HERESY COMES TO EDEN: THE ANNAPOLIS MASS SHOOTING

Summary: today’s shooting at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland is the latest in a series of firearms -related outrages that ought to shock the conscience of an aggrieved nation. Of course it will not. As we try to take a deep breath, to give ourselves time to learn the facts, the temptation to engage in obsessional speculation and partisan recrimination will be well-nigh irresistible. My dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, and endearingly weird: welcome to the league of massacre cities.

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Another shooting.

This one at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis. It’s a newspaper I can remember from my Baltimore childhood. Though my family had a subscription to the Baltimore Sun, every once in a while one of my parents would pick up a copy of the venerable Maryland Gazette from a local newsagent, largely because the Gazette’s coverage of the ofttimes bizarre politics of Maryland’s inbred, postage stamp capital excelled that of either the Baltimore Sun or the Washington Post.

Now, as has happened so often, a shooter has invaded the workplace and shot up the joint, killing five and “gravely injuring” several others.

As always, our first, involuntary reaction is to invoke the deity.

Oh, my God.

Our second reaction, equally ineluctable and equally inevitable, is to start engaging in a frantic round of obsessional speculation, accompanied by conspiracy theorizing, as shocked, aggrieved nation struggles to come to terms with the latest massacre. We know that a shooter is in custody. Yet we do not know yet what the shooter’s motivations may have been, whether the shooter was acting alone, or whether the shooter was part of some larger criminal or terrorist enterprise.

But, while imagination is as good for a fool as a physic, as my West Texas grandmother used to like to say, in the immediate aftermath of the events which transpired in Annapolis this afternoon we should perhaps take a deep breath, and wait to speculate, to point fingers, to clutch pearls,  to engage in partisan recrimination, or to engage in Trumpian tweeting until the authorities have had a chance to gather additional information.

Right now, before we risk jumping to what may well be unsupportable and unsustainable conclusions, we should take a deep breath, and quietly, carefully, and with complete honesty of self and purpose, ask ourselves what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?

I remember asking these questions after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by Jared Lee Loughner, along with senior U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, who died of his injuries, and 16 others on January 8, 2011. What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?

I suggested at the time, and do so again now, that it may well be far too early, and the data may be far too insufficient, for us to be able to formulate any hypotheses about the shooting. Nevertheless, we live in qualitatively different times now than then.

Seven-and-a-half years ago, the political climate in this country was divisive, but we did not have a president in office whom Russian American journalist Masha Gessen has suggested is a fascist, even if the government over which he presides is not. Seven-and-a-half years ago, America seemed to be more calm, more centered, more rational. Aside from various sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the country was not tribalized or Balkanized to nearly the extent that it is today.

In just a few hours since the shooting occurred, partisans and activists on both sides of the political divide have launched the inevitable complaints, barbs, and allegations against one another that seem to be virtually inevitable in Donald Trump’s America. Moreover, indications are already emerging that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s troll army is preparing to enter the fray, to use active measures to propagate as much disinformation as possible, as they did within 45 minutes of the Parkland, Florida shooting, and as they have now been exposed as having done in connection with the Minneapolis death of Philando Castille, where Russian trolls organized phony protests and fake Facebook groups as part of their information warfare campaign against the United States.

Indeed, it is also possible that no matter what the root causes or etiology of today’s events in Annapolis may have been, the Trump administration will respond in one of two ways. Either the administration will try its level best to ignore the shootings or depict them as the single act of the so-called lone wolf shooter, motivated by some sort of mental illness, thus stigmatizing the mentally ill while exonerating everybody else, or the administration will, should the shooter prove to be a member of a minority, to urge an anti-immigrant propaganda or an anti-“terrorist” one.

Given the unbelievable, and nakedly cynical, tactics of this administration, with its bland indifference to how poor the optics of its constant appeals to rabid partisanship and its constant pandering to its base may be to the majority of Americans who are not on the so-called Trump train, we can reasonably expect that this president and this administration will do their damnedest to wring every possible ounce of partisan political advantage out of the outrage outside of Annapolis.

Sadly, a state capital where the most newsworthy events for years had been Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel’s tax troubles, and Gov. William Donald Schaefer’s unconventional relationship with Hilda Mae Snoops, has now joined the unhappy league of American massacre sites. Annapolis can now join a murderers’ row that includes New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Bernardino, Santa Fe, Texas, Orlando and Parkland, Florida, Tucson, Columbine, and on and on and on.

Oh, my dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, endearingly weird, not a state capital like the others. With what has happened today, heresy has come to Eden.

What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Whatever the answers these questions may be, we’re not going to like any of them one little bit.

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 PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He spent several years of his childhood living in Baltimore and has many fond memories of the endearingly weird little state capital where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay.

OH, GOD, NOT AGAIN

By: Paul S. Marchand

Summary: another mass shooting has called forth almost predictable responses within American society. Republicans and Democrats will each have their own partisan take; the NRA, shameless and corrupt as ever, will be fundraising off the tragedy, while the Kremlin will be deploying its troll army to use this latest outrage to spread dissension and division within American society. Altogether absent will be the comforting words Barack Obama knew how to offer. Instead, we should we were with the usual hackneyed political clichés of “thoughts and prayers.” How long will it be before an outraged public finally calls bullshit on the shootings, on the thoughts, and on the prayers? What, then, is to be done?
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Columbine.

