The Silence of the Lambs: Or, Why Democrats Lose

 

The meeting brought forth no surprises, only the expected behavior from those Mad Dog had come to know pretty well over the years.

The Hampton Democrats gathered 20 odd citizens, the usual suspects, to plow through the nuts and bolts of what passes for organization and planning and thinking of the local Party. 

There were long minutes spent talking about lawn signs, their value, the strategy of planting them on side streets, then moving them to busy intersections where signs can legally be planted as the election on March 9 draws nearer.

Mad Dog did learn something new, something he had always wondered about: when Democrats or Republicans gather to hold sign at the town's main intersection  (a dreary crossroads of Route 1 and Route 27, over arched by a jumble of thick power lines so ugly townspeople no longer even see them)  the sign holders often stand on the corner across from the Old Salt restaurant, but, it turns out, the Hampton police have informed the chairman of the local party, you cannot stand there legally, and have to keep moving, so if you want to stand, you have to move 500 feet down Route 1 toward the town gazebo.

Never knew that. 

The chairman announced that Democrats dominated the letters to the editor to the online edition (or it may have been the print edition--Mad Dog reads neither) of the Hampton Union and similar plans are being hatched to do the same for Seacoast Online. 

A video was played from a current octogenarian town councilor running for re election, a woman who refused to endorse the Hampton Democrat running for finance board,  because while a Democrat, this councilor  has a fondness for old friends who are Republicans or she has a fondness for simply landscaping for the town graveyards, which the town has done by cutting down ten 50 foot pine trees, leaving that part of Rte 27 denuded as a clear cut swath. 

 Out of a sense of  fairness, we listened to this octogenarian tell us that taxpayer money was routinely squandered and that no new buildings ought to be allowed in town ever again because the construction vehicles are noisy, destructive and unsightly, and nobody is offering to build this town councilor a new house any time soon. 

Warrant Article Tree Massacre at Graveyard

When 85 of the allotted 90 minutes for the meeting had elapsed, the chairman asked Mad Dog to present his thoughts on the warrant article (mentioned in the previous blog post) which allocates $65,000 from town coffers to the Sacred Heart school nestled on the grounds of the Miraculous Medal Catholic church. 

Mad Dog expostulated this payment from public funds to a religious institution violates the First Amendment, prima facia, and the Democrats should rise up in one mighty chorus and condemn it. 

Separation of church and state, don't you know?

Two lawyers present suggested since they are not constitutional scholars they could not offer an opinion about whether spending public governmental funds on a religious institution is in fact, unconstitutional, because, well, there are some laws which allow for it if the funds are for particular purposes. 

Mad Dog suggested you don't need to be a constitutional scholar to know an elision of church and state when you see it in the form of money getting deposited into a church account from a government account. 

The opinion of a town teacher of government was solicited and he opined the separation of church and state has never been absolute in America and the RSA laws which allow for government funds to be spent on private organizations for certain purposes have been endorsed by voters for years, by wide margins. He mentioned "shared bus routes" which Mad Dog took to mean that public school buses have been delivering town children to Sacred Heart for years.

Mad Dog did not have time or space to say that, yes, he understands in America we sometimes violate separation of church and state: we have a pledge which identifies our nation as nation "under God" and we have a chaplain of the United States Congress who often leads the Congress in prayer. And we have "In God We Trust" on our coins, but none of these things should actually be tolerated, and none of them involve spending taxpayer funds on a religious school, a wholly own subsidiary of a church.

Mad Dog was dying to tell the story about the time the Supreme Court directed the state of Texas to remove a nativity scene from the grounds of the state capitol and Anne Richards, then governor remarked, "It's a damn shame: It's the first time there ever were three wise men simultaneously present in Austin."

The purpose of this outlay of Hampton taxpayer funds is for a school nurse, for other non classroom activities Mad Dog was told. To which Mad Dog responded it doesn't matter if the funds provide for maintenance of flower beds, plowing of the parking lot; all that should be paid for by the Church, not the town.

View from Plaice Cove--Obadiah Youngblood

Several Democrats said for them the idea that public funds were handed over to non public schools was the problem, not the religious thing, which, if Democrats objected, would lose an entire Catholic vote. 

