Summary: Once again, Christmas finds me in the office honoring what has become a shibboleth for me. By going into the office, I can escape some of the seasonal ridiculousness of the kind of nastiness into which Christmas has degenerated.
Yet, in the silence of the office, insulated from The Donald’s objectionable and nasty cultural appropriation of this holy incarnation season, And his recasting of it is some kind of political Festivus, I’m reminded not only that God’s passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Savior, but also that God and God’s holy church remind us that we ought to have a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, and those who have no place to lay their heads. God will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and will take note of how we have treated the least among us.
-----------------------------------------------
In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season.
I came across a new word recently, coined by a high school student who shows what his teacher called “signs of greatness.” The word in question, used to describe our current situation, was “fucktangular.” Certainly, with the traitor-in-chief Donald Trump at the head of our affairs, the situation this Christmas can only be described fucktangular.
What, after all, can we say when Gospodin Trump, in a fit of pique, holds the United States government to ransom for his ridiculous border wall? What can we say one Gospodin Trump treats Christmas like Seinfeld’s Festivus, subjecting us all to a recitation of his usual diet of lies, falsehoods, and childish grievances? What can we say as we learn that on this Christmas day, another child, this one a boy of eight, died in the custody of the United States government?
Moreover, what can one say when one sees a homeless person, with all his worldly possessions crammed into a shopping cart, making his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other? It came home to me forcibly in that moment that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God. So, too was I reminded of God’s ineffable presence looking out into the Whitewater Wash and seeing another homeless person sharing his or her meager foodstuff with a murder of crows, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is something fucktangular in the way modern American society tends to organize itself. It reminded me that there is something indeed fucktangular about the heresies implicit in the so-called prosperity gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformists. It reminded me that there is something fucktangular in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I don’t think God ever intended the Incarnation of the Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump has emboldened all of us to live down to the worst aspects of our Originally Sinful human nature, we should, instead of accepting his invitation, which is, after all, an invitation to live according to the perverse “gospel” of Antichrist, try to get in touch with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative.
For when we examine the Lucan infancy narrative, the one we hear about at every Christmastide, the one that has become such a treasured possession of the Western mind and the Christian Republic, it’s easy to gloss over a very simple, foundational, reality. Simply put, our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Worse, the Lucan infancy narrative also reminds us that they became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump and his supporters are holding the government hostage to build their absurd border wall, to go Qin Shihuangdi one better. Yet, as I pointed out in my last post, Wanli Changcheng (The Great Wall of China) did not keep out the barbarians whom China desired to exclude. Instead, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shangaiguan, conquered China, and, in the end, became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
And if Wanli Changcheng proved unavailing, so, too, will Gospodin Trump’s border wall. Indeed, we have the assurances of the Savior Himself that Gospodin Trump, and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. For when the Savior comes, he brings with him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to overcome all terrors. For we who are Christian, we who are Catholic, we who are Anglican, we who are Episcopalian, preach the faith of God Incarnate, of God among humanity, of God crucified, of God conquering death by death.
The baby in the manger or the mature man with his disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of that beautiful Child.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with her pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Thursday, December 20, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: THE ARROGANCE AND HUBRIS OF DONALD TRUMP AND MARK ZUCKERBERG
Summary: The arrogance, hubris, and treasonable incompetence of Messrs. Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg has revealed itself yet again. The Donald, in another, perhaps inevitable, display of churlishness, solipsism, and indeed treasonable incompetence, has managed, almost simultaneously, to betray our national security interests in Syria and to set up a shutdown of the government for which the Russian ... er, that is, the Republican Party, will ineluctably be held responsible, and with respect to which they will be ineluctably tarred with the same brush of treason as The Donald himself.
If The Donald’s own lack of self-awareness, and his own treasonable disposition, have left the Republican Party caught with its metaphorical cock and balls hanging out for everyone to see, Mark Zuckerberg’s own solipsism, arrogance, hubris, and pathetic want of self-awareness have left his company, Facebook, on the brink of intrusive and necessary legislation by hostile legislative bodies including, but not limited to, Congress, the California Legislature, the Imperial Parliament, the European Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing. The handwriting may be on the wall for scandal-plagued Facebook.
---------------------------------------------
The traitor-in-chief of the United States, Donald Trump, demonstrated yet again his treasonable incompetence within the last 48 hours. First, by announcing a withdrawal of all American military forces from Syria, on his mere ipse dixit, without the first shred of interagency review or participation in the decision, Trump has given material aid, and probably considerable comfort, to enemies national of the United States, including Russia and Iran.
Moreover, Trump’s demarche has also given aid, and a distinct amount of comfort, to Daesh, the entity known in the West as ISIS, or to the Obama administration as ISIL. Trump may have felt it appropriate to adopt the strategy of some time Vermont Sen. George Aiken, who, appreciating that we were backing into a quagmire in Vietnam, said that we should, in effect, “declare victory and pull out.”
Unfortunately, as with the Vietcong, Daesh is not the kind of opponent with respect to whom we can unilaterally declare victory and slink out of the battlespace. Daesh has demonstrated, time and time again, that it is not disposed to conduct itself according to the laws of war or the usages of civilized societies in either the Judeo Christian Roman world or in the Islamic community. To achieve victory against Daesh will require the kind of scorched earth, on-the-ground elimination of the enemy which Donald Trump is unprepared to contemplate, and which he actually quails from thinking about.
By withdrawing American forces from Syria, Trump the traitor-in-chief only emboldens Daesh, and gives openings to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and to Turkey’s neo-Ottoman dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Moscow will be looking to establish a de facto protectorate over Syria, with access to Syria’s warm-water port of Latakia; Ankara will be looking for an opportunity to crush the Kurds.
Either way, The Donald’s unilateral demarche is not only contrary to American interests, but also serves the interests of enemies national.
In addition to serving enemies national by screwing up the American position in Syria, The Donald has also betrayed this country by holding the United States government hostage to his hubristic demand for funding for his so-called Great Wall. The last head of a sovereign state to have a Great Wall associated with him was a Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, 2200 years ago. The Qin Emperor, though enumerated as the first Emperor of China, is uniformly reviled on both the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan for his excesses, his character flaws, and his bloodthirstiness.
Any student of Chinese history can tell you that the Qin Emperor’s project was not a success. Wanli Changcheng, as the Great Wall is known in China never stopped a barbarian invasion of China proper. In 1644, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shanhaiguan, northeast of Beijing, and went on to conquer all China, ruling it as the Qing Dynasty until 1912.
By holding the United States government hostage, The Donald has managed to recapitulate many of the political mistakes and the character flaws which led to the collapse of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Certainly, by threatening to cripple large parts of the government, the Donald has given another Christmas present to Vladimir Vladimirovich: a government shutdown promotes instability and reduces the credibility of the United States with its alliance partners in both NATO and the Pacific.
Such a lack of basic competence in the skills of governing is not merely inexcusable, it constitutes what the Russian Imperial Criminal Code defined as treasonable incompetence: incompetence on a scale so massive, and so dangerous that one must infer malice on the part of the incompetent. In all, malice may be inferred where an action is taken with obvious and reckless disregard for its probable consequences.
