#975: Heroism vs. Cowardice: Alexei Navalny vs Vladimir Putin, Joseph Biden vs Donald Trump and Mike Johnson

                           Alexei Navalny (June 4, 1976 — February 16, 2024)

The late Alexei Navalny - who died (murdered, actually) just a few days ago in an icy-cold Russian gulag - and former president Donald Trump, have precisely 2 things in common: first, both will be remembered by history (albeit for totally different reasons) until the end of time and second, neither man will ever be awarded the Nobel Prize. In the first instance, of course, Navalny has earned his eternal niche as a hero among heroes; a world-class political organizer who gave millions upon millions of people hope in a time and a place where human degradation was a - if, indeed, not “the” - operating principle of a brutal autocratic regime. Trump’s place, on the other hand, will always be part of a different archive: one sparsely peopled with history’s most malevolent, narcissistic, self-serving, self-deluded cowards.

(n.b.: It should be noted that since 1974, the Nobel Foundation’s charter disallows prizes, regardless of category, to be awarded posthumously).

Within hours of the announcement that Navalny had died “while taking a walk” around the frozen prison grounds, nearly every leader or person of political influence or importance in virtually every small ”d” democratic country expressed their profound sympathies to the fallen lawyer/activist’s family and followers, and utter outrage and contempt at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who unquestionably had Navalny killed. The one gaping hole in the litany of leaders expressing their thoughts, feelings, and outrage was Donald Trump and the vast, vast majority of Republicans in the  U.S.A., who, either through sheer cowardice or a not-so-well-hidden admiration for the Russian autocrat and his thugs, decided to remain mum.    

There can be no question that Mr. Navalny, Putin’s most strident and best-known nemesis, was murdered. Most of Putin’s victims “fall out” of second-floor windows or die from exotic poisons or nerve agents. (Indeed, less than 24 hours ago, Maksim Kuzmanov, a Russian pilot who defected to the Ukraine, was “shot dead” in Spain.”)  

In addressing Navalny’s death, President Biden said,

Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny's death. What happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. . . What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality.  No one should be fooled — not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world.  Putin does not only target his [the] citizens of other countries, as we’ve seen what’s going on in Ukraine right now, he also inflicts terrible crimes on his own people. 
And as people across Russia and around the world are mourning Navalny today because he was so many things that Putin was not: He was brave.  He was principled.  He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and of — where it applied to everybody.  Navalny believed in that Russia — that Russia.  He knew it was a cause worth fighting for and, obviously, even dying for.  

Biden concluded by saying:  He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.

Shortly after the President made his remarks, democratically-elected leaders from nations around the globe began issuing their own statements; echoing the Biden’s sentiments - both on the positive and the negative side of the equation; praising and eulogizing both Navalny’s patriotic charisma and heroic grit, while excoriating and condemning the homicidal psychopathy of Vladimir Putin . . . the man who murders anyone who gets in his way.

Finally . . . finally, 72 hours after Navalny’s murder, Donald Trump, head of the MAGA Party and putative Republican Party candidate for POTUS, made his first and, so far, only statement . . . in which he never so much as uttered the words “Russia” or “Putin.” Having written and delivered thousands of eulogies in my rabbinic career, I’ve got to tell you: this one was sui generis (iunprecidented): a eulogy in which the eulogizer speaks only about himself and not the deceased.

Here, in its entirety are the 63 words he wrote on Truth Social, of which only 2 are devoted to the deceased:

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.

It makes one wonder what in the Hell Putin has on Trump that the latter won’t even utter the name of the former for fear that . . . what? It’s got to be a doozy. Meanwhile, Trump’s cultists, in keeping with their master’s tortured silence, have kept suit and, likewise, maintained their own craven, pigeon-hearted reticence. The assassination of Navalny comes as the GOP is under the thrall of Putin. Trump and congressional Republicans are doing Putin’s work by refusing to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine. MAGA poster boy Tucker Carlson provided a platform last week for Putin to spread his lies about Russia’s history and territorial claims—including his claim that Ukraine is “not really a separate country.” Even Putin was derisive of Tucker Carlson’s pathetic interview.  Putin Says He Thought Tucker Carlson Would Ask Tougher Questions.

The heroism of Navalny highlights the craven cowardice of both Donald Trump and House Republicans. Speaker Mike Johnson. for his part, Johnson is damaging US foreign policy so he won’t have to provoke the ire of Trump’s strongest, most obnoxious devotee, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Remember, Johnson’s Speakership hangs by a thread that is even thinner and more fragile than the sword swinging about the head of Damocles. In his mind, should he do the right thing and bring the Ukraine/Israel aid bill to the floor, his head will be quickly become separated from the rest of his anatomy.

Against Mike Johnson’s cowardice (emblematic of all congressional Republicans) is the heroism of Alexei Navalny. In anticipation of his own assassination, Navalny left these words to those who remained behind:

“If they decide to kill me, then it means we are incredibly strong.

We need to utilize this power and not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed . . . . We don’t realize how strong we actually are.  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing,, so don’t be inactive.”

My friends and readers: go with the heroes and heroines (like Navalny’s widow Yulia, who has sworn to keep up his mission) and do everything in your power to fight the cowardice of the Trumps, Johnsons, Greenes and Tubervillles of this world . . . and always remember Alexei’s self-written epitaph.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#966 Ken Paxton: Malefactor Of the Year

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

   Trust me: I would be far, far happier writing a piece about Taylor Swift, Time Magazine’s “Woman of the Year,” or Shohei Ohtani, the “second coming of Babe Ruth,” who just signed a 10-year. $700,000,000 contract with my (and my sister Erica’s) Los Angeles Dodgers, then one about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom I am designating the “Malefactor of the Year.” This title, akin to calling him “Paxton the Terrible,” is his lifetime achievement award for last year, this year, and unquestionably next year as well.

   For most Americans not living in the Lone Star State, the 60-year old Texas A.G. Ken Paxton (that’s him on the left) has, until just a a couple of days ago, been as unknown as Rob Bonta, Ashley Moody, Lynn Fitch or Michelle Henry, respectively, A.G.s of California, Florida, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.  Unlike the vast majority of America’s state attorneys general, Paxton has made quite a name for himself for mostly the wrong reasons. As but one  example, on December 8, 2022, Paxton sued the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where certified results showed President-elect Joe Biden the victor over President Donald Trump, alleging a variety of unconstitutional actions in their presidential balloting, arguments that had already been rejected in other courts.  In Texas v. Pennsylvania, Paxton asked the United States Supreme Court to invalidate the states' sixty-two electoral votes. Because the suit was cast as a dispute between states, the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction, although it often declines to hear such suits.  This time, SCOTUS decided to take a look-see; within 3 days, they shot down Paxton’s suit, making him a bit of a legal laughing stock.

Ken Paxton served 5 terms in the Texas Legislature (2003-2013) and 2 years in the Texas State Senate (2013-2015), before declaring his candidacy for A.G. During his years in the legislature he developed a reputation for being a hard-core conservative of the Tea Party stripe, and a full-throated Christian Nationalist, whose views and votes were based on his religious principles. Along with his wife Angela Allen Paxton (who currently serves as the Majority Leader of the Texas Senate), the popular political team helped to found Stonebriar Community Church, a Christian evangelical megachurch, in Frisco, Texas. On January 5 2015, Ken Paxton was sworn in as the 51st Attorney General of Texas, a position to which he was reelected in 2018 and 2022 - in which he beat his Democratic opponent by slightly more than 10 points.

As A.G., Ken Paxton has developed among voters a “you either love him or hate him” attitude. Devoutly, rabidly anti-abortion, he gave his employees a paid vacation day to "celebrate" the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and sought to block rules from the US Health and Human Services Department that would require hospitals to provide abortions to women when the procedure is necessary to save their lives. In 2018 Paxton initiated a lawsuit seeking to have the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) ruled unconstitutional in its entirety. Three years earlier (2015), Paxton created a human trafficking unit within the AG office. In 2019, he convinced Texas lawmakers to more than quadruple the human trafficking unit's annual funding. The year after, the unit did not secure a single human trafficking conviction and only four in 2020.

In 2018, Paxton falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants had committed over 600,000 crimes since 2011 in Texas. PolitiFact said that it had debunked the numbers before, and that the numbers exceeded the state's estimates by more than 400%. In October 2020, seven of Paxton's top aides published a letter to the office's Director of Human Resources, accusing Paxton of improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other crimes, and said they had provided information to law enforcement and asked them to investigate. The Associated Press reported that the allegations involved Paxton illegally using his office to benefit real estate developer Nate Paul, who had donated $25,000 to Paxton's 2018 campaign.

But things were to get even worse for Ken Paxton: The Associated Press also reported that the allegations include the claim that Paxton had an extramarital affair with a woman, and that he had later advocated for that woman to be hired by Paul's company, World Class. Mr. Paul acknowledged employing the woman but denied that he had done so at Paxton's behest. Then, four of the former members of the Texas AG's Office sued the Office of the Attorney General, alleging that Paxton had fired them for reporting misconduct to law enforcement, a form of illegal retaliation under the state's Whistleblower Act. Paxton countersued, claiming that they hadn’t pursued their case in a lawful manner; the Texas Supreme Court and a court of appeals. both agreed that the 4 employees had done things correctly and overturned Paxton’s claim. He was fined $3.3 million and then tried to get the state to use taxpayer funds to pay the settlement; this too was overturned.

In spring 2023, the Texas House passed a bill of impeachment against Paxton, citing 16 separate charges. It was also decided that Paxton’s wife, the Texas Senate Majority Leader, had to recuse herself from the trial. After much back and forth between Paxton his attorneys, the State of Texas and the Texas Bar, Ken Paxton was acquitted on all 16 impeachment charges by the senate on September 23, 2023.