There you had it: fear of offending an interest group paralyzed these Democrats.

Do you think for a minute Republicans would shrink from saying what they thought was right for fear of losing votes? Mad Dog asked.

Practical objections were raised: Keeping those kids in Catholic school was cheaper than bringing them into the public schools where it cost $25,000 a year to educate them. To which Mad Dog said: So you would have argued, before school desegregation, it was cheaper to keep colored kids in colored schools and that was right?

Entirely Legal

Mad Dog could see he had a problem convincing this group to fight on principle: If only he had a poster child, a sympathetic face who would be harmed by government money spent on a religious school. He considered asking the group how they would feel if a madrassa opened in town and asked for dollars to educate its Muslim students.

In the end, no vote of support was taken. 

Mad Dog was told by several Democrats they would secretly vote against the warrant article but none would risk public exposure and the "blow back" that might bring. These Democrats would resist, but only if protected by the veil of secrecy, where they would offend no one. 

Only one stalwart said she would join Mad Dog's effort and she was no surprise at all: She is a Catholic, appalled to see town funds sent to Sacred Heart, and she  ever true to principle and never backs down from a fight and persists in all things. She is the heart and soul of the Democratic party in New Hampshire, but sadly, she is the rare exception. 

Unafraid to be Unpopular

But, in the end, the assembled Democrats advised Mad Dog if he was so worked up about it, to go to the ACLU and see if they would help him, but the Hampton Democrats were too fearful and in any case it was too close to the election.

Mad Dog muttered about "the fierce urgency of now" but Martin Luther King is not someone who resonated with this group.

So the group washed its hands of church/state separation, taking a stand on principle and adjourned, having heard all the committee reports about efforts at communication with the public, and Mad Dog wondered: What, exactly, do we, as Democrats have to communicate?"

As the line from Hamilton said: "If you stand for nothing, what do you fall for?"

 

Hampton NH Votes on Spending Public Funds on a Religious Institution

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

--First Amendment, Constitution of the United States of America

A week from today the good people of Hampton, New Hampshire, a seacoast town of 20,000 will go to the polls to vote for their representatives on the zoning board, the school boards, for selectmen and on twenty pages of "warrant articles."

One of these warrant articles authorizes $40,000 to the Sacred Heart academy, a wholly owned subsidiary of a religious institution.

Whether that religious institution were the Catholic Church, a madrassa or a Jewish school, it would not matter. It is a religious school where religion is taught. 

If this were a private school, say Phillips Exeter Academy, there would be no problem.

But this is a school owned by a religious institution on grounds which are not taxed because this is  church property and in this country we separate church from state.

Every year for many years, this warrant article has passed with hardly a murmur of dissent. This expenditure of public money in a town which zealously guards every dime spent from its treasury is remarkable and the reasons why Hampton citizens are willing to spent money in this equanimous  manner is largely a mystery to Mad Dog.

When pressed, Mad Dog's fellow Democrats, who clearly see the separation of church and state problem, justify the expenditure on practical grounds:

1. It is popular and usually passes by wide margins.

2. The money is said to be for the purpose of paying for transportation of students to the school, for nursing services and for special needs students at the school, so it's not really spent on the school so much as on support services for the school, as if the town were paying for landscaping or plowing of the parking lots at the church connected to it.

3. If Hampton did not support the Catholic school, those students, 100 or more would be sent to the local public school where the cost of educating each is $20,000 a year. So the Catholic school is education on the cheap, a bargain for the taxpayer. It is often said this is why the voters have voted the funds every year. 

When a member of the "Hampton Dems"--a motley collection of citizens who range from left of Lenin radicals to homespun Hampton Democrats who attend monthly meetings, stand with signs on Route One in election years and go to Toni Trotzer's annual barbecue--several objections were made:

1. For the Dems to take a position on this issue a week before the election would result in "blowback" from unhappy citizens who may not think much about politics but would be roused from their sleep over this issue.

2. Such blow back may jeopardize the candidacies of Democrats running for various town positions. 

Mad Dog, who brought this issue to the agenda, argues:

1. Taking a position officially, by vote to express the opinion of the group is one thing; what to do about that is another.

