WILL OUR INSTITUTIONS SAVE US FROM DONALD TRUMP?

Summary: Will our institutions save us from Donald Trump? There are those who believe that we are so totally fucked that our institutions are too corrupt to save us from Donald Trump. There are those who believe, with undue optimism, that Trump must go down and that we have nothing to worry about. Then there are those of us who believe that Trump can be taken down by our civil society and public institutions of self-government, but that we must work to shore up those institutions and not let them be corrupted by Trump or his supporters. Madison and the framers of the Constitution builded better than they knew, in creating a system of checks and balances. But it falls to us to protect our institutions and to make sure that those institutions can function with the self-confidence and the testicular fortitude needed to bring our current national nightmare to an end.
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"Our institutions will save us from Donald Trump; there is nothing to worry about."

"Our institutions may save us from Donald Trump, but we must be watchful, we must hold our institutions accountable, and we must safeguard them so that they can perform their prophylactic function."

"Our institutions can only save us from Trump if we act strongly to increase their power, being militant and uncompromising in so doing."

"We’re fucked; our institutions cannot save us, for they have been hopelessly and irredeemably corrupted by Donald Trump."

These four soundbites essentially sum up the current range of prevailing opinion about the capacity of the United States and her public institutions of civil society to stand up to the existential menace that is Donald Trump.

The view that we have nothing to worry about, that our institutions will save us from Donald Trump, strikes one as unduly optimistic, given the cultlike mentality of many Trump supporters.

By the same token, the view that we are essentially fucked, and that our institutions cannot save us from a Trump-induced slide into fascism, strikes one as being more despairing than is warranted by the current situation.

A few months ago, we might have been right to adopt such a despairing view. We had been warned by such formidable journalists and commentators as the Russian American Masha Gessen, author of The Man without a Face, a well-received biography of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that, essentially, all was lost. Trump, Gessen assured us, would encounter little if any difficulty in corrupting our public institutions of civil society and self-government.

Gessen warned us that the election of Donald Trump portended an all-but-ineluctable slide into fascism. Yet, as the Trump administration slouches past the 200 day mark (curious that we should be counting the days of the Trump administration as if they were the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad), the trend that seems to be emerging is not of an ineluctable surrender to the fascism represented by the Mussolini wannabe in the White House, but of a Madisonian battle among competing centers of power. Madison’s theory that tyranny would be checked in the United States by the competing, territorial ambitions of separate power centers within the government seems to be experiencing a strong reaffirmation of its basic viability.

For despite the way the presidency has taken on many of the attributes of Byzantine Emperorship, in which the head of state moves in a bubble, less a man than a jeweled effigy onto which a divided people a project whatever inconsistent expectations they see fit, the presidency still remains largely what Madison and the framers of the Constitution intended it should be, a temporary chiefship of one branch of the government, accountable and answerable to the sovereign people referenced in the very first words of the preamble to the Constitution, and more immediately, to the coequal branches of government mentioned in, and deriving their authority equally from that selfsame Constitution.

The Constitution was written in the expectation that competing and conflicting centers of power within the government would act to limit one another. Indeed, our entire constitutional theory can arguably be summed up in the phrase “checks and balances.”

Yet, if Madison and the other framers envisioned those checks and balances as a functioning within the initial textual confines of the three branches of government described and prescribed in the Constitution, they may have nonetheless builded better than they knew. It is almost inconceivable that Madison and the other framers could not have had the prescience to realize that many of the checks and balances they had envisaged would come not only from the clash of competences all three coequal and territorial branches of government, but also from within those individual branches of government themselves.

When, during the Watergate imbroglio, Richard Nixon sought to set the CIA and the FBI at odds against one another, Nixon, a clever California lawyer, realized that the executive branch itself might well have given rise to a whole series of conflicting power centers. As we face a worse crisis than Watergate, in which the evidence seems to be accumulating that we truly have a Manchurian candidate President in the White House, we see the same kind of conflicting power structures and power centers emerging once again within the executive branch.

Certainly, the intelligence community, which in the past has so often been at war with itself, seems to be finding a kind of common ground against the Russophile Manchurian candidate in the White House. Nearly a year and a half ago, when Donald Trump’s candidacy for president seemed like a bizarre a long shot, a piece of guerrilla theater designed to boost The Donald’s ratings on NBC, I predicted elsewhere in this blog that if The Donald got out of hand, and that if The Donald managed to alienate the intelligence community, he might well pay a heavy price therefor.

Now, with The Donald having gone out of his way to insult and piss off America’s seventeen intelligence gathering agencies, and with a full on investigation being undertaken by special counsel Robert Mueller, it becomes easy to perceive the existence of an all-out conflict between the executive and a considerable part of the executive branch itself.

