RETHINKING WHAT IT IS TO BE AN AMERICAN

 

I was born in Connecticut almost 72 years ago. My mother was a direct descendant of immigrants William and Suzanna White through their son, Peregrine, who was born on November 20, 1620 on board the good ship Mayflower as it rode at anchor off the tip of what we now call Cape Cod. 

My father was born in Pennsylvania. His father came to the United States from Poland in 1913 and was immediately shipped off to Pittsburgh to work in the coal mines that fed the steel industry there. Because my grandfather could speak many languages he was recruited by the mine workers' union and became an organizer for them who was blacklisted and shot at by thugs in the employ of the mine owners.

My grandmother, from Eastern Poland, left there as the war clouds of World War I were lowering. She and her brother, Vincent, snuck across the border of Poland into East Prussia where they caught a Baltic steamer to Amsterdam from which port they sailed for the United States where they had a brother who had already immigrated and landed in Pittsburgh. Vincent was just another strong back to be sent to the mines in and around Pittsburgh but my grandmother was seen as a potential public burden. She was confined to Ellis Island for a month while pleading with her brothers to send her $10 that would allow her to be released into America. She and my grandfather met when she was called in to translate for my grandfather. He was in the Allegheny County Hospital having contracted Black Lung. My grandfather was fluent in Polish, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Russian, and had some Czech as well but none of those languages was English, a language that my grandmother had picked up easily.

This woman that the Immigration Officials deemed a potential public charge went on to give birth to three American citizens: a daughter who became a registered nurse and one of the founders of the Connecticut Nurses Association, a son who was a tank mechanic in the 3rd Army during World War II and who was at the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and another son who was a radio operator and waist gunner in B-17s honored for saving his entire crew when their first plane, The Old Shillelagh, was shot down over the North Sea following the Regensburg Raid and was wounded in bailing out of their second plane when it was shot down over southern France in 1944. He became a prisoner of war and wasn't repatriated until January of 1945. Because of the service of their sons to the nation both my grandparents became U. S. Citizens.

I am an American in every way one can imagine. I am the embodiment of 300 years of immigration to this great nation. I have ancestors who served in the Continental Army during our Revolution and who served in both World Wars. I have studied American history since boyhood, both the common history and many of the more esoteric parts of the last 2 and a half centuries of our nation. I have been to Gettysburg and Saratoga, Fort Ticonderoga and Lexington Green, to Concord Bridge and Antietam and to Fort McHenry. I have been to Washington, D. C. several times and visited the memorials there. I have been moved to tears reading Lincoln's words inscribed on his memorial and at  the sight of the Iwo Jima Memorial near the Arlington National Cemetery. My present for my 14th birthday was attending the Centennial reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. I've been to the Smokey Mountains, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Acadia and many of our great cities. I have thrilled to see the U.S.S. Constitution, Old Ironsides, under sail and reenactors of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry march down Beacon Street in Boston as if they were on their way to glory at Fort Wagner.

I am an American. I believe in our form of government as established by our Constitution, its amendments and the laws promulgated on that Constitution. I believe that the words of its preamble, as was intended, define the broad purpose of our democracy. That "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Because I am an American I can say without the least ambivalence that the 8 Senators and 139 Representatives who opposed certification of the votes of the Electoral College are not Americans. They have set themselves in opposition to the most basic tenet of American democracy: that the majority vote of the people determines our elected officials. I can also unequivocally say that none of the riotous mob of seditionists that stormed our Capitol on January 6, 2021, whether they entered the building or not, are Americans. Those traitors and insurrectionists acted in concert to undermine our "more perfect union". Those traitors and insurrectionists acted to promote injustice, disturb the "domestic tranquility", attacked those trusted with our "common defense", opposed "the general welfare" of the people and sought to take "the Blessings of Liberty" from "ourselves and our Posterity" by destroying the Constitution ordained and established for the United States of America.

No amount of quasi-patriotic rhetoric can absolve the Republiscum in the Senate and the House of attempting to impose a dictatorship on the United States. No flag lapel pin, no Gadsden flag, not even an American flag waved by coup plotters and participants can make these scum Americans. Certainly no one who waves the Confederate battle flag or the Stars and Bars anywhere in this land, let alone inside the U. S. Capitol, is truly an American. No con man usurper of the presidency can call himself an American by instigating an insurrection against the will of the people.