2. The candidates do not have to endorse this policy and still be supported by the Hampton Dems.

3. The issue as a matter of principle is pretty simple:

The first amendment forbids Congress (and by extension local government) from acting to establish a state religion. 

Warrant Article Tree Massacre

One might argue Hampton is a town, not Congress, but as Brown v Board of Education demonstrated, that distinction is null and void as all governments from small towns to state legislators are bound by the Constitution.

Hampton Civil War Dead

One might argue for Hampton to pay for school buses to Sacred Heart is not "establishing religion" in Hampton. It's just school buses.  But if Hampton were asked to pay for new windows at the school, for repaving the parking lot or for other upkeep, would we not then begin to question how much paying the Church's cost in running the school becomes a government participating in establishing a church in town? After all, in Henry VIII's England, the church abbeys were supported by taxes on the people and much of that had nothing to do with what was preached from the pulpits.

We do not tax church property because we know that taxes become a vehicle of control of state over church; so if a church uses taxes for its benefit how is that not a vehicle of church control over state?

Let's assume, for sake of argument, the vote tonight at the Hampton Dems meeting is overwhelmingly in favor of a statement of opposition to the warrant article granting town funds to Sacred Heart: What would we do with that?

1. Establish a committee to study what action we might take for the 2022 warrant article.

2. Pat ourselves on the back for taking a stand for the 1st Amendment and eat cookies.

3. Write a letter to the editor of Seacoast news stating our opposition and the reasons why.

4. Engage the ACLU to bring a 1st amendment case (their favorite) on our behalf and sue the town of Hampton to stop this clearly illegal practice.

Why should we fight over a principle which has no poster child? 

Are the students at Sacred Heart injured? No. Are their parents injured? No. Are we as taxpayers injured? Not really: it's chump change, really.

You may say the separation of church and state is not absolute: Congress opens its sessions with a prayer; we pledge allegiance to the flag of one nation "under God" and our coins have "In God We Trust."  Mad Dog would argue each of these violates the 1st amendment and is open to challenge, which a suitably constructed Supreme Court would reject, but in none of these does money change hands from the state to the church.

You will say the town votes on this money to the temple: But that is in fact what the Constitution is all about: There are some things you cannot vote on. The Constitution defines these things. You cannot vote to allow involuntary servitude in Hampton, N.H. because that violates the 14th Amendment.

Who specifically is hurt by this expenditure of town funds?

The answer is we are all hurt when we look at our own town violating the law, the most essential law--the US Constitution--for practical reasons. The Constitution is there to ensure that principle is not sacrificed for expediency. 

It was practical to have segregated schools when I was growing up. Nobody complained about it. It was cheaper to send the few colored kids in Arlington, Virginia to their own school, which, underfunded as it was, was a lot cheaper than it would be to educate these kids in the pricier white schools.

It was only a matter of principle.

Everyone seemed happy with it at the time. 

Our parents decried the practice, but nobody made too big a fuss.

Smartmatics & the Limits of the 1st Amendment

 

One of the virtues of absolutism is the power to be consistent: If you say there should be no limits to free speech, then anytime you have a case, no matter how complicated it is easy to know the answer. 

If  Mr. Giuliani appears on your show and you know what he says it is a lie, and you agree with him, "Wow!" you say, "That's awful!"  He can say it and you can broadcast it,  because speech, even false speech is protected by the First Amendment-- if you are an absolutist, like the ACLU. 

There are some problems with this:

1/ Here is the first amendment: 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So, if the judicial branch of the government finds a defendant guilty of defamation for lying on public airwaves, that is abridging the right of freedom of speech, his right to say wrong, stupid or knowingly untrue and hurtful things. And if that lie is put forward by the press, then it's doubly protected.

Right? Well, not absolutely.

Famously, as Justice Holmes said, "The first amendment does not give you the right to falsely shout 'Fire' in a crowded theater."

Why?  Because there can be consequences to those words, which are an act in themselves and people can be directly and immediately harmed, physically or financially, by that act.

Laws against inciting a riot come down to the Brandenberg decision, in which the test for incitement is proximity to violence, or "imminent lawless action." So someone who says, "Go lynch that darkie!" if that is followed by a lynching, then he is guilty of incitement. 

