Apocalypse Now: Trump and the Baby Caravan

Oh, save us, President Trump, from that swarm of Ork babies and mothers and MS 13 adolescents headed for our Southern border, as if ordered by Flash Mob, by the White House.

Don't they make your blood run cold?

Where is Bob Mueller when you need him?

Democrats, that wild mob which pounds on the iron studded doors of the Supreme Court and defiles Saint Kavanaugh and sends pipe bombs to former Presidents and Secretaries of State and liberal billionaires, are also funding the caravan of babies headed as an infestations to our Southern border, where, unless some very fine Nazis head them off, they will inundate our thin blue line and start raping white women just as soon as they hit puberty!

Actually, it's this guy makes my blood run cold.

Oh, the forces of evil and Nancy Pelosi are swelling and only a pure Aryan soul can lead us to safety!

Did you know global warming is a trick invented by Chinese Democrats to destroy our great American economy--the greatest economy EVER--and if it weren't for the king of Saudi Arabia, very dishonest journalists would convince the uninformed that those 7,000 invaders could not kill all 320 million Americans?

Fortunately, our Saudi friends know how to deal with those terrible, no good, very bad people who are our media. That journalist worked for the Washington Post, which is proof enough of what a bad man he must have been. The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon and he looks like a very bad man with that shaved head. 

And Amazon is BAD! They have enslaved the United States Postal Service, with a VERY BAD deal, forcing postal workers to work Sundays!

Oh, we got Apocalypse coming! 
Just hold on to Donald J. Trump, or we'll all be raped and slain and the stock market will crash!

Frederick Douglass Answers Jim Brown on Taking a Knee

Football players, TV personalities, Popular singers all have brains. The most successful have some sort of higher intelligence which facilitates their achievements.

But the sort of intelligence which allows you to set records on the gridiron, or to attract huge audiences of the unwashed hoi polloi may not equip you to comment on symbolic acts of protest.

For that sort of analysis, you need a different sort of intelligence, the sort possessed by Frederick Douglass, once a slave, then a force of history.

Douglass

Were we to interview him today about the "take the knee" controversy, we would likely derive more useful instruction than the recent remarks by the dissipated former star running back, Jim Brown, who Donald Trump re tweeted, as Brown spoke tearfully about his flag, his country, his idea of patriotism and the act of taking a knee.

The Man Who Used to be Jim Brown

Douglass died in the nineteenth century, but he speaks through the ages to us today, having seen the empty, cheap expressions of "patriotism" and reverence for "the flag" in his time. 

He spoke about celebration of the stars and stripes most emphatically, and although his reference was the state of the Black American in times of slavery, it will do just as well for the condition of the American Black who is stopped by a white police officer in the 21st century.

"What to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin vei to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

Substitute "your national anthem ceremony" at professional (commercial) football games for "4th of July," and all this applies.

It is no fluke that the Army pays the billionaire owners of football and baseball teams to allow "color guards" carrying flags and other displays of military might, fly overs by tax payer funded jet fighters, and all the other demonstrations linking the champions, the gladiators on the field, the heroes to military virtue. Wear a football uniform, and you can be a hero. Wear a military uniform, and although you are a little worm of a man, you can be like them, a hero.

Lost in all the noise and pageantry is the simple truth that billionaire owners have charged the 40,000 fans in the stadium a stiff ticket price to roar their approval of the waving flags and the marching soldiers. The commercialization of patriotism for the addled masses.

A new opiate of the masses, not religion from Rome or the Baptist ministry, but from Madison Avenue.

Would be Gladiator Hero 

Lost in all the proud tears is the story of the professional football player, Pat Tillman, who somehow perceived playing football after such patriotic displays was an empty gesture of patriotism, so he joined the Army, got himself shipped off to Afghanistan, where he did not die gloriously on the battlefield slaying his nation's enemies (who, it must be admitted, posed little threat to his nation from that impoverished 13th century nation) but he was shot by his own Army in a "friendly fire" mistake, which is  a polite way of putting what the grunts call an instance of FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition.)

Oh, the Shame!

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, it must also be admitted, it sells. 
The Olympic Games, Inc, appeals to the most base jingoism, and the amazing thing is the raw hypocrisy of the owners of the games sending home the two American athletes who had the temerity, at the 1968 Olympics, to bow their heads and raise their fists while standing on the winners' platforms as the American flag was raised to the strains of the Star Spangled Banner.  The very idea! Look at those (nasty Black) athletes despoiling this beautiful moment by a political protest! Why, all we were doing was celebrating the victory of the United States of America over the vanquished nations who had tried to field athletes from their countries of 5 million in a vain attempt to defeat the athletes from the country of 250 million!  Such depravity!

