Congenial speak #57

History's a Duel of Fencers

It's the version of Robin Hood in the bizarro world. The tax bill the GOP is rushing past houses of congress will steal from the poor and give to the rich. What would Reagan say? What would Friar Tuck say? The bill is being paraded by senate at break-neck speed because each eyeful shows something worse about it. How can McConnell, Ryan do this as, like the health care bill, Trump sits with pen ready to scrawl his EKG-like signature. I don't even think this one has any intention to ever trickle down to anyone. The bill would do nothing to ever lower the national debt. It will in fact raise it by 1.4 trillion dollars. Now, with the cost of fighting what is, as far as I can see, another Vietnam situation in Afghanistan the bill will add insult to injury. A generation in 2085 will be talking about what their ancestors left for them. And then there is the embryo of another war, a bit further east, with not far to go. It's on the brink, the provocation of a poorly worded or timed tweet, an ill-candor emoji or schoolyard taunt.

Maybe this is the dawning of the true America. Maybe this is the fight we have been fighting since the end of slavery. Should Senator Sanders and Warren concede? Take a dive? Elizabeth Warren once compared the middle class to a fighter being on the ropes. Trump is here to deliver the knock-out punch. I read once that those Puritans who came to these shores in 1620 were not escaping religious persecution at all. They wanted to build a system similar to the one they had left in England. Well, most of them did. The other 2% wanted show stoppers, impediments to the plan to the stuffy wig fluffers had. Things they objected to like taxation without representation, all of which led to acts of civil disobedience like dumping tea in Boston Harbor. Some estimates today, based on John Adams and other journals, suggest that as many as 55% of the colonists were patriots, supported total independence from England. I am guessing that these were who would be your Warren and Sanders, the founders who really saw a future America as not just a knock-off monarchy, a Democracy in wolves' clothing with everyone cow-towing and afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. The colonists who remained loyal to England, did not want anything to change, would never think of thinking out of any box, numbered between 15 and 25%. It is the uncommitted, as with voters in elections, that warrant watching. These comprised 30 to 45% of those fourth generation puritans. I surmise that these were the ones that wanted it both ways. They were on the fence. They wanted, for instance, in regards to health care, the best leech bleeding services. But the lower and middle classes would have to work harder so they could have it. In addition, the access to affordable health care would be taken away from the lower classes.

In nearly three centuries only the methodology has changed, the leeches still apparently suck blood from the pale, the insulted injured Americans. If the GOP get the only significant legislation they achieved with control of both houses they will throw 13 million Americans off heath care by 2027, according to the CBO. Still, it is an amazing time. There is never a dull moment in America. I once, for shits and giggles, looked up what was the dullest day in history, the 24-hour period when the news was the least eventful. It was April 11, 1954. It had to do with the birth of a scientist who went on to invent a very obscure and ineffective search engine. Funny thing about computer searches, what they lead to, the answers found, the way your question is rarely answered with acuteness. Google could tell me the most boring day in history. It also told be the worst days in history. There was a top ten, including things like the Black Death, Crusades (#1), or fanatical terrorism. As far as a chain of causation, a day in June of 1914 kept coming back like groundhogs do. WWI began, escalated hostilities to the point of a gun pulled at an arch duke. Historians map out the chain of belligerents. How for a few reasons in the aftermath of WWI the fuses for II were exposed. In 1945, after V-J day, hostilities remained in the Pacific theater. China threatened French colonies. The US policed Korea to fight back the Chinese, North Koreans, and Soviets from 1950 to 1953. The French were fighting in Indochina to stop the Chinese communists from ruling Vietnam. The French eventually left, conceded, in 1956 and the US embarked on its own mission to save South Vietnam from Communism in the second Indochina war, what became the Vietnam War in which we were technically involved until 1975.

December 2017 could be nearly as costly in US history as June of 1914 was. Consider, if tyrant Trump's bill passes it would 1) raise the debt for generations to pay off 2) make health care unaffordable to 13 million 3) give him that one piece of legislation that could garner support for him, thereby laying a base for 2020 and a....second term. Passing this bill will have negative repercussions touching, probably sooner than later, the very rubes that voted for him, many of whom now in focus groups admit that he is an embarrassment. It will kill the middle and lower class. If Republicans object to programs like SNAP now, what do they think will happen when those people are taxed, made to pay more so they don't? No one, as far as I can see, as long as I've been around, has learned from history. Are they doomed to repeat it? Maybe they're adament on repeating it until it comes out right. Or are they just the descendants of those Mayflower waifarers who chose a spot on the fence?

