BLACK LIKE THEE

Outrage is an easy emotional reaction. It feeds on our easiest emotion, anger, to which it is too close kin. It stems from all the wrongs done to us in the past but hasn't a lot to say about the present or the future. We are, unfortunately, in a time where our outrage is far too close to the surface. The very words "President Donald Trump" outrage me. Practically everything he, his cabinet and his supporters in Congress say and do is an outrage and much of it a violation of either the Constitution, our laws and/or our social norms. With the daily, if not hourly, beat of new outrages coming from our neo-Fascist Administration, Fox News, Info Wars and scum like Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh we are rubbed raw. Even thick skins have grown thinner with those of continually oppressed minorities like women, African-Americans and our LGBTQ brothers and sisters being the thinnest of all. That isn't a fault but rather a fact. The women exploited and raped, the African-Americans subject to hate, fear and ignorance at every turn to say nothing of the violence visited upon them and similar discrimination against those in the LGBTQ community have more than a right to be thin skinned and to respond with anger of their own to their treatment. However, that an angry response is understandable doesn't also make it inherently justified.

Let's look a little more coolly at the current mess engulfing the elected officials in Virginia as an apt example.

Democratic Governor Ralph Northam got himself into some hot water with the anti-abortion fanatics recently. I am not going to deal with that controversy here but it serves as the seed for what has followed. His support for abortion brought Northam to the notice of some right-wing fanatics who started scrounging around for something that could be used against Northam. What they found was a personal yearbook page from Northam's Medical School, Eastern Virginia Medical School, from 1984 with a photo of two people, one in blackface and the other in full Ku Klux Klan regalia.

As Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show, were this a photo of an actual black person and an actual Klansman side-by-side, raising their drinks together at a party we would see it as a positive photo. It is not that. It is two white people trying to be funny and shocking while demonstrating only their cosmically great insensitivity.

Northam has not helped his case any either. First, he apologized for being one of the people in the photo. Then he apologized for the photo, claimed that he wasn't one of the people in the photo and claimed that he didn't know how it got onto his personal yearbook page. Then Northam, deepening the ineptitude, claimed that he thought that the person in blackface in the photo might have been him because he's worn blackface at around the same time when he'd impersonated Michael Jackson in a dance contest. Then to dig the hole for himself deeper, Northam's wife barely stopped him from moon walking in response to a reporter's question. I will acknowledge that Ralph Northam has dug this hole so deep that, if he can see over the rim at all, it's only on tiptoe.

The bad news for the militant right-wing extremists who want to bring down the Democrats currently in power in Virginia is that Northam's lieutenant governor can't be accused of wearing blackface because Justin Fairfax is black. Such a simple fact never stopped the right-wing fanatics before so they have defaulted to the strategy that proved effective in ridding them of Al Franken*. They found a couple of women to claim that Fairfax had sexually assaulted them at some point in the past. Let me backtrack slightly and say that the women's allegations may well be true but they require some very serious investigation before I will and many others should take them at face value. The women's allegations appear at a time that is a little too convenient for the Republiscum Party in Virginia and do not appear to have any prior history. Is it not a bit odd that these allegations did not surface in 2018 when Mr. Fairfax was running for lieutenant governor yet as soon as there is a possibility that he could succeed to the office of governor they appear?

The allegations against Fairfax and Northam bring into play the further constitutional offices that may fall in the line of succession. Thus Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring is forced to step into the spotlight as third in possible succession to the governorship and admit that he too once wore blackface at a party potentially disqualifying him for his current office let alone the office of governor. To Herring's credit, he got ahead of the right-wing fanatics and admitted this incident himself.

So who's next? If the three top elected Democrats in Virginia have to leave office we get down to Republiscum Speaker of the Virginia House, Kirk Cox. Speaker Cox, however, has his own problem since he was the editor of his yearbook at Virginia Military Institute and, mirabile dictu!, that yearbook is rife with blackface photos, racial epithets and other outright racist nastiness. Then again, wasn't this whole campaign against Northam, Fairfax and Herring designed to put a Republiscum in the governor's office?

Lost in all this recrimination and character assassination are some questions that the people outraged by Northam's, Fairfax's and Herring's past behavior should be asking: are these men racists or sexual predators? What are the motives of their accusers? Are they governing well or badly. Are they the kind of people today who would think and behave as Northam and Herring did some thirty-five years ago or as Fairfax is accused of doing fifteen years ago?

We used to have a concept called "consciousness raising". People who held awful, if traditional views, of African-Americans, women and members of the LGBTQ community, could question their beliefs, learn about the people for whom they held prejudicial attitudes and come to a higher consciousness that put aside those negative views and values emerging as better people. Today with our outrage rubbed raw by Trump and other neo-Fascists, by the murder of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille, or Emantic Bradford, Jr., (this list is foreshortened but already 100,000 times too long), by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and elsewhere, by inaction over gun violence generally and school shootings in particular, by rapists whose money, power or success in sports make them immune to prosecution certain offenses whose actuality may be questioned loom large, often larger than warranted.

The aphorism, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," is most often attributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma. It implies that if we take revenge for each offense done to us then the whole world will soon be engulfed in tit-for-tat revenge that leaves everyone wounded and no one whole or satisfied. That aphorism might well be applied here. Is it not possible that people who were either of stupid or actually evil intent thirty five years ago may have grown and become wiser and allied to good over that time? If you are an African-American living in Virginia today whom would you believe might better respect your rights and treat you are a human being worthy of respect? Would that be Ralph Northam, Mark Herring or Kirk Cox or any other Republiscum? If you are a woman, who would better respect you as another equal human being and respect your right to choose what happens to your own body, Justin Fairfax or one of the Republiscum who want abortion outlawed when a fetal heartbeat can be detected?

I am not proposing that we ignore offense for some pragmatic advantage. I am suggesting that offenses of the past need to be viewed in the context of what has passed between the offense and the moment we are in now. If Ralph Northam wore blackface in the past and would wear it now, that's one thing. He has renounced it now and denounced it too. If the man has grown and become educated to the offense and distress that such behavior causes over the last thirty-five years I do not see why he must resign his office. That is equally true for Mark Herring. If a full and complete investigation of the charges against Justin Fairfax establish that he sexually assaulted his accusers then he doesn't belong in his office. If, on the other hand, his accusers are shills for some Republiscum fanatics then they should be exposed and Mr. Fairfax continue as lieutenant governor.

Finally, all this is taking place in Virginia amongst Virginians. Is it really so hard to believe that a white man in blackface was abnormal in any state of the old Confederacy yesterday let alone thirty-five years ago? That isn't an excuse but it sure provides context. Where would we expect to find consciousness raised less, less frequently and most recently than in the states of the old Confederacy? One would always expect that racism and its cousin, racial insensitivity, would be rife in the states that fought hardest for the evil of slavery. I don't give a pass to Northam or Herring because they are Virginians but rather I'm sure that it took longer for them to learn and grow out of racism than it did for many others.

I appreciate the source of the outrage. I understand how offensive these men have or may have been yet it is also true that their offenses were from a then that is now long past. If they are no longer the men they were many years ago that must count for something. The present man should be evaluated in relation to his past but the past must also be judged in relation to the present man.


* Some stupid clowning on Sen. Franken's part not withstanding, we know that his main accuser of sexual misconduct is a long-time right-wing activist. We also know that the allegedly "unwanted" kiss during a USO tour was a part of the show and had been rehearsed before the tape that showed the alleged "unwanted" kiss was made. Al Franken was railroaded out of office by the same right-wing that delayed him from taking his senate seat until July, 2009 and by Democrats who were all too eager to appear on the side of women in general without looking too hard at this woman in particular. In that sense Democrats had trapped themselves by going to bat for women who are actually too often ignored or disbelieved when they have actually been sexually assaulted because truly investigating the woman's charges looks too much like the rampant and egregious disbelief that most truly victimized women face. The right-wing fanatics like to catch Democrats and other Liberals in traps they have constructed for themselves especially when Democrats have no idea how to get out of those traps.

RIGHT-WING RALPHING

The neo-Fascists among us have long railed against anything that does not comport with their world view. If if isn't echt Fascist than it must be (Heaven forefend!) Liberal which is, in their blinkered and jaundiced view, Progressive which is Socialist and also Communist! That is the formulation the neo-Fascists continually use to delude the rubes and, to borrow from the very apt H. L. Mencken, Boobouisie in the electorate. Of course, they don't like the Fascist or neo-Fascist label and have gone so far as to convince the ahistorical and semi-literate that Nazism and Communism are one in the same simply because Nazi is a contraction of Natzionatalische Socialistiche Partei. If the Nazi's abused the name of socialism to blinker German voters in the 1920s and 1930s then they must have been Leftists like the Liberals=Progressives=Socialists=Communists of today. Of course they must because CHRISTIAN preachers and their Volkische Beobachter, Fox News says so.

For 50 years we've had the neo-Fascists railing against "the Liberal Media" meaning all Non-Fascist Media. Dr. Goebbles'...I mean Rupert Murdock's...(so confusing trying to keep those two straight!) media outlets have recently had a guest on railing against Liberal and Feminist bias in the Disney animated film Ralph Breaks the Internet. The claim was that Disney's characters influence the good, seen-and-not-heard, obedient children of neo-Fascist parents to become disobedient "smart-mouthed children". We certainly can't have that! Why, children have never had such disobedient role models is the good, old Martin Dies/Joe McCarthy/Richard Nixon/Barry Goldwater days. It may also have something to do with the pernicious and insidious effect that the voice of smart-mouthed Liberal Democrat Feminist Sarah Silverman may have on children unaware that she is a Liberal, Feminist and Democrat or of what those terms mean.

In those good, old, kill-a-Commie-for-Christ days there never were smart-mouthed and disobedient children if you eliminate Nancy Drew, Nancy and Sluggo, the Hardy Boys, all the kids putting on shows with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Pippi Longstocking, the cartoon kids in Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, all those later kids on the beaches with Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and Gidget, the Goonies and...well, the list goes on.

This active search for movies, books, radio and other media that offend the delicate sensibilities of the lunatic right-wing goes on from generation to generation. Why aren't these self-appointed guardians of public morality against all that ruffles their nether feathers called "special snowflakes"? They certainly are flaky enough! I vividly recall a similar right-wing hack railing against the 1964 movie, The Yellow Rolls Royce. That film's crime came in the third story regarding the eponymous automobile. You see its owner, played by Ingrid Bergman, found herself in Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation and turns the car over to partisans fighting the Nazis. Anyone with any historical knowledge will know that the leader of the chief faction fighting for Balkan nationalism and against the Nazis was Josip Broz Tito a (shudder!) communist. Despite the leader of the movie partisans being played by Omar Sharif and there being no mention of any politics other than opposition to the Nazis the mere hint of support for someone who turned out to be an avowed communist was intolerable in the year that Barry Goldwater ran for president.

All of this is nonsense at best and insane even when given the benefit of the doubt. The neo-Fascist will never be satisfied unless the media of all sorts looks and sounds like a brown-shirted Nürnberg rally. If everyone isn't goosestepping on the march in straight-arm saluting conformity with them then those who have the temerity to question, to dissent and to be "smart-mouthed" will always be a danger to be expunged. I must, however, ask the question weren't Patrick Henry, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and all the others, weren't they questioners, dissenters and "smart-mouthed" too? Isn't our Declaration of Independence one of the great "smart-mouthed" documents of all time? If the answer to those questions is, Yes, who should we conclude is opposed to the basic values of America?

P. S. Ralph Breaks the Internet's opening weekend had the highest gross of any movie currently in theatres. The best revenge on the neo-Fascists is beating them at capitalism.

Speaking Volumes

During the summer of 2009 we were beset by a collection of charlatans, dupes and dunces shouting, "Read the bill," at town hall meetings held to discuss health care reform. The charlatans knew, the dupes didn't know and the dunces were to stupid to care that there was no one bill to read.

Now we have the Congressional Republicans introducing a 200 page health care reform bill and touting it as a work of exceptional brilliance when contrasted with the majority Democrats' bill that is some 1900 and more pages long. This is the same mentality that equates reading the Cliff's Notes of War and Peace with reading the entire novel. It is great for the dunces whose attention spans are shorter than the life of most subatomic particles. But there's an adage that, I think, applies here: you get what you pay for.

So why would a bill hovering in the range of 2000 pages be so large and another bill purporting to do the same thing be one-tenth that size?

First, let's consider that health care and related industries represents somewhere between 30 and 35 per cent of the American economy. The Republicans will tell you that in ominous tones as if that much of the nation's economy were about to be murdered. So, let me ask you, would you like about a third of the nation's economy considered carefully and in detail or would something that is, by contrast, scribbled on the back of an envelope be equally good?

Second, there is the long, arduous effort that Democrats have made to consider and include Republican ideas where they have been offered in a cooperative spirit. Not just this year but over the last thirty years Democrats have made sincere efforts to overcome objections by Republicans even when, as now, the objections are simply hysterical and obstructionist. Currying favor with senators like Olympia Snow of Maine has added bulk to a health care overhaul.

Third, the stated goals of health care reform are to extend coverage to all Americans, improve health in the population as a whole and control the run-away inflation of health care costs while not reducing the coverage enjoyed by anyone who currently has health insurance. Achieving those goals requires some careful consideration of the effects of reform on private insurance plans, on Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans and Indian Health Services, military medical care, private for profit and non-profit medical facilities, health care cooperatives, HMOs, the Federal prison system and 50 states and additional territories and their state and state licensed health care systems and providers. The dunces, dupes and charlatans may clamour for something that their tiny minds and blinkered visions can encompass, but I for one think it's a very good idea that there be a great volume of paper in a bill that has attempted to consider all the implications of reform on these systems.

The point is that a 200 page bill is not a serious consideration of health care reform. It cannot possibly be such. Yet to the dunces, that segment of the population that the great H. L. Mencken aptly called the "booboisie", are ready to surrender themselves to something that is a sham simple version of health care reform in the same way that they surrendered themselves to a sham common man and genuine simpleton in George W. Bush. They take the absurd position that something one-tenth the size must be better than the larger version.

Even these booboisie could figure out that a box containing 20 ounces of corn flakes is a better deal than one containing 2 ounces if both are priced the same but when it comes to a bill in Congress they clamour for the short weight that short changes them.

But that's not the only issue with volumes currently in the news.

Sarah Palin has uh...written a...book. Her biography is a hot item on Amazon despite its being weeks from actual release. There may actually be some fun in reading whatever the ghostwriter recruited by Palin's handlers has put together but for it to be a best seller even before publication raises my eyebrows and probably ought to raise yours.

Let me pull out an incident from my long memory to contrast a little here.

Back in 1988 and 1989 there was a scandal involving House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. It seems that Speaker Wright had actually written a slim book. Not many people were clamouring for copies for some friends of Wright's bought some copies in bulk. Those friends freely admitted that they were attempting to help Wright finance his campaigns for his seat in the House of Representatives. They were using the book purchases as a subterfuge meant to evade campaign finance limits. This scandal caused Wright to resign his seat in May, 1989.

Given the paucity of ideas rattling around in the space between Sarah Palin's ears, perhaps someone ought to look into the sales of her book. Perhaps some of the neo-fascist plutocrats that regularly hire amiable dunces as political fronts for their rapacity are buying cases of the Palin book for kindling in their ski lodges or hunting camps. Their bulk purchases could be seen as political contributions except for one thing. Governor Palin isn't governor any longer, is she?

Everyone was puzzled by the dramatic resignation of Palin as Alaska governor last summer. Puzzled, that is, unless they were just a little bit cynical and were thinking like trailer trash. You see, Sarah Palin is not now running for anything. She can rake in all the cash she wants without violating anything but reason and decency before she declares herself a candidate for something like president of these here United States of America. Had she remained governor of Alaska to the end of her term she would have been that much poorer and have had about a year and a half less to suck at the teat of embarassingly large private neo-fascist fortunes.

