Sunday, January 28, 2018

Hideous Memories. Beautiful Songs.

When Sarah Vowell described the story of America as hideous memories with beautiful songs, she knew of what she spoke.

Certainly, among us today are people who remember John F. Kennedy's assassination in hideous Dallas, in 1963. His assassin may have been a dissolute loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, but many believe Oswald was an innocent fall guy and that Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, possibly involving Mafia hit men. No matter, it was hideous and lunatics were involved. 
General James A. Garfield

Lincoln, of course, was shot in the back of the head by another lunatic, a self dramatizing out of work actor, who shot Lincoln, slashed an accompanying officer and then leapt to the stage, shouting, "Sic Semper Tyranis!" thus always to tyrants, before fleeing. Another hideous memory.

Between those two assassinations another President was shot, just a year into office, and before he could make any mark in history.  James A. Garfield had been a true war hero, in the Civil War, which ended only 16 years before he took the oath of office. He was nominated when the Republican convention deadlocked, torn asunder by the boss of the New York party, who thought he deserved to be running the government, and would have been had his candidate been nominated. 
President James A. Garfield

Garfield may have been the finest mind since Lincoln, and certainly one of the most admirable men to have ever been elected President. 

His inauguration speech was--outside of Lincoln's two addresses--the finest or among the finest ever given.

After a brief summation of the history of this nation, in which he put our struggles into a moral and emotional framework, he turned to the problems which his administration had to face, among them the unfinished work of freeing the former slaves, who without education and help could never be really free, he noted.

He knew he had to address the spoils system of government and replace it with a Civil Service whose job it was to serve the people not simply to be paid off for services rendered to victorious candidates.

He pointed to the financial underpinings of democracy which entailed decisions about whether to back American currency with gold or not.

And he turned to the issue of racism, and colored folks in the crowd stood weeping as he highlighted the importance of this work:



The supremacy of the nation and its laws should be no longer a subject of debate. That discussion, which for half a century threatened the existence of the Union, was closed at last in the high court of war by a decree from which there is no appeal—that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are and shall continue to be the supreme law of the land, binding alike upon the States and the people. This decree does not disturb the autonomy of the States nor interfere with any of their necessary rights of local self-government, but it does fix and establish the permanent supremacy of the Union.9
  The will of the nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended Constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming "liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof."10
  The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness. It has given new inspiration to the power of self-help in both races by making labor more honorable to the one and more necessary to the other. The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years.11
  No doubt this great change has caused serious disturbance to our Southern communities. This is to be deplored, though it was perhaps unavoidable. But those who resisted the change should remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.12
  The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress. With unquestioning devotion to the Union, with a patience and gentleness not born of fear, they have "followed the light as God gave them to see the light."

Had he been successful in solving these problems, we might have been spared the Jim Crow years in the South and much heartache, but he was shot by a man who was clearly a lunatic, whose family had hoped to commit to an insane 
but who, as is understandable to us today, managed to get a gun.
Garfield's lunatic assassin 

Such is American history: the great, the less than great and the potentially great wiped out by the weirdest and most diseased among us.


Saturday, January 27, 2018

Senator Patrick Leahy on Nothwithstanding Clause and Funding Rapists

Rachel Martin interviewed Senator Patrick Leahy about a report that says the United States Congress is still funding Afghan police units which are known to systematically rape young boys, who they seem to have a predilection for raping.

In our country, if you have child porn on your computer you can go to prison for the rest of your life, but our Congress is funding real live child rapists in Afghanistan, and has been for some years.
Ex-Captain Daniel Quinn

Daniel Quinn, an Army officer in Afghanistan was relieved of his command because he beat the daylights out of an Afghan police commander who liked to chain village boys to his bed and rape them all night. That was more than Quinn could stomach, but his American superiors scolded him, reprimanded him and ultimately ended his career for giving vent to his outrage in a most unsoldierly manner.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
--NYT article 



But America is still at it, still making bargins with the devil. Here's an exchange from NPR:


RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The abuses include the routine enslavement and sexual abuse of underage boys by Afghan military commanders. Senator Patrick Leahy wrote a law requiring the Pentagon to stop funding foreign military groups who commit human rights abuses. But in Afghanistan, that has not happened.
INSKEEP: The Pentagon explains this by citing language tucked into a funding bill called the notwithstanding clause as justification. Notwithstanding other issues, the funding continues.
David Greene spoke with Senator Leahy about the inspector general's report. And we should warn you, the details in this interview will be disturbing to some.
PATRICK LEAHY: I can't imagine walking down Main Street - certainly in any town in Vermont - and say, how would you like to have your tax dollars spent to support a military unit that will take young boys, dress them up as girls and then use them as sex slaves? That's exactly what's happening.

Not Even Original

George Templeton Strong, a diarist and lawyer, who is widely quoted in histories of 19th century America, particularly in the Ken Burns series on the Civil War and in Chernow's "Grant" described one of the two scoundrels who were able to hoodwink the gullible President Grant into a variety of shady schemes, a man named Jim Fisk.

In a long line of husksters


Chernow describes him as handsome, blonde, bloated with diamond rings and "flashy." 

But it is Strong's description which is eerily familiar:

"Illiterate, vulgar, unprincipled, profligate, always making himself conspicuously ridiculous by some piece of flagrant ostentation, he was, nevertheless, freehanded with his stolen money, and possessed, moreover, a certain magnetism of geniality, that attracted to him people who were not particular about the decency of their associates."

Chernow adds:
He collected prostitutes and chorus girls no less promiscuously than he bought railroads and steamships and exulted in the attention his flamboyance aroused."

If any of this sounds familiar, it should at least remind us that today's version of Big Jim Fisk isn't even original.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Chris Pappas: Bringing An Olive Branch to the Knife Fight

Last night, the Rockingham County Democrats hosted the first of 7 candidates for the Unites States Congress seat being vacated by Carol Shea Porter.
Such a Nice Boy: Mamma would be proud


The would be Congressman is a 30 something who runs a family restaurant with 230 employees in Manchester, N.H. He went to Manchester public schools, then Harvard.


He gave a very nice stump speech and said all the usual Democratic Party things about the need to end of opioid epidemic by spending more money, the need to embrace immigrants as he has done with his own employees--he has 2 adolescents from Syria--the need to safeguard planned parenthood, the need to protect victims from bullies, the need to sing Kumbaya on a regular basis.


He is a very nice guy; that much is evident. His heart is in the right place.


Questions ensued from the audience of mostly older men and young women.
Someone asked what his bed side book table had on it.
Several made statements about the abuse of women, the abuse of immigrants, the offensiveness of Donald Trump, the need for more money for various victims of Society.


Someone mentioned that whoever the Republican opponent in the Fall, he would likely emphasize the need to build the wall and to protect American womanhood from marauding rapist immigrants and what would he say when he was faced with the thuggish Republican.


"Well," he said gently, "I don't see any point in engaging in food fights."


He said he thought New Hampshire folks were not going to respond to that sort of frat boy, testosterone driven anger.


I thought of canvassing in Kingston, N.H. in 2016 where we saw nothing but Trump signs.


PS.
Here are Mad Dog's contrarian views on Democratic shibboleths:
1/ Voter suppression: White guys telling Black folks they cannot vote without passing a literacy test or paying a poll tax is racist disenfranchisement. But if you are not sufficiently politically engaged to get your ass down to register, then maybe you should not be voting. Keep the polls open Friday 6 AM to MN through Sunday MN.


2/ Responding to the opioid crisis: This should be done as part of an overall healthcare for all program. Spending money on feel good ineffective programs is money down the drain.  The programs work only as long as people stay in them. Do it as Portugal did it--legalize and treat in the healthcare system like diabetes or don't do it at all.


3/ Immigration: Acknowledge we cannot have open borders. We could be overwhelmed by Chinese and Indian immigrants alone. We need rules. We got DOCA people and we should amnesty them in, make them citizens. We may have to do this periodically going forward, but we should not criminalize the desire to work hard and become part of our USA club.


