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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      -xxx-

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

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

KAMALA HARRIS’ UNFORTUNATE POLITICS OF GRIEVANCE

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

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

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

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

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

So, by the same token, would Kamala.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girlfriend, get your shit together!

-xxx-

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

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

Summary: After 50 years of Pride, the bloom is off that rose for an awful lot of queerfolk.  The LGBT civil rights movement, which had seemed so full of promise and excitement, has in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become 50 years after the October Revolution.  In short, the queer nation has become domesticated and endotic, the stuff of political calculus, plundering forays by advertisers, and a source for material by comics and commentators seeking to demonstrate how “edgy” or how “woke” they are, as well as by an “Official Movement” that has taken over the struggle, commandeered its agenda, and defined who is “orthodox” and who is a “heretic” among the queer nation, meriting being written, airbrushed, photoshopped, and deepfaked out of our queer history.

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Cathedral City, June 29, 2019 --Fifty years after Stonewall, while queer academics flay one another alive in sterile, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the–of-a-pin scholastic debates over whether the events at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn half a century ago last night really constitute the beginning of the movement for queer civil rights in this country, or whether Stonewall is just a “convenient white, cisgender, gay male creation myth,” as urged with considerable anger, nay, venom, by certain academic outliers, it is a somewhat melancholy, if inconvenient, truth that for many queerfolk, the bloom may be off the prideful rose.

Of course, the debate over Stonewall’s place in our queer history is hardly new; for years, historians of the American Revolution have been exchanging musket fire among themselves about when the American Revolutionary war actually began. 

There is certainly an argument to be made that the American Revolution may well have begun in 1765, when HM Government, desperately seeking to recoup the costs incurred in prosecuting the Seven Years’ War — which actually began in North America, and which we know as the French and Indian War — of 1756 to 1763, sought to tax the unrepresented-in-Parliament colonies as if they were a part of metropolitan Britain proper.  After all, the Seven Years’ War/French and Indian War had cost Great Britain’s exchequer a staggering amount of money, which Parliament was desperate to recapture. 

It was no surprise, therefore, that Parliament would seek to recoup at least some of that staggering expense of the war from the colonies on whose behalf HM Government believed the war had been fought in the first place.  The leadup to the process by which the British lost America has been well documented in numerous learned monographs, not least of which is Barbara W. Tuchman’s delightful 1984 monograph March of Folly, in which she devotes a chapter of just over 100 pages to explaining and chronicling how “the British los[t] America.”

But if the run-up to the American revolution can be said to have occupied the roughly 10 years between the passage of the Stamp Act, 5 Geo.3, c. 12 (1765) and the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, together with the so-called Intolerable Acts intended to punish and coerce the uppity colonials of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the actual beginning of our national liberation struggle — the event that put the match to the metaphorical powder keg — was the now famous pair of skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on April 18, 1775.  With Lexington and Concord, the run-up to the American Revolutionary War ended and hostilities could be said to have begun in earnest.

Some historians of our queer movement for authentic first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth have urged, somewhat pedantically one thinks, that it is somehow “wrong” to treat the resistance —the prophylactic violence, if you will— to an NYPD raid on the Stonewall Inn in the West Village by a somewhat motley assemblage of drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety gay men and lesbians, as the “beginning,” as it were, of the LGBT civil rights movement as such.

Yet, for all the precursors —all the movements for queer rights that had died aborning, all the isolated acts of resistance by courageous individuals, all the eloquent pleas, all the queer martyrs and martyrdoms, including the three trials of Oscar Wilde— the events which have come to be shorthanded simply as Stonewall have, for better or worse, become the generally accepted Epoch, or starting point, of our queer calendar, much as September 22, 1792 represented the start date of the French Republican Calendar (BTW today is the 12th of Messidor, an 227). 

And, taking Stonewall as that generally well accepted Epoch of our calendar, we may now reckon 50 years to have passed since our Lexington and Concord, since the evening when the New York Police Department, acting out the role of the redcoats, provoked the wrath of those drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety queerfolk whose salutary prophylaxis of violence must have struck the NYPD and straight observers much as the resistance of the train band on Lexington Common must have struck the British regulars under Marine Major John Pitcairn.

And as the regulars retreated in good order on Boston, with the Massachusetts militia taking shots at them from behind every tree and fence along the way, they, like the NYPD at Stonewall nearly two centuries later, must have had at least some inkling that things were about to change, and that the old dispensations must soon pass entirely away.

Lo, it is half a century now that we who are queer and our brethren and sistren have lived with the reality of an ongoing movement for first-class citizenship in the commonwealth.  How far we have come from 1971's Baker v. Nelson, (1972) 409 U.S. 810, in which the Supreme Court held that two gay men’s claim that the Constitution guaranteed the right to marry should be dismissed “for want of a substantial federal [constitutional] question” to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 576 U.S. ____, 135 S. Ct. 2584; 192 L. Ed. 2d 609;  which unequivocally overruled Baker and opened to every same-sex couple in the United States the doors of marriage equality!

Yet, even as much as Obergefell guaranteed to Jonathan and David or to Ruth and Naomi or even to Adam and Steve the liberty of marital contract, an unintended consequence of marriage for queerfolk has been, at least in part, something of an expectation that queerfolk will conform themselves to the dispensations and morés of the larger straight community.  In that regard, our greatest civil rights triumph may, ironically, open us up to all intents and purposes to demands that we all make honest queers of each other by marching down the aisle as soon as, or even before, we have physically consummated our relationships.