We, the people of the United States, need to look at our definitions of what we mean by "an American". In recent years we have heard scum from the Republiscum Party and ultra right-wingers in media attack the birthright citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment. Were it not for that birthright citizenship my father, the decorated World War II veteran, would not have been a citizen. I must grant that even the adherents of the Republiscum Party and The Orange Führer are citizens of the United States but they are most definitely not Americans. Not one of them should be allowed to remain in public office. Not one of them should be allowed to run for or hold public office ever. Nor should any of these fascist scum be allowed to serve in any branch of our military, police or other law enforcement forces. The danger to our democracy is far to immanent and great to allow these insurrectionists public office, public trust or firearms.

We are at a turning point. Will we allow the seditious scum to continue to undermine our democracy and accept the probable dire consequences of their attacks on our Constitution, or will we decide that those who do not hold American values are unfit to serve the public at large? If we do not define them, as by their actions they have defined themselves, as opposed to everything that makes us Americans, we are undermining our democracy from within.

I am well aware that what I am calling for raises the vile shadows of HUAC, the Blacklist and McCarthyism. Let me point out that thousands of supposed "communists" never stormed the U. S. Capitol. No president of the 1940s, 50s or 60s every called for insurrection to keep him in office. Even Richard Nixon balked at that. We have allowed the McCarthites, the Goldwaterites, the Reaganites and the rest of the Republiscum, the militias, self-styled Minutemen, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Klansmen, Nazis and right-wing evangelicals who hide behind religion to carry out their anti-American goals to grow and fester within our body politic until their attacks on our democracy metasticized into The Orange Führer and his seditious minions both in government and outside storming the Capitol. Let us not confuse a real cancer in our nation to an imagined and feared one. The answer to this cancer is radical surgery. Anything less begs for it to recur in a more deadly form.

THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE

 

Wrong! This is precisely who we are. Some of us always and all of us at our worst.

The attempted coup by Fascists and right wing groups allied to The Orange Führer on January 6, 2021 is precisely who they are. The scum who caused five deaths in threatening our elected legislators are precisely the Nazis that marched through Skokie, Illinois more than four decades ago and the Nazis that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. The scum who attempted to end our democracy are precisely the people who hid and supported Eric Robert Rudolph, Olympic Park bomber and assassin. The scum who invaded our Capitol are precisely the people who bombed the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The scum who sought a coup to make The Orange Führer  president for another term and possibly for life are precisely the traitors and tax evaders who incited the stand offs at Ruby Ridge, the Bundy Ranch and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 

These scum are not patriots. Regardless of what flags they wave, they are not supporters of American democracy. It is a desecration of our flag to see these insurrectionists carrying American flags as if they supported what that flag stands for, a united nation.

I have noted several times in the past that Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language, defined Patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." A century later Ambrose Bierce noted Dr. Johnson's definition but insisted that, on the contrary, "it is the first." The traitors and insurrectionists on January 6th proved Bierce's gloss on Dr. Johnson. Although we must note that the grinning idiot Orange Führer hugging a flag is the paradigm for his imbecile minions waving a banner they too insult by their actions.

Many of my political stripe have thumped, foolishly, for elimination of the Electoral College. I understand their frustration because a 110 year old refusal to reapportion the House of Representatives based on a Census that showed that most Americans live in urban areas has biased the House and the Electoral College toward rural states. However, a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Electoral College is treating the symptom rather than the disease. The U. S. House needs to be reapportioned, as the Constitution intended, to account for the 340% increase in our population since the 1910 Census. The Electoral College is a part of our Constitution because its framers had a healthy mistrust of rabble rousers like The Orange Führer. To guard against such would-be dictators they created an alternate means of confirming election results to prevent the presidency from falling into the hands of demagogues of which there were plenty in their time and midst.

The United States of America is a great nation. Contrary to the message on The Orange Führer's red baseball caps, this 45th president has sullied the nation and its reputation worldwide. The Orange Führer and his Republiscum minions have made our nation more vile and venal, a nation to be pitied and derided, an example of how not to treat people both citizens and immigrants. That is not anything like patriotism. Wearing a flag lapel pin as one tears down our democracy is not patriotism. White supremacy is not patriotism. Supporting a would-be dictator and insurrectionist is not patriotism. Attacks on people of other religious faiths is not patriotism. Vilifying the duly elected representatives of the people  and exalting those who participate in insurrection is not patriotism. Fomenting dissention and discord on the public airwaves is not patriotism.