For example, a person firing an AR 15 into a moving Amtrak train would not be able to defend him- or herself by denying any specific malicious intent to kill a passenger, but the law would infer malice from the high probability that death might result. In the same fashion, drunk driving offenses can be, and often are, charged as a second-degree murder, because of the high risk that death will occur as a result of the illegal conduct.
In the case of Donald Trump, adverse consequences to the United States stemming from his conduct, are so foreseeable that his incompetence may indeed be considered treasonable; it is not a defense for a bad actor to claim that he did not intend the results of his misconduct, when those consequences are reasonably foresseable to anybody with even a middle-school skill set or level of self-awareness.
The Donald has laid the groundwork for what should be an extensive set of articles of impeachment by the House of Representatives come January. His conduct is inexcusable, it is treasonable, and it should be punished accordingly.
* * * * *
If anyone else can be accused of culpable incompetence, that person is Mark Zuckerberg, the man-child in charge at Facebook.
This week, Facebook was the subject of another exposé about its failure to respect its users’ privacy. This one, broken by the New York Times, comes hard on the heels of a series of other, not altogether unexpected, Facebook scandals.
In every one of them, Gospodin Zuckerberg has managed to stumble his way into making a bad situation worse. Not only has Facebook lost nearly 30% of its market value, but it is now facing investigations into its business activities by a whole series of hostile legislative bodies including, but not limited to, Congress, the California Legislature, the Imperial Parliament, the European Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing.
Starting even before Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had confronted a series of privacy scandals. Gospodin Zuckerberg responded to each scandal with an anodyne non-apology “apology.” In every case, Zuckerberg’s pro forma apology was a cosmetic fiction, leading to no real reforms whatsoever. In fact, so inauthentic were Gospodin Zuckerberg’s apologies that we may not only doubt the sincerity of his current so-called apology tour, but we may also infer that his other apologies, those to Congress and to the Imperial Parliament, may well have been nothing more than carefully packaged, artfully orchestrated lies.
The writing may be very much on the wall for the monstrosity of Menlo Park. Not only does Facebook have to confront the possibility of a growing #deletefacebook movement, but it must also contemplate the possibility that one or more of the legislative bodies looking into its business model may see fit either, in the case of Congress, to reassert in their fullest forms the antitrust remedies contemplated in the Sherman Antitrust Act, or to legislate Facebook out of existence altogether, a step being contemplated by the Imperial Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing.
Facebook may have no other option than to offer Gospodin Zuckerberg a gold watch for his service, buy him out, and put some figure of worldwide, unimpeachable integrity at the helm. If Zuckerberg continues his arrogance, his hubris, and his solipsism, Facebook may not be here come the elections of 2020.
I’m not sure I would count that a great privation.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
BRINGING TREASON IN FROM THE COLD: WHY THE DONALD SHOULD BE CRAPPING IN HIS PANTS
SUMMARY: District Judge Emmet Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold this morning at the abortive sentencing hearing for Michael Flynn. By mentioning treason for the first time in a criminal proceeding involving The Donald, Judge Sullivan has very much upped the ante. Treason and bribery are the two specifically enumerated crimes that constitute grounds for impeachment under the constitution. Sullivan may very well have unstoppered the bottle and let the genie out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Washington, D.C. courtroom this morning, United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan tore a metaphorical strip off former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In a series of pointed questions directed at the quondam general, Sullivan included one inquiring whether the investigators from the Special Counsel’s office had considered charging Flynn with other crimes, including treason.
Given that Flynn has already pled guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with his undeclared work as an agent of foreign governments, it might have seemed that ventilating the possibility of a treason prosecution might have been a bit of a reach.
Yet, as the evidence has continued to mount that the United States has been the subject of what amounts to an undeclared war by an enemy national, the question of whether the numerous contacts between Trump administration figures and agents of the Russian State constitutes treason has been one that has been very much bubbling along at the margins of our national conversation.
No one has been willing thus far, with the possible exception of former Naval Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance and a number of other commentators on MSNBC, even to mention the T-word.
Until today.
Because in his Washington courtroom today, Judge Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold and set it right down at the table. Essentially, Judge Sullivan has done two things none had thought possible; he has mainstreamed the concept of treason prosecutions for one, some, or even all of the Trump entourage, and in so doing has decidedly upped the ante.
Basically, Judge Sullivan has blown the lid off of the generalized reluctance to link treason and Trump. If, as recently as last week, the concept of some kind of formal linkage between the Trump campaign and the concept of treason had been dismissible as the ravings of a marginal conspiracist, this morning’s courtroom colloquy, by bringing treason in from the cold, demands that we now engage in a serious, non-hysterical discussion about the possibility that one, some, or all of the senior leaders of the Trump administration may have been engaged with agents of the Russian State in a comprehensive effort to betray the United States.
Of course, many “lay lawyers,” imagining themselves as far more competent in the law than they really are, will protest that there is no declared war between the United States and Russia, and insist that a treason prosecution will only lie when there has been a formal declaration of war.
Aside from constituting the crime of unauthorized practice of law, the “lay lawyers’” analysis fails on two very simple points.
First, neither Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines the federal offense of treason, nor 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which defines the statutory offense of treason, contain any textually demonstrable requirement that the United States be in an actual, declared state of war. In fact, the United States last declared war on December 8, 1941, when Congress, in consequence of “the unprovoked and dastardly attack” against Pearl Harbor the previous day, declared a state of war to have existed from December 7 between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Yet, if we were to accept the “lay lawyers’” formulation that a treason prosecution requires a declared war, then the treason statutes would fall into ineluctable desuetude, becoming unenforceable through nonuse.
Yet, when one considers the statutory history of treason statutes, both in this country and in England, one finds that from the time Parliament first legislated on the subject of treason, in the Statute of Treasons 25. Edw.3. c.5 s.2. (1351), that while levying war against the sovereign within the sovereign’s own jurisdiction was certainly treason, certain other acts could be considered treason as well.
What the statutory history makes quite clear, especially when one considers the various English Treason Acts following the original 1351 Act, is that the gravamen of the offense is that it constitutes an effort to contravene the authority of the State at the most basic level, by individuals who owe a duty of allegiance thereto.
Moreover, it cannot be gainsaid that Russia’s “active measures” in the course of propaganda, disinformation, fomentation of division, and stirring up of unrest constitute what is known as “information warfare,” prosecuted by the Russian State against the United States and its allies may not be a declared war, but it is war, all the same.
Consequently, if we accept the proposition that Russia’s “active measures” against the United States are a form of warfare, then any American assisting the Russian State in prosecuting such “active measures” against this country is unquestionably guilty of treason within the meaning of Article III, section 3 of the Constitution, and within the meaning of 18 U.S. Code § 2381.
Even the most basic understanding of the realities of how Russia’s “active measures” of information warfare do in fact constitute war against the United States should quickly dispose of any half-baked notion on the part of “lay lawyers” that assisting Russia against this country is not treason.
When Judge Sullivan dared to say the T-word in his courtroom, he not only brought treason, the redheaded stepchild whose name no one had dared to speak its name until now (pace Lord Alfred Douglas), into the mainstream of our national discussion, But, he also unstoppered the bottle, allowed the genie to escape, and also raised the very real possibility that treason prosecutions may very well become a part of the counterintelligence toolbox.
