LITTLE SNAPPERS, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

Summary:  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole brouhaha over Brexit has turned into a huge humiliation for new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His party is fragmenting in the House, his base is subject to the inevitable demographic realities of age, and the Celtic nations of the United Kingdom regard him and his party with an increasingly gimlet eye.

Meanwhile, in this country, the Democratic primary campaign for president is shaping up to be another gift to Donald Trump. The Sanders-induced climate of rancor, which manifested itself so strongly in the primary campaign of 2016, has returned as strong and as cancerous as ever. When will Democrats learn not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The Militant Tendencies on the far left of the Democratic Party need to hear this message: straighten the fuck up and fly right; America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.


Anyone watching Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons the other day might have been forgiven for thinking that the Commons of the United Kingdom had lost their collective minds. From Boris Johnson violating decorum by using a barnyard epithet (hell, let’s shame the devil, tell the truth, and admit that what BoJo uttered was the word “shit,”) to Dr. Philip Lee, MP’s dramatic defection across the aisle to the Lib Dems in the midst of BoJo’s speech,  the virtual mayhem in question time itself may well have been a low point in the institutional history of the Mother of Parliaments.

Indeed, the whole Brexit situation is curiously topsy-turvy. The most vocal pro-Brexit “change agents,” the “leavers,” are the base of the Conservative & Unionist Party, those Tories of Middle England who tend to share in common they are of great age and the fact that most of them are drawing pensions from HM government.

On the other side of this curiously topsy-turvy Brexit brouhaha are those “remainers” who prefer to continue Britain’s membership in the EU. They tend, as a rule, to break younger then the angry Tory “little Englanders” who make up the Tory base. They also tend to break more Welsh, more Northern Irish, and decidedly more Scots than the “leavers,” who in overwhelming numbers are Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen.

In short, the more Burkean conservative (small “c”) demographic, the demographic that prefers not to upset existing dispensations, is actually the younger demographic that should be expected to be willing to embrace change and to take the risk of burning down existing systems.

Nevertheless, in the topsy-turvy world of British Brexit, it is the older, “leave” voters who are more willing to burn down the system. To a certain extent, the hard-line Brexiteer Tory voters who are prepared to burn down Britain’s time-honored political system, and plunge the country into uncertainty where the pound is dickie, the royal house is on thin ground, and the rest of the world looks at England as little more than a laughingstock, the home of unruly, Sassenach soccer hooligans. In short, the "leavers" are the same people who have been mourning the loss of the British Empire since 1947. 

Many of the sour, stolid, solid, superannuated “leavers,” when pressed hard enough, will evince a surprising degree of nostalgia for the palmy days of the Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set. They will tell you all the Great Days of the Empire, reciting for you a doleful litany of how Great Britain taught a watching world the art of gracious Imperial leavetaking. “When we were in... India, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, The Sudan, The Gold Coast, Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, Nigeria and the British Cameroons, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika, Malta, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Swaziland, Trucial Oman, Aden, British Honduras, Hong Kong, and so many other shreds and patches once colored British red on a map of the world.

Now, in 2019, having seen the once mighty British Empire reduced to a few island outposts in the West Indies and in the far South Atlantic between Argentina and Antarctica, the Tory nostalgists of Empire, trooping off to hear “Rule, Britannia” at the annual Proms, have become embittered and disinclined to engage with the larger world of which the British Isles are necessarily still a part.

Nostalgic as much for the era of “Splendid Isolation” from Europe as they are for the era of Empire, it is easy for Brexiteers to conflate the two trends. They see the period of “Splendid Isolation” as being concurrent with that of the British Empire at its apogee, when the rest of the world trembled lest the British lion roar in their general direction. Much of the Tory base, the superannuated, Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen who voted “Leave,” have a fanciful view of Brexit as representing the accomplishment in some way of some sort of redemption of Britain’s conceit of itself as an imperial power.

Younger Britons, on the other hand, having no memory of Britain before September 1, 1939, when the balloon went up and everything turned to shit, tend to accept the idea of a “United States of Europe” such as that visualized by Giuseppe Mazzini, Napoléon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and Robert Schumann. For younger Britons, who have known only the reality of the EU, the EU, for all its bureaucratic aggravations, for all its imperfections, and for all of the demographic changes that have occurred under the EU, is still a hell of a lot better than the alternative, a cloistered Britain clutching at a collection of nostalgic remnants of its imperial past.

Better the EU devil younger Britons know than the Russian devil they also know. Better to have peace in Ireland and no hard border there, than to usher in a recrudescence of The Troubles. Better not to retreat into the castle as the “leavers” prefer, slam the front gate, raise the metaphorical drawbridge, and retreat to the parapets to hurl contumely at the wogs who, as any Sassenach Englishmen can tell you, begin at Calais.

What is happening in the U.K. right now is a confrontation between two fundamentally irreconcilable views of what Britain is, what it should be, where it’s been, and where it’s going. Ironically enough, the “leavers” seek new dispensations they believe will take England (but not necessarily the Celtic nations) back to a time of splendid isolation and imperial greatness. The “remainers,” on the other hand, the more Burkean “conservative” section of British society, want to keep Britain as it has become since joining the European Economic Community and acceding to the European Union; they want to see a Britain that is engaged in its neighborhood and a Britain which rejects the atavistic isolationism which the Conservative & Unionist Party has so insistently embraced in the years since Prime Minister David Cameron cynically threw a bone to the far right of his party by agreeing to a Brexit referendum he privately thought should never have happened and would never carry.

The battle for Britain is well and truly underway.

    * * * * *

While the Tories are savaging themselves over Brexit, laying infrastructure for a general election in which Labour may well cruise to a commanding majority in the House of Commons, notwithstanding their own internal nets and quarrels, American Democrats may be preparing to gift wrap the next election and present it on bended knee to Donald Trump.

Simply put, the Democratic Party is living down to the traditional stereotype of the Party as a gang that can’t seem to shoot anything except its own foot. Barack Obama’s warning about a circular firing squad is certainly coming true.

