Inexplicable: Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump and the Poisoned Chalice of Testosterone

 Charisma is what Teddy Roosevelt had.

Quentin Roosevelt 

Ebullience. Joy. Exuberant insistence.

"You must never forget: Theodore is six [years old]," his lifelong friend, Cecil Spring Rice, said of him when Roosevelt was in his 40's.

People gravitated toward him in any room, because he was having more fun than anyone else.

He created a fantasy world of heroes and giants and giant slayers and lived in it. He played cowboy and soldier and naturalist, explorer, big game hunter and philosopher and he was a dilletante in all these arenas.

He was a professional only in politics and writing.

He believed gentlemen ought to treat women as ladies and that ladies should produce lots of children, if they were well bred, intelligent and the right sort, which is to say, the right class of women. But he also supported the vote for women.

The best day of his life, he never tired of saying, was the day he got to play soldier and charged up San Juan hill in the Spanish American war in Cuba. 

Make Believe Soldier

When he got a letter from his son, who he had pushed to join the Army air force, the letter describing Quentin's first "kill" of a German fighter plane, Teddy replied that no matter what happened now, Quentin had had that "crowded moment" of heroism and honor and glory and that is what men, real men, were made for.

A Real Man

Teddy begged Woodrow Wilson to allow him to form a cavalry regiment, as he had done in the Spanish war, as Teddy dreamed of reliving those days of glory, but Wilson and his Secretary of War demurred, and when pushed they finally told Roosevelt he was too old and, in any case, cavalry charging across a field waving swords in the face of machine guns, artillery, tanks, barbed wire and trenches was simply suicidal, and what America needed were real soldiers, trained to fight a modern war, not men captured in arrested development playing out childhood fantasies.  Undeterred,  Teddy urged each of his sons to be the first to volunteer, the first on the front lines.

Quentin lying by his plane: 2 bullets in the brain

Quentin, of course, did not last long. His honor devolved into a shattered corpse with two bullets in his head. He was found by his airplane and given a military funeral by the Germans, who also believed in honor, but who noted he was inexperienced and brought down by a professional German pilot, who actually knew what he was doing.

Teddy loathed and fulminated against weak, soft, quiet men, and particularly Woodrow Wilson, who was cerebral and without brass balls. 

Playing Cowboy

Like Trump, Teddy had no use for shithole nations, although he would never have been so vulgar to use that phrase, but the meaning was the same. He called the autocrats of Columbia "monkeys" and he thought that allowing dark races from Southern Europe freely into America was "racial suicide."  On the other hand, Teddy respected certain Black men, who he  had met on the range when he was playing cowboy, and he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, which got him vilified in the South, where Senators speculated about this Black man rubbing his thigh under the dinner table along the thigh of Alice Roosevelt ("Princess Alice") Teddy's alluring daughter.

A Real Soldier, A  Real Man

So Teddy bloviated about how his sons were heroes, the first to answer the call of duty and honor and he pushed them all, shamelessly, to prove themselves in battle, as he had done and what did that get him?

A dead son.

Playing Frontiersman

A father, six years old until he was 60, and, ultimately a shattered boy man, whose recklessness and joy brought disaster to his family and, if there is any real thing as shame, then it should have brought shame to the man who thought he knew enough to instruct others about what a worthy life should be.

Dumb Liberalspeak: Indians not Native Americans

 Driving along, listening to Rush Limbaugh, in the old days, I used to laugh a lot. He was just so absurd, so enjoying himself, and one could only imagine what most of his audience was like--and they, clearly, could not matter.  They had to be the boy with the banjo in the holler. How many of them could there even be, people who bought what he was selling?

The actor was actually Italian

But now, with Rush in charlatan heaven, I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) and the experience is not a laugher. It's the agony of fingernails scratching on a blackboard--but, wait. I'm dating myself. Nobody has known what a blackboard is for decades. 

NPR is so relentlessly politically correct, it has become so precious, it is almost impossible to listen to without shouting, "Oh, SHUT UP!"