Donald Trump should be afraid, afraid to the point of existential dread, about where the prosecution in U.S. v. Flynn is heading.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Washington, D.C. courtroom this morning, United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan tore a metaphorical strip off former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In a series of pointed questions directed at the quondam general, Sullivan included one inquiring whether the investigators from the Special Counsel’s office had considered charging Flynn with other crimes, including treason.
Given that Flynn has already pled guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with his undeclared work as an agent of foreign governments, it might have seemed that ventilating the possibility of a treason prosecution might have been a bit of a reach.
Yet, as the evidence has continued to mount that the United States has been the subject of what amounts to an undeclared war by an enemy national, the question of whether the numerous contacts between Trump administration figures and agents of the Russian State constitutes treason has been one that has been very much bubbling along at the margins of our national conversation.
No one has been willing thus far, with the possible exception of former Naval Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance and a number of other commentators on MSNBC, even to mention the T-word.
Until today.
Because in his Washington courtroom today, Judge Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold and set it right down at the table. Essentially, Judge Sullivan has done two things none had thought possible; he has mainstreamed the concept of treason prosecutions for one, some, or even all of the Trump entourage, and in so doing has decidedly upped the ante.
Basically, Judge Sullivan has blown the lid off of the generalized reluctance to link treason and Trump. If, as recently as last week, the concept of some kind of formal linkage between the Trump campaign and the concept of treason had been dismissible as the ravings of a marginal conspiracist, this morning’s courtroom colloquy, by bringing treason in from the cold, demands that we now engage in a serious, non-hysterical discussion about the possibility that one, some, or all of the senior leaders of the Trump administration may have been engaged with agents of the Russian State in a comprehensive effort to betray the United States.
Of course, many “lay lawyers,” imagining themselves as far more competent in the law than they really are, will protest that there is no declared war between the United States and Russia, and insist that a treason prosecution will only lie when there has been a formal declaration of war.
Aside from constituting the crime of unauthorized practice of law, the “lay lawyers’” analysis fails on two very simple points.
First, neither Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines the federal offense of treason, nor 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which defines the statutory offense of treason, contain any textually demonstrable requirement that the United States be in an actual, declared state of war. In fact, the United States last declared war on December 8, 1941, when Congress, in consequence of “the unprovoked and dastardly attack” against Pearl Harbor the previous day, declared a state of war to have existed from December 7 between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Yet, if we were to accept the “lay lawyers’” formulation that a treason prosecution requires a declared war, then the treason statutes would fall into ineluctable desuetude, becoming unenforceable through nonuse.
Yet, when one considers the statutory history of treason statutes, both in this country and in England, one finds that from the time Parliament first legislated on the subject of treason, in the Statute of Treasons 25. Edw.3. c.5 s.2. (1351), that while levying war against the sovereign within the sovereign’s own jurisdiction was certainly treason, certain other acts could be considered treason as well.
What the statutory history makes quite clear, especially when one considers the various English Treason Acts following the original 1351 Act, is that the gravamen of the offense is that it constitutes an effort to contravene the authority of the State at the most basic level, by individuals who owe a duty of allegiance thereto.
Moreover, it cannot be gainsaid that Russia’s “active measures” in the course of propaganda, disinformation, fomentation of division, and stirring up of unrest constitute what is known as “information warfare,” prosecuted by the Russian State against the United States and its allies may not be a declared war, but it is war, all the same.
Consequently, if we accept the proposition that Russia’s “active measures” against the United States are a form of warfare, then any American assisting the Russian State in prosecuting such “active measures” against this country is unquestionably guilty of treason within the meaning of Article III, section 3 of the Constitution, and within the meaning of 18 U.S. Code § 2381.
Even the most basic understanding of the realities of how Russia’s “active measures” of information warfare do in fact constitute war against the United States should quickly dispose of any half-baked notion on the part of “lay lawyers” that assisting Russia against this country is not treason.
When Judge Sullivan dared to say the T-word in his courtroom, he not only brought treason, the redheaded stepchild whose name no one had dared to speak its name until now (pace Lord Alfred Douglas), into the mainstream of our national discussion, But, he also unstoppered the bottle, allowed the genie to escape, and also raised the very real possibility that treason prosecutions may very well become a part of the counterintelligence toolbox.
Donald Trump should be afraid, afraid to the point of existential dread, about where the prosecution in U.S. v. Flynn is heading.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms as a member of the city council. He currently practices law in Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own.
Monday, December 10, 2018
A WORLD DYING, A WORLD BORN
Summary: the municipal world in Cathedral City is dying. The municipal world in Cathedral City is being born. After more than 30 years of directly elected mayors, Cathedral city passes to a rotating mayoralty. The first rotating mayor of Cathedral City will be my old friend and sometime Council colleague Greg Pettis. Much will be expected of this highly talented, richly experienced new mayor. We should all wish him well.
------------------------------------------
Cathedral City-December 10, 2018. Tonight, as our eyes behold the vesper light, our municipal world is dying, and it is also going through its birth pangs. Three councilmembers will take their oaths of office here in Cathedral City. One, Mark Carnevale, will be sworn in for his second term on the city Council. The other two, Ray Gregory and Ernesto Gutierrez, will be taking the oath for the first time
At the same time, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis, will become mayor of Cathedral city. Of course, having known Greg for 20 years and having served with him as a councilmember for eight years, and having been his political ally through much of that time, I congratulate him and wish in the best of success in his mayoralty.
Of course, much has changed in Cathedral City in just the last couple of years. Two years ago, Cathedral City adopted Measure HH; after 30-plus years as a general law city, Cathedral City opted to become a Charter city, free from many of the impositions and mandates historically imposed by Sacramento on general law cities.
One of the major changes wrought by Measure HH was to adopt the system of a rotating mayoralty in which the mayor is chosen by the members of the city Council from among their number. Measure HH thus did away with the quasi- mayor-Council system, in which the mayor, though a member of the city Council, was directly elected for a two-year term. The system of rotating mayoralty, which obtains in many other Coachella Valley cities, is common among cities with a Council-manager form of government, which Cathedral city had and has.
The particular upside of a rotating mayoralty is that the mayor under such a dispensation serves a single twelve month term and then hands the mayoralty off to another member of the Council. More bluntly, by limiting the mayoralty of a single individual to twelve months, that individual has a relatively limited opportunity to do significant damage to the city he or she represents.
Had we had a rotating mayoralty system between 2004 and 2014, we would not have had to put up with the 10 dreadful winters of the mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen, whose conflicts of interest, whose disdain for the city she represented, whose vindictiveness, and whose all-around nasty behavior were a perfect prefiguring of those of Donald J. Trump.
When Ms. DeRosa’s successor, outgoing Mayor Stan Henry, took up the gavel, Cathedral city had lived through what can only be described as a period of ten winters of Brezhnev-like stagnation. DeRosa was more interested in the ego trip of the mayoralty than she was in actually getting anything done for the community. Stan Henry, the former police chief in Cathedral City, managed to get Cathedral City somewhat back on track. And kudos is due to him for his accomplishments during his two terms in office.