Oh, the shame!

But my favorite example of the connivance of powerful interests is the "Bong Hits for Jesus" Supreme Court case, in which a public high school principal in the state of Washington ordered her entire student body to line the streets in front of the school so the students could cheer the passing of the Olympic torch as it was driven down the street. Remember this is a publicity stunt for a commercial enterprise, the Olympics, which got its start in 1936 when Adolf Hitler decided to spend public money to host the Olympics in Berlin, so he could market the success of National Socialism (Nazis) to the world. And in that great tradition, the Olympics have been passed down to us to celebrate nationalism, as shamelessly as the NFL celebrates it for marketing purposes. 

A high school adolescent, unimpressed, decided not to participate in this pep rally for dollars and set up his banner, across the street from the school, not on school property, "Bong Hits for Jesus!" The enraged principal stormed across the stress, tore down his banner and suspended this peaceful protester from school.

The Supreme Court pondered the possible meanings of "Bong Hits" and that exchange among the puzzled black robed septagenarians is worth googling, as one justice asked, "What is a Bong hit?" And another opined Jesus was unlikely to be impressed. 

They finally decided students, being under the age of majority, had no rights to express their opinion in school, or even across the street from school, because free speech would be detrimental to the good order and discipline essential to controlling what could become an angry mob of students in the classroom. 

Thus the Court, with Kennedy the swing vote, ruled that order and the importance of control by state authority, was more important than the teachable moment about free speech in public schools.

Given that attitude, that free speech, that peaceful acts of dissent cannot be tolerated in American society, the President's outrage over taking a knee at commercial football games is entirely understandable.  

The Sanctimony of the Originalist

Antonin Scalia, the spiritual leader of the current Supreme Court, gone but not forgot, styled himself as an "originalist." 

"The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted."
--Antonin Scalia
Scalia said he really didn't care about the founding fathers and what they thought, only about the text they wrote, but that is sophistry, sounds nice but hides the truth behind a veil of words. He says you take the words as they were commonly meant and used at the time of the founding fathers, in the late 18th century and that way you have an immutable set of laws which you cannot change except by amendment. 

The fact is, you cannot know the meaning of the words without studying the past, and the men who made that past, which is why Scalia read the Federalist papers. He treats the Constitution as if it were handed down on stone tablets from the mountain.

Of course, Scalia uses this when it gets him where he wants it to take him, but discards it when inconvenient. He wants to find the District of Columbia law limiting ownership of guns is invalid and he has to refer to the 2nd Amendment to do it, so he has the problem that the 2nd Amendment is the only place in the Constitution where the founding fathers actually take pains to explain why they are granting a right, and they say explicitly  the right of the people--the people who are in a well regulated militia--to bear arms shall not be infringed. 
Well, Scalia retorts, the understanding of what a militia was in those days was different than what we understand as a militia now and he's a "textualist" and an "orginalist" so he goes back the meaning as Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton would have understood that word.

And Neil Gorsuch says the same thing. For these two there is no right of privacy, no right to abortion because there wasn't any such thing at the time the Constitution was written. The word "privacy" never appears in the Constitution so it cannot be used by Supreme Court justices to justify abortion.

But consider another opinion:  "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the convenant, too sacred to be touched...They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human."

Who is this brash and irreverent cad? Who would despoil Justice Scalia's sacred text?
Well, actually, it was Thomas Jefferson.

Scalia was appalled at the idea that the public now understands when you appoint a Supreme Court justice you are appointing a man who sees the law in terms of today's world, a man or woman who brings his/her own understanding of right and wrong to each case and will likely find something in the Constitution to justify that, just as preachers have found just about anything you wish in the Bible. 

But that is where we have been for at least two generations. 

Anything's Possible

What Democratic candidate can play to a stadium of 10,000 fans?
Donald Trump did that in Iowa and he does it routinely, once or twice a week every week.
Meanwhile, here in Hampton, New Hampshire, we go door to door and we're lucky if 9 out of 40 houses on our list open the door to us to even hear the pitch.

It's the ants working on their colony getting swept away by the big wave, every week.


But here is the Des Moines Register:

For those Iowa Republicans, the high-profile backing could boost their support among some Republican voters. But it may make no difference to those crucial independent voters or even hurt support for the candidates among them.