As much as the executive seems to be imposing its own internal checks and balances on Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, the Congress also seems to be awakening to its critical duties of oversight and institutional accountability. Though we saw California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes stoop very close to treason by attempting to interfere with investigatory work of the House Intelligence Committee of which he was chairman, our public institutions — of which Ms. Maria Alexandrovna Gessen was perhaps more ready to despair than she should have been— of self-government rallied firmly against what Nunes was trying to do. Nunes has since been obliged to recuse himself as chair of House Intelligence.

On the other side of the capitol, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, and vice chaired by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, and on which both of our powerful California women, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, sit, took a lesson from Devon Nunez’s misconduct and chose to proceed in a far more upright and bipartisan manner. Both committees are also working to avoid stepping on each other’s toes, or on the toes of the investigation undertaken by special counsel Mueller.

Yesterday, we learned that FBI agents executed a search warrant, on July 26, apparently issuing out of the Northern District of Virginia (the traditional go-to jurisdiction for national security cases), on the Alexandria, Virginia residence of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. All this despite the increasingly desperate efforts of Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov to prevent the investigation into his, and his campaign’s, collusion with the Russian State from proceeding any further.

So, pace Masha Gessen, at the moment the public institutions of self-government and civil society upon which we rely to impose checks and balances and to prevent a lawless president from becoming a dictator seem, at the moment, to be performing their prophylactic and disinfectant function. For, as Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed: “"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." 

Brandeis’s dictum is as applicable to government misconduct as to any misconduct which may occur in the private sector. And as long as there exist strong, Madisonian, public institutions of self-government possessing the confidence and, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, the institutional ego, and the testicular fortitude to shine bright lights into the dark corners of governmental and political misconduct, we may still be cautiously optimistic that our institutions can save us, if we are prepared to hold them accountable, to give them the tools they need to perform their prophylactic function, and as long as we ourselves are militant in demanding accountability.

For there is no doubt that Donald Trump is an evil man, set, if he can get away with it, on undermining the foundations of American civil society, on destroying the credibility of our civic institutions and of our public institutions of self-government. We cannot permit this to happen. It must be prevented by any means necessary.

As a City Councilman, I believed absolutely that the most important requisite for success at any level of government was to ensure that the public could and did have confidence in the integrity of the process not only by which policy was developed and implemented, but also by which the body politic itself was governed by the people’s representatives.

We may thus dare hope that Maria Alexandrovna is wrong, and that our civil society and our public institutions of self-government will stand up to gospodin prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, that they will bring him down, and, to riff on Abraham Lincoln, that this nation, under God, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, will have a new birth of freedom, and correct and honorable government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He served two terms on the city Council there. He is an unapologetic Hillary Clinton liberal Democrat. The views herein are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Of course, the views herein are entirely his own.

IN A TIME OF DIVISION, A REMINDER OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT OUGHT TO UNITE US.

Summary: The United States is the first country in the world to be founded upon a written ideological statement. Across 240 years, the soaring, hortatory, inspiring words of the Declaration of Independence have been for generations of Americans the ur-text for our national consciousness of what it means to be American, of what it means to live in a nation that holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Yet, in a time of division fostered by a crass, Russian-controlled wannabe despot, far too many of us have lost sight of the unparalleled magnificence of vision that called the United States into being.

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It was twelvescore and one years ago, in a blazing Philadelphia summer, that one of the most extraordinary political events in the last thousand years happened on this continent.  A fractious, nervous group of men agreed to declare independence from the colonial power to which they had heretofore owed and borne allegiance. As Abraham Lincoln expressed it 87 years later at Gettysburg, they “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

But now, as we come to the 241st anniversary of that singular event, called into being by a group of men who knew viscerally, that they would, as Benjamin Franklin wryly observed, have to hang together or they would certainly hang separately, we seem to have lost our American faculty for hanging together. We seem to have lost sight of and lost touch with the clear-sighted, magnificent vision that emboldened the men (and women, pace Abigail Adams) of that summer of 1776 in Philadelphia.

We have lost sight of Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop’s vision of America as “a city upon a hill,” watched by the whole world. Instead, a minority of the American electorate, taking advantage of an electoral college system conceived in slavery and dedicated to the protection of the Peculiar Institution as it existed in the 1780s, has inflicted upon us a corrupt, Russian-controlled wannabe despot under whose malign misgovernment, America is rapidly ceasing to be that city on a hill, watched and admired by the whole world.

If one may be forgiven a reference to the history of Russia, that country which seems to have affected in a bloodless conquest of our city on a hill, Donald Trump bears a resemblance to the worst of the Romanov Russian emperors. Lacking the drive and judgment of a Peter the Great, the intellectual vision of a Catherine the Great, or even of the humbleness before God (Micah 6:8) of Tishaishii Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645-1676), Donald Trump stands out as a combined simulacrum of the Emperor Pavel (Paul) Petrovich (r. 1796-1801) and his father Emperor Peter III (r. January-July 1762): spoiled, entitled, arrogant, paranoid, narcissistic, and such generally bad men that both had to be physically eliminated to ensure the security and survival of the Russian state.

