#🟦 Standing Up to Jewish Hate

         Standing Up to Jewish Hate

The word antisemitism was first popularized in Germany back in the year 1879. Its originator was a German agitator and journalist named Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904). As early as 1862, Marr, a Lutheran who was, for a short while, married to a Jewish woman, published an essay entitled “The Way to Victory of Germanicism Over Judaism” (Der Weg zum Sieg des Germanismus über das Judentum. Marr’s conception of antisemitism focused on the supposed racial, as opposed to religious, characteristics of the Jews. His organization, the League of Antisemites, introduced that into the political lexicon and established the first popular political movement based entirely on anti-Jewish beliefs.

(n.b. There has long been an uncertainty as to precisely how to spell the term; is it hyphenated or not? In German, French, Spanish and many other languages, the term was never hyphenated. The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity ‘Semitism’ which ‘anti-Semitism’ opposes. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism.)

Long, long before Wilhelm Marr, there was an Egyptian priest who likely lived in the Ptolemaic kingdom in the early 3rd century, B.C.E.  His name was Manetho, and he was rather famous during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt from 284-246 BCE.  During his reign, wrote Manetho the Aegyptiaca (History of Egypt) in Greek, a major chronological source for the reigns of the kings of ancient Egypt.

In one of the volumes of his work, Manetho presented a counter-narrative to the traditional story of the Biblical work Exodus. He depicts the Jews most negatively — as Lepers and Shepherds – exuding anti-Jewish themes. While the Hebrew Bible's Exodus tells of the Jews escaping Egypt, and thus, with the help of G-d and Moses - liberating themselves, Manetho tells a different story: that Egypt expelled lepers because of their impurity who then chose to revolt against Egypt pioneered by leader Osarsiph — later revealing himself as Moses. — who imposed various anti-Egyptian laws. Together with the Shepherds, they conquered Egypt in a 'barbarous manner…set[ting] the cities and villages on fire…roasting those sacred animals…and forced the priests and prophets to be the executioners and murders of those sacred animals." (For a thorough examination of Manetho’s counter-narrative, one can check out Flavius Josephus’ Against Apion.

Hatred against Jews and Judaism - as a people, a religion, a culture and (falsely) a race, is as old as recorded history. Sometimes it is a bit better, and others one hell of a lot worse. It is both omnipresent and universal; there have long been reports of societies, kingdoms and cultures which, although never having offered a home to Jews, have nonetheless despised them. The “whys?” range from “They were complicit in killing Jesus” (I’ve never understood how anyone can kill a supposedly divine being) and “they foment and finance revolutions everywhere they go,” to “they control the banks, the media and the food supply,” and “they are avaricious, incapable of telling the truth, and are the most malodorous people on the planet.”

Depending on time, place, and contemporary circumstance the reasons for upticks in Antisemitism vary. But they always lead to the same thing: hatred. Sometimes Jews are pilloried for having killed Jesus; at others, being blamed for “poisoning the water supply” (during the medieval Bubonic Plague), of destroying the economy or funding revolutionary causes . . . do note that the majority of actors, directors and screenwriters accused of being Communists during the post-war “witch hunts” were Jewish. And the capital-H Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Jews, was not the only lower-case-h holocaust in human history: the massacre of English Jews in York (and their eventual exile) in 1190; the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century; the notorious Kishniev Pogrom of 1903 . . . and today, the rapid rise in Antisemitic acts here in the United States, Europe and South America.

Where once the name “Rothschild” and even “Roosevelt” (whom Antisemites tried to convince unlettered people was in fact, a Jewish family) has now been replaced by “Soros.”  As recently as this past week, diehard MAGA Republicans and the cheerleaders at Fox are claiming that Donald Trump’s indictment at the hands of a NYC grand jury and D.A. Alvin Bragg was “politically motivated.” What’s the proof? That D.A. Bragg had received campaign donations from none other than billionaire George Soros . . . which, they insist, means that the Jews are behind it all. I have had a couple of nauseating conversations with people who gladly mention Soros’ name in discussing Trump’s legal woes. “Who’s George Soros?” I ask, “and what does he have to do with the indictment?” Most just answer “You know . . .“ In response, I either remain silent or simply say, “No I don’t . . . please enlighten me.” So far, no enlightenment has yet come my way.

Over the past decade or so, Antisemitic acts, statements and beliefs have grown exponentially here in the United States. This is not to say that antisemitism was barely existent before  MAGA came on the political scene, for such is certainly not the case. It has always been there . . . but until recently, operating in the shadows. In his new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Professor Matthew Dalleck shows how since the time of its founding in the late 1950s, the John Birch Society has fought tooth and nail against the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to take over America, as well as promoting America as a Christian nation, looking to ban books which they found to be “unwholesome,” against international cooperation and against NATO and the United Nations, and funding candidates who would bind themselves to the eradication of the federal income tax, immorality, and federal funding for nearly everything save the military. Sound familiar?

What the Birchers did not have in their time were two things: first an internet, through which they could introduce, induce and inculcate tens upon tens of millions of potential supporters with their far-right ideas, and second, a potential base of radicals armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry. In the 1950s and 60s, Birchers could only hope for a second Civil War; today, their descendants are gearing up for one. In the 1950s, Birchers were against a democratic state because it was “communistic”; today, they are in favor of a fascist state because it is not “woke” . . . even if they cannot define it.

Jewish people in America are feeling far less safe than at any time since the end of McCarthyism.  When a former POTUS invites known, vocal Antisemites to his private club for lunch; when synagogues are being bombed and Jewish philanthropists put on the hot seat, this is indeed a cause for concern.

The question is: what can we do about it?  There are certainly going to be those - both Jewish and not - who will claim that since the former POTUS has a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren, he cannot harbor any Antisemitic tendencies.  Stuff and nonsense; to my way of thinking, Trump/Kirschner was far more a merger than a marriage; tantamount to the old saw “Some of my best friends are Jewish.”

We now come to the “blue emoji,” which will be showing up on television and computer screens more and more in the days to come.  These blue squares are meant to fill about 2.4% of each square . . . equal to the percentage of Jews living here in the United States.  Despite this small percentage, 55% of all religious hate crimes in this country relate to Jews.  This is unconscionable, to say the least.  What we are hoping is that television newscasts, blogs and other communications will contain the  #🟦 as a way of keeping the message that we - both Jews and non-Jews alike - are #Standing Up to Jewish Hate.

Last week, billionaire Robert Kraft, owner (among other things) of the New England Patriot’s football team, donated $25 million  to create the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. which uses the blue square emoji, which is already on all smartphones, as a "simple, but powerful symbol of solidarity and support for the Jewish community."

The campaign's launch follows last week's release of a report by the Anti-Defamation League asserting that Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. rose 36% in 2022. The report tracked 3,697 incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault aimed at Jewish people and communities last year. It's the third time in five years that the annual total has been the highest ever recorded since the group began collecting data in 1979.

The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, based at California State University, San Bernardino, reported last week that Jews were the most targeted of all U.S. religious groups in 2022 in 21 major cities, accounting for 78% of religious hate crimes.

During Kraft’s campaign, the blue square will take up 2.4% of television and digital screens, billboards, and social media feeds. That number as mentioned above, symbolizes that Jews make up 2.4% of the American population, yet are the victims of 55% of religious-based hate crimes. The foundation already has its own website: #StandUpToJewishHate - Uniting to Combat Antisemitism.  In announcing the creation of his foundation, Kraft said the campaign “is designed to raise awareness for the fight against antisemitism, specifically among non-Jewish audiences, and to help all Americans understand that there is a role for each of us to play in combating a problem that is unfortunately all too prevalent in communities across the country today,”  

Already, the blue square #🟦 is appearing on television shows, digital billboards and social-media sites.  The campaign is encouraging people to download the blue square and share it widely. You can also watch a clip on Twitter explaining it.

Said Kraft: “We must stand up and take action against the rise of all hate, and I hope everyone will post and share the blue square to show their support in this fight.”  Already, former New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady and former Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson have joined the crusade.

Sadly, one cannot convince an avid anti-Semite to stop hating Jews; its a lethal part of their genome. One can, through knowledge, diligence and smarts, open the minds and hearts of those who never hated in the first place to understand that they can do their share to spread the word: a society that is not safe for Jews is ultimately not safe for anyone . . . of any color, any religion, any ethnic origin or sexual orientation.

Do check out the online ADL report Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era. To be knowledgeable is to be well armed. And while you’re at it, you may want to check out the latest statistical report from ADL about the horrifying growth of anti-Jewish, racist attacks in the United States. 

If antisemitism has grown exponentially with the growth of social media (it definitely has), perhaps we can fight it on social media as well.

 #🟦

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

The Historic Importance of January 6th . . . 1941

                     January 6, 1941: “The Four Freedoms”:

It seems like the prime-time presenters on MSNBC (Ari Melber, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell ) have been reporting on nothing but the historical importance of January 6, 2021 for the past year-and-a-half. Who can blame them? After all, that is a day - which, to borrow a quote from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - “which shall live in infamy.” The major difference, of course, is that FDR’s December 8, 1941 “live in infamy” address to Congress, concerned Japan’s bombing of the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor; our “day of infamy” is the seditious storming of the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021.  The people of MSNBC have spent the lion’s share of their on-air time investigating and reporting on virtually every aspect of that day when democracy was nearly destroyed.  It fascinates me no end that no one has mentioned or figured out what, most eerily, happened on Capitol Hill precisely 80 years before (that’s 29,200 days and 700,800 hours before) on January 6, 1941: FDR’s State of the Union Address, where he set out in bold and eloquent detail that which has ever since been known as “The Four Freedoms.”  What makes it all the more eerie - not to mention prescient and breathtaking - is how much FDR’s speech mirrors America and the world 80 years later . . . to the day. 

To be certain, there are a handful of speeches which stand out in American political history:

• George Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796.

• Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (“Four score and seven years ago . . . “)

• JKF’s Inaugural Address (“Ask not what your country can do for you . . . “)

But topping them all, in my humble opinion, is FDR’s State of the Union address to Congress on January 6, 1941. For his “Four Freedoms” address, while not white-washed with the good news and optimistic phrases of most annual presidential addresses, set a course and a purpose for this nation that has never since been equaled. As America entered the war these "four freedoms" - the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear - symbolized America's war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom. Indeed, it is the only one speech in American history that inspired a multitude of books and films, the establishment of its own park, a series of paintings by a world famous artist, a prestigious international award and a United Nation’s resolution on Human Rights.

At the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union address on January 6, 1941, he had just been reelected president for an unprecedented third term. At the time, the world faced unprecedented dangers, instability, and uncertainty. Much of Europe had fallen to the advancing German Army and Great Britain was barely holding its own; London was being strafed from the air by the German Luftwaffe on a nightly basis. A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United Sates should continue to stay out of the war, but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and attempted to convince the American people of the gravity of the situation. 

In his State of the Union, FDR articulated a powerful vision for a world in which all people had freedom of speech and of religion, and freedom from want and fear.

The ideas enunciated in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were the foundational principles that evolved into the Atlantic Charter declared by Winston Churchill and FDR in August 1941; the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942; President Roosevelt’s vision for an international organization that became the United Nations after his death; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt.

As tyrannical leaders once again resort to brutal oppression and terrorism to achieve their goals, as democracy and journalism are under attack from extremists and conspiratorialists both in the United States and across the globe, and as surveillance and technology threaten individual liberties and freedom of expression, FDRs bold vision for a world that embraces these four fundamental freedoms is as vital today as it was more than 80 years ago.  For those who are interested in reading the speech in its entirety, please check out FDR’s Four Freedoms Speech.

Interestingly, FDR, after consulting with his behind-the-scenes advisors, dictated the speech in a matter of minutes to his secretary Grace Tully.  Unlike presidents ever since, FDR rarely used a team of speechwriters.  This SOTU  came from his heart; it would wind up changing the world. 

               FDR’s Handwritten Notes for the January 6, 1941 SOTU                 

In 1941, there were plenty of people who believed that FDR was a “traitor to his class” - an aristocrat who actually cared about the state and fate of the downtrodden; one who believed that democracy was the most superior form of government. There were also those who found him “too much of a Socialist” (FDIC, Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority). He surrounded himself with a stellar brain trust (Samuel Rosenman, Benjamin Cohen, Felix Frankfurter and Bernard Baruch, to name but a few) and listened intently to the advise he was given.  He also understood that the fate of America and her allies was ultimately up to him, and did whatever he could to motivate a nation to do the right thing.  Yes, it is true, his State Department didn’t always do the right thing when it came to the Jews attempting to escape Nazi oppression (which causes many modern-day Jews to throw him on the ash-heap of history); nonetheless, FDR responded to his ilk by telling them that Democracy belonged to everyone . . . not just the WASPS he grew up and was educated amongst.

At the time of the January 6, 1941 State of the Union address, there was both a loud, staunchly vituperative isolationist wing of  the Republican Party (“America First,” led nationally by Charles A. Lindbergh) and a fully-armed batch of Nazi sympathizers (The “German American Bund,” led for many years by Fritz Kuhn, the so-called “American Fuhrer.” 

Today, more than 80 years  after that first, historic January 6th, America is once again beset by isolationists (the MAGA wing of the Republican Party), growing anti-Semitism and conspiracies galore. This time, we are led by a decidedly non-Blue Blood president who like FDR, understands the critical role America can and must play in a world that once again is falling in love with autocracy and fascism.  But unlike FDR, who was accused of being an enemy of America’s hereditary aristocracy, Joe Biden is attacked for being the leader of a “woke” nation; the leader of a left-wing socialist/communist conspiracy which attempts to make “sissies” of us all.  It is just as moronically idiotic today as it was 80+ years ago.  

    jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr 

 Way back in 1849, French critic, journalist and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose “ – the more things change, the more they stay the same…  From January 6, 1941 to the same date in 2021, many, many things have changed in and about the United States of America . . . if indeed, not the entire world.  But Karr was and always shall be unerringly correct for in modern idiomatic English, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose means “What goes around comes around.”

Let us work and teach, give voice and vote that which FDR pledged on the first historic January 6 - the Four Freedoms - will continue to go around and come around.  For it is only through maintaining these four indelible freedoms that America can continue being a beacon of bright light for the rest of the world.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

Oh When Will We Ever Learn?

On April 5, 1945, U.S. Army troops entered Ohrdruf, part of the Buchenwald concentration camp system. One week later, April 12, 1945 (8 days before what would have been Adolph Hitler’s 56th birthday), Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower flew to Ohrdruf to meet American generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. The camp was still filled with the bodies of prisoners who had been murdered just before the SS guards fled. The stench of death filled the camp. That which they saw was beyond human comprehension; the stuff which causes the most gruesome of all possible nightmares . . . the sort that never go away.

General Eisenhower quickly cabled U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, declaring that everything that had appeared in the press about these sites was “an understatement." He requested: 

If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.

Eisenhower, a man often underestimated for the depth of his knowledge and foresightedness, understood that it was of extreme importance that everything the conquering Allied Forces saw, smelled or felt be committed to film - both cinematic and still. His reason? He understood that the day would likely come - whether it be in a year, a decade or even more - that people would forget the Holocaust; would declare that it never had happened . . . that it was all a myth perpetrated by the very people “claiming” to have been its victims.  

   Hebrew translation: “The Israeli connection to the Twin Towers terrorist attack.”

Eisenhower’s prescience was and still is, sadly, a marvel to behold. For the number of “Holocaust Deniers” is continually growing. Indeed, it is an essential part of the bedrock that underlies the philosophical feculence called QAnon. As noted in a recent ADL report on the frightening growth of anti-Semitism in both America and around the world: Today, the most popular QAnon influencer, GhostEzra [recently outed as Robert Randall Smart of Boca Raton, FL], is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich, and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews. 

 It is estimated that the ironically-named “Smart,” has a minimum of 300,000 followers on the so-called “Deep Web,” best described as “the parts of the web not indexed (searchable) by search engines.  His followers are conspiracy theorists of the highest (or deepest) water; they are fervent Holocaust deniers who find George Soros’ fingerprints (as well  as his billions) on virtually everything from Democratic pedophilia and COVID-19 vaccines to the “stealing” of the 2020 presidential election.  They are loony, dangerous, very, very well-armed, and more than willing to kill in order to “save” America and the White Western World from the Great Satan. Believe it or not, there are even QAnon followers in Israel!

As recent as the mid-1980s (when he would have been in his nineties) there were people the world over who, at the drop of a hat, would proclaim that Hitler was alive and well, and living in Argentina (or Bolivia or Peru). Similarly, there are inane conspiracists today who fervently believe that  J.F.K. Jr. is still alive, well, and about to reappear in the public square in order to announce that he is going to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.  Shakespeare hit the nail on the head when he put into the mouth of Puck “Lord, what fools these mortals be” (A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 2).   

Of course, it’s not just QAnon and their unlettered fellows who are unfurling and raising aloft the flag of anti-Semitism. Hatred of Jews, Jewish ideas, ideals, and accomplishments, have long earned the obloquy of the frightened, the fearful and the utterly feckless.  A Holocaust-era chestnut told the tale of an anti-Semite who asked  a fellow he knew: "Who is to blame for our economy going to hell in a hand bucket and everything else falling into the trashcan?” His friend told him: "It’s simple: it’s the fault of two groups: the bicycle-riders and the Jews.”  “What in the world do the bicycle-riders have to do with our problems?” the man asked.  “Beats the daylights out of me,” his friend responded.  “What in the hell do the Jews have to do with our problems?” 

