Saturday, August 1, 2020

Just Yesterday Rachel Maddow accepts the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Journalism Segment



During a very recent online brawl, as I pointed out that no white people have been discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity with anything like the force and violence that Black, Native American, Asians, Latinos, etc. have been on the basis of skin color and ethnicity, I was mockingly asked if I had ever been discriminated against because I'm Irish.   

I answered that never have though I've been subject to bigoted remarks because of that on "liberal" websites, not to mention on the basis of my name.  And I could point out to past, very violent discrimination against the Irish (especially based on their presumed Catholicism) and that hatred of Catholics was literally a part of the founding documents of the United States and by some of its most august of Founders.  

But I was also able to point out that literally the day before that mocking demand was made I could have been discriminated against in accommodations, in housing, in services, in employment, etc. I could have been discriminated against on all of those things on the basis of my being an LGBTQ human being - oddly that wide range of previously legal discrimination abolished by decision of the very court which, as Rachel Maddow points out has, in fact, legalized discrimination of another sort in the very same term.  And up into my adulthood I could be discriminated on all of those and many more IN LITERALLY EVERY STATE IN THE COUNTRY.  As can be seen from the court case brought by fascists and accepted that allows legal discrimination by corporations owned by religious entities, full equality is not yet achieved.  That is a loophole through which fleets of buses and monster trucks can be driven.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Colin Murphy - Hamlet Prince of Derry



Something is rotten in the state of Derry, and Hamlet is determined to fix it… between all-night computer gaming sessions, angry rants on YouTube, and fights with his girlfriend on Snapchat. This is Hamlet, Prince of Derry - a Hamlet for our distracted times. Stage Beyond is Derry's theatre company for adults with learning disabilities. Here the Stage Beyond players bring their unique skillset and perspective to the most famous play in the English language, re-imagined for the company.

It was all due to premiere as a stage play in May of this year.But because of the Covid-19 crisis, the production has moved to radio, with RTÉ Drama On One teaming up with Stage Beyond to use an array of online apps to record the cast during the lockdown.So imagine our cast, each player working from home on the phone, waiting for their cue to deliver this unique Hamlet for our times.

Cast and Production CreditsAdapted for the company by Colin Murphy.Directed by Conall Morrison.Performed by Stage Beyond Theatre Company.Original score by Si Schroeder.Oisín Kelly (Hamlet)Isobel Sharkey (Ophelia)Bryan Sutherland (Claudius)Bernie Shiels (Gertrude)Catherine Campbell (Horatia)Carol Glenn (Francisca)Alan Doherty (Guildenstern)Martin O’Hagan (Rosencrantz)Gary Quigley (Laertes & Jack Sceptred Isle)Tarrah Sharma (S S Sleeping Wolf)Frank Nelis & Shane Marron (the Gravediggers)Bernadette Foley (the Priest)Patrick O’Kane (the Ghost)Paul Clark (the Newsreader)Gorretti Slavin (the Courtier)Alison Mahoney (the Computer Voice)The Slavin family recorded the Derry chants,Other roles were played by members of the company.Assistant Director: Alison MahoneyThe Artistic Director of Stage Beyond is Dee ConaghanSound Supervision and Sound Design: Ruth Kennington & Damian ChennellsSpecial thanks to Lyndsay Martin, Brian Cash and Sinéad MurphyHamlet Prince of Derry, adapted by Colin Murphy, was produced by Kevin Brew.The Series Producer of Drama On One is Kevin Reynolds.The RTÉ Group Head of Drama & Comedy is Shane Murphy.First Broadcast Date : 26 July 2020.

It's a play I haven't heard as I post it, it's new, it's a stage production that has as a result of the time been quickly reconceived for radio production - I love seat of the pants productions that try.  I love people who try.  So here it is, sink or swim, plunge in with me. 

Reading The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann - A proposal for a Fall Project

A wintry season:  such is [Karl] Rahner's metaphor for the situation of faith in the modern world.  Keeping his eye on middle-class, educated European persons who are trying to live a Christian life,  he sees that this is a world that no longer easily communicates the faith.  First off, a person can no longer be a Christian out of social convention or inherited customs.  To be a Christian now requires a personal decision, the kind of decision that brings about a change of heart and sustains long-term commitment.  Not cultural Christianity but a diaspora church, scattered among unbelievers and believers of various stripes, becomes the setting for this free act of faith.  Furthermore , when a person does come to engage belief in a personal way, society makes this difficult to do.  For modern society is marked not only by atheism and agnosticism but also by positivism, which restricts what we can know to data accessible from the natural sciences;  secularism, which gets on with the business at hand, impatient of ultimate questions, with a wealth of humanistic values that allow a life of ethical integrity without faith;  and religious pluralism, which demonstrates that there is more than one path to holy and ethical living.  All of these call into question the very validity of Christian belief.  

