Summary: After 50 years of Pride, the bloom is off that rose for an awful lot of queerfolk. The LGBT civil rights movement, which had seemed so full of promise and excitement, has in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become 50 years after the October Revolution. In short, the queer nation has become domesticated and endotic, the stuff of political calculus, plundering forays by advertisers, and a source for material by comics and commentators seeking to demonstrate how “edgy” or how “woke” they are, as well as by an “Official Movement” that has taken over the struggle, commandeered its agenda, and defined who is “orthodox” and who is a “heretic” among the queer nation, meriting being written, airbrushed, photoshopped, and deepfaked out of our queer history.
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Cathedral City, June 29, 2019 --Fifty years after Stonewall, while queer academics flay one another alive in sterile, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the–of-a-pin scholastic debates over whether the events at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn half a century ago last night really constitute the beginning of the movement for queer civil rights in this country, or whether Stonewall is just a “convenient white, cisgender, gay male creation myth,” as urged with considerable anger, nay, venom, by certain academic outliers, it is a somewhat melancholy, if inconvenient, truth that for many queerfolk, the bloom may be off the prideful rose.
Of course, the debate over Stonewall’s place in our queer history is hardly new; for years, historians of the American Revolution have been exchanging musket fire among themselves about when the American Revolutionary war actually began.
There is certainly an argument to be made that the American Revolution may well have begun in 1765, when HM Government, desperately seeking to recoup the costs incurred in prosecuting the Seven Years’ War — which actually began in North America, and which we know as the French and Indian War — of 1756 to 1763, sought to tax the unrepresented-in-Parliament colonies as if they were a part of metropolitan Britain proper. After all, the Seven Years’ War/French and Indian War had cost Great Britain’s exchequer a staggering amount of money, which Parliament was desperate to recapture.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Parliament would seek to recoup at least some of that staggering expense of the war from the colonies on whose behalf HM Government believed the war had been fought in the first place. The leadup to the process by which the British lost America has been well documented in numerous learned monographs, not least of which is Barbara W. Tuchman’s delightful 1984 monograph March of Folly, in which she devotes a chapter of just over 100 pages to explaining and chronicling how “the British los[t] America.”
But if the run-up to the American revolution can be said to have occupied the roughly 10 years between the passage of the Stamp Act, 5 Geo.3, c. 12 (1765) and the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, together with the so-called Intolerable Acts intended to punish and coerce the uppity colonials of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the actual beginning of our national liberation struggle — the event that put the match to the metaphorical powder keg — was the now famous pair of skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on April 18, 1775. With Lexington and Concord, the run-up to the American Revolutionary War ended and hostilities could be said to have begun in earnest.
Some historians of our queer movement for authentic first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth have urged, somewhat pedantically one thinks, that it is somehow “wrong” to treat the resistance —the prophylactic violence, if you will— to an NYPD raid on the Stonewall Inn in the West Village by a somewhat motley assemblage of drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety gay men and lesbians, as the “beginning,” as it were, of the LGBT civil rights movement as such.
Yet, for all the precursors —all the movements for queer rights that had died aborning, all the isolated acts of resistance by courageous individuals, all the eloquent pleas, all the queer martyrs and martyrdoms, including the three trials of Oscar Wilde— the events which have come to be shorthanded simply as Stonewall have, for better or worse, become the generally accepted Epoch, or starting point, of our queer calendar, much as September 22, 1792 represented the start date of the French Republican Calendar (BTW today is the 12th of Messidor, an 227).
And, taking Stonewall as that generally well accepted Epoch of our calendar, we may now reckon 50 years to have passed since our Lexington and Concord, since the evening when the New York Police Department, acting out the role of the redcoats, provoked the wrath of those drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety queerfolk whose salutary prophylaxis of violence must have struck the NYPD and straight observers much as the resistance of the train band on Lexington Common must have struck the British regulars under Marine Major John Pitcairn.
And as the regulars retreated in good order on Boston, with the Massachusetts militia taking shots at them from behind every tree and fence along the way, they, like the NYPD at Stonewall nearly two centuries later, must have had at least some inkling that things were about to change, and that the old dispensations must soon pass entirely away.