But the worst of Ken Paxton was yet to hit the surface . . . that which would make him a truly reviled person, both in the United States and much of the so-called “civilized world.”

But before we get to the latest and - in my opinion - the worst in the man I choose to name the “Malefactor of the Year,” a few words about the two people I’d greatly prefer to be writing about: singer/songwriter/billionaire philanthropist Taylor Swift and Shohei Ohtani who, barring serious injury, will likely be named the greatest (if not the richest) baseball player of all time.

To be perfectly honest, until I read about Taylor Swift being named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” she was just the name of a celebrity, nothing more, nothing less. (n.b. From its inception in 1927 until 1999, the award which Ms. Talyor wonwas called Time’s Man of the Year.” During these 72 years, only 3 women achieved this status: Wallace Simpson [1936], Queen Elizabeth II [1952] and Corazon Aquino [1986]. Since 1999 Melinda Gates [2005], Angela Merkel [2015] Greta Thunberg [2019] and Kamala Harris [jointly with Joe Biden in 2020] have had the honor bestowed upon them.. And now, in 2023, Taylor Swift.)

I have never knowingly heard a Taylor Swift song, and certainly cannot name even one. However, in performing research for this piece, I have discovered that she is all but universally considered to be a top-flight singer and songwriter, with 10 studio albums, 10 Grammys and more than 50 million album sales as of 2019 and 78 billion streams as of 2021. She is also the highest-grossing female touring act of all time. She is a world-class philanthropist who has made literally tens-of-dozens of donations of more than $1 million to various disaster relief projects and has paid for medical care for many of her concert-going fans. Swift is a self-made billionaire who has invested her earnings wisely in both people and property (which includes the Samuel Goldwyn estate at 1200 Laurel Lane in Beverly Hills). And oh yes, as of earlier this year, she is dating Kansas City Chiefs all-pro wide receiver Travis Kelce.

Since the day I first heard that the Dodgers were going to be moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles (it must have been late 1957), I have, as we say in L.A., “been bleeding Dodger Blue.” And now, with the signing of two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani, we are deeper than royal. Imagine that: he’s going to be making $700 million over the next 10 years. Can any athlete be worth so much money just for playing a game? I mean, if he merely has an average (at least for him) season in 2024, he will be earning $522,388.00 per game, which is also $165,485.00 per at bat or, if he is merely pitching, $727,266.00 per inning. And to think, when Babe Ruth was at the height of his glory (1927-28), he only made $70,000.00, which is $1,237,756.90 in 2023 dollars (minus, of course, sales of merchandise, advertising, etc.). When asked if he realized that he, “The Sultan of Swat,” made more money in 1927 than President Coolidge Calvin Coolidge, he supposedly answered, “Well, I had a better season than he did.” (Actually, in 1927, President Coolidge was paid $75,000.00)

In answer to the question can any athlete be worth so much money just for playing a game?” the answer is “Yes!” The Dodgers are owned by Guggenheim Partners, whose board includes Mark Walter (the team’s CEO), Magic Johnson, Stan Kasten, and Tennis legend Billie Jean King. They didn’t get to be that rich by throwing money away. Obviously, they went over the figures and determined that Ohtani was worth $700 million to them . . . in increased ticket sales, cable television and network rates and assorted paraphernalia. For that, they land, as mentioned above, a young (29 years old this past July 5th)man who just may turn out to be the greatest player of all time. And . . . he’s handsome, very well-spoken (in Japanese and increasingly, English), and is a flawless gentleman. And by the way, his nickname is “Shotime” - how perfect for Hollywood.

We wind up this week’s piece by briefly discussing that which Texas A.G. Ken Paxton - as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbot and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick will long be remembered for standing in the way of Kate Cox, a 31-year-old native of Dallas to undergo an abortion. Cox had petitioned a state court this month for an exemption from the state’s strict laws to receive an abortion once it was determined that her 20-week-old fetus was diagnosed with full trisomy 18 (Edwards Syndrome). Life expectancy for children diagnosed with Edwards syndrome is short due to several life-threatening complications of the condition. Children who survive past their first year may face severe intellectual challenges. It can also, in some cases, prove fatal to the mother. Mrs. Cox’s doctors argued that carrying the fetus to term and giving birth via Caesarian section could be dangerous, possibly resulting in her losing the ability to have children in the future.

Texas District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble gave Cox a temporary restraining order this past Thursday, giving her, husband and her doctor immunity from prosecution to perform an abortion procedure. For a few moments, it looked like Mrs. Cox and her “team” could breathe a sigh of relief. But within less than an hour, Ken Paxton appealed to the Texas State Supreme Court, asking the court to halt the lower court’s ruling. In his appeal, Mr. Paxton urged the court to act “with all due speed,” and noted that and wrote that if an abortion was allowed, “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result.” The court did act “with all due speed”: the very next day, the Texas Supremes said that, “without regard to the merits” of the arguments on either side, it had issued an administrative stay in the case, to give itself more time to issue a final ruling.

P:axton’s appeal to the Texas Supreme Court in Ms. Cox’s case followed his letter to three Houston hospitals where he warned that Dr. Karsan (Ms. Cox’s personal OB-GYN) is authorized to admit patients and could perform the abortion, was hereby warned that the judge’s order would not shield them from eventual prosecution or civil lawsuits. Lawyers for Dr. Karsan have said in legal filings that she believes her patient’s abortion is medically necessary to preserve her health and future fertility.

But regardless of what a board-certified OB-GYN says, Ken Paxton feels he knows better. As an ultra-conservative Republican, he demands that the government stay the hell out of people’s lives . . . except in any and all matters of sex, marriage, giving birth and what they read. And despite the fact that according to Texas law, there are exceptions which have been carved out in anti-abolition legislation when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest . . . or when the life of either the fetus or the mother is in jeopardy. According to “Dr.” Paxton, he does not deem carrying a 22-week-old fetus who has been diagnosed by real physicians with Edwards Syndrome is nothing to worry about. “Don’t worry about whether or not giving birth will kill you or make you infertile; don’t give a moment’s thought that you are going to give birth to an infant that will likely be blind, deaf and dumb, incapable of movement, experiencing excruciating pain and likely dying within anywhere between sixth months and a year. If and when it dies, that is just G-d’s will.”

What the Malefactor Of the Year is hoping for is that by the time the state Supreme Court finally hands down its ruling (whatever it may be), Kate Cox’s pregnancy will have proceeded well beyond the legal time limit for any abortion to take place.

In any event, Ken Paxton will have earned even more street cred with his Christian Nationalist crowd, thus allowing him to continue living a godly - if infuriatingly - immoral - life.

Copyright©2023 Kurt Franklin Stone

PLEASE NOTE THAT JUST BEFORE POSTING THIS, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO REPORTED THAT KATE COX AND HER HUSBAND HAD LEFT TEXAS TO SEEK FURTHER MEDICAL ATTENTION OUTSIDE OF TEXAS. PRECISELY WHERE IS NOT YET KNOWN. KFS

#963: Bamboozlement: A Pernicious Threat to Democracy

        Jonathan Swift (1667-17450

As an informal noun, “bamboozle” means, roughly, “a state of deception or mystification.” As a verb, it means “to deceive”, “delude,” “defraud,” or “to hoodwink.” Despite being a fun word to say, no one really knows anything definitive about its etymology. Even in good old Latin, the word bamboozle is just plain bamboozle. The breathtakingly brilliant Anglo-Irish satiric clergyman Jonathan Swift (best-known for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal wrote a 1710 essay called "The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue," In this brief piece, he described the word "bamboozle" as one of the words that were in his opinion, "corroding, if not destroying, the English language" In other words, although he had a sense for what it meant, he hadn’t the slightest idea of its linguistic origin. Swift was wrong in his assertion that within a decade or two, the term would completely disappear from human speech.  I mean, here we are, 313 years later, and it is still in use

Anyone who has ever read Twain’s Tom Sawyer will remember the scene in which young Tom bamboozled his friends into whitewashing his Aunt Polly’s fence.  Who isn’t aware of history’s greatest bamboozlers, Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff?  In order for bamboozlers to succeed, there must be a steady supply of cretins, naifs, and babes-in-the-woods ready and willing to believe that there is reality in “something for nothing.”

Of late, bamboozlement has become a singularly important ingredient in partisan politics.  Three-quarter truths and outright lies have increasingly become the fuel upon which authoritarian politics thrives.  Don’t get me wrong: whoppers and semi-lies have played an important  part in campaigns and elections almost since the beginning of our history. One of the filthiest was  the presidential election of 1884, when Democrats freely used a doozy of a nickname against the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine - former Representative, Senator and twice Secretary of State under two Presidents: Blaine, Blaine: The Continental liar from the State of Maine.  Blaine wound up losing by a mere 1,047 votes to New York Governor Grover Cleveland . . . up until today, the only POTUS to win two non-consecutive terms. 

One of the first people to recognize just how dangerous bamboozlement was to democracy was the late polymath (astronomer, exobiologist, novelist and science popularizer) Carl Sagan (1934-1996) who, in one of his last books, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a  Candle In the Dark” wrote:

                      Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

   “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Now mind you, Dr. Sagan wrote this more than a quarter-century ago. I guess one could add to his already bulging c.v.: “Prophet and Seer.”  It’s not so much that he looked into a crystal ball and foresaw the malevolence of a Donald Trump, the almost geometric growth of bamboozlement in the public square, and the subsequent dumbing-down of a lost, and highly gullible citizenry.  Rather, he was extrapolating just how far a baleful narcissist in the digital era, armed with the ability to reach the masses, could complicate and affect the ability of the hoi polloi to ferret out fact from fiction and science from witchcraft. For as sure as most of us are that G-d made little green apples, this is precisely what Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes have done. I mean, who in their right mind would ever have believed that bleach or the anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine were certain cures for COVID-19, or that the biggest enemies of the nation were “Communist, Fascist, LGBT” and immigrants minorities? And what’s even worse - far, far worse - is that the bamboozlement is so deep and pervasive that anyone attempting to speak “truth to power” is ignored, derided or threatened with future retaliation.

