Looking toward the future (at this perilous and hopeful moment), and our places in history (if there is to be history, in the future), here is Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, accepting a prize from a French historical society, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:
“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.
“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth. I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.
“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.
“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”
As I get ready to volunteer to make a few calls to “low-propensity” voters in Georgia tomorrow, I scan the paper to survey the new world we have in front of us in 2021. A couple of them caught my eye.Then a call to action.
This is according to the New York Times, of course, so take it with the usual teaspoon of salt [1]but it’s of a piece with general modern-day extremist GOP electoral strategy. The red baseball cap could say FEAR BLACKS!!! on it and have the same galvanizing effect. This black reverend, Warnock, stands at the same pulpit that known Communist Martin Luther King, Jr. (as portrayed by J. Edgar Hoover’s secretly sourced — tippy top, top secret — also, coincidentally, false — memo on this radical menace sent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy back in the day) once abused for his Red purposes. If it barks like a communist, lifts its leg like a communist … need we say more? Gentlemen, who among us is safe in a country where somebody like that has a vote equal to Miss Lindsey Graham’s? As for that other one, that smart-mouthed young Jew journalist? Enemy of the goddamned people, son!
Of course, someone like incumbent Georgia Senator David Perdue, loyal backer of our nation’s greatest one term president, has nothing to worry about, really. Nobody in his party will hold it against him that he made his impressive fortune outsourcing good old American jobs. That’s just NY Times propaganda, folks. You can read all about it here, in a Scalawaggin’, Carpetbaggin’ hit piece called Before Embracing America-First Agenda, David Perdue Was an Outsourcing Expert . Keep your salt shaker handy as you read it and stay tuned to OAN and Newsmax for the rebuttals (note: FOX can no longer be trusted, they traitorously reported the president lost the election he won!).
Speaking of the wealthy and their financial assets vs. ordinary American workers, how do you figure this one?
The “tide” that lifts “financial assets” is the same one that always does — the misery of nickeled and dimed laborers and short-changed consumers (who own no “financial assets”) translates directly into increased profits for the investing class. Every job that is outsourced to cheaper labor markets, every workers’ union that is crushed is a boon to the owners of the enterprise. If you can force low-paid workers into the plant during a deadly pandemic, by designating them “essential” and denying them the right to organize for safe working conditions — well, shit, do the math!
Then all you have to do to keep that tide rising on your financial assets is have a law passed that says you’re immune to all lawsuits from the families of these worthless pukes who died doing their goddamned jobs. Or as we say on Wall Street “boo fucking hoo!”
If the above sounds like embittered Commie twaddle that ignores the realities on the ground in our complex global economy and so on, I come from working class stock. My beliefs about the heartlessness of “financial assets” are in my blood. My grandmother, a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, was very far to the left. She was one of many leftist Jews who had no hesitation to support the struggle of American blacks against their persecution. This solidarity with the oppressed was natural to her. Back in bleeding Ukraine (where native Ukrainians were enslaved and abused for centuries, by a variety of masters, leaving only the Jews to take it out on) the only light my grandmother saw as a hopeful young woman was the light of international worker solidarity, as preached by revolutionaries from the newly created Soviet Union, overthrowing the regimes that had kept boots (and worse) on people’s necks for centuries. Is there anything surprising in her readiness to embrace this vision of the future?
My ambitious grandmother got on a boat in 1921, after years of civil war in her part of Ukraine (eventually resulting in a communist takeover), bid farewell to everything and everyone she knew, and headed to a better life in America. She slept in a lower, cheaper compartment of the ship where a giant rat once walked along the partition that separated her bed from the next sleeping berth (causing her to leap over the little wall into the bed of the startled man who was sleeping on the other side) and dreamed of a life where her family could not be marched to a ravine in their hometown and shot in their heads. Barely two decades later, local Ukrainians, sick of the fucking Jews, enthusiastically helped round up all of my grandmother’s large family, march them to the ravine, confiscate their clothes, shoot them in the head, scramble over their corpses with surprising dexterity, straightening the rows for the next batch to be killed. The Nazi overseer gave the word, and… repeat.
