Feel Good Moments

How long ago was it when all those women wearing pink hats rallied and organized massive group hugs?

And where are they now?

There's a scene in "Band of Brothers" where American soldiers liberate a Dutch town and the women in particular, but all the citizens, just go wild with joy and relief and wave flags.

Several nights later the American soldiers, defeated in an ill conceived operation called "Market Garden," stand on a hill at night and watch that same town being bombarded by German artillery and Lou Nixon, one of the soldiers, remarks, "I bet they're not waving all those pretty flags now."

That's how I feel about all those million women who hugged and marched and cheered speeches from Gloria Steinem et al just yesterday, it seems.

Now, with early voting going hot and heavy in Florida, snow birds from the Middle West, the rich folks who live 6 months and day in Florida and vote there, have put the Republicans 100,000 votes ahead already. The artillery is reigning down on the state. 

Bet those women aren't waving their pink knit hats now. 

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