Who would ever have imagined a presidential candidate proclaiming to his supporters not “I am you leader,” or “I am your champion,” but “I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION!”? Speaking before a Veteran’s Day gathering in New Haven just the other day, the FPOTUS said that in his next administration “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country . . . . the real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day.”

The former president and First Bamboozler’s chilling rhetoric — and use of “vermin” in particular — set off fresh comparisons between him and the fascist dictators of the 1940s in some media outlets and even from President Biden’s camp. “Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions, campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

It’s true that Trump has adopted the rhetorical strategies of some of the most reviled dictators. He dehumanizes his political enemies, has discredited the legal, political and electoral system, has demonized the press and has targeted vulnerable members of society, minorities and immigrants, as scapegoats. Like other strongmen, he presents himself as a persecuted savior of a disenfranchised sector of society that sees its traditional values and mores as under attack.

(Do keep in mind that the Bamboozle - on right-wing blogs and networks as well as slickly-produced TV ads - has performed such a total “mind meld” on a vast segment of the public, that 69 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believe that Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate, a slight increase from 63 percent earlier this year and through last fall.

We’ve all run into the bamboozled at one time or another. They are the ones who proclaim flat-out lies that seem to be from a single script:

• “President Trump is victim to the biggest political witch hunt in American history.”

• “Under Trump, America was more prosperous, safer and well-respected in the world than it is today under Biden.”

• “Donald Trump had his 2020 victory stolen from him.”

• “Joe Biden is senile and has accomplished nothing; he is the most corrupt president in all our history.”

• “Donald Trump did more for Israel than any other president.”

It’s terribly difficult to disabuse folks like these from believing all the lies they’ve had pumped into their systems. One suggestion I have is making sure you contribute to candidates who don’t engage in “victim talk,” who do their best to bring people together and promote democracy.  Also, keep a couple of links at hand to check out anything you believe is a lie: among my particular favorites are Snopes. Fact Checker, the Washington Post, Factcheck.org and Politifact.  These are all sound, unbiased sites that practice real journalism.

 Carl Sagan was right: “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Copyright©2023 Kurt Franklin Stone

#938: Four Questions #🟦 (Copy)

It’s hard for the approximately fifteen to twenty percent of us - like readers of this blog - who are deeply involved in following “the chess game of politics” to believe - let alone grok - that an astounding 80%-85% of the American public follow it anywhere between “casually and not at all.” The New York Times’ editorial board refers to this as the “attention divide.” According to an astute - though deeply disturbing - editorial published back in October of 2022: “Most Americans view politics as two camps bickering endlessly and fruitlessly over unimportant issues.” If this is true - and I for one have no reason to gainsay their finding - is it any wonder that people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are being taken seriously as presidential contenders; that more and more state legislatures have passed laws permitting the banning of books in public schools; that at least 14 supermajority Republican state legislatures have passed laws banning drag shows; and that despite more than 60% of those polled supporting a woman’s right to choose, more than 2 dozen state legislatures have already enacted laws banning the medical procedure?.

The precipice at which the American political process - and indeed, Democracy itself - currently lurches, has as much to do with the mega-billions now flooding the undertaking as the quality of its practitioners (at least on one side of the aisle), and the dumbing-down of its content. It’s not that the issues are too complex for the average citizen to follow; it’s more that the average citizen doesn’t feel they have any skin in the game. They don’t know what or whom to believe, and haven’t the slightest idea of what questions to ask of those soliciting their vote. For the 80%-85% who, in the words of the Times’ editorial, follow politics “casually, if not at all,” they can’t tell you why they support candidate X over candidate Y, except for the fact that the former is not the latter. If anyone contemplating suggesting that these folks are, in reality, supporting people who really don’t care a whit about their plight or needs, expect a concussion; this is the typical result of banging one’s head against a brick wall.

I for one long for the day when citizen voters can state positive reasons for supporting candidate X over candidate Y . . . instead of hearing “Well, at least he/she isn’t the other guy/gal.” Perhaps part of the problem is that neither citizens nor members of the professional press ever ask the right questions in such a way as to elicit a response . . . or make the pol at the mike come off as a first-class know-nothing.

Here are 4 questions that should be asked of every candidate at every press gathering or conference:

1. “According to almost every every recent poll - including - Fox News - a clear majority of the American public favors enacting a ban on assault weapons. While 45 percent of those surveyed said they would encourage more citizens to carry guns to defend against attackers, 61 percent said they favored banning assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons. Where do you stand on this issue, and how would you vote on any form of sensible laws concerning lethal weapons in the hands of citizens? And by the way, how much money did you receive from the National Rifle Association in the last election cycle?”

2. “A recent survey found that nearly 60% of registered voters prefer political candidates who will take action on climate change — including more than a quarter of Republicans. Do you see this as a major issue affecting the future of the planet? And if not, why not? How much money did you receive from the oil and gas industry in the last election cycle?

3. Many political analysts have suggested that the Democrats’ surprisingly strong performance in the 2022 midterm elections — which were held about five months after the Supreme Court’s decision which overturned Roe V Wade— stemmed partly from public dissatisfaction with the justices’ ruling. And there’s evidence that Democratic voters in particular were energized to vote because of the change in abortion policy. In recent polling nearly three quarters of adults (74%) and 79% of reproductive age women say that obtaining an abortion should be a personal choice rather than regulated by law. Where do you stand on the issue of a woman’s right to choose? Will you vote to fine and/or imprison women who receive abortions and/or their physicians who perform them? At what age will you vote to cut off abortions?

4. A recent USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word “woke” as a positive attribute, not a negative one. And yet, Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on "woke.” According to this poll, a 56%-39%, majority, say 'woke' means being aware of social injustice, not being overly politically correct. Republican politicians and voters alike have differing definitions of wokeism — and some struggle to define it at all. The rallying cry has recently been used to denounce everything from climate change policies and socially responsible investing to transgender rights, critical race theory, which books must be removed from library shelves in public schools, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Please explain your definition of “woke,” and justify how legislating so many aspects of people’s lives, education, relationships and individual choices is consistent with the classical Republican agenda of smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.

At this point in time, it is more than evident that the gap between Democrats and Republicans is of Grand Canyon proportions. How so? Well, agree or disagree with them, Democrats have a pretty obvious ethical and legislative vision upon which to run. They have pretty clear-cut strategy based on both a a set of ethical principles - such as the moral trinity of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and the furtherance of Democratic values - and concrete political goals such as saving planet Earth for future generations, keeping assault weapons out of the hands of everyone save members of the military, supporting our allies and changing tax laws so that the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay what used to be called “their fair share.” These are all things which can be given expression without having to resort to fear and name-calling. Ask the four questions - or five or six or more - and then demand answers.

On the other side of the political gap, it seems there are no answers to the basic questions - just rhetoric and buzz-terms such as “Socialist,” “Communist,” “Woke,” “anti-religion,” and a laundry list of villains like “George Soros,” “Adam Schiff,” “LGBTQIA+” and pejorative nicknames (“Brandon,” “Sleepy Joe,” and “Pocahontas.”(  Of course, to those of us who love the history of political nicknames, these show little wit and even less tact. Take for example a couple of the best: “Martin Van Ruin” (after America’s 8th president, Martin Van Buren . . . given that nickname after presiding over the “Panic of 1837”); “Rutherfraud” (America’s 19th chief executive, Rutherford B. Hayes who, despite losing the popular vote in the election of 1876 to Samuel Tilden, still managed to win the Electoral College); and “Slick Willie” (obviously Bill Clinton).

I urge all lovers of Democracy and fearers of Führers - whether journalists or just plain citizens - to dig in and ask the four questions at every press conference, town-hall meeting and Passover seder, and not give up until you hear some answers.  And if the questions are avoided or turned into attacks on the other side, remember to ask the best, most obvious follow-up question of all: “Why won’t you answer the question he/she just asked you?”

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone    #🟦

Isn't Life Wonderful?

                A Scene From Griffith’s 1924 Film “isn’t Life Wonderful?” 

In early 1924, D.W. Griffith, the greatest of all silent film directors, led a cast and crew to Berlin, where they made what is now considered one of the greatest of all films: the ironically titled Isn’t Life Wonderful?  The film, based on a short story by British soldier/writer Geoffrey Moss, starred Neil Hamilton (who 40+ years later would play police commissioner Gordon on Batman) and Griffith’s protégé, the long-forgotten Carol Dempster.  Isn’t Life Wonderful? takes place in real-time: the post “Great War” ‘20s, when hundreds of thousands of refugees (such as the film’s main characters, “Inga” and “Paul” flocked to Germany in search of food and shelter.  Historically, this was the time when the Weimar Republic was beset by hyperinflation, caused almost entirely by Germany’s staggering ($33.3 billion) debt it owed the victorious Americans, Brits and French.  The inflation that held the Republic in a strangle hold for several years was unlike anything ever seen before . . . or since.  As an example, a loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 Marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks by late 1923; by November 1923, one US dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 (that’s a mind-bending  four trillion, two hundred ten billion, five hundred million) German Marks.  Paper money reached such a level that Weimar issued 50 trillion Mark paper. This is the Germany that Griffith chose to shoot his picture in.

And we kvetch and call for a radical change in government when the inflation rate stands at 6.04% (as it did yesterday)?