4/ Stop being the champion of every victim group which has a board of directors and some sob story. Toughness is not a gravel voice or a jutting jaw, but do not take a step backward and do not back down.









Sunday, January 21, 2018

Jell-O Man: Trump Pinned to the Wall

Chuck Schumer is what we've got for the face of Democrats in the Senate, which is one reason the Republicans control the government, but finally Schumer fastened on something which might be useful.

"Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) on Saturday blasted President Trump as an unreliable negotiating partner, fuming that working with him is “like negotiating with Jell-O" after a failure to secure a deal to avert a government shutdown."
--The Hill

Jell-O man! Better than Rocketman. Better than Little Marco. Jell-O man. It sticks because it carries embedded in it a ring of truth. The man who was once solidly pro-choice and is now solidly anti-abortion;the man who was for a Dreamer policy "with heart" who is now against putting dreamers ahead of Norwegians. Oh, it fits!

We have Jell-O man!

Now, if we can just get a few Democrats to sing in the chorus.
You can shape it into any form you want. 
You can color it any color you like. 
It's cheap. 
It's non nutritive, but it tastes pretty good going down. 

It's the sort of stuff you can eat when you are down with the viral crud, and if you throw it up, it's not all that bad coming back. 
When you try to pin it to the wall, it just oozes down. Can't pin it down. 
You can't live off it, but for a short while, it sort of hits the spot. 
It's the man, in a single image.

Jell-O man!
We can throw it at his limousine when it comes up to a rally.
We can eat a big bowl of it at the podium, with a smile.
We can hold it up and point to it.

It's what we need now.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

The Post, The Movie

When exactly they decided to make "The Post" I do not know, but Wikipedia suggests the script was bought before Donald Trump won the Presidency.  

In light of Trump's attacks on the press it seems to be a film about the importance of that fourth estate which Trump attacks as an enemy of the people and an enemy of the truth, "just such horrible, dishonest people."

This movie will not persuade many Trump-holes that the press is a noble thing, the guardian of the people, but it is worth seeing.

Yes, it's a movie about the press and the pursuit of the truth, but it's just as much a movie about what America was like 40-50 years ago, when women were not supposed to have important careers or even important opinions. 

Along the way the cozy relations between Ben Bradlee  and Kennedy are mentioned. They have Bradlee admitting because he was so charmed by Kennedy, he did not do his job as a newspaperman and he was seduced into Kennedy fandom. 

Kay Graham's decision to risk it all and publish the Pentagon Papers becomes the classic worm turns story, as she is treated as some dull witted child who has no business running the paper her father gave to her husband to run, but you can see her gradually growing a spine, and when she finally confronts her good friend, Robert MacNamara she does it on a personal level: Her own son had gone to Vietnam and MacNamara knew even then the war was simply unwinnable and the only reason to continue was to avoid humiliation for American politicians. 

The most interesting character in this movie is actually given only brief screen time, namely Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who worked on the 7,000 page report which MacNamara commissioned and which detailed how American involvement began, was sustained and ultimately at what point it became evident there was no way the Vietnamese would lose that war. 

If you read about Ellsberg on Wikipedia, there is a scene where Ellsberg, who has done 2 tours in Vietnam, listens to a man who is going to prison for refusing to go to Vietnam, and it finally dawns on him this guy is a true patriot for refusing to go, and all the fools who got sucked in and sent over were simply tools of a malevolent government. 

If Ellsberg had read Thoreau in high school, as I had, he would have known "the true patriot serves his country with his mind, not with his body, marching off to war like some wooden soldier." But Ellsberg did not have Ms. Johnson for high school English; he only had two degrees from Harvard and one from Cambridge.

Reading about that revelation in Ellsberg's life reminded me of the time they called a meeting for seniors in my college and they had a Marine sergeant, in dress uniform, explain that each of us were obligated to serve in the United States armed forces until we were 36 years old and were eligible for the draft that whole time, plus a year for each year of college deferment which meant we could be drafted to age 40.

