Untruth In Advertising I

You’ve seen them, those Visa Check Card commercials. The whole world is an harmonious, well-oiled machine. Everything is running in sync with the music, varying from Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse or Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brasil to Danny Elfman’s Breakfast Machine from PeeWee’s Big Adventure, until someone pulls out…

a) cash
b) a check
c) something else that most people actually have.

The consequence of this implicitly anti-social act is that the music slows and stops, things fall from the sky, disasters ensue until someone with a Visa Check Card comes along and sets the world to rights again. The music swells, and everything resumes moving harmoniously.

I’m going to gloss over the paradigm implicit in those commercials of regimentation and conformity, a society that cannot run smoothly if it admits of any individuality at all and go straight to the point that we all knew from the beginning: they’re a load of crap.

A day ago I was in a local grocery store. As is my wont, I found the shortest checkout line. There was a mother and daughter team who had a huge, combined grocery order that ultimately totaled $486.77. The cashier was moving the order right along so I unloaded the dozen or so things from my cart and awaited my turn to pay.

I could almost hear Powerhouse playing as the items went over the scanner. The $486.77 total came up on the register and mom pulled out her Visa card. She wanted to use it as a debit card.

First there were problems in running the card through the machine. It didn’t read. It wasn’t swiped in the correct sequence. The third time was the charm or, rather, the curse. The transaction was rejected.

It seems that mom’s card didn’t process transactions of more than $200 all at once. What? What would have happened if she were buying furniture? But we hadn’t figured that one out yet. Oh, well. Mine not to reason why. Mine just to stand and wait. So the manager was called over, the transaction voided and there was a second try. Still no good. Another transaction voided. Both the cashier and manager were giving me apologetic looks. I was actually enjoying the process and mentally working on this blog entry. Well, next they broke the transaction up into a pair of $200 and $286.77 pieces. The $200 was good. The $286.77 didn’t make it. Again a transaction voided.

Now they broke the $286.77 into two pieces of $200 and $86.77. The second $200 went through as a charge rather than a debit once the attempt to do it as a debit resulted in voiding another transaction. The $86.77 didn’t go through. She was now over limit. Well, that’s o.k. Just write a check. The check processes as insufficient funds. As if that hadn’t been obvious already when the last debit failed.

By that time my milk was past its “sell by” date.

As the mom and daughter began sorting out things that they could do without to reduce the bill to $400, the manager took me to another register and arranged for me to get a $3 credit for being so patient and good humored about it.

Let me be clear that I have great sympathy for that mom. We’ve all been there. The card is rejected. The check bounces. We forgot our wallet or don’t have enough cash in it. We knew our balance but underestimated the cost of the things in our cart. It’s an embarrassing moment that we don’t wish on anyone and I certainly wish that the mom preceding me through that checkout line could have been spared that torture. Still, the next time you see one of those Visa commercials, think of that mom and don’t be conned into thinking that you need a Visa Check Card. You’re an individual person, not a cog and the only machine for which that card provides the grease is Visa itself.

Finally, you’ll notice that this is the first installment of “Untruth in Advertising”. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a very long series.

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.

Scott Free: McClellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a book and the level of vilification from the Bush White House, neo-cons and other ultra-right wing loyalists has been swift and deafening. The gist of all the criticism from the neo-fascist propaganda mill from Ari Fleischer to the noisemakers at Fox and other ultra-right wing media is, "How dare he!" The amazing thing to me is that the response has been so swift and so rancorous the McClellan must, at long last, be telling the truth.

The criticism I've heard most frequently goes something like if Scott thought that something was wrong, why didn't he step up and say something at the time?

That question is what's known as a "gimme". McClellan saw what happened to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame when Wilson reported honestly that there was nothing to one of the neo-fascists' rationales for the Iraq invasion. Looking at that and knowing how the Bush loyalists fetishized loyalty he had only two choices. He could resign in protest and probably be relegated to the same outer darkness that the neo-fascists are hustling him toward now or stay on and try to make money and connections that would support him should he eventually find himself in that outer darkness.

In some sense the choice he made is a quintessentially Republican one. He chose to stay on because he, even today, excuses Dubya and because staying was in his self-interest. Self-interest ahead of nation, community and law is the ultimate Republican characteristic. Thus, asking why McClellan stayed is both foolish and self-evident. For hitman, Karl Rove, to pose that question is deliciously ironic and reveals two more essential characteristics of Dubya’s neo-fascist crew and Republicans in general: they know neither shame or irony.