But if he says, "Hang those people who don't look like us, or maybe not. You might want to. I don't know. But I'm with you. If you want to save the country and your wives and daughters, and if you want to be heroes and do the right thing, you have to use force. I'm right behind you," well then, you've got some ambiguity. 

He really said "you might want to" not "you really ought to" or "you have to."

But if 10 minutes later a person of color is lynched, most juries would find Brandenberg instructs them. 

In other democracies, like Germany, you cannot deny the Holocaust. They decided, after Hitler,  an abridgment of free speech was a fair price to pay for squelching the big lie, and yet their democracy thrives.

So some abridgment of free speech can be seen to be necessary.

We need some rules to guide when speech can be abridged.

These rules usually start with something called "the truth." 

In America "truth is an absolute defense against a charge of defamation or slander."

But what is a "fact"? and What is "truth"?

2/ To prove something is a lie, you often have to establish the truth.

 And how do you prove there are no lasers from outer space causing wild fires or that Democrats do not drink the blood of white Christian children in Satanic rituals or that Hillary Clinton is not even today running a child pornography ring out of the basement of a pizza pallor which has no basement, in Northwest Washington, D.C?

 To appreciate what Fox News did in the case of Smartmatic you really have to hear the clips from Fox and that's where the podcast, "The Daily," is so useful.

Listen to this podcast and then come back to this blog post.

(Preview of coming attractions: Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell claimed Smartmatics software for elections machines turned elections in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona from Trump to Biden; but the truth is, no Smartmatic software was even in voting machines or used in any way in any of those states. 

In fact, Smartmatic was used only in LA county. 

That is one of those things you can investigate, document as a "fact." 

That Smarmatic was created and is still owned by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is also easy enough to disprove, and yet Fox apparently never sent a cub reporter to investigate, simply reported what Giuliani and Powell said as true and reacted with, "Wow! We are so eager to hear the rest of your investigation!" )

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/podcasts/the-daily/smartmatic-fox-news.html

The common tests for defamation and slander are:

1/ The claim is false.

2/ The speaker knew it was false when he made it.

3/ The speaker had "malice aforethought" which is to say, meant to cause harm to the party he slandered.

Listening to this podcast, without doing any more googling, the Smartmatic suit seems to meet all these requirements. 

One of few memorable classes I attended in college in which the professor  confounded the class by asking us to define what is an incontestable "fact." 

We went through all the mathematical arguments: 2+4=4. 

But no, that's a definition, not a fact. We agree on that one as a convention. 

"We are both sitting in this room together." 

"Ah, but how do you know this?"

And on like that--spinning right on to metaphysics, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and onward. 

But real life is not metaphysics. 

There are "facts" which are clear enough "real" enough and necessary so we can live life and not be harmed by wrong facts: If you are bleeding, we have to stop that so you can not die.

If you do not believe in exsanguination and tourniquets as "facts" then you are not going to survive long enough to exercise no friggin' First Amendment. 

If you have been wounded, and your billion dollar company rendered worthless by Fox News in pursuit of a story it wants to be true but should know is not true, then you ought to be able to be made whole by Fox News. 

Part of this discussion is tied up in the concept of "platform." 

 If someone posts a lie on Facebook, is Mark Zuckerberg responsible for the consequences of that lie? So far there is a law, 230c, which says, no, Facebook and Twitter cannot screen or "vet" millions of comments daily and users have to know that.

But not true for news organizations which present themselves as "journalists"  or news outlets, whose job, it is commonly understood, involves challenging the assertions made by those they quote and interview, and to investigate the substance of those claims and then, if they report these claims they are responsible for reporting the denials by those affected.

Anyway, those were the rules when newspapers did not have to compete with News "shows" and social media. 

FOX News may well argue it is and has not been for years a news organization: It's simply entertainment with blond, leggy young women crossing their gams on white leather couches while flashing white teeth and wearing hot pink dresses cut mid thigh. 

But words have consequences, and in this case a multi-billion dollar company, Smartmatics, was executed. And it was a company which did a lot of social good in counting votes quickly and accurately in elections, mostly in countries outside the US. 

And it was a company which was not even on the scene when the crimes occurred as alleged by Giuliani, Power and, more indirectly, by FOX.  This unholy triumvirate claimed Smartmatics did illegal, nasty, election-stealing things in Pennsylvania and Georgia and Arizona, when, in fact, no Smartmatic software was running in any of those states and was only running in LA county. It's like blaming Mexico for Pearl Harbor. 