There was a guy on stage,  who had graduated a year earlier, who had fled to Canada, and was now a Canadian citizen. Canada was not actually all that welcoming. He had got in because he had a degree in engineering. 

There was another guy who was about to be sentenced to prison for refusing to go.

And then there was this other guy who spoke soberly, but very respectfully to us, who said what we were all thinking: None of these options looked good. Going to prison sounded like no fun at all. Canada would mean, well, not being an American any more. That would seem to be pretty easy--after all, the Canadians are just like us, aren't they? But somehow, when you really have to decide, you realize just how deeply ingrained being an American is part of you.

But then, this guy nodded to the Sergeant and said, "But then, there's that other option." 

The guy who was talking was named Tom Hayden and he impressed me deeply. I wrote my parents about him.

What made the Pentagon Papers important, which is alluded to in the film, is the difference in the way most Americans perceived their government. Kay Graham explains to her daughter she went on Air Force One with LBJ to go visit at his ranch because, "When the President tell you to do something, it's hard to say no."

Of course, now we are all much more jaded about our political leaders, but not then.

And the effect of the Pentagon Papers was aptly summarized by one of Nixon's lieutenants, H.R. Haldeman: To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing.... You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the -- the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.[16]
--Wikipedia

Friday, January 19, 2018

Victims, Me Too, Bernie Sanders and the Losing Coalition

The "Me Too" movement and all the ripples outward from that on Twitter and elsewhere have caught my attention as an example of why Democrats will not be successful in winning office or even shaping discussion for the foreseeable future. They simply are too fractured an amalgam of ideas and half formed thoughts and raw emotions.


Part of the problem is their embrace of "victimhood."


The best analysis I've seen of this is an old piece now, written in 1989 by a man named Joseph Epstein, who was fired from his post as editor of "The American Scholar" for being too politically incorrect. If I could get him on the phone or get his email address I'd surely try to contact him and ask what he thinks of "Me Too" and other similar "movements" or modes of thought.
Epstein


His piece, in the NYT deserves some attention:



Ann Richards, the Texas State Treasurer, completed her strong keynote speech, the commentator on the television network I was watching remarked (as near as I can recall), ''Ann Richards is a divorced mother of four who has undergone rehabilitation for an alcohol problem.'' Earlier in the campaign, Kitty Dukakis had announced that she had undergone treatment for an addiction she had to diet pills. During his speech at the convention, Jesse Jackson, in speaking of his own origins, declared that he was an illegitimate child, and then he wove a speech around the metaphor of the Democratic Party being a quilt both made by and supplying warmth to all those elements in American life - minority groups, homosexuals, American Indians (or Native Americans, as they're now known), welfare families, and many others - who, in Mr. Jackson's reading, were America's victims. Eight and even four years earlier, the Democratic Party had advertised itself as the party of concern. Last summer, though, the Democratic Party seemed to have cut out the middleman and gone from ''caring persons'' straight to victims. The logic of the convention seemed to call for Michael Dukakis, on the night of his nomination, to arrive in an iron lung and announce that he was a lesbian mother.

Oh, how politically incorrect!  I stood up and cheered! Finally!

God, how tired I am of all the sad eyed wailing from self dramatizing people for whom victimhood is the most accessible status to advance themselves.
I'm a journalist. Why do men hit on me?

Epstein continues:
Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why this should be so isn't very complicated: to position oneself as a victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even victory.
But then, Epstein notes, the strategy of claiming victim status is not confined to individuals, but can accrue to causes:
It's not only individuals who benefit. In international politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves - or at least the Palestinians as their representatives - seem the great victims in the Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the organized riots known as the intifada - one might ask why small children are allowed anywhere near such danger - the victimhood of the Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the stronger.
Real victim

Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one's victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi's lessons for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists. Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants, have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.
Yet it was the civil rights movement, by my reckoning, that changed the tenor, the quality, the very nature of victimhood in the United States. I happened to be living in the South in the early 1960's, working as a director of the antipoverty program in Little Rock, Ark., while the civil rights movement was under way in full earnest. What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws. One really had to have nailed shut the shutters to one's heart not to have been moved by the spectacle of men and women risking everything to gain only what in fairness was coming to them. It was immensely impressive, on every level. Why? Because the early civil rights movement's appeal was unmistakably not to the guilt but to the conscience of the nation.