And so it goes . . .

Late last week, The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report showing that, in 2021, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in America than in any year since the group started keeping track over 40 years ago. The rapid growth of Jew hatred isn’t limited to the United States. According to a new report from the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, anti-Semitic incidents were up last year in countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Comparisons to 2020 might be misleadingFeducated because pandemic lockdowns likely reduced the numbers of anti-Semitic assaults and in-person harassment. But in several countries, including the United States, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in 2021 than in the prepandemic year 2019.

As the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg noted in a trenchant op-ed piece, “. . . something has obviously gone wrong. The question is, what? Some, she notes, blame the left for being anti-Zionist . . . as if finding fault with the Israeli government (which I do from time to time) is really anti-Semitism cloaked in a kippah (a Jewish skullcap, often called a yarmulke, which I myself wear). An extension of this observation would then have it that anyone who does not support everything the Israeli government says or does is really an anti-Semite. To me, this is stuff and nonsense; they should study the centuries-old arguments of the rabbis of the past, who made careers of disagreeing with one another. These were not haters of Jews; they were seekers of truth.

Just yesterday, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with California Representative Adam Schiff and 9 other Democratic members of Congress met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in war-torn Kyiv (which had been bombed just hours before their secret arrival), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov caused an absolute furor when he told an Italian interviewer that Russia’s purpose in invading Ukraine was to ““denazify” the country - a justification which Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly used for months.  When the Italian interviewer mentioned that President Zelenskyy was himself Jewish and had lost family members in the Holocaust, Lavrov responded “. . . when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites [sic] were Jewish,"  One can only imagine how well that comment is being received by anti-Semites around the world.  Once again, the victims are being accused of having been the perpetrators. . .

The reason - or reasons - for the stunning rise in anti-Semitic incidents both in the United States and worldwide is nigh on impossible to thoroughly comprehend. Certainly, there is an [un]fair measure of anti-Zionism involved, though, as mentioned above, simply being critical of Israel does not necessarily make an individual, a group or a political alignment guilty of being anti-Semitic. Then too, the explosive growth and untrammeled “Wild West” nature of social media over the past generation has made the spread of all kinds of mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories available to the credulous masses. But in the main, the reason for the growth of the baseless hatred of Jews is what it always has been: cultural breakdown and economic uncertainty, which frequently lead to both antisocial behavior and the dire need to “pin the tail on the donkey.” It’s what the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), himself a French Jew from a long line of Rabbis, called anomie, generally translated as “normlessness” . . . a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals."

It is absolutely essential to restore norms to society; to challenge anyone who is shallow, callow or ignorant enough to liken anything or anyone they don’t agree with to Hitler or the Nazis;  to have the courage to stand with the angels (in the Jewish world we call them mentchen),  call a monomaniac a menace, and refuse to remain silent before the megaphones of mendacity.  

I have long pondered - with a soupçon of frustration - about what came first: Jews or anti-Semites. “How’s that?” you may well ask. At times it just seems to me that if G-d in Co’s (the “Divine Possessive Pronoun” id est .. His/Her) infinite wisdom had not created the Jews, the “Eternal People,” anti-Semites, in their infinite depravity, would have, in order to possess a target for their eternal hatred and inhumanity. As a question, it is no doubt a non-starter . . . but one which has long drawn my attention.

Another imponderable is how or what can ever bring an end to anti-Semitism . . . to the hatred of Jews? It is undoubtedly the case that psychopathy cannot be cured with a pill, shockwaves or a set of facts and photos. What can help - if not solve - this menace is a commitment on the part of individuals, leaders and nations to make the world saner, less economically unbalanced, and more universally educated; to do whatever we can to delimit the causes of severe anomie . . . toxic normlessness.

Or, to slightly paraphrase the late Pete Seeger, Oh when will we ever learn?

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

One Person's Religious Exemption is Another's Civic Mandate

According to most modern-day Republicans, America’s Founders were, for the most part, a bunch of pro-life, Christian fundamentalists who would have little or no argument with today’s right wing office holders. Not only is their knowledge of America’s Founders deeply flawed; it reveals an astounding lack of understanding of what makes America truly great.

Consider that among America’s most important founders, and early presidents, Washington, Madison and Monroe were Episcopalians; the Adamses,  both pere et fils were Unitarian; Jefferson (who like John Adams and James Madison could read and translate the Old Testament from Hebrew to Latin and from Greek to English)  and Benjamin Franklin non-denominational Deists. None - we repeat none - would have understood - let alone accepted - the hard-core “born-again” Christianity of their modern successors. They really, truly believed in the separation of Church and State, and would have found the incursion of one upon the other to be both noxious and deeply dangerous. Yes, they certainly did believe in the G-d of creation; nonetheless, they also had a deep and abiding faith in both human reason and the discoveries of science. 

Today, those who argue that the federal government oversteps both its rights as well as its licit moral and legal boundaries by mandating COVID-19 vaccines ought to learn from history; had it not been for General Washington mandating Small Pox vaccinations for all his troops before going into battle, this essay would have been composed in the Southern-most colony of the British Empire. According to the U.S. Library of Congress's Science, Technology, and Business Division, the smallpox inoculations for all of Washington's forces who came through the then-capital of Philadelphia and then through Morristown, New Jersey, following the Battle of Princeton, began Jan. 6, 1777.  As noted above, had not Washington done so, this week’s essay would have been composed in the Southern-most colony of the United Kingdom . . .

But alas, not that many citizens in early 21st century America know jack about our early history; about how George Washington mandated that all his troops be vaccinated against Small Pox, thus saving a revolution. Today, a small but garrulous minority - aided largely by the conspiracy theorists predominating a right-wing social media blitz - argues that mandating vaccinations against COVID-19 is a flat-out abridgement of individual rights and freedoms. (As opposed to not smoking on airplanes, wearing seatbelts or vaccinating children before they can attend public school.)  As we have seen, such utter נאַרישקייט (nareshkeit - that’s Yiddish for “lunacy”) has led to thousands upon thousands of needless deaths. Unlike G. Washington and his loyal troops, these modern Americans find no truth coming from the ivy-covered halls of science. Their preference is following a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, all the while praying for recovery from the immediate agency of the Divine. Of course in reality, this approach has far more to do with partisan politics and the winning of elections than with religion versus science. Although the number of so-called hard core anti-vaxxers is getting smaller all the time (thank G-d), there are still those who steadfastly proclaim that  they have every right to receive a religious exemption from said vaccines. In fact, for every law which has been enacted at some level, there is a group that demands its religious values permit them to abrogate the law or clause in question. As Washington Post contributing columnist Kate Cohen wrote in a recent piece: “A person can claim a religious exemption to the equal opportunity clause that’s required in all federal contracts; to the contraceptive coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act; and, in some states, to the requirement that a child be immunized to attend public school.”  We’ve all read about bakers refusing to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples because they believe that to do so would be going against the word of G-d.  Where does it end? This seems crazy. Obviously not everyone agrees with every law, but that’s the bummer and the challenge about living in civil society. In a democracy, if you feel strongly enough, you can set about finding like-minded people and then try to change the law. Or, if that doesn’t work, and you truly believe it’s a sin to, say, fill contraceptive prescriptions, then (a) don’t be a pharmacist or (b) risk getting fired. Wouldn’t G-d appreciate the gesture? For now, let’s return to the issue of vaccines and masks. By keeping an angry, largely unlettered minority believing that scientists, progressives and Democrats (frequently referred to as “Socialists”) are purposefully injecting vaccines and salad dressings with GPS trackers and various poisons, keeps that minority within the Republican fold . . . thus keeping Republicans in charge of the three branches of government.  

So let’s get this straight: according to these משוגעים (m’shugoyim - that’s Yiddish/Hebrew for “screwballs”), it is both good and perfectly legal to keep government from imposing on individual liberty and freedom when it comes to the wearing of masks, getting vaccines and mandating social distancing, but not so when it comes to a woman’s right to choose whether or not to get an abortion . . . under any circumstance, whether it be rape, incest or the health of the mother? And then, adding even further insult to injury, legislating precisely when life begins? According to the Texas Legislature (and soon the legislatures of George, Mississippi and Florida), a viable life begins at precisely 6 weeks . . . a time when a vast majority of women have yet to discover that they are pregnant. According to Texas, after six weeks, abortions are illegal, and anyone who assists a woman in any way, shape or form to terminate a “viable fetus,” can be arrested, tried and sentenced. (And whosoever notifies the authorities about these “assisters” may receive a reward of up to $10,000.)

In other words, what Texas has done in passing this onerous legislation is to, essentially, incinerate Roe v. Wade. Publicly, those legislators (the majority of whom are men) who vote in favor of such draconian laws, say they are doing so with G-d’s blessing . . . that abortion - regardless of the circumstance - is  murder.

These are the folks who self identify as “Pro-Life.”  I have never understood this.  How can it be that the vast majority of “Pro-Life” legislators consistently vote against such things as food stamps, funding for healthcare and universal pre-K education, cannot and will not lift  a finger to fund clean air, clean water or dozens of other things which are necessary for life?  By their actions it would seem that they are of a belief that although life begins at conception (if not even before - like the moment one considers engaging in sexual congress), it ends with birth.  If so, let’s call a spade a spade: they are not “Pro-Life” - - - they are stridently “Pro-Birth” and nothing more.

Recognizing that many readers of this blog are “MOT” (“Members of the Tribe”), permit me a few words about the beginning of life from a Jewish legal perspective. Jewish law (halacha) has a nuanced view of abortion. While it is true that many פרומע יידין (frume Yidd’n - Yiddish for “pious Jews”) have not been overly worried by these and other efforts to curtail legal abortion, in America, the pro-life narrative is largely articulated by the Christian right; there are important differences between how Judaism and Christianity view the span of time between conception and birth.

Jewish law does not consider the fetus to be a being with a soul until it is born. It does not have personhood. Furthermore, before 40 days, some poskim, (deciders of Jewish law), have a low bar for allowing an abortion. The Talmud, in Yevamos 69b, cites the view of a rabbi named Rav Hisda that “until forty days from conception the fetus is merely water. It is not yet considered a living being.” Moreover, if there is a threat to a woman’s life, the safety of the mother takes precedence over continuing the pregnancy at any stage. Many sources illustrate this graphically and rather unambiguously, and all modern poskim, or religious deciders, agree on this. In fact, in certain circumstances, a fetus that endangers the life of the mother is legally considered a “murderer” in active pursuit.  Jewish law prohibits killing in all cases — except if one person is trying to murder another. If an individual is trying to end someone’s life, killing that person is actually a requirement. How much more so, a fetus (not yet a full person) who threatens the mother’s life may be aborted.

In his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides (one of the greatest physicians of his day) writes: “The sages ruled that when complications arise and a pregnant woman cannot give birth, it is permitted to abort the fetus in her womb, whether with a knife or drugs, for the fetus is considered a רודף (rodef - a murderer in pursuit]) of its mother … If the head of the fetus emerges, it should not be touched, because one life should not be sacrificed for another. Although the mother may die, this is the nature of the world.”

In other words, when a fetus endangers the life of the mother, unless it is in the process of being born, abortion is a halachic (Jewish legal) requirement.  How very different from that of the fundamentalist Christian perspective . . .

One of the biggest differences is that Jewish law has never, and will never, be decided on the basis of contemporary political needs.  Although there are centuries-old disputes within the world of Jewish law on how various laws and enactments should be interpreted and/or adjudicated.

Whether it comes to vaccines, climate change or choice, there is a lot to be learned from ancient texts. One of the most insightful comes from an ancient sage known as Rabbi Tarfon:

“It is not up to you to finish the task, but you are not free to avoid it”.

Sounds like something the Founders might have said . . .

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

In the Majestic Words of JFK (Or Ted Sorensen, or Winston Churchill or George St. John)

Without question, one of the most majestic and awe-inspiring of all presidential inaugural addresses was the one delivered by the then 43-year old John Fitzgerald Kennedy on January 20, 1961. It was also one of the shortest - a mere 14 minutes. That speech contained such gems as:

• 'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.'

• 'If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.'

• 'Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.' and perhaps the most magical of all presidential phrases:

• 'And so, my fellow Americans - ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.'

The inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) represented a seismic change in American politics.  He was, after all, more than a generation younger than his predecessor, President Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969).  He was also the first president born in the 20th century and brought to the White House, a dash and flair, an energetic youthfulness and élan unlike anything America and the world had ever seen before. JFK and his picture-perfect family had it all: wealth and movie-star good looks; sophistication, 50-mile hikes and above all, breathtaking charisma.  He only lived a brief 46 years; unbelievably, he has now been dead for nearly 60. 

Kennedy’s image is that of a fire-breathing progressive.  In truth, he was anything but.  Rather, he was a slightly right-of-center moderate Democrat whose greatest accomplishments - Medicare, the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts - were mostly completed by his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was likely American political history’s most masterful legislative prestidigitators.  What Kennedy had in spades over Johnson - and most all of our presidents before or since - was the ability to motivate people of all ages to get off their backsides and give something back to “The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”  The motivation of which we speak was of course wrapped up in the ultimate sentence of JFK’s  inaugural address: to "Ask not what your country can do for you, [but rather] ask what you can do for your country.”  Ironically, those words for which he is best remembered may well have not come from his pen . . . or that of Ted Sorensen, his brilliantly poetic 33-year old speechwriter.  According to Chris Matthews, the former press spokesman for Speaker Tip O’Neil,  chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and former MSNBC news host, that phrase likely came from either from one of Winston Churchill’s war-time speeches or George St. John, who was JFK’s headmaster at Choate  in the early 1930s.  In his 2011 book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,  Matthews, who interviewed many of Kennedy’s Choate classmates, notes that they frequently heard headmaster St. John tell his students precisely the same thing.

I well remember listening to JKF’s inaugural address on the radio in Miss Cook’s class that January afternoon in 1961.  (The next day would be our father’s 45th birthday).  The new president sounded so young; his Boston accent was like something we only heard in movies; hearing Robert Frost read the poem The Gift Outright was especially rewarding . . . I was terribly smitten by great poets, thanks largely to “Granny Annie,” my mother’s mother. (Actually, Frost had written a brand new poem for the event entitled Dedication.” He approached the microphone, but blinded by the sun's glare on the snow-covered Capitol grounds, Frost was unable to read it. Thinking quickly, he instead recited "The Gift Outright," a poem he had written in 1942.)

I also well remember wanting desperately to join the Peace Corps and go out on a 50-mile hike. Alas, one needed a minimum of a B.A. in order to join the former, and their parents’ permission to participate in the latter. (I was but 11 at the time and possessed neither the degree nor parental permission.) Nonetheless, JFK inoculated in many of us a desire to be active, to give something of ourselves back to the country of our birth. JFK would be the reason why many of my generation became involved in what used to be known as “causes.” It’s something woefully lacking in today’s world . . .

        Post-war: able to get back into tailored clothing!

As a child, I well remember going to either the Union (train) Station in downtown Los Angeles or what was then known as the Los Angeles Airport (where parking was still both unpaved and free). In my recollection, both places were filled with uniformed soldiers, sailors, and marines rushing to make connections. In our neighborhood, there were many men who still bore the scars and halting gait of men who had been injured in the war. Unbeknownst to us - children living lives of relative privilege, many of our parents were actually in the 91%-92% income tax bracket and yet never tried to start a revolution. They were children of the Great Depression who survived a gruesome war and helped rebuild both a nation and a world. For some, it was a matter of noblesse oblige; for most, it was part of the obligation of being a patriotic citizen.

Where have those times gone?

I for one firmly desire to see Congress and the Biden administration institute something akin to “National Service; a series of programs and policies meant for the masses to join, thereby repairing our country while answering JFK’s challenge to “ask what we can do for our country.” In one of the very few conversations I ever had with my father about his 6 years of service during WWII, I remember him telling me that perhaps the best part of being in the service (outside of winning the war and coming back alive) was working alongside and getting to know people he otherwise would never have met. “I learned so much about people who were vastly different from myself . . . and they about me. Imagine: I was the first Jew many of these lads had ever met . . .”

Let’s face it: for quite some time, Americans have been growing further and further apart, whether the dividing lines be race, religion, politics, ethnicity economics or a combination of any or all these things. We frequently take sides, “knowing” that our problems or shortcomings are due to others with whom we have next to no contact with - let alone or knowledge of. This is a loss for all of us. If there were some way for people to work together for the common good, perhaps we could revive the dream of JFK: to ask what we can do for our country. I for one couldn’t care less whether the words come directly from JFK, Ted Sorensen, Winston Churchill or George St. John or Bob Dylan. If America is to survive, we must all find a way to work together.

Interestingly, the one person in the Biden Administration who has spoken most about reviving a national service program is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He is all all in favor of expanding the Peace Corps (which still exists), as well as Vista and other such programs. Ironically Elaine Chao, Secretary Pete’s immediate predecessor at DOT (she is the wife Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) served as the head of the Peace Corps during the first Bush Administration. Perhaps Buttigieg and Chao should get together with President Biden and his Chief of Staff Ron Klain in order to begin the process of creating a new National Service agenda for all of America.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Pride and Privilege, Paranoia and Prejudice

The late Alan King - one of the greatest of all Jewish comedians - once quipped “Here’s a brief summary of every Jewish holiday: ‘They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!’”  