One of the other questions frequently asked is, “Why now?” Why did McClellan put his account of Administration machinations and perfidy out now? That too is obvious. It’s an election year. This year his book is likely to sell better than in any other year. Again, self-interest trumps everything. Still, being a little less cynical, I think that Scott McClellan, like several former denizens of this Administration like Colin Powell and George Tenet before him, knows that this crew of war criminals and civil rights violators is going to be called to account as soon as they are out of the White House and regardless of the raft of pardons that Dubya, like Poppy before him, is going to issue on his way out the door. McClellan is jockeying for position. He’s a relatively little fish. If he suddenly develops or counterfeits a moral compass the coming storm is likely to break lightly on his head.

In 1980 Cyrus Vance who’d differed with Jimmy Carter over the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission allowed the mission to fail and then had the decency to resign once his reservations had proved all too prescient. But Vance was a Democrat a bit less steeped in total self-interest than Republicans. McClellan, like his Republican cronies, talks a good game when it comes to morality, personal responsibility and shared values but doesn’t stand up until it’s too late for the nation and profitable for himself.

To be a true Republican of this time it seems to me that one must have steeped one’s self in Ayn Rand’s pernicious screeds Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The wildly misnamed Objectivism contends that nothing matters but the individual and what that individual deigns to grant to others and society as a whole. Indeed life is characterized by the struggle of the individual against society. In truth it is extreme subjectivism and a close, even incestuous, cousin of fascism. Scott McClellan hasn’t had a change of heart; rather he’s decided that his bread is buttered on a different side. Still, that he’s being more truthful today than he was while he was one of Republican minions is to be celebrated but much in the way that one thanks a match seller for turning in an arsonist he before sets another fire. While we congratulate him for his current honesty we should remember that had he found a spine in 2004 we would have been spared some of the depredations of the last three and a half years of neo-fascist rule.

Rights at the Wrong Time: Bad timing from the California Supreme Court

First, though it's going to seem a bit hollow, I have long supported gay rights. I've had gay and lesbian friends since I was in high school more than 40 years ago. All the hoopla over rights for blacks, women, gays, etc. in fact is something of a continuing shock to me because it seems to me obvious that we all should have those "unalienable rights" of which Thomas Jefferson wrote. We are all human beings (though I have doubts about Dick and Lynn Cheney, Pat and Bay Buchanan and am quite sure that Ann Coulter is not) and by virtue of that fact we all inherently have those rights regardless of our color, ethnicity or whom we love. That said, I am more than a little ambivalent about the decision of the California Supreme Court today (May 15, 2008) declaring California laws banning same-sex marriages illegal.

I would, however, have no ambivalence whatever had this same decision come down on, say, November 10, 2008. The Supreme Court's decision is obviously and unquestionably correct. But this decision in our largest and most populous state is only going to electrify the bigots and loonies during an election campaign. The effect is likely to be that we will spend more time talking about same-sex marriage than we will about the criminally prosecuted war in Iraq or the decimation of the American economy by the neo-fascist ideologues of the Republican Party.

This past Tuesday we were treated to interviews with older white voters in West Virginia making clear that their bigotries had survived unchanged since the 1950s. They offered a raft of false excuses and outright racist statements for rejecting Barack Obama's candidacy. Their bigotries reveal the dark, noisome depths of American ignorance, fear and hatred that the Republican Party has mined so effectively for the last 60 plus years. The Republican prescription for winning elections has been to fragment and intimidate the electorate. They exploit the fears of black and white, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight bringing those ephemeral and foolish issues to the fore so that we never have to consider why the United States alone amongst the industrial nations of the world deny our citizens health care, adequate housing and decent pensions.

Ultimately the California Supreme Court's decision was long overdue. It was correct. The dissent that would have it that the decision violates the separation of powers is, prima facie, absurd and an abdication of judicial responsibility. If it is not for the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of a law, what is the Supreme Court for? I am glad that my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters now can legally marry in California as well as Massachusetts. Still, had I had my druthers I would have allowed the injustice to continue for another 6 months so that we could have a presidential election without scum from Focus on the Family and other bigots energized by this decision. I'm not proud of that position but I must own it mine.

Part and Parsing: Why Antonin Scalia must be impeached.