The motivations of Giuliani and Powell were so clearly manifest, their need to find a dastardly villain capable and eager to steal the election was so visible, there is little doubt about motive, and the motive was clearly not truth seeking.

So we can only hope the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court (Trump's Court) will do the right thing. 

But this is America.

America's Guarded Gate: 2021

 

Listening to the New Yorker's podcast February 5, "Trump Closed the U.S. to Asylum Seekers. Will Biden Reopen it?" I was struck by how the law functions in individual cases.

Medical journals typically only publish papers which give you the big picture, studies which are "sufficiently powered" to draw general conclusions: This vaccine works to protect from disease or it does not. Double blind, prospective, controlled studies.

But sometimes they publish a case report of a single well studied case, and the axiom has been, "A single, well studied case sometimes tells you more than a big study."

So it was with this podcast. Looking at how general rules set down by Trump play out for a single case, you see the larger picture more clearly.

Once we look at what happened to one woman from Honduras, we can back away from the close up to see the larger picture.

In this case a woman appears, without a lawyer but with a translator before a newly Trump  appointed immigration judge who clearly is faced with a body of law she is not comfortable with and the federal prosecutor, who is seeking to deny this woman entry on the basis of arguments with which she clearly is accomplished in using.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/how-trump-closed-the-us-to-asylum-seekers

The woman has walked from Honduras, through the jungles of Guatemala and Mexico to reach the southern border of the US, where she asked for asylum. She testifies she was a political party functionary in Honduras and her husband was a store owner and between the two of them they apparently offended both drug traffickers and government officials friendly to the drug lords. Her husband stepped out his door one morning and was shot to death. One of her three daughters was kidnapped, raped in the presence of a police officer, who stood in a corner of the room while she was raped on the bed,  and later the daughter was shown a picture of the whole family and told, "We are coming to get your m other and sisters."

The mother thought it prudent to flee her home town, and when it became evident she was safe nowhere in Honduras, she headed north to the USA.

She now appears before the judge and her testimony is her only evidence. There is no document from her hometown chief of police. There is no witness to deny what she says and none to confirm it.

The judge asks her if she herself was tortured, or was it only her daughter?

The law requires the person seeking asylum has been directly personally threatened, not by rumor or not by association.

 The judge asks the prosecutor about the presence of the police officer. If the policeman was carrying out an official policy of the Honduran government then the woman may have a case under an exception called the CAT rule, having to do with protecting asylum seekers if they have credible evidence they will be tortured because of their race, religion or political beliefs. 

Since the policeman was of her race and presumably also Catholic, then those cannot be used, but maybe political belief. The prosecutor points out it's not known if the man dressed as a policeman was actually a real policeman or at what level, local, state, federal or whether he was just a rogue cop or acting out a Honduran policy. In fact, the prosecutor points out the entire case is based on what this asylum seeker says: there are no supporting documents, no proof her daughter was raped or even that she has a daughter. 

The judge asks the woman if she has the badge number or name of the policeman who stood in a corner while her daughter was raped. Oddly enough, the woman cannot provide these.

In the end the judge says her heart goes out to the woman but the law requires she send the woman back to Honduras because she does not meet criteria for admission. And, the judge notes, this woman was naughty:  she crossed over two other countries on her way to America and did not seek asylum in those countries. 

It's fascinating to hear the judge try to get herself off the hook of her own conscience, how emphatically the judge wants to say what a nice person she is but she is helpless before the requirements of the law to help this naughty, law breaking mother who walked through two countries to reach the American border.

MS St Louis

Of course, this is not a new story: When Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of State, refused to allow the M.S. St. Louis entry to any American port in 1939 because its load of Jews fleeing Hitler did not qualify for asylum, because they did not have a letter attesting to their good character from their local police, who were the Gestapo, he literally wrapped himself in the American Flag by his desk saying he would be betraying his duty to American law by admitting these people, and the ship returned its people to die in the concentration camps. Hitler later laughed about the American posture of being the savior of the downtrodden Jews, pointing to America's rejection of the St. Louis and sending them back to France and Germany where they were exterminated by men who  at least had the spine to own what they were doing. 