Most common words and phrases on NPR are, in no particular order: "The most vulnerable,"  "economically disadvantaged," and "terrified" and "challenged"--as in "vertically challenged" (short), or "intellectually challenged" as in stupid or even retarded--and "urban poor" as in Black, African American or Negro (which is vintage Martin Luther King), also "scared" and "frightened" and "scary" and "unprecedented" and the overall gestalt is that of a radio network portraying the world as a threatening place, and its listeners weak, cowering, terrified, mostly feminine, and often prepubertal, unable to defend themselves, except by whimpering and huddling helplessly together,  and hoping some benign, big hero will ride to their rescue.

But one word you will never hear on NPR (or PBS) is "Indian."

Because, you know, "Native Americans" are hurt deeply by being called "Indians" and they find it insulting, and they fall to one knee and tears roll  down their cheeks at such overt racism, and insensitive, predatory language. 

But then, I remember the irreplaceable George Carlin, who had this to say about "Indians."

"I call them Indians because that's what they are. They're Indians. There's nothing wrong with the word Indian. First of all, it's important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached "India." India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan. More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus's description of the people he found here. He was an Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, "Una gente in Dios." A people in God. In Dios. Indians. It's a perfectly noble and respectable word.

So let's look at this pussified, trendy bullshit phrase, Native Americans. First of all, they're not natives. They came over the Bering land bridge from Asia, so they're not natives. There are no natives anywhere in the world. Everyone is from somewhere else. All people are refugees, immigrants, or aliens. If there were natives anywhere, they would be people who still live in the Great Rift valley in Africa where the human species arose. Everyone else is just visiting. So much for the "native" part of Native American."

So, there you have it. "Indian" is derived from indigenous people of God. What's wrong with referring to a people or peoples who are people of God?

And that whole idea of "Native" really irks me. As Carlin points out, "Natives" don't own this continent because they got here first. They did not arise from the soil in New England or the Great Plains. They likely migrated here across the Bering Straight, or in boats. They often look quite a lot like Asians, because that's where they migrated in from. But they are not native, as in originating here. They were clearly displaced, but they did not own the land any more than anyone else can "own" land. Ownership is a construction of government.

Kids Who Really Did Need Protection

Just a brief digression: there are no native people and there are no native fish or grasses or trees. Things arrive in some area of geography, and they find a climate, temperatures, food sources amenable to their genomes and so they exploit a niche and flourish. But then some other living thing arrives, a snake fish, a Norway maple tree, a rat, a snake and they are then "invasive" species which are BAD and we must eradicate.

No: Every species is an invasive species. We just like some more than others.

In New Hampshire the beautiful Norway maple with its maroon leaves are illegal: no nursery can sell them, and you cannot even transport them across state lines.

Why? Because some arborists at the University of New Hampshire, do not like maroon trees, and they testified before some legislative committee of bowling alley owners, retired postal workers and restaurateurs and they called Norway maples "an invasive species."

Norway Maple

Of course, you almost never see Norway maples growing free in the forests or parks or free spaces in New Hampshire. You see them around schools, houses and other places where people who love their lovely maroon leaves (which turn bright crimson in the Fall,) have planted them--before the legislature was enlightened by the UNH faculty of horticulture. If this is an invasive species, it is a remarkable docile, well behaved invasion, only appearing where it was invited, or in this case, deliberately planted.

Now back to the Indians.

During the COVID lockdown, the New Hampshire Democrats opened their virtual convention with a group of Native Americans pounding on drums for the longest fifteen minutes in the history of time, to remind us that they were here first and "we," an invasive species, displaced them.

Now, I'm not saying what European immigrants did to the Asian immigrants they called "Indians" or "redskins" was a blessing or a good thing. White, European Americans ruthlessly murdered not just Indians, their children and wives but also the buffalo, and all that was dreadful and movies like "Little Big Man" and "Dances with Wolves" and books like "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Custer Died for Your Sins" have made this case.