Lo, it is half a century now that we who are queer and our brethren and sistren have lived with the reality of an ongoing movement for first-class citizenship in the commonwealth. How far we have come from 1971's Baker v. Nelson, (1972) 409 U.S. 810, in which the Supreme Court held that two gay men’s claim that the Constitution guaranteed the right to marry should be dismissed “for want of a substantial federal [constitutional] question” to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 576 U.S. ____, 135 S. Ct. 2584; 192 L. Ed. 2d 609; which unequivocally overruled Baker and opened to every same-sex couple in the United States the doors of marriage equality!
Yet, even as much as Obergefell guaranteed to Jonathan and David or to Ruth and Naomi or even to Adam and Steve the liberty of marital contract, an unintended consequence of marriage for queerfolk has been, at least in part, something of an expectation that queerfolk will conform themselves to the dispensations and morés of the larger straight community. In that regard, our greatest civil rights triumph may, ironically, open us up to all intents and purposes to demands that we all make honest queers of each other by marching down the aisle as soon as, or even before, we have physically consummated our relationships.
In short, it is not unreasonable to ask whether our own scapegrace exoticism, our own reckless fabulousness, our own joie de vivre, is in danger of being lost. Have we sacrificed upon a nuptial altar our quality of being different enough from our straight neighbors that we can hold up their shibboleths to relentless, critical examination? More to the point, have we become, fifty years on, in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as left-bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become fifty years after the October Revolution? More briefly still, are we becoming endotic, and safely assimilated to our straight neighbors?
Certainly, there are worrisome signs and portents that we are becoming not just endotic, but indeed domesticated. More than 40 years ago, when my parents, who might now be called by the “woke” term “straight allies,” were socializing with gay and lesbian friends on a regular basis, one of their gay friends, a passionate Trotskyite anarchist who had been at Stonewall on That Night, said something that worked its way into my youthful, proto-homosexual brain.
In sum and substance, riffing on the words of then-still-living Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, my parents’ passionate Trotskyite anarchist said one night at dinner that what was then called simply the gay community should be eternally vigilant against the tendency to develop what Djilas had called a “new class” of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks. I learned two new things that night. First I learned about Milovan Djilas and his relationship to also then-still-living Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, and second (and perhaps more ominously) I also got my first inkling of the divisions that were beginning to appear within the queer nation.
For my parents’ friend had spoken prophetically at our domestic dinner table about the dangers implicit in what he saw as an emergent “Official [queer] Movement,” taken over and staffed, as it were, by that “new class,” which in due course would arrogate to itself the power to define the goals, agenda, and ideology of the community as well as the punishment of those who do not conform thereto.
Though it would be the better part of another decade before I would acknowledge to myself that I was very much a boy who liked boys, let alone that I had kissed other boys and had found it liberating, pleasurable, and even joyful; and though the awful reality of the AIDS crisis would for another decade beyond that keep me so far inside the closet that I could see Narnia from its depths, the ominous words our passionate Trotskyite had spoken at our dining table never left me.
Indeed, I soon became aware through unhappy personal experience of how a Djilas-esque “new class,” had emerged to form the “Official Movement” against which my parents' passionate Trotskyite friend had inveighed so strongly at their dinner table. The personnel of this Official Movement were the kind of mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, bureaucrats, men-and-women-on the make, victory pimps, star fuckers, and pushers-to-the-front-of-the-line that tend to attract themselves like barnacles, a virus, or a cancer to any movement for social change. The women and men who made up the personnel of the Official Movement commandeered and arrogated to themselves the setting of our agenda, the “right” to speak for the movement as a whole, and, worst of all, the right to define who was “orthodox” and who was a “heretic” within our queer civil-rights effort. Consequently, the Official Movement was nothing if not highly territorial.
Moreover, the Official Movement tended, rather like the early Christian church, to present a united front to the outside, to those who do not share its belief structure. However, if the early church presented a united front to heathens and pagans, it was sorely divided against itself. Arian against Catholic, monophysite against orthodox, East against West, Alexandrian against Constantinopolitan, and on and on. Similarly, the Official Movement, for all its exterior monolithic aspect, was, and continues to be, sorely divided along lines, among others, of politics, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual expression.
And each such group within the movement has learned to practice its own particularly parochial or fissiparous form of identity politics and identitarianism, while remaining blissfully unmindful of Charles de Gaulle’s pithy aphorism “[c]omment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese? But, pace mon général, catty debates over Brie, Gruyère, or Roquefort notwithstanding, the Official Movement was remarkably unified in setting its face against any “outsider” who dared to display any kind of independence or initiative, or who departed from the announced agenda of that Official Movement.