Time was that Democratic presidential nominees were made in a metaphorical smoke-filled room, as the party elders argued and finally came to consensus with one another about who was the best candidate.

When that gave way, under the impetus of the civil rights movement and its impetus towards “extensive democracy,” to the primary system to which we are all now accustomed, that primary system itself seemed to work satisfactorily well; primary elections and state delegate selection caucuses seemed to produce, in fairly orderly fashion, a nominee for the presidency with sufficient delegates to be nominated on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention.

Until 2016.

In 2016 that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating bourgeois Brooklyn/Burlington Bolshevik, Bernard Sanders heeded the siren song of his ego and tossed his Mao headgear into the ring, determined to lead a “political revolution,” that would radically transform America and remake it in his own Leninist image.

And so the Sanders agitprop began.

In sharp contrast to proceeding primary campaigns, Sanders and his supporters went after front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton in the nastiest way imaginable. Aside from uncritically and enthusiastically repeating Trump’s talking points, they also gleefully encouraged WikiLeaks and the notorious traitor Julian Assange to act as an unlawful foreign surrogate for the Trump and Sanders campaigns.

The Sanders campaign also enlisted social media, particularly Facebook, making inroads to Mark Zuckerberg and the left-bourgeois Berniebros in Menlo Park.  

Zuckerberg and his bros did not disappoint. Facebook soon gained a malodorous reputation for hosting grossly one-sided content on its platform, while overpolicing and aggressively censoring (a practice they refer to as “moderating”) any attempts by Hillary Clinton loyalists to state her side of the case. Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders, and by extension, Donald Trump, was instrumental in poisoning the tone of the Democratic primary and dividing the Party against itself. If Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had sought to run an active measures information warfare campaign, he could not have found a better operative than Gospodin Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The divide in the party, with the Sanders "Bernie or bust" intransigents either protest voting for a third party candidate such as Gary “Aleppo” Johnson or Jill “I sit with Putin” Stein, or spite voting for Trump, proved to be fatal to Hillary in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where though Hillary outpolled Trump by nearly 4 million votes nationally, she lost by 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which because of our insane electoral college system was enough to give the election to Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders and his redeless followers are personally, jointly, and severally responsible for having inflicted Donald Trump and his racketeer influenced and corrupt organization crime family on the United States. A famous Internet meme, depicting a number of people sitting around a campfire against the backdrop of a ruined city, captioned

    “yes, a homophobic, Latino-hating, Muslim-hating racist, sexist pig won the US presidency, but for a beautiful moment in time I got to stamp my feet and refuse to vote for Hillary. You’d understand if you saw how many people on Facebook were impressed with me at the time[.]”

depicted with mordant accuracy what Sanders, Stein, and Gary Johnson, with the help of Vladimir Putin, had inflicted upon this country.

Now, in 2019, we see the same kind of nasty, bitter, offensive tone manifesting itself again against front-runner Joe Biden. The Sanders people, with predictable help from Donald Trump and from the Kremlin, have tried to start a “but his gaffes” narrative, accusing the quondam Vice President of everything from racism to senility. And as in 2016, the Sanders/Trump/Russia axis is making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to spread this active measures information warfare through the Democratic electorate.

And again, Twitter and Facebook are knowingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, uncritically, complicit in the Trump/Sanders/Putin campaign of information warfare. Facebook is once again busily taking sides against Joe Biden. Facebook’s moderators have once again been policing and suppressing commentary favorable to Vice President Biden, while giving an indulgent pass to Sanders/Trump/Putin trolls and troublemakers.

What we’ve seen, every time Bernard Sanders’s ego gets the better of him, is a schism in a Democratic Party between those who understand how politics works, and the far left which doesn’t give a shit about the practicalities of politics, but was just wants what it wants, right now, and be damned to the rest of us. We see in Sanders and in his redeless followers a kind of neo-Bolshevism that is almost as irresponsible as the cynicism of the Tory Brexiteers in the United Kingdom.

The revolution came to this country in 1776 and is still ongoing.  Hell, we Americans invented the idea of revolution. What we do not need is Gospodin Sanders and his bullshit so-called political revolution in 2019. We don’t need redeless Sanders followers such as Susan Sarandon telling us that there is no difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as she did when she told us that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 

Ms. Sarandon, after all, has the wealth and the wherewithal to ride out the shitstorm she’s responsible for creating in the relative safety and comfort of a flat on the Île-St.-Louis, or in one of the trendier arrondisements of Paris, or in Auteuil or some such other upscale Banlieue, where she may hobnob with snarky, anti-American, French intellectuals who will privately moan about their North African help and talk about the evils of immigration into the French Hexagon.

The left-bourgeois, like Susan Sarandon and Mark Zuckerberg, will do a great deal of damage to this country. Ron Wyden may be right to suggest that the federal government should criminally prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and as for Ms. Sarandon, she is welcome to hang out in her trendy arrondissement of Paris until either Joe Biden is president or the 2nd Tamanskaya Guards Motor-Rifle Division of the Russian army rolls down the Champs Elysées.

The Democratic Party needs to discipline its discourse, purge its Sandernista dissidents, boot Bernard Sanders the hell out of the Democratic Party, drop the caucuses, require every state to have closed primaries, and send a clear message to the Militant Tendency on the far left of the Democratic Party: straighten up and fly right.

 America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.

                                            -xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is a former two-term member of the Cathedral City city council. He is a pugnacious Democrat who, when he hears the word “progressive,” “corporatist,” or “neoliberal,” wants to reach for his revolver. He has no room for Militant Tendencies.

LITTLE SNAPPERS AUGUST, 22, 2019

Yesterday, I received at my office in Rancho Mirage, a phonebank appeal on behalf of Cachedral City First District council wannabe Rita Lamb. Apparently, Rita and/or her campaign people aren’t very careful about who they’re reaching out to. Not only is my office located in Rancho Mirage, outside of Cathedral City and, perforce, outside the First Council District, but if Rita and/or her minions had done any due diligence, they would have discovered that I do not reside in the First Council District. I certainly hope, given the rookie foolishness I see from Rita’s campaign, that the voters of the First Council District choose Shelley Kaplan, whose campaign has been run like a top.

