11 IV 2018: The Impeach Nunes Movement

So the congressman who represents the world of infamy, the leading rat of the House, David Nunes, is blathering about impeaching honest men. I look forward to the time when maybe Nunes is impeached or, at least, is listed in retrospectives on the Trumpzeit as the slimiest burrower in Donald’s dung heap.

8 IV 2018: U.S. is committing suicide??

Back again after a long hiatus … Not much has changed fundamentally since last August. But we’ve seen more, learned more of Trump and his ménage. Trump clearly needs psychiatric treatment (or to be put in prison) so that he does no more harm to himself and others. His family, friends, and appointees have proven to be wannabe plutocrats who are, if not criminal, at least sleazy through and through. Why don’t the American people and their elected representatives do something about this. Perhaps Mr. Jimmy Carter is right; maybe the American people want a jerk for president, someone as ignorant as they, someone as selfish as they, someone as hypocritical as they, someone as irresponsible as they. Unless the course of things changes soon, I have to conclude that the United States of America has a death-wish.

How will it die? It could wait and die of greed and the surfeit attendant upon it; it could die of sentimentality; it could die from ignorance. Or Americans might lose patience and slaughter one another, since we hate each other so. How could they accomplish this slaughter? The easiest way would be with firearms. There are plenty of them around.

As several investigations get closer and closer to Trump, he will surely try to distract us with a war. If we survive the war, maybe we will be chastened and move towards democracy. Perhaps we will have enough new citizens, young people and immigrants, whom the plutocrats have not yet seduced with their K-Mart, television, sports, and scandals, to find our way back to our ideals.

23 X 2017: Who crossed the line?

I read in the paper last week about the lawsuit brought by the ACLU for various disaffected people who had been with those blocking traffic, smashing windows, and overturning planters downtown, against the St. Louis Police for being too severe with them. The same article reports a statement of Sgt. Matthew Karnowski: “He also said police found six guns after the arrests.” I assume the guns were found on the ground, dropped there by people who’d been carrying them illegally. The police were dealing with an armed crowd of people who themselves or whose associates had committed acts of vandalism. “Innocent bystanders” who have any sense will keep well clear when the law is being ostentatiously broken. The protesters must find a way to separate themselves from criminals or potential criminals. The protesters may mean their demonstrations to be peaceful, but how can they be believed when people in the demonstrations break the law? Is the misbehavior associated with the demonstrations part of a plan to provoke the police? Is it intended to frighten the public? Or does it happen when a demonstration becomes an invitation to a block party for people with nothing better to do.

Today’s news reports the closing of an interstate highway and another invasion of the Galleria. On a television segment someone covering the closing of I-64 read off the list of the protesters demands, a long wishlist of wrongs to be righted. Few, if any, of these problems can be corrected at once. Most are long-term goals. But none of them can be achieved without serious leadership in the black community, and serious, disciplined behavior by protesters who wish to persuade the larger community.

21 X 2017: No right to be heard

I found on CNN this headline:

Bannon delivers blistering attack on former President George W. Bush

Why does the press continue to report drivel designed to shock?

George W. Bush’s criticisms of the selfish, pusillanimous kind of state that Bannon advocates apparently came too close to home, and Bannon, like his puppet Trumpy, was compelled to counterpunch. Wannabe-fascists like them ought really to have thicker skins, but there it is. Bannon launched a very nasty personal attack on Mr. Bush, asserting, in effect, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Now who is it who really does not know what he’s talking about? Why report this piece of ugliness from a public enemy like Bannon? Why allow him any standing beyond that of a radio-show host like Rush Limbaugh, a cunning man pandering to the ignorant?

19 X 2017: Unlimited free speech

Read about racist Richard Spencer’s attempts to make himself heard at the University of Florida. In a piece from the Associated Press that reported estimated cost of security for the event at $600,000, it was said that public universities “are compelled by the First Amendment to provide a speaking forum.” This is news to me. I believe the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but it surely does not guarantee an audience. State universities must restrict access to some who demand to speak on campus. Otherwise they would have to accommodate speakers who assert the moon is made of green cheese, that the earth is flat, and that there is no human-caused climate change. University of Florida was silly to be suckered in by an appeal to free speech.

Once Spencer was there and given a venue, he was prevented from speaking by the hecklers who made up a majority of the audience. These were suckers also, for I’m sure Mr. Spencer gets a lot more points with his base by being shouted down than by actually speaking.

Right-wing nutcases and publicity hounds should not be allowed to speak on university campuses. “But if the students invite them ….” The students are students. They are not adults and show that they are not with some regularity.

“Oh, but we are trying to have a diverse campus.” We really ought to get rid of diverse and diversity. These terms have no commonly agreed upon meaning in political discourse. If diversity is truly insisted upon, and any group of students can invite any speaker, the number of abusers of women, liars, egomaniacs, adulterers, cheats, and frauds on campus will increase, and in addition to this familiar group of reprobates, absolute diversity would require that a place be made for sadists, cannibals, and pederasts if a student group invites them.

Will common sense and moral authority ever return to America’s universities?