We cannot hide behind the easy disclaimer that "This not who we are!" It is exactly who some of us are. It is exactly who some 74 million of us are. If we refuse to confront the fact that many of us are these racist, vicious lunatics who would bring down our democracy in loyalty to on single con man then the next would be Führer may succeed in destroying everything that our nation has stood for for nearly 250 years. Should we allow that to happen by not rooting out the disease in our population, this will certainly be who we all are like it or not.

MARVEL-ING AT FASCISM

 

First, let's understand the term. Fascism is a right-wing authoritarian political philosophy which melds corporations and the state. It opposes unions, workers' rights, free speech, democratic government, a free press, an independent judiciary and all education which is not in service to the state. The term was coined by Benito Mussolini who became the Fascist Party's Dictator of Italy in 1922. Adolph Hitler's Nazis were Fascists as was the Spanish government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. World War II was started in Europe by Fascist Axis powers of Germany and Italy. Britain, free military forces representing many countries conquered by the Nazis and, eventually, the United States fought Fascism in Europe during the war that lasted from September 1, 1939 to May 8, 1945. A slightly different species of Fascism was practiced by Japan in the period from July 7, 1937 to September 2, 1945. World War II in the Pacific officially ended on October 14, 1945.

For decades the Republiscum Party and its toadies in neo-Fascist media (e.g. Fox, Sinclair, OANN, Rash Lamebrain, Glenn Beck, Alec Jones and others) and right-wing fundamentalist religious fanatics have been brain washing their adherents with the farrago that Communism and Fascism are both left-wing political philosophies. They insist that because Communism is a spin-off of Socialism and the Nazis called themselves the Natzionalische Socialistische Partei (National Socialist Party) that Communism, Socialism and Fascism are all the same. That assertion is patently false. Russian, Chinese and several other forms of Communism are or have been Totalitarian (the state, usually in the form a a single strong man, is all powerful in Totalitarian states) as was Italy under Benito Mussolini and Germany under Adolph Hitler, the authoritarianism and violent tactics are the same but the similarity ends there. The Republiscum Party has given itself over to Fascism wholeheartedly since the end of World War II. Those who would say otherwise are either uninformed or incapable of thinking for themselves.

I am proud to say that my father and my Uncle Eddy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill were all anti-Fascists.

One of the main characteristics of a Fascist government is it's readiness to set aside law and even common decency to achieve and maintain power. Murder, mob rule, vigilantism, assassinations, all outside the law and usually in flagrant opposition to established law, are Fascism's hallmarks. Usually this lawlessness is carried out in service to some special hero/strong man. Which brings me to a series of shows on NetFlix that I have been watching with some pleasure but great trepidation recently.

As a boy, I was a DC Comics lover. I had a huge stack to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Green Lantern comics as well as their spin-offs like Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl et al. I wasn't much of a Marvel Comics fan at all. Still, here I am, an old man, in a universe that Marvel Comics dominates.

Not surprisingly at all as a pre-teen I was fascinated by superhero comic books. Every child feels powerless. Children must do as parents say. Even the best of parents deny their children agency to some degree. That denial is the nature of parenting while rebellion against that denial, sometimes in the pages of a superhero comic book, is the nature of the growing child. I would suggest that all fascination with superheroes is a function of feelings of powerlessness.

In July, 2020 I heard some good things about the series Jessica Jones so I started watching it and fell in love with Kristen Ritter, the damned good actress who plays the conflicted, post-traumatic stressed Jessica brilliantly. I like the fact that Jessica is very down scale, distressed and wary of her super power that is also pretty limited. I watched the whole 3 seasons of the series before finding out that it was one part of a larger Marvel universe that includes the ethically and morally ambivalent Daredevil, the invulnerable Luke Cage, the rich boy turned Kung Fu monk, Danny Rand aka The Iron Fist and the vengeful, violent ex-Marine, Frank Castle, The Punisher. I have viewed the whole series and become increasingly anxious about my country while doing so.

So how can Captain America, who started out fighting the Nazis, be a fascist or any of these characters be such? Let's take a look.

Each of these characters is him or herself a "strong man" who carries out his or her vengeance/actions in furtherance of his or her individual goals. That those goals are established as "the good of society" is a tissue thin distraction. Adolph Hitler murdered between 9 and 12 million people in concentration camps for what he claimed was "the good of society".

Each of these characters fights some sort of super-villain whose over-the-top viciousness makes an over-the-top response logical and even necessary. Let me return to Chancellor Hitler for a moment and note that "The Eternal Jew" (The Ewige Jude) was his super-villain that made "The Final Solution" codified by the Wansee Conference, logical and, to these fascist scum, necessary.

Democracy, literally government of, by and for the people, is the antithesis of "strong man" autocracy (literally government of, by and for one's self). When the "strong man", however noble his or her goals, makes the rules and up ends the laws of the people we are in a dictatorship. Dictatorships may be of the political right or left but they are never a democracy. By definition a Dictator imposes the rules of government, the definitions of right and wrong behavior. Government by a Dictator imposes restrictions or allows license at the whim of the Dictator. We all know how that goes whether it was the show trials and purges under Stalin in Russia, the state sanctioned murders and repression under Mussolini and Franco, the murders of Jews, gays, the disabled, Roma, socialists and communists under Hitler, Mao's Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's Killing Fields.

In the United States we have periodically faced calls for dictatorship. For all the superficial gloss of "states' rights" our Civil War was about a dictatorship that allowed enslavement of human beings simply because of their skin color. Dictatorship by slave owners, after the 13th and 14th Amendments, morphed into dictatorship by corporate magnates who denied workers their basic rights and commodities speculators who denied farmers fair prices for their produce. Calls for right wing dictatorship produced the ultimately thwarted "Business Coup" of 1934. Over the last century and a half corporate dictatorship and monopoly practices have had few setbacks to their growth and no restraints whatever since the 1970s and the farrago of "supply-side economics". This right wing corporate Fascism has brought great wealth to the few and stagnant wages, ever increasing debt and calls for a strong man to right the wrongs that strong men have imposed. The most laughable, were it even slightly funny, argument is that "a business man" would right the wrongs that "business men" have imposed on the middle class.

All of the Marvel heroes come equipped with doubts about their actions and worries about how they will be perceived. The super-villains who oppose them, however, make those heroes' actions necessary thus overcoming the heroes' doubts and worries. Let me say quite definitively that super-villains do exist. The 45th President of the United States, The Orange Führer, is one though about the least competent of the bunch. What is true of most super-villains is that they hide in the shadows. They send their support for Fascism through dark money paid into protected and untraceable accounts to fund right wing militias, white supremacist groups, foundations designed to put forward plausible but utterly false reports to confuse otherwise decent people about corporate depredations, pollution and climate change, evangelical religious organizations that teach falsehoods as writ from one god or other and always to fund the political campaigns of frauds and demagogues so vile that only distractions keep them from being laughed off the ballot.

Though I am certain that super-villains exist I am just as certain that super-heroes do not exist. The only way to resist the super-villains is through an educated and active people who cling to truth, science and decency toward their fellow men and women. We are all immigrants, early or late. We are all human beings regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, language or heritage. We are all Americans simply by the fact that we choose to live in this nation. We are all neighbors regardless of the distance, physical or philosophical, between us. We are all heirs to a history of greater and greater democracy. We deny all of those things by insisting on divisions, succumbing to hatreds and giving in to the Fascists who would dictate to us. 

No Superman or Luke Cage or Jessica Jones is going to rescue us from America's decades long slide toward Fascism. We, the people, collectively are powerful. Anyone who denies our power is looking to delude us for his or her own ends We, the people have proved our power several times over in Georgia over the last few months. We are and must be our own super-heroes. We are the only ones who can rescue ourselves.

Post Script: During the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U. S. Capitol a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Larry Randall Brock, Jr., invaded the Senate Chamber in full tactical gear. He had previously been fired from the military for threatening and racist statements to airmen under his supervision. He also had posted messages on social media about taking members of Congress hostage and executing them. Mr. Brock wore, among other patches on his riot gear, a Texas flag over the skull logo of The Punisher, one of the Marvel series discussed above.

JANUARY 6, 2021

 

On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, we saw American Fascism express itself in Washington, D. C. in terms so obvious and unequivocal that only the Fascists themselves could ignore it. The Orange Führer and his lunatic minions stormed the United States Capitol and were allowed in. The Orwellian nature of the mob of rioters was striking. For these QAnonsense cultists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, secessionists, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, and Republiscum hate of their government is love of their fantasy of country, overthrow of the government is patriotism, authoritarian Fascism is the true Constitutional government, allegiance to The Orange Führer is the true expression of representative democracy.

For years the neo-Fascist media at Fox, Sinclair, OANN and others have vilified the anti-fascist movement (Antifa) while exalting The Orange Führer and the Republiscum who enabled him. Those same neo-Fascist outlets are now expressing the lie that the scum who invaded the U. S. Capitol weren't really supporters of The Orange Führer but rather Antifa anarchists who masqueraded as right-wing scum. In the 1931 movie Monkey Business, Groucho Marx, trying to convince a witness that he hasn't seen what actually just transpired asks, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" That was supposed to be a joke 90 years ago. It's not a joke anymore or at least I'm not laughing.

Well, who are you going to believe, the neo-Fascist scum like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Janine Piro, and Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Alec Jones, Rash Lamebrain, and their vile ilk or your "lying" eyes that saw the right-wing rioters and traitors invade and vandalize the Capitol?

Who are you going to believe, the husband who loved Ashli Babbitt and supported her lunatic views, or the police officer who was confronted by a screaming, fanatic rioter and shot her to protect the people's House from her irrational rage stoked by the lies of a conman, The Orange Führer?

Who are you going to believe, The Orange Führer and his lunatic fringe minions like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell or the courts that have carefully reviewed the accusations backed by nary a single shred of evidence that there was malfeasance in counting votes and found those claims to be appalling and false?

Who are you going to believe, The Orange Führer who tried to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to engage in vote fraud or Secretary Raffensperger who took his oath of office seriously and refused to commit fraud at the insistence of The Orange Führer?

Who are you going to believe, the 147 members of Congress who attempted a treasonous coup by challenging the votes of the American people or the 81,283,098 citizens who repudiated The Orange Führer and said that they had had enough of nepotism, treason, malfeasance and incompetence from The Orange Führer?

Who are you going to believe, the Constitution and laws of our nation or a Republiscum Party that perverts and violates the Constitution and those laws with every breath they individually and collectively take?

Make no mistake in considering the riot at the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the flags that extolled The Orange Führer, the Confederate flags, the Don't Tread On Me flags waved by the mob at the Capitol had nothing to do with America or American patriotism or history. They were a farrago, a substitute for the Nazi flag and its swastika that would have flown over our country had The Orange Führer and his imbecile mob succeeded in their attempted coup.

For that crime against our Constitution every one of the 147 Congresspersons who sought a legislative coup should be removed from office forthwith and banned from ever holding political office at any level for the rest of their lives. For his crimes too numerous to list The Orange Führer and his vile offspring and minions should spend the rest of their miserable, vicious lives in jail cells as traitors to our nation too dangerous to be allowed to see the light of day except in a prison exercise yard.

THE TWELVE (IF ONLY THERE WERE THAT FEW!) (DAMNED!) EAR WORMS OF CHRISTMAS

 

Every year (and ever earlier it seems) we are treated (there's a misnomer if ever there was one!) to Christmas music and Christmas muzak (there is a difference) for weeks on end. When I was a boy, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the songs started on the day after Thanksgiving which we now know as "Black Friday", a term that previously had been reserved for describing the two worst stock market crashes in United States history. Today that Friday post Thanksgiving is defined by lunatic bargain hunters trampling and fighting one another for "hot items" which are laid out in retail stores in a planned, artificial scarcity. And as the consumers commit mayhem on one another lovely music plays about them to put them in the "true Christmas spirit®". Since we are actually still in the Christmas season, the 12 days that begin with Christmas Day, December 25th, and end on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, I want to take up the subject of that music/muzak for a final curmudgeonly shot at the season. 

The following are a more than Baker's dozen songs that are those of which I've heard far more than enough for any lifetime. For a more comprehensive and, as if that were possible, more curmudgeonly view of Christmas music/muzak I suggest that you run through Washington Post columnist, Alexandra Petri's dish on the songs. Here beginneth my list from moderately offensive to AaaaRRRRRGGGG!...

12d. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: As a very young boy I had Gene Autry's recording of this classic. It was always too cute by half and over the last 70 odd years it's been done to death. The song is the fantasy of every child who's a little bit different and is, therefore, bullied and excluded from every "reindeer game" and social activity under the sun. So Rudolph gets his moment of glory but we know how this goes. A day or two after Rudolph goes down in history the other reindeer start with things like, "Isn't red the color of TAIL lights?" "Yeah! I wonder how fast Rudolph the TAIL light could go if we lit one of his farts?" "Yeah! Rudolph the 'jet pack' TAIL light!" Rudolph with your nose so bright, I'm sorry, kid, but we're done.

12c. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer: Keeping with a reindeer theme, I am one of the last people to criticize satire and black humor but after 1 single hearing this song deserves the trash bin. If it weren't for the reindeer this song would be much higher on the list of horribles.

12b. Up on the Housetop: More damned reindeer! Enough already!

12a. It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas: This song come to us from Meredith Wilson's final Broadway venture and only flop, a stage musical version of Miracle on 34th Street. It actually looks a lot like Christmas as early as Halloween these days and for all the modest charm of the song, stuff it!

12. We Need a Little Christmas: This song comes from the Broadway musical Mame and the film version that starred a nearly embalmed Lucille Ball. It figures in the story as a plea in summer to brush away depression by getting out the Christmas decorations 6 months early. Since the day after Thanksgiving is already too early we have far too much of Christmas so we'll need none of this song.

11. I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas: a nascent sociopath complains that he's not getting any Christmas presents because he's been a jerk all year. If there were justice in the world he would get juvenile detention and never be elected the 45th President of the United States. Tough shit kid and shut up about it.

10. Do You Hear What I Hear?: How could you not? Bing Crosby gave it his best shot but this song has lousy lyrics and a faux religiosity that is beyond the faux inherent in religiosity. I never want to hear it again.

9. Santa Baby: This is no reflection on Ertha Kitt who, as Eddie Murphy wisely pointed out, was hot and sexy will into old age, but it's been done to death. This song is a vibrator with dead batteries.

8. Rockin' 'Round the Christmas Tree: the day someone makes a truly plausible explanation of what "the good, old fashioned way" is, I will move this song up a couple of notches but it still sucks.

7. Blue Christmas: O. k. I will bring down some real wrath upon my head by saying that I never thought much of Elvis. He was a poor white boy who could sing and made it viable for white kids to like the blues and rock that had been segregated into the black ghettos for decades. Can you say, "cultural appropriation"? This isn't good blues and it's not a good Christmas song.

6. The Little Drummer Boy: after 1 verse, let alone the whole interminable treacly, religiose song I want to take his drum sticks and ram them up his pa-rum-pa-pum-pum so hard he'll walk funny for the rest of his life. This song makes it to 6 simply because there a 5 worse, not because it has anything to recommend it.

5. Holly, Jolly Christmas: when I was a very little boy one of my favorite records was of Burl Ives singing about that "Little Green Frog, sittin' in the water". I liked Burl Ives. It wasn't until much later that I learned that to save his own career he'd thrown Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert and Lee Hays under the HUAC bus. That tarnished Ives for me forever. However, apart from that this is just an awful song.

4. The Hawaiian Christmas Song: this song deserves to be stuffed and stuffed hard up your Mele Kalikimaka and never removed.

3. Silver Bells: It was Christmas, 1975. I had 1 single day in which to do all of my shopping, food, presents, everything. In addition I had to drive, in a sleet storm, from Waterbury, Connecticut to New Haven (good toy store) to Windsor Locks (meaning from the extreme south of the state to the extreme north) for work on what was supposed to be my day off and back to Waterbury again. The moment I entered any store, building, bathroom or phone booth this song began playing. It became the theme for a hectic and fraught Christmas and a trigger for a very mild case of PTSD from that day. I absolutely HATE this song.

2. The Chipmunks Christmas Song: this song makes me want to torture small woodland creatures because it is utter torture to hear and I generally like small woodland creatures. Call the taxidermist because I want Alvin's little head mounted on my wall encircled by a tiny hula-hoop. 

1. The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: it isn't. There is little more to say. This song with its relentless, pell-mell rush and thumping, strained positivity just calls for strangulation of anyone who sings or plays a recording of it. That it can beat out the Chipmunks for worst Christmas song of all time is a superlative that beggars the imagination.  Or as that great philosopher to whom Berkeley Breathed introduced me long ago, Bill the Cat would say, "Gack!"

Let's be honest here. The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was not "in the bleak mid-winter". Christmas is the Christianized Roman Saturnalia. It is a celebration of the slow but inexorable return of the light so nearly extinguished at the winter solstice. It is the faint but growing sense that spring and new life will conquer the deadly cold and white of winter. That alone, without any saviors' births, is worthy of feasting and celebration yet it is further made sublime by the addition of a birth. I do not believe in anything supernatural but I do believe in the sublime, that in the presence of which Vladimir Nabokov wrote, makes the small hairs at the back of our necks stand up. I attended the birth of my 3 daughters and can say unequivocally that there are few things as sublime as a newborn child, small, wrinkled, crying and a manifest piece of all the power and potential of the entire universe. The birth of any child, every child and, as the ancients would have it, the birth of the sun link together in what we call Christmas. That, in itself, is great cause for celebration and feasting and for raising our voices in song.

