A MELTING SNOWFLAKE

 

Two days after our national election at about 9:00 P. M. Eastern Standard Time a national embarrassment embarrassed the nation further while undermining American democracy. Let's face it, when our Orange Führer opens his mouth he embarrasses everyone in the nation and most of the world except for himself and his family and his cadre of grifters, yes-men, white supremacists and just scumbags that form the Republiscum Party. He came forth to meet reporters in a house that he never should have occupied in the first place because he was and is unworthy of the office that racists, lunatics, fascists and stupid "reality" television show fans elected him to in 2016.

 The Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have never been thrilled with the messiness of democracy. In Republiscum ideology they know what's good for the nation and they have to tolerate, at least, and manipulate, usually, the "great unwashed" so that democracy doesn't get too "uppity" and try to do positive things for the poor and middle class. In Republiscum ideology fascism is the object; they just don't like to be up front about it. 

William F. Buckley, looking at the problems of the Republiscum Party in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the formula that Republiscum could be as fascist as they wished in private as long as they pretended to patriotism and gave lip service to democracy in public. Buckley's formula began to degrade with the election of Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968. Once Nixon and the Republiscum absorbed the white supremacists in the "Southern Strategy" at the urging of dyed-in-the-wool racist, Strom Thurmond, the marriage of fascism and native racism brought both a bit too far out in public. It was the equivalent of the drunk relative at the family gathering who forgot to zip his fly though he was still tucked in.

Since the Reagan Administration, however, what once was trucked in has (there isn't any good adjective for this) increasingly hung out to the disgust of many. A lot of revisionists in politics have tried to find positive things in the Reagan Administration. I lived through it. The only positive things about the presidency of corporate spokes clown, Ronald McReagan, were the positive brakes imposed on him by Tip O'Neill and a Democratic Congress.

What Reagan did manage to do was upset the Democratic coalition of working class Americans by convincing millions, with no evidence but empty rhetoric, that the Republiscum Party really had the interests of the middle class at heart. It doesn't and never has had but as Abraham Lincoln put it, "you can fool some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time...." Thus, for 40 years the Republiscum, with the complicity of many Democrats, have cut taxes on the wealthiest few in America while also cutting services to the poor and middle class. This farrago has the effect of making the middle class angry at the poor, who do get a small and shrinking safety net, while adoring the rich which they delude themselves into thinking they can be with the correct lottery bet.

Very few understand that the taxes "cut" were providing them with essential services and reliable ways out of poverty and debt for themselves and their children. Those tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited the small percentage of the wealthiest Americans have brought on higher tuition at public colleges and universities, stagnant wages, greater personal debt and decreased upward mobility for themselves and their children. Meanwhile phony "news" services like Faux, Sterling and NewsMax con the unwary into hatred of those who are worse off than themselves so that few of the middle class understand that they are being fleeced by the wealthy.

This election saw the Republiscum Party and our Orange Führer move from their ambient fascism to full totalitarian Nazi mode by undercutting democracy itself and inciting violence against even their own elected officials, those who had the temerity to break with the Orange Führer's party line and tell the truth for once.

American democracy has evolved over the last 233 years. That evolution has seen us move to a greater and greater inclusiveness in our electorate which is a good thing as long as that electorate is informed by actual facts and genuine concern for the broad education of the public. That is what our Freedoms of the Press and of Speech were intended to promote. When those freedoms are perverted into the spouting of lies in the guise of news our democracy breaks down into camps of those who can be fooled "all of the time".

For the 7 weeks since the national election the Orange Führer and a majority of Republiscum office holders have lied, obfuscated and generally undermined our democratic institutions in order to promote the false claim that the Orange Führer actually won an election that he lost by 7 million votes of the people and 39 Electoral College votes. Even a U. S. Supreme Court heavily weighted with Republiscum ideologues could not stomach the Orange Führer's false claims or the lunatic conspiracy theories of his unethical lawyers.

According to legend, as Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a person in the crowd outside of Independence Hall shouted, "Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." It is the job of every American to keep it. The self-styled "patriot" militias, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, "Patriot" Prayer members and right wing evangelicals that make up the Republiscum Party are not keepers of our republic. They seek to undermine it with every foul breath they take. They are abetted in their treason to their nation by the right wing extremist television and radio media that trumpet nonsense instead of news, conspiracies instead of facts and idiocy disguised as opinion.

Thanks to the Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party we are on the verge of not being able to keep the republic we have and of losing the democracy that we have won at great cost over the last 2 centuries.

THE MOST BASIC OF RIGHTS

I write today about the right to vote and the need for every citizen to exercise that franchise. Please bear with me while I establish my bona fides and indulge, as I too often do, in a bit of history.

In an absolute monarchy as existed in Britain and its colonies in the 1770s no one could vote for the king. In fact, no one votes for king or queen in any country with one today. Back in the 1770s there was some unpleasantness that lasted for more that 6 years between Britain and her American colonies over the fact that the people of those American colonies could not vote and be represented in the British government. In consequence of that unpleasantness those British colonies became the United States of America, the nation in which I was born and have lived all my life.

Not only am I a native of the United States of America but I also feel a special bond to this nation that goes beyond my lifetime. My earliest ancestors on the North American continent were William and Suzanna White. Suzanna was pregnant when she left Europe. Before she could even land she gave birth aboard ship to a son and named him Peregrine after the falcon that travels great distances. Peregrine White was born on November 20, 1620 (Old Style) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the tip of what we now know as Cape Cod. Other ancestor immigrants from Britain were among the first settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts and Chandler's River (now Jonesboro), Maine. Some of those ancestors stood to stop the progress of General Howe's troops at Lexington Green and also fought "by the rude bridge that arched the flood" in Concord, Massachusetts later that day.

As I say, I feel a special bond to my nation. Man and boy I have visited many of the shrines of our nation from Saratoga, Ticonderoga, the U. S. S. Constitution, the Bunker Hill Monument, Ulysses Grant's Tomb, Valley Forge, Independence Hall, the Gettysburg battlefield, the many monuments in Washington, D. C., and the battlefields of Virginia including Yorktown, Fredericksburg, Winchester and others. I've been to Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods and walked through Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, Illinois as well as been awed by his monument in our capital, my capital.