Wannabe victims

He goes on to see the positive value of using the status as victim in some instances:
An appeal to conscience is an appeal to one's ethical nature, to one's sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best that is in one. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather than awaken the best in one, it reminds one what a dog one is. Conscience seeks its outlet in action, or right conduct; guilt seeks assuagement, or to find a way to be let off the hook.
The civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake. Suddenly, if you were white you couldn't possibly be in the right. Such civil rights figures as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown - and not they alone -were endlessly reminding everyone that their forebears were brought to this country against their will in chains by our forebears. (That my forebears themselves fled a 25-year conscription in the czar's army and your forebears fled the peril of another potato famine was judged beside the point.) This abundant stirring up of guilt may have produced little in the way of direct social change, but it did without doubt strike its target - so profoundly that social scientists began to write about a ''culture of guilt.'' The guilt that was loosed, moreover, was of a kind that had no outlet.

And then he nails the whole Black reparation for slavery thing, which has always struck me as not just patently absurd, but destructive of ends. Do these reparation urgers not understand Lincoln's "every drop of blood drawn by the lash paid by one drawn by the sword" remark?  Legions of young white men died in reparation for slavery. And they were not even the slave owners.
real reparations; paid by the sword

What are you supposed to do, after all, if someone blames you for slavery, a hideous institution, to be sure, but one defunct for more than a century? Say you are sorry it ever happened? Should you clear your throat and announce that there are historical reasons for some of these things
 It soon began to seem as if there wasn't anyone in American life who couldn't find grounds for claiming to be a victim.


Then he gets down to the nub of the psychology of the victim mongers:
Small wonder, too, for victimhood has not only its privileges but its pleasures. To begin with, it allows one to save one's greatest sympathy for that most sympathetic of characters -oneself. Of the various kinds and degrees of pity, easily the most vigilant is self-pity. To stake out one's own territory as a victim, or member of a victim group, also allows one to cut the moral ground out from under others who make an appeal on the basis of their victimhood - to go off singing, as it were, ''You've got your troubles, I've got mine.''
THE PLEASURES OF VICTIM-hood include imbuing one's life with a sense of drama. The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that society is organized against one.
. Excluded, set apart, alienated, the victim begins to sound like no one so much as the modern artist.
Artists have for some while now liked to think of themselves as victims. Whole books - usually overwrought, rather boring books - have been written about the alienation of the artist in modern society.
 It reminded me of H. L. Mencken's remark that whenever he heard writers complain about the loneliness of their work he recommended that they spend a few days on the assembly line, where they would have plenty of opportunities for camaraderie with their mates.
A victim, especially a professional victim, must at all times be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, or homophobia that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. With victims everywhere, life becomes a minefield in a cow pasture - no matter where you step, you are in trouble.


And here, I have in fact, seen this very thing on Twitter: the ambulance chaser victims' advocates:
As if all this isn't nervous-making enough, there has come into being a large number of people, many of them in universities, who, if not victims themselves, wish to speak for victims or rouse other people to a sense of their injury as victims. They are the intellectual equivalent of ambulance chasers.
All hammer cheerfully away at revealing what a perfect hell life has been, and continues to be, for almost everyone in the world. And yet they all seem so happy in their work:
One might conceivably be a victim if one works in a coal mine or a steel mill or in the fields as a sharecropper, but no one who works as a teacher in a university, or for that matter is a student there, is a victim. To have a teaching job in a university is to work roughly seven months a year in a generally Edenic setting at intellectual tasks largely of one's own choosing. Relativity of relativities, a victim among university teachers is someone who isn't permitted to teach the Shakespeare course, or who feels he has stupid students, or whose office is drafty, or who doesn't get tenure (which is lifetime security in the job) and therefore must find another job within (usually) the next 16 months. These are not exactly the kinds of problem faced by, say, boat people fleeing Cambodia.