Last week, Independent Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, whose bid for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to be faltering, took a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book and attacked the Washington Post for its coverage of him, which he deemed insufficiently sycophantic, propagandistic, and hagiographic. Mr. Sanders’s complaints about the Washington Post not surprisingly found eager echoes among his pugnacious, intransigent, Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island followers. He and they ramped up their performative assholery/ideology (pace Rick Wilson) to a whole new, Trumpian level.

And while Gospodin Sanders was giving further proof of his perfidy, the sycophants of Donald Trump have been waging an all out propaganda struggle to classify the diffuse anti-fascist movement known as antifa as a terrorist movement. Of course, nobody in Washington City apparently has the slightest desire to classify such neo-Nazi outfits as Andrew Anglin’s Stormer, or the far right, neo-Nazi Proud Boys, which are terroristic organizations, as terrorists. Sad!

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Cathedral City -- August 22, 2019 Yesterday, late in the afternoon, the noisy monster that is the telephone in my office rang. Since I was not particularly disposed to take a call as I was on my way to the gym for a workout, I let the answering machine take the call. It was a phone bank appeal on behalf of Cathedral City First Council District wannabe Rita Lamb.

Of course, my office is located in Rancho Mirage, and I myself am a resident of Cathedral City’s Second Council District, all of which could, and should, have been known to Ms. Lamb and her campaign staff had they exercised the barest fragment of due diligence.

Of course, this is not the first time that I have received solicitations and entreaties from Rita Lamb, as she and her minions have importuned me to cast a vote in an election in which I do not possess the qualifications to cast a vote. Now, when I ran for council, and won, back in the Jurassic years of 2002, my election was an at-large election. I had to reach the entire city with my appeal, so I had the advantage of not having to do that kind of due diligence. Yet still, the failure of due diligence on the part of any Council candidate perturbs me. Quite simply, the care and the diligence which one puts into one’s campaign are a predictor of the extent to which one is prepared to put care and due diligence into governance.

Kathleen DeRosa, the quondam mayor of Cathedral City, for whom I have nothing but unfootnoted disdain, used to run such slipshod campaigns that just about every time she campaigned she fell afoul of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. I would not be surprised to see Ms. Lamb fall similarly afoul of the FPPC. Of course, the DeRosa campaign also availed itself of anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Mormon whispering campaigns, as was the case in 2004, when she mounted a whispering campaign to the effect that then-mayor George Stettler was suffering from dementia.

A candidate who is willing to cut corners and to play fast and loose with the truth, either herself, or through staffers working on her behalf, cannot be expected to govern honestly, forthrightly, or transparently. We can also expect that if her campaign effort is as slipshod as the DeRosa effort was, and as the Lamb effort is, Lamb, if (God forbid) elected to the city council, would not put in a tithe of the effort needed to govern effectively. The Council is already lumbered with the presence of a contingent of members who lack significant governing experience. Adding one more to their number would seriously retard the progress Cathedral City has made since Kathleen DeRosa ceased to be mayor. We cannot afford to return to the ten Brezhnev-like winters that we survived under the incompetent, venal, corrupt, mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. Rita Lamb, tainted as she is by her association with Kathleen DeRosa, is utterly and entirely unqualified to serve as dogcatcher, let alone on the city council. 

I will support Shelley Kaplan.

    * * * * *

We’ve known since the fall of 2016 of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his followers. Consumed by misogynistic hatred of Hillary Clinton, he and his followers did everything they could to act as a knowing fifth column for Donald Trump.

Not satisfied with providing The Donald with most of the talking points the Trump people used against Hillary, and not satisfied with having trafficked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Sanders and his followers, evidently frustrated by the way their campaign is so obviously faltering, particularly considering that the front runner is Joe Biden, whom Sanders so evidently despises, have taken up the Trumpian tactic of attacking the news media.

Last Monday, Sanders, speaking at a town hall in Wolfeboro, N.H., attacked the Washington Post, the paper that brought down Richard Nixon, by implying that the Post’s editorial stances and news coverage were prejudiced against him and controlled by Jeff Bezos, against whom Sanders has railed for years: "[a]nd then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn't write particularly good articles about me. I don't know why, but I guess maybe there's a connection...."

It could just as easily have been Donald Trump railing against the “failing” New York Times, whom Trump has defined as “an enemy of the people” so often that it has become extremely tiresome. Indeed, in a comment thread in a Washington Post article criticizing the Vermont Senator’s untruths concerning the media coverage of him, one commentor referred to Sanders and Trump as “two old, cranky white guys from the ‘boroughs’ recycling the same messages.”

Now I don’t propose to get into a screed against New York City’s Outer Boroughs; my father’s people came from the Bronx, not Manhattan. Nonetheless, there seems to be some similarity in personality to be found in politicians from those Outer boroughs. They tend to be cranky, humorless, pugnacious, confrontational, condescending, and combative, as well as dishonest.

Frankly, the Democratic Party has a right to expect better from its candidates. Sanders has a reputation for being dour, sour, grim, prim, humorless, and doctrinaire. Was the Democrats need is not a squatter in the party’s parlor, crapping on the rug, wiping his ass on the drapes, eating it out of house and home, and demanding that the party comply with his every demand. What the party needs, irrespective of age, is a happy warrior, insurgent, who takes joy in the fight and is willing to take that fight straight to Donald Trump. Bernard Sanders, his poll numbers stagnating, is emphatically not that man.

We may, God willing, soon see the time when Sanders begins to realize that there is no second bite at the apple; if he does not do well in the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the time may well be at hand to show his finger wagging butt the door, and apply the Party boot to his posterior. Bernard Sanders must not be allowed to be the nominee of a Democratic Party of which he has never been a good faith member.