To remind ourselves that we are the proud inheritors of that magnificent vision which called forth a great nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and remind ourselves that we are the heirs of those men and women who dared to take up arms against the enormities of the British Crown and by opposing, end them, I incorporate in this post the entirety of the Declaration of Independence, urgently commending every word of it to your reading. As the words of the collect appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Sunday closest to November 16 urge us, let us “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”



In Congress, July 4, 1776.

THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE 13 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
                                           


Georgia
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

North Carolina
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn

South Carolina
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts
John Hancock

Maryland
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross

Delaware
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

New York
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris

New Jersey
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple

Massachusetts
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery

Connecticut
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire
Matthew Thornton

THE SADDEST MEMORIAL DAY IN HISTORY

SUMMARY: our Memorial Day, that sacred day when we remember and rededicate ourselves to the calls of social justice which hundreds of thousands of our countrymen fought and died more than 150 years ago, has been profaned this year almost beyond redemption. It has been profaned by a lewd man, a coarse man, a wicked man, a man conceived in bigotry and awash in treason.

America’s wars have always had about them a sense of social justice, waged as they have been by American fighting men and women of every sort and condition imaginable on this planet. What makes America an extraordinary nation is her diversity, her astonishing ability to be a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels have no meaning, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, Jew, and the Muslim, all serve together, in the same uniform under the same flag, by the same appellation.

Donald Trump does not understand social justice; he rejects diversity, and he sees America as just one of a league of ordinary nations. On this Memorial Day, when the sadness is so deep no tears can come, we must resist this man with all the strength and all the perseverance God has given us. Let us say an unequivocal “no” to the wannabe dictator, and let us not be found wanting in this hour.

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Memorial Day is about social justice. From its beginnings as a celebration among South Carolina freedmen of the lives of the Union troops who had died to save the union and extirpate the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery, Memorial Day has become a time to remember all who have laid what Abraham Lincoln, in his immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby, referred to as “costly sacrific[es] upon the altar of Freedom.”

For all the tacky, jingoistic excesses into which our memorials for the fallen have sometimes veered, we have never until now allowed our pride and gratitude to suffer profanation.

Until now.

If last year we could still dare to hope that we were living in an America in which the arc of our moral universe, though long, nonetheless bent toward justice, the passage of a year has bereft us entirely of that hope, instead reminding us that America is no longer a shining city on a hill but rather part of the league of ordinary and disreputable nations.

We have managed to profane everything about America that had been good, decent, true, aboveboard, honest, worth crossing oceans for, and worth laying down our lives for. We accomplished all this by allowing a vulgar, crass, gross, coarse, wicked, traitorous man to steal the presidency with the active assistance and collusion of Bernard Sanders and the Russian State.

Because we have managed to profane so badly what Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop once famously described as that city on a hill on which lay the eyes of a watching world, we Americans, those who have borne arms for this country and those who have not, find ourselves grappling with a sadness so deep no tears will come.

Has it come down to this? Did our American fighting men and women, particularly the estimated 1.4 million who laid that most costly and ultimate sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom, do so in order that America might be governed by a downright moron, by a gibbering idiot whose basic loyalties to America and to the West are open to the greatest question?

What an insult Donald Trump has been to our sacred dead! His performance at the recent NATO and G-8 summits has been likened to that of a drunken tourist. He has managed, perhaps in furtherance of instructions from Kremlin, to drive such a wedge between the United States and Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a rally in Munich, was moved to pronounce what may have been the epitaph of NATO, telling her Bavarian audience that Europe could no longer rely on the US or the UK to help provide for the defense of the continent.

In short, Donald Trump has given the Kremlin everything it has been seeking since 1949. I will leave for another time the particulars of the betrayal which Donald Trump, his supporters, and those of Bernard Sanders, have been responsible.

For now, however, I will content myself with the observation that the current occupant of the White House, along with his organized crime family, represents a searing repudiation of every American value we have been raised to hold dear.

 War has few, if any upsides, but for the United States, the minute pearl of consolation we have always been able to draw out of the rough oyster of war is that every one of America’s conflicts has had the effect of incrementally precipitating the American body politic toward greater inclusion, toward forming a more perfect union in which all men truly are created equal. Our wars have always had an implicit social justice dimension to them.

Yet the current occupant of the White House, together with his organized crime family, scoffs at the very notion of social justice. With his open and overt racism, the current occupant of the White House demonstrates that he is truly “a man of the 50s:” a man of the 1850s.

Yet to scoff at social justice, or to scoff at environmental justice, and to scoff at the idea of any kind of justice, which the criminal in the White House has done so often, is openly and notoriously to declare that one is willfully, knowingly, volitionally, out of touch with the values we consider integral to our American way of life.

