For over 40 years I’ve heard and read ridicule, dismissal, and condemnation of The Sixties–mostly accusations that it was when America went out of control, turned upside down, or lost its way.
Today I join many who say that about the last four years. While others have compared protests in the streets of both eras, and the incitements of Donald Trump to those of George Wallace, the most painful similarity has been overshadowed by the deep divisions of politics, race, gender, and other demographics that lately include suburban vs. urban:
A body count.
Night after night for the past eight months, we see graphs and numbers already quadruple those of American fatalities in Vietnam–and still rising. Anyone my age might flash back to the nightly body count reported by news anchors night after night in the late Sixties into the Seventies.
Most memorable was Walter Cronkite who ended his Vietnam reports with “There is still no end to the war in sight.”
We called it “The Generation Gap,” mostly because it pitted so many teenagers against parents, but also because America’s ill-advised military involvement in Vietnam exacted a heavy price paid mostly by the young.
As stark a similarity as they draw, the two body counts point to the most telling difference between The Sixties and this Era of Trump:
Neither American president back then—not Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon—ever denied that numbers were high.**
Neither ever called a death toll “nothing.”
Though both complained about coverage of the war, neither ever accused the press, much less the military, of exaggerating a body count to increase its budget.
Neither ever claimed that the war was “no big deal,” or that it would “just go away.”
Nor would anyone on either side of the Generation Gap back then have denied science or demonized medical professionals—as an entire political party, coast to coast, does now. In fact, it was Republican Nixon who, for all his faults, insisted that America “make peace with nature” when he promoted a new Environmental Protection Agency in his 1970 State of the Union Address.***
Identify as many gaps as you can or will in 2020, the basic choice in this election isn’t between liberal and conservative any more than between young and old as it was half a century ago. Those divisions, as well as all others are entirely included in–and to some degree created by–a division that America will either begin to face or irreparably continue to deny this week:
A Reality Gap.
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*This blog is adapted from the latter half of “Aside the Ides of 2020,” posted yesterday and revised for tomorrow.
**I do not include JFK with LBJ and Nixon here because, although Kennedy committed military advisors to South Vietnam, no American troops landed until 1964 after Johnson took office.
***Below is Richard Nixon’s State of the Union Address, 1970. His remarks on the environment begin at the 23-minute mark and last about seven minutes of this 38-minute speech. One highlight: He calls air, water, and land “no longer common property free to be abused by anyone without regard to consequences, but scarce resources we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor’s yards.”
Now we ask how anyone could possibly vote for a candidate who praises and thanks supporters who harass an opponent’s campaign bus with their pickup trucks on a highway—while moving and in traffic.
Reminds me of a question we’ve been asking, complete with photographic evidence on social media, for four years: How could anyone vote for a man who ridicules handicapped people?
Dumb questions!
Anyone who would object to either would never vote for him anyway. His fans are those who have a need to look down on others and will do it for any superficial reason–which a handicap, like a color of skin, or article or clothing provides. Reflexively, they will ridicule, shout down, and harass anyone who contradicts them—and an opponent’s campaign bus is filled with those targets.
Giving them what they want, Trump never loses votes with ridicule, incitements, threats, or his ranting hate, juvenile or sadistic. He gains them.
Equally dumb: We keep saying that this is “like fascism.”
Like???? Look up the definition and you’ll find something like this: “forcible suppression of opposition.”
You’ll also find it on your ballot Tuesday, from the president at the top reaching down to all his Republican enablers in state and county governments, running against the very idea of America as it was conceived in 1776.
Not sure just when it sunk in. Leaving work on the Ides of March I had no idea of any reason to beware.
Like most, I thought I’d be back in a few weeks, after which I figured another month. Okay, maybe two, during which time I began enjoying the warm weather and, quite frankly, forgot about work.
Instead, I took advantage of the time and solitude to compile a collection of past writings and keep cranking out new ones, a total of 92 blogs since the most momentous anniversary of Caesar’s assassination ever.
When you live on an island, social distancing isn’t just easy; it is redundant. When you live alone in a stand alone home, quarantine is not an imposition; it is a way of life. And when you live next door to a bird sanctuary, masks are for the bluejays.
Except on the one day out of five or six when I combine my trips to the supermarket, pharmacy, landfill, laundromat, library (curbside pickup only), dentist, and doctor (who took liquor store off this list in August). That’s when I do for two or three hours–minus the time in the car–what most of you must do for twice or thrice that time five, six, if not all seven days a week.
Sorry if my relative, if inadvertent, luck is salt in the wound of your unwanted mask, but I miss pastimes in good company as much as anyone. And who could possibly miss going to movies more than a projectionist?
Watching sunset after sunset over the distant mainland–while noting its progression from Newburyport northwest to Rowley southwest–has eased that pain, though I am somehow still on the same late-night cinema schedule. Without assuming the tendencies of other writers, I find the act obsessive and am often up past midnight completing a draft, polishing it, adding material that pops into mind or that I stumble upon while checking facts, names, dates, spelling on websites on another window I keep open on screen.
Free of my day-job (from which I was on the verge of retiring anyway), that owlish habit begat a turtle-ish habit of sleeping-in. I never awake before nine. Most times it’s past ten when I stumble to the kitchen and bathroom only to return to bed with a French press of coffee, two cups that I sip to eleven or half past before I arise for breakfast at noon.
Since I’m down to two full meals a day, it’s a generous breakfast with fistfuls of blueberries in pancakes made with brown sugar and vanilla, or it’s doses of rosemary and Old Bay for the pan-fried potatoes and onions, or it’s one English muffin each for the two eggs blanketed with garlic powder and ground pepper before going once over–over a full flame that turns their bottoms brown.
That kind of feast calls for yet another French press, two more cups that I sip while reading, back in bed. For years, before this fateful Ides of March, most all my reading has come from the “New Release” display in the Newburyport Public Library. One day a librarian at the main desk spotted me there and took three books from a shelf behind her. They had just arrived and were waiting to be put on the stand, and she thought I might want one of the two histories she held out with her left hand. I might have, but I noticed the third book in her left hand. Who could resist a memoir titled The Only Sounds We Make?*
Such serendipity has succumbed to Covid, as has browsing. Now I must make my choices online and wait a day or a week for the notification to go get it. Just as well. This summer, as unusual as it was, I made more unusual by going on a Herman Melville binge, easy as it is to think of this glorified sandbar as an oversized boat, and there are no library patrons putting holds on or holding on to 19th Century novels. If the whole country can regress to the Dark Ages, why can’t I go whaling?
Coffee gone, eyes bleary, I get dressed and try to flatten my own Covid curve with a mid-afternoon three-mile walk into the reserve–on the beach if it’s low tide, barefoot if the weather allows; on the road along the marsh otherwise. A friend calls it “writing on your feet,” because I have my current or next project in mind from the time I leave to the time I return, and I waste no time getting on this keyboard.
But I often spend as much or more time sitting on a bench facing the marsh right at my turnaround point where fowl friends inspire me without trying–or on a washed up tree trunk from where I watch the action of the waves. On the marsh, duck and Canada geese turn phrases, egrets and swans set a tone; red-tail hawks and blue herons offer grace and color; peregrine falcons and bald eagles reinforce purpose and resolve; owls, snowy and grey, remind me that some things are best left unsaid. On the beach, gulls diving for fish, pipers and plovers racing ahead of the surf are always good for comic relief.
Lunch, then, is taken at the keyboard, no more than a banana, a honeycrisp apple, and a couple handfuls of almonds, followed by my third and last French press of the day. (Saying it that way takes the edge of six cups.)
Getting thoughts of those two or three hours down in screen feels as much like typing as writing, and, out of curiosity, I have clocked myself at 50 words per minute with a four-finger frenzy helped along by my 45 years as a wind musician. Which reminds me that busking is another occupation that came to an end on March 15, as it just isn’t possible to play a flute while wearing a mask. Not that I’ve tried it, but if a fellow piper out there has found out otherwise, please leave a comment.**
The rest of the day and the night go as the writing goes. I break for supper around eight, usually a salad and, now that the season has retired the grill, broiled haddock or salmon. Sometimes a soup such as tortellini in broth spiked with Worcestershire sauce, oregano, and olive oil, topped with grated Parmesan. Still addicted to baseball and football–though not one who lives or dies with the fate of the hometeam–I’ll have a game on while writing game-on political screeds or slice of life memoirs such as this.
We could all say, to varying degrees, that our lives were sliced in mid-March. We all know the word “Ides” and know we should “beware” the day, and I am far from the first to note or riff on it as the 2020 date that everything changed and much was lost. However, few realize that “Ides” is derived from the Latin word for divide.
No secret that the country has been sharply divided for at least twenty years before the advent of Covid-19. For this election, division amplified by Covid makes Bush v. Gore look like a friendly coin-toss, makes the Tea Party in 2010 look like a tea party in Wonderland.
The notorious Sixties offer a closer comparison. We called it “The Generation Gap,” mostly because it pitted so many teenagers against parents, but also because America’s ill-advised military involvement in Vietnam exacted a heavy price paid mostly by the young. There’s a sharp difference between then and now:
No one on either side of the Generation Gap sixty years ago denied science or demonized medical professionals.
And another one:
Since March, night after night, we have seen the graphs and heard the numbers of a body count that has already quadrupled the number of American fatalities in Vietnam–and is still rising. Anyone my age might find it reminiscent of the nightly body count from Vietnam reported by Walter Cronkite and other news anchors night after night in the late Sixties.
Can anyone my age imagine an American president back then–no matter how disliked both LBJ and Nixon were–denying that those numbers were high? Or were “nothing”?
Or that the military was exaggerating the count to increase its budget?
Or that the war was “no big deal,” or that it would “just go away”?
No matter what generation you are in or how far back your memory goes, the division today isn’t between right and left; it’s between reality and delusion.
Ides? This entire year has been one to beware, but the Romans attached another meaning to that day: A deadline to settle all debts.
This week, we’ll either pay up with a commitment to solve problems or beg off with a deadbeat determination to pretend we have no problems.
That’s why about half of those 92 blogs have described today’s Reality Gap, brought to light details hidden in shadow, offered solutions, and attempted to generate interest in all we have at stake. Oddly, Covid has given me the time to do it with this de facto retirement.
And that is what has finally sunk it: I am now a full-time, fully committed citizen.
No regrets. If I may channel George Harrison, “All things must pass.” I’m no longer a busker, no longer a projectionist, no longer a delivery driver with favorite stops all over New England: beef brisket in Vernon, Conn; crab cakes in Wareham, Mass; cheddar-ale soup in Deerfield, Mass; Mediterranean lamb-burgers in Freeport, Maine; turkey clubs in Meredith, N.H; fish & chips in Dover, N.H; clam chowder in Wells, Maine, and Shirley, Mass; spanakopita just down the road in Saugus and Beverly; falafel anywhere I could find it.
Must be why I’ve become so experimental on the grill and on the stove this year. Something else to beware, a curve I will never quite flatten.
Hate to spoil the party, but news of the Supreme Court keeping hands off the tally of votes in Pennsylvania and North Carolina next week is not what it appears to be.
Nor was Amy Covid Barrett’s non-participation in those decisions any principled recusal that we might expect from an ethical jurist given the contrived circumstance of her appointment.
As with the warranty on a new car and conditions of an insurance policy, we need to read the fine print:
In both cases, the Supreme Court specified it would not consider the counting of votes before Election Day–and reserved the right to take up the case after Election Day–by which time Barrett will have the chance to do the homework that was lacking this week.
What could be a better ruse?
While establishing a reassuring facade that the Court–Mitch McConnell’s hasty new addition in particular–will be fair and reasonable when judging challenges to the election next week, it harmonizes with the president’s open, repeated insistence that no votes should be counted after Election Day.
His followers fall for this because it rarely happens that mail-in votes–set aside and tallied later in most states–outnumber the margin by which a candidate is ahead when the day’s in-person ballots are counted. Therefore, a winner can accurately be declared that night, and only the margin will change in the days following.
Republican politicians repeat Trump’s claim because they know it will serve them. In recent years, all statistics show that those who vote Democrat are far more inclined to vote by mail than are those who vote Republican. Predictably, this year’s pandemic has exploded the requests for mail-in ballots.
Republicans are setting up a pretext. There’s nothing unprecedented about a vote count needing days before a winner is determined. And certainly nothing illegal about counting a ballot after the day so long as it is postmarked on or before the day. Republicans know that, but they also know that the American public is accustomed to quick results and made easily suspicious of delays. Delay, then, will be their pretext to get the courts involved.
If the state courts rule against them, as just happened in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, they’ll appeal it to their newly ideologically-packed Supreme Court–a replay of 2000 when Florida’s highest court ruled for Al Gore only to be overturned by a Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush whose legal team included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and, yes, Amy Covid Barrett.
While Barrett hid behind the word “hypothetical” in her confirmation hearing when asked about her possible role in unravelling an election that the man who nominated her insists on ravelling, Brett Kavanaugh has–enjoy the pun–exposed himself.
In Wisconsin, the Supreme Court did hear a Republican appeal to prevent mailed ballots received after next Tuesday from being counted, no matter a postmark that meets the deadline. Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh rationalized it this way:
States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.
Put aside the chaos caused by undermining the US Postal Service and the suspicion raised entirely by Trump, his Republican enablers, and Russian bots on social media, and consider Kavanaugh’s use of the word “results.”
What results? As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”
Consider Kavanaugh’s use of “flip.” Does evidence that surfaces while a jury deliberates flip the verdict or prolong the trial? Do the runs scored in extra innings flip the game, or are they part of the game?
Rhetorical questions for a scam that is purely rhetorical, but there will be nothing hypothetical about it for Barrett to continue hiding behind next Wednesday morning when appeals are ramrodded at the Supreme Court faster than McConnell can pack its seats.
Nor will she want to, or need to after using the recent appeal by Pennsylvania Republicans to put up a pretense of objectivity.
All while the rest of the country will be expected to accept the pretense that these appeals all coming from battleground states–Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and counting past any and all plausible deadlines–are purely coincidental.
Most everyone has heard of McCarthyism, the “Red Scare” in the Fifties that destroyed lives and ended careers of mostly innocent government and military personnel, but how many know the details? Would we recognize it if it happened again?
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, a brand new biography of the hard-line, hard-driving, and hard-drinking one-man American Inquisition, might make you wonder whether it is happening again or just never stopped.
That’s a question many of us had long before the book appeared when reports quoted Donald Trump fuming with rage against his first Attorney General: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
The reference was to McCarthy’s top aide and bulldog extraordinaire. Before too long, the new AG, William Barr fired those Trump wanted fired, whitewashed reports he wanted whitewashed, and said what he wanted said. The consensus of the press, at least those of us old enough to remember: Trump now has his Roy Cohn.
A timewarped national nightmare? Prolonged USA-ja vu? More like we bit off more than we can chew of something very bad, and we may yet choke on it.
If you don’t know who Roy Cohn was, or if Joe McCarthy is no more than a name that you vaguely recall from the wrong side of history classes long ago, Demagogue will tell you not just who they were, but who they still are.
Open randomly to any page and you will find contemporary quotes such as this from Collier’s magazine: “(T)his speech sets a new high for irresponsibility in a senatorial career distinguished mainly for its extravagant accusations… No American who is both sane and honest can believe that George Marshall… is a traitorous hireling of the Kremlin.”
(Yes, Gen. George Marshall, one of the heroes of WWII, Dwight David Eisenhower’s mentor, and author of the “Marshall Plan” which won the peace. And you thought John McCain was wrongfully smeared?)
Or you will meet the Lt. Col. Vindmans and Ambassador Yovanovitches of the 1950s, players such as John Adams, the Army attorney during the closed hearings who “was aghast at the chasm between what McCarthy was telling the press and what Adams was observing in the hearing room.”
(Yes, I read that while listening to the current president keep repeating that the pandemic is over while the numbers of fatalities and hospitalizations keep rising.)
Or you will find author Larry Tye’s dot-connecting analysis:
In lieu of solutions, demagogues point fingers. Attacked, they aim a wrecking ball at their assailants. When one charge against a manufactured enemy is exposed as hollow, they lob a fresh bombshell. If the news is bad, they blame the newsmen.
McCarthy may have never led chants such as “Lock him up,” but as Tye points out, his rallies were large, loud, and angry, and he stoked that anger with evidence-free accusations, smears and innuendo, demonization of the press, claims of having proof that did not exist, promises of what would “soon” be revealed.
Says Tye, noting American history’s “lineup of zealots and dodgers,” such as Louisiana Gov. Huey Long and Detroit hate-radio host Father Charles Coughlin, both of whom preceded McCarthy:
The playbook invariably is the key. It transformed Joe McCarthy from crank to one of the most menacing men in modern civilization. Armed with a similar blueprint, Donald Trump rose from sideshow to contender to commander in chief. Neither was sure of the formula in advance–bullies seldom are, but they can sense in their bones how to keep the pot simmering and know when they achieve a critical mass. Suddenly and shockingly their scattershot bile is gaining traction and lacerating countless noncombatants.
That claim in 2016 about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue? Here’s pollster George Gallup in 1954: “Even if it were revealed that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, (his supporters) would probably still go along with him.”
The unwillingness to disavow the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups? McCarthy “deftly tap-danced” the same tune when asked about American Firsters and other fringe groups. Trump complimented QAnon for “fighting against” pedophilia; McCarthy America First for “fighting against” communism.
(Yes, that moment when you realize that “fighting against” now means “accusing people of.”)
Surprised that the thick book Trump gave to 60 Minutes did not contain his long-promised health plan aimed to replace the Affordable Care Act, but a collection of already existing legislation aimed at nothing? Seven decades ago, all those rolled up papers McCarthy waved over his head with names of commies in the State Department and Army contained no evidence. The stuffed briefcase was filled with random documents and publications. All props that looked so good on TV and in photos. All nothing.
Sadly, then as now, the demagogue senator aroused such fervent support that one political party went along for the ride, seeking his endorsement in their states, while the other party and presidents of both parties were reluctant to cross him.
Both Truman and Eisenhower eventually did, but Truman not until he was already on the way out, and Ike waited until McCarthy’s alcoholic rage was taking him out. A chapter that Tye titles “The Enablers” begins with this line: “Dwight David Eisenhower was a man of inscrutable contradictions.”
Later on, a future president fares worst of all: “The most shameless of the fence-straddlers was John F. Kennedy.” Quotes from JFK regrading McCarthy you can almost hear–not in his nasal twang but in the halting mince of Susan Collins–whose Maine mentor, Margaret Chase Smith, was the lone Republican senator to oppose McCarthy.
Very few Democratic senators stood up to McCarthy before he melted down in the glare of TV. Hubert Humphrey (Minn.), an early congressional champion of Civil Rights, was one. Henry Jackson (Wash.), a newcomer, tried so earnestly to be an amiable reconciler that the press dubbed him “Senator Jimmy Stewart.” Stuart Symington (Mo.), treated the hearings as a campaign for president and was dubbed “Sanctimonious Stu.”
Tye also accounts for the reaction of those outside of politics, including a characteristically brief, to-the-point letter sent McCarthy by Ernest Hemingway: “You are a shit… I would knock you on your ass.” Later Hemingway would write of his African airplane crash for Look magazine: “My last thoughts were how unfortunate it was that Senator McCarthy wasn’t sitting beside me.”
Then as now, some wonder if all the histrionics were mere distraction for a dismantling of government, particularly–now as then–of the State Department. Demagogue‘s opening theme is that most of the cleaning out of communists was already done and under quiet control before McCarthy stumbled onto the issue as one that gained headlines and roused a rabble. Ardent anti-communists from Truman to John Foster Dulles to Richard Nixon were annoyed by McCarthy’s grandstanding and thought it hurt the cause–but feared public perception if they confronted him. Humphrey and a few others agreed, and they attacked on the very grounds that McCarthy was doing the Kremlin’s work.
A parallel today? Unlike McCarthy who condemned the relatively reasonable Nikita Khrushchev who ousted Stalin as much as Stalin, Trump clearly envies and praises Vladimir Putin who bears far more resemblance to Stalin than to Khrushchev. If we accept the verdict of McCarthy’s critics, the only real difference is that the senator was an unwitting tool of Moscow–while our president is all too willing.
Be that as it may, it was the gutting of the State Department (something Trump has also done, albeit by attrition) that left American foreign policy in the hands of inexperienced ideologues who were especially inept in China which had just gone Communist. To assess the lasting damage, Tye quotes one of McCarthy’s targets:
“After this generation of Asian specialists was annihilated, the United States stumbled into two Asian wars–Korea and Vietnam; we can only guess how history might have been changed had these talented specialists on East Asia served out their government careers.”
Tye may have had that quote in mind when he chose “Long Shadow” for Demagogue‘s subtitle and unifying metaphor. American troops did not land in Vietnam until seven years after McCarthy drank himself to death. George Wallace’s presidential campaigns came four and eight years after that. Pat Buchanan’s was another twenty, soon followed by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America”–which would be more honestly remembered as Contract on America, a precursor of the Tea Party in 2010. Somewhere in there, you could say that McCarthyism begat Fox News and a raft of ideological pundits who have openly, vehemently sought to “rehabilitate McCarthy as the victim rather than the perpetrator of a witch hunt that commentator Ann Coulter calls ‘the Rosetta Stone of all liberal lies’.”
That long shadow is now darker than ever. Claims Tye:
Joe McCarthy’s most apt student was Donald Trump. Roy Cohn was the flesh-and-blood nexus between the senator and the president. An aging Cohn taught the fledgling Trump the transcendent lessons he learned from his master, McCarthy–how to smear opponents and contrive grand conspiracies. During the 1970s, Cohn and Trump spoke as often as five times a day.
Tye lets an intimate of Cohn, still with us, draw the conclusion:
“I hear Roy in the things that [Trump] says quite clearly… If you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth.“
By harping on fears and suspicions, Trump, like McCarthy, offers simple solutions and irresistable promises that are easy to swallow. Enough of the American public swallowed McCarthyism to let it reign for half a decade. Enough in the right places–including McCarthy’s native Wisconsin–have swallowed Trumpism to give it four years, and next week we may regurgitate for another four.
Call it Trumpism or McCarthyism, no matter what happens, Demagogue warns that it will not be kept down.
For Kennedy fans: Robert Kennedy may be conspicuous by his absence from my review, but he’s a strong supporting character in the book. His father was a friend of McCarthy and got the senator to hire young RFK as a counsel for the committee he chaired–which explains JFK’s unwillingness to attack the Wisconsin Republican.
By Tye’s account, RFK was, or tried to be, a moderating influence on McCarthy but the senator was much more in tune with the fire-breathing Roy Cohn. Eventually he became at such odds with Cohn that Cohn challenged him to a fight in the senate hearing room. Others separated them. But he remained McCarthy’s friend to the end. Their wives were friends, and the two couples socialized. RFK attended McCarthy’s funeral where he sat in the choir to avoid being photographed, and then asked reporters who spotted him not to report his presence.
For my English major friends: The editor/critic F.O. Matthiessen was among those who committed suicide rather than face charges made by McCarthy. He jumped from a hotel window in Boston according to the litany offered in a chapter titled “The Body Count.”
Also, the playwright Lillian Hellman, another McCarthy target, treated the senator with open contempt, calling him, Cohn, and another young, gung-ho aide named David Shine, “Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde.”
For my South Dakota friends: When McCarthy finally became a subject of his own committee hearings, he had to turn over the gavel to his loyal pal, Sen. Karl Mundt (R-S.D.) who preferred to bang a thick glass ashtray rather than the wooden stick. Everything else about him was so weak that the press dubbed him “Tortured Mushroom” and “The Leaning Tower of Putty.”
Though a disaster for McCarthy, Mundt–who sounds like an early version of Mike Pence in this book–wanted to celebrate the hearings being over and planned a party for which he sent out not invites, but “subpoenas.” It was cancelled that same day when he learned that another good pal, Wyoming Sen. Lester Hunt shot himself in his office. Hunt’s son was caught in a sting operation in a hearby DC park and was about to be accused of homosexuality by the McCarthy team.
Trivia: Hunt designed Wyoming’s bronco license plate.
Postscript sent from a native South Dakotan old enough to remember:
“I won’t say I am defending Mundt’s record of harmful and questionable actions, but in his career he voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, & 1968, and the 24th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. He encouraged the US to join UNESCO in 1945. The Voice of America, which was established as a result of the Smith-Mundt Act, 1948. He was unsuccessful in attempts to have HUAC investigate the Ku Klux Klan. The R party was a different beast then.
“Mundt’s work with the National Forensic League helped make high school debate a respected HS activity across the US, nowhere more than in SD. Who knows, maybe George and Eleanor McGovern would never have met if not for that NFL over which Mundt presided (1932-1971).”
Is it just me, or does “QAnon” sound like the brand name for a new line of condoms?
Such was the question that opened the weekly meeting of “The Helens,” a group of civic-minded middle-aged women, fans of the darkly satirical 1988 film, The Heathers, who gather at undisclosed locations in the Mingya Valley to trade notes on current events, films, books, and any cultural oddity that comes to mind.
My editor, Helen Highwater, posed my question to her friends who didn’t so much answer as react. Or recoil, as did Helen Wheels: “That’s one I’d rather not have on hand!”
“But it wouldn’t be on his hand,” intoned Helen Bach.
“You haven’t seen the new TV ad for the Massachusetts Lottery,” teased Helen Heels, referring to a man’s talking head on the tip.
The Helens turned quickly to the “drive in” campaign speech delivered by Pres. Obama in Philadelphia, all eight of them agreeing that the sheer contrast in tone, logic, common sense, and grounding in reality to what Helena Basquette called “the shitshow we have withstood under Dump” was “a breath of fresh air when any air at all would have done.”
A laughing Helen Urth added that, as a rally, it was “better off with honking horns rather than all the robotic cheering we’re used to.”
“Uniqueness matters,” agreed Helena Bucket, “although his best touch was ending with a reprieve of ‘Fired up!’ and ‘Ready to go!'”
“Speaking of ‘ready to go,'” chuckled Urth, “I’ve just saw a photo online, but what is Rudy Giuliani getting ready for in that film???”
The Helens looked at each other until a voice piped up from the end of the table: “I saw it.’ All eyes went to Helen Fryed:
“Borat is already available. Like a good corporate sucker, I could not resist that ad, so I blame MSNBC for my interest in seeing Rudy in this disgusting, reprehensible, politically-incorrect, sick, creepy, revolting, misogynist, xenophobic laugh fest. Something for everyone to cringe about. Something for everyone to feel guilty for laughing about. It is almost worth spending the 100-minutes to see how low things have gone.”
“Does anyone who has seen footage of a Trump rally need Borat to show how low things have gone?” asked Basquette. She then asked about another recent film: “Has anyone seen The Perfect Weapon?”
No one had, so she summarized:
“Iran hacked Sheldon Adelson’s casinos in Vegas in February 2014 after he made remarks suggesting the US should threaten Iran with nuclear weapons. Adelson has donated hundreds of millions to Trump and other Republicans since then. What does he get for that money? Maybe the end of the Obama/Euro nuclear deal with Iran. What does Trump get for that money? Maybe 2020 election interference from Iran.”
“Who started it?” pitched Bach.
“George W. Bush with the stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges. Whose tactics did the Iranians study to find ways to retaliate? Putin’s Internet Research Agency.”
“Stuxnet?” howelled Urth, “Is that another line of condoms?”
“Malware,” returned Basquette, “which I suppose could be yet another.”
“Maybe that’s what that strange press briefing was about,” offered Wheels. “With emphasis on Iran rather than Russia, that rat Ratcliffe slips in that it’s being done “to damage the president” even though reports say that the attempts are to frighten voters into voting for that, that, that damned thing. Things are so warped now that I’m surprised Russia was mentioned at all.”
Fryed slammed her hand on the table: “Highlight for me went unnoticed: Rat began by invoking America’s (faking a deep, pretentious voice) ‘deeply held belief in one person, one vote.’ Does that mean they are going to abolish the Electoral Outhouse?”
“Uggggggh!” This was Bach who explained her crescendo with exasperation: “I just spent the entire week talking up Ranked Choice Voting, and with some people you just can’t get past this ‘most votes win’ no matter how carefully you explain the difference between plurality and majority–or that preferences are still votes. Finally, I started asking if they applied that logic to the Electoral College, and they see no connection!” She spread her hands, fingers splayed, and shook them over the table.
Highwater grabbed one and laughed: “So call it the Electoral Outhouse! That’ll make the difference!”
Urth laughed again (if she ever stopped): “A college gave us Trump; an outhouse is full of shit. What difference?”
Highwater waited for the other Helens to gather themselves: “Apres baseball, I listened to a few hosts and commentators calling it a ‘press release read aloud’ (since no questions means no conference). They all agreed it made no sense. They kept using the word ‘flummoxed,’ mostly due to the emphasis on Iran and the downplaying of Russia. Also the lack of specifics even though the bogus Proud Boy emails had just exploded into the news.”
“Apres baseball?” chided Bucket.
“My Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series! I’m a lifelong fan, even though they dropped the Devil from their name.” She glanced at Fryed: “Not because of political correctness but because they wanted to change their logo from that ugly fish to the Florida sunshine.”
Fryed: “Hell they did! And, by the way, ‘Proud Boy’ could be another brand name for love gloves.”
Wheels to Basquette: “Your connected Adelson dots explain that unintelligible Intelligence briefing. Also curious were Barr’s absence and FBI-man Wray’s vague-as-possible statement which made no attempt to reinforce anything Ratcliffe said before him.”
Basquette to Highwater: “Helen, there’s your devil: Wray!”
Bucket: “Oh, where’s the groan button?”
Heels: “How about a mute button!”
Highwater: “Nice segue into the debate, Helen! Who wants to go first?”
Five Helens and two Helenas: “You do!”
Highwater later admitted to me that, here, she was cribbing the last column I had sent her, but she has given me too many good lines and insights of her own over the years of our collaboration for which I have gained all credit and equally appreciated blame (because it let’s you know you’ve hit your target), so I’m happy to return the favor.
Highwater: “Trump talks to (or for) those already enthralled by him, and it was bizarre to hear him mention ‘the laptop’ as if anyone outside the Fox orbit other than news junkies would know what he meant. And like everything else, he repeated it.”
Heels: “As he always does, everything is stated at least twice, often back to back, the same word or phrase five or six times within 30 seconds.”
Highwater: “Exactly! That ‘laptop’ made me wonder how many other inside references might have been made. Equally bizarre was his failure to understand the satire of being called Abe Lincoln just minutes after he himself compared himself to Lincoln.”
Bucket kicked in: “Equally bizarre was his repeated claim of prepaid taxes.”
Highwater: “And how many times did he say the word ‘prepaid’?”
Wheels shifted gears: “Nothing benefitted Biden better than having the chance to end the evening with a very well-designed closing statement. He even said it with his body language during Trump’s minute. Almost a ‘meme,’ as he put his pen–which he had held in his hand, gesturing throughout–into his shirt pocket, closed his jacket, and waited with gravitas for his minute to drive home. It was almost subliminal.”
Bach chimed in: “Biden showed himself positively. Trump was much better behaved compared to his banshee performance in the first debate, almost as if he was Biden’s apprentice–quite different than the world wrestler he portrays at his rallies. I wonder if his ‘base’ even recognizes this version of him.”
Heels dug in: “Maybe he knows those people don’t watch or care about these sleepy debates anyway. I doubt it changed many minds.”
Wheels: “Biden had some fine moments, and you’re right about his closing. His not about my family or his family, but your family directly to camera (a la the first debate) I thought his best moment for three reasons. One, it redirected the debate; two, it was an honest, personal appeal; and three, it reminded anyone paying attention of just how much of oh, I-can’t-even-say-his-name’s gaslighting is done through sheer repetition.
Highwater: “That’s the condom!”
Wheels: “What?”
Heels: “Huh?”
Basquette: “WTF???”
Bucket: “Excuse me???”
Fried: “Come again?”
Urth: “Or don’t come at all!”
Bach: “Presto!”
“America has been getting screwed for four years,” reasoned Highwater. “We always talk and complain about his lies. We call them big. We call them ugly. We call them harmful, divisive, and devastating. How do such lies penetrate? How do they wear down any resistance? How do they keep coming and coming?”
Silence. Even Urth stopped laughing.
“Well, they must be lubricated,” Highwater held, “and no matter what you name it, the condom is repetition.”
Democrats, by treating these “hearings” as anything but the kangaroo court they are, have given them a credibility they in no way deserve. Instead of asking Amy Coney Barrett any questions at all, they should have attacked the process.
Specifically, they should have turned the word “pack” against those doing the actual packing.
Republican senators bragged that they “had the votes” as soon as the nominee was named. They had no interest in any questions or answers. All their efforts were—and still are—to justify the rush to fill the seat during an election after they themselves unanimously insisted that a seat could not be filled ten months before an election just four years ago.
That, literally if not politically, is packing.
Granted, the American public has a short attention span, but not that short. Therefore, Republicans dodge the contradiction by accusing the Democrats of planning to “pack” the court by expanding it from nine to eleven with President Biden making both nominations soon after inauguration.
What would I say into one of those senate microphones? I’d begin with a line much like what many Republicans said of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, four years ago: “Sorry, Judge Barrett, this has nothing to do with you but with the charade in which you are being used as a pawn.”
After that, I would speak—as Sen. Klobuchar often did—directly into the camera. The line that I would drive home:
If Republicans are so against packing the court, all they have to do is suspend this nomination until the election results are in. If the president wins, go ahead. If not, withdraw the nomination, and the court will stay at nine with a nomination made after January 20.
Instead of being blunt, Democrats are forced to dodge all the accusations of something that, though not unconstitutional, feels unethical and unAmerican. They would be so much better off agreeing that, yes, it is unAmerican and unethical, and the Republicans are doing it now.
At the risk of losing many friends and political allies, I call this The Curse of Obama.
Didn’t we learn anything from the way Republicans treated him and his bend-over-backwards, bipartisan efforts for affordable healthcare from the time he took office? Or in his last year when they tabled his nominee for the Supreme Court?
Even in the last months of the 2016 election, Obama was briefed on Russian interference and, rather than making it public, went to Mitch McConnell as if asking permission to make the announcement “bipartisan.” McConnell, knowing which side of the political bread Russia buttered, snubbed him, and Obama kept it under wraps.
Four years after Obama left office, the Democrats, who seem immune to learning lessons even when those lessons are beaten into them year after year, month after month, day by day, still operate under the Curse.
Why should just one side abide by a professional courtesy that the other side mocks? Or, to borrow a line that Melville used to describe a most gullible character, why be “unwilling to appear uncivil even to incivility itself”?*
Democrats maintain their civility—even as Republicans say they don’t—and treat the Barrett confirmation as if it’s an on-the-level senate hearing because they are banking on a landslide victory in November, something too large for Trump to pry out of the Electoral College. Something so big it will be beyond Republican state legislatures to use a delayed count of mailed ballots as a pretext to name Trump loyalists as electors regardless of their state’s vote. If that sounds paranoid, you can find reports that the Trump White House has already approached state legislators in Pennsylvania and Florida for that reason.
Let’s hope the Democrats are right, that it is overwhelming–but even this suggests that they would rather make cheating irrelevant than risk the apparent incivility of confronting the cheating head on. That Curse again.
If the Republicans successfully ramrod Barrett’s nomination, it would be a dereliction of duty for the Democrats not to counter it. Say all you want against packing, but if one side insists on doing it, the other side must do it. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” you say? Since when is it right to let wrong stand? And since when is correction wrong?
But more: If Democrats are going to beat an opponent that keeps rigging the game, they must put the game beyond rigging.
To do that, a new Democratic president and a new senate majority leader should make two new Supreme Court seats the second order of business on the afternoon of January 20. Merrick Garland would be pitch perfect as one. The other? Well, it’s a role in which Barack Obama’s ability to remain civil to incivility itself would serve him and us well. Call it his revenge.**
President Biden’s number one move? Statehood for the District of Columbia & Puerto Rico.
Before that–in fact, immediately–how about a new campaign slogan:
Kick Back!
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Notice the last four words on the headline on the NPR report that cite Garland’s “record of Republican support”:
*From “Benito Cereno,” a description of American Captain Amasa Delano.
**This would not be a first. William Howard Taft left the White House in 1913 and was appointed to the Supreme Court as Chief Justice by Warren Harding in 1921.
If I were to moderate tonight’s debate, I would ask Pence to settle a dispute I had this morning with a friend:
“Is Donald Trump an ass? Or is he the cumulative gas of the 63-million asses who voted for him? And for you?”
That debate–my friend vs. me, not Pence vs. Harris–arose from an inadvertent brainstorming session to find a metaphor that fits the president’s theatrics and tweets in recent weeks, if not recent years.
My friend thinks that Pence might try to convince us that his boss is playing multi-dimensional chess that, though all for our benefit, is beyond our comprehension.
Another friend was more direct: “Or Monopoly. Trump thinks he’s going to win everything but very soon he will draw the Go Directly to Jail card.”
Then came: “Or Cribbage, where he thinks he can skunk us for another four years only to get stuck in the dead hole.”
My entry questioned the first suggestion: “Chess? More like pin the tail on the donkey. And the American public is the donkey.”
The chess advocate relented but wishfully mistook my donkey for a pinata: “And the president is an ass.”
Which brings us back to the question I would love to hear put to Pence tonight.
Problem with debates–and for that matter with interviews of public officials–is that moderators are too polite or restricted to ask the real questions, those that might penetrate motives and shed light on causes and effects that officials would rather keep to themselves–an unacknowledged crime against democracy which the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 has aided and abetted with unlimited Collect & Go cards adjusted for inflation.
Admittedly, my proposed question above would get me immediately run out of the hall and kicked out into a downtown Salt Lake City street with at least one footprint on the flat of my back, but what about a question based in undeniable facts, such as what we have all witnessed this past several days?
For instance: “Mr. Vice-President, did you agree with the president’s announcement that there should be no stimulus package until after he wins the election? Also, since he specified the condition of his winning, do you think the stimulus should be ignored until Jan. 20 should you and he lose?”
Should Pence deflect this with, “Ah, but the president changed his mind,” the follow up should be something like, “So you will not bear witness to the presidents’ original motive.” There’s a chance that Pence might react to the religious connotation of the word witness, in which case he could expose his belief in the union of church and state. If not, I’d move on to:
“Mr. Vice-President, what’s it like to be a lapdog to a lunatic?”
Sorry, another too-true-to-be-asked-aloud stab, but Sen. Kamala Harris herself could subtly make the same thrust with a pin-pricking, “Mr. Vice-President, have you kept track of how many times you have said, “Thanks to the extraordinary leadership of President Donald J. Trump?”
This would be most effective in the context of the moderator’s questions about the administration’s disastrous and contradictory disavowals of and pronouncements about the pandemic–which have been the times when Pence has most emphatically licked his boss’s boots.
Some may howl that such questions could also be aimed at Harris–or Biden. Tell them to name one. If they can name anything, ask them to measure it, no matter what it is, to a pandemic’s death toll made four times higher by Trump & Pence’s initial denials and dismissals.
So, no need to limit the targets of such questions, not any more than the format in which they are asked. Indeed, they will serve us as much in interviews as in debates.
For example, Sen. Ted Cruz on NPR last week complained that justices appointed by Democratic presidents stay rock steady but those appointed by Republicans have the terrible tendency to drift left. Interviewer implied that might have something to do with long exposure to the Constitutional arguments, but Cruz dodged. He and the Republicans are counting on the notoriously anti-choice and anti-Affordable Care Act Amy Coney Barrett to be a rock that won’t roll left.
Why bother with such a question? Is there anyone who doesn’t already know the answer? Instead, NPR’s audience would have been much better served had the interviewer asked:
“Senator, the president has called you a liar, your dad an assassin, and your wife ugly, yet you still support him. Does the word ‘manhood’ ring a bell?”
Of course, the real question that could be put to Cruz and to most every Republican senator and representative is: “Why are you a lapdog to a lunatic?”
But if I had my choice of interviewing just one of them right now, it would be Maine Sen. Susan Collins who, prior to the Senate vote on impeachment, conceded that, yes, the president had violated the Constitution, but that she would still, in spite of that violation of an oath of America’s highest office, vote to acquit.
I would remind her of her nervous giggle, might even try to mock it, when she justified herself with, “Oh, I think he has learned his lesson.”
But I wouldn’t ask if she still thinks he has learned his lesson. Nor would I ask, tempting though it might be, if she was aware that she was laughing in the face of the American people.
No. Instead, I would ask, “Senator Collins, are you an ass? Or are you just the cumulative gas of anyone stupid enough to still believe you?”
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Two Gas Passers (Photos from CNN)Praying for more Gas. (From Rolling Stone)
Do you think politicians are doing enough for our veterans? Press one if yes. Press two if no.
That’s what I heard when I picked up the phone today. Held my tongue on the chance that someone, alerted to a non-response, would cut in to restate the question, but it was a robo-call, and so I held the phone through about ten seconds of silence before hanging up.
The Ugly
On the surface, the question is certainly simple. And the subject is irresistible. Other than a president who calls them “suckers” and “losers,” who, with any heart and soul, could say that, yes, veterans get “enough”?
Beneath the surface is the rhetorical trick. The question, for all its seeming innocence, implicitly demonizes people called “politicians.” No distinction between federal, state, or local. No distinction between executive and legislative branches.
More often that not, such pitches–whether made in advertisements, newspaper headlines, cable news graphics, social media memes, or polls designed to elicit pre-ordained answers–are aimed at what we call “congress.” That may seem more specific, but the difference is so slight as to render it misleading.
There’s no mention of two distinct houses, so no acknowledgement of numerous bills, many on the federal level in recent years to benefit veterans, passed in one only to be buried in the other.
Nor is there mention of two distinct parties, so no recognition that one consistently supports veterans’ benefits while the other watches those attempts disappear on the desk of a majority leader who boastfully calls himself “The Grim Reaper” and his desk “a graveyard.”
Instead, the question offers the generalized “congress,” which simultaneously draws from and adds to an American tendency to blame “them all,” to say that they are “all the same.” All of which, in turn, leads us to punish the ones who talk about what government can do to solve problems and reward those who tell us government is the problem–even though the former are working for what we want, while the latter obstruct it every chance they have.
Imagine a city, rocked by arson, firing the firefighters and hiring the arsonists because the arsonists successfully destroy while the firefighters can only limit destruction. That’s the logic by which we have Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell deciding what burns.
The question also reinforces the simplistic one-size-fits-all call for term limits rather than campaign finance reform as a way to “fix congress.” As if there’s no difference between Ed Markey and Lindsey Graham, or between AOC and, say, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Just what year would John Lewis have been forced into retirement?
Simple as it appears, the question is a sophisticated tool of demagoguery. By not admitting distinctions, it doesn’t allow for thought, only reaction.
I waited those ten seconds to tell someone that. Then it hit me: This is America. We don’t make distinctions. Why think when reaction is so quick and easy?
And what is more American than quick and easy?
The Bad
All of the above was a first for me only because there was no one on the other end, and I’m certain it was the first robo-poll I ever picked up. I always answer pollsters and enjoy joking with them, Republicans as much as Democrats.
The latter laugh louder when I insist that I’d vote for venereal disease before I’d ever vote for any Republican for any office, but the former take it in stride, end the call quickly but politely, and softly hang up.
Hope that my friends from Newburyport to Florida manning and womanning phone banks, or anyone seeking an opinion rather than money, find that reassuring. Call anytime, and be assured that what I’m about to say is only for those seeking donations.
Most everyone agrees that all calls from telemarketers, robo or real, are annoying and ought to be banned. We complain that lists called “do not call” do not work. Some try to politely end the call, some hang up right away, some never answer after checking their caller ID..
Due to some undiagnosed birth defect, or possibly a blow to the head that neither of my parents noticed as their baby crawled beneath the dinner table, or maybe the consumption of too much red and gold Central American produce during my college years, I have this compulsion to turn annoyance into amusement.
For a quick laugh, I answer in a whisper, apologizing for having strained vocal chords while I reach for a sopranino recorder I keep by the phone just for this purpose. That’s a small, high-pitched wooden flute on which I can play the highest, most piercing C with one hand while holding the phone to it like singers hold microphones right to their lips.
Knowing that telemarketers wear earpieces gave me pause until I remembered that they are the ones imposing on me. If anyone objects to that means to an end most everyone wants, then tell me the means that work for you–because nothing else I’ve heard of stops them.
In a more improvising mood, once I know it’s a he or a she and not an it on the line, I’ll unleash things off the top of my head, some of which work well enough to repeat. Often I say I’m a member of some fictional group such as WHO-DATT.
If they ask what that WHO-DATT is, as they often do, I spell it out: “The World Health Organization’s Decapitate All Telemarketers Taskforce.” Sometimes I’ll say the full name first and wait for their light bulb to go on, such as: “I’m with the Federation for Unwelcome Call Killing United.” If they keep me on the phone, I keep repeating the full name until they hang up or, as happened just once, I hear sudden laughter followed by, “Oh! Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day!” Click.
Here’s one of the better exchanges that I’ve been using of late when the creative juices fail me:
“I have already donated all my spare Jacksons and Grants to NO-EAT.”
“What’s NO-EAT?” they ask with their invariable, irrepressible cheer.
“The National Organization to Euthanize All Telemarketers.”
You’d be amazed how often I’m asked to define “euthanize.”
The Good
Or maybe you wouldn’t. And maybe you would rather I not joke about such things. Be assured that I never beat the eardrums or propose the funerals of the very good souls who solicit for good causes. However, I do tell them not just why I have nothing to give them, but why I consider them part of the problem that they, with all their good intentions, hope to solve.
Rather than modest, scattered contributions to cure this disease or ease that misfortune, to support a local fire department or to save a nearby river from contamination, wouldn’t it make more sense for our government–supposedly a self-government–to address those needs?
Often voicing a general agreement with me, pollsters always deflect the question, as they should, and try to steer me back to the cause. I cut them off instantly.
Isn’t that what self-government is for? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make these donations to candidates who support universal healthcare and a clean environment and get the ones who oppose them out of office?
They usually make a second attempt to steer me back to their cause. I allow them two words–yes or right, neither of which I have ever heard–before cutting in again:
And how do I know that you or your group do not support the politicians who cut funding for everything they can, who are trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, repeal environmental regulations?
If they are still on the phone, which most often they politely are, this is where they politely excuse themselves and hang up.
Call of the Called
It’s also where I take a deep breath. Would be hard for them to believe–and likely for you to believe after reading these pranks pulled on people trying to make a living in hard economic times–but the exchange is no easier for me than for them.
We often hear the phrase, “speak truth to power.” This is speaking truth to those who, for all their good intentions, serve as a buffer for power.
I hope they meet their fundraising goals. I hope that all abandoned dogs and cats find homes, that all diseases are cured, that all children have nutritious meals and access to the internet, that all police and fire departments are adequately funded, and that all veterans have all their needs met.
If people who run and work for philanthropies would realize that the apparatus to address all those needs is already in place, they could much better focus their efforts. If the money they raise were put into the unified effort of self-governance, their “annual” goals could be made to last, and all the tension and pressure of, say, medical bills on top of medical needs could be erased.
As they are in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Costa Rica, Japan, Australia, Egypt, Ghana, Botswana, India, Sri Lanka, and 50 other nations, not one of which, by the way, claims to be the greatest country in the world, a claim that is nothing but a cover for indifference.
Instead, telephone solicitors for charities, through no fault of their own, provide yet more cover for those who preserve the status quo, who work the halls of congress to ignore our basic needs, who serve only their donors. Americans are a generous people, they intone. Who can argue with that? Compassionate conservatism, one tried to popularize before it got laughed off his teleprompter.
To the contrary, instead of more calls seeking support for those who would turn government offices into agencies that do meet our needs, we now get robo-calls reinforcing the notion that “politicians” are “all the same.”
On this 50th anniversary of the film Catch-22, based on a novel about the absurdities of war and bureaucracy, it is as fitting as it is perverse that veterans are the bow meant to play our heartstrings and drown out what we most need heed.
My fellow fans of Melville might be amused to know that, during the writing of this, entirely by coincidence, I happened to read his Piazza Tale, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” for the first time. Written well before phones and telemarketers, the title character is one of their forerunners, the door-to-door salesman, a “drummer” as they came to be called in the 20th Century. The way the narrator dispenses of that nuisance at the story’s end makes me sooooooo envious.
A couple months before my granddaughter Briana’s third birthday, I made a delivery to a gift shop in Somerville’s Davis Square where I spotted a cloth doll no bigger than a bluejay.
“Bluejay” is among the most deceptive words in the English language. Heard separately or together, both syllables make the creature sound happy, harmless, and carefree, while the sight of the bird itself says otherwise. How many mornings have I wakened on this glorified Atlantic sandbar, a migratory path and nationally designated bird sanctuary, to come face to face with a bluejay in the bush immediately out my window?
Its mask makes it appear so ferocious, so menacing, that coffee on such mornings seems redundant.
In Davis Square, the doll on the shelf had no such effect, but was equally commanding. Rather than any bright colors common to most dolls, this was black and white save for the eyes and lips. Rather than the happy face that we always seek to show our children, this doll looked as stern as a dollar Washington through thick horn-rimmed glasses.
Having trained myself long ago to resist impulse purchases, I wasn’t two blocks away when I resolved to buy it next time I was sent there. A black and white doll for a three-year-old? Why not? If she and her brother can grow into the oversized shirts their parents recommend, they can grow to know and appreciate Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
From what I hear, they have already overheard a lot about the doll that now sits on their living room mantle. My daughter told me that, before the pandemic, it was a reliable conversation piece whenever they had company. Call those visits inadvertent civics lessons. Of course, she had to add, “I think that present was more for me.”
Justice Ginsburg was for all of us, something made clear throughout both the documentary and feature films made two years ago. Fortunate to have been a projectionist at an arts cinema that ran both, I heard the proof of it every night as packed audiences applauded during the credits and raved about them on the way out.
RBG had more critical success, including an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. On the Basis of Sex, which begins with her entry into Harvard Law in 1956 and ends with her landmark victory in a Colorado appeals court–a sex discrimination case representing a man–in 1972, won AARP’s award for “Best Grown Up Love Story.”
Don’t laugh. During those years, a favorite adage convinced us that “Behind every great man is a great woman,” although even then it seemed like consolation for second-class status. As a role reversal , Marty Ginsburg’s contributions to his wife’s career were enormous, and they were prominent in RBG, more so in Basis, proving that the adage can work both ways.
Considering that he was stricken with cancer soon after their daughter was born, and how she took care of them both while attending both her own and her husband’s classes (taking notes for him), it also worked both ways within the marriage.
Daughter Jane, too, contributed to her mother’s career. Coming of age in the turbulent years of Johnson and Nixon, she drew mom’s ire by skipping classes to attend demonstrations. But Jane also accompanied Ruth to interviews and meetings to determine legal strategy and prepare arguments. While Ruth’s gaze was already fixed on equal rights, it was Jane’s influence that sharpened its focus.
Basis puts that transition, and a few others, in a memorable soundtrack. Ruth walks through a demonstration to teach her first class at Rutgers to the tune of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” A spat with Jane is set to the Moody Blues’ “Questions.” Her later realization that Jane’s generation is the future is set to a song written for the film and performed by Kesha, “Here Comes the Change.”
As she reasoned in Moritz v. Commissioner before that Denver court: We’re not asking you to change the country. That’s already happened without any court’s permission. We’re asking you to protect the right of the country to change.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court 21 years after the scene that ends Basis. In the 27 years since, she became renowned for her dissenting opinions, most notably in voting rights cases in recent years as Republican state legislatures from Texas to North Carolina, from Florida to North Dakota contrive all they can to limit access to the polls, to purge rolls, to make voting in the low-income precincts of cities and on Indian reservations difficult if not impossible.
As currently comprised, the Supreme Court often refuses to hear the case. Instead, they punt complaints of discrimination back to the very state legislatures that enacted the discriminatory laws in the first place.
In the role of America’s own Pontius Pilate is Chief Justice John Roberts who in 2013 penned the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, overturning Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ginsburg’s dissent compared that to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”*
I doubt that anyone who saw Basis was surprised last night when NPR’s Supreme Court Correspondent, Nina Totenberg, quoted Ginsburg saying that she wrote dissents “for future generations.” Judging from the rock-star status she attained in recent years, the “Notorious RBG” didn’t need either film to establish her popularity with those who now attend Jane’s law classes at Columbia University’s Law School.**
As Rachel Maddow mused last night, “Who else ever became a rock-star in their eighties?” An odd echo of a Screening Room patron following a showing of RBG, “How does someone weighing 80 pounds show so much force?”
Answers to those questions are beyond me. I’m just waiting for the next bluejay to show up out my window. I want to see if that frightening mask is really a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses.
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Taken pre-pandemic when she was still three. Photo by Mama.
**The Ginsburgs also had a son, James, ten years younger than Jane, who, according to WikiPedia, “is the founder and president of Cedille Records, a classical music recording company based in Chicago, Illinois.”
Mouth of the River 