Rejected and sent home to die

Of course, as Daniel  Okrent details in his amazing book, "The Guarded Gate," American immigration policy has always instilled barriers based on race and class disparagement. First it was the Chinese. Later the dark races from Southern Europe (Italy, the Balkans) then the Jews, and along the way even the Irish, who while still white, were often Catholic and always poor. 

Immigrant from Slovenia, a "shit hole: country

Why, asked Donald Trump in amazement, were immigrants always trying to get into America from "shithole countries?"  Why weren't more Norwegians applying for membership in the American Dream Machine?

Of course, in some ways the barriers to immigration find support from people who do not mind the idea of seeing communities spring up which are dark skinned. There are other objections:

1. What if new immigrants take away jobs from those already here?

Immigrants 

2. What if new immigrants who cannot find jobs turn to crime?

What Trump sees when he sees immigrants

3. What do we do with new immigrants who reject the basic idea of tolerance? The UK is beset by problems of Imans in London who preach that the UK is an infidel nation and the immigrants arriving there should not tolerate the British women who walk around half naked, enticing good Muslim boys to impure thoughts, Imans who activity reject the nation and its values into which they have moved. A graft vs host reaction.

4. And what about numbers and rates: Suppose tomorrow America threw open its borders and 10% of Indians and 10% of Chinese moved here in 2022? That would be 150 million Indians and 150 million Chinese and in that case English would not be the language of the majority of people living here.

But for now, we are dealing with immigrants from Central America mainly, people who can walk here. The same forces of instability driving immigration into Europe from the Middle East and Africa: poverty, political instability, crime and violence drive people to vote with their feet and flee.

International law says, Mad Dog is told, that no nation can reject a boatload of Jews or any other similar group who would be returned to a country with laws which would send them to extermination camps, and having passed that law, the nations of the world sat back feeling very virtuous.

But what about that lady whose daughter was raped, or so she says, and what about all those folks, the wretched refuge of the teaming shore? 

Michael Sandel: Meritocracy, Credentials and the Rage that Brought Us Trump and the Proud Boys

On the left, less viciously, we have elite universities that have become engines for the production of inequality. All that woke posturing is the professoriate’s attempt to mask the fact that they work at finishing schools where more students often come from the top 1 percent of earners than from the bottom 60 percent. Their graduates flock to insular neighborhoods in and around New York, D.C., San Francisco and a few other cities, have little contact with the rest of America and make everybody else feel scorned and invisible.

--David Brooks

 Reading Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" a glimmer of insight peaked through the fog of the last four years.

Sandel, a "rock star" professor of philosophy at Harvard in the department of government and politics wrestles with the idea of what is a just society and how the idea of a meritocracy and all that goes with that, actually translates into injustice and justifies the vast inequalities we are now seeing in the United States with the top 400 families owning more wealth than the bottom 80% of the country.

How, in other words, can we justify so few owning so much and why should the government, in the interest of the common good, the greatest good for the greatest number not simply seize a sizable part of that wealth and redistribute it to the rest of the population--as it in fact always had done since 1913, when the 16th amendment, creating the income tax was passed?

Sandel exhaustively documents instances in which American politicians, including President Obama and President Clinton exhort the nation to create mechanisms which more than allow, but promulgate opportunity for every citizen to "rise" to the highest level to which their talents and their desires and motivation can bring them.

This sort of talk has been the "liberal" response to conservatives who say that welfare rewards lazy people who do not want to work, who want to freeload off a system which pays them to stay home and watch TV.

Sandel cannot help but explore the different arguments from the different philosophers, going back to Aristotle, and to tease out anything useful if you want to argue with Republicans or your neighbors today can be tedious, but if you've watched his youtube lectures at Harvard, it can be fun.

Basically, he says the idea that any American has pulled himself up by his bootstraps or should have is an exercise in self deception, in the sense that we all function in a very complex and connected system. There are some folks who have no bootstraps to pull and others who were born, if not on third base, at least on second and think they have hit a triple.

In fact that meme is one of the few useful ripostes to the "I did it on my own" braggadocio thing.