Thus, in the spring of 1993, when I took on a challenge to California’s then-gender-specific marriage law, litigating on behalf of the two young gay men who were my clients, the Official Movement turned on me as if I had, in one sweeping and comprehensive blasphemy, denied the existence of Almighty God and the virginity of His mother. Professional colleagues of mine “ordered,” “instructed,” and “demanded” that I cease to represent these clients and that I not proceed with the litigation of the case. The media within the community basically blacklisted me; if they covered our case at all, it was a tiny, dismissive bit of filler in the most undesirable inside left page, below-the-fold periodical real estate conceivable. The then -and still, God help us- Executive Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center chose to speak as scornfully as she could in public about me and my clients.
After all, the doyens and doyennes of the Official Movement took pains to school me, the queer issue du jour was lifting the ban on queerfolk in the military. Now, having been a Democratic activist since 1972, and having worked in California for Fritz Mondale’s unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and for Evan Bayh’s victorious 1988 Indiana gubernatorial effort, I knew, rather better than the politically unschooled queer boys and queer girls of the Official Movement, many of whom have now gravitated to the Bernard Sanders camp, that “gays in the military” was not an issue with respect to which Bill Clinton would be able to exert any traction whatsoever. The President’s own Party shivved him on the issue, and Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made it part of their appeal to Republican voters in the 1994 midterms. I could read the prevailing winds, I could read the whip counts, and I knew that Bill Clinton did not have the votes or the support in Congress to lift the ban.
However, I knew that there was a shift happening in state courts on the issue of same-gender marriage. Though it would be two-plus decades before Obergefell, the courts of the states were starting to look more sympathetically at the case for same-gender marriage. In Hawai’i, the state Supreme Court, in Baehr v. Lewin, (1993) 74 Haw. 530, on remand and rehearing, Baehr v. Miike, (1996) 80 Haw. 341, had, in 1993, ordered the state of Hawai’i to demonstrate a compelling interest in limiting the liberty of marital contract to opposite-gender couples or otherwise lift the marriage ban.
Thus, when the “emissaries” of the Official Movement had told me and my clients to back off, I had suggested to them that the result of a California state court challenge to our gender specific marriage law might not produce the kind of harshly reactionary result they were anticipating. My response to their demands did nothing but arouse in the Official Movement a vengeful spirit against me and my clients that has lasted to the present day.
The Official Movement could not or would not seem, however, to distinguish SCOTUS’s backward -looking, homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) 478 U.S. 186, from the much more promising jurisprudence coming out of Hawai’i. They did not seem to understand or want to understand that a California court would probably do one of two things with our case. Either a California court would find the Hawai’i decision persuasive, or it would be so taken aback by the very nature of the relief we were seeking that they would deny our petition in a brief, one sentence per curiam decision saying “the petition is denied.” Certainly, I thought then, and I think now, that a California court would not engage in the kind of gratuitous homophobia that underlay Baker v. Nelson, and hold that no constitutional question had been presented.
Notwithstanding the damnifications of the Official Movement, my clients agreed, and we persevered with the case. Of all of the mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, and bureaucrats of the Official Movement, only one professional colleague took the time to visit with me as one professional to another about the case and the jurisprudential climate in which we were operating. In our discussions, we arrived at a consensus that the time might be premature, but it was worth taking a flyer even if we were probably ten to 20 years away from marriage equality being taken seriously in either state or federal court and that a national “conversation” needed to occur before straight America could be comfortable with the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the nuptial knot and making honest queerfolk of each other.
Meanwhile, states throughout the country were demonstrating a propensity for what Lyndon Johnson famously called “frontlash,” a preemptive series of legislative strikes against an event which has yet to occur. Yet, though 31 states wrote some varying form of same-gender marriage ban into their constitutional or statutory enactments, (including Hawai’i, where, in response to Baehr, the Mormon and Roman Catholic churches bankrolled a bigoted and homophobic initiative outlawing same-gender marriage in that state) these homophobic anti-marriage laws had the effect of waking the sleeping dog, which our parents had always told us to let lie.
As these states proceeded with their frontlash, they raised consciousness not only about marriage equality, but even more importantly, about the issue of authentic, first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth for queerfolk, and as they did so, barriers began to crumble.
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont, in Baker v. State (Vt. 1999) 744 A.2d 864, reopened the whole marriage debate by holding that same-sex couples were entitled to the same rights at law as were opposite-sex couples. And so, Vermont civil unions were born.