I've been able to do all these things because my ancestors, including my Father and Uncle Ed who fought Fascism in Europe during World War II, could and did vote. The ability to vote for your representatives in government is the first and foremost right for which we fought our Revolutionary War. Some will say that the Revolutionary slogan was "No Taxation without Representation". That was one of the Revolutionary slogans but it is utterly wrong to place the sole emphasis on the word "Taxation" and forget "Representation" and the vote that elects representatives.

We have a flag that I cherish. We have all those monuments that I've named and many more. Yet the flag, the monuments, the ancestry and history is meaningless without the right of franchise, the right to vote.

During our Civil War, with the nation torn apart over the disgusting idea that one group of people had the right to enslave another group of people because of the color of their skin, our nation held Congressional elections in 1862 and a Presidential and Congressional election in 1864. That right to vote was so essential, so sacred that even a civil war could not gainsay it.

Today, however, we face a different kind of crisis which some try with all their might, money and influence to turn into a civil war. We are faced with an epidemic. Today it is not armed traitors in grey uniforms that we fight; it is a microbe that is passed from infected person to uninfected persons by our very breath. Today the traitors who would do us in are our very breath or that of someone near us. In our 19th Century Civil War, Maine, Michigan and Minnesota were far from the battlefields. Today every state, every town, every community is the battlefield against this virus and. once again, we face an election.

The only effective way we have at the moment of winning this war against this CoVid-19 virus is by limiting our contacts with others. I don't like it much. No one I know likes it much. However, using social distancing and wearing face masks means that I am, so far, not infected and am not potentially infecting people with whom I come in contact. With our national elections just over two months away, the safest way for us to conduct that election is by limiting our contact with others. We are fortunate in having a fine postal system through which we could readily conduct our election this year so why shouldn't we do so?

The answer to that is that there is no real reason other than the fear that our Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have that they will lose catastrophically if everyone votes. The propaganda that voting by mail opens the process to fraud is nonsense. The state in which I live has voted entirely by mail for a decade without any hint of fraud. In fact the only instances of verified and actual fraud in elections have been carried out by the Republiscum Party in North Carolina and Georgia. Further, there is no evidence whatever that shows an advantage for one party over another in voting by mail.

But it isn't the method of voting that is really under attack here. The Orange Führer and the Republiscums are attacking the universal franchise itself. They know that they lost the fair and honest popular vote in 2016. They also know that their crony capitalism, treason with Putin's Russian dictatorship and influence peddling both in and outside the United States isn't likely to claim even the Electoral College in 2020. Their best hope is to keep as many American Citizens from exercising their most basic right, the right to vote. We have already seen their nefarious attacks on voting. In 2018 voters in predominantly white wards in Georgia waited an average of 3 minutes to vote while citizen voters in predominantly Afro-American wards had to wait 51 minutes to vote thanks to closing of polling places, intimidation and intentional delays. Similar things happened in Republiscum dominated Wisconsin. 

Attacking the right to vote is anti-democratic and a clear violation of our Constitution. Attacking the right of every citizen to vote is absolutely and incontrovertibly UnAmerican. Coupled with the use of Gestapo-like tactics in Portland, Oregon and the Orange Führer's encouragement of neo-Fascist vigilantism our nation, my nation is descending into the same sort of Fascism that my Father and uncle fought against 80 years ago. We MUST stop it here, now and in this presidential election if we are not to forsake our history, our democracy and all that my ancestors fought to save so that "this government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." If we cannot stop the Orange Führer and the Republiscum now we will not have a democracy in 2024 and won't deserve to have one.

PYROMANIACS

Yesterday, July 1, 2020, I heard one of the men in my building telling another that the Democrats (to this Trumpite/Republiscum a dirty word) are trying to cancel the Fourth of July and want to bomb Mount Rushmore. For the moment let's set aside the absurdity of his oral diarrhea and focus just on his assertions.

It is correct that our Orange Fürher has scheduled one of his rallies for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the Fourth of July.

It is also correct that many people, not just Democrats, see his rallies as major vectors for transmission of the CoVid-19 virus since there will be neither social distancing nor mask wearing at the event. With new infections from the novel corona virus hitting new peaks daily (48,000 new cases on July 1 alone) all opportunities for mass transmission of the disease should be curtailed.

Further, it is correct that the Orange Fürher has scheduled a fireworks spectacular for the close of his rally at Mount Rushmore. Both the National Park Service and the Forestry Service have asked that the fireworks display be eliminated because of a serious risk of forest fires. The Orange Fürher and the Republiscum Party have ignored those warnings.

If you, dear reader if you exist, ever played the game of "Telephone" when you were younger you know that information can get garbled and strangely perverted in the course of transmission. While such things do happen, this nonsense is of a particularly nasty and vicious order. The message that my Trumpite/Republiscum co-resident receives has been intentionally garbled and intentionally perverted to suit the Trumpite/Republiscum supporters and rile them up to new heights of frenzy. This imbecile in my building has no idea who is shoveling this offal onto the Internet pages he frequents. He doesn't know who funds his sources or where they are actually located. All he cares about is that they feed his bigotries and stupidity with drivel that he's predisposed to credit.

As America began burning up with rage over the murders of George Floyd and others, far too many others for far too long, the German magazine, Der Spiegle published with a cover that showed America on fire in the background through a White House window. In the foreground sat the Orange Fürher holding a lighted match. The caption to the artwork reads, "Der Feuerteufel/ Eine Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand". In English that means literally "The Fire-Devil (Pyromaniac)/ A President sets his Nation on Fire (to the Torch)".

The great and very Conservative Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in the opinion in Schenck v. United States that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The scum who use any forum to foment panic by shouting the kind of idiocies that my co-resident mouths are precisely "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The Rash Lamebrians, Ann Coulters, Sean Hannitys, Janine Pirros, Laura Ingrahams, Glenn Becks, Alex Joneses and others both in and out of Russia and China are fomenting hate and violence against those whose politics simply differs from theirs or the candidate that they prefer. They know that the gasoline they are pouring on the fire is gasoline. They are abetted in their pyromania by Mark Zuckerberg and some more well-meaning Internet entrepreneurs confused as to the scope of our Constitutionally guaranteed free speech.

Perhaps you will recall "Pizzagate" in which Alex Jones and other ultra right-wing and white supremacist web sites spent weeks promoting the farrago that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child trafficing ring out of the basement of a Washington, D. C. pizza parlor that didn't have a basement. The result was that on December 4, 2016 a North Carolina man who, like my imbecile co-resident, credited such crap invaded the pizza parlor and briefly shot up the place before being arrested and disarmed by the police. What went unnoticed was that the businesses neighboring the pizza parlor as well as others as far afield as New York City and Austin, Texas were harassed and vandalized by the idiots taken in by this heinous lie. Members of the pizza parlors owner's family, his friends and even members of bands who'd played at the parlor received threatening phone calls and mail.

