By: Paul S. Marchand
It has not been a good last few days for serial deniers of reality, either on the front of climate change or in Libya.
Climate change deniers got a rude shock last week when UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, long known as a prominent climate change skeptic, concluded, after extensive study, that existing climate science is correct, and that the Earth’s surface is indeed warming. For his apostasy from the ideological camp of climate denialism, Prof. Muller has become the target of angry right-wing climate deniers out to attack not only the methodology of this study but also his personal integrity.
Now, nobody likes to be wrong. When evidence disproves a cherished idea or hypothesis, our reaction can range from mild disappointment through irritation to outright concealment and spoliation of conflicting evidence. But one of the signal hallmarks of intellectual honesty, per se, is a willingness to modify an idea or hypothesis to bring it into accord with facts.
It was John Adams --defending the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre case in 1770-- who observed that “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Yet, far too many of us find ourselves subscribing to a philosophy that proclaims “don’t confuse me with facts; my mind is made up.” These are the same kind of intransigent people as Oliver Cromwell addressed in his famous 1650 letter to the Scots Kirk: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
So it is with climate change deniers; there is a strong current of both intellectual dishonesty and ad hominem attack in the claims and assertions climate change deniers use to try to advance what has become for them an almost religious faith. A personal example: a couple of years back, when I was serving on the Community, Economic, and Human Development Committee of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the organization was in the process of finalizing a document relating to alternative energy and the challenges of climate change. Needless to say, conservative Republicans on the committee tried --thankfully without substantial success-- to turn the document into a climate change denying tract.
So common are phenomena like climate change denialism that behavioral scientists have coined the term “confirmation bias” to describe the process. Reduced to its simplest terms, confirmation bias is the tendency all of us have to accept information that accords with our own views and to reject that which does not. In that regard, we all tend to match Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.”
Of course, confirmation bias is hardly limited to climate change denialism; we can see it in the hyperventilating, backtracking, obfuscating, and climbing down in which Republican politicians have been engaging in the days since the late Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s Sheikh of Shriek, met his overdue and unlamented end. To hear the GOP tell it, the President either did too much, did too little, failed to include our allies, let our allies take too much of the lead, or just did or didn’t do whatever it was the GOP did or didn’t want done. All they can seem to agree on is if the President did it, or likes it, they don’t approve. Reflexively.
To listen to people like John McCain or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham complain about the fact that on Barack Obama’s watch the United States and our NATO allies were able to get rid of a perennial disturber of peace is to find oneself in an Alice in Wonderland altered reality in which one does not know whether to laugh, to cry, or to rage against the Brobdingnagian stupidity of a political party which seems to have forgotten its 2008 campaign sound bite of “country first.”
Time was, within relatively recent memory, that elected officials of both parties subscribed to an unwritten, but nonetheless powerful, understanding that domestic politics should end at the water’s edge; when Americans are in harm’s way, we may debate over means and ends, but seeking to undercut the execution of the nation’s foreign policy in order to secure domestic political points was considered out of bounds.
Unfortunately, that was then and this is now; times really have changed for the worse. The willingness of certain Republicans and Republican-leaning Democrats/Independents to criticize and downplay the Administration’s success in Libya, especially after the individuals in question had, to use Sarah Palin’s phrase, been palling around with Col. Qaddafi, does not speak well either for their common sense or their patriotism. Apparently, for Republican Obamanators, party now comes before country, not the other way round.
We had not thought it possible that the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States could have undone so many, so badly, so completely, so quickly, as to bereave ostensibly intelligent and experienced people of their basic faculties of commonsense and commonweal. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened. The confirmation biases of the American right now appear so entrenched as to make it impossible for them to accept the overwhelming weight of evidence supporting the science of climate change, while concurrently making it equally impossible for them to accept that the Obama Administration has in Libya actually accomplished a worthwhile and long-standing foreign-policy goal of the United States.
Such invincible error may incorrigible, but we are under no obligation to tolerate its propagation in silence. If the GOP wants to deny not merely the anthropogenicity of global climate change, but also its very existence, and if the GOP would rather be seen as carrying Col. Qaddafi’s water, or rather than that of the United States and the rest of the civilized world, that is their privilege, as it is our privilege to vote them out of office at the earliest possible opportunity.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
IF WE’RE SO POWERFUL, WHY DOES THE GOP KEEP GAY-BAITING?
By: Paul S. Marchand
Imagine how absurd it would be were a court somewhere to rule that, because the President of the United States is African-American, it would be constitutional for a city to pass an ordinance requiring African-Americans to ride at the back of its municipal buses.
More than half a century after Rosa Parks changed history by insisting upon her right to ride at the front of the bus, such a ruling would strike us as inconceivable.
Nonetheless, that is essentially the argument lawyers for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are making in defense of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Essentially, the lawyers in question are claiming that LGBT people have so much political power that we don’t need the courts to protect our rights against anti-GLBT incursions.
The argument is specious on its face; if the queer nation were as powerful as the GOP and their lawyers make us out to be, the entire discussion about first-class citizenship for America’s queerfolk would simply not be happening; our equality as first-class members of the Commonwealth would be accepted as a matter of course, and gay-baiting would be considered as unacceptable as race-baiting.