Lest I be claimed as a soldier in the phony "War on Christmas" let me say that I adore some Christmas songs. Good King Wenceslaus, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, and the 3 World War II Christmas songs that have made it into the canon, I'll be Home for Christmas, White Christmas and (only as Judy Garland sang it in Meet Me in St. Louis) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

I eschew all shining stars upon the highest boughs but wish you all to have or have had a merry little Christmas now.

CROCODILE TEARS

 

During the 2020 election some adherents of the Republiscum Party have drawn back in horror at the actions of the Orange Führer and collected themselves into a sort of political kaffeklatsch called "The Lincoln Project". This Neo-Fascist Liberation Front is opposing the re-election of the Orange Führer in a fuddled flurry of regret and crocodile tears. They are the precise equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein recoiling in horror at the monster he has created. 

Many years ago one of my dearest and oldest friends had to put up with meetings her partner held with his friends to discuss Marxism and other Lefty ideologies over wine and snacks. She called them "The Bourgeoisie Liberation Front". Basically they were pretentious "Limousine Liberals" who couldn't afford a 10-year old Volkswagen Beetle but had hopes. The Lincoln Project recalls that to me because they seem to be the Neo-Fascist right wing's answer to that old group of chit-chatters.

Let me say at the outset that all opposition to the Orange Führer has been and will continue to be good opposition regardless of whence it comes. I applaud their advertising and interventions on behalf of the Orange Führer opponents. The enemy of my enemy is definitely my friend...through November 3, 2020. Yet while I am pleased to get in the proverbial bed with these folks I think a "bundling board" is necessary lest we get too close and I become infected with the syphilitic Neo-Fascism of which they are carriers.

As usual with these blog posts, let me take you on a brief and admittedly jaundiced (Because it's factual) view of history.

The Republican Party (they hadn't yet become scum) came together from four disparate groups following the election of 1852. In that log cabin in Ripon, Wisconsin were "free soil" westerners, abolitionists and representatives of the essentially defunct Whig Party.  Their candidate in the 1856 presidential election, John Charles Fremont, carried the Whig and free soil strongholds of New England, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. He also carried New York despite New Yorker Millard Fillmore's candidacy that claimed only Maryland's electors. Fillmore, who had started his career in the bigoted, conspiracy drenched Anti-Masonic Party, was the candidate of the American Party. Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania became president and perhaps our most ineffectual holder of that office. Once the American Party better known as the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and racist Know-Nothings showed an ability to win votes in the east and border states the nascent Republican Party quickly allied themselves with that rabble.

The rest is, as they say, history. Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with but 40% of the popular vote in 1860 yet he got us through our Civil War, preserved the Union, established that we were once and for all United states and ended all slavery within our nation. After his assassination in 1865, at the very moment of victory, the Republican Party began morphing into the Republiscum Party of today.

The Republican Party inherited from the defunct Whigs a tradition of putting forward candidates who were war heroes (some with thin claim to any heroism). In the aftermath of our Civil War Republican candidates for national office continuously "waved the bloody shirt" which, beside claiming wartime service and heroism, also pointed out that Democrats were not the Party that "saved the Union".

The other major result of the Civil War was an officer corps which started off as politically connected, gained the friendship, counsel and support of the business men who greatly profited from the war and ensuing Reconstruction, and who later advanced the veteran officers' post-war careers. This situation created a cadre of staunchly Republican, exceptionally wealthy men who always had ambitions to wield power and often had ambitions to front for that power as office holders. 

Not that ambition is an inherently bad thing or, contrary to the proverbial, that money is inherently evil. No insentient and insensible object is inherently evil though such objects do frequently bring out the evil in those who desire and accumulate them. Fighting to the death (usually someone else's) to keep increasing one's wealth, power and serve ever expanding ambitions, that is the very definition of evil. So it came about that cadre of staunch Republicans in the decades following the Civil War morphed inexorably from the Republican Party of Lincoln into the Republiscum Party of Mitch McConnell and the Orange Führer.