Speaking of Nazi overseers, the SS, the outfit that ran the death camps, provided slave laborers to German industries who set up near the camps. They charged German corporations $1 a day, a sort of handling fee, for every slave laborer marched to and from work. An ideal way to lift the tide of the old financial assets, I’d say. One of the beneficiaries of this arrangement was the company that recently bought mega-corporation Monsanto — once again lifting all financial assets for everyone (who owned shares in those assets, of course).
Here is a central myth of our no-holds barred, a rising tide lifts all financial assets, let the free market freely decide the free rules of our neoliberal system of capitalism: it benefits those wealthy enough to own financial assets and pretty much fucks everyone else. This myth enables the belief that when Wall Street is booming the “economy” is doing great. That’s why Mitch McConnell can block financial aid to millions who have recently entered poverty — the economic indicators prove that the economy is growing at a record rate, doing great!
It’s related the the myth of the “White” person. You can be a dirt poor, ethnically “white” citizen of the great state of Georgia (or a dirt poor, ethnically “white” Ukrainian for that matter) and still, automatically be superior to someone with dark skin, someone traditionally called a “nigger” (or the Ukrainian equivalent for Jew). You can be the poorest, most oppressed white person in your county — you still have the invaluable consolation of not being a nigger, of being infinitely superior to even the most accomplished one of them. They can’t take that birthright away from me, unless they flay my skin off (which they might, don’t rule it out). I’m sure the Ukrainians who executed most of my family back in Europe felt the same way about their ethnic superiority when they were getting rid of a few thousand Christ-killers in my grandparents’ hometown.
All this history is just history, part of my eternal one note samba. Oy, they killed most of my family, Nazi fucks! It gets tiring, I know. Back to 2021, and the next few days. Here’s what I’m going to do, to try to get a working Senate that we can actually influence:
If you’d like to join the Focus 2020 effort, we have a need for volunteers on Saturday at 2pm PT/ 5pm ET for a phone bank targeting low-propensity GA voters. Please sign up here: https://forms.gle/NE31ey6F5fginjaa8
Here is the rest of their rap:
Hi All, On the last day of 2020 (finally!) and with just 5 days to go until the Georgia runoffs, we wanted to share some key stats on the race. There have been over 2.8 million votes already cast — a rate of about 80% of the votes cast at this point in the general. According to America Votes, Democrats have a modeled edge of approximately 52% of the vote, putting us about 3 points ahead of where we stood at this point in the general election. Black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, represent a larger share of votes than they did at this point in the general– 34% versus 31%. This increase is driven almost entirely by voters over 50. Significantly, about 105,000 of these early voters did not vote in the general election and black voters represent 41% of this group. Despite these positive numbers, there is reason for caution. The trend in the general election, both in Georgia and in other states, was that Democrats had higher turnout in early voting, but Republicans had higher turnout on election day. And Republicans have more high-propensity voters left who have yet to cast a ballot so they could eclipse much of the lead established by Democrats. See Graph from Catalist below. Note: The Georgia electorate is 57% White, 33% Black, 4% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% AAPI, and 2% Native American or other races
The ground game by progressive groups has been impressive. For instance, there have been over 6.5 million door knocks by these groups and will continue at a rate of about 500,000 a day for the last four days. And our Focus 2020 volunteer group has been working virtually to provide voter information to over 2000 local community leaders, and to reach thousands of low propensity voters. The great unknown is how Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud, his enmity toward some Republican leaders in Georgia, and his delay in signing the relief bill will affect Republican turnout on election day. This race was never going to be easy to win and it’s still uncomfortably close, but Democrats are doing the work needed to get out the vote. Our community has supported three programs that weren’t being funded by others (Block Power, site-based vote-by-mail registration, and Working America) and so will certainly add net votes to the total. Let’s collectively hope for the best.