For when race-baiting or gay-baiting become a tool of legislative policy --as gay-baiting has become part of the right-wing's legislative playbook-- it is emphatically one of the most crucial functions of the judiciary in a government composed of coordinate branches to step in and exercise checks and balances; in a system such as ours, the judiciary serves as a vital safeguard of minority rights against the “tyranny of the majority.”
The history of most American minorities --- to say nothing of the history of American women --- has been one of ongoing efforts to secure first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth. Obtaining first-class citizenship and obtaining political power have historically been closely intertwined in a self reinforcing feedback loop; the more a minority community can overcome structural discrimination against its own membership, the more members of that community can secure the political clout needed to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate the grosser forms of legally sanctioned discrimination.
Consider for example the parallel histories of the Irish- and African-American communities. The success of the Irish effort to integrate into American society, and the relative success of the African-American community to do so can be gauged by the extent to which members of each community have been able to seek political office, up to and including the presidency of the United States. John F. Kennedy established the principle that an Irish Catholic can make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Barack Obama broke the color barrier that had kept a black man from being in charge at the White House.
One of the other reliable indicators of a community’s relative degree of political power is the extent to which it becomes progressively less admissible for mainstream politicians or political parties to advocate against that community’s equality --to engage in race-baiting or gay-baiting, for example. Thus, no sane American incumbent or seeker of political office would seriously argue in favor of restoring Jim Crow, or bundling the descendents of the millions of Irish and Italians who fled grinding poverty for a better life in a New World back to the old countries from which their ancestors came.
But if the measure of any American community’s respective or relative political power is that it is, or comes to be, regarded as inadmissible to target that community for specific and invidious discrimination, then GLBT Americans are far from having the kind of political power that the House Republicans’ lawyers claim we do.
If we had such power, then 31 states would not have written discrimination against our families into their constitutions.
If we had such power, it would be unlawful in every single state of the union to deny LGBT people jobs or access to housing on account of sexual orientation.
If we had such power, it would not have taken almost 20 years to lift the ban on open service in the Armed Forces by queer people.
In short, if we had such power, the GOP would presumably know better than to use us as targets whenever a Republican presidential hopeful wants to throw red meat to the extreme base.
Forasmuch as we might wish it, however, and as much as the trend of history is running in our favor, we still remain one of the few minority groups --- along with Latinos (who many on the right see as presumptively illegal aliens) and Muslims --- against whom many of our American neighbors feel it perfectly legitimate to discriminate with hateful legislation that denies us such basic rights as the freedom to marry and the liberty to be authentically ourselves as out people in the Commonwealth.
Many years ago, I observed that a government which can deny me the right to enter into a marriage -- by that name, and not some other -- with the man of my choice in some measure reduces me to the status of a slave. It is worth recalling that in the antebellum South, slave marriages had no legal validity; the master could break up that marriage at his convenience and sell one or both of the parties down the river.
Because the lack of liberty of marital contract is so very much a badge and incident of slavery, our liberty as queerfolk is necessarily impaired and incomplete; we are barely a single degree removed from the trammels of the Peculiar Institution.
It has been said that the true test of democracy is not how well it protects the majority, but how well it protects the dissenting, outspoken, or unpopular minority. As long as we are considered legitimate targets for exclusion from first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth, as long as a disturbingly large number of so-called socially conservative politicians and wannabes seek to compass our vanishing by any means necessary, and as long as our basic human rights are in danger of being stripped from us by the whim or caprice of a demagogued and inflamed electorate, we will still need the protection of the courts and of the Constitution.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He litigated one of the first marriage equality cases in California, almost 20 years, ago, when it wasn’t fashionable or politic to do so. The views expressed herein are his own.
Imagine how absurd it would be were a court somewhere to rule that, because the President of the United States is African-American, it would be constitutional for a city to pass an ordinance requiring African-Americans to ride at the back of its municipal buses.
More than half a century after Rosa Parks changed history by insisting upon her right to ride at the front of the bus, such a ruling would strike us as inconceivable.
Nonetheless, that is essentially the argument lawyers for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are making in defense of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Essentially, the lawyers in question are claiming that LGBT people have so much political power that we don’t need the courts to protect our rights against anti-GLBT incursions.
The argument is specious on its face; if the queer nation were as powerful as the GOP and their lawyers make us out to be, the entire discussion about first-class citizenship for America’s queerfolk would simply not be happening; our equality as first-class members of the Commonwealth would be accepted as a matter of course, and gay-baiting would be considered as unacceptable as race-baiting.
For when race-baiting or gay-baiting become a tool of legislative policy --as gay-baiting has become part of the right-wing's legislative playbook-- it is emphatically one of the most crucial functions of the judiciary in a government composed of coordinate branches to step in and exercise checks and balances; in a system such as ours, the judiciary serves as a vital safeguard of minority rights against the “tyranny of the majority.”
The history of most American minorities --- to say nothing of the history of American women --- has been one of ongoing efforts to secure first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth. Obtaining first-class citizenship and obtaining political power have historically been closely intertwined in a self reinforcing feedback loop; the more a minority community can overcome structural discrimination against its own membership, the more members of that community can secure the political clout needed to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate the grosser forms of legally sanctioned discrimination.
