When the July 4 sun rose here on the New England coast, there was a banner about the size of a beach towel strung over the front door of Newburyport City Hall with the black-on-white silhouette of a clenched fist and the words “Disarm” and “Defund.”
Since the shutdown began on the Ides of March, I rarely get out of bed before ten, so I would have missed it if not for a picture posted on social media which I did not see until after breakfast at noon.
Nor did I see the original post but a screenshot of it with a remark added onto the photo itself, though the name of the poster was redacted:
“City Hall this morning. Probably John G——- and his Crew of Thugs.”
As I read, left to right, I knew it had to be someone from my college days calling me by my formal name, and I swelled with pride at the second initial, until…. Poof! The poster had named someone else.
Yes, the full name was there, a fellow not much older than my daughter who, soon after the election of Vladimir Putin’s servant in November 2016, helped organize a local chapter of a national group devoted to electing Democrats for all state and federal offices.
Must confess to the cardinal sin of envy, which I felt immediately and for which I feel very bad. Then it occurred to me that the poster may have passed me over because he figures I’m too old to pose any threat to the old world order, which made me feel even worse.
The “John G” in question took it all in stride, playing along with a former city councilor’s suggestion that “Crew of Thugs” be the name of a new rock band. Knowing that the former councilor is a deft guitarist if daft vocalist, John G accepted the offer. This made me jealous yet again, and so I volunteered myself as a flautist with 45 years theatrical experience. I was hired on the spot.
Before we convene, I will ask that we forego the thuggish name in favor of one suggested by another of John G’s friends later in the thread, the “Online Arguments.”
If we were to engage the intended slur in an online argument, it would be easy to defend the targeted group. Their main work is writing postcards, tending phone banks, attending rallies, canvassing. All of which is well within the First Amendment.
But the smear artists of the right know this. What they are really up to?
The Culture War Manifesto delivered at the foot of Mount Rushmore, possibly at the very time the clenched fist was hung on Newburyport City Hall, made it very clear that the main MO of the Republican Party–all of it–will be to conflate the worst incidents that occur during protests (the thuggery) with the entirety of the protest movement (peaceful) as a way to discredit all of it.
In that speech, for instance, not one of the examples of monuments under attack was Confederate, even though his main theme was the “cancelling of our history,” and he delivered carefully crafted bios of the Rushmore four who had nothing to do with it–except for Lincoln who fought it, defeated it, and was assassinated by a malingering adherent of it.
So much for what the right will not hear. Now for what the left doesn’t want to hear:
A few blogs ago, I suggested that the use of the word “defund” plays directly into the hands of those who already rig the deck against us. So, too, the few attacks on monuments to those who were not part of the Confederacy, no matter what detail of a complex biography may be regrettable.
One reader complained that my last blog was not “very helpful.” Helpful? My main intent is to call attention to things that go unnoticed, to connect dots that need connecting. The blog, “De-Flag the President,” was about the frequent desecration of the American flag at Republican rallies–something that has gone virtually unnoticed while we focus all attention on their many Confederate, KKK, and Nazi flags. Seems to me it would be “helpful” to know and use that.
Since my critic gave no reason for his verdict, I’m left to guess that he thinks it unwise to target the people who fly those flags–or the people who by their silencetacitly approve of those flags and the desecration of the American flag–as if there’s still any chance they might be “persuaded” to vote for goodness happily ever after.
Good luck with that! Seems to me that we have had ample evidence of what they are willing to swallow–from the ridicule of a handicapped reporter during the 2016 campaign to the neglect of briefings revealed last month–to convince us that appeasement is a dead end. Much more important, more urgent, and more practical is gaining the attention of those who still think that any effort will not be worth it. If the 2016 election proved anything, it’s that it takes some sensation to gain that attention.
The banner on City Hall may be a bad idea. I’m already on public record with a newspaper column saying that the word “defund” is a bad idea.* Once they are done, however, let’s consider all the online argument we can stage from them.
Everything is cast in extremes, and the Republican Party’s gamble is that extremes will work. Problem for the rest of us is that, four years ago, they were right.
Solution in 2020, then, is to show just how extreme they are.
Newburyport City Hall, built in 1851, with the Betsy Ross flag, named for its designer who sewed the first one flown by Washington’s army a month or two prior to the Declaration of Independence.
If you can celebrate America and happily wave the flag this July 4 weekend amid reports that the president has not only ignored Russian bounties on those who defend and represent that flag, but has–following those reports–rewarded the Russian president with both concessions and endorsements on the world stage, then this post is not for you.
If you wave a flag or drive around with a bumper sticker or wear a hat or shirt that says “Support Our Troops,” then this post is for you only if you are paying attention to what has been in the news concerning our troops in Afghanistan this past week.
If you think that the Republican president supports those troops with anything more than lip service, and you dismiss the report as fake news or call it a hoax, then I have news for you: The American flag is not a happy face.
And for the last three and a half years, it hasn’t been at all happy.
In fact, for the first time in American history we are seeing the Stars & Stripes with a face of a president embossed on it. Those who fly it are blissfully unaware that this violates the US Code titled “Respect for the Flag.”
Not surprisingly, given his affinity for the Confederacy, the KKK, and White Nationalism, his image is also embossed on the Stars & Bars. Might call that a desecration of the desecration he holds in high, wind-blown esteem, along with the “very fine people” who wave it.
All these years we have heard and used the expression “wrapped in the flag.” Perhaps that’s the secret of Trump’s success: He comes wrapped in two flags.
Or should I say three? In the town of Newbury, Mass., where I live, there are at least three homes that fly white-on-blue “Trump” flags with the MAGA slogan spelled out in red. I’ve spotted others in Eastern and Central Massachusetts, not just for the 2016 or this year’s campaign, but as permanent as the Old Glory above it (at least they get that right) and Gadsden’s snaking “Don’t Tread on Me” below.
While America over the years has gone ga-ga over athletes, entertainers, and a few politicians here and there, no one has ever had their name run up flag poles. Every president from Obama back to Kennedy would have either laughed or been dumbstruck at the suggestion. Eisenhower, Truman, and FDR would have been embarrassed and mortified.
This is called “Cult of Personality,” and it shows that he has more in common with Stalin and Mao than he has with any former leader of the free world.
If, despite all that, you still want to celebrate and wave a flag, then your happy face idea of patriotism is not for me.
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In the text of Section 8, see (g) for “The flag shall never have placed upon it…”:
Worth noting that the words “knee” and “kneel” do not appear in the code, although I tend to attribute that controversy to the inability of many people to distinguish between the words “during” and “against.” No surprise that many of them are those unaware that embossment of images–or use as clothing, or use in advertising–is disrespectful according to the US Code.