17 X 2017: “Thy banners make tyranny tremble”

This is a line from the first verse of the old patriotic song “O Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” The entire verse is as follows:

O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,
The home of the brave and the free,
The shrine of each patriot’s devotion,
A world offers homage to thee;
Thy mandates make heroes assemble,
When Liberty’s form stands in view;
Thy banners make tyranny tremble,
When borne by the red, white, and blue.
When borne by the red, white, and blue,
When borne by the red, white, and blue,
Thy banners make tyranny tremble,
When borne by the red, white and blue.

This is rather frothy stuff, but still it would have been a better national anthem than the impossible “O say, can you see.”

What I’ve been thinking about is the line: “Thy banners make tyranny tremble.” The United States of America is forsaking its role of leadership of the free world, reneging on its promises and treaties, and colluding with tyrants of every type. Pretenses to “Moral Leadership,” already called into question by torture of prisoners and “collateral damage,” are made truly ridiculous by our President’s expressions of admiration for and uncritical association with tyrants world-wide. Who is it trembles at our banners now? The upright, I would say, the idealistic, those who collaborate in service of justice and peace. They are the ones now afraid of the United States.

11 X 2017: A day without Donald

I have to admit that I, along with the media, mainstream and fringe, devote too much time to Trump’s uncivilized behavior. Clearly, we are being played. His behavior and rudeness are so shocking, no, not shocking, so repulsive, that it is hard to let them go by without some sort of comment. But I believe that is what he intends. We spend so much time complaining about what a perverse little shit he is that we fail to measure what a sneaky bastard he is also.

What I want to propose is this. Let’s have a day without Trump and see how it feels. Let all the news and non-news media boycott what Trump says for one day. No news of his speeches, no word of his tweets, and let’s see how it feels. We might enjoy it so much, and benefit from it so much, that we could go for a week or more without listening to Trump.

Let’s ignore what he says, but pay close attention to what he does, and fails to do. Popular superstition imagines a “Black Mass,” one in which all that is done and said in the real Mass is done backwards in adoration of the demons. Trump and his minions are celebrating their own black mass. They are doing just the reverse of what sound government and the good of our Country require. Let’s take note of what they are doing, in every detail, let’s work hard to thwart them, and then hold them to strict account when the reckoning finally comes.

10 X 2017: Imagine Trump in the honky-tonk of life

Trump’s recent tweets prompt me to wonder how things would go for Trump if he were not rich, to imagine how a belligerently vocal coward and bully like him would fare in the favored milieu of many of his base, the roadside beer joint. Yes, Mr. Trump is said to be a teetotaler, but his behavior is that of an chronic dry drunk.  I think that in any of the drinking establishments that have common sense, he would long ago have been forbidden entry as a chronic trouble maker, a danger to himself and to others. In less well-run bars, he would have been punched out so often that he’d have learned to hold his tongue.

3 X 2017: The Las Vegas slaughter, wholly predictable. Get over it.

The surprising thing about the shooting in Las Vegas is not that it occurred, but that such outrages do not occur far more frequently. Could anyone lead an active, half-way observant life in the U.S. without realizing how many crazies there are out there? Get out on the road, go to a football game, go to a Trump rally, go to a white supremacist or survivalist gathering, visit a  local gunshow, and you will see crazies “as thick as hasty pudding.” I’m not talking about your foam-at-the-mouth, hatchet-swinging crazies. I’m talking about your road-ragers and your internet trolls, about the crowd that wants to make the USA all white and all Christian again, about the willfully ignorant and subrational, about the multitudes that blame their own errors and deficiencies on the imagined malice of others. And firearms circulate freely in this this mental institution of a nation in incalculable numbers. We are addicted to firearms, and crave more guns and bigger guns, really ugly ones! Go to a gun show, go to a gun shop. You will not find graceful fowling pieces, single-shot target rifles, or weapons suited to the defense of house and home. You will find military grade firearms whose only real purpose is slaughter, although, thank goodness, they are more often used only to enhance b-movie inspired masturbatory fantasies. No, Vegas should be no surprise.

And yet, events like that in Vegas, thanks to our astounding capacity for denial, afford us days of 24-hour coverage of shock and surprise, hand-wringing, thrilling emotional catharsis, and political posturing, none of which ever does anything about the national maladies that create this atmosphere so conducive to mass shootings.

America has grown pathetically soft. At the time of 9-11, when we were treated to a nation-wide orgy of grief, terror, and mindless rage, I was studying at an institute that hosted a number of Israeli scholars. These Israelis offered America their condolences, up to a point. But they stopped when they saw us refuse to get over it and get on with responsible living. They observed that if Israelis went into such a paroxysm after every terrorist attack, the community and state would collapse altogether.

Whether the shooting in Las Vegas was “an act of pure evil,” or an act of mixed evil, or an exercise in self-indulgent and cowardly lunacy, we had better get past the emotional posturing and honestly confront our national sickness, hoping to prepare for future generations a more honest and rational community.

1 X 2017: Sparked no more

The Post Dispatch describes recent conflicts in downtown Saint Louis: “The protests are the latest sparked by a not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of former St. Louis patrolman Jason Stockley ….” Now Stockley shot Mr. Smith in 2011. Were demonstrations sparked in 2011? I don’t know. None are mentioned in current reporting. Anyway, a righteous indignation seems to have been ignited by the announcement of the acquittal of Jason Stockley three weeks ago. Protests were sparked then, but now some seem to be blowing on the coals to keep the fire alight. Why?