Virginia Tech.

Tucson.

Sandy Hook.

Mother Emmanuel.

Pulse.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Santa Fe, Texas.

Every time another mass shooting happens in this country, we have an almost standard involuntary reaction. We hear the news and we invoke the deity.

“Oh, my God....”

Some of us may be moved to utter prayers and to make the Sign of the Cross. Politicians among us will offer the anodyne cliché that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the killed and injured, (though with the events at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, the “thoughts and prayers” from Republican politicians were notably thin on the ground, inasmuch as so many of the dead were queerfolk.)

This shooting, like so many others, seems to fit into a fairly standard pattern: a young man with uncompensated issues and insecurities goes into a public or semipublic venue, armed to the teeth, and opens fire. Aside from offering their anodyne thoughts and prayers, politicians will do little, especially knowing that the National Rifle Association will be ineluctably fundraising off this tragedy even as these words are written.

We also know, after the Ash Wednesday shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that the Kremlin’s troll army will be swarming social media networks with a view to using this latest incident to stir up dissension and division within American society.

After the shooting in Tucson, in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and wounded, I asked in this blog “what do we think, what do we know, what can we prove?” At the time, I suggested that before drawing any conclusions we should allow the dust to settle, allow a reasonable time for mourning, allow ourselves some space for careful, rational thinking, and that we should perhaps forbear from drawing immediate conclusions.

The same counsels apply today. It is still far too early to have a clear picture of what was going on in the mind of the shooter, who is at least in custody and can be interrogated. It would be reckless to try to draw conclusions when the facts are still not completely clear to us and we see as through a glass, darkly.

Nevertheless, there are some not unknown knowns, pace Donald Rumsfeld, which have manifested themselves to us since the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in February.

First, we know that the Russian troll army has already been deployed. After the Ash Wednesday shootings at MSD, Russian trolls swarmed American social media networks within half an hour to forty-five minutes of the incident, disseminating all manner of divisive disinformation. It was a textbook example of Russian active measures intended to drive wedges into American society. 

Second, the NRA, as always, hopelessly corrupt, began aggressively fundraising within a couple of hours of the incident at MSD. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre, with his unerring lack of tact, took to the microphones and to the “interwebs” with his by now standard trope of self victimization to besiege the faithful to help fill the NRA’s coffers for the inevitable “battle to save the Second Amendment” that, to the NRA’s way of thinking, has been just around the corner since the assassination of President Kennedy.

Third, the conspiracists at Breitbart, at Infowars, and at other conspiracists outlets, have already begun circulating ridiculous claims and notions that this latest incident was just another “false flag” attack, that the dead — and survivors — are nothing but paid “crisis actors,” presumably acting at the behest of some sort of quasi-mythical Deep State out to destroy the Trump administration.

We also see that the response to mass shooting incidents inevitably breaks down along partisan lines. Republicans tend to respond to such fusillades by taking absolutist Second Amendment positions in which they frequently delude themselves of such nonsensical notions as “a bad guy with the gun will be stopped by a good guy with the gun,” and “let’s arm all the school teachers.”

Democrats, by contrast, tend talismanically to invoke the notion that an assault weapons ban and universal background checks are a panacea for the problem. Democrats, who also control the legislatures in large population blue states such as New York and California often tend to respond to mass shooting incidents with their own fusillades of predictable legislation by anecdote.

For example, after Sandy Hook, the New York legislature rushed onto the statute books reactive legislation essentially doing away with most of the evidentiary privileges that had shielded doctor-patient communications. In California, 3000 miles away from the side of the incident, Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento rushed a whole package of legislation into law designed to enhance California’s reputation for having the nation’s toughest gun control laws. 

Indeed, gun control continues to be a political football in California. Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has aggressively campaigned on an activist gun-control platform, and today’s events will no doubt form the subject matter for yet another Gavin Newsom campaign commercial or mailer. 

Yet, stuck between Republicans, with their Second Amendment absolutist positions, and Democrats who think the moment is opportune to push for a totally gun free society, the millions of Americans who inhabit the political middle find themselves in a difficult place. It’s hard in America in 2018 to be a gun owner between the two camps. If you are not a Second Amendment absolutist, the Republicans will anathematize you as a “squish;” while for their part, the “repeal the Second Amendment” militant tendency among Democrats will condemn you as an illiberal, anti-communitarian DINO, to be read out of the Democratic Party with bell, book, and candle.

The absolutist positions of absolutists and doctrinaires within both parties leave conservatives who favor reasonable gun safety legislation and armed liberals in a conundrum. I, myself, fall into the latter category. As an armed liberal, as a person of the political left who was taught by his grandfather at the age of seven and eight how to shoot in the arid country of West Texas, I know the destructive potential of even a low caliber weapon. I know that you can kill as easily and as efficiently with a .22 round as you can with a .44 Magnum. I know that depending upon the production run, a Colt .45 caliber model 1911 semiautomatic tends to throw high and to the right, as does a 9mm Makarov semiautomatic.