Consider for example the parallel histories of the Irish- and African-American communities. The success of the Irish effort to integrate into American society, and the relative success of the African-American community to do so can be gauged by the extent to which members of each community have been able to seek political office, up to and including the presidency of the United States. John F. Kennedy established the principle that an Irish Catholic can make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Barack Obama broke the color barrier that had kept a black man from being in charge at the White House.
One of the other reliable indicators of a community’s relative degree of political power is the extent to which it becomes progressively less admissible for mainstream politicians or political parties to advocate against that community’s equality --to engage in race-baiting or gay-baiting, for example. Thus, no sane American incumbent or seeker of political office would seriously argue in favor of restoring Jim Crow, or bundling the descendents of the millions of Irish and Italians who fled grinding poverty for a better life in a New World back to the old countries from which their ancestors came.
But if the measure of any American community’s respective or relative political power is that it is, or comes to be, regarded as inadmissible to target that community for specific and invidious discrimination, then GLBT Americans are far from having the kind of political power that the House Republicans’ lawyers claim we do.
If we had such power, then 31 states would not have written discrimination against our families into their constitutions.
If we had such power, it would be unlawful in every single state of the union to deny LGBT people jobs or access to housing on account of sexual orientation.
If we had such power, it would not have taken almost 20 years to lift the ban on open service in the Armed Forces by queer people.
In short, if we had such power, the GOP would presumably know better than to use us as targets whenever a Republican presidential hopeful wants to throw red meat to the extreme base.
Forasmuch as we might wish it, however, and as much as the trend of history is running in our favor, we still remain one of the few minority groups --- along with Latinos (who many on the right see as presumptively illegal aliens) and Muslims --- against whom many of our American neighbors feel it perfectly legitimate to discriminate with hateful legislation that denies us such basic rights as the freedom to marry and the liberty to be authentically ourselves as out people in the Commonwealth.
Many years ago, I observed that a government which can deny me the right to enter into a marriage -- by that name, and not some other -- with the man of my choice in some measure reduces me to the status of a slave. It is worth recalling that in the antebellum South, slave marriages had no legal validity; the master could break up that marriage at his convenience and sell one or both of the parties down the river.
Because the lack of liberty of marital contract is so very much a badge and incident of slavery, our liberty as queerfolk is necessarily impaired and incomplete; we are barely a single degree removed from the trammels of the Peculiar Institution.
It has been said that the true test of democracy is not how well it protects the majority, but how well it protects the dissenting, outspoken, or unpopular minority. As long as we are considered legitimate targets for exclusion from first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth, as long as a disturbingly large number of so-called socially conservative politicians and wannabes seek to compass our vanishing by any means necessary, and as long as our basic human rights are in danger of being stripped from us by the whim or caprice of a demagogued and inflamed electorate, we will still need the protection of the courts and of the Constitution.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He litigated one of the first marriage equality cases in California, almost 20 years, ago, when it wasn’t fashionable or politic to do so. The views expressed herein are his own.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
IN WHOSE INTEREST? Traveling Perez Road with My Fellow Ninety-Nine Percenters.
By: Paul S. Marchand
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
FOR NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY: THOUGHTS ON OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE
By: Paul S. Marchand
If you’ve been out of the closet for twenty-plus years, and if you live in a community where between a third and two fifths of the population is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, it can be easy to get blasé about National Coming Out Day.
So I’d like to thank House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, the Republican -and Mormon- Congressman from California’s 25th District for reminding me why NCOD still matters. Today’s edition of The Hill reports that McKeon “would rather go without a defense spending bill this year than compromise on allowing military chaplains to conduct gay marriages.” (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/186363-house-armed-services-chair-i-wont-compromise-on-gay-marriage-detainees)
So, let me get this straight, all puns intended.
McKeon would harm and hamstring this nation’s entire defense in order to push his personal anti-queer agenda.
I must be in an alternate universe. I thought it was the Republicans who were supposed to be the hawks, while Democrats were supposed to be dovish wusses, unable to commit to our national defense.
But no, McKeon apparently really does believe that anti-queer bigotry is more important than making sure that our nation has a defense capability.
Whose side is he on?
Certainly not the side of America, that’s for sure.
A Congressional back-bencher, a Mary Bono Mack or a Michelle Bachmann, for example, might be allowed a little leeway in making crazy pronouncements; Bono Mack is considered little more than a lightweight, and Bachmann’s appeal to her like-minded base has little crossover appeal to rational America.
Howard “Buck” McKeon, on the other hand, does not -or should not- have the luxury of crazy talk. As a committee chair, he should understand that his utterances carry weight, and that he owes the nation a higher duty than sacrificing the national security of the United States to his personal, religiously-motivated, ideology.
I guess you could say I’m a little angry.
I’m angry not just because I’m tired of social and religious conservatives insisting that America needs one last minority against whom it should be legal to discriminate; I’m tired of the lavender Jim Crow of Buck McKeon and his ilk.
I’m also angry because Buck McKeon happens to be a senior member of a religious denomination that contributed millions to Prop 8 campaign whose clear intention was to keep us uppity queers as far in the back of the bus as possible.
Finally, I’m angry because I believe the defense of the United States should never, repeat never, be held hostage to ideology so crudely or so cynically. We do have enemies who wish us ill, against whom this nation must be defended. More importantly, we have servicemembers whose livelihoods and well-being depend on passing the defense authorization bill, livelihoods and well-being that are too important a thing to be treated as a political football.