A recent Iowa Poll found that 52 percent of Republican voters and 48 percent of independent voters say candidates' support for the president would make no difference to them; 39 percent of independents say a candidate's support for Trump would make them less likely to vote for the candidate.

In Young's 3rd Congressional District, where the Republican incumbent faces a tight race against Democrat Cindy Axne and 61 percent of Iowans view the president unfavorably, the numbers are even starker. Among likely voters, 46 percent say if a candidate supports Trump, that would be a mark against them.

Who knows? Maybe, if we're lucky, there is something going on we do not see on CSPAN every night.

A Plan to Save America

we have to begin with mass communications.
Then, once you have established a base, you can move on to controlling the numbers.
Then we find some leaders.

Stop Channel Surfing: We Got What You Want!

We can learn from the Trumpling, who had no real interest in the product, in policy in details or even goals; he was all about selling, mostly himself.
But you need that exposure. In a democracy, you have to have people know your name and now, your face and voice. You cannot run on ideas. You need to be sold.

He Knows How to Sell

Then the numbers: The thing about a true authoritarian state is they don't have any meaningful elections, but in America, we have actually counted votes for most of our history, even if those votes have been manipulated so the rich and powerful can retain control, still those manipulations have been, on occasion, overwhelmed.

Is this Balloon Going to be at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade?

After Andrew Jackson lost an election because it got thrown to the House of Representatives where a "corrupt bargain" could be made, we started electing Presidents in a more, if not completely, democratic way, which meant electors were elected by the people. Still no popular election of the President to this day, but closer to democracy, which many politicos of the early 19th century loathed and disparaged.

But that means, if large numbers of people are eligible to vote, you have to reach large numbers.

Which takes not just money, but planning.

Francine Lacqua

I would start with PBS and CNN and I would give two anchors maximal exposure, and allow them to bring out the news on both channels. These would be Francine Lacqua, currently with Bloomberg News and Ky Ryssdahl, currently on NPR's Marketplace.

Both of these people were brought up during their formative years in the US and speak perfect English but they also have deep and abiding European connections.
Lacqua's father is Italian, which she speaks, but she did grammar school through high school in Washington, DC (L'Ecole Rochambeau, a French speaking school) then on to England and France for university. She speaks French, English, Italian and she is that rare Grace Kelly cool which leaves the viewer hungering for more.

Ky Ryssdahl

Ky Ryssdahl has Danish/American breeding and is a warmer, but still hard edge presence and he can take apart a sleazy politico in a genial manner so calmly the politico hardly realizes he's been exposed.

Once you have this in place, you can draw folks from Fox News, and the commercial networks and then, maybe elect enough Dems to pack the Supreme Court and launch an assault on the Electoral College. Remember, in the 20th and 21st century the EC has given us two minority Presidents, one worse than the first.

This is Them

Fox Newsreader

That's the plan. Go do it.


This is Us: She can blow those hot pink air heads away

Maine and Missouri

Here's something Jill Lepore just reminded me about:  The state of Maine is actually rather young, as New England states go. While Massachusetts and New Hampshire were among the original 13, Maine did not get into the union until the 19th century. It had been part of Massachusetts, which must have been one huge state, and how that happened with New Hampshire in between, I'll have to google. 

But when Missouri wanted in as a slave state, they needed a free state to offset that, which provided Maine with an opportunity.

And so, we have the beautiful (free) state of Maine, and here is a sunset shot by one of Maine's best photographers, from Frye Island, which, I suppose, must carry a lesson: Even sordid dealings may occasionally come with a golden sunset.

Frye Island, Maine, Sunset--M. McCarthy

The Court: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

How quickly has Kavanaugh become yesterday's news?
For too many women, who flew to Washington, to tell tearful stories with trembling lower lips, to bond with fellow women who have been abused by predatory men, who wailed that women can never again feel safe in this country, who Tweet each other and say, "Thank you for sharing your story. How very brave of you." 
For all those women for whom this final nail in the lid of an archly conservative Supreme Court, this has simply been a great stage for self dramatization, hugging, wearing pink hats, well they can move on now to organizing marches and singing "We Shall Overcome."

For the Republicans, men mainly, they can retire to their dens, break open some booze and light cigars: The Court is now safely in their hands for the next 30 years. 
Roe v Wade's days are numbered. Individuals will be able to claim their unwillingness to serve Blacks, gays, MS-13 members, Spanish speakers is protected by the First Amendment, as their racism is simply an expression of their deeply held religious beliefs: GOD has spoken to them and told them to burn Negroes and Jews and undesirables at the stake.

