John Randolph: Citizen of the Republic of Reason

I am a citizen of the Republic of Reason. 
--John Randolph

Reading about John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia, born 1773, who served in the nascent United States House of Representatives and the Senate is both thrilling and reassuring, here and now in 2016. 

Randolph was a slave owning master of a Virginian plantation, a son of Virginia aristocracy and bizarrely, a distant relative of none other than Pocahontas. (This should be a comfort to Elizabeth Warren. Not all descendants of Pocahontas look like Cher.)

He was a prodigious horseman, whose feats upon stallions were well known and much admired in hunt country, but he was also clearly a eunuch. His biographers speculate about the source of his testosterone deficiency, speculating him to be  a victim of Klinefelter's Syndrome, but all we really know is at his autopsy, he had only a remnant of one atrophic testicle. Whatever caused this, it likely happened before puberty was fully completed, leaving him with long legs, no beard growth and a high pitched voice.

It was Randolph, reacting to another Congressman's taunt about his lack of virility, who said, "Sir, you pride yourself on an animal faculty, in which the Negro is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior."
Oh, that we had Congressmen with that sort of mind today--but without the racist tinge. 
As if in compensation for his lack of manliness, he became pugnacious and physically fearless.  His home plantation was called, "Bizarre." And bizarre he was.

But he was also important and reading about him is much more than merely entertaining and enthralling: It is enlightening. 

Randolph vehemently opposed the proposition the federal government ought to raise and support a standing army in peacetime.  For Randolph, the idea of paying an army of mercenaries to defend the citizens of America was an anathema. 
"A people who mean to continue free must be prepared to meet danger in person, not to rely on the fallacious protection of mercenary armies. When citizen and soldier shall be synonymous terms, then will you be safe."
As a student at Columbia, he had listened to debates in the United States Congress, then in New York, about the idea of allowing militia to keep and bear arms.  He thought arming the militia a bad idea. Citizens should arm themselves.
This provides a new insight into the origins of the Second Amendment. Clearly, the Second Amendment was meant to arm militias, not individuals. Randolph thought the Constitution should guarantee an individual's right to bear arms and was appalled it ceded that right only to members of a militia.
Somehow, this escaped the attention of Justice Scalia and others as they found the Second Amendment guaranteeing an individual's right to keep and bear arms in what they claimed was the original intent of the founding fathers. (What did Scalia actually know about what the founding fathers thought?)
Randolph was offended by the idea of paying men to be soldiers when there was no war to fight. These fighting men, with no fight before them would simply be "mercenary loungers and ragamuffins." 

Oddly, the idea that peacetime soldiers might be described as slackers or hired guns did not so much offend the military as the description, "ragamuffin," and Randolph felt compelled to walk back that term, but he stuck to his guns about the slacker (lounger) and mercenary parts.

I cannot know for sure, but from what I've read, those off the grid white supremacists living out in Idaho and North Dakota would likely agree with Randolph about the imperative to be self sufficient and to be prepared and willing to defend yourself and your home personally and they are arming themselves to fight the standing army of the federal government. Now we think of these people as lunatics, but Randolph, coming from a Virginia plantation was describing this mentality explicitly.

Distrust of others, unwillingness to place power in the hands of people outside your family, your plantation is sewn into the fabric of those Trump supporters who pack heat and show up at his rallies. These people are profoundly, often sociopath ically, anti social. Theirs is a distrust of the losing class, the kids who were told in grade school they were stupid, who were denigrated by their teachers in middle school, who were never going to get past high school.  Institutions of the government rejected them, told them they were worthless losers. And they never fully recovered, even if they went on to earn decent livings as HVAC repairmen, plumbers, electricians and wood workers.

Clinging to their guns.

But the really interesting thing is the unraveling of threads we today think of as interwoven.  Clinging to their guns and their religion. Not so in Randolph, who like Jefferson and so many other founding fathers was a "deist, and therefor an atheist."  Deist, as Jefferson described it, hoped for the existence of a God and an afterlife, but had no faith in any earthly religion connecting them to that.

Randolph would not have embraced today's Second Amendment crowd. He detested the idea of equality, and no gun could make you his equal.

It's pretty clear the current gun toting Second Amendment character feels powerful, the equal of any man when he straps on his Glock or slings his AK-15 over his shoulder and walks down the street or shows up at an Obama rally to protest.

Randolph had no illusions about even the biggest hand gun or rifle making you all powerful. The Revolution had been fought with cannon and howitzers--even in the late 18th and early 19th century, armies could crush any individual or plantation owner. 

My right to enslave others

Oddly, Randolph and Jefferson and the early Republican-Democrats loved the French revolutionaries, who were heavily into chopping off heads.  The heads they were after were aristocrats and the government they were advancing was one of citizen equality. And Jefferson and Randolph were aristocrats. But what they did not like was the idea of a government which could intervene on behalf of the have nots to impose power over them in their own little plantation kingdoms. 

Much as today's anti government Trumpees revile the whole notion of government. 

The odd evolution has, however, brought our present day anti government types into the military fold. Kelly Ayotte extols the virtues of our present day ragamuffins at every opportunity. Of course, you can argue that we no longer have a peacetime army in our world of eternal, constant war.  But she loves the idea of hiring others to do our fighting for us, rather than making citizens defend themselves in person. 

But Ayotte and her Tea Party lovers do share that Jeffersonian, Randolph desire to live without a government.  

You want guns: I'll give you guns

"Given the choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I'd choose the latter," Jefferson said.

Which means, for all his dismissal of the value of any real government, Mr. Trump has not embraced the alternative. 

Only I Know What Hillary Is Hiding

Oh, that villain

While David Brooks and Mark Shields blather on about the pyschological effect of Jimmy Comey's recent letter to Republican Congressman on that unicorn of a voter who hasn't already made up his or her own mind, I alone know what is in all those emails, on that private server, what Hillary is desperate not be revealed:

1/ Hillary arranged for those State Department employees to die at Benghazi
2/ Hillary covertly shipped grenade launchers, rock propelled grenades, tanks, airplanes, Black Hawk helicopters and sharp head lopping off swords to ISIS and used the money ISIS sent her to fund late term abortions in the Congo and Texas through the Clinton foundation
3/ Hillary diverted State Department funds to Planned Parenthood to search out women recently pregnant who might be persuaded to have late term abortions
4/ Hillary sought to buy the silence of all those women who her sexual predator husband Bill continued to bed because she was afraid one of those women might speak up and implicate her in Bill's assignations. She was furious when some of them refused and instead showed up in the front row of the debates, having taken Trump's better offer of roles on the next Celebrity Apprentice
5/ General Petraeus is Hillary's secret lover, one among many. Others include: Bernie Sanders, Tim Kane, Harry Reid, Sheriff Arpaio (of Arizona), Sitting Bull (in another life), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonin Scalia (who she had murdered because he threatened to talk), Clarence Thomas (who is only alive because he never talks.)

I don't see what's so funny

And that only scratches the surface of what I know about what's on those emails. 
But I'm not going to let it all out just now. I'm going to send it to Wikileaks so they can dribble it out, day by day until November 8.

Remember only I know the truth.
Eat your heart out, Donnie John.

J. Edgar Hoover, Comey and the Tooth Fairy

Oh, just a little notice to Congress, we have a new computer to look at and it belonged to the former wife of one of the most embarrassing Democrats ever and it may have her emails violating security and she's a friend of Hillary so let the headlines read: FBI investigating Hillary. AGAIN!
She's just SO corrupt. But, of course, that's not for me to say. 
I'm just saying. We are just investigating, or not. Maybe. We're looking into it.
Eleven days to go, we had to do something.
It's an old FBI tradition. You know, like when J. Edgar went after Martin Luther King. And that was the beginning of a tradition around here. 

But I'm just doing my job. Got to get those statements out right now.
Don't want this coming out after the election. Might make the bureau look bad. 

So, this may or may not be germane to our investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, but it is certainly not  motivated by a desire to affect the election.

Just me doing my job, just pure as the driven snow. Just like J. Edgar before me...
But here's the thing. What do you think is the worst possible thing that could be on any of Ms. Clinton's emails? 
Nobody ever talks about that.
Like, suppose there was top secret stuff which could have hurt "national security." Like what? Exactly. 
Actually, this computer didn't really have Ms. Clinton's emails, just her friend's emails and some of the husband's. Well, maybe some of Hillary's. I'm not saying.
But back to the good stuff: What could be in Mrs. Clinton's emails?
Maybe she is secretly Vladimir Putin's mistress! Or maybe she was having a thing with Qaddafi and that's why she was so keen to get him. Lover's spat. Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned or what not. I mean. I'll just leave it to your imagination. 
Not even Donald can come up with something specific. He just says, Oh, it's just so bad. So corrupt. So, very, very, very corrupt. (He doesn't have a lot of words, so he just repeats himself. But he has the best words.)
Well, the less said, the better, I always say.

That's my boy, Jimmy Comey

Hillary v Trump: Michael v Sonny Corleone

Flawed candidates. That's what we hear daily.  "I find Hillary repugnant," they say. "I just can't vote for that conniver."  Then again, "Trump--he might start World War III."


The fact is, we do not know either Hillary or Trump. We think we do, but we don't.


We have to look to experience outside our own to extrapolate to the idea: What kind of person is this?


For a while, I thought Trump was simply Tony Soprano, but Soprano, for all his thug sound was infinity more subtle, had many more shades to his character.


King Joffrey of Game of Thrones comes closer, the cowardly child put on the throne who becomes willful, orders the head of the good John Stark chopped off, but Joffrey quakes in fear and is immobilized when face with real danger and his dwarf uncle has to rescue him by the exercise of real cunning.


But the real and best touchstone, for my money, is "The Godfather." 
There you have the cool, calculating, quiet plotter, the leader who does not reveal himself, who organizes quietly, effectively in Michael Corleone.

Sonny is Trump, explosive, fun to watch, but, in the end, as his father observes, "A bad Don."


Talking to people while canvassing, I'm frequently confronted with people who cannot express what they don't like about the Machiavellian Clinton, and aren't much better at saying what bothers them about Trump.


From now on, if they are old enough to have seen "The Godfather," it's going to be: "Would you rather have Michael or Sonny Corleone as your godfather? Who would you rather have in charge of the family?"

Hillary at Wellesley

 For too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.
--Hillary Rodham, Wellesley, Address to the Class of 1969, at her graduation

Sitting in the audience when Hillary Rodham rose to deliver her address to graduating seniors in 1969 was a woman who I had known since I was 13 years old. Her name was Kristie Anne Hansen, and she had been my heart throb, until we both left Bethesda in 1965 to go to off to college.

In 1964, I had run against Kristie for president of the student government and there was a big assembly of the whole school in the field house. I had written my speech with lots of references to drinking beer and I tried to appeal to the hoi polloi, the guys I knew from the locker rooms, the varsities, the future frat boys and sorority girls. I was not among the crowd that was winning, but I was doing my best impression of that, not very successfully.
 I was going low. Kristie went high. 
She went directly at the biggest problem her candidacy had: She was a girl running for the office of president. Girls ran for secretary, sometimes for treasurer, but never president. "But why should a girl not be president?" Kristie asked the stunned audience. "If that girl has been captain of the cheerleaders, has worked hard in the Montgomery County student government?" She went on to list all the things a high school girl could do, which, admittedly was not much, but she was really saying, girls should be taken seriously. 
By the time she was finished, I was ready to vote for her. There were two boys running and I don't remember the other boy's speech or my own, but I remember Kristie's. She was nervy and bold.

She beat me and the other guy running: I'm guessing it was a landslide.

But by the time Kristie found herself listening to Hillary Rodham that day in 1969, much had changed. The war in Vietnam had gained full steam. Gloria Steinem had caught the public's attention. Martin Luther King had delivered his speech on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial and had been slain in Memphis. "Hair" had hit Broadway.  Bob Dylan had risen. Bob Dylan wouldn't have cared much about who won a high school election or what college she went to. Bob spoke of that debutante who knows what you need, but not what you want.  In my mind, Kristie faded into that class of debutantes and chosen people who were just distant memories in a world which no longer existed.

The first time I heard "Like A Rolling Stone." I was sitting in a lifeguard chair at Old Farm swimming pool with my transistor radio plugged into my ear and just about fell out of the chair. "Ah, you went to the finest school alright, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it."  And I thought of Kristie. She had been on top, just like the girl in the song, and I wondered if she had wound up on the street , once she had to leave the Promised Land of elite colleges. I suspected nobody had ever taught her how to live out on the street.

Actually,  I hadn't heard from her or much about her, after high school.  I only learned about her indirectly, when I read Richard Holbrooke's eulogy of Kurt Schork. I had  heard Kristie  married Kurt Schork, who had got a Rhodes scholarship but while they were  still at Oxford, the marriage fell apart and I imagined Kristie without a home, no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. 

Kurt later became a war correspondent, covered Sarajevo and was killed in Sierra Leone. He was a nervy, bold guy, but that was his undoing. 

In high school, everyone said Kristie Hansen would be the first woman President of the United States.  They thought she deserved to be that.

I don't know what happened to her. I can't find her on Wikipedia. I heard she went to law school and went back to Washington to work in the government on student loans or something. I saw her at a high school reunion, but we never talked. 

There must have been a lot of girls like her at Wellesley. Bright stars, the creme de la creme. The debutante parade, all the girls who just wanted to be on the side that's winning. I used to be among that crowd. It was positively Fourth Street.

But one of those women that I know of...Hillary Rodham, seemed to come out on the other side, and do okay.

Hillary for Jail? What the Trump?

Trump Chumps in Full Flower: Is that a Glock in Your pocket?

Okay, I admit, I may not be the sharpest blade in the drawer, maybe not all the lights are on upstairs, but what's with this "Hillary for Jail" thing?

I've tried looking this up on line and all I can find Donald Trump or any of his acolytes accusing her of is mishandling of classified documents, or setting up an illegal server, or destroying emails.

And what is the worst thing they are saying she could be hiding by all this?

What it comes down to is "She must have done something really bad, she's trying to cover up."


But what exactly are they thinking? 


The closest I can come to an actual theory of crime was from that airhead Congresswoman from Alabama who implied during the Benghazi hearings that Hillary went home from the State Department at 3 AM the night of Benghazi for a tryst with a lover, which was finally enough for Hillary to burst out laughing, and when the Congresswoman said indignantly, "Well, I don't see anything funny," Hillary just shook her head, and of course everyone else in the room saw something very funny, as the airhead sat there looking dumb and dumber.

Alabama's finest: Heaven Help Alabama

Of course, had I been the voice in Hillary's ear phone during the hearings, I would have said, "Oh, Congresswoman, you have found me out. I spent the night alone, until General Petraeus came over for a late night tryst."  Maybe, in fact, someone did say that to Hillary in her earphone and that's why she was laughing. I don't know.


But to get back to the Hillary for Jail thing--this has become a chant among Trump Chumps, but whenever I ask one he just says, "Well, the emails," or "Well, the server," or "Well...you know."


Which says, of course, none of these guys has thought past the chant.


Enlighten me here. What am I missing?

Punched Out?

Muhammad Ali's strategy for the George Foreman fight was to allow Foreman to wail away on him and "punch himself out." Once Foreman's arms were too weary to throw another punch, Ali moved in for the knockout.

Predictions for Foreman's victory were unwavering and universal, so much so that Foreman actually prayed before the fight he would not kill Ali in the ring.

Watching Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, David Gregory and all the pundits on TV this morning I thought I was seeing Trump in a rope a dope.  No more mention of building a wall, kissing women, fat women, disgusting, nasty women, no more mention of forbidding Muslims from crossing our borders--now it's all about bringing back the factories for all those Ohio and Pennsylvania workers. You can all just go back to the factories now, get your paycheck. Ain't America great again. 

Never mind when those factories re open the 3,000 jobs once held by your fathers will be done by 2,000 robots and 100 workers.

Donald has learned what works and in the last two weeks he's lulling everyone to sleep, playing rope a dope. All he has to do is simply not be outrageous, and people forget all those wild things he said. He looks calm and a safe option.

Republicans come home--your boy is all grown up now.