The double standard Mr. McKeon and his fellow travelers apply to their own actions is reprehensible. If a Democratic House committee chair had even suggested holding up the annual defense authorization, even for a compelling and justifiable reason, the Republicans would be screaming “treason,” or worse.
Yet, by McKeon’s lights, the thought of an armed forces chaplain joining Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David is so awful as to justify laying this country open to its enemies and starving its defenders. We would be right to question -and we should question- such a person’s patriotism and commitment to this country, to say nothing of questioning his fitness to serve in the Congress.
Whose side is he on?
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works. The views expressed herein are his own, including his view that Howard McKeon is an embarrassment to the Golden State.
If you’ve been out of the closet for twenty-plus years, and if you live in a community where between a third and two fifths of the population is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, it can be easy to get blasé about National Coming Out Day.
So I’d like to thank House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, the Republican -and Mormon- Congressman from California’s 25th District for reminding me why NCOD still matters. Today’s edition of The Hill reports that McKeon “would rather go without a defense spending bill this year than compromise on allowing military chaplains to conduct gay marriages.” (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/186363-house-armed-services-chair-i-wont-compromise-on-gay-marriage-detainees)
So, let me get this straight, all puns intended.
McKeon would harm and hamstring this nation’s entire defense in order to push his personal anti-queer agenda.
I must be in an alternate universe. I thought it was the Republicans who were supposed to be the hawks, while Democrats were supposed to be dovish wusses, unable to commit to our national defense.
But no, McKeon apparently really does believe that anti-queer bigotry is more important than making sure that our nation has a defense capability.
Whose side is he on?
Certainly not the side of America, that’s for sure.
A Congressional back-bencher, a Mary Bono Mack or a Michelle Bachmann, for example, might be allowed a little leeway in making crazy pronouncements; Bono Mack is considered little more than a lightweight, and Bachmann’s appeal to her like-minded base has little crossover appeal to rational America.
Howard “Buck” McKeon, on the other hand, does not -or should not- have the luxury of crazy talk. As a committee chair, he should understand that his utterances carry weight, and that he owes the nation a higher duty than sacrificing the national security of the United States to his personal, religiously-motivated, ideology.
I guess you could say I’m a little angry.
I’m angry not just because I’m tired of social and religious conservatives insisting that America needs one last minority against whom it should be legal to discriminate; I’m tired of the lavender Jim Crow of Buck McKeon and his ilk.
I’m also angry because Buck McKeon happens to be a senior member of a religious denomination that contributed millions to Prop 8 campaign whose clear intention was to keep us uppity queers as far in the back of the bus as possible.
Finally, I’m angry because I believe the defense of the United States should never, repeat never, be held hostage to ideology so crudely or so cynically. We do have enemies who wish us ill, against whom this nation must be defended. More importantly, we have servicemembers whose livelihoods and well-being depend on passing the defense authorization bill, livelihoods and well-being that are too important a thing to be treated as a political football.
The double standard Mr. McKeon and his fellow travelers apply to their own actions is reprehensible. If a Democratic House committee chair had even suggested holding up the annual defense authorization, even for a compelling and justifiable reason, the Republicans would be screaming “treason,” or worse.
Yet, by McKeon’s lights, the thought of an armed forces chaplain joining Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David is so awful as to justify laying this country open to its enemies and starving its defenders. We would be right to question -and we should question- such a person’s patriotism and commitment to this country, to say nothing of questioning his fitness to serve in the Congress.
Whose side is he on?
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works. The views expressed herein are his own, including his view that Howard McKeon is an embarrassment to the Golden State.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON? How the Religious Right’s War on Science Represents a Threat to the National Security of the United States
By: Paul S. Marchand
Steve Jobs, who died this week, was one of those people Who Change The Way We Do Things. If today we take for granted devices and technology that barely a generation ago seemed the stuff of science fiction, it is at least in part because Steve Jobs helped make it happen.
Thus, one cannot help but notice the irony inherent in the use of Jobsian technology by reactionaries and obscurantists of every stripe whose vision of the world could not be further from that which Steve Jobs articulated, as when one receives an e-mail or a link to some science-damning, flat-earther website.
We seem to be caught up in a headlong retreat from scientific literacy in this country. From the right, we see a climate of scientific denialism that rejects not only the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, but also the reality of Darwinian evolution itself; notwithstanding enormous evidence to support both theories, right-wing denialists insist, contrary to the enormous, overwhelming, weight of the evidence, that climate change is a hoax and Darwin was wrong. Indeed, so great is the right-wing denial of reality that there are actually websites out there denying that the earth revolves around the sun: Copernicus and Galileo were wrong.
On the other side of the political divide, we find a different kind of obscurantism, a sort of post-scientific rejection of what, by now, ought to be the basic commonsense view that vaccinating your children against common childhood diseases is a good thing. Instead, we have so-called empowered parents placing their children and children around them at risk by refusing to agree to simple, basic, sound, prophylactic health measures.
While it might be easy to postulate a moral equivalency between right and left when it comes to America’s headlong retreat from scientific literacy and understanding, the fact remains that much of the blame must go to the religious right and their fellow travelers, who have spent generations trying to convince Americans that there is something evil and suspect in all of that scientific book-learning, in all of that knowledge that seems to be the province of so-called "elites," which has become the pejorative right wing codeword for anyone possessing some degree of advanced learning or education.
