ATTACK OF THE BULLSHIT PEDDLERS: THE “PROGRESSIVE” ATTEMPT TO FABRICATE AN ANTI-BIDEN NARRATIVE.

Summary: Democrats, who can’t seem to stand prosperity, have foregathered to try to take out the front runner in the hypertrophied, hyperventilating, hyperbolic, Democratic primary campaign. The attempt to fabricate some kind of “Biden is racist/Biden is too old/Biden’s implosion is imminent,” narrative would be risible if it didn’t say such unfortunate things about a Democratic Party that does not seem to have the will to victory

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Like my close contemporaries Barack and Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris, I’m a late bloomer Boomer. Born toward the end of the baby boom generation which ran from 1947 through 1964 —and now, in the eyes of the supercilious millennials who make up the so-called progressive wing of my Democratic Party—  teetering on the brink of antiquity, I find myself realizing that my frame of reference, my weltanschauung, if you will, is more similar to that of Joe Biden, the Obamas, and even that of Kamala Harris then it is to, say, my personal trainer, who was born in the 1990s.

Like Barack, Michelle, and Kamala, together with many other late bloomer boomers, I was experiencing of the not unmixed joys, if one may use such a word, of late adolescence and early adulthood when the digital revolution snuck up on us and mugged us. Those of us who were adolescents or young adults during those years in the late 1970s when the first personal computers had their advent, had spent our youth in a world very much like that of Joe Biden. When we wanted to send a message in writing, we either put pen to paper, we pecked it out on a typewriter --electric if we were lucky enough to have one, manual for most of us. We did our shopping either at brick-and-mortar stores or from the pages of a paper catalog which arrived at our domiciles courtesy of the United States Postal Service. When we wanted to listen to music on demand, we spun platters of vinyl on turntables, or, as the quondam Vice President might put it, on a record player. In my early adulthood, CDs were in their infancy and streaming audio was the stuff of science fiction, along with Captain Picard’s replicated tea, “Earl Grey, hot.” 

The computers and devices on which all of us, even Boomers, depend, have largely changed our Boomer world. Unfortunately, the convenience afforded by our various devices has merely papered over a ravening gap between the generations. Indeed, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, writing the day before yesterday in Politico, observed that 

To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.

Moreover, 

 “The [press corps covering the Biden campaign] view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump. And they were not on the ground in the Midwest primaries for governor races in 2018 in Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin where more moderate and older and more experienced candidates won against young cool left — often people of color — primary opponents.”

The same objection has also been voiced by acerbic political commentator Bill Maher, who from his relative antiquity of 63, has made it fairly clear that he has little patience for the so-called woke left.

And if the Biden camp has felt a certain not unjustifiable disdain for the woke, millennial left, certain parts of that woke left have made no secret of their active loathing for Joe Biden and the moderate majority of the Democratic Party. For example, writing in Truthout not too long ago, woke left activist William Rivers Pitt (born in 1971) turned the quondam Vice President’s debate remark about record players into a racist screed apparently equal, in Pitt’s mind, to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Indeed, the largely Generation-X and millennial commentariat, smugly convinced of their own superiority to all those fusty old boomers and pre-boomers, and secure in their conviction of their own wokeness, has managed to do fairly well in creating a “but his gaffes” narrative of Joe Biden as a “fragile front runner,” and a doddering, superannuated, gaffe prone old man whose candidacy will inevitably collapse of its own age, its own inconsistencies, or its own un-wokeness.

Yet, what all the woke hipsters of Generation-X and the millennial cohort seem not to remember is a rather time-honored truth in politics, as much as in anything else, that youth, skill, and enthusiasm will be defeated by age and treachery. Much of the woke contingent, which, paradoxically enough, seems to profess a curious fondness and loyalty toward Bernard Sanders, the oldest candidate in the primary, seems to overlook the fact that the 40-plus voters who make up the majority of the Biden base are not looking for a candidate who will usher in enormous, transformative change in American society in the next four years. Rather, the 40-plus voters of the Biden base, having learned from bitter experience not to upset the apple cart, are looking for a candidate right now who can, in the words of one commentator of Boomer years, right the ship and get us out of the storm in which the antics of Donald Trump have placed us.

We don’t need, quite frankly, to be lectured by contingent of brats who have not yet acquired the wisdom or the understanding to realize that, as Bill Clinton, a Boomer of 73 now, noted, during his own 1992 primary campaign, that when selecting a standard-bearer, “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Older Democrats, accustomed to having had their asses kicked with the stolen election of 2000, the stolen election of 2004, and midterms and local elections around the country, have begun to feel a hell of a lot less need to “fall in love” with a candidate of absolutely unimpeachable purity on every conceivable issue. Democrats who have begun to see silver threads among the gold or the ebony have learned that sometimes the Rolling Stones were right, "you can't always get what you wanted, but you might find sometimes that you get what you need" if you're willing to hold your nose, swallow hard, and fall in line.

And while we’re still alive, we'll take the pragmatic option. We’ll opt for the candidate who doesn’t necessarily come trailing clouds of transformative, purist, glory. We’ll opt for the candidate with a history of experience; we’ll opt for the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief; will opt for the old guy who’s been around and yet who doesn’t insist on waving his finger in our face and shouting at us all the time, as that tiresome fellow Bernie Sanders is wont to do; while we are still alive, we who are teetering on the brink of an age range will opt for Joe Biden. 

What we Boomer Democrats want, we Boomer Democrats who are teetering on the brink of old farthood, is for the Democratic Party to get its act together. We want the Democratic Party to recover what it had in 2008 and 2012, the will to victory. We're tired of being told our mettle is bred out, that we are to out of touch, that we are too "socialist," and that we don't have the temperament for the fight. Let's remember the words of the Sean Connery character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue."  

We must be rude, partisan, unfair and hectoring to the Republicans, but we must have a truce within our own fortress.

And be damned to the woke left and their pretensions.

 

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. At 392 (in coyote years), he is teetering on the brink of an age range, though AARP has been trying to recruit him since he was a mere stripling of 290.he makes no claim, and advances no pretension, to being particularly woke, just to being an old line yellow dog/coyote Democrat. Call him neoliberal, a corporate shill, or Republican-lite, and expect him to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is ready to hand. The views expressed herein are his own.

A WIND AGE, A WOLF AGE, A SWORD AGE, AN AX AGE: Why 9/11 Was More Like June 8, 793 than December 7, 1941.

Summary: 9/11 was not an attack like Pearl Harbor. Instead, it was more like the Viking raid on the island of Lindisfarne in June, 793. Since 9/11, the Roman West has been clenching its collective hands around the hilts of swords. Since 9/11, America has fallen into a more or less permanent state of hostilities; the very thought of peace has slipped away from us. Children who were toddlers when 9/11 happened are now serving second or subsequent deployments in Afghanistan. We have become mistrustful, distrustful, paranoid, and Balkanized. We have flung ourselves into the arms of the most dishonest and deceitful president in our history. We had not thought that even so large-scale a terrorist outrage as 9/11 could have undone so many, so badly, so completely

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Cathedral City, September 11, 2019 – Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it had become fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Such an analogy was tempting.  After all, millions of Americans living on that day, my late father among them, could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack, much as my late father could remember sitting in Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx, munching peanuts and sipping an illegal beer as the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy was and is inapt.

Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.

Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast.  On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.

The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western, Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.

Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England:

    “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”

In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, one could easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change:

    “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”

What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever have been lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.

Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda.  To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers.  Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.

Herein lies the paradox.  While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.

By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.

For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping those sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful. 

By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively.  The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.

This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails.  While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines.  The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.

Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 was merely the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age.  If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last eighteen years how to respond, it is because we have not faced an ongoing challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.

Our challenge, then, on this 18th anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.

First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. “Nous sommes tous américains,” the Paris newspaper Le Monde eopined the following day; we are all Americans.

Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time.  Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.

Now, with 9/11 steadily receding into our distant rearview mirror, we once again find ourselves with a government that, influenced by the brazen truculence of its so-called Maximum Leader, has well-nigh squandered the good will of our alliance partners and the rest of the world.

That same Donald Trump administration has, to an even worse degree than the George W. Bush administration, equated dissent with disloyalty, aroused in the American people a sense of hyper- partisan tribalism, and has managed again to fragment beyond repair any unity we had had, and any hope of putting the Humpty Dumpty that was the American nation back together.

Second, we must overcome our solipsistic, parochial insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have, and can have, no understanding.  As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11.  We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Mumbai, in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere. 

For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization. For when all is said and done, what draws us together, as the late Ursula K. Le Guin observed, is suffering. Suffering leads to the development of faculties of empathy, understanding, common effort, and common resistance. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump likes to speak so slightingly of the very concept of empathy, deriding those who feel it as “weak.”

Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in the terrorist outrages since 9/11 some kind of existential clash of civilizations.  Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous.  We know from direct observation, for example, that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities.  We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general. 

It may also be that Al Qaeda itself has become dated and unfashionable, rather like a ridiculous late 1970s hairdo; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated.  With Osama bin Laden dead and the Arab world going through a process of revolution and civil conflict not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.

We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova.  But eighteen years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead, even as we learn how to resist the blandishments of The Donald and his political tribe, and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,” may come to an unlamented end.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.  This post is an adapted an updated version of a post from the year 2011.

LITTLE SNAPPERS, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The battle for Britain is well and truly underway.

    * * * * *

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

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

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

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

Until 2016.

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

And so the Sanders agitprop began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                            -xxx-

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

LITTLE SNAPPERS AUGUST, 22, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will support Shelley Kaplan.

    * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *  *  *  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citoyens! La Patrie est en danger!

¡Ciudadanos, el país está en peligro!

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

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

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

What has Mark Zuckerberg been smoking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, that is what happened with Enron. 

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

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

-xxx-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      -xxx-

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

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

KAMALA HARRIS’ UNFORTUNATE POLITICS OF GRIEVANCE

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

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

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

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

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

So, by the same token, would Kamala.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girlfriend, get your shit together!

-xxx-

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