Saturday Night Short Opera - James Agee and Samuel Barber - Knoxville Summer Of 1915

 

Russell Thomas - Tenor

Simon Lepper - Piano 

I know it's not an opera but it is a very effective mono-drama.   I wrote a piece about this music about twelve years ago, you can find it in my archive if you're curious.   It was going through my head so I went looking for a performance I hadn't heard and wondered if a tenor had ever recorded it,  this is the one I found.  I don't know if Barber ever authorized a tenor singing of it, the original having been commissioned by the great soprano Eleanor Steber whose piano accompanied performance I posted then (still available on Youtube) but this is one mighty fine performance, both Russell Thomas singing it and Simon Lepper playing the piano.   

Three More Gun Deaths That Charlie Kirk Thought Were "Worth It" To Have The Second Amendment

Bishop Timothy Senior of Harrisburg said he was "deeply saddened" by a shooting in rural Pennsylvania that claimed the lives of three police officers and injured two others.

York County law enforcement officials were attempting to serve an arrest warrant to a man at a farm in North Codorus Township Sept. 17 when the man opened fire before being shot by an officer, officials said.

"At this difficult time, I entrust all those impacted to the loving care of our Lord," Senior said in a Sept. 18 statement. "We recognize and honor the bravery and selflessness of law enforcement officers, who daily put their lives on the line to protect others. Their courage reflects the highest ideals of service and sacrifice."

"As a community, I call on all people of good will to join me in praying for healing for the two injured officers, and comfort for the families of the three officers killed," he added. "May Christ, the Prince of Peace, bring comfort to those who suffer and guide our community to healing and unity."

And as Bishop Senior mourns them,  Cardinal Timothy Dolan is calling Kirk a "a modern day St Paul."

The grinning, asinine Dolan is about as full of shit as it's possible for someone in his position to be,  joined by that other crock of crap,  Robert Barron.   The US Catholic Conference of Bishops is still full of the worst appointees in living memory, put there by JPII and Benedict XVI.   I hope that Pope Leo retires Dolan as soon as he can get round to it,  I thought he hadn't turned 75 yet but he did in February,  they're required to proffer their resignation,  his should be accepted as soon as possible and he should be shunted into something where he can't make so much of an ass of himself and a scandal to the Catholic Church.  

As AOC said at the link, 

We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was. A man who believed that the civil rights act that granted black Americans the right to vote was a mistake.

And he should always be remembered as someone who was entirely OK with the epidemic of gun death in the United States.  We know he was BECAUSE HE SAID HE WAS. 

Trump Is Rotting Before Our Eyes

 like Louis XIV did.  

It's a matter of time at this point. 

This Time There Are No Real Stalinist Spies

and ideologues to muddy the waters like there actually were during the late 40s-mid-60s red scare.   And it wasn't as if any of those were any actual danger to American democracy except a very, very few of the actual spies for Stalin.   There was less than a zero chance that America was going to go commie back then, that was just a way for old line Republicans to scare the grandparents and parents of today's Trupzi voters into voting against their own economic interests.   

This time the colluders with the neo-Stalin are the Republican-fascists,  and I mean every one of them from Trump to the leadership of the House and Senate and the six actual fascists who sit on the Supreme Court,  the hugest irony of American history is that in 2025 it is the Republicans who are more than all-in on selling the country to a Stalinist-expansionist-imperialist dictator and making sure that all American institutions,  from the always-Quisling corporate media to the pathetic universities and colleges,  the Ivys as well as those who are dependent on Republican-fascist dominated legislatures and governors are acquiescent if not enthusiastic.  Any Republican who isn't in on that left the party just before or during Trump I.  

This time there is not going to be any hypocrisy in the resistance to the Trumpian-McCarthyism,   there is not going to be any whining about the violations of "free speech" or other rights by those who support a Russian dictator who crushes all of those as there were in the first and second red scares.  There is not going to be any question of disloyalty in that opposition to American democracy BECAUSE IT IS THE TRUMPIST-NEO-MCCARTHYITE SIDE WHO HAVE BETRAYED NOT ONLY AMERICAN DEMOCRACY BUT EVEN THE REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT.   The Roberts Court did that last year as they prepared the legal system for exactly the fascism that Trump II embodies and practices.  

And as I have pointed out and will repeat,  seeing what the Roberts Court traitors have done for the stupidest, most vulgar, most criminal, most financially corrupt president in American history IMAGINE WHAT THEY WILL DO ONCE J. D. VANCE TAKES OVER AND THE EVEN MORE OVERTLY FASCIST THIEL, HIS OWNER, IS THE ONE WHO IS PLAYING THE ELON MUSK ROLE.

It is a smaller irony that what got us here was the Warren Court making it possible for the New York Times and all other media to lie with impunity from a lied about individual or group suing them for those lies - ironically in itself, them doing so when it was a white supremacist fascist, the Sullivan who they thought they were ruling against when what they did over the next six decades was to empower the white supremacists by their "civil liberties" ruling.   And, as I pointed out again the other day,  what they did in 1964 the Burger Court furthered into overtly aiding big-money corruption of our elections in Buckely v Valeo (in that case the Buckley they sided with was an overt fascist) and to further corrupt our politics in the Citizens United ruling.   The Warren Court's precedents that ended up aiding the corruption of our politics, preparing us for the previous most corrupt president in our history,  Nixon,  the one whose administration used to hold the record for number of members of it indicted for crimes committed in office,  Reagan,  Bush I who pardoned his way out of a criminal investigation of himself with the aid of Bill Barr,  Bush II, installed by the previously most baldly partisan political Supreme Court in our history,  and then Trump who the Roberts Court made a king - though the lower courts and the cowardice of the likes of Merrick Garland and the manipulations of "THE LAWS DELAYS" played their own role in this. 

Don't expect that there will be any relief of this from the Courts because the Roberts Court, sitting atop the government ALONG WITH THEIR CHOSEN REPUBLICAN-FASCIST KING will do everything it can to thwart the reestablishment of not only democracy but,  republican governance, itself.   That is another of the ironies of this, that it was the "republican" party which has abolished republican governance in favor of Republican-fascist gangster-dictatorship.   It would take a Democratic Congress and President finally, once and for all, refusing to go along with the Marbury v Madison power grab by the Supreme Court to thwart that and the lawyers and Constitutional scholars among the Democrats can be counted on to chicken out on that emergency measure to save egalitarian democracy.    I have no confidence in the lawyers, least of all the "civil libertarians" among them.  

There is so much that has to be changed in the U.S. Constitution but one of the most essential is stripping the Court of lifetime appointments,  their self-created power to nullify laws duly enacted by the Congress and the flagrant corruption that those like Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Coney-Barrett are overt examples of - and I wouldn't at all be shocked to find others of them revealed as being as overtly corrupt.    

Another thing that has to change is that those who hold office, the ones who take an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution" have to be formally required to pledge to protect and defend EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.   And it must overtly be equality as well as democracy because we have had apartheid-democracy and it leads exactly in the same direction we have gone.   The Constitution is a piece of paper, as the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have proven, as the Taney and Marshall Court proved before,  it means nothing under the present rules except what the corrupt "justices" in their majority say it means which means it means nothing.    It doesn't serve EQUALITY,  so it doesn't serve legitimate democracy, the equally expressed decision of a majority of how the law will be and how we will be governed.    

In the series of posts I made of the late 18th century anti-federalists' warnings about the Constitution - which I am about to get back to - it was clear that a lot of what they saw as dangerous in the Constitution has turned out to be far more prescient than what the federalists of the highly touted federalist papers claimed for their work.   None of them more prescient than "Brutus" warning about the potential corruption not of BUT THROUGH THE SUPREME COURT.  

The warnings about the Senate are as proven by history as those about that insult to democracy, the Electoral College and those who had reservations about the presidential system that was set up.   I have been reading the notes made from inside the dangerously secret meetings of the Constitutional Convention by Robert Yeats,  who many believe penned the "Brutus" letters.    The publication of those preceded the publication of Madison's far less orderly notes, the only known extensive record of the otherwise secret meetings.   It was after the publication of the Madison papers in 1840 that the abolitionists, most notably another author I've cited extensively, the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips,  was able to make the case that the Constitution was, in fact, a pro-slavery compact between the Southern slave-power and the Northern financial interests,   in being that it was also what I have concluded it is, an anti-equality and so anti-democracy compact made among aristocrats hostile to democracy and its "adoption" rigged by them in most of the states.   There is no honest way to back up the lie coined by the federalist James Wilson that it was adopted by "the whole" American People, it was as rigged an election as those held today in the former slave power and other Republican-fascist strongholds now that the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have annulled the Voting Rights Act, the duly enacted and re-enacted law of a bi-partisan Congress that, for the first time in our history, gave us the potential of a truly democratic government.  

The very structure of our government has to be changed to make another Trump or Bush II or Reagan or Nixon not only possible but, in light of that history since the Sullivan Decision - A LIKELIHOOD UNDER THE CONSTITUTION.    The Constitution will always thwart equality and so democracy from now on,  it has been doing so since its adoption,  EVERY STEP OF PROGRESS BOUGHT WITH OCEANS OF BLOOD, BY BLACK PEOPLE AND OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, WOMEN, WORKERS, LGBTQ+ ETC. TURNED BACK BY THE SUPREME COURT, OFTEN USING THE SO-CALLED "BILL OF RIGHTS" AS THEIR BASIS FOR THWARTING EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY.    That is the true history of the United States under the Constitution, they've perfected their sandbagging of democracy for the entire time,  they get even the most devoted proponents of equality and democracy to go along with the system that does that by the fake reverence for the meaningless document and suckering them with those oaths into thinking it is anything than what our history proves it is and always has been, an aristocratic instrument that will always turn oppressive,  the danger that we face, today, is the greatest danger of that which the whole People have faced in our history.   

I'm Sounding Like A Broken Record, For Those Who Are Familiar With Vinyl Recordings

 OLBERMANN HAS THE BEST essay on what produced the milieu in which Kirk was assassinated with a huge litany of citations of Trump's advocating deadly violence INCLUDING GUN VIOLENCE AND "SECOND AMENDMENT" TACTICS.   And if that's not enough he plays a clip of Kirk advocating political violence,  advocating that President Biden be put to death in the mix.   It is the best essay I've read about this. 

----------------------------------

In other news,  in the wake of FOX Lies Brian Kilmeade advocating the murder of homeless People,  in the fifth incidence of mass shooting violence IN MINNEAPOLIS MINNESOTA! in recent time, two homeless encampments have been the victim of mass shootings last night.

And the response of the city is to destroy the homeless encampments,  NOT BY, YOU KNOW, HOUSING THE HOMELESS PEOPLE THERE,  but by bulldozing where they live.   

“If this city truly treated these shootings like the emergencies they are, people would already see grief and trauma counselors on the ground,” Sabri told local media after the shooting. “Instead, the mayor’s answer is the same tired move we’ve seen for years: displacement. Bulldoze people’s tents, fence off their space, and call it leadership.”

The city promptly moved to clear out the encampment on Sabri’s property, which could nullify the drawn-out legal battle between the two.

As the cost of housing continues to soar beyond the means of most Americans and the number of unhoused people rises across the country, the topic is increasingly prevalent on the national stage.

The shootings were two of five mass shootings to occur in Minnesota’s largest city in the past two weeks, including one at a local Catholic school that killed two children.

A Trump executive order month earlier directed governments to begin “shifting” people without stable housing into “long-term institutional settings”, something many critics feared could lead to a direct criminalization of homelessness.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade recently floated the idea of “involuntary lethal injection” for homeless individuals around the country, stating: “Just kill ‘em.”

It's unfortunate that they didn't include the Roberts Reublican-fascist controlled Court in the story because,  IN AN ENTIRELY MORE PRACTICAL WAY THAN KILMEADE FLAPPING HIS FLABBY LIPS THEY HAVE LEGALIZED THE FIRST STEP IN KILLING THE HOMELESS,  MAKING IT POSSIBLE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS TO ILLEGALIZE HOMELESSNESS.   To ban homeless People living because in order to live you have to live somewhere where you can live.  The clean, well dressed, billionaire grifting six Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court were more elegant in their language BUT THEY ACTUALLY MOVED THE CONSTITUTION IN THE DIRECTION THAT KILMEADE ADVOCATED.    Those millionaires and soon to be millionaires didn't address the typical unwillingness of governments to make an effort to end homelessness,  they would certainly never say there was any kind of government obligation to do that,  so all they have to do is harry the homeless out of their town into another town or into some wild area where they can't possibly live for long and that's the same thing as saying they can be harried to death.   Considering how many of those who are homeless are children might help understand that this is worse than the British death camp system of the workhouses which had, at their foundation, the same Malthusian intention.  

If "They" Killed Kirk The Ones Theying Us Are The Ones Who Provided The Gun And Trained His Killer And Gave Him The Ideology To Think It Was OK

I HAVE POINTED OUT many times here that lies are the lifeblood of the Trump movement, that if lies were not permitted to be told freely by our corporate media and individuals then American democracy would never have been in any danger.  There is a reason that Donald Trump, even in Trump I had a proven record as the biggest liar who has ever been president of the United States,  and there have been plenty of also-rans especially among recent Republican ones.  

That permission for the media to lie with impunity was first given in the Sullivan Decision of the Warren Court in which those "liberal" justices, who, by the way, were hardly "liberals" even then, I wouldn't even put William O. Douglas in that category.* Certainly foremost in those lies are the lies targeting groups of People,  People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, the destitute.  Note: I'll have something to say about Kilmeade saying the quiet part out loud and how the Roberts Court isn't all that far behind him in its desire to kill off the destitute.    And certainly far from least among those who they lie about are  "liberals."  Lying about liberals, real and some of the liberalish libertarian kind has been the lifeblood of the modern conservative movement,  certainly from the time that the fascist and racist with a silver plated tongue,  William F. Buckley and the more in print and behind the scenes traitorous faggot, racist and Buckley's fellow fascist William Rusher .**

But to get back to my theme.   This short piece by Paul Blumenthal says it quite well. 

“They couldn’t silence him so they killed him,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) told the Albany Times-Union.

“They’re killing us in our churches. They tried to kill our president. They killed Charlie, one of our greatest advocates,” conservative podcaster Matt Walsh said on X.

“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die,” billionaire Elon Musk wrote on X.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News anchor Jesse Watters said on Sept. 10.

Life: Jesse Watters’ ‘War’ Remarks After Charlie Kirk’s Killing Have Experts Sharing 1 Dire Warning

“The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done,” Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, said. “They should all know this: If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea what you just have unleashed across the country and this world.”

“They almost killed Donald Trump, they killed Charlie Kirk, both outdoors,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told Fox News Digital.

Who “they” is is rarely said explicitly, though it is heavily implied — some blurry coalition or Venn diagram encompassing Democrats, liberals and political opponents; but also institutions that are already right-wing targets such as think tanks, donors and higher education, with some conservatives blaming the one semester of college suspect Tyler Robinson attended for radicalizing him.

Conservatives’ efforts to blame some vague “they” for these attacks are not a slip of the tongue: It crafts a narrative of victimhood aimed at enacting retributive repression or violence against their political opponents. This is made explicit in calls to indict billionaire liberal donor George Soros, investigate and dismantle liberal nonprofits and target media companies, none of which appear to have had any involvement, as a response to Kirk’s murder.

Vice President JD Vance made this clear in a furious speech stating that the country cannot be united unless the institutions of the political opposition are dismantled and destroyed.

"They" is not the kid who is the guy who shot the right wing liar, racist, misogynist and targeter of LGBTQ+ People,  they is their political opponents who didn't provide the shooter with an uncontrolled gun, with an apparent lifetime of gun culture and the ability to gain his proficiency in killing.   "They" didn't provide him with a social, "religious" and political culture in which such a killing would be held to be justifiable,  THAT WAS THE MODERN RIGHT WING OF WHICH EVERY ONE OF THOSE "THEYING" ASSHOLES ARE MAJOR FIGURES IN. 

If they want to put the blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk on a "They" the one that really fits that role is THEM.    And I would include Kirk himself in that.   HE DID SAY THAT GUN DEATHS WERE WORTH IT TO HAVE THE SECOND AMENDMENT WHEN IT WAS A "THEY" WHO DIDN'T INCLUDE HIM.   He was a part of what killed him and that should never be forgotten. 

No one on the left should ever let them get away with this one because IT'S ONLY WHEN CERTAIN PEOPLE ARE MURDERED THAT THEY CARE AT ALL ABOUT IT AND THEY OPENLY DELIGHT WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE TARGETS OF ASSASSINS AND ATTEMPTED ASSASSINS.   Kirk did that when it was one of theirs who went to kill Nancy Pelosi and nearly did kill her husband.   And when it wasn't Kirk proposing a fund to bail the assassin out,  it was others of his ilk who were trying to justify it by painting Paul Pelosi as gay.   And the corporate media lets them get away with having it every which way all the time.   The idea that the "free press" is a pillar of democracy is as crumbling to dust in reality as it is a major participant in the destruction of democracy.  Buckley and Rusher had a lot to do with that, too.   Two of the original false=faces of American fascism.   Two huge liars. 

*  "Civil libertarians" who put the rights of words over the lives of human beings and other living creatures aren't liberals in the traditional American meaning of the word.   Douglas was a civil libertarian, his "liberalism" was more in line with the corrupted meaning of that word derived from 18th century laissez faire than the ethic of doing unto others what you would have them do unto you and loving others as you love yourself.   That corrupt understanding of liberalism is really not much different from the money side of the Republican-fascist coalition.  Even many former laissez-faire libertarian Republicans have had to face what their ideology produced in the real test of history instead of lawerly-liarly language. 

** I've become more interested in the role that the putrid hypocrite and general asshole William Rusher played in turning what was merely a conservative Republican Party into the Republican-fascist party we have today,   all the time being protected as an in-the-closet gay man by the viciously anti-gay conservative movement.   As can be heard in this confrontation of Buckely biographer Sam Tanenhaus by Margaret Hoover on the resurrected "Firing Line" in which she complains that it was unfair of him to "out" the long dead Rusher even as Tanenhaus says that when he interviewed him he "outted" long lists of other men.  Rusher's hypocrisies and lies were his whole personality and existence.    May he linger in hell a long, long time. 

If I knew I had twenty more years I'd do a study of the decidedly bizarre frequency of male homosexuals in the worst of the American fascist movement.  William Rusher is an especially putrid specimen of that pathology.    I am, by the way, entirely on-board with outting Republican-fascists who are living a sex life in the closet.  Not only those who bash other LGBTQ+ People but the racists, misogynists, haters of the poor and destitute.    From here on in,  I'm all in with them as much as I am LGBTQ+ People.   

I've Changed My Mind We've Got To Destroy The Phony Front They're Putting On Kirk To Make Him A MAGA Martyr He was As Bad As Some Of The Worst Of Them - Hate Mail

I WOULD WELCOME SOMEONE, anyone documenting to me any time that any MAGA,  Republican-fascist,  Trumpzi, or anyone on the right who has recently invoked the many instances when Leviticus or other verses in the Bible command the stoning murder of straight men who commit adultery or any or a range of sexual or other crimes.   I'm trying to think of any time I ever heard anyone, even the most rabid of old-line "trad" Catholics who may still take Luke 16:18 or Matthew 5:32 seriously* take the logical step to say that according to Leviticus those straight adulterers have to be taken out and stoned to death. 

I would welcome it knowing full well that apart from, perhaps, some of the cultists of the late and excommunicated Fr. Leonard Feeney, you won't find a one.    

I would like to know when Kirk or any other Republican-fascist influencer ever advocated  that treatment for straight adulterers explicitly or even in the wink and nod way that Kirk did when he and his fascist bros were slamming an nice young woman on instagram for advocating love - I'll give you the link to where you can hear what he actually said.

MS Rachel, in her Pride Month message pointed out that Jesus said that Loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself were the very basis of the Law and the Prophets:

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being,[a] and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”   Matthew 22: 37-40  Common English Bible 

You can listen to what Kirk and the other creeps said,  you might notice that Patriot Takes gives you the gist of what Kirk asserted SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THE STONING GAY PEOPLE  PART OF IT:

While criticizing YouTuber Ms. Rachel for quoting “love your neighbor” to defend celebrating pride month, Charlie Kirk quoted a Bible verse used to justify stoning gay people “to death.”

Kirk called the stoning verse, “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

I have no idea why Stephen King backed down but his original reading of it was right,  it's exactly what Charlie Kirk was advancing in his selective reading of Scripture, just as everyone selectively reads it while calling one of the most brutal of verses EVER REALLY FOLLOWED UP TO AND INTO THE MODERN ERA AS THE REST OF IT IS IGNORED.   If you think that kind of thing is over,  when Charles Rhines was sentenced to death in South Dakota (executed in 2019) one of the jurors took him being gay into their decision he should die.  One who sentenced him said that just sending him to prison for life would be what a gay man would want.  The courts wouldn't even look at the evidence:

South Dakota executed death row prisoner Charles Rhines on November 4, 2019, following unsuccessful litigation on multiple fronts. A South Dakota judge issued an execution warrant for Mr. Rhines in June 2019, on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to grant certiorari review of his claim that his jurors had sentenced him to death based on his sexual orientation. From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Rhines had attempted to obtain judicial review of that claim, armed with sworn statements from multiple jurors confirming this basis for their decision. However, state and federal courts repeatedly refused to grant him a hearing to determine whether his death sentence was constitutional in light of the new evidence.

I could go on and on with that.  I would point out that even today that anyone who murders a gay man in many, perhaps all states could put him on trial by bringing that up and many law scholars say that that should be allowed. 

Perhaps someone should give the generally thoughtful Stephen King that real context to what Kirk said as an excuse to reject the "Love your neighbor"  "all your neighbors" part of what Ms. Rachel said.  

Kirk called the stoning verse, “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”   I'm sure that he and the bros would reject the parts about straight guys getting stoned for committing adultery,  I'm sure they'd exempt their god-man Trump for his lifetime of violating what Kirk called "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."   And that's just one of the massive hypocrisies, lies, racist slanders, etc.  that came out of that fountain of hate and advocacy of violence. 

* Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband, commmitteth adultery. Luke 16:18

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery. Matthew 5:32

Douay-Rheims Bible

Olbermann Is Excellent Today

STARTING WITH KILMEAD'S FINAL SOLUTION to homelessness while dealing the Republican-fascist attempt to turn Kirk into Trumpzi America's Horst Wessel better than anyone I've encountered, he analyzes Putin's trial runs for his attempt to reestablish the Soviet Union with turning the entirety of Eastern Europe into his vassals and then move on to Western Europe with the American Republican Party being all-in on it here.    I would have to give you the entire transcript to do justice to how he covers everything, including the attacks on Kirk by Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes (far more likely to have influenced Robinson than anyone on the left,  that that white supremacist troll-boy) and why the fascist mouth flappers from FOX Lies to the most obscure of them online are freaking out about one of their getting shot - by one of theirs - is because they never believed all of that violence they have called for since right-wing hate-talk radio first started getting off the ground in, like, the 1920s might touch their lily white hides but now they have to figure someone might do what they wanted done unto so many others being done unto them. 

Just listen to it.  

Hate Mail

 Dave Rubin?   That right-wing whore?   

I read what he said,  I stand by what I said.  No LGBTQ+ PERSON who saw that doesn't know what it means.   Especially given who his audience is.   I'd advise anyone who is inclined to take him seriously should consider that very carefully. 

If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes.

ANSWERING MY MOST persistent and persistently wrong troll brought the reaction to this early post of mine to mind.    I will call your attention to the very last line added to it noting that I first posted it on June 1st, 2006 less than a month after I started posting regular blog pieces.  I vaguely remember it was in reaction to a Supreme Court ruling that protected commercial speech while the members of the Roberts Court diminished the noted consequential harm to children their ruling would result in.  Maybe I should go back and try to figure out which of the atrocities of the Rehnquist years that might have been.  

It's unfortunate that the original comments this piece got deleted by the technology it was done in dying because being a violation of liberally-lefty free-speech absolutism, it got a huge reaction, far more than I was used to getting at the time.   I will admit that I included the line about Lady Chatterly's Lover because of the iconic first-amendmenty vibes that piece of tripe held due to its ancient legal suppression - D. H. Lawrence is a very overrated writer who would have been even more forgotten if that piece of junk hadn't become a rather stupid cause celebre.   There is no work of fiction I'd put above the rights of children but I chose that one for that reason.   But the idea that someone would dare put the rights of real, living children over words was deemed to be beyond tolerance at even a feminist blog of the time.  It is insane to put a book over the rights of anyone.   I have no common ground with "liberals" or any left that puts the make-believe "rights" of objects over the lives of humans and other living beings. 