But now the gavel passes to our first annual, rotating mayor, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis. There is much work to be done in Cathedral City. I certainly believe that Greg is the right man to move that work forward. After better than two decades on the Council, with experience that includes service on the Riverside County transportation commission, and the presidency of the Southern California Association of Governments, among others, Greg brings more experience to the mayoralty than any of his predecessors since incorporation.
Of course, with such a body of experience, much will be expected from the incoming mayor, perhaps so much that some of his constituents will be disappointed if, on his watch, we do not attain utopia in a day. Certainly, followers of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen will be looking eagerly for any gaps or missteps the Pettis administration may stumble into. It is common knowledge that DeRosa despises Greg Pettis, and it is also common knowledge that she would very much like to stage a political comeback.
Yet Cathedral City is not what it was during the ten Brezhnev winters during which DeRosa was mayor. To the extent that Stan Henry has been a turnaround CEO for Cathedral City, all of us should perhaps thank him for his service and wish him well in his amply deserved retirement.
At the same time, we should all be aware that Greg Pettis takes the gavel with more expectation and more hope for his success than has greeted any mayor of Cathedral City since incorporation.
I wish my old friend and former colleague all the best as he jumps into the maelstrom of being the public voice and face of Cathedral City.
Knock ‘em dead, old friend.
------------------------------------------
Cathedral City-December 10, 2018. Tonight, as our eyes behold the vesper light, our municipal world is dying, and it is also going through its birth pangs. Three councilmembers will take their oaths of office here in Cathedral City. One, Mark Carnevale, will be sworn in for his second term on the city Council. The other two, Ray Gregory and Ernesto Gutierrez, will be taking the oath for the first time
At the same time, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis, will become mayor of Cathedral city. Of course, having known Greg for 20 years and having served with him as a councilmember for eight years, and having been his political ally through much of that time, I congratulate him and wish in the best of success in his mayoralty.
Of course, much has changed in Cathedral City in just the last couple of years. Two years ago, Cathedral City adopted Measure HH; after 30-plus years as a general law city, Cathedral City opted to become a Charter city, free from many of the impositions and mandates historically imposed by Sacramento on general law cities.
One of the major changes wrought by Measure HH was to adopt the system of a rotating mayoralty in which the mayor is chosen by the members of the city Council from among their number. Measure HH thus did away with the quasi- mayor-Council system, in which the mayor, though a member of the city Council, was directly elected for a two-year term. The system of rotating mayoralty, which obtains in many other Coachella Valley cities, is common among cities with a Council-manager form of government, which Cathedral city had and has.
The particular upside of a rotating mayoralty is that the mayor under such a dispensation serves a single twelve month term and then hands the mayoralty off to another member of the Council. More bluntly, by limiting the mayoralty of a single individual to twelve months, that individual has a relatively limited opportunity to do significant damage to the city he or she represents.
Had we had a rotating mayoralty system between 2004 and 2014, we would not have had to put up with the 10 dreadful winters of the mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen, whose conflicts of interest, whose disdain for the city she represented, whose vindictiveness, and whose all-around nasty behavior were a perfect prefiguring of those of Donald J. Trump.
When Ms. DeRosa’s successor, outgoing Mayor Stan Henry, took up the gavel, Cathedral city had lived through what can only be described as a period of ten winters of Brezhnev-like stagnation. DeRosa was more interested in the ego trip of the mayoralty than she was in actually getting anything done for the community. Stan Henry, the former police chief in Cathedral City, managed to get Cathedral City somewhat back on track. And kudos is due to him for his accomplishments during his two terms in office.
But now the gavel passes to our first annual, rotating mayor, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis. There is much work to be done in Cathedral City. I certainly believe that Greg is the right man to move that work forward. After better than two decades on the Council, with experience that includes service on the Riverside County transportation commission, and the presidency of the Southern California Association of Governments, among others, Greg brings more experience to the mayoralty than any of his predecessors since incorporation.
Of course, with such a body of experience, much will be expected from the incoming mayor, perhaps so much that some of his constituents will be disappointed if, on his watch, we do not attain utopia in a day. Certainly, followers of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen will be looking eagerly for any gaps or missteps the Pettis administration may stumble into. It is common knowledge that DeRosa despises Greg Pettis, and it is also common knowledge that she would very much like to stage a political comeback.
Yet Cathedral City is not what it was during the ten Brezhnev winters during which DeRosa was mayor. To the extent that Stan Henry has been a turnaround CEO for Cathedral City, all of us should perhaps thank him for his service and wish him well in his amply deserved retirement.
At the same time, we should all be aware that Greg Pettis takes the gavel with more expectation and more hope for his success than has greeted any mayor of Cathedral City since incorporation.
I wish my old friend and former colleague all the best as he jumps into the maelstrom of being the public voice and face of Cathedral City.
Knock ‘em dead, old friend.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
CRITICAL THOUGHTS AT THANKSGIVING
Summary: The celebration we call “Thanksgiving” is problematic a number of grounds. Leaving aside the issue of whether any European-derived celebration of “Thanksgiving” reflects a kind of cultural amnesia with respect to the settlement of this continent by her First Peoples, Thanksgiving, as we celebrate it, is hardly a retelling of a triumphalist Yankee version of the national creation story, inflicting upon us cultural amnesia as to our Latino history, our Cavalier history, and our Anglican history. Perhaps we ought to give thanks not for the things the Yankee, triumphalist, sectionalist Thanksgiving myth postulates, but for our basic human ability to build communities and to find strength therein. In building communities may very well lie our saving grace and our salvation.
---------------------------------------
To be a queer Anglican of at least attenuated First Peoples descent at Thanksgiving is to find oneself roused to silent dissent over the holiday.
Thanksgiving, as we have come to understand and to celebrate it, finds its origin in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of November, 1863. It has been a federal holiday since then. Given the origin of Thanksgiving in the maelstrom of the Civil War, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken on a profoundly Northeastern coloration. Thanksgiving is now, and always has been, about retelling the next story with a distinctly Massachusetts-centric, white, Anglo, religiously Nonconformist accent.
Going to school in California ---among classmates of every conceivable sort and condition, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latino, families that had been in California for generations and classmates who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves— I always found it vaguely amusing to see an Ethiopian-American schoolgirl, descended as she was from an ancient, Christian, African civilization, togged up to look like a “comely Indian maiden” of the Wampanoag tribe. I, descended as I am from Native Americans appearing on one or more Dawes Commission reports, and therefore myself a “Congressional Injun,” was inevitably cast as a towheaded Englishman in whatever Thanksgiving pageants the educational bureaucrats of my elementary school had seen fit to inflict upon us. (It’s worth remembering that the rate of intermarriage among the Eastern Cherokee has always hovered around 100%; scratch a Cherokee and you will find Scots Highlander.)
But togging up Ethiopian, Latino, Native American, and Latino schoolchildren as English religious Nonconformists or Wampanoag Indians inflicted upon us a kind of historical amnesia that bereft us of knowledge not only of Native American Thanksgiving-type harvest feasts, but also of earlier, pre-Plymouth Rock European observances.