In short, it is not unreasonable to ask whether our own scapegrace exoticism, our own reckless fabulousness, our own joie de vivre, is in danger of being lost.  Have we sacrificed upon a nuptial altar our quality of being different enough from our straight neighbors that we can hold up their shibboleths to relentless, critical examination?  More to the point, have we become, fifty years on, in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as left-bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become fifty years after the October Revolution?  More briefly still, are we becoming endotic, and safely assimilated to our straight neighbors?

Certainly, there are worrisome signs and portents that we are becoming not just endotic, but indeed domesticated.  More than 40 years ago, when my parents, who might now be called by the “woke” term “straight allies,” were socializing with gay and lesbian friends on a regular basis, one of their gay friends, a passionate Trotskyite anarchist who had been at Stonewall on That Night, said something that worked its way into my youthful, proto-homosexual brain. 

In sum and substance, riffing on the words of then-still-living Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, my parents’ passionate Trotskyite anarchist said one night at dinner that what was then called simply the gay community should be eternally vigilant against the tendency to develop what Djilas had called a “new class” of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks.  I learned two new things that night.  First I learned about Milovan Djilas and his relationship to also then-still-living Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, and second (and perhaps more ominously) I also got my first inkling of the divisions that were beginning to appear within the queer nation.

For my parents’ friend had spoken prophetically at our domestic dinner table about the dangers implicit in what he saw as an emergent “Official [queer] Movement,” taken over and staffed, as it were, by that “new class,” which in due course would arrogate to itself the power to define the goals, agenda, and ideology of the community as well as the punishment of those who do not conform thereto.

Though it would be the better part of another decade before I would acknowledge to myself that I was very much a boy who liked boys, let alone that I had kissed other boys and had found it liberating,  pleasurable, and even joyful; and though the awful reality of the AIDS crisis would for another decade beyond that keep me so far inside the closet that I could see Narnia from its depths, the ominous words our passionate Trotskyite had spoken at our dining table never left me.

Indeed, I soon became aware through unhappy personal experience of how a Djilas-esque “new class,” had emerged to form the “Official Movement” against which my parents' passionate Trotskyite friend had inveighed so strongly at their dinner table.  The personnel of this Official Movement were the kind of mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, bureaucrats, men-and-women-on the make, victory pimps,  star fuckers, and pushers-to-the-front-of-the-line that tend to attract themselves like barnacles, a virus, or a cancer to any movement for social change.  The women and men who made up the personnel of the Official Movement commandeered and arrogated to themselves the setting of our agenda, the “right” to speak for the movement as a whole, and, worst of all, the right to define who was “orthodox” and who was a “heretic” within our queer civil-rights effort.  Consequently, the Official Movement was nothing if not highly territorial. 

Moreover, the Official Movement tended, rather like the early Christian church, to present a united front to the outside, to those who do not share its belief structure.  However, if the early church presented a united front to heathens and pagans, it was sorely divided against itself.  Arian against Catholic, monophysite against orthodox, East against West, Alexandrian against Constantinopolitan, and on and on.  Similarly, the Official Movement, for all its exterior monolithic aspect, was, and continues to be, sorely divided along lines, among others, of politics, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual expression. 

And each such group within the movement has learned to practice its own particularly parochial or fissiparous form of identity politics and identitarianism, while remaining blissfully unmindful of Charles de Gaulle’s pithy aphorism “[c]omment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?  But, pace mon général, catty debates over Brie, Gruyère, or Roquefort notwithstanding, the Official Movement was remarkably unified in setting its face against any “outsider” who dared to display any kind of independence or initiative, or who departed from the announced agenda of that Official Movement.

Thus, in the spring of 1993, when I took on a challenge to California’s then-gender-specific marriage law, litigating on behalf of the two young gay men who were my clients, the Official Movement turned on me as if I had, in one sweeping and comprehensive blasphemy, denied the existence of Almighty God and the virginity of His mother.  Professional colleagues of mine “ordered,” “instructed,” and “demanded” that I cease to represent these clients and that I not proceed with the litigation of the case.  The media within the community basically blacklisted me; if they covered our case at all, it was a tiny, dismissive bit of filler in the most undesirable inside left page, below-the-fold periodical real estate conceivable.  The then -and still, God help us- Executive Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center chose to speak as scornfully as she could in public about me and my clients.

After all, the doyens and doyennes of the Official Movement took pains to school me, the queer issue du jour was lifting the ban on queerfolk in the military.  Now, having been a Democratic activist since 1972, and having worked in California for Fritz Mondale’s unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and for Evan Bayh’s victorious 1988 Indiana gubernatorial effort, I knew, rather better than the politically unschooled queer boys and queer girls of the Official Movement, many of whom have now gravitated to the Bernard Sanders camp, that “gays in the military” was not an issue with respect to which Bill Clinton would be able to exert any traction whatsoever.  The President’s own Party shivved him on the issue, and Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made it part of their appeal to Republican voters in the 1994 midterms.  I could read the prevailing winds, I could read the whip counts, and I knew that Bill Clinton did not have the votes or the support in Congress to lift the ban.