Mathematician/topical song writer Tom Lehrer wrote a well-known satiric piece called “National Brotherhood Week,” the opening lyrics of which go: “Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Moslems, and everybody hates the Jews.”

In 1923, the Welsh-born, sober-sided David Lloyd George, who served as British Prime Minister from 1916-1922, noted: Of all the extreme fanaticism which plays havoc in man’s nature, there is not one as irrational as anti-Semitism. … If the Jews are rich [these fanatics] are victims of theft. If they are poor, they are victims of ridicule. If they take sides in a war, it is because they wish to take advantage from the spilling of non-Jewish blood. If they espouse peace, it is because they are scared by their natures or traitors. If the Jew dwells in a foreign land he is persecuted and expelled. If he wishes to return to his own land, he is prevented from doing so.”  Then too, there was an anonymous wit who once proclaimed “I don’t know which came first: the Jews or the anti-Semites.  It  seems to me that if G-d hadn’t, in his great wisdom created the ‘Chosen People,’ anti-Semites would have, in order to have an eternal target for their deranged animosity.”  

To my mind, the best of all quotes about the Jews comes from the pen of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens): "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race.  It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way.  Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of.  He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.  He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it.  The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmaties, of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind.  All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains.  What is the secret of his immortality?”

Between the humor of comedian King and the wit of satirist Lehrer one gets an insider’s grasp of the irrepressible, self-deprecating wit of the Children of Abraham and Sarah.  Likewise, the brilliant insights of two non-Jews - Lloyd George and Mark Twain shine a blinding white light on the historic enigma of this people who are about to enter the year 5782 with prayers of hope and forgiveness, as well as historic pride and tearful remembrance.    

Without question, there are tons and tons of things to be proud of when it comes to the accomplishments of Jewish people.  Hell’s bells, a brief ramble through the pages of movie history, broken down into producers, directors, screenwriters, composers and stars is enough to make one’s chest puff up to the point of exploding.  Then too, the number of Jewish brothers and sisters involved in medical research, physics, chemistry, biology and various sciences we cannot even pronounce is legion. In the world of politics, the Senate Majority Leader (New York’s Chuck Schumer) and the floor leaders of both Trump impeachment trials (California’s Adam Schiff and Maryland’s Jaimie Raskin) are all "MOT” (members of the tribe).  Within the  Biden Administration we can identify far more than a minyan occupying important posts:

Ron Klain: Chief of Staff

Janet Yellin Secretary of Treasury

Alejandro Mayorkas: Secretary of Homeland Security

Tony Blinken Secretary of State

Merrick Brian Garland: Attorney General

Jared Bernstein: Council of Economic Advisers

Rochelle Walensky: Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Wendy Sherman: Deputy Secretary of State

Anne Neuberger Deputy National Security Adviser for Cybersecurity

Jeffrey Zients: COVID-19 Response Coordinator

David Kessler: Co-chair of the COVID-19 Advisory Board and Head of Operation Warp Speed

David Cohen: CIA Deputy Director

Rachel Levine: Deputy Health Secretary

Jennifer Klein: Co-chair Council on Gender Policy

Jessica Rosenworcel: Chair of the Federal Communications Commission

Stephanie Pollack: Deputy Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration

Polly Trottenberg: Deputy Secretary of Transportation

Mira Resnick: State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regional Security

Roberta Jacobson: National Security Council “border czar”

Gary Gensler: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman*

Genine Macks Fidler: National Council on the Humanities

Chanan Weissman: Director for Technology and Democracy at National Security Council

Thomas Nides U.S. Ambassador to Israel [to be confirmed]

Eric Garcetti U.S. Ambassador to India [to be confirmed]

David Cohen: U.S. Ambassador to Canada [to be confirmed]

Mark Gitenstein: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union [to be confirmed]

Deborah Lipstadt: Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism [to be confirmed]

Jonathan Kaplan: U.S. Ambassador to Singapore [to be confirmed]

Marc Stanley: U.S. Ambassador to Argentina [to be confirmed]

Rahm Emanuel U.S. Ambassador to Japan [to be confirmed]

Sharon Kleinbaum: Commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom  

Thankfully, to date, there has been precious little chatter from cyber anti-Semites about the overwhelming number of Jewish men and women serving the country in top-line posts.  Historically, those who hate Jews need little reason for their conspiratorial animosity.  Historically, the reasons why people hate Jews falls into roughly six categories:

1. Economic -- "We hate Jews because they possess too much wealth and power."

2. Chosen People -- "We hate Jews because they arrogantly claim that they are the chosen people."

3. Scapegoat -- "Jews are a convenient group to single out and blame for our troubles."

4. Deicide -- "We hate Jews because they killed Jesus."

5. Outsiders -- "We hate Jews because they are different than us." (The dislike of the unlike.)

6. Racial Theory -- "We hate Jews because they are an inferior race."

Every other hated group is hated for a relatively defined reason. We Jews, however, are hated in paradoxes: Jews are hated for being a lazy and inferior race - but also for dominating the economy and taking over the world. We are hated for stubbornly maintaining our separateness - and, when we do assimilate - for posing a threat to racial purity through intermarriages. We are seen as pacifists and as warmongers; as capitalist exploiters and as revolutionary communists; possessed of a Chosen-People mentality, as well as of an inferiority complex. It seems that we just can't win.

Over the past year or so, there has been an obvious rise in the number of anti-Semitic events in both the United States and Europe, as well as throughout much of the rest of the world. Much of it has been focused on Israel and the spread of COVID-19. In a sense, history is repeating itself; much of Europe blamed the Jew for the spread of the so-called “Black Death” of the early Middle Ages. And yet, if there are any bright spots on the horizon when it comes to COVID-19 and its Delta variant, they emanate from Jewish scientists, immunologists and infectious disease specialists in America, Europe and Israel. As Jews, we can be proud, knowing that our sons and daughters have been largely at the forefront of containing the worst, most lethal pandemic of the past century. But at the same time, we are both puzzled and frightened by the response of professional Jew-haters who tell their followers that we are largely responsible for its spread.

It is one of the great ironies of human history that virtually every powerful culture or civilization which sought to eliminate the Jews from the face of time are now extinct . . . to be found mostly in museums or libraries.  It is even more ironic that the great and literate histories of their growth, decline and fall, have been written primarily by Jewish historians.  Perhaps. when all is  said and done, the underlying truth of being  part of the “Chosen People” is precisely this: that we have been “chosen” to exist throughout time . . . to continue adding to human history regardless of what our enemies - both ancient and more contemporary - might have wished.    
I for one am more than amazed that few professional anti-Semites have yet to figure out that the vast majority of the people serving in the current administration are either Jewish or Catholic. If they had, the level of finger pointing and ethno-religious animosity would be far, more virulent than it already is.

We are by no means a people without flaws. Like any people, we have our historic and contemporary embarrassments. From the phony “Messiah” Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676) and the man who continued Zevi’s cult, Jacob Frank (1726-1791) and from such psychopathic American gangsters as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegal (1906-1941) Mickey Cohen (1913-1976) and America’s greatest/worst fraudster Bernard “Bernie” Madoff (1938-2021) Jews have plenty of MOT (“Members of the Tribe”) to be embarrassed by.  Then too, we have provided the world with more medical discoveries, scientific breakthroughs, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as Emmy, Oscar and Tony winners and MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”) recipients than any other tiny family on the face of the earth.   

As we enter this New Year, we have much to be proud of . . . and much to worry about. Those who hate despise and dream up noxious conspiracies about the children of Abraham and Sarah not about to disappear from the human equation. Then again, their pernicious derangement isn’t about to stop us from doing everything in our power to make the world a better, saner, more healthy place. It’s just part of the price we pay for being “chosen.” Pride comes with privilege; paranoia always runs alongside prejudice.

So be it.

Copyright ©2021 Kurt F. Stone

There's More to President Grant Than War, Whiskey and Dishonest Dealings

Today is the 4th of July; America’s 245th birthday. It is, of course, a day of fireworks (“The bombs bursting in air”), backyard barbeques and for some of us, watching for the umpteenth time Peter Stone’s magnificent musical 1776, starring William Daniels (John Adams), Howard Da Silva (Benjamin Franklin) and Ken Howard (Thomas Jefferson). For American historians, it is the time to write yet another essay, hopefully shedding even greater light on this magnificent experiment in liberty and representative democracy called America. At this time of year, Presidential historians are, as is their wont, surveying anew the presidential ranking of all 45 of the nation’s Chief Executives - from Washington to Trump. (#46, Joe Biden has not yet made the list as of today he’s only served in office 165 days.)

                             Ulysses S. Grant: America’s 18th President

When it comes to Presidential ranks decade-by-date, there are many givens: Lincoln, Washington, FDR and TR have ranked numbers 1-4 as long as anyone can remember. Then too, those at the bottom of the list - Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding and John Tyler - haven’t budged; they are still the worst of the worst . . . with the exception of Donald J. Trump who now enters the list at 41 out of 45.  (BTW: Barack Obama debuted at #12 in 2016 and as of the latest polling, has moved up to #10). There are some surprises: Dwight Eisenhower, as an example, has moved all the way from 9th to 5th best over the past 2 decades.  The president whose reputation has improved the most in the past two decades? That’s Ulysses S. Grant, who started at No. 33 and is now ranked 20th. Grant has had a number of sympathetic biographies in recent years, and these days gets more credit for Reconstruction and his diplomacy than condemnation for his supposed dipsomania and alleged corruption.

That Grant loved bourbon (likely “Old Crow”) was well known to just about everyone.  According to one tale, a leading politician told President Abraham Lincoln that the man he was about to appoint his commanding general was nothing more than a rotten drunk.  “He is not himself half the time; he can’t be relied upon, it is a shame to have such a man in command of an army,” the man told Lincoln. “So Grant gets drunk, does he?” queried Lincoln, addressing himself to one of the particularly active detractors of the soldier. “Yes, he does, and I can prove it,” was the reply. “Well,” returned Lincoln, with the faintest suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “you needn’t waste your time getting proof; you just find out, to oblige me, what brand of whiskey Grant drinks, because I want to send a barrel of it to each one of my generals.”  That might have ended the crusade against General Grant . . . not the historic stereotype . . . which may or may not be true.  

At the end of  1930, Scribner’s Magazine began publishing what would prove to be a short-lived series of “alternative history” pieces. The first installment, in the November issue, was “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln.” This was followed by a contribution from none other than Winston Churchill who turned the concept on its head. It was piece bafflingly titled “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”—but, as we all know, Lee didn’t win the Battle of Gettysburg.  Reading Churchill’s story brought out the zaniness in parodist James Thurber, who then wrote “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” in The New Yorker in December of that year. The next month Scribner’s published a third essay (“If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”) before bringing the series to an end. All three pieces were soon forgotten, but Thurber’s parody became one of his most famous and beloved works, and is still being performed on stage.  I urge you to you read If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox and have a good laugh . . .  So much for Grant’s affinity for whisky.  Politically, his presidency was long associated with corruption . . . most notably (and ironically) the so-called “Whiskey Ring,” a scandal uncovered in 1875 involving whiskey distillers, agents of the I.R.S. Treasury clerks and various members of the Grant Administration.  Although Grant appointed the nation’s first “special prosecutor” to look into the case (who discovered, tried and sentenced the culprits), the president and his time in office were nonetheless forever tarnished. In the eyes of history, he may have been a successful commanding general, but was definitely a worthless drunk and criminal.

Presidential historians, it turns out, have begun finding out that U.S. Grant was far, far better than his reputation or personal stereotype would have us believe.  He was responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of former slaves into American society, and see that the  South not get away Scot-free with their moral and political transgressions.  Although deeply flawed, the “Reconstruction Era” did make it possible for government to get back on its feet after the War.  Grant had a lot to do with making the politics of that difficult program possible.

Then too, Grant was far better read and far more philosophical than historians have given him credit.  He was a damn good writer whose prose was praised by none other than the great Mark Twain who came to Grant’s financial aid during the former president’s final days by convincing Merrill Lynch to put up $50,000.00 to buy the rights to Grant’s autobiography, which Twain would then publish. (Twain accomplished what he sought out to do; most regrettably, Grant put the finishing touches on his autobiography just 5 days before dying in July 1885 at age 63.  The two-volume work was published at the end of that year.)

One of the Grant’s most prescient and chilling messages was delivered in a speech he gave at the Annual Reunion of the Army of the Tennessee in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 29, 1875.  Its most revealing passage sounds like something could - and should - be spoken on this year’s Fourth of July observance.  We will conclude with these words, think about them, and then prepare to watch 1776:

I do not bring into this assemblage politics, certainly not partisan politics, but it is a
fair subject for soldiers in their deliberations to consider what may be necessary to secure the prize for which they battled in a republic like ours. Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Now in this centennial year of our national existence, I believe it a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundation of the house commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago, at Concord and Lexington. Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.

Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that the State or Nation, or both combined, shall furnish to every child growing up in the land, the means of acquiring a good common-school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistic tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards, I believe the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee will not have been fought in vain. 

And may Ulysses S. Grant’s name, deeds and reputation grow with every passing year.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

The Talking Cure

                        Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Anyone who has spent even a bit of time learning about the history of Freudian psychoanalysis, is familiar with the term “The talking cure.” In a nutshell, the good Dr. Freud was speaking with a colleague of his, Dr. Josef Breuer one day and Breuer told Freud about a patient he called “Anna O” (in reality, Bertha Pappenheim), who was experiencing “hysteria.” Breuer excitedly told Freud he had discovered that if he hypnotized Anna, she'd reveal all sorts of information she didn't recall when she was conscious — and her symptoms would lessen afterward. Freud tried this “talking cure” in his own private practice, but found patients would talk pretty freely to him without hypnosis, provided they were in a relaxed position — specifically, lying down on a couch — and if they were encouraged to say whatever came into their heads, a process known as “free association.” Once a patient talked at length, Freud could analyze what the person said to figure out what past traumas were likely causing the patient's current distress. Thus was born Freud’s “Talking Cure.” It was a boon to the nascent world  of psychoanalysis . . . not to mention the sale of couches!

As important as the Talking Cure has been to  psychoanalysis, one must keep in mind that it is not - nor ever has been - a panacea; sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Let’s just say that it can be a valuable arrow in Freud’s quiver.

The United States Senate has its own version of the Talking Cure - a tradition which occasionally offers a helping hand to those in the minority, but frequently acts as a political hindrance or impediment to those in the majority.  Here, of course, we are referring to one of the most nettlesome of all legislative strategies: the filibuster.   

Likely stemming from the Dutch /ˈvrɛi̯bœy̯tər/ meaning either a “freebooter” or “a pirate,” the Senate website defines filibuster as “An Informal term for any attempt to block or delay Senate action on a bill or other matter by debating it at length, by offering numerous procedural motions, or by any other delaying or obstructive actions."  The term filibuster was first used in the 1850s when it was applied to efforts to hold the Senate floor in order to prevent a vote on a bill. In the early years of Congress, representatives, as well as senators, could filibuster bills. However, as the number of representatives grew, the House amended its rules placing specific time limits on debates. In the 100-member Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue. Prior to 1917 the Senate rules did not provide for a way to end debate and force a vote on a measure. That year, the Senate adopted a rule to allow a two-thirds majority to end a filibuster, a procedure known as "cloture." In 1975 the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60) of the 100-member Senate.

                James Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes  to Washington” (1939)

For non-political geeks, the greatest exemplar of the term filibuster is Jimmy Stewart playing the young idealistic Senator Jefferson  Smith holding the Senate floor hour after hour so as to keep a handful of his more corrupt colleagues from destroying his dream - creating a national boys’ camp.  Most will recall the hoarse, reeling Smith collapsing on the Senate floor after setting some sort of record for “talking the bill to death.”  In reality, this is a tactic which actually did exist: the “talking filibuster.”  The all-time record for the longest filibuster of ‘em all belongs to the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who  spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, according to U.S. Senate records.

Thurmond began speaking at 8:54 p.m. on Aug. 28 and continued until 9:12 p.m. the following evening, reciting the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, President George Washington's farewell address and other historical documents along the way.  So long as he stayed on his feet, it  really didn’t matter what he spoke about. Using what might be called a “tag-team” strategy, Thurmond and several of his colleagues (all Southern Democrats) managed to hold the floor for an amazing 57 days (March 26 -June 19), the day the Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed.  Among the other filibuster champs, several were, believe it or not, progressives: Wisconsin Senators William La Follette, Sr. (18 hours, 28 minutes in 1908) and William Proxmire (16 hours and 12 minutes) who managed to stall debate on an increase of the public debt ceiling in 1981 and Oregon’s Wayne Morse (the “Tiger of the Senate”) who spoke for 22 hours and 26 minutes to stall debate on the Tidelands Oil bill in 1953.