In neo-fascist circles, Antonin Scalia is what passes for a major intellectual. I refuse to call him "Justice" Scalia because justice and Antonin Scalia don't belong in the same sentence. Like most ultra-right wing pseudo-intellectuals Scalia is well read but nothing that he's read penetrates the denser-than-a-black-hole certainty of his ideology. Mr. Scalia in interviews with Lesley Stahl and with the BBC has insisted that torture is not "cruel and unusual punishment". That terminology comes from, among other places, the 8th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution which reads in its entirety, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Mr. Scalia, being a "strict constructionist" and all, he obviously knows the language of the 8th Amendment. Since Mr. Scalia claims to be a legal scholar he obviously also knows the history that culminates in the 8th Amendment. He knows that it derives from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. He knows that the English Bill of Rights stems from nearly 400 years of almost constant civil war in England going back to the reign of Edward II. In those wars winners used such punishments as impaling their live opponents on stakes or drawing and quartering. Burning and beheading were also favorite forms of punishment. Of course, often as preparation for trial, what modern attorneys call the "discovery process", came torture, usually in forms that make water boarding look positively benign. Mr. Scalia's scholarship certainly includes reading in the history that led to the language of the 8th Amendment. Which is, of course, exactly the point. Mr. Scalia can read the history, read the records of the public debate leading to the 8th Amendment, read the entire history of the law's interpretation by our courts and have none of it penetrate his impenetrably black ideological certainty.

I do think that I understand Mr. Scalia's specious logic. I think he must be relying on a definition of punishment that beggars Bill Clinton's parsing of the word is. I believe that Mr. Scalia has convinced himself that punishment is something that follows adjudication. Since the people that we are and have been torturing over these last 7 years have not had an adjudication of their guilt or innocence, the torture is not, in Mr. Scalia's view, punishment per se. It may be cruel. It may be unusual, but absent an adjudication it cannot be punishment in the ideologocally benighted mind of Antonin Scalia.

In typical neo-fascist fashion, Mr. Scalia insists that what is sauce for the liberal goose can't even come close to the ultra-rightist gander. The Constitution which, as a "strict constructionist", Mr. Scalia believes does not enshrine a right to privacy does clearly enshrine a right to torture. He maintains this ideologically insane position despite the reading that clearly informs him that the right to privacy was of paramount concern to the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights while torture was anathema to them.

Mr. Scalia lacks what is losely referred to as a "judicial temperament". His refusal to recuse himself from the deliberations in Cheney v. USDC for the District of Columbia shows that his ideology and friendships override his legal judgment when it suits him just as did his vote in Bush v. Gore. But now he has gone beyond the pale. He has shown himself willing to embrace the kind of "judicial activism" (albeit from the far right) and "moral relativism" so decried by his fellow neo-fascists. Once more we see that the people most apt to wrap themselves in the flag are those with the least respect for the Constitution that flag represents.

I would hope that my fellow Democrats and anyone with even modest respect for our Constitution, for civil and human rights would stop the nonsensical pursuit of a bill of impeachment against Dubya and Cheney and put that energy into a bill of impeachment against Antonin Scalia who is a clear and present danger to the U. S. Constitution.

An Oxymoron from a Nazi and a Moron: No good words for Benedict XVI

On April 19, 2005 then Cardinal Ratzinger delivered a homily to which Our Fearless Leader, Dubya, saw fit to refer in his introduction of now Pope Ratzinger...er Benedict XVI at the White House last Tuesday, April 18, 2008. In that homily the Cardinal stated, "Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires."

One of the most serious faults of reasoning is allowing some conman with an agenda to set the terms of a debate. "Clear faith" hasn't anything to do with fundamentalism. The Cardinal, now Pope knows as much. He's a well educated and knowledgeable man whose faith, I presume, is "clear". Like most people of "clear faith" Josef Ratzinger has found that faith and reason have come to him together. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.

Fundamentalism, however, is exactly the antithesis of Josef Ratzinger's path. It insists on blind faith, not clarity. Fundamentalism insists that reason is faith's enemy, that mindless acceptance of absurd literalism is the true path of belief, and that questioning the Bible and the teachings of your church or preacher is heresy. (And, yes, I too have an agenda about which I’m being far more honest than Benedict XVI.)

