I confess that I am partisan, proudly partisan. You may call me partisan intending to insult me, but, unlike sticks and stones, that name will never break my bones. [I promise: no more doggerel until the end.] It certainly seems that those who currently play the partisan card while sanctimoniously pretending to be unifiers hope to distract from their polarizing partisan politics.

Merriam-Webster defines the noun partisan as: “noun 1: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance” and accuses political partisans of seeing only one side of the problem; and 2a: “a member of a body of detached light troops making forays and harassing an enemy;” and 2b: “a member of a guerrilla band operating within enemy lines.” M-W’s anti-partisan prejudice rears its ugly head again in its definition of the adjective: “blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or person.”

Although my bones remain unbroken, I confess to some slight bruising when accused of blindness and prejudice, and “seeing only one side of the problem.” Hmph. My partisanship results from the very fact that my eyes are wide open, my cataracts have been plucked, and I clearly see several sides of the political problems. And as far as the “unreasoning allegiance” goes, I protest that I am anti-allegiant, particularly the kind the deep state intends to instill in innocent minds by forcing children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which I had to do every morning in grade school.

And “blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or person?” Read on and decide for yourself.  

I am charmed by M-W’s noun 2 definition of the word: “a weapon of the 16th and 17th centuries with long shaft and broad blade,” but not charmed enough to look for a photo.

I have only a small quibble, a quibblet really, with M-W’s 2a and 2b definitions. They give the example of the WWII Polish Partisans, a guerrilla band operating within territory controlled by Nazis, but ignore the Italians. Having watched more Italian movies and TV programs than Polish, I am more familiar with the Partisanos. In my war-fantasy-filled youth I longed to be a Partisano because when plotting their operations they drank lots of red wine. And as far as the noun 1: definition goes, they were no doubt prejudiced against the occupying Nazis and brutal fascists, but not blindly or unreasonably so.

On the whole, I am once again disappointed with the failing M-W, particularly since their adjectival definition of partisan is blindly and unreasonably one-sided, making them, by their own definition, partisan. I am confident that if you asked a Polish or Italian Partisan whether his or her adherence to a party, faction, cause, or person was blind, he or she would be as offended as I. I confess that I know next to nothing about the Polish P’s, have never been to Poland, and have minimal experience with Polish cuisine, but having worked and traveled in Italy, being a better than average cook of Italian food, and having seen and heard Italian men who cannot boil an egg vehemently argue over who’s mother’s recipe for [name any Italian dish] was correct and proper, I would dispute that they adhered to any one thing other than the defeat of the Nazis and fascists.

Yes, I am proudly and reasonably Partisan. As the Partisanos opposed fascists and Nazis, so do I. As today’s Republican Party leaders are supported by Nazis and fascists, I am opposed to today’s Republican Party. I am reasonably certain that you can’t go wrong working on the principal that any party supported by Nazis and fascists has got to be doing something wrong.

Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, homophobes, and misogynists all overlap in their beliefs and goals, and all comprise, if not the majority, at least the controlling interest in the Republican Party, which exhibits “blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance” to a person, to he-who-shall-not-be-named. Reasonably and with my eyes wide open, I cannot do otherwise than oppose the Republican Party.

In an earlier post I gave a brief sketch of my history of finicky political allegiances and will not recapitulate other than to say the I am emphatically not a Democrat and only reluctantly a Green, but certainly not a “firm,” let alone “blind” adherent. My complaints about the Greens are numerous, but chief among them is their nimbyism, their holier-than-thou mentality, and failure to emphasize, agree on, or sometimes even name, what should be any environmentally conscientious person’s goal: ZPG.*

I was a ZPGer before I became a Green, before there was a Green Party in the U.S. In another strike against the Repubs, the Reagan administration killed the ZPG movement or wounded it severely enough to put it out of action and out of mind, and no doubt most under the tender age of 70 have never heard of it, while most above that age have forgotten about it along with a great many pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

He-who-shall-not-be-named and his supporters polluted the air and airways with bombast and balderdash about the necessity for A Great Wall of America along the southern border to keep the invading Mongols out, while hypocritically opposed to ZPG (if they even knew what it was about). Well, perhaps calling them hypocritical in this case is unfair: the wall was never about population control, only color control. Speaking of color, far too many Green nimbies are conflicted on this issue: they side with you-know-who when it comes to the human species crossing the border, while at the same time lamenting the Great Wall’s harm to other-than-human migrating species.

Like the Partisanos, I am not so much in favor or any party or faction as I am opposed to the Republican Party. And I like to drink red wine and eat Italian cuisine. At the moment I have ample reason to cheer for the Democrats and Greens, number one being that they are the AntiRepubs, a moderate version of Antifa. Frustratingly moderate. The Repubs hypocritically accuse the Demos of polarization. Well, if the U.S. were a battery the Repubs would be the negative pole and the Demos and Greens the positive.

I wasn’t always so adamantly opposed to Republicans, nor so fervently supportive of Democrats, but it’s the old “enemy of my enemy” thing.  As a boy I enjoyed Ev Dirksen’s gravelly-voiced witticism about a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money. I’m not sure that I even realized at the time that he was a Republican. I was taught to admire Honest Abe and big-stick T.R. who gave his name to my high school. For a number of years in my impressionable but not impressive young adulthood, my significant other was a hereditary Republican whose parents were homozygous dominant for the R gene. They were from a small farming community in central Missouri. I helped out on the farm on occasional visits and often felt like an ethnographer, although at the time I hadn’t heard of the job and didn’t realize the dedication to detail and the responsibility for accuracy required. Neither did I know about kinship studies, but I did note that some of the extended family were ex-Democrats, a condition I traced back to the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s a few years earlier.

A part of me liked the family and their rural salt-of-the-earth quality, and I liked working on the farm, a learning experience for an urban, working-class kid who grew up believing that vegetables grew wrapped in cellophane. During leisurely hours on the farm I was encouraged to read the National Revue. I found the magazine to be well-written, sometimes well-researched, but invariably badly conclusioned, not to say partisan. I liked the puzzle on the last page, but it also tended to propaganda. When the family tuned in to W.F. Buckley on TV, I was turned off by the elite intellectual, well, snotty, persona he adopted and could not see how the salt-of-the-earth people around me could be turned on by him. We were poles apart but only generated a few weak sparks when some sarcastic but positive remark escaped from my tightly closed mouth.

My father was a Nixon supporter. I knew nothing about his politics until Watergate. Well, not true. I knew he liked Ike, possibly more for the uniform than the politics. I don’t know how he felt about Truman or FDR, although during the depression he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps. That was before he joined the army and became a drill sergeant. I knew that he was in favor of the Vietnam War because he got angry when he found out that I was trying to flunk the draft physical, angrier than when I flunked out of school. When I lived in Philly, he called me to tell me that he had seen a great TV show that he highly recommended. He couldn’t remember the name but told me the time and day it was on. When I watched All in the Family, I, surprisingly, enjoyed it, but when I next spoke with my father he didn’t want to discuss the program. I suspect that he finally caught on that the Archie Bunker he had identified with was not the hero he saw himself as, but the butt of the jokes.

When I visited during the Watergate hearings my father started to rant about the cabal against RMN, but I tuned him out. I wasn’t completely partisan, neither firmly Democrat or Republican, and pre-Green, but my father had drilled into my empty head the concept of fair play, which the Nixon team seemed to take great joy in violating. Although I enjoyed watching Democratic Senator Sam Irwin lambast some hypocritical Nixon enablers, at the same time I realized that Sam was a Jim Crow southerner. I respected some Republicans and was impressed by what I thought of as the integrity of several Republican members on the Watergate Committee, well, two anyway: Baker and Weicker. I believed they genuinely wanted to see justice done and were sincerely appalled by the Dirty Tricksters employed by Tricky Dick. I believed it was not simply a political pose on their part.

I don’t remember any Repubs showing the least bit of integrity during Iran-Contragate.

After Nixon retired my only serious gripe against Ford was that he pardoned Nixon. Other than that I thought he was amiable and equally effective in the White House and on the golf course where he was famous for bogies.

Many Repubs might have been sincerely outraged by the Capitolgate coup attempt, and might, in the heat of the moment or soon after, have blamed he-who-shall-not-be-named. But after that adrenalin rush, only a handful, a small handful, showed enough courage and integrity to vote for impeachment and conviction, while the rest showed more than enough cowardice to pretend that it was no big deal. Currently the cowards cower at the thought of the retribution the flim-flam man will rain down on them if they admit the elections were honest and he is a loser, a poor loser, a cry-baby loser, and he is guilty of inciting the insurrection. Hell, most of them now pretend the insurrection never happened or that it was just some good old boys, and a few girls, expressing their First Amendment Rights. One senator claimed not to be afraid because the rabble was composed of white people. Well, to be fair, he used the other side of that racist equation and said he would have been afraid if the rioters were a Black Lives Matter crowd.

Since Capitolgate the pusillanimous Repubs walk on eggshells to avoid incurring the wrath of he-who-shall-not-be-named and his rabble, and make pilgrimages to Sea-to-Lake to pay homage to the man who wanted to harm them. (And isn’t Sea to Lake backwards? Don’t lakes flow to the sea? Pre-climate change they did.) All of which leads me to propose that when journalists and talking heads show colored maps to indicate the two parties’ areas of popularity they ditch the red and switch to yellow for the Repubs. Yes, I believe blue and yellow maps would be more appropriate.

As I believe I stated in an earlier post, I am not as opposed to the rioting rabble, although I am very much opposed to them, as I am to he-who-shall-not-be-named and his coterie of enablers. I have a certain sympathy for the rabble who exhibit “blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance” to a buffoon. I feel certain that my father would have been a MAGA man. I can imagine him in the hat, but, even after a couple of glasses of red wine, I cannot see him invading the Capitol. He was a poor kid who grew up in the Great Depression and had too much reverence for neoclassic architecture, especially banks. He was too much a law and order man and would never have broken past a police line or shot bear spray into the faces of policemen.   

I can imagine some of the rioting rabble readily buying the propaganda about a stolen election and doing their patriotic duty to take back the country, like suckers who think they’re getting a good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge or a real steal on diamonds from Africa. From the beginning, he-who-shall-not-be-named reminded me of a flim-flam man and, giving credit where due, I thought he had nearly perfected his shtick. Hell, he even sold snake oil as a preventative for COVID19. A part of me always sympathizes with suckers who fall for flim-flammery, while a less humane part gloats and says they deserve what they bought into, as opposed to what they thought they bought. I mean, how can anybody be so stupid as to think they could buy the Brooklyn Bridge, or reap a fortune in diamonds by helping the widow of the late dictator of Zaire escape. [I confess that I thought twice about that one.] How can anybody be so stupid as to truly believe that a flim-flam man won the election by a landslide, but it was stolen by massive fraud, when no evidence was presented and numerous lawsuits were laughed out of court all around the country, many by Repub judges appointed by the flim-flam man himself and when the numerous recounts supported the results and when Repub Secretaries of State and election supervisors continued to affirm that the election results were accurate? I don’t understand. And yet, I do, because I confess that I continue to believe that the 2016 elections were stolen with Russian help. Not being a true patriot, I did not attempt an armed insurrection. And really, H. Clinton ran a boring and complacent campaign. When the flim-flam man shouted “Lock her up,” and called her “Crooked Hillary,” she should have shouted right back, “Lock him up” and called him “Crooked He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.”

I can’t say if my father, upon seeing the rioting and destruction at the Capitol, would have quietly put away his MAGA hat as he had quietly put away his identification with Archie Bunker.

I am not so partisan as to oppose out of hand all Republican tenets. While a part of me, a miniscule part, remember, sympathizes with the rank and file rabble, that sympathy is tempered by my belief in the great Republican tenet of personal responsibility, a belief that my Republican father, with great energy and effort on his part, and great suffering on mine, drummed into my rebellious being, generally from the rear. In this case I am only opposed to the Repubs who don the hat of personal responsibility when it suits their political personas, but quietly put it in the closet when it conflicts with their ambitions. Hell, they won’t even admit that he-who-shall-not-be-named lost the election when many of them on the same ballot won. How does that work? And what about the personal responsibility of the man who incited the rabble to attack the Capitol and said he would be right there with them, but then scurries, if someone of his ponderous bulk can scurry, to a safe shelter to watch the battle on TV?

Now, I regret tuning my father out when he ranted about Watergate. I would like to have known what he thought about the Plumbers and Dirty Tricksters. He was definitely a law and order man, but did he excuse their underhanded and extra-legal exploits because they were doing the bidding of a president he admired? Much as they would like to, today’s law-and-order Republicans cannot exonerate the Capitolgate assailants with the feeble excuse that they were doing the bidding of the president for fear of exposing him to criminal charges for inciting the insurrection. Which he did. The rank and file rabble are out in the cold, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind while he-who-shall-not-be-named conceals his bogies on the golf course at Sea-to-Lake.

The law and order Repubs don’t seem to mind a white riot that killed one cop and injured many others and traumatized two who committed suicide. The Dems, if they had any creativity, instead of letting the Repubs sweep it all under the rug, should have piled all the insurrection detritus in front of the Capitol, coated it with Fixative, and left it as a monument, a reminder of how fragile and messy democracy can be.

Durability in the age of planned obsolescence should be commended, and I take my unMAGA hat off to Roger Stone. Roger, one of today’s Dirty Tricksters, insurrectionist instigators, and pardoned felon, cut his teeth as a college-kid Dirty Trickster for Nixon and has kept at it for fifty years. Back in the day, he worked for CREEP.**  I credit CREEP for the boycott I have faithfully maintained against MacDonald’s for those same fifty years. When I learned that $50,000 or so of Ronald McDonald’s dollars were slipped under the table to CREEP, I decided to spend my burger bucks elsewhere. Any day now I expect that my boycott will bring MacDonald’s to its knees.  

[Note: Trickster in Native American religions makes fools of humans to teach us humility. Dirty Tricksters are in it for pleasure and power and payback.]

From a boy who grew up during the Great Depression and bragged about going hungry and having to steal milk from people’s porches, my father evolved into a strict proponent of property rights. In his later years when he moved to the distant suburbs, then a rural region really, he bragged that once when some unknown woman rode her horse harmlessly over his land he yelled a stream of obscenities as he chased her off his property. The property-rights Repubs don’t seem to mind a violent white riot that destroyed public property. But oh how they screamed when a few in the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations destroyed property. I’m certain that my father would have screamed about the BLM demos, but what about the destruction to the revered neoclassic Capitol?

[Note: I went to great lengths—five pages—in a previous post to make clear that I am areligious. Consistent with that belief, I object to the talking heads’ use of the terms ‘sacred’ or ‘temple’ to describe the Capitol. ‘Bank’ or ‘counting house’ would be more appropriate, but never ‘trust company.’]

My depression-influenced father was big on the debt issue. He was fond of colorful sayings, especially if obscene, but I can’t remember if he quoted B. Franklin’s cliché about borrowers and lenders. He worked hard to stay out of debt and even paid off the 30-year mortgage on our flat in 15 years. He certainly would have applauded candidate Flim-Flam’s promise to pay off our national debt in eight years. But what would he have thought when he realized that President Flim-Flam increased the debt by nearly eight trillion in four years, which according to ol’ Ev D. approaches real money? What would he have thought about the Repubs’ lack of concern about the debt during those four years because the root cause favored the rich while they suffered apoplexic fits because Biden’s stimulus, which increased the debt a paltry 1.8 trillion, is heavily slanted in favor of the poor and middle class? I would like to think that a working-class schmuck like my father would be appalled, not by the stimulus, but the hypocrisy. But then I see all the working-class Repub schmucks who agree and am reminded that facts, logic, and truth often play no part in politics. Especially not truth. Not to these blind and unreasoning Republicans.

What made my father angriest was my fallback position of denying guilt, refusing to own up to my transgressions—my childhood version of the big lie. My father preached truthfulness with the intensity of a tent revival minister. He told me he would never punish me if I told the truth, which was a lie. He also indulged in a few whoppers about his athletic prowess, which I believed when he taught me to play catch in the alley behind our house. But who among us faithfully practices what s/he preaches? On the one hand, I believe, sadly, he would have kept his MAGA hat on when he-who-shall-not-be-named repeated his version of the big lie, that the evidence of his landslide win was overwhelming, but he was cheated out of victory.