Today, the “talking filibuster” is a remnant of the past.  Just calling for a filibuster on a given bill (most always by the minority party) makes it possible to stall legislative activity against a particular bill while continuing to be in session.  In 2003, Senate Democrats threatened a lengthy filibuster to block several of then-President George W. Bush’s nominees. Republicans discussed invoking the parliamentary move since, like a nuclear explosion, it cannot be controlled once it is unleashed. Former GOP Senate Majority leader Trent Lott coined the term “the Nuclear Option” because both parties saw it as an unthinkable final recourse, just like nuclear war. During a standoff over George W. Bush nominees in 2003, Republicans discussed invoking the parliamentary move by using the codeword “The Hulk" since it, like the superhero alter ego, cannot be controlled once it is unleashed. Senators who wanted to give the maneuver a more positive public image, call it “The Constitutional Option.”

Well, now that Democrats and Republicans are living and working in an equally divided Senate (where only V.P. Harris can break a tie), the idea of minority Republicans reverting to the filibuster has both sides wondering what to do.  Some - mostly the progressive left - want to get rid of the filibuster altogether; others want to go back to the days when cloture requires 60 votes; then there is President Biden, Majority Leader Schumer, his assistant, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, and  the so-called “institutionalists.”  They realize that they simply do not have the votes to change Senate rules (it only takes a majority vote).

If the Democrats managed to end the filibuster (as of today, they don’t have the votes) the first thing they would no doubt do is pass their voting rights bill, (S.1), which would counteract curbs Republicans are placing on mail-in and absentee voting, streamline national voter registration and end the partisan drawing of congressional lines. Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams has argued Democrats could possibly get around the filibuster for this one bill. But most people agree that once a party ends the filibuster for one bill, it'll be hooked and do it again and again.

President Biden is likely the lynchpin in this debate. He was a senator for decades and respects the institution, but he's now a president trying to get things done. Biden told ABC's George Stephanopoulos just the other day he'd like to revert to a "talking filibuster."

"I don't think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it [like] what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days," he told Stephanopoulos. "You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking."

"So you're for that reform? You're for bringing back the talking filibuster?" Stephanopulos asked.

"I am. That's what it was supposed to be," Biden said, a la "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

There is already quite a significant debate over whether or not returning to the “Jefferson Smith” version of the filibuster will solve anything.  Shortly after the president’s sit-down with George Stephanopoulos, CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza wrote an analysis piece flatly stating that A 'talking filibuster' isn't going to solve the Senate's problems.”  Only time will tell.

I personally agree with the POTUS and a growing cadre of Democrats. By going back to the old rule, it would force Republicans to remain on their feet in front of all those cameras, showing themselves to the American public for what they are; obstructionists whose main issue is being against anything and everything the Democrats are for.  Period.  It would b e easy enough to change one aspect of the filibuster rule: mandating that all speechifying must be germane to the topic at hand. In other words, no more reading from the Bible, the White Pages, or Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham (as Ted Cruz actually did in September 2013).

Which brings us back to Dr. Freud who, although unbelievably gifted and insightful, was by no means political.  Nonetheless, he did understand the mind, heart and soul of the politician Fpr indeed, here are his thoughts:

“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” 

Can we talk?

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

March 7, 1965

Fifty-six years ago today (March 7, 1965) the then 25-year old civil rights activist John Lewis (1940-2020) led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and faced brutal attacks by oncoming state troopers. Lewis himself was one of 18 who were injured badly enough to require hospitalization. Footage of the violence collectively shocked the nation and galvanized the fight against racial injustice. In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Although Wallace ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7.

In the wake of the shocking incident, President Lyndon Johnson called for comprehensive voting rights legislation. In a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, the president outlined the devious ways in which election officials denied African American citizens the vote.

Within days, the number of people participating in the march - whose ultimate destination was Montgomery - had grown to more than 25,000.  Now led by John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the horrific event which began on “Bloody Sunday” galvanized the nation.  So much so that Congress passed - and President Lyndon Johnson signed the “Voting Rights Act” on August 6 . . . a mere 5 months after “Bloody Sunday."  The purpose of this act was to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Voting Rights Act is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, over the past several years, governors, state legislators and members of Congress (overwhelmingly Republican) have been doing everything in their power to undo or reverse the Voting Rights Act. The majority of those seeking this reversal are motivated by pretty much the same concern: putting as many stumbling blocks in the path of poor and minority voters, a sizeable percentage of who regularly vote for Democrats. Most readers of The K.F. Stone Weekly know that there are important aspects of voting which are protected by the 15h Amendment which in sum states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Nonetheless, many state legislatures - especially those under Republican control - have been, as mentioned above - been putting significant roadblocks before the rights of minority voters.

Today, in memory and honor of the 56th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” President Biden has signed an executive order to promote additional access to voting. The administration describes the executive order as an “initial step” to protect voting rights — one that uses “the authority the president has to leverage federal resources to help people register to vote and provide information,” according to an administration official. This move comes not just in memory of “Bloody Sunday,” but also as a strong response to Republicans in statehouses around the country who are doing everything in their power to advance voter suppression legislation, including a bill in Georgia that voting rights groups say targets Black voters. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed measures in recent days to increase voting rights, including HR1 -- a sweeping ethics and election package that contains provisions expanding early and mail-in voting, restoring voting rights to former felons, permitting voting on Sunday, and easing voter registration for eligible Americans.

Despite the fact that the decisions of 60 separate courts and Donald Trump’s own Justice Department finding virtually no voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election (the one which the previous president and his staunchest supporters claimed to be as true as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west) Republican lawmakers in 43 states have introduced 253 bills to restrict ballot access. The greatest activity has been in battleground states, especially Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Measures involve early voting, mail-in ballots, drop boxes, mobile voting facilities, and rules to disqualify ballots received after Election Day that cannot be overruled by the executive branch or the courts.

Some restrictions, however, are likely to be adopted in states in which the GOP controls both the legislature and the governor’s mansion. The Iowa state senate recently passed a bill shortening the early voting period. Although Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis declared that his state “did it right” in November 2020, Florida is poised to reduce the number of drop boxes. Texas lawmakers have submitted a slew of bills limiting voter access.  This week, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a bill whose motive Gwinnett County Republican election official Alice O’Lenick acknowledged was partisan: If House Bill 531 is enacted “at least we have a shot at winning,” she said. The legislation mandates that all counties have the same early voting dates and times: Monday-Friday, during business hours, one mandatory Saturday, one additional Saturday or Sunday. The elimination of early voting in the evening and all but one Sunday is aimed directly at working class Georgians and “souls to polls” initiatives, which usher African Americans to polling places after Sunday morning church services.

An Iowa bill aimed at limiting voting and making it harder for voters to return absentee ballots is headed to Gov. Kim Reynolds' desk this week, after passing both Republican-controlled chambers of the state legislature.

The bill, introduced by a Republican state senator, specifically would reduce the number of early voting days from 29 days to 20 days. It would also close polling places an hour earlier on Election Day (at 8 p.m. instead of 9 p.m.).

The bill also places new restrictions on absentee voting including banning officials from sending applications without a voter first requesting one, and requiring ballots be received by the county before polls close on Election Day.

The Republican-controlled Iowa House passed the measure on Wednesday night in a party line vote of 57-37. That vote came a day after the GOP-controlled Iowa Senate, where the legislation was introduced, also passed the bill on a party line vote.

One attorney representing Arizona before the Supreme Court went so far as to admit that these changes and restrictions had virtually nothing to do with guaranteeing that elections could neither be stolen nor rigged: “We are pushing for these changes for they guarantee the success of Republicans in coming elections.”  If anyone needs a new definition of chutzpah, here it is . . .

So what can be done?” Can or will President Biden’s executive order regarding the 15th Amendment put a horse collar around the Republican-controlled states that wish to turn back the clock?  The only thing that comes to mind on this, the 56th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” is for everyone to work just as hard to overturn their state legislatures and replace their governors as they/we did to get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris elected in 2020.  

In other words, there’s no rest for the weary.  We simply must keep the spirit of John Lewis and Bloody Sunday alive.

Any takers?  Please let me know.

Copyright©2012 Kurt F. stone

How Low Can You Go?

                                Charles Kushner: Trump’s Mechutan

Unlike a majority of Jewish  people (especially rabbis) residing here in South Florida, I was neither born nor raised in a Lower East Side family where the parents spoke Yiddish whenever they did not want the children to understand what they were saying.  Both I and my slightly older sister Erica (Riki) are 100% Californian. Neither our grandparents nor great-grandparents for that matter were Eastern-European immigrants who came through Eliis Island or Castle Garden and then settled a short distance from their  place of disembarkation. Rather, the earliest generations of Hymans, Greenbergs and Schimbergs were born in 19th century Virginia, Maryland and Minnesota. Their children - our great-grandparents - were native English speakers about as far removed from “Tevya,  Golda and the girls” as can be imagined. The next generation - our great grandparents - raised their families in places like Baltimore, Richmond, Virginia, Chicago and Kansas City. (Granny Annie, my mother’s mother, was born in 1896 in the same St. Paul neighborhood  where just a few days earlier, F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald (F. Scott) had entered the world - not exactly a Yiddishe shetl). As such, neither our great grandparents, grandparents nor parents understood more than 5 words of Yiddish. (I myself did learn a bit of Yiddish with the late Professor Herb Paper out of an urge to be able to read Sholem Aleichem in the original) Indeed, today, whenever we want to speak in front of “Madame” (our soon-to-be 97 year old matriarch) in a language she won’t understand, we (meaning me and Annie) chatter away in Hebrew. (Unlike most America-born, Hollywoodish Jewish great-grandmothers of her generation, she does do reasonably well in French and Italian.) So what in the world does any of this have to do with “Politics & a Whole Lot More,” as the subtitle of this blog has proclaimed for going on 17 years? 

To wit: our purpose is to introduce a Yiddish word that takes a paragraph to explain - a word that soon may become as well known as schmuck, mazal tov, meshuggah, chutzpah, glitch, mensch, shtick and yente - all of which likewise take a brief  sentence or two to explain.  And that word is מחותן (pronounced m’chut’n for a male,  מחותנתטע (pronounced m’chutn’steh for a female, or מחותונים (pronounced m’chutonim in the plural.  Let’s, for the moment, pay attention to the male version (מחותן) of the term.  Derived from the Hebrew word for “groom,” a mchut’n is how one describes the relationship between you and your child’s father-in-law.  A simple example (and getting ever closer to the purpose of this little linguistic exercise) would be to explain the relationship between Donald Trump and Charles Kushner - Jared Kusher’s father . . . the one just given a presidential pardon.  Charles Kushner is Donald and Melania Trump’s m’chut’n, while Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer), Jared’s mother and Charles’ wife, is the Trump’s m’chutn’steh; together, they are Donald and Melania’s m’chutonim. (BTW: For those who speak/understand Spanish, the word consuegro/consuegra is pretty close  . . . “the father-in-law/mother-in-law of one’s son or daughter.”). In issuing a pardon to his m’chutan just days before he (please G-d) heads for the exit, Donald Trump has done something which has never happened before in American history and undoubtedly will never happen again.  

Ever since George Washington issued the first presidential pardon in 1795 (forgiving two Pennsylvania men sentenced to death for treason after participating in protests known as "The Whiskey Rebellion”) there have been some forgotten doozies. How many recall that in 1868, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fully pardoned every soldier who fought for the Confederate Army? Or that in 1989, Ronald Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner, the loud-mouthed owner of the New York Yankees, who had been convicted in 1974 on 14 criminal counts for making illegal financial contributions to Nixon's reelection campaign two years earlier? 

Of course, up until just the other day, President Gerald R. Ford’s pardoning of his predecessor Richard Nixon had been the most notorious such act in all American history. Now mind you, ‘45 isn’t the only president to pardon a family member: Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger (who had pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution charges and served a year in prison). Roger’s pardon was one of 147 issued by the outgoing president on his very last day in office.  45’s pre-Christmas pardons were far, far more than mere gifts to loyalists such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and his m’chutan Charles Kushner; they were knockout punches aimed directly at core American principles.  For in addition to these particularly noxious characters, there were three former Republican members of the House of Representatives -  Chris Collins of New York, Duncan Hunter of California and Steve Stockman of Texas — who were guilty of, respectively, insider trading, stealing hundreds of thousands in campaign money and robbing a charity.  These pardons, in the words of columnist/constitutional law professor/professional whistleblower Harry Litman “. . . delivered an especially brutal kick in the teeth to the DOJ.” Generally speaking, in order to receive a presidential pardon, petitioners are supposed to have served their sentences, demonstrated genuine remorse for their crimes and led a productive life afterward. Such requirements are just one more joke to Trump — by a conservative estimate, more than half of his pre-Christmas pardons went to people who did not meet Justice Department criteria.

Ivanka Trump’s billionaire father-in-law Charles Kushner had pleaded guilty in 2004 to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. Moreover, he had confessed to retaliating against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him. He filmed the encounter and sent it to his sister, the man’s wife. Prosecuted by then U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, Kushner served 14 months of a two-year sentence in federal prison.  Christie, who recently referred to Kushner’s crimes as “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney,” gained enough notoriety and positive publicity that he was eventually elected governor of New Jersey. His involvement in prosecuting the case also got him kicked off the Trump political jet.  I guess what they say is true: קיין גוטע מעשה ווערט נישט באשטראפט (keyn gute meshh vert nisht bashtraft - viz. “No good deed goes unpunished”) Prior to 2016, Charles Kushner was a major donor to Democrats in New York.  Once Donald Trump started his race for the White House, Kushner switched his allegiance - and donations - to the G.O.P.  And yes it is true, he has long been a major contributor to Chabad and other Jewish educational institutions.  

But Roger Stone?  Paul Manafort?  Michael Flynn? Have they shown or voiced any contrition?  What have they done to indicate any rehabilitation?  Former general Michael Flynn, who served about 2 weeks as Donald Trump’s first National Security Advisor, has, of late, been appearing on News Max and OAN urging his former boss to put the country under martial law in order to get the 2020 election overturned!  This is how one earns a presidential pardon?  Or, have the Stones, Manaforts and Flynns done something far more important: put cash into the Trump coffers?  Although there is as yet no hard proof that a crime has been committed by Donald Trump, the history is both clear and ever-present: the man has consistently used his office as a personal ATM. 

There will undoubtedly be more pardons between today and 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2021.  And who knows, perhaps the  final pardons - which easily could be issued to many Trumps (Donald, Don, Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Jared certainly come to mind) won’t be signed by the man who, up until he left for Mar-a-Lago just other day, sat behind the Resolute Desk . . . but by Mike Pence who may well become “President for a day” just so he can pardon his former boss. Only time will tell.  (BTW: Anyone seeking to purchase a handsome replica of the Resolute Desk, it will set you back $6,118.49.  Ironically, the best venue for purchase is Overstock.com, whose former C.E.O., Patrick Byrne, plays a significant role in the conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.  And by the way, the Resolute replica is made not in the United States, but rather Indonesia.)

In pardoning his m’chut’n - another billionaire real estate tycoon who got his start because his father was very, very rich - Donald Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the truth of two things:

1. דאָס עפּעלע פֿאַלט ניט װײַט פֿון בײמעלע (Dos epele falt nit vayt fun beymele - “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and

2. When it comes to Donald Trump, the answer to the question “How low can you go?” is נידעריקער ווי די נייַנט קרייַז פון גענעם (nideriker vi di naynt krayz fun genem) . . . “Lower than the ninth circle of hell!”

8 days until the Georgia election;

23 days until Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are inaugurated.

Be safe . . . See you next year!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

The Politics of Pandemics: a Primer

                                    The Black Death Hits Venice

In October, 1347, the Black Death, a variant of bubonic plague, arrived in Europe and began killing about half the population, thus changing the social order and transforming the European continent forevermore. Although it was no means the world’s first pandemic, it did carry with it the most memorable of all history's fatal taglines: “The Black Death.”

Despite being largely discredited by the vast majority of medical historians like the Swiss-born Iris Ritzmann, millions of central Europeans fervently believed that Jews were to blame for the plague, and as such gruesomely killed them off by the hundreds of thousands. Hey, if you’ve got to blame someone for being the cause of an otherwise inexplicable disease which wound up killing off more than 200 million men, women and children, why not make it the Jews?

The first of history’s horrific pandemics was known as The Plague of Justinian (541 C.E.). It was caused by a single bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, and hung around most of the inhabited world for more than a thousand years. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was then carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, a recently conquered land paying tribute to Emperor Justinian in grain. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the black rats that snacked on the grain. This plague decimated Constantinople and spread like wildfire across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people, perhaps half the world’s population.

When the Black Death finally made its way to Venice in 1347 the Doges (city fathers), although possessing no scientific understanding of contagion, were able to fathom that it had something to do with proximity. As a result, forward-thinking officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they weren’t sick. At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a trentino. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a quarantino, the origin of the word “quarantine,” and the start of its practice in the Western world.

In England, the Black Death kept popping up every decade from 1348 and 1665; each decade found nearly 20% of the population succumbing to this plague. Then there was smallpox, which wiped out entire populations in Mexico, North Africa and parts of Asia. In 1801. British doctor Edward Jenner famously inoculated his gardener’s 9-year-old son with cowpox and then exposed him to the smallpox virus with no ill effect. Jenner’s vaccine was right on the money, but wouldn’t totally eradicate the disease until 1980.

