Two Parties; Inevitable and Desirable

American Dissatisfaction With Everything Is Reaching Historic Levels - http://huff.to/1qCE9he

Reference the above article discussing results of a recent poll by Pat Caddell:  I agree with Caddell's conclusion but not his solution. I think the two-party system is an inevitable and desirable political framework that is a legacy of our constitutional system. The problem, ultimately, is that the electorate are not keeping up their end of the deal. The two-party system is inevitable because of the electoral college and the 12th Amendment. It is desirable because it confers a degree of stability lacking in most parliamentary democracies.

Look at the root meanings of "congress" and "parliament." A congress comes together to pursue a common good. In a parliament, the parties talk (parle) about their differences, and then the ruling party or coalition of parties does what it wants while the opposition fields cat-calls from the back. Parliamentary systems are set up so that the opposition is really out of power. They cannot frustrate the ruling party or coalition.

In our system, Congress must work together and seek compromise because our constitution and the legacy of house and senate rules dictate they do. If one party decides to act as the opposition in our system, they have the power to bring government to a grinding halt. That creates openings for executive overreach that imperils our democracy. I, for one, do not believe that our current President has overreached with his use of executive orders and actions. But what about future presidents? How will they respond to obstructionist Congressional parties? Has the die been truly cast during these last congresses?

What can the American people do? I noted above that the electorate hasn't kept up its end of the deal. There are any number of pundits and paid loudmouths ready to tell you that you have no voice (Caddell is one of them). They will insist that all politics is corrupt, that "Washington" is the problem, and that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. And, if you believe their cynicism and accept their prescription of apathy and abandon the political field to them, then they will be right.

Today, roughly 20 - 25 percent of registered Democratic or Republican party voters vote in the primaries that select our candidates. That means that less that 15 percent of registered voters in this country decide who will actually compete for office.  We need to reclaim our ownership of the parties and the process. If we don't the meaning of this day -- July 4th -- will truly be diminished to hot dogs, beer, and sunburns; and the lives, fortunes and sacred honor of the men in Philadelphia who gave us this country, will have been given in vain.

For Ben

We look at you and muse; whose nose, smile, eyes?

We do that; grandparents, aunts, uncles, ancestors.
We know you are just you, and quite perfect.

We look for ourselves and to our pasts.

We are for you, with bonds of blood and love.
You are a new river. You spring new from the earth,
You meet our streams.
We seek you, tributaries.

We, "Flying Dutchmen" and "Frenchified Jews,"
Englishmen, Irishmen, Navigators

Younger sons and pilgrims,
Seeking land and freed souls.

We skipped an ocean and washed ashore;

Wandered inland, built railroads, piloted boats;
Miners and roughnecks, millworkers,
Chambermaids and scouts,
Airmen and scholars, lumberjacks, engineers.

We are for you.

Rivers grow, and seek the sea,
Meet rivers as they flow.
Some loud and joyous, rambunctious,
Some meander and eddy; 

Deep pools, deep life lie within.
Rivers enrich,
Sweet bright boy.
And rivers endure.

The Lost and Lonely Article

I propose a new word: historoidy, or as a variation, historoidical. Like factoids, which look and feel like facts, historoidy looks and feels like history but is, well, BS.

Of course if someone else has already coined the term, I apologize and thank you at the same time.

I have been thinking about historoidical fantasy for a couple of weeks now. I was in a discussion group recently, in which a fellow who professes a "conservative" and "originalist" view of our history, argued that the "militia" supporting Cliven Bundy in his standoff with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) were on sound Constitutional and historical ground. Rather than suggest he is an idiot who listens to nutjobs like Glenn Beck and reads too many Cleon Skousen novels, I wrote back "You're wrong," and proceeded to explain why.

Apparently "You're wrong" is inflammatory, insensitive and -- curiously, to a group that claims to despise political correctness -- politically incorrect. So, next time I'll eschew such elitist devices as apostrophes and contractions and go with "Your wrong." Maybe that will sting less.)

But I digress.

My correspondent pinned his contention that Bundy's thugs were doing the founding fathers' work on two arguments. The first was that the BLM isn't mentioned in the Constitution and therefore violates the 10th Amendment, which says:

    "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

(Notice that it says "powers not delegated," not words not said. It also follows that if a power is delegated to the United States (by which it means the federal government, elected by the people directly and through the States) or is prohibited to the States then the 10th Amendment doesn't apply. We'll come back to that.)

The other argument my correspondent advanced was that the right of the States to own and control public lands is rooted in the Treaty of Paris, signed between the King George III's ministers and Commissioners appointed by the United States of America in September of 1783 and ending our war for independence.

The Treaty of Paris argument is historoidical.

But let's start with the 10th Amendment argument, and talk about the lost and lonely Article IV of the Constitution. 10th Amendment enthusiasts make much of the Amendment reserving to the States those things that aren't reserved to the federal government or prohibited to the States. Of course Articles I, II and III lay out the powers and responsibilities of the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary, respectively. Where does the Constitution say what is delegated, or prohibited, to the States.

That would be Article IV -- listing the rights, responsibilities and limitations of the States -- which includes such jewels as:

    "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State. [emphasis added]" --Article IV, Section 3

So, in the case of public lands certainly, the Constitution explicitly reserves to Congress the right to dispose of and regulate the use of lands that don't belong to private owners or States. Obviously, should a new state put language in its Constitution that recognizes federal control over public lands within its borders (like, say Nevada), then that settles the question that much more.                   

Curiously, States' rights advocates who seem to live by the 10th Amendment, rarely mention Article IV, without which any further discussion of the 10th Amendment is basically meaningless.

It's as if it's, well, inconvenient.

Well what about the historoidical argument about the Treaty of Paris? I would normally snort with derision as it is utterly irrelevant. However, since it sounds and feels like there might be something there historically, it must be dealt with.

As I noted, the Treaty of Paris was the agreement between Great Britain and the United States of America that ended our war for independence. In the agreement, Great Britain gave up sovereignty over some of its former American colonies, listed as

    "New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia..."

The treaty furthermore describes the the entirety of land transferred to the sovereignty of the United States, from which the new nation intended to carve future States. That area included what are now Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.

The Treaty of Paris Argument runs thus:

1. The "United States of America " referred to in the Treaty is not the unitary government of later years but the collective States who had not conceded any autonomy to a central government and were thus negotiating independently with the Crown.

2.  By enumerating the "free and independent states" with which the British Crown is negotiating, the parties to the treaty agreed that the States are independent of each other and free to do whatever they want; therefore invalidating later innovations in governance such as the Constitution. Indeed, with this interpretation, the Constitution usurps the States' power and any laws passed under the Constitution are only as valid as the States allow them to be.

Oh, where to begin...

The Treaty of Paris was signed five years before the Constitution was completed. That much is true. However, the American Commissioners were empowered by an American Congress that was organized under the Articles of Confederation (signed in 1777 and enacted in 1781). The Articles listed  the powers and limitation of the States (as does the Constitution a few years later).

Article I lists the States that form the new nation, and lays out the process by which new states may be admitted. The process was fairly rigorous and required two-thirds of the States consent, with one exception, Canada. Article XI gave Canada a free pass to get in whenever they wanted. This puts another cast on why the British crown enumerated the States to which the Treaty of Paris applied; to make clear that it did not apply to Canada.

Article II states "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled" (echoed later in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution). Article VI clearly stipulates one of those powers not given the States; " No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any King, Prince or State."

So, as far as the United States Commissioners were concerned, the Treaty was negotiated by a collective entity, empowered to speak for all under the Articles of Confederation, known as The United States of America. And, it really doesn't matter if the British ministers thought the were dealing with one government represented by five commissioners, or thirteen governments represented by five commissioners.

Five years after the Treaty was signed, the American Congress decided that the Articles of Confederation were flawed. Among other things, they didn't adequately address how the government would raise revenue in order to defend its against foreign powers or domestic insurrection. One of the problems had to do with the new lands to the west and how to carve new states out of them. The States were fighting over boundaries. Would-be new states like Franklin seceded from older States and were suppressed. And the question of who actually owned the lands in the new territories created new and dangerous tensions.

The States agreed to review the Articles and fix the flaws. In the Constitutional Convention that ensued, the State settled the issue of the new lands by surrendering claims to the territories. The federal government, holding the land in trust, sold it to citizens to raise revenue to pay off debts and perform its duties under the Constitution.

The current "Sovereignty" movement that cheers on guys like Cliven Bundy and his ruffians, portrays themselves as patriots and Constitutionalists. They have not read the Constitution -- certainly not Article IV -- and are not patriots. The best that can be said of them is that they are undereducated dupes. The worst that can be said is that they are traitors; according to the Constitution, mind you.

Caribou

I wrote this poem, Caribou, in the early 1970s. I take it out and massage it every so often. It's dedicated to the memory of those who built the silver town. Caribou wasn't much in modern terms. None of those towns were much. A loud noise, a hard road certainly. By the turn of the 20th century most were going or gone. Colorado owes much to them. They birthed a state.

The Road and the Visions

Trapped between the blasted rocks,
The pavement winds
And works its way through the hills.
Past Nederland
It finds an air of freedom,
Running fast and true
Toward the nearing peaks
And Caribou.

“Caribou is SILVER! Rivaled by nothing, this is where a young man's dreams come true. Presidents walk on Caribou silver bricks! With just a pick and a shovel, a man can work his fortune in a day!"

“Caribou? There is nothing there now but the wind. A few shacks, foundations and headstones. Nothing else.

"Once - I'd guess it was really something”


The Wind; Thoughts and Lessons

"The people who built this town didn't build to last out the first big payday. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. It was too windy"

Sometimes,
The wind will blow and howl
Through windows and cracks in wall.
I think then,
The wind is an old angry man,
Sweeping the dead leaves, branches,
And neighbor's trash cans.

We were kids,
And spread our coats as wings.
Leaned into the wind and wished
We would fly and hoped
We wouldn't fall.
So we knew Chinook;
And forgot our wasted matches
And lost hats.

The wind was more than that to Caribou.

“It was wind that killed this town. O, there were other things too. There was a plague and fires. But mostly, it was the wind. You can't keep a town where the wind won't go below ninety miles an hour."

 The Legacy

"The miner's did some pretty bad things up here, to themselves, their women, to the mountains. I wonder if the mountains didn't just get tired of it, summon up the wind, and blow all the people back to the flats. I guess not; the wind was here before the miners, wasn't it.

"The wind is the only thing left now”


The wind left hopes;
Or held them
And holds them yet -
Hopes not seen, though heard
On the wind,
And always felt.
The brawling hearty hopes
Of glory-holes and whiskeyed whores
Holler down canyons to land below.
Quiet hopes of peace
Seek peace,
Slip through rocks and knotty wood,
And slip away.
Desperate hopes
Shriek,
Fall to moans,
And fall away.
Silent,
Hopes of wishes lost and life regained,
Brush across the grass,
Linger,
And wander on.

.... Once

Once again winding,
The road goes to dirt
And roughly,
It comes to end.

Caribou.
A headstone there, a shack here,
Blasted and strafed by the wind
And dead many years.

Beecher Island

Beecher Island is the site of site of an 1868 battle between Southern Cheyenne warriors and cavalry scouts from Fort Hays, Kansas. It was one of the legendary Indian battles of the old west, featured ficticiously in the 1936 movie The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper, and written up by Dee Brown in his book Action at Beecher Island.  

I wrote this poem after visiting Beecher Island in the the summer of 1975. I had just finished the Navy's Preventive Medicine School and was on my way to Camp Pendleton, California, which had just received 20,000+ Vietnamese refugees after the Saigon government collapsed. The weekend I arrived home, in Boulder, a former roommate got married and we all got trashed. After the hangover, I cajoled a friend and future brother-in-law to accompany me on a "fishing" trip to Beecher Island.  

Beecher Island is in the ultimate east of Colorado. In 1975 the Arikaree river contained enough water to make fishing plausible. Today the river bed at Beecher Island is silted in and grown over by wild grasses.


The prairie is more Kansas than Colorado here.
The road drops away from the corn stalks, grass,
and deKalb signs to a forgotten park.
We stopped the car to read the marker
and drop our lines in shallow water,
too shallow really.

We came here, leaving weddings and wars behind,
to say we fished, and drink beer,
and read the stone left behind in another year.
"I don't think we'll get a bite,"
Gary flicked his line and opened a Coors.
I left mine and heard a bee
and a young girl's horse crossing a wooden bridge.

Horses thundered and screamed, then,
and splashed through the shallow prairie river.
Fleeing Roman Nose, the white scouts holed up, here,
while the Cheyenne flung their arrows and youth at them.

Roman Nose and Sandy Beecher came to this place,
and an errand boy named Slinger, and fifteen men from Hays
and a hundred or so Arapaho who stayed
-- its all on the stone --
for nine long days.

And the horses clop on the bridge, the sun passes a cloud.

It Is Not About Religion

This essay began as a comment on something I shared on Facebook, regarding the Arizona Legislature passing their SB 1062, aka the "Hate the Gay Away" Amendment. The bill "protects" individuals' rights to refuse service to people they deem objectionable on religious grounds (mostly gays, but the bill would allow businesses to deny others as well). As I write this, SB 1062 has been passed by the Arizona legislature on nearly party-line votes (I think a couple of GOP State Senators voted with Democrats to oppose the bill) and is waiting for Governor Brewer to sign it.

I'm usually wary of comparisons to Nazis, but this one seems inevitable. Quite simply, how do you tell that someone is gay? Is it a "Good morning, welcome to McDonald's, are you gay?" sort of thing? Is a man holding hands with a another man gay? Because that makes President Bush gay. Or how about kissing; except Russians do same-sex kissing as a way of saying hello and I'm pretty sure they're mostly not gay. So, how do you tell? Or is it when someone feels uncomfortable around people who act and dress a little different than he or she, that we get to treat them differently?

The Nazis, after working to persuade people that Jews were a inferior and malevolent species realized that it was hard telling them apart from other Germans, so they made up "Jew Codes" and made Jews wear yellow stars on their clothes, which they billed them for by the way. I wonder how the Arizona legislature proposes to tell who is gay and who isn't, and do they plan to charge them for the honor of being singled out?

But all that deals with the practicalities of the bill. Let's get to the really important question, what is wrong with being gay? Some people insist that it violates their religious beliefs. Fine, if you believe that then don't be gay. But we have this thing in the United States called the First Amendment, and within that, called the "Establishment Clause," that says the government can make no laws regarding the establishment of religion. In other words, behaviors that are proscribed solely on religious grounds cannot be banned by government laws. If you were Catholic in the 1950s and couldn't eat meat on Fridays, it didn't mean your Protestant friends had to give up their hamburgers. It had to do with Catholic beliefs, and there was no compelling public good to be achieved by mandating meatless Friday; or harm to be avoided.

In the early 1960s, a future Georgia governor named Lester Maddox demanded that he, as a private businessman and restaurant owner, had a right to refuse service to anyone he wanted. Of course that meant black people back then. To emphasize the point, Maddox offered pickaxe handles to white patrons who wanted to help him refuse service. The federal government's point of view was that a person entering a business that was open to the public had an expectation and right to the same services as any other patron, as long as they weren't doing anything against the law or -- within reason -- disturbing other patrons (the fed maintained that just being there was not -- within reason -- disturbing). Interestingly, this is the same argument that gun rights advocates use when they pack heat in Starbucks and other public businesses.

I'm a straight guy, why do I care? Because liberty isn't divisible. This bill, which is billed as protecting religious freedoms, does nothing but mock and undercut them. It empowers individuals to deny services to people on the purely subjective basis of not liking something about them. Wrap it in religious language all you want, but we in the United States have settled law that says that is bunk. Can I refuse to serve people who aren't dressed for church on Sunday, on the grounds that they disrespect the Lord's day? How about refusing someone wearing a yarmulke? How about someone wearing a gun? Am I allowed to refuse someone sporting a Confederate flag on his T-shirt because I object to celebrating treason against my country?

As I noted, SB 1062 is on Governor Brewer's desk for signature. She is under intense pressure from the business community to veto it. Tourism dollars and things like the Superbowl hang in the balance. Tweeting your opinions to @NFL and @NBC about holding the Superbowl in a state that sanctions hypocrisy and hate would add clarity to her decision.

Labor, and the GOP's Betrayal of Conservative Principles

Last night workers at Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted on whether the United Auto Workers would play a part in their plant. The vote went against the UAW by 712-626. This has been characterized by some as a devastating loss to the union. I think that is the wrong judgement.

It matters that the vote happened at all. That is pretty impressive in a part of the country where anti-labor forces are allowed to obstruct organizing efforts and otherwise violate federal and state labor laws at will. In this case, the UAW didn't even initiate the effort. Plant workers, with the apparent blessing of VW, courted the UAW. As the drive took shape, Tennessee's Republican Governor and junior Senator went on a blitz to stop the unionization effort. The Governor and Senator were joined by a host of usual suspects; Grover Norquist led the charge.

The various opposition parties made dark mutterings about communists, intoned about "foreign influences" (German labor unions) penetrating their state, and generally tried to scare the bejesus out of the 1,500 plant workers. Images of Detroit abounded, and President Obama's name was thrown about with wild abandon.

It worked, this time. The victory may be Pyrrhic however. The GOP has to own an anti-worker blitz at a time that workers are hurting and concerns about income disparity have achieved traction. This will come back to bite them.

Interestingly, VW had asked "third-parties" to stay out of the union vote effort.

Before getting into the question of why the GOP and the political right are so opposed to labor unions in general, its helpful to look at the ways that unions are a boon to business, industry and conservative politics (here I ask readers to note that I use conservative in its correct sense. When I refer to what the wing-nuts have coopted I use the word in quotes ["conservative"]).

First of all, the American labor movement has been overwhelmingly conservative. While today's GOP wants you to imagine Wobblies storming the factory gates (or Winter Palace), in fact the AFL/CIO for years was the mainstay of conservative Democrats. They rallied their forces against FDR's preferred 1944 VP candidate Henry Wallace and we got Harry Truman instead. In the 1950s and 60s they largely drove the Democrats' anticommunist wing occupied by the likes of JFK, LBJ, and Hubert Humphrey. Labor put the brakes on the Democrats as they courted marginal constituencies in the late 60s and 70s. Look, in retrospect, slow-rolling minorities seeking a place at the table is nothing to be proud of, but it kind of meets the essence of conservatism; go slow, be deliberate, think about unintended consequences.

In the early 80s, labor poured money into Solidarity, the Polish dissident labor movement that did a damn sight more than Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War. When Polish workers struck in 1980; first in the Gdansk shipyards and, then, through the entire country, it ripped away whatever shreds of "rule by the proletariat" were left of the old Soviet system. And America's house of labor was front and forward with money and moral support.

Organized labor is good for business, in part because it relieves a lot of businesses of the cost of administering health and retirement programs. It is popular to point out the ruinous expense of maintaining pensions and health care for retired auto workers; I won't debate that they were costly, but the auto manufacturers did not have to pay the cost of administering those programs, that was borne by the UAW.

Labor is also good for business and industry because it provides standards for workers to train to, and follow. Workers who are trained through union sanctioned apprenticeships to the journeyman and master level know what they are doing. I know I always feel safer  knowing a union electrician fixed the wiring in my house.

Labor does push business and industry to pay workers better. But even that is conservative and good for business - as long as you define "good" as good for the long haul and not good for next quarter's balance sheet so you can churn your stocks and make a quick buck at your company's expense. Henry Ford figured out years ago that if he paid his workers well enough to buy the cars they were building that they would work better and he would get richer. Ford was not a bleeding heart. He understood enlightened self-interest.

Similarly, a nation that pays its workers well invests well. Such a nation wants workers to be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise; so they can fully participate, be invested, in the life of the nation. And those too are conservative values.

So, why the GOP opposition? It is partly historical. Reflexive GOP opposition to union efforts in the 30s opened the door for Democrats under FDR to lock up the labor vote as a key element of the Roosevelt coalition. In zero-sum politics anything that hurts your enemy helps you.

Going back to Henry Ford, who bitterly opposed unionization, he thought that the union diluted the workers' sense of loyalty to him and his company. He may have been right. The workers may have liked Henry's wages and paternalistic views, but they also knew that Henry was getting on in years and would not be at the helm for long. Would another generation treat them like family, or would they become expenses in a ledger? A modern comparison is Walmart. Sam Walton was a latter-day Ford in many respects. He took pretty good care of his workers and looked poorly on unions. His heirs have not done well by their workers and are one of the contributors to rising welfare and medicaid expenses because they refuse to pay a living wage and expect taxpayers to subsidize their paltry wages.

Labor remains a core piece of the Democrats' coalition, although private sector unions have been on their knees for decades. That makes any UAW inroads into the South particularly troublesome. Southern states have been historically hostile to organized labor and have also -- historically -- had the most poorly paid workers. In the worst economy since the Great Depression, the GOP probably does not want workers in the GOP's geographical base putting two and two together and starting a regional push to unionize.

GOP hostility to labor has been a feature of the party's right wing for a century. Republican moderates realized the value that labor brought to the table and worked with them. George Romney had the labor vote in Michigan pretty well locked up. Richard Nixon was endorsed by the Teamsters in '72, and the AFL/CIO refused to campaign against him that same year.

Democrats haven't always been there for labor either. I suggest that labor's decline and the dearth of conservative Democrats that started in the 70s are related phenomena and not good for the Democratic party.

But, given the GOP's current rank hostility toward labor, Democratic diffidence is tolerable and acceptable. Labor's attitude toward the two parties reminds me of Jean Seberg's line in Paint Your Wagon: "Well Joseph, I may not know what I'm getting, but I know what I've gotten."

Double Dog Dare

So, for the last week or so, I have heard TV and radio journalists discussing the President flipping the bird, rhetorically, at Congress in the State of The Union address.

Here is what the President said:

" ...what I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require congressional action, and I'm eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do."

That really does not translate to "screw you, I'll do what I want." However, I have pretty much given up on the media's ability to 'get' nuance and understand -- and report -- the difference between telling Congress, "I want to work with you but I also have a responsibility to the people who voted for me and I will meet that responsibility however I can," and saying "screw you."

My mother once pointed out that FDR's "court-packing" proposal, decried by the GOP as unconstitutional, was anything but. My mother really liked FDR by the way. FDR proposed and defended a constitutional amendment to modify and fix the number of justices who sat on the court. It was debated and voted down and FDR dropped it. Where was the constitution violated?

Similarly, Obama proposes to use his executive powers to effect changes he thinks will improve things for Americans. His executive orders have effect if Congress let's them stand. They can legislate them away. No constitutional crisis here folks. Keep walking...

But, if Congress -- the GOP in particular -- wants to vote Obama's executive orders out of existence, then they have to go on record as voting to screw over American workers, something they go to great pains to avoid by legislative devices like the filibuster and distractions like "repealing Obamacare." The President has double-dog dared 'em. Let's see what happens.

And let's see if the media start paying real attention.

"...you go to the box, you know. Two minutes by yourself, and you feel shame, you know."

The title of this essay is taken from an early line in Slap Shot, the hockey movie with Paul Newman. It was one of my favorite movies when I saw it back in 1977 and though I haven't seen it in decades I always remember it as insanely funny, if perhaps a bit crude. Last night it was on satellite TV so I recorded it on the DVR and sat down this morning with my coffee and breakfast to enjoy it.

Things change in 37 years.

The movies was the template for many of the sports movies that followed: There is the old veteran seeking a last season in the sun; and a team of plucky losers determined to show up an unfeeling owner who is out to sell the team and could care less about the people themselves. How many sports movies have we seen since the late '70s that echo that plot?

The movie also depicts the plight of the rust-belt towns of the northeast, in this case Charlestown, Massachusetts. Charlestown, you may remember, saw its economy fold in the late 70s, while simultaneously being ripped apart by busing riots. A background theme is  the despondency of those towns as their industrial bases fled overseas and their work forces faced recession, unemployment and a future offering people shopping carts and a pleasant greeting.

And then there is this: The movie is incredibly misogynistic and homophobic; jarringly so. Indeed, as I watched it again, I recalled that I was taken aback by the language and sexism when I first watched it in 1977. I wasn't particularly shocked by the homophobia at the time. Actually both the term and concept were largely unknown. Only five years earlier the then Democratic front-runner Edmund Muskie, was doing everything he could to avoid meeting with a gay caucus during his campaign for the White House. 

I recall thinking at the time of a question I'd heard some old Navy Chiefs ask their young sailors when they trash-talked women around the base or on liberty: "Would you want someone talking to your daughter like that?" But that question by itself isn't enough. It should be asked along with: "Would you want your son talking to anyone else's daughter or son like that?" If it isn't it may do more harm than good.

But in 1977, we were getting "liberated." I wasn't entirely sure what we were being liberated from in 1977. Now I suspect the people getting liberated were the ones who ran Hollywood studios and had previously been expected to adhere to certain decency standards. They were definitely liberated from those things. But in the process, they popularized and celebrated behaviors that were -- well -- unconscionable. 

So back to that question: "Would you want someone talking to your daughter like that?" Of course not! Not my daughter! But as with many questions, this one, left by itself, contains a "yes, but." But, what about someone else's daughter, someone I don't know, someone that doesn't look like me, doesn't earn as much, doesn't do things I approve of, etc? What then?

The message of the movie is that it is okay to treat people shabbily or cruelly because of their gender or orientation. Excuses as to whether they "joined in the fun" or that it reflects an ethos of another era are beside the point. Reducing men or women to their body parts or what they do with those parts is as wrong as reducing people to the color of their skin, the pattern of their speech or the balance in their bank accounts. When you strip off the dignity to which a person is entitled simply by the fact of their existence, their personhood, you hate them in the classical sense of the word.

Slap Shot, funny as it seemed when it came out, does exactly that. It reduces people to something less, and permits other people to do the same. 

The title of this essay comes from an early line in the script. The team's goalie is being interviewed and is explaining what happens when you foul another player: You go to the [penalty] box where you spend two minutes by yourself and feel shame. This morning, I felt shame or mortification that a movie I once thought funny should, years later, turn out to be vile.  The shame lasted longer than two minutes, long enough to reflect on and type this essay. 

I won't watch it again..

1914; and a century begins...

It is Boxing Day, 2013. The next holiday in the chute is New Years of course, and with it we may end the world's worst century. If we are luckier than wise.

100 years ago the world seemed secure and peaceful. Some statesmen knew it was a fragile peace, but few had any idea what the costs of shredding the peace would be.

In 1878, Otto von Bismark is reputed to have said "Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal ... A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all ... I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where ... Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off."

But 35 years later, in 1913, the statesmen, in their wisdom (or hubris?) were sure they had figured it out, that they could "manage" war should it come. 

At the end of 1913,  Great Britain worried far more about trouble in Ireland than anywhere in the Balkans. There was also uncertainty in Europe's capitols, as well as in Washington DC, as to the fate of investments in China as Sun Yat Sen's revolution swept away the Manchu Dynasty. Washington was mostly worried about Mexico and its troubles.

Great power politics in Europe resembled a family reunion or squabble; the Hohenzollerns in Berlin, the Romanovs in Moscow, and the Hanovers in London were linked through marriage and blood. George V of England was easily mistaken for his Cousin Nicholas II of Russia and both bore a family resemblance to their cousin Willy--Wilhelm II--of Germany. And they were united (well, related) as well to the Hapsburgs who ruled over the decrepit Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

On Europe's southeast flank, the relatively new Serbian kingdom sought to reclaim an imagined glory by uniting the Slavic peoples and carving off a corner of Austria's domains. Serb leaders appealed to a pan-Slavic identity and, bolstered by Russia--who had their own issues with Vienna and the Hapsburgs--stirred trouble in the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina through ultra-nationalist terrorist gangs such as The Black Hand. 

Six months into the new year, on 28 June 1914, a damned foolish thing happened in the Balkans. 

Gavrilo Princip, a Black Hand terrorist in his 20s shot and killed the Hapsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, in Sarajevo. Vienna demanded harsh reparations from the Serb government in Belgrade and appealed to their partner in the Triple Alliance, Germany, for help. Belgrade in turn, turned to Moscow for help and attempted to negotiate less onerous reparations from Vienna. Although Europe was a web of treaties and alliances; some secret, some open, no one thought that the "thing" in Sarajevo would lead to general war. Cooler heads would prevail.

Professor Michael Neiberg examines the first weeks of July 1914 in his new book, The Dance of the Furies. He looks at the correspondence of  "ordinary" Europeans as well as press reporting in those fateful weeks of July and reveals that no one thought much about the event beyond noting it as a tragedy. Certainly there was no sense of far greater tragedies dead ahead. Dr Neiberg discusses his conclusions in a lecture at the National WWI Memorial Museum in March of this year.

What is most striking about the beginnings of the war is that the leaders thought they had it under control. They thought that, at worst, it would be a manageable minor conflict on Europe's periphery. They weren't fools; in his lecture Dr Neiberg talks about his desire to rescue the the people of July 1914 from "the stupid box," to show that they were on ground they thought they understood and were buffeted by forces wholly beyond their ken. Neither fools or knaves, they were the best their nations could offer as leaders and public servants, and yet...

The Great War they unleashed destroyed their world. At its end, the family businesses of the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Hapsburgs (aka the German, Russian and Austrian empires) were gone. Britain's empire was mortally wounded. Ideologies that were gasping for oxygen--or didn't even exist--before the war became conflagrations of thought and emotion. And the embers were laid for a greater war to come. 

A poem from that second war captures some of the statesmans' folly in their surety. 

Son, written by a Russian Jewish poet, Pavel Antokolsky, in 1943 is a dialog between a father and his son who was killed in action the previous year. In the poem the son tells his father: 

"We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our tracks.
On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords. "

War is indeed a route uncharted; it is easy to get into and damnably difficult to navigate and get out of again. War releases forces beyond our imagination and beyond our ability to recapture.

It was not entirely cowardice that led many in England and France to dread the thought of another war in the 1930s. It was also a healthy regard for what the last one had unleashed. The Second World War was made necessary by the First, which had released unimaginable evil. In its resolution however, the second war perpetuated the problems of the first, along with new ones and required accommodating one evil to defeat a worse evil.

Today there are statesmen and leaders who would take us into war for the best of reasons; to protect the helpless, to combat terrorism, control weapons of mass destruction. No one goes to war for ignoble reasons, in public. No one ever imagines how much worse it can be.

Perhaps we will learn or perhaps we will get lucky and not repeat the mistakes of the past 100 years. Perhaps we will pay attention to the past and its lessons and expect no less of our leaders.

Answering his son in the poem, Pavel Antokolsky writes: 

"Farewell…

"I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son, is come to its close"

The other Churchill; and a World of Hope and Glory

At the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries one of the most popular writers in the English speaking world was an American from St Louis named Winston Churchill. He was so popular that an up and coming English politician with the same name felt it necessary to use his middle initial, S, to distinguish himself.

In 1918 Churchill wrote a book called A Traveller in Wartime (it can be downloaded free in Google Books). The book contains an appendix called "The American Contribution," which is a very interesting examination of American and European -- particularly British -- politics and developments as WWI crawled to its close. Churchill offers a stirring defense of the emerging liberal order of its day. It is fascinating to read, to see the imaginings that would become the New Deal, and realize that we are having the many of the same discussions today, 100 years later.

Old Jules Country

Call it moonscape if you want,
Or UFO country.
To me, it is the turn toward home,
That half-left at mile marker 103,
Down into the dusk of Old Jules Country.
The road speeds past silhouettes
Of bare trees and hills, joined by
Windmills and billboards, silos,
And pumping rigs that pierce the earth
Drinking blood of dinosaurs and mastodons;
Silhouettes of irrigation rigs snake
Across plow-dappled fields where buffalo fed
And fell to Cheyenne arrows.
This was the home of the great southern herd,
A bison sea moving in waves across the prairie,
Where Herefords now dot the hills
And mope in feedlots.
Closer in, past Sterling, 
The houses and truckstops
Sneak the land away from old Jules
And the ghosts; the bison and Cheyenne.
The ghosts, the bones remain with the hills and trees.
The tracks endure beneath the concrete road
As it speeds toward the orange and dusky sky.

Delusion and Deadbeats

For Ted Cruz and Company:

Read This !!! and This!!!  and then this!!!

Would breaching the debt ceiling be catastrophic? Survey says yes!

However, if you think that the Yuan or Euro would be a better reserve currency than the Dollar, or think that Europe's interwar economies  are a good model, then this depression will be for you (and thanks to you). 

But, DON'T / DON'T call yourself a patriot ever again.

Debt, Deficit, and Deadbeats

The shutdown is chugging along and the debt limit throw-down is just around the corner. Soon, all the horror stories about our debt will roll off the tongue of every right wing shouter and every journalist desperate to not be seen as biased. 

Is the nation in debt? Absolutely and too much. Several things get the blame, some unfairly. Social Security gets a good piece of the blame, although even its harshest critics (for the most part) admit that it isn't an immediate problem. Social Security -- as it now exists -- has quite a few good years left. If the Congress had kept to the "grand bargain" worked out by President Reagan, Tip O'Neill and Robert Dole in the 80s, and allowed the amount of income subject to Social Security tax to rise along with average income, Social Security would be solvent well beyond anyone's ability to predict. 

Medicare is a different problem. Health care costs have been increasing well above the rate of inflation for years and the situation is now becoming untenable, although the rate of increase is slowing now. Still predictions that our government is on its way to becoming a health care agency with a military is a worrisome prospect.

Speaking of our military, it is too big and too expensive. The individual services have always had insatiable appetites and far too little effort is put into restraining them. The services often appear incapable of thinking of a common good, beyond their own needs and desires. It isn't as overtly as bad as during the "Admirals' Revolt" over the favor shown the upstart Air Force in the 40s. No Air Force General has offered to sink a Navy aircraft carrier, and no Navy Admiral has offered to shoot down an Air Force strategic bomber. Now the battles are fought in Congressional Committees, among Committee staffs, and in the Offices of the Secretary of Defense. But they are no less fierce. 

In addition to cost of systems and equipment, the force itself has grown far more expensive. The advent of the All-Volunteer Force led to a force that is far better paid than that which fought the Vietnam War. The force is now largely married and with families. It is older and more senior. Individual soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines stay in longer -- often for full 20-year careers. They are far better trained and many are highly competitive in the civilian work-force. The upshot is a smaller and far more expensive military than the one that went to Korea or Vietnam -- or even Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1991.

And then there are tax expenditures. What is a tax expenditure? Lets say I manufacture widgets and I am also the President of the Association of Widget Manufacturers of America (AWMA). As a manufacturer and AWMA President, I think that I need a tax break to help me fund research and development, and to give me an edge against widgets that are imported from countries who pay their workers a lot less than I do. So I send my lobbyists to Washington DC and they come back with a tax break worth $300 million. While that is great for me, it is $300 million that is not available for a bunch of other stuff our tax money pays for. 

Ah, but I may point out that that $300 million is an investment in my industry. It ensures jobs in various Congressional districts. If my widgets are used in military aircraft or ships, that is even better. So, it is an investment. Okay?

There are scads of tax expenditures. There is the oil depletion allowance. There are tax breaks that allow US companies that do business overseas to sequester their overseas earnings so they aren't taxed in the US. There are personal income tax breaks for people who are able to take advantage of them; such as carried interest and stock options. One of the most wide spread tax expenditures is the home mortgage allowance.

All of these tax expenditures have their defenders. And, to some extent they are defensible as investments in industries, business start-ups, home-ownership, etc. 

So what have the new breed of debt and deficit hawks done to fix these problems? You know, the people who are ready to crash the country's and the world's economy, so as to "fix" the debt.

Not a damn thing.

If they wanted to "fix" Social Security, you would think they would either raise the amount of income subject to Social Security tax to $180,000, where it should be if the terms of the Reagan/O'Neill/Dole plan were honored. Or they would propose a change to how we ensure a decent income in retirement for our seniors, and put it in front of Congress and the American People for a vote; except the last time that was tried by the White House, Congress wanted nothing to do with it and Republicans took a beating in opinion polls and electoral polls for their pains. 

Moving on...  What have our debt demons done about the military? Well, they have tried to address personnel problems by sequestering funds and cutting services in the least productive way possible, leaving some to wonder if they accidentally picked up Mitt Romney's proposal to get illegal aliens to self-deport by mistake. As far as equipment and high-end systems; well, we have the F-35 which has blown a hole in every spending level and development timeline it has met. It is said that in a few years, at this pace, we will have the largest defense budget in the world, and one F-35 for our trouble. But at least the F-35 doesn't suffocate its pilots (I don't think it does anyway), that honor goes to the F-22. Both aircraft are burning money like crazy and aren't in service yet. Not to be outdone the Navy is playing with the Littoral Combat Ship, which is a multi-tasking platform. That means it can be reconfigured to do all sorts of missions, but hasn't shown an ability to do any of them well. So what is Congress doing on these? Spending the money as it is asked for and even as it isn't asked for. Sometimes, Congress buys stuff the services have told them they don't want. But its good for their donors, and sometimes for jobs back home. 

And lets not forget those tax expenditures. Thanks to Grover Norquist, everyone of those tax expenditures is sacrosanct. Try touching one and Grover and minions will raise a hue and cry that you are RAISING TAXES!!! They love the arguments about how tax cuts (read expenditures) are investments in jobs and that cutting them is JOB-KILLING! Curiously though, they don't see how spending on infrastructure improvements, or building a high-speed rail system, or building new schools, or investing in alternative energy systems also invests in jobs. 

Finally, we should talk about MEDICARE and medical expenses. I mentioned that the rate of increase is actually starting to slow. Funny story that. About twenty years ago, President Clinton tried to reform the health system and deliver a long dreamed of Democratic Party program of universal health care for Americans. Clinton made some political mis-steps along the way and the Republicans in Congress took his lunch money. They took control of both houses of Congress and summarily killed his proposed plan; "Hillary-Care" they liked to call it after his wife, the health care task-force chairwoman. 

Not to be seen as hard-hearted, and realizing that something actually did need to be done about health care, some Republicans came up with a solution that involved establishing health-care exchanges that would inject market forces into regulating health care costs, and implement a health care mandate, requiring everyone  get health care coverage as a way of getting past the health insurers reluctance to cover pre-existing conditions. The concept was widely accepted by GOP leaders. It became a feature of Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, and was endorsed by senior Republicans in the Senate. It got its first real-world test in Massachusetts when Governor Mitt Romney signed it into law. The resistance came, albeit mutely, from the left, who saw it as a way to blunt any drive toward a single-payer system.   

Yes, I am referring to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), developed in the bowels of the Heritage Foundation and beloved of every GOP leader right up to the moment that a Democratic President chose to adopt it. 

So, please keep this in mind when you listen to them bleat about our debt and deficit. They have done nothing to fix it and quite a lot to make it worse (and I didn't even get into fighting two wars on a credit card and cutting VA expenditures , thus potentially dumping those costs onto already strapped States). Now, in their fervor, they are prepared to welsh on debts that they have authorized and appropriated while prancing about as fiscal conservatives. 

Conservatives aren't deadbeats and they pay their bills. They also pay their way. These bums aren't conservatives.

Nature Gets a Vote

Military strategists -- the good ones anyway -- know a big truth; your enemy gets a vote. There are forces at work in the world that do not do our bidding, that do not know our plans, and care less about them. It is a good life lesson, and I was thinking about that as I watched floodwaters devour much of Colorado's front range last month.

For most of my life I have generally trusted that technological and engineering solutions could solve most of our problems with high levels of safety. While I still think those solutions deserve our consideration, recent events such as the Colorado floods and the Fukushima Daichi reactor disaster from two years ago, have shaken my confidence.

You'll recall that the Fukushima disaster happened when a massive tsunami inundated the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The plant was designed with layered defense principles in place. It was designed to "fail to safe" in the event of a severe earthquake. 

What does it mean to "fail to safe?" Have you ever wondered why elevators don't fall? Because they are designed  so that if they lose power -- which would cause them to fall -- that a braking mechanism will engage and stop the elevator in the shaft. The braking mechanism is disengaged by the same power source that moves the elevator, when that power fails, the break engages. 

That is an example of engineering solutions making things safer for us (nothing is completely safe, but most things can be made safer).

Fukushima was engineered to be safe against almost every imaginable event; earthquakes, airplanes, operator screw-ups -- almost everything but a 30 foot wall of sea-water. They missed that one.

Along Colorado's front range, floods have followed a consistent pattern. A violent thunderstorm in a limited area sends a large amount of water into a river or creek causing highly destructive, albeit fairly limited, flash floods. Meteorologists weren't quite sure what to make of a massive weather system that appeared to be have the capacity to inundate much of northern Colorado. It defied all their expectations. Flood control measures and systems were defeated. 

In addition to the property damage , people driven from their homes, washed out roads, cut-off mountain towns and a mercifully small number of lost lives, the storm also did severe damage to oil and gas drilling and storage sites across the plains of north-eastern Colorado. Storage ponds containing "fracking" effluent were flushed out and the effluent washed into the soil where it will percolate into aquifers that supply water to farms and communities. Oil storage tanks were upset by walls of water moving through ancient seasonal waterways, as well as newer expedient one like highways. Those tanks were filmed rolling and bobbing like so many corks across the prairies, jettisoning their contents into the water tables. 

The front-range floods were bad enough, but imagine a little more rain and a somewhat larger area, spreading from Denver to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Imagine massive walls of water hitting the North and South Platte Rivers and moving across the prairies with the inexorable intensity and appetites that we saw in the Saint Vrain and Big Thompson Rivers and Boulder Creek. 

Imagine the Keystone XL Pipeline in the rivers' path. 

Nature gets a vote too.

Words Matter

Conservatives believe that change should be approached with an appropriate level of caution. Before a change is made, one should consider the benefits and costs; what will be left behind, and whether we -- as a collective -- will be truly better off.

Conservatives believe in paying their way.

They also believe in the redemptive power of people trying to promote the general welfare, but always with the humility that comes with knowing that you could get it wrong.

Conservatives believe in politics and government because they know that through them the appetites of greed and power are restrained.

Conservatives do not believe in lighting the house on fire because they lost an argument over what will be served for dessert.

They don't go from tantrum to tantrum.

Words matter. When we debase words and tell lies with them we risk losing the concepts and behaviors they represent.

Please stop racist, revanchist, misogynist radicals from stealing that which is best in America. They are not conservatives. Don't let them have the word.

War Poems

I have been watching (well, re-watching) The World At War, the 1974 BBC series on World War II. The series was credited for -- among other things -- bringing the war on the Eastern Front to Western viewers. Episode number 9, "Red Star" explores the siege of Leningrad, Russian partisans, and ends with the Battle of Kursk, which marked the end of Germany's offensive and the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime.

What was most poignant for me were the poems quoted in the episode. Russians are serious about their poetry; it is often hauntingly beautiful and tragic. These poems certainly were:

Wait for Me (Konstantin Simonov, 1941)
According to the site http://russianpoetrytranslations.wordpress.com, "This poem was written and dedicated to V.Serova by Konstantin Simonov (1915-1979) in 1941. During the Great Patriotic War Simonov was a frontline correspondent for the newspaper ‘Krasnaya Zvezda’(‘Red Star’) . It was published in the newspaper ‘Pravda’ in February 1942, when the nazi forces were repulsed from Moscow. Soldiers cut it out of newspapers, copied it as they sat in their dugouts, learned it by heart and sent it in letters to their wives and sweethearts. It was found in the breast pockets of the wounded and the dead."

Wait for me, and I’ll return,
Wait, and I will come.
Wait when heavy yellow rains
Try to bring you down.

Wait through summer’s wasting heat,
Wait through falling snow,
Wait when others still repeat
Not to stay alone.

Wait with hope when letters stop,
Strong and tough just be…
Turn away from those who’re stern,
From their grief stay free.

Wait for me, and I’ll return
No illusions..Try
To escape the ones who mourn,
Keep away your heart.

Let my son and mother cry
And believe I am dead.
And ignore friends’ tears around
When weak hope is spent.

Bitter wine they’ll drink..Forget,
Their compassion, too.
Wait for me, believe instead..
Pray and smile once more.

Wait for me, and I’ll return.
I will go through flame.
I’ll be back to you, I’ll burn
Any threat’s disgrace.

They will never understand
How among the fire
Out of lethal empty space
I have come alive.

Only you and I will know why
I am at home again..
Why you’ve learned to wait in time
Like nobody has.

Then there is this poem:

Son (Pavel Antokolsky, 1943)
The poem was also featured in the "Red Star" episode and has been published at the website http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread801701/pg "This poem "Son" was written by the Russian Jewish poet Pavel Antokolsky,a year after the death of his 18 year old son Lieutenant Vladimir Antokolovsky,killed in action on June 6th,1942... " The poem is a dialogue between father and son.

Do not call me, father, do not seek me,
Do not call me, do not wish me back.

We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our tracks.
On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords.
All of us in battle fallen, not to be brought back by words.

Will there be a rendezvous? I know not.
I only know we still must fight.
We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet,never more see light.

Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience.
My youth and my solace my one and my only.

And let this farewell be the end of a story,
Of solitude vast and which none is more lonely.
In which you remain,barred forever and ever,
From light and from air,with your death pangs untold.
Untold and unsoothed, not to be resurrected.
Forever and ever, an 18 year old.

Farewell then, no trains ever come from those regions
Unscheduled or scheduled, no aeroplanes fly there.
Farewell then my son, for no miracles happen,
As in this world dreams do not come true.

Farewell…

I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son, is come to its close.

My generation of Americans were raised to think of Russians as godless communists -- the best that could be said for them that they were automatons who hated and feared us. Yet, six years before I was born, Russia was our steadfast ally and they paid a frightful price waging war against our common enemy. Their poetry from that war should remind us that soldiers -- all soldiers -- love and grieve, and that wars sometimes go in unintended directions and present unthinkable bills to the innocent and guilty alike.

More Gun Talk

This post started out as a Facebook comment to a friend on the subject of our gun rights and whether they are threatened. This is a cleaned up and edited version of that response.

I don't think there is a threat to gun ownership in this country.

The NRA tells us there is; of course they've been doing that since the 70s. And since the 70s guns have been used as a wedge issue and a way to bolster a political brand.

The Heller decision of a few years ago, in which the SCOTUS said that the District of Columbia could not deprive residents of the right to have handguns in their homes also clearly stated that the government (federal, state or local) could establish reasonable boundaries as to what kind of weapons are allowed to the public. The Heller decision was widely praised by gun-rights activists because it pretty well knocked down the previous judicial view that the 2nd Amendment said you had to be in well-organized militia for the 2nd Amendment to pertain to an individual's rights.

So, about some of those weapons. Not so many years ago,  few private citizens had AR-15s. They just were not available outside of police departments. In 1977, at the "revolt in Cincinnati" the NRA was taken over by a guy who wanted to eliminate just about any government restriction on gun ownership. He thought that laws banning ownership of full auto weapons should be abolished for example. At about that same time the NRA abandoned their policy of not accepting funds from gun manufacturers, becoming in essence the lobbying arm for a billions-dollar international business. One of the things the manufacturers and their lobbying arm did was create a new domestic market in guns--by manufacturing variants of the AR-15 and some other semi-automatic weapons that allow a shooter to put as many rounds as the magazine will hold downrange in a very short time.

By the way, we hear a lot about mentally ill people being the problem, not the gun. But I have to tell you, a mentally ill person with a Bushmaster is a lot more dangerous than a mentally ill person with a baseball bat, or knife, or even a bolt action rifle.

The NRA says that before we start making new laws we should enforce the ones we already have. However, they have spent much of the last 30 years neutering our ability to enforce the laws we have on the books. They also argue that one of the more effective laws (background checks) is useless and ought to be tossed. In part they are right; background checks are far from optimal--because the NRA has pushed laws that make it illegal to share background check data. Do you know that the FBI cannot check a suspected terrorist's name against state and BATF data to see if the suspect has purchased a weapon? Thanks NRA, for helping the USA win the war on terrorism.

 What has the Obama Administration done? Not much until a few weeks ago. Now Obama has sent Executive Orders to Executive branch departments telling them to do things that they are required by existing laws to do and, in some cases, clarifying some vagaries in existing laws. In short he is doing what the NRA insists he should do. President Obama's commission--led by Vice President Biden--is also drafting laws that it will submit for Congress's consideration to limit what kind of guns the public can own.

So Congress (and the nation) can have a debate about it. The NRA seems to think that even having the debate is the onset of tyranny.

I want to stress that the administration is doing what SCOTUS in the Heller decision says should happen: the citizens' rights to keep and bear arms should be respected within reasonable limits. I also want to emphasize that if all of the measures that the Obama administration proposes to Congress pass, then we will have the same gun liberties that we enjoyed when Ronald Reagan was President.

With that, I'll go back to my point that I do not believe our rights are in any jeopardy at all. This argument is artificial. It is generated to churn up sales for gun-makers, and drive political wedges at the same time between Americans.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

    I think it is wrong that the NRA's leadership has cornered the market on paranoia. In the interest of fairness I would like to indulge in a little paranoia of my own. Rahm Emanuel popularized the axiom about never letting a good crisis go to waste, and the NRA capos are true believers in that axiom. In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the NRA's mouthpiece, Wayne LaPierre, declared their conviction that something had to be done about violence in the media, violent computer games, and the mentally ill.

   
    But guns are not a problem.

    Granted, crazy people who are pumped up on Mortal Kombat and slasher flicks would be far less effective at mass murder if they had to use a chainsaw, or knife, or even a decent bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifle. But the point is that they are crazy. Crazy!

   
    So let's get paranoid, shall we?

    The NRA--as I have previously suggested--is less about training and educating people in safe gun use and responsible ownership than it is about shilling for gun manufacturers. Because guns are what you call a durable good (they last for years and years) the only way to increase sales is to create an increased perception of need in peoples' minds. They do that by creating a climate of fear and imminent conflict between armed citizens and an intrusive government determined to take away peoples' guns. They also harp on the idea that society is is in peril from people that aren't like us; people who want to steal our stuff, who hate our values, dark people, bad guys, and crazy people.

    All this to get us to buy more guns and more expensive guns.

    But the NRA isn't just about selling guns. It is also a flank in a vast conspiracy on the right that is committed to preserving the privileges and profits of a few oligarchs at the expense of our liberties, health, safety and lives. The various divisions in this conspiracy move in lockstep. Their talking points are coordinated, uniform and their objectives are identical; feed the sheep and then feed the oligarchs. This, by the way, is proving a successful formula in Vladimir Putin's Russia.

    A key element in the conspiracy is the America Legislative Exchange Council (aka ALEC). ALEC is a group that purports to bring legislators and businessmen together to craft legislation, usually at the state level. Some of their prouder achievements are "stand your ground" laws and the Arizona and Alabama "show me your papers" statutes. These latter statutes, which included provisions to lock up illegal aliens in detention centers until they could be deported were largely written at the behest of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison operator in the country. CCA likes "three strikes and you're out" laws that send people found guilty of three felonies to prison for life.  And, they like mandatory (long) sentences  for certain drug offenses. As a general rule they like (and promote) laws that put as many people as possible behind bars (preferably CCA's bars) for as long as possible.

    I don't think I am alone in being uncomfortable with the prospect of a for-profit enterprise spending a lot of money on legislation and legislators to make it easier to fill said for-profit enterprise's prisons and detention facilities.

    When I hear Wayne LaPierre rail against the mentally ill and demand we do something (other than a decent background check which might prevent them from buying a gun) I find myself wondering when ALEC and Wayne's fellow travelers in CCA will introduce legislation to mandate confining mentally ill persons in newly built asylums funded by taxpayers and operated by private corporations.

    Never let a good crisis go to waste. Is that paranoid enough?

Wayne's (Dystopic) World

Where to start? So much has been written about the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut that it is hard to marshal my thoughts and write anything coherent. After the shootings I tried to push the horror  into a mental "box" where it was solely an intellectual problem, but it wouldn't stay there. I saw a picture of my lovely grand-niece, old enough to have been in that school, and felt consumed by anger and fear for her safety, and the safety of so many children.

Predictably the debate about guns began almost immediately. Most of the arguments from Littleton, Jonesboro, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, Aurora, Portland were re-hashed. It isn't the guns, it's the video games, the culture, the lack of God in the schools. You knew they were coming.

I am happy to acknowledge that mental illness, and video games and violent television and movies play a part. I also think that corrosive public discourse, in which any disagreement equals "fightin' words" and people who don't get their way at the polls try to deligitimize democratic processes.

One of the more rancid bits of paranoia suggested that the attack was "staged" or organized by the government. This played to NRA Executive Vice president Wayne Lapierre's pre-election predictions that Obama was coming for America's guns if he got reelected. In Wayne's world, President Obama's unwillingness to address gun issues isn't because he is uncomfortable with the Constitutional issues associated with confiscating billions of dollars worth of legal property owned by American citizens. No, it is because Obama was lulling us into a false sense of security. Now that he has been reelected he will come for our guns while black helicopters swoop down on our cities and neighborhoods.

A number of folks have gone on television to decry the "politicization" of the tragedy by suggesting it is time to talk about guns. Fortunately, they were able to exercise their indignation the week before on Bob Costas who pointed out that Jovan Belcher had some serious problems that, when combined with a gun, turned deadly for his girlfriend and himself, and that maybe it was time to talk about the gun part of the equation. The dawn came up like thunder.

If it is politicization to suggest that guns are part of the problem and that we ought to talk about them, is it not also politicization to insist they should be off-limits? Aren't political discussions about limits and compromises by their very nature? If saying something is off-limits isn't politicizing the something, then I don't know what is.

Let's think about what happened a week ago. A disturbed young man named Adam Lanza killed his mother in her house. then he took her guns (2 pistols and a Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic carbine) to a school where his mother worked. He entered the school premises and began shooting people. He killed 20 school children, six adults, and himself. We don't know why he did it. We don't know if he planned it or acted on some sort of impulse. Among all the unknowns, I think it is fair to conjecture that -- if he had not had the guns -- a lot of those children and adults would be alive today.

Some folks have made the argument that it wasn't the guns, per se. They make comparisons to an event in China earlier in the week, in which a man entered a school's premises, armed with a knife, and attacked 22 children; implying some sort of equivalence. None of the children in the attack in China died however.

The argument that if "they" can't get a gun, they'll just use something else like a knife or pipe-bomb, or baseball bat is to be blunt, crap. Using a knife to kill a large animal (including a person) is hard, tiring work. You can slash at your victims, which cause painful lacerations but is likely not going to kill them. But if you do want to kill, you have to close with your victim and drive the knife in deep through bone and muscle and then get it back out again. Again, it is hard work. It takes time and potential victims can either run away or attack you.

The same general conditions apply to baseball bats. They too take a lot of work and give potential victims time to flee or attack you.

Pipe-bombs and other improvised explosive devices could be used for mass-murder but they tend to require an expertise that isn't common in the general population. They also require procurement of specialized ingredients that alert authorities to the danger you may represent. Still, they have factored into the plans of some mass-killers. The Columbine killers planned to set off propane bombs, and the Aurora movie theater killer booby-trapped his apartment with bombs, probably to kill investigators who followed up on his crimes.  But pipe-bombs and other IEDs require an element of planning that isn't consistent with what we see in a lot of these instances.

Mass-killers like guns with rapid rates of fire and large capacity magazines because they are highly effective for doing what the killers want to do.  Is it politicizing the issue to acknowledge that reality?

Another ludicrous idea that pops up during these "debates" is that the tragedy in Newtown could have been prevented if only the principal, or a teacher, or maybe the janitor had been armed. As of yesterday, Wayne LaPierre elevated this particularly dystopian vision to the NRA's organizing principle for their "response" to the tragedy, using the pithy equation that "the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

In Wayne's world, every school that wants one, should have an armed guard who is trained to shoot it out with the legions of bad guys that Wayne imagines are waiting in the dark to storm our schools. Of course his proposal won't help the customers in movie theaters or shopping malls, or churches. Wayne thinks more of them should pack heat so they can gun down bad guys on an as-needed basis; such as in a dark movie theater filled with panicked movie-goers and smoke and a shooter who is spraying the audience.

You see, if Wayne has any idea how difficult very experience police and SWAT officers consider that kind of scenario, he isn't letting on. And it is difficult. It is a nightmare to even think about. Or take it out into the light; imagine a shooter in a busy mall (not too hard, since it happened in Portland in the last two weeks). Imagine trying to fix the shooter while the crowd rushes past you in a panic. Imagine also what the police will think of you wielding a weapon as they respond to the site and have to decide (in less than a second) whether you are a threat or not.

Wayne isn't really interested in armed good guys shooting armed bad guys. He is just interested in armed guys, period. He is interested in putting as many weapons in peoples' hands as he can.  In the last two decades, the NRA has gone from an organization that was dedicated to teaching responsible and safe gun use to one that is a lobbying group for gun makers (a transformation I am not sure a lot of NRA members realize has happened) and Wayne LaPierre earns his daily bread.

Well-made guns last a long time, so in Wayne's world the way to sell more guns is to scare people into buying them; by saying that "the government" is going to take your guns (and the rest of your freedom while they're at it). Wayne has been waving this bogey day in and day out for twenty plus years in the finest tribute of imitation ever paid to Josef Goebbels.

Wayne has the perfect bogey-man in Barack Obama. He is a Democrat (bad enough) and he's black, which means he must be the leftiest of the left. The fact that in his first term never indicated the slightest interest in confiscating guns is certain proof of his bad intentions because it means he is going to seize them once he is reelected (see rancid paranoia above).

Yesterday, Wayne shared his vision of the future for those who survive to inherit it. It is a world in which citizens are armed and ready, confident that their guns (as many as they want and can get their hands on) are secure and in which they and their children live in a cross-fire.

It shouldn't be our vision and it sure as hell should not be our future.