Oh, and here he gets going on the college crowd, the Victim Lit thing:
Yet an increasing number of university teachers nowadays teach one or another branch of victimology -what might not unfairly be called Victim Lit. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and other only scarcely less august institutions compete among themselves lest they be caught without a goodly supply of angry teachers of victimological subjects.
Irony of ironies, nuttiness of nuttinesses, the scene thus presented is that of the fortunate teaching the privileged that the world is by and large divided between the oppressed and the oppressors, victims and executioners, and that the former are inevitably morally superior.
No dogs chewing on them


And then there are the demographics of victimhood:
Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.


Can the victims play a role in their own victimization?
People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black -that is, violence by blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.''



For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of substance to the victim's complaints. Blacks were discriminated against, de facto and de jure, in this country for a very long while. Women were paid lower wages for doing the same work as men and they were indubitably excluded from jobs they were perfectly capable of performing. Mexican-Americans often worked under deplorable conditions. A case for victimhood cannot simply be invented, though some people try. I recall some time ago watching a television program that stressed the problems of the unwed teen-age father. Greatly gripping though they doubtless were, I remember muttering to myself: the unwed father, another victim group - who'd've thunk it?


When the victim becomes the bully. Sound familiar?
Even when there is a core of substance to the victims' complaints, they tend to push it. A subtle shift takes place, and suddenly the victim is no longer making appeals but demands. The terms lady and homosexual are out; it's only woman and gay that are acceptable. Public pronouncements from victims take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the line between victim and bully seems to blur. At some point, one gets the sense that the victims actively enjoy their victimhood - enjoy the moral vantage point it gives them to tell off the rest of the country, to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and then demonstrate outrage when it isn't delivered.


Moral superiority of the victim:
Although it was never their intention to do so, they make the contemporary joys of victimhood -the assumption of moral superiority, the spread of guilt and bad feeling, the shifting of responsibility for one's own destiny onto others or the ''system'' or society at large - seem rather dreary, if not pathetic. They also remind the rest of us that the most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act like a victim.
It's all here, but you'll never get elected if you agree with this.
Trouble is, on some level, the core Trump acolytes know this and this is a core reason they resent so many Democrats. Trumpers talk about how they like the testosterone and the straight talk coming from Trump. I think this is what they are really talking about. They can't abide the whining. They want someone to stand up and be fierce.


What Democrat--apart from perhaps Bernie Sanders--does that?



Wednesday, January 17, 2018

No, Elizabeth, Trump is Not a Racist

Hear ye, Hear ye: I do not know Donald Trump.




Never met the guy.
Never had beers with him.
Never played baseball with him.
Never even watched his TV show.


So I am willing to take his son's assessment on face value: The man is not a racist. The only color he sees is green.


That fits what I have seen of him.


He's got nothing against Black people or Arabs or Jews. All he cares about is money.
So the main crime, the major offense of all those SHC's is they are filled with poor people and the countries themselves are poor.


In this, he is not far from the core sentiment of the Republican party.


He is not far from Andrew Undershaft, that "hero" of "Major Barbara" who provides an affluent living for his workers, for all the people in the company town he presides over, a town which makes weapons of mass destruction, a town which thrives on killing people from other towns.




He doesn't want to allow poor people into the United States.


In that, he is not too far from the Downton Abbey crowd. They lived in the ultimate walled community, free from interaction with the lower classes, except of course, for the servant class, who they try their best to ignore.


Republicans, Trump included, fit that world view which is best exemplified by the charming, pretty Southern lady I met at a barbecue some years ago who was talking about why she hated the whole idea of welfare, public assistance, public housing, Social Security, anything which established mechanisms for the government to help the poor.  "It's like we always say down home: Don't feed the stray dogs--they'll follow you home."


She was wearing upon her ample, pink bosom a gold cross, simple, elegant, understated.


And she wanted nothing to do with stray dogs.