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.