That I know some of the behaviors of these two semiautomatic handguns does not make me a monster, a gun nut, or a ravening conservative. I do, however, treat each such weapon — on the rare occasions when I come into contact with one — with the care it deserves. That may be one reason why I don’t keep semiautomatic handguns in my home, in my car, or in my business. I keep the one handgun I do possess, a .44 caliber revolver, locked away in a gun safe to which no other human being on the planet has the combination.

In short, I treat guns with the care and respect my West Texas grandfather inculcated into me those long years ago when we were plinking bottles out near the New Mexico line. For when the hammer falls, and you hear the explosion that sends that bullet on its way to destroy a bottle on a fence post or a watermelon propped up on the ground, there is that ephemeral moment, that (pace, Betty Friedan) quintessentially male moment when you see the bullet destroying the bottle or blast in the watermelon, and a little frisson of satisfaction lights up the lizard part of the brain.

But we’re not lizards. Neither are we those other closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds. And because we are neither birds nor lizards, it is incumbent upon us to interact with the weapons we create and use in the context of a larger moral compass.

It would be a mistake, with investigations still pending, to try to guess the nature and parameters of the moral compass within which Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, the alleged shooter, was acting. Nonetheless, at some point, we must try to suss out the moral geography in which the shooter was operating. The shooter himself may tell us, and it will be incumbent upon Facebook to cooperate fully with investigators, and the shooter’s social media profile for clues.

If, as Pat Conroy once wrote in his novel Lords of Discipline, “our Europes were different; our Americas were different,” so are our Texases. The Texas of my heritage is the West Texas of the sere, stripped-of-nonessentials, Trappist desert. It is the Texas of El Paso, of Democratic Congressman and Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke. The shooter’s Texas, by contrast, was the humid, hurricane Harvey harried, conservative East Texas of the Gulf Coast, the Texas of Tom DeLay and Blake Farenthold, the Texas of so many Republican politicians whom the late Molly Ivins took such joy in skewering. 

As investigators, journalists, and inky wretches like me seek to get our arms around what made the shooter go and do what he did, we will be tempted, after the fashion of Joan Didion and the other dissectors of the California psyche, to try to draw conclusions about the shooter from the environment in which he was raised and from which, presumably, he took his inspiration.

Yet still, as we try to ascertain the whys and wherefores of this latest incident, we should still let ourselves be guided by the better angels of our nature, allowing the survivors to recover, to grieve, to mourn and bury their dead, and to regain the composure so unceremoniously stripped from them today. Donald Trump notwithstanding, no good can come of off-the-cuff, inconsiderate, predawn tweets from the residence of the White House.  

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

The next few days will be a time for considerate contemplation of this incident, not for partisan bickering, Trumpian tweeting, conspiracy theorizing, or Russian active measures.

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Paul S. Marchand has been an attorney for the last 29 years. He lives in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms on the city Council. He currently practices in Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own.

WAS THE FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING A RUSSIAN "ACTIVE MEASURE" TO GIVE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION A REPRIEVE FROM ITS SCANDALS?

After the Florida school shooting last Wednesday, I predicted that it would not be long before 1) the NRA began fundraising on the tragedy and 2) that the right, particularly conservative media and people like Trump Flack former Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Georgia) began attacking any survivor who had the temerity to speak out in criticism of the existing dispensations that allow an active shooter to enter a high school and wantonly take seventeen lives.

As the White House and the right wing eagerly circulate all manner of conspiracy theories to deflect attention from America’s lax gun safety laws, to say nothing of deflecting attention from the numerous scandals swirling about the Trump administration itself, we may legitimately ask whether there does not exist probable cause to believe that there may indeed have been conspiracies occurring with respect to this tragedy.

The conspiracy I suggest may well exist is one designed to protect Donald Trump and his embattled administration. Consider the following facts: first, anywhere that Donald Trump sets up a substantial business operation, be that in Bedminster, New Jersey, or around his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida, there almost inevitably arises a substantial community of Russian émigrés and oligarchs looking to shelter flight capital. Second: wherever two or three Russians are gathered together, there is almost certain to be a Russian intelligence apparat presence. It is said in Russia that you cannot speak of Russians in the plural without also implying the presence of Kremlin eyes and ears. Third: the presence of sketchy Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska and Dmitri Rybolovev, in close proximity to Trump, his campaign appearances, or his properties at highly suspicious times has been documented by both the Western media and by the U.S. Intelligence community.

Add to that the close propinquity in time between the release of the so-called Mueller indictment, with its bombshell charges against 13 Russian individuals and three Russian entities, and the shooting. The Mueller indictment not only created a distinct sense of agita in the embattled Trump White House, but it also sounded clear alarm bells in the Kremlin. Both the Trump White House and the Moskovskiy Kremlin were clearly looking for a “reprieve” from the relentless drumbeat of bad news coming the administration’s way. Indeed, the degree of Muscovite solicitude for the Trump administration only lends further probable cause to believe that a conspiracy is very much underway.

