Last night, commentator Kevin Williamson published a piece in National Review justifying voter suppression by suggesting that “the republic would be better served by having fewer—but better—voters.” Representatives, he says, “are people who act in other people’s interests,” which is different from doing what voters want.
As much as this history of the right to vote is interesting, may I remind all of you that more than half the population of the United States did not win the right to vote until 1920. I use the word win quite deliberately. Women were not given the right to vote. They fought for it -- long and hard. We need to fight for universal suffrage now. We the People, All of Us This Time!
I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow deputy who is a really decent guy (he was my first recruit in about 1989) and is now talking about retirement, which launched into a discussion about which PERS option to take (there are several that include in a person's name only that stops when that person dies, and two others that allow for a spouse to receive benefits after the death of the retiree, and another that allows a representative to receive benefits after the death of the retiree; each one of those has a decreasing monthly benefit. When he asked why I had chosen the last one, I told him that it was because at the time I retired (2013) I was legally married in California, but since Oregon had a definition of marriage as "one man and one woman" I had to be "domestically partnered" (civil process) AND because of Oregon's law, the Federal government did not recognize my marriage which really complicated things. The Obergfell decision changed that, but it was after I had retired. My marriage is dependent on the SCOTUS upholding that decision. He was pretty incredulous. SMH.
I told him that, in my opinion, if your right to vote was not granted by constitutional amendment, you didn't get to have a say in changing voting regulations. He looked quizzically, and I told him the right of Black men to vote was via the 15th Amendment, and the right of women to vote was via the 19th Amendment. He again was a little surprised, and said "I never really thought of it that way. You're right."
This is an excellent point. An additional note: the citizenship of indigenous Americans was not officially recognized until 1924 with the Snyder Act. However, regardless of the 15th Amendment having granted the vote regardless of color, states were allowed to decide eligibility, so just as many Black voters have had to deal with literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers to voting, it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act and beyond that their suffrage was protected.
What a viscous circle. We don’t want them educated because we can’t pull the wool over their eyes. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they aren’t educated.
Then the states decide what is to be taught but it’s way too left leaning and even babies are being indoctrinated! Education isn’t liberal leftist rhetoric, it’s just enlightenment.
The conservative group doing a number on the school district where I work is not the majority view. But they are taking over! I’m sure they believe they know what is best for the misguided souls. I might be out of a job for saying things like people are mammals! It’s why we have to vote in local elections. To be heard!
"For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
You should see the GOP attacks on public education in Kentucky. It's exactly the same thing that RR started. Cut funding to Education. Then sell the 'right to work ' laws to break unions. Without critical thinking, people don't vote in their own best interest
Yep! We have the “right to work” law here in Texas too! We have teacher associations instead of unions. Which are basically insurance companies to protect teachers from administrators and parents alike.
Voter suppression is well documented in Texas. But the republicans keep voting for the things that don’t benefit them anyway! The reason is usually it’s the way we’ve always done things. But who knows, we’re gerrymandered out the wazoo! The votes do not reflect the majority, just the republicans.
I’m a broken record and probably people avoid me, but vote vote vote!
Here in NH, we have a Repub quadrafecta (Gov, House, Senate, and Executive Council. The last is an advisory board. We now have a RTW bill in process too.
My daughter and I were talking recently, wondering how in the world 2 states, about the same size, similar geography, similar origins, similar issues, adjacent to each other could be so different when it came to values and legal systems. Neither of us had to name the states- we both knew we were talking about Vermont and New Hampshire. No matter how much we read the history and follow the present, it makes no sense. If New England ever seceded, we'd have to figure out a way to leave NH behind. (This is not a serious proposition; more a New England joke. Or perhaps wishful thinking....)
In Europe, too, there are very active groups now championing what amounts to a re-creation of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime which kept the country preserved in aspic for 42 years until 1974; or, if we are more fortunate, something more like De Valera’s Ireland, in which change becomes more viscous (yes) and fly-papery while every possible means is used to extend the outreach of religion-as-social-control. I’ve just received a petition emanating from a Polish women’s group opposing the candidature as Judge at the European Court of Human Rights of one Aleksander Stępkowski, said to be the founder of an association called Ordo Iuris with policies reported to include a total ban on abortion, action against sexual minorities reminiscent of Nazi judenfrei zones, the criminalization of sex education, a restriction of or ban on divorce and withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention of 2011 (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) which Erdogan’s Turkey intends to renege on, while the Polish Sejm is now debating similar action, an interesting correspondence between different users of religion as politics—see:
The trouble is that the defenders of a fossilized social order grounded in identity myths are in reality promoters of systematized hypocrisy and endemic disorder. They seem to have been shoehorned into America’s judiciary, while in Poland the far-right government has taken the opposite line, purging the judiciary…
Peter, the situation in Poland and the eastern European zone that lies between (and has been historically contested over by) Germany, Austria, and Russia is becoming scarier and scarier. And many of these nations are members of the EU, which gives the would-be and actual autocrats political cover. In the meantime, there are riots in Belfast, apparently initiated mostly by "Loyalists" (pro-UK, anti-Unionists) who object to the closer associations of NI with the Rep of Ireland and the creation of trade barriers between NI and the UK--the direct result of Brexit. It would seem that we are back to 1975 again.
Ah, the old autocratic empires -- who knew we'd miss them so much? Despite much inequality and injustice, the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Habsburgs, Ottomans all managed to limit ethnic/internal conflicts until things began deteriorating in the late 19C. In many ways the legacies of Great War matter more than those of WW2. The former settled many important issues, but those who felt victimized, and didn't accept the results of 1918-19, gave us another, still worse global conflagration. Then communist regimes embalmed ethno-national problems for a half century, which were unleashed again after the Cold War.
You may if you like call this sympathizing with the enemy, but as far as I'm concerned it means know-your-enemy and feel for said "enemy" as a human being, even if he or she behaves like something straight out of hell... I've just added another comment about the origins of much violent resistance to change...
Unless we have a little more fellow-feeling for those who cause us and the world so much trouble, we'll never get anywhere in developing a sane relationship with them.
A hearty No Thank You to any rehabilitation of Salazar, whose regime oppressed Portugal for decades and committed countless atrocities in Africa. Watching the European fascists rise again from their graves is far more frightening than the scariest zombie flick.
B Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm
M Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique
Peter, unfortunately I'm not sure that the Chief Justice of the ECHR can reject national nominations. There have been loonies in the past on this and all other Euro Courts in Brussels and Luxembourg.
But Stuart, I don't know, but you may be quite right about ECHR nominations, which is why Polish women are resisting this one; but aren't you confusing EU institutions with the older postwar Council of Europe ones?
true Peter, i only know the former well. Image the political turmoil if the nomination is refused...akin to the battle over "rule of law" budgetary criteria recently which ended with the usual "fudge" and non-application of any such parliamentary impositions!
Remember that interview of the son of David Dukes, KKK, where he was being groomed to be the next leader one day. He said that he went away to uni and his new friends could not believe his racist, supremacy views. They gently guided him, educated him and he left the KKK. Education is what should be supreme as well as humbling.
Penelope, I do believe in the ability of human beings to change: I've seen it happen, in people of all ages. The question is not merely education, but how a person becomes ready to open up to a way of thinking he/she/they are unaccustomed to. It sounds as if Duke's son perhaps had already begun questioning his father, and the people at his school were able to exert care in exposing him to new ways of thinking. I wonder how we can encourage this kind of approach. I see so many posts (here and elsewhere) that simply use a bludgeon.
And there is the other side: I knew an intelligent woman who, out of an emotional needs to belong I suppose, or a need for structure, let herself get sucked into a fundamentalist evangelical pseudo-Christian cult. It was one of the weirdest groups I've ever met. My neighbor was a student in a highly regarded college at the time, graduated cum laude, but only because she was able to create papers that had internal consistency while not reflecting what was going on in the world at all. And her degree was in art.
Years later she left the cult without realizing until afterward that she had been in a cult. Everything she has done since has been with the same ferver she brought to her involvement in the cult, even things that have nothing to do with cult-like characteristics. This does not appear to be the result of lack of training in critical thinking, but it seems just the opposite: the underpinnings of her thinking do not allow her to test the results of her reasoning.
Yow, Denise! What state do you live in, where you see conservatives taking over the local school boards and you worry that your job would be at risk if you stated publicly that humans are mammals?
This is so troubling. With gerrymandering the republicans have been able to take over so many state legislators. Now they are suppressing voter rights and seem to have control over our rights as human beings. ( the transgender law in Arkansas that was vetoed by the governor and overridden by the legislature) I had such a deep sense of relief when Trump was defeated and Biden became our president. I truly believe President Biden is working hard to not only undo the damage Trump did to our country, but also move us ahead as a healing and prosperous nation. I’m troubled and frustrated partly because it’s been a difficult year with Covid, and not just because I’m a nurse but as anyone who has struggled with loss and sadness. I start to see light peek through and have some hope for humanity. Then I read about the laws states are passing to make it difficult if not impossible for people of color, elderly and those who have to work 2 jobs to barely make ends meet. It’s really pathetic that the only way the republicans can win is by picking their voters and they know it. I learned in grade school that we, the voters, are supposed to be picking our representatives. Seems upside down. No wonder I’m frustrated.
Democracy has never been easy. It is a contact sport, it has been said. And there is a wide swath of conservative, evangelical and Christian voters who feel a way of life is slipping away from their families’ future. I feel these anti-democracy antics are a last grasp for the Limbaugh-Falwell-Trump crowd
But they have been practically dead before and here they are again! time to finish them off. It's the founding constitution that allows them to survive. it must be changed.
Boy, do I ever agree. But the process of amendment is both cumbersome and antidemocratic; we could never get enough conservative states to agree to changes to the composition of the Senate, for instance. They like things just as they are. What I am curious about is why we don't propose, say, a Voting Rights Amendment anyway. Remember the Equal Rights Amendment? Even though it didn't pass, it led to a vigorous, nationwide debate which had the effect of surfacing all of those sexist arguments that could be publicly shot down.
Strangely, I can't help feeling that this betrays a failing of confidence in real family values as opposed to degraded ones...
Perhaps these problems arise in the countries comprising the former Soviet Union and satellites because the nuclear family was the last holdout of resistance to the totalitarian State; and this had the effect of fostering shared beliefs and disbeliefs within the family unit, accompanied by general mistrust of all outsiders and outside influences, including even those who marry into the family. These defensive views can—like all defense mechanisms—easily lend themselves to paranoia, as though there weren’t already enough reason for that in countries under the heel of paranoid psychopaths and their brutish bureaucratic tools.
In America, the violent settlement of the country will have encouraged individualism, the struggle for survival in a hard, hostile and often lawless environment. But when genuine individual responsibility degenerates into notions like social Darwinism and these harden into ultra-individualist dogma, ordinary citizens become, not free but free radicals endangering the body social and politic. The weirdest effect being mass conformism—herd mentality—within a society fragmented to the point of becoming atomized. The resulting alienation amidst potent materialism in everyday life strengthens attachment to religious and political identity and feeds the power of those who exploit that. Hence much mass cultism and pseudo-religion.
Moving back to the former Eastern Bloc, it is normal enough that religion should, in many nuclear families, have survived all attempts to eradicate it, while others turn to it when they are free to do so, in search of values more universally shared than their own. It is normal, too, that ecclesiastical authoritarians should exploit this situation to increase their own power.
All this places enormous responsibility on political authorities, educators, spiritual leaders and all those in positions of power in our great desert of crass materialism. It calls on all those who can to reach down within themselves beyond conditioning and to serve those who can’t.
I wish I could claim more than to seek after freedom like a clumsy, ignorant dowser looking for groundwater, but I can’t. My one certainty is that the groundwater’s there.
Peter, you managed a deep dive into the meta view of human history and where it’s lead us with insight and astonishingly few words. Bravo. My fear is that we’ve already poisoned the groundwater.
Thank you, Diane, you reassure me. I thought I was being too verbose, although I was trying not to spoonfeed American readers of these Letters who will be able to flesh out national issues better than I. It may be that not all readers realize this, but they are already on a diet of far more meta-history than meets the eye. This is because Dr. Cox Richardson is acutely aware of how the past conditions the present and is sharing with us endless details of how this is materializing in America today.
Our entire culture is strong on detail, on bits and pieces, on hyper-specialization, on analysis, yet often surprisingly weak on synthesis, blind to implications, blind to the big picture—blind to the obvious. Our specialists tend to live and work in windowless boxes, whereas a specialization ought to provide a window onto wider perspectives. These, the Letters open up for us.
I’ll admit to a penchant for context and for big pictures and a corresponding weakness when it comes to sticking to the point… Yes, but digressions and peripheral vision have their uses too, especially in compensating for the shortcomings of what Edward T. Hall called low-context cultures…
We find ourselves embroiled in sterile and deeply divisive culture wars and our tendency to indulge in division rather than wholeness exacerbates the Manichean abyss that has opened up between us. Precisely because of the choleric and intolerant aspects of my character, I am interested in peace between supposedly incompatible parties and as far as I am concerned we should all without exception be interested in that if we care for our countries, if we care for our world.
I share the frustration, the anger of most members of this community at the injustice, gross inequality, misrule, obstruction, obfuscation, racism, ingrained ignorance, sexism and brutality to which Americans are subjected day in day out, year in year out. But, like practically everything else that is wrong with the country, its endemic diseases persist because they correspond to vested interests and are highly profitable to some privileged minority. Hence, too, the country’s Constitution-idolatry, which serves to entomb all hope of rational change under a heavy stone slab, one that may be worshipped from afar but must otherwise remain untouched.
Having said which, persistent hatred and rejection of the other because of that other’s hateful activities condemns the hater as much as it condemns the object of hatred. Like fear, like any other strong emotional reaction, hate is perfectly understandable as a momentary reaction; beyond that, it is at the very least a sign that the hater has been infected by the evil of the one who inspired that hatred. “In fighting, you come down to your adversary’s level.” (Seneca)
The widespread belief in original sin and man’s fundamentally evil nature are a completely gratuitous reactionary identification with evil, one that necessarily besmirches those who hold such views. Our mother may irritate us if she goes gaga and becomes aggressive, but would we hate her? Would we hate our child if he or she turns psychotic? We may have good reason to hate what they do, but to indulge for more than a moment in blowback hatred, blowback racism, blowback sexism… all these behaviors denote a choice on our part, the choice of hatred. If we are serious, WE CAN ONLY CHOOSE NOT TO HATE.
This in turn leaves us with no choice but to seek out the origin of our divisions and work to heal the delusions that gave rise to them.
It may be that mining and extractive interests will succeed in poisoning America’s groundwater and practically everything else, but the metaphorical equivalent of that wellspring, our innermost being, cannot be polluted.
Thank you, Peter. Heather's insights and revelations keep me coming back here, and I tend to read way more of the comments that I have time for- so skip over some with known tendencies. I whacked right into your first post just above and ended up reading it several times. I relish both the depth of your thought and the way you unravel the intricacies so they mesh.
Then I come down here to this beautifully written piece, almost a sermon. Speaking truth to power as the saying goes. More to ponder this evening as I feel yet more growth in my ability to grasp what we are about. This one will also go into my folder of things to return to.
I’m grateful to you, Annie, and to anyone who has the patience to read through this and my previous post, let alone find the resonance you found.
When you speak of growth in your ability to grasp what we are about, that is what is on my mind. Thereon depends how we’re to cope with what we are up against.