Happily, there is another hand: When I was 9 I was a sore loser and a cry baby. I played softball in a cousin’s back yard. I yelled and screamed that the other side cheated whenever I was called out, which was often, or my team lost, which was usual, until my great-uncle who liked to nap in the afternoon closed that venue permanently, at least to me. When my father found out, I had trouble sitting for a few days. I don’t remember him emphasizing, or even talking about being a good loser, but he was hell on crybabies. I also remember his frequent lectures on behaving like a gentleman and being a good sport. When he-who-shall-not-be-named yelled and screamed like a crybaby and incited his team to attack the Capitol to change the score, I believe my father would have penalized him for unsportsman-like conduct. The Repubs invited him to a convention.

To my poor partisan brain, it seems that today’s Repubs—well, going back to the Nixon era, passing through Reagan, Gingrich, and the Tea Party—squandered their investments in their most fundamental and firmest beliefs, law and order, personal responsibility, property rights, honesty, especially honesty, on the Brooklyn Bridge and African diamonds sold by a flim-flam man. The Repubs are no longer a political party, but a cult. Even though the curtain has been pulled aside to reveal the flim-flam man pulling levers and blowing smoke, they still worship their false god out of fear of his divine retribution. All they stand for is obeisance to the flim-flam man currently waiting for the tide to change at Sea-to-Lake. They didn’t even have a platform for the last elections. The best they could do was hitch their little red wagons to a falling star.

Now they are circling their little red (well, yellow is more appropriate) wagons. Repub zealots, of which there is no shortage, excoriated the few Repubs who voted their conscience by voting to impeach and then convict he-who-shall-not-be-named, claiming that it is not their duty to follow their c’s but to represent the will of the people. This mandate does not seem to apply to the Democrats’ American Rescue plan, which has 75% overall approval and 52% approval among Repubs. Not in the least surprising, no zealots excoriated the Repub Congresspersons who unanimously voted their conscience (really McConnell’s conscience) by voting against the plan.

As the Democrats’ agenda is popular, even with Republican voters, the Repub elite fall back on voter suppression and search desperately for weaknesses they can attack. They have dug deeply into their shallow souls and, lo and behold, discovered some sympathy for children at the border, compassion they mislaid four years ago. They have invented the concept of culture cancel. Or, to put it in a language they understand:  

McConnell hears a Seuss

McConnell the elephant, McConnell the elephant heard a small noise.

Help, help

He heard it again, just a very faint yelp

As if some tiny person were calling for help.

Help, help

He looked and he looked, and he finally saw,

Some poor little persons shaking with fear,

Poor little persons shedding a tear.

Trump put them in cages, no matter their ages.

McConnell the elephant, McConnell the elephant tuned out the small noise

It was only little BROWN girls and boys.

McConnell the elephant surely knew, there was nothing the Trump wouldn’t do,

when he ran the zoo.

For four years McConnell heard small noises

From little brown girls and boyses,

But McConnell the elephant, McConnell the elephant

Ate greenbacks and ham with Graham-I-Am

They ate them in the Senate, they ate them in the house,

They ate them with a louse.

They ate them in a boat, but when they lost the vote

They sat there those two, how they wished they had something to do.

And then the Capitol went bump, how those Trumpsters made them jump,

Making a lot of noise, those Proud Boys with their toys,

They beat and battered the cops with bear spray and door stops

Proud patriots, they waved Confederate flags with great glee

And laughed as McConnell and Graham-I-Am did flee

But McConnell the elephant and Graham-I-Am

Ate greenbacks and ham with Iago in his shelter at Mar-a-Lago.

He whispered in their ears, listen carefully my dears,

Don’t be hard on Proud boys, don’t take away their toys

After all,

A person’s a person when white and tall.

A person’s a person unless brown and small.

Now McConnell the elephant, McConnell the elephant

Hears a loud noise

Cancel Culture, Cancel Culture,

Cries his culture vulture boys.

Now McConnell the elephant, McConnell the elephant

And his culture vulture boys put on a big show.

Let’s blame it all on Sleepy Joe, that Delaware schmo.

He cancelled the wall, and Dr. Seuss too.

McConnell the elephant and Graham-I-Am are all in a stew

So they asked Jim Crow, What can we do?

Now MLB won’t play ball, the Proud Boys don’t stand tall,

And Iago has had a great fall.

McConnell the elephant lost control of the zoo.

Without Dr. Seuss, the creatures will get loose.

There goes a mule, there goes a goose.

What can we do, what can we do?

McConnell the elephant cried, “I wish that I gnu.”

   *ZPG: Zero Population Growth

**CREEP: Committee to Re-elect the President

I confess that I am areligious, and I take umbrage at the fake-definitions given by failing dictionaries that carelessly cast aspersions on my belief system. The devious Miriam-Webster defines areligious as “noncommittal or professedly neutral concerning religious matters;” while the not-to-be-trusted Urban Dictionary gives this completely misleading version: “Having an aversion for or a lack of interest in all religions and religious beliefs.” Not content with that slander, they go on to say: “ An areligious person is one who has become frustrated listening to proponents of one religion or another and finds the labels athiest(sic) and agnostic inadequate.” I must confess that I don’t know who the athiest people are nor what makes them the most athi. That the Urban Dictionary doesn’t have a spell-check program is proof that it is failing.

Unlike M-W or the UD I define “areligious” by using the prefix “a” as the ancient Greeks intended. That is, “a” equals “without.” Many more learned than I have wrestled with and written whole volumes on the meaning of atheist and theist, agnostic and gnostic, but being areligious, I find those labels not so much inadequate as boringly incomprehensible, and my eyes glaze over when I attempt to read those volumes. Interestingly, those failing, fake-definition dictionaries are able to get it right in the case of “amoral,” which they define as without morals. In the interest of getting it right, I would like to point out to who would call me amoral because they find me wanting in respect for religion: “immoral” is the adjective you want.

I confess that I am without religion, and I object to those fake-definitions because I am interested in and have studied many religions with at least as much attention and fascination as I skimmed some sketchy notes on the transhumance patterns of the Nuer in an ethnography course long ago. Nor do I profess neutrality in religious matters. Speaking of the ancient Greeks makes me think of the Olympics, and, well, let’s say I think of myself as an Olympic scorer of religions. I give positive points to some parts of all religions and score some religions higher than others. I deduct points for some parts of all religions but only disqualify cults, especially cults on steroids. I do not get frustrated listening to proponents of religion, only debating with zealots (more on that later). To those who would admonish me with the cliché, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” I would say, “read the whole quote: ‘Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.’” And I would add, “Fair enough. You can use my standards to judge me.” To those who would accuse me of hubris, I would humbly agree.

I was not always without religion. Before I was born, my family engaged in a months-long resurgence of the 30-Years War over the form of Christianity my siblings and I would be immersed in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my father’s family was Catholic, and my mother’s Protestant. My father’s family won the first battle and my mother, in order to be married by a Catholic priest, signed a kind of rider to the Treaty of Westphalia, pledging that all her children would be raised Catholic. I don’t believe my mother was punished for breaking the treaty, not on this plane, and neither do I believe some Catholic god’s enforcers on a higher plane have broken her angelic thumbs. I don’t know why my father agreed to that treaty. He represented the more exuberant anti-Catholic wing of their relationship because, he claimed, the Sisters Without Mercy beat him in school. Like our recent ex-President, my father placed such a high value on truth that he rarely used it, but such a low value on fiction that he was quite generous in spreading it around. Without more information on my father’s abuse claim my sympathies are with the Sisters. My brother, sister, and I were raised as good little Protestants.

I can only suppose that my anti-Catholic father agreed to the wedding arrangements to please his fiercely Catholic mother, my devout grandmother, who became a divorcee. Well, her husband left her, divorced her, and remarried. My grandmother also remarried, but to a Greek Orthodox man. The Orthodox Church had no prohibitions against divorcees remarrying. I remember going to the Orthodox Church for my step-grandfather’s funeral. I was six or so and impressed by all the stained-glass windows and the unintelligible language of the priest.

I, of course, have no memory of my first five years of religious life. When I was in first grade we moved to a new neighborhood in North St. Louis and my brother and I went to a Lutheran school for the best of reasons: the public school was going to hold my brother back because our move was badly timed. All I remember of that school, apart from having a crush on my teacher, was marching in the snow across the schoolyard to the Lutheran church. I remember nothing about what went on inside the church, only that it was dark. Outside, to show my affection, I hit my teacher with a snowball.

A year later we moved to our all-white South Side Dutch neighborhood, switched allegiance, and went to my maternal aunt’s whitebread Protestant church, just a few blocks from our house. I went to Sunday School in the church basement on Sunday mornings and when there was an evening service on Christmas Eve got promoted to the upstairs part of the church, one floor closer to heaven, I suppose. In keeping with the whitebread mode Christmas Eve service was at 8:00. No midnight mass for us.

Despite the early hour, I always had a difficult time keeping my eyes open during the evening service. The audience, well, congregation, sat in the dark facing the pastor who stood on a stage illuminated by tall candles. Staring at the little golden flames in the dark make my eyes water, and I literally and metaphorically cursed the lit candle rather than the dark.

I only remember my last Sunday School teacher, an inoffensive man with remarkably offensive breath, like that of a fire-breathing dragon that cannot achieve ignition of its fetid fuel. Four or five of us pre- and early-post-teens sat around a table in the church basement. I tried to sit far from the foul-breathed teacher, more a mouse than a dragon. All I remember was that we were supposed to learn the names of the Books of the Bible in order. I can still name three but don’t believe I ever progressed much beyond that. I felt bad for my failure but even worse for the poor Sunday School teacher who seemed to take it as his failure. He tried to prompt me, his miasmic breath flowing across the table and assailing my sense of smell as he enunciated Kings and Chronicles and Psalms (not the three I remember in order). Now that I cast my mind back, I vaguely recall memorizing a few Psalms. Possibly all our time was taken up with memorizing. Even more possibly, our teacher must have expended some bad breath on explanations of some religious conundrums, like cramming two of every animal on some homemade boat, but I don’t remember them. I do remember chafing in church because during good weather I longed to be outside playing with the unoppressed neighborhood kids who didn’t have to go to church, and during bad weather I longed to stay in bed.

My mother and father made us give thanks out loud before dinner, but not before breakfast or lunch, thank heaven. I memorized the Lord’s Prayer and religiously and for years silently recited it as I lay in bed before falling asleep at night, a habit that lasted until I went away to college. As far as I saw, no one gave thanks in the college cafeteria for the vegetables cooked until they were less lumpy than the mashed potatoes or the liver and onions fried to a leathery toughness. Not theology students, my friends and I spent a surprising amount of time discussing religion. We eagerly adopted the personas of the educated elite and bravely professed to be above faith-based dogma, but I suspect that a few prayed in quiet moments when only god was watching.

In my short military career I must have spotted various camouflaged chaplains going about their business, but only remember the priest who mumbled an explanation of Just War and why what we were doing in Vietnam was right and necessary. I know some GIs went to some kind of services when possible, outdoors or in holey (due to shrapnel) tents, but most of us were sleep deprived and preferred to prolong those luxurious moments of Just Peace wrapped in our silky poncho liners on our firm cots when possible. Years later, a friend asked me if the old saw about the lack of atheists in foxholes was true. I explained that I never saw a foxhole but often took shelter in sandbag bunkers or behind other handy objects, and in those clamorous moments my thoughts were wonderfully concentrated on the physical world and I never got around to polling anyone nearby on the atheist question. My friend patiently explained that she was asking about my opinion on god. I suppose I gave her a sermon on my firm belief: I do not bother my pretty head about the existence or non-existence of god, which, if there were one (or more) and if she were a just god who didn’t play favorites, she couldn’t possibly care what I, one of her more insignificant creatures, thought. (In my more Buddhist-leaning moments I use the pronoun “it” instead of “she.”)

In El Salvador, a friend of mine and I enjoyed many cool nights sipping rum on top of a middle-post-classic earth-covered temple while we watched the distant but approaching storms blindly grope their way through the darkness with bright white canes of lightning. Watching that magical display from the top of an ancient religious structure, it seemed only fitting that we form our own religion. The rum helped. Well, it also hindered our creative abilities, and we opted for joining man’s oldest known religion. We formed a subsidiary of the Cave Bear Cult. My friend and I were, naturally, the High Priests, but, proselytize as we would, we were unable recruit anyone into the fold. Like all High Priests, we did not blame ourselves for that failure. We blamed the lamentable lack of caves and bears. 

Proof that the Great Cave Bear rewarded our faith was the undeniable fact that not once were we struck by lightning, while that same year an archaeologist who was not a member of the Cave Bear Cult was struck and killed by lighting on top of El Castillo, the big temple in Chichén Itzá.

I deny having an “aversion to” or “lack of interest” in religion. Because of my studies, I had to learn enough about a variety of religions to pass tests. For the past 35 years or so I have worked with religious people in the refugee racket. My boss and colleague, as well as friend, is a Catholic Nun. As I mentioned in an earlier post she prefers to be called a Religious, making a difficult noun out of what god meant to be an adjective. I confess that I don’t know how to make that noun plural. She and others in the office claimed that they let me work there out of pity. Or because they didn’t know how to get rid of me. Being areligious, it’s all the same to me. At some point in our little office in the basement of a building owned by a somewhat liberal Methodist Church we adopted grandiose titles to look more professional and business-like, and to impress the ignorant. She has become the CEO. I wanted my business cards to say “High Priest” but the CEO gave me the choice of Flunky or Lackey. As the former reminded me of too many of my disappointing grades, I opted for the latter. As the staff increased in size it has diminished in religiosity, composed of only the slightly religious, usually Catholic and lapsed Catholics, some on-again-off-again Protestants, one Jew, one Buddhist, a smattering of atheists, for several years we had a Muslim as the Assistant CEO, and me, the areligious Lackey. We represent clients from all walks of life and religions, which has greatly expanded my understanding of the functioning of religions.

Having interviewed thousands of refugees, my thoughts on religion have evolved. I now appreciate religion’s utility and function. I believe that for much of humankind religion is a necessity. And I appreciate Marx’s usually misquoted statement: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I have heard the sigh of the oppressed and listened to the heartbeat of those fleeing heartless worlds.

I see that religion fulfills a need, gives a sense of community to displaced people. Loneliness is a debilitating, even crippling problem for many refugees, as is nostalgia for the homeland, even the homeland that refused to nurture and in fact persecuted those homesick people. Many profoundly traumatized Mayan men who suffered atrociously during the genocide in their native Guatemala, are enthusiastic fans of the Guatemalan national soccer team, even though no Maya are on the team and, if there were, they would no doubt suffer the same racial persecution Jackie Robinson suffered. Or worse.

In filling the refugees’/immigrants’ need for community, the Evangelical churches seem readiest and most willing. They have regularly scheduled Sunday services plus Assembly at least three evenings a week, generously giving strangers in our strange land the opportunity to pass lonely hours in a community, singing, often badly—especially if compared to Black gospel singers—hymns in their native language (or second language for the Maya).

I give some religions a few extra points on my scorecard. Tibetan monks whose hair is uniformly black or whose scalp is shaved are the fair-haired Religious (plural noun) in the SF Bay Area. I have interviewed a number of them, including one with the name of Rinpoche. I was rescued from my ignorance by a knowledgeable friend who told me that Rinpoches were the heads of monasteries and the word means “precious one” in a religious, reincarnate sense. The Rinpoche and minor monks I met were all sympathetic and likeable and I felt privileged to work with them. The Rinpoche got a job in the kitchen at a Ghanaian restaurant. I thought that was quite a come-down for him, but when I visited him at the restaurant he cheerfully informed me that he loved the food because it was so different from the fare in his monastery. It actually had flavor. It contained spices. I was happy for him, but his delight and the delight of others in their sensual indulgence of American food (i.e., Ghanaian, Mexican, Indian, etc.), did not rehabilitate my negative impression of Tibetan Buddhism. Several had described their intense loneliness when taken from their families as children and sent to remote retreats where they were raised in austere, not to say cold, conditions in unheated mountain monasteries. A cruel system, I thought. And the icing on that cake was: no spices or sugar in their food, but plenty of Yak butter tea. Yummy. And always anti-authoritarian, I didn’t approve of the Dalai Lama, whom I considered a medieval Papal figure ruling over the oppressed, poverty-stricken people of Tibet, albeit from exile.

I got to meet HH as his staff and many monks irreverently call him instead of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He was giving awards to a number of deserving people and through a bureaucratic error included me. The event was to take place at an exclusive hotel on Nob Hill, which no doubt made a good impression on the rich funders who were invited, but a bad impression on me. Before I accepted the invitation I whined to a friend whose opinion I value one evening over cognac and chocolate. He opined that he approved of the Dalai Lama because he was a force for good in the world. As my friend was in the anti-torture racket, worked with victims of trauma, and had delved more deeply into the sigh of the oppressed than I, I threw his opinion onto the scale and accepted the invitation, with reservations.

Over coffee and pastries in the courtyard of the ritzy, hilltop hotel, HH’s handlers informed all of us supplicants that we were not to try to shake hands with him. He was elderly, and they were afraid that one of us might pass on some communicable disease (this was pre-COVID-19). They told us to simply accept our award certificates, nod, and move on. Seemed reasonable. Well, as I waited my turn, I saw that wasn’t happening. HH was the aggressor. With both hands, he grabbed everyone by the hands and even embraced one person, an African woman with AIDS who devoted her life to assisting people with AIDs. I was moved by that significant embrace. When it was my turn, HH grabbed my hands in his, bowed slightly, and said something I didn’t catch, while I bowed slightly and mumbled something I’m certain he didn’t catch. Despite the mumbling, it was all very moving. I was impressed by his bravery and warmth, and I gave HH a 9 on my scorecard. Leaving the exclusive hotel, I had to run a gauntlet of Chinese protesters passing out pamphlets denouncing HH as the False Dalai Lama. I changed my score to a 10.

I regret that I didn’t have a chance to ask HH what he thought about sex and sexual orientation. Or gender. As far as I can see, all major religions struggle with these issues or simply handle them dogmatically and miserably, denying the miracle of human sexuality and human variation and earning a negative score on my card.

And I thank god that I am areligious.

Well, I as a High Priest, but never a zealot, I am aware that the Great Cave Bear’s teachings on the sex and gender issues were lost during humanity’s toddler days, but I can say with confidence, extrapolating from hunter-gather societies, that She considered the oppression of women a sin.

In my unbiased opinion, a number of religions merit negative scores for certain events. Some merited negative scores in the past but are making decent cases for do-overs. I am always in favor of redemption, as long as there is sincere regret, confession, and restitution, where possible. As an example let’s examine some sinful skeletons in the Catholic Church’s closet. The CC’s skeletons are numerous, egregious, and heinous. Think: the dark ages, the inquisition, the crusades, the 30-Years War, support for Nazis and fascists during WWII. Well, for the Catholic Church all that seems to be in the past and the church no longer considers teaching people to read a sin, or teaching that the earth revolves around the sun (think Galileo) is a sin. They might still think that leaving the church is a sin, that my mother committed a sin when she reneged on the treaty to raise my siblings and me as good little Catholics, but they did not burn her at the stake. Some in the Catholic hierarchy surely still support Nazis and fascists, but that is not official church policy. And, hell’s bells, our most recent ex-President supports the N’s and f’s (as he and his followers comprise a cult they are disqualified and do not get take-overs).

All the major religions have an abundant supply of old bones buried by their dogmas, and all, except Buddhism, seemed, at some point, hell-bent on wars of conquest (the Myanmar Buddhists are an exception to the exception). All the major religions adhered to the orthodox means of increasing their holdings in the physical world as well as in the realm of souls: through conquest, violent or peaceful. The New Testament lays it out plainly and says that Christians are soldiers of Christ, and the 19^th century hymn adds, “Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to war.” I would be inclined to give Christianity a higher score if more of its followers followed the teachings of Christ.

As far as conquest and (capital) punishment for deserters go, the major religions have made some advances on the path to redemption, as they mature. All have yet far to go.  Bear in mind that one major religion is half a millennium younger than its next oldest sibling.

Redeemed or on the road to redemption, all religions get black eyes and bad names from the zealots and hypocrites in their ranks, be they Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, Muslim, or Buddhist.  All lose points when they support immoral (not amoral) politicians like our most recent ex-Pres and his cultish cohorts. To those who critize our present Pres of straying from the true path, after supporting he-who-shall-not-be-named for four years, I would suggest that you build stout barriers in front of the glass portions of your houses.

Despite my appreciation for religion, I confess that I am afraid of religious zealots. My great fear is not of being in an airplane hijacked by religious fanatics armed with box cutters (not an entirely unreasonable fear), but of being snowbound with a religious zealot for a weekend (an irrational fear). Or even an evening. What could we possibly talk about? I am not a scaredy cat. I have survived many terrifying and traumatic situations, usually by cowering in sandbag bunkers or behind other objects. I have even shared a ski cabin with my friend and colleague, the Religious, for a long weekend, several times, along with refugees who had never seen snow. The Religious was more fearful than I and spent the leisure hours in the cabin trying to put a brave face on her fear of having go out again into the snow and stand for hours on the summit of a bunny hill (well, more of a gopher mound), gathering up the courage to plunge recklessly down that life-threatening slope.

Since I rely on the Ancient Greeks for my definition of areligious, it seems only fitting that I rely on them as examples for my theory on the creation of religions—which theory no doubt will offend as greatly as the Monkey Man’s “The Descent of Man.” The A.G.’s, as clearly as I’m sitting at my computer offending, created their gods in their own image, in the image of a human family. What are the Greek gods and immortals but a large extended family governed by benevolent and cruel, just and corrupt, petty and magnanimous, wise rulers often ruled by their hormones? Some lesser gods are outcasts, some were born out of wedlock or raised by a single parent. Some are rebellious, some obedient. And what is Zeus, the head of that extended family, but a typical human patriarch, a father, a general, a politician, a king? Being only human, the Ancient Greeks made their gods (their images of themselves) as they would like to have been, powerful, handsome or beautiful, and placed them on high, on Mount Olympus, just as Hollywood gives immortality to the most attractive stars whom they place up on the silver screen for us lowly mortals to worship. What is the purchase of People Magazine but an offering to those gods? Hollywood also gives its stars great powers, such as the ability to change shape. What is Zeus but a Chi–man when he changes into a swan or a bull, like Mystique or Morph? (I confess my ignorance about the X-Men. I had to google the shape changers and then wasted too much time searching for what they changed into. I would like to have come up with some brilliant examples, for a few Greek gods, but it’s been a long time since I read Edith Hamilton.)

The Ancient Greeks get points for creativity but lose points for believing their own works of fiction.

If anyone cares to extrapolate this man-creating-gods-in-his-own-image instead of vice versa into other religions, be my guest. I will not accompany you on that pilgrimage because I do not wish to be the target of an inquisition or fatwa.

As I whined earlier, I had to study, well, read, well, skim, learned and not so learned tomes about a great many religions. I confess that at first reading I was contemptuous about many native American religions and their origin myths. They were too simplistic and illogical. Childish, I thought. But I was being childish. On more mature reflection and taking into account the human condition, I have been converted to the belief that the Native Americans got one important thing right, perhaps the most important thing. They have the concept of the Trickster, the god or spirit or supernatural being who breaks conventional norms to play tricks on unwitting humans that make us look foolish. No religion should be without a Trickster. How else account for our absurdity? 

I confess that I am Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. This is not a problem for me. Like all humans I am capable of holding completely contradictory positions on any number of issues. Take the Vietnam War for instance. In my formative years, the 60s, the burning issue, the number one issue, the issue that was front in center in everyone’s mind, was Vietnam. Well, I confess that sex was the number one issue in my mind, but right after sex came Vietnam. In those college years, over our gourmet cafeteria meals of meatloaf or fried liver and onions, during bull sessions in the dorm, and while getting drunk on cheap beer or wine, my friends and I indulged in endless hours talking about the war in Vietnam (because we didn’t want to spend any time indulging in the war). Perhaps we didn’t talk nearly as much about sex because we spent so little time indulging in it, and we didn’t want to discuss our failures.

We didn’t talk much about civil rights because we were mainly white, pre-baby boomers, and raised in a former slave state

We talked about the war and especially the draft. Well, mostly about the draft. I was opposed to the draft, mostly out of self-interest, and got swept up in my newly found principles of pacifism and my Pro-Life stance that any kind of killing, even in war was wrong. Well, not all war. I was born during WWII, which was a good war of course. Well, war is never good, but that was a necessary one. I confess that I had not actually heard about the dubious concept of Just War until I was actually in one. In Charm School, I was forced to bake under the midday tropical sun while listening to a lecture on Just War given by a mumbling priest, who seemed uncertain of the concept. Or was he simply intimidated by the well-armed congregation that faced him? Some members of the congregation were busily flouting the rules by defacing their new camouflage helmet covers with religious quotes, such as: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.” The guy next to me misspelled valley and meanest. I confess that I was intimidated by some members of the congregation. Even had I understood what that priest was mumbling about, I would have been dubious about the concept, dubious because who gets to decide on the Justness? LBJ? Tricky Dick?

I believed that WWII was a Just War, but I was dubious about the Korean War, and opposed to the Vietnam War, even more so after participating. Well, police actions. (I am unaware of the existence of any philosophical concept about a Just Police Action.) I certainly didn’t buy the Domino Theory. I had absorbed a little history. For instance, I knew that Ho Chih Minh had been our ally during WWII. But then so was Stalin. But Ho merely wanted freedom from the colonial oppressors, the French. He was a nationalist. Colonies all over the world were struggling for freedom, as did the Thirteen Colonies before they became colonizers. But Ho was a communist. And all the dominoes around him were teetering. On the whole I was wholeheartedly opposed to the war and thought Vietnam should be free. At the same time, I bought the line that if we, the public, knew what the national security types in our government knew but couldn’t tell us, we would be wholeheartedly in favor of the war. At the same time once again, I was cynical about the national security types.

With minimal effort, I was capable of holding completely contradictory positions about Vietnam and Just War.

My college buddies and I never, that I remember, talked about abortion. The topic never came up. After all, we were all sexist males and Roe v. Wade wasn’t decided until long after those halcyon college days. I must have read novels in which some female character died or nearly died of a botched illegal abortion, and I saw Hollywood movies in which the female star decided at the last minute not to go through with the illegal abortion and got back with the boyfriend and he made an honest woman of her. Whew! In one movie they married while the nurses were wheeling the dishonest woman into the delivery room. Thank you, D. Day and R. Hudson for enlightening us.

Neither did we discuss the question of what life is or when did it begin. In some zoology and physiology courses we might have touched on the what-life-is topic, but, that I recall, we never came to any definite conclusions, unlike many Pro-Choicers or Pro-Lifers who seem to split endless hairs about when life begins and is human life the same as human personhood. Is it a religious/philosophical question or a purely physiological one? For many of the religious-minded, human life/personhood begins when their god breathes life, i.e., soul, into the fetus. Well, when does that occur? For literalists as well as biologists that can only occur after birth because the fetus doesn’t breathe in the womb. And what is a soul, what is consciousness, what is will? Except to zealots, these are objectively unanswerable philosophical or religious questions, and I cannot bother my pretty gray head with them.

I have certain beliefs about religious beliefs, which I will discuss in a later post. For now, let me confess that I am only somewhat consistent in my beliefs. As I said, I am Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. Unlike the case of my unyielding stance on the Vietnam war, which I was forced to yield, my Pro-Life and Pro-Choice position is not contradictory or a symptom of my inoperable case of cognitive dissonance. To my mind they are compatible.

It is simply that I am only an imperfect human and my Pro-Life stance has a few imperfections. On the whole, I am opposed to capital punishment, but I do wonder if some who have committed truly horrific crimes—think the jealous husband who murders his wife and six children—can ever be redeemed and might be better off dead rather than living with their guilt? If they come to terms with their guilt. While I am opposed to executing even mass murders, I am wishy washy in that opposition. I would prefer that criminals who committed truly horrible crimes—think Pol Pot—be given the opportunity to commit suicide. I confess that I am a believer in the ritual of seppuku, not only for murderers but for those who commit atrociously disgraceful acts, like inciting a violent invasion of the Capitol, or commanding the light brigade to make a suicidal charge. It would be the honorable thing to do. And it needn’t be a painful death as in seppuku.

Yes, I am an imperfect Pro-Lifer, as are a good many Pro-Lifers. While politicians, generals, and the generally religious debate what is a Just War, many Pro-Lifers debate what is a Just Abortion, i.e., in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the woman’s life or health. (But a woman’s freedom seldom enters their equation and it took the Supreme Court to throw in privacy.)

Perhaps a more apt description of our beliefs would be Partially Pro-Life. Simply Pro-Life has the ring of a moral absolute and doesn’t allow for the exceptions discussed above. While we’re on the subject of appropriate names, let me return briefly to capital punishment. Many Pro-Lifers and Pro-Capital-Punishmenters maintain that the person about to be executed had a chance to grow up and lead a good life but failed and therefore deserves to lose his or her life. Yet they are adamantly opposed to abortions, except in select cases, claiming that the fetus is innocent and deserves a chance to be born, grow up and make his or her own mistakes. By definition then, they are only Pro-Fetal-Life. And some might go so far as to be only Pro-Gamete- and -Oocyte-Life.

Note: The Pro-Gamete group are literalists when it comes to Onan’s spilt seed story, while the metaphoralists claim that his only sin was not fulfilling his duty by marrying his deceased brother’s widow.

I have a friend who is a nun—she prefers the noun “religious,” which I thought was only an adjective before she set me straight—who is a moral absolutist, or reasonably close to it, and completely consistent in her Pro-Life belief. We don’t discuss abortion but I believe she is opposed in all cases. She is also adamantly opposed to capital punishment, lynching, and religious wars. And drone murders. And murders of abortion providers. Every Easter Sunday at sunrise she goes to Livermore to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. I would go with her, but my anti-nuclear-war commitment doesn’t extend to getting up before dawn. My friend is equally concerned with the born and the unborn. Me, not so much. I believe that the Peter Principle also applies to evolution and we, homo fauxsapiens, who believe we are the sublime culmination of evolution have perhaps risen to a level of incompetence the world could well do without. On the other hand, nuclear winter would kill off most innocent animal and plant life.

“Competing interests” is the cliché the Supreme Court chose for the conflict between the Pro-Lifers and the Pro-Choicers, making it sound like a game of tug of war. As these competing interests are heavy, they should have come up with something that sounded more like sumo wrestling. In my Just Police Action days I had “competing interests.” On the one hand I was Pro-Life: I didn’t want to shoot anyone and didn’t want anyone to shoot me or my buddies. Well, I confess that I was more Pro-My-Life, i.e., just plain scared. On the other hand I was Anti-War: I was determined to do as little as possible, yet at the same time, I wanted to perform well. And the state certainly limited my Choices. “Competing interests” simply does not convey the complexity and seriousness of the issues. Not for my contradictory positions.

Another of my contradictory positions is on Roe v. Wade. Seven Supreme Court Justices relied on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, LIBERTY, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added). They went on to state that a woman’s right to privacy was paramount in the decision of whether or not to abort a fetus and that right could not be abridged without due process, which in this case involved the balancing of competing interests: a woman’s right to privacy versus the state’s interest in “potential life.”

The majority then came up with a trimester standard: only until the last trimester, when the fetus was potentially viable outside the womb, did the state have a legitimate interest that would tip the scales and allow the state to violate a woman’s right to privacy.

Those Constitutional literalists, White and Rehnquist, dissented, arguing that there was no right to privacy in the Constitution, and the word “privacy” does not even appear anywhere in that quasi-holy document. They claimed it was an egregious example of judicial activism to invent this right to privacy, akin to coming up with an Eleventh Commandment. I confess: the Commandment part is mine, not theirs; it seemed appropriate because of the religious element. White’s and Rehnquist’s argument also sounds convincing, except they somehow failed to note the long history of decisions based on the privacy issue, as well as the perhaps embarrassing fact that eight years earlier, wishy washy Whizzer White concurred in Griswold v. Connecticut that it would be a violation of that same due process clause to prohibit married couples in the privacy of their homes from using contraception. Possibly he had a horse in that race. To be fair, White said it would be a violation of their LIBERTY, not privacy, and that married couples should be “free of regulation of the intimacies of the marriage relationship.” To be unfair, that sounds suspiciously like privacy. I wonder if the Whizzer would have dissented if the majority in Rowe had followed his LIBERTY argument. There was never any hope for Rehnquist.

My wishy washiness about Roe results because I am dubious about their legal argument yet approve of the result, sort of. Well, I am also dubious about the result. I don’t say they shouldn’t have gone with the privacy argument, but I do say they should have loaded their legal canons with the Thirteenth Amendment for greater accuracy and firepower: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Here’s where I leave my wishy washiness behind. It is my unwavering belief that I would complain of slavery or involuntary servitude if the state forced me to vomit every morning for three months, and then followed that by forcing me to strap an UNWANTED and increasing load of sloshing liquid, ten pounds in the ninth month, to my belly 24 hours a day for nine months, forced me to sleep on my back when I could sleep, caused me dizziness, discomfort, and insomnia, and distorted my body, increased my appetite for food while decreasing my sexual appetite for the duration. And only a true zealot would say that pregnancy is punishment for crime.

Roe v. Wade was a product of its time. The court focused on due process/privacy and not slavery because the court is a slave to precedent–they prefer “stare decisis” because Latin is the officious language of the United States. My dubiousness about the result results from the court’s ruling that the state had no legitimate interest in the fetus until the last trimester because, in 1973 when Roe was decided, fetuses were viable only in the last trimester of pregnancy. That result is a moving target. Zealous Pro-Fetal-Lifers have been hammering away at Roe, and in 1992, they succeeded in knocking a big chip off the moving target, thanks to a changing of the Justices and to progress in medicine. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court, still a slave to precedent, upheld the basic principal of Roe but substituted the expandable concept of viability for the trimester plan. Fetuses were then viable as early as 21 weeks, which means that states, judiciously weighing the competing interests involved, could prohibit abortions earlier still.

And five years after Roe the first test tube baby was born. What will that mean to the Pro-Gamete and -Oocyte Lifers who claim the state has a legitimate interest in the potential life at conception?

The Court has constructed a clumsy balancing act of “competing interests” between the woman’s privacy and the state’s interest in the viability of “potential life,” with only Privacy weighing in on the woman’s side, while allowing the state to put its thumb on the viability side. Privacy is not as compelling, does not weigh as much, as LIBERTY. Could the court justify slavery or involuntary servitude, which is expressly prohibited in the Thirteenth Amendment, by the state’s compelling interest in the viable fetus? Can they justify a direct harm to an actual life for the sake of what they call a “potential life?”

Pro-Fetal-Lifers argue that if the woman doesn’t want to be burdened by the baby she should carry it to term and then give it to the state for adoption, and because the state believes that it has a compelling interest in the baby, it will bear the burden of raising it or finding someone who will. If medical advances can be tossed onto the scale of competing interests, why shouldn’t the state take viable fetuses (beginning at 21 weeks), without harming the mother, and raise them or arrange for adoptions? As medicine continues to advance, the state could possibly take fetuses even earlier, perhaps even at the test tube stage. All parties would be satisfied. The pregnant woman would have her LIBERTY, as well as privacy, and the Pro-Fetal-Lifers would have the living fetus they could nurture. Well, the state might not be happy with the expense, but how would they balance money against a “potential life?”

For the Pro-Lifer in me this is all very complicated, while for the Pro-Choicer in me, the question is simple: to force a woman to go forward with an unwanted pregnancy is slavery or involuntary servitude. I am more Pro-Life than many Pro-Lifers, but less Pro-Fetal-Life than many Pro-Fetal-Lifers. For me it comes down to a question of choice. Not mine, not the states, not anyone’s but the woman’s.

I confess that I am clueless. Not about everything, of course, but a great many things. Editing Merriam-Webster, I can come up with the definition most applicable to my situation: “completely or hopelessly bewildered…or foolish.” I have deleted “unaware” and “ignorant” because I’ll deal with those equally applicable adjectives in a subsequent post, and really, “bewildered” and “foolish” suit me to a T.

I suppose I’ve always been bewildered or foolish, sometimes completely and, even on a good day, substantially. It took me longer than you would suppose to catch on to the law of gravity. Jumping off a shed roof at the age of four was instructive. And possibly contributed to my fear of heights. I was clueless about personal grooming. I thought my dad was a movie-star-handsome man mostly because he always had perfectly combed and parted, thick hair and that feature overshadowed his big nose and double chin. I tried to emulate his hair style but no matter how much greasy kid’s stuff I plastered onto to my thin hair, I always looked more like Alfalfa than Cary Grant. (For those too young to have a clue about Alfalfa, substitute Dagwood Bumstead. For those too young to have a clue about Cary Grant, I give up.)

I was naturally clueless about politics in grade school, but quickly learned to avoid beatings by playground bullies in 1952, by telling would-be torturers that I was in favor of Adwight Stevenhower. That was the extent of my political education until college. When I entered my teens and my doctor told me that milk shakes and ice cream were contributors to my blossoming pimples, I was skeptical. In my clueless world view nothing as good as a milk shake could result in anything so bad as pimples. Although athletic, I was clueless about sports. I became a fan of the St. Louis Hawks basketball team and, studied all the players and memorized their vital statistics. Familiarity bred clueless overconfidence. I foolishly thought they would win every game, every title. I was certainly bewildered when they lost. After they abandoned the city, I transferred my clueless allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. By then I was more mature and wiser, somewhat, and did not expect them to win every game but believed that they would always win that day’s game. Like most devoted fans, I cluelessly thought, as an act of faith, that I could affect the play, help them win.

After puberty, I searched long and hard, but found few clues about sex, certainly not enough to overcome my innocence. If ignorance about sex is innocence, then, like the Ivory Soap ads of those days, I was ninety-nine and forty-four one hundred percent pure. All sexual innuendo in pop music and jazz were too many for me. I was a literalist. When J. Cash sang that he was “gonna open up your gate” I pictured him opening a white picket garden gate. I was clueless about sex into my 30’s. Well, I might as well confess: I was clueless well into my 70’s. But never so clueless as to qualify for membership in INCEL. I feel certain that had I applied, INCEL’s Master Celibates would have blackballed me because, contrary to their prime directive, I blamed my cluelessness for my problems.  

I was certainly clueless as to what I wanted to do with my life. But I hope to get a clue one of these days soon.

I was raised in the Midwestern state of Missouri. I lived in St. Louis, the state’s largest metropolitan district. I was clueless as to how the rest of the state felt about life, race, politics, foreign policy, the cold war, etc., until I lived in a college town in the center of the state. I began to realize that Missouri had been a slave state, and, like most slave states, was still fighting the Civil War, like most losers, still fantasizing about a time when they were winners. Football was big time at the U of MO and the stadium was always full. I was charmed by the cheering, the music, the autumn weather, by being a part of the crowd, more than by the game. My third year, the U recruited, along with the usual hulking football suspects, a skinny black kid who was the nation’s best baton twirler. I had no clue about universities recruiting baton twirlers, but this kid got a full scholarship. I ate in the same cafeteria as the baton twirler and got to know him a little. He was a nice kid, but I was somewhat prejudiced and didn’t hang out with him outside the cafeteria, after all, I was a junior and he was a mere freshman. He could toss his twirling, silver baton to impossible heights, higher than the uppermost seats in the stadium. Four or five stories high it spun and spiraled and glittered in the autumn sun, and then plummeted to earth, twirling and whirling and accelerating, until Warren caught it with one hand reaching under his right leg, without missing a beat. He never failed to wow the crowd when he strutted onto the field at half-time, leading the marching band that played Dixie. I, at least, was deaf and blind to the irony. Warren was banned from a competition in some little town in rural Missouri because of race riot fears.

I slowly, all too slowly, began to have a few clues. I even suspected that the thrill Fats found on Blueberry Hill was something more than a bush full of ripe berries

Were cluelessness a crime, these instances would be mere misdemeanors. My felonies were in the department of politics. As far as politics and politicians go, if there were a National Clueless League, unlike the Hawks and Cardinals, I would be the undefeated champion every year. In p and p, I have reached the pinnacle of cluelessness. For instance, I have a long record of picking losers in Presidential elections. After my shrewd choice of A. Stevenhower, I avoided politics until 1964 when I voted in my first presidential election. I went for LBJ because somehow I had decided I was a democrat. I don’t know how or why. My family always got the Sunday Post-Dispatch. As a kid, I read only the funnies and later graduated to the big words in the sports pages. I don’t remember reading editorials or important news articles. On TV I was exposed to an unending series of white male newscasters and talking heads, including network heroes E. Murrow and W. Cronkite. I don’t know why, but I assumed that they were Democrats. I had taken a beginning course in government at the U and, thinking back, the prof was clearly a democrat. He adopted a cynical and sarcastic persona that appealed. After all, we were in the Show-Me state, in those days a solidly Democratic state. After all, Lincoln was a Republican. LBJ won and I was gratified to be on the winning side. It confirmed my quarter-baked world views.

I was out of the country, all expenses paid, for the ’68 elections. The patriotic Post-Dispatch sent me their paper free of charge, which sometimes arrived only a week late. I knew it was a well-regarded newspaper, but still only read the sports pages and the funnies. Well, I scanned the headlines and read any articles about Vietnam. I knew Nixon claimed to have a secret plan to end the war. I had adopted my old prof’s persona and was skeptical as well as clueless and thought Tricky Dick had as much chance of getting elected as I did of finding a snowball outside my hooch in the morning. In ’72, I was certain that TD would get re-elected, but clueless as to how so many people could believe him and his light-at-the-end of the tunnel nonsense. I was clueless as to how TD’s “silent majority” could blame the students for the massacre at Kent State. I was clueless as to how the secret bombing of Cambodia was kept secret from the people being bombed. I no longer lived in Missouri, but I was still a Democrat and voted for McGovern despite his cluelessness in the Eagleton affair, the Missouri Senator he backed for Vice President 100% until he didn’t.

The more I read and learned, the more clues I gathered, the more I disliked both major parties which were busily engaged in swapping sides on the race issue in the 60’s and 70’s. I drifted into various cult parties. Perhaps it’s a characteristic of cluelessness, but I’ve always favored underdogs and candidates with a snowball’s chance on a sunny Vietnamese day of winning. I voted for Fred Harris in the ’76 Demo primary and Independent E. McCarthy in the Pres elections. In 1980, my cluelessness kicked into overdrive. I was certain that the American people would not elect a third-rate actor like Reagan, although I was not clueless as to Carter’s shortcomings. One early poll confirmed my certainty. A few days before the election, I was in a truck heading to the Mendocino with three friends who had also sent in their absentee ballots. Our exit poll showed four votes for the Citizen’s Party candidate, B. Commoner. With that commanding lead, I didn’t see how a man whose principal qualification was a starring role in Bedtime for Bonzo could be our next President. Never having seen the movie, I believed that Bonzo was a chimp and Reagan a buffoon. I was stunned when I learned how clueless I was about the American preference for buffoons.

Note: although never a fan of the sanctimonious J. Carter, I will confess that he has won my vote for the best ex-president in our history (not a high bar), and I’m willing to bet the ranch that he is not likely to lose his crown to D. Trump.

After the Citizen’s Party I went, at the urging of friends, to a Green Party meeting. I was put off by the number of NIMBYs and xenophobes and the uniform whiteness of the room, but, as they had the same chance as your typical Vietnamese snowball, I stuck with them.

In 2016, a fifth rate-television character took the ratings crown from Reagan and ran for President. Never having seen his TV show, I was clueless as to what it was about other than a chance to humiliate people eager for humiliation. Once again I was certain that the American people would not elect a buffoon. I broke my rule and voted for the candidate of a major party, not because I approved of her so much as because I believe in affirmative action, another losing issue, and thought it was time to sweep the Y chromosomes from the White House with the biggest broom possible. Well, I did think she would be a better President than her husband, as would most first ladies. The white ones anyway. (As I wrote in my confession to being a racist, I am prejudiced against old white men.) I was certain H. Clinton would win in a landslide, and I wanted her to get many millions more votes than her sixth-rate opponent. Speaking of her seventh-rate opponent, I almost didn’t vote for H.C. because she caved under pressure: She retracted her statement that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorables, that they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic.” Well, she retracted the “half” part. Giving her a break, I decided she was merely bad at fractions, and the correct answer, “eleven twelfths,” was beyond her grasp.  

Note: I am cluelessly conflicted about who’s a deplorable and who isn’t. Being a lower class kid myself, I have some sympathy for the lower class deplorables, as well as few illusions. They might do deplorable things, like the coup attempt at the Capitol, but at the same time they are victims, victims of an unjust class system, victims of propaganda from the upper class. But at the same time once again, they are responsible for their actions. And they seem to be nearly all white males, just like the playground bullies who hit me when I said “I like Ike” or “Adlai”, only bigger and meaner. I suffer from no clueless conflict about the deplorableness of the affluent class that exploits them.

I am clueless as far as understanding what seems to me to be hereditary party loyalty. I took some physiology classes at my first U but must have dozed off during the Cell Phys lecture on the party loyalty gene. I don’t think it was a case of the lecture being beyond my grasp, although many lectures were. Perhaps I was busily trying to grasp what E. Waters had in mind when she sang: “He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle.” When I first heard that song I imagined some nice guy preparing to make pancakes by melting some butter on a griddle. I got so hungry that I forgot about the ashes and fiddle parts. In any case, I slowly came to realize that there must be a party loyalty gene. There is no other logical explanation for much of American politics.

A big clue was the case of the GA Sec of State who defended the fairness of the Pres vote count in GA and even went so far as to rebuff the Pres himself in a one-hour phone call in which the Pres asked him to somehow find 11,800 votes. The Pres must have known it was taped, but felt safe enough to cajole, flatter, and threaten the Sec. Because of the rebuff, the honorable Sec was vilified and threatened and even his family was threatened by rabid Trumpistas. The Sec of State stood steadfast on the burning deck. When asked whom he was going to vote for in the two Senatorial run-offs, he said he would vote for the very candidates who vilified him and encouraged and abetted the threateners because, obviously, the party loyalty gene trumps threats to his family and him.

My cluelessness overwhelms me when I see a talking head like the WAPO contributor I saw on PBS the other night. A 50- or 60-something white guy from somewhere in Ohio. He deplored the insurrection at the WH and was bravely critical of Trump, but mitigated his heresy by stating that he was glad that Trump had been elected in 2016 and thought he had done a lot of good up until the insurrection. I was not so clueless as to be upset with him; he’s an old white guy from Ohio where his cohorts who don’t carry the Republican loyalty gene wear Republican-colored glasses. But the interviewer? I wanted to shake her and make her ask some critical questions: What good was he talking about? Getting out of the Paris Climate Change? Taking kids from parents and putting them in cages? Trump’s great success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic that made the U.S. the world leader in deaths and cases? His non-existent health plan that covered pre-existing conditions? His successful handling of the deficit—always a biggie with the conserves—that grew by a measly four trillion before the pandemic? His insistence that all our traditional allies sit at the children’s table while dictators in N. Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Russia got to sit with the adults? His perfect telephone call to the President of the Ukraine? Did he approve of Donnie’s 25,000+ lies? The race baiting? The pandering to the white supremacists? Remember some are very fine people? The corruption in the sleaziest administration in our short history? His failure to drain the swamp but his success in polluting it? His moral integrity? Paying hush money to porn stars? Bragging that his fame gave him impunity when he grabbed women by the pussy? His rollback of environmental protections (don’t forget his pollution of the swamp)? I am truly clueless as to how this made him a good President and why the interviewer didn’t challenge this interviewee. She claimed to be a journalist. I know. I know. She wanted to appear impartial and unbiased and not hostile. I know that FAKE NEWS journalists strive to appear unbiased, as opposed to the performers on the ALTERNATIVE FACTS NETWORKS, such as Vulpine News that likes plenty of raw red meat, no matter how rotten, and whose baying-at-the-moon heads are proudly biased, as well as proudly propagandists.

I am repelled by spinners, spiders, no, but pols, yes. And when I hear a pol spin I struggle to maintain my equilibrium not unlike a fly struggling to free itself from sticky threads. The leader of the House Repubs, after saying that the Pres instigated the insurrection, reversed himself a week later and said the Pres did not instigate the insurrection and should not be impeached, but he magnanimously said he would let the Repub Congresspersons vote their conscience. Let’s think about that. I know I’m clueless, but I thought the job of Congresspersons was to vote their conscience? Are their votes normally determined by their party loyalty gene and not their consciences? By bribes? By favors? And are their consciences rusty from disuse? Voting your conscience should not be confused with the idiom about having the courage of your convictions because, as clueless as I am, I believe the spinners and enablers to be in short supply of courage while only the lower class deplorables will be convicted.

What then, is a poor, clueless person like me to think about politics and politicians? As an aid to combat indecision or overthinking, humans invented proverbs, like the one about dogs lying down with cowardly pols and coming up with fleas. I have invented a proverb of my own (some might call it an aphorism, but that doesn’t convey the religious flavor I want the way proverb does). It’s concise and cuts through the spinners’ webs: If the Nazis support you, you must be doing something wrong.

It may seem that I am picking on poor Donald.  I don’t really mean to (see my post in which I confess to being a Liar). It’s just that Donnie and I share one redeeming feature, and I am taking advantage of that feature. When I was a young boy, for reasons I was clueless to understand, my father got into the bad habit of saying that I was good for nothing. My always helpful brother tried to cheer up by telling me that Dad was wrong. He said that I could always serve as a bad example. The same can be said of poor Donald, his enablers, and minions (“coterie” is too elegant to describe them). Some say that poor Donald, after his clueless coup attempt, will go down in history as our worst President ever. The competition is stiff, from Jackson, Buchanan, the first Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, and the quantity of clues can be overwhelming. No matter. Even if Donnie doesn’t make the grade as the worst President, he can still stand and serve…as a bad example.

Liar

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a liar. Don’t overreact. We’re all liars. Don’t pretend to be shocked when I say that even Presidents are liars: think Tricky Dick’s whopper that he was not a crook; think Reagan’s claim to have been present when a Nazi death camp was liberated or that supply-side economics was not trickle down or that he didn’t bake the chocolate cake for the Ayatollah; think Clinton’s extra-marital escapade(s); think Bush’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; think Obama’s claim that he was born in the U.S—oh, wait, he was; think Trump’s frequent claims that Obama was not born in the U.S. or that everything he does is the biggest and best in the history of the country, the planet, the solar system, and even the universe. To give Trump credit for some honesty, he does admit that his boasts about his great achievements are incredible.

When politicians get caught with their hands in the literal or figurative till, they attempt to distract the public’s attention by whining: “Yes, but what look what Fulano de Tal (from the opposite party) did.” I may be a liar (and a whiner), but I don’t intend to distract from my guilt by ratting out our Presidents for the same sins. Neither do I blame them in order to lessen my own guilt. They were not my role models. I began my career as a liar long before I was aware of our Presidents and their intimate relations with deceit. As a child, I told silly, easily disprovable lies, often telling my angry father that I didn’t do whatever it was that upset him when plainly I had. Once when I was upset with my brother—I think he had squealed on me, and I wanted some payback—I carved my initials on a desk we shared, thinking that my parents would never believe that I was stupid enough to carve my own initials, thinking that my parents would believe that my sneaky brother did it for the express purpose of getting me in trouble. Thinking has too often been problematic for me. That lie pounded home, by way of my sore behind, two important lessons: avoid devious lies—keep them simple; and my parents had unshakeable faith in my stupidity. Several years later, I opted for stupidity in another silly lie: I told my high school English teacher that I had guessed wrong on all the latest quiz questions, not because I had not read the riveting final chapters of Ivanhoe, which I obviously hadn’t, but because I didn’t understand it. She pitied me and gave me a B (for Bullshit?).

Yes, I confess that I had no true compunction against telling lies when I was a boy, only against getting caught. I lied as readily and easily as Huck Finn who lived a short distance upriver from me, but in a different time zone. Lying was one of my few natural talents. I sneered at the honesty-was-the-best-policy cliché. That was for suckers. I thought Geo Washington was a stupid boy to risk a whupping in the cherry tree incident. We had two cherry trees that I would gladly have chopped down because picking and pitting cherries was an onerous chore, especially pitting on hot summer days when the juice ran down my arms and attracted even more flies that usual. The only reason the hateful trees remained standing was that chopping them down would have been an onerous chore, resulting in a whupping if I told the truth, and a whupping with a few bonus whacks if I chopped them down and tried to cover my crime with another unbelievable lie. Whereas, if I sucked it up and picked and pitted cherries I would get a slice or two of mom’s cherry pie.  She made great cherry pie.

I am not proud of my lies, but I am proud of the fact that although we had a dog, I never once, among my many boyhood lies, told a teacher that the dog ate my homework, not that I had any literary objections to cliches, but because even I thought that one too silly to believe. Or perhaps I’m lying now. Perhaps I was simply not smart enough to think of that lie. It was all too long and too many lies ago.

Lies can be very personal, and I refuse to confess to any more of my particular lies. Reading is like shopping, and “let the buyer beware” holds true for both. It’s up to you, dear and not-so-dear readers, to decide whether what I write is true or false. Last night, while enjoying my cognac and chocolate, it occurred to me—perhaps because I experienced an intrusive traumatic memory of the far, far too many True-False tests I endured in my far, far too many school years—that life is an unending T-F test, and the majority of humankind struggles to get C’s while far, far too many report cards are filled with D’s and F’s. However, failing report cards seem to be passes to Trump rallies. Even when Truth is self-evident, she is pursued by Falsehood, and too often she surely feels his fetid breath on her neck.

My boyhood lies, and indeed my adulthood lies, have not had much effect on the course of history, the march of progress or its retreat. My lies have been of little consequence because I am of little consequence, and in my approaching senility my lies have become even less consequential. My limited area of operations has limited my lies to telling my dentist that I floss every day or my doctor that I have only one glass of wine with dinner. Or the kind of little lies meant to protect others from hurt or harm or spare their feelings, not to gain an advantage. Honest. There is no advantage to be gained when I said: “Your costume parties are such a treat and I truly wanted to go, but the truth is I couldn’t because the dog ate my Trump mask.” The earth is not shattered by my lies. If there were a Richter Scale for lies, mine would be in the 0.00001 to 0.00002 range, at best. They harm no one in the next country, town, or the house next door.

The lies of politicians, heads of state, and generals of armies do have great consequences. And unfortunately their lies are often long lived. While only I remember the little lie about my carved initials, which, in any case, no one believed, half a century later many Wisconsinites still believe McCarthy’s lies about the lists in his possession of evil communists in our government, lies he told with conviction and vehemence while theatrically waving blank sheets of paper before the TV cameras. Many in the Q-Anon congregation still believe that D.T. will save us from the deep state pedophile ring, although few, if any, still believe that the pedophile headquarters is located in the basement of a pizza joint in Baltimore. Worse yet, many still believe that D.T. has overwhelming and irrefutable proof that the election was stolen by the worst fraud in the history of the galaxy, but the Supreme Court Justices refuse to let him present that evidence. Although appointed by him, they have been corrupted by the deep state that only he can save us from. Not to worry, Trump’s armed jihadists are standing by in case they are needed to squash this fraud.

Some say that D.T. brags far too much, but I say he has good reason to brag: his lies are far more consequential than mine.  And I freely admit, with just a touch of lie envy, that although we have both been active practitioners of this art form for the same length of time, his lies are bigger than mine.

How to explain the believability and longevity of certain lies? Sometimes, while enjoying my evening cognac and chocolate, I reflect on this existential question. After the cognac, answers occur, and it seems that the more ridiculous the lie, the more transparent the liar, the stronger the belief. Belief is like a high-tech start-up, and believers are venture capitalists who invest in lies. When confronted with the failure of the enterprise they shovel in more belief rather than declare bankruptcy. Belief can also be a religious experience. Trump’s rallies are revival meetings. When he speaks in tongues his followers shout and cheer with true religious fervor, whether his tongues are forked or not. The true believers ride on emotional highs and are rewarded with a temporary trip to paradise. Truth and falsehood don’t enter into the equation. Belief is the answer.  

Truthful and trusty Merriam-Webster offers many definitions of the word lie, verb and noun, among them: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive; to create a false or misleading impression; an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker or writer to be untrue with intent to deceive; an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker or writer.” While a liar is simply “someone who tells lies.”

By underlining “intent,” perhaps M-W intends to distinguish between Falsehood and Lie, but if so, why does she confuse us with her last definition in which the liar may believe his lie? She confuses us even further with her second definition of Falsehood: “a lie.” English is a poverty-stricken language and doesn’t seem to have a good, dependable noun for a false statement the stater believes to be true. I believe “Falsehood” will serve. In any case, the distinction is not useful on a T-F test, and of limited use in life. When LBJ told us about a second attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, he might have believed it, although Navy archive footage show that it did not occur. Giving LBJ the benefit of doubt, let’s say he got bad information and believed that a second attack occurred, in which case it was not a lie but a falsehood. All the same, that falsehood dragged us, kicking and screaming, into the Vietnam War. When General Westmoreland said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient,” he might have believed it. Giving the good general the benefit of a doubt, let’s say he was merely an ignorant racist and believed what he said. All the same that falsehood supported his policy of attrition, which led to a great many deaths of Vietnamese. 2,500 years ago, Aeschylus, said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” And the Vietnam War coaxed a great many fibs and falsehoods from our leaders, including candidate Nixon’s secret plan to end the war and President Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. Another example to show that the Vietnam war was not just an outlier: When Bush the Second said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he might have believed it. The fact that Saddam did not made no difference at his trial or to the subsequent long years of war and suffering of the Iraqi people.

Life presents an unending series of choices, and children and politicians often make less than rational choices. In my high school years, my amygdala was in the lowest percentile of development, and I chose the Projection Club over the Debate Club, thinking I could get a few tips on how to project my faults on my brother, but all I learned was that you had to keep an eye on the lower loop in old film projectors. During moments of senile nostalgia, I wonder what great honors and prestige I might have gained but for that irrational and regrettable teenage decision. I know little about Debate Clubs but I persist in the vague belief that members learn to argue in favor of both sides of a given statement, possibly good training for marshalling facts and logic, and even better training for covering up Lies and Falsehoods. Had I learned great debating skills, had I learned to argue with great fervor opposing sides of an issue, I might have become a Supreme Court Injustice like Kavanaugh who argued against executive privilege during the Clinton years, but in favor of it during the Bush years. I might have become the leader of the Senate like McConnell who argued during the Obama administration that Presidential nominations for Supreme Court Justices should not be confirmed within a year a Presidential election, and that they should during the Trump administration. Some might call these examples of hypocrisy, but, never having gained debate-club wisdom, I withhold judgement.

It does seem to me that Falsehoods can evolve into Lies. For instance, that famous purveyor of Fake News, the Washington Post has compiled a data base of over 25,000 false or misleading claims by Trump, which, if WAPO can be trusted, should make Trump either the most ignorant or dishonest President in history. Finally, he achieved the distinction of being the biggest and the best in history at something. Does he believe these 25,000 falsehoods? With unlimited access to experts and think tanks and even Wiki, why has no one corrected him? Educated him? Can he truly believe that he has done more for Blacks than any President in US history? That Mexico is paying for the biggest and most beautiful border wall in history (China gave the world a great virus, but not a great wall), which, by the way, has only been extended slightly, and that in a sensitive biosphere? That the US has handled the corona virus pandemic better than anyone in the Universe? That hydroxychloroquine is a cure for COVID 19? Or maybe you should inject bleach? That non-US-citizen Obama left no ventilators? That he has irrefutable proof of the biggest and worst election fraud in history? Well, you’ll have to do a search if you want to see all 25,000+.

One of my favorite authors was renowned for his lying skill. I believe he fell well short of the 25,000+ mark in four years, but he even lied about his name when telling his lies, while Trump proudly trumpeted his. The difference between the whoppers told by D. J. Trump and S. L. Clemens is that the former sought an advantage while the latter sought only to entertain. The whoppers of neither are all that believable, but I must confess that when still an innocent boy, I believed that some Calaveras frogs could swallow a load or two of buckshot and live, but not jump, and California jays might attempt to fill up deserted mountain cabins with acorns. I have never been so innocent that I swallowed any of Trump’s whoppers.

D. J. Trump often prefaces his whoppers with the statement, “I have heard,” or “People are saying,” to avoid blame for any of his lies. Taking a page from his liars’ manual, let me say that I have heard that the Big D also leads the league in the number of high level minions who are bent on telling whoppers whenever the opportunity arises. One glaring instance is Attorney General Barr’s synopsis of the Mueller Report. Some might accuse Barr, et al, of stupidity for putting in writing lies and half-truths easily disprovable by anyone who might actually read the report. However, we should always give credit where credit is due, and our nation’s chief minister of justice knew that spin trumps truth when you get your version out first. I believe that Barr excelled in his high-school debate club.

Speaking of half-truths, why do we never speak of half-lies? Interestingly, if you google half-truth, Merriam-Webster will inform you that it is: “a statement that is only partially true; a statement that mingles truth and falsehood with deliberate intent to deceive.” If you google “half-lie,” a deceitful algorithm will divert you to “half-life” yet tell you nothing about how long a lie lives. Being a realist whenever I hear Trump’s minions speak, I view their speeches as full of half-lies and empty of half-truths? I firmly believe that the mingling of truth and falsehood “with deliberate intent to deceive” results in a bastard lie.

And while we’ve got M-W open, let’s look up the definition of spin: “engaging in spin control (as in politics).” This is why I gave up on Ivanhoe: every time I looked up a word I didn’t know I always had to look up more words to understand the definition. Now we have to look up spin control. So frustrating. While I would have given up in my pre-computer, high school days, now I can just click on the phrase and learn: “the act or practice of attempting to manipulate the way an event is interpreted by others.” M-W is being annoyingly coy. Why doesn’t she just come out and say it’s the use of half-truths, half-lies and downright lies to manipulate perceptions? Half-lies are the preferred weapons of great spin doctors such as Mitch McConnell, the Whirling Dervish of the Senate, who never met a bill he didn’t like as long as it gave millions and billions to millionaires and billionaires like him, until he was confronted with a bill that would increase the coronavirus relief package to $2,000 to households earning less than $150,000.

It might seem that I’m picking on poor Donald and his minions, but the truth is I have great sympathy for them. Honest. Well, I sympathize with the Big D, not his minions, and for a great number of reasons, but let’s just list the first few that come to mind: he’s obese and addicted to fast-food burgers; his loyal friend/attorney who said he would take a bullet for him, dodged the bullet and ratted him out; Kimberly Guilfoyle might one day be his daughter-in-law (Did you see her speech at the RNC? Scary); every day is a bad hair day for him (probably why he likes to have his MAGA hats firmly in place). Perhaps my sympathy for poor Donald results from the great empathy he generates in me; I can see aspects of myself in him, sometimes. I’m not obese but I have a food addiction: cognac and dark chocolate. I have no friends, loyal or otherwise, who would take a bullet for me. I often suffer greatly from bad hair days but my bad hair would be even more rebellious were I to don a MAGA hat. I most certainly do not empathize with his Guilfoyle problem. I suspect that Donnie’s high school projection club experience was more rewarding for him than mine was for me. Think: “Crooked Hillary” and “Election Fraud. *” Donald and I have many remarkable similarities and habits, but mostly I empathize with him, mostly I see myself in him and him in me, because we are both liars. It seems to come naturally to both of us.

*Donnie’s Election Fraud projection and his subsequent reaction to his loss are proof of my latest conspiracy theory. The conservative wing of the Republican Party has made liberal use of Election Fraud, principally in the form of voter suppression (previous to the 60’s and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act suppression was the principal practice of the Democrats. Whereas the D’s mostly confined their election fraud to the Jim Crow South, the R’s have improved it and expanded it to many northern states). The new and improved Republican Election Fraud combined with Russian foreign aid aided Donnie in 2016. The fix was in. It is only natural then, for him to think that the fix was in again in 2020 and, projecting, the only way he could lose was if the Democratic Election Fraud was greater than the Republican. This admirably explains his frustration, not only with the Republican EF ineffectiveness, but with his hand-picked judges’ refusal to grant him a fair hearing. Poor Donnie. If it’s any consolation, he has my vote if he runs for President of the Projection Club.

P.S. No sooner had I finished this post than Donnie doubled down on his Election Fraud whoppers and instigated The Charge of the Lightheaded Brigade on the Capitol, ignoring Truth to the right of them and Truth to the left of them. I take back anything nice I might have said about Donnie and his minions. Seeing that the coup failed, said minions are, rat-like, abandoning the sinking ship of state. They do not deserve credit for suddenly encountering their long-lost ethics and spinal columns. They were cowardly enablers during their terms of enlistment, and now they are cowardly rats, still carriers of that dreadful Trump disease. Keep them in quarantine until they test negative. Remember, they are long haulers, and there is no known cure, not injecting Lysol or drinking bleach, but sincere apologies and repentance, along with community service, might alleviate some symptoms.

 

 

I confess that I am an unpatriot. While not a crime, it is, no doubt, a horrifying confession to the über patriots. I was not always in this iniquitous frame of mind. In fact, I had a strict patriotic upbringing. My father had been a drill instructor in the army, and he drilled patriotism into my poor brain with the same zeal he bullied recruits into performing the Manual of Arms. When I was six or seven I wrote an über patriotic poem that I proudly showed my father—I’ve always been a show-off.  All I now remember was the lines: “for might makes right, and this it holds tight,” the “it” being America. There were a few other lines with the same complex meter and rhyme scheme, but they’re lost forever. My father petted me and praised the poem. He was not an educated man—he got his GED in the military—and I don’t know if he praised my poem because he was impressed that at my early age I could write lines that rhymed or because of the sentiment. I began every grade school morning with my right hand over my heart as I recited the Pledge of Allegiance which I readily memorized even though none of the lines rhymed. I swam in a sea of newsreels, TV shows, and movies in which America not only defeated the world’s enemies but offered a lift up to the world’s downtrodden. I memorized the lines on the Statue of Liberty—they at least rhymed. I memorized the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I knew the first ten Amendments to the Constitution better than I knew the Ten Commandments. In grade school history courses I learned to be proud of the American patriots who freed us from the evil British and their insidious tax on tea. I was proud that we, the good guys, always won, always did the right thing. I bought American exceptionalism with the same eagerness and pride I would have bought and showed off a new Corvette which I might have been able to buy had I not wasted my lunch money on scrumptious sandwiches of Velveeta Cheese (Product) on Wondrous Bread. We Americans were the leaders of the free world.

My unpatriotism did not come about in a sudden epiphany, like a light turning on with the flick of a switch—for the über patriots, “a light turning off” is more appropriate. It was a snail’s-pace process for my sluggish brain, difficult to pin down when it began, but I blame it on the 60s. Those were turbulent years for America, years of dramatic changes, years of protest against racism and against the war, most of which I missed. Oh, I saw the turbulence on the nightly news and read about the changes in newspapers, but, I was a patriot who swallowed the line about the war that “if you knew what we know but can’t tell you because it’s secret, you would approve of what we do.” I was unaffected by the changing times until I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the army, kicking and screaming not because of any ethical concerns about military service or the war in Vietnam, but because, like future Vice Presidents and Presidents, I had better things to do, more important things, like getting drunk and trying to get laid, and I was not mature enough to realize that the first ruled out the second. Lacking the resources of Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Trump, and whole armies of other well-connected, well-monied young men, I reported for duty when called—kicking and screaming only in my mind. Still a patriot, I went to Vietnam, a land where the seed of unpatriotism found fertile soil.

I nurtured the evil seed until it became a large, spreading Black Oak, or, for the über gang, a thicket of Poison Oak. I grieved for my loss of patriotism, and I cannot better explain how I allowed this oak to mature than to resort to a template based on the five stages of grief proposed by that renowned psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross.

But first: Mirriam-Webster has this to say about a patriot: “one who loves and supports his or her country.” My issue is with the noun “country.” M-W defines a variety of countries, including: “an indefinite, usually extended expanse of land;” “the land of a person’s birth, residence, or citizenship;” “a political state or nation or its territory;” “the people of a state or district.”

STAGE I: DENIAL As far as the expanse of land where I was born is concerned, I love that country. The famous lyrical poet, W. Guthrie mapped out that expanse: “From California to the New York Island, From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters.” I have lived in the mid Midwest, the Deep South, the upper Midwest, the Atlantic Coast, New England, and California. I’ve seen Mr. Guthrie’s sparkling sands, diamond deserts, and waving wheat fields, but not the rolling dust clouds, although I have seen enough smoke from forest fires. I have seen plenty of Guthrie’s fog, some summers too much. I love this expanse of land.

Sunsets when I’m at an overlook in the Berkeley Hills and look down at the enormous, shimmering San Francisco Bay, watching it unhurriedly turn from gray to golden and back to gray, or when I climb, in cross country skis, to a high Sierra hilltop and look down at beautiful Lake Tahoe and all the surrounding snow-covered peaks, I feel fortunate to be at those places, at those times. But I cannot help but think that it was all more beautiful, less contaminated before we white people came along.

We seem to be homozygous dominant for the hubris gene. We nearly killed San Francisco Bay, even had plans to fill it in to expand our local “expanse of land.” We clear-cut forests in the Sierras. We have heedlessly dotted the land with toxic superfund sites, polluted the water we drink and the air we breathe. We have not been good stewards of this “expanse of land.”

STAGE II: CONFUSION (this is my own category; I can’t think how Kübler-Ross missed this essential category, but then she was born and lived her formative years in a foreign land). When I was on a government-paid vacation overseas, I read about the Chicago riots (not the riots in April ’68 after King was murdered, but those in August after King and Kennedy had been assassinated and during the Democratic National Convention). My hometown newspaper and the Stars and Stripes stated that all the deplorable violence in Chicago was caused by hippies, anarchists, and outside agitators. Slowly reports emerged that claimed the riots were caused by the Chicago police, soldiers, National Guardsmen, and Secret Service who attacked peaceful protesters, the press, and innocent bystanders. An angry Mayor Daley attacked those reactionary historians. What was I to believe? Throughout my paid vacation I read about riots, cities burning, hate, and anger back in the land I longed to return to.

On that vacation we had armaments problems, which I accepted as only natural and learned to mitigate. Then I read that corrupt government inspectors were charged with accepting bribes to look the other way when armaments factories produced defective armaments for us fighting patriots. I saw civilian contractors ripping off Uncle Sam. For six months I camped next to the Michelin Rubber plantation, a safe zone for our enemies. The US had to pay Michelin for every rubber tree destroyed. The war seemed to be more about money than keeping dominoes upright.

STAGE III: ANGER I returned to the world from Vietnam, a lowly decorated combat veteran, not proud of my service, only relieved that it was over.  And angry, angry that my life had been so completely controlled by incompetent officers, leaders of men who were a danger to those men, and angry that so many of those men were bigots. I had seen too much corruption, moral and venal, too much racism. I had counted the days down for a year before I returned to the world I had idealized, and I was angry at what I saw when I returned. I was angry at the same corruption and racism; angry at redneck hardhats who bashed long-haired hippies and protesters; angry at the massacre of students at Kent State by uniformed National Guardsmen; angry with the Dirty Tricks and the enemies list and the smarmy politicians who justified them; angry about support for the coup in Chile, the Dirty War in Argentina, the genocide in Guatemala and the murderous military in El Salvador. I was angry for a long time. I was not angry with the election of an obvious flim-flam man, shocked yes, but not angry. However, I soon became angry at the evil emanating from his administration, the racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and perhaps the apogee of evil: taking children from their parents and locking them in cages in order to terrorize tempest-toss’d masses who dared think about breathing free in our shores, our version of Sophie’s Choice.

STAGE IV: COMPLACENCY (Kübler-Ross carelessly missed another one). I thought things were getting better. Sure, I was angry at Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq. And I was angry when a federal cop beat me up at a demonstration—well, at the time I was mostly in pain; the anger came later. But I couldn’t stay angry forever, and all around me I saw that things were getting better. Maybe I was just getting older and mellower and should have taken off my rose-colored glasses. But when I participated in a demonstration I felt that I was surrounded by the kind of people I could “love and support,” the kind who made this, if not a great country, at least a better country, my kind of people. Sure, there was no shortage of holier-than-thou types and people who were angrier at other demonstrators than at the people and policies we were demonstrating against. Still, I thought things were visibly getting better. I realized that I lived in a bubble in the Bay Area and things were different in other places in this “extended expanse of land.” And I wasn’t always wearing rose-colored glasses. I saw that even in the Bay Bubble we were plagued with problems. But we were working on cures.

Back in the 70’s I had stopped standing for the national anthem at baseball games. Nobody paid attention, perhaps because I’m a white guy, perhaps because I lived in San Francisco. After years of being ignored, I complacently stood during the n.a.

STAGE V: ACCEPTANCE Many an evening I shared cognac and dark chocolate with a friend, an over-psychologist who had a rather elitist view of humankind. He argued that stupidity was rampant in the species, while I argued that it wasn’t a question of stupidity, but of ignorance, lack of education. I argued that nearly all humans were born with the same equipment, giving them the same potential for intelligence.

Along came the Trump phenomenon. I knew that we had racists, Nazis, and fellow travelers, but I thought they were all in hidden enclaves in remote forests or in Congress and had no idea that our “extended expanse” was so lousy with them until Trump made them feel safe enough to come out of the closet. The magnitude of this minority has poked a giant hole in my argument. I am forced to accept my friend’s argument. How else explain all the people donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s farcical and losing battles to overturn the election? Even after Trump’s consigliere says there’s no there there? How else explain the Trumpites’ loyalty throughout four years of lies and scams? I knew there were always people who would jump at the chance to buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a fast-talking flim-flam man, but I had no idea they were so numerous. The great American philosopher, P. Barnum, posited the intellectual hypothesis that a sucker was born every minute. I now believe that his estimate was far too modest. But If the suckers were born with the same number of brain cells as everyone else, why do they refuse to learn? Are their brain cells not properly functional? How can they so readily fall for flim-flammery?

I cannot be a patriot because I cannot love or support “a political state or nation or its territory;” or “the people of a state or district,” when that political state is run by battalions of flag-waving, lapel-pin-wearing, über patriots loved and supported by flag-waving, MAGA-hat wearing suckers who trust that their hats, but never masks, will protect them from a pandemic. I cannot love and support Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys and other childish groups whose unifying characteristic is hate and fear of the other.

I am an unProud Boy. I am opposed to 40% of the people of this country. How can I believe in American exceptionalism when one of our two major political parties, the party of Lincoln, no less, has eagerly allied itself with racists, Nazis, and Uriah Heepish politicians who fear and fawn over Trumpian tweets? If America is exceptional, it’s because it leads all developed nations in bad health outcomes, despite paying the most for health care. America leads in hunger, poverty, violence, and the number of citizens incarcerated. We also currently lead, by far, in the number of cases and deaths from COVID19. Americans are violently opposed to universal public health care, fearing that it is simply evil socialism, yet applaud expensive health insurance which is simply socialism for profit.

Americans are not exceptional, neither better nor worse than other populations, but merely plodding members of what the greatest American philosopher, M. Twain, dubbed “the damned human race,” and I do “love and support” Americans more or less than I “love and support” people from other “expanses of land.” I now accept and am proud of my unpatriotism. How can I be other than an unpatriot?

A few years ago, I was pleased when a pro quarterback for the San Francisco football team took a knee during the n.a., and more than a little angry at the hypocritical, faux anger from Trump and rich, white football club owners, who stoked the anger of MAGA-hat wearing suckers. During the current (and biggest, so far) Black Lives Matter wave, I was pleased to see many pro athletes take a knee. Hypocrites argue that the sports arena is no place for political statements, but isn’t standing with your hand over your heart a political statement? I believe I’ll remain seated during the n.a. the next time I’m at the ballpark.

If you, like me, are prejudiced against racist rants and quickly turn the page or hit delete when you come across one, I ask you to give this racist rant a fair hearing. Delay deleting this post and you might find that I have become discriminating in my prejudices. And you might agree with me.

I confess that I am a racist. The on-line dictionary defines racism thusly: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” That’s me in a nutshell. I am prejudiced against two particular racial groups, both afraid of becoming rapidly marginalized.

Racism in itself is not a crime but certainly a character defect. I do not brag about this or other defects of mine, but I will say that I share this particular defect with a great many humans, perhaps even all humans, and certainly with the soon-to-be-past President of the U.S., while at the same time I do brag that my particular defect is distinct from the President’s.

Racism is a learned behavior—no racism gene has been discovered. Racism is a strong motivator that can Trump self-interest and incite riots and wars. Racism in the form of slavery is a dominant theme in the founding, structure, subsequent history and current events of the U.S. It is responsible for ridiculous anomalies such as our Electoral College that allows a loser to become President, and the U.S. Senate where a state with a population under a million gets the same representation as a state with 39.5 million. Racism in the form of genocide accounts for the large land mass of the U.S.

Throughout my long life, I have seen overwhelming evidence of racism. What we have lived is an essential part of what we are, and for 77 years I have been immersed in racism, some of it unobtrusive, like the atmosphere that surrounds us on a calm day, some of it shocking like a bolt out of the blue. I cannot be other than racist.

I grew up in the south side of St. Louis. Our neighborhood was affectionately called the South Side Dutch, conjuring up the image of the old lady with the white headscarf scrubbing the white marble steps on her stoop (porch) that appeared on cans of Old Dutch Cleanser. As it was an all-white neighborhood, I didn’t notice any racial or ethnic intolerance, except in my family, for many years. There was friction between the Protestants and Catholics, but that was so mild that perhaps it didn’t really exist outside my family. My father’s side was Catholic, and according to my mother, blamed her for not raising my siblings and me as Catholics even though she had signed papers promising to do so. The fault, however, was my father’s. He was prejudiced against the Catholic Church because, as he often claimed, the nuns beat him severely in school—probably with good reason, but maybe that’s my prejudice. 

My father was a man of deep prejudices and used pejorative terms for all nationalities and races, with special passion for black people and Jews. My mother tried to calm him when he went on a racist tirade, usually resulting in increased tirade volume. My mother and her sister must have had their own prejudices, since, as I maintain, racism is universal, but any racial prejudices were not visible to my innocent eyes, and my aunt’s long-time boyfriend was a Jew. As I grew older and became more aware of pejorative terms and phrases, I sometimes felt sorry for the boyfriend when I heard my father or my mother’s brother talk, in front of the boyfriend, about some great deal they got by Jewing someone down. Years later I stopped feeling sorry with the boyfriend when I heard him rant about black people. Victims can also be oppressors.

I must have been about 11 years old when my friend, Leonard Pagano, complained that someone had called him a dago. I was not shocked by that. I knew the term. My father used it often, and a mostly Italian neighborhood in St. Louis was, not affectionately, called Dago Hill. Now it is called simply The Hill and is a popular tourist area. When Len told me, it was as if a light went off in my brain. I realized that racial slings and arrows were hurtful to the targets. 

St. Loo was and still is a racially divided city. Black people lived on the north side and across the river in East St. Louis (I didn’t know the term “ghetto” until I studied WWII history), white people in the south, the west, and the suburbs. Jews congregated in a suburb near Washington U, officially named University City, usually called U City, which my father, not affectionately, called Jew City. There were few Asians or Latinos. My grade school and high school were all white. My mother’s boss in the credit department at Sears was Japanese. My mother liked him and talked about him with respect, but to my father who had served in the military during WWII, he was a Jap. My father didn’t use any offensive terms for German Americans, because they were a majority in our South Side Dutch neighborhood, and my mother’s side was only a generation or two from Germany. Mr. Hirowaki had moved to St. Louis to avoid the internment camps, which I knew nothing about but filed away for future reference. I thought of him when I toured Manzanar. I didn’t know any Native Americans, although my father claimed to be part Cherokee. He had the classic profile and lack of facial hair, but he also had no lack of blarney.

Radio, TV, and Hollywood movies were rich sources for racial prejudice material. I laughed at Amos and Andy on the radio, while most Asians were, naturally, the evil enemies in war movies, be they WWII or Korean. The Chinese, as a race, were not the enemy—we hated the Maoists but loved the Chiang Kai Shekists—but they were good for laughs. I was amused by old Charlie Chan movies on TV in which white actors portrayed comical Chinese characters.  I vividly remember Mickey Rooney playing the Chinese landlord with impossible buck teeth and coke-bottle glasses in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He, as did Charlie and family, spoke with a hokey sing-song accent.

St. Louis was not an important stop on the foreign film circuit, and I was mostly limited to war, cowboy, or Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies. I was impressed when Rock, without Doris, stood up for his Mexican daughter-in-law in Giant, but seldom saw Native American role models. No one wanted to play Tonto when we played cowboys and Indians. I didn’t see a Japanese movie until I was in my thirties and lived in California. I now much prefer the Kurosawa originals to the spaghetti-western rip-offs. 

At 17, I went to the U of MO at Columbia where I, for the first time, mixed with black students. Black students were a distinct minority and most were athletes, but a few who weren’t. Sixty years later I can still picture the black girl I talked to on the steps outside our chem class. I liked her and thought she was attractive, and it occurred to me to ask her out, but I was shy, afraid of rejection, and had no money—boys had to pay in those days—which meant that I didn’t really date.

Football games at the U of MO were big deals with huge crowds that chanted missouRAH and a marching band that played Dixie while some people waved Confederate flags. It was all new to me—I was from the big city and said Missouree and had never seen a confederate flag except in Civil War movies—but because the crowds loved it and cheered, I enjoyed it but refrained, I hope, from cheering. I did not think of the implications, not for a minute.

In my second year, an older, black, gay, grad student lived in a single room across the hall. He seemed to like to me and often wandered into my room which I shared with a friend, white and straight of course, from Kansas City. The grad student—I no longer remember his name; this was 59 years ago—flirted with me, probably to wind me up. I had no experience that I knew of with gay people (subject for another post?). He worked in some state government job and had an apartment in Jeff City which he invited me to several times. He liked my hair—dirty dishwater blonde with some blonder streaks, and occasionally ran his fingers through. I was embarrassed but shy and could only come up with lame excuses for not going to Jeff City with him. When he left our room, my roommate giggled and teased me. I liked the man but I also giggled. And quite possibly the man giggled in the privacy of his own room.

I laid out of school one year and worked in a factory in North St. Loo. No black people worked in the factory but a lot of rural migrants did, the kind who said Missoura. It was a poorly paid job but I felt important when they made me Traffic Manager. I arranged for shipments in and out of the warehouse. One drayage firm hired a black driver. I met him at the warehouse. He seemed nice enough. That same day I got a call from the warehouse manager telling me not to send that driver again, because he was a terrible driver and took too long backing the semi up to the loading platform. I dutifully called the drayage firm, and the dispatcher accused me of racism. I didn’t think I was racist because I liked the man and had nothing against him, but the dispatcher was right. Because I didn’t stand up for the black driver, I was part of the systemic racism in the U.S., and 57 years later I am still ashamed.

I was a big baseball fan, and my best buddy and I often sat in the dollar seats in the center field bleachers at Sportsman’s Park. I knew who Jackie Robinson was and how important he was to baseball, but, I was a slow learner, and didn’t realize that even after the Dodgers moved to L.A. they drew a large black crowd when they came to town. I knew the Cards were late in integrating, but when I began attending games they had four black stars. And a Cuban. Curt Flood, Bill White, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Julian Javier, were all favorites of mine. Late one season when the Cards and the Dodgers were fighting for the pennant, my buddy and I sat in the old wooden center field bleachers, two white boys in a sea of black fans. Late in the game, Flood, the Cards’ speedy center fielder, dashed to the wall and made a spectacular catch of a long drive, practically right in front of us. Everyone in the bleachers rose as one and cheered. The black man next to me and I hugged each other. Flood later became an even bigger hero because of his abolitionist challenge of major league baseball’s reserve clause.

As Latinos were few in St. Loo—we didn’t even have a Mexican restaurant–I wasn’t aware of much prejudice against them. I don’t even remember my father using a pejorative for them. In my 20’s I dated a Mexican American. She told me the family had changed their surname from Cruz to Cross, to fit in better. I was ignorant and slow and didn’t realize what she meant.

When I was 24, Uncle Sam made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—at least my conservative background led me to believe that an old baseball injury was my only honorable way of refusing. For the medical exam 40 or so of us stood, stripped to our shorts around the perimeter of a large cold room. A doctor—well, a man in a white coat—stood in the center of the room and told us to turn around, drop our drawers, bend over and spread our cheeks. When the man in the white coat examined 40 anuses at a 20-foot distance, it occurred to me that my old sports injury might not be much help. I also noticed that a big black man in the room wore tight black boxer shorts while all the rest of us wore baggy white Jockey shorts. It had never occurred to me that there was any other color for men’s underwear.

Because of my advanced age I was flown with several other twentysomethings, including the man with the black boxers, to Fort Bliss, TX, while the 18 year olds went to Fort Leonard Wood, MO. I didn’t notice any racial or ethnic prejudices in basic training, possibly because I was too wrapped up in my own problems, too worried about my immediate future. I became friends with the black-boxers man, Bobby. He was a tight end on the Cardinal’s football team. I shared a room with a white kid, Lonnie, and Bobby shared a room next door with a black kid, Mooney. We did not bunk in the main part of the barracks. I remember that out in the desert, a very tired and thirsty Bobby and I drank out of the same canteen. When Len Pagano and I were kids, we sometimes drank out of the same bottle of soda, wiping it theatrically first to get rid of the cooties. Bobby didn’t give my cooties a second thought, nor I his.

We had two drill sergeants, one white and one black. The white one had a lot of red in his neck and was nasty and sadistic. He liked to pick on the weaker recruits. Color didn’t matter. Once, when we were doing pushups, he stepped on a recruit’s head, slamming it into the cement pavement and causing his forehead to bleed. Another time when he was obviously drunk, he hit a recruit who couldn’t understand his order. The black drill sergeant was exemplary, always looking sharp in ironed fatigues with knife-sharp creases. No dust dared decamp on his spit-shined boots, not even on forced marches in the desert. He did all the exercises with us, never breaking a sweat, his campaign hat never listing out of place. He was as hard on us as the redneck, but never unfair or sadistic. When we graduated, he came into my room and relaxed, shooting the shit with Bobby, Mooney, Lonnie and me. He told us that he was a confirmed lifer and was going for thirty (years). His only complaint about the army was that too many bases were below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Because he was a pro football player, Bobby was immediately made Sergeant and sent to Germany. I was sent to Fort Rucker, Alabama for advanced training. I noticed a lot of prejudice there. There was open animosity between a white guy from Georgia and several black guys who hung out together. The white guy explained to me that he wasn’t a racist, but they were. That was my first up close and personal experience with projection, which I have now seen nearly every day these past four years. I also saw convincing evidence that things were not as peachy as the white Georgian claimed. On leave I went to a run-down gas station across the state line in Georgia. It was hot and I had my uniform on and I wanted a drink of water. The white attendant in greasy overalls listlessly pointed to a ceramic drinking fountain attached to a slowly collapsing shed. The fountain was as filthy as the attendant’s overalls. The filth and a White’s Only Sign hanging somewhat crookedly above the fountain shocked me. I was not completely innocent and knew that whole populations saw similar signs every day, but it was if those signs, that overt bigotry, was from a foreign country, an alien reality. I had never experienced that reality before, and it was a bolt out of the blue. I decided that I was not thirsty enough to drink from a fountain my old buddy Bobby couldn’t drink from. Too many cooties.

King was assassinated while I was at Ft. Rucker.

I nearly drowned in bigotry in Vietnam. The air was thick and oppressive, as was the racism—I could feel its weight—but it was not the racism I expected. All the GIs used a common pejorative for the Vietnamese, even the black GIs. I vowed not to give in, but I confess that one particularly bad night during Tet, I lapsed. I had never been around so many people who were different than the people in my South Side Dutch neighborhood. I became friends with Pete, a Mexican American from Texas, and my best friend my last six months was Larry, a black man from Chicago. Larry often complained about the rednecks in his hooch and spent his off hours in mine. Our First Sergeant, an old southern white guy, younger than I am now, seemed to go out of his way to call the black GIs boy. He did not use the off-limits N word but his thick southern accent transmogrified the word Negro into Nigra. I got along, I like to think, with a highly decorated black sergeant on his second tour. We shot the shit as we stacked buku sandbags after Tropical Storm Bess nearly wiped us off our little hill. When he got caught with hash and was about to lose a stripe, his anger erupted. He accused our CO of racism and tried to kill him with a white phosphorous grenade. Two black GIs ordered the white soldiers to stay away, and they tackled the Sergeant. It had never occurred to me before, but now because of the B. L. M. movement, I think they were afraid some white GI would shoot the Sergeant. We all carried M-16s, locked and loaded.

I made it out alive and moved to Philadelphia where I began my transmogrification into a coastal elite (perhaps the subject of another post). I didn’t know much about the politics of the City of Brotherly Love, but soon after I moved there, Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo led a police raid on the Black Panther Party offices. They took the prisoners outside, stripped them naked and leaned them against a wall in full public view. This was meant to humiliate the Panthers, which it no doubt did, but photos of the event appeared in the local, national, and world press, humiliating many Philadelphians and Americans. It didn’t humiliate enough Philadelphians and Rizzo was soon elected Mayor.

I got a job as a roofer in a company in the suburbs of Philadelphia. My mentor was an old black guy. He had a lot of years as a roofer under his belt, and was a good teacher, but he worked for low pay—higher than mine—for our non-union company. The city was tightly unionized and no blacks were allowed in the roofer’s union.

For the past 30 years or so I have interviewed many hundreds of indigenous Guatemalans. I have been to the refugee camps in Chiapas, Mexico and indigenous towns in Guatemala. Learning about their lives has taught me a great deal about the persecution of black people as well as Native Americans in the United States. I have testified in Immigration Court that the situation for the indigenous people in Guatemalan is similar to that of American blacks in post-Reconstruction southern states. They are ostensibly free, free to work for starvation wages on the plantations where they are abused and cheated by non-indigenous supervisors and owners. Sound familiar? Non-indigenous people can and do rape indigenous women and sometimes indigenous men with impunity. Sound familiar? Some of the stories I have heard have shocked even me. I studied and read about the North American genocide of Native Americans in the 1800’s. I learned about the Guatemalan genocide of the Maya in the 1980’s through interviews with survivors. Even today indigenous Guatemalans are driven from their ancestral lands by brutal tactics. Even today many indigenous children are discouraged or prevented from getting an education or becoming teachers—non-indigenous teachers routinely insult and physically abuse indigenous students, causing many to drop out. The high illiteracy rate is then trumpeted by the racist non-indigenous people as proof that the indigenous people are inferior. Sound familiar?

As an old white guy, I have a deep understanding of the resistance to change. At the same time that I chafe under change, I embrace many of the great changes I see. Black, Latino, and Asian actors are common in the movies and on TV in leading and meaningful roles. A work of art, Moonlight, won the best picture Oscar a few years back. Mixed race couples are common. As an aside: Why don’t geneticists speak out against this purity of the race nonsense? Aren’t species with larger gene pools better adapted to survive? Something to think about during those long pandemic nights?

The changes have become so widespread and common that many people do not notice them, many take them for granted and embrace them, as we have seen in the very large B.L.M. demonstrations. While it is undeniable that “all lives matter”, as even the B.L.M. people would agree, that term has become the rallying cry of the racists, their attempt to turn the tables on the B.L.M. movement.

It is undeniable that racism is still a force to be reckoned with and will not go down without a fight, a fierce, no-holds-barred, punches-below-the-belt fight. It is undeniable that white cops stop people for driving while black, use excessive force against black people, and kill black people. It is undeniable that old white President Trump is racist, surrounds himself with old white enablers, and performs for his gun-toting, white supremacist followers. It is undeniable that many old white Congressmen opposed what President Obama proposed primarily because he is black. It is undeniable that many white politicians scheme to deny black citizens the right to vote. It is undeniable, unless you’re a Supreme Court Injustice, that racism is still systemic in the U.S. The optimist in me thinks that even they might have had their eyes and minds opened a little by the recent surge of cop killings of black people and the Black Lives Matter movement. But then the pessimist in me thinks that poor math skills will prevent the Injustices from extrapolating from excessive force by police to voter suppression. And the cynic in me thinks that some Injustices simply want to keep Red states Red.

I confess that my use of the word undeniable is illogical, knowing that denial is our first line of defense.

My family and friends have all moved out of the old neighborhood and into the all-white suburbs, part of the white flight exodus and partly because that was the American dream. On my rare visits to my hometown I like to go to the old South Side Dutch neighborhood, not for nostalgic excursions down memory lane, but because the old neighborhood has had an attractive makeover. It is now a vibrant area with Mexican/Nicaraguan, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants. The old white-bread Kroger store is now an international food store. Foot traffic is still mainly white, but with a healthy mix of black, brown, and Asian people, and what seems to be a large, out, gay community. I also go to The Hill for good Italian food or to shop at the great delis. Those areas give me hope that my hometown might yet overcome its bigoted past. Those hopes were somewhat dashed at a high school reunion, in the suburbs, of course. At lunch with a group of old friends, all old white men, of course, I blathered enthusiastically about the changes in our old neighborhood. One ex-friend told me that it was so dangerous that he wouldn’t let his wife go there (as if she needed his permission). When I innocently mentioned that suburban people probably said the same things when we lived there, he got defensive and offensive and said that I didn’t live in the area and didn’t know what I was talking about.

I am smugly self-satisfied by the fact that I have not brought out the old anti-semitic trope about some of my best friends, etc., etc. But I will now dust off that old cliché, shake it, and twist it into the shape that fits my prejudices. I confess that I am still a racist. I am prejudiced against at least two racial groups.

I am prejudiced against old, straight, white men, although some of my best friends are old, straight, white men, although I am an OSWM. Walking down the street or in social events, I try to avoid unknown OSWM. When I do meet one, my fight or flight response locks and loads, knowing that if I’m not careful in my conversation I will strike a wall, greater than Trump’s and also not paid for by Mexico, which will keep me up at night thinking of the many useless points I should have fired at that impregnable barrier.

I am also prejudiced against young, straight white men who feel the need to carry automatic weapons in public places as if every city street were a war zone. When I see them on TV I think of Lewis Black’s riff on water—people leave their apartments in Manhattan every morning, carrying a liter of water as if they were going to cross the Mojave Desert. I shudder to think what these gun-toters’ fantasies are like: Probably only different than my childhood fantasies in that I was a child with make-believe weapons and Nazis and fascists were my enemies. And I realized they were fantasies.

I plead guilty to contempt of court, the Supreme Court.

I wasn’t always guilty of this particular crime. In my youth I was properly reverent and law-abiding, and, beginning in grade school when I learned about the three branches of our government, I was taught to look up to the men on the Supreme Court. Somehow it seeped into my leaky brain that people in high places reached those lofty summits on merit, and I believed that those aristocratic old white men (which they invariably were) on the court overflowed with the judicial qualities of wisdom, impartiality, an infallible sense of fundamental fairness, and a desire to do what was right that was not swayed by bellowing public opinion. Justice was blind. Naïve of me, but I was a young, blue-collar kid from a working class neighborhood, in a working-class school and easily corrupted.

Looking back, I see that we lower-class kids took pride in our hometowns, our states, and our leaders, whether they nurtured us or not. I learned that the great city of St. Louis was graced with the presence of the Old Courthouse, where the Supreme Court heard the famous Dred Scott case. I confess that I was childishly proud that my hometown was associated with such an important national landmark and such a famous case. I confess that I didn’t see the building or read about the case until I went away to college

The criminal seed of contempt was planted in a college history course when I learned that Dred Scott lost, remained a slave, and the Chief “Justice” wrote that the Constitution never intended for black people to be citizens. Nothing to be proud of in that contemptible decision.

I was slightly embarrassed for my ignorant pride. How could I not have known the contemptible outcome of the case? Perhaps I was in denial because I didn’t want to hear anything bad about my hometown, or perhaps I was not a good student (two mutually reinforcing probabilities), but somehow the idea that the court ruled in favor of Scott and against slavery had stuck in my starry-eyed mind. Why else would my teachers mention, with what I took to be pride in their voices, that venerable building and historic case?

My life of crime slowly began to take root.

For many years after my disillusionment, I didn’t think much about the Supreme Court one way or another. The Abe Fortas scandal came and went without a strong opinion on my part, partly because I was becoming a conspiracy theorist and suspected that Nixon’s Dirty Tricks gang was involved.

Well into adulthood, I had my first close up and personal experience with a judge—really, a magistrate, the bottom rung on the judgeship ladder. After one of my arrests I was summoned to appear before the magistrate in the same federal building I had blockaded to protest our government’s support for the murderers and rapists in the Guatemalan and Salvadoran military. The proceedings were interesting. When the arresting policeman identified me in court because I was wearing the same colorful wool shirt I had worn on the day of the arrest, the judge told him he had a lot to learn about evidence. However, I confessed my crime and informed the judge, under oath, that, as someone who had lived, worked, and studied in Central America, I had expert knowledge about the situation and was required by law to do what I could to stop our country’s support for the criminals. I cited an arcane law I had stumbled upon in my hurried research. The judge got somewhat flustered and began looking for the cite in one of his law books. When I gave him the full citation he kindly informed me that I was citing British common law, found me guilty, and sentenced me to community service.

Since then, I have testified numerous times on country conditions for indigenous Guatemalans, usually telephonically. The immigration judges (again, magistrates) were usually quite pleasant. I later heard from one respondent’s attorney that after I was off the phone, the judge told the government attorney that they had a problem: it looked like he would have to grant the case because there was no rebuttal to my testimony. He thought granting asylum was a problem. Contemptible.

I have seen a number of immigration judges in action, and one of my prejudices (I have many, and will confess to my bigotry in a later blog) is that female judges are, as a rule, more compassionate. However, one female judge, was highly contemptible. In the case of an indigenous woman from Guatemala the judge found no past persecution despite the fact that soldiers had destroyed the woman’s family and gang-raped her. The Ninth Circuit overturned the decision, writing that they found persecution written on every page of the trial transcript. There are contemptible judges and admirable judges.

After college I enjoyed reading history and learned a great many things about our great country, things not taught in grade school or high school history, or even entry level college history, for fear, I suppose, that they would shock or corrupt impressionable young minds. I learned that our glorious country had a lot of skeletons in its closet, a great many blemishes on its not-so-smooth skin. That’s the trouble with history: if you look too closely you see a great many wrinkles and warts, and even some melanomas. I learned about the often violent, always ugly labor struggles in the U.S. in which the courts nearly always sided with Big Business and against labor. I learned that money talks and like certain political bullies, drowns out dissent. I learned that in 1918, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not ban child labor in interstate commerce. It was a states’ rights issue. Dissenting Justice Holmes reminded the Court that it had upheld a tax levied by Congress on dyed oleomargarine that was so high it effectively prohibited its manufacture. That argument fell on selectively deaf ears.  States’ rights lose when they do battle with the diary lobby, but there was no children’s lobby to defeat the mine owners who saw the advantage of having little people working in their cramped mines, and, as Snow White’s dwarves were employed elsewhere, they settled for poverty-stricken children. FDR’s Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 remedied this truly contemptible ruling. By then the depression era obstructionist “Justices,” perhaps because of public opinion, stopped tossing their sabots in the New Deal machinery.

Reading about the rise of Hitler in Europe, I learned that his ideas about eugenics were imported from the land of the free and home of the brave. In 1927, the admirable child-defender Holmes rode the pseudo-scientific wave created by the eugenicist winds and wrote: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Hard to come up with a more urbane yet contemptible decision, you would think, but the court has done so time and again. Some judges are admirable and contemptible.

In a recent decision of abortion, Injustice Thomas, who quite likely earned his seat through perjury rather than wisdom and a sense of fundamental fairness, confused abortion and birth control with eugenics (eugenicists to a man—and they were nearly all men—vehemently opposed abortion as well as birth control). Is he unable or unwilling to understand the difference between state mandates and personal choice, or is he not above a little dishonest propaganda to achieve what he views as a greater good?

Our contemptible court has a long history of taking the fundamentally unfair side when it comes to race. Striking down a 19^th century Civil Rights Act, upholding the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and upholding segregation until finally, in 1954, unanimously getting it right in Brown v Board of Education.

These decisions, the contemptible and the admirable, often reflected the prevailing attitude of society or at least the most powerful elements of society at the time they were pronounced. This reflection of social attitudes is not necessarily bad, but it does demonstrate a contemptible pretense and hypocrisy in many “Justices” who claim to be impartial arbiters above the fray. Many adopt the attitude and language of impartiality but reach a foregone conclusion that they justify with lengthy arguments written in legalese and backed by selective research in the hopes of obscuring the lack of fundamental fairness. Mr. “Justice” Scalia was a good example. In Gore v. Bush he and the other Republicans “Justices” wanted their candidate to win. To be fair and impartial they stopped the counting of questionable ballots until they could hold a hearing and issue a decision. When they finally held a hearing they permanently halted the counting, stating that it was then too late to meet the deadline for the Safe Harbor requirement, neglecting to mention that they caused the delay or that the Safe Harbor requirement wasn’t actually a requirement.  They became activist judges, they kind that they pretended not to be, the kind they vehemently criticized, and gave the election to their preferred candidate.

Scalia reappeared with his excess verbiage intact in Heller, the Second Amendment case, where he marshalled a great militia of words about the purpose of prefatory (introductory) clauses and operative clauses and laid down a tremendous field of fire to advance the meaning of words such as “militia,” “keep,” “bear,” and “arms,” no doubt impressed with the historical research of his clerks. No doubt out of ammunition, he abandoned “well regulated,” merely stating that it obviously meant discipline and training. He found that authorities in our nation’s capital could not ban handguns and require trigger locks on assembled firearms when not in use, surely, in my experience, requirements that would fall under discipline and training. Long ago, I was obligated to bear arms in a well-regulated militia. I was not issued nor permitted to keep a handgun on my posts in the U.S. I was on occasion issued a rifle that I could not keep, but was allowed to bear that arm only for training purposes with a carefully limited number bullets. Overseas, I was permitted to bear and keep a rifle for a year but was required to keep the safety on, except in certain obvious situations. 

Originalist Scalia deployed his automatic weapons to spew out a crossfire consisting of verbs and nouns and armor-piercing adjectives to pin down a colleague who claimed that an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment might well mean that our well-regulated militia could not be prohibited from owning muskets.

As much as I find many of Scalia’s decisions contemptible, I am entertained by his caustic comments against dissenters. Perhaps I enjoy them because of a favorable comparison: they are much wittier and well thought out than the childish barbs hurled against the great many perceived enemies by the bully currently in the White House pulpit. 

Often, the wisdom and fairness in the rulings of the “Justices” seem more aligned with those of Roy Bean than Solomon.  In Herrera, 1993, the Court effectively ruled that executing an innocent person was not prohibited by the Constitution, if that person had been previously found guilty. New evidence showing innocence need not be considered because of the “disruptive effect on the need for finality in capital cases…” And in a concurring opinion: “…there is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough) for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.” In effect, they said you only get one day in court and then off with your head.

The dissent in Herrera brought up the nagging little matter of the prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” mentioned in the Eighth Amendment. In doing so, the dissent perhaps did not give due weight to the fact that executing an innocent person was not unusual in the United States, where a great many innocent persons, usually people of color, have been executed. Further, the dissent brought up the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against the deprivation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…without due process,” and suggested that due process might require looking at new evidence. Ridiculous.

The Injustices were impatient with these arguments and complained that the dissent “would have the District Court “make a case-by-case determination about the reliability of the newly discovered evidence…” A case-by-case determination? Horrors. I feel certain that Judge Bean would have applauded the decision. After all Judge Bean is reputed to have instructed a jury in a horse-thief case: “You’ve got a greaser and you’ve got a missing horse. Do your duty.”

I am not alone in my contempt. It seems that a great many Senators have such contempt for the court that they approve perjurers to sit on it.  I watched the Anita Hill hearings and my contempt for the old white men in the Senate blossomed. I believed Anita Hill. I also believe that many Senators who voted to seat Thomas believed her or at least worried that she was truthful, otherwise why not hear (and let the public see and hear) the other witnesses who backed Hill up? They wanted to seat Thomas for political reasons and were certain willing to violate standards of fundamental fairness. And to them, sexual harassment of subordinates was just normal male behavior.

I listened the Blasey-Ford hearings and found her completely believable. Again the old white men who controlled the Senate refused to allow testimony that would back her up because the fix was in from the start. They based their decision on the falsehood that it boiled down to he-said-she-said and found them both credible, while refusing to allow testimony from a number of witnesses that would have made it they-said-he-said. Despite the likelihood that Kavanaugh was a sex offender and a perjurer, and despite his rant that it was all a Clinton conspiracy, which should have disqualified him for his obvious lack of judicial of temperament, he was approved. Which goes to show the contempt those old white men in the Senate have for the Supreme Court.

We are all human and make mistakes, but Supreme Court decisions can have terrible consequences, such as an extra 20 years of child labor in the mines and factories. It is farcical to think that those Gilbert and Sullivan figures in their silly black robes—at least they lost the wigs—seated high above the masses (traditions passed from upper class British forebears to our classless class society) can always set aside their personal preferences and prejudices, can and should completely ignore changing social attitudes.

Our makeup, genetic and experiential, has great influence on our thought processes and decisions. In the recent DACA decision Sotomayor was the sole Justice who believed that the Trump administration’s decision to dump DACA was “contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus.” How could any judge or any reasonable person who’d been paying attention not have noted the racism in many of Trump’s statements and actions and then not think that racism was a factor in the decision to get rid of DACA? But even the so-called progressives on the court denied that racism was a factor. Were they simply too afraid to publicly state that they believed Trump was racist? Was Sotomayor the only one alert to the racist reasoning because she is the only Latina on the Court? Or was the reverse true: the others did not see the racist reasoning because they are not Latino? Is it more difficult to recognize racism if your race is not the victim? Or to see the injustice of class if not the victim?

Who we are influences our decisions. The most contemptible Injustices are the loudest in denying this cultural universal. They go to great lengths to maintain the persona of impartial arbiters who read the constitution as if it were a religious text and they were literalists. Well, the earth and the universe are more than just a few thousand years old and living things keep evolving, and there is little proof that the humans who wrote the Constitution did not want it to evolve.

I do admire some justices. I had no contempt for Thurgood Marshall or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They worked all their lives for fundamental fairness for people of all races and genders. Marshall was cynically replaced by a black man who opposed efforts to remediate past racial injustices, such as affirmative action, and Ginsburg by a handmaid (not from the Atwood novel but from the religious sect People of Praise in which all the leaders are men and the followers women). Being a failure at predicting the future—I was confident that U.S. voters would never elect a second-rate actor like Reagan or a third-rate performer like Trump, not realizing that most voters prefer a performer pretending to be a politician to the real thing—I cannot say how Barrett will perform on the court. Optimists have great faith in humanity and hope that she will grow. Contemptimists like me have great faith in the judgment of Trump, McConnell, and Graham and believe that the fix is in and Barrett will please the anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, hard-right conservative crowd. Like her contemptible cohorts, she will be the alchemist who transmutates her personal opinions into glittering legal opinions.

In support of my position, I offer my personal opinion: If Barrett were ethical she would have refused the nomination because of the laughable hypocrisy shown by those who rushed her through the process, but she has made herself complicit because her ambition to wear the robes and sit above humble humanity overruled her ethics. Or worse, her certainty that by accepting the nomination she could divert our ship of state from the sinful course set by the likes of Marshall and Ginsburg.  

Fifty years of criminal contempt. Fifty years of guilt. Never achieving familiarity with the “Justices,” I nevertheless got as close as I wanted to get by reading their decisions, close enough to breed contempt. I blame myself and I blame the victims. If they didn’t want me to get that close, they shouldn’t publish those contemptible decisions that shift the tectonic plates of society to align with their world views. At least the “Justices” prohibit TV cameras in the court. The contemptible old white men in the Senate foolishly allowed TV cameras during the Hill and Blasey-Ford hearings, resulting in a tsunami of contempt that has and will continue to realign the gender and color of that body.  

I am an anti-fascist.

Even worse, the lesson that I was on an evil path did not begin to penetrate my thick skull until I saw the video of another old white man viciously attacking defenseless Buffalo policemen and heard our unimpeachable white male President denounce the pitiless Buffalo criminal as an antifascist and a member of that notorious terrorist organization, Antifa. The lesson was finally driven home when our patient President repeated, for us slow learners, during the Great Debate that Antifa was responsible for all the unrest and violence in America. Worse yet, I must confess that I felt a moment’s hurt that Antifa never asked me to join or even sent me a newsletter. After that brief moment of hurt I roused myself and felt appropriately guilty for my crimes. 

Yes, it’s a tired cliché for criminals to whine about bad childhood influences instead of taking responsibility for their offenses. I freely admit my guilt, and I only bring up my early environment to help others avoid the addiction I failed to kick. I did not even realize that I was a dopa addict until I recently read that we weak humans get a dopamine hit each time we listen to the ravings of bellowing blowhards that support our world views and the louder they rave, the greater the dose.

The unfortunate circumstances of my birth were the evil beginning. I was born in a military hospital outside St. Louis, Missouri in 1943, smack in the middle of WWII. Due to the post-war housing shortage we remained in a barracks for several years after the war. I was bussed to kindergarten near the Parade Grounds where the day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a bugle call. I attended Memorial Day parades in which proud veterans, heroes all, marched and were cheered by emotional crowds. These were gateway drugs whose insidious effects began to warp my innocent mind as I entered the dawn of reasoning.

In my formative years we lived in the city where the hard drug was ubiquitous and easily obtained. Throughout the late 1940s and into the 60s, it was drummed into my foolishly receptive brain that the Nazis and the fascists were the enemy of all humankind. In war comics and on television I inhaled deeply the propaganda that the Nazis and the fascists were more than just the enemy; they were the evil enemy. I allowed myself to be led astray by the seductive tones of what I was told was the quintessential American voice of Walter Cronkite. I mainlined the newsreels, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, in black and white, of the war in North Africa, in Sicily and up the Italian peninsula, the Normandy landings, the Battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of concentration camps.  I huddled in dark theaters and tried to reduce my out-of-control craving for more dopa by ingesting Milk Duds or JuJu Bears that stuck to my teeth and gums the way that the idea that the GI Joes who defeated the evil Nazis and fascists were American heroes stuck to my drug-addled brain. I see now that I was misled by my dopamine addiction when my warped world view was reinforced by what I thought to be a true American Hero, Spencer Tracy, in “Judgement at Nuremberg”, when he presided over the trials of Nazis and condemned them as war criminals. Or John Wayne leading the invasion of Normandy in “The Longest Day.” This saturation bombing had a lasting effect on my still-developing and under-defended brain.

I confess that I still enjoy the high I get from that propagandistic war film “Casablanca.”

I confess that I don’t know when I absorbed the reality that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and all the Nazis were fascists. Previously, in my youthful innocence, I had thought Fascism was a proper name applicable only to Mussolini and his followers who were equally evil but less competent. With time, I learned to make some distinctions. Somewhere in those formative years I learned that not all Germans had been Nazis and not all Germans were evil. Only the Nazis were evil. In high school I got all A’s in courses, which made me susceptible to the misleading mathematical proof: Nazis = Fascists; Nazism = Evil; Therefore: Fascism = Evil. I was too far gone to be saved by the recent lesson that some Nazis were very fine people.

I confess that in college and after, I continued to abuse WWII stories and histories, and I devoured the many popular books about the war, such as Berlin Diary, The War Years, and The Arms of Krupp, to feed my dopamine addiction, but not Mein Kampf.

I confess that in my own deeply unpopular and divisive war I looked back longingly at what everyone said was the deeply popular World War II, a war that united the country. My war was controversial and divisive, many questioning the righteousness of our cause. No one publicly questioned the righteousness of our cause against Nazism and fascism during WWII, once we got into it. Back in my impressionable youth, I had learned that St. Louis hero, Charles Lindberg, had been an outspoken admirer of the Nazis—before the war. I never learned how he felt once the war started. And I confess, I didn’t bother to try to find out.

I confess that I scornfully dismissed Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s efforts to rehabilitate us antifascists when she explained why we had to support fascist regimes around the world. I was too much of a basket-case to even try a dose of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine Methadone. Quite possibly I would have had a different perspective on the situation when federal police savagely beat me when I was peacefully demonstrating against our support of fascist regimes in Central America. Possibly I would have realized that from the police point of view, I was an aggressive and dangerous member of Antifa, even as I lay on the steps of the federal building while they continued to whale away on me with nightsticks.

But no, I was too far gone.    

Looking back, it seems that my whole life I have abused antifascist drugs. They have molded me into the misshapen being I am today.  I do not try to avoid my personal responsibility for this terrible addiction that has crippled me and rendered me unable to walk with Nazis or fascists or those they support. I hope someday to kick the habit.

I am inspired by the knowledge that through the years a lot of old white men like myself, and some even older, even some who fought the Nazis in WWII, have found the strength to get off the terrible antifascist dopamine drug, and they have cleansed their hearts and minds such that they are now able to support Neo-Nazis and fascists and pandering politicians.

I confess that I cannot. Not yet.