So let’s continue to parse the Cardinal/Pope’s homily. Relativism is “letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching’….” in Ratzinger’s phrase but is it? I am an atheist who comes by his lack of faith through a solid grounding in the teachings of the Methodist Church and life-long inquiry into religion. I consider myself relativistic but in a different form than that which Joseph Ratzinger seeks to define. As the starkest example of which I can think, let’s consider abortion.

According to the Catholic Church and certainly in the view of Benedict XVI, life begins at the moment of conception. In that moment an act of god has occurred. I think that the Pope and I could agree that in that moment there are the stirrings of the great mystery of life and that something sublime is occurring but we would be talking of very different things. What to the Pope is an act of god is, to me, an act, sweaty, gasping, straining and delightful, of two people carrying out a biological imperative and the entirely random, haphazard serendipity of male and female cells meeting.

So where does relativism enter the picture? In our attitudes to the results of those stirrings of the great mystery of life.

For about three week of initial development the fertilized egg remains a mass of largely undifferentiated cells. Only in the eighth week does that mass of cells begin to resemble anything like a human baby. And even then the organs are undeveloped and there’s no possibility that the fetus could exist outside the mother’s body. Only after about 12 weeks is the fetus sufficiently formed to be viable outside the mother’s body. Therefore, I don’t think that there is anything “relativist” about acknowledging that the fertilized egg up to the 12^th week of pregnancy is entirely a function of the mother’s body. Yet Catholic dogma says otherwise. The dogma here relies on blind faith rather than “clear faith”.

Absurdly, the Roman Catholic Church opposes all methods of birth control. Catholic dogma insists that methods of birth control whether physical or chemical interfere with “god’s plan” as if any god had the time to determine a plan for pregnancy in every copulating couple. I personally have some squeamishness about abortion. I think it far better to reduce or eliminate the risk of pregnancy before the fact than after yet the Roman Catholic Church and certainly Pope Benedict XVI will not hear of birth control as a means for reducing the need for abortion.

Similarly the Catholic Church preaches against a “morning after pill”. The fertilized egg hasn’t even attached itself to the uterine wall to begin developing into a fetus but chemically preventing that attachment is anathema to Benedict XVI. Thus Roman Catholicism places itself in an absurd and self-defeating straight-jacket. Preventing pregnancy is a violation of “god’s will” and abortion is too. Again blind faith paints the Catholic Church into a corner into which “clear faith” wouldn’t have allowed it to go.

But the most troubling aspect of this fundamentalist blind faith is the attitude toward the living. Steeped in the dogma of sin abortion is impermissible even if the life or health of the mother hangs in the balance. The reasoning appears to be that the baby is innocent of all but “original sin“ (a pretty dodgy concept in itself) while the mother is ipso facto a sinner. Therefore, preserving the baby’s life is preferable to that of the mother. Is it any wonder that some have seen a gross anti-feminine bias in this dogma?

So it’s “relativism” to see that a woman might have other children if this fetus that threatens her life were aborted and, therefore, save her. It’s relativism to weigh the two lives and find in favor of the woman rather than the baby. If that’s relativism then so be it. I will proudly wear the mantle of relativist.

And, yet again, comes the con that relativism has “has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires." Josef Ratzinger did not become a cardinal or pope without setting his own ego and desires ahead of everything else. To fail to see that this pot is calling all the other kettles black is utter absurdity. I’m sure that he would tell you that he was elected by the holy spirit moving amongst his colleagues rather than by careful pruning of the College of Cardinals throughout most of the last 3 papacies, ruthless attacks on all liberal interpretations of Catholicism and incessant politicking with his colleagues. Convenient how the holy spirit is so in tune with Josef Ratzinger’s ambitions, isn’t it? But the biggest con of all is the characterization of relativism as a dictatorship. One has to expect that one’s audience is willing to jettison all rational thought to accept that oxymoron. Relativism, also known as empiricism, by definition, looks at the circumstances of a given situation and tries to find the least hurtful or most accurate resolution to the situation. It is fundamentalism and dogma that impose an immutable will on the world and all circumstances admitting of no other choice but that dictated by its hidebound inflexibility. It’s dogma that insists that the mother must carry to term a child of rape, incest or one whose continued development jeopardizes her own life, not relativism.

Pope Benedict XVI has taken some pains to distance himself from his past as a member of the Hitlerjugend. What he’s not done is reject the inflexibility of his Nazi past. Certainly he may visit a synagogue or confer with some Imams but Benedict XVI, like Cardinal Ratzinger and young Josef Ratzinger before him believes in a totalitarian dictatorship of his version of Catholicism. In that sense he has merely exchanged Hitler for Roman Catholic dogma. That Dubya should give lip service to the Cardinal’s oxymoron is both typical and blatantly dishonest. For Dubya and his mal-administration to condemn “relativism” when they have parsed the meaning of torture in ways that make Bill Clinton’s parsing of “is” look inconsequential. For a man who insists that his government does not torture people to attack relativism while his top advisors manage the very torture he denies is beyond despicable. But then again, Dubya is probably too “incurious” to realize that he’s contradicting himself. I wonder what Pope Benedict’s excuse is?

So?

So?

So!

It’s just too perfect. When asked about polls that show that 80% of Americans don’t support the neo-fascist, colonial war in Iraq Dick Cheney answered “So?” This is the man who was at great pains to con the American people into believing that the will of the majority required an end to the recounting of votes in Florida in 2000, the man who tries to sell the idea that our invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified at every turn, the man who spouts his support of “democracy” everywhere in the world but in America who now, conveniently, thinks that the opinion of his constituents matters not at all.

And when asked about the toll this war is taking on our servicemen and women, Cheney’s similarly unfeeling answer was, “They enlisted.”

When Marie Antoinette asked a courtier why the Parisians were rioting in the streets she was told the people had no bread. Her reply, “Let them eat cake,” has become a proverbial statement of the insensitive stupidity of the ruling class. Yet in Marie Antoinette’s defense we must say that the word traditionally translated as “cake” probably more accurately meant “rolls” and in her removal from the plight of her subjects she was so uninformed that she could not conceive of a world in which rolls or cake could not instantly substitute for a temporary dearth of bread.

Cheney, however, unlike the Queen of France, knows the situation and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t care that young Americans are dying daily to increase the value of his holdings in Halliburton. And he certainly hasn’t the least use for democracy except as a convenient cover for the imperialism that he favors.

They enlisted.

That remark is of a piece with Donald Rumsfeld’s rationalization that, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” to explain why the military in Iraq was inadequately equipped. Like the neo-cons’ contempt for actual democracy even as they bandy the word about at every opportunity, Cheney believes in tossing out the phrase “support our troops” while doing nothing to actually support them.

Cheney’s interview with Martha Raddatz confirms that he is probably the highest ranking sociopath in this Administration if not in any American Administration since Aaron Burr.

Any number of my friends and fellow Democrats insist that both Cheney and Dubya must be impeached. It’s far too late for that now but they and their partners in crimes, Con-yo' Sleeza, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Wolfowitz, should be remanded to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for their war crimes if only to establish that no American, regardless of how thoroughly convinced of his unassailability, is above the law. Cheney would probably plead that his alleged heart condition precludes his imprisonment, that dragging him off to the cell of Slobodan Milosovic as justice demands, would be tantamount to a death sentence.

So?

1968 I: The Day Our Conscience Died

(I began writing this entry, after a long absence, on April 2^nd. Life often interferes with plans, even well-intentioned ones and so it did here. But also I must admit that returning to 1968 to give context Dr. King’s murder is, in many ways, as difficult as living through it was. It is a time that is vivid in memory as is the worst of nightmares. Looking back into the maw of evil in 1968 has taken longer than I thought.)

Last Friday was April 4, 2008. It is one of the saddest anniversaries in American history, the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The anniversary of the day that the conscience of America, the voice of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” was murdered at the hands of the racists and neo-fascists amongst us. Please don’t mistake any part of that statement as hyperbole. Dr. King was our conscience personified. That doesn’t deify Dr. King. A conscience may be imperfect but most certainly Dr. King called America to its best nature, to fulfill its promise and strive toward its dreams something impossible to say of most of our leaders since.

Let me set the scene for myself and for the nation for you in case you do not remember that time.

On April 4, 1968 I was 3 months short of my 19^th birthday. I was a freshman at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a sleepy hamlet whose chief industry was the college about 10 miles from Utica. I was involved in theatre. That evening I had a rehearsal for a production of Georg Büchner’s play, Leonce and Lena. Hamilton still is a private college where Ivy League, particularly Princeton, wanna-bes go when they aren’t quite up to snuff for the more prestigious schools. Hamilton at that time was a men’s school only. The majority of my fellows in the student body of less than 900 were sons of wealth or better than comfortable means.

Most upper classmen were members of fraternities. We freshmen, however, all lived in a horrid cinderblock, prison-like dorm, Dunham. The noted architect, Edward Durrell Stone, designed the building at best on the cheap, at worst as revenge for some wrong done him in the past. It was a “U” shaped building opened toward the east. It was one of 3 Stone-designed buildings on campus in all of which I spent considerable time, which is why I have not the slightest grain of respect for him as an architect.

Apart from the blight of the Stone buildings, Hamilton College had a very beautiful campus, especially when it wasn’t buried in snow. Elihu Root, who’d been U. S. Secretary of War and State and was a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, had been born on the campus. His elderly daughter-in-law still lived across the street from the campus in The Glen House. Her home derived its name from the Root Glen, a piece of early 20^th Century landscape architecture as sublime as the Stone buildings were appalling. The Glen itself was a carefully planted “natural” space which had one patch of formal garden just behind the Glen House. Though the Glen was a beautiful delight, that small formal garden was a place of order and peace to one side of the studied rankness and riot of the Glen.

From the specifics of where I was, let me explain how it was.

The year 1968 is the pivot point on which turns American history from September, 1945 to the present. It is the most horrible year in my memory. In 1968 American neo-fascism cemented its position with murder and made the world in which we live today nearly inevitable.

Since World War II we’d given in to our fears: real fears of nuclear holocaust, imagined fears of communist subversion and general fears of a world utterly changed by war, economics and nationalism. We call it The McCarthy Era instead of the Eisenhower Administration and ignore that it might as well be called The Martin Dies Era, The Nixon-Hiss Era, The Apotheosis of J. Edgar Hoover or any one of dozens of other more apt names that don’t have the comforting sub-context of an alcoholic conman who was finally exposed, disgraced and dead; nothing more to worry about.

In 1960 enough of the old New Dealers and Left-wing patriots coalesced around John Kennedy to get him elected president and all too briefly turn the nation from its fears to its hopes and aspirations.

I am not going to do more than brush against conspiracy theories here. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe that all of the people responsible for the assassinations of the 1960s were ever caught or named or have ever paid for their crimes. But regardless of whether my belief is foolish or factual, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Allard K. Lowenstein, Fred Hampton and Robert F. Kennedy sought to turn us from fear toward hope, from resignation to aspiration. When it became clear that they would use power to focus America on its hopes and aspirations, they were murdered and the disciples of fear and resignation profited.

In 1968 if your hair were long enough to cover your ears, you had a beard or a moustache, didn’t wear the "correct" clothes or supported the “wrong” ideas the police could freely stop you without cause. Such detentions were as illegal then as they are today but the society was bent on keeping a lid on any variations from a comfortable norm. Conformity, rigid, debilitating and demeaning conformity, meant security to the many. Those who didn’t fit their rigid norms were treated as Muslims are since September 11, 2001 or Hispanic immigrants are and have been.

The vile Richard Nixon was again running for president spouting specious claptrap about a “secret plan to end the Vietnam War” to pander to the anti-war majority while developing a “Southern Strategy” meant to enfold the racists and other neo-fascists, who’d been allied with the Democrats since the Civil War, in the loving arms of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan was governor of California, elected on a platform of fear and neo-fascism supported by the likes of Max Rafferty.

The fact was that the nation was in the grip of change, some growing pains if you will. Anyone who was dissatisfied with the status quo was a “commie”, a “subversive” or, regardless of name, someone to be crushed so that nothing might change. Like King Canute, the guardians of the norm were trying to hold back the tide. Unlike Canute, this alliance of wealth, business interests, old pro-fascists, America Firsters and rabid anti-communists had a bloodthirsty eagerness to use force to hold back the tide.

The National Review was the front organ for the more rabid Human Events. The Young Americans for Freedom was the front organization for the John Birch Society. It was a time that grew out of the McCarthy Era and made its progenitor look tame. Still it was not the top-down institutional neo-fascism that’s gripped America since January 20, 2001. In 1968 it was still societal and informal even if in both cases snarling hate for anything that challenged the entrenched norm was the order of the day.