Our Constitution enshrines our right to speak our minds and make our opinions known. It does not, however, protect those who incite violence, as  our Orange Fürher and his minions on Fox News and the Internet have done. Deliberately promulgating patently false information is not protected free speech. It is rather incitement to violence. My freedom of expression is not curbed by being forced, under penalties established under law, to wear a face mask or stay at least 6 feet from other persons during an epidemic. Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, was not unjustly imprisoned when she'd infected 53 people with typhoid fever and caused 3 deaths. Public safety, that is the safety of the public at large, was endangered by her free movement. When Mary Mallon refused to give up her work as a cook, she had to lose her personal freedom to prevent more and wider infections.

Not only are the Orange Fürher and his syncophants of the Republiscum Party  pyromaniacs, the Orange Fürher himself is also a Typhoid Mary spreading the disease of phony conspiracies, lies, bigotry and hatred to thousands who share his bigotry and ignorance.

My co-resident is an imbecile and a fool. He never seeks to question anything he hears as long as it comports with his hatred and ignorance. He is not alone in that. He is far from alone in that. My very faint hope is that Abraham Lincoln was correct in saying (and he may never have said it but it's still a pretty good line), "You can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I will stick with the attribution to Lincoln and hope against hope that enough of the voters in enough of the states will not be fooled this coming November 3rd.

SPEAKING ILL OF THE DEAD I

On Friday, November 30, 2018 George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, died and has been graciously and effusively eulogized since. Some of those attempts at hagiography have been genuine and valid but they ignore the gross weight of the negatives justly heaped upon Bush 41 for the great evil that he did.

First, George H. W. Bush carried on a tradition of questionable heroism in war. His father, Prescott Sheldon Bush, served in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. He claimed in a letter to his parents that he had batted away from General John J. Pershing an artillery shell and thereby saving the life of the A.E.F. commander. Prescott's proud parents made the letter and his alleged act of heroism public. However, once out in public Prescott's great heroic act came under scrutiny which quickly determined that his baseball skill, let alone that of Babe Ruth, could not have altered the course of an artillery shell. Prescott's claim of heroism was utterly false and physically impossible. Faced with public derision, Prescott was forced to admit that his purported saving of General Pershing was a complete fiction. Whether Prescott ever intended it to become public or not isn't and cannot be known. There is no doubt that Prescott's son, George H. W. Bush was a Navy pilot in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. On one of his last missions, George H. W.'s plane was hit by Japanese fire. He was able to bail out but his two crewmen died in the crash of the plane. George H. W. was quickly rescued by a submarine that happened to be conveniently on the ocean surface nearby. During the 1988 presidential campaign some serious questions arose as to whether George H. W. had bailed out of his torpedo plane early leaving his crewmen to their death and, much like his father's heroism, his serendipitous salvation by that submarine wasn't as serendipitous as it's said to be. The question that has never been answered was did George H. W., piloting a damaged plane, see the submarine and parachute out leaving his crew to die. We don't know but it would carry on a less than savory family tradition.

Prescott Bush became a protege of W. Averell Harriman and Harriman's investment banking firm in the 1920s and took up residence in the Connecticut commuter suburbs of New York City. In the explicitly Liberal 1930s and 40s Prescott became an officer of the the Connecticut chapter of the United Negro College Fund and of the American Birth Control League in Catholic dominated Connecticut where all forms of birth control were illegal. In a period in which such things were not anomalous, Prescott was also the finance chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party. The long connection to support for birth control and abortion became a millstone around George H. W.'s neck when he sought the presidency in 1980.

During World War II Prescott set another family tradition of making loyalty secondary to business. Prescott was a director, along with his mentor Harriman, of the Union Banking Corporation, a bank that held significant assets for German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen's Vereinigte Stahlwereke AG controlled about 75% of Germany's iron ore reserves and made much of the steel that went into Hitler's planes, tanks and other armaments. Thyssen was a Nazi supporter from 1923 onward. He was one of the signers of the letter to German president Paul von Hindenberg that convinced von Hindenberg to appoint Adolph Hitler as German Chancellor in 1933.  He was in complete agreement with the Nazi expulsion of Jews from jobs and industry but demurred in the mid-1930s when Hitler turned on the Roman Catholic Church. Shortly after Germany began World War II by invading Poland, Thyssen, believing that war was not appropriate at the time, fled to Switzerland. He was subsequently condemned by the Nazi Party and government. However, Thyssen continued to profit from his steel industry. Rumors were flying that Union Banking Corp. was holding gold for high ranking Nazis including Thyssen and in October, 1942 the U. S. Government seized the assets of Union Banking under the Trading with the Enemy Act, retaining those assets for the duration of the war. Though there is no reason to believe that Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer, it is impossible to believe that he was unaware of Thyssen's Nazi sympathies, anti-Semitism and involvement in the German armaments industry. Thus, Prescott Bush established his son, George H. W.'s belief that loyalty to country is one thing that's all well and good but loyalty to money is forever.

In 1950 Prescott made his first run for senator from Connecticut against Sen. William Burnett Benton as a Liberal Republican, something that was then not the imaginary, fantastical beast it is today. He lost by 1,000 votes. Prescott planned a run again in 1952. As part of that planning W. Averell Harriman advised Prescott that he could not be elected if he did not take a vigorous anti-communist stance in line with Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and California Senator Richard Nixon. Prescott won election as senator from Connecticut in 1952 riding the wave of Dwight David Eisenhower's presidential campaign and anti-communist fearmongering. Thus Prescott set another tradition that George H. W. followed in 1980 and 1988 of jettisoning all personal beliefs and ethics in favor of claiming power.

Following his military service George H. W. moved to Texas where his family wealth and prominence gave him entree into the oil industry and even greater wealth and influence.

Prescott Bush retired from the senate in 1962. His second son, George H. W., ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 1964 when Barry Goldwater led the Republican's to near universal defeat. George H. W. ran again in 1966 and won the election to represent Texas' 7th District where he served for 2 terms. During George H. W.'s 2 terms in the House of Representatives the Vietnam War was at it height as was opposition to it in America. Coincidentally, his son George W., hereinafter referred to as "Shrub" (the late Milly Ivins' delightful nickname for "Dubya" graduated from an undistinguished 4 years at Yale University and needed both a military "career" and to stay alive. George H. W. got Dubya a position in the Texas Air National Guard far from even the faint prospect of actual combat. Dubya managed to be accepted for pilot training despite low scores on the pilot aptitude tests, irregular attendance at pilot training and frequent drunkenness. In 1971 Dubya miraculously got transferred to the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard but really so that he could work on the senatorial campaign of Winton Blount. Shrub's pilot career ended when he refused to appear for a required physical leaving him with a military career less distinguished though less public than his grandfather's.

Once George H. W. lost his seat in Congress, his father's friend, and our first overtly criminal president, Richard Milhous Nixon appointed him U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet level position. In January, 1973 as the Watergate Break-In began to develop into the Watergate Scandal, George H. W. became chairman of the Republican National Committee. He held that post until September, 1974 when newly anointed President Gerald R. Ford shipped him off to be chief of the new liaison office in China, effectively making Poppy Bush our ambassador to Beijing. That job lasted about 16 months until Ford brought Poppy back to Washington, actually Langley, Virginia, to head the CIA. Ford acted in the shadow of the investigations of the Church Committee (Senate) and Pike Committee (House) into CIA operations many of which flagrantly violated U. S. and International Law and treaties. Poppy came in to the CIA as someone ostensibly untainted by the questionable operations and bizarre policies of the Intelligence Community.

Once Jimmy Carter became president on January 20, 1977, Poppy retired to investment banking in Houston, Texas, joined the Trilateral Commission and prepared himself for a run at the presidency in 1980. That year the ultra-right wing of the Republiscum Party made it's comeback from the Goldwater debacle of 1964 with Ronald Reagan as their front man. Reagan, who was probably showing signs of Alzheimer's Disease, needed a reliable vice-president. Poppy put himself forward as not only that reliable man but as the representative of entrenched oligarchical power within the Republiscum Party. Carter's inept handling of first the Shah of Iran and then the subsequent Iranian Hostage Crisis doomed his bid for reelection and Poppy became the 43rd Vice-President of the United States.

When Reagan was clearly losing mental capacity during the 1984 campaign, Poppy Bush became an increasingly important part of the Administration. Though he claimed to have "gone to the bathroom" during the time that Reagan authorized the illegal actions that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair there is plenty of reason to believe that Poppy was deeply involved in the illegal acts in Iran and Nicaragua with Col. Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter. Poppy Bush's involvement in Iran-Contra is the most likely reason that his son, Shrub, immediately on taking office, changed the availability of presidential papers to scholars from 25 to 50 years following the end of an Administration. The Reagan Administration papers would have become available after January 20, 2014 while his father's papers would have been open to scholars after January 20, 2018. Now the Reagan papers are locked up until 2039 and the Bush 41 papers won't become available for critical review until 2043. Justice delayed is justice denied and history delayed is truth denied. We won't know all of the crimes of the Shrub-Cheney Administration until 2058 far too late for the American people to know and understand how they have been misled and ill-served by Ronald Reagan, Poppy Bush, his feckless son.

So belatedly I am here to speak ill of the dead who deserve to be spoken ill of. I am sure that there are good things to be said of George Herbert Walker Bush but as a public man, I cannot think of any and can think of more than I've listed above that are ill.

As far as that goes, for more speaking ill of the dead I eagerly await the obituaries for the following:
Richard (Dick) Cheney
Donald Rumsfeld
Oliver North
John Poindexter
William Barr
Donald J. Trump
Michael Pence

None of those obituaries can come too soon.

MODERATION IN...NOTHING

Two years ago I listened to a lot of news up to and following the 2018 mid-term elections. One of the tropes that kept coming up was the "demise of the Moderate Republican". It seemed to be something that news outlets enjoy discussing and airing interviews with self-appointed experts and even alleged Republiscum Moderates. The problem with this Republiscum Moderate trope is that it comes 50 or 60 years too late, possibly even more. The only reason that some Republiscum look "moderate" is that, like Ivory Soap, the Republiscum Party is 99 and 44/100ths per cent pure fascist shading over to full Nazi. If you're a Republiscum elected official who doesn't think that our military should be shooting refugees from Central America, you're a moderate because you only want to make it impossible for those same refugees to gain acknowledged refugee status and ultimately become U. S. citizens. The only way that is "moderate" is in contrast to the "build the wall and shoot anyone who tries to climb over" vast majority of Republiscum.

I'm sorry, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and a few others but you would have been right-wing extremists in 1950 and Goldwaterites in the early 1960s. Now that the vast majority of your colleagues are goosestepping to whatever tune The Orange Führer is tweeting you look moderate but you are absolutely, definitively not anything like moderate. Jeff, brokering a week of seriously curtailed investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and then voting for the alcoholic, rapist, ultra-right-wing bastard is not the stuff of which moderation is made. You may be a fascist looking for some cover in case we ever get a U. S. version of the Nürnberg Trials but that is not the stuff of moderation.


I have been paraphrasing General Philip Sheridan for decades saying the only good Republiscum is a dead Republiscum. That doesn't mean I or anyone should go out and start shooting Republiscum. By ignoring sensible precautions to control the corona virus pandemic the Republiscum will be making plenty of dead Republiscum without my or anyone's intervention. What I mean by that phrase is there are plenty of good Republicans but they are all dead: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Robert LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick and Elliot Richardson to name but a few. All moderates and even Progressives of their day but they are all dead.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair because Pete McCloskey is still alive at 93 and William Ruckelhaus only died last November at 87. Some might point out that Mitt Romney passes as a moderate but that is sort of like saying that Albert Speer wasn't much of a Nazi. Mitt, whether governor of Massachusetts or senator from Utah, is a vacuum filled by whatever makes Mitt look good for the moment. That self-serving thing of the moment can then be whisked away in the slightest breeze from a different direction. Mitt Romney is the walking, talking personification of there being no "there", there.

Currently the Republiscum Party has committed itself to Trumpist dictatorship. Mitch McConnell has been running the U. S. Senate with a playbook cadged from the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Parliament. Like the rise of the Nazis in 1929-33 there is no concern with venality and corruption in government as long as those corrupt, venal Republiscum in question adhere to the Republiscum Party line. There is no concern with actual violation of the Constitution so long it is a Republiscum who's violating it.

There are some differences between the Republiscum of today and the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s. For one they don't resort to assassination, so far as we can tell. They just make as many legitimate voters as possible ineligible to vote so that their inability to attract a majority, one they congenitally despise anyway, won't be a bar to elective office.

Unless I am somehow mistaken, along with every dictionary and close to two hundred and fifty years of political rhetoric in this country, "democracy" means "government of the people, by the people and for the people" just to add in Abraham Lincoln's apt phrase. Keeping "people" from casting votes on specious and spurious grounds is the very definition of "anti-democratic", that is opposite to democracy itself. But that doesn't bother the Republiscum. They are only interested in the oligarchs who fund them and in hugging a flag now and then for show or using a Bible as a prop and means of paying no taxes.

The Orange Führer and his Republiscum allies like Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton decry voting by mail as an invitation to vote fraud. They ignore the fact that many states have used vote-by-mail for a decade or more without any hint of voter fraud. Meanwhile the only confirmed case of voter fraud in the nation over the last fifty years was a systematic action by the Republiscum Party in one Congressional District in North Carolina in 2018. If we are worried about vote fraud, it is the Republiscum Party whose actions we must vigilantly check, not the individual voter mailing in a ballot.

When the demos, the Greek word for the people, take to the streets peaceably because, regardless of our skin color, we have had more than enough of police abusing their power by murdering citizens, most often citizens of color, the Republiscum start screaming about riots and suppressing dissent. I seem to recall that their attitude was a bit different when smaller demonstrations by the Astroturf "Tea Party" group their oligarchs funded were carrying idiot signs that read things like, "Keep Govt out of my Medicare!" The Orange Führer's attitude toward protesters was different when neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of their number used his car to murder and maim protesters. Also, it's particularly interesting to watch the talking heads of the Volkische Beobachter (i. e. Fox News) scream about violent protesters when time after time in Minnesota, Colorado, Washington and California it has been police who have initiated the violence or the Republiscum and "Libertarian" supporters like the "Proud Boys" or the "Boogaloo Bois" (spelling and, more broadly, education are not the strong suit of these thugs) who have infiltrated peaceful protests and initiated violence.

The fact is that the Republiscum have no shame and no moderation at all. They incite and condone violence in defense of their anti-democratic attempts to establish a neo-Fascist oligarchy in the United States. There is no instance in which we can rationally speak of a "Moderate Republiscum". Like fairies, demons and unicorns the "Moderate Republiscum" simply does not exist except in the rhetoric of some news networks desperate to fill air time. How "moderate" is the Mussolini-style Fascist when compared with his Simese Twin brother the neo-Nazi anyway?

MISCELLANY, JUNE, 2020

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Donald Trump is an intellectual micro-midget who is incapable of governing himself, let alone the United States. He is an embarrassment to the nation and a danger to it as well. Trump is a congenital Fascist. Eighty years ago we combined with Britain, the Free French and forces from many other nations to defeat Fascism in Europe and the Far East. It is crime for us to allow Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Republiscum Party to bring Fascism to America and it is also an insult to the men and women, living and dead, who fought Fascism in the 1920 through 1945 period. If we want to honor "The Greatest Generation" we must remove these Fascists from government no later than the November elections if American Democracy is to survive.

I have been homeless for just over a year. I currently live in a dorm in a shelter run by a Calvinist fundamentalist religious group. We are in Washington State. The manager of our shelter expressed his distress at the "tyrannical orders" of Governor Jay Inslee in March when sensible regulations for controlling the Corona Virus came down. I am in one of three dorms with ten other men who are either pigs or babies when they are not being bigots. The fellow, a young man with very serious physical and mental problems, in the bed next to mine spent months saying that he'd decided he was Jewish because Jews are all rich and control the world. He also uses the word "Negro" as if it were the even nastier variant on that term. The fellow next to him is very sympathetic to him and is also a big Trump supporter. Two others of my dorm mates are very distressed that NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag.
You, dear reader, if there are any dear readers out there, need to know this background because this morning (June 11, 2020) I awoke at 7:30 A. M. to find myself utterly alone in the dorm. That situation is so completely unusual that my first reaction was, "Well, finally The Rapture has happened and I get my choice of cars!"
Sadly, about ten minutes later one of the Confederate flag supporters came back and my plans for a road trip evaporated.

When I tweak the folks who run the shelter in which I now live, please don't misunderstand. They are good people and are expressing their faith in the way truest to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as set forth in the Book of Matthew 25th Chapter. Their failings all centre around getting bogged down in the Old Testament prophets, the Revelation of St. John and the letters that purport to be from Paul of Tarsus. They believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of god but have no compunctions about editing it to comport with their belief that demons are abroad in the land. I choose to know them by their acts rather than their failings though I still like pointing out the absurdities of those failings.

I have some hope that the Corona Virus in the United States is natures way of weeding out the Republiscum. I encourage "Red" states to abandon sensible virus control measures especially in towns and counties with big Republiscum majorities.

Isn't it great that Stephen Miller looks like the villain he is?

Remember how we were sold William Barr as a solid defender of law and an adult in the room? Remember how we were sold first Dubya and later Trump as a "business man" who would bring a responsible business perspective to government? Now, I ask you, do you really think that we aren't going to order some other dose of Republiscum snake oil in the future?

Yes, I know I was getting the Trump matter out of the way at the start but there's just too much of it to to fold into one paragraph.

I am so relieved that Donald Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine. It is supposed to be dangerous for the elderly, you know.

I'm glad that Donald Trump refuses to wear a mask in public. It wouldn't improve him any and might allow inattentive people to mistake him for a decent human being.

Let's give a cheer for the unsung hero Warren G. Harding. When his administration was rife with corruption and beset by scandal he had the decency to die in office.

I have been going to demonstrations and singing We Shall Overcome for 60 years. Now, thanks to cell phone videos, we just might.

Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins so why do we expect him to act nobly now?

How come we don't see anti-vaccers out demonstrating against creating a Corona Virus vaccine?

The Republiscum are constantly talking that our sovereignty is threatened by international treaties and organizations while they threaten our Constitution. Could there be a connection there? A distraction?

Can we agree that Twitter is for Twits?

I have fallen in love with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rachel Brosnahan (Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel respectively). What more can a man want than a lovely, smart woman who is sexy, sensual, funny and talks dirty?

Republiscum believe that patriotism means wearing a flag pin or hugging a flag while trampling and then pissing on the Constitution. Over a century ago Ambrose Bierce wrote that Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. He then corrected Dr. Johnson by definitely stating that it is the first refuge of a scoundrel. The Republiscum prove Bierce correct every minute of every day.

Once we include African-Americans and Latino Americans, the black and brown peoples who are our neighbors, brothers and sisiters, in "All Lives Matter" we can use that slogan. Until then Black and Brown Lives Matter is something to push for.

Wouldn't it be nice if the CHRISTIAN Fundamentalists actually followed Jesus of Nazareth?

If this world is the creation of the Judeo-Christian god, then isn't it a bit presumptuous to be so all fired up and eager for the "End Times" and the destruction of their god's handiwork? Wouldn't it be more respectful to step back and let their god get on with his or her work and take things as they come?

The United States has had over 100,000 deaths from CoVid-19 with the death count rising daily. Is anyone surprised that that total could have been much smaller if we weren't led by a congregation of fools who despise science and think that mental illness is caused by demonic possession?

And, by the way, bad Christian Rock is redundant. It falsely implies that there is good Christian Rock which, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, does not exist. I know this from a year's worth of experience.

If you've been stuck at home since mid-March and need something to do, read a good book -NOT THE Good Book. Read a novel that you've never read before by an author you've never read before. If you have children at home, read to them. Read them Harry Potter or the Oz books of L. Frank Baum or the Gormengast books or Lord of the Rings or something else that's age appropriate like Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins or The Saggy, Baggy Elephant or A Child's Garden of Verses. Reading is what got us to the heights we've reached so far. Not reading is what got us Republiscum and Donald Trump.

While I'm on the subject of reading, a couple of years ago I waded through Herschel Parker's 2 volume, 1937 page biography of Herman Melville. The other day I came across another quotation from Ambrose Bierce that fits that work exactly. The quotation is , "The covers of this book are too far apart."

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure that there will be more to recommend or skewer in July.

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

So now we have ultra-right wing ideologue, hyper-partisan, perjurer, alcoholic and serial sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice if the U. S. Supreme Court. He joins his fellow in many of those adjectives, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito in creating an ultra-right wing of the Supreme Court. He joins Chief Justice John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, right wing ideologues who pass for moderates in our pell mell descent into fascism, to form a solid majority of five to work the insidious program of overturning every bit of social progress made in the United States since 1901 at the least.

Some readers (I expect I have at least 2 and possibly as many as 3 or 4) may see an irony in my defense of Woody Allan contrasted with my condemnation of Brett Kavanaugh. That would be an extremely shallow assessment but let me deal with that from the start and let's allow that start to be a little parable I've been using for many years.

Two churches sit across the street from one another. One Sunday as the congregation is singing a hymn two different thieves sneak into the foyer of each church. The thieves rip the respective Poor Boxes off the wall and race down the street. The sextons of each church and some members of the congregation hear the thieves and give chase. They apprehend the perpetrators and drag them back to the church where they put them in front of the congregation.

The Republiscum thief, broken Poor Box still clutched in his greedy hands, breaks free of his restrainers, mounts to the pulpit and begins to justify himself by sermonizing. He flatly denies that he did the crime. He claims that he just found the Poor Box lying on the street where someone else must have dropped it. Then he argues that whether he stole it or not had he been allowed to get away with the cash he would have spent it thereby improving the economy of the neighborhood and creating jobs for bartenders, barmaids (he mentions that he drinks and likes beer), fences of stolen goods, hookers and other businesses that he frequents. He demands to know by what right the congregation members have laid hands on him when he is actually a benefactor of their society. As his diatribe ends he falls to his knees on the alter and claims to have accepted Jesus as his savior and that he is washed clean of his sins. He heads down the main aisle of the church still clutching the Poor Box. The congregants are so dumbstruck by the gall and effrontery of this thief that he manages to escape instead of being beaten to a pulp as he deserves.

Meanwhile the sexton and congregants of the church on the opposite side of the street have caught and returned to the church the Democrat thief. This thief acts a bit differently. He acknowledges that he's stolen the Poor Box out of his greed but he hands it back to the congregants. He admits his crime. He probably makes some excuses for being driven to it by forces beyond his control but he acknowledges his guilt. He offers to accept whatever punishment the congregants determine for him. He begs for their mercy and forgiveness then stands silent as the congregants consider what they should do. In the end, they turn him over to the police but several congregants appear at his trial and ask the court for mercy. The thief is convicted but given community service. His obligation to the court as his punishment is to work at the church. He has to repair the loose banister on the stairs to the choir loft. He washes dishes at every church supper for a year, even after his six-month sentence is up, and he becomes a trusted member of the congregation from which he never steals again.

So which would you prefer to have judging the validity of your Constitutional rights? The unrepentant Republiscum thief or the repentant Democrat thief. They are both thieves. There is no doubt about that. I would just prefer to have the thief who has a sense of shame and guilt sit in judgment over me than the self-righteous, unrepentant bastard who is still and always will remain a thief.

One case in point is the Supreme Court's extremely partisan decision that Federal Courts cannot intervene to make more fair and just Congressional Districts created to insure the supremacy of one political party over another. Let's leave aside for the moment that this issue arises because the Republiscum minority in the nation has managed to secure enough power in enough states to skew the membership of Congress toward their party despite it's support by a minority of voters. I'm leaving that aside because I am not so naif to believe that Democrats would be more fair and just given the same degree of power. Further, this is a problem of both party's making, especially the Democrats since they held majorities in Congress for many years during which they could have remedied the problem.

The underlying problem that exacerbates Gerrymandering on all sides and violates the U. S. Constitution is that the U. S. House of Representatives has not increased its membership since 1927. I have written at length about this matter before. Bear with me as I recap the problem. When out Constitution was written and adopted we opted for a bicameral legislative branch. The process at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was called "The Connecticut Compromise". In that compromise we created a Senate (literally a chamber of elders) in which each state, large or small, had equal representation of two senators. We created a House of Representatives in which members were determined by population. Because the larger house of our Legislative Branch's membership was based on population we created a decennial census to determine the size of the nation's population (note that we counted all persons living in the United States, not just some subset of them) so that the U. S. House could be reapportioned to increase with the increasing population of the nation. Everything went along swimmingly for more than a century.

The Census of 1910 showed for the first time that more citizens lived in urban areas than rural ones. The Republiscum Party of the day refused to acknowledge that change but did reapportion based on the data. The 1920 Census, however, showed an even greater shift from a rural to an urban majority. The Republiscum of the day refused to reapportion based on that census. The U. S. House remained unchanged from 1910 until 1927 when the even more pronounced urban shift and Democratic gains in Congressional elections in 1926 forced a reapportionment for the elections of 1928. In 1927 the population of the nation, according to the Bureau of the Census was 119,035,000 and the U. S. House determined that there should be 435 members for the 1928 election pending the 1930 Census.

Sadly, in 1930 the Republiscum retained control of Congress and the White House so there was no change in the membership of the U. S. House. In 1940 Democrats controlled the Federal government but did not reapportion the House despite a population increase of more than 22,000,000 persons. Democrats controlled the White House in 1950 for that Census but Republiscum were resurgent in Congress and gain the House membership remained at 435. The net result has been that in every decade since we have retained 435 Congressional Districts although the population has now exceeded the 1927 level by 213,604,000 or very nearly 3 times what it was when the membership of the U. S. House was set at 435.

Democrats bear much blame in this mess. They have shied away from diluting the influence of rural state members by expanding the House membership. I would say that 93 years of violating the Constitution by holding U. S. House membership at 435 is a good 90 years too many. We need reform in the House now. I wish I could confidently say that a Democratic majority in both houses and a Democratic president would remedy the situation. Unfortunately, I can't for, as the great Will Rogers said, "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

That Chief Justice Roberts, and his four Republiscum ideologues could not see that a nearly 300% increase in the U. S. population with no increase in the number of seats in Congress was a clear violation of the Constitution is a wilful act of blindness and a partisan action. But, in fairness, that is not the question that they were asked to decide. They were asked to weigh in on Gerrymandering for partisan advantage which is rather a different issue. Because it is a different issue the Roberts Court Republiscum were justified in ignoring the issue.

So why do I bring up reapportionment in the discussion of Gerrymandering? Because if we had more Congressional Districts showing greater representation in urban areas we would not only be cleaving close to the letter and intention of the Constitution but smaller districts and more of them make Gerrymandering more difficult. The smaller and more compact districts don't eliminate the Gerrymandering problem, but creating a contiguous district that includes, say, 580,000 people is much easier and less likely to allow for bizarre, snakey districts that thread their way through towns and counties that lean toward one party or another than it is for a district of 770,000 people to do so.

A Supreme Court that is more committed to upholding our Constitution than it is to interpreting it for partisan gain might well have looked deeply into the Gerrymandering question and built on the "One Man; One Vote" decisions of the Warren Court by mandating a reapportionment based on the actual population.

I do not want to see a U. S. House of 1300 members. We have enough imbeciles and loonies like former Representative Michelle Bachmann or current Representative Louis Gohmert as it is. But the Constitution itself offers us a neat and responsible way of equitably reapportioning the U. S. House. According to the Constitution, every state, no matter how small its population, gets at least 1 representative. Currently 7 states have just 1 Congressional District. the smallest of them in population is Wyoming with 578,759 residents. Reapportionment based on Wyoming's population would give some of its neighbors, Montana, North and South Dakota, an additional Congressional District each and would give us a U. S. House of about 663 members.

And as a sidelight for those all distressed about the Electoral College, the change to 763 electors would make it harder for a minority party to cobble together 382 electors to take the White House. The Electoral College is not the problem, the lack of any increase in seats in the U. S. House is the problem skewing the Electoral College to rural states with relatively smaller populations.

Perhaps we can impeach the very impeachable Bret Kavanaugh but we cannot have another 4 years of our current Imbecile-in-Chief or any other Republiscum. Ruth Bader Ginsberg won't last that long, I fear, and a 6 to 3 Supreme Court majority could devastate the nation even more than this current mal-Administration already has.

Or, to stay with Will Rogers, I wish I were a member of an organized political party.

THE SCHISM METHOD

I was raised in the Methodist Church to which I attribute the atheism to which I have ascribed since I was 16 years old. Let me explain.

My maternal grandmother was a Methodist in the revivalist tradition of the late 19th Century. I suspect that her parents may well have been Methodists too though I have no knowledge of that either direct or indirect. That grandmother died several years before I was born so I never got any direct influence from her for good or ill. I do know that I have a paperback book of revivalist hymns that belonged to her. My mother, the middle daughter who was closest to my grandmother, was a confirmed Methodist who became very involved in her church. My mother was a great watcher of religious programs on television which is how I became acquainted with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Oral Roberts and every televised Billy Graham crusade. It is also how I acquired a subconscious association of religion and showmanship.

The church to which we belonged, a small but reliable congregation in the section of Waterbury, Connecticut near where we lived when I was very young, had two ministers up to the time when I was ten or eleven. The second of those was British. He was a silversmith, as I understand it, who underwent a conversion experience which led him to seminary and the ministry. I am not sure but that experience may have involved comforting a dying flyer whose plane crashed during World War I.

In any case, I was allowed into a Bible class taught by Rev. Reith generally reserved for high school age children by the time I was ten years old. By the time I was twelve I was teaching a Sunday School class of 1st and 2nd graders. At fourteen I was hired by a Protestant Ecumenical group to teach in a weekday religious school whose main attraction was early discharge from the public schools one day each week. Everyone in my congregation firmly believed that I was headed to seminary and would be ordained as a Methodist minister.

The core of my church's congregation was a group of extended and interconnected families who had been instrumental in founding the church in 1876. Though such a core is fine for tradition it is also ossified and tends to see the church as its proprietary business. As long as the old families remained unchallenged and secure in their proprietorship all was well but change was coming.

Rev. Reith's replacement was a young, energetic man who was deeply involved with the civil rights movement. He was appointed to serve both my church and another in what was fast becoming part of the African-American ghetto. This other church served a largely African-American population in what had once been a German and Polish immigrant ghetto. It was the neighborhood in which my Polish paternal grandmother lived. This other church was dying. Many of the African-American members were finding a more congenial home in the black led pentecostal churches. The diocese decided that it deserved a shot and preservation so Rev. Floyd was sent to give it a try. Had Rev. Floyd been African-American he might have succeeded in preserving the other congregation but my church would never have accepted a black man as minister. Our church was essential to paying Rev. Floyd's salary so the diocese sent a white man to do a black man's job with predictable consequences.