Frontlash in California, orchestrated by the appallingly reactionary Pete Knight, led to Proposition 22, declaring that “only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognized in California.”
However, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went all in for same gender marriage in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, (2003) 440 Mass. 309, holding that the Massachusetts Constitution mandated marriage equality for same-gender couples.
In June of that same year, SCOTUS finally, belatedly, recognized that same-gender intimacy is not criminal when it struck down Texas’s criminal sodomy statute in Lawrence v. Texas, (2003) 539 U.S. 558.
Lawrence knocked out the last prop from the traditional conservative argument that same-gender intimacy tarred the entire queer nation with the brush of unspeakable criminality, which taint of unspeakable criminality justified subjecting queerfolk to the badges and incidents of slavery by denying the validity to queerfolk’s marriages, much as the laws of the antebellum South denied validity to the marriages of slaves.
As queerfolk began to win victories, particularly on the marriage front, the same issue or which my clients and I had been read out with bell, book, and candle into the outer darkness in 1993, suddenly became the new issue du jour, the new “gays in the military” issue of the first part of the 20th century. Now my clients and I had been an unsung part of that history, a history out of which my clients and I were written, airbrushed, and photoshopped the same way Lev Davidovich Trotsky was airbrushed out of so many pictures showing him with Ilyich and with Josef Visssarionovich on the Kremlin wall (Photoshop not having been invented yet). The Official Movement was very happy indeed to write, airbrush, and photoshop me and my clients out of the Official History.
Unfortunately, though my clients and I may have been airbrushed, photoshopped, deepfaked, and written out of the received queer history that will be passed on to the next generation of upcoming fags and dikes, I’m not running away to Coyoacán, México, D.F. to be assassinated like Lev Davidovich. I intend to stay and fight.
For I have no love lost for the queer boys and queer girls and queer non-binaries and queer transfolk of the Official Movement. I have little patience for Johnny-come-lately mandarins, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, and careerists, for the boys and girls on the make, the chow line crashers, the victory pimps, and -God help us, the star fuckers- who will not bear a hand when there is work to be done, but who make haste to knock everyone out of the way to get to the head of the reception line when recognition or kudos are being doled out.
So, at the risk of seeming as dour, sour, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and humorless as that bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, Bernard Sanders, I don’t see in this 50th anniversary of Stonewall an awful lot of cause for celebration. Not if what we are celebrating is our domestication and our endoticity. I fear we are becoming as complacent as the bourgeois Jews of Wilhelmmine and Weimar Germany allowed themselves to become in the years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, warning against complacency, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mandarins, mavens, movers, and shakers of the Official Movement will soon fall to bickering and fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written, airbrushed, deepfaked, or photoshopped out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about lessons learned and steps for the next half-century.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister (and Mussolini son-in-law) Count Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents have been altogether more busy fighting to have a paternity test done than on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Ciano warned, “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are the product of that unfortunate passage at arms with the Official Movement and the people who make it up, the mandarins, the bureaucrats, the careerists, the apparatchiks, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and —let’s shame the devil and tell the truth— the star fuckers. They will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall with little real understanding of its implications, its ramifications, or its consequences. Official Movement people will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had little or no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation at Stonewall 50, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people at gatherings around the country, and then, as the long day completes its journey into night, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in a matter of hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting, all while Donald Trump and his homophobic Russian allies compass the doom of liberal democracy, and by extension, that of the queer nation.
Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when the personnel of an Official Movement muscle their way to the head of the chow line. So I see little cause to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed, where we are, where we have come from, and the future for which we are fighting.
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Paul S. Marchand is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and takes a rather dim view of the queer Official Movement which has written, airbrushed, and photoshopped him and his clients out of history. The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any Movement, Official or otherwise. Part of this blog post is taken and adapted from his post of June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, and everything changed for the queer nation.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Thursday, June 20, 2019
ON THE DESIRABILITY OF COMPROMISE: JOE BIDEN AND “‘GOOD ENOUGH’ IS BEST.”
By: Paul S. Marchand
Summary: The propensity of Democrats, particularly Democrats on the so-called Sanders left, to engage in purity tests and circular firing squads has been on full display over the last 48 to 72 hours. Apparently they’ve got their knickers in a knot over the way Joe Biden spoke of the importance of working across the aisle, even with people you differ from, to accomplish good public policy. Sad!