Griffith, ever a master at telescoping dire reality into  a few feet of celluloid, captures this monstrous hyperinflation in the scene pictured above.  In long shot, we see dozens of families pushing wheelbarrows laden with paper money to a bakery where there is already a long, long line.  Then, camera pulling up closer and closer, we see the baker emerge from his place of business every 30 seconds, wiping off the chalk board that bears the price of a single loaf of bread.  The figure gets larger and larger with each rewrite, as more and more starving families exit the line and go back to God knows where.  This is the brutality and apocalyptical doom which led the common folk to demand to know precisely who was to blame, and the followers of the soon-to-be Führer only too happy to provide the answer: the Jews.  From there, the slide to gruesome dictatorship was all but guaranteed.

Democracy is having a tough time all over the planet; from the world’s oldest (USA) to its largest (India) its newest and most raucous (Israel) to its least comprehensible (France), the forces of intolerance, bigotry and self-regarding defiance for the rule of law are making insomniacs of the masses.  “How is it,” so many of us ask, “that minority political factions are increasingly capable of turning their warped version of reality into the law of the land?  When was the last time democracy was attacked by so many bellicose bullies and would-be dictators?

We are all, of course, familiar with the scene here in the United States, the oldest of all democracies.  Day in, day out, the former president, the MAGA and Clown-Car-Caucus, are stirring the pot and shifting attention to how much freedom their followers at the hands of “Woke” - the new way of saying “Commie Bastard.” They spend their time convincing them that they are losing their freedom to choose what their children should read, learn, see or hear; their ability to carry automatic weapons without registration . . . let alone education.  And on and on.  We are daily witness to the diabolical commands of the former Commander-in-Chief that if he is indicted in any of a number of state and/or federal cases, his followers must "protest, protest, protest” and further warning that should this happen, the American public should “be ready for  potential death and destruction.”  Say what you will about our former POTUS; he knows his supporters well.

                                                   Rahul Gandhi

In India, the world’s largest democracy, P.M. Narendra Modi has summarily disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi (the leader of the party opposing the current P.M.) from serving in that country’s Parliament,  after a court found him guilty of defamation over his remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surname.  Now mind you, Mr., Gandhi isn’t just some garden-variety member of Indian society; his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was India’s first Prime Minister; his father Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991) who served as India’s 6th P.M., was assassinated by a member of the Tamil Tigers, a radical Sri Lankan separatist group,  in 1991. In a sense, to be a Nehru/Gandhi in India, is the equivalent of being a Roosevelt or Kennedy in America.  Rahul Gandhi, who has served 19 years in the Indian legislature, was removed after he was found guilty of defaming Modi’s surname in a 2019 case filed by a politician in the prime minister’s party. Gandhi was convicted on the defamation charge this week and sentenced by a court in Modi’s home state to two years imprisonment, which, under Indian law, allowed the parliamentary speaker to suspend him from politics.  This is an unprecedented move; one which potentially fires an arrow into the heart of India’s democratic body politic.  Without question, this is an earth shattering event.  One simply does not disqualify a member of the Indian Parliament (especially one with Gandhi’s familial roots) simply because he attacks the P.M.  It is an example of anti-freedom that is all but unsurpassed in that country’s history.  Needless to say, many people in India are up in arms and accusing P.M. Modi and his judiciary of engaging in anti-democratic actions.

In France, protests involving upwards of 1.3 million people (out of a population of about 2.2 million) have become a fixture of Parisian nightlife after the French government rammed through a pension bill last week raising the retirement age to 64, from 62, without a vote in the lower house of Parliament.  The fact that President Macron did this without a parliamentary vote is highly unusual, and highly unlike how things are normally done in France.  The wild protests are part of a larger trend that has seen previously peaceful demonstrations growing increasingly menacing as the government refuses to back down on the pension overhaul. This past Thursday, nearly 1,000 fires were lit by protesters, about 440 police officers and firefighters were injured, and about the same number of demonstrators were arrested throughout France, according to the French interior minister. Those huge protests have shifted in character over the past week. They have become angrier and, in some cities, more violent — especially after nightfall.

                           French President Emmanuel Macron

These protests have been less about the fury felt over the raising of the retirement age to 64 from 62, and more about Mr. Macron and the way he rammed the law through Parliament without a full vote.  Finally, they have broadened into something approaching a constitutional crisis.  As a result of all this, the postponement of a state visit to France by King Charles III  became almost inevitable; the optics of President Emmanuel Macron dining with the British monarch at the Château de Versailles as Paris burned were not just bad; they would have looked like a brazen provocation to the blue-collar workers leading a wave of demonstrations and strikes across the country.  One must remember that the country’s far right, in the person of parliamentarian Marine LePen’s National Rally, which consistently blames France’s educational, social and economic problems on Macon’s immigration policies and left-wing predilections.  Sound familiar?

Then there is the Middle East’s sole Democracy, Israel, which has seen tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of people taking to the streets  protesting Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s changes to the Israeli Judicial system . . . all seemingly for the sole purpose of keeping him free of legal liabilities so long as he holds office.  For the past weeks, Prime Minister Netanyahu - sounding more and more like former President Donald Trump than David Ben Gurion or even Ariel Sharon - has defied critics of his plan to weaken Israel’s highest court. 

Earlier today (March 26), An Israeli good governance group asked the country’s Supreme Court to punish Netanyahu for allegedly violating a conflict of interest agreement meant to prevent him from dealing with the country’s judiciary while he is on trial for corruption. The request by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel (התנועה לאיכות השלטון בישראל) intensifies a brewing showdown between Netanyahu’s government and the judiciary, which it is trying to overhaul in a contentious plan that has sparked widespread opposition.

                             Israeli P.M. Bibi Netanyahu

The Movement leaders have demanded that the court force Netanyahu to obey the law and sanction him either with a fine or prison time for not doing so. It’s repeated refrain is “He is not above the law” (הוא לא מעל החוק). The fast-paced legal and political developments have catapulted Israel into uncharted territory and toward a burgeoning constitutional crisis. After the last election, Netanyahu put together a coalition larded with far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties in order to maintain power . . . something which has many Israelis both angry and on edge. It has potentially buried a dagger into the heart of Israeli democracy. For the first time in the State of Israel’s nearly 75 year history, the words
”anarchy” (אנרכיה) and “dictatorship” (רודנות) are being heard.

As I’m editing this blog just prior to recording, word has gone out over the Internet that Bibi has abruptly fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for challenging his judicial overhaul plan. Gallant, a former senior general, had called for a pause in the controversial legislation until after next month’s Independence Day holidays, citing the turmoil in the ranks of the military. This is big stuff; Bibi’s government is pushing for a Knesset (parliament) vote this week on a bill that would give his governing coalition the final say over all judicial appointments. It also seeks to grant the Knesset the authority to override Supreme Court decisions by a simple majority and give the coalition the final say over all judicial appointments. Can you say “constitutional crisis?” (משבר חוקתי).  

Bibi and his allies say their plan will restore a balance between the judicial and executive branches and  “rein in” what they see as an interventionist court with liberal sympathies.  It sounds to me like they are taking  a page out of the MAGA/Clown-Car-Caucus  playbook

These are indeed perilous and most jarring times. Those who were once considered part of the extreme right are now considered the newly emerging center. Where once experience, education, good judgement, diplomacy, and civility were keys to successful leadership, brutishness, extreme commonality, narcissism, the use of fear and a “what’s in it for me” attitude have become central to attracting followers and acolytes . . . people who will follow come hell or high water.

Citizens in India and France, Israel and the U.S.A., have, of late, come to a breaking point; they are fed up with so-called leaders who refuse to listen to their voices, heed their majority wishes or act like adults. They see in these “leaders” men and women whose main concern is feeding their followers a daily diet of mis- and disinformation, and setting up straw dogs whom the public can both fear and hate. In this way, they believe they can keep their followers’ votes and their backers’ dollars. In so many countries, the concept of e pluribus unum (Latin for “out of many, one”) to Après moi, le déluge (French for “after me, the deluge” - King Louis XV’s bon mot which stands for leaving a place or job and predicting disaster or chaos after their departure). What a way to live life!

Much of what made Inga and Paul so desperate in Isn’t Life Wonderful? was that their reality had been turned upside down. Where once, despite their poverty, they led lives worth living, now they had to subsist on horse turnips or, if lucky, a single potato per day. But unlike many of we moderns, they refused to spend their days and nights trying figure out who or what was to blame for the vast changes their lives had undergone. Somehow, they understood that life’s complexities could not be overcome or fixed through vapid simplicity. Despite everything, the came to realize by the film’s end, that they had one another to love, to share with and cheer on . . . the basic ingredients which helped them conclude that indeed, Life is Wonderful.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

Sorry to Say, But Karl Marx Knew What He Was Talking About

Without question, Madame’s first cousin, Mercedes (Mitzi) Debardas Dworin (1922-2016) was my favorite member of the Hyman/Kagan/Chicago side of the family. For not only did Mitzi throw the party at which my mother and father first met in Beverly Hills more than 80 years ago; she was a literate, thorough-going political animal who had no fear calling a spade a spade or a virulent anti-Communist a fascist troll. (She was also the only one in the family who pronounced my name in the European fashion . . . “Kourt.” Up until nearly the end of her life, she was tweaking the political right; in 2014 she responded to an article on former Texas Governor (and then Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry on her Facebook page, writing: “Not even his new-fangled glasses can mask the fact that Gov. Perry is dumber than a bag of hair!”

For quite a few years, Mitzi would host a smallish December luncheon in her home at 313 N. Maple Drive for the surviving members of the Hollywood Blacklist.  As one can well understand, with each passing year, the number of luncheon guests dwindled until, by 2011, the sole survivors who were able to attend, were screenwriter Norma Barzman (who, so far as I know will be 104 this coming September 4), and Norman Corwin, "The Grand Master Of American Audio Theatre," and screenwriter for Kirk Douglas’ 1956 film “Lust For Life.” Mitzi always scheduled these lunch-gatherings for late December, knowing that Annie and I would be in town to listen to them discussing contemporary politics sharing their most difficult memories and letting them know that someone (moi) would keep their names, history and travails alive for yet another generation or two. . .

From the late 1930s through the beginning of the Kennedy era, to be a virulent anti-Communist generally meant being either an ultra-conservative Republican isolationist, or an unreconstructed Southern Democratic racist. These anti-Communists aimed their knives at, among others, union members and their leaders, teachers and blacks. When it came to the movie industry, these hellions of hatred became completely unhinged, hauling actors, screenwriters, directors and producers (a majority of whom were Jewish) before various Congressional committees in order to ask what became the most haunting question of the age: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Many took the Fifth, and were forced out of the industry; others “named names,” thus becoming pariahs to their colleagues. Some were sent to prison. Then, there were the self-taught “experts” on Communism who, at the drop of a hat, pointed fingers and told tales of precisely who was out to foment revolution within our borders. Such “experts” became so reviled by progressives that they became eternally damned, their names never again mentioned in polite company . . . among them were the likes of Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, was the only POTUS to ever lead a trade union . . . the liberal Screen Actors Guild . . . but then again, Ronnie at one time supported actress/U.S. Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas [aka “The Pink Lady”] over Richard Nixon in the 1952 California senate election).

Not only were people in those days attacked for having been a member of the C.P. back in their youth; they were accused of being “premature anti-Fascists,” “Fellow Travelers” and what today we might call either  “influencers,” or “groomers.”  (One of the actors on my paper route, the blacklisted Hershel Bernardi told me that indeed, he had joined a couple of left-wing groups in his youth due to a girl friend he sought to impress.) There were far too many victims, and not enough heroes or heroines.  It was a terribly difficult time; so many lives, reputations and the ability to earn a living were at stake. There also emerged a kind of PTSD; to the best of my recollection, Madame never, ever signed a petition - even if it was something she believed in - for fear that it would come back to haunt her.  The fear and paranoia engendered by the daunting conspiracies of a generation did not fade; many of the victims took the fear and paranoia with them to their graves.  (BTW: One of the best histories of this era of blacklisting was written by the late actor Robert Vaughn: Only Victims, which served as his PhD dissertation when he was a doctoral student at the University of Southern California. in the late 1960s.)

Being both a Hollywood Brat and a longtime student of American political history and its psychological underpinnings, I have long had my doubts about whether all these virulent anti-Communists really, truly feared Karl Marx’s “haunting spectre” — “the spectre of communism,” or whether they merely glommed onto a political cause which would pay dividends both in the press and at the ballot box. Remember that before “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy became the end all and be all of anti-Communism, he was known around Washington as “The Pepsi Cola Kid” - a tool of business interests who had accepted a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for).

From the time of his election to the Senate in 1946 until he gave a history-changing speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in February of 1952 (in which he held up a piece of paper proclaiming “I have here in my hand the names of dozens upon dozens of Communists who are infecting our State Department”), McCarthy was considered a light-weight. Once he gave that speech - and many just like it - he was on the front page of every newspaper in the country and soon found himself the leader of a movement . . . which up to the age of Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz, is still referred to as “McCarthyism.” Oh to be the eponymous ancestor of a movement!

In years past, anti-Communist Republicans and racist Southern Democrats loudly attacked and spoke and tried their damndest to legislate out of existence such “Socialist” programs as Social Security, Medicare and federal spending on everything from education and public housing to feeding poor children. The rhetoric never changes, just the names of the speakers. We recently saw another McCarthy - Speaker Kevin - promise to legislate against Social Security and Medicare in exchange for being given the gavel he has long dreamed of wielding. He has as much of a chance of succeeding as Robert Taft did back in the 1950s or Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.

Make no mistake about it: MAGA Republicans are just as much against anything and everything that smacks or smells of communism or socialism as were their predecessors. The one enormous difference between yesteryear and today is from whence these MAGAites see the conspiracy emanating. In an earlier age, the face belonged to Stalin, and the place was Moscow. Today, the faces are those of Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schiff, George Soros and anyone who believes in Democracy over autocracy or freedom over oligarchy. Unbelievably, where Russia was freedom’s greatest enemy during the Cold War, today, Vladimir Putin is more praiseworthy than the Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (How ironic it is to hear President Zelenskyy attacked as “nothing but a third-rate television comedian” by those who revere Donald J. Trump, a fifth-rate television presence.)

It makes one ill to hear Republican leaders deride the war in Ukraine, attack President Biden for his surprise visit to Kyiv, and for being more concerned about that war than about the needs of the American people, or warning that there should no longer be a “blank check” for that war. Whatever happened to proudly being a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world? Then again, perhaps the Clown Car Caucus has been spending so much time deriding the President, his family and his party, that they’ve failed to note all the bills he’s passed which will lower drug prices, beef up micro-chip production and rebuild bridges, highways and schools.

Will we ever awaken from this nightmare where Russian autocracy is preferred over American Democracy? Or was Karl Marx being spot-on when he noted nearly 175 years ago that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I for one am sick and tired of farce being played out by a bunch of political philistines.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

Is the USA a "Melting Pot" or a "Salad Bowl?"

  This past Valentine’s Day, PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute, which describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy,” issued a report on the astonishing growth of Christian Nationalist beliefs within the American political system . . . overwhelmingly so among conservative “MAGA” Republicans and Evangelicals.  Researchers for PRRI found that more than half of Republicans polled believe that America should/must be a strictly Christian nation, either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%).  

  Christian nationalism is a worldview that claims that the U.S. is a strictly Christian nation and that the country's laws should, therefore, be rooted in Christian values. This point of view has long been most prominent amongst white Evangelicals, but of late, has been receiving a lot of lip service from non-Evangelical Republicans in general.

  During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told the overflow audience that Republican Party leaders must of necessity become more responsive to the party’s base which, she claimed, is made up largely of Christian nationalists.  And Ms. Taylor Greene, who is gaining media minutes with every passing day, is by no means the loudest voice in the pews advocating the ideals and political theology of Christian Nationalism within  the public square.  Whether they take the Bible literally - or go to church every Sunday, or publicly advocate living morally upright lives - is well beyond the point; they have found yet another cause by which they can capture the votes of otherwise under-educated, politically unsophisticated naïfs. 

  Over the past many years, members of Congress have offered up resolutions - and even a proposed Constitutional amendment - proclaiming that “America is a Christian nation.” Their arguments never seem to change: either, that the Founders ‘intended” America to be a Christian nation,” or citing Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer’s lead opinion in the 1892 case Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. The first argument - that the Founders “clearly intended the United States to be a Christian Nation” can - and has been - easily disproven. Even before he became President, George Washington may have said it best, if not first: “Religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” President Jefferson denied that Jesus was “a member of the Godhead,” and Benjamin Franklin, a co-author of the Declaration of Independence with Jefferson, (and like him, a thorough-going Deist) decried Christian church services for promoting church memberships instead of “trying to make us good citizens.”
  So far as the 1892 Supreme Court case, whose origin was an 1885 law called the Alien Contract Labor Law which prohibited “the importation and and migration of foreigners and aliens under contract . . . “, the Court ruled unanimously that the Church of the Holy Trinity was not in violation of the law and could indeed employ the services of an Anglican minister who had been brought to New York from England for the purpose of service to the congregation. What is still remembered and frequently cited from this case is one sentence in Justice David Josiah Brewer’s opinion: “These and many other matters which might be noticed add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” Justice Brewer’s obiter dictum has come into question dozens upon dozens of times over the past 120+ years. And yet, it is still raised by Christian Nationalists to “prove” that their belief is settled law.

Over the past several years, one of the unlikeliest - and least comprehensible alliances has been that between Donald J. Trump and America’s Evangelical/Fundamentalist community. How and why such a rigorously pious swathe of America could lend so much support and so many dollars to a man who has evinced less moral fiber than any of his predecessors is beyond reason . . . except for the fact that preachers from Maine to Southern California have told their flock to do so. An article in last Thursday’s Rolling Stone authored by Tim Dickenson summed up this mystery . . . and the possible fall from “messiahship” for Trump in 2024: “White evangelical Christians are the beating heart of the GOP base. Perhaps the wildest feat of Trump’s political career was convincing the fundamentalist faithful that he — a philandering, thrice-married, “pussy” grabber — could advance the cause of Godliness in the White House. If this bloc were to lose faith in Trump, it could doom his dream of recapturing the GOP nomination.”

At this juncture, it would seem that the mantle of political Messiah is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ to lose. Throughout his time in office, he has increasingly risen within the ranks of Christian Culture Warriors - even without using too much overtly Christological language. His support for the removal of “immoral” books from school libraries; making the teaching of CRT (Critical Race Theory) in schools which do not even teach it a crime; decrying anything which even hints at “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) studies in Florida schools from K through graduate level and leading the charge for restoring the death penalty (despite the fact that the Catholic Church - of which he is a member - is universally against it . . . mark him a man who is, by implication if not invocation, fighting hard to become the leader of the Christian Nationlist pack.

Then there is Nikki Hailey, former Governor of South Carolina and Ambassador to the United Nations, who announced her candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination just the other day. She had little to say about what she would do as POTUS, made not a single reference to her former boss by name, and spoke mainly about how difficult it was to be raised as the daughter of a Sikh family in small town South Carolina.

