm Springs with $13,000 at his or her disposal would stand absolutely no chance in a system that has been “reformed” in a way that protects incumbents and candidates with sufficient private wealth to be able either to self fund or to create a sufficiently efficient fundraising infrastructure to scare off any opponent.
And certainly, Mr. Kors’s astonishing success in raising six figures in six months, and his willingness to publicize it, bespeaks not only a high order of fundraising sophistication, but also a kind of sheer cutthroat political savvy. After all, what less- well-funded candidate would not feel some real hesitation taking on a man with a apparently unlimited fundraising ability? I don’t blame Geoff Kors for doing what the law lets him get away with doing; he himself is not the problem; he is, however, a symptom of the way in which we have allowed money to corrupt the integrity of our political system at every level.
Of course, once the election is over, and the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs take a look at the amounts of money that were spent in what is essentially a third or fourth tier municipal election, there will no doubt be calls for some kind of campaign finance “reform.”
And yes, I do put skepticism quotes around the word “reform,” because like so many so-called reforms, any so-called campaign finance reform Palm Springs implements will be largely intended to protect incumbents and independently wealthy candidates in the future. Most so-called good government reforms wind up having the effect of penalizing the least well resourced, the least well-off, and the least well connected in any given body politic. We should expect nothing less in Palm Springs, where the city fathers and the city mothers have a history of pulling the ladder of success up behind them.
-xxx-
Nothing in the preceding is intended, and nothing in the preceding should be construed as, legal advice. The opinions stated herein are the author's own.
Last week, our local Gannett newspaper reported that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors had received $147,343 in campaign contributions during the first six months of calendar 2015.
Obviously, Kors is very, very good at raising money. Props to him from a purely pragmatic political perspective; certainly he shows mad skills at political fundraising. To be able to raise that kind of money, even from a Palm Springs demographic where residents simply have more discretionary money to throw around, is not unimpressive. I have some personal experience from which I can speak; during my first and victorious run four city Council in Cathedral City, in 2002, I was victorious on a grand total of roughly $10,000 in cash and $3000 in in-kind contributions. On 13K, I was able to run a successful campaign.
But as effective as Geoff Kors is in raising money, it’s still fair to ask what kind of message the substantial campaign price tags we routinely encounter in Palm Springs elections may be sending. If we extrapolate the rate at which Mr. Kors has been raising money out till November, he will have raised nearly $300,000 in order to secure election to a city Council seat in a smaller city than Cathedral City, where the salary is still quite nominal.
When city Council races begin to cost of that kind of money, public service begins to look very much like a One Percent proposition; public service looks like an occupation of One Percenters. Running for public office looks very much in Palm Springs like an enterprise limited by its nature to the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. When a council race comes in at close to $300,000, it becomes pretty clear that Latinos and other persons of color, working people, and the ordinary middle-class need not apply. What kind of race and class messages are being sent?
Now would be a good time for the residents of our Western neighboring city to take a long hard look at the extent to which they, themselves, have rigged the system in such a way that the body politic in Palm Springs has come to resemble government of the One Percent, by the One Percent, and for the One Percent.
Because there does seem to be something more than a little offputting about small town Council races being so expensive. Again, one hesitates to analogize to one’s own political experience, but it certainly goes without saying that a city council hopeful in Palm Springs with $13,000 at his or her disposal would stand absolutely no chance in a system that has been “reformed” in a way that protects incumbents and candidates with sufficient private wealth to be able either to self fund or to create a sufficiently efficient fundraising infrastructure to scare off any opponent.
And certainly, Mr. Kors’s astonishing success in raising six figures in six months, and his willingness to publicize it, bespeaks not only a high order of fundraising sophistication, but also a kind of sheer cutthroat political savvy. After all, what less- well-funded candidate would not feel some real hesitation taking on a man with a apparently unlimited fundraising ability? I don’t blame Geoff Kors for doing what the law lets him get away with doing; he himself is not the problem; he is, however, a symptom of the way in which we have allowed money to corrupt the integrity of our political system at every level.
Of course, once the election is over, and the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs take a look at the amounts of money that were spent in what is essentially a third or fourth tier municipal election, there will no doubt be calls for some kind of campaign finance “reform.”
And yes, I do put skepticism quotes around the word “reform,” because like so many so-called reforms, any so-called campaign finance reform Palm Springs implements will be largely intended to protect incumbents and independently wealthy candidates in the future. Most so-called good government reforms wind up having the effect of penalizing the least well resourced, the least well-off, and the least well connected in any given body politic. We should expect nothing less in Palm Springs, where the city fathers and the city mothers have a history of pulling the ladder of success up behind them.
-xxx-
Nothing in the preceding is intended, and nothing in the preceding should be construed as, legal advice. The opinions stated herein are the author's own.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Bomb Away! The Moral Conundrum of Preventing 100 Million from Dying Together
Summary: Seventy years after Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast to his nation his government’s decision to surrender to the Allies and bring World War II to an end, we still find ourselves conflicted over the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was fashionable in some circles to characterize the use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a morally inadmissible act of mass murder, we dare not ignore the reality that as the Pacific War wound down, and as Japan braced for a land invasion, diehards within the Japanese high command were seriously advocating that the Japanese people should commit what amounted to national suicide. To the extent that their mantra, “One Hundred Million Die Together,” was known to Allied planners, as it was indeed known, it presented the Allies with a moral conundrum. Which is the least worst option? To incinerate between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals in an atomic bombing, or become complicit in a planned act of national self genocide? 70 years on, the descendents of those One Hundred Million who did not die together are alive because leaders like Harry Truman swallowed hard and gave the green light.
70 years ago today, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast his famous Gyokuon-hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.
Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.
Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last seven decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.
And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear weapons, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis.
Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.
Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking the Japanese point of view.
By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation ha[d] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Putting aside the euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring.
Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.
A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished.
So, if the Empire lay so open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan leftists or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.
For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.
And Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”
One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.
Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.
To that extent, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, US planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?
Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.
And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the planet.
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.
Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.
-xxx-
Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.
70 years ago today, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast his famous Gyokuon-hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.
Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.
Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last seven decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.
And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear weapons, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis.
Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.
Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking the Japanese point of view.
By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation ha[d] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Putting aside the euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring.
Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.
A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished.
So, if the Empire lay so open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan leftists or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.
For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.
And Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”
One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.
Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.
To that extent, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, US planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?
Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.
And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the planet.
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.
Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.
-xxx-
Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.
Friday, June 26, 2015
HAPPY FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES: After Marriage Equality Became a Nationwide Reality
Summary: The Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges has been a great victory for American queerfolk. I was happy for fifteen minutes. Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David can now get hitched all across America. Of course, the reaction from cultural conservatives has been predictably sulfurous, while in the queer nation we are rapidly falling into all of those things that tend to steal our victories from us. Like Democrats, we often have difficulty opening the gifts we are given, and we have a long history of winning a war but losing the peace. There will be an awful lot of credit-taking by the Official LGBT Movement, many of whose members will muscle their way to the head of the chow line to bask in glory they did nothing to earn.
Oh, my ears and whiskers!
After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration. I was happy for fifteen minutes.
I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.
Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.
Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.
Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?
Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?
Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.
Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.
Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won.
Oh, my ears and whiskers!
After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration. I was happy for fifteen minutes.
I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.
Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.
Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.
Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?
Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?
Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.
Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.
Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won.
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