Such a rejection of science, whether it comes from the religious rightist (like far too many of the current Republican presidential hopefuls) who rejects evolution or climate change, or whether it comes from so-called empowered progressives who won’t vaccinate their kids because they have listened uncritically to long-discredited, fraudulent, gossip masquerading as good science, has dangerous ramifications for the immediate and long-term national security and interests of the United States.
We would do well to remember that our leadership in the world is very much a function of our long and honorable heritage of innovation, invention, and scientific inquiry. The United States has long been regarded as a place to which people come to do science free from the kind of ideological blinders and fetters which so often oppress scientists in other parts of the world.
When Hitler and the Nazis declared war on so-called Jewish science, the resultant exodus of world-class scientists from Europe to the United States brought to this country many of the men and women who helped make the Manhattan Project a success. By the same token, strong scientific education in much of the United States helped produce a generation of young scientists who also played a critical role in the success of the Manhattan Project. The history of the world would have been much different, and much worse, had Germany been victorious in the race to build The Bomb.
In the years since World War II, particularly after the-kick-in- the-butt humiliation of Sputnik helped jump-start the effort that took us to the moon barely a dozen years after that first Soviet satellite, American innovation, inventiveness, and scientific leadership have helped preserve American preponderance in the world, to say nothing of creating the kind of climate in which Steve Jobs and the other giants of his generation could give rise to a technological revolution of unprecedented magnitude.
During the years when I was in elementary and high school, between the late 60s to the early 80s, the whole concept of scientific, Darwinian evolution was regarded as settled. We did not view Genesis, nor was Genesis taught to us as, a scientific text, even though a part of my elementary and high school education took place in schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church, of which I continue to be a member. We did not have to contend with reactionary preachers proclaiming that “if the science conflicts with the Scripture, the science must be wrong.”
Since then, however, the religious right has been frighteningly successful in implanting in the minds of many Americans a profoundly regressive and medieval view of the sciences. For the religious right, and for far too many politicians who pander to it, science has become not a means for establishing and maintaining American preponderance, but a positive enemy of the faith.
Such a view is dangerous to our national security and national interests, both at home and abroad. The syllogism is simple: America’s preponderance in the world depends upon the America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. It’s no accident that people like the late Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg should have come out of a climate which fosters and cherishes innovation. America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation, depends in turn on ensuring that the next generation of American schoolchildren receives sound scientific education, based upon sound scientific learning and knowledge, and not upon the dogma of any particular religious denomination.
Those in the religious right who would turn us backward, and who would substitute their own denominational dogma for sound science do not --- or refuse to --- understand the clear and direct linkage between our national security and our commitment to ensuring that our children attain the same level of scientific literacy as do children in such countries as China, India, and Pakistan, to say nothing of children in Singapore, Japan, or Germany.
When American schoolchildren test anything less than first in the world when it comes to scientific literacy, the religious right, and their enablers in the political culture, ought to hang their heads in shame. Instead, they proclaim that they are in some way doing God’s work. In truth, they are harming the national security of the United States, they are undercutting our competitive position in the world, and they are leaving our children a damnosa hereditas composed in equal measure of medieval thinking and misplaced faith in American exceptionalism.
Such misplaced faith in our so-called exceptionalism is akin to the story the man who lived in a floodplain. When he was warned that a great flood was on its way, he said “I am a righteous man, so surely God will save me.” As the floodwaters rose, the local Sheriff’s Department sent out deputies in a Humvee to the man’s home. He sent them away when they offered to give him a lift, proclaiming his faith that God would save him. A short time later, as the waters were now two feet deep in his front yard, more Sheriff’s deputies came by, this time in a boat, yet still the man spurned their offer of rescue, proclaiming again that God would save him. A few hours later, as the man was on the roof of his house, a Coast Guard helicopter came by, and again, the man refused their help and reiterated his faith that God would save him. The man drowned. As he arrived at the Pearly Gates, God Himself was there to meet the man, and he rebuked him asking, “why are you here?” And the man replied “you said you would save me and you didn’t.” God replied “you idiot; I sent you a Humvee; I sent you a boat; and I sent you the Coasties in a helicopter. What were you waiting for?”
It was Benjamin Franklin who declared that “God helps those who help themselves.” By failing or refusing to understand the importance of scientific literacy, the religious right --like the “righteous” man drowned in the flood-- has fallen into a dangerous trap into which it would lead the rest of America, the trap of believing that we don’t need to look out for ourselves, that we don’t need to cultivate a climate of scientific and intellectual inquiry, because God will save us from ourselves even when we do nothing.
Rubbish.
Our competitors are outcompeting and outperforming us in indices and areas in which America had been, and still ought to be, the undisputed leader of the world. If the religious right believes that somehow God will save us from the consequences of our own unwillingness to acquire scientific literacy for ourselves and inculcate it in our children, then they are as foolish and disconnected from reality as the flood victim who spurned the Humvee, the boat, and the Coasties in their helicopter.
Until the religious right gets out of the way of scientific inquiry and technological innovation in this country, they cannot in good faith claim to have national security of the United States at heart. Until the religious right stops trying to lead this country backward; until the religious right stops carrying the water for our rivals and potential enemies, they do not deserve a place in the body politic.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity, board, or organization with which he is associated.