[1]
It was the overheated, accusatory rhetoric of radical abolitionists, the paper opined on January 19, 1859— that hardened the Southern resolve to keep their slaves. If not for the violently moralistic outrage of anti-slavery zealots directed against the Southern slaveholders (threatened with the taking of their property without compensation!) these genteel planters would probably voluntarily free their slaves, according to the Grey Lady.
I am not alone in wishing good riddance to this fucking deadly year. Not that flipping the calendar page will do anything, really, but it’s nice to symbolically turn the page on 2020, which NY Times op-ed writer Michelle Cottle generously called a “soul crushing hellscape of a dumpster fire.” It has been that. Let’s look at just a few things we learned.
If you have an even one vote majority in the Senate, you get to decide what business gets in front of the Senate, what the People will get an up or down vote on, what democracy is.
Black guy picks a replacement for a suddenly deceased giant of the right on the Supreme Court? No hearing, no advice nor consent, forget it, let the People decide in the next election. President impeached by the House, the law requires a trial in Senate? No worries, we openly vow to work closely with the president’s defense team, allow no witnesses or evidence, acquit him ASAP and put the blame back where it belongs: on enraged haters, traitors, communists, black terrorists. COVID-19 puts burdens on the wealthiest corporations in the country (many making record windfall profits during the pandemic) while poor people who work for these outfits (“essential workers”) sicken and die? A liability shield for all corporate entities who may have inadvertently killed people by forcing them to work in unsafe conditions during a highly infectious, deadly pandemic. It’s only fair, and a totally reasonable pre-condition for any government aid to tens of millions of immiserated Americans.
Record Wildfires and Killer Storms, a small price to pay for continued prosperity.
A pandemic is first and foremost a political event.
Public safety precautions urged by medical experts may safely be mocked as partisan bullshit, a hoax, a nasty stunt fueled by irrational anger. Mayors and governors seeking to enforce mask mandates, social distancing? Sue these tyrants in court, exhort unhinged supporters to take up guns, rise up against tyranny!! No political price need ever be paid, in fact, the base (‘al qaeda’ in Arabic) loves it!
Check out this dead Republican’s official website, updated when he died of COVID-19. Do you think this staunch supporter of the president wore a mask, ever?
Alternative facts are just as good as so-called real facts.
When a police officer kills an unarmed person, live on video, particularly if that dead person is “colored”, the officer is entitled to the presumption of innocence, “qualified immunity” [1] from prosecution and a vigorous public defense by the media team at the police union.
And you can go down the whole disgustingly detailed list. How did we get to this hideous and embarrassing point in our experiment in democracy? My short answer: consumerism, materialism, greed, stupidity, the coercive power of advertising, extolling the unlimited virtues of unlimited individual competition between Rugged Individuals who duke it out for supremacy.
The value of the American Dream, and the life of every dreamer, can be expressed in a number, which follows a dollar sign. During this pandemic the 650 American billionaires increased their wealth by almost a trillion dollars. A trillion is a thousand billions, a million millions, like so: $1,000,000,000,000. Thousands of American lives could be saved, and many of the dead would still be alive, by the targeted infusion of that kind of money (a historic windfall to our 650 wealthiest, during a pandemic) into the fight against this terrible disease, to keep people from homelessness, hunger, terror and despair.
We’ve been successfully sold the idea that Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and Koch deserve every penny of their more than $100,000,000,000 fortunes, and every blessed dollar of their tens of billions in plague-related profits. To tax any of that money, even a windfall made during a pandemic, for use on the public good, even in a vast public health emergency, is coercive, socialistic, yea, communistic, totalitarian. So we seem to believe here in the USA, the land where Rugged Individualism has been marketed so successfully by influential actors like The Great Communicator.
MacKenzie Scott, former wife of world’s greediest man Jeff Fucking Bezos, has so far taken about 10% of her estimated $59,000,000,000 fortune and given the money directly to causes that need help, like pandemic relief and anti-racist groups. She gave six billion dollars to organizations she believes in, asking them only to use it where it was needed most.
Contrast that with usual billionaire strings-attached philanthropist micromanagers like Gates and Zuckerberg (Bezos, Musk and Koch don’t seem to believe in philanthropy) who, considering themselves among history’s greatest geniuses, create foundations that bear their names and fund specific solutions they believe in, like proposing to solve inequality of education and its role in intergenerational poverty with private “charter schools” (that don’t work — certainly not to help fix our long-besieged public education system).
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a short version of how we got here, an essay that arrived in my inbox around 5 a.m. Our pay-to-play political cesspool today is directly traceable to the rage and determination of a group of very wealthy white men following Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision when the “activist” Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation unconstitutional. You can trace their privilege-protecting, anti-majoritarian determination to take back the unquestioned power they never lost in the Civil War to the years right after American schools were ordered to be de-segregated “with all deliberate speed.”
Racism plays an outsized role in our nation’s woes — though, like the “n-word” itself, it must never be uttered aloud.
Think of it, without racism you have a tiny group of super rich, politically insulated heirs of great fortunes (think the old slaveholding class in Dixie and their counterparts in the North) versus the overwhelming human force of the great masses of the poor and disenfranchised. If poor whites and poor blacks ever united in a voting block based on their mutual interests, ever marched by the millions demanding action towards justice — you’d have to hire literally an army of lone gunmen to shoot all of their leaders in the head. Remove racism from the mix and you’d have sudden, massive change, or a bloodbath of our greatest, and most valuable, citizens. The world would not be safe for those born, booted and spurred, to ride the backs of the rest of us.
Of course, not every one of the 74,000,000 who voted to give Donald Trump a second chance to make America great again is a racist. On the other hand, we all understand that every eligible racist in the country voted for Donald. Anger at racism? It brings me back to personal experiences with old friends and reminds me of how personal the political always is.
The guy I asked to please stop provoking me would not even acknowledge doing it, he’d never provoked me, he kept insisting. At the same time, the last time we talked, he couldn’t rest until, reminding me three times in 15 minutes that though it was unfair to accuse me of disrespecting him, based on the actual events of the day and my constant communication with him about delays, that he still felt disrespected by my lateness. The third time he brought this up was the charm. I finally exploded, listing several very specific reasons I had no respect for him. Set and match.
It’s this way with racism. You keep bringing it up, I’ll keep telling you it’s not a problem. We are never going to talk about it in any meaningful way, nor acknowledge its prevalence in our culture. When you get mad, well, it just proves I was right all along about you fucking people.
A guy complained that he had no idea how much he’d hurt me because I’d been so calm, reasonable and nonjudgmental when I told him I was hurt. Somebody who is really hurt cries out, he pointed out, it’s only natural. How could I really blame him for not knowing how upset he’d made me when I didn’t cry out? It was unfair of me to expect him to know how hurtful and aggravating his actions were without a little screaming to give him a clue. So, to allow him to understand why I was hurt, and how much, I cried out. When I did, he was devastated that I could be such a merciless fuck.
This is how it works with racism too. You can be philosophical in the face of the pain of it, but that’s only a way of coping. Your restraint can be cited, by those who don’t believe in racism, as a demonstration that you’re pretty much cool with the way things are, that we all enjoy freedom here, and basic equality under the law.
Everything seems fine, until another unarmed black man, not resisting his handcuffing by police (as a suspect in a very minor, non-violent crime), is slowly murdered on video, by an officer kneeling on his neck for long, agonizing minutes, while the officer’s colleagues assist in the killing — during a pandemic. A high school girl films the entire thing on her cellphone. There is no question about the hideous sequence of events, the lynching, exactly how long it takes the begging man to lose consciousness, how long they wait to call for medical help.
Now you take to the streets by the millions, finally bringing many thousands of “white” people with you, everywhere. Racism doesn’t seem so abstract now, does it, you reality denying motherfuckers? Of course, now you are a visible, united threat and people who deny that racism exists start getting defensive, even shrill. Who is really making the problem here?
Anyway, a happy, healthy 2021 to you all. It’s hard to imagine it can be as bad as 2020, though guys like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will do their best to hold the line, keep hope alive for al q’aeda, the base. The feelings of those left out, the large majority shoved aside, hurt, in need, bereft by the preventable deaths of loved ones — well, as Mitch and Lindsey and their ilk are used to believing, they simply don’t have the votes to do anything about it, do they?
A majority of one vote or not, we’re going to have a much better 2021 than the surreal, stinking shit-show of 2020.Take that to the bank, stay alert and be of good cheer.
[1]
Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from being held personally liable for constitutional violations—like the right to be free from excessive police force—for money damages under federal law so long as the officials did not violate “clearly established” law. Both 42 U.S.C. § 1983—a statute originally passed to assist the government in combating Ku Klux Klan violence in the South after the Civil War—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971) allow individuals to sue government officials for money damages when they violate their constitutional rights. Section 1983 applies to state officials, while Bivens applies to federal officials. Because damages are often the only available remedy after a constitutional violation has occurred, suits for damages can be a crucial means of vindicating constitutional rights. When government officials are sued, qualified immunity functions as an affirmative defense they can raise, barring damages even if they committed unlawful acts.
As the United States reports record deaths and hospitalizations from COVID-19 in the final days of 2020, we look at how thepandemic that ravaged the country this year has shone a stark new light on racism in medical care.
In a viral video recorded by Black physician Dr. Susan Moore, she describes racist treatment by medical staff at a hospital in Indianapolis and says they did not respond to her pleas for care, despite being in intense pain and being a doctor herself. In the video, Dr. Moore says she had to beg to receive pain medication and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and accuses a doctor at Indiana University Health North Hospital of ignoring her pleas because she was Black. “I put forward, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that,” she says. Dr. Moore died December 20, just over two weeks after she posted the video. She was 54 years old.
Somebody compared watching this video to seeing the video of the George Floyd murder, and I can see that. Can you say “black lives matter,” motherfucker?
Or as noted non-racist former Attorney General William Pelham Barr would say: an infinitesimal number of female black doctors have been killed this way during this historic pandemic, certainly not more than a large handful. Obviously not indicative of any kind of institutional problem reflecting on the values of the larger society, and clearly, this is an angry dying woman in the “viral” video. And give me a break, forced lockdowns of people used to freedom and liberty are actually worse than centuries of slavery for people who have never known freedom or liberty!
Does my heart good to refer to the repellant Trumpist “Christian” as the former attorney general.
Famous philosopher and mass murdering paranoiac Josef Stalin is reputed to have observed “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million people is a statistic.” This is never more true than during the rampant spread of a highly contagious and occasionally deadly disease. A few hundred thousand, or even a million, Americans will have to die, will have to sacrifice their lives, in order for the rest of us to acquire herd mentality, er, herd immunity.Humanist philosophers (and even dry Empiricists) have long pointed out that a human soul is of infinite worth. In my religion we are taught that saving the life of one person is like saving the universe, though it is sometimes a religious challenge keeping this great insight alive in the world.
Let’s leave aside the insane political weaponization of this terrible disease, its disproportionately deadly impact on the poor, on people of color (a category that only exists in racist societies, let’s be honest), on the weak, the obese, the immunocompromised, how it brings into grim relief the way our sick private health insurance regime ensures countless unnecessary deaths every year. It is only necessary, today, to focus on one of perhaps 3,000 Americans who died yesterday, the man mourned by leaders of both parties on the floor of the House of Representatives. The sad passing of 41 year-old Luke Letlow, Congressman-elect from the great state of Louisiana, just days before he was to take office.
I never heard of Luke Letlow while he was alive, though his death yesterday is one of today’s headlines in mass media. A Republican, a man who was not old, or in any category that should have increased his odds of dying of COVID-19. He received the best treatments available, the same ones given to Mr. Trump and people of his wealth and status. The remdesivir and steroids didn’t help Mr. Letlow. He got excellent medical treatment, in a modern intensive care unit, he just couldn’t be saved. You can read a bit more about his passing here, from today’s NY Times.