Elizabeth A. Johnson:  Quest For The Living God

A few years back in response to my disgust over what I was reading about the then just opened Museum of the Bible I proposed instead of paying the rather substantial entry fee to look at what, if I recall correctly, included some rather dubiously authentic as well as looted artifacts in its collection, you'd do a lot better by spending a fraction of that to buy a copy of Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense and going through it, reading the texts, looking at the scholarly reference materials and works he suggests (I'm sure his recommendations would be updated, today) and doing his exercises.   I still would recommend that as an excellent alternative to looking at even authentic, even honestly acquired artifacts and antiquities.   There's more than a bit of the "graven images" flavor to going to a "Bible museum, "libary" or theme park.  That project began during Advent and it extended well into the following winter.   I learned a lot from doing those posts and hope other people here did as well.  As an aside, during it I typed out the entire text and copied and pasted the texts that Brueggeman gave citations for which I have gone back to and read.   Typing out or copying a text is a good way to study it, just saying. 

Anyway I'm hoping to do a number of posts going through some from all of the chapters of The Prophetic Imagination to encourage the study  and consideration and discussion of that very fine, often very troubling as well as enlightening study by one of the finest of Old Testament scholars.  Having done a post on the introduction to the book, I'll start with Chapter 1

The Alternative Community of Moses

A study of the prophets of Israel must try to take into account both the evidence of the Old Testament and the contemporary situation of the church.  What we understand about the Old Testament must be somehow connected with the realities of the church today.   So I shall begin with a statement of how I see our present situation and the task facing us in ministry.  I will not elaborate but only provide a clue to the perspective from which I am presenting the subject.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.  This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life,  both liberal and conservative.  It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time.  That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons.  Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric.

The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition.  Our consumer culture is organized against history.  There is a deprecation of memory and a ridicule of hope,  which means everything must be held in the how, either an urgent now or an eternal now.  Either way, a community rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical hopes is a curiosity and a threat in such a culture.

When we suffer from amnesia every form of serious authority for faith is  in question,and we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice unauthorized ministries.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.  This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgement that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.  And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid a faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and  Enlightenment. 

It must seem kind of ironic to those of us brought up in a pretty uninformed and superficial notion of the history of Western intellectual life that Brueggemann notes that conservatives in Christianity in 1978 had buried religion under "hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightnement"  but, as I keep pointing out,  theologians and religious scholars of his level are not uninformed and superficial in their understanding.   The very right-wing Christiantiy "fundamentalism"  that is identified with the rejection of science is, itself, a product of "Enlightenment" scientistic culture mistaking itself for what Brueggemann knows is the quite different "full power and authenticity" of the Hebrew-Christian religions.  What he talks about throughout this work will continually come up against the common habits of categorizations of college credentialed  English speakers.   I thought I should point that out first.  In order to understand his book, you have to get past the common received nonsense about such things that comprise the "knowledge" commonly mistaken as such. 

As surprising and, I'm sure some would feel insulting, is the criticism of liberal Christianity as too "chic" to allow itself to "remember" or, I'd say, to really believe. That Brueggemann links the two in terms of the ubiquitous acculturation into what he called in The Bible Makes Sense "The Modern Industrial-Scientific Model" of reality which is the golden calf of most affluent and aspiring to be affluent Christians* is spot on.   And Brueggemann points out then and now that it is also the reason that the Israeli prophets rose up and spoke their poetic verse in protest against that vision of life.   For me, Brueggemann's analysis of that kind of thing is one of the most important I've ever come across in my lifetime.   He often points out, in Biblical order in Genesis,  Joseph's management of Pharaoh's horded food, using it to reduce the People to slavery - but I'd argue it has a prelude in the Tower of Babel if not the conflict between Able the herdsman and Cain the sower of crops. 

As he has pointed out, the hinge on which everything in the Bible, Old and New Testaments moves is the Law of Moses coming out of the Exodus stories.  His alternative, his most radical of all political ecnomics is an alternative to Pharaoh's centralized, hierarchical system of life and reality in one which strives to guarantee economic and social equality and NOT DISTRIBUTION but sharing of the common wealth.   I say "not distribution" because if there is a distribution, there is a distributor, there is one who decides to do that and with that will come, inevitably, a decision of who is deserving of receiving that distribution and who isn't, who is "worthy" and who is "unworthy".  And not only of material goods but of what we live by other than bread, alone.  I think that is as true in that widest sense among liberals, even those who believe themselves to be "levelers" as those who don't follow that form of radicalism.

Two days ago a member of my family told me that his dentist had given him a discount on the two crowns he had had to have replaced, he was only charging him $1800 instead of $2400 for the job.  We had a discussion of how in America** 
having good teeth is a luxury item, even in places where they fluoridate the water.  Which led to me pointing out how that very day I'd seen on a liberal website a picture put up mocking Trump supporters as missing teeth and wearing overalls.  As I have been typing out this post that and similar memories of reading and hearing talk about "trailer trash" and the like on "liberal blogs" on those that consider themselves as leftist comes to mind.  I haven't gotten far into that in terms of this self-study course in Brueggemann's book but I expect it's something I'll think about and revisit. 

I am proposing this as a sort of self-teaching course though unlike The Bible Makes Sense,  The Prophetic Imagination isn't set up to be one.  Brueggemann notes that one of the most significant features of the Israeli Prophets is that they were "uncredentialed" he often these days notes what they have in common with the singer-songwriters of protest songs today who seldom have credentials to do what they do.  I'm not surprised that the late too little remembered Harry Chapin comes to mind right now, another undeveloped association.  I think we are all going to be a lot more on our own from now on in learning and acting.  No better time to start that than on August 1.  

 * And Jews and casual non-believers, professed believers in the monotheistic religions and others and outright and hostile atheist-scientistic-conceited atheists with some pretense to intellectual status,  that is the real faith that has hegemony over the world and world culture today.   

Friday, July 31, 2020

Thursday, July 30, 2020

William Bolcom - Free Fantasia On O Zion Haste And How Firm A Foundation




The University of Michigan Saxophone Ensemble; Dr. Timothy McAllister, director

The playing starts after 2:40 if you want to avoid the intro and the tuning. I love this piece as it was composed for organ but the registration a lot of organists choose makes a lot of the quieter passages a bit obscure on recordings.  This is the clearest recording I've heard of it.  This ensemble is very good and big enough to work, they can't match the variety of tone and texture that a good organ can but there are some things they can do that an organ can't. 

Here's someone playing the original at their senior recital.  I love to hear this played at a senior recital.  



Chelsea Kerr in Senior Recital at Seattle Pacific University on May 14th 2012

A Confession - Is It A Devil's Bargain To Hope That The Devils Get Their Due?

I wonder if "New Blogger" kept screwing around when I tried to post a moring post because my guardian angel knew I was going to say that now that that monumental asshole of an ass Louis Gomert has announced not only that he has gotten Covid-19 in about the most irresponsible way,  risking spreading it even as he made the announcement but the ass has also said he's going to demand taking hydroxychloroquine,  I was more than willing to hope that he follows Herman Cain to hell.   

I'm not sorry to say that I don't feel sorry for saying that as they have actively worked to spread the pandemic for political gain.  I feel the same way about that as gun nuts who end up getting shot, if someone has to die I wish it would be the guilty.  I'm not sorry for not feeling sorry for not feeling sorry for thinking and saying that.   We'll see if I feel sorry for that in the future but I suspect the list of those I don't feel sorry about will grow a lot now .  I'll feel sorry for those in Southern Texas who are dying of it, the Republican-fascists will have to get in a very, very long line of their making. 

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

The Thought Criminal Posts An Ad From Republicans - Not something you see every day



I'm not sure I'd put up Olympia Snowe as an icon of independent integrity and morality, and I have reservations about the mythologies of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the other two,  other than that, yes. 