As we pranced about in our inauthentic pilgrim garb, we were blissfully ignorant, for example, of the thanksgiving feast held on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to mark the foundation of the City of San Augustín, Florida, or of the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by Juan de Oñate and his compadres at what is now San Elizario, a suburb of El Paso, Texas.
As much as we were ignorant of these early Spanish thanksgivings, we were equally ignorant of the very-similar-to-Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving feast that had occurred at Berkeley Hundred Virginia in 1619. For us, togged up in our inauthentic, Nonconformist Massachusetts 1621 attire, our Thanksgiving history and our national history was presented to us as having begun at Plymouth Rock with the arrival of the pilgrims aboard Mayflower.
The other shortcoming of the triumphant Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was that for those of us who came from religiously Conformist families, i.e., we were members of the Episcopal Church, was that it tended, and tends, to cast the Episcopal/Anglican Church as the villain of the piece. When we were taught the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth, the pilgrims were always presented as noble, stalwart, Calvinist souls fleeing religious persecution that, according to the myth, was somewhat akin to the sufferings inflicted on Christians under the Emperor Diocletian or on "heretics" by the Roman and Spanish inquisitions.
In short, the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was intended, whether knowingly or not, to poison our minds against the Anglican faith and to bias us with a pre-disposition in favor of Calvinist Nonconformity.
Now the truth be told, it has been said that the two foundational ideologies of our American society are capitalism and Calvinism. Given the tentacular reach of both ideologies into just about every aspect of American life, it is hardly surprising that the “official” Thanksgiving narrative should postulate what is, to all intents and purposes, an anti-Anglican, anti-Indian, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, narrative.
More than 150 years after the initial Thanksgiving proclamation, Thanksgiving has come to mean little more than an occasion for gluttonous feasting, political arguments with the Trump followers at the dinner table, and vacuous football pageantry afterwards. The thankful introspection to which President Lincoln’s proclamation called us has become as beyond our knowledge as have the other harvest feasts and thanksgivings which formed the context in which the Plymouth pilgrims celebrated their own Thanksgiving.
Instead of seeing Thanksgiving through the Massachusetts-centric, Yankee triumphalist sectional lens through which we have heretofore been accustomed to see it, perhaps we should read President Lincoln’s proclamation as a call to a broader, more inclusive time of thankful introspection. Perhaps we should give thanks for the coming together of native and newcomer, for the expression, throughout what has become the United States, of the basic human imperative to build communities, and for the equally basic human imperative to find gregarious companionship.
For what are we human beings except creatures whom God was gathered together into families and communities?
Nearly a generation ago, when the science fiction television series Babylon 5 was running, I watched the episode entitled “Lines of Communication.” In it, the character of Ambassador Delenn tells the commander of the Babylon 5 station that “[she] began studying [human] history. I came to the conclusion that of all the races we had encountered humans were the most dangerous. Because humans form communities, and from that diversity comes a strength no single race can withstand. That is your strength and it is that which makes you dangerous.”
Perhaps that’s the true message of Thanksgiving; we build communities; perhaps that will be our saving grace.
When we can understand that Thanksgiving is not about the triumphalist sectional narrative of a particular part of our society, but about coming together in thanksgiving and love as communities within our body politic, then we may envisage an hypothesis of salvation.
---------------------------------------
To be a queer Anglican of at least attenuated First Peoples descent at Thanksgiving is to find oneself roused to silent dissent over the holiday.
Thanksgiving, as we have come to understand and to celebrate it, finds its origin in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of November, 1863. It has been a federal holiday since then. Given the origin of Thanksgiving in the maelstrom of the Civil War, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken on a profoundly Northeastern coloration. Thanksgiving is now, and always has been, about retelling the next story with a distinctly Massachusetts-centric, white, Anglo, religiously Nonconformist accent.
Going to school in California ---among classmates of every conceivable sort and condition, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latino, families that had been in California for generations and classmates who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves— I always found it vaguely amusing to see an Ethiopian-American schoolgirl, descended as she was from an ancient, Christian, African civilization, togged up to look like a “comely Indian maiden” of the Wampanoag tribe. I, descended as I am from Native Americans appearing on one or more Dawes Commission reports, and therefore myself a “Congressional Injun,” was inevitably cast as a towheaded Englishman in whatever Thanksgiving pageants the educational bureaucrats of my elementary school had seen fit to inflict upon us. (It’s worth remembering that the rate of intermarriage among the Eastern Cherokee has always hovered around 100%; scratch a Cherokee and you will find Scots Highlander.)
But togging up Ethiopian, Latino, Native American, and Latino schoolchildren as English religious Nonconformists or Wampanoag Indians inflicted upon us a kind of historical amnesia that bereft us of knowledge not only of Native American Thanksgiving-type harvest feasts, but also of earlier, pre-Plymouth Rock European observances.
As we pranced about in our inauthentic pilgrim garb, we were blissfully ignorant, for example, of the thanksgiving feast held on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to mark the foundation of the City of San Augustín, Florida, or of the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by Juan de Oñate and his compadres at what is now San Elizario, a suburb of El Paso, Texas.
As much as we were ignorant of these early Spanish thanksgivings, we were equally ignorant of the very-similar-to-Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving feast that had occurred at Berkeley Hundred Virginia in 1619. For us, togged up in our inauthentic, Nonconformist Massachusetts 1621 attire, our Thanksgiving history and our national history was presented to us as having begun at Plymouth Rock with the arrival of the pilgrims aboard Mayflower.
The other shortcoming of the triumphant Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was that for those of us who came from religiously Conformist families, i.e., we were members of the Episcopal Church, was that it tended, and tends, to cast the Episcopal/Anglican Church as the villain of the piece. When we were taught the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth, the pilgrims were always presented as noble, stalwart, Calvinist souls fleeing religious persecution that, according to the myth, was somewhat akin to the sufferings inflicted on Christians under the Emperor Diocletian or on "heretics" by the Roman and Spanish inquisitions.
In short, the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was intended, whether knowingly or not, to poison our minds against the Anglican faith and to bias us with a pre-disposition in favor of Calvinist Nonconformity.
Now the truth be told, it has been said that the two foundational ideologies of our American society are capitalism and Calvinism. Given the tentacular reach of both ideologies into just about every aspect of American life, it is hardly surprising that the “official” Thanksgiving narrative should postulate what is, to all intents and purposes, an anti-Anglican, anti-Indian, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, narrative.
More than 150 years after the initial Thanksgiving proclamation, Thanksgiving has come to mean little more than an occasion for gluttonous feasting, political arguments with the Trump followers at the dinner table, and vacuous football pageantry afterwards. The thankful introspection to which President Lincoln’s proclamation called us has become as beyond our knowledge as have the other harvest feasts and thanksgivings which formed the context in which the Plymouth pilgrims celebrated their own Thanksgiving.
Instead of seeing Thanksgiving through the Massachusetts-centric, Yankee triumphalist sectional lens through which we have heretofore been accustomed to see it, perhaps we should read President Lincoln’s proclamation as a call to a broader, more inclusive time of thankful introspection. Perhaps we should give thanks for the coming together of native and newcomer, for the expression, throughout what has become the United States, of the basic human imperative to build communities, and for the equally basic human imperative to find gregarious companionship.
