From Whence We Came: George Washington and Our Sordid Past

Nathaniel Philbrick, in his excellent history of the final campaign of the American Revolution which ended at Yorktown tells some grisly tales about what the British troops under Cornwallis did in the Virginia countryside.

Cornwallis

A pregnant American woman, an American patriot, her abdomen sliced open, her breasts sliced open, her baby butchered and decapitated heads lined up along her pottery shelves where pottery had been, with "Breed No Rebels" painted in her blood on the wall. 

These British soldiers were not the benign Redcoats depicted in our American history books, who were simply trying to protect the king's tea from being dumped in Boston harbor.

The level of butchery wrought upon the natives rivaled what we later saw in movies like "Platoon" about American soldiers in Vietnam.

But what was just as appalling was the story of the treatment of Black slaves, who the British commander, Cornwallis, had taken from surrounding Virginia plantations, promising them freedom if they would help build fortifications at his redoubt at Yorktown: When Washington and Lafayette finally surrounded him and their usefulness was spent, Cornwallis ejected the slaves into the no man's land between his fort and the American lines, where, once the slaves walked across, they were once again enslaved.  George Washington appointed a slave procurer to take custody of these unfortunates and to return them to "their rightful owners."

Slaver

After the British commander surrendered, Washington hosted a surreal dinner for the French officers who had fought alongside the Americans and for British officers.
Having read through 200 pages of the fierce and ruthless fighting, of the bombardment and saber slashing, it strikes one as almost incomprehensible that these soldiers could sit down to a catered dinner together. 

But what is really interesting, is that the British and French officers got on wonderfully well. Neither liked the Americans much.  The French had fought long and hard side by side with the Americans, but the French officers were from the upper classes and considered the Americans ill mannered and not of their station. The British officers were, of course, gentlemen and it was the class bond which mattered.

Lafayette

Of course, there were exceptions: Lafayette was well loved by Washington and Hamilton and returned their affection, but on the whole, the gentlemen of the upper classes found affinity.

As Philbrick notes,  among the best American soldiers who lined the road out of Yorktown as the beaten British troops marched by, were the Black soldiers from Rhode Island, who had been steadfast and reliable and effective but now they watched as lines of hundreds of slaves marched by them, on their way back to "their rightful owners." What they were thinking, Philbrick notes, one can only imagine.

This is not the story portrayed in high school history books in Texas, or in any of America, one can imagine. Those grisly, grimy, ghoulish parts get scrubbed clean.

But it's where we come from, and that may explain some of where we are today.

The Creed of the Democrat

As a score of Democrats vie for advantage Mad Dog has stumbled across Thomas Paine, the 18th century thinker whose ideas now find a new life in the 21st century moment of Trump.

These words flitted across my Twitter screen and Mr. Paine spoke to me from the 1770's as if a fresh voice reached across time to find me, from the big bang of American thinking:

"When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government."

Mad Dog can think of no more concise enunciation of what the Democratic Party of 2019 should stand for, and what separates us from the snarling dogs of the Republican Party and Fox News.

1. Neither ignorance nor distress:  Are you listening Betsy DeVos, and all those who sail with you, intent on traveling back to the time before public education?

2. Jails are empty of prisoners:  When America incarcerates more citizens than any other nation, and for crimes of drug possession and use, which result in one of four Black males spending time in jail.

3. My streets of beggars: And we have homeless from LA to Seattle and in every city, and we have no clear thinking about the causes of this blight or any real idea about how to ameliorate it?

4. The aged are not in want: Thank Democrats for Society Security and Medicare, which the Republicans, though they claim to only want to improve these systems, take every action to kill.

5. The rational world is my friend: When we have our President saying he's the best thing to every happen to the community of color, while he decries brown immigrants as criminals and rapists but yearns for more immigrants from Norway?

We do not need another Democrat in the ring: We need some Democrat who can think and write and speak with the clarity of Mr. Paine.

If It's a Lie Then We Fight on That Lie

Every once in a while, Twitter shows me something.

Someone managed to add a GIF showing that wonderful 32 seconds from "The Wire" where Slim Charles explains to Avon Barksdale, the king, the essential truth about war, for any nation, whether it's a subculture in Baltimore or for the United States of America. 

It's a truth which explains every American war, with the exception of WWII, going back to the Spanish American War of the 1890's.

Of course, it has much wider application in today's Trumpery era. 

And here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQCuRdWt-A

Okay, Finally, Someone Who Can Beat Him

Yesterday, Mad Dog heard Cory Booker at a backyard New Hampshire event.
He told an affecting story about washing the blood of a gunshot victim off his chest with water hot enough to cause enough pain to his skin to deflect the pain he felt inside. Women sobbed. You could hear a pin drop.

Mad Dog was unmoved:
1. It was simply too much, too much drama, too theatrical.
2. It was all about appealing to white suburban women who are all about empathy, compassion and who are moved by "heart rending."
(Some men are, too, but this is a pitch which is focus grouped.)

Not that he was insincere. He was just not what Mad Dog was looking for.
Mad Dog loves Elizabeth Warren, but she shares that fatal earnestness of the Democrat: bleeding heart liberal, oozing concern for the wretched refuse stuff Booker is trying to sell.

Don't get Mad Dog wrong: He loves Emma Lazarus and the yearning to breathe free stuff, but he is looking for someone who can withstand the acid rain of the Trump crowd, who say all that's for losers.

Today, it was different.

At a house party in an elegant Brentwood manse, Amy Kobuchar arrived and ridiculed Trump from start to finish. She did the one thing Trump cannot stand: She made a fool of him, much to the delight of the crowd. 

The one thing that makes Trump melt is withering ridicule, laugh out loud, ridicule. 

She mentioned that when Trump pulled us out of the climate accord, only Nicaragua and Syria had not signed on. Today both of these countries have signed on--only the US has not. She went through a few stories about floods and fires and asked: Do you really think we don't have climate change? She mentioned a march of scientists who marched with banners that said, "Science matters. But first, peer review."

She said Trump has been riding on the Obama recovery for two years and he has been doing his level best to torpedo the recovery Obama gave us. 

Everyone was  laughing together. It was cathartic.

From climate change, to healthcare to student debt she said just enough, not too much wonky detail, just broad strokes.

Mad Dog could have listened to her all night.

This is just 4 days after Trump regaled his 10,000 storm troopers in Manchester.

After she finished her stump routine, she took questions, written on slips of paper she pulled from a box.
She pulled  out one slip and read it: "How to you defeat a candidate of charisma with policy?"

She laughed. "Well, I think I have plenty of charisma."

She had already proven that.

Weepy Democrats

Something's changed, it's not that I fear but
Maybe it's that I took care of you too many times
And you grew weaker for a kindness
And sometimes kindness from a friend can break a man
--Rickie Lee Jones

Don't feed stray dogs: They'll follow you home.
--Southern proverb

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
--Emma Lazarus

This is racism. Real racism. 

Riding in to work this morning Mad Dog is listening to 3 stories on NPR:
1. An ER doctor talking about treating drug addicts in Boston who sometimes return to his ER 3 times in a single day with overdoses.
2. An activist talking about Trump's new policy to deny entry to immigrant family members if their US citizen relatives who are sponsoring them have been on food stamps or Medicaid--as a way of preventing people entering who will become burdens to the state.
3. A Democratic politician who says Donald Trump is a racist because he says immigrant caravans are filled with MS-13 gang members.

Now Mad Dog is a radical leftist Democrat, he knows this about himself. But something about these stories dived subcutaneously, got into his blood stream and started his blood boiling. 
Mad Dog would like to address the drug problem, the problems of addiction, would like immigration to be fair and orderly and he agrees that there is something suspicious about a man who sees a dark man coming across a border as a rapist gang thug but who smiles and opens arms wide when he sees a blond Norwegian at the gate.

Furthermore, Mad Dog thinks we are doing something wrong in the United States that we have so many mass shootings and so many home shootings compared to other nations, especially English speaking nations.

On the other hand, nothing gets Mad Dog more irritated than hearing the typical Democratic response to all these problems because it sounds so effete, formulaic and wrong headed and the posture is always one of lachrymose --"I'm so sorry for your loss"--and never tough, pragmatic.

The Trump fan will say:
1. That drug addict is a leech on society. He is making his problem our problem. He keeps presenting himself to the ER for care then goes right out and repeats his transgression.
2. That immigrant family is on food stamps and gets free insulin from Mass Health when my insulin costs me $600 and why does the government take better care of these illegals than it does for me, a hard working guy who puts roofs on houses in the hot sun all day?
3. Trump is not racist. Look at his rallies--always a few Black faces in the stands behind him. He says he is doing more for Blacks than Obama by opening up factories and getting them jobs. Would Hitler or George Wallace have shaken hands with Negroes on stage at their rallies? Trump never said he didn't want Black immigrants or brown immigrants. What he doesn't want is criminals and people who will go straight on welfare. Has nothing to do with race. He doesn't like "shithole" countries. His antipathy is not toward Blackness but backwardness. He loves rich Black people.

What Democrat is this loved?

Anti Trumps keep pointing to the Statue of Liberty and the idea of the maternal gathering up of the suffering as the ideal of the United States.
Trump is saying, "NO! Our ship is full!"

Compassion is out, hard edge is in. We take care of our own, not the whole world. Africa, South and Central America, Asia, South Asia are huge buckets and we cannot contain all their misery in our cup.

Do we turn her away?

The fact is, Mad Dog believes, most of his fellow citizens are somewhere in between these two extremes.
1. There should be care for drug addicts, but the addict and his family are not primarily our burden. These folks have to get themselves right. We can help in a limited way but the responsibility of getting you clean is not ours.

2. We want to provide limited welfare--the welfare system was changed during the Clinton years to accommodate people briefly, for a matter of months, but we cannot support every needy family indefinitely. We can tide you over, but not accept the full burden of your family indefinitely. You must learn some skill and work. When Trump says he's open to immigrants with PhD's this is what he's tapping into. Send us your well trained, your high tech stars, but keep your failures.

3. It was for years a liberal trope that 90% of our prison population is Black, which proved, ipso facto, that the justice system is unjust and biased. 
But then someone asked, "What if 90% of the crime is committed by Blacks? 
Suppose the justice system simply incarcerates, color blind?"

The average citizen, reading his newspaper sees the description of the perpetrator and sees "a Black male, in his twenties" often enough it makes an impression. 

4. As for immigration: Yes, we want immigrants, but since the early 20th century our doors have been closed, often to whole classes of people, particularly Asians and Africans but even to southern Europeans. That was done on a straightforward master race/Nordic race racist basis emanating not from the slack jawed, illiterate Southern simpleton, but from the Harvard, Princeton, Yale set of privileged entitled white males.
Trump is simply atavistic; he's nothing new. The whole Emma Lazarus thing was but a flicker.

Desperation

We can work out immigration but we need to decide basic things like are we out to "reunite families" or to import talent or to be sure new immigrants will not be unemployable or diseased? We used to exclude people for TB and trachoma. In recent years we admitted people with HIV and severe heart disease which were sure to cost the public coffers dearly. What do we want to do about allowing the disabled or unemployable to immigrate? 

Is this racist?

What we need is thought, not slogans.
But the left gives us bumper stickers.
Trump gives us rallies.

Studying Trump; Learning from Trump

People who loathe Trump cannot penetrate his armor.
Intelligent, scholarly, otherwise learned and effective people melt before his visage.

Why? They simply lose their cool. They stop examining the disease under the microscope or in the lab and they erupt in a bilious outrage and all hope of effectively striking back at him is lost.

This happens in various (usually contact) sports: If you can just get your opponent to blow his top, he'll self destruct and be unable to hurt you.

So Mad Dog submits this proposition for your, kind reader's, consideration: Let's find what is attractive about Mr. Trump. Why people love him, and then see where that takes us.

First of all, you will note, his rallies are not conventions of snarling dogs.
People you see behind him are grinning ear to ear. 
The people you cannot see in the audience are laughing uproariously.

Take just a random, recent clip of Trump speaking to a crowd in Texas, where he complains about the criticism coming from the liberal/fake news media: 
"They complain about my saying we are seeing an INVASION coming across the border! Ten thousand coming across! What else do you call it?"

He laughs. 
The crowd laughs with him.

"Well, of COURSE it's an invasion what else would you call it?"

Now he is all reason and incredulity that the obvious truth of this assertion could be questioned.

"And what can we do about it?" he goes on, grinning.

"Shoot 'em!" someone cries out from the audience.

"Well, that's only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff. Only in the panhandle!" Trump roars.

The crowd roars. 

Now, what has he done here, exactly?
1. He has shown the crowd he knows there is a panhandle.
2. He has suggested he shares an inside joke about the panhandle with them. (Although what exactly that joke is eludes Mad Dog, who is not even sure he wants to know.)
3. He has used a big number to substantiate his claim, 10,000. Where that comes from doesn't matter. He just says it. 
4. He shows the good folks of Texas he is with them on shooting folks first and asking questions later--a good ol' Texas tradition.

Despite his red tie and designer suits, his New York origins, he has shown he is one of them, can laugh with them, can reduce those self righteous, sanctimonious snots who are the Eastern liberal media to sputtering effete puddles of jelly.

And what is the response?  Joe Scarborough explains, tediously, that this is bad. This is racist. This is the President being unpresidential.

Trump knows if you can get the crowd laughing with you, he wins.

What Democrat--other than Bernie, on occassion--can do that?

Justice Thomas Instructs on Eugenics

"The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.

Margaret Sanger

This case highlights the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation. From the beginning, birth control and abortion were promoted as means of effectuating eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was particularly open about the fact that birth control could be used for eugenic purposes. These arguments about the eugenic potential for birth control apply with even greater force to abortion, which can be used to target specific children with unwanted characteristics. Even after World War II, future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher and other abortion advocates endorsed abortion for eugenic reasons and promoted it as a means of controlling the population and improving its quality. As explained below, a growing body of evidence suggests that eugenic goals are already being realized through abortion."

--Thomas in Box v Planned parenthood.

Justice Thomas

Scholars and educators also rushed toward a eugenic future with enthusiasm. Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin, Northwestern and other universities added eugenics to their curricula. Booker T. Washingt, who harbored the belief that self improvement could be passed along genetically, invited Davenport to speak at the Tuskegee Institute.

--Danile Okrent, "The Guarded Gate"

In  his opinion in Box v Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas says Planned Parenthood is a vile organization, determined to use abortion to eliminate Black babies as a way of maintaining the racial purity of America. He particularly savages Margaret Sanger, who was addressing the needs for contraception in the early 20th century. He does include Alan Guttmacher, who was still active in the 1950's.

Of course, Thomas is an amateur historian, and is apparently unaware of the tenure of the times in which Sanger and even as late as Guttmacher, functioned. He knows only what he wants to know about the waters in which Sanger swam.

When we think about the recent criticisms of Justice John Stevens, attacks which focus on his willingness to admit he came to his conclusions based on facts, experiences and thinking which occur outside legal cases, one should think immediately of Justice Thomas, who like the "orginalist" Scalia, refers to history extensively, to justify his opinions, and that history is a selective reading of sources, often biased. 

The problem is, history is one long argument and you can never have enough information. Just when you think you know something, another piece of information arises. (Think of Abraham Lincoln, who has been knocked from his pedestal with the case of the 38 Dakota Sioux--he signed the order for their execution, the largest mass execution in American history: Turns out the people of Minnesota presented him with the demand to execute over 300, and the ultimatum that he execute Indians or they would take the law into their own hands and  kill Sioux men, women and children, without the help of the government if he did not sign on.)

Reading Okrent's illuminating book on immigration,"The Guarded Gate", you find long chapters  devoted to the eugenics movement in America, which formed the basis for an attempt to discern who we should want to allow to live in the United States.

It is astonishing how thoroughly "eugenic" beliefs permeated the "intelligentsia" of the country, and in England, where Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin's son, and a host of intellectual luminaries signed on.

Underlying the eugenics thing was the idea, based in an agrarian society, that you could improve "stock" by selective breeding, as you do with cattle and horses, and that over time, given the immense wisdom and perspective of the educated, intelligent and right sort of person (Theodore Roosevelt's phrase) you could produce a stronger, more vital, successful and dominant nation.

Willet Hays, of the American Breeders Association, would give men and women an eleven digit number so that they could chose to mate with "those of equal genetic excellence." (Susan Patton, the Princeton grad and mother of Princeton grads echoed this sentiment when she advised Princeton women to marry Princeton men, who were most likely to be "worthy" of them.) There was a Better Babies Bureau which sponsored competitions and Charles Davenport, the Harvard physician and "eugenics scholar" advised the BBB to judge babies by their heredity as much as by what they could see in front of them.

Peter Kropotkin 

There were, of course, detractors, who questioned whether men were wise enough to actually know what "good" genes are, and the idea of genes was still fairly rudimentary. Peter Kropotkin, a wonderful character, a descendant of the Russian czars Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, who self exiled to London, and who had been brought up in an Moscow home with 75 servants and a country estate with 100 more, attending a meeting of eugenicists rose to ask them, when they proposed sterilizing imbeciles, whom the eugenicists proposed to sterilize: "Those who produced degenerates in slums, or those who produced them in palaces?"

Bad Stock, Inferior Race

And a Methodist pastor from Minnesota, Samuel G. Smith,  noted that "genius was the surprise of history" noting Lincoln, Michelangelo and Luther arose from ordinary, undistinguished families. Nurture and environment mattered to the assessment: "Shakespeare could have done nothing among the Hottentots, or Beethoven among the Alaskans."

Samuel G. Smith

But then he got to the essence of the argument: The world, he said, has "suffered more from the vices of the rich than from those of the poor."

This struck at the heart of the eugenics movement, which flowered from the drawing rooms of the successful, the rich and the prominent. These people believed either tacitly or overtly that criminality, poverty was genetically inherited, and that whatever it was they had inherited, made them successful. ("The rich are different," as Fitzgerald said. "Yes," Hemingway replied, "They have more money.")

The cream rises to the top, and the rest is used and some spoiled milk must simply be discarded.

All this was so pervasive to assail Margaret Sanger for having dabbled in this thinking is like attacking George Washington and his doctors for believing bad vapors caused disease, before the day of microbiology, Semmelweis, Lister and germ theory. And how do we know what people actually thought? Was Shakespeare an anti Semite? No surprise if he were, given the prevalence in Elizabethan England, but the Jew in "The Merchant of Venice" asks, "Am I not a man? If you prick me, do I not bleed?" Not the question you would expect from a thorough going hater. Hate depends on de humanization, and yet Shakespeare gives the Jew that line.

Again, what we know about historical figures, what they believed and even what they did is shroud in the webs of history.

I lived through history--the war in Vietnam, the protests, the Civil Rights era, the moon shot and the reaction among Americans who thought it arrogant to shoot for the moon while our cities burned in race riots--and what I read of that "history" now always leaves me shaking my head--yes, that was true, that happened, but that does not tell the whole story.

So it is with Margaret Sanger and Justice Thomas, who rages against eugenics, which deserves to be railed against, but in his outrage, he neglects the "what else"?

Of course, in the case Box v Planned Parenthood, the whole question of history is misused. What does it matter what the origin story of Planned Parenthood is if it is not that today? Ford Motor company was founded by a man who wrote "The International Jew" and who traveled to Berlin so Hitler could pin a medal on his chest. Name a company which existed in the 1930's and you come up with a Nazi, from Mercedes to Volkswagen to American companies now owned by German conglomerates. 

Corporations, and Planned Parenthood, dear justice, are not people.