In every one of America’s wars, those who laid down their lives in the service of this country laid down those lives, at least in some measure, in the service of a vision of America as that city on the hill upon which rested the eyes of all people, of America as the exceptional nation, of America as the nation that had transcended the ancient quarrels and rivalries and tribalisms of the ancestral lands from which we all migrated, even Indians.

Our fallen did not face foreign shot, foreign shell, and foreign steel, bear foreign plagues, foreign pestilences, and foreign afflictions in the service of an ordinary nation. Our American fighting men and women did not march and countermarch in the service of European dynastic quarrels over a few acres of Silesian snow or a few French fortresses.

What has sustained us has been our sense of ourselves as an extraordinary nation, as a nation called into being as a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels were no more, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim, could fight together in the same uniform, under the same flag, for the same country, under the same common appellation. Our diversity has been our greatest strength, and it continues to be expressed in our original and true national motto “E Pluribus Unum,” of many, one.

Yet the current occupant of the White House scorns the diversity that has made this nation truly extraordinary and exceptional. Instead of seeing America as melting pot or, in a more modern understanding, as a tossed salad, the current occupant of the White House sees this country through a Russian lens, as a squabbling congeries of antagonistic tribes, unfit for self-government, but fit rather only for rule by an autocrat, preferably of Muscovite derivation.

On this Memorial Day, we Americans have a stark choice. We can either accept and normalize the sinister, malignant views of the wannabe dictator in the White House, turning our backs upon the sacrifice of the 1.4 million Americans who laid the ultimate sacrifice on the altar of Freedom, insulting her memory and setting at naught their heroism and their offering of life itself. Or we can reject the malignant and warped ideals, wrong ideology, and skewed values of the wannabe dictator in the White House. We can say to our war dead that we take up their quarrel, remembering the heart wringing words of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The sadness of this Memorial Day is so deep that no tears will come. Our duty to the fallen is simple. Resist. Resist all our soul. With all our strength. With all our mind. With all our perseverance, as God gives us strength to persevere. We must be equal to the task of building again that city on a hill that cannot be hid, for the whole world is watching. 

The. Whole. World. Is. Watching.

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TREASON WITHIN THE BELTWAY: Joe McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky Were Right

SUMMARY: Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right.  We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers. Last year I warned about the dangers of the systematic betrayal and sellout of this country that seem to be underway at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Though my words were pooh-poohed at the time, particularly by Democrats who were more afraid of being thought tainted by “McCarthyism” then they were of losing what might be an existential election in our history, my fears have been borne out. Every policy undertaken by the Trump administration has been tainted with treason. The policy direction of the United States under Donald Trump is not in America’s interest, but that of Russia. The revelations of the nature and extent of Trump and his associates’ connection with the Moskovsky Kremlin are rapidly approaching critical mass for probable cause to believe the treason has been committed and that Trump and his personnel have committed it. Trumpism, as I warned last year, is treason.

Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right.  We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers.

In June, 2016, I posted in this blog a warning that Trumpism is treason. The better part of year later, my warning has been vindicated and largely borne out by events. The amount of aid and comfort which has flowed from the Trump, or should I say Trumpov, administration to the Kremlin has been astonishing, frightening, and, thankfully, the subject of increasing scrutiny by the media. By the media, whom gospodin Trumpov has insistently characterized in Leninist terms as “enemies of the people.”

Last June, I suggested that gospodin Trumpov’s uncritical support for Brexit was intended to provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin’s ongoing Kriegßpiel against the West, to the Kremlin’s effort, underway since 1949, to fracture the Atlantic alliance and the generations long project of European unity that was French statesman Robert Schuman’s lifework.

I suggested also that gospodin Trumpov’s ongoing and continuous critique of NATO, and his uncritical admiration for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, together with his “policy” formulations on the American position in Asia were all intended to affect a diminishment of American stature, American authority, and American power, not only in the region but also worldwide.

To these ominous and lowering warning signs we may now add a further and much more comprehensive bill of particulars.

The steady drip, drip, drip of revelations concerning the contacts of people in or close to the Trumpov administration, including quondam National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Reichsleiter Jared Kushner, Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, campaign advisers Paul Manafort, J.D. Gordon, and Carter Page, Trumpov sons Uday and Qusay (Donald, Jr. and Eric), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, and Trumpov dirty trickster Roger Stone, with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Russian banking/business interests, or agencies of the Russian government itself, has continued, slowly accumulating toward a critical mass which would justify any federal grand jury in the country in returning a true bill of indictment for treason against some, or all, of the senior leaders of the Trumpov administratsiya. (Since we appear to have been the victims of a hostile takeover, we may all have to start learning to Russianize our vocabulary.)

In short, we have been betrayed at the highest levels by those who now occupy the highest levels of government in this country.