After a short couple of years Rev. Floyd was moved to a congregation in Bridgeport where he had a better chance and more success. His replacement had been a missionary in the Philippines. He had a Fillpino wife which the congregation found exotic but not like them. He was also frightfully insecure and easily intimidated by the entrenched members of the congregation.

That minister's tenure was very short indeed. He was replaced by Rev. Howley, his wife and a brood of three or four children, maybe more. Rev. Howley had been a Roman Catholic priest. He was taking a graduate course in theology or ancient languages (I forget which.) in which a fellow student was an attractive, young nun. They began conversing, going out for coffee after class and, to shorten this narrative, fell in love. The got released from their vows, married and began raising a "good, Catholic family" of many children. Not wanting his theological training to entirely go to waste, Rev. Howley converted to Methodism, was ordained a Methodist minister and was sent to Grace Church with a mandate from the Bishop to make the church more financially viable.

Revs. Reith, Floyd and Howley represent three worthies in my religious upbringing. Rev. Reith taught me the fundamentals of Methodism. Rev. Floyd introduced me to a church militant for social justice as well as saving souls. Rev. Howley was the first person to take me to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City which, though he was not involved in it any further than as chauffer, taught me the art and intellectual side of religion.

Rev. Howley's mandate to place Grace Church on a better financial footing ran him headlong into the entrenched families who used the church as their subsidizing landlord and piggy bank. He was there less than a year. When the beneficiaries of church largess finally drove him out of that church he said he was fed up with the ministry. I fully understood. I was heartbroken to see a bunch of selfish bastards drive him from my church and from the preaching of theology that he loved. His departure happened to coincide with my growing interest in the theatre and my reading of Isaac Asimov's original Foundation Trilogy. Those three concurrent events along with the ongoing insanity of the Vietnam War, the vile responses to the civil rights movement south and north alike and my own intellectual growth led me to reject all religion. In one far too glib formulation, I saw the entrenched families of my church acting selfish, vile and nasty to protect their prerogatives and decided that if they were, as they smugly felt themselves to be, on the short route to Heaven, Hell was going to be a pleasant picnic, Dante not withstanding.

I have never really given up on religion though. I cannot believe in the supernatural mumbo-jumbo of risen dead and demons from Hell or angels in white reclining on clouds somewhere above us. I can, however, believe in decency and humanity and their opposites, vileness and inhumanity. I've seen too much vileness and inhumanity from political leaders and neighbors alike just as I've seen plenty of decency and humanity from some other political leaders, friends, nuns, priests, Salvation Army Captains, ministers, rabbis and everyday people. I still think that Christianity is a wonderful religious philosophy and wish that more people practiced it. Certainly the Simoniacs like Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, Jerry Falwell father and son, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Francis Chan and a host of televangelists and similar con artists do not. Those who clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit those who are sick or in prison and generally see to the needs of fellow human beings who cannot provide for themselves are doing the good work that, god or no god, makes human life a little more heavenly and a little less hellish.

Today the site of Grace Methodist Church in the Waterville section of Waterbury, Connecticut is the location of a strip mall with a check cashing shop and other businesses catering to a more downscale population than existed in that neighborhood fifty years ago. Grace Church did not survive to celebrate its centennial in 1976 and, given the narrow  minded and narrow self-interest of the parishioners, I'm very glad of it.

Today a similar situation writ large envelops the United Methodist Church. A group of entrenched and bigoted "conservatives" has decided that who someone loves must exclude a person from the church generally and certainly from fulfilling sacramental offices. It has always seemed to me that the person who said "Suffer the little children to come unto me," who had no qualms about sitting down with the most reviled members of his society and who posed parables like "The Good Shepherd" and "The Good Samaritan" would be able to find it in his heart to embrace gay men and women or those who find their birth gender inconsistent with their own self-image, but that's just me. I'm terrible at finding limits and qualifications on the statement, "Love one another as I have loved you." Clearly others, including many self-styled "conservatives" feel that only those things of which they personally approve are consonant with the teachings of that good man, Jesus of Nazareth.

So the United Methodist Church has decided to try to split amicably. There will be a Methodist sect that embraces all comers, much as, we are told, did Jesus himself. There will also be a Methodist sect that embraces only those who live by its approved standards both in the church and in private life. The first Methodist sect will ordain gay and transgendered men and women, provide them with all the sacraments of the church including marriage and treat them as valued members of their Christian community. The other will exclude gay and transgendered men and women from all or some sacraments, refuse such folks the right to  marry within that church and treat them tacitly or overtly as pariahs who offend the narrow morals to which those "conservatives" adhere. To call this latter sect "Christian" is a step too far for me as I see nothing Christ-like in their bigotry.

Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov relates a parable of The Old Woman and the Onion. It seems that a young woman, thrown out upon the road and the mercy of other people and the elements, is starving. She comes to the gate of an old woman, known for her viciousness, meanness and greed, asking for food. This old woman who has never done a good deed for anyone throughout her long life, digs in her trash pile and retrieves an onion, partly rotten and black with mold. She tosses it to the starving woman and says something on the order of "That's all you'll get from me. Now be off with you and be damned."

Time passes. The starving woman gets little additional sustenance and eventually dies of starvation. The old woman also dies, alone with no one to see to her funeral rites. The old woman is condemned to a lake of fire in hell for her inhumane life while the starved woman rises to heaven and is called before the throne of god. God makes an offer to this poor woman. He gives her that very onion that the old woman gave her and tells this starved soul that she may, if she wishes, descend into hell and use that very onion, the symbol of the only good deed done in the old woman's life, to rescue her benefactor from the lake of fire. The starved woman descends into hell and extends the onion to the old woman telling her of god's mercy toward her. The old woman latches onto the onion and the starved woman begins to pull the old woman from the lake of fire. As she's being pulled toward salvation the others condemned in hell see what's happening and they grab onto the old woman until every condemned soul in hell is being drawn toward heaven. The old woman, true to her nature, realizes that all the others are about to be saved by her one good deed and shouts, "It's MY onion!" In that moment the stem of the onion breaks and all those souls, including that of the old woman, fall back into the lake of fire and resume their eternal suffering.

In the formerly United Methodist Church one group has decided that salvation is for everyone while the "conservatives" led by Bishop Yambasu of Sierra Leone have decided that it's THEIR onion. We do not easily eliminate bigotry. I expect that Bishop Yambasu and his following will persist in their self-made lake of fire for a long time to come. I can only wish them the joy of it while their rejected fellow Methodists rejoice in the joy of their diverse fellowship. Amen.