    *  *  *  *  *

The Proud Boys misbehaved in Portland over the weekend. They took their neo-Nazi white nationalist filth to an otherwise pleasant community and befouled it. They were met by counterdemonstrators from the diffuse, not particularly well organized opposition movement known as Antifa. In the rumble that followed, Portland police arrested 13 people. In Washington City, Donald Trump, and his acolytes, saturated with white nationalist evil, took, to all intents and purposes, the side of the so-called Proud Boys and, almost in chorus, began calling for federal legislation to declare Antifa a terrorist group.

The Trump regime’s push to declare Antifa a terrorist group is the kind of tactic we should expect from a dictatorial, authoritarian regime that has set itself at deliberate odds with the United States Constitution. Authoritarian “leaders,” particularly in authoritarian countries, such as Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, and Israel — “leaders” such as Jair Bolsonaro, Nicolás Maduro, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Orbán Viktor, and Binyamin Netanyahu, and former dictatorial “leaders,” such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, the generals of the Argentine junta, and Libya’s late, unlamented Moammar Qaddafi, are very fond of defining their domestic political “enemies,” as “terrorists.”

And, having defined their domestic political “enemies,” real or imagined, as “terrorists,” authoritarian leaders will unhesitatingly deploy the power of the state and of a tame tabby judiciary to suppress any such “terrorist” movement. As of yet, Gospodin Trump has not sought to avail himself of a tame tabby judiciary; he has not sought to gut the Posse Comitatus Act in order to deploy the military in the streets of American cities and towns, nor has he sought to revive the obnoxious British practice of so-called General Warrants that permit the search of every individual or residence in a given area, a practice the British government inaugurated after the Jacobite arising in 1745 which ripped a scar across the face the Scots Highlands, and which the British government sought to implement its North American colonies in the 1770s. Gospodin Trump has not sought to do these things... yet.
Now, bien pensant Democrats, who cannot seem to see the evil lurking behind the façade of the Republican Party, may be inclined to pooh-pooh such predictions and concerns as “conspiracy theories,” unworthy of consideration by "correctly" thinking Democrats. This bears a disturbing resemblance to the tone of much of Jewish commentary during the Weimar Republic. Far too many German Jews and Gentiles pooh-poohed the ominous signs of Hitler’s rise by saying essentially “it can’t happen here; this is the country of Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller. We are civilized Europeans who would never permit someone like Hitler to rise to power.”

Unfortunately, the good Germans of the Weimar Republic took their Hitler naysayers seriously. They turned the other way when the storm troopers took to the streets, they tut-tutted at the Nazi street toughs who smashed the windows of every Jewish shop they could find, and finally, when Reichspräsident Paul v. Beneckendorff u. v. Hindenburg, whose mind was drifting away from him, appointed Adolf Hitler as Reichskanzler on January 30, 1933, they breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that that vulgar little man Adolf Hitler would now be controlled by the institutions of German civil society and by the Reichswehr. The good Germans of the Weimar Republic had deceived themselves and been deceived by Hitler and his propagandists.

I fear that far too many “good Americans” are being similarly deceived. Far too few Americans have read Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which, with a kind of frightening and eerie prescience, predicted the coming of fascism to America in the person of a populist president named Buzz Windrip. Not only did Lewis expertly skewer the pretensions of populism as a political ideology, but he also managed to describe an America in which H.L. Mencken’s dire prediction had come true, that:

 “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

We may safely predict that, if Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and their fellow travelers are allowed to retain even the slightest tincture of power,  there will come some great and glorious day when the plain folks of this land will find their consciences utterly unaffected by the presence of what amount to concentration camps for migrants. Writing in 1938, Winston Churchill once observed that
 

 [I]n modern conflicts and revolutions in some great states bishops and archbishops have been sent by droves to concentration camps, or pistolled in the nape of the neck in the well-warmed, brilliantly lighted quarter ofa prison.... We are sunk in a barbarism all the deeper because it is tolerated by moral lethargy and covered with a veneer of scientific conveniences.

And the fiery Scots Calvinist John Knox, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all agreed that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Resistance to Trump and his cabal of evildoers is not merely politics, it is the religious/moral duty of the entire American public. As the French revolutionary statesman Jean-Antoine-Joseph, De Bry proclaimed, “Citoyens! La Patrie est en danger!” Citizens! The country is in danger!

Citoyens! La Patrie est en danger!

¡Ciudadanos, el país está en peligro!

FACEBOOK'S FORAY INTO CRYPTOCURRENCY: JUST ANOTHER JUSTIFICATION FOR BREAKING UP THE SOCIAL MEDIA GIANT BEFORE IT GOES THE WAY OF ENRON

Summary: Social media giant Facebook plans to venture into cryptocurrency, which it proposes to call Libra. Knowing as we do the dangers inherent in crypto currency such as Bitcoin, and having as we do a not incorrect appreciation of the emission of legal tender, currency, or coinage of any sort as an incident of sovereignty, now may be the time for Congress, as well as legislative and regulatory bodies throughout the world, to squash Libra — and maybe to squash Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg as well.

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Cathedral City, July 21, 2019 – apparently not satisfied with its plundering forays into individual privacy, or with its well-nigh unilateral arrogation of control over a great deal of speech to be found on the Internet, Facebook now wants to take over much of the world monetary system, too.

What has Mark Zuckerberg been smoking?

The obvious answer is, nothing good. Facebook’s cryptocurrency venture, entitled Libra, tells us one of three things. Either Gospodin Zuckerberg is a redeless fool with no understanding of the law of foreseeable, if unintended, consequences, or Gospodin Zuckerberg really is suffering from an undiagnosed case of Asperger’s syndrome which blinds him to the strong negative optics of the Libra venture, or Gospodin Zuckerberg is simply undone by sheer hubris, marvelously defined by late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington as a belief that “to [Gospodin Zuckerberg] the rules just do not apply.”