As the Republican Party morphs into a club for monied, elitist scum you get the violent suppression of voting and civil rights of Afro-Americans through segregation, Ku Klux Klan violence and "Jim Crow" Laws once the Republican Party turned their backs on the black folks they'd just fought to free, so that they might get Rutherford B. Hayes elected president in early 1877. You get the murderous suppression of workers' rights both with private armies of "Pinkerton Men" and with Federal troops in multiple cases and even the aerial bombing of strikers in the 1920s. You get often violent suppression of the rights of small farmers seeking fair prices for their goods and agricultural workers seeking fair wages on industrial farms. You get financial scandals involving government officials, major banks, public funds and massive corruption every 3 to 5 years and major Depressions about every 20 years. You get a political party that represents an ever diminishing portion of the population that seeks to stay in power by sowing fear, hatred and division between religious, ethnic, racial and economic groups with common interests in order to keep their opposition fragmented and weak. Throw in a generous helping of suppressing the voting rights of non-whites and you get, by 1920, The Republiscum Party.

Yes, I will admit that there have been individual bright spots in the Republiscum Party's record of darkness over the last century but all of them have flashed brightly only to be enveloped in darkness and amnesia. Robert M. LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, Elliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus, Pete McCloskey and a number of others. Besides a love of their country and Constitution and a profound sense of decency the other thing that these Republicans, except Pete McClosky, have in common is that they are all dead.

The Republiscum Party has relentlessly moved to positions that would be familiar to the fascists of the 1920s and '30s, Benito Mussolini or Fransisco Franco. At the same time they have adopted the vilest tactics of the Nazi Party's rise in the 1928 to 1933 period. Take any speech on immigration by any Republiscum office holder over the last 20 years and substitute the word "Jew" for "immigrant" and you will find something entirely consistent with Brown Shirts goosestepping by torchlight at Nürnberg. Compare the tactics of Nazis in the Reichstag before the fall of the Weimar Republic with Mitch McConnell's tactics of obstruction since 2011 and you will find what I wish I could say is an uncanny correlation. A sizeable number of Republiscum supporters style themselves as "Patriots" in much the same way as a majority of evangelicals style themselves as "Christian" though in neither case do their alleged patriotism or Christianity relate in any substantive way to the tenets of our nation or the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

From out of this noisome cesspool of fascism called the Republiscum Party now rise some "Never Trumpers" and newly annointed "Not Anymore Trumpers" like Jeff Flake and Ben Sass, Bill Kristol and George Will and the "Team" at The Lincoln Project. I am happy to find that there are members of the Republiscum Party who reject our Orange Führer. With any luck at all some or even all of them actually support our Constitution and have a modest belief in democracy though those qualities have been in drastically short supply amongst Republiscum for the last 60 years.

These are people who have polluted the airwaves with their right-wing screeds, who have worked to steal the 2000 election, which is, by the way, the only presidential election in the United States that has been stolen from its rightful winner since 1876, who have sewn the seeds that the Orange Führer has been reaping. To say that the Orange Führer is an aberration, something inconsistent with the Republiscum Party that has sought to ruin our nation and destroy democracy itself since the 1920s is to be blind to history and those in The Lincoln Project that have worked mightily to bring a neo-Nazi scum like the Orange Führer to power. These are the very people who have derided progressive taxation as an assault on enterprise when it is the very source for enterprise. These people in The Lincoln Project have promoted the insane theory that giving ever greater wealth to the few raises the standard of living for the many. They have promoted authoritarian approaches to policing, justice for and decency to the poor and middle classes setting the one against the other. They have sewn division of region against region, race against race, religion against religion and neighbor against neighbor for the sole purpose of fragmenting an electorate that might otherwise rise up against their failed and self-serving policies. They have promoted and enacted a militarization of local police forces turning those who should protect and serve all our citizens into an occupying army that murders the poor and minorities with impunity.

Now, at long last, when their vicious, anti-democratic policies have reached the goal for which they have worked so mightily to achieve, now they expect us to forget their rush toward totalitarian plutocracy has achieved its goal and a piddling, mewling sop to the democracy, in which they do not at all believe, will make us forgive all their fascism.

On leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin supposedly answered a call from the crowd asking, "Do we have a republic or a monarchy?" by saying, "A republic if you can keep it." If we simply thank The Lincoln Project's founders and adherents and welcome these vipers back into the life of our nation we are not only failing to keep our republic but failing to deserve it as well.