Steve Jobs, who died this week, was one of those people Who Change The Way We Do Things. If today we take for granted devices and technology that barely a generation ago seemed the stuff of science fiction, it is at least in part because Steve Jobs helped make it happen.
Thus, one cannot help but notice the irony inherent in the use of Jobsian technology by reactionaries and obscurantists of every stripe whose vision of the world could not be further from that which Steve Jobs articulated, as when one receives an e-mail or a link to some science-damning, flat-earther website.
We seem to be caught up in a headlong retreat from scientific literacy in this country. From the right, we see a climate of scientific denialism that rejects not only the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, but also the reality of Darwinian evolution itself; notwithstanding enormous evidence to support both theories, right-wing denialists insist, contrary to the enormous, overwhelming, weight of the evidence, that climate change is a hoax and Darwin was wrong. Indeed, so great is the right-wing denial of reality that there are actually websites out there denying that the earth revolves around the sun: Copernicus and Galileo were wrong.
On the other side of the political divide, we find a different kind of obscurantism, a sort of post-scientific rejection of what, by now, ought to be the basic commonsense view that vaccinating your children against common childhood diseases is a good thing. Instead, we have so-called empowered parents placing their children and children around them at risk by refusing to agree to simple, basic, sound, prophylactic health measures.
While it might be easy to postulate a moral equivalency between right and left when it comes to America’s headlong retreat from scientific literacy and understanding, the fact remains that much of the blame must go to the religious right and their fellow travelers, who have spent generations trying to convince Americans that there is something evil and suspect in all of that scientific book-learning, in all of that knowledge that seems to be the province of so-called "elites," which has become the pejorative right wing codeword for anyone possessing some degree of advanced learning or education.
Such a rejection of science, whether it comes from the religious rightist (like far too many of the current Republican presidential hopefuls) who rejects evolution or climate change, or whether it comes from so-called empowered progressives who won’t vaccinate their kids because they have listened uncritically to long-discredited, fraudulent, gossip masquerading as good science, has dangerous ramifications for the immediate and long-term national security and interests of the United States.
We would do well to remember that our leadership in the world is very much a function of our long and honorable heritage of innovation, invention, and scientific inquiry. The United States has long been regarded as a place to which people come to do science free from the kind of ideological blinders and fetters which so often oppress scientists in other parts of the world.
When Hitler and the Nazis declared war on so-called Jewish science, the resultant exodus of world-class scientists from Europe to the United States brought to this country many of the men and women who helped make the Manhattan Project a success. By the same token, strong scientific education in much of the United States helped produce a generation of young scientists who also played a critical role in the success of the Manhattan Project. The history of the world would have been much different, and much worse, had Germany been victorious in the race to build The Bomb.
In the years since World War II, particularly after the-kick-in- the-butt humiliation of Sputnik helped jump-start the effort that took us to the moon barely a dozen years after that first Soviet satellite, American innovation, inventiveness, and scientific leadership have helped preserve American preponderance in the world, to say nothing of creating the kind of climate in which Steve Jobs and the other giants of his generation could give rise to a technological revolution of unprecedented magnitude.
During the years when I was in elementary and high school, between the late 60s to the early 80s, the whole concept of scientific, Darwinian evolution was regarded as settled. We did not view Genesis, nor was Genesis taught to us as, a scientific text, even though a part of my elementary and high school education took place in schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church, of which I continue to be a member. We did not have to contend with reactionary preachers proclaiming that “if the science conflicts with the Scripture, the science must be wrong.”
Since then, however, the religious right has been frighteningly successful in implanting in the minds of many Americans a profoundly regressive and medieval view of the sciences. For the religious right, and for far too many politicians who pander to it, science has become not a means for establishing and maintaining American preponderance, but a positive enemy of the faith.
Such a view is dangerous to our national security and national interests, both at home and abroad. The syllogism is simple: America’s preponderance in the world depends upon the America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. It’s no accident that people like the late Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg should have come out of a climate which fosters and cherishes innovation. America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation, depends in turn on ensuring that the next generation of American schoolchildren receives sound scientific education, based upon sound scientific learning and knowledge, and not upon the dogma of any particular religious denomination.
Those in the religious right who would turn us backward, and who would substitute their own denominational dogma for sound science do not --- or refuse to --- understand the clear and direct linkage between our national security and our commitment to ensuring that our children attain the same level of scientific literacy as do children in such countries as China, India, and Pakistan, to say nothing of children in Singapore, Japan, or Germany.
When American schoolchildren test anything less than first in the world when it comes to scientific literacy, the religious right, and their enablers in the political culture, ought to hang their heads in shame. Instead, they proclaim that they are in some way doing God’s work. In truth, they are harming the national security of the United States, they are undercutting our competitive position in the world, and they are leaving our children a damnosa hereditas composed in equal measure of medieval thinking and misplaced faith in American exceptionalism.