Even a creature like Mitch McConnell may shed a tear or two when talking about this fine young man, a promising young Republican about to take his place in public service. You can see his smiling face, his optimism, appreciate the fact that he graduated from Ouachita Christian School at the age of 19 and then went straight into party politics. A man with his whole life ahead of him!!!
Speaking of crocodile tears and fake, forced, reptilian smiles, check out this fat, grinning crocodile.
Taking a short break from stating the obvious to work on my “calligraphy” and watercolor technique a bit last night.
Odd to say, during this Democrat hoax pandemic lockdown (fueled by pent up rage against the election and re-election of our greatest president) I’ve been doing virtually no drawing. Neither have I been working on perfecting prissy handwriting, both very unusual for me. Few things are more delightful to me than drawing ink, or color, across a blank page.
Talk about a random twist of fate staying the executioner’s ax — Lisa Montgomery, the first female slated for execution by federal authorities since, correct me if I’m wrong, Roy Cohn orchestrated the electrocution of Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 (though, see [1]) may get to live the rest of her tormented life in prison. She will not be executed as Trump originally planned, days before Biden’s inauguration, because her lawyers came down with COVID-19 and could not appear to make arguments to extend her stay of execution. A simple twist of fate may save her miserable life of solitary confinement in prison.
A judge has delayed the execution of Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row. Montgomery suffers from mental illness caused by a life of abuse, and her lawyers are asking for clemency. She was convicted for the gruesome 2004 murder of a pregnant woman. Her execution this month was delayed after her lawyers got COVID-19; a D.C. district judge ruled Thursday the Justice Department can’t move ahead with a January 12 execution because the stay order will still be in place. Advocates hope Montgomery’s life will be spared by Joe Biden, who has vowed to abolish the federal death penalty.
Trump and his shameless enabler Bill Barr have executed more federal prisoners in the last few months than have been killed by the federal government in the last fifty years. The last lame duck president to carry out an execution was former executioner Grover Cleveland, in January 1889 [2]. Trump clearly loves the power to order the death of black men, as he pardons unrepentant war criminals, private (Blackwater) and military (disgraced, sadistic SEAL Eddie Gallagher) and corrupt colleagues. Trump and uber-Catholic Bill Barr were determined to kill a woman too, the only female federal death row inmate, come hell or high water.
The woman in question committed a gristly murder in 2004. She is administered a daily cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs. Never mind any of the details, Trump was determined to execute this crazy lady — whether by lethal injection, electric chair, firing squad, hanging, poison gas or any other means necessary (Barr actually changed the department’s guidelines for state executions to include those other ways of killing, in case certain mandated deadly chemicals were not available for lethal injection).
One can only hope for, and agitate for, justice to be applied to these wicked men. Justice is the only remedy for wickedness, though the interests of justice are disregarded with sickening regularity when it comes to wealthy, powerful, white men.
[1]
The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.[48] Ethel was the last female convict to be electrocuted in the state of New York and also the first of the only two women executed by the Federal government in the 20th century, the other one being Bonnie Brown, also executed in 1953.
The number was updated to five, after the article quoted below came out, four are already dead, see THIS:
The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration of the new president for a federal crime was nearly 132 years ago, on January 25, 1889, when the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland executed Richard Smith, a Choctaw Indian, for a murder on tribal land in Arkansas.
The power of accurate, clearly written history writing is not the same kind of power as that threatening blunderbuss-style of power wielded by an unaccountable maniac with a childish view of life and a sadist’s keen delight in the suffering of others, but it is powerful. It cannot literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, or a week’s pay away from their parents, as can randomly flexed presidential power when POTUS pouts and golfs while protesting the unfairness of things like the proposed name changes of military bases now honoring traitorous Confederate generals, not that it would want to. A president so inclined can mandate a national curriculum of denial of history, a historian with a conscience writes serving the opposite inclination.
A detailed, honestly told history is a powerful force in the world. Here is a prime example of it, written last night by Heather Cox Richardson, who ends with this inspiring observation:
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
A friend sent me the recent NY Times business piece about the historian’s amazing and well-earned viral internet success and her sudden wealth. The reason so many subscribe to her nightly newsletter is that she has emerged as a clear, mostly calm voice, giving the perspective of history to shed light on this horrific moment in time. Forwarding this piece to my friend last night all I could add was “WOW”. All he needed to write was “Agree”. A short read, well worth your time, particularly if you think history is a bunch of boring and irrelevant busy-work with no relevance to our current predicaments and no clues to offer about a way to a better future.
Years ago, during a visit to my parents after they retired and moved to Florida, I bought a bumper sticker, legible from five car lengths back, that read:
WHY BE NORMAL?
On my way out for a walk that evening, I put it on the back bumper of my parents’ Cadillac. It remained there until my father noticed it, a day or two later, and it was gone.
To suggest that being normal is even a question, well, it’s simply not normal. The normal thing is to want to be normal, I suppose, to do what a normal person normally does, to want a normal life. The larger question, of course, is why be philosophical? Why inquire?
It was not normal, before recent years, for an incumbent (or even retired) president to publicly lie over 25,000 times in a four year span. Now we’re used to it, you know, everybody lies, this guy is just really, really driven to lie, so what? The deadly, massively destructive storms that now visit nations around the world regularly, while uncommon, even unthinkable two decades ago, are now pretty much normal. Friends communicating exclusively by texted initials like LOL, ROTFLMAO!, etc. is now, like, totally normal (even if these two are relics). We have a bias toward getting used to what happens regularly, quickly considering it the new normal. The first time we are confronted with the unfamiliar might be a shock, even feel like a moral reckoning, the fifteenth, certainly the hundredth, time is pretty normal.
This is what we mean when we speak of battle-hardened troops. It’s normal for a person to hesitate to kill another person, until you are in a place where your best friend’s head gets blown off by a deadly enemy. You see the ugly bastard swing his gun toward you and you blow his fucking head off. It’s him or you. The first time you blow somebody’s head off you might vomit, have nightmares about it. After a few times, well, shit happens, you simply have to get used to it. It becomes fairly normal. Eventually you can even fire into a crowd, fuck it, these fucking people are not even people. It’s normal human behavior, has been from the dawn of the homo sapiens epoch.
So it was when one of the psychiatrists who interviewed normal German bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann before his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. Asked if Eichmann was “normal” one court appointed shrink said “more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him.” [1] Astute readers of this blahg had to know a reference to Nazis was on the way, at the same time, the normal Nazi is one of the best examples of what I’m talking about.
We have Normal (standard behavior based on the norms of the group — sane) on one side and Abnormal (extraordinary, exceptional, out of the ordinary — insane) on the other side, the side where monsters, saints and heroes live. As I have written here many times — we are always able to justify our actions as good and morally correct. This is a cardinal characteristic of the “wise ape”. If I cut your head off it’s because you made me do it, you sick bastard. That’s normal.
Normal for 126 sitting members of the House of Representatives to join the president’s Texas friend’s baseless lawsuit seeking to invalidate the votes in each swing state that Trump lost in 2020. They just argued, you know, that the Supreme Court should throw out those millions of votes because they deprived the majority in the great state of Texas of their right to the president they chose. Nothing not normal about sucking up to a powerful, famously vindictive boss who rules by fear and intimidation and is also a sadist. Normal, also, for the well-funded elected representatives of the rest of us to do nothing about these 126 democracy subverting lickspittles.
Decency, of course, is normal too. Kindness to others, perfectly normal. Mercy, normal. Except when these things are weaponized, which is now normal too. What a useless idea “normal” is. I was reminded of that by this headline in the New York Times.
Now there is absolutely no reason to think that Mr. Trump was one of these outliers, I’m not saying it or even suggesting it. In defense of a man who’s hard to defend, he was pretty much the same before and after his dramatic brush with COVID-19 (and Vegas oddsmakers are at odds over whether the Liar-in-Chief actually ever was infected with the novel coronavirus before his heroic quick “recovery”). Mental illness is a whole other topic, when we start throwing around words like “psychotic”… hoo boy, that’s not normal. Not normal at all!!!
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