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Cathedral City, June 20, 2019 -- Joe Biden has committed the terrible “sin” of speaking candidly about the importance of working across the aisle, even with persons whom one finds objectionable, to accomplish sound public policy.
His Democratic primary opponents, the Sanders left, and Social Justice Warriors of every stripe have piled on to accuse him of “racism” and to excoriate him for the heresy of having even engaged with segregationist Republicans and Southern Democrats on matters not relating to the enormities of Mr. James Crow.
Such a Puritan posture is counterproductive at best, and destructive of The Democracy at worst.
I think I can speak with some credibility on this issue. As a member of the Cathedral City city Council for eight years, I learned the value of compromise and of being willing to listen to good ideas from otherwise thoroughly bad people. Indeed, when I was first elected to the Council, a mentor of mine, the late Desert Hot Springs Councilman Gary Bosworth, reminded me that in municipal governance, the secret to advancing any policy was “being able to count to three,” that is, on a council of five members, being able to reach working consensus on an issue among at least three of the five members.
As a practical matter, being able to count to three meant being able to overcome one’s visceral personal dislike of some of one’s colleagues. Former mayor (the worst and most ineffective in Cathedral City’s history) Kathleen Joan DeRosa and I cordially loathed one another, yet on a majority of issues coming before the city Council, we were able to put our mutual loathing aside and vote the same way. Indeed, the number of 5-0 votes on the city Council stood as a mute testimonial to the ability of all of us to work across a metaphorical aisle.
There was no love lost between me and Kathleen, or between me and the late Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace when he was caught embezzling from the city, and certainly there was no love lost between me and former councilmember Bud England, a compendium of everything so objectionable in this country about evangelical Protestant Nonconformity. Yet on something like 85% of the votes taken by the city Council during my tenure, we were able to find unanimity.
Perhaps that is why I am so upset, nay, offended, by the criticism raining down on Joe Biden for having spoken of his ability to work across the aisle. Apparently, among Democratic purists, particularly pompous Cory Booker, is now a grave heresy to have been able to work across the aisle, even with people whose values one scorns, or with whose Weltanschauung one disagrees profoundly. Apparently, in the new purist left —particularly the Sanders left– Weltanschauung, being able to agree with such a person is simply unacceptable, and makes one “racist.”
I took particular exception to New Jersey junior senator and presidential wannabe Cory Booker’s pompous, self-important, un-self-aware attacks on Joe Biden not only because I thought they displayed a lamentable lack of understanding of collegiality —an understanding one would have expected from the former mayor of the largest city in New Jersey— but also because I found Cory Booker’s holier-than-thou Puritanism offputting and offensive to begin with. Frankly, I have had a lot of trouble forgetting or forgiving Cory Booker’s May, 2012 characterization of certain remarks of Pres. Barack Obama as “nauseating.” That’s a kind of Democratic disloyalty that I can neither abide nor tolerate. Pres. Obama deserved better from Cory Booker than he got. Mr. Booker’s pomposity may very well get the better of him as he struggles to command more than one percent of primary voters.
And of course the redeless votaries of Vermont independent Sen. Bernard Sanders — who should not have been allowed to run in 2016 or now as a Democratic candidate — have been gleefully touting their Schadenfreude on social media. Of course, Bernie, who carries a nostalgic torch for the long-vanished Soviet Union, has never been known as one who plays well with others in the senatorial sandbox.
Unfortunately, the criticism coming Vice President Biden’s way seems reflective of the hyper-partisanship, ideological posturing, and purity politics that has become so much a part of the new normal in the era of Donald Trump. While Trump himself has no ideology beyond that of treasonably enriching himself and his family at the expense of the public fisc, many of his supporters are profoundly ideologically driven. Democrats, partially understanding the nature of the beast with which they are dealing, have allowed themselves to become every bit as ideologically intransigent as the Republican self-identified Trump True Believers.
By indicating a desire to work across the aisle with members of the party opposite on mutually agreeable policy formulations, Joe Biden has not preached any political heresy at all. Instead, he has preached the old-fashioned political Gospel according to James Madison and expressed in the Constitution of the United States. Instead of castigating uncle Joe for being willing to call for a return to correct and honorable government, we should be applauding his fidelity and commitment to the vision of the Founders.