Congenial-speak #56

Era of Women

Glass ceilings receive scratches, kind of like a woman's nails might irritate the back of a man in an auto-erotic fantasy. They leaves cracks, wounds proliferate to heal, they raise to seal, men whose fates are revealed. And when the bleeding begins, let the blood letting in, allow the confessions to begin. They're moguls of Hollywood, of Real Estate; they hide at Pennsylvania Avenue, on capitol hill and those of Hollywood. Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby, Roger Ales, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Weinstien, George HW Bush, Roy Moore, Donald Trump. Al Franken? He surprised me most. As a self-professed “Giant of the Senate” I really thought he was smarter. But, to his credit, contrary to most of his colleagues across the aisle Al apologized with a sincere letter right away. He invited the ethics committee to investigate him.

The alleged power-plays are about to begin. It is definitely there. Hillary, Mrs. C, the first woman was a first lady, the Democratic nominee lost her opportunity to be president on a constitutional technicality. Advantage women. Trump's glutinous past of disparaging women, beginning—and hopefully—ending with Rosie O'Donnell, opened the box, knit the pink pussy hats, began a narrative that exposed centuries of men for what they believe, or thought was to be believed still, after the 1970s. Something is happening here, something long overdue, like a library book that presents women in submissive roles that you were ashamed to return. The catharsis of this may be—aside from empowering women—that a female Democratic nominee in 2020 becomes president. (See my last post discussing the self-imploded death of the GOP.)

Politically, constitutionally speaking, as far as power-tripping, it started with the Adams, John and Abigail, America's first “power couple.” The fairer half, better part, of the couple, in a March 1776 letter, requested that her husband “remember the ladies” as he drafted the code of laws at the Continental Congress. She enlightened him, saying “all men would by tyrants if they could.” That was over two centuries ago. A track record set by the most powerful men in history, from Thomas Jefferson to JFK to Bill Clinton. It is a mentality that began with the aspiring actress on the casting couch and paused for air, for benign comic effect with Woody Allen and Pee-wee Herman in the movie theater. It never ends though. It's an idea that's been circulating since (for the sake of this post) the Garden of Eden. For want of a more concrete base, we will assume the whole woman from rib bubbe mayseh (Grandmother's tale), the apple, the serpent. Blame the media, advertising, history books, ANY book ever written before 1980, men who had their heads in their ass during the whole sexual revolution, blame men who refuse to let go of this alpha ideal. They hang on to it like Conservatives hang on to, for instance, the second amendment. Oddly enough there is a connection. Each argument is old, even archaic, pathetic and worn. Each pacifies a primal need, an instinct that gets less necessary or plausible with each decade. And, last but not least, each involves the wearing of a cod piece, and extension of a phallic symbol or fallacies designed to elevate the men reluctant to codify their code of ethics.

I was raised in a very feminist environment. Although, for all I knew, back when young people were working at the DFL office on Hennepin, where my mom went to work as DFL chairwoman in 1968, power-plays between older men and young women might have been going on. Anything's possible. I personally never saw women like that, to be the respondent people to someone who held power. Yes, in my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I sometimes refer to “silky-haired women in fuzzy ponchos” but what kid doesn't see the beauty in women who enter the house. At nine-years-old I certainly had nothing on them, and probably still don't. Is it something for themselves, self-ingratiating, following a goal, or does any man consciously say “hey, I'm going to go to law school after college, become a very wealthy attorney, and I'll have access to any woman I want?” I doubt 9 out of 10 men do. I sincerely believe that screwing women, along with all the contractors, was figured into Donald Trump's plan when he went to Wharton Business School. Nixon, Clinton, JFK et al. merely found it to be a pleasant benefit, an occupational hazard, an incidental provider of many, many ah-ha moments. That's not to say it's any less deplorable, but for them it was not pre-meditated. Obviously I have never aspired to any level of power. But, by the time this wave of men accused by women of harassment crests, it would not surprise me if I saw a living writer. I'm sure Hemingway, Henry James, Kerouac, definitely Bukowski did not get through their careers without incident. It would be a delicious irony if Hawthorn had been a harasser and/or an infidel. Fear not ladies, I just don't have it in me, the basic inclination for any power, the gall, the testosterone, the bladder, or the dangerous level of self-esteem that leads to arrogance.

Congenial-speak #55

A Slow Death

Is the republic happy? I sincerely doubt it. A year ago those under-appreciated forgotten rapscallions who crawled from the lattice work like termites with a bone to chew threw something at the fan that I think they really knew would not stick. In doing so, they unwittingly (or knowingly) left the door open a crack for the least desirable. They let in so many arcane symbols of our unsavory past that it was hard to see any shred of validity to what their red hats claimed, that it was not just a platitudinal herring to cross a line, to look noble as they gave the republic away to a billionaire celebrity, a former Dem...igoge who played upon their rouge-like stupidity. The had an alternative, an alt-left, even an alternative left candidate to someday delete the right and its self-indulgent philosophy.

Beginning with—oh, Jesus I suppose—the closer society got to really caring for one another, I mean beyond your odd charity, really working together as a whole, the person is either killed or cast aside in favor of—this time—the exact opposite. Lincoln tried to bring together a country, purge it of slavery, and he was killed. Kennedy tried to bring the nation together, equate black with white in unprecedented integration, he was killed. His brother espoused agendas of John, he was killed. Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when one would “be judged not by the color of his skin but by the contents of his character.” He was killed. John Lennon sang about peace. He implored us to imagine a world in which there was “nothing to kill or die for...” He was killed. There is definitely a pattern here, a fear of that old Cold-War bug-a-boo. . . SOCIALISM. The Marxist fear that someone at some point may have to give up something, make the fairest of concessions in order to “build a more perfect union for ourselves and our prosperity.” That echos fro my past, from Schoolhouse Rock. I think it was from the preamble to the constitution. Lest the billionaire CEO of the giant insurance company (yes Virginia, they do still exist under the ACA) forget that they got there by playing a third party role. They got there by decades of exploiting illness and misfortune of the middle and lower classes. In fact, a few people I know are pharmaceutical representatives. Now, I don't know how high they are on the food chain but as a member of the middle-class I can say I made their boss. Without millions like me buying their inflated drugs—that may inflate me causing me to buy another drug—they would not be in the tax bracket that was designed with loopholes.

I recognize the independent senator from Vermont, the man who one day in 2015 walked out of his office and declared that “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” On February 1 the following year, in Iowa, as I turned as old as the number of cards in a deck, he lost the state in the primary to his Democratic rival by two votes. It was early on and I really saw a chance for economic equality, for the current iteration of the story that had been the death nail for so many of his predecessors. He'd been low profile (I had not heard of him before 2015) he was no Paul Wellstone stumping on the senate floor, as I gather is often how it goes, to an audience on-demand. He was the wave maker, the instigator, the dark horse who had not the weight of the baggage ($$) of his rival. He was the first of the last of the grass-rooters, a horticulturist who grew things the way nature intends—from the bottom up. I was among the thousands who offered $20 to his campaign, to exist as a seed in the grass destined NOT to grow up like a Roy Moore. I received my “feel the Bern” coffee mug. At 52 I had a place alongside legions of millennial, voters I saw at my caucus who could be my children. The progressive message, the alt-left, the alternative to mainstream Democratic ideology was out there, placing its neck yet again on the well-whittled and selectively heard stump.

“The loser now will be later to win...,” sang our poet of the '60s, Minnesota's sound-geist to the movement to end war and bring civil rights to society. A parable of workers even claims in the bible that “the last will be first and the first will be last.” A prophesy? Something to put in the bank for another 240 years like a savings bond? Was your bible wrong Mr. Moore? What are the chances a pre-1970s Dylan, a Jew, would paraphrase a quote from the bible? It's just been a battle between the red and blue since the Civil War. Since Lincoln, the last in line, as he was shot in his theater box, as the first Republican to realize something was wrong. He realized that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. Over 600,000 died, black men fighting for their freedom, for democracy. They fought to hold the union together.

It is 152 years later and the loser of the Civil War is as close as it's ever come to winning, maybe even at breeches too immoral for Jeff Sessions (see 11/11 SNL sketch). But I fear (I laugh) that the forgotten Who fans that were fooled again in 2016, who were taken by a money laundering, tax evading New York hustler, a bone spurred charlatan who figured our that the best way to defraud the U.S. government was to act like he was presiding over it, have mortally wounded the elephant in the room—and everyone knows the penalty for that. As it lies bleeding in capitol halls, as tortured as the metaphor it created, a not-so-silent grassroots army of the democracy—the blue—has judiciously gathered to rip apart its carcass. Republican senators are leaving, bowing out or retiring, finding that screwing America won't be any fun if the paradigm shifts. McConnell, the man who looks like the Big Bang Theory's Sheldon when he was forced to smile, and Ryan won't support a child molester in the senate. A handful of blue states won big last Tuesday, electing a transgender legislator and taking some business from bathroom contractors. But Democrats should stay humble and not repeat the general election last year. Remember when everyone saw many “paths” to 270 for Bernie's successor and none for her opponent? Now is the time to merely sit back and watch the seeds grow. Now is the time to cotinue to defend democracy. Now is the time to watch the GOP poison itself more and more.