The nexus between Moscow and Parkland, Florida may be inferred from the existence of Moscow’s felt need to protect the Trump administration. It is worth noting that Moscow’s reaction to the indictments of Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and quondam national security advisor Michael Flynn, like their reaction to this most recent True Bill, was composed in equal shares of contempt, defensiveness, dismissiveness, and old-fashioned “shit, we’ve been caught,” apoplexy.

But, one may ask, how does this feed in to the events in Parkland, Florida. Again, consider the presence of that not insubstantial Russian émigré community in Palm Beach, to which they gravitated to be near Donald Trump. The Russian intelligence apparat is fairly sophisticated. Knowing, as we do, that the accused shooter had manifested distinct right-wing tendencies, it is not unreasonable to infer that his existence may very well have become known to one of the Russian intelligence agencies operating in this country, FSB, SVR, or GRU. Any asset of any one of the three Russian intelligence agencies would have known how to acquire the shooter as a potential asset, working on his strengths and weaknesses to compromise him and to turn him into a compliant asset of the Russian State.

The shooter could have been acquired through the kind of tradecraft the intelligence community refers to as MICE, Money, Ideology, Compromise (or Coercion), and Ego. Assets can be turned and acquired through one or a combination of these factors. Certainly, the Florida investigators will want to do careful research into the shooter’s 1) finances, 2) his ideological leanings, 3) the extent to which he had been compromised and was thus subject to being coerced, and 4) the extent to which the shooter may have been driven by his ego. The Florida authorities would be fools not to treat this matter as a counterintelligence investigation.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team should also take cognizance of these events. It is not unreasonable to believe that if the shooter had been turned by one or more of the agencies of the Russian intelligence apparat, that he may well have been encouraged or goaded into shooting up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murdering 17 classmates and teachers to distract attention from the Mueller indictment in particular and from the mounting scandals engulfing the Trump White House in general.

Indeed, it is also worth noting that within a matter of hours of the school shooting, Russian botnets were active selling as much dissension and disinformation as possible, most of it intended to defend the Trump administration or to smear the survivors. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html  This Russian botnet activity is too fortuitous to be coincidental. Indeed, the Russian botnet offensive strongly suggests that the shooter had indeed been compromised, turned, and acquired, set in motion by the Kremlin to divert the attention of the American public away from the systematic treason happening in the White House.
 
If any part of the hypothesis laid out hereinbefore is supported by any data at all, then the investigation of the Florida school shooting needs to become part of the remit of the Mueller investigation. We are under a systematic attack from Russia, and the school shooting bears all the hallmarks of Russian active measures.

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 The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author, but if readers find them congenial, readers are welcome to make them their own.

“MORAL HIGH GROUND:” NOTHING BUT A PLACE TO SURRENDER ON.

Summary: the Democrats have once again demonstrated that they have the courage of all the wrong convictions. Faced with what is increasingly obviously a Roger Stone/Kremlin ratfucking operation designed to eviscerate the Democratic leadership in the United States Congress, the Democrats have fallen into the usual “they go low we go high “posture of unconditional and abject surrender. The first target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was outgoing Minnesota Senator Al Franken. The second target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was the Father of the House, Michigan’s John Conyers. Democrats should realize that these are preemptive strikes intended to protect Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. But Democrats, sadly true to form, reacted in their typically puritanical fashion, rushing to judgment and establishing a lynch mob. It is certainly suspicious that Democratic ire should fall on a Jew and on a person of color. We have been played like a Stradivarius, our hypocrisy is plain for all to see, and behind the scenes, Roger Stone and Donald Trump are laughing their asses off. Democrats have a reputation for political cowardice, and they earned it again, in full measure, during the last 10 days.

The other day, embattled Minnesota Senator Al Franken announced that he would be resigning “in the coming weeks.” Last week, Michigan’s John Conyers, the longest-serving representative in Congress, the Father of the House, also resigned.

Both men were caught up in an emergent moral panic of ostensible sexual harassment that appears to be targeting the careers of a number of lawmakers. Let’s shame the devil, told the truth, and admit that the lawmakers in question come from both parties. Arizona Republican Trent Franks, who had planned to leave at the end of January, 2018, announced today that he has moved up his departure and is leaving now. Texas Republican Blake Farenthold is currently under ethics investigation by the House of Representatives, and is expected to call it quits fairly shortly.

Nevertheless, the moral panic in Washington is just a little bit too convenient, and its Democratic targets just a little bit too prominent, to be taken at face value. When Roger Stone tweeted, almost immediately after the Franken “scandal” broke, with information which suggested that Stone had some kind of pre-knowledge of Leeann Tweeden’s allegations, that should have been an indicator to Democrats that this particular moral panic might be something rather more nefarious, that this “moral panic” might in fact be part of a campaign of “active measures,” or dezinformatsiya trafficking in dubious kompromat designed to cause as much harm to prominent Democratic officeholders and to the Democratic Party as possible.