The 1918-1920 “Spanish Flu,” the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide —about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million men, women and children, including some 675,000 Americans. Here in the United States there were 2 waves; the first wasn’t nearly as lethal as the second, which saw the Wilson administration ordering U.S. citizens to wear masks, close and shutter schools, theaters and businesses; bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march. There is little evidence that people declared these steps to be illegal obstacles to freedom . . . unlike what we see and hear today during our current COVID-19 crisis.

In brief, the history of pandemics has shown progress on many fronts including the superstitious, the social, the scientific and today, something rather new: the political. The progress with which biochemists, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists have created, tested and vetted innumerable vaccines (two of which have just this past week received FDA emergency approval) is nothing short of the miraculous. In my work with the medical and scientific experts at Advarra (for which, by law, our primary mandate is to protect the rights and safety of participants in clinical trials), it has never ceased to amaze me how much distance there is between pharmaceuticals, procedures and just plain politics. From our side of the aisle, it has been both deeply tragic and utterly laughable to observe the countless roadblocks and phantasmagoric pronouncements of politicians who haven’t got the slightest idea of what they’re talking about. They have placed an altogether psychotic roadblock on the pathway to cure.

More and more, we read or hear the declarations of so-called community leaders who aver that COVID-19 is a “hoax” nefariously created and funded by the likes of the late Hugo Chavez, Bill Gates and George Soros; that vaccines created by the likes of Pfizer and Moderna have not been created to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic but rather to implant microchips into those receiving vaccinations for the express purpose of tracking every human being on the planet. Further, these same people claim that the wearing of masks, observing social distancing and other sensible precautions represent nothing less than the death of liberty.

Then there are those who are scaring the daylights out of people by telling them that these vaccines are purposefully made to inflict lethal harm, not healing.

A couple of examples might be useful. Just the other day, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Pfizer, bizarrely warning that their BioNTech vaccine could result in such strange side-effects as women growing beards and people turning into crocodiles. He also announced that under no circumstances would he submit to being vaccinated.  And by the way, Bolsonaro is one of the autocrats that our current POTUS most admires.

Closer to home, just this past Friday, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that he will not be taking the coronavirus vaccine, explaining that he is “more concerned about the safety of the vaccine” than the “side effects of the disease.” “It is my choice,” Rep. Buck told Cavuto: “I’m an American and I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and, in this case, I’m not going to take the vaccine.” Then there are all those “super spreader” gatherings we see covered on the nightly news in which hardly anyone is wearing a mask or keeping their distance. It seems that for a troubling minority, refusing to wear a mask or keep six-foot distances are marks of all-American machismo or marianismo. (Do note, being a hardcore anti-vaxxer is by no means the exclusive purview of conservative Republicans and political lunatics; If you look at some of the places where opposition to vaccinations for children is highest, it’s places like Santa Monica, Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge) and Seattle, none of which are part of the right wing.

Here in Florida (which, with a few exceptions is the reddest part of the Deep South)-, Governor Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. in umbra Trump (Latin for “In the Shadow of Trump”) has made it next to impossible for counties or municipalities to initiate their own pro-mask, pro-social distancing ordinances and has further mandated that restaurants, bars, gyms, nail parlors and other such businesses remain open so as not to interfere with the state’s supposedly reemerging economy. (It should be noted that DeSantis is giving serious thought to running for POTUS in 2024 should his revered leader not. As such, he is doing everything in his power to keep on the good side of Trump’s right-wing, Libertarian base.) DeSantis has also managed to distort both COVID-19 and COD (Cause of Death) stats so as to make it seem that deaths attributable to the pandemic are much lower than the more trustworthy stats provided by the Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center.

While the scientific/medical progress made in the pursuit of corralling COVID-19 has been nothing short of a breathtaking miracle, the politics behind it all have been as terrifying as any Wes Craven-directed slasher film. On the science/medical side of the pandemic, researchers and ethicists have done their jobs with tireless alacrity, going through tens of dozens of clinical trials in order to develop vaccines which are both relatively safe and more than reasonably effective. Are these vaccines perfect? No . . . no drug, vaccine or medical procedure is 100% safe. There is always the possibility of “adverse events” (side effects) depending on a host of issues like “comorbidities” (other medical conditions like HIV, diabetes, immune system deficits or advanced age). And of course, any medicine or vaccine must by law include the majority of these possible known side effects. Anyone who has ever watched drug ads on television knows that the majority of a 60-second spot is consumed with telling you all the possible things that could go wrong. Although both the legal and ethical thing to do, it’s nonetheless enough to keep many people from telling their physician to try the drug - although why a patient should be telling the doctor what to try has always seemed to me a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Knowing that I have been working on COVID-19 protocols for most of 2020 (along with the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Project” for the past 5), I am frequently asked if I will be taking one of the various anti-COVID-19 vaccines. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” I tell them. “I will be doing it for me, for my family and friends, my students, neighbors, coworkers and congregants . . . for anyone and everyone I may come into contact with.”

I always conclude my answer with: “And always remember:  the acronym for “United States” is “U.S.,” as in “us.”

We are all in this together.

15 days until the Georgia Senate elections

30 days until the beginning of the Biden/Harris administration.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Where’s Smedley Now That We Need Him?

Back in 1852, Karl Marx published an essay entitled The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. The genesis for this brief essay was an event which occurred on December 2 1851 when followers of French President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

    General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940)

In this minor - though fascinating - work Marx traced how the conflict of different social interests manifests itself in the complex web of political struggles. In other words, as is stated in the Hebrew Bible (Koheleth [Ecclesiastes] 1:9), ““There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Unquestionably, the most famous (though frequently misquoted) statement found in The 18th Brumaire is still regarded as one heck of a truism even during the waning days of the Trump Presidency in 2020: that historical entities appear twice, "the first as tragedy, then as farce." Marx, of course, knew nothing of Donald Trump the man; he did, however, know tons and tons about autocrats like Donald Trump. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx was aiming his pen at - respectively - Napoleon I and then to his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III).

The haunting truth of Marx’s old chestnut came to mind yesterday, when SCOTUS (the Supreme Court of the United States) gave the shortest of shrifts to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal brief (along with amicus briefs from 17 other states’ attorneys general and a majority of Congressional Republicans) to overturn - and thus invalidate - the 2020 presidential election. This legal kick in the privates came just days after the Roberts’ Court took all of one sentence to tell Trump et al to take a long hike on a short pier in their case against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Ever since it has been understood that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and Senator Kamala Harris will be the next President and Vice President of the United States of America, Donald Trump and his [il[legal team have filed more than 4 dozen cases in state and federal courts, seeking to have the 2020 presidential election overturned.  Their batting average has been near zero.  For this we can offer prayers of thanksgiving to the American judiciary which, for the most part, refuse to be drawn into any conspiratorial coup.  Come tomorrow, December 14, the 2020 presidential election will have become part of American history; Donald Trump will be a loser,  Joseph Biden a winner and the attempted coup will begin melting into the scummy slag of history. 

“So where,” you may well ask, “is the tragedy and the farce?”  The farce, to put second things first, is the attempted coup created by Donald Trump, his autocratic billionaire buddies, a gaggle of different Nationalist, Racist, White Supremacist, uber-libertarian and conspiratorial groups; and all those who wish nothing more than to  dismantle virtually everything ever done or dreamed by former President Barack Obama and his administration. These coup-masters are a frightening cult made up of folks who disdain Ivy League graduates, progressives, immigrants, scientists, most Jews, environmentalists and feminists; they are, for the most part, made up of all those Second Amendment-loving Americans who seek a return to the days of the Cold War when political correctness was unheard of, Ozzie And Harriet were the typical American family, and moms stayed at home in order to raise a family.  It is a “farce,” precisely because it is a misguided dream of yesteryear.  

So far as “tragedy” goes, let’s hop into the “Wayback Machine” and alight on the earliest days of the FDR administration. Shortly after his inauguration in March, 1933, a group of the wealthiest men in America started putting together and funding a campaign which they hoped and prayed would punish - and eventually remove from office - the most aristocratic of all American presidents. Their reason?  Because, as the most blue-blooded member of the Mayflower-Groton-Harvard-patrician breed, he turned out to be very much on the side of the working middle class; a progressive with deep ties to the Jewish/immigrant/rural community. To his classmates and club mates, he became nothing short of an anathema – a traitor to his class and culture. And that is why that group made up of the richest of the American rich sought to overthrow him through a coup in early 1933. They were also deeply afraid that he might raise their taxes. Although not necessarily widely reported in history texts, this group was at the epicenter of what historians have called either “The Business Plot,” or “The Wall Street Putsch.”

It was a dangerous time in America . . . much like the times we have been living through of late. Then along came FDR who soundly thrashed incumbent President Hoover in the 1932 election and then embarked upon an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. During FDR’s historic “first hundred days,” West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield (a member of the “Hatfields v McCoys” clan) worriedly wrote a colleague that:  "This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."

Times were extraordinarily tense.  According to historian Sally Denton in her excellent 2012 book The Plots Against the President, “. . . fascism, communism, even Nazism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills. . . . Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.”  In addition to the bankers who underwrote the “putsch” (one of whom, Brown Brothers/Harriman partner Prescott Bush would eventually become a U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the father of future President George H.W. Bush) thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to a basically fascist, military-type government.  It was, in the words of historian Denton, “a cockamamie concept.” The conspirators had several million dollars (and this was in 1933!), a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces.

Smedley Darlington who?  General Butler (nicknamed “Old Gimlet Eye” due to his feverish, bloodshot eyes) was, in 1933, the most highly decorated Marine in American history - the only one to be awarded the Brevet Medal (awarded for “Extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force”) and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. Following “The Great War,” Butler quickly became a household name in America. People trusted him; his name and fame were right up there with Charles Lindbergh and General John J. Pershing. Butler would meet on quite a few occasions with the principles of this plot - including the aforementioned Prescott Bush, bond salesman extraordinaire Gerald MacGuire, Bob Doyle of the American Legion, members of the DuPont family and Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark.  Their topic was, of course about overthrowing FDR and instituting a Fascist form of government. They then sent Butler out across the country, making speech after speech about the absolute necessity of getting rid of Roosevelt and his band of “communists, socialists, Jewish Marxists and anti-capitalists.”  They would eventually coalesce into “The America First” committee

But somewhere along the way, Butler became convinced that these bankers, heirs and white-shoe, blue-blooded Wall Street attorneys represented a vile danger to our form of government. When he finally got around to asking bond-broker MacGuire what specifically was wanted of him from the group, Butler was told he would be the ideal leader of a vast army of veterans, promising him an army of 500,000 men and all but limitless financial backing, so long as he would be willing to lead a march on the White House to displace Roosevelt.

With time, General Butler moved further and further to the political left, and actually became so anti war that he picked up a new nickname: “The Fighting Quaker.” Finally, unable to remain a part of the crowd of conspirators - let alone leading an anti-Democratic, anti-Semitic putsch - Butler decided he had to do something about it.  But who, he thought, would ever believe what he  had to report?  It was such an outlandish plot as to sound like a story-line from Mark Twain at his fabulist best. Increasingly troubled by MacGuire’s plans, Butler knew he would need someone to corroborate his story if he was going to stop the intended coup. Having previously worked as a police captain in Philadelphia, Butler reached out to a reporter from the Philadelphia Record named Paul Comly French, who agreed to meet with MacGuire as well.  (French, by the way, had gained fame for covering the Lindbergh baby kidnapping - one of the most sensational stories of the early 1930s). During this meeting, MacGuire told French that he believed a fascist state was the only answer for America, and that Smedley Butler was the “ideal leader” because he “could organize one million men overnight.”

Armed with French’s mutual testimony, Butler appeared before the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee, also known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal what he knew about the plot to seize the presidency in November 1934. (The committee’s co-chairs were Massachusetts Democrat John McCormick [1891-1980], an Irish Catholic who would serve as Speaker of the House from 1962-1971 and New York Democrat Sam Dickstein [1885-1954], the Lithuanian-born son of an Orthodox rabbi who would eventually serve 9 years as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court.  The two men did not get along with one another at all.  Whenever McCormack wielded the gavel, Dickstein absented himself; whenever Dickstein led the committee, McCormack was nowhere to be seen.)  

Listening to General Butler, along with the testimony of both French, and the erratic MacGuire, the committee began to further investigate the plot. The final reports of the committee sang a different tune, finding that all of Butler’s claims could be corroborated as factual. However, they also stressed that the plot was far from being enacted, and it was not clear if the plans would have ever truly come to fruition.

Quickly becoming known as the “White House Coup” and the “Wall Street Putsch,” many major news sources derided Butler’s claims, as the committee’s final report was not made available publicly. Those implicated, ranging from the DuPont family to Prescott Bush, laughed off Butler’s claims; they believed that they were “above the law.” Evidence of the validity of Butler’s testimony was not released until the 21st century, when the committee’s papers were published in the Public Domain. No one was ever prosecuted in connection with the plot.  And yet, without General Butler, there is every reason to believe that some sort of coup would have occurred and likely succeeded.  When America needed what today we would refer to as a “whistle blower,” Smedley D. Butler was there, doing what he did best: being a hero.  (BTW: General Butler wrote a brief book in 1935 [still in print] that for years, was taught in American public schools: War is a Racket.  It is one of the most profound antiwar essays in all American history.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump will no longer be occupying the White House after this coming January 20, (fingers crossed, lucky Dodger socks pulled tight), he is likely not going to be leaving the American political scene.  He and his henchmen (which include Ivanka, Jared, Eric and Donald, Jr.) have already amassed more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in their own PAC - ostensibly to keep paying their attorney fees for cases they cannot win . . . let alone get on any court’s docket.  Mostly, the money will be used to fund the Trump lifestyle as well as keeping him on the campaign circuit supporting those who bow before him and destroying those who have seen through or had the chutzpah to criticize him.  He is by no means finished with his task of destroying America while selling the Trump brand and - who knows - creating his own media empire.  There are dire consequences for both America and indeed, the world - in having an unhinged, amoral narcissist go unchallenged.  The fact that a clear majority of all elected Republicans are either incapable of - or afraid to - stand up like Smedley Butler and tell the truth about this miscreant from Manhattan (actually Queens) is both a curse and a stain on the fabric of civil society.

To all those Senate Republicans who are hinting that they won’t be holding hearings for any of Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees until they are 100% convinced that Trump’s loss wasn’t a case of fraud (i.e. never), I have one thing to say: don’t ever refer to yourself a patriot. You are cultists driven to do whatever your dictatorial master commands - even if it will bring down the American political system. You actually see no danger in declaring the next POTUS illegitimate in the eyes of nearly half the American people. Do you have any idea of how foolish and robotically puerile you look to the rest of the world? Are you that feverishly  fearful of Donald Trump that you would eviscerate the body politic in the hopes that he won’t find someone to challenge you in the next Republican primary?  Where is your spine?

And so, permit me to issue a call for any and all true American patriots (in the real sense of the word) to step into the shoes of General Smedley D. Butler and tell it like it is.

Goodness knows, we need each and every one of you. NOW!

23 days until the Georgia elections.

38 days until the Biden/Harris administration gets to work.

Here’s wishing our Jewish friends a chag chanukah s’maycha! May your latkes (and/or sufgan’yot be delicious and calorie-free . . . And do remember: this is the season for miracles!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

An October Surprise to End All October Surprises

Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, C. 1862

It’s gotten to the point where it’s all but impossible to believe anything anymore. I’ve already chatted up at least a couple of dozen people who have grave suspicions that the President and Mrs. Trump’s (not to mention a lot of high-ranking Republicans and members of his White House staff) having tested positive for COVID-19 is an “October Surprise” - some kind of a hoax; a way of managing the news by trading in last week’s headlines for a new “page one above-the-fold” story. Let’s face it, after last week’s debate debacle and the New York Times front-page headlines about 45’s having paid only $750.00 in federal taxes in both 2017 and ‘18, the Trump team needed to do something - anything - to turn the tide from what’s increasingly looking like a electoral rout.

Around the time U.S. deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic went beyond the 100,000 mark (and well before ‘45’s “Stand back and stand by” charge to the white supremacist “Proud Boys,” I began making notes for a possible satiric piece in which several weeks before the November 3rd election, a desperate White House would announce that POTUS had contracted COVID-19, and the Cabinet, under terms of the 25th Amendment, would then turn the reins of authority over to VP Pence. Then, during the period that Pence would be acting POTUS, he would announce that he was granting transactional immunity - an across-the-board pardon - for Trump, regardless of whatever future federal charges might be waged against him. For reasons which no long matter, those notes never became manifest; the satire yet remains in a computer file. The title was to have been The October Surprise That Changed History.

In the meantime, I have done quite a bit of research on various “October Surprises” in American political history.  The earliest I could find went back to the presidential election of 1864, pitting incumbent Abraham Lincoln and former Union general George B. McClellan (1826-85).  In the spring of 1864 Lincoln was worried that he would go down to defeat.  This was grounded in Lincoln’s concern over Northern anger over the Emancipation Proclamation and the length of the war. Then, two “October Surprises” coalesced, handing Lincoln an overwhelming 55.03%-44.95% victory in the popular vote and a 212-21 swamping of  McClellan in the Electoral College.  What were the 2 surprises?