The idea that merit should be the guiding light to award glittering prizes gets a thorough scrubbing, beginning with the idea that talent is not a thing which a person actually achieves by trying. Michael Phelps had to work very hard to win his Olympic gold medals in swimming, but he has flippers for hands and feet and he is very tall and his "talent" which was necessary if not sufficient for success was not the result of his trying harder, but from the stuff he got genetically. As far as swimming goes, he got superior genes and exploited that for gain. But he never could have profited from that were it not for a huge commercial enterprise, the Olympics Inc, which provided venues, advertising, TV coverage, opportunities for endorsements, sponsorships. He did nothing to build any of that; he simply was able to exploit what others built for him.

Then there is the idea that people are rewarded for their value to society, that their labors simply have monetary value and should be reward whether or not they are virtuous people; they have something to sell in the environment which rewards it and so they deserve their wealth because they've provided what was valued. Walter White in "Breaking Bad" realizes he gets paid very little for being a good high school science teacher but he can make the world's best methamphetamine and so he does that to sell on the marketplace, which values his product because laws making it illegal make it scarce and valuable. 

Does Walter White "deserve" his wealth? Well, in one sense he does. But because it's been declared illegal, he is undeserving.

Does the hedge fund manager "deserve" his worth?

Terry Rodgers

Doctors, who have been put through a grinder of competition for scarce medical school spots work very hard to get into school and then work hard to get internships, fellowships, to do be trained to be expert surgeons and physicians. Surely, they "deserve" their financial rewards (which are getting more and more diminished.) But, then again, most of them started on second base in the competition to get into medical school in the first place. 

Lawyers who get paid $300,000 a year do work long hours. Do they "deserve" that wealth? They work no harder or longer than electricians, plumbers or HVAC repairmen.

Oh, we are told but the competition to get into top law schools is more difficult than for electrician school. But why should that matter, if 10 years after training is done both electrician and lawyer and doctor work equally hard?

Why should an accountant get paid more than a plumber?

And why should Jeff Bezos, who did not invent the internet and who does not deliver any packages get to keep the money the American financial and economic system keeps creating for him?

The problem with meritocracy is the myths built into it.

Oh, he was a Rhodes scholar. Oh, he got into Harvard Law. She got into Harvard medical school. She won a Nobel prize.  All of them worked very hard and got rewarded, but that does not mean they should be able to keep every cent they make.

Playing by the rules. Well, who made the rules?

Income tax rates during the Eisenhower Republican years were 90%. Our country was not "socialistic."  Did most Americans think our government was "re distributing" wealth?

Why do Americans who have good health care on their union plans not want the same for other Americans? Well, I don't mind if everyone gets as good coverage as me, but I don't want to lose mine.  Why do you think the government is determined to make your coverage worse? Why does the Dane trust his government when the American does not?

Well, look at Denmark--and Norway, Sweden and Finland. Until recently these were all white countries each with its own distinctive language spoken by only about 6 million people each. They are more like large family groups than multiracial, multiethnic America. 

Sandel insists we should see ourselves, as Americans, as a community. Fact is, when we were at war, in the Second World War, we came close to that. We were all in it together. But not even in the Civil War was that true. Surely, not since. Those who went off and fough, "for their countries" were "suckers" as Mr. Trump reminds us; Sonny Corleone's sentiments exactly.

We justify our disregard for our neighbors in moralistic terms: Well, I work harder. I deserve it more. 

The winners in America have hubris: they are proud and they think they were both chosen and favored; they worked hard to deserve whatever they've got. The losers are humilitated. If they are losers, it's because they deserve to be losers because they are not bright enough or driven enough. 

When England had more clearly defined and rigid classes, the poor or middle class lad who could not rise into the upper classes know his fate was no fault of his own. He was simply stuck in his place of birth. No shame in that.

But with meritocracy, there is always shame enough to burden all classes below the 1%.

With Apologies to Sam, Toby & Will: Joe's Inaugural Address

 Mr. Chief Justice, Madam Speaker, Senators, Congressfolk, My fellow Countrymen:

This is a day, as Roosevelt said, of national consecration. 

We face today a stricken nation. Our distress owes to two phenomena, one natural and one of our own making.

The natural cause is a virus. Not a virus made by man. It arose in no science fiction laboratory in China, but was carried in bats and overflowed into mankind, the fault neither of the bat nor of man.