It is tolerably well understood in the modern world that the emmission of any kind of medium of exchange, whether currency or coinage or some derivative based thereon, is a nondelegable incident of sovereignty. Notwithstanding the multibillion-dollar– a-year credit card industry, even the ubiquitous pieces of plastique we carry in our wallets derive their legitimacy and negotiability from the sovereign backed currencies in which they are denominated. It is also tolerably well understood in the modern world, whether in the common-law world, the civil law world, or in other legal traditions that derive from neither England nor Rome, that that which is an incident of sovereignty is rightly jealously guarded by sovereigns themselves.

Thus, most sovereign entities tend to look with a distinctly jaundiced, gimlet eye upon cryptocurrency and its emitters. Certainly, the use of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency in numerous ransomware attacks and other nefarious activities has left the whole cryptocurrency gray market in distinct malodor, particularly in Western industrialized democracies. Indeed, the use of Bitcoin in such obvious East Bloc ransomware attacks as occurred a few months ago in Atlanta has left both lawmakers and regulators on every continent strongly convinced that the whole Bitcoin enterprise is nothing more than a Kremlin cut out.

Now Facebook, easily the most mistrusted, un-trusted, distrusted social media entity on the planet, wants to get a piece of the cryptocurrency action. Not surprisingly, David Marcus, Facebook’s go-to guy on Libra received a less than friendly reception before congressional committees of jurisdiction when he tried to pitch the idea on Capitol Hill. And. Quite. Right. Too.

Whoever at Facebook came up with the idea that Facebook, with all of its trust and image issues, should want to dip its toe into the cryptocurrency lake, ought to be fired, unceremoniously shown the door, and referred to federal and California investigating and prosecuting authorities. Of course, were the idiot who came up with this redeless proposal Mark Zuckerberg himself, I expect that a great many people in Congress, in the EU Parliament, in the Imperial Parliament, in Dáil Éireann, the German Bundestag, the Japanese Diet, and other legislative bodies in the West, including the California Legislature, would doubtless experience some significant Schadenfreude.

Facebook would be well advised to shit-can the whole Libra project before the wrath of the Western democracies turns upon it so completely as to make its continued existence not merely unsustainable, but an affront to the West altogether.

There are a number of reasons why it would be in Facebook’s well considered self-interest to shit-can Libra. First, Facebook should consider carefully the applicability of the law of reasonably foreseeable, but unintended consequences. If Facebook, whose chairman and CEO is an Ashkenazi Jew, gets involved in a cryptocurrency venture, it will provide fuel to the already dangerously smoldering fires of anti-Semitism throughout the West. Already, anti-Semites are ramping up again the old trope that Jewish financiers secretly control the world.

The last thing Facebook should be doing, given the recrudescence of anti-Semitism during the Trump administration, a recrudescence given form by, among others, Andrew Anglin’s website The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website modeled after Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, is giving credence to the vicious canards disseminated by neo-Nazi anti-Semites in this country and abroad. Given that Facebook has acquired a piss poor reputation for trustworthiness, and has repeatedly acknowledged that it needs to “earn our trust,” while blithely taking steps calculated to demonstrate its utter untrustworthiness, one might think that Facebook would at least consult with people somewhat learned in the history of Western anti-Semitism before undertaking a project like Libra, untransparent and unknowable as it is.

Of course, Facebook’s ill considered foray into cryptocurrency may not be so much a result of a corporate failure to understand the reasonable foreseeability of unintended adverse consequences as it may be a result of some disconnect in Gospodin Zuckerberg’s personality. There has already been speculation in some circles that Gospodin Zuckerberg may fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. Perhaps what we are seeing in Facebook’s latest misadventure is a manifestation of some form of high functioning Asperger’s. Certainly, Gospodin Zuckerberg’s apparent inability to read the optics of a given situation is not inconsistent with undiagnosed high functioning Asperger’s. The last several additions of the Diagnostic and statistical Manual have defined part of the symptomatology of Asperger’s as an inability to discern affect in others, as well as an inability to ascertain emotions, social cues, or the social dynamic of a given situation.

Certainly, Gospodin Zuckerberg’s inability or unwillingness to read the social cues of senators and representatives when he was before Congress, his inability or unwillingness to recognize the strong mistrust and distrust for Facebook that have been manifested throughout the world, and his apparent belief that all will be well if he tenders some anodyne (but to others wholly unconvincing) “apology,” certainly raises probable cause to believe that somewhere some of the synapses in Gospodin Zuckerberg’s brain simply aren’t talking to one another. That’s fine if one is a computer drudge in some Silicon Valley startup who is not expected to have any contact with the world. However, it doesn’t work when you are the CEO of a company worth the better part of trillion dollars. What would be intolerable in an entry-level sales job is even less tolerable when one’s company exercises the kind of influence that Facebook does.

Of course, it may be that all of Gospodin Zuckerberg synapses are talking to each other, and that we are not so much dealing with a case of ignorance of sociopolitical optics or an undiagnosed case of Asperger’s as we are with the sheer hubris that is so often a concomitant of wealth inhering in someone who may not be mature enough to handle it. In that regard, we may justifiably wonder if Mark Zuckerberg and Jared Kushner are not suffering from the same kind of wealth-based millennial hubris that causes them to believe that they possess plenary understanding of how the world works.

Though Gospodin Zuckerberg and Gospodin Kushner may not be devoid of a certain useful cunning, they are both entire strangers to anything resembling true wisdom. Both men manifest a kind of dangerous hubris, that belief, according to Harold Washington, that “to them, the rules do not apply.” Gospodin Zuckerberg may realize that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been a disaster for the West and a tool in the hands of the West’s enemies, but he may think that since he’s “the smartest guy in the room,” he can make a success where others have failed.

Of course, that is what happened with Enron. 

Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay both thought they were “the smartest guys in the room.” Yet, as it happened, a bunch of federal and state prosecutors, collectively smarter than the smartest guys in the room, brought them down, sent them to prison, and brought down Enron as well. That’s history Gospodin Zuckerberg and his management Krewe in Menlo Park would be well advised to remember. If the government could bring down a multibillion-dollar corporation like Enron, staffed as it was by friends of then-Pres. George Dubya Bush, Gospodin Zuckerberg should not underestimate the willingness of Gospodin Trump to burn an asset, or of Gospodin Putin to do the same.