Unless and until the Democrats can brave up and chose some real leaders, real warriors.

Jill Lepore, Ginsburg, Kavanaugh and Reality

Jill Lepore has, in the October 8 New Yorker, rendered the ultimate service of the historian: she has made sense of a confusing present moment by re examining the past, in an article which is nominally about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but is really about the Supreme Court and the underlying lie which pervades that most political of our institutions, namely that the justices of that Court are non political, not making up laws, not creating new strike zones but only calling balls and strikes in a zone determined by the legislature.
She begins with the question Senator Joseph Biden posed to Ginsburg during her confirmation hearings: "In your work as an advocate in the seventies you...pressed for immediate extension of the fullest constitutional protection for women under the Fourteenth Amendment and you said the Court should grant such protection notwithstanding what the rest of society, including the legislative branch, thought about the matter."

What he was questioning, of course, is what conservatives call "judicial activism" when it is the conservative ox which is gored, and "original intention" when the other side gets gored by the Court.

Clearly the Court was ahead of public opinion in Brown v Board of Education, when it declared "separate but equal" was a phony dodge for segregation and denial of basic rights to Negroes. And it may well have been ahead of public opinion in Roe v Wade, when it found a right to privacy, that word appearing nowhere in the Constitution, as the basis for a right to women "controlling their own bodies" and being allowed to have abortions, although Harry Blackmun, who wrote that extraordinarily wise opinion, noted that the line between infanticide and abortion is a matter of line drawing, and he drew his line at viability, which in 1973 was about 21 weeks.

 Lepore notes, "She never answered Biden's question. Instead, she established her own rule: the Ginsburg precedent, a rule of restraint. But there are very few rules left anymore, and even less restraint."

With the Kavanaugh show, we have been told, clearly enough, it's Trump Rules now. Everything is now in your face, mafiosi style now. "Hey, I'm a gonna smash your face in!" And this is just style, we are talking about. A pretense. A veneer of respectability, when in fact, underneath, deeply held biases guide each justice to an end point unaffected by facts or the law. If you are Roger B. Taney, hearing a case from Dred Scott, who claims his rights have been violated by enslavement and you do not believe Negroes are people but in fact are property, like cattle, then you get to the decision to deny him freedom and you find a law or legal principle to get you there. This Dred Scott is property and so he has no "standing before the Court." A dog cannot sue for his freedom. Dred Scott has no more standing than a dog.

Which is exactly the point I wish to explore: 117 judges have written to the Senate condemning Judge Kavanaugh's lack of "judicial temperament," and his political attack, calling the attack against him a "political hit job."  But one man's lack of restraint is another man's righteous indignation.
And Kavanaugh is not wrong about the use to which the charge against him has been put and the motivations of those, beyond his accuser, which have driven this attack.

Why do judges and Court experts so fear an appearance of anger on the part of a justice? Retired Justice Stevens said now that Kavanaugh has attacked Democrats as being politically motivated in their opposition to him, he cannot be seen as impartial.
As if any of these justices--Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch--are not seen as politically driven in their opinions. As if Sotomayer, Kagan, Ginsberg and Breyer do not see cases through liberal lenses.  It is this abiding fantasy, that the court is above politics, is impartial, does not prejudge cases by bringing to them a set of foundational beliefs which Kavanaugh threatened with his flash of anger.

There are several questions which have been jumbled up in the Kavanaugh affair and we should try to untangle these:
1/ Is it possible that both Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford be telling the truth?
2/ Is the opposition to Judge Kavanaugh based on an assessment of his moral fiber, his character or on his conservative politics?
3/ Is there an 800 pound gorilla in the room nobody wants to talk about: Namely Mitch McConnell and his brazen acknowledgement that the court is fundamentally political, and politics is power and he had the power to steal the seat owed Obama, so he did and now the Democrats are saying, we will try to use our power to steal it back again?
4/ The role of #Me Too and the "joys of victimhood."
5/ The idea of "rehabilitation"--long a liberal song. We should not send people to prison to punish them because people can do violent, nasty things and yet be able to be "cured" of this, to right themselves and to change.

Sally Hemmings and Me Too?

This last idea has got almost no attention. Even if Kavanaugh attempted to rip off Christine Blasey's swim suit and rape her when he was 17 and she was 15, does it not matter that in the 30 years since his high school and college days, he has interacted with many women who were his law clerks, his colleagues and many of them attest he was a perfect gentleman? Where is the concept of rehabilitation, personal change and redemption there? Once a drunken, randy frat boy always a frat boy?  Kavanaugh would be dishonest to put on a sweet, judicial face and countenance that attack.