For what are we human beings except creatures whom God was gathered together into families and communities?
Nearly a generation ago, when the science fiction television series Babylon 5 was running, I watched the episode entitled “Lines of Communication.” In it, the character of Ambassador Delenn tells the commander of the Babylon 5 station that “[she] began studying [human] history. I came to the conclusion that of all the races we had encountered humans were the most dangerous. Because humans form communities, and from that diversity comes a strength no single race can withstand. That is your strength and it is that which makes you dangerous.”
Perhaps that’s the true message of Thanksgiving; we build communities; perhaps that will be our saving grace.
When we can understand that Thanksgiving is not about the triumphalist sectional narrative of a particular part of our society, but about coming together in thanksgiving and love as communities within our body politic, then we may envisage an hypothesis of salvation.
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
Friday, November 16, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS November 16, 2018
Summary: Cathedral City’s adoption of an ordinance banning single-use plastic straws, while doubtless well intended, is nothing more than grandstanding. A statewide prohibition will go into effect at the new year, leaving Cathedral city’s ordinance little more than a piece of “feel-good” legislation. Councilmember Mark Carnevale and outgoing Mayor Stan Henry were right to vote against it.
A federal district judge in Washington City ordered the White House to reinstate CNN’s Jim Acosta’s “hard pass” after a hearing this morning at which the Justice Department lawyers made absolutely nonsensical arguments. Today’s order is a victory for the free press, but the war against the regime is by no means won.
-------------------------------------
Cathedral City, November 16 –- at its Wednesday night Council meeting, the Cathedral City city Council adopted an ordinance banning the use of so-called single-use plastic straws in Cathedral City.
The ordinance, while well intended as a gesture of conscientious environmental stewardship, nonetheless comes across as unfortunate political grandstanding. The state has adopted similar legislation which goes into effect on January 1, 2019. Why Cathedral City should have felt it necessary to burden its municipal codebook with a duplicative and probably pre-empted ordinance is unfortunately no mystery.
Cities throughout California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, West Hollywood, and Palm Springs, have a history of what may be called statement legislation. The legislation itself is usually intended to cover matters that are already covered, or will be covered, by a statewide Act of the Legislature. But, by jumping the gun, cities with histories of “statement legislation” can feel good about having made a statement or taken a stand about a particular issue before the Legislature did so.
Now, fortunately, the damage that local jurisdictions can do with “statement legislation” is pretty much limited to the geographic boundaries of the jurisdiction. Unfortunately, from a Democratic partisan perspective, the ammunition that such “statement legislation” gives to Republicans and cultural conservatives of every stripe cannot be measured.
While of course, there is no good reason to take issue with limiting the use of plastic straws. (Who can forget the heartbreaking YouTube video of rescuers trying to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose, having to make an election between leaving the straw in and potentially killing the creature, or extracting it and causing the creature excruciating pain in the process?) There is ample reason indeed to limit the use of plastic straws, even ignoring the plight of the random sea turtle.
However, trying to steal a march on the Legislature through “statement legislation” does not strike one as a compelling justification for grandstanding. Sacramento has been known to take a fairly dim view of local legislation that it sees is trampling upon the prerogatives of the Legislature, whose powers, where not limited by the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States, are, after all, coextensive with the powers of the Imperial Parliament of the United Kingdom. That includes the authority to pass pre-emptive statewide legislation on any subject within the Legislature’s competence. And the Legislature has been known to be more than a little territorial on occasion.
Thus, while the Cathedral City ordinance in question was doubtless well intended, it was the kind of political grandstanding that in the end should be rejected as politically ill-advised because it not only pisses off the Legislature, but also because it provides ammunition to haters.
Cathedral City’s plastic straw ordinance will probably prove to have been an unforced error on the part of the city Council. Were I still on the Council, I would have voted “no.”
* * * * *
The Trump administration took another black eye this morning when federal District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, ironically a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to reinstate CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s “hard pass,” thus reinstating Acosta’s ability to cover the White House for “the little network that could.”
Just about every American by now has learned the history of the Trump/Acosta confrontation last week that resulted in a petulant president ordering Acosta’s hard pass revoked. Just about every American also knows that the Trump administration attempted to justify its conduct with the usual outrageous lies, buttressed by a doctored video supplied by Alex Jones’s InfoWars website. Those lies, together with a doctored video, were quickly fact checked by numerous media outlets. Those same media outlets, including Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, rallied to CNN and Acosta’s defense.
And CNN and its colleagues in the media have prevailed. Gospodin Trump’s effort to impose a media regime on the White House that would reduce coverage of the President to that which is fawning and sycophantic, has — at least for the time being — failed, and American democracy lives to survive, and fight, another day.
But what was so problematic about the Trump/Acosta imbroglio was that the Justice Department, in oral arguments before the District Court, argued that the White House had essentially unfettered discretion to keep any journalist off the White House grounds for any reason whatsoever. Reporting on CNN.com, CNN’s Brian Stelter framed the larger issue in these ominous words:
While responding to a hypothetical from Kelly, [Justice Department lawyer James]Burnham said that it would be perfectly legal for the White House to revoke a journalist's press pass if it didn't agree with their reporting. "As a matter of law... yes," he said.Fortunately for the Republic, Judge Kelly did not see the matter the way Mr. Burnham would have liked him to see it.
A President does not have the right to contravene either the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, or the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process as against the federal government, on his mere ipse dixit, simply because he dislikes or disagrees with the reporter or the media outlet in question.
Of course, Donald Trump, who has a rather imperial concept of presidential power, including the power of his mere ipse dixit, won’t like the results of this morning’s hearing one little bit. Like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who, according to bombshell New York Times reporting earlier this week, also has a rather thin skin, Donald Trump can be expected to let fly with one or more rage tweets. We should expect something along the lines of “Disgraceful decision by Democratic so-called judge! Outrageous! Will appeal! Terrible for the country! Sad!”
Already, a number of media outlets are describing a sense of siege within the White House. A Politico.com headline describes Trump world as “preparing for the worst.” CNN’s victory in court this morning can only have reinforced the ominous feelings within Trump world. Will that world come crashing down? Will Trump world go the way of Atlantis or Pompeii? All the auguries indicate that the Trump organized crime family is becoming uncomfortably aware that it is dancing on a volcano.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY; DON'T FORGET IT!
Summary: The Democrats appear to have done rather better in the midterm elections then a lot of the pundits and handicappers had thought possible. It was, after all, Aotsunami, a blue Tidal Wave, rather than just Aonami, a little blue ripple. Though the dust has yet to settle, the Democratic margin of control in the incoming House of Representatives appears to be widening. Kyrsten Sinema’s victory in heretofore deep red Arizona gives Democrats throughout the country hope for recapturing the upper chamber in 2020.
But Democrats, true to their reputation for foolishness and fecklessness, are talking seriously about ousting Nancy Pelosi, the architect and field marshal of their victory. It’s too early to say whether the mutiny against the incoming leader of the majority is a fruit of sheer misogyny, or whether it is part of the ongoing Sanders effort to destroy the Democratic Party from within. Either way, the rebellion should be squashed without mercy.Women hold up half the sky, and the Party needs to remember that immutable truth.
------------------------------------------------------
When I posted in this blog on November 8, I suggested that “Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped.” I may have been premature. As votes are counted, particularly in California, which seems to take a perverse pride in the slowness of its election returns, it appears that Aonami really may have been Aotsunami after all.
While we did not recapture the Senate, the defeat of Nevada’s Dean Heller and the victory of Kyrsten Sinema in heretofore ruby red Arizona suggests that Democrats may be well-positioned to recapture the upper chamber in 2020, when the electoral math and map for Republicans will be even more unpromising than the senatorial electoral math and map of 2018 were for Democrats.
Withal, the last week has been a very good week for The Democracy and a very bad week for Gospodin Trump and the un-American Republicans. Democrats should be celebrating the extent of their victory and laying plans for 2020.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are displaying once again their traditional fecklessness and foolishness. In the House, there seems to be a revolt brewing against Nancy Pelosi, the once and hopefully future Speaker of the house.
Unfortunately, feckless and foolish Democrats seem intent on penalizing success and rewarding failure. The anti-Pelosi revolt, spearheaded by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, and encouraged by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocacsio Cortez, seems to come straight out of either a deep cesspit of misogyny, which tried to find expression in the insurgency of Kevin de León against Dianne Feinstein, or it comes out of a conscious effort by the so-called Bernie Sanders "wing" of the Democratic Party to destroy the party from within.
Either hypothesis bodes ill for the Party’s hopes of being victorious in the long game against the Muscovite Republicans in 2020.
If the Party is taken hostage by a kind of reflexive ageist misogyny that postulates the unsuitability of either Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi for public office because they are too old or insufficiently masculine, then the Party will be setting itself up for long-term defeat.
The Party ought to have realized that the coalition originally set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four victorious presidential campaigns was a Coalition of Others. It was a coalition of women, Native Americans, Labor, and most of all, people of color. The Roosevelt coalition was a harbinger, in politics, of what the nation has come to resemble as a whole.
For we are rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation. No single American can say that he or she represents the majority of all voters any longer. To recognize this truth is not to traffic in identity politics, but merely to acknowledge that America has always been a glorious, messy tossed salad of a society. Where voters are comfortable accepting the reality of our “tossed salad” body politic, such voters tend to vote Democratic.
It is equally a matter of political truth that Republicans do well in parts of the country where appeals to threatened senses of whiteness resonate with paler voters. Democrats should realize not only that we are still the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt called in to being, but that within that coalition itself resides enormous wellsprings of strength and political potential.
Democrats need to realize that in our Party, “women,” as Mao Zedong put it nearly three quarters of a century ago, “hold up half the sky.” And to the extent that women hold up half the sky, they also hold up a considerable portion of our Party and our politics.
Thus, to hear Kevin De León or his followers argue that Sen. Feinstein is “too old” or too “out of touch,” to be California’s senior senator, is to say in effect that “this is a man’s job,” for which the old lady simply isn’t qualified. Add to that the often ill concealed undertones of anti-Semitism that not infrequently emerge from certain quarters of the California Democratic Party, and it is easy to see that there is very little substantive merit in either Mr. De León’s critique, or in that of the critique of the executive board of the California Democratic Party, which saw fit to overrule the delegates at the state Democratic convention, who had opted not to endorse De León, and substitute their own judgment in the place of that of the representatives of the broad mass of the California Democratic Party.
Of course, if misogyny, misplaced identity politics, ageism, or even anti-Semitism were the primary reasons for Kevin de León’s challenge to a sitting senior senator with substantial seniority, it might be easy to understand such behavior.
It’s a lot less easy to understand, and a lot less easy to forgive, the motivations behind the revolt against Nancy Pelosi, the Organizer and the field marshal of our recent victories. Again, the fecklessness of the Democratic Party seems to be asserting itself powerfully. Of course, political parties sometimes get a metaphorical bug up their butt that causes them to turn on incumbents with substantial seniority, without realizing what advantages that seniority brings home to the district or the state, but most party activists with a pragmatic sense of how politics works understand that shivving a senior member of your Party’s own caucus benefits no one but the other side.
One can see in the revolt against Nancy Pelosi two equally objectionable Militant Tendencies at work. The first is raw sectionalism. Many of the rebels against Nancy Pelosi come from the Northeast, formally the most dominant section of the American body politic. One can see in the sullen and mutinous disposition of a Seth Moulton, a Conor Lamb, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Curtez, some sense of loss expressing itself over the diminished role of the Northeast in our national politics.
Time was, in living memory of many with current seats in Congress, that states such as New York and Pennsylvania had the largest House delegations of any. Though California has had the largest population of any state in the union since 1962, and New York has fallen to fourth among the states in terms of population, there is still a certain sectional bias in favor of the Northeast and against California.
Add to the that the fact that Nancy Pelosi represents the 12th Congressional District of California, which is comprehended entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, and it’s not hard to understand why there should have been a Republican propaganda against Nancy Pelosi for so very many years.
But for Democrats to subscribe to that propaganda, and to the larger Republican propaganda against state of California as a whole, is simply inadmissible.
The other Militant Tendency operating within the Party is the Bernie Sanders virus. It is simply inadmissible is for members of the Democratic caucus to be pledging their loyalty not to the Party but to the person of Bernard Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who flirts with the Democratic Party when it suits his political agenda to do so, but who stabs the Party in the back on a regular basis.
The various Sanders front groups that seem more interested in helping The Donald then and helping The Democracy include groups like the so-called Justice Democrats, the Our Revolution group, and the Democratic Socialists. Not one of these names bears any semantic resemblance to reality. Instead, they all seem to be dedicated to attacking the Democratic Party, the oldest political party existing anywhere in the world, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
I have written elsewhere in this blog of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, of how they were, and are, nothing more than a fifth column for Donald Trump. Given the perfidious nature of Bernard Sanders and his followers, it is hard to understand why any person identifying as a Democrat would give him -or them- the time of day or the courtesy of a hearing.
The Sanders game plan seems to be to attack the unity of the Democratic Party from within so that it can be vulnerable to attack from without. We do not yet possess sufficient evidence to link Sen. Sanders to Gospodin Putin, but it certainly does seem, at a gut level, to warrant further investigation.
But while we are doing so, we cannot afford the Democratic Party to be subverted from within by revolt led by people such as Messrs. Moulton and Lamb and by Ms. Ocasio Cortez. If, as appears likely, Nancy Pelosi becomes the new speaker of the Democratic House come January, the rebels should find themselves stripped of any significant or responsible committee assignments, and consigned to the darkest, dankest office accommodations available on Capitol Hill. And they should expect to be primaried in 2020 if they don’t straighten up and fly right.
Democrats need to stop being nice to the traitors and subversives in their midst. We need as always, to be guided by the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
They pull a knife,
we pull a gun;
they send one of ours of the hospital,
we send one of theirs to the morgue!
After all, women hold up half the sky.
But Democrats, true to their reputation for foolishness and fecklessness, are talking seriously about ousting Nancy Pelosi, the architect and field marshal of their victory. It’s too early to say whether the mutiny against the incoming leader of the majority is a fruit of sheer misogyny, or whether it is part of the ongoing Sanders effort to destroy the Democratic Party from within. Either way, the rebellion should be squashed without mercy.Women hold up half the sky, and the Party needs to remember that immutable truth.
------------------------------------------------------
When I posted in this blog on November 8, I suggested that “Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped.” I may have been premature. As votes are counted, particularly in California, which seems to take a perverse pride in the slowness of its election returns, it appears that Aonami really may have been Aotsunami after all.
While we did not recapture the Senate, the defeat of Nevada’s Dean Heller and the victory of Kyrsten Sinema in heretofore ruby red Arizona suggests that Democrats may be well-positioned to recapture the upper chamber in 2020, when the electoral math and map for Republicans will be even more unpromising than the senatorial electoral math and map of 2018 were for Democrats.
Withal, the last week has been a very good week for The Democracy and a very bad week for Gospodin Trump and the un-American Republicans. Democrats should be celebrating the extent of their victory and laying plans for 2020.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are displaying once again their traditional fecklessness and foolishness. In the House, there seems to be a revolt brewing against Nancy Pelosi, the once and hopefully future Speaker of the house.
Unfortunately, feckless and foolish Democrats seem intent on penalizing success and rewarding failure. The anti-Pelosi revolt, spearheaded by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, and encouraged by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocacsio Cortez, seems to come straight out of either a deep cesspit of misogyny, which tried to find expression in the insurgency of Kevin de León against Dianne Feinstein, or it comes out of a conscious effort by the so-called Bernie Sanders "wing" of the Democratic Party to destroy the party from within.
Either hypothesis bodes ill for the Party’s hopes of being victorious in the long game against the Muscovite Republicans in 2020.
If the Party is taken hostage by a kind of reflexive ageist misogyny that postulates the unsuitability of either Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi for public office because they are too old or insufficiently masculine, then the Party will be setting itself up for long-term defeat.
The Party ought to have realized that the coalition originally set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four victorious presidential campaigns was a Coalition of Others. It was a coalition of women, Native Americans, Labor, and most of all, people of color. The Roosevelt coalition was a harbinger, in politics, of what the nation has come to resemble as a whole.
For we are rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation. No single American can say that he or she represents the majority of all voters any longer. To recognize this truth is not to traffic in identity politics, but merely to acknowledge that America has always been a glorious, messy tossed salad of a society. Where voters are comfortable accepting the reality of our “tossed salad” body politic, such voters tend to vote Democratic.
It is equally a matter of political truth that Republicans do well in parts of the country where appeals to threatened senses of whiteness resonate with paler voters. Democrats should realize not only that we are still the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt called in to being, but that within that coalition itself resides enormous wellsprings of strength and political potential.
Democrats need to realize that in our Party, “women,” as Mao Zedong put it nearly three quarters of a century ago, “hold up half the sky.” And to the extent that women hold up half the sky, they also hold up a considerable portion of our Party and our politics.
Thus, to hear Kevin De León or his followers argue that Sen. Feinstein is “too old” or too “out of touch,” to be California’s senior senator, is to say in effect that “this is a man’s job,” for which the old lady simply isn’t qualified. Add to that the often ill concealed undertones of anti-Semitism that not infrequently emerge from certain quarters of the California Democratic Party, and it is easy to see that there is very little substantive merit in either Mr. De León’s critique, or in that of the critique of the executive board of the California Democratic Party, which saw fit to overrule the delegates at the state Democratic convention, who had opted not to endorse De León, and substitute their own judgment in the place of that of the representatives of the broad mass of the California Democratic Party.
Of course, if misogyny, misplaced identity politics, ageism, or even anti-Semitism were the primary reasons for Kevin de León’s challenge to a sitting senior senator with substantial seniority, it might be easy to understand such behavior.
It’s a lot less easy to understand, and a lot less easy to forgive, the motivations behind the revolt against Nancy Pelosi, the Organizer and the field marshal of our recent victories. Again, the fecklessness of the Democratic Party seems to be asserting itself powerfully. Of course, political parties sometimes get a metaphorical bug up their butt that causes them to turn on incumbents with substantial seniority, without realizing what advantages that seniority brings home to the district or the state, but most party activists with a pragmatic sense of how politics works understand that shivving a senior member of your Party’s own caucus benefits no one but the other side.
One can see in the revolt against Nancy Pelosi two equally objectionable Militant Tendencies at work. The first is raw sectionalism. Many of the rebels against Nancy Pelosi come from the Northeast, formally the most dominant section of the American body politic. One can see in the sullen and mutinous disposition of a Seth Moulton, a Conor Lamb, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Curtez, some sense of loss expressing itself over the diminished role of the Northeast in our national politics.
Time was, in living memory of many with current seats in Congress, that states such as New York and Pennsylvania had the largest House delegations of any. Though California has had the largest population of any state in the union since 1962, and New York has fallen to fourth among the states in terms of population, there is still a certain sectional bias in favor of the Northeast and against California.
Add to the that the fact that Nancy Pelosi represents the 12th Congressional District of California, which is comprehended entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, and it’s not hard to understand why there should have been a Republican propaganda against Nancy Pelosi for so very many years.
But for Democrats to subscribe to that propaganda, and to the larger Republican propaganda against state of California as a whole, is simply inadmissible.
The other Militant Tendency operating within the Party is the Bernie Sanders virus. It is simply inadmissible is for members of the Democratic caucus to be pledging their loyalty not to the Party but to the person of Bernard Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who flirts with the Democratic Party when it suits his political agenda to do so, but who stabs the Party in the back on a regular basis.
The various Sanders front groups that seem more interested in helping The Donald then and helping The Democracy include groups like the so-called Justice Democrats, the Our Revolution group, and the Democratic Socialists. Not one of these names bears any semantic resemblance to reality. Instead, they all seem to be dedicated to attacking the Democratic Party, the oldest political party existing anywhere in the world, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
I have written elsewhere in this blog of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, of how they were, and are, nothing more than a fifth column for Donald Trump. Given the perfidious nature of Bernard Sanders and his followers, it is hard to understand why any person identifying as a Democrat would give him -or them- the time of day or the courtesy of a hearing.
The Sanders game plan seems to be to attack the unity of the Democratic Party from within so that it can be vulnerable to attack from without. We do not yet possess sufficient evidence to link Sen. Sanders to Gospodin Putin, but it certainly does seem, at a gut level, to warrant further investigation.
But while we are doing so, we cannot afford the Democratic Party to be subverted from within by revolt led by people such as Messrs. Moulton and Lamb and by Ms. Ocasio Cortez. If, as appears likely, Nancy Pelosi becomes the new speaker of the Democratic House come January, the rebels should find themselves stripped of any significant or responsible committee assignments, and consigned to the darkest, dankest office accommodations available on Capitol Hill. And they should expect to be primaried in 2020 if they don’t straighten up and fly right.
Democrats need to stop being nice to the traitors and subversives in their midst. We need as always, to be guided by the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
They pull a knife,
we pull a gun;
they send one of ours of the hospital,
we send one of theirs to the morgue!
After all, women hold up half the sky.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)