The men who came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia had prosecuted to victory the world’s first war of national liberation, who had kept a delicate, chaotic union of 13 states together through through the Confederation period, transcending and triumphing over fissaparous tendencies which might have sundered the infant Republic, finally came together to accomplish what historian Catherine Drinker Bowen referred to, with only a small touch of hyperbole, as a “miracle at Philadelphia.”
Much of what made that “miracle at Philadelphia” possible was a sheer willingness to engage in old-fashioned political horse trading, to compromise, and to arrive at workable, if imperfect, solutions. Flinty, uncompromising, New Englanders and Down-easters found themselves making common cause with urbane man of affairs from New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Stern Calvinist Congregationalists found themselves working with Anglican Cavalier descendents of Virginia and the Carolinas, in an unwonted and unexpected spirit of compromise. Indeed, so strong was a spirit of compromise and accommodation at Philadelphia during that exceptionally humid summer of 1787 that the still-in-force Constitution they produced was innocent of any mention whatsoever of political parties.
Thus, when Joe Biden speaks of working across the aisle, even with individuals whose values he may find abhorrent, to accomplish good and sensible public policy, we should be hesitant, for the Constitution’s sake as well as our own safety’s sake, to excoriate him as if he had violated some doctrinaire, European ideal of revolutionary partisanship and ideological purity.
Yet that is exactly the temptation into which Democrats in this hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, hyperpartisan 2020 primary election cycle are falling. We have apparently bought into the Leninist idea that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, and that the mere idea of speaking civilly to those with whom one differs profoundly on certain issues is, indeed, a political and doctrinal heresy.
Democrats have always been enamored during my lifetime of purity tests, litmus tests, doctrinaire ideological purity, and turning on one another to enforce what any given faction considers to be the “party line.” Buffeted about on every conflicting wind of doctrine imaginable, Democrats fling away the opportunity for victory in search of an ideologically perfect candidate. Bill Clinton was right to suggest that “Republicans want to fall in line; Democrats want to fall in love.”
Perhaps, instead of seeking the perfect candidate, Democrats should seek the best candidate available, the candidate who is “good enough,” if not perfect. In this year when Russians are trying again to subvert the American democratic process, perhaps we should take counsel from the late Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, who, noting the desire of most navies for all kinds of bells and whistles and technological wonders in their weapon systems, responded with the homely aphorism “‘good enough’ is best.”
Instead of seeking the perfect candidate, let us be satisfied with the candidate who is “good enough,” because Sergey Georgyevich was more right than he knew: “‘ good enough’ is best.”
Postscript: pompous Cory Booker, struggling to break 1% in Democratic primary polling, poured gasoline on the fire in an interview last night on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, when he offered an unbelievably pompous word salad justifying his earlier attacks on front runner Joe Biden.
Now it’s to be expected that also-rans such as Cory Booker would be tempted to try to take out the frontrunner. It’s the price of frontrunner status. However, what made Sen. Booker’s remarks doubly offensive to queerfolk was his condescending, tone deaf, un-self-aware appropriation of the LGBTQ civil rights struggle in the service of his own attacks on the quondam Vice President.
Queerfolk do not need to be lectured to by politicians of color who have been accustomed for a long time to pooh-poohing the reality of the queer struggle for an authentic, first-class place in the American Commonwealth. Too many of these politicians of color reject any form of queer analogy to the African-American civil rights struggle, walling off that protean struggle as the exclusive property of the African-American community.
Yet, what the watchmen on the African-American wall apparently don’t know is that the struggle for full civil rights for queerfolk was already well underway when the Supreme Court rendered its unfortunate decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 163 U.S. 537. Though the queer nation has unabashedly and unashamedly gone to school, as it were, on the strategy and tactics employed by the African-American civil rights movement, neither queerfolk nor African-Americans should ever accuse each other of appropriation, except where Cory Booker tries to appropriate, during Pride Month at that, the struggles of queerfolk in an attempt to legitimate an ill-informed, ill-founded, foolish attack on Joe Biden.
All Cory Booker did last night was to accomplish a further diminution of his already minimal chances of scoring the Democratic presidential nomination next year.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, where he learned the value of compromise. His views are his own, and do not reflect those of the Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is now or ever has been associated.
Summary: The propensity of Democrats, particularly Democrats on the so-called Sanders left, to engage in purity tests and circular firing squads has been on full display over the last 48 to 72 hours. Apparently they’ve got their knickers in a knot over the way Joe Biden spoke of the importance of working across the aisle, even with people you differ from, to accomplish good public policy. Sad!
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Cathedral City, June 20, 2019 -- Joe Biden has committed the terrible “sin” of speaking candidly about the importance of working across the aisle, even with persons whom one finds objectionable, to accomplish sound public policy.
His Democratic primary opponents, the Sanders left, and Social Justice Warriors of every stripe have piled on to accuse him of “racism” and to excoriate him for the heresy of having even engaged with segregationist Republicans and Southern Democrats on matters not relating to the enormities of Mr. James Crow.
Such a Puritan posture is counterproductive at best, and destructive of The Democracy at worst.
I think I can speak with some credibility on this issue. As a member of the Cathedral City city Council for eight years, I learned the value of compromise and of being willing to listen to good ideas from otherwise thoroughly bad people. Indeed, when I was first elected to the Council, a mentor of mine, the late Desert Hot Springs Councilman Gary Bosworth, reminded me that in municipal governance, the secret to advancing any policy was “being able to count to three,” that is, on a council of five members, being able to reach working consensus on an issue among at least three of the five members.
As a practical matter, being able to count to three meant being able to overcome one’s visceral personal dislike of some of one’s colleagues. Former mayor (the worst and most ineffective in Cathedral City’s history) Kathleen Joan DeRosa and I cordially loathed one another, yet on a majority of issues coming before the city Council, we were able to put our mutual loathing aside and vote the same way. Indeed, the number of 5-0 votes on the city Council stood as a mute testimonial to the ability of all of us to work across a metaphorical aisle.
There was no love lost between me and Kathleen, or between me and the late Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace when he was caught embezzling from the city, and certainly there was no love lost between me and former councilmember Bud England, a compendium of everything so objectionable in this country about evangelical Protestant Nonconformity. Yet on something like 85% of the votes taken by the city Council during my tenure, we were able to find unanimity.
Perhaps that is why I am so upset, nay, offended, by the criticism raining down on Joe Biden for having spoken of his ability to work across the aisle. Apparently, among Democratic purists, particularly pompous Cory Booker, is now a grave heresy to have been able to work across the aisle, even with people whose values one scorns, or with whose Weltanschauung one disagrees profoundly. Apparently, in the new purist left —particularly the Sanders left– Weltanschauung, being able to agree with such a person is simply unacceptable, and makes one “racist.”
I took particular exception to New Jersey junior senator and presidential wannabe Cory Booker’s pompous, self-important, un-self-aware attacks on Joe Biden not only because I thought they displayed a lamentable lack of understanding of collegiality —an understanding one would have expected from the former mayor of the largest city in New Jersey— but also because I found Cory Booker’s holier-than-thou Puritanism offputting and offensive to begin with. Frankly, I have had a lot of trouble forgetting or forgiving Cory Booker’s May, 2012 characterization of certain remarks of Pres. Barack Obama as “nauseating.” That’s a kind of Democratic disloyalty that I can neither abide nor tolerate. Pres. Obama deserved better from Cory Booker than he got. Mr. Booker’s pomposity may very well get the better of him as he struggles to command more than one percent of primary voters.
And of course the redeless votaries of Vermont independent Sen. Bernard Sanders — who should not have been allowed to run in 2016 or now as a Democratic candidate — have been gleefully touting their Schadenfreude on social media. Of course, Bernie, who carries a nostalgic torch for the long-vanished Soviet Union, has never been known as one who plays well with others in the senatorial sandbox.
Unfortunately, the criticism coming Vice President Biden’s way seems reflective of the hyper-partisanship, ideological posturing, and purity politics that has become so much a part of the new normal in the era of Donald Trump. While Trump himself has no ideology beyond that of treasonably enriching himself and his family at the expense of the public fisc, many of his supporters are profoundly ideologically driven. Democrats, partially understanding the nature of the beast with which they are dealing, have allowed themselves to become every bit as ideologically intransigent as the Republican self-identified Trump True Believers.
By indicating a desire to work across the aisle with members of the party opposite on mutually agreeable policy formulations, Joe Biden has not preached any political heresy at all. Instead, he has preached the old-fashioned political Gospel according to James Madison and expressed in the Constitution of the United States. Instead of castigating uncle Joe for being willing to call for a return to correct and honorable government, we should be applauding his fidelity and commitment to the vision of the Founders.