However, I knew that there was a shift happening in state courts on the issue of same-gender marriage. Though it would be two-plus decades before Obergefell, the courts of the states were starting to look more sympathetically at the case for same-gender marriage.  In Hawai’i, the state Supreme Court, in Baehr v.  Lewin, (1993) 74 Haw. 530, on remand and rehearing, Baehr v.  Miike, (1996) 80 Haw. 341, had, in 1993, ordered the state of Hawai’i to demonstrate a compelling interest in limiting the liberty of marital contract to opposite-gender couples or otherwise lift the marriage ban. 

Thus, when the “emissaries” of the Official Movement had told me and my clients to back off, I had suggested to them that the result of a California state court challenge to our gender specific marriage law might not produce the kind of harshly reactionary result they were anticipating.  My response to their demands did nothing but arouse in the Official Movement a vengeful spirit against me and my clients that has lasted to the present day.

The Official Movement could not or would not seem, however, to distinguish SCOTUS’s backward -looking, homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) 478 U.S. 186, from the much more promising jurisprudence coming out of Hawai’i.  They did not seem to understand or want to understand that a California court would probably do one of two things with our case.  Either a California court would find the Hawai’i decision persuasive, or it would be so taken aback by the very nature of the relief we were seeking that they would deny our petition in a brief, one sentence per curiam decision saying “the petition is denied.” Certainly, I thought then, and I think now, that a California court would not engage in the kind of gratuitous homophobia that underlay Baker v. Nelson, and hold that no constitutional question had been presented.

Notwithstanding the damnifications of the Official Movement, my clients agreed, and we persevered with the case.  Of all of the mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, and bureaucrats of the Official Movement, only one professional colleague took the time to visit with me as one professional to another about the case and the jurisprudential climate in which we were operating.  In our discussions, we arrived at a consensus that the time might be premature, but it was worth taking a flyer even if we were probably ten to 20 years away from marriage equality being taken seriously in either state or federal court and that a national “conversation” needed to occur before straight America could be comfortable with the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the nuptial knot and making honest queerfolk of each other.

Meanwhile, states throughout the country were demonstrating a propensity for what Lyndon Johnson famously called “frontlash,” a preemptive series of legislative strikes against an event which has yet to occur.  Yet, though 31 states wrote some varying form of same-gender marriage ban into their constitutional or statutory enactments, (including Hawai’i, where, in response to Baehr, the Mormon and Roman Catholic churches bankrolled a bigoted and homophobic initiative outlawing same-gender marriage in that state) these homophobic anti-marriage laws had the effect of waking the sleeping dog, which our parents had always told us to let lie. 

As these states proceeded with their frontlash, they raised consciousness not only about marriage equality, but even more importantly, about the issue of authentic, first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth for queerfolk, and as they did so, barriers began to crumble.

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont, in Baker v. State (Vt.  1999) 744 A.2d 864, reopened the whole marriage debate by holding that same-sex couples were entitled to the same rights at law as were opposite-sex couples.  And so, Vermont civil unions were born. 

Frontlash in California, orchestrated by the appallingly reactionary Pete Knight, led to Proposition 22, declaring that “only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognized in California.”

However, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went all in for same gender marriage in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, (2003) 440 Mass. 309, holding that the Massachusetts Constitution mandated marriage equality for same-gender couples. 

In June of that same year, SCOTUS finally, belatedly, recognized that same-gender intimacy is not criminal when it struck down Texas’s criminal sodomy statute in Lawrence v. Texas, (2003) 539 U.S. 558.  

Lawrence knocked out the last prop from the traditional conservative argument that same-gender intimacy tarred the entire queer nation with the brush of unspeakable criminality, which taint of unspeakable criminality justified subjecting queerfolk to the badges and incidents of slavery by denying the validity to queerfolk’s marriages, much as the laws of the antebellum South denied validity to the marriages of slaves.

As queerfolk began to win victories, particularly on the marriage front, the same issue or which my clients and I had been read out with bell, book, and candle into the outer darkness in 1993, suddenly became the new issue du jour, the new “gays in the military” issue of the first part of the 20th century.  Now my clients and I had been an unsung part of that history, a history out of which my clients and I were written, airbrushed, and photoshopped the same way Lev Davidovich Trotsky was airbrushed out of so many pictures showing him with Ilyich and with Josef Visssarionovich on the Kremlin wall (Photoshop not having been invented yet).  The Official Movement was very happy indeed to write, airbrush, and photoshop me and my clients out of the Official History.

Unfortunately, though my clients and I may have been airbrushed, photoshopped, deepfaked, and written out of the received queer history that will be passed on to the next generation of upcoming fags and dikes, I’m not running away to Coyoacán, México, D.F. to be assassinated like Lev Davidovich.  I intend to stay and fight.

For I have no love lost for the queer boys and queer girls and queer non-binaries and queer transfolk of the Official Movement.  I have little patience for Johnny-come-lately mandarins, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, and careerists, for the boys and girls on the make, the chow line crashers, the victory pimps, and -God help us, the star fuckers- who will not bear a hand when there is work to be done, but who make haste to knock everyone out of the way to get to the head of the reception line when recognition or kudos are being doled out.