                                                 Sarah Silverman 

To my way of thinking, the most telling thing about her announcement came even before her she made her announcement. The invocation at the event was delivered by controversial pastor John Hagee, who Ambassador Haley told the crowd she wants to be like she when “grows up.” Hagee’s history of controversial statements includes remarks that a God-sent Adolf Hitler was tasked with hunting Jewish people as part of a divine plan to send them to Israel, that Hurricane Katrina “was God’s retribution for a planned gay pride parade” in New Orleans, and that women “are only meant to be mothers and bear children.” Speaking about the event, The Daily Show guest host Sarah Silverman (one of the best comedians/political satirists in the business!) mocked Haley’s praise of Hagee: ““Oh, Pastor Hagee, I hope one day I can appreciate Hitler as much as you do,” Silverman joked. “Right now my appreciation of Hitler is like here (she raises her hand). I want to get it up, get it up to about here,” she continued with a raised-hand salute. She concluded by saying “Sure, this guy thinks the Holocaust is good and that’s not good but on the bright side, he does believe it happened. You know, you got to take the Ws (“Wins”) where you can.”

Hagee’s comment about Hitler and G-d’s divine plan to “send them (the Jews) to Israel,” is one of the most horrifying aspects of the Christian fundamentalist rendering of the Bible.  According to recent  polling by LifeWay, upwards of 80%  of evangelicals believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about the Second Coming . . . which means that anyone who has not accepted Jesus as their Messiah will be destroyed.  To a great degree, this explains why the largest and most fervent Zionist groups in the United States are Christian . . . not Jewish.  As a fairly knowledgeable and literate Jew, I could never support anyone who’s love of Israel is based on this revelation; if they succeed, we lose.

 Christian Nationalism posits that America must be a Christian Nation, which entails one hell of a lot of conversion.  To Jews, proselytizing and "spreading the 'Good News’ is about as foreign as ham and cheese on white bread.  We Jews do not have an exclusive on G-d or salvation. Co (my pronoun for “he/she”) belongs to everyone, and everyone belongs to Co. In fact, Judaism is the only religion that offers specific commandments for nonmembers. Following the story of the Great Flood, G-d commanded Noah and his sons to keep seven basic laws. Judaism believes that any Gentile who keeps those laws is righteous and will go to heaven.  Oh yes, Jews did go in for forced conversion once: there is one known case in which Jews (as a ruling power, which in itself is extremely rare) did in fact force gentiles to convert. This took place in the Maccabean era, around 168 BCE. A group called the Idumeans was forcibly converted by second generation Maccabees. However, the Idumeans’ ‘conversion’ was terribly ineffective. We learned our lesson; it doesn’t appear that the policy of forced conversion was popular with other Jewish zealots of the time and has never occurred since.  

Let us get to the original question posed in the title of this essay: “Is the USA a “melting pot” or a “salad bowl.”  According to Christian Nationalists it must be the former; according to American history it really should be the latter.  For what is a “melting pot?”  It is a place where a variety of peoples, cultures, or individuals assimilate into a cohesive whole.  (n.b. the term itself comes from a very popular play written by the Victorian/Edwardian-era playwright and novelist Israel Zangwill.  It tells the story of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, whose mother and sister were killed in a pogrom, hoped for a society free from ethnic divisions, and a refuge for all those suffering persecution for political or religious beliefs. Zangwill wrote, "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American." The play was so popular and well-received that when it opened on Broadway in 1908, playwright Zangwill’s “date” was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt!)

For many generations, the “melting pot” theory worked pretty well.  Although there were certainly racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian feelings, the immigrants themselves wanted nothing more than to become accepted as Americans . . . to melt into the social and cultural fabric of the new world.  The melting pot provided America with a plethora of talent, skilled workers and new citizens.  But alas, in recent times, the very concept of a “Melting Pot” has morphed into something akin to a multi-Christian nation.  More and more, we have become a “Salad Bowl” - an entity which despite being a whole (a “salad”) is composed of innumerable ingredients whose individual shape, size and individuality can still be easily identified.

To my way of thinking, “Christian Nationalism” is not only unpatriotic; it is also un-American and grossly chutzpadik (Yiddish for nervy, impudent or brazen).

If I choose to live my life as an American citizen who observes the Sabbath on Saturday rather than Sunday, to read my holy books from right-to-left rather than left-to-right or stay the hell away from shellfish and cheeseburgers, that should be of no one’s concern. I am still a patriotic American; a (hopefully) noteworthy ingredient in the greatest salad ever created. For those who disagree on religious or cultural grounds know this: you are the minority . . . get used to it.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

The Fatuous Five

Unless you live in Utah, Kansas, North Dakota, Indiana or Montana (or are a hardcore  political geek), it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever heard of Republican Senators Mike Lee (UT) Roger Marshall (KS), Kevin Cramer (ND), Mike Braun (IN) or Steve Daines (MT). You really should know who they are and where they stand on social/cultural issues, for they represent an extraordinarily weird and wacky wing of the Republican Party . . . a wing that is on the rise.  The “Fatuous Five,” as I choose to call them, are uniformly against any and all abortions (and mind you, Senator Marshall is an OB-GYN), same-sex marriage, any and all restrictions on guns, gays in the military, the separation of Church and State, and are positive that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.  

While these political positions are hardly unusual for Republican members of the House and Senate, the Fatuous Five go even further down the path towards turning America into a blended theocratic/autocratic state. They are to the far-right what “The Squad” (the unofficial six-member [5 women, 1 man] progressive block in the House of Representatives are to the Congressional left. Unlike the Fatuous Five, which is made up exclusively of midwestern Anglo men, the Squad’s membership is exclusively made up of people of color; 2 are practicing Muslims.

Unlike Congressional Republicans, who tend to exile those who do not pay strict obeisance to their erstwhile leader to the political version of Elba . . . exempli gratia anyone who voted in favor of convicting Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial or publicly admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election . . . Democrats tend to work with most every member of their caucus even when or where they may disagree. Why is this so? Generally speaking, Democrats actually do believe that a party of inclusion is where it’s at, while Republicans tend to proclaim themselves to be a “Big Tent” while actually practicing behind a barricade of exclusion.  

Want further proof?

Last month, the “Fatuous Five” addressed a letter to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board Chair Charles Rivkin. In their letter to Rivkin. who is also serves as CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the five outlined their reasons for trying to create a new rating for television shows that feature LGBTQ+ characters and topics.  In their letter, the Fatuous Five thanked Rivkin and the monitoring board “. . . for empowering parents through the provision of tools that enable them to identify television content that is not suitable for certain ages. In recent years, concerning topics of a sexual nature have become aggressively politicized and promoted in children’s programming, including irreversible and harmful experimental treatments for mental disorders like gender dysphoria. To this end, we strongly urge you to update the TV Parental Guidelines and ensure they are up-to-date on best practices that help inform parents on this disturbing content.”

For a party so hellbent on complaining about “cancel culture”, the GQP (“Grand QAnon Party”) seems to be really obsessed with cancel culture.

In its own way, this is nothing new. Back in the early 1920s after the film industry went through a series of tragedies which gave the public a shocking look behind the virginal curtain of Hollywood (the morphine overdose of the “All-American” actor Wallace Reid, the murder of starlet Virginia Rappé at the hands of everyone’s favorite funnyman Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and the murder of the urbane director William Desmond Taylor), Hollywood moguls hired President Warren G. Harding’s Postmaster General (At a salary $150k per annum (which is more than $2.5 million in 2022 dollars) to become the industry’s “moral’s czar.”  It was his responsibility to make sure that all actors, directors and producers toe the moral line.  Then, in 1934, a new code (called “The Breen Code”) came into effect which forced all gay actors to enter into “lavender marriages” (marriages arranged by Hollywood studios between gay, lesbian or bisexual people such as Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates; Rudolph Valentino and Natasha Rambova; Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester; Judy Garland and Vincent Minelli; Janet Gaynor and costume designer Adrian, etc.), as well as creating a list of words which could not be said (“raspberries!” “So's your old man,” “nuts!” Damn!” and others, as well as such no-nos as:

• If a married couple were shown in the bedroom, they had to be sleeping in separate beds;

• No kiss could last longer than 3 seconds;

•  Miscegenation (interracial relationships) were not allowed;

• Scenes of childbirth were never to be shown;

• Illegal drug usage could not be presented;

• Words like "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Christ," "hell," and "damn" could not be used unless it was in connection with religious ceremonies.

The Production Code came into desuetude by the end of the 1960s, when the “X-Rated” movie, “Midnight Cowboy” won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  Since then, movie ratings (”G,” “PG,” and “M”) have meant next to nothing.  But now they may be reemerging, thanks to folks like the Fatuous Five.  What they are most concerned about are cartoons and Disney pictures which have “ . . . dialogue [which] often involves the promotion of irreversible experimental treatments that involve surgical and otherwise invasive cosmetic procedures that are detrimental and life-altering, and do not evidence medical necessity. The motivations of hypersexualized entertainment producers striving to push this content on young audiences are suspect at best and predatory at worst.”  The senators added that “To the detriment of children, gender dysphoria has become sensationalized in the popular media and television with radical activists and entertainment companies. This radical and sexual sensation not only harms children, but also destabilizes and damages parental rights.”

What the Fatuous Five are  asking for are warning labels [⚠️] for the country's television ratings system to warn parents about "sexual orientation and gender identity content" on children's TV shows. As one of my dear, long, longtime (more than 40 years) friends, the supreme political activist Marc Kallick recently wrote me in an email, “This will obviously then lead to a prohibition of openly LGBTQ+ spokespersons, such as when TV programming has any LGBTQ+ content., teachers and the illumination of any openly LGBTQ+ spokespeople in our contemporary American society.”

Mark also noted, “ . . . one of these five regressive Senators, the reprehensible and repugnant Senator Braun of Indiana, has just announced that individual states should have the legal right to prohibit interracial marriages… overthrowing the established judicial precedent from the 1967 Supreme Court decision, Loving V. the State of Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages. In order to stuff our American societies’ genie back into the bottle, will painfully require, taking a sharp knife to the genie… severely cutting away huge hunks of societal flesh, in order to stuff the genie back through the bottle’s narrow neck. This narrow minded approach, for the future of the world’s most open and leading democracy, will prove to be… bloody, painful and profoundly detrimental!!”

As what we would hope and pray is a free and open society, many of our leaders - and we, their constituents - have put our blood, sweat, tears and donations into protecting women’s reproductive rights, equality for minorities of all stripes and colors, and making healthcare available to all. Now, in what seems like the wink of an eye, many of these rights - and more - are slowly and inexorably being attacked and slipping through our fingers. We’ve gone from Indiana Senator Braun, suggesting the reversing of federal recognition, of interracial marriages to quickly following on the heels of the Fatuous Five demanding labeling for LGBTQ+ television content.

Until recently, I have never considered the “slippery slope” argument (“Today the government takes away our right to having unfettered access to guns or any sort, and tomorrow they’ll come to take all our guns away”) to be much more than the product of paranoid minds possessing little - if any - regard for history or reality.  Of late, however, I have observed the slope becoming increasingly steeper and slipperier. I have studied history well, and know that in the 1930s Nazis required labeling Homosexuals with a pink triangle to be worn on their/our clothing (while lesbians were required to be forcibly impregnated for the continuation of the, so-called, Aryan Race). Jewish Homosexuals were required to wear a pink triangle with an overlapping yellow triangle . . . thus forming the identifying Homosexual/Jewish Star.  

The explosive growth of homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and religious intolerance, coupled with highly-armed bigots who will believe next to anything just so long as it is broadcast by people who call themselves “patriots”  - makes me uncomfortably nauseous and deeply troubled.  

Is there an answer to what ails us short of taking a super strong emetic? Perhaps remembering the words of Dr. Benjamin Franklin will give a suggestive clue. The story is told that as Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”

To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

I wonder if the Fatuous Five and their priggish followers have the slightest idea of what the good doctor was speaking about . . . 

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Don't Find Fault; Find a Remedy

The late Senator/Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey (1911-1978) was, in many ways, his generation’s version of Joe Biden; accomplished, mostly - though not universally - well-liked and respected, decent . . . and not overly quotable. About the only quip he is remembered for in a public career spanning nearly 35 years is: To err is human. To blame somebody else is politics.  Sadly, Humphrey’s bon mot carries even more weight and truth in 2022 than it did back in the early 1960s when he first uttered it. 

Although finger-pointing has long played a noxious role in politics, it has never been as much a replacement for action as it has become in the past several years. In the same way, hardcore, steel-encased partisanship was never as much an absolute roadblock to passing legislation of any kind as it has become in the era of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. For most of American political history, certain Congressional measures were invariably guaranteed of passage: federal judgeships, names of courthouses, ambassadorships and resolutions of praise or condemnation, to name but a few.  Sadly, this is not so much the case today, when an historic nomination to the Supreme Court barely passes, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism or praising cops for saving the Capitol on January 6, 2021 finds naysayers or H.R. 7990, Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act cannot attract more than 9 republicans voting in its favor.  (Please note that Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who has become a bit of a fan-favorite amongst Democrats, actually voted against passage of the bill, which provides $28 million to address infant formula shortages.) 

Why ultra-partisanship should stand in the way of even the simplest actions being approved is not all that easy to limn, for their are a lot of disparate factors at play here. But to my way of thinking, one of the most obvious can be summed up in three words first used by Henry E. Peterson, an Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division at a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “Follow the money.” (For film aficionados, the creator of the term would be novelist/screenwriter William Goldman, who put the three words into the mouth of “Deep Throat” [as played by actor Hal Holbrook] in the 1976 blockbuster film “All the President’s Men.”)

So let’s follow the money. . . . Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, Citizen’s United V Federal Elections Commission, which gave the green light to mega-wealthy citizens and corporations to flood American politics with unlimited $$$, politics has become a matter of doing what is best for the donor class. Doing their bidding has become far more important than doing what is right. Money has become the most impregnable roadblock in public life. That one judicial decision has had an immense impact on everything from the failure to pass gun safety laws and the successful banning of books in public school libraries, and from the inability to enact meaningful climate change legislation, to the emasculation of voting rights laws and the vast growth of self-financed, civically illiterate candidates for public offices ranging from local school boards and state legislatures to the very halls of Congress. Citizens United, which gave lucre protected speech status  under terms of the First Amendment and turned corporations into people, has also made it possible for political money to become both invisible and anonymous through the creation of hundreds of PACs - “Political Action Committees.”  These committees have the ability to bypass federal election laws, and contribute hundreds of  millions - even billions - of dollars to “causes” . . . which is a euphemism for both political candidates and corporate dreams.

Although we are only in the month of May, we are nonetheless up to our necks in midterm primaries; November 2022 is just around the corner. This means that as slow and relatively ineffectual as the current Congress (the 117th) has been, its going to become even slower and less effectual. Minority leaders McConnell and McCarthy are going to do everything in their power to bring all Congressional action to a virtual standstill. The Democrats are legislatively stymied; about all they can accomplish in the last months of this Congress is holding Republican feet to the fire by forcing them to go on the record through a series of votes and televising hearings of the January 6 Committee in the hope that the American public gets some notion of just how dangerously close we have come to losing our hold on Democracy.

In the upcoming midterm elections, the Democrats will run on a platform of issues and actions they seek to accomplish in the future. As for the Republicans, they have already admitted that they will not have a platform . . . outside of returning the Democrats to the minority by repeatedly harping on how the ultra-Left has caused historically high inflation and souring gas prices, as well as accusing them of being Socialists and Communists; of seeking to increase the flood of illegal immigrants in order to take away American job,s and then quickly giving them citizenship rights so that they may vote for Democrats.

Not much of a platform, is it?

And should they be restored to the majority, Republicans will no doubt hold hearings as a way of getting back at the likes of Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin and the gang for the actions of the January 6 committee.

In other words, they’re going to be doing the bidding of their well-heeled right-wing masters.  

Follow the money!

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, it will be the Democrats’ responsibility to get across the fact that although inflation is at a 40 year high, corporate profits are a 50 year high. Then too, whenever House and Senate candidates face each other in public debates (that is assuming that Republicans will agree to it in the first place), they must ask simple questions, such as:

“The price of gas is set by several factors:

• the price of crude oil and its availability

• refining costs

• the cost to distribute

• state and federal taxes

• the oil companies desire for profit

“Tell me: since none of these factors are controlled by the President of the United States, what are you going to propose that Congress do about it?   

What it all is going to boil down to in November is precisely whom the two parties’ candidates seek to serve: their donors or the voting public?  And what will they see as their most important challenge: to find fault or to  seek remedies?  

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

"There's a Spectre Haunting the World"

We begin by paraphrasing one of the most famous opening lines in all 19th century literature: “There’s a spectre haunting much of the world . . . the spectre of fascistic victimhood.” The literate amongst us will no doubt recognize from whence this paraphraseology comes: the opening paragraph of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), which reads “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

Leapfrogging ahead 170 years, we find a no less brilliant, prescient and disturbing analysis of contemporary times, which should be read by anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world: Professor Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, which begins with the words “The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives.’ To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a pre-marked grave in a pre-purchased plot.”

Whether it be Marx or Snyder, both are (or in the case of the former, “was”) writing about tremendously dynamic, potentially earth-shattering changes in the political world. Marx wrote about an ancien regime made up of the churchmen, nobles and the ever-growing banking houses of Europe. He (along with his co-author, the German political philosopher Friedrich Engels, was concerned with a new order; one which would lift up the very victims of the ancien regime. In the case of Professor Snyder (he’s the Richard C. Levin Professor of history at Yale University), his focus is also on victims . . . but in a very different way. For his victims are not society’s dispossessed; rather they are the modern era’s version of the ancien regime, being convinced by their leaders that unless they man the barricades against immigrants, Jews, and a vicious “new world order,” they will be taken over by, and become enslaved to, a growing hoard of anti-Christian, “woke,” ultra-liberal Communist immoralists (the American version) or anti-Christian pro-Nazi fascists (the European/South American version). 

Writing in this past Saturday’s The Guardian, Jason Stanley noted that “Vladimir Putin’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust.” To accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of being a Nazi ranks right up there with the worst lies in all recorded history. President Zelensky is, of course, himself Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. For the atheistic, autocratic Putin to recast himself as the ultimate defender of Christian nationalism puts him in league with America’s 45th POTUS, who somehow convinced most Evangelicals that he is the ultimate bulwark against Socialism and immorality. . . and that White Christian males – not Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jewish or Muslim folk – are modern American society’s true victims. Just as Putin asserts that Nazified Ukrainians represent a lethal threat to the Russian people, so too do Trump and his ilk warn that “ultra-left-wing Socialists and Communists” represent the gravest threat to “real” Americans.  Both believe the enemy must be defeated at all costs.  Between Putin and Trump (and their most avid acolytes) there is barely a millimicron’s worth of distance in their political weltanschauung..

Historically, it was hard-right conservative Republicans who feared and warned of “Reds under the beds” . . . those lurking writers and academics, screenwriters and actors (a huge percentage of whom happened to be Jewish) who were the true enemies of America. Today, the shoe is on the other foot; former President Donald Trump describes Putin as “smart” and “savvy, and, Fox “News’” host Tucker Carlson insists that “Hating Putin, has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” As far as the Republican right is concerned, Putin is the one standing up to the “Nazified” Ukrainian President Zelensky (who was democratically elected), while President Biden kneels before those who are doing their best to demean and destroy White Christian America. Oh what an unfathomable change of footwear!

How is it possible that the American chapter of the “Friends of Putin” can ignore that this mass murderer has ordered his troops to bomb the largest cities in a Democratic nation which is our ally, as well as deploy TOS-1 heavy flamethrowers (which are capable of vaporizing human bodies) against innocent civilians? How can they aver in poll after poll that Vladimir Putin is a more capable leader than Joe Biden? I guess they just prefer Tom Doniphon (the character played by John Wayne in the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) to Thomas Jefferson ‘Tom’ Destry, Jr.) the character played by James Stewart in the 1939 film Destry Rides Again). As Emily Tamkin, senior editor of The New Statesman wrote in a recent New York Times guest editorial, “The American political right was long associated with Cold War hawkishness. But in recent years the trend has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries, as well as projecting our own culture wars overseas. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of U.S. conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview.“

This “victimization” battle-cry has become both the raison d'être and basis for the platform of one of America’s two major political parties. It tells voters that they - and they alone - can put an end to all the malevolent, progressive (which they spelled either S-O-C-I-A-L-S-T, W-O-K-E or U-L-T-R-A- L-E-F-T- W-I-N-G) conspiracies designed by the “enemies of America” to continually victimize and thus destroy the “real America.”

A frightening proof of this is Florida Senator and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott’s 31-page GOP agenda that he’s dubbed “My Plan to Rescue America.” Scott’s 11-point proposal for what Republicans promise to do should they take back the Senate in 2022 can be summed up in a few chilling sentences:

• Finish construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border -- and name it after Donald Trump;

• Ban all racial disclosures and references to ethnicity on government forms;

• Legally recognize that there are only "two genders," and that "unborn babies are babies."

• Limit absentee ballots and demand that "no ballots that show up after election day will be counted, ever,"

• Mandate that school children say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, and learn that America is a great country;

• Starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism;

• Eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress;

• Guarantee that Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of their lives;

• Guarantee that every American pay income taxes, so as to assure they have “skin in the game.”

Having lived through eight years of Rick Scott’s governorship here in the Sunshine State, many of us have discovered that as a political leader, he is both hapless and hair-brained. This proposal of his will no doubt - if used correctly by Democrats - become an albatross for Republicans in the 2022 election. For Scott’s lame rescue plan is attempting to solve problems which do not exist . . . such as stolen elections, the teaching of “Critical Race Theory" in public schools, millions upon millions of Americans not paying income taxes (ever hear of payroll taxes?”) illegal immigrants stealing jobs from hard-working Americans. In other words, Scott’s plan, like Vladimir Putin’s, is using the spectre of victimization to keep the legions in line.

But there is some hopeful news on the horizon - both in Europe and America. In Europe, we are daily witnessing both the adroit leadership skills and breathtaking heroism of President Zelensky and the Ukranian people, and the growing unity of our allies in the E.U. and NATO (even Sweden has dropped its centuries-long position of political neutrality). And here in America, it’s not so much what we see as what we‘re beginning to sense: the muteness of the institutional wing of the Republican Party towards the purveyors of victimization - folks like Trump, Scott, Cruz, Hawley, Greene, Carlson and Bannon.

Yes, there is unquestionably a spectre haunting the world . . . but precisely what spectre, only time, tolerance and the truth shall tell.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Q: What Do Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield and Harry Potter All Have in Common?

A: They have all been central characters in classic novels that were - or still are - banned from many school libraries . . . 

To many of us it seems well beyond the bounds of reason; what in the  world could be so objectionable about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, or the Harry Potter series as to be worthy of banishment from bookshelves . . . or even worse, being burnt?  Many of us remember the war on Catcher in the Rye back in our schooldays; how, for many teenagers, it’s banishment lead us directly to devouring J.D. Sallinger’s only novel-length work.  In the day, the guardians of literary mortality found it to be "obscene,” with an "excess of vulgar language, sexual scenes, and things concerning moral issues."  I for one found Holden to be one of the most real people in all literature.  To this day I can quote him:

• "All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

• "I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to someone I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."

• "I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do."

• "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

My sister Erica (Riki) and I were among the fortunate ones of our generation; our parents didn’t put any restrictions on what we read.  There was a pretty large library in our home, and I/we got the benefit of becoming friends with Shakespeare, de Balzac, Mauldin, and Steinbeck if we so chose . . . all of whom were at one time or another banned. (I must admit that my “slightly older sister” wasn’t nearly as much of a reader as her younger brother . . . just a hell of a lot smarter, more sociable and far more well-rounded!)

From the first book banned in the American colonies (Thomas Morton’s three-volume work of history, natural history, satire, and poetry New English Canaan in 1637) through today, the number of famous and meritorious essays and novels banned by bigots and what used to be called “bluenoses” could easily fill a mid-size, small-town bookstore.  Among those found to be “irremediably evil” at worst,  “decadent” or salacious” at best, were such well-known works as:

• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, banned for passages that were considered "sexually offensive," as well as for the tragic nature of the book, which some readers felt was a "real downer."

• Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), was criticized for being immoral and scandalous, and now is considered an important work in feminist literature. 

• Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), was challenged in schools and libraries across the United States for being "centered around negative activity."

• Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, frequently challenged and banned for what has been termed "sexual and social explicitness."

• John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath'; banned and challenged for "vulgar" language.” Parents have also objected to "inappropriate sexual references."

• William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies; Despite the fact that "Lord of the Flies" was a bestseller, the novel has been banned and challenged — based on the "excessive violence and bad language."

• The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850): censored on sexual grounds. The book has been challenged under claims that it is "pornographic and obscene."

• Ulysses by James Joyce (1918): a masterful novel with impenetrable prose, it was banned for obscenity. In the 1930s, the U.S. Postal Service burnt copies sent in the mail.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960); still banned in many school and local libraries, Harper Lee’s only novel has been frequently banned and challenged on sexual and social grounds. Not only does the novel discuss racial issues in the South, but the book involves a White attorney, Atticus Finch, defending a Black man against rape charges.

Banning - if not burning - questionable books from public school and municipal libraries is a hot-button issue which rears its ugly head every 2 or 4 years. Thanks to the politically maladroit comment of former Virginia Governor Terry McAulliffe (“I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.") and the fast-tracking of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as a central focus of many campaigns, state legislatures and local school boards have made education a central focus for the 2022 midterm elections. Already, several state legislatures - most notably Texas and Oklahoma - have enacted legislation which essentially gives any parent the power to petition for the removal of books they find objectionable.

In Texas, Matt Krause, a Republican in the state House of Representatives, recently went hunting in public-school libraries for any books that might generate “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of [a student’s] race or sex.” He then distributed a watch list of 850 books. In parallel, Texas governor, Greg Abbott called for a criminal investigation into the availability of “pornographic” books in public schools. Then, a San Antonio school district pulled 414 books from its libraries in response to the ongoing pressure from Texas lawmakers and a vocal segment of angry parents to limit what children can choose to read.

Just the other day, Oklahoma state Senator Rob Standridge introduced a book-banning bill that would enable parents to challenge books in public schools, setting a $10,000 bounty to be collected by parents for each day a challenged book remains on library shelves.  If this sounds somewhat reminiscent of the recent Texas abortion bill (which is now headed for the U.S. Supreme Court), you are correct.  The idea of adding the $10,000 per diem bounty on each book makes it a matter of civil - rather than 1st Amendment - concern.  In his remarks before the Oklahoma Senate, Standridge justified his proposed legislation in a statement which read: “Our education system is not the place to teach moral lessons that should instead be left up to parents and families. Unfortunately, however, more and more schools are trying to indoctrinate students by exposing them to gender, sexual and racial identity curriculums [sic] and courses. My bills will ensure these types of lessons stay at home and out of the classroom.” 

Parents believing a book violates the bill may demand school officials remove it within 30 days. If the book is not removed during this time, the school employee tasked with getting rid of it will be terminated —subject to due process— and prohibited from working at another school for at least two years.  Parents may then seek “monetary damages,” according to the bill, including a minimum of $10,000 for each day the challenged book is not removed.

Under Standrige’s second bill, public universities in Oklahoma beginning next year would be prohibited from requiring students to enroll in courses “addressing any form of gender, sexual, or racial diversity, equality, or inclusion curriculum,” which fall outside course requirements for their major. 

Many of the books in question do include passages about sex, abortion, race, and sexuality. Some are nonfiction; others are novels. They span several decades in American publishing and include authors who have been awarded Pulitzer, Nobel and Booker Prizes, as well as McArthur “Genius Grants.”  In some cases, local school librarians weren’t even aware that the “nasty” books were on their shelves. As will happen when the “. . . censorious zeitgeist swallows up a novel” (in the words of The Guardian’s Luke Winkie), sales of those books goes through the ceiling.  It’s nothing new; in 1982, when the United States Supreme Court set the standard for banning books in Board of Education v. Pico, sales of such previously banned works as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five experienced a merchandizing renaissance. 

Expect education - and the centrality of parents’ freedom to choose what their children are taught or assigned - to be a central MAGA-pushed issue in the upcoming midterm elections.  There is a sick irony at work here: adults, who are  repeatedly told that principals, librarians and individual teachers have no right or authority to create curricula for their children, are instead brainwashed into believing that they should heretofore cede that authority to politicians and their deep-pocketed benefactors . . . supposedly in the name of "personal freedom.”  Just because a state legislator or local schoolboard member declares that Jenny Nordberg’s The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan, or Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, or Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Reluctantly Alice (all 3 of which are on Texas’ ‘no-no’ list) must be removed from the shelves of public school libraries, doesn’t mean they are experts, authorities or trained literary critics.  The first question I would ask of them would be “Can you summarize the book in question?”  “Did you actually read it yourself, or are you just taking someone else’s word for it that it’s bad, or salacious or even worse?”

Keep your eyes and ears open in your city, county or state for attempts to muzzle what children can read.  And do remember the haunting words of the great German-Jewish poet Heinrich (Harry) Heine (1797-1856), whose haunting words adorn both the Yad va-Shem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."    

Copyright2022 Kurt F. Stone