It"s Here

Cathedral City, California

February 1, 2024

     To follow up on my last posting, this to announce that my YouTube channel is up and running.  I put out my first "show" last week.  To view it, go to YouTube and search for "Bizarro Gospel Hour" and you'll see my smiling face, and my first program.  

     Although I will say so on my next show, coming soon, I wish to apologize now for the poor production values of the first one.  I got frustrated trying to edit it on iMovie, where I thought I could easily put in an opening title, and also some closing words and maybe a little music.  This is probably possible, but I couldn't figure it out, and decided instead simply to load the video from my phone directly onto YouTube and launch the channel.

     I'll film the next show vertically, so it fills up the screen, and I will try to sit up straighter.  Also, I'm going to iron my bishop's mitre so that it looks a bit more even.  And gradually I will improve the presentation of the program, though until I get some hands-on technical advice from my grandson (also a YouTuber) I probably won't get it the way I'd like it to be. 

      To you my faithful readers I'll add a small warning.  I intend to "recycle" some ideas from my previous blog posts as sermons on the YouTube show, so don't be surprised it you hear familiar things.  Not that pretty much everything I say isn’t more or less the same.

     At any rate, thanks for tuning in.

      

Coming Soon!

Cathedral City, California

December 21, 2023

     Greetings to my faithful readers--the few, the proud, the indiscriminate.  As you're all well aware, the number of posts to this blog has been diminishing over the years to practically nothing.  I got a shot to the gut when Trump was elected, because his chicanery easily eclipsed the most roguish and absurd political theater I could have imagined up to that point.  It left me without much to say about politics that couldn't already be imagined based on real events.   And the post-Trump administration antics of the nation as a whole and the Republican members of Congress in particular have beggared belief. 

     At this point I was about to say that the Europeans could more easily understand this insane turn toward fascism than we Americans, having been through it not too many decades ago.  And that's true to a great extent.  However, when we look back on U.S. history and the bargain with the devil we made at the very inception of the country to allow the continuation of slavery in order to have a "union" of colonies we could call a country, and then the post-Civil War countenancing of a century or more of apartheid, I don't know that we can claim the moral high ground regarding right-wing craziness, except for the fact that we did help win a war against worldwide fascism.  Now of course we are in the midst of a mass-media spate of false conspiracy theories that easily rivals the anti-Semitic European hysteria that arose between the two World Wars, although one hopes it won't result in millions of people being rounded up and exterminated.  Certainly if the Christian right and the other Trumpian fellow-travelers get their way there will be far less tolerance of many already-marginalized people in the country.

     But all that bad news isn't why I'm writing to you today, folks.  Instead, it is to announce the beginning of a new show I will be putting on YouTube, to be called The Bizarro Gospel Hour, with your host Bishop Pete.  For those of you who knew about my earlier broadcasting antics on public access cable TV, this will look familiar.  The difference is that the new show will be accessible to a worldwide audience through the magic of YouTube.  So look for it over the next few weeks.  Right now I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver my bishop's hat, and after that I'll start recording and posting shows, if I'm able to navigate the editing process and get them streaming.  I'll have the advice of my grandson Jacob, who has his own show on YouTube called The Shed Productions, so I should be okay if I run into any technical glitches. 

     I wanted to get the word out here on the blog so that you, my faithful readers, can see more of yours truly.  You may address me as Your Excellency.  Or not, what the hell.  Whether or not I continue the blog remains to be seen. 

Ozzie

Pentwater, Michigan

September 20, 2023

   

     One of the nice things about modern streaming TV technology is the wide variety of obscure programming available to the curious and intrepid viewer on the Roku platform. We get a few of the ones that cost money, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but my preferred ones end up being the freebies such as the Roku Channel, YouTube, and Tubi, which is my current favorite. The latter two are laden with commercials, but what the hell, they're no worse that what one has to endure when watching a live sporting event on regular network TV.  And they also feature many old situation comedies, like Leave It To Beaver, The Honeymooners, and The Life of Riley.  They afford me the opportunity to see just what kind of stuff--good, bad, or indifferent--I spent the idle hours of my youth watching.  It's a great way to see what kinds of garbage the media-meisters of yesteryear thought the public wanted to see.   If you're lucky they even include some of the old commercials, often rudimentary by modern standards, but no more or less ridiculous than the ones they have today.

     Lately I've done a deep dive into The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I realize that when I was watching the show as a kid, I was probably watching some of it as it appeared weekly, and some of the older ones as reruns, since we didn't get a television at our house until about the mid-1950s.  (I  remember sitting by the radio listening to The Lone Ranger before we had TV.)  Right now I'm watching season five of Ozzie and Harriet, which takes place in approximately 1957, in which Ricky Nelson is a high schooler, and David Nelson is attending USC, but living at home. On the horizon, about to break, but not quite yet, is Ricky's blaze into teen idol fame, which was heavily promoted--indeed launched--via the show itself, with Ricky ending each show in front of his band, strumming the guitar and curling his lips to a series of hot charting tunes. Ricky's style was a mix of the sensuality of Elvis and the rockabilly renderings of the Everly Brothers, plus his own clean good looks inherited from his parents and a deft way of conveying the probably imaginary fact that, despite his fame, he was just a lonely teenager looking for a girl to call his own. Not wholly original stuff, I grant you, but very effective at attracting his audience, and all done without the need for him to appear on weekly variety shows in order to keep his chiseled features before the adoring public.

 

     But it's Ozzie Nelson I want to concentrate on here. This guy really fascinates me. On the show he plays a benign, lovable, and occasionally whiny paterfamilias, always getting himself into small scrapes with his braggadocio and low-level hubris, then getting caught up short and having to at least partially admit that he was mistaken, but always being forgiven by his long-suffering wife Harriet and devoted sons David and Ricky. Other TV men of the era played similar kinds of fools, to be sure. Ralph Kramden and Chester A. Riley come immediately to mind. The difference between them and Ozzie, however, is that Oz doesn't bellow or verbally abuse his wife or commit acts of absolute stupidity. He just sort of lets his best-laid plans, or his incorrigible dispensing of fatherly or husbandly wisdom, go slightly sideways, but in the end he owns up to his shortcomings pretty casually and effortlessly. And he's a decent, generous, and tolerant dad to his sons. Meanwhile Harriet provides the gentle sarcasm and wit needed to keep Ozzie in line, and she's usually one or two steps ahead of him all the way. Unlike Alice Kramden, she doesn't get in the last word with her arms folded and a frown on her face, but instead does it with grace and charm and an unfailing smile that makes you wonder what the hell she sees in this bumbling, lazy, goofball husband of hers.