Unfortunately, instead of doing due diligence, which might well have discovered the existence of a coordinated campaign of active measures of dezinformatsiya and kompromat, a whole raft of Democratic officeholders trooped to various microphones and piously declared that they believed in their entirety all of the allegations against Franken and Conyers, no matter how stale, how far-fetched, or how remote in time.

Worse, this lynch mob of Democratic officeholders was not interested in hearing any defense from either Sen. Franken or Rep. Conyers, but was instead determined to see the two men’s metaphorical heads on pikes being led out of the Capitol. Instead of a careful review of the veracity of the allegations, the Democrats climbed onto a puritanical bandwagon of “zero tolerance” and made it clear to both Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers that they were not disposed to do due diligence before hustling the senator and the Congressman straight to the Tarpeian Rock and hurling them to the bottom.

The conduct of the Democratic officeholders who made speed to hurl Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers from the Tarpeian Rock spoke to everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. It spoke to the puritanical, schoolmarmish tendency of the Democratic Party to buy into the notion that one who is accused of anything at all must be considered guilty until proven innocent. It also spoke to the unfortunate Democratic tendency to be unable to distinguish true moral high ground from a hill on which to undertake an abject surrender.

Democratic protestations that it is somehow important to make an example of Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers fail on two counts.

First, the desire to make an example of these two lawmakers so that we may “establish a clear moral contrast with the Republicans” is worse than feckless. It assumes that the Republican Party and the American electorate possess a moral compass. There is absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that either the Republican Party or the American electorate possess anything even resembling a moral compass. Given this lack of any evidentiary support for the proposition that either the GOP or the American electorate even has a moral compass, democratic invocation of some sort of “moral high ground” starts to look less like a principled stand and more like an unprincipled hunt for a hill upon which to engage in the traditional Democratic tendency toward abject and unconditional surrender.

Second, we should take a look at the targets of this campaign of active measures, dezinformatsiya, and kompromat. For while the Republicans are rallying around a serial outrager of girls and young women in the person of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the Democrats have been pursuing two members of their own party who, by definition, are Other. Senator Franken is Jewish; Congressman Conyers is black. And yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have had the good common sense of optics to realize that the lynch mob set in train against both men might very well appear, notwithstanding minority participation therein, like a boneheaded maneuver intended to cast to prominent Others out of the halls of Congress.

Queerfolk observing this phenomenon should consider themselves on notice; the moral panic can be, and will be, extended to include claims of queer sexual misconduct as well as claims of straight sexual misconduct. And when that happens, the Democratic Party, that masterpiece of American cowardice, cannot be expected to rally to the defense of any queer officeholder. What will happen when someone with a queer ax to grind targets California Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) the only gay, Asian member of the House of Representatives? What will happen if Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, the only open lesbian in the upper Chamber, is targeted?

It is easy to predict what will happen. Democrats, who practically wet themselves trying to get on the bandwagon to condemn Al Franken, the Jew, and John Conyers, the African-American, will find it even easier to fan the flames of moral panic against the strange, exotic, queerfolk in their midst. And people like Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and the Russian intelligence apparat with which they have so obviously and notoriously coordinated, will be happy to provide kompromat and to undertake Active Measures and spread dezinformatsiya intended to drive queer Democrats from office. And, Goddammit, stupid Democrats will be more than happy to help them do it.

In my previous post, I sounded the alarm bell that this kind of moral panic, stirred up by Republicans to ratfuck the Democratic Party, would be something the Democrats would fall for, hook, line, and sinker. I was right.

We should have had the courage of our Democratic convictions. We should have done our due diligence before jumping on the moral panic bandwagon. We should not have allowed ourselves to become part of a lynch mob. We should have stood with Al Franken and John Conyers.

Our Democratic failure to stand with Al Franken and John Conyers is a failure of our moral compass and our respect for the rule of law. Our eagerness to rush them to the Tarpeian rock and hurl them over it is a nasty revelation of our own internalized anti-Semitism, our own internalized racism, and our own internal unwillingness to do the kind of due diligence we should have done.

When they pulled a knife, we should have pulled a gun. When they sent one of ours the hospital, we should have sent one of theirs to the morgue. Instead, we scrambled up on a spurious piece of “moral high ground” and once there, we ran up the white flag.

The Democratic reputation for political cowardice has never been better deserved that it has been in the last 10 days.

WEAPONIZING A MORAL PANIC

 Summary: there is a Republican conspiracy aimed at two of our giants of Congress, Al Franken and John Conyers. The Republicans, led apparently by that freak Roger Stone, are busily exploiting the moral panic that revelations about allegations of sexual harassment has engendered. The Republicans have weaponized a very real social phenomenon, and are using it to attempt to protect Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and the harasser-in-chief Donald Trump.

Last week, Al Franken.

This morning, John Conyers.

There appears to be a moral panic developing, centered on allegations of “powerful men” allegedly “harassing,” “disrespecting,” or “victimizing” women. Now, sexual harassment is a real thing, and both women — and men — can be its victims. Nevertheless, the moral panic that is apparently taking shape appears to bear all the hallmarks of an organized Republican effort to weaponize it and to use it against Democrats. The involvement of Republican dirty trickster (and possible Russian asset) Roger Stone ought to tip us off that this moral panic may not be genuine.