At all events, if I were strategically consulting for Gospodin Zuckerberg and his management Krewe at Facebook, I would advise them to run, not walk away from the temptation to engage in cryptocurrency trafficking. They have aroused a fighting, punitive spirit in Congress, and they should not make haste to tempt fate.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney and former Cathedral City City Councilman who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. His disdain for Facebook derives from Facebook’s obvious preferential option for Donald Trump and for Bernard Sanders. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.

50 YEARS AFTER TRANQUILLITY BASE, A CHANCE FLUBBED: OUR BATTERY IS LOW AND IT’S GETTING DARK:

Summary: The possibility of a manned American mission offworld anytime soon is worse than risible. Any Trump administration effort to send an astronaut back to the moon or to Mars would soon wind up mired in the kind of scandals we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump and the officials of his regime. How far this country has fallen since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the moon 50 years ago today. Indeed, the prospect of sending Americans offworld in this period of our history is risible. There will not be another voyage to the moon in our lifetimes, if ever. There will not be an expedition to Mars, probably ever. Our battery is low, and it’s getting dark.

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CATHEDRAL CITY, July 20, 2019 –- Fifty years ago today, Sunday, July 20, 1969, my parents and I, then five years of age, watched on a staticky black-and-white TV (like most good liberal Democrats, my parents refused to have a color TV in the house, cloaking their frugality as principled protest against the banality of television itself, and did not purchase a color TV until the spring of 1973 so they could see PBS in color) as Neil Armstrong alighted from the lunar module on the surface of the moon and declared his first steps there to be “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

My parents, those staunch liberal Democrats, watched, transported with awe, as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fulfilled the first half of the vow that John F. Kennedy had made before Congress on May 25, 1961 that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” 

The moon landing, reflecting as it did America at her postwar apogee, also reflected our postwar faculty for attempting great enterprises. As Jack Kennedy himself said in his now famous “[w]e choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962: 

 We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things ..., not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Aside from militant tendencies on the fringes of the American body politic, tendencies that, whether on the right or the left, shared, and share to this very day, disturbing philosophical affinities with Mao Zedong’s insistence upon “putting politics in command” of every conceivable issue, the American public was broadly unified around Jack Kennedy’s call to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s. The space program in general, and notwithstanding the traumatic events of 1968, the Apollo program in particular, unified American public opinion the way few things have before or since. We met Pres. Kennedy’s challenge, we rose to it, and that Sunday afternoon we saw it fulfilled, and America’s attention was riveted. What had begun under Dwight David Eisenhower and had continued through the administrations of JFK and LBJ came to fruition in the six month old administration of Richard Milhous Nixon.

Yet, even the Nixon administration, otherwise so morally and ethically challenged, took up the unifying and noble cause of the space program which the Johnson administration had passed on to it. Yet, the Nixon administration did not attempt to arrogate to itself the credit for what its predecessors had set in motion. For all his faults, Richard Nixon never attempted to weaponize the space program and use it as a stick with which to beat his political opponents.

What a contrast there is between Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the last two Republican lawyers to occupy the White House, and the narcissistic, man-baby, traitor Donald J. Trump! If we were to attempt an expedition offworld on the Trump administration, the lead-up to such an expedition would inevitably be mired in scandal before the first circuit was printed, before the first blueprint was drafted, and before the first two pieces of metal or heat absorbing tile could be put together. Whoever would be assigned to oversee the project would inevitably be some sleazeball Trump crony, up to his neck in sketchy business practices, 10b-5 insider trading violations, or some sort of sexual misconduct involving underage girls or cabana boys. Worse still, there would be active Russian cyber interference in the project with a view to ensuring its swift and inevitable failure. And any such failure of the project would inevitably be blamed by The Donald on “obstructionist” Democrats.

In short, the project would wind up being pre-engineered for failure, and it would fail. The project would fail for a number of ineluctable reasons. First, it would fail because The Donald would demand that the project be weaponized to function as some sort of “Star Wars” orbital attack platform. This, notwithstanding the fact that for the last half-century, since the Outer Space Treaty came into force in October, 1967, all the spacefaring nations of the planet have either ratified the Treaty or otherwise agreed to be bound by its provisions. Unfortunately, since we know that the Trump administration doesn’t believe in honoring any of America’s commitments, as illustrated by Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal, we could expect that the Trump administration would withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty for no good reason other than to appeal to the narcissistic, excessive, borderline criminal ego of The Donald, and the treasonable, white nationalist impulses of his uneducated base.

Second, any offworld expedition project would inevitably be hobbled by the kind of scandal that has routinely hobbled other parts of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization which has been the Trump administration since January 20, 2017. The project would soon find itself the subject of comprehensive investigations by the House Oversight Committee, and every other committee of jurisdiction.

The final, and probably most important, reason any manned American offworld expedition will die before it can reach the launching pad is that the Trump administration has managed to divide the American public so badly against itself that there simply is not the political will or resolution to undertake such a project.

When Jack Kennedy called America to summon up the resolution to make a voyage to the moon, American presidents were still believed to be men of probity; their sins, if any, were the venial sins of concealment or of the flesh which more civilized societies, notably the French, are more inclined to accept and forgive in their chiefs then are we Americans, steeped as we are in the worst excesses of evangelical Puritan Nonconformity. Today, however, the sins of our president are sins against nationality, against American values, and against the Holy Spirit itself; they are vast, inexpiable, and unforgivable.

It takes a man -or woman-of probity and of vision to embody the political will and the social resolution necessary to unite the country around a great national purpose. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., described Franklin Roosevelt as having "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Yet, Franklin took us out of the Great Depression and saw us safely through the darkest, sternest days of World War II. That is what a first-class temperament can do. The Donald, unburdened by any pretense of intellect, and possessing the worst temperament of all the 44 men to have served as president of United States, has not got the first scintillum of the leadership skills necessary to lead America back to the moon.