After supper on the night of April 4, 1968, I went back to my depressing dorm room to ready myself for rehearsal. On my way out my suite-mate, Lenny Kornberg, was listening to the radio and told me that Dr. King had been shot. I went to rehearsal not knowing whether he was alive or dead but fearing the worst. By the time rehearsal ended for me some other cast members had brought the news that King was dead.

On returning from rehearsal, I went into my room and shut the door. I sat at my desk numb for I don’t know how long, certainly less than half an hour. I sat there only until the celebration began.

Out my open window I heard voices, then cheers and fireworks. Some of my classmates were having an impromptu celebration of Dr. King’s murder.

I couldn’t take it. I put on my coat, grabbed a flashlight and went out to the quiet and peace of the bench in the formal garden of the Root Glen. By the time I got there I was moving from fury at the scum celebrating in the Dunham courtyard to an overwhelming sadness for my country and my world. I sat on that bench and cried for more than half an hour.

The night had grown misty. I was cold. Eventually I was worn out. I went back to my dorm. The next day I heard and read about the rioting that had erupted. I resolved to place my hope in Eugene McCarthy though I’d be quite happy to have Bobby Kennedy as president too. I crawled into bed believing that there might still be hope that we could salvage America from the fear merchants.

I was wrong.

[P. S. (November 8, 2011)  Not long ago a friend of mine mentioned that he'd read this entry. He asked me how many of my classmates were out celebrating Dr. King's murder that night. I told him that I did not know. It certainly was at least two and, from the cheering I heard rather more than three. Richard then made the point that a group of two or three or four racists was different from having a majority of my fellow students celebrating. On the surface he's correct but that is, I'm afraid, a parsing of the situation that is inaccurate as it is comforting. That anyone was out cheering a murder is pretty appalling. It's the same repulsion I felt at the dancing in the streets the night Osama bin Laden was killed. I'm not sorry that bin Laden is gone. He was a man of disgusting evil made worse by it's veneer of religiosity, much like Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps or Terry Jones. Personally, I'd be privately pleased if any of them were shot through the eye; however, I'm not about to dance in the streets should they be. What is worthy of note is that the college took no action against the celebrants. The incident didn't raise as much concern as fraternity vandalism.

What I would point out an illustrative incident that took place almost exactly two years later. By 1970 Hamilton College had undergone some changes. The coordinate women's college, Kirkland (since absorbed into Hamilton) opened in the autumn of 1968 bringing some civilization to the campus. The times and attitudes were slowly changing toward a consensus for personal liberty though the national slide into fascism was accelerating. We actually had significant numbers of students participating in efforts to keep military recruiters off the campus. On Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon went on television to announce that his "secret plan to end the war in Vietnam" included, as all neo-fascist "peace plans" always do, expanding the war into Cambodia. The response from America's campuses was predictable and angry but largely non-violent. That opposition was most definitely growing. Over the weekend Republican President Nixon referred to the protesters as "thugs". On Monday, May 4, 1970, as the school year was winding toward its conclusion, the Ohio National guard under the direction of Republican Governor James Rhodes, murdered four students and wounded sixteen others. Ten days later the Mississippi State Police murdered two black students at Jackson State. Largely in response to the Kent State murders a national student strike gained momentum and reached the Hamilton Campus. A group of my fellow students, motivated by worries that the police and military were now shooting white students like themselves and seeing more of an opportunity for advancement than a way to express a real conviction, convened a meeting in the college chapel.

The student strike committee had commitments of cash for supporting strike activities and there were various resolutions on how to apply that cash to express the opposition of Hamilton and Kirkland students to Nixon's expansion of the war. Among the requests for money was one from the Black Student Union for a modest amount. I don't recall the amount exactly but don't think it was more than $250. The debate went on longer than for many more dubious requests we'd already approved. I rose to advocate for the allotment to the black student group. Another man rose to oppose it and said the we had no idea how "those people" would spend the money. I replied that his statement was the most racist comment of the many I'd heard during that debate. I was generally and loudly booed by hundreds of students for pointing out that they were actually racist and ended up shouting down the entire assembly. The black students did not get any money from the strike committee and no one ever got an accounting of how the white students spent what they'd reserved to themselves. The point is that Hamilton College's administration and its student body in the years from 1967 through 1971 tended toward an easy, passive racism of which the celebration of Dr. King's murder was a stand out example regardless of whether two or two hundred students were out that night setting off fireworks. Not everyone was racist. I knew many who were not. I also know that we were a distinct minority of the student body.]