But Indians are Indians, as far as I'm concerned and I can hardly abide NPR nowadays. I may get desperate enough to start listening to network news. At least there you have the open hucksterism of commercial news. They are selling stuff, but at least they have few pretensions they are actually dealing in the truth. "Coming up, a story which could save your life!" Or, "Miss this story and you may well seal your doom!" Or, "And now a heartwarming story from Topeka, Kansas..."

"Wait a moment, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Now, THAT would be news.

How to Beat Charisma with Ideas

 When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire during the 2016 primary season, I asked her how she intended to beat a candidate of charisma (Trump) with a campaign of policy.

She seemed stumped, momentarily, and admitted she had never been asked that question, but finally said she thought she had charisma.  

What most Democrats seem to think is they can continue to talk about policy (Women's rights to control their own bodies, i.e. to have abortions, transgender rights, gay rights, rights of the disabled, rights of minorities) and they can use this approach to beat the Trump stand in's running for Congress, Senate, state seats, and ultimately, Trump himself.

But, what I hear from so many folks, like the Black cab driver in Chicago, and a White machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts is nothing about policy. All they talk about is how old Joe Biden is.  Or they like that "Trump talks like I do: He talks about shithole countries, and that's what they are, you know? He's just brave enough to say it."

So how do you beat that?

Canvassing door to door for Hillary Clinton, I met enough people who said they would have voted for Bernie but they would not vote for Hillary, and it was the way they said it, the looks of disgust on their faces that really rocked me.

That taught me that if you're going to beat Donald Trump, you'd better do it with something real, and you cannot appear to be parsing your words so as not to offend the gays or the Blacks or the immigrants.

But, of course, Bernie was seen as too radical by too many people.

So what to say? 

Well, history may offer some clues.

In 1910, a wealthy American Aristocrat, Theodore Roosevelt,  went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had battled slavers with the sword, and he spoke about the upcoming election as another battle in that effort to perpetuate the American experiment.

He began by laying down some basic principles:

1. He noted that even Lincoln had observed that in every modern industrialized society beyond subsistence farmers, a struggle between those who produced and those who profited. And Lincoln concluded that "labor is superior to capital."

2. Corporate Greed Over Common Good

Teddy, who lived in a mansion with servants, insisted that property rights must henceforth be secondary to to those of the common welfare, and society should strive to undermine "unmerited social status."

He said, "The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been to take from some men or class of men the right to enjoy power or wealth or position or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows." That meant that the corporate elite should not be able to buy votes in Congress. 

"The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation."

(Apparently, SCOTUS disagreed in Citizens United, when it said corporations have the same rights to free speech as individual citizens.)

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall not be the master of the man who made it."

That might take a crowd a moment to digest. But then:

"The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

(Does Elizabeth Warren say anything different, when she notes that the man who owns a company which employs workers taught to read and write at public expense, who ships his goods over publicly built roads and pumps his waste into public air owes something to society?)

To this end we need to protect 

        a/ A graduated income tax

        b/ Taxes on inheritance on big fortunes

3. The Rigged System: 

With "channels of collusion"  between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government.."The people must insist on complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs...the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes" must be regulated. 

4. Ecology:

He went on, as Edmund Morris notes in his Roosevelt biography,

"The great central task of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security," is imperative.

5. Supreme Court Reform:

Essential is Supreme Court reform making the "judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions." And we need a judiciary which favors "individual over property rights." 

6. Importance of a Strong Central Government

to wit:

a/ child labor laws

b/ workmen's compensation laws

c/ safety and sanitation in the workplace

d/public scrutiny of all political campaign spending both before and after elections.

Note that even as long ago as the turn of the 20th century, in 1910,  the wealthy aristocrat, a member of the ruling class saw that campaign finance scrutiny was essential to a functioning democracy.

In 2011, President Obama made the speech available on his White House website.

I would propose that the Democratic candidate who is picked to run against Trump--or any Democrat running against any Trump Republican (a tautology) simply begin by reading the Republican Teddy Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech, and when he is accused of being a communist, an anarchist, a socialist, he can simply shrug and say, "Well, all I'm doing is quoting a famous Republican," and move on.

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.