The men who came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia had prosecuted to victory the world’s first war of national liberation, who had kept a delicate, chaotic union of 13 states together through through the Confederation period, transcending and triumphing over fissaparous tendencies which might have sundered the infant Republic, finally came together to accomplish what historian Catherine Drinker Bowen referred to, with only a small touch of hyperbole, as a “miracle at Philadelphia.”
Much of what made that “miracle at Philadelphia” possible was a sheer willingness to engage in old-fashioned political horse trading, to compromise, and to arrive at workable, if imperfect, solutions. Flinty, uncompromising, New Englanders and Down-easters found themselves making common cause with urbane man of affairs from New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Stern Calvinist Congregationalists found themselves working with Anglican Cavalier descendents of Virginia and the Carolinas, in an unwonted and unexpected spirit of compromise. Indeed, so strong was a spirit of compromise and accommodation at Philadelphia during that exceptionally humid summer of 1787 that the still-in-force Constitution they produced was innocent of any mention whatsoever of political parties.
Thus, when Joe Biden speaks of working across the aisle, even with individuals whose values he may find abhorrent, to accomplish good and sensible public policy, we should be hesitant, for the Constitution’s sake as well as our own safety’s sake, to excoriate him as if he had violated some doctrinaire, European ideal of revolutionary partisanship and ideological purity.
Yet that is exactly the temptation into which Democrats in this hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, hyperpartisan 2020 primary election cycle are falling. We have apparently bought into the Leninist idea that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, and that the mere idea of speaking civilly to those with whom one differs profoundly on certain issues is, indeed, a political and doctrinal heresy.
Democrats have always been enamored during my lifetime of purity tests, litmus tests, doctrinaire ideological purity, and turning on one another to enforce what any given faction considers to be the “party line.” Buffeted about on every conflicting wind of doctrine imaginable, Democrats fling away the opportunity for victory in search of an ideologically perfect candidate. Bill Clinton was right to suggest that “Republicans want to fall in line; Democrats want to fall in love.”
Perhaps, instead of seeking the perfect candidate, Democrats should seek the best candidate available, the candidate who is “good enough,” if not perfect. In this year when Russians are trying again to subvert the American democratic process, perhaps we should take counsel from the late Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, who, noting the desire of most navies for all kinds of bells and whistles and technological wonders in their weapon systems, responded with the homely aphorism “‘good enough’ is best.”
Instead of seeking the perfect candidate, let us be satisfied with the candidate who is “good enough,” because Sergey Georgyevich was more right than he knew: “‘ good enough’ is best.”
Postscript: pompous Cory Booker, struggling to break 1% in Democratic primary polling, poured gasoline on the fire in an interview last night on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, when he offered an unbelievably pompous word salad justifying his earlier attacks on front runner Joe Biden.
Now it’s to be expected that also-rans such as Cory Booker would be tempted to try to take out the frontrunner. It’s the price of frontrunner status. However, what made Sen. Booker’s remarks doubly offensive to queerfolk was his condescending, tone deaf, un-self-aware appropriation of the LGBTQ civil rights struggle in the service of his own attacks on the quondam Vice President.
Queerfolk do not need to be lectured to by politicians of color who have been accustomed for a long time to pooh-poohing the reality of the queer struggle for an authentic, first-class place in the American Commonwealth. Too many of these politicians of color reject any form of queer analogy to the African-American civil rights struggle, walling off that protean struggle as the exclusive property of the African-American community.
Yet, what the watchmen on the African-American wall apparently don’t know is that the struggle for full civil rights for queerfolk was already well underway when the Supreme Court rendered its unfortunate decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 163 U.S. 537. Though the queer nation has unabashedly and unashamedly gone to school, as it were, on the strategy and tactics employed by the African-American civil rights movement, neither queerfolk nor African-Americans should ever accuse each other of appropriation, except where Cory Booker tries to appropriate, during Pride Month at that, the struggles of queerfolk in an attempt to legitimate an ill-informed, ill-founded, foolish attack on Joe Biden.
All Cory Booker did last night was to accomplish a further diminution of his already minimal chances of scoring the Democratic presidential nomination next year.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, where he learned the value of compromise. His views are his own, and do not reflect those of the Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is now or ever has been associated.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
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:
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
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.
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.
Monday, May 27, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, May 26, 2019
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.
----------------------------------------------------------
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.
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.
----------------------------------------------------------
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.
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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.
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
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.
-xxx-
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.
-----------------------------------------------
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.
-xxx-
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.
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