Apr 30, 2018

April 30, 2018: Rotting the Soul, Four Horsemen, Apocalypse Now


"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  For a traitor appears not a traitor--he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation--he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city--he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared"

                       ----Cicero, Roman Statesman, 42 BCE

Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich listed in a podcast posted on Facebook a few days ago the reasons why he judges our Caesar Disgustus to be the worst president in the history of this country.  We've had incompetent presidents before, Reich explained, citing James Buchanan and Warren Harding.  We've had racist presidents as well, Reich informs us, citing Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johson.  He could have added Woodrow Wilson to the list.  But never before have we had such a combination, asserted Reich, as he made his case for 45 weighing in at 45. 

Reich could have said more.  For added to this dubious list of nefarious characteristics one would also have to add more than a measure of corruption as well as mendacity.  Our Caesar Disgustus is nothing less than the quintessential "Boomer", the ultimate vandal; the very incarnation of the four horses of the apocalypse: Ignorance, Incompetence, Corruption, and Mendacity, all rolled into one utterly obscene personage masquerading as the president of the United States.   

Reich is quite right: never before has the Republic witnessed, in the words of William Bendix in "The Life of Riley" such a "revolting development".  Indeed, never before has the republic been presented with such a clear and present danger.  While Harding struggled with his self-conscious ignorance, painfully aware of what he didn't know.   Buchanan sat quietly as the Union was breaking at the seams but was, nevertheless, operating upon widely held beliefs concerning the limitations then held as to the nature of federal authority.  These men were, given their limitations, not at war with the 'norms' of governance as uninformed or wrong-headed they may be.  Disgustus is cut from a different cloth.  A vandal, a barbarian, destroying willy-nilly the norms of governance calling into question the legitimacy of the very institutions of government itself.  In the process, Teapot Dome, Credit Mobilier, Watergate, appear to be mere child's play, a mere prelude to the storm now savaging the republic.   

"That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men"…   Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.  Wherever one postulates the origin and, therefore, the legitimacy of the 'rights of man', be it providence or the people, such rights can only be exercised and made secure by the establishment of government.  Without government, there can be no rights.  To make war upon government, republican government is to wage war not only upon the rights of the people—the rights of man in the words of Thomas Paine—but upon the people.  This is the threat now posed by the great vandal who, while destroying the legitimacy of the organs of government—be it the press, the intelligence agencies, the courts, the Congress, and law enforcement--threatens the legitimacy of government itself and our rights it was constituted to protect.   One has only to witness the assault by Digustus on the first amendment as well as the fourth amendment's guarantee of procedural and substantive due process.  One need look no further than the assault upon the 14th amendment's guarantee of equal justice, as Disgustus seeks to delegitimize the investigations into his conduct, his advocacy of police violence, his denigration of the courts, his vandalizing of the regulations.   

Disgustus is indeed a clear and present danger, the delineation of which will occupy these columns in the coming months and beyond, for the threat runs wide and it runs deep.  It extends well beyond the tRUMP White House and well before the current administration.  It is a cancer called conservatism and, should the republic survive, will take decades to expunge.  

The Apocalypse is here.  The Apocalypse is now.  The four horsemen are upon us. 

"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh" 
Impeach and Imprison 

Apr 27, 2018

April 27, 2018: Those Were The Days, The Whirlwind, Would Forever Define



This is a time that you will always remember; a time that will forever define who you are.”

­                 ----a local union leader, Marion, Indiana



Today, I stop and observe yet another benchmark. On this date, a Saturday a now half-century ago, I found myself in Indiana. The presidential primary election, held on Tuesday, May 7, was at hand, and I found myself in Marion canvassing for Senator Robert Kennedy. What follows is a column I wrote ten years ago in which I described where I had found myself in the whirlwind that was 1968:



As I watched Robert Kennedy give his speech at Campau Square that bright April afternoon I remember him asking if we would join his campaign and go to Indiana. I thought, at the time, that it was a rhetorical question and didn’t think any more of it. We simply nodded yes. A few days later I got a call from the campaign to do just that. The Kennedy campaign had chartered a North Star bus out of Big Rapids and gave us instructions to gather in front of the Michigan Consolidated Gas building in downtown Grand Rapids and head south to join the campaign.



