LITTLE SNAPPERS: THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR IN CATHEDRAL CITY

Summary: Sometime Chief Justice Warren Burger used to let off steam by penning short concurrences or dissents which he called “Little Snappers.” These Little Snappers were usually written for his eyes only, and not filed. They were more intended to assist in his personal offgassing rather than have an influence on the development of American jurisprudence.

Sometimes, here in Cathedral City, events occur which impel me to put fingers to keyboard to address certain potentially problematic issues in the city. Today’s Little Snappers concern some disturbing revelations about the Cathedral City Police Department, the candidacy of Rita Lamb for the open Council seat in in the First Council District, and the disturbing recrudescence of the Berniebro phenomenon in the hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, 2020 Democratic primary.

Our Political Police

According to a June 11, 2019 article in our local Gannett publication, "Cathedral City’s cops are afraid of facing retribution for 'truth telling.'" I call crybaby self-victimization.

Surprisingly for The Desert Sun, reporter Christopher Damien and his editors managed to avoid burying the lede. A few grafs further down the article, however, a rather disturbing revelation appears concerning the apparent political atmosphere within the department:

“[S]everal respondents expressed concern over the ‘current political climate against law enforcement’  and ‘anti-crime [sic], pro-criminal laws.’ Others complained about the proliferation of marijuana. One, misspelling the names of several prominent Democratic politicians[,] replied: ‘Gavin Newsom, Alex [sic] Becerra, Kamila [sic] Harris, and if Jerry Brown continues to seek publicity celibrating [sic] their pro-criminal anti-law enforcement agendas.’”

Now it is generally taken as virtually a given that law enforcement personnel tend to skew strongly conservative in their politics. It is also taken as a given that law enforcement tends to embrace a corporate culture that regards the law enforcement-industrial complex as the curators, custodians, and conservators of what are, or in the view of the law enforcement-industrial complex, “ought” to be the “correct” values of a given society or body politic, values which they see it as their mission to enforce, usually with increased vigor on those communities they see as “cultural dissidents.”

Given the politically and culturally conservative nature of most law enforcement personnel, it is hardly surprising that most of them would break heavily Republican. Thus, it is hardly surprising to see our local law enforcement busily engaged in a travestying the Democratic political leadership of this State.

Add to that the self victimization narrative pointed out in the article, and it’s clear that we have some serious problems with what may well be an excessively politicized police force in Cathedral City. 

Yet, when all is said and done, our cops work for us. We are supposed to be a city with a Police Department, not a Police Department with a city attached. In a community with a substantial number of Democrats, a substantial communidad latina, and a substantial queer contingent, we, its inhabitants, are entitled to live our lives without having to feel constant low-level apprehension that being a Democrat, being Latino or Latina, or being queer will get one crossways with a group of law enforcement personnel who see themselves more as the servants of Donald Trump and the forces of political and cultural conservatism than as apolitical servants of the commonweal and the commonwealth.

From the story as it appeared in our local Gannett publication, we may infer that there are a substantial number of Trump-supporting cops on our force who consider themselves victims because they have been asked to moderate their transports. They should be told that there is absolutely no room for political bullshit of any kind or character in what is supposed to be our apolitical police service. If they cannot or will not conform their conduct to that apolitical standard which we, as inhabitants of Cathedral City, as voters of Cathedral City, and as taxpayers of Cathedral City have an absolute, nonnegotiable, fundamental right to expect, then let them turn in their guns and their badges and depart hence. And if they won’t, then let us apply the Reagan/Thatcher solution and sack the lot.

The Problematic Candidacy of Rita Lamb in the First Council District

Earlier this year, outraged, exorcised, ready-for-a-rumble residents of Cathedral city’s newly minted first Council District were able to bludgeon, as it were, the four surviving members of the city Council into abandoning their idiotic plan to appoint a councilmember (from outside the district, at that) to serve out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Gregory S. Pettis. The Council, after much huffing and puffing, agreed, on a three to one vote, to call a special election in the first district, and to limit the candidates to residents of that district. Only councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, who merits recall for his antics, dissented.

Now that the Council, admittedly by constraint, and admittedly under threat of litigation and potential recall of the entire body, has done the right thing, two candidates have qualified for the ballot. One is former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, a man not only with council experience, but also with experience on other regional boards and commissions. The other is Rita Lamb, a retired schoolteacher who seems, on first blush, to be “perfectly nice.” “Perfectly nice,” that is, until you start taking a look at who is supporting and bankrolling her campaign.

Now most Democrats will piously pooh-pooh the idea of guilt by association, tarring it with the brush of “McCarthyism.” But, for all the piously self-defeating tropes Democrats deploy to shoot themselves in the foot, “they will know you by the company you keep,” or “when a person’s character is not clear, look to that person’s friends.”

On that score, Ms. Lamb’s campaign has already been fatally tainted by her associations. Her so-called press liaison, Miriam Alario, who admins a Facebook group denominated “Cathedral City Neighbors for Transparent Representation,” is a close friend of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olson, and, like her, is running a whispering campaign and a Facebook campaign against Mr. Kaplan with the tag “anybody but Shelley.”

Given that politics tend to be a rather binary enterprise, in which, in a single member constituency, there can only be one winner and a whole shitload of losers, it is fairly evident that the campaign against Mr. Kaplan is making use of all manner of unethical and potentially illegal campaign tactics. This would not be atypical of DeRosa and her supporters. In 2004, when DeRosa ran against her brother-in-law, then-Mayor George Stettler, she set in motion a whispering campaign alleging that he was suffering from dementia.

In subsequent campaigns, DeRosa was fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission for state law campaign finance violations. In short, DeRosa and her loyalists have always been willing to sail very close to the wind. If Ms. Lamb is willing to have such people on her campaign staff, then we may draw some extremely non-recommending inferences about her character and her fitness to serve. We cannot afford a pale political clone of councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, or of the late councilmember Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace after being caught embezzling from the City.

Rita Lamb’s campaign has been fatally tainted, she needs to bow out.

Godzilla’s return, the Revenge of the Japanese-Holdout-on-Pacific-Island Berniebros.

They're baaaaack!

Just when you thought the nastiness of the 2016 Democratic primary had begun to fade, Bernie and his Bros, like marooned Japanese holdouts fighting World War II on lonely Pacific islands long after the Shōwa Emperor ordered the Japanese Armed Forces to stand down and surrender to the Allies, are still waging nasty, fratricidal war against the Democratic Party and against supporters of authentic Democratic candidates who are now beginning to knock him out of second place in the primary contests.

Of course, we knew that Bernie and the Bros would wage what amounted to a terrorist campaign against front runner Joe Biden. Bernie apparently blew several gaskets when polling began to show that Biden had built up a substantial lead. Now that Elizabeth Warren has pipped Bernie for second place in the crowded Democratic primary field, his anger can be expected to be coruscating. To be in third place behind a woman!

Though Berniebros have not yet attacked Sen. Warren the way they launched vicious, misogynistic calumnies against Hillary Clinton, the operative word is YET. Gospodin Sanders is getting the vetting now that none of his starry eyed, redeless, twentysomething supporters were willing to do in 2016. Even the media, which eagerly suspended its critical faculties and failed to perform any kind of due diligence on the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, is now beginning to realize that the loudmouth Leninist has real feet of clay.

Of course, this will cause the Berniebros to swing into full on attack mode, using any form of asymmetric, insurgent political warfare available to them. During World War II, suicidal Japanese charges were often referred to as “banzai charges,” from the Japanese phrase “Tennō Heika banzai,” or “10,000 years to the Emperor.” A Banzai charge was usually the last expression of a forlorn hope, intended to destroy as many Allied lives as possible, while permitting the participants to go out in a blaze of metaphorical glory. As Sanders’s path to any possible Democratic nomination starts to narrow, his Bros will be sharpening their metaphorical bayonets and katana, preparing for the final, forlorn Banzai charge that they hope may confer upon their lost cause some of what noted Japanologist Ivan Morris once referred to as “the nobility of failure.”

But while kamikaze attacks may be enshrouded in a numen of some sort of noble failure, they still do real damage. The kamikaze mentality of the Sanders intransigents in 2016 damaged the Hillary Clinton campaign so badly as to pave the way for the advent of the unbelievably corrupt Donald Trump. Now, three years later, the Berniebros are set to do it all over again. We must prevent this from happening; those who facilitate treason out of spite are traitors themselves. The Democratic Party must stop being “Minnesota nice,” and fight this primary to win.

They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. For our own safety’s sake, we must resist the blandishments of Gospodin Sanders and his redeless Komsomoltsy.

LOSING TOUCH WITH D-DAY

Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, Utah.

Today, these five nouns carry little meaning. When I was in elementary school, however, at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, almost any schoolchild, presented with these nouns and questioned what they had in common, could, without too much help, recite them as the names of the Normandy D-Day invasion Beaches.

Now, as we come upon the 75th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 landings, the memories of Operation Overlord and its related Operation Neptune have faded into a grayscale past. The men (pace ladies, there were no women on the front lines in Normandy on D-Day, save for those of the French Résistance) of that Greatest Generation who stormed ashore that day to open up a new front against the Nazis are passing into eternity at the rate of something like 1200 a day. Soon we shall see their like no more.

When I was a boy, taking those vocabulary quizzes where we were called upon to tell the teacher what Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah had in common, our neighborhood was full of men and women, many of them still in their vigorous 50s, as I am today, who had fought in World War II. Because my neighborhood was part of Hollywood, and because many of my neighbors were part of the Entertainment Industry (and one always applies capitals to those initial letters), a not insubstantial number of them had fought for our erstwhile enemies.

The 1960s and early 1970s were something of a golden age for cinematic descriptions of the Second World War. My neighbors, who had come to the Entertainment Capital of the World were frequently employed by various studios and production facilities as technical advisors, voiceover artists, editors, to say nothing of being in front of the camera, sometimes reprising on the silver screen roles very similar to the ones they had lived during the war. These were the years of such blockbusters as Battle of Britain, Sink the Bismarck, Tora Tora Tora, Patton, and a little bit later, Midway and MacArthur.

And in the Hollywood village that raised me, those men and women in their vigorous 50s often shared with us memories of a war that had receded, but was still fresh and alive in memory, of a war that had left Germany divided, at that time still to be reunified, of the Marshall Plan, and of the opportunities that come their way in Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry. My “village” was in many ways a microcosm of California at its best; it was a place where ancient enemies could become friends and neighbors. It was a place where Japanese veterans who had fought in Okinawa or Iwo Jima could break bread with British veterans of Normandy or the Rhine campaign, who in their turn could quaff Liebfraumilch or stout Bavarian lager with Wehrmacht veterans who had faced the Red Army at Kursk or Stalingrad. In their turn, those Wehrmacht veterans of the Russian front could exchange easy pleasantries with recent Israeli immigrant veterans who had fought their way into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, or veterans of the Free French who had liberated Paris in August of 1944.

These men and women, with their salt-and-pepper hair, their British, French, Asian, or “Mitteleuropa” accents, together with their American counterparts, represented the existential awfulness of war, but even more important, in our “village” in the Hollywood Hills, they represented also the best of the hopeful promise of peace. In our little piece of America, they also represented the two centuries old hope of a “United States of Europe,” in which the ancient quarrels and grievances could be laid to rest, in which the soaring prophecy of the fourth verse of the second chapter Isaiah should be fulfilled, that
 [T]hey shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isa 2:4. 

Those easy days of social interaction, among erstwhile enemies now become coworkers, friends, and neighbors, have also passed very much into eternity. The easy social interactions of those days have been interred with those who took part in them. Today, we have become a different community entirely. Today, it is unfashionable to speak of a “United States of Europe.” Today, instead of thinking about the importance of collective security, instead of acknowledging how astonishingly effective the United Nations has been in preventing another worldwide, all-out, shooting war, we find ourselves retreating into a kind of atavistic, existential posture of prewar confrontation. 

Instead of acknowledging the reality of an interdependent world, in which chaos theory holds the beating of the wings of a butterfly in Beijing can cause hurricanes in Hialeah, and in which the shooting of an Archduke and his morganatic wife on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan can cause what Barbara Tuchman once referred to as “the red edges of war” to spread across the world, creatures like Donald Trump and his cabal of corrupt acolytes wage war against the rules-based international liberal democratic order which the world has struggled to create since the end of the Second World War. 

Instead of considering carefully how a “village” such as the one by which I was raised could help create a climate of acceptance, reconciliation, and peace, Trump and his acolytes and redeless followers have behaved like the bullies who had no place in my elementary school in that “village.” When you went to school with kids whose granddads had fought with the 1st Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Waffen SS division, or with the British 50th division, or with the 82nd and 101st Airborne, or who had served under either Chester Nimitz or Yamamoto Isoroku, or whose dads had stormed into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, there wasn’t a lot of room for the kind of ethnic or nationalist bullying we so often see in schools today. 

My “village,” for a brief shining moment, had transcended much of the ethnic or national insecurity that has become so much a part of modern American life.

Was it for this that the men and women, both behind the lines and in the field, who made Neptune/Overlord a success, who risked life and limb in the last great crusade of our modern time, gave so very, very much? Did we storm ashore at Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah beaches just to return to and reinforce and restore in their fullest and most objectionable forms the dispensations that had obtained prior, not even to 1939, but to 1914?

As the Greatest Generation slips into eternity, and as World War II becomes little more than a greyscale period piece played at by reenactors for weekend pleasure, should we not meditate upon the waste we are laying to their sacrifice, and weep for it?

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. He practices in the adjacent community of Rancho Mirage. Like many Americans, he had family who fought to save the civilized world during the Second World War. Like so many of that great generation, they have slipped into eternity, and he misses them terribly.

ON MEMORIAL DAY, 2019, LESSONS FROM LINCOLN

Summary: Memorial Day usually calls for all manner of bloviating, “patriotic,” stupefying, speechifying from all manner of public speakers who do not realize that Gen.  William T. Sherman was right to declare that “war is hell,” and that “its glory is all moonshine.” Our reflections on this day when we commemorate those who laid the costliest sacrifice imaginable on the altar of freedom should instead be informed by the words of a President who, though a stranger to war at the beginning of  his administration, learned through the four years that separated Fort Sumter from Appomattox, the existential sorrow and sadness of war.

Today is Memorial Day.  Today we will hear a great deal of bloviating on the glories of war, especially from people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, or who avoided service by faking bone spurs.  “War is hell,” Gen.  William T. Sherman (he who redeveloped the hell out of downtown Atlanta) once said, “its glory is all moonshine.” As we remember today those who “laid [the ultimate] sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” let us leave off with the bloviating and the “patriotic,” but stupefying, speechifying.

Instead, let us read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the words of Abraham Lincoln, the American President who, though largely a stranger to war at the beginning of his administration, became far too well acquainted with the existential sorrow and sadness of war in the four years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.

The first text is the Gettysburg address, delivered on November 19, 1863. 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The second text, dated a few days short of a year later, is that of the President’s condolence letter to Lidia Bixby, of Boston, who Pres. Lincoln had heard had apparently lost five of her sons on the field of battle.  Though Lincoln had been misinformed, the sentiments of his letter still make it one of the finest expressions of condolence ever written or proffered.

"Executive Mansion,

"Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

"Dear Madam,

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

"I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

"Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln."

These two texts, coming from the mind and the pen of arguably the greatest of American Presidents, express the reality of Memorial Day better than any canned, carefully scripted, politically calculated, triangulated speech ever could.  They stand out as two of the greatest state papers in the history of the United States, and arguably as two of the greatest state papers ever written in the English language. 

There should be no other words this Memorial Day.

 

FACEBOOK DELENDA EST

Summary: After someone close to the Donald Trump reelection campaign (very likely Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale) disseminated a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intended to make the Speaker looked drunk, stoned, or otherwise incapacitated, responsible media operations, including Google’s YouTube, yanked the phony video within hours.  But not Facebook.  Facebook, stubbornly declaring that the video didn’t violate its murky, highly subjective, (in other words, bullshit), “community standards,” insisted that its users could “decide for themselves,” an abdication of responsibility that came across as sleazy, immoral, and quite possibly criminal as well.
    Recently, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, that Facebook should be broken up, that it should be required to divest itself of the apps that it spun off as it grew including, most notably, Instagram and WhatsApp.  After Facebook refused to pull down the doctored Pelosi video, and after Facebook livestreamed 17 minutes of the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, it is no longer sufficient to speak of breaking up the platform.  The conversation must now (assuming the advent of a Democratic administration in January 2021) be about putting Facebook out of business as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, and forfeiting its assets the United States and/or the State of California.  As Marcus Portius Cato once said, Cartago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed.  Perhaps now is the time for the liberal democracies of the world to say Facebook delenda est.

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Last week, after planned Trump-Schumer-Pelosi infrastructure talks fell apart because Donald Trump had a temper tantrum over allegedly nasty things Nancy Pelosi said about him, Speaker Pelosi addressed the issue in remarks at the Center for American progress.  The Trump campaign, ever ready to use immoral, sleazy, and even criminal means to attack its perceived enemies, doctored the video with the intent of making Speaker Pelosi appeared drunk, stoned, or otherwise incapacitated.  The fakery was crude and easily detected, and indeed was detected within a couple of hours of the doctored videos being posted on YouTube and Facebook.

YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, immediately did the right thing and yanked the videos, determining that it would be inappropriate for YouTube to be complicit in the dissemination of disinformation from the Trump campaign, presumably from Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager.

But not Facebook.

Facebook’s half-assed response to the revelation that these videos, which had been shared thousands of times on its platform, was simply to “de-promote” the faked, Russian-style disinformation videos, but not to remove them.  Instead, Facebook doubled and tripled down on its posture, proclaiming, in tones of what Winston Churchill once described as “injured guilt,” that they were a “social media organization,” not a news organization.  Facebook was guilty of a similar enormity after the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, when its explanation for livestreaming seventeen, yes, seventeen, minutes of the shooting, was equally muddled and equally morally abhorrent.

What we have seen from Facebook since roughly 2011 is that Facebook has stumbled, staggered, shuffled, and shambled from one scandal to another.  First it was a series of privacy gaffes which formed the subject of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which Facebook then went and breached, subjecting it, this spring, to a potential $5bn fine.  Next came the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio, which gave Facebook another black eye, then it was the exposure of Facebook’s complicity in the genocide of the Rohingya and the intercommunal strife in Sri Lanka.  Of course, we cannot afford to forget the 17 minutes of livestreamed horror in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which caused the Kiwis to question whether Facebook had any moral compass whatsoever.

Of course, if we cannot forget or forgive Facebook’s obvious moral bankruptcy in Aotearoa, or its craven misconduct in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, we also should be equally ill inclined to forget or forgive Facebook's knowing complicity in the Russian attack and the Russian active measures against our election in 2016.  Who can forget how Gospodin Zuckerberg scoffed at the idea that the Russians might have misused his platform to steal the election from Hillary Rodham Clinton? 

As much as he would not even entertain the idea that the Russians had misused his platform to elect Donald Trump, Gospodin Zuckerberg would no doubt have scoffed at the idea that his employees, who like so many Bay area millennials, made absolutely no secret of their preferential option for Bernard Sanders, applying Facebook’s murky, subjective, indefensible, bullshit so-called community standards to make sure that Facebook gave an indulgent pass to every pro-Sanders attack, and to every vile calumny against the Clinton family, while running aggressive interference for the Independent Vermont senator.  Thousands of Clinton loyalist Facebook users were blocked from using the platform (commonly referred to as being “sent to Facebook jail,”) for voicing the slightest criticism of Gospodin Sanders, while vicious, misogynistic attacks by “Berniebros” against Sec. Clinton were given the most indulgent treatment imaginable.

Now that we see the Trump campaign, probably at the urging of campaign manager Brad Parscale as aforementioned, using crude, Soviet/Russian-style tactics to attempt, with limited success, to smear House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, what is even more disturbing is how Facebook has made itself willingly, even eagerly, complicit in such sleazy, immoral, dishonorable, even criminal, tactics.  This really ought to be the straw that breaks Gospodin Zuckerberg’s back.

And the responsibility, nay, the liability and the accountability for Facebook’s latest act of wrongdoing ought to land squarely and unequivocally on Mark Zuckerberg himself.  Gospodin Zuckerberg personally owns 60% of Facebook’s stock.  That makes Mark Zuckerberg the unilateral arbiter of a great deal of the speech that takes place in liberal democracies.  In a sycophantic “60 Minutes” segment some years ago profiling Facebook, a number of senior Facebook managers acknowledged that just about every management decision at the company had to pass the so-called Zuck Test, essentially admitting that Gospodin Zuckerberg is himself in absolute control of, and therefore responsible for, everything that happens at Facebook.

Nearly 260 years ago, the great Prime Minister William Pitt, later first Earl of Chatham, in his October 2, 1761 resignation speech from King George III’s Privy Council, stunned his colleagues by articulating the principle of ministerial responsibility thus: “being responsible, I will direct.  I will be responsible for nothing I do not direct.” The corollary to the Great Pitt's definition of ministerial responsibility is that he or she who directs must be responsible. In In re Yamashita (1946) 327 U.S. 1; SCOTUS defined in no uncertain terms the principle of command responsibility when it sanctioned the execution for war crimes of Japanese Gen. Yamashita Tomoyuki as the officer bearing “command responsibility” for numerous Japanese atrocities in Manila and throughout the Philippines during the Japanese occupation of those islands.

Given our strong commitment to the Great Chatham’s concept of ministerial responsibility, and to the Common Law/Law of Armed Conflict concept of command responsibility, it is fair to say that the time may very well be at hand for an incoming Democratic administration in January 2021 to set in motion the wheels of federal prosecution, concurrently with California Atty. Gen.  Xavier Becerra, to take Gospodin Zuckerberg’s toys away from him. Gospodin Zuckerberg has not been responsible, therefore he should not be allowed to direct anything at all.

Now while Gospodin Zuckerberg's defenders may insist, in cognate tones of injured guilt to Gospodin Zuckerberg himself, that it would be wrong to impute Gospodin Zuckerberg any sort of malice, urging instead that Gospodin Zuckerberg can be held responsible for nothing more than misplaced Silicon Valley idealism, the law may very well hold otherwise.  One need not entertain actual malice to have malice at law imputed to one.  Malice at law can be imputed, for example, when a shooter discharges, say, an AR-15 into a moving passenger train.  Notwithstanding the actor's assertions of "no malice," the risk of severe injury or death to at least one passenger is sufficiently great that the law will simply impute malice.

Now it may be possible that Gospodin Zuckerberg is simply suffering from Asperger’s syndrome or some other form of high-functioning manifestation that nonetheless places him somewhere on the autism spectrum. Certainly, Gospodin Zuckerberg’s curious inability to understand the optics of the scandals into which Facebook has stumbled, staggered, shuffled, and shambled more or less constantly since 2011, raises an inference that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.  However, being on the autism spectrum should not be an excuse when one is at the helm of one of the largest multibillion-dollar corporations on the planet. 

Indeed, as French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has suggested, “Trump and Zuckerberg, though they probably agree on nothing, are the two blades of a pair of scissors,:” joint enemies of American leadership and of the rules-based international liberal democratic order throughout the world.  If so --if, in fact, Gospodin Zuckerberg is, either through being somewhere on the autism spectrum, or as a result of some dangerous political leaning, recklessly or even knowingly complicit in the siege against liberal democracy being mounted by such people as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Binyamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Orbán Viktor (who manages to make Hungarian Fascist dictator Nagybányai Horthy Miklós look almost respectable), and, of course, our own Donald Trump, then in fact the law can rightly impute malice to him.

Under such circumstances, either the federal government or the State of California would be justified in investigating Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization.  Certainly, there may be a case to made for wire fraud if Facebook is disseminating information knows to be false and fraudulent.  There may also be a case to be made for a seditious conspiracy to attack the authority of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  In either case, an incoming Democratic administration should green-light such investigations immediately.

In his May 9, 2019 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested that Facebook should face antitrust enforcement action, being obliged to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp, and that Facebook be barred for at least three years from acquiring any further platforms or apps.  Given how Facebook has ranged itself so sleazily and so criminally on the side of falsehood and fraudulent disinformation, and given how we now know who side Facebook is really on, mere antitrust enforcement is insufficient.  Facebook’s credentials as an enemy of democracy have been clearly established.  Nothing less than a criminal RICO investigation and prosecution will suffice to protect the Republic and liberal democracy itself against Facebook and against Gospodin Zuckerberg, with the implication of complete criminal asset forfeiture to the United States and/or the State of California very much on the table.

To borrow from Marcus Portius Cato's insistent trope that Cartago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed, perhaps the time is at hand to repeat that trope, applying it to Facebook, among our own public institutions of self-government

Facebook delenda est.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who practices in Rancho Mirage and lives in neighboring Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member of the city council. Like an increasing number of Americans, and like his fellow member of the Francophonie, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, he believes that Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg represent an existential threat to the rules-based liberal democratic order that has brought freedom and liberty to so much of the world in the last 120 years, and that therefore the democratic world should take comprehensive steps to put Facebook out of business and put Gospodin Zuckerberg behind bars as a serial violator of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

WOMEN OF COLOR HOLD UP A CONSIDERABLE PORTION OF THE SKY

Summary: Mao Zedong was right when he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” What he did not realize, because he was a member of China’s dominant Han majority is that women of color often hold up considerably more than half the sky, and they do so unsung, unheralded, and unrecognized. Certainly, Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones ought to have a clear sense of how integral women of color can be. Joe Biden should be particularly aware that much of his voting strength, notwithstanding Anita Hill, inheres in African-American women.
 
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Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong had a reputation for being a fair to middling poet in the Chinese language. In one of his poems, he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” Now the Chairman was a member of the dominant Han majority in his country; Han Chinese enjoy a kind of privilege that makes the much maligned privilege of white people in the United States pale in comparison. Mao was woke enough to realize that women, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, really do hold up half the sky above not only the Middle Kingdom, but everywhere under Heaven. However, as a Han man, brought up with all of the quotidian assumptions that underlie the privilege of any dominant ethnicity, it probably never occurred to The Chairman that minority women, particularly women of color, often have to hold up distinctly more than half the sky in their own communities.

Certainly, this has been the case in communities of color in the United States. The sheer toughness of African-American women, their often rocklike constancy in the face of discrimination and systemic racism, has become proverbial. “She was warned, she was given an explanation, nevertheless she persisted,” could have been applied to African-American voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (famed for her aphorism “we are sick and tired of being sick and tired,”) or to Rosa Parks seeking to ride in the front of the bus, long before it was ever applied to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Yet among a largely white, largely male, class of pundits and prognosticators, the inchoate political potential of African-American women has often been ignored or understated. When Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III left the Senate to become Donald Trump’s Attorney General in 2017, it created a vacancy in the Senate seat he had held since 1997. After the usual political jockeying, a special election was held to fill the vacant seat. The Republicans, after ousting appointed incumbent Luther Strange, chose former Chief Justice Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore as their standardbearer. The Democrats chose former U.S. Attorney (N.D.Ala.) Doug Jones.

The pundits and prognosticators in Washington City and New York, taking a cursory look at Alabama and taking into account its deep Republicanism, quickly concluded that Roy Moore was the prohibitive favorite. Alabama, they thought, was so intractably, tribally, Republican in its allegiance that the pundit class assumed that the ever increasing revelations of Roy Moore’s Roman Polanski-like predilection for pubescent girls would mean nothing to voters. Their reading of the tea leaves therefore had Roy Moore winning by a landslide.

After all, this was the Alabama of George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” Wallace, of Bull Connor, of the violence of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and all the other enormities of the civil rights movement. What they had not remembered was the Alabama of Rosa Parks, that Uppity Woman who had the Effrontery To Want to Ride in the Front of a City Bus in Montgomery.

On election night, the Washington City and Manhattan prognosticators and pundits expected to be able to call the election in Roy Moore’s favor within roughly an hour of polls closing. That was not to be. 

Through the counties that made up the so-called Alabama black belt, and in Alabama’s larger cities, including Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Huntsville, Jones outperformed Roy Moore, often by double digits. Contrary to Maoist orthodoxy, the cities overwhelmed the countryside. As the night wore on, the pundits and prognosticators realized, to their pleasant surprise, that they had, in fact, misread the tea leaves. By the end of the night, Doug Jones was the Democratic Senator-elect from Alabama.

The voting bloc that had been the most consistent in his support for Doug Jones proved to be those unsung, unrecognized, unheralded African-American women whom nobody had expected to hold the balance of power. Doug Jones’s upset victory brought home an important lesson:  Democratic politicians who ignore women of color, whether Latina women in the Southwest or African-American women in the South or in the African-American diaspora in northern and Midwestern cities, do so at their peril.

In 1932, the turnout of African-American women in northern cities helped Franklin Roosevelt give Herbert Clark Hoover the bum’s rush from the White House. 

In 1936, African-American women helped pad Franklin’s margin when he administered an epic shellacking to Kansas’s Alf Landon. 

In 1940, African-American women helped give Franklin his unprecedented third term as the war clouds gathered, and in 1944, African-American women, seeing, like all Americans, the glimmering light of potential victory and the end of the horrible war, helped vouchsafe Franklin his even more unprecedented fourth term.

In 1948, African-American women held the line for Harry Truman, helping ensure his defeat of New York Gov. Tom Dewey.

In 1960, African-American women helped secure Jack Kennedy’s razor thin margin of victory over Richard Nixon.

In 1964, African-American women helped cement the Kennedy legacy by voting for Lyndon Johnson and keeping Barry Goldwater the hell out of the White House.

In 1976, African-American women rallied to Jimmy Carter, and in 1992 they rallied to another Southern governor, Bill Clinton, to whom they rallied again to defend his presidency against Bob Dole in 1996.

In 2008, African-American women turned out in historic numbers to elect the first African-American president, and they defended his presidency against Mitt Romney in 2012.

Barring Franklin Roosevelt’s trouncement of Alf Landon in 1936 and LBJ’s major ass whipping of Barry Goldwater in 1964, it is probably safe to suggest that African-American women played an integral role in securing the victory of a whole bunch of Democratic presidents.

As Joe Biden cements his status as the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination for president next year, he will need to remember that while it is always possible for him to lose while carrying a majority of African-American women, it is simply not possible to win without African-American and other women of color.

As America becomes less white, and as the future assumes a more female form, any victorious Democratic coalition (and it’s important to realize that The Democracy is less a political party that it is a political movement) will necessarily have to include women of color. Women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar are no longer curiosities in our political culture. They are women of color, and they are here to stay.

Moreover, these Uppity Women of color, who owe so much, so very much, to white women like Abigail Adams, Jeannette Rankin, also owe an even greater debt to women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and the rock-like Dolores Huerta, who truly held up half the sky over César Chávez.

Men like Bernard Sanders, who have always been curiously tone deaf to the way women of color hold up so very much of the sky, may do well in small, heavily white, caucus states. But in places like Alabama, where Hillary Clinton trounced his butt in the primaries because of her simpático not just with women, but with women of color, Bernie may very well find himself trounced again.

For Democrats, the 2020 election, both in the primary and general election cycles, may very well belong ineluctably not simply to women, but to women of color, who, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, have held up a lot more than half the sky for a very, very long time.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., a damn man, is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.

LEARNING NOTHING, FORGETTING NOTHING, THE SLIPPAGE OF BERNIE SANDERS

Summary:  As the 2020 Democratic presidential primary season cranks its way into the repetitive foreplay of the 2019 pre–primary season, poll numbers for Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are looking progressively less promising (all puns fully intended) then they had earlier this spring. On the other hand, Joe Biden’s poll numbers have quickly established him as the prohibitive favorite; at this stage, despite the fulminations of Sanders and his redeless followers, the primary is very much Joe Biden’s to lose.

What Biden brings to the fight, that Sanders has never been able to muster, is the sheer insurgent joy of a well thought fight. In short, Biden brings a kind of Cavalier joie de vivre that Sanders, the Cromwellian Roundhead, is entirely incapable of mustering. To the extent that joy cometh in the morning (Ps, 30:5), Biden still has the advantage.

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Frankly, it’s hard to tell whether the Democratic 2020 presidential primary, which is now underway much too far in advance, has started to resemble a pilgrimage, a gladiatorial contest, or an orgy.

The backbiting, the dirty tricks, the hit pieces, and the sheer nastiness of the primary season all put us in mind of the Democratic primary season of 2016. The Democrats, like the Bourbons of the ancien régime in France, have lived down to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s mordant witticism that “Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié,” they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.

In the learned nothing and forgotten nothing department may be found particularly Bernard Sanders and his redeless, pugnacious, always-ready-for-a-fight online followers, the so-called Berniebros whose penchant for attacking other candidates or other social media commenters soon became common fodder for watercooler discussions among the American left. Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation, asserted in May, 2016, that “Bernie Sanders is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim.”; the same month, Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect, warned about “How the Bros Are Undermining Bernie.”

Three years on, the Bros seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Neither has Sen. Sanders. Just recently, this February, in fact, the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman, making “The Case Against Bernie Sanders”  observed, as numerous other commentators had done, that the Vermont Senator’s “humorless dogmatism” was undermining his campaign. 

If many Democrats fear that Joe Biden is “too old,” or too gaffe-prone to be president, they overlook the fact that Biden is nevertheless noticeably happy in this battle. There is an insurgent, effervescent joy that Joe Biden has brought to this campaign that Bernard Sanders seems utterly incapable of mustering.

Recently, a Biden-supporting queer friend of mine suggested that Joe was rather like the William Hurt character in Kiss of the Spider Woman, playing opposite Raul Julia in the classic scene in which Hurt’s character, imprisoned for being queer, offers Julia’s character, the imprisoned revolutionary, a morsel of avocado. Raul Julia’s character rejects the proffered avocado with the observation that “what life offers... is the struggle.”

In many ways, the difference between the effervescent Joe Biden and the humorless, dogmatic Bernard Sanders can be perfectly summed up by the exchange between the two characters in that scene in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Put another way, harking back to mid-17th century England, the Biden effort comes across with much more a Cavalier sensibility, effervescent, possessed of a sense of joie de vivre, and above all, capable of smiling, laughing, and shrugging off the occasional gaffe.

By contrast, Bernard Sanders, together with his followers, his proverbial Bros, really does come across as grim, prim, dour, sour, doctrinaire, dogmatic, pious, self-righteous, and, da capo al fine, utterly humorless. The entire Sanders campaign has been framed like some kind of Leninist exercise by which aspirants for admission to Komsomol were assigned to write essays on the evils of capitalism and the inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism. The whole Sanders effort, in short, resembles nothing so much as an attempted Soviet Mosfilm cover of Ninochka, the 1939 MGM film starring the unforgettable Greta Garbo as a no-nonsense Soviet diplomat. 

Mosfilm would have made a pig’s breakfast of Ninochka. Comedy did not go over particularly well in Stalin's Soviet Union.

But even worse, the Sanders effort has come to resemble that of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads, determined to impose upon the United States the same kind of pious, self-righteous, priggish regime that Old Noll, his Roundheads, and his Major Generals imposed upon Great Britain and Ireland from the execution of King Charles I 1649 until the triumphant return of King Charles II in 1660.

Yet, America neither needs nor desires, nor will it accept, a political dispensation where joy is banished and where it’s Lent in America. Jimmy Carter, an otherwise thoroughly decent and honorable man, learned this lesson to his great political sorrow in 1980. During the Carter years, there was a Lenten sensibility in America. One small example will suffice to make the case: in 1977, under pressure from the Carter Administration, American auto manufacturers ceased production of convertibles because they were ostensibly unsafe. 

In less than three months after the administration's ukaz, a thriving after market had sprung up to convert hard tops into convertibles. European manufacturers continued to produce convertibles, most notably the MGB, the swan song of Morris Garages of Abington, Oxfordshire. American consumers were not happy at being stripped of their choice to buy convertibles by what they perceived as a hypertrophied, schoolmarmish government bureaucracy determined to deprive them of all their joie de vivre.

Similarly, in the 1961 mayoral campaign in the city of Los Angeles, under then-Republican incumbent Mayor Norris Poulson, homeowners throughout the city were required to segregate their garbage, much as California homeowners are required to segregate their garbage today. The trash segregation policy proved unpopular, and Poulson was challenged for the mayoralty of Los Angeles by former Democratic Congressman Sam Yorty. Among the planks in Yorty’s platform was an abolition of the garbage segregation requirement. Resentful San Fernando Valley residents put Yorty over the top, knocking Norrie Polson out of office.  When Yorty was elected, it was said by Angeleño political wags that Sam Yorty had been swept into office on a wave of garbage.

While it may actually have been a bit much to say that Sam Yorty was really swept into office on a wave of garbage, and equally a reach to suggest that Ronald Reagan was swept into office in a convertible with the top down, it would nevertheless not be too far off the mark to suggest that the Carter administration’s pressure on the then big four automakers to discontinue convertible manufacture, added to the administration’s less than adroit handling of the Iran hostage crisis, may have played a part in Reagan’s victory in 1980,

Suffice it to say, however, that Ronald Reagan understood the temper of America in the early 1980s. His “it’s morning in America” campaign was nothing short of brilliant. It beat Fritz Mondale’s Carter administration redux messaging all to hell. Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders seems to have bought, hook line and sinker, into the Carter/Mondale “it’s Lent in America” messaging. After all, joy cometh in the morning. Ps. 30:5

It may very well be that Joe Biden’s sunny, effervescent, youthful approach to his campaign is part of the reason why Sanders seems to be slipping in the polls. The American public wants a happy warrior; not a hectoring scold.

As long as Bernie Sanders continues to act the part of the superannuated shtetl Stalinist scold, the loudmouth Leninist, the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik, the man devoid of a sense of humor who sparks no joy, he can expect to be trounced in the primaries, particularly among the women of color who, as I’ll discuss in my next post, will be so enormously consequential in the Democratic primaries of 2020.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.

TIME TO LOWER THE SHERMAN ANTITRUST ACT HAMMER ON FACEBOOK

Summary: calls for the breakup of Facebook are coming more often and faster than we had a right to expect.  Facebook represents an almost textbook example of the kind of monopoly power against which Sen. John Sherman (brother of the Gen. Sherman who redeveloped the hell out of downtown Atlanta in 1864) inveighed so strongly back in 1890.  Facebook’s well-nigh unilateral control over speech and viewpoints, as well as its evident desire to control the political discourse of the United States, makes it a prime candidate for Sherman Act intervention.  It’s time to take Gospodin Zuckerberg’s toys away from him and have him sent to his room with no supper.


What conclusions can be drawn from an analysis of the following official text from Facebook? 

"We base our policies our Community Standards on input from the people who use Facebook around the world, as well as experts.”

First, let us hone in on the word “experts.” That tells us that Facebook uses a particular group of motivated individuals, usually outsourced in countries of the East Bloc.  In short Facebook’s so-called experts are, in all likelihood, motivated East Bloc trolls who consider themselves to have an obvious dog in our American hunt.

“We base our policies are community standards on input from people who use Facebook around the world.”

Second, let’s take that phrase apart.  “We base our policies are community standards....” What outsourced East Bloc individual, not fluent in English, composed this ridiculous fragment?  Again, it’s obvious that Facebook outsources its moderation and community standards enforcement to countries in the East Bloc.  They also probably outsource a substantial portion of their moderation to countries in South Asia, particularly India.

At all events, Facebook’s so-called community standards are based upon the “community standards” of illiberal non-American countries.  When moderators apply the “community standards” of Bangalore, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Warsaw, or other countries east of Calais, we may expect a significant level of disrespect for American canons of free speech.

Facebook’s well-nigh unitary control of a great deal of speech in our public spaces ought to cause us significant concern for the future of free societies.  Facebook’s suppression of Sen.  Elizabeth Warren’s calls for the platform to be broken up, together with Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders and its ill concealed de facto undeclared campaign contributions to Donald Trump ought to cause us considerable agita about the extent to which one monopolistic organization can affect both our politics and our freedom.

When Facebook applies the “community standards” of Bangalore, Budapest, Berlin, or Bucharest to conversations in Palm Springs, Palo Alto, Petaluma, or Pasadena, or even Pocatello, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg scoffs at the idea that Russian intelligence may have been gaming his platform to influence the 2016 presidential election, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg permits the platform to live stream 17 minutes of the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg looks the other way while agents of the Burmese state stir up on his platform genocidal violence against the Rohingya, something is very wrong. 
When Gospodin Zuckerberg shades the truth to the United States Congress, and then works assiduously to convey an impression that our representatives are too old and too out of touch to understand the dynamics of his platform, something is very wrong.
 
In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested that the time was at hand for Facebook to be broken up, to required to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, and to be barred from further platform acquisitions for at least three years.  In short, it really is time to bring down the hammer of the Sherman Antitrust Act on an organization that, in 2019, represents virtually a textbook example of the evils against which Sen. Sherman inveighed when he carried his initial legislation back in 1890.

The representatives and senators who voted for the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 were not nearly so old and out of touch as Gospodin Zuckerberg might have been pleased to describe them had he been alive when the antitrust bill was under consideration by Congress.  The 51st Congress knew full well how dangerous monopoly power could be.  They had the fortitude and the hardihood to take on industrial exponents of monopoly power.  We should expect similar things from the 116th Congress.  It’s well past time to lower the hammer of the Sherman Antitrust Act on Gospodin Zuckerberg and his dangerous monopoly, as well as to send Gospodin Zuckerberg to his room with no supper.

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Paul S.  Marchand is a lawyer who lives in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council.  Mr.  Marchand practices law (on the theory that the more you practice, the more you’ll get it right) in the next-door community of Rancho Mirage.  His disdain for Facebook is the product of his strong views on monopoly capitalism, and also of his disdain for certain candidates ostensibly running as Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.