Do You Know Santa Claus?

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Computer problems. Other problems. Life sometimes intervenes to inhibit blogging though it really should be the other way around.

In any case, I have survived another Christmas Season. The enforced "joy" of this "most wonderful time of the year" is a little hard to take even when you have some reasons to be joyful. Christmas music is one of the harder things to take. It is ubiquitous. It is incessant. It is worse than elevator music in that many of the tunes are vicious ear-worms that eat away at your brain. Now, please don't misunderstand. I like some Christmas music. The minor key O, Little Town of Bethlehem, has an ominousness that makes it stand out amongst carols. My personal favorite is Good King Wenceslaus with its message of decency and generosity:

So, you Christian men be sure,

Wealth or rank possessing,

Which of you would bless the poor,

Shall himself find blessing.

I'm also partial to God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.

Among Christmas songs, there are 3 from the years of World War II that are special favorites. All speak of longing for something past and only tentatively possible in the future. The best known is, of course, Irving Berlin's White Christmas. In it the quiet, white world under its glistening blanket of snow is a dream of the past as it must have been for a lot of servicemen when it was written. Similarly, I'll Be Home For Christmas is filled with the ache of longing. Yet I find the most moving to be Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

The song was introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis. The song originates in 1943 and was so depressing that Garland demanded revisions. According to the Wikipedia entry, the song opened thus:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

It may be your last.

Next year we all may be living in the past.

and continued:

Faithful friends who were dear to us,

Will be near to us,

No more.

While those thoughts certainly were in the minds of many a person as the fourth year of war and second since America's entry into it concluded, they don't represent anything up-lifting. Hugh Martin, at Garland's urging changed the lyrics to a form only partially familiar today.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

'Til next year our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Make the Yuletide gay.

'Til next year our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,

Happy golden days

Of yore.

Faithful friends who are dear to us,

Gather near to us,

Once more.

Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.

Until then we'll have to muddle through some how,

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Loss and a very conditional hope for the future suffuse the song and make it all the more poignant when we consider its historical context. The final injunction retains the feeling that one must sieze this opportunity for a merry little Christmas because there may not be another. I don't mean to be so sober and depressing, but it is an achingly beautiful song even in the more up-beat and familiar Frank Sinatra version. Still, to return to my original point, there are some Christmas songs that need to be quietly and permanently retired. The dogs barking Jingle Bells is certainly the one that only the person making royalties from its play could love but the Chipmunks Christmas song needs to be buried very deep right next to those barking dogs.

But enough of the cynicism! How was my Christmas? Not so bad.

My friend, Anna, and I shared Christmas dinner with her soon-to-be 91-year old mother at the assisted living facility where Emma Catherine lives. We had a very good institutional meal which was punctuated with the poor enunciation of one of the servers. You see, the meal offered a choice of roast beef or roast turkey or both. Probably because of the two kinds of meat there were two kinds of potatoes, baked and mashed. The woman serving the side dishes asked each personoming through the line, "Mashed or baked?" She didn't enunciate clearly, however, and tended to elide and run her words together. So I'd barely begun eating when I thought I heard her say, "Masterbate?" "No. She can't have said that," I thought. Then I heard it again. A moment or two of processing and I realized that she was saying, "Masht er bak'd" Anna had heard it the same way I had so we had to explain it to her mom, adding that it was a good thing that the server hadn't any comments about plucking the turkey.

But the sort of high point for me came on Saturday, the 22nd. I was working as a cashier in the local arts association's Christmas store. A couple came up to my register with their little girl who was probably about 4 or 5. While I was ringing up their purchases the girl asked me, "Do you know Santa Claus?"

"Yes. I know him a little."

"I'm kind of afraid of him."

"Well, you don't need to be. He's o. k. Besides, did you ever think that Santa might be a little afraid of you?"

It took a second or two but her face screwed up and she began to cry. I felt terrible. I said, "He might be afraid that you wouldn't like him." That got her thinking and the tears went away as quickly as they'd started. Her parents understood and I think she might have left a little less afraid of Santa Claus. I hope so.

In any case, as cynical as I am about the commercialization of this season and the enforced conviviality that gives us some license for viciousness for the other 46 weeks of the year I do know Santa Claus a little and wish you all "a merry little Christmas".

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.