It was not, given the times, a difficult decision to make. The war was raging, the nation was tearing apart at the seams, and Bobby appeared to not only have a grasp of the situation, but was the one candidate who appeared most likely to prevail in the struggle against the “establishment”—that is, the established order. My problems in joining the campaign, however, were manifold.



Grand Valley State was, in those days, a small teachers college with a growing campus located due west of Grand Rapids on the plains overlooking the Grand River at Allendale. It was founded in 1963, and graduated its first class just prior to my arrival in 1967. One of the peculiarities of the institution was that for some reason, never made clear, registration for classes occurred on a single day in which the entire student body, then numbering about 1200, would converge just off the cafeteria and sign up for classes. Over the course of time it transpired that a great number of upper classmen had not been able to register for their foundation courses by this method and, therefore, were facing a situation where they could not graduate until they had satisfied the basic course requirements. This produced a melee in which upper classmen, juniors and seniors, converged on the proceedings with slips in hand from department heads and deans, reserving positions in the 100 and 200 level classes normally taken by freshmen like myself. By the time we got to the counter there were only junior and senior level courses left to be taken. So it was that I found myself with a course load that included one basic course in economics, but an upper level class in 19th century American History, and a course in International Law.



We were on quarters then, classes lasted for a mere 10 weeks, and some History classes would have as many as 5 textbooks and require a major paper, sometimes two. At the time the institution had not yet received certification, and the demands of the classes were daunting. Needless to say this was a formidable challenge made all the more compelling by the fact that my History professor was none other that John Tevebaugh. To understand what that meant one needs to watch a few episodes of “Paper Chase”, in which John Houseman plays a law professor who is a demanding old curmudgeon. I think this role must have been inspired by John Tevebaugh. Tevebaugh was the chairman of the History department and such a task-master that seniors were known to schedule writing their thesis around John’s sabbaticals. In any case I was quickly up to my eyebrows in books as I found myself, along with Steve Peckich and Dick Merrick charged with researching and writing two 50 page papers covering the political history of 19th century America. The experience proved to be, in spite of the ordeal, one of the most rewarding classes I would take, for I was introduced to the colorful and ribald political world of New York’s Tammany Hall, the machine politics of Philadelphia and other cities, the study of such splinter groups as the ‘Barnburners’ and the ‘Mugwumps’; and began my understanding of Jacksonian Democracy as well as the later Greenback and Progressive movements.



Additionally I was up to my eyebrows in the study of International Law, researching a major paper for Dr. Junn which included the readings of jurist Hugo Grotius among many others. This was a great period, one of those seminal times in one’s life in which one is confronted with great challenge, in which one works hard not to let the grade point average suffer too greatly, but nevertheless produces quantum leaps in ability and confidence. After this experience I knew that I could handle whatever the college could throw at me, and I was off to the races.



In addition I was working two jobs, on weekends and some evenings at the old W.T. Grant department store in Grand Haven unloading trucks and stocking shelves, and on weekends at the old Starlight Drive-In Theatre between Holland and Saugatuck, as a projectionist. It was a full load to be sure. Then I got a call from the Kennedy campaign asking if I would make the journey south to Indiana and join the cause. Of course I would. I made arrangements to take some time from work, skipped some classes, and made my way to the ‘big city’ to meet the bus.



We gathered very early on Friday morning at about this time of the month and made the long bus trip down to Kokomo, Indiana where we were split up into two groups. I went along with the group that was sent on to Marion and arrived at the campaign headquarters located across from the courthouse on the town square in a scene that looked very much like the town in the film “Back to the Future”. We found our way down to the campaign headquarters; an old store-front rented for the occasion, and were introduced to the campaign organizers. We were given a list of registered voters and addresses, some brief instruction, and sent out to canvass the neighborhoods door-to-door. Indiana, in those days, presented a bit of culture shock to those of us who were still, figuratively speaking, babes-in-arms. I remember Mark Henges, a friend of mine who had likewise joined the campaign, relating the story of a lynching that had occurred a few decades earlier in the square across the street from the campaign’s headquarters. Nothing like that had ever occurred from where we came from and such tales seemed exotic and somewhat frightening. Years later I would tune in to PBS and see an account of it and recognize immediately the incident being retold. Further we were up against the political forces of the Governor, Roger Brannigan, who was originally a stand-in for Lyndon Johnson but now a stalking-horse for Hubert Humphrey. The governor had the full power of patronage on his side with state workers taking time to openly campaign for him in the primary, leaving the streets to be patrolled by packs of dogs that freely roamed the city. The campaign was worried that Brannigan, a popular Democratic governor, would win the votes of the party regulars leaving Kennedy and McCarthy to split the ‘peace’ vote. Victory was not seen then as anything like a foregone conclusion.