I Think We've Found The "Demon Sperm" And It's Got Nothing To Do With DNA

The most bizarre thing about Donald Trump grasping at any straw, even one burning on the other end, in this case the clearly demented Dr. Stella Immauel, is that seeing her, she's not what you might call a "Donald Trump kinda person".  I'd have expected she's more the kind of person he'd want to deport back to a country he no doubt would call a, and this is an exact quote, "shit hole country."  In her case Cameroon.  It is rather hilarious how fast after citing her as an impressive voice he dumped her as soon as a reporter brought up some of her more bizarre ravings.   Why, one might conclude his endorsement wasn't entirely sincere. 







I see her "ministry" and am forced to think we have allowed 18th century rhetoric to keep us from calling a sham of religion just that, a sham.   Though maybe it's the fault of Christians deciding to be too nice and middle-class comfortable in being too delicate to talk about when religion is a clear, money-making scam.   So much of it would have to be open for discussion.  

It would seem likely that Donald Trump came to his minimal awareness of her in his, no doubt, last minute looking for something to support his previous lies through the neo-Nazish "news" site Breitbart who promoted the crackpot.   Which lead me to repeat that I'm certain allowing liars and spreaders of dangerous lies to get through and infect the American population on "First Amendment" grounds is an even greater danger.   It's getting thousands killed every week as I'm typing this. 

I'd love to go into her bizarre idea of "alien DNA" and the bizarre idea that "other life" would even have DNA and the incredibly dumb ideas that have grown up in popular and, obviously, even "scientific" minds around that bizarrely over-sold, popularly conceived of molecular structure.  But that's for another time.   

From what I read around the internet as I try to find out about Dr. Immanuel,  it would seem that other tower of intellectual integrity,  Madonna seems to be endorsing her.  As is pointed out,  Immanuel's insane hatred of LGBTQ people would call into question Madonna's past support of LGBTQ rights.   But, then, that's how it is with show-biz intellectual and moral engagement in so many cases.   It's no deeper than Donald Trump's respect for Dr. Immanuel.  You wonder what movement of the Zeitgeist Madonna's trying to jump onto with her endorsement.  

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Lets See If I Can Manage To Keep This Resolution Announced Two Days Early

I am making a number of August resolutions this year, those are resolutions that you want to try out before January comes round,  I make them a number of times a year on the theory that if you do it often enough, something might stick.

Mine is to give up some of the online time wasting that I am sure I won't have time to indulge in.  Including playing on my alternative blog, mocking and baiting my long time obsessive libeler and slanderer, a recently resumed bad habit.  

We have had a number of brawls there, one that led to him finally going too far and giving me total justification in cutting him off completely when he mocked my father who was was a permanently disabled WWII veteran, wounded in battle and decorated - I have his Purple Heart in my desk drawer as I type into my computer.   That was something that went past the point of my endurance.   So I cut off all possibility of communication concerning him and his lies, which will continue but without my knowledge of them. 

The brawl started when I was sent a dubious claim that he had watched his parents trembling in fear while watching the Army McCarthy hearings, which he more than just implied were a manifestation of antisemitism - he calls everything antisemitism, including someone wishing there were more Jewish citizens in the United States.   

I knew that was total and complete bullshit because I knew why McCarthy started his feud with the Army, it was all over the drafting of his Chief Counsel's close associate and, many believe, boyfriend, G. David Schine and the Army's refusal to provide the rich Harvard boy with privileges that would have pleased Cohn and McCarthy.   The irony is that what was claimed to be a terrible manifestation of McCarthy's antisemitism was started, by him, over the refusal of the Army to give into Cohn's badgering them to get Schine special treatment.   I think you really have to stretch that fraying, overstretched word to past the breaking point to call that "antisemitism."   Most ironic of all was that McCarthy putting his neck out for Cohn and Schine is what led to his downfall.   Here is an accurate but brief description of what happened:  

This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.

It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.

And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.
The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.

Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.

The article is worth reading for what follows on there because it says that McCarthy going after Fisher wasn't a result of McCarthy and Cohn and Schine outting a former commie, they found out about that through a carefully and skillfully laid out trap laid by Joseph Welch.   But I'll let you read that. 

Notice while you're reading this fact:

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy would never have gotten anywhere if it hadn't been for the "free press" naming, among others two of the most influential scumbags in journalism of the time,  the odious Westbrook Pegler and the gossip smear artist Walter Winchell (I believe I was the one who informed my attacker that Winchell was one of a number of Jewish supporters of Joe McCarthy).   And, contrary to claims made during the course of the brawl, McCarthy never prosecuted anyone, including the foolish Mariam Moskowitz who he claimed was one of McCarthy's victims.   She was prosecuted by the Southern District Federal Attorney Irving Saypol in a trial heard by the judge most infamous for his convicting and sentencing of the atomic spys Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,  Irving Kaufman.   During the trial Roy Cohn, Harry Gold and the odious and ever present Elizabeth Bentley testified against Mariam Moskowitz and the boyfriend she stupidly lied to the FBI for - she said later that she was too embarrassed to admit having an adulterous affair with a married man.   I pointed out that the only persons she had to blame for her trouble were herself and her boyfriend.  I knew it wouldn't go over well - it's so opposed to the tedious show-biz formula of the unfairly embattled victim of the commie hunters - but in her case she did the crime, she did the time and she had no right to be exonerated, especially as she admitted to it.   From what my troll said,  I doubt he ever met her, he certainly didn't get the story right.   

More generally, the question is why we seem to have the need to attribute every bad thing to a piece of garbage like Joe McCarthy?   I mean, I was brought up to despise him and I certainly do - in no small part for bringing the name into such disrepute but he was hardly the most odious villain of that disgusting era.   Cohn and Saypol and Kaufman did do what the idiot troll accused McCarthy of,  prosecuting people - getting two of them fried in the electric chair.   Cohn of course did a lot more than that.   But McCarthy was horrible enough for getting on with without accusing him of conducting an anti-Jewish witch hunt - which he didn't - and other sins which a look at the record doesn't support.  

And while we're at it, a lot of those who were prosecuted and convicted were actually guilty of things which were crimes, some of them as serious as the spying for Stalin which may or may not have helped him obtain the bomb earlier than he would without it.  But other crimes were committed during the course of that, often lying to law enforcement, a crime which, when it's a Scooter Libby or a Mike Flynn we would have no problem seeing as a serious crime.  The mythology that all of those prosecuted during the red scares were hapless victims is a huge lie, a number of them were guilty of serious crimes.  A lot of the ones who were persecuted were actually pretty terrible people who supported one of the world's all time worst mass murders, guilty of Nazi level genocide and terror murders to keep in power.   Some of them were unjustly accused of things and some of them were persecuted and injured though they did nothing.   Doesn't it diminish the wrong done to the innocent to excuse the crimes of the guilty as much as it diminishes the guilt of the guilty by insisting that someone like McCarthy had to not only be held accountable for what he did wrong but for things he didn't do? 

That disgusting era was disgusting on both sides, that's a fact.   You don't have to choose one side to be less disgusting, you can reject both.  And I do. 
I have put commenting back up with "word capture" which I assume means you've got to type a word into a box though as the administrator of the site, that apparently doesn't come up on my screen.  If that's enough to thwart the porn bot,  we'll see. 

I have retained comment moderation.  Comment moderation was put up when people who troll me started attacking other people here, something I won't sponsor.   I don't care much what you say about me as long as it isn't true and it often isn't, but that doesn't mean I'm required to post it, either.   Amuse me, and I might post it, attack someone who doesn't get a choice in what gets posted here and you won't get your comment posted. 

By the way,  I will be sticking with the "New Blogger" some of the things about it I don't much like but I guess I'll get used to it.  It is a lot easier to see on the screen for someone with less vision acuity such as myself.   I might actually learn to like it, sort of. 

Joe Biden Had Better Be Forced To Be A President Of The Future Instead Of A Return To The Trump Producing Status Quo Ante

If Joe Biden wins the election one of our most important jobs is to immediately put pressure on him to mount a full investigation of the many crimes of the Trump regime, its treason, its theft, its violations of the rights of people. STEALING BABIES AND YOUNG CHILDREN AND PUTTING THEM IN CAGED CONCENTRATION CENTERS FOR FUCKSAKE!, some of them citizens, its massive crimes against egalitarian democracy - and so attacks on the American People - and to prosecute and punish a lot of very rich, white people, people of privilege wealth and fame, the kind of people who get away with everything in what was, before Trump, the normal course of events.  I support Biden's election fully,  I am skeptical that he will be any better at doing what was necessary to protect all of those people and things attacked by Trump than Obama was.    If Obama had dropped the bipartisan bullshit the day after the election and played hard ball he might have been the great president that his voters were led to expect from his campaign and the idiotic romanticism best exemplified in the TV show that came to quickly seem like a lying mockery of that kind of mythical excellence in the presidency,  The West Wing. 

The Trump era has been an epoch of Constitutionally enabled, permitted and sustained evil the like of which we have never seen in our lifetimes,  though the history of the American government, especially throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries have provided ample preludes to.  The 19th century, in fact, can be seen as one long example of  the problems with and evils permitted in the system set up by the Constitution leading to the Civil War . In recent decades, especially through the legal theories championed by the Republican establishment and elite law schools,  the Constitution has been weaponized to destroy American democracy,  the unitary executive theory is an explicitly fascist view of the American presidency favored by some of our most elite and corrupt legal minds. It is matched by many others tending towards if not explicitly endorsing the kind of corruption that is personified in Trump and his government.   

Biden's long time in the Senate will have provided him with some of the worst tendencies in Democratic politicians, the emetic calls for "comity" in that body, the idea that we should return to the "normal" which is the thing that got us Trump will be at work immediately.   There is some chance that Biden and those around him will have learned something that will keep them from doing as Obama did, as Bill Clinton did to a lesser but still disastrous effect (remember Louis Freeh?), trusting Republicans.   GETTING SUCKERED BY THE DC-NYC MEDIA INTO APPOINTING THEM TO POSITIONS OF TRUST.*  

That is the mortal sin that any desire to turn to any past is, the refusal to participate in the creation of the future by demanding a return to what produced the evils we have to struggle against.   THAT IS THE REASON THAT I SO DETEST THE CULT OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FETISH OF THE FOUNDERS, those are the conventional version of Confederacy romanticism that are the required superstition of the show-biz, the journalistic, the educated and elite areas of American life.  Deviation from those, violations of those are met with everything from confused incomprehension to furious excommunication in the cheesiest tradition of Brit anti-Catholic theatrical and movie scripts.  

Biden, old as he is, has to be convinced he is not a return to the past, he, by running for president in 2020 chose to make himself a figure of the post-Trump future, if we are lucky.   If there are two people in the world he should not look to as models for a Biden presidency it is the last two Democratic presidents,  Bill Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama.  

We have got to face the terrible fact that that Constitution which is the idol of civic idolatry in educated and uneducated America carries terrible features intentionally put into it by the slave power and their Northern allies and those who compromised with them with the explicit intent of giving us rule by a malignant minority.   And those have worked too often for us to tolerate them anymore.  Getting rid of a host of things, starting with the Electoral College that gave us both Bush II and Trump is essential to protect equality and democracy.   The extra-Constitutional privileges the Supreme Court granted itself, making it the McConnell-Trump vehicle for destroying American democracy have got to be decisively and permanently removed from it.   The rigging of it by McConnell, as well his Grassley's and Graham's corruption of the federal courts is all we need to attack that problem.  If a Democratic President and Congress refused to allow that to continue, it would not.   It's not as if the present Courts will not allow Republicans to ignore past precedent set by the courts when the time is ripe for 
Republican-fascism.   I doubt any product of any Ivy League law school is going to be willing to imagine anything so bold a response to the real reality instead of the pantomime of judicial tradition that is the typical bull-shit presentation of a pretty corrupt reality. 

*  If you take nothing else away from this, take away that we have to end the convention that has put the FBI and other such agencies in the hands of Republican leadership.  The one and only person from that world who came out of the period in which Comey helped give us Trump by playing politics during the crucial election and its aftermath of it who I have any respect for is Andrew McCabe.  I have no idea what party he belongs to if any, he is the only one who I have as of yet found did little to nothing to condemn. 

NO DEMOCRAT SHOULD EVER AGAIN APPOINT A PERSON WHO HAS BEEN A REPUBLICAN DURING A CRIMINAL REPUBLICAN REGIME TO ANY POSITION OF TRUST.  Especially in the areas of law enforcement.   

Monday, July 27, 2020

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Update:   For some reason this new fangled Blogger is not letting me put up a new post this morning, Tuesday, July 2020 .   I will try again later today.

All Too Successful Dodges: Praising Slavery With Faint Damning Of It.

The aptly named Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas gave an interview to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in which he attacked an initiative to teach American history, telling some of the truth about the role slavery played in the founding of the United States by, idiotically, admitting the truth of what the 1619 Project reportedly says.  

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Though the "necessity" of Americans doing such monumental evil produced what it produced, a different choice by the people who introduced and accepted the evil of slavery into the United States would have produced a future as well, there was no necessity in doing it. They could have chosen a far different path and the results would have been based in morality instead of the immorality that Tom Cotton praises with faint damning.  

The funniest thing about this is that even as the highly touted 2024 Republican-fascist presidential candidate (whether touted by him or by others, I don't exactly know) is introducing a bill to prevent federal funds to go to that educational initiative BY CONFIRMING WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE CENTRAL PREMISE OF IT! he is calling his call to deny that "saving American history".  

The double-speak coming from the more than slightly ironically named "Tom Cotton" (as some have also pointed out) is a good example of how American history is now taught.  

Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

First, the last statement was disproved in the most dramatic of ways possible by the bloodiest war in our history (if you don't count the slaughter of the Native Americans) disproved that fraudulent ass-covering by the Founding Fathers.  That view of the drafting and peddling of the original Constitution is, itself, a falsified, hagiographic view of history because if there is one thing that is bleedingly obvious it is that the American Constitution was drafted with the full intent of the slave powers, the slave owners AND NOT ONLY THOSE FROM THE STATES WHICH WOULD BE LED BY A CLASS OF ARISTOCRATIC TRAITORS TO FORM THE CONFEDERACY to maintain slavery, certainly for as long as it was possible to retain it but in perpetuity if its abolition could be thwarted.   That is obvious from the writings of the slave owning Founders who, occasionally, talked out of both sides of their mouth as their spiritual descendant, the slavery excusing, lying about slavery insisting Tom Cotton trying to ride this insane wedge issue to the presidency.  

The irony in him using the Republican-fascist hobby horse of slamming the  New York Times in this is that the Great Gray Drab has promoted a similarly false and romantic view of the same history,  its part in promoting the lying musicial Hamilton covers up the incredible sleaze of one of the worst of the Founders who, as well, spoke out of both sides of his mouth on the issue, pretending to favor abolition of slavery as his own wife and in-laws AND HIMSELF owned slaves and as he as one of the writers of the Federalist Papers sold the slavery enabling Constitution on the benefits that Northerners, especially those with money and power and the vote, that came from slavery.   

Cotton calls slavery a "necessary evil".   Well, someone else said "Necessity is the mother of invention." which is apropos if you remember that "invention" can mean a lie.   Alfred North Whitehead said it well when he said,  

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb, "necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is nearer the truth. 

The popular history of the "Founding fathers" and the adoption and life of the Constitution, and also not anywhere near a little of its official AND ESPECIALLY LEGAL ARTICULATION is one such dodge.   In 2020, with the state the country has gotten into through the Constitution and its mythologization, we can't afford anything but the most exigent AND ACCURATE criticism of all of them.   If we don't get past it, the same Constitution that has produced and maintained Trump will lead us into slavery and I am afraid the bloodshed that was necessary to merely end the legality of slavery will be outdone in the bloodshed which will be necessary to end it in reality and to try for egalitarian democracy.  

The Constitution of the Confederacy is worth looking at because the kind of double-speak that Cotton engages in is the language it is written in.  I might do that,  whenever the talk is of "liberty" and "freedom" as slogans, you should always be looking for the dodge because not all of those dodges are futile except in so far as people buy those words that so often cover up slavery and similar evils.  Our history is full of that.   So is our present. 
Apparently Blogger has made the switch to "New Blogger" overnight.  It's going to take me  a while to get used to it.  I'll be trying it out so if things look different,  I didn't do it, if things are bumpy, that's the reason.   I don't see any great advantage in anything I've seen yet but we are at the mercy of the blog hosting company,  I guess.  I'll be testing to see how I can post music and other videos and the radio plays, I've heard complaints about such things from people who have tried it out in previews.   Maybe addressing the complaints are what took them longer than they had announced.  We'll see. 

Update:  If Blogger wanted to make a useful change, they'd separate the "Sign Out" button from others you meant to press.  I don't know how many times I've hit "Sign Out" by mistake,  also "Delete" also "Revert to Draft".   I don't know what they could do about the boring old porn bot that has forced me to pause the comments.  Assuming it is a bot and not just another way for the trolls to try to get under my skin.  If that's the case, cutting off their noses to spite their false faces.