Such misplaced faith in our so-called exceptionalism is akin to the story the man who lived in a floodplain. When he was warned that a great flood was on its way, he said “I am a righteous man, so surely God will save me.” As the floodwaters rose, the local Sheriff’s Department sent out deputies in a Humvee to the man’s home. He sent them away when they offered to give him a lift, proclaiming his faith that God would save him. A short time later, as the waters were now two feet deep in his front yard, more Sheriff’s deputies came by, this time in a boat, yet still the man spurned their offer of rescue, proclaiming again that God would save him. A few hours later, as the man was on the roof of his house, a Coast Guard helicopter came by, and again, the man refused their help and reiterated his faith that God would save him. The man drowned. As he arrived at the Pearly Gates, God Himself was there to meet the man, and he rebuked him asking, “why are you here?” And the man replied “you said you would save me and you didn’t.” God replied “you idiot; I sent you a Humvee; I sent you a boat; and I sent you the Coasties in a helicopter. What were you waiting for?”
It was Benjamin Franklin who declared that “God helps those who help themselves.” By failing or refusing to understand the importance of scientific literacy, the religious right --like the “righteous” man drowned in the flood-- has fallen into a dangerous trap into which it would lead the rest of America, the trap of believing that we don’t need to look out for ourselves, that we don’t need to cultivate a climate of scientific and intellectual inquiry, because God will save us from ourselves even when we do nothing.
Rubbish.
Our competitors are outcompeting and outperforming us in indices and areas in which America had been, and still ought to be, the undisputed leader of the world. If the religious right believes that somehow God will save us from the consequences of our own unwillingness to acquire scientific literacy for ourselves and inculcate it in our children, then they are as foolish and disconnected from reality as the flood victim who spurned the Humvee, the boat, and the Coasties in their helicopter.
Until the religious right gets out of the way of scientific inquiry and technological innovation in this country, they cannot in good faith claim to have national security of the United States at heart. Until the religious right stops trying to lead this country backward; until the religious right stops carrying the water for our rivals and potential enemies, they do not deserve a place in the body politic.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity, board, or organization with which he is associated.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
AND SO IT ENDS: The World Hasn’t Ended, only DADT
By: Paul S. Marchand
This morning, after eighteen years of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and after a dozen years of its predecessor, the so-called 123 Words (which began with a ringing declaration that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service,”) the United States finally joined the many other nations that permit LGBT persons to serve openly in their Armed Forces.
GLBT Americans can now serve without lies or concealment, as can their counterparts in the Armed Forces of such nations as the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and twoscore others.
For LGBT veterans, the end of the ban on open service has been a a not unmixed vindication, a belated acknowledgment of the integrity of their service to a nation that was happy to send them into harm’s way, but only at the price of constraining them to fearful silence about the most integral aspect of their personhood.
For those of us who were deterred from pursuing a vocation to service in the Armed Forces -in my case, in the United States Navy- today marks a day of “what ifs.” Some deterred applicants -those still young enough to serve- may well seek to pursue their callings. For those of whose time to serve has passed, the moment is more bittersweet. What if we had stuck it out? What if we had been willing to accept the silence our service would have imposed upon us? As Winston Churchill once wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible Ifs accumulate.”
But for those on active duty, or those who feel a vocation to service, today marks the first day in which their service need no longer conflict with their integral sense of self. In a prior post, I observed that the interpersonal culture of the American military places a premium on truth-telling; the end of DADT resolves the conflict between that all-important virtue of truth-telling and the heretofore critical necessity of remaining closeted in order to serve.
Today, the gay 17 year old pursuing service through Navy ROTC can do so knowing that he won’t be confronted with the 123 Words, as I was at 17 when I walked away from an opportunity for a full ride three-and-a-half year NROTC scholarship rather than live a lie that I had no confidence in my ability to sustain. Today, a motivated lesbian can find a place in the Armed Forces without having to pay attention to the pronouns she uses about her girlfriend lest she fall afoul of DADT.
Of course, on this day when we celebrate the lifting of the ban on our ability to make war and be cannon fodder alongside our straight fellow citizens, I am not unmindful of the irony inherent in the fact that obtaining an equal right to participate as out people in military hostilities should be such a landmark advance for GLBT civil rights. Nonetheless, as I observed at the time the Senate’s cloture vote opened the way to DADT repeal, the fact remains that in a society such as ours, participation in military service remains in many ways a critical index of first-class citizenship.
If there has been any silver lining in the long struggle to lift the ban, it has been that we have before us the example of more than 40 other countries’ experiences with open LGBT service in their Armed Forces. The experiences of our allies in particular have demonstrated that the parades of horribles envisaged by supporters of the ban have simply not materialized. If Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in the U.K., or the Israel Defense Forces can integrate, so can we.
Withal, the world hasn’t ended today, the West hasn’t gone into a sudden, headlong decline today, and America hasn’t collapsed today by allowing homosexuals to serve openly alongside their straight fellow citizens. In due course, perhaps, the example of queerfolk serving openly and honorably in our Armed Forces will help lay the groundwork for that good day when marriage equality becomes a reality: when Ruth and Naomi, or Jonathan and David, will be able to come home from active service to have their marriages recognized throughout the length and breadth of this great nation.
My mouth to God’s ear.
This morning, after eighteen years of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and after a dozen years of its predecessor, the so-called 123 Words (which began with a ringing declaration that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service,”) the United States finally joined the many other nations that permit LGBT persons to serve openly in their Armed Forces.
GLBT Americans can now serve without lies or concealment, as can their counterparts in the Armed Forces of such nations as the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and twoscore others.