We went out into the neighborhoods and worked until dark, long hours going door-to-door, engaging the bewildered Hoosiers who were surprised to find people coming from so far away to elicit their support. We asked questions, we engaged in conversations, we wrote down their responses. At the end of a long day, as the sun was setting, we headed back to headquarters where we met with campaign organizers and relayed the information we had gathered. My friend Henges and his friend Larry Baker —who would transfer from Grand Rapids Junior College to Grand Valley later in the year— and Baker’s friend Keith Wakefield, suggested we get a motel room and do some serious drinking. I asked if we had any booze, and Baker, with a grin, simply gave a silent nod. We asked one of the campaign organizers, a local union official, if he knew of a good motel. Sensing that we were up to no good, and that he was looking in the face of a possible major campaign scandal—since we were all underage—if we were left unattended, he seized upon the idea and told us that he knew just the place. He then promptly drove us to a local motel on the outskirts of town. When we got there we were surprised to learn that we would be staying with the family that owned the establishment and would remain with them in their living quarters. With the much desired beer warming in Brother Baker’s suitcase, the outlook appeared grim indeed.



The four of us sat about a small table playing a game of penny-ante poker as their young teenage son sat on a small couch engaging us in conversation. With the evening winding down and the beer getting warmer, Baker suddenly turned to the lad and asked, “Would your parents mind if we all had some beer”? “I don’t think they’d mind if you had a beer”, replied the lad, adding “why, you don’t have any do you?” At that Brother Baker got up and walked over to his suitcase, opened it up and proceeded to produce several cans. He had several such containers packed full. The boys eyes lit up and he went down the hall and, explaining to his parents that we would be undressing and getting ready to retire, arranged to have the area of the house closed off.



The party began in earnest at that point. To keep our cover we continued the poker game as each of us would temporarily leave the table, guzzle down a can, and then return. Over the next few hours hands were played, and coins changed hands with an ever diminishing understanding of whose hand one was playing and whose coins one was risking. What I remember mostly was the difficulty of getting the soap from my body as I showered before finally retiring in a drunken stupor. I slept like a rock, and woke up fully refreshed and ready to go.



Those were the days my friend

We thought they’d never end

We’d sing and dance, forever and a day

We’d live a life we choose

We’d fight and never lose

Those were the days

Ah, yes those were the days” ----Mary Hopkin “Those were the Days” (1)



Those were the days, my friend, drink like a fish and no hang-over. We awoke, our gracious hosts none the wiser served us a splendid breakfast. We were then off to campaign headquarters for a repeat of the previous day’s labor and, at the end of another long day, we boarded the bus and headed back home. Sometime early Sunday morning we returned to Grand Rapids, found our cars and made the long drive back arriving safely home as the sun was rising.



As I reflect on that time now so long ago a few more memories play upon my mind. One is the image of my friend Mark standing in the middle of an intersection surrounded by a pack of dogs, the other is the remarks of a local Marion union leader who told us that we would always remember these days; that this was a time that we would always carry with us; a time that would forever define who we are. So it was.

_______________

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_The_Days_(song)






Apr 19, 2018

April 19, 2018: Lessons from Rwanda, Hot and Cold Mediums, Clear and Present Danger


"The Medium is the Message" ----Marshall McLuhan.

I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning, and they had a segment on the civil war in Rwanda in the 1990's. The war began with hate radio and led to the destruction of social norms. In the aftermath, radio adopted a sitcom involving intermarriage between the tribes. Studies done by a professor at Princeton reveal that while the media didn't change the prejudice, it did change norms restoring the nation to more civilized behavior. Behavior is, apparently, determined much more by social norms than by prejudice. There are lessons here. Talk radio--hate radio--Limbaugh, Alex Jones et. al., have been eroding social and political norms for decades resulting not only in the explosion in the number of hate groups in this country but in the elevation of Caesar Disgustus to the throne. In this sense tRUMP is not an aberration but a symptom of the illness inflicted by hate radio and fixed noise.