The second phenomenon was of our own making, or of the invention of disturbed or confused or fearful minds: The evasion of hard, cold reality and cowardly retreat into fantasy, a flight to the land of make believe and conspiracy and darkness.

We have found that we can live in worlds of our own imagination for only so long until reality intrudes and asserts itself. In the past this reality has come in the form of war, military attack or, as in this case, of epidemic disease. Once reality arrives, our need for real action, for science, for cooperation, and for, yes, for government to light the black night of error and mendacity becomes clear.

Our descent into the mad world of dismantling our government left us ill prepared to face reality. The libertarian view that we do not need government, that government is not the solution but the problem always crashes on the hard boulders of public health, public defense or economic disaster. 

My predecessor in this office did not invent the idea that government is necessarily bad, that we should shrink government to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub, but efforts to destroy the departments of government responsible for data collection, (the Department of Commerce,) to destroy the department responsible for science, (the Department of Agriculture,) to destroy the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, all vital to our safety and prosperity as a nation, have made matters much worse than they had to be.

If I read the results of this election clearly, what I am being asked to do is to restore these vital agencies to their full power.

Our distress comes from no failure of ourselves. And our distress did not begin with the pandemic.

Our distress arose because we lost faith in each other, and we lost faith in the fairness of the American way.  Too many people in too many counties came to believe they had been dealt a loser's hand, systematically, and the deck was stacked against them.  What they have come to believe is meritocracy is a fraud. They were constantly reminded if they worked hard, played by the rules, they would be rewarded, but they found themselves on the losing end and they were shamed into believing it was their own fault.

They were sold that canard that the value of their jobs could be measured in dollars. They watched as American companies moved their jobs to nations where workers were valued only as pieces of machinery. The false god of material wealth as the standard of success walked hand in hand with false god of an aristocracy of elite colleges as the defining prize of entry into the upper classes. 

We have learned in this pandemic who really are the "essential workers." Nurses, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, hospital attendants, electricians, HVAC workers, plumbers, mechanics, information technology geeks, construction workers must be in place and thriving before the doctor, lawyer, professor, stock broker or businessman can even begin to work.

We need first to restore science, government and organization to our society, and only then can we get our population vaccinated, our children back to school and our factories and restaurants open. Only then, can we begin to travel, to fly, to reconnect.

Once we have accomplished this, our economy and our long nightmare of isolation and paralysis will recede. 

When that happens, we can take stock. We can look at reality and real facts, not "alternative facts" in the face and we can know, once again that children really did die at Sandy Hook, that a policeman's knee really did kill a defenseless Black man and that the reaction to this, while it ultimately was marred and besmirched by violence, was understandable.

And once the dark curtain of pestilence has been lifted, we must not forget how it was dropped in the first place. We must not forget that every state has, between it's gleaming and energetic metropolises, too much decaying and disintegrating rural space, too long out of sight and out of mind.  We must turn our Rust Belt back into a thriving heartland. 

We must turn our energies and our money toward vitalizing our rural areas as we once decided to embark on rural electrification. We must bring the farmland and the "empty spaces" into the heart of our national life. We can no longer be content to ignore or denigrate "fly over country" or to dismiss the poor Southern states as lost causes, or characterize the Mountain West as white nationalist country. There are millions who live in these places who, though outnumbered, voted for change, voted for progress.

We do not face a financial crisis from a corrupt banking system; we do not face a Great Depression with origins in a  degenerate economic order and colonialism. Our challenge, in fact, has already been met by the most innovative and successful scientific triumph since the polio vaccine. 

We can and we will charge ahead, distribute the vaccine, maintaining our masks and our distance for only as long as is necessary and then we can emerge from the dark into that sunny plain of honesty, of mutual respect and of, finally, unity, so that we can once again speak of the "United" States of America with real belief and not irony. 

We can be that country which has time and again come together, as people from different places, rural and city, wealthy and poor, North and South, East and West, coastal and inland, realize we are all Americans, so much more like each other than different from each other and we can know in the words of that old song, 

"We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

We'll put it together and we'll get it undone,

We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

When the world is much brighter."

Thank you and God bless the UNITED States of America.