This is among many descecrations of the American flag that is sold as “Trump merchandise,” not just flags, but images on mugs, t-shirts, etc. At 3×5 feet it originally sold for $15.99 but is now available for just $7.99. Another desecration popular at Trump rallies appears below.
We like to believe that America encourages innovation and rewards those who find ways to improve the lives of others, particularly when it comes to saving time, effort, or money.
The old “build a better mousetrap” adage is so ingrained in the American psyche that, when confronted with evidence to the contrary, such as the Big Three automakers’ crackdown on the electric car in the 1980s, or Big Oil’s suppression of solar energy for four decades—both with the aid of state and federal legislators—we dismiss it as political aberration.
Here’s review I wrote in 2016 of a book about such aberrations. Too bad it was for a publication that may have gone out of business before they received it–nor was it ever posted online. This year, the memory of it has nagged me since the impeachment hearings due to the unnamed judge who called the author “a turd.”
That judge is Louie Gomhert, now a US Representative from Texas’ first congressional district, among the Republicans most hostile to Lt. Col. Vindman, Ambassador Yovanovitch, and all others who bore witness to presidential abuse of power in the impeachment hearings. More recently, Gomhert was the member of a House hearing committee who drummed on the table in front of him to drown out health officials testifying about the pandemic.
And then there’s the commentary on criminal justice in America, and race, always race:
Deep in the Heart
In Cornucopia of Evil: A True Story of Murder, Cover-up and Injustice, a memoir that reads like a success story turned mystery embedded in an expose of corruption, Michael Collins, a forensic documentalist (more about that later), builds and delivers a strong case that crackdowns on innovation are anything but aberrations.
Most civil servants and journalists would use the word “systemic,” but Collins’ name for it does not let participants so easily off the hook. Rather, he eschews the idea of a system that seduces those who hold power and purse strings with a term insisting that they game it:
The Enterprise.
First published in 2005, Cornucopia of Evil is gaining renewed attention due to Collins’ run for the Texas state senate. As many early reviewers noted, Collins, now 79, remains an avid advocate for the less fortunate and for those who are easy marks for exploitation.
As a young idealist just returned from a Cold War tour of duty in Germany, Collins first encountered the “enterprise” in Eastland, Texas, where he became a banker—and campaigned for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket and “every Democratic nominee thereafter, from the courthouse to the White House.”
All well and good in LBJ’s Texas, and Collins barely noticed that “without so much as a notification or a nod of the head, I had become a member of what then was considered a nameless club.”
Before long his civic spirit would take him into the poorer neighborhoods of African-Americans, finding ways that his bank might work for them. This didn’t sit well with the enterprise that
traced its roots back through the father, the father’s father… until they ultimately arrive at the era of the Carpetbaggers and the Reconstructionists… (and) had its genesis at a time when the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black farmers and white sharecroppers…
Collins’ efforts were tolerated because his political connections made him “of value to the enterprise.” (An aside: For a look at 1960s Texas when and where there was little tolerance for integration, see the Port Arthur scenes in the first five minutes of the recent Janis Joplin documentary, Little Girl Blue.)
About an hour and a half west of Fort Worth, in Eastland where “school segregation was at its worst for inequality,” Collins’ outreach eventually drew him into courts of law as a coach for those who knew nothing about it, including a homeless veteran with PTSD arrested for urinating behind a supermarket.
When the sentence was jail, Collins politely protested to a judge he considered a fellow member of that nameless club. After a pause, the judge asked: “Has anyone ever told you that you’re like a turd that won’t flush?”
As persistent as that implied, Collins continued assisting low-income people in court, eventually conceiving ways to present evidence—using charts, diagrams, and scale models—making evidence so clear to juries that word of it spread:
I began refining and producing a simple kit called Re-N-Act… It only took one small ad in an insurance industry publication to bring in orders from all over the country. It was going to become a standard in the industry.
Hence, Collins’ self-designated job title: Forensic Documentalist. Quitting his day-job at the bank, he was at the threshold of a lucrative career only to have the door slammed in his face by a third wife who appears to have married him for just that purpose.
That door was barred—in both senses of the word—by lawyers all too aware of a decrease in demand for their services, and therefore a decrease in income. (Aside Number Two: If you saw last year’s Oscar-winning film, Spotlight, there are several scenes in Cornucopia that cannot help but remind you of the journalist played by Michael Keaton saying to the lawyer hoping to gain his silence, “That’s how it begins, isn’t it? One guy just leans on another…”)
Interspersed with his ventures into community involvement and court proceedings, his personal narrative is equally compelling: From his formative years, through military service, through the breakup of his first marriage, through the deaths of his second wife and his eight-year-old daughter.
That last becomes as suspicious as tragic when Collins reveals that the doctor who signed the certificate was never at the hospital and his attempts to question the hospital staff met with evasion. Doctors, of course, are members of the enterprise and have its protection.
All of which makes the first two-thirds of Cornucopia a page turner. His mention of a meeting with Harry Reasoner of 60 Minutes comes as no surprise, and his meeting with Steven King—at King’s request—about the possibility of a film needs no cinematic aside.
Indeed, the first 19 of the book’s 28 chapters are easy to imagine in comparable settings and a comparable pace to Spotlight with Keaton as Collins—or to 1981’s True Confessions with a young Robert De Niro as he played a priest complaining to an archbishop, “Looking the other way is getting to be a full-time job.”
This includes a most poignant chapter titled “My Own 9/11” written by Collins’ older daughter, a few pages that make as strong a case against suicide as you’ll ever read. Collins adds another formidable case regarding family discord, but it unfolds as a surprise near Cornucopia’s end, and I’m afraid I have already overrun one spoiler alert.
Be assured that Collins seasons all this food for thought with comic relief, such as in “Night on the Town” when he mistakes a glass of oil to fuel a floating candle for a “drink on the house.” May seem like a wild tangent from Cornucopia’s themes, but the mistake underscores Collins’ willingness to be involved, his openness to the unfamiliar. More to the point, his recovery from the mistake makes what others might call his stubbornness a sure sign of resiliency.
Much of the last third of the book delves into details of Collins’ various legal proceedings. No question that these chapters—most of them with the words “enterprise” or “evil” in their titles—will fascinate and perhaps prove useful to readers hoping understand the nuts and bolts of how old boy networks operate. In terms that apply in varying degrees to most workplaces, it does analyze what might be called “adult peer pressure”—most specifically, how passivity, like silence, can constitute consent.
For readers who may feel bogged down after so much fast paced drama, the last chapter, “Why Take a Stand?,” and Epilogue offer a most satisfying finish, very well summed up by the book’s last page:
A photo of a tombstone Collins has waiting for himself with his date of birth followed not by another date, but by three words: “To Be Continued.”
No, he will never be flushed, but if Michael Collins’ campaign is as convincing as Cornucopia of Evil, he’ll soon be in the Texas state senate where he will no doubt do some flushing of his own.*
His continued book is a testament to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a better mousetrap.
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*Collins, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, lost to incumbent State Senator (District 22) Brian Birdwell, who ran unopposed in the Republican primary. The margin was 70-29.
Yes, girls and boys, drop those toys, ’cause we’re gonna play: Monkey See, Monkey Say!
My name is Helen Highwater, and I’ll be your host tonight for a brand new fill-funned game, a remedy for polarization no matter what happens to those poor polar bears. F’ ’em! Time to LOL!
Here’s how it works: First, I pick a segment of the American population. Second, I pick a series of recent news items. Third, I follow each with four responses from that group, except that one is not real.
That’s it, and that’s where you come in! Put yourself in the shoes or shoehorn yourself into the minds, however tight the fit, however weird the sh– of our “chosen people,” identify the one bogus response, and then send in your prizes to claim your answers!
Ready? Okay! For tonight’s first-ever round, imagine that you are a Trump supporter, and the news items are:
In the Dead of Night: The Republican president retweeted a video of supporters at a golf course wearing his shirts and caps yelling praise for him, including calls for “White Power!”
1. Fake News! 2. Very fine people! 3. They meant The Beatles’ White Album! Give ’em a break! 4. Wow! That’s either outright racist, hopelessly careless, or rock-bottom stupid!
Campaign Finance Fraud: The attorney general erroneously announced that a federal prosecutor in New York in charge of several fraud cases involving the Republican president was “stepping down,” and would be replaced by a prosecutor in New Jersey who is a frequent golfing partner of the president.
Fake news!
Deep state!
Witch hunt!
Wow! He thinks he’s above the law, and Barr is aiding and abetting his assault on the Constitution!
Not Responsible: Those who attended the Tulsa rally had to sign waivers that absolved him from responsibility should they get sick. Prior to his appearance in Tulsa, his advance team went through the auditorium removing “social distancing” signs from the seats.
Fake news!
Everyone has to take care of themselves!
Social distancing is for wimps!
Wow! He really doesn’t give a damn about us! We’re nothing but gullible props!
What Polar Bears? This month, Siberian towns north of the Arctic Circle reported 100 degree temperatures for the first time ever.
Fake news!
So what!
Enjoy your new beaches!
Oh! Maybe climate change is real!
Laying Waste: The Republican president refuses to wear a mask even when touring factories that make them. In Maine, his host factory, as a matter of policy, discarded all masks made that day.
Fake news!
Picky, picky!
What’s a policy?
Hmmm, maybe he is an f-ing moron!
AKA Obamacare: At the end of June, as virus numbers kept spiking across the country and as several states, including Texas, had to re-shut down as hospitals filled to capacity, his administration asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, wiping out insurance for an estimated 23 million Americans.
Fake news!
Some people need to die for the sake of the economy!
I need a haircut!
How on earth did I ever support such a cruel, inhuman thing?
What Lesson? Prior to the impeachment vote, at least four Republican senators said that he had violated the Constitution and abused his power–and yet still voted to acquit.
Fake news!
Oh, I think he learned his lesson!
We’ll have their heads on a pike!
Senate Republicans are spineless weasels.
Bounties on American soldiers: The Republican president was briefed in March by US intelligence that Russia had offered–and paid–bounties to Afghan rebels to kill American troops, and did nothing. In April, he urged the G7 to admit Russia, which was expelled following their invasion of Crimea, back into the group.
Fake news!
It was Obama’s fault!
He wasn’t told! He didn’t know!
Wow! That’s treasonous!
Not Just Kidding: He put more effort into saving Confederate statues than into saving American soldiers.
Fake news!
What about Benghazi?
We prefer our soldiers bronzed!
How did I ever fall for this lowlife?
And that’s it!
All you need to do is write down your nine answers on the back of a twenty dollar bill and send it to me, your host, Helen Highwater, 20 Jackson Way (or 20 Tubman Way depending on what happens in November), Plum Sandbar, People’s Republic of Massachusetts 01951.
Write them on a fifty and special consideration will be granted.
And that’s our show for tonight! Remember to tune in next week when we will get into the minds, such as they are, of people who think that the entire world is their phone booth, or maybe that their phone is the entire world.
At first I planned to use an image of the three monkeys in the see no, hear no, say no pose, but while clicking around for one, I found several websites that revealed something I never knew:
The “Three Wise Monkey,” as they are known originated as a Japanese maxim with a meaning that could not be more opposed to the meaning which it has long had in America. Several websites describe this, but none seem agreeable to being embedded here.
So I went looking and found this grotesque irony for the banner. Then I realized that I myself wanted to see no such thing, say anything about it, or take the chance of hearing about it from anyone who didn’t read the blog first. The one in the center looks a lot like the publisher in Little Women. So then I went back looking for a cartoonof the three–and found four.
At times you might think that the only way to tell the two apart is that all the footage back then was in black and white while all the footage now is in all-too-living color.
So ironic that it would come down to a matter of color.
CNN is re-running its four-part documentary 1968 due to the in-the-streets, across-the-nation parallel of Black Lives Matter to the Civil Rights movement. Right down to athletes kneeling before games who could be grandchildren of the two who raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics.
Both took place during a rendition of the national anthem as a way to call attention to injustice in the “land of the free,” as the song goes, but America, then as now, cannot distinguish between the words during and against, and so the gesture was ignored at best and resented at length.
Equally parallel–though Don Lemon doesn’t mention this in his intro, doesn’t need to–is Donald Trump now to George Wallace then. Yes, Wallace had an ideology while Trump does not know what ideology is–or what ideas are–but the Alabama segregationist’s sowing of hate and division, his incitement of violence, and then presentation of himself as a candidate for “law & order” are as well displayed in the archival footage as have been Trump’s on cable news since his campaign.
And equally parallel to that is the outright racism of supporters who wave Confederate flags and yell obscenities at the press. In 1968, the microphone is put before construction workers, cab drivers, women running downtown shopping errands: Why do you support Wallace?
Answers, over and again: He tells it like it is. He says what he really means. He’s easy to understand. He talks like us.
All of that was apparent to those of us who recall Wallace’s presidential campaigns–he ran again in 1972–in real time. In fact, I recall telling my daughter during a string of violent Trump rallies and mass shootings in 2016, “Now you know what it was like to live through 1968.” Might have been too easy for me to say. I was referring to the year of my high school graduation; she heard it about when her son was 18 months old.
For those parallels I recommend 1968, but there’s more that will interest my fellow Boomers, OK or not, behind the scenes reports that took me by surprise and have me once again asking, what if?
Wallace knew that he could not win the election, but he also knew he could throw the election into the House of Representatives by taking enough electoral college votes from the South, including Texas. To do it, he needed a running mate with a nice guy image to soften the edge on Wallace himself but would still appeal to the South.
It was that nightmarish prospect that led newscaster David Brinkley to tell his NBC audience: “This may be the last year for the Electoral College, and I think it would be a good idea if it was.”
His first choice was Happy Chandler, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball. He dropped that idea as soon as he learned that Chandler was the one who presided over MLB’s integration, levying fines on opposing team managers who taunted Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson.
First offer went to Dave Thomas, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, who said no thanks, I have a business to run and “I don’t want to alienate half my customers.”
Finally, former Air Force General Curtis Lemay accepted. A hero of WWII who led the firebombing of Japan, he was a most attractive candidate except for one flaw: He was a staunch advocate of nuclear weapons at a time when the American public didn’t want to hear about it. Neither did the Wallace campaign who coached him before his first press conference not to talk about it, which he did not in his opening remarks.
First question was what he thought of nuclear bombs. His answer went on and on and on, long enough for the camera to pan twice to Wallace who you see melting–and then actually walking out while his guy was still talking about places where “nature comes back better than it was” with all the bad bombable people still there, “so, yes, it’s a good thing.”
Wallace plummeted in the polls, and Brinkley was spared his nightmare.
No question that the year was overall a nightmare–war, assassinations, race riots, police violence–and 1968 reflects all of it, but the cultural context is also generous–from the relevance of films such as The Graduate, Heat of the Night, and 2001, to the soundtrack of songs such as “Love Child,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and “Time Has Come Today,” to the comic relief of Laugh In, the sentiment of Elvis’ comeback, and the optimism of a preliminary Moon launch.
Yes, it omits a few items worth knowing today: Republican presidential hopeful George Romney’s use of the word “brainwashed” to describe the American public’s perception of Vietnam after he returned from a fact-finding mission. He was right, of course, and it was the precise word, but not one that anyone wanted to hear. So it ruined his career.
And where were the Soviet tanks that rolled into Czechoslovakia? Were they left out because neither of those two countries still exists? On the other hand, 1968 did very well to capture what it was like to be a teenage male with a draft card in your wallet. It’s just that I recall the occupation of Prague as the time I felt it most acutely.
And one error: Boston was not among the cities that erupted into violence following the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was an exception, largely due to the presence of singer James Brown who was scheduled to perform in the Boston Garden that night. He had a very calming effect on the crowd and briefly shared the stage with Boston Mayor Kevin White. The mistake is especially odd after 1968 covers the role of James Brown in the year’s progression, describing his song of that year, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” as very much a part of the soundtrack of Civil Rights.
Enough attention so that Brown’s famous theatrics with his cape during “Please Don’t Go” is in black and white while the “Be Proud” anthem is sung in living color.
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For the full story, there are numerous sources. This one includes the fascinating, poignant role of the Australian runner who was the third medalist in the event: https://www.history.com/news/1968-mexico-city-olympics-black-power-protest-backlashThere’s a clip from this interview in which David Frost rattles off a series of quick questions about Lyndon Johnson’s chances for re-election months before Johnson abdicated and Kennedy announced. Kennedy says “Yes” to each one until Frost asks about a possible disaster for the Democrats, expecting Kennedy to take the conversation from there. Instead, Kennedy smiles and says, “Yes.” Frost and his studio audience laughed as loudly as I did last night.LBJ’s address to the nation, March 31, 1968, began with a lengthy description of the war and what he hoped to accomplish by way of negotiation. The last minute or two brought my father and I out of our chairs, as I suspect it did many who were watching, as he slowly revealed reasons for his closing announcement, that he would not seek re-election. The CNN documentary lets it unravel in much the same way, to the same effect, even though you may know it, 52 years later.Final count: Nixon 301, Humphrey 191, Wallace 46–the last election in which a third party candidate has received electoral votes.
How many times have you heard someone begin a sentence with, “I am not a feminist, but…” or “I am not an environmentalist, but…”?
If you have taught or taken college classes or attended meetings in your local town or city hall these past 36 years, chances are you have heard it many times. In 1984–the year, not Orwell’s novel (although this story well illustrates it)–the Republican Party issued a curious instruction manual to all candidates, incumbents and challengers, running for all federal and state offices.
Curious because its sole purpose was to dictate their choice of words and phrases.
Some of the instructions appeared innocuous, such as never turning the name “Democrat” into its descriptive form, Democratic. But the effect of repetition went beyond appearance by disconnecting the subject from any philosophy or vision of self-governance. Yes, it’s the political party but nothing more. Just as any talk about, say, the Indianapolis Colts has nothing to do with horses or horseshoes.
Moreover, the sheer awkwardness of the noun-as-adjective has a conditioning effect over time if for no other reason that it makes the subject–any Democrat or any number of them–sound just as awkward.
Most of the 1984 list, however, is far more direct and could appear in an updated glossary of Orwell’s “Newspeak.” The directives continue to warp discussion, debate, and innocent private conversation to this day. Repetition has made them seem true.
The reason we hear people disavow feminism and environmentalism even as they take feminist and environmental stands is because of the resolve of the Republicans to always link the names to words such as “hard-line” and “extreme.” No matter how moderate a move might be to gain equal pay, it is never made by a feminist, but by a “hard-line feminist” or a “feminist extremist.” Any call to lessen pollution comes from an “extreme environmentalist” or an “environmental hardliner.”
You’ve heard the word “goose-step”? This is goose-speak.
The instructions left some room for improvisation such as “environmental wacko” and “uppity feminist,” but most of that is reserved for the base.
Another stunt that has survived since Reagan has been to always refer to union presidents & representatives as “bosses,” even though they are all elected. You never hear that word applied to CEOs, even though they literally are bosses. Instead, we get “job creators,” even though they all too often are job eliminators.
Over time, the list grew. In 1996, Sen. Robert Dole, a native of a small town in western Kansas named Liberal, seemed to believe he could win the presidency by dripping the word “liberal” with sarcasm three times in every sentence. In 2000, George W. Bush tried to put the lipstick of “ownership society” and “compassionate conservativism” on the pig of privatizing Social Security.
Ten years ago this week, Republicans pounced on Barack Obama’s use of the word “empathy” to describe Elena Kagan, his nominee for the Supreme Court. Kagan agreed in the hearings that empathy could never influence, much less override written law, but the impression was made. Thanks to the repetitive, slurring condemnations of the word and the idea behind it, that impression for many Americans remains: Empathy is unAmerican.
Since then, Republicans have made a point of using the deliberately misleading term “Death Tax” in place of the accurate and reasonable “Estate Tax.” And Sarah Palin introduced “Death Panels,” a cruel–and equally deliberate–distortion of the Affordable Care Act’s provision for “end of life counselling.” No report yet on whether the Disaster from Alaska was among many Republicans who urged elderly Americans to be ready and willing to die as a sacrifice to the economy for the sake of the young among us.
Finally, in the last three years, Republicans have gone completely off the rails of honesty and logic with bizarrisms ranging from “alternative facts” to “perfect phone calls.”
For all the talk of “fake news,” we’ll do well to address fake language every time we hear it. Unfortunately, it’s not just for Republicans anymore.
From the Newburyport (Mass.) Daily News (6/24/20):
Deflate theWord “Defund”
When the Indianapolis Colts accused the New England Patriots of deflating footballs five years ago, no one who knows anything about the sport thought it meant taking all, most, or even very much air out of the ball.
Spectators at home and in the stands never noticed the difference, nor did the broadcasters who wondered aloud why the game’s second half was delayed.
Judging from the rout that the Patriots inflicted on them with fully inflated balls in that second half, the Colts likely wished they themselves never noticed.
Today, no matter their home team, Republicans across the country are delighted that most Americans do not and will not notice that the word “defund” is much like “deflate.”
That’s why, as one commentator put it, the slogan “Defund the Police” is “a valentine to Republicans.”
Sure, anyone paying attention knows that it’s a call to re-direct excess funds from police departments to community, health, educational, athletic, and arts organizations—all of which are underfunded.
Police funding is excess because most cities and towns expect police to solve problems far better suited to such groups.
But Republicans count on voters who see and hear only surfaces, which in this case appears to say abolish police. A call for anarchy.
The guy who modelled his 2016 campaign on the “Law & Order” campaigns of George Wallace & Richard Nixon in ’68 will harp on “Defund the Police” from here to November.
Joe Biden is right to disavow the slogan—which will cause the superficial all-or-nothings on the Democratic side to disavow him—but that giant yellow painting on the DC street might as well be a picture of Chairman Mao.
If “defund” conveyed an immediately understood and accurate description of what is being called for, I would endorse it.
Since Obama first proposed universal health care in 2009, I have often made the case for bold, New Deal measures, without regard for how flat-earth Republicans will react.
For example, “Democratic Socialism” and “Single Payer Health Care” are terms that Republicans easily twist, but the words have singular definitions that cannot be changed.
You cannot say that about “defund.”
Why? Because every Democrat you can name, moderate to progressive, adamantly opposes Republican calls to “defund” Planned Parenthood.
We can’t have it both ways. If the word means eliminate in one context, it means eliminate in another.
This controversy is exasperating because it is unnecessary. Absurdly so. So many other words and phrases are available to advance the cause. That’s why Biden rejected it.
America is a place where politics are expressed and taken in extremes, absolutes, all or nothing.
Unfair? Yes, but easy to avoid if we pay as much attention to what we say as we ask others to pay to all that is said.
As much attention to the second half as to the first.
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Quite a few images such as this at https://quotesgram.com/orwell-1984-newspeak-quotes/You can also find several t-shirt versions of it by typing “1984 orwell instruction manual images” into a search engine. But be careful which you choose, as some are marketed by Libertarian groups.
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out. Part commentary on race, on politics, on history, on education, part book review, part literary survey, and part confessional from a guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic, it may strain the patience of anyone looking for tight, contained, targeted, single messages from what they pick up or open or click to read. If this was a newspaper I could suggest turning to the funny pages or to Dear Abby, but even here those diversions and so many others are only a motion away.
Perhaps the built-in diversion of occasional snippets of lyrics from songs or verses from poems will get you through the night into which I would prefer not to go gently.
America’s Original Sin
At some point the Black Lives Matter movement will turn to elementary and high school curricula, and Huckleberry Finn will be in the crosshairs of the first guns aimed.
Attention to curricula is necessary and will be welcome by any educator worthy of the name. Changes in education regarding race are as long overdue as the removal of monuments and flags that perpetrate beliefs and attitudes unchecked by education—all while those who cling to them claim that such monuments and flags are “our history.”
“How will we know our history?” they ask. “When was the last time you picked up a book?” I ask in return.
No high-school or college teacher of American literature or history these past 30-years needs any reminder that Huckleberry Finn is on the top-ten list of banned books every year due to the frequent appearance of the N-word in its pages.
Most all of them—of us, since I was one from 1982 to 2002—argue that the novel is an expose of the evils of slavery, that the runaway slave Jim is an entirely sympathetic, humane character, and that the word appears only in dialogue and in a 14-year-old’s first-person point of view—in other words, as people spoke in that time and place.
The debate seems to re-emerge nationally about once a decade. I recall it in the late 90s, and I read about it in 2011. So, when it comes up later this year or early next, it’ll be right on cue.
My fear is that the book will be burned, literally as well as figuratively, by those who should know better—for nothing better than the sake of political expediency, a simplicity that makes no distinction between the expose of satire and the ridicule of hate. And that Mark Twain’s expose of “America’s original sin,” a phrase he coined to describe slavery, will be lost to a politically convenient attitude of “out of sight, out of mind.”
On the other hand, the push to rid school curricula of racist literature has an irrefutable point. My point is that it can be achieved without the collateral damage of erasing works essential to understanding a past that has shaped America’s present.
Wake Up, White Boy!
Another classic of American literature, Look Homeward, Angel, the 1928 novel by Thomas Wolfe—the Thomas Wolfe of North Carolina, not the Bonfire guy of New York City—was a high school assignment that I opened 52 years ago just enough to add quotes to a book report gleaned entirely (though put in my own words) from Cliff Notes. Up till then, just weeks before graduation, I never cared much for English classes or literature or writing, but the teacher gave it an A+ and praised it, including reading a couple passages in class.
How he smiled and clenched both fists in front of him while calling it “tight” I will never forget.
These were the years of Civil Rights and Vietnam, the draft and LBJ’s “Generation Gap.” Central Catholic High School put James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time on the summer reading list before that senior year. Most images of anyone reading a book have the reader’s hands holding it, but my memory of Baldwin’s Fire has the arms extending from the book with hands grabbing my collars, shaking me, “Wake up, white boy!”
From a typical American boy obsessed with girls, sports, and cars, I turned into someone wanting to be involved. The A+ for Angel showed me how. Before I ever set foot on a college campus, I thought I could do with the draft what Baldwin had done with race.*
Thus began my loss of interest in a future of banking and finance that I had imagined for myself. No one believes me when I tell them that I entered Salem State as a math major, and just weeks into my first semester I didn’t believe it myself. Instead of learning calculus, I was typing letters to editors and joining the student newspaper, the beginning of 50 years and counting of various literary pursuits. Call it Karma. Due to a fraudulent book report, I was cast into a life-long shoe-string existence.
Through it all, the 522-page, large-format-but-small-print paperback followed me all these years only to sit unopened on shelves in Maine, both Dakotas, Oregon, Colorado and back here in Massachusetts before a pandemic shut down libraries and I ran out of shorter books to read. Truth is, I always intended to read Look Homeward Angel to atone for my sin. Call it the curse of Catholicism at odds with the debility of procrastination.