Impeaching and imprisoning our Caesar Disgustus is a necessary act because he is a clear and present danger. But it is not enough. We must clean up our public discourse by shutting down talk radio and bringing objective reporting back into the forum.

It is no mere coincidence that radio brought Hitler to power as it did the genocide in Africa. Radio is a 'hot' medium, that is, it is one-directional and involves minimum participation by the audience as a lecture differs from a dialogue. McLuhan included film and photography (especially high resolution photography) as 'hot mediums. He identified as 'cool' mediums such as television, newsprint and cartoons because they were low resolution, drawing the participant or audience into them rather than shouting at them. In our age ,with high definition, television is becoming a hot medium. For the implications of this read Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media", in which he concludes that the rise of fascism would not have occurred in the age of television because while radio is conducive to expressing anger and rage (because it is a hot medium), Hitler and Mussolini would have come across a laughable cartoon, albeit dangerous figures, on television in low definition black and white. It is no coincidence then, that Nixon, who had a face and voice for radio--and indeed, those who listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won-- would lose to Kennedy in 1960 but win in 1968 because television has gained higher resolution with the addition of color. With the advent of high definition, television now poses the same threat as radio for being a medium conducive to the transmission of rage and discontent. Enter Faux News.

It is not benign, and it is not neutral for, as McCluhan taught us so many years ago, media is the message. That is, it is not content that determines the message but the media itself. In this case it is the media that amplifies and legitimizes rage. Therefore, how it is used becomes critical and the the greater society has every right to insist that it be used responsibly.

The other lesson from the Rwandan experience is that it isn't prejudice that produces the genocide. It is the destruction of social norms, which the "Idiot Wrong" have been celebrating for nearly a half-century. Caesar Disgustus is all about destroying norms and therefore is an existential threat not only to the republic but to civilization itself.

"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh"

Impeach and Imprison

_____________

(1). NPR. "Morning Edition", Thursday April 19, 2018

(2). See McLuhan, Marshall. "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man" Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan






Apr 18, 2018

April 18, 2018: All Tweet No Action, Headed for the Exits, No Military Strategy,


Yahoo News is reporting today that according to two U.S. Senators the United States, by ceding influence to Russia and Iran, has made possible a resurgence of the Islamic State in parts of Syria.  
Comments made by Senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina were less than reassuring when they emerged from a military briefing by the Pentagon.  Both took issue with the "hands-off" approach of this administration as Caesar Disgustus "signals the US could be headed for the exits there".  (1)  

"A frustrated corker spoke after exiting a classified briefing by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and top generals, who explained the Pentagon's strategy to lawmakers following last weekend's missile strikes on Syria.   


" We may be at the table, but when you're just talking and have nothing to do with shaping what's happening on the ground, you're just talking " a somber Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said, adding "Syria is Russia and Iran's now. They will be determining the future." (2) 

Senator Graham was more pungent in his criticism saying: "All tweet, no action".(3) 
Graham, like Corker, has been on-again/off-again critics of tRUMP.  Generally supporting his domestic policies, they have voiced, at times, strong criticisms of both his foreign policies and his behavior in the White House—especially as it pertains to the ongoing investigations swirling about the numerous scandals engulfing this administration.  Graham pointed out the rather obvious fact that "There is no military strategy on the table to deal with the malign influence of Iran and Russiaadding "Everything in that briefing made me more worried, not less". (4)  

There is no military strategy because there is no strategic thinking in this White House.  There is no strategic thinking because the 'twit' in the presidential chair has an attention span measured in nanoseconds.  Strategy involves thinking long term, thinking several moves ahead in the chessboard.  Caesar Disgutus only reacts and reacts only to the moment.  This is an administration where judgment has been replaced with reaction, reason with rage.  As a result, everything is quixotic, with a sense of neither permanence nor purpose. Witness last weekend's farce involving Disgustus' actions in the aftermath of the missile strikes on Syria.  Beating his chest and rattling his sabre, Disgustus solemnly announced that we had fired over three score cruise missiles.  A "perfect" strike in his words.  Everything he does is always couched in superlatives.  The White House then announced through UN Ambassador Nikki Haley that a new round of stiff sanctions would be forthcoming against Russia for its failure to help rid the Assad regime of these weapons.  Then the backpedaling began and by mid-week Disgustus has backed down.  The question doggedly remains: Why?  