The original American space program succeeded in large measure because we were led by presidents (even Richard Nixon) who were altogether better men than Donald Trump will ever be, and because the space program itself was transparent and was viewed by the American public as noble, uplifting, and incorrupt. Indeed, the space program has brought us unimaginable advances in pure, basic science, in technology, and in advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding. From such amazing artifacts of science as the Mars rovers, one of which, Opportunity, reduced the world to tears with the final message attributed to it: “[m]y battery is low and it’s getting dark,” to such mundane objects as the cellular telephone and nonstick pans, the space program has changed our mode of life for the better.

Unfortunately, the space program has not changed our politics for the better. Any new offworld expedition we may seek to mount will be doomed by the fact that the Trump administration has managed, in just 30 months, to corrupt and make contemptible just about every single one of our public institutions of self-government or of civil society. We are well on the road, on this 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, to becoming a failed state. We are failing because the notoriousest traitor ever to taint our body politic has set us up for failure. The very idea that the United States could mount a successful offworld expedition with Donald Trump and the Republicans anywhere close to the levers of power is simply risible. We had our chance to slip the surly bonds of Earth and dance in space on sunlight-dappled wings, to choose to go to the moon, and to make an attempt on Mars. We have flubbed that chance.
 
Our battery is low and it’s getting dark.

                                                      -xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in a neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. His despair this day is palpable.

“Centurion, I find myself wishing for destruction before we can return.” - The Romulan Commander (played by Mark Lenard) in Star Trek TOS “Balance of Terror”

KAMALA HARRIS’ UNFORTUNATE POLITICS OF GRIEVANCE

Summary: Kamala Harris certainly left an impression after Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate.  She launched an insurgent, buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden.  Biden, like a great British three-decked ship of the line from the days of Nelson, sailed relatively imperturbably through the debate.  However, in the days that followed, both he and Kamala find themselves undertaking damage control.  It is not unlikely that Sen. Harris’ broadsides may have been a tactical, or even strategic, error on her part.  By concentrating on Biden’s past, rather than on America’s future, the California senator may have unwittingly given Donald Trump ammunition he doesn’t deserve.
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There is no doubt that in the Democratic presidential debate last Thursday evening Kamala Harris sailed into battle with a kind of insurgent, almost buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden.

Following up on Cory Booker’s self-referential and pious attack on the quondam vice president, Kamala decided to prosecute an attack based on Joe’s opposition to mandated school busing during the 1970s.

Joe bore up fairly well under the attack, sailing imperturbably through MSNBC’s piss poor excuse for a debate like a great British three-decker first rate line-of-battle-ship from the days of the great Nelson. (Instead of relying upon the grossly overrated Chuck Todd, MSNBC might have been better advised to have retained the services of Commons Speaker John Bercow, who could probably have kept the otherwise fractious pool of Democratic presidential hopefuls in line with a few growls of “ORDER.”)

Uncle Joe’s performance was not after the style of Vice Adm. Horatio, Viscount Nelson of Burnham Thorpe and The Nile, Duke of Brontë, KG, RN, but if Biden’s performance lacked the so-called Nelson touch, it was nonetheless adequate, serviceable, and workmanlike, more after the style of Nelson’s contemporaries Sir Samuel Hood or Cuthbert, Baron Collingwood of Caldburne and Hethpool, not dazzling, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgievich Gorshkov might have put it, “good enough.”

Nonetheless, in a Democratic primary that resembles nothing so much as a Hobbesian state of nature, of “war of all, against all, with life poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Thursday night’s debate ought to have demonstrated to Uncle Joe that he needs to up his game.  Though Kamala’s broadsides damaged his rigging, she didn’t score any hits between wind and water, or below the waterline.  Nevertheless, Uncle Joe would profit from taking some time to reflect on lessons learned.

So, by the same token, would Kamala.

Though her attacks on Vice President Biden might play well in largely white, "progressive," Sanders-left circles in the Democratic Party, I think she may have done herself some real damage among African-Americans who remember Uncle Joe fondly from his service as Barack Obama’s vice president, and among more moderate centrist white Democrats.

By opening up the ancient, 1970s-vintage wound of mandated busing and pouring salt on it, Kamala may have unwittingly given Donald Trump a new treasure trove of ammunition against Uncle Joe if, as is generally expected, Biden remains the front runner in this endless, agonizing, circular-firing-squad Democratic primary.  After all, the divisions opened up by forced busing have largely been ameliorated, or at least healed up and haired over, during the 40 years since busing was such an existential issue for so many Americans.

Of course, like Kamala, I have my own personal memories of court ordered busing in Los Angeles.  I was an elementary school student when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Paul Egly found himself overseeing the desegregation cases in which the LAUSD was embroiled at the time.  Like many children of educated, pale parents, I found myself confronted with the very real possibility that if I stayed in the LA public schools, I could find myself bussed to Compton, Watts, or some other part of South L.A. County with which I was totally unfamiliar in order to meet some court mandated goal of integrating the public schools.

This, notwithstanding the fact that my little elementary school in the Cahuenga Pass, being smack dab in the middle of the entertainment industry, was one of the most diverse and naturally integrated schools in the entire district.  My parents, white, liberal, and withal, of the well-educated demographic that made no bones about supporting George McGovern in 1972, found that their tolerance for court ordered social experimentation ended with their academically "gifted" son. 

 My, and my parents’, hesitancy about busing had little to do with racial insecurity.  But it did have a great deal to do with the fact that, by the metrics of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I was indeed considered academically “gifted.” At the time, gifted kids, along with their intellectually challenged counterparts, represented no more than 4% of the student population in the LAUSD, representing about 2% of that population at either end of the spectrum..  However, as a result of federal and state mandates, together with an “anti-elitist” bias on the part of educational bureaucrats within the LAUSD, far more resources were devoted to “mainstreaming” the intellectually challenged, while the “gifted” kids were largely left to fend for themselves.