So, at the risk of seeming as dour, sour, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and humorless as that bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, Bernard Sanders, I don’t see in this 50th anniversary of Stonewall an awful lot of cause for celebration.  Not if what we are celebrating is our domestication and our endoticity.  I fear we are becoming as complacent as the bourgeois Jews of Wilhelmmine and Weimar Germany allowed themselves to become in the years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, warning against complacency, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.

I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mandarins, mavens, movers, and shakers of the Official Movement will soon fall to bickering and fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written, airbrushed, deepfaked, or photoshopped out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about lessons learned and steps for the next half-century.

However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister (and Mussolini son-in-law) Count Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents have been altogether more busy fighting to have a paternity test done than on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Ciano warned, “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.

My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are the product of that unfortunate passage at arms with the Official Movement and the people who make it up, the mandarins, the bureaucrats, the careerists, the apparatchiks, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and —let’s shame the devil and tell the truth— the star fuckers.  They will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall with little real understanding of its implications, its ramifications, or its consequences.  Official Movement people will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had little or no share in making.

People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation at Stonewall 50, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people at gatherings around the country, and then, as the long day completes its journey into night, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in a matter of hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting, all while Donald Trump and his homophobic Russian allies compass the doom of liberal democracy, and by extension, that of the queer nation.

Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when the personnel of an Official Movement muscle their way to the head of the chow line.  So I see little cause to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed, where we are, where we have come from, and the future for which we are fighting.

    -xxx-

Paul S.  Marchand is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and takes a rather dim view of the queer Official Movement which has written, airbrushed, and photoshopped him and his clients out of history.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any Movement, Official or otherwise.  Part of this blog post is taken and adapted from his post of June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, and everything changed for the queer nation.

ON THE DESIRABILITY OF COMPROMISE: JOE BIDEN AND “‘GOOD ENOUGH’ IS BEST.”

By: Paul S. Marchand


Summary:  The propensity of Democrats, particularly Democrats on the so-called Sanders left, to engage in purity tests and circular firing squads has been on full display over the last 48 to 72 hours. Apparently they’ve got their knickers in a knot over the way Joe Biden spoke of the importance of working across the aisle, even with people you differ from, to accomplish good public policy. Sad!

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Cathedral City, June 20, 2019 -- Joe Biden has committed the terrible “sin” of speaking candidly about the importance of working across the aisle, even with persons whom one finds objectionable, to accomplish sound public policy.

His Democratic primary opponents, the Sanders left, and Social Justice Warriors of every stripe have piled on to accuse him of “racism” and to excoriate him for the heresy of having even engaged with segregationist Republicans and Southern Democrats on matters not relating to the enormities of Mr. James Crow.

Such a Puritan posture is counterproductive at best, and destructive of The Democracy at worst.
 
I think I can speak with some credibility on this issue. As a member of the Cathedral City city Council for eight years, I learned the value of compromise and of being willing to listen to good ideas from otherwise thoroughly bad people. Indeed, when I was first elected to the Council, a mentor of mine, the late Desert Hot Springs Councilman Gary Bosworth, reminded me that in municipal governance, the secret to advancing any policy was “being able to count to three,” that is, on a council of five members, being able to reach working consensus on an issue among at least three of the five members.

As a practical matter, being able to count to three meant being able to overcome one’s visceral personal dislike of some of one’s colleagues. Former mayor (the worst and most ineffective in Cathedral City’s history) Kathleen Joan DeRosa and I cordially loathed one another, yet on a majority of issues coming before the city Council, we were able to put our mutual loathing aside and vote the same way. Indeed, the number of 5-0 votes on the city Council stood as a mute testimonial to the ability of all of us to work across a metaphorical aisle.

There was no love lost between me and Kathleen, or between me and the late Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace when he was caught embezzling from the city, and certainly there was no love lost between me and former councilmember Bud England, a compendium of everything so objectionable in this country about evangelical Protestant Nonconformity. Yet on something like 85% of the votes taken by the city Council during my tenure, we were able to find unanimity.

Perhaps that is why I am so upset, nay, offended, by the criticism raining down on Joe Biden for having spoken of his ability to work across the aisle. Apparently, among Democratic purists, particularly pompous Cory Booker, is now a grave heresy to have been able to work across the aisle, even with people whose values one scorns, or with whose Weltanschauung one disagrees profoundly. Apparently, in the new purist left   —particularly the Sanders left–  Weltanschauung, being able to agree with such a person is simply unacceptable, and makes one “racist.”

I took particular exception to New Jersey junior senator and presidential wannabe Cory Booker’s pompous, self-important, un-self-aware attacks on Joe Biden not only because I thought they displayed a lamentable lack of understanding of collegiality —an understanding one would have expected from the former mayor of the largest city in New Jersey— but also because I found Cory Booker’s holier-than-thou Puritanism offputting and offensive to begin with. Frankly, I have had a lot of trouble forgetting or forgiving Cory Booker’s May, 2012 characterization of certain remarks of Pres. Barack Obama as “nauseating.” That’s a kind of Democratic disloyalty that I can neither abide nor tolerate. Pres. Obama deserved better from Cory Booker than he got. Mr. Booker’s pomposity may very well get the better of him as he struggles to command more than one percent of primary voters.
 
 And of course the redeless votaries of Vermont independent Sen. Bernard Sanders — who should not have been allowed to run in 2016 or now as a Democratic candidate — have been gleefully touting their Schadenfreude on social media. Of course, Bernie, who carries a nostalgic torch for the long-vanished Soviet Union, has never been known as one who plays well with others in the senatorial sandbox.

Unfortunately, the criticism coming Vice President Biden’s way seems reflective of the hyper-partisanship, ideological posturing, and purity politics that has become so much a part of the new normal in the era of Donald Trump. While Trump himself has no ideology beyond that of treasonably enriching himself and his family at the expense of the public fisc, many of his supporters are profoundly ideologically driven. Democrats, partially understanding the nature of the beast with which they are dealing, have allowed themselves to become every bit as ideologically intransigent as the Republican self-identified Trump True Believers.

By indicating a desire to work across the aisle with members of the party opposite on mutually agreeable policy formulations, Joe Biden has not preached any political heresy at all. Instead, he has preached the old-fashioned political Gospel according to James Madison and expressed in the Constitution of the United States. Instead of castigating uncle Joe for being willing to call for a return to correct and honorable government, we should be applauding his fidelity and commitment to the vision of the Founders.

The men who came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia had prosecuted to victory the world’s first war of national liberation, who had kept a delicate, chaotic union of 13 states together through through the Confederation period, transcending and triumphing over fissaparous tendencies which might have sundered the infant Republic, finally came together to accomplish what historian Catherine Drinker Bowen referred to, with only a small touch of hyperbole, as a “miracle at Philadelphia.”

Much of what made that “miracle at Philadelphia” possible was a sheer willingness to engage in old-fashioned political horse trading, to compromise, and to arrive at workable, if imperfect, solutions. Flinty, uncompromising, New Englanders and Down-easters found themselves making common cause with urbane man of affairs from New York and the mid-Atlantic states. Stern Calvinist Congregationalists found themselves working with Anglican Cavalier descendents of Virginia and the Carolinas, in an unwonted and unexpected spirit of compromise. Indeed, so strong was a spirit of compromise and accommodation at Philadelphia during that exceptionally humid summer of 1787 that the still-in-force Constitution they produced was innocent of any mention whatsoever of political parties.

Thus, when Joe Biden speaks of working across the aisle, even with individuals whose values he may find abhorrent, to accomplish good and sensible public policy, we should be hesitant, for the Constitution’s sake as well as our own safety’s sake, to excoriate him as if he had violated some doctrinaire, European ideal of revolutionary partisanship and ideological purity.

Yet that is exactly the temptation into which Democrats in this hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, hyperpartisan 2020 primary election cycle are falling. We have apparently bought into the Leninist idea that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, and that the mere idea of speaking civilly to those with whom one differs profoundly on certain issues is, indeed, a political and doctrinal heresy.

Democrats have always been enamored during my lifetime of purity tests, litmus tests, doctrinaire ideological purity, and turning on one another to enforce what any given faction considers to be the “party line.” Buffeted about on every conflicting wind of doctrine imaginable, Democrats fling away the opportunity for victory in search of an ideologically perfect candidate. Bill Clinton was right to suggest that “Republicans want to fall in line; Democrats want to fall in love.”

Perhaps, instead of seeking the perfect candidate, Democrats should seek the best candidate available, the candidate who is “good enough,” if not perfect. In this year when Russians are trying again to subvert the American democratic process, perhaps we should take counsel from the late Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, who, noting the desire of most navies for all kinds of bells and whistles and technological wonders in their weapon systems, responded with the homely aphorism “‘good enough’ is best.”

Instead of seeking the perfect candidate, let us be satisfied with the candidate who is “good enough,” because Sergey Georgyevich was more right than he knew: “‘ good enough’ is best.”

 Postscript: pompous Cory Booker, struggling to break 1% in Democratic primary polling, poured gasoline on the fire in an interview last night on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, when he offered an unbelievably pompous word salad justifying his earlier attacks on front runner Joe Biden.

Now it’s to be expected that also-rans such as Cory Booker would be tempted to try to take out the frontrunner. It’s the price of frontrunner status. However, what made Sen. Booker’s remarks doubly offensive to queerfolk was his condescending, tone deaf, un-self-aware appropriation of the LGBTQ civil rights struggle in the service of his own attacks on the quondam Vice President.

Queerfolk do not need to be lectured to by politicians of color who have been accustomed for a long time to pooh-poohing the reality of the queer struggle for an authentic, first-class place in the American Commonwealth. Too many of these politicians of color reject any form of queer analogy to the African-American civil rights struggle, walling off that protean struggle as the exclusive property of the African-American community.

Yet, what the watchmen on the African-American wall apparently don’t know is that the struggle for full civil rights for queerfolk was already well underway when the Supreme Court rendered its unfortunate decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 163 U.S. 537. Though the queer nation has unabashedly and unashamedly gone to school, as it were, on the strategy and tactics employed by the African-American civil rights movement, neither queerfolk nor African-Americans should ever accuse each other of appropriation, except where Cory Booker tries to appropriate, during Pride Month at that, the struggles of queerfolk in an attempt to legitimate an ill-informed, ill-founded, foolish attack on Joe Biden.

All Cory Booker did last night was to accomplish a further diminution of his already minimal chances of scoring the Democratic presidential nomination next year.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage.  He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, where he learned the value of compromise.  His views are his own, and do not reflect those of the Democratic Party or any other organization with which he is now or ever has been associated.

LITTLE SNAPPERS: THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR IN CATHEDRAL CITY

Summary: Sometime Chief Justice Warren Burger used to let off steam by penning short concurrences or dissents which he called “Little Snappers.” These Little Snappers were usually written for his eyes only, and not filed. They were more intended to assist in his personal offgassing rather than have an influence on the development of American jurisprudence.

Sometimes, here in Cathedral City, events occur which impel me to put fingers to keyboard to address certain potentially problematic issues in the city. Today’s Little Snappers concern some disturbing revelations about the Cathedral City Police Department, the candidacy of Rita Lamb for the open Council seat in in the First Council District, and the disturbing recrudescence of the Berniebro phenomenon in the hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, 2020 Democratic primary.

Our Political Police

According to a June 11, 2019 article in our local Gannett publication, "Cathedral City’s cops are afraid of facing retribution for 'truth telling.'" I call crybaby self-victimization.

Surprisingly for The Desert Sun, reporter Christopher Damien and his editors managed to avoid burying the lede. A few grafs further down the article, however, a rather disturbing revelation appears concerning the apparent political atmosphere within the department:

“[S]everal respondents expressed concern over the ‘current political climate against law enforcement’  and ‘anti-crime [sic], pro-criminal laws.’ Others complained about the proliferation of marijuana. One, misspelling the names of several prominent Democratic politicians[,] replied: ‘Gavin Newsom, Alex [sic] Becerra, Kamila [sic] Harris, and if Jerry Brown continues to seek publicity celibrating [sic] their pro-criminal anti-law enforcement agendas.’”

Now it is generally taken as virtually a given that law enforcement personnel tend to skew strongly conservative in their politics. It is also taken as a given that law enforcement tends to embrace a corporate culture that regards the law enforcement-industrial complex as the curators, custodians, and conservators of what are, or in the view of the law enforcement-industrial complex, “ought” to be the “correct” values of a given society or body politic, values which they see it as their mission to enforce, usually with increased vigor on those communities they see as “cultural dissidents.”

Given the politically and culturally conservative nature of most law enforcement personnel, it is hardly surprising that most of them would break heavily Republican. Thus, it is hardly surprising to see our local law enforcement busily engaged in a travestying the Democratic political leadership of this State.

Add to that the self victimization narrative pointed out in the article, and it’s clear that we have some serious problems with what may well be an excessively politicized police force in Cathedral City. 

Yet, when all is said and done, our cops work for us. We are supposed to be a city with a Police Department, not a Police Department with a city attached. In a community with a substantial number of Democrats, a substantial communidad latina, and a substantial queer contingent, we, its inhabitants, are entitled to live our lives without having to feel constant low-level apprehension that being a Democrat, being Latino or Latina, or being queer will get one crossways with a group of law enforcement personnel who see themselves more as the servants of Donald Trump and the forces of political and cultural conservatism than as apolitical servants of the commonweal and the commonwealth.

From the story as it appeared in our local Gannett publication, we may infer that there are a substantial number of Trump-supporting cops on our force who consider themselves victims because they have been asked to moderate their transports. They should be told that there is absolutely no room for political bullshit of any kind or character in what is supposed to be our apolitical police service. If they cannot or will not conform their conduct to that apolitical standard which we, as inhabitants of Cathedral City, as voters of Cathedral City, and as taxpayers of Cathedral City have an absolute, nonnegotiable, fundamental right to expect, then let them turn in their guns and their badges and depart hence. And if they won’t, then let us apply the Reagan/Thatcher solution and sack the lot.

The Problematic Candidacy of Rita Lamb in the First Council District

Earlier this year, outraged, exorcised, ready-for-a-rumble residents of Cathedral city’s newly minted first Council District were able to bludgeon, as it were, the four surviving members of the city Council into abandoning their idiotic plan to appoint a councilmember (from outside the district, at that) to serve out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Gregory S. Pettis. The Council, after much huffing and puffing, agreed, on a three to one vote, to call a special election in the first district, and to limit the candidates to residents of that district. Only councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, who merits recall for his antics, dissented.

Now that the Council, admittedly by constraint, and admittedly under threat of litigation and potential recall of the entire body, has done the right thing, two candidates have qualified for the ballot. One is former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, a man not only with council experience, but also with experience on other regional boards and commissions. The other is Rita Lamb, a retired schoolteacher who seems, on first blush, to be “perfectly nice.” “Perfectly nice,” that is, until you start taking a look at who is supporting and bankrolling her campaign.

Now most Democrats will piously pooh-pooh the idea of guilt by association, tarring it with the brush of “McCarthyism.” But, for all the piously self-defeating tropes Democrats deploy to shoot themselves in the foot, “they will know you by the company you keep,” or “when a person’s character is not clear, look to that person’s friends.”

On that score, Ms. Lamb’s campaign has already been fatally tainted by her associations. Her so-called press liaison, Miriam Alario, who admins a Facebook group denominated “Cathedral City Neighbors for Transparent Representation,” is a close friend of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olson, and, like her, is running a whispering campaign and a Facebook campaign against Mr. Kaplan with the tag “anybody but Shelley.”

Given that politics tend to be a rather binary enterprise, in which, in a single member constituency, there can only be one winner and a whole shitload of losers, it is fairly evident that the campaign against Mr. Kaplan is making use of all manner of unethical and potentially illegal campaign tactics. This would not be atypical of DeRosa and her supporters. In 2004, when DeRosa ran against her brother-in-law, then-Mayor George Stettler, she set in motion a whispering campaign alleging that he was suffering from dementia.

In subsequent campaigns, DeRosa was fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission for state law campaign finance violations. In short, DeRosa and her loyalists have always been willing to sail very close to the wind. If Ms. Lamb is willing to have such people on her campaign staff, then we may draw some extremely non-recommending inferences about her character and her fitness to serve. We cannot afford a pale political clone of councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, or of the late councilmember Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace after being caught embezzling from the City.

Rita Lamb’s campaign has been fatally tainted, she needs to bow out.

Godzilla’s return, the Revenge of the Japanese-Holdout-on-Pacific-Island Berniebros.

They're baaaaack!

Just when you thought the nastiness of the 2016 Democratic primary had begun to fade, Bernie and his Bros, like marooned Japanese holdouts fighting World War II on lonely Pacific islands long after the Shōwa Emperor ordered the Japanese Armed Forces to stand down and surrender to the Allies, are still waging nasty, fratricidal war against the Democratic Party and against supporters of authentic Democratic candidates who are now beginning to knock him out of second place in the primary contests.

Of course, we knew that Bernie and the Bros would wage what amounted to a terrorist campaign against front runner Joe Biden. Bernie apparently blew several gaskets when polling began to show that Biden had built up a substantial lead. Now that Elizabeth Warren has pipped Bernie for second place in the crowded Democratic primary field, his anger can be expected to be coruscating. To be in third place behind a woman!

Though Berniebros have not yet attacked Sen. Warren the way they launched vicious, misogynistic calumnies against Hillary Clinton, the operative word is YET. Gospodin Sanders is getting the vetting now that none of his starry eyed, redeless, twentysomething supporters were willing to do in 2016. Even the media, which eagerly suspended its critical faculties and failed to perform any kind of due diligence on the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, is now beginning to realize that the loudmouth Leninist has real feet of clay.

Of course, this will cause the Berniebros to swing into full on attack mode, using any form of asymmetric, insurgent political warfare available to them. During World War II, suicidal Japanese charges were often referred to as “banzai charges,” from the Japanese phrase “Tennō Heika banzai,” or “10,000 years to the Emperor.” A Banzai charge was usually the last expression of a forlorn hope, intended to destroy as many Allied lives as possible, while permitting the participants to go out in a blaze of metaphorical glory. As Sanders’s path to any possible Democratic nomination starts to narrow, his Bros will be sharpening their metaphorical bayonets and katana, preparing for the final, forlorn Banzai charge that they hope may confer upon their lost cause some of what noted Japanologist Ivan Morris once referred to as “the nobility of failure.”

But while kamikaze attacks may be enshrouded in a numen of some sort of noble failure, they still do real damage. The kamikaze mentality of the Sanders intransigents in 2016 damaged the Hillary Clinton campaign so badly as to pave the way for the advent of the unbelievably corrupt Donald Trump. Now, three years later, the Berniebros are set to do it all over again. We must prevent this from happening; those who facilitate treason out of spite are traitors themselves. The Democratic Party must stop being “Minnesota nice,” and fight this primary to win.

They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. For our own safety’s sake, we must resist the blandishments of Gospodin Sanders and his redeless Komsomoltsy.

LOSING TOUCH WITH D-DAY

Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, Utah.

Today, these five nouns carry little meaning. When I was in elementary school, however, at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, almost any schoolchild, presented with these nouns and questioned what they had in common, could, without too much help, recite them as the names of the Normandy D-Day invasion Beaches.

Now, as we come upon the 75th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 landings, the memories of Operation Overlord and its related Operation Neptune have faded into a grayscale past. The men (pace ladies, there were no women on the front lines in Normandy on D-Day, save for those of the French Résistance) of that Greatest Generation who stormed ashore that day to open up a new front against the Nazis are passing into eternity at the rate of something like 1200 a day. Soon we shall see their like no more.

When I was a boy, taking those vocabulary quizzes where we were called upon to tell the teacher what Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah had in common, our neighborhood was full of men and women, many of them still in their vigorous 50s, as I am today, who had fought in World War II. Because my neighborhood was part of Hollywood, and because many of my neighbors were part of the Entertainment Industry (and one always applies capitals to those initial letters), a not insubstantial number of them had fought for our erstwhile enemies.

The 1960s and early 1970s were something of a golden age for cinematic descriptions of the Second World War. My neighbors, who had come to the Entertainment Capital of the World were frequently employed by various studios and production facilities as technical advisors, voiceover artists, editors, to say nothing of being in front of the camera, sometimes reprising on the silver screen roles very similar to the ones they had lived during the war. These were the years of such blockbusters as Battle of Britain, Sink the Bismarck, Tora Tora Tora, Patton, and a little bit later, Midway and MacArthur.

And in the Hollywood village that raised me, those men and women in their vigorous 50s often shared with us memories of a war that had receded, but was still fresh and alive in memory, of a war that had left Germany divided, at that time still to be reunified, of the Marshall Plan, and of the opportunities that come their way in Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry. My “village” was in many ways a microcosm of California at its best; it was a place where ancient enemies could become friends and neighbors. It was a place where Japanese veterans who had fought in Okinawa or Iwo Jima could break bread with British veterans of Normandy or the Rhine campaign, who in their turn could quaff Liebfraumilch or stout Bavarian lager with Wehrmacht veterans who had faced the Red Army at Kursk or Stalingrad. In their turn, those Wehrmacht veterans of the Russian front could exchange easy pleasantries with recent Israeli immigrant veterans who had fought their way into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, or veterans of the Free French who had liberated Paris in August of 1944.

These men and women, with their salt-and-pepper hair, their British, French, Asian, or “Mitteleuropa” accents, together with their American counterparts, represented the existential awfulness of war, but even more important, in our “village” in the Hollywood Hills, they represented also the best of the hopeful promise of peace. In our little piece of America, they also represented the two centuries old hope of a “United States of Europe,” in which the ancient quarrels and grievances could be laid to rest, in which the soaring prophecy of the fourth verse of the second chapter Isaiah should be fulfilled, that
 [T]hey shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isa 2:4. 

Those easy days of social interaction, among erstwhile enemies now become coworkers, friends, and neighbors, have also passed very much into eternity. The easy social interactions of those days have been interred with those who took part in them. Today, we have become a different community entirely. Today, it is unfashionable to speak of a “United States of Europe.” Today, instead of thinking about the importance of collective security, instead of acknowledging how astonishingly effective the United Nations has been in preventing another worldwide, all-out, shooting war, we find ourselves retreating into a kind of atavistic, existential posture of prewar confrontation. 

Instead of acknowledging the reality of an interdependent world, in which chaos theory holds the beating of the wings of a butterfly in Beijing can cause hurricanes in Hialeah, and in which the shooting of an Archduke and his morganatic wife on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan can cause what Barbara Tuchman once referred to as “the red edges of war” to spread across the world, creatures like Donald Trump and his cabal of corrupt acolytes wage war against the rules-based international liberal democratic order which the world has struggled to create since the end of the Second World War. 

Instead of considering carefully how a “village” such as the one by which I was raised could help create a climate of acceptance, reconciliation, and peace, Trump and his acolytes and redeless followers have behaved like the bullies who had no place in my elementary school in that “village.” When you went to school with kids whose granddads had fought with the 1st Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Waffen SS division, or with the British 50th division, or with the 82nd and 101st Airborne, or who had served under either Chester Nimitz or Yamamoto Isoroku, or whose dads had stormed into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, there wasn’t a lot of room for the kind of ethnic or nationalist bullying we so often see in schools today. 

My “village,” for a brief shining moment, had transcended much of the ethnic or national insecurity that has become so much a part of modern American life.

Was it for this that the men and women, both behind the lines and in the field, who made Neptune/Overlord a success, who risked life and limb in the last great crusade of our modern time, gave so very, very much? Did we storm ashore at Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah beaches just to return to and reinforce and restore in their fullest and most objectionable forms the dispensations that had obtained prior, not even to 1939, but to 1914?

As the Greatest Generation slips into eternity, and as World War II becomes little more than a greyscale period piece played at by reenactors for weekend pleasure, should we not meditate upon the waste we are laying to their sacrifice, and weep for it?

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. He practices in the adjacent community of Rancho Mirage. Like many Americans, he had family who fought to save the civilized world during the Second World War. Like so many of that great generation, they have slipped into eternity, and he misses them terribly.

ON MEMORIAL DAY, 2019, LESSONS FROM LINCOLN

Summary: Memorial Day usually calls for all manner of bloviating, “patriotic,” stupefying, speechifying from all manner of public speakers who do not realize that Gen.  William T. Sherman was right to declare that “war is hell,” and that “its glory is all moonshine.” Our reflections on this day when we commemorate those who laid the costliest sacrifice imaginable on the altar of freedom should instead be informed by the words of a President who, though a stranger to war at the beginning of  his administration, learned through the four years that separated Fort Sumter from Appomattox, the existential sorrow and sadness of war.

Today is Memorial Day.  Today we will hear a great deal of bloviating on the glories of war, especially from people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, or who avoided service by faking bone spurs.  “War is hell,” Gen.  William T. Sherman (he who redeveloped the hell out of downtown Atlanta) once said, “its glory is all moonshine.” As we remember today those who “laid [the ultimate] sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” let us leave off with the bloviating and the “patriotic,” but stupefying, speechifying.

Instead, let us read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the words of Abraham Lincoln, the American President who, though largely a stranger to war at the beginning of his administration, became far too well acquainted with the existential sorrow and sadness of war in the four years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.

The first text is the Gettysburg address, delivered on November 19, 1863. 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The second text, dated a few days short of a year later, is that of the President’s condolence letter to Lidia Bixby, of Boston, who Pres. Lincoln had heard had apparently lost five of her sons on the field of battle.  Though Lincoln had been misinformed, the sentiments of his letter still make it one of the finest expressions of condolence ever written or proffered.

"Executive Mansion,

"Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

"Dear Madam,

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

"I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

"Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln."

These two texts, coming from the mind and the pen of arguably the greatest of American Presidents, express the reality of Memorial Day better than any canned, carefully scripted, politically calculated, triangulated speech ever could.  They stand out as two of the greatest state papers in the history of the United States, and arguably as two of the greatest state papers ever written in the English language. 

There should be no other words this Memorial Day.