Citing the report of Colonel Ryan Dillon, "a spokesman for the US-led coalitionISIS forces have been able to retake some of the territory it has lost including "some of the neighborhoods in Southern Damascus"(5).  Additionally, Yahoo reports that many of the Kurdish fighters engaged against ISIS have withdrawn to fight an incursion by Turkey aimed at driving Kurdish fighters out of the City of Afrin, further stalling efforts against the Islamic State. 
  
As noted in previous posts, this administration's response to the fighting on the ground has be obsequious in its approach to the Kremlin and its interests to the point of all but withdrawing from the field.  The behavior of this administration and the likely consequence on our emerging international posture has not been lost on the Congress.  Democratic Senator Chris Coons explained: "if we completely withdraw, our leverage in any diplomatic resolution or reconstruction, or any hope for a post-Assad Syria, goes away"(6).   
Precisely. 

"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh" 

Impeach and Imprison.  
_________ 
(2). Ibid 
(3). Ibid 
(4). Ibid 
(5). Ibid 
(6). Ibid 
(7). Ibid 

Apr 15, 2018

April 15, 2018: Ideological Affirmative Action: Orgy of False Equivalence, Breathtaking Public Gullibility.



To suggest that conservatism somehow rises to the legitimate equivalency of liberalism or socialism is to engage in ideological affirmative action." 
---from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe" 

Economist Paul Krugman, writing in Friday's New York Times (1), excoriates the media and its insistence upon the 'equivalency of ideas' for the rise of the penultimate con-man Paul Ryan and, by extension, the rise of the ultimate con-man Caesar Disgustus himself.  Considering the former, Krugman writes of Ryan: 

"Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.  Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare. 

"And his 'deficit reduction' proposals were always frauds.  The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from 'magic asterisks': extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs.  I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgement into question. 

"So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.  

"Even now, in the Age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders—especially, but not only, in the news media—whose careers, whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray.  For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are serious, honest people on both left and right, practically defines their identity." (2) 

There are serious political thinkers on the right.  Krugman's colleague at The New York Times, David Brooks, is one of them.  But, as Krugman is quite right to observe: "While there are some serious, honest conservative thinkers, they have no influence on the modern Republican Party." (3) 

Citing what Krugman calls "asymmetric polarization" caused in turn by a "motivated gullibility",  
"Centrists who couldn't find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV.  Paul Ryan wasn't actually very good at faking it: true fiscal experts ridiculed his 'mystery meat' budgets.  But never mind.  The narrative required that the character Ryan played exists, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article. " 

I've written about this false equivalency before, one essay about the minimum wage leaps immediately to mind (4).  We've raised the minimum wage more than a score of times since its inception in the 1930's and not a single job has been lost.  Nevertheless, whenever progressives lead a campaign to raise the minimum standard the same hoary argument that it will cost jobs is regularly given equal time on television and more than equal time on talk radio.  In this case, one of the more egregious examples, the relative merits of the opposing argument are not equivalent.  The conservatives are here, as in so much else, simply dead wrong.  The historical record clearly demonstrates their error.  Nevertheless, they are paraded out upon the stage and by so doing error is granted legitimacy.  This savaging of universal empirical observation is the beginning of a not so slow slide down the slippery slope wherein facts are opposed by 'alternate' facts, the known universe by the 'alternate' universe of Fox and Fiends. 
  
As Krugman duly notes, these same dynamics that produced the laughable posturing of Paul Ryan are the same forces that produced Donald J. tRUMP.  

Like Ryan,Caesar Disgustus has not emerged from under a cabbage leaf, he is, in fact, the product of the bastard union of an "orgy of false equivalence" joined with a breathtaking public gullibility.   
The Republic appears to have survived Paul Ryan.  It is not entirely clear if the Republic can survive Caesar Disgustus.   

"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh" 

Impeach and Imprison 

________________ 
(1). Krugman, Paul.  "From Flimflam to Fascism" The New York Times.  Friday, April 13, 2018. Page A27 
(2). Ibid 
(3). Ibid 
(4). See March 29, 2018:  Minimum Wage, Maximum Myth, Dog-Eared Objections, Into the Abyss.