In the one case we have the dumbing down of complex issues seen as a positive thing by the boboisie that the forms the Republicans base and in the other we have the very personification of that dumbed down booboisie pretending to be a bestselling author...with a little help from her neo-fascist friends. It's an apotheosis of ignorance that speaks volumes about the Republicans and their base, you betcha.

Most Basic Responsibilities: Neo-Fascists with no concept of irony.

Yesterday America's most visible embarrassment, Dubya, the putative president, signed a continuing resolution to keep Federal departments funded. He used his weekly radio address to accuse the Congress of "failing to fulfill its most basic responsibility". This comes hot on the heels of his photo opportunity in support of the ill-conceived and vastly under-funded "No Child Left Behind Act" in which he informed those gathered to celebrate education that "Childrens do learn." It also follows by a week or so Dubya's outrage at the MoveOn "General Betrayus" advertisement.

In order to be one of the current crop of neo-fascists who style themselves as "Conservatives" one must have no shame and no sense of irony. The Republicans who were appalled at the MoveOn ad most vociferously were not terribly disturbed by the farrago of John McCain's black baby at the time of South Carolina's 2000 Republican Primary. They actively participated in an advertisement in 2004 that morphed decorated Vietnam Veteran Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden and actively supported or, at least never condemned, the Swift Boat Veterans scurrilous attack on John Kerry. And subsequently they have been utterly silent as their favorite drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, has attacked John Murtha. No shame and no sense of irony.

Dubya has to have no sense of irony or else he couldn't get through any given day. And, like his father and grandfather before him, he has no sense of shame. That gene has been bred out of the Bush family for a number of generations and carefully kept from creeping in through marriage.

But the accusation that Congress or anyone has failed in their most basic responsibilities has a special stench coming from Dubya's mouth. You see, on the same day that Dubya was castigating Congress - meaning Democrats - for being unable to pass vital legislation in the face of Republican opposition and his own veto threats the Topps Meat company was notifying the public that tons of hamburger from its plant were tainted with e. coli bacteria and unsafe to eat. What has that to do with failing to fulfill basic responsibilities, you ask? Well the Food and Drug Administration is an Executive Branch agency that oversees the purity of the things that go into our bodies. Leaving aside the issues of lax testing of drugs for the moment, during the last 26 years we have had an ever increasing number of instances of contaminated food. During that same 26 years under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the Republican Congresses of 1995 through 2006 and Dubya the FDA has had an ever shrinking budget. Sure we can throw away a trillion or two dollars on a unjustified war that has no foreseeable ending but meat inspectors...they're one example of "big government" and "unnecessary regulation" and "interference in the private sector". Surely meat inspectors aren't necessary since the food industry can adequately police itself, right?

No.

A century ago we had an unregulated meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle. The wholesale violation of sanitary conditions was such an outrage that that notable lefty and closet communist, Theodore Roosevelt, with the support of a Republican Congress passed legislation to regulate an industry that was killing and sickening U. S. citizens at an alarming rate. But that was a century ago. Surely the blind pursuit of profit and negligence couldn't let it happen again!

Topps Meat is not "the canary in the coal mine". It is the latest example of a system that has been intentionally dismantled by ideologues no less criminally deluded than the Soviet planners who killed millions through forced collectivization in the 1920s and 1930s. It is of a piece with the appallingly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina that more than 2 years later has not properly housed thousands of families. It is of a piece with sending men into battle without proper equipment. It is of a piece with sitting in a Florida classroom inactive while fanatical ideologues flew airliners into buildings. It is of a piece with all of the Republican's other failures to fulfill their most basic responsibilities to protect the people of this nation. It is also of a piece with the actions of this group of neo-fascist ideologues in violating their oaths to "protect and defend the Constitution of these United States" by suspending habeus corpus, spying on American citizens without cause or warrant and other extra-legal measures.

Dubya hasn't any right to outrage over anyone's advertising and certainly hasn't any right to accuse anyone or any institution of failing to live up to their responsibilities. Without either a sense of shame or a sense of irony he will continue to to make such statements. Those of us ashamed of his shamelessness and understanding of the irony in his statements can only hope that enough of the electorate will understand and also be ashamed so that we can have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to begin undoing the damage.