For LGBT veterans, the end of the ban on open service has been a a not unmixed vindication, a belated acknowledgment of the integrity of their service to a nation that was happy to send them into harm’s way, but only at the price of constraining them to fearful silence about the most integral aspect of their personhood.
For those of us who were deterred from pursuing a vocation to service in the Armed Forces -in my case, in the United States Navy- today marks a day of “what ifs.” Some deterred applicants -those still young enough to serve- may well seek to pursue their callings. For those of whose time to serve has passed, the moment is more bittersweet. What if we had stuck it out? What if we had been willing to accept the silence our service would have imposed upon us? As Winston Churchill once wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible Ifs accumulate.”
But for those on active duty, or those who feel a vocation to service, today marks the first day in which their service need no longer conflict with their integral sense of self. In a prior post, I observed that the interpersonal culture of the American military places a premium on truth-telling; the end of DADT resolves the conflict between that all-important virtue of truth-telling and the heretofore critical necessity of remaining closeted in order to serve.
Today, the gay 17 year old pursuing service through Navy ROTC can do so knowing that he won’t be confronted with the 123 Words, as I was at 17 when I walked away from an opportunity for a full ride three-and-a-half year NROTC scholarship rather than live a lie that I had no confidence in my ability to sustain. Today, a motivated lesbian can find a place in the Armed Forces without having to pay attention to the pronouns she uses about her girlfriend lest she fall afoul of DADT.
Of course, on this day when we celebrate the lifting of the ban on our ability to make war and be cannon fodder alongside our straight fellow citizens, I am not unmindful of the irony inherent in the fact that obtaining an equal right to participate as out people in military hostilities should be such a landmark advance for GLBT civil rights. Nonetheless, as I observed at the time the Senate’s cloture vote opened the way to DADT repeal, the fact remains that in a society such as ours, participation in military service remains in many ways a critical index of first-class citizenship.
If there has been any silver lining in the long struggle to lift the ban, it has been that we have before us the example of more than 40 other countries’ experiences with open LGBT service in their Armed Forces. The experiences of our allies in particular have demonstrated that the parades of horribles envisaged by supporters of the ban have simply not materialized. If Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in the U.K., or the Israel Defense Forces can integrate, so can we.
Withal, the world hasn’t ended today, the West hasn’t gone into a sudden, headlong decline today, and America hasn’t collapsed today by allowing homosexuals to serve openly alongside their straight fellow citizens. In due course, perhaps, the example of queerfolk serving openly and honorably in our Armed Forces will help lay the groundwork for that good day when marriage equality becomes a reality: when Ruth and Naomi, or Jonathan and David, will be able to come home from active service to have their marriages recognized throughout the length and breadth of this great nation.
My mouth to God’s ear.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a city councilman. He is currently a member of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board. He was one of the first openly gay councilmembers in Cathedral City’s history, and was also one of the first California attorneys to litigate a same-gender marriage case, back in 1993, when it wasn’t on most people’s radar. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not necessarily the views of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board, or of any other entity, board, or commission with which he is associated.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
A WIND AGE, A WOLF AGE, A SWORD AGE, AN AX AGE: Why 9/11 Was More Like June 8, 793 than December 7, 1941.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it has been fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Such an analogy is tempting. After all, millions of Americans living today, my father among them, can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack.
Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy is inapt.
Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.
Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast. On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”
The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.
The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England: “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”
After the events of 9/11, one can easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change: “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”
What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever be lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.
Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda. To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers. Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.
Herein lies the paradox. While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.
By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.
For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping our sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.
By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively. The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.
This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails. While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines. The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.
Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 may merely have been the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age. If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last ten years how to respond, it is because we have not faced a challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.
Our challenge, then, on this tenth anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time. Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.
Second, we must overcome our solipsistic insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have no understanding. As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11. We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere. For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization.
Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in Al Qaeda’s outrages some kind of existential clash of civilizations. Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous. We know from direct observation that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities. We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.
It may be that the coming of the so-called Arab Spring may undo some or all of the appeal Al Qaeda has heretofore had; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated. With Osama bin Laden dead in the Arab world going through a process of revolution not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.
We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova. But ten years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead,may come to an unlamented end. and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved.
Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it has been fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Such an analogy is tempting. After all, millions of Americans living today, my father among them, can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack.
Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy is inapt.
Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.
Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast. On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”
The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.
The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England: “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”
After the events of 9/11, one can easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change: “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”
What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever be lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.
Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda. To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers. Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.
Herein lies the paradox. While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.
By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.
For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping our sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.
By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively. The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.
This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails. While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines. The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.
Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 may merely have been the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age. If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last ten years how to respond, it is because we have not faced a challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.
Our challenge, then, on this tenth anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time. Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.
Second, we must overcome our solipsistic insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have no understanding. As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11. We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere. For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization.
Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in Al Qaeda’s outrages some kind of existential clash of civilizations. Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous. We know from direct observation that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities. We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.
It may be that the coming of the so-called Arab Spring may undo some or all of the appeal Al Qaeda has heretofore had; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated. With Osama bin Laden dead in the Arab world going through a process of revolution not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.
We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova. But ten years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead,may come to an unlamented end. and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved.
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