     One thing that separates the show from other situation comedies of the day is that it features all four members of the real Nelson family, and, I've discovered, was filmed in a studio replica of their actual house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. As I said, it’s Ozzie himself who most fascinates me. So, in an effort to learn more about him, I explored the internet and also took the extraordinary step of buying and reading a used copy of his autobiography, appropriately titled Ozzie, written in the early 1970s, just a few years before his death. Overall, I learned a number of things about Oswald George Nelson, born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1906. Early on, Ozzie took an interest in music, and began playing several instruments, including the ukulele and the saxophone, all very Roaring 20s and collegiate in nature. He began playing at local clubs in north Jersey and New York, and by the time he matriculated at Rutgers in the mid-1920s he was regularly burning the candle at both ends, going to college by day and leading big band gigs until the wee hours, all the while playing football and swimming for the school. Oh, and before that he was an Eagle Scout, attending an international jamboree in England and Europe in the early post-World War One years. After graduating from Rutgers he obtained a law degree, of all things, but decided at that point to go into the music biz full time, playing at high-toned clubs and speakeasies, mostly in Manhattan. Soon after, the band, consisting of him as leader and about a dozen musicians, began a practically endless tour of the east and Midwest that would have put many later rock groups to shame for its nonstop rambling from town to town for months on end. In the meantime Ozzie cut some records, including—get this—the first-ever recording of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with Ozzie himself doing the vocal in a sort of Rudy Vallee-style croon. And he could carry a tune. That was in 1931, when he was 25 or so, well before greats like Ella Fitzgerald made the song famous, and a generation before Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas scored with the most successful version of the song. Check out Ozzie’s rendition on YouTube. Or just imagine a young Oz crooning “Say nighty night and kiss me,” backed by soft strings and muted horns.

     A few years after that a young vaudevillian named Harriet Hilliard joined the band as the obligatory “girl singer,” and in due time the two of them married. Harriet, who had been born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines in 1909, was by then a stage veteran and also in demand for Hollywood B movie parts. They spent their time on the road, conquering the nightclubs and hotel ballrooms east of the Mississippi, with Harriet occasionally going to LA to make a movie, until she quit the movie biz, for the most part, to become a wife and mother. Nah, just kidding. Between and after having David in 1936 and Ricky in 1940, she continued to tour with the band and do radio with Ozzie, pretty much full time. The two of them had a regular role on the Red Skelton radio show, singing and leading the band and doing some husband-wife schtick, until Red got drafted in about 1944, and they found themselves pretty much in charge of the show. I note all this to point out to those, like me, who only knew them on TV, that they were already very well known all over the country before The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was ever conceived. In the late 40s it occurred to them, or to someone else in the business, that they should do a show that was about them as a family, so they could include the boys and be with them and more or less exploit the fact that they were this All American post-war family. So began the program, as a regular radio show, written, directed, and produced by none other than Ozzie himself, with some help from his younger brother Don. When radio shows began to give way to TV in the early 50s, Ozzie and Harriet decided to do the show on television, but they didn't stop one and start the other. Oh no. For about two years they did BOTH the radio and TV versions of the show at the same time, with, of course, different writing and production and studios for each. As if this weren't enough, during the summer hiatus (then only 13 weeks off in the summer, with about 39 shows a year being produced), they toured the country in summer stock productions of popular musicals and stage comedies. I mean, damn! And lest you think they neglected the boys with all this work, no, not at all. They traveled with nannies and relatives and attended ball games at Hollywood High and all the shit that model parents are supposed to do. 

     Aside from hyping and presenting a perhaps rosier-than-life picture of the Nelson family, my real purpose in all this has been to tell you how I arrived at the answer to the puzzle that nearly all Ozzie and Harriet viewers have had over the years, namely, what the hell did Ozzie actually do for a living, and why did he always seem to be loafing around the house and taking naps, no matter what day it was? When confronted with this question, Ozzie would generally evade it, and say that he wanted to have the show seem as if it were taking place on the weekend, so that the audience would be able to relate to him and the family better. But this wasn't always the case. The show often took place during the week. So Ozzie would say, if really pressed, that his character was a lawyer. But even this seems far-fetched, because if he was indeed a lawyer, he worked only part time, if that. Many was the afternoon when he'd wander home in the middle of the day, dressed in a sport coat and tie, but not looking anything like a working attorney. Indeed, he had a neighbor, Darby, who was a lawyer, and who dressed the part.    

     Anyway, I think I finally figured out the key to Ozzie's indolence on the show. I believe he was acting out a fantasy--that of a guy who had nothing much to do, and plenty of time in which to do it. Because the reality is that Ozzie Nelson, and for that matter Harriet, were tireless workaholics, probably with barely a moment to spare between acting, writing, producing, rehearsing, performing, promoting, and parenting. They were Energizer bunnies on steroids, day after day and year after year. Their idea of relaxation was what most of us would consider vigorous activity. There are people like that, I know. I'm just not one of them. So if you're creating a fantasy alternative television life for yourself amid all that frenzy, why not have your protagonist just kick back, put his feet up, and relax, occasionally doing a light chore or chatting with his next door neighbor, even if it takes you 12-16 hours a day to create this illusory character? Ozzie did this for 435 episodes over fourteen years, from 1952-66, still a record for the most sitcom episodes ever produced. This guy's life was cut short by cancer at 69, but he lived at least two lifetimes during that span--Eagle Scout, school athlete, law student, band leader, actor, etc. etc. etc. It's exhausting just to think about. So when you watch the show, if you do, just remember that Ozzie Nelson on screen was, as the cowboy said of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, "taking 'er easy for all us sinners."

     I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that.

Restless, But Not So Young

Cathedral City, California 

April 7, 2023

     Several years ago I posted about The Young and the Restless, a soap opera I’d been watching.  Now, after a long hiatus, I’ve begun following it again, though not every day.  

     As is the way with soap operas, the show’s core characters have remained the same, with some additions, but a few of them are being played by different actors.  Adam Newman, the black sheep of the wealthy and powerful Newman family, who was my favorite back when I originally posted about the show, is now portrayed by a different guy, and I can’t quite get used to him.  The wily Tucker McCall, illegitimate son of the late Katherine Chancellor, is also being played by someone else, but I like this new guy better.  And so it goes.  Also, there are a few newer younger characters.  They’re less straight and white than the old timers, but still boringly the same in terms of wealth and privilege.  They trade off positions as CEOs or COOs or CFOs of divisions or subsidiaries of the mega corporations owned by the big families of Genoa City, Wisconsin, where, improbably, all this wealth resides.  Originally the businesses were competing cosmetics companies, but they’ve diversified to include media groups and fashion arms.  It’s humorous to hear these good-looking but clueless actors plan mergers and acquisitions, startup enterprises, and such, knowing that in real life they have very little idea of what they're talking about, and that for the most part neither do their viewers.  But really, why shouldn't people who are about as deep as the Kardashians rule the corporate world?  They might do less damage.