Congenial-speak #54

When eagle talons

hold pigeon holes

“Give democracy its day in court,” he said in 1967. On a trip to California, months into his Dump Johnson campaign, New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein began the long search for a candidate to run against Johnson/Humphrey as an anti-war candidate in the 1968 presidential race. He saw hippies exercising their first amendment right, assembling to protest the Vietnam war in ways that were not constructive. He meant that their forms of sometimes violent, dangerous, shock-valued protest were in the end counter-productive. He cautioned the difference in opinion should not be at first a protest, an us against them confrontation, but a display of constituents. Those against the war should show that they were willing to play politics, to uphold the constitution (which is somewhat more than the government could say from the beginning) rather than simply tear at it, burn flags, take a knee or hang people live or just in effigy.

Fifty years later we find ourselves giving democracy its day in court. However this time a rotten war is not the issue, it is protecting the rights of millions while an insane narcissist tramples out a constitution he's never read (at least further than “we the people”). Two thirds of the country has (for the most part) been non-violent for the past 253 days. This administration began side-stepping democracy before the last inaugural balls had descended. Any kind of democracy that I've known, that the founding fathers intended, as the Greeks conceived has come out of the Oval Office since January 21, 2017. Many of the numerous executive orders, coming almost weekly at the beginning, made if for no other reason than to recklessly tear away at his predecessor's policies, have been given many days in court. This is not the way government should work. But then you get what you pay for. You get what the electors say, not the populace. Democracy is given its day in court. It needs its day in court because democracy was given its day in court. Because the constitution had a clause, rarely invoked with the scope and necessity it was on December 19, 2016 to count the electoral votes, we now need to give barely perceptible democracy its day in court.

Any legislator worth his or her salt will agree the Vietnam War was unconstitutional. Johnson violated a constitution he'd sworn an oath to defend. All but two legislators who voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were guilty of the same violation. They gave Johnson that “blank check” to escalate the war to the point where it was a vicious cycle, producing jobs for the undertaker around a staring contest daring the other to blink. Five decades later democracy is just as fragile, just as subject to convolution. Saving it, remedying it when its very foundation is threatened is a meticulous course that takes time. Most presidents for example, unless the legislative majority opposes them, use the executive order judiciously, as a last resort. This president, who has the majority (but really, did he ever) signs EOs like a voluntarily ambidextrous primate eating a bushel of bananas.

Middle America has endured a lot in political history. The past 253 days has tested their resilience and compromising ability to give democracy its day the most in my lifetime, which was beginning around the time of Al Lowenstein's advisement. Upper America, well, they have theirs. They are, most often, the problem. Lower has been something America sometime forgets, or they think they are forgotten and may buy into the rantings of the candidate who says that there is “trouble right here in River City, tells his African-American friend he has nothing to lose. I am humbly from middle America. I spent my childhood watching, sometimes participating, as many middle Americans gave democracy its day. The result, arguably, upper got knocked down a peg, lower moved up one, maybe more. We are in the middle, mitigating with democracy as a trusted tool that has, believe it or not, a service record of occasionally tapping that vein in America that sees beyond the needs and wants of the few. It finds the channel that can distribute America's GNP so all will feel its effect

In a PBS series about John Adams there was a scene of a man being tarred and feathered, run out of town on a rail. It was brutal stuff to watch, painful, humiliating, violent, humorous—it had it all. It was definitely what would be seen today as cruel and unusual punishment. The tarred man was a colonist, but an impostor, a deviant who upset the balance of things, the democratic foundation Adams and others of the time were trying to birth. The eighth amendment had not yet been written to protect this outcast, this dissident who refused to give anything constructive its day. Currently, and under Bush, water-boarding was or may well be used as a permissible deterrent in the military. This would fall under cruel and unusual punishment. The current man in the WH owes a lot to the constitution. He is there because democracy, against the preference of over 3 million, was given its day.. He wasn't and isn't tarred and feathered, run out of D.C. on a rail because of democracy. He does not understand, woefully missing the irony, the contested, antiquated, long-debated auspices that put him there.