The recent allegations of “sexual misconduct” almost uniformly involve Democratic officeholders. It may not be too much to say, though certain Democrats love to pooh-pooh the idea, that there is a real and palpable Republican conspiracy in place, which the evidence available to us suggests may have been orchestrated by that malignant freak Roger Stone.

Why would Republicans be interested in trashing the reputations of Democratic officeholders. Aside from the overall strategic goal of weaponizing normal human behavior for nefarious political purposes, the Republicans have a very clear and obvious tactical goal here.

That goal is to protect the Senate candidacy of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from the bench twice for his flagrant defiance of the United States Constitution he swore an oath to protect and uphold.

Thus far, the Russians — er, the Republicans — have done passably well in protecting Roy Moore, the Kremlin’s candidate for Senator from Alabama. In doing so, they have played many Democrats like a Stradivarius. Too many Democrats have responded to the Franken imbroglio like prim, prissy, schoolmarms, rushing into print with cowardly attacks on the Minnesota senator, calling for his resignation and, to all intents and purposes, demanding the man’s head on a pike.

Even worse, the Bernard Sanders-aligned “Justice Democrats” have also begun agitating for Franken’s removal and replacement with Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison. If we didn’t know how poor the Sanders people’s sense of optics was, all we need to point out is that agitation for the removal of a Jewish senator and his replacement by a Muslim congressman bears all the hallmarks of a convenient anti-Semitism which ought to have no place in the ranks of the Democratic Party.

The cowardice of Democrats in this moral panic is by no means surprising. Democrats suffer from two political ailments that they need to purge from their body politic. The first is the tendency, any time someone like Leeann Tweeden comes forward with some “salacious” allegation, no matter how old or stale, to go into a crouch, piss themselves, and engage in theatrical mea culpas while floating away on waves of their own fear pee. Unfortunately, Al Franken lived down to that stereotype, rather than by allowing the situation to develop for a few days before pushing back.

The second political ailment from which Democrats suffer is the one that permits interlopers and fifth columnists like Bernard Sanders and his fifth column closet Trump supporters to attempt a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Simply put, it’s the unfortunate tendency Democrats have to want to occupy unimpeachable a high moral ground, and to want to be led to that unimpeachable high moral ground by candidates of unimpeachable virtue and purity.

While the Russians — er, Republicans — are content to cast their votes for real, admitted, harassers and victimizers of women, for reasons of partisanship and cynicism, Democrats demand a kind of perfection from their candidates that we should not expect to see in the Calendar of Saints. While the Republicans would give a pass to a man who shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Democrats, always prim, proper, dour, sour, and schoolmarmish, would willingly get themselves into a pearl clutching swivet if a Democratic officeholder or political hopeful double parked his car or made an off-color remark to one of the finches in the ficus tree in his front yard. 

And because Democrats want to attain utopia in a day, and demand to be led there by candidates of dazzling Simon purity, they are often tragically unready and unprepared when Republican dirty tricksters and ratfuckers like Roger Stone and his ilk set in train the kind of obvious conspiracy that is now being run against Al Franken and John Conyers.

Al Franken and John Conyers are two stalwarts of the Democratic Party. They deserve the full throated and unhesitating protection and support of that selfsame Democratic Party. They do not need to be stabbed in the back by whiny, pearl-clutching so-called liberals who have neither the courage of conviction nor the willingness to push back against dishonorable tactics.

Because Democrats should be pushing back against what is increasingly obviously a Republican/Russian disinformation operation to try to drive Al Franken and John Conyers out of the Congress of the United States. We need at all times, but particularly now during the Trumpoe Vremya, the Trump Time, to be willing to push back, and to push back hard against people, even ostensibly in our own ranks, who try to ratfuck the Democratic Party. Our operating philosophy should be taken from Sean Connery’s unforgettable line in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!”

Democrats have been bringing knives to gunfights for too long. Given what we are starting to know about Leeann Tweeden, this case represents the perfect opportunity for Democrats to un-limber much heavier artillery than we have been accustomed to bring to a fight.

They pull a knife; we pull a gun. They send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is a former member of the Cathedral City city council and a former member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee, which he left in disgust because they were more interested in playing nice with the Republicans than in fighting to win. The views set forth herein are his own.

OCTOBER 12, ENCOUNTER DAY

Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, or perhaps, more accurately, Encounter Day, we get our knickers in a knot.  Should we embrace a breast-beating white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of us learned in school?  The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy.  Whose day is it?  Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples?  Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other?  Columbus Day/Encounter Day is, and will always remain, a paradox.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Cathedral City, October 12, 2017- Today is traditional Columbus Day.  This day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an Italian 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 the Spanish named not one, but two cruisers, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.

Commemoratively named warships notwithstanding, the view of many Americans of this day is colored, so to speak, by 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 others 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.

For, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “Indians.” If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants.  The term "Native American" is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Inuit as "First Peoples."

Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation.  The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself.  By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire whose Inca inhabitants knew it as 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." 

Despite the facile characterization of the pale people as eager perpetrators of “genocide,” we should be chary of attaching such a label to what transpired in the Western Hemisphere. Though the statistics of morbidity among indigenous peoples are certainly the statistics of apparent genocide, we need to be aware that genocide, in international law, is a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate extermination of a particular prople, in whole or in part.  Though we may be appalled at the morbidity statistics, the evidence suggests that the butcher’s bill was inflicted as the result of negligence, inattention, and a lack of knowledge rather than as the result of deliberate policy, and thus does not rise to the level of genocide as that term is understood in international law.

Thus, 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 Nãos, 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.

Nor can we forget the other ramifications which have preceded from a biological phenomenon which has become known as the Columbian Exchange. Without the Columbian Exchange, the cuisines of Europe would be innocent of such now-integral foods and stimulants as the potato, the tomato, corn (which the British, who cannot seem to handle their own language, use to describe the grain properly known as “wheat.”) chocolate, vanilla, and tobacco. Similarly, without the Columbian Exchange, the tables of the New World would entirely lack such staples as citrus fruits, apples, bananas, mangoes, onions, wheat, rice, and that staple of insomniacs everywhere, coffee. Indeed, until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the horse, which had originated in what is now North America but had become extinct there, had been unknown to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, while the pale invaders from across the water must take responsibility for such diseases as the measles, the emergence of syphilis, which for almost four centuries cut a horrifying swath across Europe, can be laid at the door of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In short, the Columbian Exchange, like so many other phenomena throughout history, in the end must be accounted morally neutral. We should be foolish indeed to judge either Christopher Columbus or the Columbian Exchange by the purportedly modern standards of the 21st century. As Winston Churchill observed in 1938, in our own time, “we have seen archbishops pistolled in the nape of the neck in the warm, bluntly lighted corridors of modern prison.” We have seen women and children machine gunned and hacked to death in their scores, hundreds, and thousands. We possess the capacity to extinguish all life on this planet. We thus have little claim to vaunt some kind of superior civilization to that in which Christopher Columbus lived.

The invasion of the pale people from across the water 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, or Encounter 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/Encounter 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/Encounter 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?  Whose day is Encounter Day? It is all of 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.
 
-xxx-

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.






                       

#TakeaKnee, America

Summary: This weekend, as numerous football players and other athletes in sporting venues across America take a knee in defiance of Russia’s puppet in the White House, Trump cultists and so-called patriots have demonstrated their disdain for freedom all over social media by condemning the athletes who have taken a knee when the national anthem is played. These Trump cultists and “patriots” apparently neither know nor care much about American values. They do not know or do not care that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled on several occasions that withholding participation in the Pledge of Allegiance or even taking a knee at the national anthem is perfectly constitutional. The Russian puppet in the White House is trying very hard to appropriate the national symbols and our national values for himself. Taking a knee is a powerful, uniquely American, way of saying “no.”
 #TakeaKnee as if your life depends upon it.
 #TakeaKnee as if your liberty depends upon it. 
#TakeaKnee as if your pursuit of happiness depends upon it.
 The ghosts of Lexington, of Concord, and of Bunker Hill demand it of your patriotism.

-------------------------------------
As numerous professional football players, accompanied by at least one major league baseball player, chose to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, the Russian puppet in the oval office saw fit to continue the trumpertantrum he began late last week at a campaign rally in Alabama in which he chose to pick a fight with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick about Kaepernick’s having knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.

This act of protest kneeling, which the ever adaptable, ever promiscuous English language has now christened “taking a knee,” has gone viral, and Donald Trump has only encouraged it by politicizing it. As a number of commentators have suggested, the Russian puppet in the Oval Office has managed to give political cachet and social respectability to conduct that, during the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations would have been met by most Americans with Stares of Wintry Disapproval.

However, by having turned taking a knee into a political phenomenon, The Donald has managed to swim deeply in the dank, fetid, fever swamps of America’s original sin of racism. Moreover, in his divisive encourage-the-Kremlin-by-dividing-America way, the Donald has provoked even lily white scions of Pale Privilege into hitherto unwonted expressions of empathy and solidarity with their African-American teammates.

Yet, while even high school athletes are standing up for freedom by kneeling down, Trump and his cultists are doing the Kremlin’s work for it by trying to create the impression that taking a knee is somehow “disrespectful” or unpatriotic. This comes almost directly out of the old Soviet criminal code which defined so-called anti-Soviet activities as criminal offenses for which the offender could be sent to some grim Siberian Gulag. One need not look too far beyond social media to see how little Trump and his cultists understand our American Constitution.

While Trump and the cultists would happily define taking a knee as some kind of new anti-Trump activity meriting incarceration in some grim new American Gulag, the blunt truth is that taking a knee is a perfectly constitutionally defensible form of protest. The First Amendment guarantees that
    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are nonnegotiable. They are part of the fundamental constellation of freedom for which Americans have been willing to lay down their lives, to face foreign shot and foreign shell, foreign fevers and foreign steel, and for which they been willing to die on battlefields from Gettysburg to Galveston in the service of a vision of a more perfect union.

Yet, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, who famously observed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried,” the American ideal itself has been found difficult and largely left untried. Americans love to talk about national symbols. Americans love to get dewy eyed when they hear the strains of the national anthem or see the American flag rippling in the breeze, but most Americans, particularly Trump cultists, have not the slightest understanding of the relationship between such symbols and the “city on a hill which cannot be hid” of which Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop spoke in 1630, and which has become, since John F. Kennedy gave it new prominence in a January 9, 1961 address to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, an integral part of our political discourse.

Yet, as powerful as the national symbols are, they are not themselves the nation; they do not themselves embody the values we profess to represent; in and of themselves, they mean nothing. The Star-Spangled Banner is just a song written by a Maryland slaveholder lawyer. The flag the Star-Spangled Banner references is nothing more than a collection of pieces of cloth sewn artfully together.

But the union they symbolize means, and must mean, a great deal more than that. The preamble to the Constitution sums up the objective of the document in six words: To Form a More Perfect Union. And to form that more perfect union we Americans have been struggling for nearly two and a half centuries. We have struggled to expand the national table to make room for people of color, for women, for people of every faith and of no faith at all, for the disabled, and, most recently, for queerfolk.

Yet as we have inserted additional leaves into that national table, we have failed to integrate into our thinking one of the truest tests of any working democracy. For in a truly free and democratic society, the test of how well the society is functioning is not how well it protects the majority, how well it looks after the well off, the well-connected, the affluent, or the comfortable. The true test of how well our free and democratic society is working is how well it protects the rights of the dissenting and outspoken minority, how well it levels the playing field so that an African-American kid from the projects, the Latina child of migrant farmworkers, the working poor white kid of a single parent, the paralyzed child confronting a lifelong disability, or the queer person in a community that has had to learn how to live as if each day contained 25 hours, can enjoy the same breadth of opportunity and live the same American dream as the most privileged Pale Person in our society.

By that standard, America is failing the test. In his novel Hawaii, the late James Michener snuck in a rather acidulous observation that “Americans despise most freedoms.” Michener was right, most Americans are uncomfortable with freedom. Most Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that in a truly free and democratic society taking a knee is an outward and visible manifestation of what it is to be truly American. Moreover, most Americans don’t seem terribly comfortable with the idea that taking a knee should be something that in America does not and should not carry an adverse consequence.

Back in 1943, in the middle of World War II, the greatest existential crisis America has ever faced, the Supreme Court of the United States had before it a case involving a Jehovah’s Witness schoolchild from West Virginia who had not taken a knee during the playing of the national anthem, but who had declined, on religious grounds, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, (1943) 319 U.S. 624, the Court sided with the Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Robert Jackson observed that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein....”

A generation later, a group of of school students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school in protest of the war in Vietnam. The school district reacted with the typical disdain for freedom to be expected from most school districts. The oldest members of the group were suspended, and litigation ensued. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held for the students. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, (1969) 393 U.S. 503, the court upheld the right of pupils to engage in symbolic activity that was “closely akin to pure speech.” Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas observed "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Id. at 506.

Yet, notwithstanding the clear constitutional instruction in both Barnette and in Tinker, a large part of the American public still continues to believe that freedom is too dangerous to entrust to schoolchildren, athletes, or anyone else holding an unpopular view. Indeed, in Texas, schoolchildren are actually told that it is unlawful, and that they can be sent to jail for, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. and Texas flags. Elsewhere throughout the country, policies are in place in numerous local entities that fly in the face of the Constitution by mandating participation in flag salutes or standing for the national anthem.

However, under the clear constitutional teaching of Barnette and Tinker, no American citizen can be required to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, any more than a citizen can be required to stand for the national anthem. It is, in fact, the absolute right of everyone of us to decline to participate in what many of us, in the Trump era, consider to be a well-nigh totalitarian exercise in idolatrous flag worship.

Now it may cause a certain amount of agita to that portion of the American public was subscribes to the Trump cult, or which otherwise despises most freedoms. But the heckler’s veto has never been recognized in American law. As much as it may irritate someone no end to see another person taking a knee, or declining to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, the true test of a free and democratic society is not how well it protects the rights of the one who takes offense, but how well it protects the rights of the one who dissents, the one who chooses to take a knee or to remain silent or even seated during the pledge.

Because, in the final analysis, America was founded by dissenters. Ours is a nation conceived, as Abraham Lincoln so famously put it at Gettysburg, in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. How can we claim to be true to that founding vision if we insist upon denying to our fellow Americans the right to take a knee or to withhold participation in the Pledge of Allegiance? America does not exist to enforce some kind of communitarian adherence to an officially defined set of national orthodoxies.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. From Thomas Jefferson’s soaring words in the Declaration of Independence have come all of our law and our prophets.

We are a free and democratic society, born of dissent, made strong by disobedience, baptized in the blood and fire of a Revolution which has made a triumphal tour of the world. The struggle that began at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill continues on football fields across America as a new generation of Americans challenges our commitment to our revolutionary heritage, standing up by kneeling down.

Take a knee as if your lives depended upon it, take a knee as if your liberty depended upon it, take a knee as if your ability to pursue happiness depended upon it.


#TakeaKnee America.