First,  the Democratic Convention, held in Chicago, nominated McClellan and adopted a peace platform, which called for a negotiated end to the war, as well as a repeal of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Quite a gift for Lincoln’s “National Union” ticket. Then, following quickly on the heels of McClellan’s nomination, was the increase in decisive Union victories: Admiral David. Farragut’s  capture of Mobile; two days after the Democratic convention General Sherman took Atlanta and began marching through Georgia, Ulysses S. Grant made progress at Petersburg, and General Philip Sheridan began his devastation of Virginia.  Goodbye to McClellan, the “Young Napoleon” (who would eventually be elected the 24th Governor of New Jersey in 1878) and welcome back Honest Abe.  This, of course, was not an “October Surprise” planned or prepared by Lincoln; that’s just the way things turned out.

Then there was the “October Surprise” of 1960 near the end of the Kennedy/Nixon joust. Two days before the final debate between Senator Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, civil-rights leader Martin Luther King was arrested. King was jailed along with 52 other blacks who were trying to desegregate a Georgia restaurant. He was sentenced to four months of hard labor based on breaking probation (King had previously been charged with driving without a license, when he actually had been driving with an Alabama license in Georgia). King's wife, Coretta, was frantic and called Harris Wofford, a Kennedy campaign aide (and future one-term Pennsylvania senator), claiming that "they are going to kill him [King]." Wofford contacted Sargent Shriver, who was married to Kennedy's sister Eunice. Shriver convinced Kennedy that he should telephone King's wife, which he did, expressing his concern. Meanwhile, Kennedy's brother Robert (his future Attorney General) negotiated with the judge and secured a promise that King would be released on bail.

In contrast, Nixon consulted with Eisenhower's attorney general (William P. Rogers), who advised him not to intervene in the matter. The Kennedys' intervention gained JFK support from blacks, including King's father, an influential minister who had previously supported Nixon. The senior King told the press, "I've got a suitcase of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap." As Evan Thomas writes in Robert Kennedy: His Life, "Just two phone calls -- one by JFK, one by RFK -- decided the outcome of the election, and determined the course of racial politics for decades to come." Kennedy won the close election, 49.7 percent to Nixon's 49.5 percent.

Lastly, there was the election of incumbent President Bill Clinton and Republican Senator Robert Dole. Clinton planned his own “October Surprise” in his re-election bid. In June, 1996, Clinton met with top FBI and CIA aides in hopes of organizing a successful sting against the Russian Mafia, which had been rumored to be interested in selling a nuclear missile. The operation failed to become a real October Surprise, however. Clinton also hoped he might be able to broker a last-minute deal between the Palestinians and Israelis. The two sides however only agreed to more talks. Clinton nonetheless won reelection, the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt.

These are by no means the only “October Surprises” within American presidential history.  This current surprise - Trump’s sudden whisking away to Walter Reed Army Hospital due to a positive rendering on his most recent COVID-19 test, is unlike any other.  Coming on the heels of a failed impeachment, a disastrous debate and the discovery that he had basically skated on his federal taxes for more than a decade (among a plethora of other episodes and events) have put the future of his presidential reelection  campaign - let alone his very future as a supposedly wealthy free citizen -  in dire jeopardy.  Throughout his nearly 4 years in office, he and his staff/enablers have shown an almost genius-level ability to transform today’s nasty, negative headlines into the opposite side of the story. 

Even if it is true that ’45 is sick – as opposed to having made the entire scenario up – it is hard to see how it’s going to help him get reelected.  Then too, there is his moral/legal/ethical culpability - by his  very silence and mismanagement of the pandemic - of nearly 210,000 deaths and the recent spate of positive tests for his closest followers and family members. For months on end, he and his people have downplayed the seriousness of the COVID pandemic, making it abundantly clear that anyone who wears a mask or sticks to social distancing is a wuss . . . a weak-kneed, dastardly milquetoast who is likely a Socialist to boot. The fact that ’45 has continually derided both science and the very statistics involved in this pandemic isn’t going to do him a bit of good.  He has yet to utter a syllable of solace to any of the souls who have died from this disease (despite claiming during an ABC World News Tonight snippet that “To all the people who have lost someone, there’s nobody - I don’t sleep at night thinking about it - there’s nobody who’s taken it harder than me”) he’s spent the lion’s share of his time ignoring and deriding the very scientists charged with creating a cure and convincing the public that vaccines don’t work unless they are used to vaccinate the ailing.

And, to make matters even worse, it now seems clear that ‘45 has kept up a schedule of campaigning, speaking and fund-raising amongst hyper-wealthy, maskless donors inside stadiums, airplane hangars and the gardens  of the nation’s  home: the White House.  Will his having contracted COVID-19 change his outlook or force him to communicate in a more compassionate, understanding way?  As much as I wish it would, I fear the answer is “No, no, a thousand times no!”  He has created - either with full knowledge  or against his will - an  “October Surprise” to beat the band.  While his political opponents (Obama, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff et al) have ceased their negative political ads and publicly urged prayers and best wishes, Trump and his coterie have continued blasting the Democrats, still labeling them “far left ultra Socialists whose only wish is to destroy American society.” 

This is more than sad; it is an utter travesty. 

I for one hope and pray that he finds  his way back to health - diminished though it may be. (BTW: as a medical ethicist, I have been privy to many of the compassionate-use drugs he has been given and have a sense of what they can/may/cannot do.) I wish him all the best and also pray that wherever he winds up, they have world-class medical care like at Walter Reed. He will need it.

30 days until the election . . .

Copyright©2020 Kurt F.  Stone

"No Longer Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breath Free"

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There once was a time when every school child could identify the term “Mayflower” - the name of the first ship to arrive in the New World. To be the descendant of a Mayflower family meant that one was a “blue-blood.” The roster of passengers on that famous 1620 voyage contained names like Alden, Allerton, Bradford, Carter, Mullins, and Priest; Standish, Story, Wilder, Williams and Winslow. Among their descendants across many generations we find such famous (and infamous) people as Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Poet Robert Frost, the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, Barbara Bush, Helen Keller, Humphrey Bogart and even the Wright Brothers, Sarah Palin, Jane Fonda and John Hinckley, Jr.  Without question, the original passenger list of the Mayflower consists of some of the most successful families in American  history.  And although, as legend would have it, most came here in search of religious freedom, the truth is that just as many arrived on these shores looking for lower taxes and greater wealth.  I well remember a cartoon which adorned a wall in my cubbyhole of an office when I worked as “environmental ethicist” for California Governor Jerry Brown back in the mid-1970’s: Two pilgrims were standing on the bowsprit of the Mayflower.  One said to the other: “Religious freedom is a great thing, but I came here to get into real estate!” Whatever the case, to be part of the “Mayflower generation” has long marked one as a member of America’s aristocracy.

Not so well known was a ship that arrived in  Nieuw Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan on September 22, 1654.  It was called the “Ste Catherine,” which had embarked from Recife, Brazil months earlier and has ever since been known as “The Jewish Mayflower.” The vast majority of its passengers were Sephardi - Jews whose ancestry could be traced to Spain and Portugal.  Non speakers of Yiddish, their native tongue was mostly Ladino (a linguistic blend of Spanish and Hebrew) or Judismo (sometimes referred to as “Judaeo-Arabic”).  Among its passenger list were families named Gomez, Seixas, Nathan, Cardozo and Lazarus.  One of the Cardozos - Benjamin [1870-1938] would become the second Jew to serve on the United States Supreme Court; another, Haym Salomon (1740-1785) was one of the two greatest financial backers of the American revolution); a third, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) became one of early America’s most respected poets, and the author of the sonnet which adorns the base of the Statue of Liberty: The New Colossus, which reads in part:

                                                                                    "Give me your tired, your poor,
                                                                          Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
                                                                             The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
                                                                            Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
                                                                                   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

For generations, immigrants to these shores - including, I would imagine - the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of many readers of this blog, entered the United States through New York Harbor . . . and this poem, sitting at the base of the “Lady With the Lamp,” was the first thing they saw . . . a message of heartfelt welcome.  My wife Annie, although she and her parents arrived at Kennedy Airport rather than Ellis Island when they came here from Argentina a half-century ago, were well aware of the welcoming arms which awaited them. Both sides of my family - with a single exception (Grandpa Doc) came in through either Charleston or Baltimore harbor long before “Lady Liberty” had been created by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, built by Gustav Eiffel, and given a permanent home on Liberty Island. Nonetheless, their arrivals - around the time of America’s Civil War - were met with overwhelming optimism and pride . . . and the certain knowledge that at last they had found a home where being Jewish was neither an obstacle nor an impediment.  And so it has been for countless generations.  America welcomed generations of Schimbergs, Greenbergs, Hymans, Kagans and Zamosces with open arms and the promise a peaceful, prideful and productive future.

And it’s largely because of that inviolate promise that both my mother and my wife have devoted their time and energy to introducing newcomers to the mysteries of the English language, Democracy and the American way of life.  My mother – a long-time Midwesterner from Chicago, Kansas  City and Hollywood -  tutored a new generation of Russian-Jewish refugees back in the 1960s; she recently told me that one of her best teaching tools was “the good old Yellow Pages” (remember them?) My wife, an immigrant from Argentina who earned both a B.A. and M.A. in English as a Second Language, has spent decades serving as teacher and mentor to refugees and asylees from all over the world, teaching them not only English but how to shop, read maps and menus, vote, create a proper resume, find a job, and generally participate in civil society.

That is until just the other day . . . 

This past Friday, the Trump administration announced an exorbitant increase in fees for some of the most common immigration procedures, including an 81% increase in the cost of U.S. citizenship for naturalization. It will also now charge asylum-seekers, which is an unprecedented move. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a final rule in the Federal Register that details the new cost for dozens of immigration and naturalization applications, a further change in immigration policy to curb legal immigration of low-income foreign nationals.  In an accompanying press release announcing the drastic and unparalleled changes, USCIS claimed they were enacted  to "ensure U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recovers its costs of services.”  While it is true that unlike many government agencies USCIS is largely fee funded, the timing is more than suspicious.  The last time the agency raised its fees (by a weighted 21%) was in late December, 2016 - the very last days of the Obama administration.  Changes like these don’t happen overnight; they are, generally speaking, the product of months - if not years - of investigation.  But to publish and make manifest such draconian raises (which will go into effect on October 2, 2020), seems suspiciously political. The Trump team based an entire presidential campaign on the issue of immigration, dumping refugees, potential asylees - the “huddled masses yearning to be free” - into a cauldron bearing the legend “Go back from where you came; you are nothing but job-stealing, drug-dealing murderers and rapists who are intent on nothing less than living off the federal government for the rest of your lives.”  And while a majority of the American public never really bought into this Kafkaesque nightmare, there were enough to form a strong political base and buy into the “MAGA” master plan.’  

For months now, immigrants, refugees “the wretched refuse of your teeming shores” have largely disappeared from  both presidential press conferences and the nightly news.  And for obvious reasons which can be summed up in just a couple of syllables: impeachment, pandemic, job-loss ‘law ‘n order’ and 'massive voter fraud.’  But now that the national election is a mere 3 months away, it’s a great time to rev back up the issue of immigration; to make sure the Trumpist base is back on board.

And, as mentioned above, the fee hikes are without question, punitive to the max.  Here are just a few:

• The fee to apply for U.S. citizenship through naturalization will increase from $640 to $1,160 if filed online, or $ 1,170 in paper filing.

• Form I-881, Application for Suspension of Deportation. Current fee: $285. Final Fee: $1,810. Percentage change: 535%.

• Form ▪ I-929, Petition for Qualifying Family Member of a U-1 Nonimmigrant (Victims of Criminal Activity). Current fee: $230. Final Fee: $1,485. Percentage change: 546%.

It should be noted in passing that one of the main reasons why USCIS is in such perilous budgetary straits is that the current administration has so clamped down on refugees and those seeking asylum that now there are far fewer people paying fees. Somewhat surprisingly, this issue has received little notice in the mainstream media. At the same time, Trump’s political base is well aware of the “final rule” and all it entails.

The Lady With the Lamp must be shedding tears at this turn of events. That which has long made the United States so successful and unique - its melange of newcomers from the four corners of the earth - has been unalterably changed. Oh sure, we’ve had bouts of anti-immigrant lunacy across the centuries; but now, it’s become both codified and made the central focus of an entire political movement. Shame on all those who have clothed themselves in the garments of cowardice and permitted it to happen.

In 1982, four years before the Statue' of Liberty’s centennial anniversary, President Ronald Reagan appointed Lee Iacocca, the Chairman of Chrysler Corporation, to head the Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation. The Foundation was created to lead the private sector effort and raise the funds for the renovation and preservation of the Statue for its centennial in 1986. The Foundation worked with the National Park Service to plan, oversee, and implement this restoration.  At the time, Lady Liberty was badly in need of repair; she was falling apart and begrimed with nearly a century’s worth of grime and slime.  And yet, by the time of her centennial, she was back to being a gleaming shrine; a vivid exemplar of what makes America unique among the nations.  At its unveiling in 1986, one of the things that people most remarked on was the pristine and hopeful idealism of the words at her base  . . . the words of Emma Lazarus, seen here in her own hand:

“The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Copyright©1883 Emma Lazarus

Benjamin Franklin's Bagatelle on Farting

I’ve been on a Ben Franklin jag these past several weeks. Why? Because, unlike just about any American who ever lived (save, perhaps Thomas Jefferson) he was the quintessential American; sui generis to the max. Unlike Jefferson, who was born into both wealth and family position, Franklin was a totally self-made man. Like Jefferson, Franklin’s list of accomplishments is both broadly breathtaking and totally inspired. For in addition to being one of this country’s most famous and beloved Founders, he was his era’s best-known scientist, the founder of America’s first lending library, the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania. Like Jefferson, his writings comprise dozens upon dozens of books, the most famous of which, the multi-volumed Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin are both still in print. Unlike the relatively somber Jefferson, Franklin was a first-class satirist who wrote his bagatelles under such pen names as Silence Dogood, Harry Meanwell, Alice Addertongue, (“Poor Richard”) Saunders, and Timothy Turnstone.

Jefferson was a thoroughgoing aristocrat; Franklin a wonderfully talented every man from next door.  Both  Franklin and Jefferson enjoyed a good meal accompanied by a vintage bottle of Madeira.  Both maintained close friendships with younger women and corresponded with hundreds of accomplished people; of the two, Franklin was a far better chess player and Jefferson the far more talented musician.  Both were genius-level diplomats, although Jefferson was easily the greater  linguist (and speller) of the two. Perhaps the one thing that has always made Franklin so compelling - at least for me - was his fabulous sense of humor - something Jefferson never truly possessed.

In our present era when seriousness and self-aggrandizement are endemic in political and public life, Franklin’s easy modesty and - at times - silly satiric pose, is welcome tonic, to say the least.  Keeping this in mind, I am delighted to present  one of the strangest, least-known and self-abasing satires in the Franklin literary corpus.  This one, a brief bagatelle (a literary trifle) written in c. 1781 when Franklin was living abroad serving as American Ambassador to France, is variously titled "Fart Proudly," "A Letter to a Royal Academy about farting,” and "To the Royal Academy of Farting." (The word fart, by the way likely comes from the olde English feortan which means “to break wind.” Franklin likely first came across the term while reading The Milleres Tale, the third of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [c.1390] where he would have found But sooth to seyn, he was somdel squaymous Of farting, and of speche daungerous. meaning, “But it is true to say that he was rather squeamish about farting and fastidious in his speech.”)

For the first decade of its existence, The Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles had yet, according to its own historians, to produce a body of work of enduring value. They then decided to get serious, and so invited various writers to send in essays in order to raise themselves from a “level of frivolity.” One of the science writers they approached was Franklin, who found their proposal - in the area of mathematics - to be both silly and ridiculous. (Never mind that mathematics was the one subject he had never been very good at.) And so, he decided to respond with a satiric piece . . . which we represent here for your enjoyment and laughs during a time of few laughs and much emotional friction. (n.b. What follows is sic, meaning that all spellings are as they appeared in the original.  Remember: Franklin’s orthography was quite a bit different than ours today.)

Enjoy!

GENTLEMEN:

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year, viz. “Une figure quelconque donnee, on demande d’y inscrire le plus grand nombre de fois possible une autre figure plus-petite quelconque, qui est aussi donnee”.  (translated as “Any given figure, we ask to inscribe as many times as possible another smaller figure, which is also given") I was glad to find by these following Words, “l’Acadeemie a jugee que cette deecouverte, en eetendant les bornes de nos connoissances, ne seroit pas sans UTILITE” ) which we shall translate as: “The Academy has judged that this discovery by extending the limits of our knowledge, would not be without UTILITY,” that you esteem Utility an essential Point in your Enquiries, which has not always been the case with all Academies; and I conclude therefore that you have given this Question instead of a philosophical, or as the Learned express it, a physical one, because you could not at the time think of a physical one that promis’d greater Utility.

Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age.

It is universally well known, That in digesting our common Food, there is created or produced in the Bowels of human Creatures, a great Quantity of Wind.

That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.

That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.

That so retain’d contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c. often destructive of  the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.

Were it not for the odiously offensive Smell accompanying such Escapes, polite People would probably be under no more Restraint in discharging such Wind in Company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their Noses.

My Prize Question therefore should be, To discover some Drug wholesome & not disagreable, to be mix’d with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes.