As Thomas Jefferson once put it, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

THE BORDER WALL: By insisting upon building a foolish and useless border wall along the Mexican border, Trumpov and his administratsiya have managed single-handedly to degrade our relationship with México to the point of rupture. Relations between the White House and Los Pinos are at a low point not seen since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Victoriano Huerta. The prime beneficiaries of any rupture between the United States and México are, of course, Beijing and the Kremlin. The red Chinese and the Russians will be happy to occupy the vacuum engendered by the diplomatic falling out between Washington City and México City engineered by Trumpov and his alt-right racist, Russophile, supporters.

TRUMPCARE: The Republican effort to roll back Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known, is nothing more than a gratuitous effort to undo one of the cornerstones of Barack Obama’s legislative legacy. However, by depriving millions of Americans of healthcare, the administratsiya not only condemns those millions of Americans to sickness and possible death, but it also provides aid and comfort to the Kremlin in the process. It is in Russia’s state interest if millions of Americans are too sick to participate in the American economy or to stand watch at the walls of the West. A sick America is a weak America. A weak America is one that lacks sufficient strength to withstand the lascivious oglings of Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man, with whom, Rudyard Kipling once warned us, we should make no truce.

THE END OF INTERNET PRIVACY: The extent to which the Kremlin benefits from the end of Internet privacy could not be more clear. By permitting Internet providers to sell the search history of subscribers, the Trumpov administratsiya has extended an engraved invitation to phony business concerns fronting for Russian intelligence, or to American law enforcement, to buy from Internet service providers information which would otherwise be barred to them by American trade regulations or, in the case of American law enforcement, by the Fourth Amendment.

THE DONALD’S UNCRITICAL ATTITUDE TOWARD VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH: Gospodin Trumpov’s unwillingness to say anything at all even slightly critical of the Russian strongman strongly suggests, to the point of probable cause to support criminal prosecution, that the allegations contained in the so-called Steele dossier are at least partially true, and that the Russians have assembled a considerable amount of kompromat on gospodin Trumpov which renders him susceptible to blackmail, and thus to Kremlin control.

THE DONALD’S CURIOUS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: If insulting our neighbors immediately to the south was not bad enough, The Donald’s insulting behavior toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands as yet another demonstration of his status as the Kremlin’s poodle. Our relationship with the Bundesrepublik has been a foundation of our foreign policy for nearly 70 years. Indeed, our commitment to the Atlantic alliance and our till-recent wholehearted support of the European unity project have been part not only of our foreign policy, but also of the foreign policies of the rest of the world as well. By behaving toward Chancellor Merkel like a wiseguy from a Mafia protection racket, gospodin Trumpov has not only demonstrated his fundamental lack of respect for our Atlantic alliance partners, but also his fundamental preferential option for the thug in the Kremlin. If this does not give aid and comfort to the Russian state, then nothing does.

THE DONALD’S HOSTILITY TOWARD CRUCIAL AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS: Now, a certain reasoned skepticism toward the institutions of American civil society is not, in and of itself, treasonable. One may criticize the judiciary if one disagrees with the reasoning of a judicial opinion or with the proclivities of a judicial nominee. But what one must not do, particularly not if one occupies a high-ranking post in the executive branch of the government, is to attack the legitimacy of the judiciary per se. By attacking federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, impugning his integrity because the Hoosier-born judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case is of Mexican heritage, and by attacking “so-called” District Judge James Robart for ruling against him in Washington v. Trump, gospodin Trumpov has given aid and comfort to the Kremlin through his outrageous contempt of court, by which he intended to, and did, call the legitimacy of the Courts of the United States into question.

In addition to attempting to delegitimize the Courts of the United States, The Donald has also given aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom worldwide by attacking the American media, one of the freest and most fearless in the world. The freedom of the American press is one of the greatest, noblest attributes of our society, its freedom to speak truth to power is an essential component of American liberty and formidable to tyrants only. Once again, attacking the legitimacy and the critical structural role of our media does nothing to help the American people, but instead gives a boost to Vladimir Vladimirovich and his Kremlin thugs.

One could go on with a lengthy bill of particulars against gospodin Trumpov and his administratsiya; at the risk of sounding like Soviet show trials prosecutor Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky, every single thing this administration does is touched by and tainted with treason and betrayal. If there are “spies, saboteurs, and wreckers” at every level of the federal government, it is only because gospodin Trumpov and his associates have worked to place them there.

But as much as there are indeed spies, saboteurs, and wreckers at every level of government in the United States and the West, Americans still don’t like to contemplate that possibility. Indeed, Democrats, members of my own party, have been so conditioned over the last 60 years to reject and oppose anything that smacks of “McCarthyism” that the administratsiya and their Republican fellow travelers on Capitol Hill and throughout Washington City have managed to co-opt “McCarthyism” into their arsenal, using it as a weapon to try to shut down any efforts by Democrats or left-leading media to call the nation’s attention to the systematic treason that is being perpetrated inside the Beltway.

Because we have been so conditioned to reject anything that smacks of “McCarthyism,” we Democrats tend, when confronted with allegations that we are involved in some sort of so-called witch hunt, to go into a crouch and piss all over ourselves, floating away on waves of our own fear pee, terrified of being thought complicit in “McCarthyism” or witch hunting. Our reluctance to embrace the hard teaching that Joe McCarthy was right to be worried about subversion (even if his methodology and execution were morally blameworthy), or the equally hard teaching that sometimes subversion is real, and that it extends to the highest levels of government, crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

When the Donald openly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, that should have been an immediate disqualifying moment. His party either lacked sufficient courage or sufficient fundamental loyalty to this country to tell The Donald that he could no longer be their standard bearer. Though Trump’s call was accurately characterized at the time as manifesting criminal intent, the GOP chose to put party over country, to put the Kremlin over the Capitol, to all intents and purposes running up the Russian flag over the Capitol building and Trump Tower.

Despite such obvious GOP disloyalty to this country to invite Russia, and of course WikiLeaks to commit plundering, criminal forays into the DNC, into Hillary Clinton, and, indeed, into the email accounts and Twitter feeds of loyal Americans everywhere, the Clinton campaign was too fearful of the decades of “anti-McCarthy” conditioning to which Democrats had subjected themselves to take the gloves off and proceed to destroy Trumpov so comprehensively that The Donald would have been a grease spot on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower by the time the proceedings were over.

Instead, Hillary let herself be guided, nay, misled, by the counsels of cowardice which preemptively equated any attack on gospodin Trumpov with McCarthyism and witch hunts. The Clinton campaign knew or should have known that the weapon of “McCarthyism” would be deployed against them no matter what they did. Indeed, WikiLeaks and the traitor Julian Assange --who have never had anything at all even slightly unkind to say about Russia or Vladimir Vladimirovich– were quick to deploy exactly such a weapon.

What Hillary and her campaign staff should have done would have been to take a leaf out of the Republican book, coming out forthrightly with a ringing declaration that the country was in danger, and that Joe McCarthy had indeed been right.

By pulling their punches, by not exploiting the endless opportunities Trump had given them to shape the narrative, by constantly letting themselves be put on the defensive, the Hillary Clinton campaign managed to lose an election they were overwhelmingly favored to win by every single polling outfit in the country.

But the piss poor performance of the Clinton campaign is not our subject. The fact remains, as has been suggested hereinabove, that we have been, and are being, betrayed and sold out at the highest levels. The direction of American policy is not in America’s interest, but in Russia’s. We may only hope that before this country slips away from us entirely, our besieged and beleaguered institutions will rally against the Russian traitor and usurper currently residing in the White House.

This country faces an existential crisis.

John Benoit, An Appreciation

Summary: The death of Fourth District Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit came as a shock to the political community in the Coachella Valley, but sadly, not as a surprise. In a year in which we have been bereft of such people as Glenn Frey, Prince, and Carrie Fisher, we in our Pleasant Desert must add John’s name to that doleful litany. If 2016 sucks, we find ourselves forced here to embrace the suck, swallow hard, and say goodbye to John Benoit.

Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit died earlier this week. His passing offers a curious parallel to the experience of his predecessor in the Fourth Supervisorial District seat, Roy Wilson, who also died in office.

I first met John Benoit in early 2003, when as a newly elected and installed City Councilmember for Cathedral City, I made the semi-obligatory pilgrimage to Sacramento to attend the League of California Cities orientation for incoming elected city officials. Part of my task while there was to introduce myself to the various elected officials in the Assembly and the Other House representing Cathedral City.

Among them was then-Assemblymember John Benoit, representing an adjacent district to my own.  Though one of my colleagues was at pains to out me to the Republican Assembl member as a liberal Democrat, her effort to stir up animosity between us backfired. As I left John’s office, leaving my impatient colleague in the corridor outside, John and I quietly assured each other that on matters where common ground was possible, he would be happy to work with me and my colleagues.

That was the beginning of a political friendship between we two Francophones that lasted until John’s death. We both had discovered that, at least in his office in Sacramento, the American tradition, inherited from our British forebears, of political civility and bipartisan cooperation was not yet dead.

In due course, John left the Assembly after being termed out and then, when Roy Wilson passed away, leaving an empty Fourth Supervisorial District seat, John was the logical choice to succeed him. John resigned his then-seat in the state Senate and returned to the Valley to take up Roy’s mantle.  When the time came for John to seek election to the seat for a full term in his own right, I was happy to offer him my support.

I did so because, notwithstanding the partisan tribalism that has come to infect our national politics, my experience with John at the state and local level had been positive, beneficial, and informative. Though a number of local Democrats took exception to my crossing the aisle to support John’s candidacy, I did so because I felt that he had demonstrated a pragmatic ability to listen to, and work with, Democrats at the local level. It was my pleasure, during the supervisorial campaign, to offer John such counsel as I could in his race.

When John came up for reelection in 2014, I was happy to support him again, though I was heavily pressured by local Democrats to support termed-out Assemblymember Manuel Perez. I again opted to proffer my support to John because I had formed a good working relationship with them, because he was a known quantity, and, above all, because his district staff looked like California. By that, I mean that his district staff literally included all sorts and conditions of Californians. Native American, Anglo, African American, Latino, straight, queerfolk, Republican, and Democrat alike. I could not say the same thing about Manuel Perez when he was a member of the Assembly.  For me, as an openly queer man, the diversity of John’s office staff spoke volumes about the authenticity of his commitment to represent the entirety of his richly diverse constituency.

Moreover, John’s constituent services were top drawer. One never had the feeling that constituent services were only available to contributors, to fellow Republicans, or to members of a particular favorite ethnic or identity grouping. John’s offices did constituent services the way constituent services are supposed to be done; and having referred more than one client to Supervisor Benoit’s office, I was pleased by the reports that came back to me from them.

As County Supervisor, John managed that increasingly rare feat in local politics; he was, despite his Republican affiliation, truly “trans-partisan” in his approach. By “trans-partisan” I mean that he was able to transcend partisanship and the political tribalism that have marred our country so badly in recent years. In my working with John, even when he was in the Legislature as a partisan official, he could find common ground with even a liberal Democrat on issues that were simply too important to see through a partisan lens.  After all, potholes don’t take a blind bit of notice of the partisanship of the driver whose day they ruin.

On issues of partisan politics, we could disagree agreeably, sparring with each other but never descending to ugly personal issues or angry triumphalism. And when we sparred, we remained terrible friends and amiable adversaries.

It was a pleasure to have been able to number John Benoit among my friends. I shall miss him terribly.

Requiem Æternam Dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.

CHRISTMAS, CELEBRATION OR REBUKE TO SINNERS?

Summary: Christmas is always a conflict at this time of year. Is it a celebration, or a rebuke to sinners? This Christmas, as we await with bated breath coming of an authoritarian, nay, Fascist, regime in Washington, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that it must be both.  Our Savior called us to repentance and self-examination, and he also called us to a gospel of radical inclusiveness in which we love our neighbors as ourselves.  To live that kind of gospel is necessarily to foreclose the approach of Donald Trump and his supporters, an approach that finds expression in exclusion, in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Today we recall that Jesus came into the world not only to reconcile us to God but to recall us sharply from the errors which made necessary this altogether singular divine intervention in our human history.

It’s Christmas.

This year, as on just about every year of my adult life, I find myself retreating to my office, on the theory that in a silent office, with no phones ringing, no mail delivery, and no other interruptions, I might be able to get some work done.

What began as an ad hoc need to find some time to do some ordinary work back at Christmas, 1989, has become very much a shibboleth since then. It is, I suppose, by way of saying “Bah, humbug!” to a crassly commercialized time of conspicuous consumption is beginning advances every year a little bit further into the liturgical season of Pentecost.

This year, I find in the Christmas season, or at least in the way we Americans do Christmas, less to celebrate than ever before. I find myself cringing at the way Donald Trump and the Republican Party have managed to appropriate the phrase “Merry Christmas,” turning it into a war prize in the annual phony culture war that  ineluctably crops up at this time every year since that fascist Bill O’Reilly invented a so-called war on Christmas in order to boost ratings for Fox News.

Now, the Trump people have taken “Merry Christmas" and turned it into an ugly, triumphalist war cry, intended to remind everyone that in Donald Trump’s ‘Murica, we had all better be prepared to toe the line, or else.

Yet, despite the temptation that rises unbidden in my mind to respond to every “Merry Christmas,” Trump-tainted or not, with a snarl of “Bah, humbug!” I find myself confronted every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with visible reminders that this day is supposed to be something different.

Seeing yesterday a homeless man crossing an intersection near my office, wending his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other, it came home to me forcibly that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God.  God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God.

And seeing that homeless man, I also remembered the words of the Lucan infancy narrative, and their powerful description of a couple caught up in the bureaucratic toils of an occupying power in an occupied territory who had, when the time came for the Blessed Virgin Mary to be delivered, no place to lay their heads.

Across more than 2000 years, the Lucan infancy narrative, with its central, profound theme of the paradox of power pouring itself into powerlessness, has become and remains one of the most precious possessions of the Western, nay, Christian mind. It is a story known to the entire Christian Republic. It tugs at our heartstrings, because it awakens in us a sense of compunction and compassion for the baby Jesus in the manger. It speaks, in that sense, less about awe then about “aww.”

Yet, perhaps we should bring more awe to our understanding of the story. As the shepherds in the fields gaze with awe upon the infant God in the manger, so, too, should we tell the story of those blessed events in tones of hushed awe, for the Savior of the world is at hand, come, let us adore Him!

But, in rejoicing at this climactic act of divine intervention in human history, we should not allow ourselves to believe that we in any way have deserved this offering of divinity. For we do not deserve anything of our own merits, lost as we are in Original Sin, a sinfulness ever more obviously on display since November 8.  What we see, instead, is a love offering, made by a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior. 

For if the world were not lost in sin, it would not have been necessary for God to pour God’s very essence into human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ.   In that regard, the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas stands as much as a rebuke as anything else. Because, in truth, the world has always organized itself very much without reference to the love to which God calls all of God’s children. Indeed, when we consider the events of November 8, 2016, in the United States, we are forced the conclusion that not only does the world organize itself without reference to the teachings and the faith to which God calls us by becoming Incarnate from the flesh of the Virgin Mary in Jesus Christ our Savior, but that in this sinful society, we have chosen to organize our world in flat defiance of the radically inclusive love of God and neighbor for which the suffering Savior was willing to die on the Cross. 

The faith which we profess and confess as Christian people, both individually and as a Christian Republic, is about faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love, summed up in the radical inclusiveness which we Christians are called to witness and live not only in the Christmas season, but also on every day of our lives. Instead, we seem to have embraced a faith based upon hate, radical exclusion, and ugly triumphalism.

In the new climate in Donald Trump’s America, we find ourselves emboldened to embrace the worst aspects of our originally sinful natures; to turn our backs upon the strangers among us, to ignore the clear command of God that we should have a preferential option for the poor, to belittle women, to treat queerfolk as some kind of dangerous, “icky,” Other, and to treat our Muslim brothers and sisters, Abrahamic People of the Book, as subversives within our midst, meting out to them the same treatment Adolf Hitler’s Germany meted out to its Jews.

This is much the same kind of world into which Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, consigned there because his parents had no place lay their heads. And indeed, what would the judgmental partisans of Donald Trump have thought a teenage girl traveling through Roman Palestine in the company of an older man to whom she was not married?  Add to that the fact that Mary and Joseph were undoubtedly someone on the brown side, and you have a recipe for a terrifying application of America’s of original sin of racism.

For most Americans, confronting the Lucan infancy narrative without benefit of the context or pre-knowledge of 2000 years of retelling, would no doubt arrive at a number of negative, typically American, conclusions.  Our American would probably assume a “distinct hint of tint” in this teenage girl and her older boyfriend, whom he would no doubt assume to be the baby-daddy of her unborn child.  Our Americans would probably conclude, based on their itinerant status and inability to find lodging, that Our Lady and Joseph were some kind of homeless freeloaders, seeking to benefit from “the hard work of their betters.” In short, without the pre-knowledge and context of those 2000 years of Christian retelling, our American, whether a supporter of Donald Trump or, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, of Hillary Clinton, would probably see Our Lady and Joseph as common welfare cheats.

Yet, the same Jesus Whose birth is so poignantly recalled to us in the Lucan infancy narrative is nonetheless the same Jesus who shares with us the parable of Dives and Lazarus somewhat later in Luke’s Gospel, at 16:19-31, when he reminds us, in a rather pointed terms, of the dreadful fate that awaits those who are not prepared to do right by the poor.

For Christians who may have convinced themselves that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky, pace John Lennon, or who may have embodied Baudelaire’s now classic dictum that “the devil’s greatest trick is convincing the world that he does not exist,” the narrative of Dives and Lazarus, freighted as it is with an implicit command to do justice by the poor and to withhold invidious judgments against them, has become a truism devoid of any real meaning.

Yet, as we brace ourselves for the impact of an administration that proposes to govern America by, for, and in the interests of, the wealthiest among us, that believes that they are appointed by God to comfort the comfortable and to afflict the afflicted, the Christmas message could not be clearer or more pointed.

Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable. He came into the world to comfort the afflicted, and to call the comfortable, whom his prefigurer, St. John the Baptist, had called a “brood of vipers,” to repentance. Jesus did not come into the world to reaffirm in their fullest form the prevailing dispensations of the day. Instead, he came to upset the metaphorical applecart. He came to call the world to a new dispansation: a new commitment to love, a new preferential option for the poor, and a new commitment to works of charity and mercy.

For Jesus reminds us that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34).  For it’s worth recalling, in these days of self-satisfied, pharisaical Christians, that if the world had not been utterly lost in sin in those days, it would not have been necessary for God to become Incarnate that we might be reconciled to him.

In these last days, about which Jesus warned us “there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders,” (Matt 24:24) we must unhesitatingly bear witness to the true God and the true Christ, Who came among us at Christmas time in great humility to lead all the world to that passionate God Whose passionate love for us is never more passionately on display than in this holy season of the Incarnation.

The Savior of the world is at hand! Come, let us adore him!

PEARL HARBOR AT 75: WHO DARES TO CONTEMPLATE THE HORRORS TO COME?

I can run wild against the British and the Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, I have no expectation of success.
       -Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku

Tora! Tora! Tora!
       -Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941

“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
      -Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
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“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.

Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.

My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.

By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.

It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.

Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”

For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.

But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.

At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.

But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.

As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.

Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”   to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.

Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.

Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.

At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.

For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?

As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?

75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.