What of the idea both Kavanaugh and Ford are telling the truth? If Kavanaugh tried to rip off that bathing suit and failed, could it not be true because he was unable to rape and penetrate that girl, it became just another in a long line of girl rejections and he moved on and forget it? 
He may have remembered his first episode of sexual intercourse, but he may well have forgotten all the failed attempts.
Of course Christine Blasey would remember that incident, while he flipped it off like a soaked sweatshirt.

Is the attack on Kavanaugh political calculation or moral outrage?
 Well, from the point of view of Chuck Schumer it is the most transparent and likely cynical opportunism.
Oh, we got him now.
But from the point of view of all those women with placards outside the hearing room, all those women following Congressmen down the halls to the elevators,  it's moral outrage. This is just another in the long line of males having their way and smirking about it. To say they are projecting their own experiences and demons onto Kavanaugh, who none of this women actually know, is to state the obvious.

But what about the current Kavanaugh?
If every woman who has interacted with him for the past 20 years insists he is a perfect gentleman, does that not matter?

And what of the #ME too thing? A writer for the Atlantic , Emily Yoffee, points out the whole idea that an accusation is tantamount to a conviction, that the accused is always guilty and the accuser should always be believed is the essence of injustice. Thal shall not bear false witness--a commandment which, is there because even the ancients recognized there is such a thing as false witness, and the harm suffered by the falsely accused is great, great enough to warrant a commandment of its own.

And then there are those other members of the mob with signs.
Women interviewed on the radio. The survivors.
And there is Joseph Epstein, writing in the failing NY Times of 1989:

"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."
--"The Joys of Victimhood"
The fact is, what this is really all about is the Supreme Court has pretended to be a political for 100 years but in reality, it as been the essence of political, purely ideological, unrestrained by term limits or being answerable to an electorate.

The solution?
Admit the truth: The Court is, has always been and likely should be purely  political and ideological.
But as politics change, so should the Court.
Roe will be overturned, and that is the will of the electorate. But four years from now, or eight, if we had a new Supreme Court, with 4 or 8 additional justices (a packed Court), it will change back again, as the voters want.
As Lepore notes, even Ginsburg thought Roe was a poor case for an abortion ruling. There was a better case, but it never saw the light of day.
Meanwhile, Supreme Court justices, especially Antonin Scalia, riddled the idea of the dispassionate, "judicial temperament" with dissents which reeked of invective.
Dissents like, "Running headlong from the questions briefed and argued before us, my colleagues seek refuge in a theory as novel as it is questionable." And calling decisions "Orwellian" or "A blow against the People."

The solution has nothing to do with any one justice. The solution has to do with restructuring the Court, which can be done without a constitutional amendment.
The Constitution does not mandate 9 justices. There could be 90.

The whole idea that we can fix the problem of the "rule from the dead" with civility, calm demeanor, black robes, probity, sobriety is the ultimate sham. We are dealing with human beings who harbor deep seeded philosophical prejudices. You cannot get around that with dressing up in black robes and play acting.
We need a court which changes with every new administration, at least a little and over the course of 8 years, if the electorate wills it, will change substantially, even radically, to reflect the beliefs of the times.

That is the only way to solve the problem of the Court.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Here's an interesting fact upon which to cogitate:


The following nine Republican United States Senators represent fewer people in the United States Senate than Ben Cardin and Chris Von Hollen represent from the single Democratic state of Maryland:
Nebraska: Ben Sasse, Deb Fischer
Idaho: Mike Crapo, James Risch
South Dakota: John Thune, Mike Round
Wyoming: John Barrasso, Mike Enzi
North Dakota: John Hoven--the other US Senator is a Democrat, Heidi Heitkemp.


Another way of thinking about it: Ben Cardin represents 6,016, 447 citizens while Mike Enzi represents 585,501 citizens.

And yet Enzi's vote on Supreme Court nominations, on whether or not Roe v Wade gets undone counts just as much as Cardin's.


Or, to put it another way, each Wyoming voter has a voice 10 times louder than each Maryland voter, on whether or not abortion will be kept safe and legal, whether or not a restaurant owner can refuse to serve Black customers in his place of business, open to the public, on the grounds his deeply held religious beliefs tell him Whites and Blacks should not mix in his restaurant, or in his hotel or in the public school his children attend, or whether we should have a national health care system or Medicare for all.


One might ask, why should a person living in a state which is mostly prairie run the lives of people in Baltimore?