Yes, they are both a last grasp, and also a last gasp, from those who depend upon the votes of the ignorant and gullible to stay in power. But remember that Tom Cotton won re-election by a 66 to 33 margin and that the Arizona state representative HCR mentions ran unopposed so it's still a loud gasp and a strong grasp. Someday, the majority will realize the Democrats offer real solutions and the other guys just do not, and at last vote for what's in their best interests.
For every frustration have two ideas. Write them down. Speak them out loud. Send them to your local news agency. Form an organization and start a voting block. We must not stand by bickering while they rape our Democracy. Now is the time to fight back. Call Fair Fight, call your local Democratic legislators, call your government leaders ask them what they are doing and what you can do to save this country. Theses are frightening times. There will be strength in numbers.
Your writing expresses exactly how I feel, Karen. What is being revealed to us is so incredibly frustrating and exhausting whilst having to deal with a pandemic (thank you for being on our front lines, too!). I just keep reminding myself, "We were made for these times, we were made for these times."
I am beginning to pray for some kind of fantastical interference in this tension...like (vaccinated) aliens or angels landing all over the earth and we have to become ONE to focus on the wonder of them. If any of you are connected to aliens or angels, could you please tell them we are ready for planetary intervention? If it is too much to ask for that, can they just beam some of us up? And can they take my Maine Coon cat, too? He loves traveling!
Penelope, I occasionally daydream about intervention by a force greater than us to re-order our thinking and priorities (is this how religions start?). But I'm going to throw in a caution to be careful of what you wish for! There's a story on the front page ofthe NY Times today about a new finding in particle physics, discovered at FermiLab in Illinois, that was based on previous experiments done 20 years ago at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, where I live. It brought to my mind an experiment done there some years ago which was said to have a small, but not impossible, chance of tearing apart the fabric of our universe and snuffing out our reality in an instant! Fortunately it didn't come to pass, obviously. Your comment and today's headline got me thinking though.
I think this is the most important point with which we have to contend. The fact that Rs control so many state legislatures (62% of legislative chambers and 46% with total state control, i.e., both legislative chambers and the governorship, vs 31% for Ds; https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx) means that we have at least another decade of this antidemocratic foolishness. Combined with the grotesque over-representation the composition of the Senate gives to small, conservative states (Rs represent 41.5 million fewer voters than Ds; https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2021/02/u-s-senate-representation-is-deeply-undemocratic-and-cannot-be-changed) and the Electoral College, the United States is structurally designed for precisely this outcome. The founders assumed good faith and adherence to norms, but never anticipated the nefariousness of people (mostly men, mostly white) without scruples.
From being a student -68 (in Sweden) I have been thinking that the ideologies refer to different ages, where legitimate conservatism belongs to being around 10, when you should be allowed to develop a sound egotism. Liberalism belongs to being teenager when you should be allowed to develop a sound personal freedom. Socialism belongs to the 20-ies, when you should discover that the world is greater than yourself and that you depend also on others.
Moreover I think fascism should be redefined to ’survival at the cost of others’, and not be attributed to any particular nation or time. Also that we survivors can realize that we are all standing on such a ground and acknowledge that. We may not want our time to be like our foundation when it is not necessary, because necessity makes the difference of what is legitimate or not.
Yes! Welcome! Your perspectives are SO familiar to me as someone who *almost* became a Dutch national! What I loved most about living and participating in Dutch society for so long was the mentality of "we're all here to help each other". Sure, there were occasionally things that I might have not agreed with, but in the end I went with the flow and found the mentality of everything for the common good was not so bad. My life there was as good or better than here. Admittedly, I was in my 30s when I emigrated there, so I suppose my age meant I had developed more empathy and compassion. Coming back here and once again encountering a society that was more about individualism took me a while to re-acclimate my thoughts. On the surface I found-still find--it rather selfish and self-centered..."I've got mine, you go get your own...I'm not sharing". I think this maybe aligns with your redefinition of fascism? It's a word that is complex to pin down to one definition. I see fascism as also grounded in/associated with "populism". Added in the mix, besides self-centered-ness, is this hyper-patriotism, chauvinism about country. It can be overwhelming here. I can remember from experience I saw how the Dutch can be patriotic (hello, voetbal!), but they manage to keep it under control (well...usually, with occasional hooliganism, sadly) and are frankly uncomfortable with too much display of it. It is interesting to see how things like hooliganism do tend to be mainly in certain age groups. Once one gets older, attitudes change. Like you, I have mused on the differences in the societies, and, based on my experience, I find comparisons interesting. I love the Scandinavian way of looking at things and I miss traveling there. Again, welcome, and do throw in a thought every now and then. It's valuable. Tack och god dag!!
There was that allure...but with so many places legalizing it, it's now not such a big deal. It would suit the Dutch because the huge tourism around the lax drug laws is ruining the quality of life in Amsterdam. They're about to make it allowed only for Dutch citizens, so foreigners won't be able to buy it. Trust me, it has gotten really bad in the city.
I last visited the Netherlands (Holland is just one province) in 1975, before serious problems arose. That memory's probably accurate; I was "under the influence" at the time.
Thank you Bruce, for your generous reply. I wonder if you had done the same had you not americanized yourself again! - Of course there are many expressions of fascism that we need to distance ourselves from. My redefining is aiming at highlighting 'survival', 'necessity', 'at the cost of others', and that in order for life to come to each one of us through the generations, we all certainly have gotten our share of life at the cost of someone else. This is not dividing us into 'the good' and 'the evil'. I also think ligitimite fascism belong to the feminine, women who can give birth may have the right to survive at the cost of others, when necessity has it there is no other way of survival.
Welcome from me too, Olof. Unfortunately, it seems that we have a sizeable chunk of the population whose mental age stays fixed at under 10! However, i would just point out that voting Conservative, no matter how you define it, tends to increase with age rather than the contrary! Perhaps this is what is meant by those denigrating the older population as "falling into their 2nd childhood"? Fascists would tend to be a bunch of adolescents that haven't assumed their "teenage-hood" , refuse to consider adulthood and are still trying to dominate the playground by force!
OK, as long as you acknowledge the base we are all standing on. Yes, it is a matter of what we do after our 20-ies, and indeed how we use our extended lifetime. The expression in Swedish is "to walk in childhood"; the experience we have in common.
It is certainly normal in childhood to have a conservative view of the protective view of the cocoon in which yoou were brought up...if indeed this was the case. Thereafter rebellion sets in to firm up personal identity at the expense of parents. Normal stuff. Thereafterwards as you say it epends what you do with the tools that are available and the values inculcated earlier. Free will and all that. Many spend their time getting rid of the problems that their upbringing caused them.
Stuart, what people become in old age is pretty much what they were when young. What I find in elder people is a greater empathy and generosity toward others. And studies bear this out. Please don't confound the tendency to take one's belief systems with one as one ages with a different tendency: that of mellowing out and becoming more accepting as one ages. The interesting thing is that what you claim is happening is just the opposite of what is happening *except* where votes are manipulated. I rather tend to agree with your sense of fascists, at least in America: I earlier- some months ago- described them a bunch of middle-aged men who'd never outgrown adolescence, and who now are finding themselves stuck in a single state midlife, in what should have been their prime years, and only themselves to blame. It's not too late for them to reclaim a productive, meaningful old age, but I wonder how many can break out of their self-bondage? Force will not save their playground because the grownups have already taken it over.
I swear, I really blame a lot of the New Age garbage that came out in the 80s and 90s, people like Shakti Gawain saying that if you Creatively Visualize you can make anything happen, even in the face of reality. This got co-opted by evangelicals into Prosperity Gospel, and the cherry on top was that awful dreck called The Secret.
Welcome, Olof! I love your developmental analogy! I, too, have felt that America has been stuck in the younger, self-absorbed egotistical levels of development and slid way backwards in the last administration. It is time to bring us to the concept that beautiful concept that "the world is greater than yourself and that you depend also on others." From our beginning years of life and, usually, towards the latter years of life we truly need others. Why see that interdependent importance throughout the middle as well. I do think we need a new language to describe today's needs to avoid the negative implications of words of the past.
Well, I was not commenting only on America, and certainly not excluding Sweden. One reason we don't see how dependent we are I think is that we (the West) has exported a lot of things we don't want to see. Redefining 'fascism' I think of as a humble start of a new language.
Agreed-- fascism and authoritarianism has been on a major upswing around the world-- America is not certainly not alone. America was founded on white supremacy-- it is in our roots. We have a lot of digging (education) to do.
Right, it "shouldn't surprise me." And I know who founded that high minded rag. But it does surprise me. It shocks me to the core.
And the wise Tom Cotton. "A major under-incarceration problem in America."
There was a moment, at least 30 second not that long ago, maybe two, three years before Trump, where even a few fairly prominent conservatives had come around to understanding that MORE prison is not the answer. That moment has passed.
And the Florida public university "veiw point test"?
It's hard to pick which of these three good ideas is the most un-American, the most dangerous.
Thank God this letter is almost the only news I'm reading right now.
When a politician opens his big mouth -- especially a creature like this one -- pay no attention to the the supposed matter he's raising. He's telling you zilch about America, but plenty about himself.
And if you take it like that, he's right, of course: there's a grave under-incarceration problem in America.
For the likes of him.
Who can feel safe with the likes of a human akistrodon piscivorus slithering around the land free? Along with far too many others, turning the Senate into a can of very venomous worms...
Incarcerate...? What's the right verb for consignment to the Reptile House in a zoo?
So...speaking of "Stop the Steal"...isn't "stealing" exactly what these voter suppression laws are doing? Stealing the rights of Americans to vote? Seriously, how far are we from a dictatorship if this is allowed to occur?
I recommend reading "Wilmington's Lie" published January 2020 which describes Wilmington's white southern Democrats' violent overthrow of Republican multiracial government in North Carolina in 1898. "Red Shirts" self proclaimed "white supremacists" sprung up all over the state to intimidate, kill and banish blacks and whites who had prospered in business or were elected to positions respecting the black vote and a multiracial society. This book shows how mob rule, destructive, murder prone and ultimately autocratic white Americans are when bent on lies, conspiracy theories, "white power" and extremism. The white supremacists of Wilmington believed only they, the Democrats, with the mindset of today's Republicans, were fit to rule. This is our national history. Within my lifetime this has again become our present.
I would advocate that the US has undergone several holocausts on a scale similar to Germany's Nazi led Holocaust, all using racists politics. First, our taking property from and attempts to exterminate indigenous Native Americans, and blame for their circumstances by white Americans. Second, our taking slaves from Africa and then keeping them subjugated via violence, killings, preventing ownership, taking of property, suppression of voting & civil rights, incarceration, economical & political deprivation, and constant blame for everything imposed on them by white Americans.
White supremacy, right wing extremism, disinvestment in America, extraction of public resources, voter suppression is all tied up in one "Big Lie".
Your suggestion that the US has undergone several "holocausts" is a always a disturbing understanding. It puts our history and the reality of our unending American violence on display and reveals the floor upon which so much is built. I try to imagine my country's history if we had not massacred Native Americans, if we had not prospered through the savage enslavement of Africans, if Americans had not gathered themselves into mobs of hatefulness, if human violence was not at the core of our "success."
I would caution your use of the word “Holocaust.” It’s easy and descriptive but the crime of the Nazi government against the Jews of Europe and assorted untermenschen should stand alone in history. The hard part is to do so and not allow Americans to posture as historical moral superiors.
The Nazi Holocaust, which included ghettos, concentration camps, enslavement and extermination was not limited to Jews, though they were the majority. Romas, mentally and physically disadvantaged were among those on the list for this inhumanity. It's a disastrous mistake to single out the Jewish people and the Nazi German extermination program as singularly the only holocaust. This allows every other abuse, ghetto, enslavement & extermination program to go unnoticed or be dismissed at not as bad. Germany is not as bad which gives license to so much inhumanity. Israel excuses itself and escapes criticism for its mistreatment of Palestinians with ghettos, taking of property, enslavement and killings. The US has concealed and dismissed so many abuses while shining lights on everyone else. This has led to Ametrican white supremacy rising again and again, with politicians making claims against vulnerable people in the same manner that Nazis, religious crusaders and all other self serving extremists have done throughout history.
Katz, Steven T. The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History. Cambridge, 2019. 2v, 853p; bibl index
"Slave driver!" "Nazi!" We commonly invoke such terms to describe harsh bosses (or teachers). Scholarly comparisons also abound: Stanley Elkins's Slavery (Choice 1959?) springs readily to mind. But prior contrasts are often superficial, even facile. Steven Katz succeeds here in lifting discussion to notably higher levels. A distinguished Holocaust scholar, thorough immersion in secondary and published primary sources on slavery greatly expands his expertise. Katz (Boston Univ.) has long asserted the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but amply demonstrates its comparability to other historical occurrences, eschewing claims that either Holocaust or slaving was more vicious or evil than the other. He also persuasively argues that, despite its cruel destructiveness, slaving in Africa and the New World was not genocide. Copious evidence shows that slave traders and owners valued captives' lives for the wealth they generated. Treatment of enslaved women and children particularly diverged from their counterparts' fate during the Shoah. Nazis (and their enablers) consistently subordinated wartime production to murderous political imperatives -- even though faltering war industries sorely needed Jewish labor. Fundamentally, slavery was economically rational; the Holocaust was ideologically driven and irrational. One controversial section argues that, under U.S. law, whites could be prosecuted, even executed, for murdering slaves, sharply contrasting with Nazi-era legislation on killing Jews. Such statutes were significant, but likely not as much as Katz believes. Cases of masters or overseers being indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced to death, then actually executed, were progressively, vanishingly small, especially compared to unreported incidents. Ultimately, southern judges and juries (often slaveholders themselves), as in slave societies everywhere, were loath to intervene in the core master-slave relationship. Still, Katz identifies many crucial issues for scholars, who will long ponder this challenging study. Summing Up: Highly Recommended; academic and large public libraries; undergraduates and above.
David, I think there is merit to your suggestion with reference to a more complete depiction and understanding of the deaths, destruction, subjugation and confiscation of land committed by the USA. Carol and Jim raised a serious issue about using the word 'holocaust' in this regard. A definition of the word is below. In any case, it is warranted that these aspects of American history be spelled out as part of our identity. If not 'holocaust', an appropriate word or phrase as an umbrella denoting America's heinous acts is called for.
holocaust (Oxford English - Spanish Dictionary
Pronunciation /ˈhɒləkɔːst/
See synonyms for holocaust
Translate holocaust into Spanish
NOUN
1Destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war.
1.1the HolocaustThe mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5. More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members of other persecuted groups such as Romani and gay people, were murdered at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
I agree. I also went to look for the formal definition of holocaust and resonate with janjamm’s comment. Our country’s atrocities have to be acknowledged by all of us no matter how difficult. “By 1900, the indigenous population in the Americas declined by more than 80%, and by as much as 98% in some areas.” Or: https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-taken-to-the-u-s-during-the-slave-trade/. Atrocities far more insidious and so perhaps more difficult to foresee and prevent must also be brought into the light and discussed and educated and how do we prevent repeating going forward. I’ll never forget a staff meeting where a co-worker said “none of us ever said when we were three that we wanted to grow up to be a murderer. But it’s what we do and the choices we make along the way every day that keep us from arriving there.” We can all do better at giving all of our children the opportunities to feed their “good wolves” every day. Too many are being taught to feed the “bad wolves” and that does not bode well for humanity nor Mother Earth.
I was in college 1957-1960 in Texas. All students had to sign a card stating they were not and did not intend to be a member of the Communist Party. After reading Dr. Richardson’s newsletter, I’m reminded of McCarthy and the damage he caused to so many people. As he was asked and which seems to apply to many of today’s Republicans, “Have you no shame?” Considering the behaviors of many of our Republicans in office lately, I question the intelligence of the voters who elected them, including Kevin Williamson.
I wrote to my US Senator, MM and ask him to support H.R. one. On April 1, I received his office's canned reply that it was the right of the states to run elections. I haven't read the constitution since 11th grade - does it really say that? Ot did I receive an April fool's day reply?
Armed with the text of the Constitution provided in the comments, I would love to see your response to MM's letter! BTW: I received a strikingly similar response from Rick Scott.
Thank you for contacting me with your concerns regarding election integrity. Hearing your views helps me better represent Kentucky in the United States Senate.
In your correspondence, you specifically mentioned the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R. 1). I fervently oppose this legislation that would give Washington, D.C. unprecedented power over the way our nation conducts elections and severely regulate every American’s right to free speech. Despite these concerns, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1 on March 3, 2021, despite bipartisan opposition. While I oppose this legislation, please rest assured that I will keep your views in mind as the 117th Congress progresses.
Since our founding, states—not the Federal government—have been entrusted with protecting and administering our elections. This massive bill would change that. Kentucky has developed rules, procedures, and protocols that are appropriate around our unique experiences in our elections. What works for Kentucky may not work for New York. And what works for California certainly does not work for Kentucky. H.R. 1 would also give taxpayer money to congressional candidates, and recreate the Federal Election Commission into a partisan weapon.
In addition to a partisan takeover of American elections, H.R. 1 also severely chills and in some cases prohibits Americans’ right to free speech. Even organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union oppose H.R. 1’s strict regulations on political speech as a violation of First Amendment rights. The bill would restrict the marketplace of ideals, force nonprofit organizations to provide donor information to the IRS, and give the Federal bureaucrats tools to silence any beliefs they deem unacceptable.
I have consistently opposed measures which would restrict freedom of speech as protected by the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Free speech is one of our nation’s most important democratic traditions and is a hallmark of any free society. As a longtime defender and proponent of the First Amendment, I will continue to fight any attempt to weaken our freedom of speech. This freedom of expression is fundamental to our republic.
Again, thank you for contacting me about this important matter. If you would like to receive periodic updates about issues such as this, please sign up for my eNewsletter at http://mcconnell.senate.gov/, become a fan of my page on Facebook by visiting http://www.facebook.com/mitchmcconnell, or follow my office on Twitter @McConnellPress.
HR1 would regulate how states run federal elections, a power given to the federal government by the constitution. It would effectively require states to make it easier, not harder, for voters to vote in federal elections. Since administering elections is an elaborate process, states often choose to run their state and federal elections by the same rules. The proposed law would require non partisan commissions to replace Gerrymandering. It would reduce hidden money in politics by requiring the revelation of the identity of anyone donating over ten thousand dollars. That is MM’s ‘free speech’ complaint. He thinks large secret campaign donations are protected free speech. His party also thinks public speech they don’t like is ‘cancel culture’ to be punished.
As our country used to be proud to have democratic government, one would have thought everything in this bill would have been passed long ago. But I guess that is the elite problem that has continued and kept a majority of white men in power. It makes me so sad that we have not come further with civil rights and equality.
The problem is that he thinks too much. I cannot say that he is not sly and devious in the ways of governing the Senate. Nope can’t say that...slimy slithering turtleneck.
Oh, thank you for saying that out loud! I have so many angry words that are being held down my throat right now. I hope many people are getting their 2nd vaccines and getting ready to march again. I feel so pinned down whilst all these braggarts lie to our people.
Ah yes, the hoary southern argument about their "heritage," their traditions. No doubt for McTurtle "our unique experiences" include the Black Patch War of 1904-09, a series of vigilante episodes with racial and class elements, much violent harassment and several murders. Kentucky also ranks 8th nationwide in number of lynchings. Yep, that's quite a proud tradition to uphold. Bah.
Speaking of lynchings, after I retired from teaching high school, I moved back home to Tennessee and for ten years was an adjunct instructor at the local community college. I will never forget the day one of my students, a recent high school graduate, and I were talking after class, and he began telling me about the lynchings he attended in his hometown (in Tennessee, I do not remember the name of the city). I was stunned; it was a wake-up call that I will never forget. His story disabused me of my long held belief that lynchings were a horrific relic of the past. How could this still be happening in today's world?
Was it into the 2000s when a black man was chained to the back of a pickup truck in Texas and dragged till he was dead? I didn't take the time to google it, so forgive me that. But it came immediately to mind after reading AndreaH's comment. We think of lynching and hanging being synonymous, but it's my understanding that hanging is only one method of visiting violent death on someone of color.
James Byrd was dragged to death in Jasper TX in 1998. It fits the torture-murder definition of lynching. Not the 21C, but still too close to the present for a reputedly "civilized" country. The Unnamed Former should have had Texas in mind when he mentioned "schist-whole countries."
Thank you, TPJ. That's the one I was thinking of. Sorry I was too 'sorry' to look it up myself! Yes, we have some nerve, calling ourselves 'civilized', not to mention, 'leader of the free world'.
I remember this. Weird to ❤️ this but it is so important to give recognition of the atrocities our citizens— the sick perps and the victims of their lethal perpetrations.
Right? My exact thought. Recent HS grad, so around 20 years old, assuming not talking about memories as an infant or toddler, say going back 15 yrs or less. Andrea replied she was told this 7-8 years ago, so we're talking about within the last 20 years or so, in Tennesee. Unless that was a very old HS graduate, or was pulling Andrea's leg, that's shocking to hear.
My original response to AndreaH: "Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/."
Andrea, we trust your account but not your informant. Either he doesn't know (or care) what is lynching; can't measure time properly; or he was BSing.
Tennessee had not 6, but 251 lynchings in the 20C. One thing to note with this list: virtually all whites lynched were Mexican Americans or other Hispanics, so still POC. Only 6 states are not listed as having lynchings: CT, MA, NH, RI, AL, HI (and I'm skeptical of the latter two's history). Way to go, New England.
My original response to AndreaH: "Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/."
The lynching platform at the Jan. 6 insurrection had a deeper meaning for me. I realized that it was very possible that given the chance, the thugs would truly lynch Mike Pence and others.
That lynching platform says to every black or person of color to beware who wants control. This is incredibly frightening and I do not understand why our country is not in a total uproar and saying this is enough. The Chauvin trial is the trial of white supremacist America. Watching the trial-- Chauvin sat there with his knee on Floyd's neck for around 9 minutes. He had his hand casually in his pants as if to demonstrate to bystanders how snuffing out a (black man's) life is the easiest thing in the world. White supremacists are America's long, dark shadow that we have been dragging for way too long. Our blatant racist history and present is just heartbreaking. If they do not back down by justice being served and rights being maintained-- there will be no other choice for our country. And history is being repeated.
The significance of the gallows built by the white rioters now makes more sense. There were quite a few “suicides” of Blacks by hanging in the south during the last few years that need to be investigated. Also the Amy McGrath loss because supposedly polls were very very close during the campaign. Why did McGrath concede so quickly? Bullies should not be controlling a democracy in the 21st century.
Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/.
Reading about the Black Patch War Night Riders is fascinating--and nightmare material. Initially organized with sophistication as little guys against the big tobacco monopoly, they turned scary violent: hoods, masks, whipping people, lynching 4 African Americans in a tree...Then there is a disturbingly straight line to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, who fortunately, were much less organized.
Looking for a visual, they were also in Tennessee. And inspired terrorist settler robbers in the Rocky Mountains? What's up with wearing bed sheets?
I read recently the white sheets of the KKK were used to recall ghosts of fallen Confederate soldiers. My apologies, I don't recall where I saw that, I thought it might have been in these letters!
but it speaks volumes to the level of education and understanding of those proferring that explanation....straight out of the comic books and tv cartoons.....or their historical equivalents. Somebody should inform the ghost world that they are generally improperly dressed to impress Republicans!
Or perhaps not so much the beliefs of black people as the beliefs ABOUT black people held by the white supremacists. Eh? I've read and been told stories recorded at the time that black people easily identified the people attacking them through ordinary means: their boots, their body build, their voices, etc. Nothing superstitious about it. They just knew better than to complain. Though it is also said that mysterious things sometimes happened to night riders some time later.
White ( in principal for purity) is common through Western traditions and faiths. In China weddings are black! Hoods of course bring us back to the inquisition etc and to stooping people from identifying their executioner,
You are quite right, Annie. I was getting my memories of what I had been told backwards.....that white would be used in a funeral and so....! The men, like elsewhere dress up in penguin suits....black.
If I got that letter from McTurtle it would go straight to the trash bin. I met a smart and charming young man last summer in Maine. We got into a political conversation about the upcoming election and ultimately he said plainly that Kentucky just wasn’t ready for women leaders. He was referring to the veteran who had been contesting McTurtle’s seat. I believed him and I’m sorry for the state of Kentucky.
Living in Kentucky and helping with Amy McGrath’s campaign, I respectfully disagree with your friend in Maine. I believe strongly that Amy won. Yes, Kentucky has a large amount of Republican voters that still think that coal mining is the only way to make a living, but a very large amount of us are sick of Mitch! And, the vote was ridiculously close.
KY is ready for a female senator, but its GQP is not. I also believe that the 2020 election was stolen by McTurtle through fraud, suppression, and Goodwife Chao's last-minute DOL budget dump in KY. A thorough, transparent investigation is urgently needed.
And “odd” isn’t it that McConnell’s win wasn’t questioned loud enough? Not too long ago I posted a link to a Think story laying out enough stats from that election that seemed far more worthy of a “fraud” claim than the crazy efforts of the Powell “team”. Don’t have the time right now to look for it, but will if anyone interested.
I am very happy to hear your news! I wish I had a couple of friends in Kentucky, but I will try to support (financially) any Democrat in the next election
Cold calls were primarily supportive. There were “suggestions” that some southern counties had more votes than registered voters ( I heard the same in other states). Bottom line, the vote was very close. I believe that in KY, there is hope. I do not understand why many Kentuckians love Mitch. He has done nothing for our state!
From Kentucky. We have had women in leadership positions, just not in Washington. We have had a female governor, Martha Layne Collins. The city of Lexington has had women mayors. We also have had women holding elective executive offices. And there are several women holding office in the state Senate and House. So to say that Kentucky isn't ready for women leaders is incorrect. I believe it is just a matter of time when we will have a person of color and also a woman in Washington
"McTurtle" is perfect. I remember well a turtle we had when I was much younger. His voting record was seriously less foolish than McTurtle's and far less obstructive to the sanity and wisdom of the Nation. He did, however, as McTurtle, pee on the carpets and disappear when there was work to be done.
My only problem with that is the sacred nature of the turtle in many Native American origin myths...their land (America) being created on the back of a giant turtle!
Well, some indigenous people have an origin story of that nature. The tortoise figures largely in a number of other cultures as well. But just as there are a lot of American indigenous cultures, there are a lot of origin stories- I find them interesting, as often they reflect some valid observation about the earth, and the people are perfectly aware that the stories are teaching tools rather than literal stories. My people have multiple stories that simply layer on each other. Spider plays a much larger role in some of them. My family honors spiders.
At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America was a head-changing book. Likewise Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow America, by David Oshinsky. You can't read those books and not come away changed.
Way to go, Melissa Perry! Thank you for sharing MM's, as you say, canned response. It clearly lays out his perverted platform. I look forward to the response from the ACLU.
Thank you, Ellie. I, too, gleaned that they support much of the provisions in the bill. Also, due to the tweaking process, it appears that it may be a number of months down the road before voting takes place. I was so hoping it would be sooner. But, good bills must be scrutinized by reputable interested parties, such as the ACLU.
And it will be necessary to twist Manchin's arm to let go on his filibuster stance. I'm not sure why he ever bothers to run as a Democrat. Too bad Paula Swearingen was not able to beat him in the 2018 primary.
Isn't it ironic that MM's home state of Kentucky just passed a law to expand voting rights in the face of voter suppression movement around the country? States should have control over its own elections? Here you go, Mitch. Listen up.
Yes, "I will keep your views in mind", Mitch days, as he gathers millions of dollars to keep yours and people's most beloved right to vote from happening! I cannot think how he has been re- elected so many times! Aggghhh!🤬🤬🤬
MM bragged in the debate that "KY was punching above it's weight" meaning more Federal dollars flow into the state than taxes go out. It's a combination of crony politics and trial behavior....
"Kentucky has developed rules, procedures, and protocols that are appropriate around our unique experiences in our elections. What works for Kentucky may not work for New York. And what works for California certainly does not work for Kentucky."
Zowie, HCR. Thanks for doing the heavy lift of having to read all this dreck in order to report on it to those of us who don't have the stomach for it! My question is this: where the heck are the essays, op-eds, and well-publicized commentary of prominent political figures COUNTERING this stuff? Biden seems to be trying to present a voice of reason but he also seems not to be supported by other voices who are remarkably muted. Meanwhile Manchin publishes a headlined Op-Ed in the WaPo stating that he will never get rid of the filibuster and he won't vote for the infrastructure bill if it goes through the budget reconciliation process. So he is undercutting the president he claims to support and the party he claims to be a member of.
A characteristic of the radical right wing of fundamentalist Christianity is a demand that families in their communities be absolutely ruled--autocratically so--by a male head, who makes all decisions for all family members. This antediluvian approach to social ordering is what is being proposed in all of these anti-voter, pro-oligarchy commentaries. In addition, the writers of these commentaries seem utterly unaware that most of the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights--and the majority of early presidents before Andrew Jackson--were secularists, pantheists, and Unitarians. Jefferson created a version of the Bible with all the religious stuff edited out, a nod to conservative secularist David Hume's rejection, on the basis of logic and science, of the existence of miracles. He was appalling in other ways, as were all of those guys, and was an avowed elitist, but to claim some sort of Second Great Awakening (which occurred AFTER the Constitution was ratified) adherence to a form of Christianity that did not even exist in the 18th century in any great concentration is just plain stupid and lousy history. Which is the SOP of all of these white boyz.
You are so right about the voices in the Democratic Party being mute, silent or contradictory. I was, once again, infuriated by Manchin’s obstinance and by his broadcasting it in such a loud voice. Oh, if only we had won even one more Senate seat last November.
Manchin's WaPo OpEd "tantrum" about the filibuster is especially galling and he really offers not one single valid reason for holding on to the damn thing, except this "pie-in-the-sky" thinking that keeping it will somehow magically restore the idea of bi-partisanship. Yeah, and leprechauns, fairies, and unicorns farting rainbows exist too. The Republican party in its present incarnation will NEVER work with Democrats, or even with more moderate voices within their own party. They are headed off the rails and Manchin's (and Sinema's) outdated and silly beliefs that we can all "play nice" are out of place right now. This will only end up creating more and more gridlock, though Manchin somehow had the nerve to maintain in his essay that the filibuster actually lessens gridlock! In what universe, dude?? The guy should just call himself a moderate Republican and be done with it. He's scuttling any chance of Biden getting much done...and McConnell is there loving every moment of it. Aggravating.
If Williamson gets his way, then not only should low information representatives like Gaetz, Marjorie, Jordan and Cawthorn not be able to serve in Congress, they should also not be able to vote for whoever replaces them.
Republicans' push for voter suppression laws around the country are acts of desperation by a party in decline. They will do anything to regain power in Washington, regardless of their constituents' wishes on major legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan. In a conversation over dinner with a highly intelligent Republican friend, he maintained that the recently passed voter suppression law in our state, Georgia, actually expands voter rights. "How can removing 2/3 of ballot boxes, severely limiting absentee voting and restricting Black and Brown voters' access to the polls translate into greater voter participation?" I asked. He had no answer. Republican lies are sad and pathetic, but lying to ourselves is heartbreaking.
I'm still waiting for prominent Republicans to denounce the voter suppression movement in our country. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to find Republican men and women of integrity and courage to speak the truth.
No doubt, Randy, if you've read the "damn bill" like a good Georgian voter and gleaned the pluses and minuses of it, you're aware of how much and how often Republicans here, including our own clueless Governor Bubba, simply act like the more suppressive parts of the bill do not exist. They only tout the few measures that ARE improvements. They just don't elect to tell everyone the WHOLE story. Government by deception is becoming more and more an obvious characteristic of Republican strategy--they're not disguising it anymore--and we need to call them on it. Stacey Abrams has her hands full, putting it mildly.
Trump with his lies and deceptions was his way of keeping control of his base and the GOP rode right along with it. Now with Biden and Democrats having more of a say so with actual power, it grows more and more insulting that Kemp is trying to pretend that we can't read or understand what he is doing. What happened to the shame of being caught in a lie or misleading the public? We somehow need that level of decency as an expected norm again.
To me (as an ex- "resident alien") - the real issue is the dumbing down of the populace - and I have no idea how to overcome that. There are now too many sources of "information" screaming for attention. I suspect it's a sad case of "too little, and far too late". I am vaguely encouraged by the apparent finding that Republican voters are supporting the moves by Biden. But like all these things, there is a sting in the tail - given the size of the USA and the deterioration of much of its infrastructure - the environmental costs of trying to put things to rights, will be massive (and maybe trying to get back "yesterday", should not be the agenda).
Your point is good. When was the period in the glorious past when the education system produced a universally literate and knowledgeable population prepared to face the challenges of life?
Teachers now combat poor, clumsy and opinionated administrations, ruefully inadequate and declining ressources, unmaintained and absent infrastructure, caveman technology and worst of all ideological deformations and political limits on what they can teach.
Over and above this, for the Black population, we are "only" about 60 or so years since the Earl Warren court did them justice ending segregation of schools. What has been done since by the State governments to ensure every Black kid has at least as good an education as his White fellow student? How have the obvious housing disadvantages, family disfunctions, parental poverty and poor educational background been redressed to allow Black kids to profit from advantages that society has to offer?
On a further point, to what extent is it studied and realized that the failure of the educational system to thereby be fully able to help the Black student to adapt to the school system is a prime cause of the slide of parts of this part of the population, and indeed many other "ethnicities" of every colour, into the non-legal economy....the endgame of which we are now following closely on media from Minneapolis.
You are correct in pointing out that education is but one piece of the opportunity pie.
My wife taught in a school that included both the richest, and poorest neighborhoods. Did they all get the same educational experience in her class? Yes. But when they walked out the door, they went to vastly dissimilar worlds.
With the rise of charter schools, the ruling class is trying it's best to undo what the Warren Court did. What good does it do to say that Black and White children can receive the same education when funding for that education they receive has been decimated to pay for tuition vouchers?
Charter Schools and choice has been the best way out of the many failing public school system for disadvantaged students. Make no mistake, the results are dramatically different. Just look at the Success Academy in NYC. No comparison. Randi Weingarten and her flock of politicians and voters beware. They are destroying the hopes and dreams of the many.
Sorry, no. "Failing schools" is a trope for conservative with insufficient basis in fact. Citing a single instance of a good charter school cannot counter their overall negative effect on public ed. Charters are the darlings of educational "reformers" whose notion of reform is to privatize public ed, allowing companies to profit from district school budgets, a major portion of government spending. The large majority are biased against POC in admissions, attention to individual students, graduation rates, and especially discipline, with significantly more suspensions, arrests and expulsions for minority students.
The privatizers also seek to kill teachers' unions (along with other public-sector unions), among the few orgs standing by dedicated professionals who perform the essential task of educating future citizens. Want to improve public ed? Focus on the whole system, not a few islands like charters that maximize profits while abandoning the duty to educate all. ALL.
I see nothing wrong with private educational establishments as long as they are not allowed to flourish at the expense of the public system. Both are necessary and both must follow the same discrimination laws, regulations and curriculum...and be obliged to put in place schemes to facilitate access by those without great financial means. If people want to pay for something they can get for free so be it but the best way to beat the private schools is to get better results in the public ones. The tax system should be so constructed so that the wealthy who send their children to private schools be obliged to contribute equally to the public schools by specific taxes and no tax credits etc allowed here. Nobody should be allowed to escape paying a contribution towards this essential public good. That way you work on the market price mechanism to control competition between the 2 systems. Then those chosing the private system can compare the full cost with the benefits that it brings....if any....with greater clarity.
Lip service. Teachers care about all students far more than charter school fans. Note use of ALL, instead of cherry-picking wealthy or promising students. POC are at a great disadvantage. Don't forget, they are students too.
Totally unsurprising response. Charter schools are essentially a Union busting effort. I haven't looked at the link you gave, but I'll take a guess - Success Academies rate themselves as highly successful.
Yet the Unions support the teachers who are the key to successful students. this cannot be just a one way street, with the unions the teachers can have a bigger say in what is taught.
Are you familiar with the podcast, Amicus? A fascinating show the other day illustrating that, had it not been for Nixon successfully forcing Abe Fortas from SCOTUS, it is likely that equal school funding would have been codified into precedent. https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2021/03/constitutional-inequality
Without regard to color, I have been extremely impressed with these witnesses' credentials...mostly all with master's degrees in their chosen field. I have been guilty of believing the stereotype that Blue Lives folks didn't reach that high.
That there has been a welcome development of the Black middle class of course. I would hesitate to suggest that this success is "population wide" . It would be interesting to look at what they were able to do collectively with their qualifications compared to white students of similar background and achievement.
On a side note, "ethnic" students in the UK are now out-performing "native" english boys. So as the girls in general have since a very longtime outperformed the boys...who does that now relegate to the dunce's corner?
Without any facts or figures to back me up, I would venture to say the development you speak of is all the more impressive when communities of color are held to a white-created curriculum (except for physics and other branches of science, of course!)
There are some sharp insights on that topic in a new book, The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The book also explains particle physics. Read when wide awake.
Teaching science is not always unbiased either - like Kansas banning the teaching of evolution vs creationism. One of my favorite movies is "Hidden Figures" about the black women at NASA who were the computers doing the math calculations for the manned space program. As a woman engineer I so related to their situation as women with brains although I'm sure I don't fully appreciate the Black experience.
Because bias is baked into curriculum developed exclusively by white people. Though their influence has waned as the production of textbooks has changed, for decades Texas wielded disproportionate influence over what was and was not taught, in particular in the fields of history and social studies. It has been demonstrated that this bias not only taught inaccurate and racist stereotypes, but that children of color were left behind by white standards of what was "right" speech and behavior. https://education.msu.edu/green-and-write/2014/texas-textbooks-and-the-politics-of-history-standards/
For all the lofty rhetoric of Republicans now and in the 1850s about how the country should be governed, there's an unstated motivation — greed. They want to ensure that the wealthy make even more money at the expense of the overwhelming majority of Americans and the nation as a whole. They can rationalize what they do to the point of deceiving themselves, but their actions proclaim otherwise.
Ummm.... you might want to go back and re-read the post. The Republicans in the late 1850s were the ones NOT making that argument. We are in a situation today where the positions of the parties have reversed; today's Democrats take the positions of yesterday's Republicans and vice-versa. It all depends on which national party is willing to do a deal with the Southernist regional parasite.
Here's an idea. Next time limit "better" voters to those who have had both shots, have a certified tax return, and can demonstrate they have taken a civics course. That would eliminate a majority of republicans.
Today’s letter reinforces my thought that “Republican” and “Democrat” are just words, especially when you realize that the parties have flipped when it comes to ideology. The real issue is the “haves” with wealth and power versus everyone else. The “haves” want to keep their wealth and accumulate more as a basis for maintaining their power. Everyone else is just a means to that end.
JennSH, I invite you to stay tuned to this column, and to dear Prof Richardson’s letter. Beginning w the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and culminating with the Johnson signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party gradually evolved into the party which saw government as a force for good. The federal govt. WOULD intervene in the marketplace, town halls, and the hollers, as a vehicle for change. Herein, we saw a movement for less government, to keep govt out of my wallet, less taxation, etc. This attitude is held by conservatives, who do not want to loose traditions - and by traditions I mean addictions and behaviors that are absolutely intolerable.
If we fast forward from Johnson and the Voting Rights Act of ’64 to the 2020 election - we see the most brilliant representations of two diverging tribes - the mean spirited Donald Trump with his call girls, male enablers Gaetz and McConnell, gun toters Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and so much illicit behavior that one cannot keep straight the investigations. Cuminating in an violent attack on our Democracy. Welcome to humanity’s shadow!
Then, we have the elder of our times, Joe Biden, who sees every human as worthy of respect. And a tribe who takes seriously the call to make things right, wherever possible. Biden is simply a natural result of the efforts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a man who deeply loved Congressman John Lewis and everyone who sacrificed at lunch counters, marches, sit-ins. Biden calls out for all Ameriansl to support the rights of workers to unionize.
There is no one Biden will not look into their eyes, with his arms placed on their shoulders, and console. Welcome to the light. Empathy and compassion.
Without being an eyewitness, your have described a progression, in actuality a very rocky one, with poetry and passion. Thank you, Frederick, for taking us on this journey in celebration of freedom and humanity.
I have finally found your note Fern, after many attempts through the maze of today’s wise comments. I wanted to thank you hours ago; so have no worries if your kindness touched me. I simply had to find you.
A very sound didactic narrative, thank you Frederick. I'd place the start of the Dem commitment to govt-as-good at an earlier date. Certainly with the New Deal, but also with Woodrow Wilson's progressive legislation. But as you note, it wasn't til the 1960s that Dems irrevocably committed to govt serving ALL citizens.
It might help to discern & distinguish between southern Democrats & northern Democrats before & after the Civil War. I don't know much about how northern Democrats responded to slavery, secession, reconstruction and Jim Crow.
The book "Wilmington's Lie" points how the NYTIMES & Washington Post accepted & broadcasted the lies & conspiracy theories that blacks in Wilmington & NC were responsible for race riots, threats against whites & the rest of the white supremacy narrative. Blacks had few supporters or protectors. Certainly none that went to the south to witness, report & demand consequences for the white violence.
Woodrow Wilson's record concerning Civil Rights and Human Rights eliminates him from my list of leaders who have advanced the country's journey toward equality. 'His desire to promote the benefits of democracy in Latin America produced the invasion and military occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. '... He tolerated no dissent during the war and authorized serious violations of Americans' civil liberties in his quest for victory. Nor did his zest for humanitarian justice extend to African Americans: He supported segregation in government departments and did little to stop the waves of antiblack violence and race riots that swept over the land during his administration, particularly in the years after the war.' (The Miller Center)
The reference is only to legislation and regulation during Wilson's admins. It is an impressive record, not just in its own time; for example, child labor and occupational safety laws. My opinion of Wilson is lower than it was, say, a decade ago. He was a bully in Latin America and the Caribbean, a racist several times over, and unable to close the deal in his global diplomacy. But the Democratic Party turned in a progressive direction under Wilson, and has mostly remained more progressive than the major-party alternative.
TPJ, I acknowledge your point, but do not conceed it. There were other factors involved in the turn of the Dems that had nothing to do with Wilson. And I'm afraid his stance on human rights had a lot to do with maintaining an ugly attitude toward Latin America (and others that we are still affected by. My mother, were she still living, could give you a detailed lecture about Wilson, as could my aunt.
As much as this history of the right to vote is interesting, may I remind all of you that more than half the population of the United States did not win the right to vote until 1920. I use the word win quite deliberately. Women were not given the right to vote. They fought for it -- long and hard. We need to fight for universal suffrage now. We the People, All of Us This Time!
And that when everybody votes, the system and the representatives are obliged to listen to what the people have said they want!
And we see that women are the better leaders.
The Iriquois Federation had it right. Nothing gets done until the "old ladies" say so!
"This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it."
-- Vine Deloria Jr
Nature certainly was.
I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow deputy who is a really decent guy (he was my first recruit in about 1989) and is now talking about retirement, which launched into a discussion about which PERS option to take (there are several that include in a person's name only that stops when that person dies, and two others that allow for a spouse to receive benefits after the death of the retiree, and another that allows a representative to receive benefits after the death of the retiree; each one of those has a decreasing monthly benefit. When he asked why I had chosen the last one, I told him that it was because at the time I retired (2013) I was legally married in California, but since Oregon had a definition of marriage as "one man and one woman" I had to be "domestically partnered" (civil process) AND because of Oregon's law, the Federal government did not recognize my marriage which really complicated things. The Obergfell decision changed that, but it was after I had retired. My marriage is dependent on the SCOTUS upholding that decision. He was pretty incredulous. SMH.
I told him that, in my opinion, if your right to vote was not granted by constitutional amendment, you didn't get to have a say in changing voting regulations. He looked quizzically, and I told him the right of Black men to vote was via the 15th Amendment, and the right of women to vote was via the 19th Amendment. He again was a little surprised, and said "I never really thought of it that way. You're right."
This is an excellent point. An additional note: the citizenship of indigenous Americans was not officially recognized until 1924 with the Snyder Act. However, regardless of the 15th Amendment having granted the vote regardless of color, states were allowed to decide eligibility, so just as many Black voters have had to deal with literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers to voting, it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act and beyond that their suffrage was protected.
What a viscous circle. We don’t want them educated because we can’t pull the wool over their eyes. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they aren’t educated.
Then the states decide what is to be taught but it’s way too left leaning and even babies are being indoctrinated! Education isn’t liberal leftist rhetoric, it’s just enlightenment.
The conservative group doing a number on the school district where I work is not the majority view. But they are taking over! I’m sure they believe they know what is best for the misguided souls. I might be out of a job for saying things like people are mammals! It’s why we have to vote in local elections. To be heard!
Thank you Heather! For continuing to enlighten!
Orwell. 1984. Summed it up well.
"For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
You should see the GOP attacks on public education in Kentucky. It's exactly the same thing that RR started. Cut funding to Education. Then sell the 'right to work ' laws to break unions. Without critical thinking, people don't vote in their own best interest
Yep! We have the “right to work” law here in Texas too! We have teacher associations instead of unions. Which are basically insurance companies to protect teachers from administrators and parents alike.
Voter suppression is well documented in Texas. But the republicans keep voting for the things that don’t benefit them anyway! The reason is usually it’s the way we’ve always done things. But who knows, we’re gerrymandered out the wazoo! The votes do not reflect the majority, just the republicans.
I’m a broken record and probably people avoid me, but vote vote vote!
Here in NH, we have a Repub quadrafecta (Gov, House, Senate, and Executive Council. The last is an advisory board. We now have a RTW bill in process too.
My daughter and I were talking recently, wondering how in the world 2 states, about the same size, similar geography, similar origins, similar issues, adjacent to each other could be so different when it came to values and legal systems. Neither of us had to name the states- we both knew we were talking about Vermont and New Hampshire. No matter how much we read the history and follow the present, it makes no sense. If New England ever seceded, we'd have to figure out a way to leave NH behind. (This is not a serious proposition; more a New England joke. Or perhaps wishful thinking....)
The state bird of New Hampshire is the black fly.
My daughter and her family live in KY. I follow KY politics from the other side of the state line. Depressing.
And without fair and decent education people don’t learn to think critically.
Ditto in Florida.