When the schools in our area of the sprawling, hypertrophic, overbureaucratized LAUSD were ordered to begin implementing "comprehensive, immediate, integration planning” for the 1973-1974 school year, my parents, seeing the writing on the wall, with all its implications for their "gifted" third-grader, took me out of the public schools, put me in an Episcopal elementary school in Studio City, and unwittingly facilitated my introduction to Conformist religion.  (I’m older now, But like That Other Gay Conformist Pete Buttigieg, I’m still fabulously Episcopalian.)

Many of my parents’ ideological and doctrinaire acquaintances, still caught up in the afterglow of the 1960s, still full of wide-eyed, uncritical admiration for Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution (about which, not speaking or reading Chinese, they had only such knowledge as was filtered to them in the pages of Guoji Shudian’s propaganda periodical China Reconstructs), insisted that every aspect of the personal was political.  Seeing the decision to seek private education for my parents’ “gifted,” if precocious, brat, they rushed to place the worst, most racist possible interpretation on that decision.

Now, I know that the heresy hunters and purists of the Sanders left will excoriate me as some kind of racist, largely on account of my reluctance, as a ten-year-old, to leave what was already a diverse and integrated elementary school seven minutes walk from my home and familiar to me.  For many hyper-liberals of my family’s acquaintance in the Democratic Party at the time, particularly those who did not have children, our familial decision to place me in that Episcopal school represented a betrayal not of our principles, but of theirs.  It’s always amusing how nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to take it on him- or herself, like a number of our more doctrinaire hard-left acquaintances who fell out with us over my placement at St. Michael And All Angels School in Studio City.

So, if Kamala Harris can account for her elementary education by being a beneficiary of busing, I can account for my Conformist Religion by being one of those kids who didn’t want to be bussed to Compton, Watts, or somewhere else in South County.


So, for me, as it does for Kamala Harris, busing still recalls personal wounds.  It still recalls the anguish that can happen when those whom one had thought friends take that Maoist route of defining as political every aspect of one’s personal life, “put[ting] politics in command.” The social and political divisions over busing in Los Angeles played themselves out over more than a decade before finally quieting down.  In Los Angeles, and I expect in most of America, the fight over busing eventually gave way to other, more immediately pressing, issues.  In short, the wounds of busing healed up and haired over.

It is difficult to see, almost 40 years on, what Kamala hopes to accomplish by ripping open those ancient wounds, pouring salt on them, and insisting upon relitigating them.  Busing in Los Angeles, though a well intended social experiment theoretically intended to implement the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, proved to be a disaster in actual practice.  While Kamala Harris may have been the beneficiary of busing in Berkeley, the benefits of busing in Southern California and elsewhere were few and far between.

Moreover, we must insist on looking at events 40 years ago in their context, and stop insisting on applying aggressively retrospective purity testing to unworkable, unsustainable social experiments set in motion by the “least dangerous branch.” There is nothing more counterproductive than retrospective purity testing, and I think it’s safe to postulate that while Kamala may experience a brief bump in the polls, she may lose the support of centrist and moderate Democrats over the long-term.

Additionally, Democrats, be they Bernard Sanders, Kamala Harris, or any other Democratic candidate stumbling over him- or herself to show his or her “wokeness,” should remember that political campaigning is largely conducted not just in the future tense, but in the future conditional tense.  Moreover, by concentrating on utterances in Joe Biden’s — or any candidate’s — past, while ignoring the very real, existential threat represented by Donald Trump and his fellow travelers one runs the risk of losing not just his or her future, but the entire country’s future.

For we know of two things that ought to inform the messaging of every Democratic presidential hopeful this cycle.  First, we must remember and communicate to our constituency at every opportunity the fact that Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, to peace, to democracy, to a rules-based international order, and to freedom itself.  We must communicate to our constituency at every opportunity that Donald Trump is an America-destroying traitor, meriting the swift and severe pains and penalties the United States has historically meted out to those who betray it to enemies national.  That’s the only politics of grievance we should be engaged in for the 2020 election cycle.

Second, we know that we are locked in an existential, even Manichaean, struggle for ownership of America’s and the world’s future.  The Republicans offer us not a future as such, but an atavistic retreat to the world of 1914 or 1933, a time in which, as Winston Churchill has written, “[u]nsatisfied by material prosperity the nations turned restlessly towards strife internal or external.” 

Contrariwise, Democrats know that in an expanding future, in which women hold up half the sky, and in which invidious distinctions of color, religion, race and ethnicity, sex, sexuality, and gender, have lost their power to divide and to enthrall, and in which an aroused world acts in concert to contain the existential threat of global climate change and to act as responsible stewards of what the Book of Common Prayer calls "this fragile earth, our island home," we have no choice but to overcome nameless and unreasoning fear, and to come together quickly, for our good and the good of the planet.

But we cannot attain that future if, as Kamala Harris so foolishly insisted upon doing last Thursday night, we insist upon looking backward while prosecuting a politics of ancient grievance.

I’ve known Kamala Harris since she was District Attorney in San Francisco.  I was hugely taken by her insistence that we should not so much be “tough on crime,” but “smart on crime.” I thought then, and I think now, that Kamala is a very smart and admirable woman.  I thought she made an effective Attorney General of California, and I have been favorably impressed with her performance as a United States senator.  Thus, I was, and remain, deeply disappointed by her appeal to a politics of grievance.

That’s the kind of shit we expect from Donald Trump, not from the woman who wants to be his successor and to lead this nation back to correct and honorable government.

I had expected better of the senator whom I had supported, to whose campaign I had contributed, and for whom I had volunteered.

Girlfriend, get your shit together!

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and has a smidgen of experience in politics.  He is very disappointed in Kamala Harris, from whom he had expected so very much better than a politics of ancient grievance.  As a gay man, he has the right to say to her “girlfriend!  Get your shit together!” The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any organization or entity with which he is associated.  Unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.

APPARATCHIKS, BUREAUCRATS, AND CAREERISTS: THOUGHTS ON THE “OFFICIAL” LGBT MOVEMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS

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.

    -xxx-

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.

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.

-xxx-

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.