     The mainstays of The Young and the Restless, truth be told, are not young any more.  Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman, the ruthless ruler of Newman Enterprises, and easily the most important character in the soap, is 82 years old, but still going strong.  (Those of you who have watched the soap will instantly recognize his photo, above.  But as is the case when hearing about other peoples' grandkids, if you don't watch the show, you won't give a damn.)  Victor Newman's current wife Nikki is played by Melody Thomas Scott, who is 66.  Peter Bergman, who plays Jack Abbot, the head of the rival Jabot company, is 69.  They and their adult children are quite fond of playing musical spouses with one another.  It would be fair to say that they have the sexual memories of barnyard animals. Victor leads the pack, as he should, having been married fourteen times to nine different women.  Jack Abbot is a comparative celibate, with only six or seven marriages to four different women.  Nikki has been married twice to Jack and four times to Victor.  And one woman, Sharon, has been married to Victor and both his sons.  

These folks have grown long in the tooth along with their parts and with the soap itself.  Back when he came into the show in the 1980s, Eric Braeden/Victor Newman was in slick early middle age, with a nice fat porn-star moustache.  The moustache remains, but silver has taken over his still-enviable hairline.  He's a decent- looking guy who has held up well, as has Bergman.  Melody Thomas Scott is rather pretty too, and hanging in there, though she's being held together with corsets and plastic surgery and makeup.  Some of the middle aged women are prone to showing far too much cleavage (or more accurately unsupported gappage), which at this stage is quite a bit lower on their chests than it once was.  But part of the blame for that surely lies with the show’s wardrobe people, not just with the actors themselves.

  The Young and the Restless is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  And like old couples who've been together that long, some of the core characters have grown a little softer and more tolerant of one another, not because they really get along, and not because they don't want things to happen differently, but because they lack the energy or motivation not to get along.  

     As I write this, Phyllis Summers, with the connivance of Jeremy Stark, has faked her own death, and it looks as if she's going to frame Diane Jenkins for the apparent murder.  This is a bit of karmic payback to Diane, who faked her own death some years ago, after which Nikki Newman got the blame, although she was exonerated.  Then, last year, Diane Jenkins reappeared in Genoa City, alive and well, in order to reestablish her relationship with her adult son Kyle, whom she gave birth to after a relationship with Jack Abbott, and also to steal Jack away from Phyllis, which she has successfully done, so far.  Got it?  If not, no problem, since it doesn't really matter.

     Now, there are those who say that soap operas are unrealistic, because of things like absurdly wealthy folks sitting around drinking coffee and scotch and trading corporate responsibilities, and characters faking their own deaths, and people coming out of comas after years, and the fact that the principal actors constantly marry one another, and so on.  But aside from all that superficial silliness, I would submit that soap operas, as a form of story-telling, are closer to reality than movies and episodic prime time television shows, and certainly more so than most novels, short stories, and plays.  Indeed, there are key elements of truth in soaps that are almost entirely missing from other story-telling mediums.  First, soap operas, like real life, don't have a dramatic beginning, middle, and end, in which a story is smoothly moved along to its supposedly logical conclusion by fortuitous or unfortunate events and then tied up, for better or worse.  Instead, they just continue for years until the actors die and others replace them.  They creep, in their petty paces, from day to day, like Macbeth’s proverbial tomorrows.  Secondly, soap operas, like real life, consist of a series of short, fragmented, and often pointless or inconclusive conversations, in which little is accomplished one way or the other.  What action actually occurs usually happens elsewhere and at a snail's pace, or instead randomly and instantaneously.  Often things that seem important at the time turn out to be unimportant, and vice versa.  Rarely does a deus ex machina descend to intervene, and often the good go unrewarded and the bad go unpunished.  All that, I submit, is real life.  And perhaps it is that verisimilitude, rather than the glamor of hotel-dwelling tycoons, that most attracts those viewers who find themselves at home alone in the afternoons, shackled to their quotidian tasks, day in and day out. 

     And the young on both sides of the screen, even when they are no longer young, are still restless.

Okay, Seriously

Cathedral City, California

March 1, 2023

                    Poor me!  A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own.                                                                                --Percival Everett, Erasure

     Okay, seriously, this post won't be about politics.  I've ridden that horse so much lately that it needs a rubdown and a rest over at the livery stable.  And very soon I'll be astride the beast again.  So today, for a change, I'll rant about my second most favorite subject, religion.  

     Religion, I hasten to say, isn't always a bad thing, though I've pretty much put it in my own rearview mirror.  There are some benign affirming aspects of religious practice, such as the celebration or observances of various passages through life--births, marriages, deaths, and a few other in-between things.  With their organized approaches to such passages, religions sometimes give us a measure of comfort and a sense of belonging, whether we actually believe the mumbo jumbo in the liturgical background about The One Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; or heaven and hell; or the exacting requirements of Allah or Hashem; or whatever else a religion might have that is designed to keep the faithful on their toes (or their knees), and which is generally a pain in the ass and pretty difficult to comprehend using ordinary human logic.

     But even the things that are out and out weird can serve a purpose, and that purpose is (drumroll, please) to take our minds off the absolutely mundane and terminal nature of human existence.  We function physically pretty much the same as the rest of our fellow-animals, about which we hold no illusions as to their going into an afterlife, and all that, except for a few sappy people who talk about doggie heaven.  For our own species (since we suffer from a seemingly unalterable conviction of uniqueness and a profound sense of our superiority to all other beings), we hold different aspirations, as scientifically untenable as they may be.  By praying five times a day, or by attending worship regularly, or by observing silly dietary restrictions, we sometimes successfully occupy our minds and bodies when we might otherwise be pacing the floor in despair in light of the biological inevitability of the closeout of our existences.  By believing that we are not, as individuals, simply going to cease to be at some point, we can stave off the existential terror and depression that sometimes plague us as a species.  We might be filled with hope for a better land beyond this one, or terror that if we misbehave we'll go to a worse one, but, thanks to most religions, we don't have to be content with the blackout end of everything for all time.

     However, beyond a rather superficial acquaintance with the basic theology of our religions, most of us don't really dwell on the specifics of salvation and eternal life.  Unless--and this is a big unless--we take the whole thing too seriously.  That generally happens when a society or subgroup within a society puts too much emphasis on religion.  In our own country we profess to practice religious neutrality and freedom of worship.  We have no official "state" church, as many countries do.  But by having none, and by insisting on accommodating a multitude of religions on a more or less equal footing, including cults and quackish quasi-religions on the lunatic fringe of even the general lunacy of standard theology and epistemology, our common sense as a nation has subordinated itself to religion rather than what I think was the original plan, namely, to free ourselves from its domination.

     In contrast, the average western European country has a long and strong tradition favoring Christianity, and also one Christian denomination over another.  The United Kingdom has an official religion, the Church of England.  Although it tolerates other religions--Catholicism, Islam, various branches of Protestantism, and so on--as a sovereign nation, it is staunchly in favor of the Anglican church, even putting its clergy on the national payroll and in the government.  Americans might think this to be heavy-handed and prejudicial, but in reality it works very well.  In the U. K. one's default religion is the good old C. of E., and the rights and privileges of that church are available to all without any need to search for them or be convinced of the mystical or theological logic of the church.  The Anglican church is just there, like convenience stores or the post office, in almost every town and village, and if you want it, you can have it, but if you choose to ignore it or go to another church, well, that's okay too.  As a result, none of it really matters much to the average Brit.  And just to reinforce the relative irrelevance of the Church of England, it is not some imam or pope who rules over the church temporal, but rather the good old King himself.  I mean, what religion that takes itself seriously would place a secular hereditary monarch, the latest sinner in a long dynastic line of them, at the pinnacle of its religion, for God's sake?!  Oh, sure, there are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ostensibly the highest prelates in the whole outfit, but they are appointed by--guess who--the monarch himself, on the advice of the Parliament.  There's no goofing around trying to figure out who is closest to the Almighty or any of that.

     Other European countries have similar setups.  In the Scandinavian countries Lutheranism is the state religion, at least insofar as the monarch is required by law to be a member.  In the Netherlands it's the Dutch Reformed Church, not an official state church, but one with a history of being the default church and the one that the monarch belongs to.  In all these countries the utter lack of interest in these churches by the citizens, except maybe as places to have funerals or weddings, is profound.  I read some time back that despite the fact that Holland was founded as a staunchly Protestant nation, the most prevalent religious preference in the country is Roman Catholicism (by a plurality, not a majority), simply because most Dutch Protestants don't give a shit about church at all.  Good stuff.  And really, much better than having no official religion, because having no official denomination, or at least a denomination that has traditionally been the preferred one, creates a dangerous vacuum.  In the U.S. that vacuum gets filled by wacky fucksticks and charlatans instead of by benign and feckless vicars and pastors.

     I propose that we adopt the United Church of Christ, or U.C.C., as the state religion here in the U.S.  Some readers might not know anything about the U.C.C.  Let me assure you that it's liberal, safe, tolerant, and above all, unobtrusive.  You want to go, then go.  You want to stay away, then stay away.  You want to take communion, then take it, or not.  You want to attend the Christmas Eve service or the Easter Sunday get together, have at it.  You want to believe in Jesus, great.  You don't, not really a problem.  But it won't chase you around or fill your ears with mealy-mouthed promises of the life everlasting or the gospel of prosperity or try to make you vote for anyone.  Of course, it would like your dollars, but it doesn't demand them, and to be sure, by its relatively progressive stance on social issues it telegraphs its political preferences, but it doesn't try too hard to piss anybody off.  It says it believes in the trinity and the virgin birth and all that other standard Christian stuff, but it doesn't try to shove it down your throat.  And I like the name.  It sounds almost like a labor union.  United Church of Christ, local 1431.  Solidarity forever.  Its denominational polity is pretty laid back, too.  No bishops or other hierarchical know-it-alls to lord it over the faithful, just ministers affiliated with a loosely-knit, democratically-run synod that functions as a guarantor of pension benefits for the clergy, and puts some checks and balances in place in case an individual congregation gets too carried away in some direction or another.  And the congregation gets to hire and fire the preacher.  

     Under my plan, if the U.C.C. became the state religion of the United States, the nation wouldn't have to spend money on it, just support it "morally," so to speak.  Maybe a U.C.C. clergyperson would open sessions of Congress with a religiously neutral and meaningless prayer.  (Truth be told, that already happens, even without a state church.)  But here's where, under my idea, things would take a profitable turn.  The state religion would be the only one that enjoyed tax-exempt status for its property and contributions to it by the public.  Other religions would be free to exist, but they'd have to pay property tax and tax on their incomes just like any other business, and they wouldn't be classified as charitable entities.

     Of course all this would require the repeal of a portion of the First Amendment to the Constitution, but what the hell, it's high time that happened.  And yeah, the Catholics and Baptists would have a shit fit, but fuck 'em.  It's not like we'd be telling them they can't exist, just that they have to hop off the gravy train.  And most importantly, by adopting the U.C.C. as our national religion we'd be telling the rest of the world, as the British and the Scandinavians and others do, that our religion is the foundation of our priorities.  Sure, there'd be a bit of that Jesus on the cross stuff, but we already have to put up with that a lot anyway, and besides, does anybody really believe any of that?  Come on.  The main thing would be that the social and moral stances embraced by the denomination would be our national social and moral stances as a country.   And what are they?  Racial justice, social justice, gender inclusiveness, open and affirming marriage, and so on.  I mean, what more could you ask for?

     Organized religions have always been about politics anyway.  Let's quit pretending that our politics has no religion.  If we believe in gender equality, same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose, racial justice, aid to the poor, etc., etc., etc., then the U.C.C. is the way to go.  The main thing here, and I know I'm repeating myself, is that NOT having a national religion has proved to be a lot more dangerous and divisive to our nation than having a nice comfortable one would be.

     So let’s quit our national pretense of religious neutrality, which allows fundamentally anti-democratic  and exclusionary retrograde groups like Scientologists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religions that actually believe in universal human justice.  It’ll be the next best thing to no religion at all, that higher state that other species appear to have achieved.

A Great, Ignorant, Simple-Minded Land

 

April 15, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     In my ongoing critiques of the United States, I am, as you can imagine, always on the lookout for validation from outside my own perspective.  Recently I read a quote from W. E. B. DuBois, one of the more insightful scholars and commentators on the state of the country, particularly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of race relations.  It had to do with the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," in which a young man was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 for breaking that state's law against the teaching of evolution in public schools.  By way of commentary, DuBois said, "Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional.  The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land."

     To be sure, "hilarious and sarcastic Europe," for its part, is certainly not free from its own monumental ignorance and self-centeredness.  Each of the powerful nations of western Europe, in particular, has its own utterly unselfconscious sense of exceptionalism that tends to edge out any introspection regarding its own faults and quirks.  The phrase "my shit doesn't stink" comes to mind.  A look at the haphazard and often unsuccessful individual national European approaches to the Covid pandemic should tell us something about that, and if we need to look further, there's the whole disastrous history of the 20th century, and for that matter, many earlier centuries.  And, after all, from what part of the world did the United States inherit its narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and pure hypocrisy, if not from those countries in particular?  And who were France, Spain, and Britain rooting for during the Civil War, for their own selfish capitalistic reasons?  (Hint: not the North.)

     But back to evolution.  In the 1920s, with universal public education only recently having been adopted, state by state, some states were at pains to keep their public school children from being taught anything other than that the world was created in six days, about 6000 years ago.  (God, being a regular hard-working dude like us, needed to rest for a day after all that heavy-duty creating, and thereby set the precedent for the six-day work week, which lasted all the way into the 20th century.  What he did the next week, of course, was to begin fucking with human kind in his sadistic anal way.  And just for shits and giggles, for his own cosmic amusement, he faked the dinosaur evidence, the carbon dating, the geology, and everything else.  I mean, he's God, right?)  Back in the 1600s, one British "scholar," the Anglican prelate Bishop James Ussher, even figured out that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC.  As good a time to create a planet as any other, I guess.  Although this view of creation is still adhered to by an uncomfortably large number of evangelical Christians, and by certain ultra-conservative Jewish and Muslim folks, by the 1920s it was pretty much done for elsewhere in the western world, probably not long after Darwin and his predecessors put a fine point on the subject, though some countries were slow to catch up.  Hence the DuBois reference to "hilarious and sarcastic Europe"--not that Europe wouldn't have found other things in the U.S. about which to be sarcastic.  In any case, the Scopes trial served to shine a bright light on the subject, and in its aftermath the trend that led to several state bans on the teaching of evolution in public schools began to lose steam (although bans on teaching evolution remained in effect in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee until 1970, and such bans have had a small resurgence in the logic-forsaken 21st century).  But in general, the idea sort of faded for the simple reason that dinosaurs have proved to be fun and exciting for school kids and adults alike, even more so than a couple of naked people eating fruit in a garden, as titillating as that might be in the short run.

     Today, a century after Scopes, the U.S is engaged in another paroxysm of denial of the facts, as we are so wont to do.  In this instance, and almost in the same way as some states sought to withhold and deny the facts of evolution, several states are busy struggling with a matter much less removed in time than the creation of the earth.  It is the creation of the racist society in which we all live.  Therefore, as recently as last week I read that the governor of South Dakota has by executive fiat forbidden the public schools to teach anything that would make modern-day students feel somehow bad about their ancestors' misdeeds, particularly, in the case of South Dakota, with respect to Indians, but also with respect to other nonwhites.  Notice that the students the law intends to protect are the precious young white kids, lest they grow up feeling somehow less confident that they are the rightful rulers of this land.  Elsewhere in the country the same thoughtful restraint is being put on the teaching of how, from its first invasion by the Spanish onward through the occupation of various parts of it by the French and the British, this continent and its adjacent islands have been subjected to the systematic annihilation, subjugation, and enslavement of the native populations, as well as by the use of millions of Africans, forcibly imported and bred to be used as slave labor. 

     And regarding the post-colonial period of the country, and particularly the post-Civil War period, some states enjoy restraining the teaching of anything critical about the horrors of slavery and the stubborn resistance of the South to Reconstruction, as well as the imposition of the oppressive post-Reconstruction system of apartheid which lasted at least until the 1960s, and the lingering institutional white supremacist bent of the powers that be in this country, including most conspicuously the increasingly fascist-style behavior of local police forces all over the country, where the nationwide motto has become "If they're Black, shoot 'em if they stand, and shoot 'em if they run."

     Also, to its eternal credit as a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, many of this country's states are now attempting, at the public school level, to curb the recognition of anything other than traditional heteronormative sexuality.  Elsewhere in the news, in our systematic attempt to oppress women (so self-righteously condemned by us when it occurs, as it surely does, in various Islamic countries), a large portion of the country is busy reinstating statewide bans on abortion, in anticipation of a decision by the Supreme Court to greatly curb its legal use.  

     Certainly, some of our policies of oppression, such as wiping out the Indians and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been carried on by the federal government acting on behalf of us all.  But in the main there is one strong common thread running through all these retrograde ideas, from slavery through the banning of the teaching of evolution up to the present-day attempts to oppress minorities, women, and gender-nonconforming folks.  And that is that we as a country are consistently impeded from progress because of the powers and desires of certain of our individual states.  The federal Supreme Court legalized abortion fifty years ago, but it is because of pressures from particular states, and the ignorant folks in them, that the issue is once again before this currently conservative high court.  How that will play out remains to be seen, but it ain't looking good.

     As I have opined in previous posts in other contexts, it is the rights of individual states to decide what is good and right for them, rather than the federal government, that underlies many of the evils with which we live in this country.  It strengthens the parochial backwardness of shithole places like Idaho, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, and gives them and other underpopulated states a disproportionate representation in the Senate, thus holding many progressive federal initiatives hostage to the minority.   And when it comes to presidential elections, that tyranny of the few over the many comes out even more starkly.  With our winner-take-all state-by-state system of electoral votes (based on popular representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, but also including two free extras for each state's Senators), as opposed to a straight national popular vote, these smaller states are able to secure the victories of Republicans in spite of the fact that more voters wanted the Democrat to win.  This has happened twice in the last quarter century.

     Except insofar as certain states (like California) are able to exercise more progressive policies than even the federal government is willing to do, often dragging the federal government into a more reasonable stance, the "states rights" governance of the country has been disastrous.  It led to the Civil War, and even in the aftermath of the South's loss, to the institutionalization of horrible suppression of Blacks.  (That's not to say that northern states haven't exercised their share of systematic de facto oppression.)  Today, and for some time previously, the term "state's rights" has simply been code for policies of discrimination and outright stupidity.  I can't think of a single instance where anything good was done in the U.S. in the name of state's rights.

     The policy of state's rights was a dubious expedient for the sake of holding the country together when it began by allowing smaller or less populated states to have an equal voice in the Senate with the giant colonies of New York and Virginia.  This equal representation of each state in the Senate has proved, over and over, to be the tail that has wagged the national dog.  It was the southern Senators who created the idea of the filibuster, requiring a supermajority of Senate votes to pass a great deal of legislation that had been passed by a simple majority in the House of Representatives.  This was done specifically to block civil rights legislation, but the practice persists to this day, preventing the current razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate from getting a hell of lot done unless the matter before them is almost entirely uncontroversial (such as condemning the Russians).

     But it wasn't just the Senate that was affected by the policy of state's rights.  The committee that wrote the U.S. Constitution was presented with a dilemma from the very beginning, namely, whether or not to include slaves in the population count for purposes of proportional representation in the lower chamber.  This shouldn't have been a dilemma at all, since the slaves were not legally entitled to any representation.  Some northerners quite logically said that since slaves had no status as humans, and were really just chattel, they should not be counted.  After all, they argued, we're not allowed to count our livestock.  Others, in particular men in the slave-holding states, thought that all slaves should be counted, so they could get more Congressmen, and hence more power, in the House of Representatives, particularly since in some of the original states the number of slaves exceeded the number of white people.  This notion was sort of odd, as I said, since the slaves weren't treated like human beings, except insofar as they could communicate as humans, and could be impregnated by both fellow slaves and white men alike.  (Indians, by the way, didn't count at all, since they were considered separate nations, albeit nations that the U.S. could manipulate at will.)  Finally a compromise was reached whereby three-fifths of slaves were allowed to be counted toward the populations of the slave-holding states.  Modern-day people decry this compromise because it devaluated the humanity of slaves by forty percent, but in reality the humanity of enslaved people was already devaluated by one hundred percent, and allowing any proportional representation of slaves, even fractional, only enhanced the power of the slave states at the ultimate expense of both the enslaved people and the free states.  And the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the 14th and 15th), establishing the full recognition of former slaves as citizens and allowing their men to vote, only gave African Americans a brief moment of enfranchisement, before the white South once more prevented them from voting for another hundred years, but this time with the advantage of being able to count all of the former slaves for purposes of political representation, while providing no effective representation for Blacks at all.  Pretty sweet deal.  The North, by giving up on Reconstruction, had effectively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

     Finally, with all this in mind, let's return to the original gravamen of this posting, namely, the banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools.  It is no coincidence that the states which disallowed teaching of evolution, and a few that have begun to do so more recently, were all, at one time, slave-holding states or territories.  In fact, with the exception of a few yet-to-become states, like Idaho and the Dakotas, almost all of the most unregenerate and backward states in today's America were once the bastions of the institution of slavery, including Oklahoma, which didn't become a state until the 20th century, but existed back then as the official national concentration camp for Indians from all over the country.  (None of which is to give a carte blanche pass to northern "purple" states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, or any other place in the U.S. where conservatism is capable of flourishing on its own.)

     The social historian W.E.B. DuBois, whom I quoted earlier, was himself born into a small community of free Black people in Massachusetts, but the main target of his accusations was the South and its influences on the North, not to mention the ways that northern capitalism tacitly encouraged slavery to exist in the first place.  Because of the disproportionate political power of the South, which drags on into the present day, and whose regressive ideas infect likeminded people all over the country, the South has risen from the ashes of its momentary defeat in the 1860s to become a force for evil even greater than the North.  The brutal institution of slavery, which it fought to protect and expand, permanently corrupted its white population, turning them into subnormal beings.  In addition to its already-mentioned general disregard for basic human rights, the South has been a haven for opposition to organized labor, promotion of capital punishment, promotion of gun ownership, a bastion of backward religious fervor, and promotion of poverty, obesity, and general unhealthiness of body and mind.  The South is, as it always has been, if not always the political, then most assuredly the moral and spiritual leader of the great, ignorant, and simple-minded land in which we live.           

The Devil You Know

April 1, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Here is a quote from a blog posting I put up a couple of years ago, after the confirmation of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court:

We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones.  Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more.   If they're good, they won't be Republicans.  Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy.  But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst.  Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil.

If it weren't so damned long, I'd like that carved on my tombstone.  But my tombstone would have to be the size of that of the Unknown Soldier, which would be pretty ridiculous, not to mention preposterously egotistical.  And really, who would take the time to read it, anyway, before it got covered with lichen and mold?  So I'll just settle for the name and dates, like most everybody else.

     To be sure, there are Republicans who occasionally do the right thing, but I think it's mostly by accident.  And there are Democrats who don't do the right thing, like that idiot senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia and, locally, Alex Villanueva, the wolf in sheep's clothing who presides as the sheriff of Los Angeles County, no less ruthless than the fabled sheriff of Nottingham.  

     As we begin the long off-year election season (longer even than major league sports seasons), it's probably a good idea to keep in mind that the simpler we keep things the better.  If we're not Republicans (as I assume is the case with all my readers, unless they've randomly stumbled on this blog), we should be prepared for a dazzling display of pure mendacity on the part of the GOP candidates for various offices, from national congressional ones to local state elections of governors and other state officials.

     The Republicans will, as has become their usual habit, simply try to tell the public that tax breaks for the wealthy are good for the poor, that racism and xenophobia are the best forms of Americanism, and that the Democrats are responsible for all the bad things the Republicans themselves have brought about by obstructing the Democrats at every turn.  They will tell us that war is peace, that freedom is slavery, and that ignorance is strength.  Sorry, got a little carried away there at the end, but Orwell's lessons from 1984 are good ones.  That Stalinist future he foresaw wasn't nearly as frightening as the real thing has turned out to be.  It would be one thing if the U.S. was living in dull grey, stripped-down, Soviet-style misery, like Winston Smith's world was, drinking watery gin, and all that.  But we're living instead in a colorful world of multiple television and movie channels, Facebook, movies filled with action comic book heroes, and much more.  It's so dazzlingly bright when we look at the screen that we hardly notice the grimness that dwells outside.  Which is simply the modern version of bread and circuses.  And as for politics and politicians, well, we now expect them to lie regularly, so what's the difference?

     But for as cynical as we all seem to be about politics, it's amazing that we repeatedly continue to vote (or not vote) in opposition to our own interests.  Even people who genuinely care about things like racial, social, and economic justice will fail to vote for Democrats, simply because Democrats don't always deliver on their promises, or because they perceive the "Government" to be some organic evil monolithic force that is out to subdue us all, when in fact the government, when decently led, is the only agency whereby we are decently protected and provided for.  And even when people don't vote for either Republicans or Democrats, they are essentially aiding and abetting Republicans, who generally are in the minority in this country.  By not voting for Democrats they oppose no one and nothing, including evil.  I cannot overemphasize this point.  "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around," to quote "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads. 

     If you're looking for a mantra--a simple and correct evaluation of the state of the U.S. political landscape in 2022--it is this, set out in syllogistic fashion:

     All Republicans are bad;

     Many Democrats are good.

     Therefore, if you want a chance to increase good in the country, you must vote for Democrats.

See how easy that is?  You don't need to evaluate things any further.  But just in case, here's another thought from a previous posting about the Republican thought process, particularly with respect to the pandemic.  It was written early in the rough going of 2020, but it as relevant now as ever, as people begin to unmask with the thoughtless glee of young children given permission to do whatever they please, but still too immature or uninformed to understand the inherent dangers of the world: 

Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.  Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny.  Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else?  People would have thought they were crazy.  They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.

     So, my friends, in this case at least, don't heed the old adage, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."  Avoid the devil you know and opt for those who might just embody the better angels of our nature. 

The Power Of The Dog

March 26, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output.  Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.

     One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year.  That movie is called The Power of the Dog.  It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.

     I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated).  Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it.  But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it.  Then I watched it again, just in case.  Nope, it didn't get any better.  Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.

     First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term.  I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest.  And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately.  Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous.  But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie.  That didn't happen.  Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.

     SPOILER ALERT here.  If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie.  It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana.  I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana.  Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right?  But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference.  There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background.  Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside.  The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the real Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser.  It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie The Piano (another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.

     So, on with the story.  These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch.  The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from Airplane! for all the drama he brings to the role.  Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated.  Yes, that's true.  But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated?  I can get that for free by looking in the mirror.  And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes.  She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch).   She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch.  Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say.  And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name.  They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not.  At all.  

     The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird.  Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation.  Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop.  All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much.  He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is.  But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person.  Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown.  All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.

     Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted.  He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style.  Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude.  Guy stuff.  Wait a minute: Bronco Henry?  Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie?  Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless?  It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.

     Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago.  He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to.  As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil.  It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants.  I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much.  In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.

      Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality.  If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a female director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar.  It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned?  Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism.  Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie.  A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called Moonlight, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer.  I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains?  I guess not.  

     Proponents of The Power of the Dog, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs.  Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know.  The only other one that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism.  The Power of the Dog isn't possessed of any of those things.  It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be.  So its name is the only thing about it that works.

  

And Now For Something Completely Different

March 17, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Nah, just kidding.  This won't be different.

     Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem.  It's just people throwing words around, right?  People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders.  It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.

     Well, no.  Not really.  Politics is, in fact, idealism.  Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally.  And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus.  That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.

     By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good.  I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride.  They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.

     Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids.  More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.

     The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor.  Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we have been, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we can be.  But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others.  That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries. 

     However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.

     I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections.  But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all?  Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls.  They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point.  In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all.  They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today).  But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican?  Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect.  I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people?  I think not.  However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal.  Republicans don't even pretend to be.

     (A word here about foreign policy.  Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly.  This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy.  We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid."  There are a few slim differences, I guess.  Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary.  Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place.  But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)

     Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots."  That they are, for sure.  But why?  First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party.  Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible.  But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible).  That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease.  Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining.  The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats.  Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order.  These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution.  So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots.  But they're white, and proud of it.  And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things. 

     Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."  The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be.  This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is.  Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote.  This they did despite Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination.  That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist.  The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War.  I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election.  Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united.   

     So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots.  I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well, seem to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds.  I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right?  They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans.  This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass.  Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties.  LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats.  Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans.  And so on.  In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be unable to decide between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker.  Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies.  Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.

     The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that.  This belief relieves them of having to think and choose.  I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do.  A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won.  But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate.  And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.

     So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for:  please don't vote.  Watch American Idol instead.

     

Supreme Politics

February 24, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Let's talk about the Supreme Court of the U.S.  I'll dignify that rather flaccid group by capitalizing its name, although it probably doesn't deserve such respect at the moment.   The constitution gives the president the authority to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, but the Senate must agree to allow the appointments to go into effect.  Since no one has much of a sense of the history of the country or of the Supreme Court, and since the news media love nothing more than to sensationalize things and foretell the doom of the nation, today it's sort of assumed that the bunch currently comprising that body is uniquely politicized, just as the country itself is aware of its own increasing political polarization.  There persists a myth, or perhaps more accurately a misunderstanding, regarding the political neutrality of the Supreme Court.  In fact, it is indeed highly political, and has been ever since the inception of the country, but particularly since the beginning of the 1800s, when party politics really began to heat up.  

     Before getting more into that aspect of the Court, let's take a look at its current makeup.  In the days of yore, when George Washington and his early successors were appointing justices, the country was run solidly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, save for a Catholic or two, usually from Maryland, which before it was a state was a British Catholic colony.  Such was the case with the Supreme Court, which didn't acquire its first Catholic justice, in the person of Roger Taney (from Maryland of course), until 1836.  Taney died in 1864, and another Catholic didn't come along until about thirty years later, but a tradition of sorts then evolved to reserve at least one seat for a Catholic.  Not long after the turn of the century, in 1916, the Court got its first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, and thereafter for most of the 20th century there have usually been one or more Jews on the Supreme Court.  

     Fast forward.  Today's Supreme Court is a far cry from the bewigged gaggle of WASPs who first inhabited it.  Protestants?  Well, I think there's one, Neil Gorsuch, although it appears that he started life as a Catholic but seems to prefer to be an Episcopalian now.  There are two Jews left after the demise of Ruth Ginsberg--Elena Kagan and Steven Breyer--although the latter is soon to depart from the court.  There is at present one African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who filled the "Black" seat on the Court after the death of Thurgood Marshall.  Soon there will be another African American, a woman, whose religion I don't know at this point.  It appears that of the top three likely candidates for nomination to succeed Breyer, one had a Jewish father but hasn't revealed her own religion, another is married to a Jewish man but might be Protestant herself, and the third is Catholic.  After all that shakes out, the breakdown of the Court will be as follows: six Republicans and three Democrats; five men and four women; seven whites, one Latina, and two African Americans; and seven or eight Christians and one or two Jewish persons, including six or seven Catholics, one or two Protestants, and one or two Jews.  It'll be a complex group demographically, and never before has the Court been quite this far away from its initial WASPishness, which on a stand-alone basis seems like it might be a good thing.

     You might well ask why it matters in the least what the religions of the Supreme Court justices are in a nominally secular nation, and most of the time you'd be right.  Who gives a shit about their religion, or whether they are religious at all?  Roger Taney, the first Catholic (pictured above), was a nasty and vehement racist and slaveholder, who gave us the Dred Scott decision, containing one of the most blatant manifestos of white supremacy ever to emanate from the Court.  In it he declared that a black person had no rights that needed to be respected by any white person.  But most of his fellow justices were slave holders, too, and went along.  The Catholic justices who followed Taney were a mixed bag.  Until very recently, that is.  Most of today's Catholic justices have been carefully chosen by their appointers (the two George Bushes and Donald Trump) not to increase religious diversity, but rather to decrease it, because their conservative Catholicism influences their political thinking in a rightward direction.  This is not to say that Catholics in the U.S. on the whole are Republicans; statistics indicate that they're split pretty evenly between the two parties.  But today's members of the conservative bloc, all Catholics save for the high church semi-Catholic Neil Gorsuch, are meaningful partly because they were selected based not only on the basis of their Republican political conservatism but also on the assumption that since they are Catholics they will oppose abortion rights, will support public spending for conservative parochial schools, will uphold discrimination against gays in the name of freedom of speech, and generally will erode the separation of church and state in as many ways as possible.  All of these things are coming to pass, thanks to that Catholic conservative bloc.  It would have been just about the same if the Bushes and Trump had appointed right-wing evangelical Protestants instead of Catholics, except that evangelicals on the whole aren't as intelligent or well-educated enough to become federal justices.  There is, to be fair, one lonely liberal Catholic on the court too, in the person of Sonia Sotomayor.

     Which brings us back to the inherently political nature of the Supreme Court.  Many people inadvertently confuse the nominally neutral role of judges at the lower levels of state courts with judges who are appointees to the federal bench by the President.  That's understandable.  When you're facing a judge in an ordinary courtroom, you are entitled to expect that judge to at least appear to be fair and impartial (even though many are not), and not to impose their political agenda on you, whether you're a prosecutor, a criminal defendant, or a civil litigant on either side.  The personal politics of the judge should not enter into whether you get a fair trial at that level, and if it does, that judge might be accused of committing some reversible error, the one thing lower court judges fear the most, because it's a sort of a rebuke to their competence and marks them as fair game for appeals from then on, not to mention limiting their chances of upward mobility.

     Now let's look at the federal judiciary, by contrast.  Because federal judges at all levels (district courts, circuit courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court) are appointed by the President or someone working for the president, and approved by the Senate, it is not merely by chance that they are usually of the same political party as the President is, or at least not significantly opposed to that President's politics.  And there are hundreds of federal judges--870 as of now.  Once on the bench, federal judges are there for life, so long as they behave themselves.  Their big boss is the Chief Justice of the United States, but they may be impeached by the Congress, just as a president may be.

     At the district court level federal judges are trial judges, just like their state counterparts.  But at the appellate and Supreme Court levels they do not retry cases on the merits, except for the Supreme Court in very limited circumstances.  Instead, they review lower court decisions and decide whether some federal (and hence constitutional) issue needs to be addressed.  However, they are all thoroughly political, especially the justices of the Supreme Court.  They wouldn't be there if they weren't, because no President with his wits about him would squander the chance to put his imprimatur on the Court by appointing someone who didn't think like he did, at least in broad terms.  Because federal judges are appointed for life, the one thing a President may do that will ensure his or her political legacy long into the future is to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices.  Other executive actions can be undone by successors, but the appointment of judges and justices cannot.  Donald Trump's single most nefarious accomplishment while president was getting three extremely conservative justices onto the Supreme Court, and they could well live for another thirty years before the Devil calls them home.  

     Again, this isn't new.  Thomas Jefferson was the first president this country had who would, in today's politics, be considered a Republican, although he was counted as a Democrat until very recently. (The labels hadn't been exactly settled on back then, but there were Federalists, like Washington and the Adamses, and their opponents, the Jeffersonians).  Why would Jefferson be a Republican today?  Well, for starters he was an avowed white supremacist and a profound hypocrite, as most Republicans are.  While eloquently declaring for the basic rights and equality of all persons, he owned hundreds of slaves, and forced one of them to be his concubine when she was about 14 years old, showing her off in Europe as he courted the French.  She soon got pregnant and ultimately gave him six more slaves.  (By the way, the aforementioned woman, Sally Hemings, happened to be Jefferson's late wife's half sister--in other words, Jefferson's father-in-law had sired her with one of his own slaves.)  Even though as president he signed a law banning the U.S. involvement in the international slave trade, at the time of his death he freed only about ten of his own--those with the cherished Jefferson blood coursing through their veins.  Also, he was in favor of the rights of individual states over the federal government (a perennial guise for pro-slavery and white supremacy, and a staple of the Republican party of today).  State's rights eventually led to the Civil War and since then has been the excuse that former slave states have used to perpetuate the suppression of minorities.  He also favored tax reductions, primarily to benefit the already wealthy, like him, another favorite Republican hobby horse.  Jefferson nevertheless gets high marks for his "forward thinking" and for being a brilliant and verbally nimble Renaissance man.  This forward thinking included his purchase of the French claim over the middle third of what is now the United States, enabling the spread of slavery and the forcible removal of east coast Indians to west of the Mississippi.     

     But the bane of Thomas Jefferson's existence during his eight-year presidency was the domination of the Supreme Court by independent and judicially-active Federalists appointed by Washington and John Adams, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, who, in 1803, established that the Supreme Court was completely independent from any sitting president and, moreover, was the ultimate authority on what was, and was not, constitutional.  Until then, that hadn't been quite clear, and Jefferson really didn't care for the idea.  While Jefferson did get three of his boys onto the court, he didn't have the majority of Republicans he would have wished for.  It wasn't until thirty years after Jefferson, when Andrew Jackson took office, that the Supreme Court was altered for good and filled with men even more roguish than the self-aggrandizing Jefferson would have chosen.

     Occasionally, nevertheless, the Supreme Court of today surprises even those who favor the politics of its majority.  Donald Trump found out, to his dismay, that he didn't own them, when they turned down, for the most part without comment, his sore-loser claims regarding the 2020 election.  But that was more a matter of repelling Trump's outright idiocy than it was of rejecting his basic Republican political views.  In related areas, such as allowing states to suppress voting rights and abortion rights, the Court will even things out for Trump and his followers in the coming months and years.

     In conclusion, lest anyone think for a moment that the Supreme Court of 2022 is overly politicized, bear in mind that there has never been a time in the history of the country when the politics of that august body has not been overwhelmingly in evidence, from the upholding of slavery and segregation, to the suppression of immigration, to the dismantling of the New Deal, to the enhancement of civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants, to the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, to the restriction of affirmative action, to the upholding of corporate rights, to the tearing down of the wall of separation between church and state.  Those of us who grew up in the days of the Earl Warren court were happy enough with its liberal decisions, even when presidents were not.  Today, barring a quick series of untimely deaths within the conservative majority, we will be living with some unhappy constitutional interpretations for the foreseeable future.