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.

1968 II: The Day Hope Died

In high school we’d had local radio stations in the Waterbury, Connecticut area sponsor students in Junior Achievement. I’d worked for a couple of them, call letters that, I believe, are now long gone: WATR, WBRY. The last was WOWW. “Radio WOW! 1340 (AM) on your radio dial. Red Carpet Radio in Naugatuck, Connecticut.” I worked there during my senior year in high school and was invited to stay during the summer of 1967 and back for the summer of 1968.

I was scheduled to work in the afternoons each weekday and on Sunday mornings. On the morning of June 5^th my mother knocked on my bedroom door and announced that Robert Kennedy had been shot. It was hard to believe. After Martin Luther King, Jr. to have an assassination of another major American leader seemed impossible. That began a deathwatch that lasted until June 6^th, 40 years ago today.

I went to work and spent far more time than ever before running back and forth to the AP news printer. This murder did not affect me as deeply as had Dr. King’s. I think that I was a little numb after April 4^th. And I was not as invested in Robert Kennedy as I had been in Dr. King.

I couldn’t support Hubert Humphrey despite his long and strong record of support for Liberal causes. He was, just as John McCain is today, tied, nay, shackled to the, wrong, insane, pointless Vietnam War. I did support Eugene McCarthy but had little hope that he’d be elected. Though I viewed Robert Kennedy as an opportunist and Johnny Come-Lately to the race, I was convinced that he was the one Democrat who could take the party nomination and rally the country to its better, more hopeful nature. The Kennedy name and power, the residual good will from his murdered brother could overcome the stark divisions in the country and lead America into a positive direction.

It was already clear that George Romney of Michigan was not going to get the Republican nomination and the ultra-right wingers who’d managed to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 were not going to allow Nelson Rockefeller of New York to win the nomination either. James Rhodes of Ohio, the man who would later order his National Guard to murder student protesters at Kent State University, hadn’t killed enough people yet to gain any real chops with the neo-fascist Republicans. It was already clear that the Republicans would nominate the psychologically unstable, blindly ambitious, pathological liar and criminal Richard M. Nixon. He was, in a very real sense, the essence of the Republican Party and “the new Nixon” (really a repackaged old Nixon) would run again for President.

Had Robert Kennedy lived to contest the general election, we would have had a second Nixon versus Kennedy contest resulting in a Kennedy win, this time by a far wider margin. In that sense, Robert Kennedy had to be killed lest he keep the Republicans out of power for 16 straight years.

I am not a conspiracy theorist but I believe that the elections of Reagan, Poppy and Dubya Bush are the culmination of insidious action by the neo-fascist underbelly of America for whom assassination would be a tool rather than a horror.

I kept running to the AP printer until the afternoon of June 6, 1968 when the bulletin came that Robert Kennedy was dead. I went back to my disc jockey’s console and pulled down the record I’d had beside me for 24 hours. I put on the last cut on the original cast recording of Camelot and out came Richard Burton’s sonorous voice reciting Alan Jay Lerner’s poetry:

Each evening from December to December,
Before you slip to sleep upon your cot,
Think back on all the tales that you remember,
Of Camelot.

Ask each person if he’s heard the story,
And tell it loud and clear if he has not,
How once there was a fleeting wisp of glory,
Called Camelot.

…………………

Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one, brief, shining moment,
That was known as Camelot.

At the end of the cut the chorus swells for those last 2 lines. I took the turntable out of gear and let the record slow down trailing off to nothing.

The Kennedy loyalists tried feebly to rally his delegates behind George McGovern of South Dakota but that came to nothing. It was over: the dream of Camelot, hope for America. The dark night of Nixon’s rule and our long slide to the neo-fascism of today would soon be upon us but there was another horror to come before that horrible year descended to Nixon’s election.

In August, I’ll write more about Chicago.

Impeach Earl Warren

Most people won't remember the billboards that went up in the states of the old Confederacy and some plains states as well after Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Furguson and outlawed segregation in America. Those billboards exhorted people to get behind a movement to impeach the new U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren had led the court to a unanimous decision that when our Constitution proclaimed equal rights to all men, it meant it regardless of minor distinctions like skin color, ethnicity, and the like. But that upset a lot of people, rich and poor, who thought that equality was fine for those who were most like themselves and inappropriate for those they preferred to hate.

A decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision one of the things at stake in the 1964 presidential election was implementation of that decision. Senators like James O. Eastland, John Stennis, Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond couldn't hold back the 1964 Voting Rights Act but they could nullify it if right-wing fanatics took the White House. They didn't get their wish then.

When they did finally elect a neo-fascist in 1968 the majority of Americans' popular perception was that all men and women were indeed created equal. Richard Nixon rode into the White House on the disarray of the Democrats following Robert Kennedy's murder and an effective campaign to blame peaceful protesters in Chicago for the police riot that victimized them. But Nixon also rode into office on his "Southern Strategy". That strategy involved pandering to the racists, segregationists, states-rights proponents, Klansmen and the like who'd been loyal Democrats since 1865. Suddenly the scum of American politics were following Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party that had been anathema to them since Abraham Lincoln's first campaign.

Truth to tell, the populist Democrats from the South in the 1920s and 1930s such as Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Sam Rayburn and others were less concerned about race than they were about economic standing. That concern allowed them to come to an uneasy accommodation with Northern Democrats, whose more liberal views on race were out of sync with that of their Southern constituents, focused on moving America out of the Great Depression. The understanding that the chains that weighted people down had more to do with class than color opened those populist leaders to change. The casually Democratic and casually bigoted voter did not share that openness and were ripe for picking by Republicans cynically eager to heave Lincoln overboard for racist votes.

But Nixon couldn't manage to shove onto the Supreme Court the candidates of his racist backers, the Klan tainted Clement F. Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell. He did get the Arizona racist, William Rhenquist, onto the court but Southern racists simply couldn't pass muster. The Haynesworth and Carswell fiascoes taught the Republicans that they needed to reframe their arguments and concentrate on subtlety.

They propagandized their position as opposition to "activist judges" and a focus on "the original intent of the framers of the Constitution". In fact, those catch phrases have always been an Orwellian smoke screen for promoting right-wing extremists who would take us back, not just to the Vinson Court of 1952 but to the Taney Court of 1852. Right-wing fanatics like Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia and Scalia's puppet, Clarence Thomas, have no more respect for or knowledge of the "original intent" that they trumpet than they have for the rights of individuals against corporations. They are exactly what they profess to oppose: activist judges, though they are themselves activists for neo-fascism.

The next attempt to neutralize the Supreme Court during the Reagan Presidency narrowly avoided afflicting the nation with Robert Bork. We despised Bork for firing Archibald Cox in 1973 but the reason for keeping him off the Supreme Court was his neo-fascist extremist vision of the Constitution. No one questions the contradiction inherent in the belief that Bork, Scalia and their ilk can use some bizarre telepathy to mystically understand the "original intent of the founders" even as they insist that the Constitution is ossified and unchanging, that things not specifically delineated in it do not exist. There is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution because "the founders" (sounds awfully like Star Trek: Deep Space 9, doesn't it?) never heard of personal privacy and were utterly unaware of the concept when they drafted the 3rd and 4th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

But persistence counts for something. Having packed the court at last with reliably neo-fascist jurists 53 years later, the Supreme Court that couldn't be rid of desegregation by impeaching Earl Warren has now achieved a reinstatement of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It is an uneasy reversal given that Justice Anthony Kennedy who swallows a great deal of rancid neo-fascist tripe choked on some of the reasoning and consequences that his even more extremist colleagues served up.

As many of us believed when Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee all but wearing a t-shirt that read, "I (heart) Stare Decisis," the new Chief Justice has no compunctions for dragging us back to the 1850s. And that return to segregation if not to slavery is cynically couched in the rhetoric of being "color blind". The irrational explanation for that catch phrase is that if race should not be an occasion for discrimination then ignoring race will magically make racism disappear. One of the requirements for being a right-winger is voluntary an selective disassociation from reality and a kind of magical thinking in which idiocy like closing ones eyes and ears makes bad things go away. The 5-member Supreme Court majority has stuck its collective fingers in its collective ears and intoned "La-la-la-la-la! I can't hear racism!" As if that would make it go away.

Segregation in America was the next best thing to having "happy darky slaves" picking in the "ole cotton fields back home." Had the South been able to completely undo the Civil War it would have done so. The violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s proved that. The graves of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr. prove that. The more recent murder of James Byrd proves that the agenda has not changed. At long last Scalia, Kennedy, Roberts, Alito and their houseboy, Thomas, can effectuate that agenda. How they are going to negate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments remains to be seen but we can have confidence those who'd sacrifice a mother to save a deformed and non-viable fetus will find a way.