A GOOD NIGHT TO BE A 99 PERCENTER: THE END OF THE BEGINNING

By:  Paul S. Marchand

It was a good night last night to be a Ninety-nine Percenter.
It was good to see mainstream Mainers restore a 38-year practice of election-day voter registration, rebuking the GOP’s consistent efforts to narrow the franchise.

It was good to see voters reject Mississippi’s misogynistic so-called personhood amendment that would have turned women into chattels of the state.

It was good to see the people of Ohio rise in support of public sector workers and their right to collectively bargain, reaffirming what ought to be an unquestionable American truth that our teachers, firefighters, and cops are our neighbors, not our enemies.

After the beating we Ninety-nine Percenters have taken in the last year at the hands of an out-of-control right wing, it was good to see us find our voice and reclaim our power at the polls.

But, as Winston Churchill said after the second battle of El Alamein,  "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The analogy to El Alamein is a compelling one.  In late October and early November, 1942, Axis forces under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel stood just 50 miles from Alexandria.  If they could break through, the way to the Nile, to Cairo, and beyond that, the Suez Canal, lay open.  The only thing standing in their way was the British 8th Army, under Lt.Gen. Bernard Montgomery.

We may be grateful that Montgomery and the 8th Army were victorious at Alamein; the history of our world might have been a much darker one had the battle gone the other way.  Together with Stalingrad and Midway, El Alamein ranks as one of the most consequential battles of modern times.  As Churchill noted after the war: "before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

For the last many years, it has seemed as if we Ninety-Nine percenters had never had a victory.  Again and again, we had seen the playing field tilted against us; banks were bailed out at our expense, only to punish us for having rescued them with the pittances of our pockets.  Reward was privatized while risk was socialized.

We of the 99 percent were blamed for our improvidence in wanting to hold onto the American Dream, while the wizards of Wall Street were routinely rewarded for mediocre performance with end-of-year bonuses that exceeded by orders of magnitude the total lifetime earnings of most of their employees. 

When the “too big to fail” haves and have-mores defaulted on their obligations, it was everybody’s problem; when an average middle class family came up against hard times and needed help with the mortgage, it was that family’s “moral hazard.”

For us in the 99 percent, the hits just seemed to keep on coming.  We were routinely blamed for the shortcomings of others; for Wall Street, an economic downturn was a “correction;” the challenge for Wall Street was to ensure that the burdens of such a “correction” were borne by anybody but those whose incompetence and peculation had caused the “correction” in the first place.

For us, an economic downturn was more than a “correction;” it was a nightmare of deferred dreams, foreclosure fears, credit crunches, and the always uncertain footing that is the ineluctable concomitant of a playing field that was tilted ever more against us with each passing year.  Under such circumstances, was it surprising that so many middle and working class Americans should have been close to despair?

Perhaps that is why last night’s victories, in Maine, in Mississippi, and most importantly in Ohio, feel so good.  If nothing else, they have send a message that we can fight back, that we can say “no” to the ongoing effort of the One Percenters and their right-wing allies to grab all the goodies while leaving us to pay for their profligacy.  Against a right-wing mantra of “no, you can’t,” we of the 99 Percent have once again dared say “yes, we can!”  

For last night demonstrated that as much as we of the 99 Percent can Occupy Wall Street, we can also occupy our polling places, that we do have the ability to hold out, that we need no longer passively tolerate our spoliation. 

The muted rumble of approaching events we began to hear with the Wisconsin recalls is growing louder, and its message is clear:  the once-silent, once-close-to-despair 99 Percent has found its voice.  More importantly, we have found new hope.  Last night was our Alamein.

This is our country; we will occupy it. 
These are our cities, towns, and villages; we will occupy them.

And we will use the power of our numbers and our vote to preserve, protect, and defend what is ours.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, CA, a working city full of 99 Percenters, including himself, even if not everybody in Cathedral City realizes it.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.

FEED THE RICH, TAX THE POOR, TILL THERE ARE NO POOR NO MORE

By: PAUL S. MARCHAND

Let’s blame the poor for being poor.

After that, we’ll tax the poor.

We’ll tax the poor till they have no more.

And then we’ll blame the poor even more.

It may sound like a bad riff on a Dr. Seuss story, but it’s actually the new political strategy being pushed by the American right.

There’s a kind of curiously unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth quality to the way in which the American right has taken out after the poor and middle class in this country.  There certainly seems to be a disposition among the American right to want to turn on its head the lyric from Ten Years After’s classic song “I’d Love to Change the World”  “Feed the rich, tax the poor, till there are no poor no more.”

Commies. Fleabaggers. Freeloaders.  Losers. Malcontents.  Mooches. Socialists.  Scum.  Traitors.  Troublemakers.

We shouldn’t be surprised, only disgusted, to see defenders of the One Percent lashing out with such vitriolic words at America’s middle and working class, and particularly at those millions of Americans who are either living in poverty, on the brink of poverty, or in daily insecurity of their own economic position and status.  America’s One Percenters and their water-carriers in the media and in Congress use, and encourage their followers to use, bullying and hateful words most of their parents would not have tolerated from them as children.

If ever we needed proof that the American right is wrong, we have it now.

Perhaps that unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth anger betokens -- at least among the more perspicacious One Percenters-- a realization that the American middle and working classes have grown tired of being despoiled in the interests of a very few wealthy individuals and corporations.  Perhaps a few of the One Percenters have begun to realize that the days when the Ninety Nine Percent would quietly acquiesce to being treated as an ATM are over.  When a company like General Electric pays no income tax at all, the Ninety Nine Percent’s irritation (to put it mildly) becomes understandable.

Certainly, behind the anger of the American right and their water-carriers should lie a real sense of worry.  Bullies often get worried when their targets begin to hit back.  Like the too-often bullied gay kid in school who one day rounds on his attacker and breaks his nose, a majority of the American public is becoming increasingly disinclined to tolerate the misconduct of the favored few at the expense of the middle and working class many.

Every movement, it seems, has its own series of turning points.  Like the 2011 World Series, whose turning point came in the Cardinals’ miraculous bottom-of-the-ninth rally in Game VI, the Occupy a movement’s turning point may very well have come when Scott Olsen, a twice-deployed Marine veteran, suffered a fractured skull at the hands of the Oakland Police.

For in that moment, millions of Americans who might otherwise have been inclined to dismiss the Occupy Movement as nothing more than a bunch of social undesirables throwing temper tantrums were forcibly confronted with the fact that the Occupy Movement looks a lot more like America than the right wing and too many of the mainstream media would have us believe.  When a decorated Marine veteran becomes the victim of officially-sanctioned violence, Americans sit up and take notice.

Shortly after the injuries to Scott Olsen became national news, a sometime constituent of mine, himself a Marine veteran, observed to me that of all the people the Oakland police could have hit and injured, it had to be a twice-deployed, gainfully employed Marine veteran.  Strike one.  Strike two.  Strike three.  As my former constituent noted to me, the Marines are perhaps most insular and clannish of all our armed services.  “Screw with one Marine,” my former constituent said to me, “and you’ve screwed with the entire Corps, living, dead, or yet to be born.”

What millions of Americans are now confronting is a disturbing reality that at least part of our social structure seems quite prepared to appeal to violence and hatred in order to avert a real conversation about the alarming growth of economic and fiscal inequality in this country.  If we are to avert class warfare, there must be a conversation that does not take as its starting point the idea that the poor are taxed too little and the rich too much.  The conversation also cannot start from Herman Cain’s wrong premise that the poor are to blame for their condition.

Of course, there have been times in our history when blaming the poor was not merely acceptable, but fashionable.  While Herman Cain might have been perfectly happy to live in such a time, he seems to forget that under such a dispensation he himself would have been worse than poor; he would have been a slave.  A society that claims to be Judeo-Christian in its values and outlook nevertheless seems astonishingly forgetful of repeated scriptural admonitions showing God’s preferential option for the poor.

Despite the admonitions of Scripture and even of the better angels of our personal natures, blaming the poor and inciting hatred toward them have become all too common in a society which has managed to go altogether too far toward re-creating and glorifying the inequalities of France’s ancien régime, and which refuses to find any lessons in the collapse thereof .  Like Talleyrand’s Bourbons, the right-wing mockers and abusers of the middle class and the poor seem to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.  

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.

ON THE STUBBORNNESS OF FACTS

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.
  
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.

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.
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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.

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.

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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.

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?

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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.

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.

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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.