In Europe, too, there are very active groups now championing what amounts to a re-creation of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime which kept the country preserved in aspic for 42 years until 1974; or, if we are more fortunate, something more like De Valera’s Ireland, in which change becomes more viscous (yes) and fly-papery while every possible means is used to extend the outreach of religion-as-social-control. I’ve just received a petition emanating from a Polish women’s group opposing the candidature as Judge at the European Court of Human Rights of one Aleksander Stępkowski, said to be the founder of an association called Ordo Iuris with policies reported to include a total ban on abortion, action against sexual minorities reminiscent of Nazi judenfrei zones, the criminalization of sex education, a restriction of or ban on divorce and withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention of 2011 (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) which Erdogan’s Turkey intends to renege on, while the Polish Sejm is now debating similar action, an interesting correspondence between different users of religion as politics—see:
https://visegradpost.com/en/2021/03/24/marek-jurek-yes-to-family-no-to-gender-a-citizens-bill-for-poland-to-pull-out-of-the-istanbul-convention/ and https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/01/istanbul-convention-poland-moves-a-step-closer-to-quitting-domestic-violence-treaty
Also: http://en.ordoiuris.pl/who-we-are
The trouble is that the defenders of a fossilized social order grounded in identity myths are in reality promoters of systematized hypocrisy and endemic disorder. They seem to have been shoehorned into America’s judiciary, while in Poland the far-right government has taken the opposite line, purging the judiciary…
Peter, the situation in Poland and the eastern European zone that lies between (and has been historically contested over by) Germany, Austria, and Russia is becoming scarier and scarier. And many of these nations are members of the EU, which gives the would-be and actual autocrats political cover. In the meantime, there are riots in Belfast, apparently initiated mostly by "Loyalists" (pro-UK, anti-Unionists) who object to the closer associations of NI with the Rep of Ireland and the creation of trade barriers between NI and the UK--the direct result of Brexit. It would seem that we are back to 1975 again.
Ah, the old autocratic empires -- who knew we'd miss them so much? Despite much inequality and injustice, the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Habsburgs, Ottomans all managed to limit ethnic/internal conflicts until things began deteriorating in the late 19C. In many ways the legacies of Great War matter more than those of WW2. The former settled many important issues, but those who felt victimized, and didn't accept the results of 1918-19, gave us another, still worse global conflagration. Then communist regimes embalmed ethno-national problems for a half century, which were unleashed again after the Cold War.
D Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace
R Gerwareth, The Vanquished
K Lowe, The Fear and the Freedom
M Mazower, Dark Continent
D Reynolds, The Long Shadow
T Snyder, Bloodlands
You may if you like call this sympathizing with the enemy, but as far as I'm concerned it means know-your-enemy and feel for said "enemy" as a human being, even if he or she behaves like something straight out of hell... I've just added another comment about the origins of much violent resistance to change...
Unless we have a little more fellow-feeling for those who cause us and the world so much trouble, we'll never get anywhere in developing a sane relationship with them.
Admittedly, a horribly difficult challenge.
A hearty No Thank You to any rehabilitation of Salazar, whose regime oppressed Portugal for decades and committed countless atrocities in Africa. Watching the European fascists rise again from their graves is far more frightening than the scariest zombie flick.
B Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm
M Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique
Peter, unfortunately I'm not sure that the Chief Justice of the ECHR can reject national nominations. There have been loonies in the past on this and all other Euro Courts in Brussels and Luxembourg.
I might add that I spent a year coaching the Justices of the European Court of Justice in collective decision-making and team management.
But Stuart, I don't know, but you may be quite right about ECHR nominations, which is why Polish women are resisting this one; but aren't you confusing EU institutions with the older postwar Council of Europe ones?
true Peter, i only know the former well. Image the political turmoil if the nomination is refused...akin to the battle over "rule of law" budgetary criteria recently which ended with the usual "fudge" and non-application of any such parliamentary impositions!
Remember that interview of the son of David Dukes, KKK, where he was being groomed to be the next leader one day. He said that he went away to uni and his new friends could not believe his racist, supremacy views. They gently guided him, educated him and he left the KKK. Education is what should be supreme as well as humbling.
Penelope, I do believe in the ability of human beings to change: I've seen it happen, in people of all ages. The question is not merely education, but how a person becomes ready to open up to a way of thinking he/she/they are unaccustomed to. It sounds as if Duke's son perhaps had already begun questioning his father, and the people at his school were able to exert care in exposing him to new ways of thinking. I wonder how we can encourage this kind of approach. I see so many posts (here and elsewhere) that simply use a bludgeon.
And there is the other side: I knew an intelligent woman who, out of an emotional needs to belong I suppose, or a need for structure, let herself get sucked into a fundamentalist evangelical pseudo-Christian cult. It was one of the weirdest groups I've ever met. My neighbor was a student in a highly regarded college at the time, graduated cum laude, but only because she was able to create papers that had internal consistency while not reflecting what was going on in the world at all. And her degree was in art.
Years later she left the cult without realizing until afterward that she had been in a cult. Everything she has done since has been with the same ferver she brought to her involvement in the cult, even things that have nothing to do with cult-like characteristics. This does not appear to be the result of lack of training in critical thinking, but it seems just the opposite: the underpinnings of her thinking do not allow her to test the results of her reasoning.
To be heard yes, not to be "herded"
Yow, Denise! What state do you live in, where you see conservatives taking over the local school boards and you worry that your job would be at risk if you stated publicly that humans are mammals?
(She mentioned-TX)
Thanks, Barbara. You're right. She did mention Texas in a comment to herself, below the one I replied to. I should have dug a little deeper. Thanks!
This is so troubling. With gerrymandering the republicans have been able to take over so many state legislators. Now they are suppressing voter rights and seem to have control over our rights as human beings. ( the transgender law in Arkansas that was vetoed by the governor and overridden by the legislature) I had such a deep sense of relief when Trump was defeated and Biden became our president. I truly believe President Biden is working hard to not only undo the damage Trump did to our country, but also move us ahead as a healing and prosperous nation. I’m troubled and frustrated partly because it’s been a difficult year with Covid, and not just because I’m a nurse but as anyone who has struggled with loss and sadness. I start to see light peek through and have some hope for humanity. Then I read about the laws states are passing to make it difficult if not impossible for people of color, elderly and those who have to work 2 jobs to barely make ends meet. It’s really pathetic that the only way the republicans can win is by picking their voters and they know it. I learned in grade school that we, the voters, are supposed to be picking our representatives. Seems upside down. No wonder I’m frustrated.
Democracy has never been easy. It is a contact sport, it has been said. And there is a wide swath of conservative, evangelical and Christian voters who feel a way of life is slipping away from their families’ future. I feel these anti-democracy antics are a last grasp for the Limbaugh-Falwell-Trump crowd
But they have been practically dead before and here they are again! time to finish them off. It's the founding constitution that allows them to survive. it must be changed.
Boy, do I ever agree. But the process of amendment is both cumbersome and antidemocratic; we could never get enough conservative states to agree to changes to the composition of the Senate, for instance. They like things just as they are. What I am curious about is why we don't propose, say, a Voting Rights Amendment anyway. Remember the Equal Rights Amendment? Even though it didn't pass, it led to a vigorous, nationwide debate which had the effect of surfacing all of those sexist arguments that could be publicly shot down.
De-gerrymander the states and win elections there. It's quicker and more certain.
You dunking is more likely, though.
In total agreement with that!
Strangely, I can't help feeling that this betrays a failing of confidence in real family values as opposed to degraded ones...
Perhaps these problems arise in the countries comprising the former Soviet Union and satellites because the nuclear family was the last holdout of resistance to the totalitarian State; and this had the effect of fostering shared beliefs and disbeliefs within the family unit, accompanied by general mistrust of all outsiders and outside influences, including even those who marry into the family. These defensive views can—like all defense mechanisms—easily lend themselves to paranoia, as though there weren’t already enough reason for that in countries under the heel of paranoid psychopaths and their brutish bureaucratic tools.
In America, the violent settlement of the country will have encouraged individualism, the struggle for survival in a hard, hostile and often lawless environment. But when genuine individual responsibility degenerates into notions like social Darwinism and these harden into ultra-individualist dogma, ordinary citizens become, not free but free radicals endangering the body social and politic. The weirdest effect being mass conformism—herd mentality—within a society fragmented to the point of becoming atomized. The resulting alienation amidst potent materialism in everyday life strengthens attachment to religious and political identity and feeds the power of those who exploit that. Hence much mass cultism and pseudo-religion.
Moving back to the former Eastern Bloc, it is normal enough that religion should, in many nuclear families, have survived all attempts to eradicate it, while others turn to it when they are free to do so, in search of values more universally shared than their own. It is normal, too, that ecclesiastical authoritarians should exploit this situation to increase their own power.
All this places enormous responsibility on political authorities, educators, spiritual leaders and all those in positions of power in our great desert of crass materialism. It calls on all those who can to reach down within themselves beyond conditioning and to serve those who can’t.
I wish I could claim more than to seek after freedom like a clumsy, ignorant dowser looking for groundwater, but I can’t. My one certainty is that the groundwater’s there.
Peter, you managed a deep dive into the meta view of human history and where it’s lead us with insight and astonishingly few words. Bravo. My fear is that we’ve already poisoned the groundwater.
Thank you, Diane, you reassure me. I thought I was being too verbose, although I was trying not to spoonfeed American readers of these Letters who will be able to flesh out national issues better than I. It may be that not all readers realize this, but they are already on a diet of far more meta-history than meets the eye. This is because Dr. Cox Richardson is acutely aware of how the past conditions the present and is sharing with us endless details of how this is materializing in America today.
Our entire culture is strong on detail, on bits and pieces, on hyper-specialization, on analysis, yet often surprisingly weak on synthesis, blind to implications, blind to the big picture—blind to the obvious. Our specialists tend to live and work in windowless boxes, whereas a specialization ought to provide a window onto wider perspectives. These, the Letters open up for us.
I’ll admit to a penchant for context and for big pictures and a corresponding weakness when it comes to sticking to the point… Yes, but digressions and peripheral vision have their uses too, especially in compensating for the shortcomings of what Edward T. Hall called low-context cultures…
We find ourselves embroiled in sterile and deeply divisive culture wars and our tendency to indulge in division rather than wholeness exacerbates the Manichean abyss that has opened up between us. Precisely because of the choleric and intolerant aspects of my character, I am interested in peace between supposedly incompatible parties and as far as I am concerned we should all without exception be interested in that if we care for our countries, if we care for our world.
I share the frustration, the anger of most members of this community at the injustice, gross inequality, misrule, obstruction, obfuscation, racism, ingrained ignorance, sexism and brutality to which Americans are subjected day in day out, year in year out. But, like practically everything else that is wrong with the country, its endemic diseases persist because they correspond to vested interests and are highly profitable to some privileged minority. Hence, too, the country’s Constitution-idolatry, which serves to entomb all hope of rational change under a heavy stone slab, one that may be worshipped from afar but must otherwise remain untouched.
Having said which, persistent hatred and rejection of the other because of that other’s hateful activities condemns the hater as much as it condemns the object of hatred. Like fear, like any other strong emotional reaction, hate is perfectly understandable as a momentary reaction; beyond that, it is at the very least a sign that the hater has been infected by the evil of the one who inspired that hatred. “In fighting, you come down to your adversary’s level.” (Seneca)
The widespread belief in original sin and man’s fundamentally evil nature are a completely gratuitous reactionary identification with evil, one that necessarily besmirches those who hold such views. Our mother may irritate us if she goes gaga and becomes aggressive, but would we hate her? Would we hate our child if he or she turns psychotic? We may have good reason to hate what they do, but to indulge for more than a moment in blowback hatred, blowback racism, blowback sexism… all these behaviors denote a choice on our part, the choice of hatred. If we are serious, WE CAN ONLY CHOOSE NOT TO HATE.
This in turn leaves us with no choice but to seek out the origin of our divisions and work to heal the delusions that gave rise to them.
It may be that mining and extractive interests will succeed in poisoning America’s groundwater and practically everything else, but the metaphorical equivalent of that wellspring, our innermost being, cannot be polluted.
Thank you, Peter. Heather's insights and revelations keep me coming back here, and I tend to read way more of the comments that I have time for- so skip over some with known tendencies. I whacked right into your first post just above and ended up reading it several times. I relish both the depth of your thought and the way you unravel the intricacies so they mesh.
Then I come down here to this beautifully written piece, almost a sermon. Speaking truth to power as the saying goes. More to ponder this evening as I feel yet more growth in my ability to grasp what we are about. This one will also go into my folder of things to return to.
I’m grateful to you, Annie, and to anyone who has the patience to read through this and my previous post, let alone find the resonance you found.
When you speak of growth in your ability to grasp what we are about, that is what is on my mind. Thereon depends how we’re to cope with what we are up against.
Leaving a trail of chaos and destruction throughout America.
But that gasp is destined to last for a long, long time.
I feel that last grasp element too.
Yes, they are both a last grasp, and also a last gasp, from those who depend upon the votes of the ignorant and gullible to stay in power. But remember that Tom Cotton won re-election by a 66 to 33 margin and that the Arizona state representative HCR mentions ran unopposed so it's still a loud gasp and a strong grasp. Someday, the majority will realize the Democrats offer real solutions and the other guys just do not, and at last vote for what's in their best interests.
For every frustration have two ideas. Write them down. Speak them out loud. Send them to your local news agency. Form an organization and start a voting block. We must not stand by bickering while they rape our Democracy. Now is the time to fight back. Call Fair Fight, call your local Democratic legislators, call your government leaders ask them what they are doing and what you can do to save this country. Theses are frightening times. There will be strength in numbers.
Your writing expresses exactly how I feel, Karen. What is being revealed to us is so incredibly frustrating and exhausting whilst having to deal with a pandemic (thank you for being on our front lines, too!). I just keep reminding myself, "We were made for these times, we were made for these times."
I am beginning to pray for some kind of fantastical interference in this tension...like (vaccinated) aliens or angels landing all over the earth and we have to become ONE to focus on the wonder of them. If any of you are connected to aliens or angels, could you please tell them we are ready for planetary intervention? If it is too much to ask for that, can they just beam some of us up? And can they take my Maine Coon cat, too? He loves traveling!
Unfortunately you’ll likely find Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos there as well. Wherever we go, there we are...
Sorry folks, I’ll be quiet for awhile and work on getting my spirits up. Sadness has a heavy hand today.
Dear Diane, as someone who boosts us, we all wish you the best. Give a listen to Odetta, guaranteed to lift the spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wBU_3UIg0Q
Thinking good thoughts for you to have a better day.
I second Daria, Diane! - I hope it lifts off of its own accord.
Penelope, I occasionally daydream about intervention by a force greater than us to re-order our thinking and priorities (is this how religions start?). But I'm going to throw in a caution to be careful of what you wish for! There's a story on the front page ofthe NY Times today about a new finding in particle physics, discovered at FermiLab in Illinois, that was based on previous experiments done 20 years ago at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, where I live. It brought to my mind an experiment done there some years ago which was said to have a small, but not impossible, chance of tearing apart the fabric of our universe and snuffing out our reality in an instant! Fortunately it didn't come to pass, obviously. Your comment and today's headline got me thinking though.
I’m frustrated too but also hopeful in terms of the approval ratings and the energy behind Biden’s agenda.
I think this is the most important point with which we have to contend. The fact that Rs control so many state legislatures (62% of legislative chambers and 46% with total state control, i.e., both legislative chambers and the governorship, vs 31% for Ds; https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx) means that we have at least another decade of this antidemocratic foolishness. Combined with the grotesque over-representation the composition of the Senate gives to small, conservative states (Rs represent 41.5 million fewer voters than Ds; https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2021/02/u-s-senate-representation-is-deeply-undemocratic-and-cannot-be-changed) and the Electoral College, the United States is structurally designed for precisely this outcome. The founders assumed good faith and adherence to norms, but never anticipated the nefariousness of people (mostly men, mostly white) without scruples.
Olof Ribbing
From being a student -68 (in Sweden) I have been thinking that the ideologies refer to different ages, where legitimate conservatism belongs to being around 10, when you should be allowed to develop a sound egotism. Liberalism belongs to being teenager when you should be allowed to develop a sound personal freedom. Socialism belongs to the 20-ies, when you should discover that the world is greater than yourself and that you depend also on others.
Moreover I think fascism should be redefined to ’survival at the cost of others’, and not be attributed to any particular nation or time. Also that we survivors can realize that we are all standing on such a ground and acknowledge that. We may not want our time to be like our foundation when it is not necessary, because necessity makes the difference of what is legitimate or not.
Welcome to LFAA, Olof. Keep the comments coming.
Yes! Welcome! Your perspectives are SO familiar to me as someone who *almost* became a Dutch national! What I loved most about living and participating in Dutch society for so long was the mentality of "we're all here to help each other". Sure, there were occasionally things that I might have not agreed with, but in the end I went with the flow and found the mentality of everything for the common good was not so bad. My life there was as good or better than here. Admittedly, I was in my 30s when I emigrated there, so I suppose my age meant I had developed more empathy and compassion. Coming back here and once again encountering a society that was more about individualism took me a while to re-acclimate my thoughts. On the surface I found-still find--it rather selfish and self-centered..."I've got mine, you go get your own...I'm not sharing". I think this maybe aligns with your redefinition of fascism? It's a word that is complex to pin down to one definition. I see fascism as also grounded in/associated with "populism". Added in the mix, besides self-centered-ness, is this hyper-patriotism, chauvinism about country. It can be overwhelming here. I can remember from experience I saw how the Dutch can be patriotic (hello, voetbal!), but they manage to keep it under control (well...usually, with occasional hooliganism, sadly) and are frankly uncomfortable with too much display of it. It is interesting to see how things like hooliganism do tend to be mainly in certain age groups. Once one gets older, attitudes change. Like you, I have mused on the differences in the societies, and, based on my experience, I find comparisons interesting. I love the Scandinavian way of looking at things and I miss traveling there. Again, welcome, and do throw in a thought every now and then. It's valuable. Tack och god dag!!
Don't forget the cannabis bars in Amsterdam. Reefer gladness!
There was that allure...but with so many places legalizing it, it's now not such a big deal. It would suit the Dutch because the huge tourism around the lax drug laws is ruining the quality of life in Amsterdam. They're about to make it allowed only for Dutch citizens, so foreigners won't be able to buy it. Trust me, it has gotten really bad in the city.
I last visited the Netherlands (Holland is just one province) in 1975, before serious problems arose. That memory's probably accurate; I was "under the influence" at the time.
It's okay and acceptable to call The Netherlands "Holland". The natives even do it.
Thank you Bruce, for your generous reply. I wonder if you had done the same had you not americanized yourself again! - Of course there are many expressions of fascism that we need to distance ourselves from. My redefining is aiming at highlighting 'survival', 'necessity', 'at the cost of others', and that in order for life to come to each one of us through the generations, we all certainly have gotten our share of life at the cost of someone else. This is not dividing us into 'the good' and 'the evil'. I also think ligitimite fascism belong to the feminine, women who can give birth may have the right to survive at the cost of others, when necessity has it there is no other way of survival.
Welcome from me too, Olof. Unfortunately, it seems that we have a sizeable chunk of the population whose mental age stays fixed at under 10! However, i would just point out that voting Conservative, no matter how you define it, tends to increase with age rather than the contrary! Perhaps this is what is meant by those denigrating the older population as "falling into their 2nd childhood"? Fascists would tend to be a bunch of adolescents that haven't assumed their "teenage-hood" , refuse to consider adulthood and are still trying to dominate the playground by force!
OK, as long as you acknowledge the base we are all standing on. Yes, it is a matter of what we do after our 20-ies, and indeed how we use our extended lifetime. The expression in Swedish is "to walk in childhood"; the experience we have in common.
It is certainly normal in childhood to have a conservative view of the protective view of the cocoon in which yoou were brought up...if indeed this was the case. Thereafter rebellion sets in to firm up personal identity at the expense of parents. Normal stuff. Thereafterwards as you say it epends what you do with the tools that are available and the values inculcated earlier. Free will and all that. Many spend their time getting rid of the problems that their upbringing caused them.
I love that "to walk in childhood" phrase!
I want to be annexed by Sweden!
Just beware! The devil is in the details.
Stuart, what people become in old age is pretty much what they were when young. What I find in elder people is a greater empathy and generosity toward others. And studies bear this out. Please don't confound the tendency to take one's belief systems with one as one ages with a different tendency: that of mellowing out and becoming more accepting as one ages. The interesting thing is that what you claim is happening is just the opposite of what is happening *except* where votes are manipulated. I rather tend to agree with your sense of fascists, at least in America: I earlier- some months ago- described them a bunch of middle-aged men who'd never outgrown adolescence, and who now are finding themselves stuck in a single state midlife, in what should have been their prime years, and only themselves to blame. It's not too late for them to reclaim a productive, meaningful old age, but I wonder how many can break out of their self-bondage? Force will not save their playground because the grownups have already taken it over.
I swear, I really blame a lot of the New Age garbage that came out in the 80s and 90s, people like Shakti Gawain saying that if you Creatively Visualize you can make anything happen, even in the face of reality. This got co-opted by evangelicals into Prosperity Gospel, and the cherry on top was that awful dreck called The Secret.
Welcome, Olof! I love your developmental analogy! I, too, have felt that America has been stuck in the younger, self-absorbed egotistical levels of development and slid way backwards in the last administration. It is time to bring us to the concept that beautiful concept that "the world is greater than yourself and that you depend also on others." From our beginning years of life and, usually, towards the latter years of life we truly need others. Why see that interdependent importance throughout the middle as well. I do think we need a new language to describe today's needs to avoid the negative implications of words of the past.
Well, I was not commenting only on America, and certainly not excluding Sweden. One reason we don't see how dependent we are I think is that we (the West) has exported a lot of things we don't want to see. Redefining 'fascism' I think of as a humble start of a new language.
Agreed-- fascism and authoritarianism has been on a major upswing around the world-- America is not certainly not alone. America was founded on white supremacy-- it is in our roots. We have a lot of digging (education) to do.
Thank you for this very interesting perspective. You've given me a new way to look at social development.
Shame on National Review. Shame on them.
Right, it "shouldn't surprise me." And I know who founded that high minded rag. But it does surprise me. It shocks me to the core.
And the wise Tom Cotton. "A major under-incarceration problem in America."
There was a moment, at least 30 second not that long ago, maybe two, three years before Trump, where even a few fairly prominent conservatives had come around to understanding that MORE prison is not the answer. That moment has passed.
And the Florida public university "veiw point test"?
It's hard to pick which of these three good ideas is the most un-American, the most dangerous.
Thank God this letter is almost the only news I'm reading right now.
Cotton is one awful guy, isn’t he? Can’t you picture him in a Nazi uniform?
Tom Cottonmouth
https://kysnakes.ca.uky.edu/snake/akistrodon-piscivorus
As much as I value all of God's creatures, I can't see starting a GoFundMe page for this guy. Reserving judgment on the snake's value.
"A major under-incarceration problem in America."
When a politician opens his big mouth -- especially a creature like this one -- pay no attention to the the supposed matter he's raising. He's telling you zilch about America, but plenty about himself.
And if you take it like that, he's right, of course: there's a grave under-incarceration problem in America.
For the likes of him.
Who can feel safe with the likes of a human akistrodon piscivorus slithering around the land free? Along with far too many others, turning the Senate into a can of very venomous worms...
Incarcerate...? What's the right verb for consignment to the Reptile House in a zoo?
Tom Cottonmouth is right -- he's still free!
So...speaking of "Stop the Steal"...isn't "stealing" exactly what these voter suppression laws are doing? Stealing the rights of Americans to vote? Seriously, how far are we from a dictatorship if this is allowed to occur?
I recommend reading "Wilmington's Lie" published January 2020 which describes Wilmington's white southern Democrats' violent overthrow of Republican multiracial government in North Carolina in 1898. "Red Shirts" self proclaimed "white supremacists" sprung up all over the state to intimidate, kill and banish blacks and whites who had prospered in business or were elected to positions respecting the black vote and a multiracial society. This book shows how mob rule, destructive, murder prone and ultimately autocratic white Americans are when bent on lies, conspiracy theories, "white power" and extremism. The white supremacists of Wilmington believed only they, the Democrats, with the mindset of today's Republicans, were fit to rule. This is our national history. Within my lifetime this has again become our present.
I would advocate that the US has undergone several holocausts on a scale similar to Germany's Nazi led Holocaust, all using racists politics. First, our taking property from and attempts to exterminate indigenous Native Americans, and blame for their circumstances by white Americans. Second, our taking slaves from Africa and then keeping them subjugated via violence, killings, preventing ownership, taking of property, suppression of voting & civil rights, incarceration, economical & political deprivation, and constant blame for everything imposed on them by white Americans.
White supremacy, right wing extremism, disinvestment in America, extraction of public resources, voter suppression is all tied up in one "Big Lie".
Your suggestion that the US has undergone several "holocausts" is a always a disturbing understanding. It puts our history and the reality of our unending American violence on display and reveals the floor upon which so much is built. I try to imagine my country's history if we had not massacred Native Americans, if we had not prospered through the savage enslavement of Africans, if Americans had not gathered themselves into mobs of hatefulness, if human violence was not at the core of our "success."
I would caution your use of the word “Holocaust.” It’s easy and descriptive but the crime of the Nazi government against the Jews of Europe and assorted untermenschen should stand alone in history. The hard part is to do so and not allow Americans to posture as historical moral superiors.
The Nazi Holocaust, which included ghettos, concentration camps, enslavement and extermination was not limited to Jews, though they were the majority. Romas, mentally and physically disadvantaged were among those on the list for this inhumanity. It's a disastrous mistake to single out the Jewish people and the Nazi German extermination program as singularly the only holocaust. This allows every other abuse, ghetto, enslavement & extermination program to go unnoticed or be dismissed at not as bad. Germany is not as bad which gives license to so much inhumanity. Israel excuses itself and escapes criticism for its mistreatment of Palestinians with ghettos, taking of property, enslavement and killings. The US has concealed and dismissed so many abuses while shining lights on everyone else. This has led to Ametrican white supremacy rising again and again, with politicians making claims against vulnerable people in the same manner that Nazis, religious crusaders and all other self serving extremists have done throughout history.
Here's a review I wrote for the ALA.
Katz, Steven T. The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History. Cambridge, 2019. 2v, 853p; bibl index
"Slave driver!" "Nazi!" We commonly invoke such terms to describe harsh bosses (or teachers). Scholarly comparisons also abound: Stanley Elkins's Slavery (Choice 1959?) springs readily to mind. But prior contrasts are often superficial, even facile. Steven Katz succeeds here in lifting discussion to notably higher levels. A distinguished Holocaust scholar, thorough immersion in secondary and published primary sources on slavery greatly expands his expertise. Katz (Boston Univ.) has long asserted the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but amply demonstrates its comparability to other historical occurrences, eschewing claims that either Holocaust or slaving was more vicious or evil than the other. He also persuasively argues that, despite its cruel destructiveness, slaving in Africa and the New World was not genocide. Copious evidence shows that slave traders and owners valued captives' lives for the wealth they generated. Treatment of enslaved women and children particularly diverged from their counterparts' fate during the Shoah. Nazis (and their enablers) consistently subordinated wartime production to murderous political imperatives -- even though faltering war industries sorely needed Jewish labor. Fundamentally, slavery was economically rational; the Holocaust was ideologically driven and irrational. One controversial section argues that, under U.S. law, whites could be prosecuted, even executed, for murdering slaves, sharply contrasting with Nazi-era legislation on killing Jews. Such statutes were significant, but likely not as much as Katz believes. Cases of masters or overseers being indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced to death, then actually executed, were progressively, vanishingly small, especially compared to unreported incidents. Ultimately, southern judges and juries (often slaveholders themselves), as in slave societies everywhere, were loath to intervene in the core master-slave relationship. Still, Katz identifies many crucial issues for scholars, who will long ponder this challenging study. Summing Up: Highly Recommended; academic and large public libraries; undergraduates and above.
David, I think there is merit to your suggestion with reference to a more complete depiction and understanding of the deaths, destruction, subjugation and confiscation of land committed by the USA. Carol and Jim raised a serious issue about using the word 'holocaust' in this regard. A definition of the word is below. In any case, it is warranted that these aspects of American history be spelled out as part of our identity. If not 'holocaust', an appropriate word or phrase as an umbrella denoting America's heinous acts is called for.
holocaust (Oxford English - Spanish Dictionary
Pronunciation /ˈhɒləkɔːst/
See synonyms for holocaust
Translate holocaust into Spanish
NOUN
1Destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war.
1.1the HolocaustThe mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5. More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members of other persecuted groups such as Romani and gay people, were murdered at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
I agree. I also went to look for the formal definition of holocaust and resonate with janjamm’s comment. Our country’s atrocities have to be acknowledged by all of us no matter how difficult. “By 1900, the indigenous population in the Americas declined by more than 80%, and by as much as 98% in some areas.” Or: https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-taken-to-the-u-s-during-the-slave-trade/. Atrocities far more insidious and so perhaps more difficult to foresee and prevent must also be brought into the light and discussed and educated and how do we prevent repeating going forward. I’ll never forget a staff meeting where a co-worker said “none of us ever said when we were three that we wanted to grow up to be a murderer. But it’s what we do and the choices we make along the way every day that keep us from arriving there.” We can all do better at giving all of our children the opportunities to feed their “good wolves” every day. Too many are being taught to feed the “bad wolves” and that does not bode well for humanity nor Mother Earth.
I was in college 1957-1960 in Texas. All students had to sign a card stating they were not and did not intend to be a member of the Communist Party. After reading Dr. Richardson’s newsletter, I’m reminded of McCarthy and the damage he caused to so many people. As he was asked and which seems to apply to many of today’s Republicans, “Have you no shame?” Considering the behaviors of many of our Republicans in office lately, I question the intelligence of the voters who elected them, including Kevin Williamson.
I wrote to my US Senator, MM and ask him to support H.R. one. On April 1, I received his office's canned reply that it was the right of the states to run elections. I haven't read the constitution since 11th grade - does it really say that? Ot did I receive an April fool's day reply?
Armed with the text of the Constitution provided in the comments, I would love to see your response to MM's letter! BTW: I received a strikingly similar response from Rick Scott.
Form letters from ALEC, the Koch foundation, or other perverters of the electoral and legislative process.
Not April Fools! Sadly this is who they are.
Melissa, they are all singing from the same hymnal. I got the same letter from Thom Tillis here in NC.
Dear Ms. Perry;
Thank you for contacting me with your concerns regarding election integrity. Hearing your views helps me better represent Kentucky in the United States Senate.
In your correspondence, you specifically mentioned the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R. 1). I fervently oppose this legislation that would give Washington, D.C. unprecedented power over the way our nation conducts elections and severely regulate every American’s right to free speech. Despite these concerns, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1 on March 3, 2021, despite bipartisan opposition. While I oppose this legislation, please rest assured that I will keep your views in mind as the 117th Congress progresses.
Since our founding, states—not the Federal government—have been entrusted with protecting and administering our elections. This massive bill would change that. Kentucky has developed rules, procedures, and protocols that are appropriate around our unique experiences in our elections. What works for Kentucky may not work for New York. And what works for California certainly does not work for Kentucky. H.R. 1 would also give taxpayer money to congressional candidates, and recreate the Federal Election Commission into a partisan weapon.
In addition to a partisan takeover of American elections, H.R. 1 also severely chills and in some cases prohibits Americans’ right to free speech. Even organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union oppose H.R. 1’s strict regulations on political speech as a violation of First Amendment rights. The bill would restrict the marketplace of ideals, force nonprofit organizations to provide donor information to the IRS, and give the Federal bureaucrats tools to silence any beliefs they deem unacceptable.
I have consistently opposed measures which would restrict freedom of speech as protected by the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Free speech is one of our nation’s most important democratic traditions and is a hallmark of any free society. As a longtime defender and proponent of the First Amendment, I will continue to fight any attempt to weaken our freedom of speech. This freedom of expression is fundamental to our republic.
Again, thank you for contacting me about this important matter. If you would like to receive periodic updates about issues such as this, please sign up for my eNewsletter at http://mcconnell.senate.gov/, become a fan of my page on Facebook by visiting http://www.facebook.com/mitchmcconnell, or follow my office on Twitter @McConnellPress.
Sincerely,
MITCH McCONNELL
UNITED STATES SENATOR
HR1 would regulate how states run federal elections, a power given to the federal government by the constitution. It would effectively require states to make it easier, not harder, for voters to vote in federal elections. Since administering elections is an elaborate process, states often choose to run their state and federal elections by the same rules. The proposed law would require non partisan commissions to replace Gerrymandering. It would reduce hidden money in politics by requiring the revelation of the identity of anyone donating over ten thousand dollars. That is MM’s ‘free speech’ complaint. He thinks large secret campaign donations are protected free speech. His party also thinks public speech they don’t like is ‘cancel culture’ to be punished.
As our country used to be proud to have democratic government, one would have thought everything in this bill would have been passed long ago. But I guess that is the elite problem that has continued and kept a majority of white men in power. It makes me so sad that we have not come further with civil rights and equality.
The problem is that he thinks too much. I cannot say that he is not sly and devious in the ways of governing the Senate. Nope can’t say that...slimy slithering turtleneck.
He is such a sleazy lil’ bastard.
Oh, thank you for saying that out loud! I have so many angry words that are being held down my throat right now. I hope many people are getting their 2nd vaccines and getting ready to march again. I feel so pinned down whilst all these braggarts lie to our people.
Ah yes, the hoary southern argument about their "heritage," their traditions. No doubt for McTurtle "our unique experiences" include the Black Patch War of 1904-09, a series of vigilante episodes with racial and class elements, much violent harassment and several murders. Kentucky also ranks 8th nationwide in number of lynchings. Yep, that's quite a proud tradition to uphold. Bah.
P Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown
C Waldrep, Night Riders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Patch_Tobacco_Wars
Speaking of lynchings, after I retired from teaching high school, I moved back home to Tennessee and for ten years was an adjunct instructor at the local community college. I will never forget the day one of my students, a recent high school graduate, and I were talking after class, and he began telling me about the lynchings he attended in his hometown (in Tennessee, I do not remember the name of the city). I was stunned; it was a wake-up call that I will never forget. His story disabused me of my long held belief that lynchings were a horrific relic of the past. How could this still be happening in today's world?
Was it into the 2000s when a black man was chained to the back of a pickup truck in Texas and dragged till he was dead? I didn't take the time to google it, so forgive me that. But it came immediately to mind after reading AndreaH's comment. We think of lynching and hanging being synonymous, but it's my understanding that hanging is only one method of visiting violent death on someone of color.
James Byrd was dragged to death in Jasper TX in 1998. It fits the torture-murder definition of lynching. Not the 21C, but still too close to the present for a reputedly "civilized" country. The Unnamed Former should have had Texas in mind when he mentioned "schist-whole countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Byrd_Jr.
Thank you, TPJ. That's the one I was thinking of. Sorry I was too 'sorry' to look it up myself! Yes, we have some nerve, calling ourselves 'civilized', not to mention, 'leader of the free world'.
I remember this. Weird to ❤️ this but it is so important to give recognition of the atrocities our citizens— the sick perps and the victims of their lethal perpetrations.
Wait! How recent are you talking?!
Right? My exact thought. Recent HS grad, so around 20 years old, assuming not talking about memories as an infant or toddler, say going back 15 yrs or less. Andrea replied she was told this 7-8 years ago, so we're talking about within the last 20 years or so, in Tennesee. Unless that was a very old HS graduate, or was pulling Andrea's leg, that's shocking to hear.
My original response to AndreaH: "Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/."
Actually, the last one reported in Tennessee was in 1940 (per Wikipedia).
It was, and should be, shocking for me to hear his report.
7 - 8 years ago.
Andrea, we trust your account but not your informant. Either he doesn't know (or care) what is lynching; can't measure time properly; or he was BSing.
Tennessee had not 6, but 251 lynchings in the 20C. One thing to note with this list: virtually all whites lynched were Mexican Americans or other Hispanics, so still POC. Only 6 states are not listed as having lynchings: CT, MA, NH, RI, AL, HI (and I'm skeptical of the latter two's history). Way to go, New England.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
omg
My original response to AndreaH: "Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/."
See my comment above.
Yikes, but unfortunately not surprising
The lynching platform at the Jan. 6 insurrection had a deeper meaning for me. I realized that it was very possible that given the chance, the thugs would truly lynch Mike Pence and others.
That lynching platform says to every black or person of color to beware who wants control. This is incredibly frightening and I do not understand why our country is not in a total uproar and saying this is enough. The Chauvin trial is the trial of white supremacist America. Watching the trial-- Chauvin sat there with his knee on Floyd's neck for around 9 minutes. He had his hand casually in his pants as if to demonstrate to bystanders how snuffing out a (black man's) life is the easiest thing in the world. White supremacists are America's long, dark shadow that we have been dragging for way too long. Our blatant racist history and present is just heartbreaking. If they do not back down by justice being served and rights being maintained-- there will be no other choice for our country. And history is being repeated.
The significance of the gallows built by the white rioters now makes more sense. There were quite a few “suicides” of Blacks by hanging in the south during the last few years that need to be investigated. Also the Amy McGrath loss because supposedly polls were very very close during the campaign. Why did McGrath concede so quickly? Bullies should not be controlling a democracy in the 21st century.
Lynell, I have some much stronger words for this than "Yikes!" that would be very unladylike.
I wholeheartedly endorse whatever words you choose, Penelope.
See my comment above.
Holy shit
Actually, this should be quite surprising to both you and some commenters. Think about it. What are the odds that multiple lynchings could occur in the 21st century without notice anywhere? A quick look at Wikipedia at shows no lynchings in Tennessee in the 21st century. There were six in the 20th century. We are not proud of those horrible events. While we can't fix that, our community has commissioned a memorial, educational programs, a scholarship fund, and a documentary to help heal. Check out https://www.edjohnsonproject.com/.
251, not 6, in 20C Tennessee.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
Watch this, it'll waken you the horror of lynchings.
Reading about the Black Patch War Night Riders is fascinating--and nightmare material. Initially organized with sophistication as little guys against the big tobacco monopoly, they turned scary violent: hoods, masks, whipping people, lynching 4 African Americans in a tree...Then there is a disturbingly straight line to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, who fortunately, were much less organized.
Looking for a visual, they were also in Tennessee. And inspired terrorist settler robbers in the Rocky Mountains? What's up with wearing bed sheets?
I read recently the white sheets of the KKK were used to recall ghosts of fallen Confederate soldiers. My apologies, I don't recall where I saw that, I thought it might have been in these letters!
Syd, I think Heather did mention it somewhere.
but it speaks volumes to the level of education and understanding of those proferring that explanation....straight out of the comic books and tv cartoons.....or their historical equivalents. Somebody should inform the ghost world that they are generally improperly dressed to impress Republicans!
yes, it was
Yes, Heather said that in a video.
I forgot to include the link to this movie poster from 1920 for "Night Riders" and "Riding for Life:"
https://www.oldies.com/product-view/8118D.html
Southern white supremacists dressed in white to simulate ghosts, using Blacks' beliefs in the supernatural against them.
Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History
Or perhaps not so much the beliefs of black people as the beliefs ABOUT black people held by the white supremacists. Eh? I've read and been told stories recorded at the time that black people easily identified the people attacking them through ordinary means: their boots, their body build, their voices, etc. Nothing superstitious about it. They just knew better than to complain. Though it is also said that mysterious things sometimes happened to night riders some time later.
They may have believed in the supernatural, but they weren't fools.
Assuming the movie poster was inspired by reality of 1910-1920, who were the cowboys cloaked in bedsheets terrorizing settlers in the Rocky Mountains?
White ( in principal for purity) is common through Western traditions and faiths. In China weddings are black! Hoods of course bring us back to the inquisition etc and to stooping people from identifying their executioner,
I thought Chinese weddings were red. It was a Chinese friend of my aunt's who said this, and I've read it. Are we misinformed, Stuart?
You are quite right, Annie. I was getting my memories of what I had been told backwards.....that white would be used in a funeral and so....! The men, like elsewhere dress up in penguin suits....black.
If I got that letter from McTurtle it would go straight to the trash bin. I met a smart and charming young man last summer in Maine. We got into a political conversation about the upcoming election and ultimately he said plainly that Kentucky just wasn’t ready for women leaders. He was referring to the veteran who had been contesting McTurtle’s seat. I believed him and I’m sorry for the state of Kentucky.
Living in Kentucky and helping with Amy McGrath’s campaign, I respectfully disagree with your friend in Maine. I believe strongly that Amy won. Yes, Kentucky has a large amount of Republican voters that still think that coal mining is the only way to make a living, but a very large amount of us are sick of Mitch! And, the vote was ridiculously close.
Tell us more. I supported Amy McGrath financially and I'm a Floridian. I thought MM won by 17 pts.
Sadly, you are correct. The map showing which counties McGrath won is disturbing. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-kentucky-senate.html
I too supported her financially from VA.
I’m trying to find some stats I read months ago....
KY is ready for a female senator, but its GQP is not. I also believe that the 2020 election was stolen by McTurtle through fraud, suppression, and Goodwife Chao's last-minute DOL budget dump in KY. A thorough, transparent investigation is urgently needed.
Agreed and good wife Chao is a whole other story.
He wasn’t my friend in Maine—he was a Kentucky man passing through Maine.
And “odd” isn’t it that McConnell’s win wasn’t questioned loud enough? Not too long ago I posted a link to a Think story laying out enough stats from that election that seemed far more worthy of a “fraud” claim than the crazy efforts of the Powell “team”. Don’t have the time right now to look for it, but will if anyone interested.
I assume corruption and fraud in anything to do with McTurtle.
I am very happy to hear your news! I wish I had a couple of friends in Kentucky, but I will try to support (financially) any Democrat in the next election
Curious about this--why do you think Amy won?
Cold calls were primarily supportive. There were “suggestions” that some southern counties had more votes than registered voters ( I heard the same in other states). Bottom line, the vote was very close. I believe that in KY, there is hope. I do not understand why many Kentuckians love Mitch. He has done nothing for our state!
From Kentucky. We have had women in leadership positions, just not in Washington. We have had a female governor, Martha Layne Collins. The city of Lexington has had women mayors. We also have had women holding elective executive offices. And there are several women holding office in the state Senate and House. So to say that Kentucky isn't ready for women leaders is incorrect. I believe it is just a matter of time when we will have a person of color and also a woman in Washington
I’m glad to hear this.
"McTurtle" is perfect. I remember well a turtle we had when I was much younger. His voting record was seriously less foolish than McTurtle's and far less obstructive to the sanity and wisdom of the Nation. He did, however, as McTurtle, pee on the carpets and disappear when there was work to be done.
My favorite name for MM is Mr. Pinchface. Product of a long intense day. It fits.
My moniker for him is McMurderer.
My only problem with that is the sacred nature of the turtle in many Native American origin myths...their land (America) being created on the back of a giant turtle!
On Amazon my location is Turtle Island. I love the legend, but it's still fair use to denounce reptilian pols who overpopulate the GQP.
But are they sufficiently offensive? I find they just get on with their own business and want to be left alone. What about McCayman?
Well, some indigenous people have an origin story of that nature. The tortoise figures largely in a number of other cultures as well. But just as there are a lot of American indigenous cultures, there are a lot of origin stories- I find them interesting, as often they reflect some valid observation about the earth, and the people are perfectly aware that the stories are teaching tools rather than literal stories. My people have multiple stories that simply layer on each other. Spider plays a much larger role in some of them. My family honors spiders.
As far as he's concerned his "traditions" solved the problem...radically.
At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America was a head-changing book. Likewise Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow America, by David Oshinsky. You can't read those books and not come away changed.
Fortunately, "canned" can have another sense in English and it's time it applied to MM.
I also wrote to the ACLU to see if MM had misquoted their position
Way to go, Melissa Perry! Thank you for sharing MM's, as you say, canned response. It clearly lays out his perverted platform. I look forward to the response from the ACLU.
Here's a letter from ACLU written in January 2021. My lay understanding is they support several provisions of the bill but had concerns with other provisions that they thought could use some tweaking. https://democracy21.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ACLU-HR-1-Request-for-Hearings-Letter-1.29.2021.pdf
Thank you. This is great! I will be sure to use this when I write to Mitch to support HR1!
Thank you, Ellie. I, too, gleaned that they support much of the provisions in the bill. Also, due to the tweaking process, it appears that it may be a number of months down the road before voting takes place. I was so hoping it would be sooner. But, good bills must be scrutinized by reputable interested parties, such as the ACLU.
Thank you for the thank you, but I'll pass it to Lynell!
ARRGH Thank you, Ellie.
And it will be necessary to twist Manchin's arm to let go on his filibuster stance. I'm not sure why he ever bothers to run as a Democrat. Too bad Paula Swearingen was not able to beat him in the 2018 primary.
Who has purchased him? they need to wear their racing togs, with all the advertisers sewn on...
Isn't it ironic that MM's home state of Kentucky just passed a law to expand voting rights in the face of voter suppression movement around the country? States should have control over its own elections? Here you go, Mitch. Listen up.
More 411 on this in Kentucky...?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/07/politics/kentucky-voting-bill-signed-beshear/index.html
So how restrictive was Kentucky before if expansion of voting rights means only 3 days of early voting after this bill passed?
Yes, "I will keep your views in mind", Mitch days, as he gathers millions of dollars to keep yours and people's most beloved right to vote from happening! I cannot think how he has been re- elected so many times! Aggghhh!🤬🤬🤬
Mitch needs to raise money. Nobody will hire his wife.
Somewhere there's some employer sleazy enough to hire Chao. McTurtle will call in his favors to keep the $$$ flowing to his family.
They refused to audit his voting machines...
MM bragged in the debate that "KY was punching above it's weight" meaning more Federal dollars flow into the state than taxes go out. It's a combination of crony politics and trial behavior....
Thanks, Melissa. Excuse me while I hurry over to FB to become a fan -- NOT!!
"Kentucky has developed rules, procedures, and protocols that are appropriate around our unique experiences in our elections. What works for Kentucky may not work for New York. And what works for California certainly does not work for Kentucky."
That is coded language if I've ever read it!
Such BS, but what do you expect from McConnell?
Oh my goodness
omg!!!
Just the reply of a fool, April or not!
Zowie, HCR. Thanks for doing the heavy lift of having to read all this dreck in order to report on it to those of us who don't have the stomach for it! My question is this: where the heck are the essays, op-eds, and well-publicized commentary of prominent political figures COUNTERING this stuff? Biden seems to be trying to present a voice of reason but he also seems not to be supported by other voices who are remarkably muted. Meanwhile Manchin publishes a headlined Op-Ed in the WaPo stating that he will never get rid of the filibuster and he won't vote for the infrastructure bill if it goes through the budget reconciliation process. So he is undercutting the president he claims to support and the party he claims to be a member of.
A characteristic of the radical right wing of fundamentalist Christianity is a demand that families in their communities be absolutely ruled--autocratically so--by a male head, who makes all decisions for all family members. This antediluvian approach to social ordering is what is being proposed in all of these anti-voter, pro-oligarchy commentaries. In addition, the writers of these commentaries seem utterly unaware that most of the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights--and the majority of early presidents before Andrew Jackson--were secularists, pantheists, and Unitarians. Jefferson created a version of the Bible with all the religious stuff edited out, a nod to conservative secularist David Hume's rejection, on the basis of logic and science, of the existence of miracles. He was appalling in other ways, as were all of those guys, and was an avowed elitist, but to claim some sort of Second Great Awakening (which occurred AFTER the Constitution was ratified) adherence to a form of Christianity that did not even exist in the 18th century in any great concentration is just plain stupid and lousy history. Which is the SOP of all of these white boyz.
You are so right about the voices in the Democratic Party being mute, silent or contradictory. I was, once again, infuriated by Manchin’s obstinance and by his broadcasting it in such a loud voice. Oh, if only we had won even one more Senate seat last November.
Manchin's WaPo OpEd "tantrum" about the filibuster is especially galling and he really offers not one single valid reason for holding on to the damn thing, except this "pie-in-the-sky" thinking that keeping it will somehow magically restore the idea of bi-partisanship. Yeah, and leprechauns, fairies, and unicorns farting rainbows exist too. The Republican party in its present incarnation will NEVER work with Democrats, or even with more moderate voices within their own party. They are headed off the rails and Manchin's (and Sinema's) outdated and silly beliefs that we can all "play nice" are out of place right now. This will only end up creating more and more gridlock, though Manchin somehow had the nerve to maintain in his essay that the filibuster actually lessens gridlock! In what universe, dude?? The guy should just call himself a moderate Republican and be done with it. He's scuttling any chance of Biden getting much done...and McConnell is there loving every moment of it. Aggravating.
If Williamson gets his way, then not only should low information representatives like Gaetz, Marjorie, Jordan and Cawthorn not be able to serve in Congress, they should also not be able to vote for whoever replaces them.
Republicans' push for voter suppression laws around the country are acts of desperation by a party in decline. They will do anything to regain power in Washington, regardless of their constituents' wishes on major legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan. In a conversation over dinner with a highly intelligent Republican friend, he maintained that the recently passed voter suppression law in our state, Georgia, actually expands voter rights. "How can removing 2/3 of ballot boxes, severely limiting absentee voting and restricting Black and Brown voters' access to the polls translate into greater voter participation?" I asked. He had no answer. Republican lies are sad and pathetic, but lying to ourselves is heartbreaking.
I'm still waiting for prominent Republicans to denounce the voter suppression movement in our country. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to find Republican men and women of integrity and courage to speak the truth.
No doubt, Randy, if you've read the "damn bill" like a good Georgian voter and gleaned the pluses and minuses of it, you're aware of how much and how often Republicans here, including our own clueless Governor Bubba, simply act like the more suppressive parts of the bill do not exist. They only tout the few measures that ARE improvements. They just don't elect to tell everyone the WHOLE story. Government by deception is becoming more and more an obvious characteristic of Republican strategy--they're not disguising it anymore--and we need to call them on it. Stacey Abrams has her hands full, putting it mildly.
Trump with his lies and deceptions was his way of keeping control of his base and the GOP rode right along with it. Now with Biden and Democrats having more of a say so with actual power, it grows more and more insulting that Kemp is trying to pretend that we can't read or understand what he is doing. What happened to the shame of being caught in a lie or misleading the public? We somehow need that level of decency as an expected norm again.
To me (as an ex- "resident alien") - the real issue is the dumbing down of the populace - and I have no idea how to overcome that. There are now too many sources of "information" screaming for attention. I suspect it's a sad case of "too little, and far too late". I am vaguely encouraged by the apparent finding that Republican voters are supporting the moves by Biden. But like all these things, there is a sting in the tail - given the size of the USA and the deterioration of much of its infrastructure - the environmental costs of trying to put things to rights, will be massive (and maybe trying to get back "yesterday", should not be the agenda).
Your point is good. When was the period in the glorious past when the education system produced a universally literate and knowledgeable population prepared to face the challenges of life?
Teachers now combat poor, clumsy and opinionated administrations, ruefully inadequate and declining ressources, unmaintained and absent infrastructure, caveman technology and worst of all ideological deformations and political limits on what they can teach.
Over and above this, for the Black population, we are "only" about 60 or so years since the Earl Warren court did them justice ending segregation of schools. What has been done since by the State governments to ensure every Black kid has at least as good an education as his White fellow student? How have the obvious housing disadvantages, family disfunctions, parental poverty and poor educational background been redressed to allow Black kids to profit from advantages that society has to offer?
On a further point, to what extent is it studied and realized that the failure of the educational system to thereby be fully able to help the Black student to adapt to the school system is a prime cause of the slide of parts of this part of the population, and indeed many other "ethnicities" of every colour, into the non-legal economy....the endgame of which we are now following closely on media from Minneapolis.
You are correct in pointing out that education is but one piece of the opportunity pie.
My wife taught in a school that included both the richest, and poorest neighborhoods. Did they all get the same educational experience in her class? Yes. But when they walked out the door, they went to vastly dissimilar worlds.
With the rise of charter schools, the ruling class is trying it's best to undo what the Warren Court did. What good does it do to say that Black and White children can receive the same education when funding for that education they receive has been decimated to pay for tuition vouchers?
Charter Schools and choice has been the best way out of the many failing public school system for disadvantaged students. Make no mistake, the results are dramatically different. Just look at the Success Academy in NYC. No comparison. Randi Weingarten and her flock of politicians and voters beware. They are destroying the hopes and dreams of the many.
Sorry, no. "Failing schools" is a trope for conservative with insufficient basis in fact. Citing a single instance of a good charter school cannot counter their overall negative effect on public ed. Charters are the darlings of educational "reformers" whose notion of reform is to privatize public ed, allowing companies to profit from district school budgets, a major portion of government spending. The large majority are biased against POC in admissions, attention to individual students, graduation rates, and especially discipline, with significantly more suspensions, arrests and expulsions for minority students.
The privatizers also seek to kill teachers' unions (along with other public-sector unions), among the few orgs standing by dedicated professionals who perform the essential task of educating future citizens. Want to improve public ed? Focus on the whole system, not a few islands like charters that maximize profits while abandoning the duty to educate all. ALL.
I see nothing wrong with private educational establishments as long as they are not allowed to flourish at the expense of the public system. Both are necessary and both must follow the same discrimination laws, regulations and curriculum...and be obliged to put in place schemes to facilitate access by those without great financial means. If people want to pay for something they can get for free so be it but the best way to beat the private schools is to get better results in the public ones. The tax system should be so constructed so that the wealthy who send their children to private schools be obliged to contribute equally to the public schools by specific taxes and no tax credits etc allowed here. Nobody should be allowed to escape paying a contribution towards this essential public good. That way you work on the market price mechanism to control competition between the 2 systems. Then those chosing the private system can compare the full cost with the benefits that it brings....if any....with greater clarity.
I care about the students. I could care less about the Union. Public Ed would excel with choice. This is Success https://www.successacademies.org/results/
Lip service. Teachers care about all students far more than charter school fans. Note use of ALL, instead of cherry-picking wealthy or promising students. POC are at a great disadvantage. Don't forget, they are students too.
Totally unsurprising response. Charter schools are essentially a Union busting effort. I haven't looked at the link you gave, but I'll take a guess - Success Academies rate themselves as highly successful.
Yet the Unions support the teachers who are the key to successful students. this cannot be just a one way street, with the unions the teachers can have a bigger say in what is taught.
As a retired teacher I can confirm all you say.
Are you familiar with the podcast, Amicus? A fascinating show the other day illustrating that, had it not been for Nixon successfully forcing Abe Fortas from SCOTUS, it is likely that equal school funding would have been codified into precedent. https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2021/03/constitutional-inequality
How horrible. What a huge loss to the country.
Without regard to color, I have been extremely impressed with these witnesses' credentials...mostly all with master's degrees in their chosen field. I have been guilty of believing the stereotype that Blue Lives folks didn't reach that high.
That there has been a welcome development of the Black middle class of course. I would hesitate to suggest that this success is "population wide" . It would be interesting to look at what they were able to do collectively with their qualifications compared to white students of similar background and achievement.
On a side note, "ethnic" students in the UK are now out-performing "native" english boys. So as the girls in general have since a very longtime outperformed the boys...who does that now relegate to the dunce's corner?
Without any facts or figures to back me up, I would venture to say the development you speak of is all the more impressive when communities of color are held to a white-created curriculum (except for physics and other branches of science, of course!)
There are some sharp insights on that topic in a new book, The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The book also explains particle physics. Read when wide awake.
Thanks for the referral
Thanks for this! Just put on hold at my library.
Teaching science is not always unbiased either - like Kansas banning the teaching of evolution vs creationism. One of my favorite movies is "Hidden Figures" about the black women at NASA who were the computers doing the math calculations for the manned space program. As a woman engineer I so related to their situation as women with brains although I'm sure I don't fully appreciate the Black experience.
Great comment, Cathy. Thanks!
And far fewer resources.
Why the exception? And also do you think that they would be more successful in life if the curriculum was not "white developed" ?
Because bias is baked into curriculum developed exclusively by white people. Though their influence has waned as the production of textbooks has changed, for decades Texas wielded disproportionate influence over what was and was not taught, in particular in the fields of history and social studies. It has been demonstrated that this bias not only taught inaccurate and racist stereotypes, but that children of color were left behind by white standards of what was "right" speech and behavior. https://education.msu.edu/green-and-write/2014/texas-textbooks-and-the-politics-of-history-standards/
And it's not just black students.
Indeed
The schools are more segregated than ever.
For all the lofty rhetoric of Republicans now and in the 1850s about how the country should be governed, there's an unstated motivation — greed. They want to ensure that the wealthy make even more money at the expense of the overwhelming majority of Americans and the nation as a whole. They can rationalize what they do to the point of deceiving themselves, but their actions proclaim otherwise.
Ummm.... you might want to go back and re-read the post. The Republicans in the late 1850s were the ones NOT making that argument. We are in a situation today where the positions of the parties have reversed; today's Democrats take the positions of yesterday's Republicans and vice-versa. It all depends on which national party is willing to do a deal with the Southernist regional parasite.
You're right. Thanks.
Skimming nails me every time. :-)
Oh Mr. Bales you hit the nail on the head. The old saying that want of money is the root of all evil is as true today as it ever was.
er, the love of money
there are many who want money...like enough to pay the bills and buy some food
Here's an idea. Next time limit "better" voters to those who have had both shots, have a certified tax return, and can demonstrate they have taken a civics course. That would eliminate a majority of republicans.
I would like to see candidates for elected office have to take the same civics test that immigrants take to become citizens.
Brilliant!
Today’s letter reinforces my thought that “Republican” and “Democrat” are just words, especially when you realize that the parties have flipped when it comes to ideology. The real issue is the “haves” with wealth and power versus everyone else. The “haves” want to keep their wealth and accumulate more as a basis for maintaining their power. Everyone else is just a means to that end.
JennSH, I invite you to stay tuned to this column, and to dear Prof Richardson’s letter. Beginning w the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and culminating with the Johnson signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party gradually evolved into the party which saw government as a force for good. The federal govt. WOULD intervene in the marketplace, town halls, and the hollers, as a vehicle for change. Herein, we saw a movement for less government, to keep govt out of my wallet, less taxation, etc. This attitude is held by conservatives, who do not want to loose traditions - and by traditions I mean addictions and behaviors that are absolutely intolerable.
If we fast forward from Johnson and the Voting Rights Act of ’64 to the 2020 election - we see the most brilliant representations of two diverging tribes - the mean spirited Donald Trump with his call girls, male enablers Gaetz and McConnell, gun toters Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and so much illicit behavior that one cannot keep straight the investigations. Cuminating in an violent attack on our Democracy. Welcome to humanity’s shadow!
Then, we have the elder of our times, Joe Biden, who sees every human as worthy of respect. And a tribe who takes seriously the call to make things right, wherever possible. Biden is simply a natural result of the efforts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a man who deeply loved Congressman John Lewis and everyone who sacrificed at lunch counters, marches, sit-ins. Biden calls out for all Ameriansl to support the rights of workers to unionize.
There is no one Biden will not look into their eyes, with his arms placed on their shoulders, and console. Welcome to the light. Empathy and compassion.
Without being an eyewitness, your have described a progression, in actuality a very rocky one, with poetry and passion. Thank you, Frederick, for taking us on this journey in celebration of freedom and humanity.
I have finally found your note Fern, after many attempts through the maze of today’s wise comments. I wanted to thank you hours ago; so have no worries if your kindness touched me. I simply had to find you.
A very sound didactic narrative, thank you Frederick. I'd place the start of the Dem commitment to govt-as-good at an earlier date. Certainly with the New Deal, but also with Woodrow Wilson's progressive legislation. But as you note, it wasn't til the 1960s that Dems irrevocably committed to govt serving ALL citizens.
It might help to discern & distinguish between southern Democrats & northern Democrats before & after the Civil War. I don't know much about how northern Democrats responded to slavery, secession, reconstruction and Jim Crow.
The book "Wilmington's Lie" points how the NYTIMES & Washington Post accepted & broadcasted the lies & conspiracy theories that blacks in Wilmington & NC were responsible for race riots, threats against whites & the rest of the white supremacy narrative. Blacks had few supporters or protectors. Certainly none that went to the south to witness, report & demand consequences for the white violence.
Woodrow Wilson's record concerning Civil Rights and Human Rights eliminates him from my list of leaders who have advanced the country's journey toward equality. 'His desire to promote the benefits of democracy in Latin America produced the invasion and military occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. '... He tolerated no dissent during the war and authorized serious violations of Americans' civil liberties in his quest for victory. Nor did his zest for humanitarian justice extend to African Americans: He supported segregation in government departments and did little to stop the waves of antiblack violence and race riots that swept over the land during his administration, particularly in the years after the war.' (The Miller Center)
I am with you on Wilson. You have nicely detailed his flaw an the damage he did to people just emerging from Jim Crow. Thank you. Well done.
The reference is only to legislation and regulation during Wilson's admins. It is an impressive record, not just in its own time; for example, child labor and occupational safety laws. My opinion of Wilson is lower than it was, say, a decade ago. He was a bully in Latin America and the Caribbean, a racist several times over, and unable to close the deal in his global diplomacy. But the Democratic Party turned in a progressive direction under Wilson, and has mostly remained more progressive than the major-party alternative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Freedom
TPJ, I acknowledge your point, but do not conceed it. There were other factors involved in the turn of the Dems that had nothing to do with Wilson. And I'm afraid his stance on human rights had a lot to do with maintaining an ugly attitude toward Latin America (and others that we are still affected by. My mother, were she still living, could give you a detailed lecture about Wilson, as could my aunt.