That this is not a chimerical Project, and altogether impossible, may appear from these Considerations. That we already have some Knowledge of Means capable of Varying that Smell. He that dines on stale Flesh, especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a Stink that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some Time on Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report, he may any where give Vent to his Griefs, unnoticed. But as there are many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, and as a little Quick-Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contain’d in such Places, and render it rather pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a little Powder of Lime (or some other thing equivalent) taken in our Food, or perhaps a Glass of Limewater drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect on the Air produc’d in and issuing from our Bowels? This is worth the Experiment. Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?

For the Encouragement of this Enquiry, (from the immortal Honour to be reasonably expected by the Inventor) let it be considered of how small Importance to Mankind, or to how small a Part of Mankind have been useful those Discoveries in Science that have heretofore made Philosophers famous. Are there twenty Men in Europe at this Day, the happier, or even the easier, for any Knowledge they have pick’d out of Aristotle? What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels! The Knowledge of Newton’s mutual Attraction of the Particles of Matter, can it afford Ease to him who is rack’d by their mutual Repulsion, and the cruel Distensions it occasions? The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing, a few Times in their Life, the Threads of Light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven Colours, can it be compared with the Ease and Comfort every Man living might feel seven times a Day, by discharging freely the Wind from his Bowels? Especially if it be converted into a Perfume: For the Pleasures of one Sense being little inferior to those of another, instead of pleasing the Sight he might delight the Smell of those about him, & make Numbers happy, which to a benevolent Mind must afford infinite Satisfaction. The generous Soul, who now endeavours to find out whether the Friends he entertains like best Claret or Burgundy, Champagne or Madeira, would then enquire also whether they chose Musk or Lilly, Rose or Bergamot, and provide accordingly. And surely such a Liberty of Expressing one’s Scent-iments, and pleasing one another, is of infinitely more Importance to human Happiness than that Liberty of the Press, or of abusing one another, which the English are so ready to fight & die for. — In short, this Invention, if compleated, would be, as Bacon expresses it, bringing Philosophy home to Mens Business and Bosoms. And I cannot but conclude, that in Comparison therewith, for universal and continual UTILITY, the Science of the Philosophers above-mentioned, even with the Addition, Gentlemen, of your “Figure quelconque” and the Figures inscrib’d in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a

FART-HING.

So there you have it.  Imagine any contemporary politician/diplomat/office holder writing a tongue-in-cheek essay on the passing of gas!  It would be a career-ender.  Franklin, like Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and the rest of the founders (with the possible exception of that Harvard-educated prig John Adams) were Renaissance men who despite being capable of reading Greek and Latin, could easily quote the Bible and actually interpret it even if they weren’t terribly religious (most were Deists), and fully understood that “the best way to serve G-d is to be good to man,” were far from perfect. And yet, the contributions they made to creating this nation were incalculable. For the most part, they could laugh at themselves, treat one another with honesty and hold their egos in check.

And oh yes, they all passed a fair amount of wind . . . without being so terribly full of it as to be front-line enemies of a democratic state.

136 days until November 3, 2020. 

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Can Hate Ever Be Conquered?

April 12, 1945: Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley at Ohrdruf

On April 4, 1945, soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered and liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. What they discovered was far worse than anything from Dante’s Inferno: piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf: the things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick ... . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.” (Today, Eisenhower’s words are etched on a plaque which hands outside the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.)

Eisenhower also ordered every soldier who had a camera to snap as many photographs as possible, as a way to begin documenting the horror they found. Further, on April 19, 1945, Eisenhower again cabled General Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could convey the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. Within days, congressional representatives, senators and journalists began arriving to bear witness to Nazi crimes in the camps. The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp, and the subsequent liberation of  Dora-Mittelbau (April 11), Flossenbürg (April 23), Dachau (April 29), and Mauthausen (May 5) opened the eyes of many US soldiers and the American public to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Without question, the Holocaust was - and is - the most thoroughly documented act of mass murder - the product of irrational hatred - in all human history.  And yet, despite the tens of millions of photos and films, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and survivors who provided eye-witness testimony and all the German citizens and soldiers that Eisenhower forced to see what had been done in their name - there are those who believe with all their hearts (and to this very day) that the Holocaust never happened . . . that it was all a heinous fabrication on the part of the very people who claimed that they were its victims.

Indeed, Anti-Semitism - the irrational hatred of Jews - seems to be of greater antiquity than the religion or people themselves. It has forced more than one wit to wonder what came first: Jews or Anti-Semites. There are times one satirically wonders if G-d, in Co’s (my pronoun which is gender infinite) divine wisdom had not created the Jews, then the devil would have in order to have an eternal object of hatred and obloquy. Certainly groundless hatred is as old as the world itself. Witness the Biblical enmity between Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, as well as Jacob and Esau. Over several millennia, these hatreds expanded to the point where any people or group who was seen as being different - possessing “otherness” - became the object of scorn and derision as well as the source and cause of whatever was wrong or incomprehensible. Got a plague spreading across your continent? Blame the Jews for poisoning all the water wells. Suffering from a devastating economic downturn? Blame and punish the immigrants for stealing jobs and creating crime, or what today we refer to as the LGBTQ community for forcing the hand of the Lord and inflicting us with Divine wrath because of their “immoral” lifestyle. Suffer a devastating surprise attack by foreign fanatics? Turn every member of that group - whether be members of a particular country, culture or religion - into a collective, conspiratorial force of ultimate evil.

Read between the lines; you get the point.

We all know that hate crimes, incidences of violence against Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and members of the LGBTQ community are at an all-time high.  Groups which track these events and the groups behind them - such as the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center - provide chilling statistical evidence of this rise.  It’s gotten to the point that just as soon as one act of lethal hate-provoked violence becomes front page, top-of-the-hour news, another comes along to replace it.  This past Wednesday, a lone gunman mowed down 9 people at 2 different shisha (hookah) bars in Hanau, Germany. The suspect and his mother were later found dead of gunshot wounds in his apartment. This is the 3rd mass killing in Germany so far this year. Attacks have likewise taken the lives of Jews, Muslim immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community in the United States, England, France, Italy and other countries since the beginning of 2020.

Responses to these murderous attacks include public vigils with plenty of prayers, placards and flowers, calls for new gun legislation (especially in the United States), finger-pointing . . . attempts at ascertaining just what or whom is most likely responsible for the startling upsurge in violence, hatred and intolerance. And while pointing a fist and finger at a president, prime minister, political party or economic inequality are all understandable, they are largely of the “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” variety. Attempting to assign blame - social networking sites and the “dark web,” too many guns which are too easily obtained, a serious lack of education, etc., does little more than permit people to vent, which is not altogether a bad thing,  However, to attempt to understand and ameliorate that which is inherently incomprehensible solves nothing. Trying to change the mind of a bigot, racist, homophobe, Islamophobe or Anti-Semite by providing facts, statistics or slices of history is next to useless. It is akin to banging one’s head against the wall which, so far as I know, produces little save concussions and cracked skulls.  The bigot, the racist, the homphobe and other such such cretinous blots on society all suffer from a disease called certitude, which as Mr. Justice Holmes noted long ago in a 1897 Harvard Law Review essay, “generally is illusion . . . is not certainty. We have [all] been cocksure of many things that never were . . .”  

Having expressed quite a bit of negativity, is there, in truth, anything which we - who are neither inherently bigoted, systemically violent nor willfully ignorant - can do to help stem the tide of hatred? Without slipping into the netherworld of idealistic innocence, there are a few suggestions to be made:

1. Always keep close at hand the names, phone numbers and email addresses of those organizations and/or individuals to whom we must report acts or threats of hatred. Shining a bright light upon the merchants of mendacity can have a sanitizing effect.

2. Be in constant contact with your elected officials . . . we must all be their eyes and ears.

3. Make sure to work and vote for those who share your worldview, your humanity and your outrage. Do not, under any circumstances decide to stay home and not vote because you don’t think it will make a difference.

4. Attend marches, vigils and meetings; if nothing else, to meet and get to know like-minded individuals.

5. Never give up.

When my sister Erica and I were toddlers, our Grannie Annie used to read us poems at bedtime.  One of the most memorable was Keep ‘a Going by the American poet Frank Lebby Stanton (1857-1927), which said in part:

If you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
If it hails or if it snows,
Keep a-goin'!
'Taint no use to sit an' whine
When the fish ain't on your line;
Bait your hook an' keep a-tryin'--
Keep a-goin'!

So, is it possible for hatred to ever be conquered?  Don’t know for sure.  But one thing I do know was taught to us by our beloved grandma:

KEEP -A-GOIN’!

255 days until the Presidential election.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

President's Day 2020

This is Presidents’ Day weekend.  Originally, it commemorated the birthday of George Washington. Washington's Birthday was first celebrated as a holiday in the District of Columbia in 1880. Five years later, It was made a federal holiday. The holiday was originally held on the anniversary of George Washington's birth, February 22. In 1971, this holiday was moved to the third Monday in February.  As the years have progressed, Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th POTUS, has been added to the commemoration.  And  by extension, it has become a remembrance of all 45 of our Chief Executives . . . for better or for worse.

For many, President’s (or “Presidents’”) Day has become little more than a day off from school, bank closures, no mail delivery, and tons of Presidents’ Day Sales.  Commerce has largely overtaken celebration or commemoration.  I for one find the sales irrelevant; shopping is far, far down on my list of things to do in honor and memory of our leaders.  Taken as a group, the 45 men who have served are a fascinating mélange, ranging from breathtakingly brilliant and accomplished to dull-as-dishwater dimwits.  In the main, Americans have elected mostly memorable men to fill the top spot.  Indeed, each one - whether famous, infamous or somewhere in between, is known to history by at least one nickname:

1. George Washington: “The Father of His Country”

2. John Adams: “His Rotundity” and “Old Sink and Swim”

3. Thomas Jefferson: “The Sage of Monticello"“

4. James Madison: “Little Jemmy” and “Father of the Constitution”

5. James Monroe: “The Last Cocked Hat”

6. John Quincy Adams “Old Man Eloquent”

7. Andrew Jackson: “Old Hickory,” “King Andrew,” and “Jackass”

8. Martin Van Buren: “Matty Van,” “Old Kinderhook” and “The Little Magician”

9. William Henry Harrison: “Tippecanoe” and “Old Mum”

10. John Tyler: “His Accidency”

11. James K. Polk: “Young Hickory”

12. Zachary Taylor: “Old Rough and Ready”

13. Millard Fillmore: “The American Louis Philippe”

14. Franklin Pierce: “Handsome Frank”

15. James Buchanan: “Old Buck,” and “Ten-Cent Jimmy”

16. Abraham Lincoln: “Honest Abe,” The Great Emancipator,” and “The Rail Splitter”

17. Andrew Johnson: “The Tennessee Tailor”

18. Ulysses S. Grant: “Unconditional Surrender Grant”

19. Rutherford B. Hayes: “His Fraudulency”

20. James B. Garfield: “Boatman Jim,” and “Preacher President”

21. Chester A. Arthur: “Chet,” and “The Dude President”

22. Grover Cleveland: “His Obstinacy,” and “Uncle Jumbo”

23. Benjamin Harrison: “The Human Iceberg”

24. Grover Cleveland: “His Obstinacy,” and “Uncle Jumbo”

25. William McKinley: “The Napoleon of Protection”

26. Theodore Roosevelt: “TR,” “The Trust Buster,” and “The Hero of San Juan Hill”

27. Wm. Howard Taft: “Big Chief,” and “Big Lub”

28. Woodrow Wilson: “The Schoolmaster”

29. Warren G. Harding: “Wobbly Warren”

30. Calvin Coolidge: “Cool Cal,” and “Silent Cal”

31. Herbert Hoover: “The Great Engineer,” and “The Great Humanitarian”

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “FDR,” “Sphinx”

33. Harry S. Truman: “Give ‘em Hell Harry”

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Ike”

35. John F. Kennedy: “JFK,” “Jack”

36. Lyndon B. Johnson: “LBJ,” “Landslide Lyndon”

37. Richard M. Nixon: “Tricky Dick”

38. Gerald R. Ford: “Mr. Nice Guy”

39. Jimmy Carter: “Jimmy,” and “The Peanut Farmer”

40. Ronald Reagan: :The Gipper,” “Dutch,” and “The Teflon President”

41. George H.W. Bush: “Papa Bush” “Bush ‘41”

42. Bill Clinton: “Slick Willie,” “Bubba,” and “The Comeback Kid”

43. George W. Bush: “Dubya” “Bush ‘43”

44. Barack Obama: “No Drama Obama”

45. Donald Trump: “The Donald,” and “Snowflake-in-Chief”

Then too, on this Presidents’ Day weekend, in addition to boning up on their nicknames, it is important to remember some of their more memorable words and expressions. They range from the truly literate and memorable to the self-serving and incomprehensible. I have chosen quotes from a handful of our Chief Executives . . .

GEORGE WASHINGTON:

• “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

• “In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy.”

• “99% of failures come from people who make excuses.”

• “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”

• “Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.”

• “I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON:

• “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”

• “I cannot live without books.”

• “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

• “When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.”

• “Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

• “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

• “I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”

• “He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.”

• “I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

• “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”

• “What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT:

• “The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”

• “No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.”

• “When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.”

• “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

• “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT:

• “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

• “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

• “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”

• “The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”

• “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

• “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”

HARRY S. TRUMAN”

• “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

• “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”

• “The buck stops here.”

• “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

• “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there's hardly a difference.”

• “Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it.”

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER:

• “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”

• “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

• “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

JOHN F. KENNEDY:

• "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

• "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

• “The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of this planet.”

BARACK OBAMA:

• “Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”

• “There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.”

• “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

•  “Americans still believe in an America where anything’s possible – they just don’t think their leaders do.” 

• “You can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.” 

• “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don't wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”    

DONALD J. TRUMP:

• “I feel a lot of people listen to what I have to say.”

• “A lot of people don't like to win. They actually don't know how to win, and they don't like to win because down deep inside they don't want to win.”

• “The point is that you can't be too greedy.”

• “I know words. I have the best words.”    

Come November, we the people will either be looking ahead to the inauguration of the 46th POTUS or the 2nd inauguration of the 45th. Whatever the case that man (or woman) will be joining the most select club in the history of the United States. May that person bring to that office the leadership skills of a Washington or Eisenhower, the manifold interests of a Jefferson or a Theodore Roosevelt, the humility of a Lincoln or a Carter, the faithful idealism of a Wilson and the class of an FDR, JFK or Barack Obama.

And tomorrow, perhaps instead of shopping, spend a bit of time contemplating about where the country is going, and who can best lead us through some particularly stormy seas.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Maddeningly Inevitable . . . Frighteningly Unconscionable

Frankly speaking, I’m a bit surprised that the ugly, twisted specter of anti-Semitism has taken quite so long to reappear on the stage of impeachment. To me, it was all but inevitable that as the dramatis personæ of the tragedy entitled Trump v. Constitution of the United States became better known to the public, a certain twisted segment of America would once again claim that Jews - merciless, acquisitive, immoral Zionists - were behind the craven plot to overthrow the Chritian world.  This has been on my mind for quite some time; the question was not “will the age-old conspiracy reemerge from the shadows?” but rather, “when?”  

About two weeks ago - November 22 to be precise - Rick Wiles, a controversial right-wing pastor, and founder of TruNews, an online hate site, launched a virulently anti-Semitic attack on leading congressional Democrats, claiming that impeachment proceedings against POTUS amounted to a “Jew coup.” On his “True News” program, Wiles, putting Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff between the cross-hairs (“Just look at his eyes . . . you can tell he’s utterly demonic”) and warned:

“That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. This ‘impeach Trump’ effort is a Jew coup and the American people better wake up to it really fast because this thing is moving now toward a vote in the House and then a trial in the Senate. We could have a trial before Christmas.

This country could be in civil war at Christmastime. Members of the U.S. military are going to have to take a stand just like they did in the 1860s with the Civil War. They are going to have to decide: are you fighting for the North or the South? People are going to be forced, possibly by this Christmas, to take a stand because of this Jew coup in the United States.

This is a coup led by Jews to overthrow the constitutionally elected president of the United States and it’s beyond removing Donald Trump, it’s removing you and me. That’s what’s at the heart of it. You have been taken over by a Jewish cabal.”

Wiles and his demented allies are scared witless by the roster of Jews “leading” or “involved in” the impeachment of the POTUS:

• Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA): Chair, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

• Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY): Chair: House Judiciary

• Elliot Engel (D-NY) Chair: House Foreign Affairs

• Ted Deutch (D-FL) Chair: House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Terrorism

• Ted Deutch (D-FL) Chair: House Ethics Committee

• Steve Cohen (D-TN) Chair: House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

• Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman: Director of European Affairs, National Security Council - witness

• Amb. Gordon Sondland: U.S. Ambassador to European Union - witness

• Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine

• Other Jewish members of the House Judiciary Committee include Steven Cohen (D-TN), Ted Deutch (D-FL) David Cicilline (D-RI), and Jaimie Raskin (D-MD)

• Other Jewish member of Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: Elise Stefanik (R-NY)

Not surprisingly, many of those accusing Jews of belonging to an insidious, conspiratorial cabal bent on overthrowing the government, claim it is being financed by George Soros, a liberal Jewish billionaire. (These same anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists have also long believed that during the Holocaust, the then-teenage Soros was a Nazi collaborator.)