Addition Beats Subtraction
The casual, frequent use of the N-word and the constant use of words such as “sullen” to describe servants in the mountains of western North Carolina circa 1900-1912 guarantee that Look Homeward, Angel will never be required reading in any American classroom short of the upper classes and graduate seminars of college students majoring in American Literature. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, this is no exposé and condemnation of slavery or its Jim Crow aftermath. Yes, it is third-person, but the boy Eugene Gant is so clearly the narrator’s younger self that there’s no distinction as there is with Huck. There’s nothing aggressively cruel or accusatory about it, but it is pervasive. At best, it is de facto racism.
While thinking how shocked I would be if Angel were assigned to my grandchildren when they reach high school, I realized that book was assigned to me by a teacher—by a school—that had already assigned James Baldwin.
With that in mind, I would propose what might be added to school curricula rather than what must be subtracted. To educators shaping curricula for junior high and high school history and literature classes, I would suggest sticking with essentials, such as Huck Finn and Baldwin’s Fire. Leave the gourmet entrees to those who later acquire the taste.
Going to a Source
With 52 years to acquire the taste, I was mesmerized by Wolfe’s stream of conscious narrative. Very easy to see why Jack Kerouac praised him as an influence. Flashing back past all but five of those 52 years, I kept recalling the editor of the St. John Valley Times for which I briefly worked in Fort Kent, Maine, long ago asking what I read. When I said Kerouac, he winced and complained, “He’s an assault on the senses!”
That guy hadn’t read Thomas Wolfe.
Kerouac’s debut novel was The Town and the City, very much in the style of Wolfe before he started listening to jazz musicians and wrote On the Road as if he was “blowing as per jazz musician.” When asked by Steve Allen what the difference was, he cited another part of his eclectic orchestra when he said that Town & City was written with violins, On the Road with bongos.
Hunter Thompson credited Wolfe for the phrase Fear and Loathing. A lot of that in Angel, though the phrase itself would have jumped out at me, so maybe it’s in You Can’t Go Home Again. Certainly no need for every American school child to learn this, but for those who want to explore history and literature, it’s worth knowing that Wolfe, a child prodigy, was reading the Greeks, the Romans, all kinds of philosophy from an early age and took an especial liking to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard whose best known work is titled Fear and Trembling. Allowing for dual translation—from the Danish in which Kierkegaard wrote it, and then from the German in which Wolfe likely read it—Thompson may have been using the same phrase. Either way, it’s a hell of a lineage, and, as we will soon see, it is biblical.
Much like Fire Next Time, a title taken from a spiritual referring to the flood in Genesis sung by slaves on southern plantations, turned a few months later into Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now,” and turned a few years later into the Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”:
Fire = Fierce = Time
Next = Urgent = Has Come
Time = Now = Today**
Cry, the Beloved Other Country
Connecting such dots is a highlight of education. But it only happens when we read more, not less, including history that might be uncomfortable, literature that might offend, and science that will be inconvenient.
Perhaps the most useful suggestion would be for high schools to institute summer reading lists, say five or six books, to make room for such additions–and connections. As happened at Central Catholic a lifetime ago, students might read them without pressure of a test or a paper, more as something to do than as an assignment.
In the racially hot summer of 1967, Cry, the Beloved Country, a novel set in the Union of South Africa, shook many of us in Central Catholic’s class of ’68. A few friends and I kept quoting three lines from the all-too-detailed account of apartheid South Africa, fully aware that we ourselves still lived in the death throes of Jim Crow America. Those who hadn’t yet read James Baldwin had learned of Jim Crow from the speeches of Martin Luther King and, yes, nightly reports from Walter Cronkite.
We also knew which USA we were targeting with a prayer overheard by the Zulu priest searching the slums of Johannesburg for his family:
Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
White man, have mercy on us.
Years later, my summer reading is mostly on the beach, mostly American history and commentaries on America’s present, no few of which might be titled “Wall Street, Have Mercy on Us” or “Cry, the Beloved Planet.”
Always on the Scaffold
At present, Black Lives Matter, and for that matter, all America has more immediate problems to solve than what our kids and grandkids will be reading.
My hope is that my grandchildren and their diverse classmates will someday talk about the young boy who ran away from home with an escaping slave on a raft and is confronted with the prospect of severe punishment—not for running away, but for aiding and abetting the slave.
Huck panics. “People that acts as I’d been acting about [Jim],”he’d been told, “goes to everlasting fire.” And he was being reminded that the Bible is clear: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”- Ephesians 6:5. (My italics. Sometimes the dots just connect themselves.)
He then writes a letter of apology to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, promising Jim’s return, rereads it, reads it again, and then:
I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.
Considering all that was at stake at that moment—and is still at stake now—this has to rank as one of American literature’s finest moments. Do I think Huckleberry Finn should be the foremost statement on the history American race relations? No. But it should be among them.***
And in those college electives and graduate seminars, I’ll recommend Look Homeward Angel if only for one brief passage. This describes a city boy from New Jersey about the age of Huck sent to the boarding school for boys in Altamont (Asheville, North Carolina). He appears and disappears within three pages midway through the book:
Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller’s mould of infantile cynicism… Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne.
Call that a description of America’s recent past, but heed its warning for our immediate future.
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The very edition I had. Notice the 1967 price!
*Fifty years later I often describe my first book, Pay the Piper!, as an attempt to do with street-performance what Wendell Berry has done with agriculture.
**More dots before and after the title Fire Next Time, including the inspiration for Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” are connected in:
So much for my bucket list. Now for a summer reading list:
On the playlist is The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” and I recommend the “psychedelicized” eleven minute version over the commercial radio friendly three minute version–although it was their performance of the short version on the Ed Sullivan Show that riveted my senior class at Central Catholic. A Monday Morning Memoir of the cafeteria scene will appear in my next book, Once Upon an Attention Span–or you can preview an early draft here:
Anyone in New England who favors the mass-marketed brands over the dark amber that flows from Vermont, New Hampshire, Western and Central Mass may be beyond reach of reason.
May I suggest that we humor them and take their “it’s just a…” defense literally? Instead of any explanation or argument, both of which are doomed to futility, respond with something like:
“You’re right! On the surface, it is just a name on a label. If you stay on the surface, that’s all there is to it: Just a name, just a monument, just a statue, just a flag. So you are absolutely correct if you want to be superficial.”
If they object, just say: “Hey, it’s just a word!
—
A Four-Letter Word at That!
Soon after I started teaching college freshman writing in 1980 right to my last class in 2002, I surprised–in some cases shocked–students by announcing on the second meeting of class that two four-letter words were banned from their papers, nor did I want to hear them in class discussion.
I could hear a pin drop and see gears turning in their heads already trying to guess what the second word would be before continuing: “They are…” I could feel their jaws drop behind me when, rather than saying them aloud, I turned to write them on the board:
JUST
ONLY
You can imagine the laughter that followed, mostly in relief, but I made sure they knew I wasn’t joking. I briefly explained it right then, and throughout the sixteen week semester, I’d interrupt them if either word slipped in to what they were saying in class.
My rule was that, by the end of America’s 20th Century, those two words had become pervasive ways to dismiss and diminish any subject that the speaker or writer did not want to think about. After that intro, I’d say with a glare as I scanned the room making eye-contact with everyone before me:
“By definition, anyone who doesn’t want to think is unfit for college. By definition.”
The alarm was so palpable, that I’d immediately deflate it with something like: “And in a couple hours I won’t want to think, so I’ll just go home.”
It worked. By mid-semester, they were stopping themselves as if to erase the word in mid-air, and by semester’s end it was virtually gone, save for their occasional “just go home” or “only one beer” jokes.
In the final years I had the added challenge of countering Nike’s–and Michael Jordan’s–Just Do It, but before long I turned that into an advantageous exception to the rule. No matter what anyone thinks of Nike, their slogan is more of a call to action with an assumption that you’ve already done enough thinking.
You cannot say that about the pervasive use of Just and Only. Taken as they are used, they reveal nothing about the subject being talked about, but everything about the person doing the talking:
He or she does not want to think.
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Not long after she first appeared doling out pancakes at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she became the basis for a court ruling that became known as the “Aunt Jemima Doctrine” which has been invoked numerous times for over a century by plaintiffs as diverse as the University of Notre Dame, Bulova, and McDonald’s
We can laugh at his absurdity, but it is calculated.
If his evangelical supporters applaud and cheer when the Republican president tweets that he is “heaven sent,” why shouldn’t he claim that he has “done more for the Black community than any other president”?
As with all the grandiose claims, he added a qualifier that disavows responsibility for any reasonable measurement or source other than his own imagination. But instead of the usual “people say” or “I heard” or “probably” or “we’ll see what happens,” he seemed to go out of his way for this one:
“And let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln. He did good, but it’s always questionable.”
Four days later, the howling hasn’t stopped. And there’s good reason to howl. He said it to an African American reporter who tried to remind him of the Emancipation Proclamation–at the end of a second week of his non-stop attempt to paint the Black Lives Matter protesters as violent, rioting thugs.
Best reason to howl may well be that the claim is absurd on its face.
Too bad most of us fail to see that the face is a mask, and that the “pass” on Lincoln is a message–what the press calls a dog-whistle–to his Confederate flag-waving “very fine people.” Take a look at their Stars & Bars and Tenth Amendment websites and you’ll soon see why they want those monuments standing, those flags flying, and the repeal of anything that hints of affirmative action or political correctness.
Nine years ago I had my first look at it following a column I wrote headlined, “Not my Dixie cup of tea,” about Republicans in Texas considering secession and in South Carolina threatening to nullify the Affordable Care Act.
On all their websites, Abraham Lincoln is cast as a traitor for “usurping states rights,” and in the unforgettable words of one contentious email sent to me, “the Klan was the good guys.”
So if you think it was just yet more of his idiot wind, you might want to look for another answer, my friend, blowing in that wind.
Ironically, for all of Dishonest Don’s wink-wink treatment of Honest Abe, his party has tried to shield itself from Black Lives Matter by insisting that they are “the party of Lincoln.”
A Shift in Presidential Tense
Of all the dubious political claims we have heard throughout our lifetime, the most deceptive is literally true.
The 2012 film may have awakened us had not director Steven Spielberg delayed the release of Lincoln to avoid charges of trying to influence the Obama-Romney election.
No matter. Democratic victories across a country recoiling from Tea-publican extremism in 2010 rendered that decision as moot as it was ironic. Like many of history’s persistent illusions, it’s true on the surface: Abraham Lincoln was our first Republican president.
But not when stretched over 150 years into: “Republicans are the party of Lincoln.”
That shift in verb tense begs the question. To answer it, let’s do the time warp again. Presidential elections, starting with 1876, offer an outline of what historians call “the ideological shift.” New York Gov. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, handily wins both popular and electoral votes on first count, largely due to Southern Democrats who chafe under Reconstruction. Before certification, however, Republicans prevail on outgoing Pres. U.S. Grant to withdraw federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida in return for a flipped vote certified by three Democratic governors.
Presto! Ohio Gov. Rutherford Hayes rides a winning margin of one electoral vote into the White House.
Call it the first step on a century-long Republican path to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign against Civil Rights and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victories throughout Dixie over Southern incumbent Jimmy Carter—save Carter’s native Georgia.
Biggest step was Theodore Roosevelt’s bolt four years after leaving office. To say that he made Republican financiers and hacks nervous is comical. He made everyone nervous. But he called their “reform” bluff by forming the Progressive Party—a.k.a. “Bull Moose”—and ran against incumbent Republican Pres. Taft in 1912. Had Democrats nominated one of their hacks, as TR calculated, he’d have won. Instead, they ran another reformer, New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson.
Hence, rather than a third party cracking the two-party system, Democrats absorbed TR’s progressive Republicans.
By 1920 conservative Democrats felt betrayed by the Virginia-born and Georgia-bred Wilson—much like fundamentalists by the born-again and well-bred Carter 60 years later. Republicans won the next three presidential elections.
In 1928, according to biographer Charles Rappleye, Herbert Hoover’s campaign employed a shill from Tennessee to make the rounds of Dixie to assure Southern Democrats that Hoover, though a Republican, would better preserve Jim Crow than would his Catholic, New York City opponent, Al Smith.
The tactic swung the USA into its third consecutive, roaring Republican rout. And headlong into the Great Depression. Who but FDR could better identify the Democrats with Main Street and Republicans with Wall Street?
Still, by clinging to Jim Crow’s segregation, Dixiecrats ceded what we now call “inclusiveness” to Republicans.
Sunshine of Civil Rights
In 1948, the Democrats felt doomed. Tired of the New Deal, America was ready to re-live the Roaring Twenties when, as Calvin Coolidge famously declared, “the business of America is business.” And why bother with how that philosophy led to the Great Depression which required the New Deal in the first place?
Harry Truman’s slim hope depended on an impossible coalition of Northern liberals pushing Civil Rights and Southern segregationists. As a sop to the former, party honchos let a 37-year-old freshman senator from Minnesota address their national convention on the last night. They told him to go easy on Civil Rights.
He didn’t.
Beginning with praise for the Dixiecrats’ “forthrightness,” he soon hammered them to “come out from the shadow of segregation into the bright sunshine of Civil Rights.” Southern delegates booed and hissed, but he wouldn’t shut up. As they walked out, he kept talking. Truman was stunned. Honchos were horrified.
What they failed to see were millions of Americans, ears to radios, buoyed as if by fresh air. We wonder how polls were so wrong in 2016? In 1948 they were so wrong that the Chicago Tribune went to press early with a banner headline: “Dewey defeats Truman.”
Next day a grinning Truman brandished it for one of the most iconic photographs in American history. Too bad the captions never identify who made it happen. Granted, he was not the candidate, but Hubert Humphrey’s “sunshine of Civil Rights” was what needed to be said, and what neither party up that point was willing to say.
Southern Strategy
Curtis Wilkie’s memoir, Dixie, tells us that Richard Nixon’s infamous 1972 re-election campaign strategy included two Supreme Court nominations of Southern segregationists, a deliberately doomed dual stunt to turn Dixiecrats into Republicans.
In 2012 Rick Santorum had them in mind–as have both Ron and Rand Paul ever since–when he cited 1965 as the year America lost its way. Without naming it, he was targeting–and condemning–the Civil Rights Act, specifically public accommodations and employment opportunity. He was successful enough in the Southern Republican primaries, that the frontrunning eventual nominee Mitt Romney started adopting some of his positions.
Soon after the election, when the Republican-controlled House delayed funds for Hurricane Sandy relief, the geographical divide sharpened the political. Had we paid attention to context, to history, to geography, we would not have questioned the third word in “Make America Great Again.”
We would have known that the Republican agenda is to return us to pre-1965, pre-Civil Rights.
Since Nixon, every electoral map shows that the ideological shift since Lincoln is complete and secure. Most of them resemble inversions of 150-year-old maps used during what Lincoln himself called “a war upon the rights of all working people,” a description that today nails Republican state house agendas from Texas to South Dakota, from Arizona to Florida.
What’s that old saying about history? Taking “a pass” on it may be tempting, but it will lead us into repetition.
Such is the absurdity–and calculation–coming soon to an election near you.
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This is a meme posted on Facebook last week. Perhaps the most ironic irony of all is that it uses the word “irony” with no sense of irony. For that matter, with no sense at all.
Shocked that he chose Tulsa on Juneteenth for his first rally?
With so many folks insisting that we need to keep our monuments standing regardless of what they represent for the sake of knowing our history, there should be no need to explain the significance of that city or the 19th of June regarding race relations in America.
But just in case: Tulsa in 1921 was the site of an outright massacre of African Americans by white mobs who could no longer tolerate the thriving success of Greenwood, a segregated, self-contained community, which white mobs torched, businesses and all. Official figures at the time reported 26 black people killed, but the NAACP estimated between 150 and 200. A 2001 commission pushed it to the estimate to 300–in addition to 800 injured.
Not only is there no cherished monument for the event, but it is never mentioned in history textbooks. On the few occasions that it has slipped in to the conversations of people who would rather not hear it, it is referred to as a “riot,” deliberately giving the impression that there were some very bad people on both sides.
This is the same stunt that American education has pulled on Native Americans, describing Wounded Knee as a “battle.” No. It was a pre-dawn attack by the US Army on men, women, and children asleep in tents.
Like Wounded Knee, Tulsa was a massacre.
Like Tulsa, June 19 is never mentioned on the statues that some folks rely on for their history because Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the rest of those bronzed fellows riding horses up on pedestals did all they could to prevent it from happening. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, 1863, but news travelled slowly in those days. Lincoln was already two months in the grave before the posthumous news reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. Only then did all black folk know they were free.
Speaking “as a Jewish person who lost family in the camps,” Bess Kalb, screenwriter & author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, put it like this:
Trump holding a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth is like holding a rally at the gates of Auschwitz on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Though it’s unlikely that he knows anything about what happened in Tulsa or about Juneteeth, there’s no question that his advisors know it. Nor is there any question but that the theatrics and symbolic opportunity would appeal to him. The announcement of a presidential campaign by descending on an escalator in a gold-studded hotel lobby before a crowd of extras paid to smile and cheer made that all too clear.
As with the infamous ridicule of a handicapped reporter while a candidate in 2016, no one offended by it would ever vote for him anyway–and it energizes the base who view it as an attack against what they call “political correctness.” If that energy rubs off on those who might not vote, who might be alienated for whatever reason, then he actually gains votes by doing it.
There may be a deeper reason.
We know that he is obsessed with undoing all things done by Obama. We know that he always speaks in superlatives, most often in praise of himself. We know that he has hinted at being “the greatest president ever” even though he tries to disguise the absurd claim in his favorite verbal weeds of “probably” and “some people say” and “we’ll see what happens” and “I hear” and “I read somewhere.”
What if, in addition to erasing Obama, he is also obsessed with surpassing the president that most Republicans still hold in the highest esteem?
Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan, a native of rural, downstate Illinois who parlayed a successful career in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue into the Governorship of California, chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, to launch his presidential campaign with an address trumpeting States Rights.
Speaking within seven miles of the spot where three Civil Rights workers were slain in 1964, a galvanizing event in the movement, Reagan never mentioned Civil Rights.
Years later, African-American columnist William Raspberry of the Washington Post put it in historical terms:
It was bitter symbolism for black Americans (though surely not just for black Americans). Countless observers have noted that Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys. The essence of that transformation, we shouldn’t forget, is the party’s successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan’s Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.*
Since then, Republicans have often offered yellow roses, most notably in the 2012 primaries when Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich won southern primaries by saying they would return the country to 1965. Without naming them, they were referring to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 & 65, including the federal mandate for “public accommodations,” all of which ended Jim Crow.
With that in mind, consider the rallies we have seen since 2015 and will continue to see from here to November with people waving Confederate flags and wearing those red caps. Can there be any doubt that 1965, that Jim Crow, is the “again” in “Make America Great Again”?
Of course, neither Santorum nor Gingrich could pull it off, losing to a man whom Trump was quick to belittle as a loser. Four years later, Trump inherited Reagan’s trump.
It’s not just about erasing Obama, it’s about eclipsing Reagan.
From Borax to Clorox. Ketchup is a vegetable. Windmills cause cancer.
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The Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 1, 1921. The photo is from the US Library of Congress which refers to the event as the “Tulsa Race Riot.” Wikipedia uses the term “Race Massacre.”
I never heard of what happened in Tulsa until right around my 68th birthday when I read Boomtown (2018) by Sam Anderson. Yes, it’s about Oklahoma City, but that is the state capitol, and so the connections to a city the size of Tulsa are many. For instance, many African-Americans who fled Tulsa after the massacre landed in OKC, about 120 miles away.
*This is from a column Raspberry wrote after Reagan died in 2004. A contributor to Wikipedia calls it a “eulogy” which brings the phrase “damning with faint praise” to a whole new level:
Mouth of the River 