The Past Is Not Dead; It's Not Even Past

 

Faulkner was wrong about a lot of things, and not even close to my favorite writer, but he did get one thing right--the past is not even past.

Fitzgerald knew that, and said as much in his famous last lines of the Great Gatsby, "So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

When I got to college, I could not fit any history course into my schedule, being a science major and having to fulfill a range of required courses, but since graduating more than half a century ago, I've luxuriated in the time to read any history whenever I like, and it's been wonderful and revealing. 

Lately, I've been reading Edmund Morris's two final books about Theodore Roosevelt, a man I thought I knew enough about to never want to know anything more about him, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The man is a contradiction, wrapped up in a paradox, folded inside an incongruity.

He was born to great wealth, but despised the effete, bloodless privileged classes, although he aspired to be a member of the "ruling class." He embraced the idea of proving manliness by violent engagement in war, which he bragged was the only way a real man could emerge as a fully made man, and yet he finessed two different peace settlements--the Russo-Japanese War and a conflict over Morocco which would have thrust Germany into war with France. He did not think Black African savages were "ready" for self rule and yet he invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, infuriating the entire block of Confederate states.  He was a man who reveled in slaughtering animals, proving his manhood like some pre Francis Macomber, but he was an ardent conservationist who wanted to protect wild animals and their habitats.

He was erudite enough to quote scripture from the Koran to clerics on his visit to Egypt, wowing them to the extent that he was the first infidel they ever saw fit to gift a copy of the Koran. Visiting the Balkans, he expounded on the history of those troubled areas, astonishing and delighting the populace. 

But most of the problems he confronted we are still dealing with today: Separation of church and state--he was indifferent to organized religion, having worked out his own sense of ethics as a "gentleman"--wealth inequality; the control by a small number of "special interests" (that was a phrase then) over the rest of the nation; the rape of the environment by coal and oil monopolies; the willfulness of non democratic governments to dominate economies and countries which have elected forms of government;  the overwhelming of the working man by the owners.

He did not believe international disputes could or should be arbitrated by judicial bodies like the World Bank or the Hague. He thought the manly thing to do was to settle conflicts with war. So he led the charge into the Spanish American War. But then, he gave Cuba its independences more rapidly than anyone expected, and after presiding over the rape of the Philippines and facing ongoing insurrection there, he bargained for an early settlement.

He faced, during his Presidency, what every President since the Civil War has faced: the fact that through generational efforts, the South has Won the Civil War, as Heather Cox Richardson, among many others has argued. They simply never stopped resisting, lynching, suppressing their Negroes/Blacks/African Americans.

He rejected the irrational, the unprovable and decisions and ideas based on blind faith as a retreat into the Middle Ages, the time before the Enlightenment, but he never succeeded in defeating that willful blindness.

Almost every really good history is based on what happened in the past as it is revealed in the words and pictures of those who lived it--diaries, newspapers, newsreels, books--but good history writing is not really about the past; as you read it you are fully aware you are reading about issues we still grapple with today. The demagogue who appeals to the lowest intellect, to the emotional masses who feel deprived, resentful and are hungry for revenge has always been with us. The sense of outrage of the mass of working folks who know the system is designed in a way which means they can never win--"the game is rigged." The inclination to look for explanations in "God" and, as Christopher Hitchens calls it, "That invisible dictator in the sky." George Carlin saw the same "Invisible God in the sky, who will punish you with everlasting hellfire, misery and suffering--But He LOVES YOU!"

Some problems get solved, over time. Technology and social  organization eliminates mass starvation and food insecurity for most people, goods and services become more widely available, even if unevenly. But many problems of ignorance, economic grievance, racial intolerance, religious strife persist. 

This is where Donald Trump thrives. He wants to take us back to the good old days when men were men and  women were under the thumb of men and America was Archie Bunker white and everyone was happy, and even before that, to the time of the Kaiser and the Royal families who ruled Europe and Africa and Asia.

He is careful to not play the race card too overtly, because A/ He doesn't have to--all he has to do is say the dark illegal immigrants from South of the border are "an infestation" or talk about "shithole nations" and everyone knows he is full out Archie Bunker

B/There really has been progress in some ways in race relations which he cannot undo, and he can appeal to the macho in Brown Hispanic males if he is not too obviously racist.

As you get older, you don't get quite as angry and frustrated when you hear Trump or hear his acolytes echo his nonsense: You just shake your head and smile, because you know you've heard that line before and you know how that plays out.

American Psycho Noir

So, here's the story.

As any devotee of Nordic Noir TV will know, this one has all the elements.

It can be produced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and directed by Alex Jones, with the screenplay by Joe Rogan.

Vlad never could resist a man in uniform

Every Netflix Noir streaming detective series has to open with a pop, either a naked dead body, or naked bodies having sex.

So this one opens with the establishing shots of The Donald as the ultimate libidinous swordsman, barely under control, bragging nobody can stop him because he's a celebrity.

This set up, of course, is the creation of the image of the hypermasculine, priapic Trump, who channels Adolph's master plan, as laid out in "Mein Kampf," but he cleaves to Benito's stage persona, and the Stormy Daniels thing and the Jean Carroll episode all part of the show. 

Of course, the audience is wondering what all this womanizing is about, and how it relates to all the bloodied, dead bodies which are sure to follow.

 Of course, the womanizing thing has worked for The Donald  for years: Marla Maples got it going in 1990 when she said sex with Donald was her best ever: It worked so well, it became his basic play, like a counter trey in football. You just keep running it until it doesn't work.

But lately Melania has simply not seemed to want to play the pulling guard, so The Donald needed a new HYPER  MAN gambit.  So he goaded Vlad into going after Ukraine, because, you know, it's a win/win: they both need it, The Donald needs to create a distraction and Vladimir Putin needed a BIG MAN demonstration.

But the formula demands that along the way, the detective/investigator needs to have a daughter, and Volodymyr Zelensky has one, and the daughter has got to feel her father is so wrapped up in his work he neglects her and so she wanders close to a third floor window, which is never a good idea when Vladimir Putin's men are skulking about.  

Zelensky manages to break free of his investigation, just as he is closing in on the real culprit, but just in time to rescue his daughter. 

The reveal is that it's The Donald all along, who is trying to cover up his affair with Vladimir the Impaler, who is, in turn, trying to push Volodymyr Zelensky out of the window, because Volodymyr just happened to stumble into The Donald and Vlad in flagrante delicto while Zelensky was on a state visit to persuade Vlad to get out of Crimea.

In the end, The Donald sweeps back into office and Vladimir pulls his troops out of Ukraine and settles for over running Belarus and Trump declares himself President for Life and Vlad the Impaler agrees to allow Ukraine to grow wheat in peace, as long as he can  sail his yacht around the Black Sea. 

Zelensky, his wife and kids are seen piling into a Range Rover, off for a well earned holiday in Odessa.

Changing the Past

 Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

--George Santayana

Ready William Shirer's memoir, "Nightmare Years," as he enters his years in Paris as a reporter in the early 1930's the most striking thing he reports is how important the role of street thuggery was in the ascent of fascism and the destruction of democracy.

As Otto Friedrich noted in "Before the Deluge" about the fall of the  Weimer Republic, during the interregnum between the two world wars, over 500 political assassinations occurred, all but 30 were Right wing assassins killing liberal politicians or thinkers.

Violence is not simply the calling card of the Right Wing; it is the primary modus operandum. Without violence, there is no Right Wing. January 6th was not some aberration; it was the first salvo.

Trump's famous taunt to a protester who he says, "You know what we used to do to guys like that? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1es9MZyyPOA

But he is clever: He first says the man, who we cannot see, is "throwing punches" and then he says, wistfully, "Oh, we can't throw punches any more." So he's setting up deniability. I didn't say we should throw punches; I was talking about responding to someone who already was throwing punches.

He's clever like that. He exhorts the January 6th crowd to march down to the Capitol Building and "Fight like Hell!"  But what does that mean?

We are told people ought to "fight like Hell" against their cancers.

People can "fight like Hell" against taxes or drag queens. That expression doesn't necessary mean throwing punches or bludgeoning. It can simply mean shouting.

Trump also complained that the new rules in the National Football League which are designed to reduce concussions and severe injuries, rules against rocking a "defenseless receiver" who has his back to the play, or rules against spearing a quarterback with your helmet as in roughing the passer, are "too bad." He liked football when it was a man's game, played by men, played rough.

Of course, Mr. Trump never set foot on a football field and never took a shot in anger in any serious way--he has a picture of himself in a high school football uniform, but he was as much a football player as Ron DeSantis was a Navy Seal--DeSantis, of course was attached to a SEAL team in Afghanistan, as a lawyer. Not exactly the same as being a SEAL. Similarly, dressing up for a photo in a picture does not make you a John Madden all star. 

Tough guys like Trump, who has never had a bullet fired at him in anger, are all about violence, as long as it does not get aimed at them.

But he knows he needs the violent men, the street thugs. 

In Paris in the 1930's it was the Right Wing street thugs who almost brought down the French Republic. It was violence, which escalated into Civil War which brought down the Spanish Republic. It was violence, culminating in the burning of the Parliament which brought down the Weimar Republic.

The problem for a democracy, a Republic, is if it responds to violence, it may look oppressive and it may look like the source of violence, as the Ohio State National Guard did at Kent State.

Donald Trump will never be defeated in the courts. Hitler spent nearly 2 years in jail and it launched his career. Trump has observed that every court case against him increases his money raising and his core constituency's anger.

If you want to see the true beginning of the apocalypse of American democracy, watch for the violence, for assassinations, street beatings, Right Wing militias opening fire. 

Then, if history teaches us anything, you'll know.

Affirmative Action, RIP

 

Sometimes, losing, like parting, is such sweet sorrow.

So it is with the case of affirmative action, which so many of us for so long have embraced as a necessary evil, but which will not be mourned for long.

Three basic arguments have been made for providing for exceptions to the rules by which meritocracy is supposed to work, namely admitting students to colleges, medical and law schools even though they did not score enough points on their own, by test scores and grades, by awarding them points for being avatars of their race, so they are admitted not because of their own personal merit, but because others of their group--a group defined by White people--have been unjustly treated in the past.

The arguments:

1. REPARATIONS:  Blacks, Negroes, African Americans, whatever you wish to call them, have been denied admission to universities and graduate schools simply because they are black, for generations, for at least 100 years, and now it's time to admit more of them simply to adjust the numbers and to make amends to this group. (Unmentioned in all this, of course, is the far more numerically important discrimination against Blacks being admitted to unions, to trades, to become firemen, policemen and other jobs which would have been numerically far more important to far more more Blacks than admissions to the 0.03% of students who get into Ivy League institutions.) But this is the case of individuals benefiting who would not have been afforded opportunity.

But the case at hand is about Affirmative Action in universities and it's about the small number of students awarded coveted places, "the glittering prize" of admission at the elite institutions of Harvard and University of North Carolina. 

2. SCHOOLS BENEFIT:  The schools themselves benefit from the presence of Black students because they provide a diversity of opinion, perception, experience. This is a harder argument for schools of engineering and medicine, of course, where the science is not much affected by life experience.

3. SOCIETY BENEFITS FROM DIVERSITY:  because schools should look more like the larger society and Black medical students will go practice in Black ghettos and Black lawyers will go help Black communities. This is the test of "a compelling governmental interest."  Under the idea of "strict scrutiny" any exception to equal protection must prove there is a compelling interest and also that the scheme devised to achieve this is "necessary" i.e., there is no other way of achieving this result.

Whenever possible, all citizens should read the actual opinions as written by the justices. When you do that, the opinions become far less jarring, and, in fact in this case, one might argue, the opinion becomes persuasive. 

Reading the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, one cannot avoid seeing his profound sympathy efforts to end racism in American society. 

1. He begins by excoriating the Supreme Court for aiding and abetting institutionalized racism by embracing "separate but equal" in Plessy v Ferguson."The inherent folly of that approach--of trying to derive equality from inequality--soon became apparent...By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal." 

As Roberts outlines the past, as it led to efforts at Affirmative Action, his sympathy for the goal of thwarting racism could not be clearer.

Of course, one of the signal victories for ending racial segregation, in the case in schools, was Brown v Board of Education, but within that decision was contained a real problem for Affirmative Action.

Brown v Board of Education posed a problem for Affirmative Action because it said you cannot use race to justify unequal treatment before the law, as the 14th amendment insisted.

If you could not use race to thwart the aspirations of any race, how could you then turn around and use race to advance the prospects of the members of a race, now favored, while diminishing prospects for members of other groups?

He outlines a series of decisions about busing, the use of public beaches, and even laws forbidding interracial marriage (Loving) which demanded that businesses and institutions serving the public be color blind. "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," Roberts concludes. "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color." (Bakke)

2. He observes that devising programs which are designed to specifically redress grievances of Black Americans has meant and will mean that other groups, like Asians, will not benefit, and, in fact, will be injured because the spaces they might have had are given instead to Blacks. 

Who are judges to judge which groups should be favored? As he notes, "By grouping together all Asian students, for instance, respondents are apparently uninterested in whether South Asian or East Asian students are adequately represented, so long as there is enough of one to compensate for a lack of the other." 

And he raises other concerns which never occurred to me: "How are applicants from Middle Eastern countries classified?...Indeed, the use of these opaque racial categories undermines, instead of promotes, respondents goals. By focusing on underrepresentation, respondents would apparently prefer a class with 15% students from Mexico over a class with 10% students from several Latin American countries."

He observes wryly, "Universities may define their mission as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours...As this Court has repeatedly reaffirmed, 'racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.'"

 3. "Our acceptance of race-based state action has been rare for a reason," Roberts observes. "That principle cannot be overriden except in the most extraordinary case."

4. In his Bakke decision, Justice Powell said that trying to right past wrongs meant favoring members of one racial group over another because of their race. The idea this would right past wrongs was "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past." Which is to say, favoring Shamika today does not help her mother or grandmother who were denied college admission. 

And he shrewdly noted increasing Black medical students had never been shown to increase Black doctors in Black communities--Black doctors go where the money is, and that is not ghettos. 

And the idea that Black students added a benefit to a technical school because of their life experience was hard to argue. Your life experience does not help you build a better bridge, calculate the trajectory of a rocket or remove an appendix.

Later Supreme Court cases fretted about "illegitimate stereotyping," which is to say, how do you know a particular Black student will add anything of value to a school, just because he or she is Black?

And then there is the problem of when is enough? Will Blacks still be preferred at Harvard or in medical schools 100 years from now?

5. There is also the problem of whether AA is a classic "wrong end of the funnel" solution. Which is to say, if you want more Black doctors, you cannot begin when students have fallen behind during their 4 years in college and then simply thrust them, unprepared, into medical school, or even earlier, placing unprepared students to compete at Harvard College, where the other 0.3% of accepted students have been competing from grade school and honing their skills for years before they arrived at Harvard.

6. Roberts asserts Harvard and UNC failed "to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue." If the idea of Affirmative Action is to make today's Black students whole, you still haven't fixed what was lost before they matriculated. If the idea is to improve life on the campus, you have to show how having more Blacks in the engineering department or the medical school has done that. And if you want to improve medical care or legal assistance in the Black community, you have to show how having more doctors at Harvard Medical School or Harvard Law has done that.

                                     ***

Of course, the big loophole Roberts left is the college can admit a person who has personally overcome adversity, shown character and resilience by growing up in a ghetto and still getting good grades, and so the applicant, who comes from the ghetto has a better life story to sell to the Admissions committee. But then he gets in not because he is Black, but because he has overcome the disadvantages of being Black.

So, in the end, Affirmative Action may morph into "Queen for a Day," that 1950's TV show where the person who told the most tear jerking sob story won a slew of prizes from the great American cornucopia if she told the most compelling story of having risen above adversity. The final shot always showed the woman with the crown on her head, tears rolling down her face, smiling through her agony. 

Oh, Those Effete, Impudent Liberals!

 

“Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’ A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” 

No, that's not Ron DeSantis.  Nope, not William F. Loeb. Not, of course, Donald J. Trump--you knew that because there are too many sophisticated words--but it just goes to show that none of these guys are really new, but they continue that long line of anti-intellectuals Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his long forgotten, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." 

Richard Hofstadter

The guy speaking those words is actually Spiro Agnew, who 90% of my fellow citizens in Hampton, NH could not identify if their lives depended on it. He was Vice President under Richard Nixon, and his use of the word effete was especially effective because most people had to go look it up--this was in 1969, before the internet, so they had to get out a book called a "dictionary." 

"Effete" was the perfect word because it carries with it the connotation of "over-refined" and infertile, pallid, exhausted of vigor. It is exactly the sort of quality Teddy Roosevelt would hold in most contempt. 

(I'm reading about Theodore Rex now, but more on that later.)

Tonight, I saw a report on the PBS News Hour which made "effete" pop up before my eyes.

Now, I love PBS News, or rather, I'm spoiled by it. I've watched it since its inception decades ago with Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil and after a few years, I simply wretch whenever I'm fed the commercial news on the broadcast channels. It's like drinking skim milk for years and then you are offered whole milk--yuck.

Anyway,  Amna Nawaz interviews this guy, Tom Lasseter, Reuters newsman who got home from an assignment overseas and was sitting around his house in Washington, DC and came up with this great idea for a story: How many American Congressmen and Presidents have slaveowners in their families? 

Lots, it turns out. Hundreds. And when Lasseter started pushing a microphone in their faces to ask about this shameful skeleton in the closet, they reacted dismissively.  

Well, it's not exactly like finding out your father was in the Gestapo, but still, not pleasant.

But many seemed to say, "Yep, doesn't surprise me to find out my great grandfather owned slaves: We're from South Carolina, for Chrissake."

But Amna, in her softest, most whimpering tone, asked Mr. Lasseter how it made him feel to learn his own family had own slaves, and he told about how he went out and found some descendant of some of those slaves and they bonded or something. I'm not sure if the word, "forgiveness" came up, but "reparations" sure did. 

And I am sitting there in oculogyric crisis trying to bring my eyes down from inside my head, groaning: "For Chrissake!"

It did make me recall two things, however:

1. On a tour of Fort Sumter some years ago, I got off the boat with a guy dressed in the typical green and gray outfit with the Smokey the Bear hat of a Park Ranger and followed this man around the fort, as the crowd from the boat shuttle split into smaller groups of a dozen tourists to a guide and listened as he extolled Robert E. Lee as a  gentleman, the best general ever not to mention the soul of the Lost Cause. I finally could contain myself no longer and said, "You know, I understand history is one long argument, but Robert E. Lee was as vicious a slaver as the South ever produced." 

The tour ended shortly thereafter as we were now free to wander around the fort, but from about 10 yards a way, our tour guide had obviously had time to think and he called out to me: "There was only one slave owner at Appomattox Court House and he was wearing blue, not gray."

(He turned out not to be a real Park Ranger, but a volunteer docent and when I emailed the Park Service, they got on him poste haste.)

Definite Vicious Slaver

Of course, this canard is one of those historical strictly speaking might be true but in essence is a deep lie: Grant, it is true owned a slave given him by his wife's slave owning father, but Grant could not stand "owning" anyone and set him free in less than a year. Lee did not, technically own the 189 slaves under his control--they were inherited by his wife, Mary Cutis Lee, but Lee whipped them when they tried to escape and then "sold them South" to even more brutal chattel slavery as punishment for trying to escape. Lee was a piece of work.  In fact, the slaves who tried to escape did so because they knew that upon the death of their real owner, Mary's father, his will said his slaves would be set free, but Robert E. Lee chose to ignore that and kept them in bondage. 

Not a Slaver

That's history for you.

2. Teddy Roosevelt

I had read plenty about Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother from from the South, and Teddy had plenty to say about inferior races, and he thought unrestricted immigration was "racial suicide" and he was thick as thieves with all those Harvard professors who founded the Immigration Restriction League and those guys in Boston and New York who were all into "eugenics" which was devoted to breeding a superior race and who read books like "The Passing of A Great Race" and Teddy was all for conquering the Filipinos who were called "niggers" by the American troops and Teddy thought the natives would take years, centuries maybe before they, as a race, would progress enough to be able to rule themselves.

Theodore Rex

But Teddy Roosevelt also appointed a Black woman as the customs official in Charleston, South Carolina and set off a storm of indignation because no Negro should be a federal government employee in the South.

And he had Booker Washington to dinner at the White House which provoked a storm of revulsion in the South, with editorials speculating that Mr. Washington might have been rubbing thighs under the dinner table with Teddy's very attractive daughter, Alice, and those Southerners always leapt right to the Negro man ravaging the pure White woman sexually.

Roosevelt said the Negroes did not choose to be brought here and we have to allow them to become part of the country and while he was chastened and retreated a little, he did not apologize for his "nigger loving" acts and he showed the strange mix of a man who believed in domination of lesser races by the superior master race, but also believed in fair play and recognizing individual virtue in particular individuals and so demonstrated the contradictory currents which can exist in the mind of White people.

He was not effete.

He jousted with wooden clubs in the White House, and he rode his stallion through Rock Creek Park in all weather and he swam naked in the Potomac, which is no tame river and he admired manly men and distained effete men.

He would have roared at Mr. Lasseter and Ms. Nawaz and grabbed the channel changer and likely switched to Fox News.

Not Effete 

Something's Dying That's Never Been Born: Democracy

 Democracy, as it has been attempted in America, never quite made it out of the shell.

And that may not be such a bad thing.

A friend--I guess I can call him a friend--a Saudi Prince I knew in Washington, DC, once remarked with his best Omar Sharif smile, "You Americans: you think everyone wants democracy, but many people do not. Many countries do not."

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first World War as a war which was meant to make the world safe for Democracy, among other things. He was half right: It had become a war between two democracies (of sorts), England and France, then America and autocratic monocracies--Germany, Austria/Hungary.  But Russia, a czarist monocracy, fought allied to the democracies, and the "democracies" of those years were far from governments of the people. That war was the death throes of monarchies, but it did not extinguish the idea of leadership of nations by strongmen, by autocrats.

Woodrow Wilson, that great champion of Democracy, purged the American government (civil service) of Blacks, and that wasn't the worst of it for Black Americans, who had virtually no say in American government since America abandoned reconstruction in the late 19th century. And Wilson rejected the idea of women voting. So American representative democracy was representative only for white males, and not even for all of them. Mostly for the middle and upper class whites, as it was in England.

Home of the Free, Land of the Brave

America, in fact, was no friend to democracy if that meant government of the people, by the people and for the people if those people happened to be Filipinos in the new American empire, or Cubans or Central Americans or people in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. 

American soldiers on bones of Filipinos

When Black veterans returned home from the horrors of the Second World War they found themselves excluded from  the GI bill which allowed their white comrades in arms to buy homes and to start acquiring the wealth home ownership would build. The democratic government of the United States conspired to keep them down.

The will of the people, American style

When Scandinavians snort at the cold heartedness of Americans who will not even extend healthcare to their own countrymen, we can ask the Swedes if they would be willing to pay for helathcare for the Portuguese, the Spanish or the Italian members of the European union. They look a bit horrified at that idea. So how "democratic" are the instincts of these liberal, socialist democracies?

Adulation Popular Will 

When I talk with the folks who stream in and out of my offices in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, I hear from people, every day, who think the government is illegitimate because it steals their money, by taxation, and give it to people who don't deserve it, like immigrants in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and while the HVAC guy pays top dollar for his medications he knows, or thinks he knows, about welfare scammers who get all their medications for free, while they sit home and watch TV, cookout on the grill while blasting their annoying Spanish music on the deck.

In my own town, a majority of voters believe that separation of church and state is ridiculous, and they agree with the current Supreme Court and Marjorie Taylor Greene that separation of church and state is unconstitutional.

The current Supreme Court, voted in with Trump, believes individual gun ownership is a right guaranteed by the Constitution because, after a hundred years of stare decisis decisions saying you had to be in a well organized militia to own a gun legally, all that went poof when gun enthusiast Antonin Scalia said guns were an inalienable right. And the idea that the rule of law involved trying to be consistent over time, being confined to legal precedent, we have entered a time when everything is now "unprecedented." 

Then again, Thomas Jefferson thought it was a bad idea to be bound by precedent. He thought the Constitution should be rewritten every 19 years to accommodate new challenges, new thinking and new realities. That was his idea of Democracy.

The voters of New Hampshire believe in open carry laws for guns, which can be carried into voting places openly, by the law of the governed, even as they close off their schools with bullet proof glass at the entrances.

The guy at the hardware store thinks immigration is an infestation and he wants the government to keep it's government hands off his Medicare and Social Security.

These are the voters who have seized control of their democracy. 

The big difference between American government and that of the Third Reich--which most people in Hampton could not actually identify if you asked them--is the violence.

Southern voters Expressing Themselves

You had guys walking around the Capitol grounds in sweatshirts that said, "The Civil War Starts Now" but they did not actually fire guns at the police. They merely bludgeoned police.

We will have actual fascism, as I understand the meaning of that word, when we have violence in the streets, and government shooting citizens--but wait we had Kent State and we've had the Pettis Bridge and Selma, and a lot of voters voted to endorse that violence.

So, I don't know. Maybe we've already made that transition.

When you look at the rule of "the people" maybe we've never really had it and now that we have "the people"--or at least 46% of them in a united mob seizing control of the democracy, maybe democracy doesn't look all that good any more. 

When Government Shows a Small, Ugly Face

My barber explained the new barber's license, which blocked part of the mirror we stare at as she cuts my hair. It has a black frame and a color passport photo of her and it is eight by eleven inches.

"Oh," I said, "You must have upped your game now--that license is much more imposing than I remember."

"Yes," she said. "I'm almost a hair stylist now with that great license. For thirty years my license was three by six inches, and I hung it over on that wall, near the window, but now I have to print it out on my computer and it has to be 8x11inches or it's a $200 fine and that other license..."--she pointed to the equally obstructive eight by eleven, black framed behemoth next to her new license--"That one is my license to operate a shop."  She continued, voice rising, "And now Joyce has to have her license up there and she has to display her license to rent a chair, right next to it. So you can hardly see your haircut as I'm cutting it, with all the licenses, and they won't let you put it on the other wall. Has to be right in front of you. And, oh, the first aide kit cannot be in the bathroom and the eyewash kit--why I need that I'll never know--has to be right next to it on that wall."

Steam was jetting out of her ears now, at least figuratively.

"The state," she continued, "Comes in here and just makes everyone miserable. And I don't even shave necks. Never use a razor. I could see if I might draw blood or something, but I use scissors and electric cutters. What the fuck?"

It made me think of going to the state Motor Vehicle Department to get my new license, which is now controlled by  federal regulations because you can use it to get on an airplane for interstate travel. You need your social security card for that one. And, boy, did I feel smug and proud to have found my social security card, which I got age 14, and carried with me through many moves up and down the East Coast, and never lost it. 

When I presented it to the clerk she took one look at it and shook her head. "Can't use that one," she said.

"Why not?"

"You laminated it."

"That card is 50 years old. It's paper. If I hadn't laminated it, it would be dust by now."

"I don't make the rules."

"Where does it say it can't be laminated?"

"It's on the form we sent you."

Sure enough, it was there, buried in print a font so small you could just make it out with a strong magnifying glass. That was the rule made by some nameless bureaucrat in the federal government, presumably, and that bureaucrat had never seen my Social Security card, issued in 1961, which says, very clearly, along the bottom in big font, "For Social Security and tax purposes. Not for identification." But, of course, I will not get to plead my case before that bureaucrat or any other. The government does what the government wants to do.

Ultimately, by some miracle, I got a new Social Security card mailed to me--can't recall what documents I had to provide for that and I got my spiffy special driver's license which allows me to fly on commercial airplanes.

But really, this is government people can hate.

Turns out, there was an actual reason the card could not be laminated: Actual, bone fide, government issued Social Security cards have a pebbled surface to them, very hard to counterfeit, and if you run your finger over them, you can feel it, but if you laminate, you cannot.

So, there was an actual reason for that one.

But why do barbers' licenses have to be eight by eleven blocking your view of your haircut?

"These people," my barber said. "They have these shitty jobs, but boy are they going to let you know who is in charge. And if I don't pass their inspection, I'm out of business. Who does that help?"

And we are talking about a small state--less than 1.4 million people--New Hampshire. 

I did not want to ask my barber if she voted for Donald Trump, but I can get the aggravation with government and petty martinets.