Rereading this last night it struck me how much of it was a description of what Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump and the other Birthday Book 12-year-old boy types were regularly doing to children,  the youngest we know about, 14.  If their crimes had been revealed then, they certainly would have figured as examples of what I was talking about.   As it turns out, the children were the ones who have lost out entirely under our pathologically degenerate legal system.   Don't tell me that's unrelated to the permission of pornography. 

Monday, August 14, 2006

The Most Important Right Children Have is to the Protection of Adults

Do you hate people who pretend that children are like adults, too? Who pretend to pretend that children are like adults. They know children aren't like adults and that's the reason they do it. They want to use them. It's not just those ironically misnamed "pedophiles" who most certainly don't love children. Advertisers, markerters, fast food and entertainment companies, youth sports and those sordid beauty pageants we found about when the little girl was murdered in Colorado, they don't love them either. All of them fall on the same continuum of adults and industries turning children into commodities and business opportunities.

Judges and the law too often go along with the pretense of the pretense. Pretending that children are little adults because that's how their bread is buttered. They pretend to be standing on high principle while allowing the violation of children's' most important right, to be protected from creeps and their business partners.

Children aren't little adults only because they're too small to protect themselves physically, they aren't able to reason at a level sufficient to see through con men. Even at the fairly advanced age of their teens they can't talk themselves out of doing the first dumb thing that seems attractive. If you need proof, just ask a public health nurse what happens to her teen pregnancy case load in the months after the carnival comes to town. Children being targeted by advertising are a lot younger than those. Toxic consumerism is turning out to be the major health threat facing children in the developed world.

The religion of free trade has successfully hidden some of the worst child abuse for profit. Children kept as slaves still produce a lot of what is sold here. It's not just the discount junk either, they produce some of the higher ticket stuff too. The trade in children as sweatshop workers isn't that far removed from the trade in them for sex, there is a lot of cross over between the two. When not enslaving children directly, their parents are kept from caring for them with long work hours at too little pay to feed or house them. That is happening here in the Unites States as well as across the third world. That is what is hidden behind the happy face of advertising and the trained voice of the corporate spokeswoman who WAS chosen for her gender.

Children are seen by corporations as either disposable robots for maximizing profit by cutting production costs or as easy marks on the consuming end of the production cycle. In the post Reagan-Thatcher world we live in the legal system and larger society threat them that way too. How bad are conservatives for children? Never forget, Thatcher blocked action that would restrict children being used as soldiers. Conservatives are filth.

The most important right that children have is to the protection of adults, their parents, their community and the world. For children that is more important than the entire Bill of Rights. Without it they have no life and no chance to pursue their own happiness free of deception and the worst forms of abuse. They have a right not to be lied to by mass media. This is so clear that it shouldn't ever have gotten lost. It might be prettied up in legal nice talk but too many law professors, judges lawyers and the constitutional purity industry have chosen corporate profits over the protection of children. Theories of freedom of the press concerning commercial speech are part of it. And that's over. If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes. Handing that crap over to the far right for them to throw against real, important First Amendment protections is one of the stupidest things that the free speech absolutists do. Theories of the market and its artificial rights are the rest of it and the far right isn't going to do anything to endanger those. Civil libertarians aren't so stupid that they can't come up with more nuanced ways to protect children and the right of speech while keeping corporate interests from deceiving us all at the same time. But it's not possible until you stop making believe that corporate "speech" deserves the same protection as the lives of real people.

Theories are supposed to help clarify the truth, not to shield degenerate behavior. Any legal theory that leads away from a society protecting every child here and around the world is the come hither call of a carny barker and a brothel Madame. Corporate lawyers and spokespersons who tell these lies don't belong on the morning shows chatting with Diane and Matt, they belong on the grainy footage of the Dateline camera.

First posted Thursday, June 01, 2006 on olvlzl