During her testimony before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Dr. Fiona Hill, former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council staff, likened a right-wing narrative casting liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as all-controlling to a notorious anti-Semitic forgery. The narrative that Soros is behind an array of evildoings “is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Hill said Thursday in hearings. “It’s an absolute outrage.”

Soros has become a bugbear for some right-wingers, who blame his liberal philanthropy for a number of ills, citing little evidence. Trump himself last year blamed Soros for an “invasion” of Central American migrants that never materialized. Even loony Texas Representative Louie Gohmert brought up the Soros-as-Nazi-collaborator canard while being interviewed on Fox News. Despite having been thoroughly discredited years ago, the Soros fabrication, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a lie that will not die. 

Even as “classical” anti-Semitic memes and tropes are beginning to resurface with a vengeance, evangelical support for Israel - which they tend to refer to as “The Holy Land” - remains strong.  It is a fact that the largest pro-Israel group in America is not the overwhelmingly Jewish AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) but the overwhelmingly Evangelical “Christians United For Israel,” which was founded by the Pastor John Hagee in 2006.

Indeed, it is more than anomalous that some of the most fervently pro-Israel Christians can, at the same time, find such innate, conspiratorial evil in Jewish people themselves. But even here, a crack is beginning to appear. “Doc” Burkhart, Rick Wiles’ on-air co-host recently gave a call for listeners and viewers to repent for supporting Israel. Burkhart led his audience to confess their sin of standing with Israel: “Lord, I’m so sorry. I don’t how I was so deceived. I don’t how I was so bewitched by all of this,” he asks his viewers to pray. “I thought it was a good thing to support the people of Israel. I thought it was a good thing to help Israel. But now I see it’s just people using the name of Israel, people using the people of Israel in order to line their own pockets, in order to build their own kingdoms, in order to make themselves feel important.”

Burkhart/Wiles’ astonishingly foul heresy even has a name: “Replacement Theology,” which teaches its adherents and acolytes “Jesus, You are my Zion. Jesus, You are my Promised Land. Jesus, You are my Temple. Jesus, You are my Eternal Capitol, Lord.”

We live in an increasingly angry, maddening and dangerous world. That Jewish support for Israel has been called into question by those who see it as a portal to the Apocalypse and its Chosen People as agents of evil is frighteningly unconscionable.

חָזַק חָזַק וְנִתחַזֵּק

(Chazak chazak v’neetchazayk):

“Be strong, be Strong and We Shall Be Strengthened”

335 days until the presidential election

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

To Impeach or Not to Impeach: That Is the Question

Although relatively low in entertainment value, former counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony before two House committees did prove at least five things:

First, that a majority of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence never read more than the briefest of summaries of the Mueller Report;

Second, that Attorney General William Barr’s assessment of that report was an absolute crock of beans;

Third, that candidate and then President Trump and his associates engaged in potential profit-making ventures with one of America’s worst enemies and then committed numerous provable acts of judicial obstruction;

Fourth, that not only did the Russians cyber-invade the voting systems in all fifty states in an effort to guarantee a Trump victory - they are hard at it for the 2020 election; and

Fifth, that despite the hearings, the House is hardly any closer to impeaching the POTUS than it was the day before the hearings. And while Democrats should be applauded for asking hard questions based on their (or their staff’s) reading and understanding of the lengthy, dry-as-dust report, Republicans were far more interested in bad-mouthing and taking cheap shots at Director Mueller - turning an American icon of Lincolnesque proportions into a senescent partisan hack.

Yesterday, Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced that he had asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury secrets related to the Mueller investigation, using the court filing to declare that lawmakers have already in effect launched an impeachment investigation of President Trump. In a legal maneuver that carries significant political overtones, the committee attorneys told a judge that it needs access to the grand jury evidence collected by Mr. Mueller as special counsel — such as witness testimony — because it is “investigating whether to recommend articles of impeachment” against the president. With the filing, Chairman Nadler was attempting to sidestep the debate raging inside the Democratic Party over whether the full House should hold a vote to formally declare that it is opening an impeachment inquiry. By declaring that his committee was in effect conducting such an inquiry, he was heading off a politically difficult vote in the committee or the full house to pursue impeachment.

To impeach or not to impeach: that is the question. Although a majority of Democrats across the country favor impeachment proceedings, only around 100 Congressional Democrats have already gotten on board. (Follow this link to see the latest tally of which Democrats favor impeachment, which say “not yet,” and which have yet to respond.) The percentage of Republicans polling against impeachment proceedings easily equals the president’s national approval ratings - about 43% at best. Among independents, impeachment is supported by a plurality, with “not sure” coming in a rather distant second. For House Democrats, impeachment is being debated and discussed along three different lines: the legal, the political and the moral.

The Legal: Despite what A.G. Barr, Republicans in Congress, the president’s base and conservative trolls everywhere may aver, there is a welter of evidence to show that crimes have been committed. Perhaps no one pierced what the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan called “the clouds and cacophony” of the morning session (e.g. the Judiciary Committee) more magisterially than Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) who wielded the gavel during afternoon session. (n.b.: for purposes of full disclosure: I have long been close to the Schiff family; his father and late mother were students of mine for many years, and I have, on occasion, served as family rabbi. My respect and admiration for Adam are boundless.) In his opening remarks, Chairman Schiff “. . .scorchingly outlined President Trump’s three-way betrayal of his country and the American people.” Adam is always low-key and lawyerly; broad emotionalism is simply not his style. The most important point he got across in his opening remarks was that even if the two-year Mueller investigation couldn’t establish criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, their disloyalty to country was “something worse” than a crime, and Mueller’s team amply established it. “A crime is the violation of a law written by Congress,” Schiff intoned, “but disloyalty to country violates the very obligation of citizenship, our devotion to a core principle on which our nation was founded, that we, the people, not some foreign power that wishes us ill, we decide who shall govern us.”

As one who has actually read, digested and taken copious notes on the entire Mueller report (it took me more than 5 weeks), I can attest to the fact that there were crimes ‘aplenty involving  candidate Trump, President Trump and much of his staff and administration.

The Political: To impeach or not to impeach is also an issue with a major political component. As of today, Speaker Pelosi is not in favor of impeaching the 45th POTUS. Why? Certainly not because she believes he is innocent or falsely accused, but rather because there is a highly critical national election on the horizon. As the highest ranking official in the opposition, she must determine if supporting and carrying out impeachment proceedings in the House (which stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding in the Republican-led Senate) will put a major roadblock in her party’s attempt to take back the White House and both houses of Congress in 2020. Knowing that there will undoubtedly be a tremendous amount of Russian meddling in the 2020 election, she must do what is best and politically smartest to garner the maximum number of votes in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and West Virginia. As such, will it be better (and politically smarter) to run on “kitchen-table issues” like jobs, healthcare, taxes, and Social Security (among others) or on impeaching Donald Trump? If it’s the latter, will she then see her party drowning in the very swamp he has created? She must determine which is more politically potent: hatred of Trump or concern for the working class. Never underestimate the political smarts of Nancy Pelosi; she is one of the shrewdest political operators in American history.

Make no mistake about it: Should House Democrats decide to proceed with impeachment hearings, the Trump White House will Twitter away with all the wrathful vengeance and fury of the Biblical plagues. And while they will be applauded by their base for standing up to “the Socialist Squad,” they will likely gain few if any new supporters. On the other hand, it is possible that pushing the impeachment envelope may keep many independent voters away from the polls, fed up with Democrats who, in their opinion, are far more interested in getting rid of ‘45 than in addressing their middle-class needs and concerns. For the Democrats, this could easily become their Sisyphean challenge.

In an interview Adam Schiff gave nearly 2 months ago (well before the Mueller’s presentation to Congress) to Los Angeles Times staff writer Christine Mai-Duc, the California Democrat summarized the political conundrum about as well as is humanly possible:

I think the most powerful arguments both for and against impeachment are really mirror images of each other. If we don’t impeach him, what does that say to future Congresses and presidents about whether this kind of conduct is compatible with office? And by the same token, if we do impeach him, and he’s acquitted in the Senate, and there is an adjudication that that conduct is not impeachable, that may be a worse precedent. So I think before we go down the road of something that would absorb the whole Congress and whole country and lead to a very predictable result, we should be sure that this is the right thing to do for the country.

The Moral: Without question, our current president lacks both a moral compass and basic human decency. It may well be that Democrats must respond to all this immorality and indecency with a tactic which is not all that politically smart. After all, to many Americans - whether they are consciously aware of it or not - Donald Trump has two distinct advantages: he is a media celebrity and he stridently opposes virtually everything that has a moral component.

Those who aren’t ferociously enamored with Donald Trump are well aware of his many, many flaws and shortcomings: his racism, sexism, xenophobia, crudity, heartlessness, narcissism and perhaps above all, his utter inability to tell the truth. He is, without question, the least moral, most disloyal citizen to ever occupy the White House. And if for no other reason than this, Democrats should proceed with impeachment. Much of the nation is both benumbed and bewildered at the Republicans’ spinelessness; at their rank inability to confront the leader of their party. It seems to me that if the Democrats do not proceed with impeachment hearings that they too will be guilty of spinelessness. It may not, in the long run, make for smart politics. Goodness knows it will - succeed or fail - carry all the marks of courage and good citizenship - qualities sorely lacking in our time and place.

In the mid-1930s, shortly before the beginning of World War II, Austrian Robert Musil, the author of The Man Without Qualities (easily one of the greatest novels-of-ideas ever written) noted that “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” Herr Musil, you said a mouthful. The political culture of the United States (and now, with the ascension of Boris Johnson, of Britain) is sick. It is unserious, crooked and lethal. There is no honest way to dissociate the rise of Trump and Johnson from the societies that produced them. The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. 

Although impeaching him will likely not succeed in the Republican-controlled United States Senate nor fix what is wrong with our political culture, it is nonetheless, in my very humble opinion, the right thing to do. Some will respond “Although I agree with your assessment, winning the presidency is far more important.” I disagree: sometimes it is essential to do what in the short-term may be the wrong thing . . . but for the right reason.

In the long run, if we impeach him it’s not because we despise ‘45 so much; it’s because we love our country and its ideals so very much more.

467 days until the presidential election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Buchanan and Trump: What's Past Is Prologue

One of the spookiest aspects of what’s going on in modern media is that major news stories and sidebars - which could and should be of historic importance - come and go in the blink of an eye, while pieces which are really no more than spicy gossip hang around for weeks and months on end. As but one example: a week ago, Federal District Judge Amit P. Mehta’s handed down a decision, which gave the president a stinging defeat in his bid to block a House subpoena of his financial records. Less than a week later, the case, DONALD J. TRUMP, et al. Plaintiffs v. COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF ) REPRESENTATIVES, et al. Defendants (Case No. 19-cv-01136 (APM) has already faded into oblivion. At the same time, the doctored YouTube video of a “drunken” Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already attained legendary internet status. And, to make things worse, hardly any major media coverage included a key element in Judge Mehta’s decision: a section dealing with the nation’s 15th president, James Buchanan.

In what may well be the greatest irony of the century, the White House’s appeal of Judge Mehta’s decision will now be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose current chief judge is none other than Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016 after the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia. (For those who may not recall, within minutes of President Obama making Judge Garland’s nomination public, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proclaimed it DOA . . . a first in American history. And what makes Judge Mehta’s decision even more ironic is that all ‘45 said about it was something to the effect that “What do you expect? The judge was appointed by Obama!”)

Very few news sources mentioned that Judge Mehta opened his decision by quoting President James Buchanan protesting against a congressional investigation nearly 160 years ago, in which he claimed that said congressional investigation was a means of “furnishing material for harassing [the President], degrading him in the eyes of the country.”

I do, therefore, . . . solemnly protest against these proceedings of the House of Representatives, because they are in violation of the rights of the coordinate executive branch of the Government, and subversive of its constitutional independence; because they are calculated to foster a band of interested parasites and informers, ever ready, for their own advantage, to swear before ex parte committees to pretended private conversations between the President and themselves, incapable, from their nature, of being disproved; thus furnishing material for harassing him, degrading him in the eyes of the country . . . – President James Buchanan

In this statement, the feckless Buchanan (who served as the nation’s 15th POTUS from 1857-1861) was objecting to the House of Representative’s decision to investigate whether his administration had sought to improperly influence the actions of Congress. Sound familiar? Buchanan argued that Congress had no general powers to investigate him, outside of formal impeachment proceedings. If Congress were allowed to investigate his conduct outside of impeachment, he warned, it “would establish a precedent dangerous and embarrassing to all my successors, to whatever political party they might be attached.” Again: sound familiar?

“Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta in his introductory paragraph, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.”

At this point, two truisms come to mind: the first from Winston Churchill (who was likely misquoting philosopher George Santayana) and the second from Shakespeare:

• Churchill: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and

• Shakespeare (from The Tempest): “What’s past is prologue.”

In light of our current political imbroglio, the apothegms of Churchill and Shakespeare are most prophetic. From what we know about ‘45 and a majority of his advisers and followers, they aren’t what one would call “students of history.” Lacking knowledge of - let alone curiosity about - American political history - they could easily cause history to repeat itself . . . which might not be such a bad thing.

Certainly, there are profound differences between James Buchanan and Donald Trump. For one, Buchanan (1791-1868) was our only bachelor president, while ‘45, of course, has been twice divorced and thrice married. And while Trump is the only president who never held elective office and one of the few who never served in the military, Buchanan was perhaps the most “prepared” public servant to ever be elected to the presidency. For prior to his election in 1857, he had:

• Served as an enlisted infantry man during the British invasion of Baltimore (1814);

• Was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (1814-16); the United States House of Representatives (1821-31) and the United States Senate (1834-45);

• Served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee (1829-31), Minister (Ambassador) to Russia (1832-33); U.S. Secretary of State under President James K. Polk (1845-49); and as Minister to England (1853-56).

And yet, besides being our only bachelor president, he is best remembered - if at all - for such historically disastrous episodes as “Bleeding Kansas,” the “Dred Scott Case” and the “Panic (financial collapse) of 1857.” And oh yes, at a time when the nation was terribly divided between pro- and anti-slavery factions, he was a a divider . . . a “Peace Democrat,” soon to be known as “Copperhead.” Much of what Buchanan accomplished (or rather, failed to accomplish) made the Civil War inevitable. Many historians and political scientists considered him “an invertebrate” when it came to making difficult decisions.

There are, to be sure, quite a few similarities between Buchanan and Trump:

• In his run for the White House, Buchanan carried five northern states while sweeping the South, accumulating 45 percent of the vote. Trump would take six northern states, almost sweeping the South, and capturing 46 percent of the vote.

• Both men were educated in Pennsylvania. Both were northerners and nominated to the presidency in Ohio cities.

• Our 15th and 45th presidents came into office extremely wealthy. Both were old for their era when elected: Buchanan, 65, and Trump, 70. Popularity greatly mattered to both. Their views on states rights paralleled one another to a considerable degree.

• Quarrels with Mexico and border protection dominated a great deal of their attention during their time in office.

• White males were primarily responsible for both of their elections (of course, in 1857, neither women nor few non-whites could vote). Investigations also dominated both presidencies, with Buchanan dismissing his investigation as an “inquisition” while Trump branded his a “witch hunt.”

And oh yes, for the past many decades, presidential historians and political scientists have ranked Buchanan - along with Andrew Johnson, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding - as America’s worst presidents. For the past two years, Donald Trump has ranked dead last . . . even worse than Buchanan.

Where ‘45 has to contend with the likes of House Committee Chairs Adam Schiff, (Intelligence) Jerry Nadler (Judiciary), Richard Neal (Ways and Means), Elijah Cummings (Oversight and Reform) and Maxine Waters (Financial Services), Buchanan’s single bugbear was Pennsylvania Representative John Covode, a former blacksmith who rose to become chair of the The Select Committee to Investigate Alleged Corruptions in Government. In 1860, Covode (1808-1871) and his committee (known to history as ‘The Covode Committee’) was mandated to conduct an investigation of the Buchanan administration to see if there was sufficient corruption and mismanagement to warrant impeachment. Despite the fact that they never did find sufficient grounds to impeach, it doomed the president; Buchanan was largely responsible for the dismemberment of his political party (then known as “Democrats,” caused the creation of a new party (“the Republicans”) and aided greatly in the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Founding Father of that party. For his efforts - or lack thereof - Buchanan went down in history as the worst (or second worst) President in American history.

Without question, Judge Mehta knows his political history. Otherwise, why would he quote Buchanan at the beginning of his legal decision? Churchill/Santayana/Shakespeare were right: ‘45 will not only challenge Buchanan for last place in the ranking of worst presidents; he could also be responsible for the dismemberment of an entire political party.

If only he, his advisers, staff and family had paid attention to the lessons of history, ‘45’s legacy might look more hopeful today. But do remember: Abraham Lincoln, the man who succeeded the heretofore last-place Buchanan, is unanimously considered the best POTUS in our history. (With the single exception of the preeminent presidential historian Jon Voight . . . who claims ‘45 is even greater than the Great Emancipator.)

Shakespeare’s Antonio was correct: “What’s past is prologue.”

530 days until the next election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone