Vin Scully: Shakespeare With a Mic

Long, longtime Dodger play-by-play announced Vin Scully passed away yesterday at age 94. He was, hands down, the best at what he did. I mean, have you ever attended a baseball game in which the vast majority of the fans in the stands were listening to the game on radio? Vin could do that.

Nearly 9 years ago, at the time of his retirement, I wrote a blog essay entitled "Vin Scully: Shakespeare With a Mic." In observing his passing . . . and with tears in my eyes, what follows is a reprint of that post .from August, 25, 2013 . . .

 Benjamin Franklin famously opined that "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."  Well, I'm here to tell you that his list wasn't complete.  For indeed, if you are a Southern Californian there is a third eternal verity: that Vin Scully, the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is the greatest announcer in the history of sports.  Period.  And, mirabile dictu, this past Friday, the Dodgers announced that the 85 year old Scully will be returning to the broadcast booth for a record 65th season in 2014. For Dodger fans -- indeed for all Angelenos -- Scully is much, much more than the voice of the Dodgers; he is, without question, the most beloved citizen of that place Dorothy Parker once called "72 suburbs in search of a city." When, several years ago, team owners asked fans to vote for their all-time favorite Dodger, guess who won?  Hint: it was neither Sandy Koufax nor Don Drysdale.  It was L.A's favorite redhead. 

Vin Scully has been with the Dodgers longer than Connie Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics, and longer than Joe Paterno coached the Nittany Lions.  In fact, the only person ever to serve a single sports team longer is another Dodger: Tommy Lasorda, who signed his first contract in 1948 -- one year before Vin came on board. 

I first heard the voice of Vin Scully on April 18, 1958 -- the first game the Dodgers ever played in Los Angeles.  They beat the San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants 6-5.  Carl Erskine defeated Al Worthington; Clem Labine got the save and third baseman Dick Gray was the first Dodger to homer at the cavernous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.  I remember being absolutely mesmerized by the dulcet tones of the Dodger announcer.  It was as if he was talking to me and me alone.  By the end of that first season -- in which they finished a miserable 7th, 23 games behind the Milwaukee Braves -- I had my own radio.  Since then, I would estimate that I have heard Vin Scully call nearly 8,500 games, which means that next to my late father, his is the male voice I've heard most often in my life.

As any Dodger fan knows, Vin Scully does far more than merely announce a game.  He is a walking, talking and breathing baseball encyclopedia.  His memories are priceless; his stories are sensational.  He not only tells mostly first-hand stories of the past 70-plus years of baseball, but also, when appropriate, tidbits about world and Broadway history, literature and music.  At the same time, this 85-year old might also remind listeners that AC/DC does "Hell's Bells" and that "Enter Sandman" is by Metallica. He does all this while calling a baseball game.  And best of all, unlike just about any other announcer, he knows when to be silent.  I guess the greatest proof of the Scully's genius is that almost everyone attending games at Chavez Ravine (Dodger Stadium) is listening to him on the radio . . . even though the game is going on right in front of them.

Over the course of his career, Vin has called three perfect games, 25 no-hitters, 25 World Series and 12 All-Star Games.  Among the iconic moments he has called:

• Don Larson's perfect game in the 1956 World Series: Got him! The greatest game ever pitched in baseball history, by Don Larson! A no hitter, a perfect game in a World Series ... Never in the history of the game has it ever happened in a World Series ... And so our hats off to Don Larson—no runs, no hits, no errors, no walks, no base runners. The final score: The Yankees, two runs, five hits and no errors. The Dodgers: No runs, no hits, no errors ... in fact, nothing at all. This was a day to remember, this was a ballgame to remember and above all, the greatest day in the life of Don Larsen. And the most dramatic and well-pitched ballgame in the history of baseball. ... Mel (Allen) you can put this in your ring and wear it a long time.

• Sandy Koufax's perfect game, September 9, 1965: And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that "K" stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.

• Hank Aaron's 715th home run on April 8, 1974: What a marvelous moment for baseball; what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia; what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron. … And for the first time in a long time, that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.

Vin Scully is more than an icon; more than a living legend.  He is, simply stated, the best there ever has been.  Scully is to baseball announcing what Shakespeare was to English literature, what Bach was to music, Einstein to theoretical physics or Sir Charles Chaplin to cinema -- both sui generis and nonpareil.  Scully has taught baseball -- both the game and the "game within the game" to countless millions over the past 65 years.  He has been both a brilliant constant and a thorough-going gentleman in an ever-changing world where far too many idols have feet of clay.  To my ear, he sounds just as young, vital and resonant in August 2013 as he did that first time I heard him back in April 1958.

When Sir Charles Chaplin died on December 25, 1977, I felt a tremendous sense of loss. Although I never met him, I had seen just about every film he'd ever made, and read every book ever written by or about him.  He was -- and still is -- to my way of thinking, the greatest genius in the history of cinema.  I remember reading dozens upon dozens of eulogies delivered by the great men and women of his profession; heartfelt and wonderfully literate sentiments by the likes of René Clair, Lord Olivier, Jacques Tati and Federico Fellini.  The simplest -- and yet the most touching -- was spoken by Bob Hope, whose words best sum up not only the life, times and achievements of "the little fellow," but Vin Scully as well:

"We were fortunate to have lived in his time."

Thank you Vin for being the third eternal verity.  We are so very fortunate to be living in your time.

©2013 Kurt F. Stone

In Search of Lost Time

                                   “Them Versus Us” - People’s Park, May 1969

In mid-May 1969, the counterculture came into armed conflict with the California National Guard in Berkeley, California. On one side were thousands upon thousands of angry students from America’s premier public university, armed mostly with shovels, spades, potting soil and placards; on the other, stood soldiers armed with rifles, bayonets and tear gas. Over a three-day period, student protesters - long-haired, deeply anti-Vietnam, anti-military draft and pro-people power - stood up to the university’s regents, who had announced their intention to develop a parcel of university-owned land about four blocks south of the Berkeley campus and just east of Telegraph Avenue in order to build an athletic facility.

Furious at the proposed development, a angry gathering of students dragged sod, trees and flowers to the empty lot and proclaimed it “the People’s Park.” In response, UC erected a fence. The student body president-elect urged a crowd on campus to “take back the park” and more than 6000 people marched down Telegraph to do just that. A violent clash ensued, leaving one man (James Rector, who was visiting friends in Berkeley and watching from the roof of Granma Books) dead, a young carpenter (Alan Blanchard) permanently blinded by a load of birdshot fired directly to his face and at least 128 Berkeley students and residents admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police.  Then-governor Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency, thus giving him legal authority to summon nearly 3,000 troops. Upon being informed of Rector’s death and Blanchard’s blinding, Reagan explained to members of the press, "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides."  

I well remember the extraordinary mix of anger, energy, fear, and youthful self-righteousness of those days now more than a half-century ago.  I remember a number of my friends and classmates hauled off to the Santa Rita Jail over in Dublin. According to their accounts, they were forced to lie face down in the yard while guards hit their calves with nightsticks, demanding that they, the protesters, scream out WE LOVE YOU BLUE MEANIES!  (The “Blue Meanies” were a fictional army of fierce though buffoonish music-hating beings and the main antagonists in the surreal 1968 Beatles animated film Yellow Submarine.  Ironically, it was - and still  is - the nickname of one of the most potent magic mushrooms on the planet.)  The protesters were all eventually released, just in time to finish out the Spring Quarter.   The university decided not to develop the land.  Indeed, it did become a people’s park, flush with flowers and vegetables, swing-sets and families, and with the passage of time, lots of homeless people. 

A month or so after the riots I found myself in Washington, D.C., about to begin an internship in the offices of U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska.  From the perspective of 53 years, I find it amazing that at the time of my arrival on Capitol Hill, Senator Gravel was a mere 38 years old . . . 3 years younger than my youngest child is today; then, he  seemed so old.  I well remember looking for a place to rent, and happened upon an area called “DuPont Circle” which today, is extremely pricey.  Back in 1969, it was pretty hip and mirabile dictu actually had a pharmacy called PEOPLE’S DRUGS.  I felt like the revolution had  been  won!  It took about 30 seconds to decide that this was the place to drop anchor.  (Back then, a spacious 2-bedroom apartment in a late 19th-century brownstone rented for under $200.00 a month. Today, the same space costs in the many thousands.)  2 months after my arrival, Woodstock happened . . . love and peace, pot and flowers were back in bloom - both in Berkeley and in Bethel, New York. I will be perfectly honest: I did not attend Woodstock, and am glad I chose instead, to attend the Berkshire Festival where I had the great joy of listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Maestro Erich Leinsdorf, play Beethoven’s Ninth. And there was neither a drop of rain nor a hint of mud.

So why am I writing about 1969?  Well, just the other day, an Alameda County judge named Frank Roesch ruled that UC Berkeley can begin clearing the historic park and starting site work on the construction of apartments and dorm space because the university’s plan does not violate the California Environmental Quality Act.  UC Berkeley and the city of Berkeley first proposed redeveloping the park in 2018, calling it a first-in-the-nation plan to build long-term supportive housing for homeless people on university land. The university would also build 1,100 units of badly-needed student housing and retain some of the park as open green space, while also erecting a monument to its storied history.

But two organizations — the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and Make UC a Good Neighbor — jointly filed a lawsuit, arguing, among other things, that the university had other options for developing housing and had not adequately studied them, as required by state law. Two other groups filed their own challenges, which will be consolidated into the judge’s decision.  A UC spokesperson issued a statement stating  that university officials are “pleased with the judge’s decision and look forward to the court making it official early next week, just as we look forward to starting construction sometime this summer.”

City and university officials have hailed the plan as a model for other universities and a landmark solution to both California’s homeless crisis and the housing shortage at UC Berkeley and other UC campuses.  “It begins with partnership,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said earlier this spring. “And it also begins with the university’s accepting that this is our responsibility to address the tragedy of homelessness in our midst.”

In learning of the judge’s decision, I found myself recalling in pretty vivid detail, the events and feelings of 1969, and asking myself “On what side of the issue do you stand Doc?  Has there been a change in your worldview from when you were 20 and today, when you’re a few days away from turning 73?  Is there truth to  the old saw "If you’re not a liberal when you’re young you haven’t got a heart, but if you aren’t a conservative when you grow up you haven’t got a smart?”  In the midst of my pondering, I find myself remembering the title of Marcel Proust’s staggeringly long 7-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past. Why?  Well for one thing, I  am myself “in search of lost time.” Then too, at the time of the People’s Park riot, I was midway through volume 3 of Proust’s masterpiece, The Guermantes Way (Le côté de Guermantes) and having my head filled with thoughts about politics and society, romance and reality. . . the greed and vacuousness of society . . . whether it be 19th century France or 20th century America.

In my search of lost time, I find that while I am perfectly sanguine with what I/We did in vigorously - and for some, violently - protesting the People’s Park evisceration 53 years ago, I am just as sanguine with having the University reclaim a hefty parcel of that park in order to build affordable housing for both students and the homeless 53 years later.  Back in 1969, things seemed so much more black-and-white; of those whose motivation was doing good, versus those whose motivation was doing well.  Back then, gradations of grey were difficult to discern; the young couldn’t wait to change the world for the better . . . to inject idealism into the body politic.  We were motivated as much by anger as by optimism.

Today, of course, anger is still a major motivator in politics. The difference, it seems to me, is that for far too many, optimism has given way to both pessimism and fear … fear of “the other,” fear of failure . . . a fear engendered by every conspiracy under the sun. Many find irrational comfort in anchoring their boots in the concrete of mindless dogmatism, and taking both their marching orders and worldview from those who often do not believe the bilge they spew.  (Of these spewers of bilge, Proust himself reminds us “It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.”) To them I say “I’m not going to argue with you in an attempt to change your already made-up minds; I’ll be quiet and let you be wrong.”

Searching through the dustbin of lost time can be both beneficial and a bit bemusing, to say the least. As we age, remembering facts of past events can lull us into mental  haziness. But the search can also be empowering . . . especially when remembering how we felt during seminal events of our youthful past. If we discover that with age we’ve changed, so be it. But never forget that so long as we have breath in our lungs, ideas in our heads and ideals in our hearts, we can still help foster positive change.

 It’s what Proust brilliantly referred to as “. . . that translucent alabaster of our memories.”

 Copyright2022 Kurt F. Stone

Patrick Michaels Meets His Maker

Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., who spoke out often and brashly against the prevailing view that climate change needs urgent attention, thus becoming a favorite of climate change skeptics and a target of criticism by those advocating action on greenhouse gases and in other areas, died on July 15 at his home in Washington. He was 72. Unlike many climate change deniers, Dr. Michaels had sterling academic credentials; he held a doctorate in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was for decades a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and Virginia’s state climatologist, and had published in scientific journals. At the same time, he was a staunch libertarian who worked hand-in-glove with both the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to spread the word that “The world is not coming to an end because of global warming. Further, we don’t really have the means to significantly alter the temperature trajectory of the planet.”

Michaels was the co-author of several books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media” (2004) Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know (2009) and “Lukewarming: The New Climate Science That Changes Everything” (2016).  Snippets from these books are frequently recited by climate-change deniers as “proof” that not everyone believes the earth is going to hell in a handbasket or that human beings are the proximate cause.

In short, Dr. Michael’s was to politically-charged climate change denial what such scientists as Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and Rachael Carson were to such seminal climate change awareness works as The Population Bomb (1968) and Silent Spring (1962).  One huge difference, of course, is that Ehrlich and Carson are still read and quoted by the masses [Dr. Ehrlich, BTW, just turned 90 this past May] while Dr. Michaels is read and quoted almost exclusively by movement conservatives. Ehrlich and Carson are recognized as experts in their field; Dr. Michaels is largely considered an outlier.

What follows, briefly, is an imagined conversation between the recently deceased Dr. Michaels and his maker . . . the Master of the Universe.  In place of the term “G-d,” I have chosen to use the Divine Pronoun “CO,” which as longtime readers know is  to be understood as “He/She” ).

CO: Well, well, as I eternally live and breath; it is you, Dear Dr. Michaels. So sorry to meet you under these circumstances. Please accept my deepest sympathies to your dear wife Rachael and your children, Erika and Robert. It’s been a most impactful and melodramatic three score and twelve.

PM: And whatever do you mean by that?

CO: Well, in a nutshell, that I fully expected far more from you. I mean, you started out your career in Climate science with so much promise, and then, as time went by, you kind of . . . sold out to the highest bidder and turned the pursuit of scientific truth into the divertissement of politics. I well remember that piece you published back in the late 1990s when you predicted that hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius, “. . . were in the process of finding out that gas is so inexpensive in this country (despite its 40 cents per gallon tax) that no one except die-hard technophiles and hyper-greens are willing to shell out several thousand dollars extra for a hybrid.” I hope you will admit, Patrick, that you were wrong, wrong, wrong.

PM:  With all due respect, I certainly will not!  I was, am and will always be ahead of the scientific curve!

CO:  Oh really? Then how do you account for the fact that the vast majority of your scientific colleagues find your conclusions on global warming to be sorely wanting, and  accuse you of having sold out to petroleum-backed and financed interests like CATO and the Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI)?  I well remember when you accepted a whopping $100,000 donation from a fossil-fuel interest, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, back in  the days when you first joined up with CTI.  I will admit that science can and does include advocacy, but you somehow found a way to profit by it all, for which I find you guity.

PM: With all due respect, dear CO, there have long been scientists who have stood firmly in place against the majority of their so-called colleagues, and were eventually proven to be correct.  Is that not so?”

CO:  Are you really trying to compare yourself to Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler or Semmelweis? To misquote the late Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, “Professor Michaels, I knew Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler and Semmelweis, and you, sir, are not they!”  Being eternal, omniscient and omnipotent, I can tell you I really, truly had a Divine Plan in creating the universe.  If you pay attention to the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible (you called it the “Old Testament”), you will note, I hope, a certain unity of purpose spelled out in the creation the universe.  To wit, the order in which I created it.  I created the oceans before the seas, and the trees before the birds, and virtually everything else before humanity,  Which is to make obvious that neither the seas need the fish nor the trees need the birds.  Nothing which precedes depends on that which antecedes.  And since humanity comes last - the so-called “Crown of Creation” -  this obviously means that nothing depends upon  humanity, but rather that humanity depends on virtually everything.  In other words, dear Professor Michaels, you are wrong, wrong wrong . . . theologically, historically and scientifically.

PM: So what is it you’re trying to say?

CO: That you have placed a major - and G-d forbid fatal - stumbling block in the path toward saving the planet I created; that you have caused so many to ignore - or forget or misinterpret - my very First Commandment to “. . . be fruitful, multiply and act as responsible stewards of the good earth.” In the original, Dr. Michaels, this reads:

                                           פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ  (p’ru, u’revu, u’m’l’ooh et ha-aretz v’kheeb-shuah)

PM: I get the feeling that you aren’t terrible happy with me. Where do we go from here?

CO: See that elevator over there?

PM: Yes, what am I to do?

CO: Enter and wait for the doors to close . . . then press the button that takes you to the basement, where most regrettably, you will experience maximal universal warming . . .

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Speaking of Senator Manchin . . .

Back in 1966, when he first ran for political office, Ronald Reagan, who was on the receiving end of a lot of ill will and jibes from California Republicans, announced that he would follow what he termed the unwritten Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” This made for smart politics, for following on the heels of the disastrous 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson destroyed Senator Barry Goldwater in the Electoral College (486-52) and won two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, the GOP was in the finger-pointing mood. This “Eleventh Commandment” strategy worked well for Reagan, for not only did it fit his personality as “a nice man with a lose screw,” but led him to a 57%-42% landslide victory over the incumbent Democratic Governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. And, as they say, “The rest is history.”

For the next half century, Republicans pretty much heeded their Eleventh Commandment, which was, in fact, not the creation of Ronald Reagan, but rather of the long-forgotten Gaylord Parkinson, who served as state chair of the California Republican Party during the 1960s. Even during the worst days of Richard Nixon and Watergate, Republicans managed to put the screws to their president not by castigating him as a person, but rather by adhering to a tightly-constructed legalistic strategy. This all ended in 2016, when a ton of Republican “heavy hitters” (e.g. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio et al) called Donald Trump virtually every name in the book . . . and then some.  Fat lot of good it did ‘em! Once “The Orange Man” became their official nominee, the Eleventh Commandment was reinstated and, in the words of Bing Crosby “. . . seldom [was] heard a discouraging word and the skies [were] not cloudy all day.” That lasted until January 7, 2022 when Republican leaders in Congress lambasted their leader for grave sins against the body politic.  Of course, their brickbats soon faded, and within less than 72 hours, most went back to honoring their Eleventh Commandment.  And ever since, institutional Republicans (with a few notable exceptions like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as well as Senator Mitt Romney) have stood idly by with mouths shut and permitted their titular leader rant and rave as he pleases. Once again, they are - at least on the surface - a unified party.

Looking over at the other side of the aisle, it is obvious that Democrats have never abided by a commandment which forbids negative speech against one’s political compatriots. As far back as the 1930s, Will Rogers, the cowboy philosopher, highest-paid Hollywood actor and political pundit joked, “I am a member of no organized party: I am a Democrat.” Back in those days, the Democrats were America’s party of dysfunction, an unstable coalition of urban Northern liberals and rural Southern conservatives. Occasionally, the two wings worked together, as during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, but more often they clashed, right up until the party splintered during the 1960s, as Southern conservatives bailed out to join the Republicans.  For the past several years, there have been obvious, clear-cut factions within the Democratic caucus: moderates and centrists, progressives and near-socialists, and a hard-core conservative or two. 

Included in this latter listing is Joseph Manchin III, the Senior Senator from West Virginia.  Manchin, a multi-millionaire whose fortune comes mostly from coal and gas, is wealthy enough to drive a Maserati and live on a houseboat in the Potomac River when in Washington. He is, without question, the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill. How so?  Well, in order for Democrats to pass any legislation in the United States Senate requiring a 51-vote majority (as opposed to a 60-vote filibuster-proof "super majority”), every Democrat - plus Vice President Harris - must vote as a unified bloc.  That’s where Senator Manchin’s power comes in, for like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) he can all but single-handedly stymie any piece of legislation. Just this past Thursday, Manchin informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not support a Democratic proposal for new climate change spending and higher taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.  This came after more than a year of negotiating (in what turned out to be bad faith) with fellow Democrats, always promising that he was “seeking a common middle ground” by which he could find a package which he could agree to vote for - a measure which would, in addition to allocating funds for climate change and lowering prescription costs, would be paid for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  His announcement caused extraordinary consternation on the part of his Democratic colleagues.  Truth to tell, the Democrats should not have been so shocked; after all, Manchin had already stymied earlier attempts to pass President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" legislation over concerns about the deficit and inflation. 

As Chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Senator Manchin can pretty much do whatever is best for him and his financial portfolio.  It should be noted that over the past several years, Senator Manchin has received the most funding from the oil and gas industry of any senator, including $1.6 million in donations from fossil fuel PACs alone.  This should come as no surprise, for not only is Manchin the Energy and Natural Resources Chair, he also represents West Virginia - the country’s largest coal-producing state.  In standing steadfast against anything green, Manchin is serving two masters at once: the mining industry and his own stock portfolio.  

Senator Manchin has drawn a lot of withering criticism from his Democratic colleagues for all but single-handedly limiting, then scuttling, his party’s attempt to enact legislation directly addressing climate change.  And then, within 24 hours of announcing that he could not go along with their latest proposal, he called in to a West Virginia radio show during which he suggested that in another month or so, he might see his way clear to salvaging the last bits of President Biden’s domestic agenda!  Is it any wonder that Democrats have had enough of (and with) Joe Manchin? While still in Saudi Arabia, President Biden was asked whether he thought Senator Manchin had been negotiating in good faith. The President demurred, saying he was not the one who had been negotiating with him. 

There seems to be next-to-nothing the White House and Congressional Democrats can do or offer in order to get Joe Manchin to cease being such a damnable political stumbling block. As New York Times writer Emily Cochrane noted in a recent piece, “On Capitol Hill, Mr. Manchin is something of a unicorn — the only national Democrat from his ruby-red state — and acts and votes accordingly. Set to face voters in 2024, he is unlikely to be threatened by a primary challenger in a state former President Donald J. Trump won by nearly 40 points in 2020.”  And so, it looks like the disorganized party of Will Rogers are stuck with him . . . unless or until they make his vote irrelevant.  How to do this?  Democrats have to put as much time, talent and treasure into flipping at least 3 or 4 senate seats this coming November.  The best chances will be in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida.  The first 2 are open seats in which Republican  incumbents have decided to retire and have political crazies running in their stead (J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania); the latter two have incumbents carrying serious baggage (Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Marco Rubio in Florida) and running against smart, well-funded Democrats (John Fettermann in Pennsylvania  and Val Demmings in Florida).  If, like me, you receive fund-raising emails from most Democratic campaigns, consider chipping in a few bucks from time to time.

Democrats have the issues: abortion, guns violence, home-grown terrorism, climate change, and the Republicans refusal to abandon their so-called 11th Commandment. Can this be enough to overcome Party of Trump whose vocabulary will be limited to precisely 5 words: “inflation” and “the price of gas.”  

I have to believe it is.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone   

"Between the Hammer and the Anvil"

Later this evening, President Biden will depart on Air Force One for Israel, his first official visit to the Middle East since taking the oath of office nearly 18 months ago. After talks with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid (who at the moment also serves as Israel’s Foreign Minister) and representatives of the Palestinian Authority, the President will get back on board his plane Air Force One and become the first POTUS to fly directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia.  During his brief stay in Jeddah, where he will be attending the GCC+3 summit on Saturday with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, along with Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. Biden will also hold private talks with both Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (generally referred to as “MBS”), the oil-rich kingdom’s de facto leader.

Diplomatic missions don’t simply pop up out of thin air; they require a loft of careful planning and frequently involve complex, interweaving back stories.  As regards Israeli P.M. Lapid’s preparations, he has, over the past several days had personal conversations with Jordanian King Abdullah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (the first in at least 5 years) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; Israel has long had diplomatic relations with the first, shares common interests with the second, and wishes to become closer diplomatically with the third. In a message to the Saudis ahead of Biden’s expected direct flight from Israel to Jeddah, Prime Minister Lapid called for all countries in the region to build ties with Israel. “From Jerusalem, the [US] president’s plane will fly to Saudi Arabia, and he will carry with it a message of peace and hope from us,” Lapid said at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting.

For his part, President Biden’s preparations for attending the GCC+3 and face-to-face meeting with MBS) involve issues ranging from Saudi human rights violations to the brutal murder/dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident who worked for an American newspaper. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden was pointedly harsh when it came to characterizing the Saudi track record on human rights abuses as compared to Donald Trump, who frequently treated the oil-rich kingdom as America’s 51st state. During a debate in 2019, Biden said, “. . . the present government of that country [has] very little social redeeming value,” and that he would stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and “make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”

Now, of course, Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia has as much to do with oil and gas prices (which despite the daily dooming headlines has actually come down by nearly half dollar a gallon over the past several weeks). Considering how close we are to the midterm elections and how low the president’s ratings are - largely due to gas prices and inflation - he must be seen as doing something to help ameliorate the situation. Simply stated, that’s what politicians do.

As MSN op-ed writer Jonah Shepp noted in today’s Intelligencer column, “Whether or not one buys the justifications, global economics and politics have conspired to send Biden to meet with the Saudis whether he wants to or not. And from a moral standpoint, he probably doesn’t.”  Such are the exigencies of global politics, where idealism  and a nation’s historic sense what we stand for, of what is right and wrong must, from  time to time, take a deeply troubling backseat to economic necessity.  In going and - as some would have it - “groveling” at the feet of the Saudis, President Biden is nonetheless pretty much insulated from Trumpist and otherwise reactionary rhetorical brickbats.  Those who will most likely find fault with his hat-in-hand diplomacy at the doorstep of the House of Saud are those perched to his political left; who cannot and will not abide with lending credence to a kingdom ruled by ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabists.

(For the uninitiated, Wahhabi is to Sunni Islam what Dominionism is to fundamentalist Christianity: Taliban-like theocracy for the masses, but libertine lifestyles for the leaders.)  It’s the Wahhibi revivalists who keep women veiled and under the thumbs of their husbands and brothers, and issue lethal fatwas at the drop of a burqa. Likewise, it’s the Dominionists who demand that an impregnated 10-year old may not, regardless of circumstance, undergo an abortion . . . unless it’s their own daughter, sister or mistress.

The current Israeli P.M., former television host, journalist, actor and songwriter, Yair Lapid, who was until less than a decade ago widely ridiculed as a cocky and superficial political novice, is in somewhat the  same position as Joe Biden, one of the most experienced and long-lived politicians of the past half century. Like Biden, Lapir is in an electoral pickle; the Israeli government has pretty much collapsed, and he is facing yet another nationwide election. His political coalition, which runs the gamut from centrists, two-state enthusiasts and Arab parties, is once again taking on Bibi Nitanyahu’s Likud block. He senses that increasing Israel’s ties to gulf-state, oil-rich Arab states and sultanates makes good political sense; hence the recent reaching out to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.A.E.

At the same time, this means that Lapid is all but giving his state’s imprimatur to countries and kingdoms whose record on human rights and the treatment of both women and religious minorities is the bipolar opposite of the Jewish State . . . the only democratic state in the Middle East.

Talk about being between the proverbial rock and a hard place! But then again no one ever said that hardcore politics and diplomacy were easy. Just how much civility, humanity and morality Lapid is willing to give up in order to secure greater, more powerful friendships is anyone’s guess. Selling the soul of a state to those who have spent generations promising the utter destruction of that state is a hard call. In an ideal world - whatever that is - Israel would tell Saudi Arabia and MBS to “stick it!” . . .. to begin treating women with equanimity and understanding . . . to finally abandon the 7th century and begin acting like modern men.

In Hebrew, the translation of “Between a rock and a hard place” is בין ההפשיט והסדן (bayn ha-pasheet v’ha-sah-dahn) literally meaning “between the hammer and the anvil.”  While I certainly do not envy P.M. Lapid for being in this position, I do understand that in reaching out to MBS,  he may well be positioned to help make Saudi Arabia - and indeed many of the oil-rich Muslim sheikdoms - better able  to enter the 21st century. 

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Federalists, Dystopians, and Extreme Nausea

Truth to tell, Friday’s 5-4* Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centered on a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, didn’t come as that much of a surprise. Movement conservatives, including the Christian Right, the Federalist Society and their billionaire backers, have been pumping time, effort, energy and endless shekels into reversing Roe v. Wade for more than 40 years. Friday’s ruling has automatically jump started so-called “trigger laws” in 13 states as well as putting fear, loathing and extreme nausea into the minds, hearts and kishkes of an overwhelming majority of the American public. (* It should be noted that Chief Justice John Roberts did not join the majority, writing in a concurring opinion that he would not have overturned Roe, but instead would have only uphold Mississippi's law banning abortions after 15 weeks.)  Despite writing that Roe had been fatally flawed when decided back in 1973, Justice Samuel Alito tried to paper over the decision by stating that it was not intended to ban all abortions in the United States; merely to put the decision back into the hands of the individual states.  Can you say “disingenuous?” 

“Trigger laws” would effectively ban abortions almost immediately after a decision from the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.  These states include Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky and Alabama.  There are an additional 9 states which have already banned abortions: Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.  In an interview on Face the Nation, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem defended her state’s trigger law, rationalizing that in cases of rape and/or incest she does not believe one tragedy is "a reason to have another tragedy occur."  Governor Noem said her state will now work to bolster resources for women who will now have to carry their pregnancies to term, including with more mental health counseling and family services.  "I would prefer that we continue to make sure we go forward and that we're putting resources in front of these women and walking alongside them, getting them the health care, the care, the mental health counseling and services that they should need to make sure that we can continue to support them and build stronger families far into the future as well," she said, adding, "The Supreme Court did its job: it fixed a wrong decision it made many years ago and returned this power back to the states, which is how the Constitution and our Founders intended it."  It should be noted that Governor Noem has made more than a handful of comments that she’s seriously considering making a White House bid in 2024. . .

For the first 15 years after Roe guaranteed women the legal right to control their own bodily destiny, Republicans were as likely as Democrats to support an absolute right to legal abortion, and sometimes even more so. But 2010 swept in a different breed of Republican, powered by Tea Party supporters, who locked in a new conservatism. Going into the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats controlled 27 state legislatures going in, and ended up with 16; Republicans started with 14 and ended up controlling 25. Republicans swept not only the South but Democratic strongholds in the Midwest, picking up more seats nationwide than either party had in four decades. By the time the votes had been counted, they held their biggest margin since the Great Depression. From that point on, Republican-controlled state legislatures began passing more and more restrictive laws which began the inexorable path toward the total dismantling of Roe v. Wade. Not that all the Republican state legislators were saturated with Biblical fervor. They did, in many cases, become increasingly more pro-life in order to grow their majorities and assure greater funding from well-heeled (and largely anonymous) billionaire backers.  This funding issue is crucial; were it not for the Court’s egregious 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC decision back in 2010, which eliminated the prohibition on PACS (“political action committees”) and corporations making unfettered independent expenditures, it is likely that Roe v. Wade would still be settled law today. 

Now mind you, Dobbs (the case which overturned Roe) wasn’t the only terrible ruling from the high court this past week.  Just the day before ruling that women no longer had any say in their bodily destinies, the court struck down a New York gun law enacted more than a century ago that restricts carrying a concealed handgun outside the home. The opinion changes the framework that lower courts will use to analyze other gun restrictions, which could include proposals currently before Congress if they eventually become law.  According to Justice Clarence Thomas, courts are required to "assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment's text and historical understanding,"   

For instance, Thomas wrote, if a gun law is addressing a societal problem that also existed in the 18th century, it is evidence that the modern law is unconstitutional if there was no similar regulation then. Likewise, he said, if that societal problem was historically addressed using a type of regulation different than the one now before a court, this is also evidence that the modern law is unconstitutional.

"When confronting such present-day firearm regulations, this historical inquiry that courts must conduct will often involve reasoning by analogy—a commonplace task for any lawyer or judge. Like all analogical reasoning, determining whether a historical regulation is a proper analogue for a distinctly modern firearm regulation requires a determination of whether the two regulations are 'relevantly similar,'" Thomas wrote.  Thursday's ruling means that for a court to find any type of gun law constitutional, it will have to be consistent with how firearms were regulated historically.  This means states and localities will run into legal trouble whenever they try to enact a gun law that does not have a historical parallel, particularly if the problem the law is trying to address is a problem that arguably has existed for generations.  

In other words, just as with the Dobbs decision, this one invites us to travel back into the past . . . to willfully ignore past decisions of the court.  To a huge extent, this is the work of the  Federalist Society, which wants nothing so much as to return to an America in which men rule over women, states have clear control of the law, black’s and other minorities legal rights take a backseat to those of White Christians, and the frontier is once again, just outside our front doors.

During times like these, my reading habits change.  To get away from all the angst, worry and bile, I tend read as much P.G. Wodehouse as time permits.  (For those not familiar with him, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE [1881-1975] was one of the funniest, most inane British writers of all time.  He is perhaps best known and most beloved for his series of novels starring Bertie Wooster (one of the dotty “idle rich”) and his sagacious valet Jeeves. My all-time favorite, by the way, is Ring For Jeeves). For more serious, mind-numbing fiction, I find myself turning (or returning) to such classic dystopian novels as:

• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)

• The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908)

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

• It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1936)

• 1984 by George Orwell (1948)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1984)

Dystopia is an imagined community or society that is dehumanizing and frightening. “Dystopia” is the bipolar opposite of a utopia, which is a perfect society. The novels I have been rereading, most notably Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, take us into an American society/political culture in which democratic freedoms have been wrenchingly upended by brutal autocrats and hideous dictators. What makes these novels so compelling is that no matter how long ago they were written or published, they all seem to be talking about today. The one drawback in most of them is that they offer no solutions to the problems they all predict . . . short of moving away to another country.

                          Wedding photo of Clarence and Ginni Lamp Thomas in 1987

Although by no means a novelist, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a world-class dystopian.  In his separate, concurring opinion in last Friday’s Dobbs decision, Thomas wrote that this was undoubtedly “an erroneous decision.”  Thomas went on to write that the Court should “reconsider” such previous rulings as those that protect contraception access (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), same-sex relationships (Lawrence v. Texas. 2003) and same-sex marriages (Obergefell v. Hodges,  2015).  Not surprisingly, nowhere did Mr.  Justice Thomas mention the court’s unanimous 1967 decision (Loving v. Virginia) decision which made inter-racial marriages legal.  At best, Thomas’s omission could be considered a case of inconsistency; at worst, utter hypocrisy.  But then again, hypocrisy and inconsistency have long been key ingredients in both bare-knuckle politics and dystopian literature.  

For all those who have been so vociferously in favor of over-turning Roe v. Wade, one has to wonder whether they are going to do anything about assisting all these newborns (even those who are the product of rape and incest) with food, housing, medical care and education, or just leave them floating in the breeze.  And do all those ultra-conservative cretins who have hopped aboard the “Replacement Theory” bandwagon understand that by outlawing abortions - which will most directly affect non-whites and the poor - will greatly increase the minority population of the United States . . . thus making their supposedly “worst nightmare” a far greater reality?  Not only are they both inconsistent and hypocritical; they are immoral. 

As mentioned above, dystopian novels rarely provide suggestions for remediation . . .  short of emigration. Not being a dystopian writer, permit me to conclude with a  couple of suggestions:

1. Increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13 . . .  the number of Federal Judicial Circuits there are in the U.S.A.

2. Elect a staunchly Democratic Congress which will get rid of the filibuster and enact a bill which codifies abortion as a federal right.

3. Start the process of overturning the Citizens United  ruling. 

4. Make sure that Roe v. Wade is on every ballot in every state and district in 2022.

Never give up hope!  This land belongs to the majority . . . 

Copyright© 2022 Kurt F.  Stone

Random Thoughts on the 80th Birthday of Sir Paul McCartney

OK fellow Boomers, how’s this for a dash of ice-cold water in the face? Yesterday, when my (our) troubles seemed so far away, Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, CH, turned 80. Can you believe it? 80! There are places I (we) remember some have gone and some remain. Without question, it’s been a Long and Winding Road since 4 Liverpudlian moptops reached these shores nearly 60 years ago . . . a time when many of us proclaimed “don’t trust anyone over the age of 30.” And yet, it was, by comparison to today, a pretty positive time where many believed that We Can Work it Out With a Little Help From My our) Friends.  As hippies (or “freaks,” as many of us called ourselves) we also believed that All you need is love, and that ultimately, we could Come Together. Looking to the future many wondered Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64.

Well, many of us are now more than 10 years past 64, and still finding both great meaning and memories in the words which Sir Paul and his long deceased (nearly 42 years) writing partner John Lennon created oh so long ago.  Many of us are now retired, no longer working Eight Days a Week and looking back realizing I Should Have Known Better.  There are days when many of us wish we could board Sir Paul’s Yellow Submarine, Get Back to where we once belonged, and once again Be Free as a Bird.  Of course, even though it’s not possible, we still have Sir Paul, the “cute Beatle.”  

On his birthday, Sir Paul - who is already selling tickets for his 2023 tour, received best wishes and glowing tributes from seemingly half the world.  Included in the greetings was one from the now nearly 90 year old Yoko Ono, which read: “Dear Paul, Happy 80th Birthday and many, many more! From a partner in Peace… love, yoko,”  He celebrated his birthday onstage at MetLife Stadium alongside the sprightly 72-year old Bruce Springsteen; 60,000 concert goers sang They Say It’s Your Birthday to their idol.  You’ve got to believe that the vast majority of them weren’t even born until long after the Beatles broke up . . . way back in September of 1969. 

Paul is not the only rock star to be knighted. The first was “Boomtown Rats” frontman and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof. The singer and activist was knighted way back in 1986 because of his work on behalf of famine relief. The only catch is that he’s technically not “Sir Bob,” a title reserved for British citizens. As an Irishman, Geldof is allowed to follow his name with the initials KBE (Knight Commander of the British Empire).  Joining Sir Paul (who was knighted by his queen in 1997 for service to music, are the Beatles’  producer Sir George Martin who was knighted one year before Sir Paul, Sir Elton John (1998), Sir Mick Jagger (2003), Sir Paul David Hewson (Bono) of the Irish rock group U2 (2007), Sir Ivan (Van) Morrison (2016), Sir Rod Stewart (2016), Sir Ray Davies (“The Kinks”) 2017, Sir Barry Gibb, 2018, and Sir Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) 2019.  It  should be  noted that In 2003, David Bowie rejected knighthood honors for his cultural contributions, saying, “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. It’s not what I spent my life working for.” In so doing, the late Bowie (1947-2016) joined a long list of people who had rejected becoming knighted, from T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and Rudyard Kipling to Albert Finney and Stephen Hawking.

As mind-numbing as it is that Sir Paul is 80 and still touring, that Sir Mick is still strutting, doing his rooster walk and is still 5’10”, 161 lbs. and sporting a 33 inch waist, the fact is that they are senior citizens.  The now 82-year old Grace Slick, lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane/Starship retired many years ago, proclaiming “All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire. You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are a way for young people to get that anger out. It’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have.”  Just don’t tell that to Sir Paul, Sir Mick, Sir Elton or the rest of the band of knights.

My feeling about aging (I am now 2 months shy of turning 73) has always been: Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  In other words, just because the bones are a bit more brittle, the hair thinning (or gone) the waist spreading and the hearing in need of a boost is pretty much a matter of genetics combined with one’s lifelong habits.  Growing stodgy, stolid, sedentary or mostly set in one’s ways are sure signs that philosophically or psychologically, one has become old; has begun losing a sense of wonderment and the need for new challenges.  But that is purely optional.  What’s to say that we can choose, regardless of age, to continue exploring Here, There and Everywhere; of awakening in the morning and uttering a small prayer in which we acknowledge Here Comes the Sun and say I Will to the new day?  

Growing old is pretty much the way of nature; growing up is, to my way of thinking an option.  For that bit of wisdom - if wisdom it be - we have the likes of Sir Paul, Sir Mick, Sir Ringo and the Nobel laureate Bob Dylan to thank.  

Happy Birthday Sir Paul. Keep on doing what you’ve been doing ever since the days of the Quarrymen some 65 years ago, and do continue on your Magical Mystery Tour.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Guns, Guns, and More Guns

     Justus D. Barnes in  “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) . . . the first Western

Assigning attribution or “literary parentage” to a particularly well-known epigram rarely yields THE TRUTH. As a rule of thumb, the wittier the wheeze, the more parents there are. One of the greatest - and unquestionably snarkiest - epigrammatists of the past hundred years, Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker (“Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”), best summed up literary attributions with a hilarious aphorism of her own: “If with the literate, I am/Impelled to try an epigram/I never seek to take the credit/We all assume that Oscar said it.”  The “Oscar,” to whom she refers is, of course, Oscar Wilde, generally considered, next to Shakespeare, to have been the most clever and skillful of all English-language scops.

Here in America, the four people who generally sit atop the “literary parentage” list are the aforementioned Parker, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. Parker generally comes in first, with Franklin second, Twain third and Jefferson fourth. My all-time favorite Parkerism is “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.” One of Franklin’s best known quips is “A penny saved is a penny earned.” As for Twain, one his best was “A little lie can travel half way 'round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots” But it is Jefferson who is awarded attribution for a statement that will undoubtedly be heard over and over in the coming days and weeks as we proceed with Congress’s attempt to pass some sort of gun safety legislation: “Half a loaf is better than none.” (n.b. It is likely that the real originator of this expression was the 16th century British writer John Heywood who had been famous for more than 35 years before the birth of the “Bard of Avon”).

When it comes to Congress trying to enact a bipartisan bill dealing with gun control (some prefer calling it “gun safety”) Jefferson (or unknowingly, John Heywood) are hitting the headlines of news articles and and being quoted in speeches and newscasts with great regularity.  Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson published a recent op-ed piece which just about says it all: We’ll get less than half a loaf on gun control. We should take it.  A few days after Robinson’s piece hit the streets, Senate negotiators announced that they had struck a bipartisan deal on a narrow set of gun safety measures with sufficient support to move through the evenly divided chamber.  The deal (the specifics of which we will look at in the next paragraph) included far, far less than gun control advocates and nearly all Congressional Democrats would have wanted. At a time in our political history when the walls of political partisanship are taller and and more impregnable than those which surrounded the Biblical Jericho, it nonetheless represented a significant step toward ending a years-long congressional impasse on the issue.  Or, in other words, half a loaf . . . or even less.  

The agreement, put forth by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Biden and top Democrats, includes enhanced background checks to give authorities time to check the juvenile and mental health records of any prospective gun buyer under the age of 21 and a provision that would, for the first time, extend to dating partners a prohibition on domestic abusers having guns. It would also provide funding for states to enact so-called red-flag laws that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous, as well as money for mental health resources and to bolster safety and mental health services at schools.  What it does not include are a majority of things a clear majority of the American public support: a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks. At the same time, it is nowhere near as sweeping as a package of gun measures passed almost along party lines in the House last week, which would bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21, ban the sale of large-capacity magazines and enact a federal red-flag law, among other steps.

While Congress has not passed new gun-control restrictions in the wake of public mass shootings in recent years, hundreds of measures have passed in statehouse across the country during such moments. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, high-profile mass shootings have been followed by a jump in state gun-control laws in the next year or two years, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on state legislation compiled by RAND, a nonprofit policy research group.

As much as the idealist in me rebels at the thought that this is the best 10 senators can come up with, the political and historical realist in me understands that this is likely the “new reality”, where even less than half a loaf is about as good as it’s going to get . . . at least for the foreseeable future. Unless and until the N.R.A. suffers a fall which even financial bankruptcy cannot touch, they will continue holding conventions, selling goods and continue working as hucksters for the weapons’ industry. They will continue getting their followers to mouth their disingenuous bromide about the only thing capable of stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, warning how the government is about to take away all their weapons, and willy-nilly buying up politicians left and (overwhelmingly) right.

To end on a positive note: the outpouring of public outrage after the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde has led to tens of thousands to take to the streets from coast-to-coast demanding that Congress - in the words of President Biden and so many others - “do something.” With this week’s announcement that the Senate might actually enact the “Half-a-Loaf” gun safety bill, perhaps it will light a spark which one day will see more fully realized measures passed into law - ones which finally resurrect the Assault Weapons Ban, rescind the legal immunity gun manufacturers currently enjoy (which makes it nearly impossible for them to be sued for crimes committed with the weapons or ammunition they sell), and put books and lesson plans back into the hands of the nation’s teachers instead of guns, guns, and more guns.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

The Fatuous Five

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

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

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

Want further proof?

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

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

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

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

• No kiss could last longer than 3 seconds;

•  Miscegenation (interracial relationships) were not allowed;

• Scenes of childbirth were never to be shown;

• Illegal drug usage could not be presented;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Betwixt Optimism and Pessimism There Lies . . .

(Permit me to begin with a word of thanks to Rodger and Madeline Gobel, my friends and congregants who, without knowing it at the time, put a big smile on my face by providing me with an actuality which provided me with the germ from whence this essay evolved.)

Question: when was the last time reading page-one headlines or watching a cable TV news crawler was anything less than a task filled with angst or dread?  (Yes, I know, “angst or dread” is an overly-repetitive redundancy . . . so sue me!)  For those whose answer is something like “I honestly can’t remember” or “Seems like forever-and-a-day,” you are undoubtedly correct.  It’s all too understandable. I mean, consider the menu of malevolence which confronts us on a daily basis: Putin’s maniacal war against Ukraine; teenagers mowing down shoppers and students with AK-47s in Buffalo and Uvalde (which, by the way, has already  passed muster with “spell-check”); the damage done to American politics as a result of the “Big Lie”; our quondam POTUS and retrogressive SCOTUS; the dilatory nature of Congress; the daily gaffs and linguistic lunacies of such Luddites as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis; conspiracy theorists whose every off-the-wall inanity is as acceptable as Sinaitic truth by a growing minority of “true believers”;  higher and higher gas prices coupled with growing inflation;  and on and on and on . . .

 As one who has posted more than 900 mostly political essays over the past 17+ years, there are weeks when it is neigh on impossible to put another 1,000-1,500 words up on the screen.  Complaining, criticizing – even satirizing – becomes sheer drudgery.  And yet, going back to the very first essay (February 4, 2005 - when the blog was called “Beating the  Bushes”), I wrote that its overarching purpose would be “to hold up an honest mirror of the times in which we live, regardless of how complex, maddening or incomprehensible those times might be.”  The past several weeks have been far more complex, maddening, and incomprehensible than many, many others.

And so, this week I will resort to reportage of a more  hopeful sort.  Remember, the subtitle of this blog is “. . . & a Whole Lot More.”   

                      Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia: self-made billionaire and philanthropist

This past Wednesday, May 25, 2022, the senior class at Brookwood High School in Snellville, Georgia, held their graduation ceremony.  Rodger and Madeline were in attendance, kvelling their hearts out; their grandson was one of the graduates.  The commencement address was given by Joe Gebbia, one of the three cofounders of Airbnb,  and a 2000 graduate of Brookwood.  (Gebbia is now chief product officer of Airbnb, the company’s in-house design studio, Samara, and is chairman of Airbnb.org, the company’s nonprofit arm.) His address contained the expected flourishes about following their dreams and never giving up.  The now 40-year old self-made multi-billionaire confided to the graduates that he wasn’t the  most serious of students while attending Brookwood, and admitted “I definitely don’t remember the advice I was given at my graduation. And I don’t expect you to, either.” 

And while few of the 890 graduates are likely to remember what Gebbia said, they will long remember what he did.  Towards the end of his address he said:  “I would like to give you a piece of my dream to help inspire yours and let you know that it is possible.”  He then went on  to inform them that each and every one of the graduates would be getting 22 (for 2022) shares of Airbnb, which works out  to about $2,400 worth of stock per graduate, based on that day’s closing price of $110.40 a share. Altogether it was a gift worth nearly $2.2 million.   

Turns out this gift was by no means Joe Gebbia’s first.  Last year he pledged $700,000 to help boost his school’s arts department and cross country team, both activities he participated in when he was a student. In 2020, he donated $25 million to two organizations in San Francisco (where he and his family live) combating homelessness. Gebbia and his two Airbnb cofounders, Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk, joined the Giving Pledge in 2016—long before Airbnb went public—promising to donate at least half their wealth to charitable causes.  

Though billionaires often donate to educational institutions, it’s becoming increasingly common for the wealthy to help students directly, especially if a billionaire is chosen as a school’s commencement speaker. Earlier this year, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel paid off the student loans for graduates of the Los Angeles-based Otis College of Art and Design, a gift of more than $10 million. Telecom billionaire Robert Hale Jr. gifted each graduating student at Quincy College in Massachusetts $1,000 each last year. The largest donation to graduating college students, though, comes from private equity tycoon Robert Smith, the richest Black person in America. He spent $34 million in 2019 to pay off the student debt for the entire graduating class of Morehouse College. Smith also gave 15,000 shares of stock from Vista Equity Partners’ portfolio companies to nearly 2,900 students, teachers and staff at Eagle Academies for Young Men, an all-boys school in New York City.

There are now more than 231 billionaires from 28 countries ranging in age from 31 to 98 who have pledged to give away more than 50% of their vast fortunes to charitable causes. Most of this pledging and giving has been done with far, far less fanfare or publicity than those who step on their tongues on an almost daily basis or shoot up schools, synagogues, supermarkets or gay bars. (Just the other day, as an example, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene garnered worldwide attention when she went off the rails, telling her supporters to beware of Bill Gates, who is planning to monitor their eating habits and “zap” them until they eat fake meat grown in a “peach tree dish.” (This is the same woman who, in accusing the Biden Administration of adopting Nazi tactics, accused him of employing “Gazpacho police-to monitor American’s bowel-going habits.

Is it any wonder that a pall of pessimism has enveloped so many otherwise hopeful people? The fact that the utter lunacy of a Marjorie Taylor Greene can garner or an ūber, over-the-top gun supporter like Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks so much more publicity than the generosity of a Joe Gebbia speaks volumes for where we’ve come as a society which is far more often glued to the lunacy of the brainless than the generosity of the accomplished.

Most are familiar with the expression “The pessimist sees the glass as being half empty, the optimist as being half full.” I have long believed that there’s got to be a third option: of being content with the fact that so long as there’s something in the glass that’s a good start. But what do we call these sorts of people (of whom I am proudly one)? I have long believed that laying somewhere betwixt the rosy-hued optimist and the dire, head-for-the-hills pessimist is the possibilist, a term first coined by the late writer/political philosopher/neo-liberal; Max Lerner. For possibilism is far, far better for the stomach than dire pessimism, and far less frustrating to the soul than rosy-hued optimism. And while both optimism and pessimism exist largely in the realm of  weltanschauung - “world view” - which is largely reactive It is the balance of which we speak - possibilism is energizing -  requiring action.  My slightly-older-sister Erica (Riki) just posted a marvelous photo of a heroic looking American Eagle stating what for me is the  possibilist’s creed:

  We are no longer accepting things we cannot change.  It is now time to change the things we cannot accept. 

Three  . . . or four or five . . . cheers for the Joe Gebbias, Brian Cheskys and Nathan Blecharczyks of the world . . . as well as the largely unknown, unsung possibilists of the planet.

Do remember that betwixt pessimism - which always sees the glass as being half empty - and optimism - which sees the glass as being half full - is possibilism - which avers that so long as there’s something in the glass we can throw a party . . . 

 Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Don't Find Fault; Find a Remedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not much of a platform, is it?

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

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

Follow the money!

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

“The price of gas is set by several factors:

• the price of crude oil and its availability

• refining costs

• the cost to distribute

• state and federal taxes

• the oil companies desire for profit

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

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

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Replacement Theory: Eugenics Refitted in 21st Century Rags

Of all the professional pursuits I have engaged in over the past half-century (Oy!), none has been more challenging or rewarding than the field of Medical Ethics. (Yes, I can hear the quip “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?” for the thousandth time . . . and no, it is decidedly NOT). Medical ethics is the one field in which I truly feel I am making a difference in this world. At the same time, each day, each week, requires a tremendous amount of study, and a lot of learning. One of the things that takes up quite a bit of learning time is cramming tons of medical acronyms (such as ARDS, BPD, DVT or PML, to name but a teeny-tiny handful) and then translating them into understandable lay English for the masses. Please know that for purposes of this essay, we won’t  get into even a small sampling, lest you, dear reader, fear that any of the abbreviations or terms will become part of some final exam.

G-d forbid! 

Whether or not one knows the difference between “PK” (Pharmacokinetics) and PD (Pharmacodynamics) is not terribly important; it can easily be solved by asking a question or two from an expert.  However, in the world of modern politics, there are tons of terms (which may or may not have their own acronyms) which are terribly important . . . such as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory), “Let’s Go Brandon,” (a right-wing code for “F*ck Joe Biden,”) and one of the newest, “Replacement Theory,” which has come back onto center-stage as a result of this week’s massacre at a Buffalo-area supermarket which took the lives of more than a dozen African-Americans.

“Replacement Theory” (often prefaced by “The Great”), first came to public attention in July, 2017, when bands of White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis, attending a “Unite the Right” rally, marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “You will not replace us!” Nearly two years later, two consecutive mass shootings occurred in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacks were carried out by a lone gunman who entered both mosques during Friday prayer; 51 people were killed and 40 injured. Prior to going on his murderous rampage, the shooter, who was eventually sentenced to 51 life terms without the possibility of parole, issued a 74-page manifesto entitled The Great Replacement. In it, he expressed several anti-immigrant sentiments, including hate speech against migrants, white supremacist rhetoric, and calls for all non-European immigrants in Europe - who he claimed to be "invading his land" - to be removed.

In last week’s mass murder up in Buffalo, the eighteen-year old terrorist, like his counterpart in the Christchurch terrorist tragedy, posted a manifesto in which he accused “Jews, Democrats and Communists” of doing everything in their power to bring about “white genocide” - of “replacing” white people with “illegal immigrants, blacks, browns and Asians” who would then vote a straight Democratic ticket with an eye to eliminating “White Christians.” Somewhat lost in the shuffle was a murderous terror attack on a Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, a community in Southern California’s Orange County.  Once again, the shooter - who was hogtied by members of the congregation with an extension cord - killed because he was a racist who wanted to get rid of as many “aliens” as possible.  (The one person killed in the attack was John Chen, a 52-year old doctor of Sports Medicine in nearby Aliso Viejo.  If not for the heroic Dr. Chen, more congregants would have been murdered. Hauntingly, he was one of my niece Julie’s physicians some years back.)

“Replacement Theory,” got its name from a 2010 work (Le Grand Remplacement) by the French writer Renaud Camus. In his book, Camus depicted a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations. The French migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas, while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview. It didn’t take too long for his worldview to turn into a conspiracy theory and find fertile ground in the rest of Europe and the United States. When all is said and done, Camus’ theory is not all that dissimilar to the 19th-century atrocity known as “Eugenics” - a set of beliefs and practices which aimed to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. The Nazis - particularly Dr. Josef Mengele (Der Todesengel, the “Angel of Death”) comes to mind. From Eugenics to Replacement Theory isn’t that great a leap.

Lest we sneer at “The Great Replacement” as the special provenance of political crazies, lovers of loony conspiracy theories, fans of Tucker Carlson and garden variety Neo-Nazis and racists, consider a few horrifying facts:

• About 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains;

• About 3 in 10 also worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence. (Republicans are more likely than Democrats to fear a loss of influence because of immigration, 36% to 27%.)

• Replacement Theory has moved from the fringes into the mainstream among Congressional Republicans. With the exception of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who ripped their colleagues for not speaking out against White Supremacy which lay just beneath the Buffalo massacre (for which they have been roundly condemned) not a single member of the Republican caucus has said word one. Indeed, the number 3 member of the House Republican caucus (Elise Stefanik) chose to attack Democrats in general, and President Joe Biden in particular for the massacre: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.

Has the whole world gone crazy?  Why oh why do so many people get their news and views from conspiracy-mongers who neither believe nor give a rat’s rump about so-called “White Genocide?  Anyone who could come up with an answer to that question would be in the running for the Nobel Prize in either peace or medicine.  As to what we can do to stifle the voices, the violence and the virulence of these monsters is a bit less confusing, but a hell of a lot more cumbersome.  It is up to us, the masses of ordinary citizens - those who seek a saner and safer society in which to live, love and learn - we MUST banish the bigots, the lovers of totalitarianism, those who are more concerned with the freedom to own weapons of mass destruction than to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and live up to the nation’s slogan e pluribus unum - “Out of many, one.”

I can see no reason why we, the masses of the ordinary, cannot band together and send the haters of humanity back to their humdrum lives . . . far, far away from seats of power.   Put up lawn signs; go knocking on doors, drive neighbors to the polls, and always, always remember the words of Churchill:

“NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE UP!! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,NEVER NEVER-NEVER-NEVER-NEVER!!!”

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would be a Sacrament

There seems to be little question that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is on the verge of replacing the late Chief Justice Roger B. Taney as the most notorious (odious?) federal jurist in all American history. Taney (1777-1864), of course, wrote the majority opinion in the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied Blacks citizenship under the Constitution and helped pave the way for the bloodiest war in American history. With the leaking of a draft opinion in the Mississippi abortion case,  Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito is likely to earn either the eternal prayers of thanks or eternal howls of damnation from future court historians and citizens everywhere.

According to Alito’s draft, the court - likely by a vote of 6-3 - will overturn Roe v. Wade’s holding of a federal constitutional right to an abortion . . . which, just as importantly, protected a woman’s right to both privacy and the ability to have ultimate control over her own body. The draft opinion, which will undoubtedly lead to Roe’s dismemberment, would be the most consequential abortion decision in decades and transform the landscape of women’s reproductive health in America. Additionally, when the Court announces its final decision in either late June or early July, it will represent the first time in American history that a protected right has been taken away from more than half of all citizens of the United States.

Is it any wonder that Sam Alito’s name and reputation will place him right next to Roger B. Taney in all future histories of SCOTUS?

For nearly a half-century, Roe v. Wade has not only ensured that abortions are both safe and legal; it has guaranteed women the right to have control over their own bodily destiny.  At the same time, however,  the very existence of Roe v Wade has been a casus belli for a steadily growing and increasingly powerful conservative movement in America.  Adroit - mostly, though not entirely - Republican politicians  have ceaselessly (and cynically) used and played the abortion card as a means of getting religiously inclined people to go to the polls; prior to Roe, true believers took their cue from the Gospel of St. Matthew, as well as St. Mark and St. Luke: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s. In short, outside of paying taxes to the government, a majority of religious conservatives stayed the hell away from politics. As mentioned above, with the confirmation of Roe v. Wade in 1973, God began being increasingly used as a lynchpin for bringing religious issues into the so-called “culture wars” being acted out in the public square.

Unquestionably, there is a large measure of hypocrisy in the fact that so many of those who have made it their political raison d'être to overturn Roe - the self-proclaimed “Pro-Lifers” - tend to be against such life-affirming programs as SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Universal Preschool and Family Tax Credits. . . to name but a few. That is why I have long referred to the two sides of the abortion issue as “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Birth,” with the latter seeming to lose all interest once the so-called “unborn” leave the mother’s womb. Sometimes, the hypocrisy even leaves an obvious trail . . .

Case in point:

Back in 2018, Dave Barnhart, a pastor at Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama posted the following sermonette on Facebook . . . it soon went viral:

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”

For the past several years, states with Republican-controlled legislatures have been passing - and their Republican governors signing - legislative fiats which severely delimit the ability of women to receive abortions . . . even if their pregnancies are the result of rape, incest, sex-trafficking or would endanger their very lives. In some cases, the limitations involved a matter of time: that if an abortion were to take place, it must be before the 15th, 12th or even 6th week of gestation. In some cases these bills required pregnant women to wait a certain number of days or weeks after first discovering that they are pregnant; in others, family planning centers must be within a certain number of miles from a state-approved hospital. There are even bills - notably in Texas, Mississippi and Florida - which would permit anyone to blow the whistle on anyone who has anything to do with an abortion . . . up to and including an Uber driver who provides transportation for a woman to reach a center across state lines. Reading through these laws, it is obvious that they are aimed primarily at the poor or women of color. As a result of this, there are already some states that have but a single place for women to go in order to undergo an abortion.  Then too, many states have enacted so-called “Trigger Laws,” which hold that the very moment Roe v Wade is overturned, their state laws will go into effect.

Once SCOTUS puts an end to Roe v. Wade and returns the issue to the various states, America will join a worldwide “Hall of Shame” . . . the countries in which abortion for any reason is illegal. The two-dozen members of that infamous “Hall” are:

Andorra, Aruba, Congo, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Jamaica, Laos, Madagascar, Malta, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Palau, Philippines, San Marino, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Suriname, Tonga, the West Bank & Gaza Strip.

Quite an exclusive club, one must admit.

One would think that after so many years of politicking, campaigning and running on the issue of overturning Roe v. Wade, Republican members of the House and Senate would be overjoyed; would be giving themselves high-fives and pats on the back for the sake of their voting base. But interestingly, such is not the case . . . far from it.  Within the past several days we have noted a profound silence among leaders of the GOP.  Despite having been fighting for decades to overturn Roe, they are now loathe to take a victory lap while on the campaign trail.   Just the other day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), advised Republican candidates to downplay and soft-pedal the prospects of anti-abortion legislation . . . both at the state and national level.  Why?  Because he and his colleagues can read poll numbers.  They understand that more than 60% of the voting public is against an outright repeal of Roe v. Wade. Then too, they recognize that if they gloat and run a victory lap, it will be pitting men against women . . . and women, they know, vote in higher numbers than men.

Instead, they are more concerned with trying to figure out precisely who was responsible for leaking the Alito draft to the press.  Texas Senator Ted Cruz proclaimed that it was “a liberal clerk on the court” who was undoubtedly responsible for the dastardly deed . . . as if he had even a scintilla of inside information.  In another piece of barely concealed racist inventive, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield suggested — again, without evidence or logic — that future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may be responsible for the leak. (It should be noted that as a Justice-in-waiting who has not yet taken the oath of office, she has neither been privy to the Alito draft, nor had the ability to appoint any clerks who might have access to the 90+ page document).  But hey: racism is racism.

Is there any logic to be found in making sure that 12 or 14-year old girls cannot be ordered - as a matter of law - to wear masks at school, and then turn around and ordain that if these same girls become pregnant as a result of rape, incest or sex-trafficking they must - again, as a matter of law - go full term and give birth?  The only bit of logic I can find is that the vast majority of legislators and political leaders who lead the charge in this gross inconsistency are . . . you got it: MEN.  Writer and activist Gloria Steinem was snarkily correct in giving voice to the words which serve as the title of this week’s blog.

Will the Supreme Court’s impending dismemberment of Roe v Wade bring even more women out to the polls in the coming months in order to express their fear and utter displeasure? Will Alito’s assertion that since the U.S. Constitution nowhere mentions a legal right to privacy, lead to the evisceration of such additional rights as gay marriage and the acquisition and use birth control? Will the court’s ruling effectively drive a further wedge between a “Red State” and a “Blue State” America? Will this one day lead to a second Civil War?

Only time . . . and the actions of an energized voting public will tell.

Copyright©2022 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

“Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.”

                            Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850).

As I begin writing this week’s essay, it is 11:15 AM EDT, on Sunday, the 24th of April 2022. The citizens of France are at the polls, voting for whether centrist Emmanuel Macron, the 8th President of the Fifth Republic of France will retain his presidency, or be bested by the ultra-right populist Marine Le Pen. Although going into the final days of the runoff campaign Macron’s polling show him to be ahead Le Pen by nearly 10 points, few political observers are sanguine about Macron being reelected for another 5-year term.  That’s just in the nature of French national politics. 

French politics have certain similarities to that which we experience here in the U.S.  As is the case here across the pond, the French have a political left, right and center, although it is quite a bit more delineable in the land of Liberté, égalité, fraternité.  Unlike in America, these political approaches are more or less codified into three separate political parties . . . but with a decided difference.  Le Pen’s political party, the National Rally (Rassemblement National, formerly the “National Front”) is quite a bit more hard core far-right than our Republican Party; Macron leads  the centrist La République En Marche! (frequently abbreviated LREM, and translatable as The Republic on the Move, or The Working Republic); LREM was Macron’s attempt to create a political home for those who were neither as statist as the Socialists nor as anti-immigrant or Fascistic as the far-right. Lastly, there is a far-left democratic-Socialist party called La France Insoumise  (“France Unbowed”), headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former member of the European Parliament (MEP), who is, roughly speaking, the French equivalent of Bernie Sanders. In  the first presidential primary, Mélenchon came in 3rd with nearly 23 % of the vote.  Today, many Mélenchon supporters are either voting for Macron or staying home and abstaining.

The title of this week’s post, “Our greatest fear lies in anticipation,” (Nos plus grandes craintes résident dans l’anticipation) comes from La Comédie humaine by the great French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). Always filled to overflowing with pithy maxims, de Balzac really hits the nail on the head here. For with regards to today’s election in France, it’s not so much the anticipation of whether Le Pen will defeat Macron which stimulates our fear, but rather whether she - like Donald Trump here in America - will wind up having more power than Macron in shaping the next five years.

Like Trump and his coterie, Le Pen is a pathologic Islamophobe. Although she has toned down the verbal hatred and outrageousness since she last took on Emmanuel Macron, her political positions remain the same: anti-NATO, anti-immigrant and pro-Putin. When it comes to Putin, Le Pen has been totally up front and totally prideful about accepting a multi-million dollar loan from the Russian strongman. Were she to G-d forbid win the election  she would then be able to attack NATO from the West while Putin does his best to bring it down from the East.

IT IS NOW 2:15 EDT: JUST A FEW MINUTES AGO, MARINE LE PEN CONCEDED THE ELECTION TO EMMANUEL MACRON!

HALLALUYAH!

Unlike Donald Trump, Mlle. Le Pen freely admits she’s been soundly defeated. The latest figures show Pres. Macron besting the final polling figures. (n.b. As of midnight the final figures are Macron 58.5%, Le Pen 41.5%). It should be kept in mind, that 5 years ago, he defeated Marine Le Pen by a much wider margin than today’s 17 points. However, this is the first time that an ultra-right candidate has scored above 40% in  a presidential election. Being a political animal, Mlle. Le Pen, who publicly ran on such issues as “. . . our daily lives - salaries, taxes, pensions” -  put the best, most positive spin on her loss as possible, calling the results ". . . a shining victory . . . in this defeat, I can’t help but feel a form of hope.”  It should be noted that the French will go back to the  polls for Parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19.  It is likely that Le Pen’s Rassemblement National will pick up additional seats in the 577-member body.  As of this morning, Macron’s La République en Marche group has 308 deputies.  It will be Le Pen’s purpose to get as many of her allies elected, thereby weakening Macron’s chances for enacting his national political agenda.

As word spreads across Europe of Macron’s victory, various leaders have expressed their overwhelming joy:

• Spanish P.M. Pedro Sánchez: “Democracy wins. Europe wins.

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “Together we will make France and Europe advance.”

• Italian Premier Mario Draughi: “. . . splendid news for all Europe, and a “boost to the E.U. being a protagonist in the greatest challenges of our times, starting with the war in Ukraine.” 

President Biden called President Macron Sunday night, but was only able to speak with members of his staff. When asked about this, Biden told reporters after returning to Washington from a weekend trip in Delaware, “I feel good about the French election . . . . I tried to talk to him last night. I spoke to his staff and he was at the Eiffel Tower having a good time. And I’m going to be talking to him today.”

The French, it has long been noted, don’t generally love their presidents; with his victory, Macron becomes the first to be reelected since 2002.  Somewhat predictably, Le Pen did better in the country’s north and in southern areas along the Mediterranean; both areas are rural, economically depressed and less educated.  Macron’s base is largely urban, better educated and far less likely to blame France’s economic and cultural difficulties on immigrants.  If this sounds a bit familiar, it should; in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and much of Europe, political divisions are drawn largely between those who are fearful of being overrun by “aliens” and those who see that the future will undoubtedly be different . . . so why not help make the best of it?

Considering the frightful rightward turn in the politics of so many countries, Macron’s victory offers for many, a brief international sigh of relief. Today we celebrate; tomorrow many will be back to fearing the future. For those inclined to fearfulness, remember de Balzac’s insight . . . that the genesis of fear is anticipation. Anticipation - whether it be about future success or failure - is at root an abstraction; it need not be real. Let us hold on to Emmanuel Macron’s victory and see it as a harbinger for greater sanity and humanity in the political realm, rather than a mere blip on the screen of growing autocracy.

Vraiiment: ‘Nos plus grandes craintes résident dans l’anticipation.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

"There Are More Horses' Asses Than There Are Horses"

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Without question, Dorothy Parker and Will Rogers were two of the most notable, quotable wits of the past century or so. Parker, a poet and world-class epigrammatist, screenwriter and saucy satirist, the teeny-tiny “mouth that roared” was best known for such pity maxims as “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk,” and a marvelous epigram about the equally quotable Oscar Wilde which appeared in a 1927 issue of the original Life:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Then there was Will Rogers: vaudevillian with a lariat, beloved motion picture actor, political commentator and honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, He was perhaps best known for the statement: “I belong to no organized party; I am a Democrat.” One of Mayor Rogers’ very best political quotes (although wrongly attributed to Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy) is as satirically insightful today as when he first uttered it nearly a century ago: “There are more horses’ asses than there are horses.”  Rogers’ bon mot is, perhaps, best understood by Parker,  who once noted: “There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

And indeed, when considering all the utter cruelty and cerebral rigor mortis occurring in partisan politics these days, Rogers’ quip about horse’s asses is absolutely spot on.  Need some examples? Just the other day, while a clear majority of America was proudly celebrating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to become the first Black woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court, there was a concurrent walkout of every Republican senator (save one, Utah’s Mitt Romney) the moment Vice President Harris announced the final vote.  Despite possessing virtually every quality and experience one might wish for a Justice - including humility and brilliance - 47 Republicans voted against her, claiming either that she was soft on crime, supported pedophilia or possessed an “activist” judicial philosophy.  Did they really believe it?  Of course not; they simply did not want to give the Republican base a reason to challenge them in the next election.

Then there’s the case of another Black judge, the late Joseph W. Hackett (1932-2021) who was the first Black man to serve on the Florida Supreme Court and the first Black judge on a federal appeals court in the Deep South.  Upon his passing, it seemed both natural and fair for Congress to pass a bill naming a federal courthouse after him.  When the time came to organize such a proposal, virtually every member of the Florida congressional delegation - Republican Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, along with all 16 Republican members of the House and all 11 Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors.  It appeared that Judge Hackett was going to be enshrined.  History was on the side of a man who attended segregated public schools and graduated from two historically black universities, and then rose to the judicial heights. For generations, the naming of federal courthouses after distinguished jurists has been the one area where congressional bipartisanship is both expected and de rigueur.  But such was not to be the case with Judge Hackett.  As journalist Annie Karni wrote in a February 22, 2022 (2/22/22) piece in the New  York Times: “ . . . in a last-minute flurry, Republicans abruptly pulled their backing with no explanation and ultimately killed the measure, leaving its fate unclear, many of its champions livid and some of its newfound opponents professing ignorance about what had happened.   

                                                  Rep. Andrew Clyde (R.-GA)

What had happened? The late Judge Joseph W. Hackett’s nomination had appeared in Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde’s crosshairs . . . that’s what happened. Clyde, shown in the photo on the right, is a dead-ringer for the australopithecus robustus, a late Pliocene-Early Pleistocene (4 to 2 million years ago) epoch humanoid. How and why did Rep. Clyde singlehandedly turn a routine vote to name a federal building after a trailblazing judge into a Republican purity test? 

First the how: Rep. Clyde circulated a 1999 Associated Press article about one of Hackett’s decisions relating to prayer in schools. Never mind that Hackett was following Supreme Court precedent when he ruled against student-approved prayers at graduation ceremonies. This single decision made him toxic among House Republicans, with 89% eventually voting against naming the courthouse after him. Since the bill’s passage was seen as certain, it had come for a vote under a fast-tracked process that required a two-thirds majority, which meant that with Republicans suddenly opposed, it failed.  When Republican members of the Florida Congressional delegation were asked why they wound up voting against a nominee they had originally supported, most answered “I don’t know.” Well, at least they were being honest . . . 

Next the why: Rep. Andrew Clyde, like fellow Georgian Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a first-term member of the House.  In his short Congressional career, he has become known for such things as voting against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who responded to the January 6th insurrection; opposing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act that made lynching a federal hate crime; and voting against recognizing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.  He’s the guy who called January 6 “just a normal tourist visit,” and has been repeatedly fined for not wearing a mask on the House floor.  In other words, despite resembling a prehistoric ape, he’s one of congress’s leading horse’s asses.  And let us not forget California’s Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, who said not a word about Clyde’s - or his party’s lunacy.  And this is the man who desperately wants to become the next Speaker of the House! We can always pray that the stable suffers a bout of equine encephalitis.

This is not meant to imply that horse’s asses are housed in just one political stable. Goodness knows, one can find equine tuchases within the ranks of Democrats and progressives as well as Libertarians, Socialists and QAnon quacks.  But still and all, the largest and most egregious number reside in the Republican paddock.  

Here in Florida, we are subject to the constant whinnying of Governor Ron DeSantis who, while ignoring such major statewide issues as skyrocketing insurance premiums, unaffordable rental costs and a chief medical officer who does not believe in the conclusions of science, instead has created his own militia whose sole purpose is to ride herd on electoral fraud (?), made abortion all but illegal for women and definitely felonious for physicians, and puts  the rights of parents to keep their children from having to read any book which might “make them feel bad” well ahead of the purpose of education - teaching children how to think. Just the other day, the head of the State Department of Education announced that the state was rejecting more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections. When questioned, Gov. DeSantis said there were different reasons for the books being rejected and officials aimed to “focus the education on the actual strong academic performance of the students.” “We don’t want things like math to have, you know, some of these other concepts introduced. It’s not been proven to be effective, and quite frankly, it takes our eye off the ball.” If anyone can explain what the hell he meant by that, please text me ASAP.

So what’s the cure for this extreme number of horse’s asses? As I believe I suggested a couple of weeks ago, stockpiling tens of thousands of feet of film showing them at their worst . . . and then airing the evidence of their idiocy on ad after ad after ad. And make sure that the media asks them truth-seeking questions . . . make them justify why they are doing everything in their power to excise ethics, fairness and the truth from democracy.

When all is said and done, horses belong in stables, paddocks and racetracks; not in the hallowed halls of Congress, state legislatures, the various governors’ mansions and above all, the White House.

Copyright©2022, Kurt F. Stone

Behind Closed Doors With Senators Cruz, Hawley, Cotton and Blackburn (SATIRE)

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): “So guys, what’s your take on the confirmation hearings so far? Think we’ve scored any significant points?”

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR): “Certainly not enough to keep her from being confirmed by the Senate as a whole. But we knew that going in . . . We’ll be lucky to keep the committee from sending her name up to the floor on a tie vote, although there’s no telling how Dr. Sasse’s going to vote . . . I mean he didn’t even show up when she was being voted on for D.C. circuit last year.  Personally, I think he’s squishy soft when it comes to our issues.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX): “Yeah, but unless I’m dumb as a community college grad, defeating her in committee . . . let  alone the Senate . . .  wasn’t our purpose in the first place. We all know that what we’re after is scoring points with the hoi polloi . . . which I, as a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard Law, class of ‘95, where I was editor of the Harvard Law Review . . . know means the common folk, and not ‘The Upper Crust’ like most idiots do . . . “

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): “Shut the f. . .k up Ted.  We all know you graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law, and that Josh here graduated from Stanford and Yale, and that Ben Sasse earned degrees from Harvard, St. John’s and Yale. And you can even  look over at the Dems on the committee and see Booker, Klobuchar, Blumenthal, Coons and Whitehouse, all of whom graduated from Yale.  Big deal . . . none of you ever started a successful business like my Mister and me. And by the way: what’s this guys crap? I’m not a guy. I’m a a friggin gal.  And don’t you forget it!”

Cotton: “Yeah Marsha, we hear ‘ya, but right about now,  here in this little private hidey hole, you sound all kinds a’ “woke” to me.  But out there in the big, bad hard-nosed world of political warfare, you come off like some sort of June Cleaver ‘Suzy Homemaker’ clone who’d prefer hanging out in the kitchen, standing by your man.  What gives? Are you in reality a RINO?”

Marsha: “Of course not! You know better than that! It’s just that when the doors are closed, the cameras have gone dark and the stringers have scattered, we all get to loosen our girdles ‘n ties, toss out  the scripts and act and speak like real selves.  And the great thing about it is that the simpletons we urge to give us bucks and votes don’t even know the difference.  Ain’t it the truth?”

Cruz: Yeah Marsha, we all know it’s true; that’s just the nature of big-league politics . . . for both us and the folks across the aisle. Although just between you, me and the hitchin’ post, we are one hell of a lot more obvious about it than the Dems.  I mean Hell’s bells: just so long as we keep 99.44% in the  good graces of our numb-nuts leader, we’re going to keep on getting reelected, turnin’ back the country to the way it was when Mrs. Cleaver was raising Wally and the Beaver and the Lord’s Prayer was said everyday in school across the nation.  Fear’s the ticket . . . fear of the lying left-wing fake media; fear of non-Aryan immigrants and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ crowd, and fear of ‘The Squad’  . . . as if these gals are the entirety of the ultra-Socialistic Democrat Party.”

Josh: “But aren’t we going to have to eventually say what we’re for and not just what we’re against?  Up till seems to me all we’re doin’ is implying, not stating, that we’re for defending the White Christian masses from a future filled with Commies, homosexuals, pedophiles and teachers’ unions bent on ‘groomin’ children for lives filled with godless filth. I mean that’s why we kept on hammerin’ away at Judge Jackson’s record, making her seem like the kind of jurist who in an earlier day would have been the protector of Oscar Wilde, Lord Montbatten and Errol Flynn.  I mean, we couldn’t attack her on her record . . . she did one hell of a lot better at L-school than any of us, and turned out to be virtually unflappable.  Hate to  admit it,  but that woman is the real deal . . . but let’s keep it to ourselves.  We’re just lucky that the Democrats didn’t  point out that we haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation dealing with child porn . . . or that we’ve loudly supported Supreme Court nominees who are less than paragons of virtue . . . remember Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh?” 

Cruz: “Now wait just a second there Josh: when it comes to anti-child porn legislation, Lindsey Graham  does have a bill to form a commission to study online child porn (for which you, Marsha, were a co-sponsor), and I for one introduced a bill to nix Covid relief rebates to those convicted of sex offenses involving children . . .  and oh yeah, remember that book I ragged on about as being filthy dirty and ought to be removed from school libraries? Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi? Well, I’ll be hornswoggled: it’s now the #1 bestselling children’s book on Amazon. Sort of makes me wish I’d read the bugger instead of just claiming I had . . .

Marsha: “. . . and speaking of your bill Ted, you know as well as I that got a big fat zero co-sponsors and was never even assigned to a committee . . .  and by the way, you never got on board Lindsey’s commission bill . . . “

Tom: ‘Let’s be honest guys ‘n gal, so far as the Jackson hearing, we did the best we could.  Let’s admit it behind closed doors: nary a Republican - and that includes Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn -  for one second believes that Judge Brown-Jackson is ‘soft on porn.’ All we were doin’ was grandstanding to beat the band . . . and  for good reason: to stay in the good graces of the QAnon wing of the party.  We all read polls the way bookies pour over Vegas betting odds, and know very well that a poll from PRRI found that 23 percent of Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation,’ and that another poll by YouGov found that fully 50 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”’ And while we may all agree that this is a barrel of crap while sitting behind closed doors, it would be political suicide not to have brought it up again and again and again during the hearings.  To a large swathe of  the party faithful ‘Pizzagate’ lives! Are we in agreement?”  

Ted, Josh and Marsha: YES INDEED!”  

Ted: We’ve got to keep on hammerin’ away at the idea that so long as Democrats control the two houses of Congress and Senate and God forbid continue controlling the Executive Branch, America’s goin’ to become a place where parents have no say in what their children read or what they’re taught, that biological males are goin’ to be be playin’ on girls’ teams and squatting in women’s bathrooms, and that God almighty HIMself is going to be outlawed. And whether or not we believe this is true is far from the point. We absolutely must keep these fears in the forefront if we are gonna to take back the country . . . if we’re going to continue being showered with the hundreds of millions of campaign dollars our best-heeled donors can bestow upon us. I know that I for one would greatly prefer to be the savior . . . ah . . . President . . . of the United States than a mere senator from the Lone Star State. Are we all in agreement?’

Josh: “Everything except your becoming the next POTUS!”

Tom: “I’m going to have to agree with Josh on that one. How’s about you, Marsha?”

Marsha: “I haven’t really given it much thought . . . I’m too busy raising money for my 2024 reelection race - and perhaps traveling out to meet with the good folks of Ioway . . . “

Josh: OK, it’s time to tighten our ties and our girdle, throw open the doors of the hidey-hole, and get back to the task at hand . . . of warning and solving problems which we do not believe truly exist.”

All: FORWARD INTO THE PAST!!!

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Sholem Aleichem's Response to Tucker Carlson More than 160 Years Before the Fox News Mamzer Opened His Big Fat Moyl

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                         Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) at Age 24

For the past couple of weeks, in addition to all my other tasks, I have been preparing for my one-man show on the greatest of all Yiddish writers, Sholem Aleichem. I will be performing it this coming Tuesday, March 22 at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, beginning at 3:00.  If you are interested in attending, just show up at FAU’s Friedberg Hall at about 2:30 at sign up.  Or, you can call 561-297-3185.)

I’ve been appearing as the man born in 1859 as Shlomo Nohumovich Rabinovich (1859-1916) for nearly a half century now, and each time I do, I try to make “his” performance a bit different from the last time we trod the boards. The Jewish equivalent of Mark Twain, the Russian-born Rabinovich (whose penname, Sholem Aleichem, is the most common Yiddish/Hebrew greeting, meaning, roughly “How’re ya doin’?) wrote hundreds of short stories, essays, novels and plays capturing the essence of a world which no longer exists. And yet, he is terribly universal: think of Fiddler on the Roof, which, adapted from many of his stories about a Jewish dairyman named Tevye, is one of the most popular, beloved and successful musicals/movies in the history of entertainment. Oy, if only the terminally impoverished writer could have lived a bit longer, he would have become as rich as Rothschild . . . 

Sholem Aleichem (Rabinovich) was born in Pereyaslav, a small city with a large Jewish population in the Poltava Governate of the Russian Government . . . that is to say, the Ukraine . . .  in early March, 1859. His father, a prosperous merchant named Nohum Rabinovich, gave his favorite son (Nahum had 12 children), in addition to a rigidly Orthodox Jewish education, a first-class secular education in which he read everyone from Shakespeare and Dickens to Gogul and Cervantes, as well as learning math and science.  At age 18, he became tutor to Olga Loyev, the daughter of one of the wealthiest Jews in Czarist Russia.  Upon Elimelech Loyev’s death, Shlomo inherited his vast estate, liquidated it and moved to Kiev (the Yiddish pronunciation of what we today call "Kiiv,” and became a stock broker on the "bourse.”  Within a few years, Rabinovich (who had already adopted the  penname ‘Sholem Aleichem’ so that his colleagues wouldn’t know what he was doing after hours), lost  all his money.  By this time he and Olga (whose Yiddish name was "Hudel,” which would become famous years later) and their growing family, had to move from Kiev and begin a trek which would eventually see them and their 6 children (which he always referred to as his "Republic,” resettle in such cities as Odessa, Nurmi, Copenhagen, Paris, London and twice, NYC.  Olga, by the way, in order to help  support the family while her husband wrote, went on to became a dentist - the first Russian woman to do so.

Before Sholem Aleichem began publishing stories, novels and essays in Yiddish, Hebrew was the only literary language taken seriously by Jewish readers; Yiddish, the daily lingua franca of European Jews, was, from a literary point of view, only for women.  In matter of fact, all of his earliest works (including a Jewish Robinson Crusoe), were written in classical Hebrew.  His idea of writing Yiddish pieces for the masses was indeed, revolutionary.  

                            Sholem Aleichem’s Funeral Procession May 14, 1916

No matter what his financial troubles - and they were many - he continued to write . . . and write and write.  No matter where he lived and what the state of his health (he suffered from Tuberculosis, prostate disease and diabetes) he managed to publish an essay or chapter each and every week :”starring” such favorites as Tevya, Menachem Mendel and Motl, Pesya, the Cantor’s Son. His characters moved form the shetlach (small villages of the Russian/Polish “Pale of Settlement”) to New York’s Lower East Side, Paris and Johannesburg, South Africa,  provided an essential link to a world which was ever-changing.  Ironically, in his distinct cultured household, the language his "republic” spoke was Russian; none of his children were able to read their father’s works in the original.   

Always living hand-to-mouth despite his universal readership in the Jewish communities around the world, he died in poverty in New York City in May 1916, and was mourned by hundreds of thousands. (At the time, it was widely reported that upwards of 300,000 people followed his funeral march from 165 Kelly Street in the Bronx to his final resting place at the Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Brooklyn. It may well have been the largest funeral procession in the history of New York City.  His ethical will was a moving work of brilliance . . . so much so that it was reprinted on the front page of the New York Times and read into the Congressional Record by New York City Representative William Stiles Bennet. 

So what in the world has all this to do with Tucker Carlson, his coterie of bahndit’n (that’s Yiddish for “gangsters”) and the ongoing dismemberment of Ukraine?  Just  the other day, Carlson, who has been accused of being “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia” during the now more than four-week conflict, asked viewers on his top-rated Fox News show a series of questions about whether Putin had promoted “racial discrimination” in schools, made fentanyl, attempted “to snuff out Christianity” or eaten dogs . . . all of which he suggested the Ukrainians were engaged in.  Carlson’s central question was “Why in the Hell should we be concerned with Ukraine?”  

Two quips - one humorous, one filled with anger - coming from the mouth of Sholem Aleichem’s beloved dairyman Tevye, provide the answer:

• "Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let the outside world break its own head."  and

• "Get off my land. This is still my home, my land. Get off my land."

As things turned out, of course, more than 2 million Jewish men, women and children fled the Pale of Settlement, the vast majority of whom made the perilous trek to the  United States of America where, freed of the shackles of Czarist oppression and anti-Semitism, went from being pushcart peddlers and pants pressers on New York’s Lower East Side to creating the motion picture industry, the great department stores like Saks, Macys, Sears and Gimbels, sending their children to colleges and universities and living long enough to see them win Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature, as well as Pulitzers and Oscars.  In short, Ukraine’s - and Russia’s - loss was the world’s gain.  At the same time, Sholem Aleichem was deeply aware that at some point in time, there would arise a new era of pogroms (organized massacres of particular ethnic groups . . . most notably Jews) that would once again bring about mass exoduses and unspeakable destruction.  And  though he knew that he would not be alive at that future time (he always believed that he would die before turning 60 . . . just like his father), he urged that his children and grandchildren be at the forefront of creating peace where there would be war, and love and humanity where there was senseless bigotry and hatred.

In his last will and testament, he urged that at the time of his yarzheit (the anniversary of his death) his children, grandchildren, friends and readers gather together and recite kaddish (the mourner’s prayer written mostly in Aramaic) in whatever language they best understood  and rather than shed tears, “. . . select one of my stories, one of the really joyous ones and read it aloud in whatever language they understand best, and let my name be mentioned by them with laughter than not mentioned at all.”  

Sholem Aleichem died at his home at 165 Kelly Street, the Bronx, on May 13, 1916 - the 10th of Iyar, 5676 on the Jewish calendar.  This year, the 10th of Iyar, 5782, falls on Wednesday, May 11 on the Gregorian calendar.  I for one will be heeding Reb Sholem’s request by gathering with as many of his fans as possible via “Zoom” for  the reading of one of his most humorous stories . . . in English and yet to be selected.  In that way, not only will we be honoring his last request, but answer the bandit’n  und m’shuga’im (gangsters and lunatics) who side with the heirs of the Czars.

Anyone who would like to participate in the Zoom gathering, please email me through this blog or at kfstone@kurtfstone.com Title your email “Sholem Aleichem Zoom” and do provide your name and email address.  The Zoom gathering will begin at 7:30 EDT on Wednesday May 11 and last about 45 minutes.  A link will be sent to you on the morning of May 11.

Sholem Aleichem!

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone    

"Woke"

A couple of days ago, North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn, the youngest philistine in Congress, held a town hall forum in his home state. Speaking to the group - many of whom are not supporting him for reelection - he called Ukrainian President Zelinskyy (the correct transliteration of his name) a "thug," and posited that the Ukrainian government, now under siege by the Russian military, is "incredibly corrupt, and incredibly evil, and has been pushing woke ideologies." Someone should have informed the 26-year old man child that the word woke, when used in its relatively modern political incarnation is decidedly not plural. Simply stated, there are no woke ideologies. Had I been at the gathering I would have fought through the increasing nausea to inform him of his misstatement and then ask him a simple question: “Would you please define the term woke (or stay woke) in its political context for all of us?” Not having been there (thank G-d!), I can only imagine the utter jabberwalky with which my inquiry no doubt would have been met. By and large, I have rarely met a Trumpeter who has the slightest idea of what the word woke means. When coming from the mouth of a moron, it is intended to be a derisive political aspersion; a synonymous look-down-the-nose slur . . . a middle-finger-in-the-air epithet for politically correct, progressive or liberal. 

A little research turns up the fact that the term woke or the two-word phrase stay woke goes back nearly 85 years when blues musician Huddle Ledbetter (better known as “Lead Belly - the King of the 12-String Guitar”) used it in a 1938 protest song entitled Scottsboro Boys. In the song, Ledbetter tells a story about nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Ledbetter warns black people that they “. . . best stay woke, keep their eyes open", when travelling through Alabama.  In addition to the Scottsboro Boys, he also wrote songs about people in the news, such as FDR, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, boxer Jack Johnson and, believe it  or not, Howard Hughes.

Three decades later in 1962, African American novelist William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017) wrote an article in the New York Times titled If You're Woke, You Dig It, in which he describes a 'woke' person as someone who's aware of the experiences of black people in the United States. The term gained popularity on social media in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. After prosecutors said that they did not have enough evidence to bring charges of murder or manslaughter against the officer, protests took place nationwide, with the slogan "stay woke" being used to shed light on instances of police brutality against Black people.

While it originally meant “becoming woken up or sensitised to issues of justice”, its meaning has changed over time into a political slur, according to linguist Tony Thorne.

The labels 'woke warrior', 'wokerati' (a British term) and 'woke worthies' are often used to insult people on the left, who are seen by conservatives as a threat to freedom of speech. A year ago, British P.M. Boris Johnson's spokesman said he was not sure what the word "woke" meant, despite the government having declared war on "woke worthies" and introducing a law to stop them. Then too, when leaving office in January 2021, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo tweeted: "Censorship, wokeness, political correctness, it all points on one direction — authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness."

Secretary Pompeo’s statement is – as Granny Annie would have it “utter canal water.”

What this brief historico-entymological journey through the land of woke teaches us is a couple of intriguing factoids:

• That woke and its linguistic derivatives have a longer history than one might suspect;

• That its meaning changes over time, and that these changes are, generally speaking, due to changes in political action and vocabulary.

• That this single one-syllable word has so many meanings - especially today - as to be almost devoid of meaning itself.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), herself an avatar of wokeness, tweeted not too long ago that ‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.” As one of the most visible members of her generation (who grew up in the ‘90s, she insists - unlike progressives who grew up in the ‘60s through the ‘80s - that “Woke ain’t broke.” Where once woke meant to keep one’s eyes and ears attuned to social and political injustice, today’s up-and-comers believe it is far, far more. That being woke is senseless if it does not motivate liberals and progressives to action; to the understanding that words aren’t nearly as important as sweat they can produce.  

The next time you hear or read the word woke coming out of the mouth, pen or keyboard of a political Luddite, you might demand for them to define the term . . . and prepare yourself for the  sound of silence.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Taking a Tip From R. Tarfon

After nearly two week’s of Putin’s savage pummeling of Ukraine, even the most obsessive of news watchers feels in need of a break. The 24-hour-a-day footage of buildings and bridges being reduced to rubble, the miles long Russian convoys and endless lines of fleeing refuges makes for moral outrage, sleepless nights and heated debate centering on two questions:

1. What’s going on in Vladimir Putin’s debilitated mind? and

2. What can we do about it?

Of course, at the same time, we marvel at - and pray for - the awesome heroism, resilience and fortitude of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Ukrainian countrymen who, like the Maccabees of old, refuse to take it.  Then too, as we noted in last week’s blog the response of the E.U., the U.S., and countries around the world has been heartening.  No, they have not invoked NATO’s Article V, which says in black-and-white "Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."  One reason is that Ukraine is not a member of NATO; the other is that an armed response from NATO either on land or from the air could most likely trigger World War III.  And there are debates about the wisdom of establishing a “No Fly Zone” over Ukraine, despite President Zelenskyy’s urgent request that NATO do so.

(N.B. A no-fly zone is an order to ban aircraft in a specified area. Such zones are sometimes imposed over government buildings or public places for security reasons, or over sacred sites for religious and cultural reasons. Their most contentious use is when they are used during conflicts to prevent military aircraft from engaging in hostile actions. The modern use of such strategy goes back to the Persian Gulf War. No-fly zones can allow countries to take action without committing large numbers of ground troops, relying instead on a comparatively small number of aircraft and supporting infrastructure. But enforcing such restrictions can also involve a significant use of force, including destroying anti-air defenses or shooting down aircraft.)

While diplomats and national leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli P.M. Naftali Bennett (who flew to Moscow on the Jewish Sabbath, despite being a practicing Orthodox Jew) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have all met with President Putin; here at home we have the likes of South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham calling for someone to assassinate the Russian president, and Fox News entertainer Tucker Carlson acting like Putin’s “Tokyo Rose.” And of course, the vast majority of Congressional Republicans are telling their constituents that it’s President Biden’s many weaknesses that are what gave Putin the idea of invading Ukraine in the first place.

And here we are, beset with what physicians call malaise, feeling confused and angry to the point of catatonia and wondering “what in the world can we do to help end this nightmare?

Enter the Talmudic sage Rabbi Tarfon who, lived sometime between 70 CE and 135 CE. His most famous bit of wisdom can be found in the Mishnaic work Pirke Avot (“The Ethics of the Fathers”), chapter 2, verse 16: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either.” It’s almost as if he’s speaking to us from across the centuries . . . not telling us precisely what to do, but rather reminding us that we should never sit idly by during an overwhelming crisis just because our actions cannot and/or will not solve it.  

So what can we do to help shake our feelings of anger, inadequacy and utter helplessness?

One of the best ways to be of assistance is through making a donation. There are any number of organizations collecting and distributing food, clothing, emergency healthcare, transportation, toys and housing for the millions of Ukrainians currently undergoing the worst crisis of their lives.  As of today (March 8), more than 2 million Ukrainians have fled their native land and headed mostly to Poland (which is being, for the  most part, wonderfully welcoming), Romania, Bulgaria and parts further west.

Now mind you, whenever and wherever devastation rears its ugly head, scammers are not too far behind, gobbling up tens of millions of dollars, Euros, shekels and other donations in order to line their pockets.  If there is a Hell, it is meant for them.  But please, don’t let the fear of being scammed keep you from making a donation to any of the charitable organizations we’re going to be listing below.  For those who do not yet know, there is a wonderful online organization called Charity Navigator, which is to 501c3 organizations what “Snopes” is to the world of political facts fiction and conspiracy theories: it investigates thousands upon thousands of charitable organizations from top to bottom, and then rates them on  a scale of one to five stars.  If a group, such as the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, receives the coveted 5-star rating, you can give without worry.  

What follows are five 5-star rated eleemosynary (charitable) organizations playing a large role in the Ukrainian crisis.  For your convenience, each bulleted entry begins with a live link.

• Jewish Joint Distribution  Committee: Founded way back in 1914, “The Joint” began with a cablegram requesting the American Jewish community’s support in aiding starving Jews in Ottoman-era Palestine; it continues to serve as a beacon of hope for Jews and others in 70 countries today.  It is the oldest such organization in the world.

• World Central Kitchen: Founded in 2010 by José and Patricia Andrés, the good folks of WCK are guided by the principle that  “ . . . food relief is not just a meal that keeps hunger away. It’s a plate of hope. It tells you in your darkest hour that someone, somewhere, cares about you.  This is the real meaning of comfort food. It’s why we make the effort to cook in a crisis.

• Doctors Without Borders: Recipient of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, DWB (Medicins Sans Frontieres) describes itself as “An independent, global movement providing medical aid where it’s needed most."  With regards to Ukraine, DWB is up and running in the port city of Odessa and in Warsaw.

• Direct Relief: According to its website, the 5-star rated charity “. . . is working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and other partners in the region to provide requested medical aid, from oxygen concentrators to critical care medicines – while preparing to offer longer-term medical aid to people displaced or affected by the conflict.”

• The International Rescue Committee: Founded at the call of Albert Einstein in 1933, the IRC now works in over 40 crisis-affected countries as well as communities throughout Europe and the Americas. They deliver lasting impact by providing health care, helping children learn, and empowering individuals and communities to become self-reliant.  They have a special project honing in on the needs of Ukraine.

This list is, of course, far from exhaustive.  There are many other sites collecting funds for Ukraine as well as “Go Fund Me” sites who likewise are aiming funds specifically for the war-torn democracy.  Please remember to check out as best you can any organization or charity seeking your hard-earned dollars for the people of Ukraine.  If you need assistance evaluating a charity please email me and I will try to lead you in the right direction.

And please, keep in mind the wisdom of Rabbi Tarfon. 

To repeat: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either.”

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone