Paul Elisha
March 29, 2011
As this nation seems to be irreversibly spinning into yet another impossible military involvement, you can take it from a member of the (so-called) 'Greatest Generation' --- There's no such thing as a 'good' war. Even when head and heart combine to affirm the definition, a 'just' war is just war and never worth its cost in lost lives, family integrity and cultural continuity.
But there are and have been times and reasons, when humanity prods democracies like ours to come to the aid of others, whose freedom is under threat of extinction, by forces without cause or conscience. In the past when we've responded, the reasons may have seemed right at the time but too often, hindsight and honest self-searches have revealed flaws that we either ignored or condoned at horrendous expense --- to others and ourselves. Here are just a few examples:
In Iran, a freely elected democratic administration headed by Muhammad Mossadeq was imploded by a combined campaign of thuggery and savage counter measures, both planned and engineered by the same pair of conspirators, whom I've dubbed: 'The brothers grim.' Both served the U.S. State Department, back in the 1950s but John Foster Dulles and his brother, Alan, were committed to a course of action with no qualms of conscience and devoted to a single objective: to place a wholly compliant ally in power to face the Soviet Union. Their successful gambit destroyed Mossadeq, installed the Shah of Iran and spawned the subsequent nightmare of today's Iran. A terrible testament to their duplicitous success, the truth of which almost surely will not be revealed as a chapter in any future curriculum on effective civics, to inspire young Americans.
Then there was the strange case of Salvador Allende, popularly elected Chilean President, subverted, unseated and assassinated in a military coup, facilitated by the American CIA, which then spawned the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who drenched Chile in one of the bloodiest chapters in South American history. To this day, no one seems able to explain how such a horrendous and conscienceless glitch came to pass. Nor could any American administration that followed, provide a believable response to inspire future ones toward more honorable accomplishments. President George W. Bush had us invade Iraq, to find weapons of mass destruction he knew weren't there, when he said they were. Try justifying that as a reason for thousands of Americans to have died there or left parts of their bodies or souls there.
This commentator thinks President Obama truly believes he's doing the right thing to have American arms become part of an international effort to end Libyian brutality against its own citizens. But given the wisdom past experience has provided us, it's hard not to believe this, too, may well turn out to be just another war. Meantime, here's an impossible dream we might all happily share… that one day soon, world leaders of every stripe will declare another 'just' war… and absolutely no one will show up, to fight it.
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March 22, 2011
The words and actions of many important Americans, of late, have convinced this commentator we've reached a watershed moment in our nation's history. It's time to stop trivializing religion for political profit. Too many of our officials and representatives pay homage, while their actions belie their beliefs. In his "Varieties of Religious experience," William James urged that we act – "as if there were a God."
In the watershed to which I've referred, irreverence has become common practice – and the most common is indifference to the value of human life. Politicians cite it, endlessly, yet habitually annul their own words. At present, Republicans seem the most flagrant offenders and conservatives are their die-hard allies. Their mantra: Preserving the rights of the unborn, a monstrous political pretense, using every conceivable device to force the carrying of a fetus to term. Then, denying funds for and withholding the very essences of life and health from countless children, once they're born.
If there's a more tragic travesty than this one, it would have to be the relentless effort of hard-core zealots to re-distill a fraudulent falsehood born of absolute avarice, into the fabled fiction that today's America was a Christian nation, from its outset; a gross distortion of historical detail, impelled by disdainful design. When the priestly partners of profit-hungry Conquistadores came ashore, here, to sanctify their shared search for wealth with emblems of the Inquisition's enforced faith, they found a thriving confederacy of Amerind communities, whose citizens were more respectful of divine design, than those who would supplant them.
The recompense these native Americans earned for their coerced conversion was forced labor with residual outlays of baneful bonuses they'd never before encountered: venereal disease, alcoholism and tuberculosis – all added at no extra charge, to the loss of their freedom and human dignity. When presumptive clerics decided to make history a reasonable replica of their own prototype, they added injury to insult, abducting children from their Amerind parents in the name of a more pious purpose, much of it funded and pursued with government assistance. Those zealots still blindly determined to have us conform to religious practice that mostly existed in their own warped intent, would do well to seek guidance in the words of Patrick Henry who penned this, on religion, in the Virginia Bill of Rights: "The duty we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can only be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence: therefore all are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion as their conscience dictates… it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity toward each other.
This commentator isn't convinced we ever were that sort of nation but for certain, it's a religious practice we all should happily embrace.
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March 15, 2011
It's never been absolutely established, that Yogi Berra originated the phrase: "It was deja vu, all over again." But listening to news media play-backs of the opening of Long Island Congressman Peter King's hearings on 'Muslims and Terrorism,' in New York City, last week, the phrase returned again and again, to this commentator's memory; except this time, it wasn't at all funny. It was – in fact – frightening.
It's hard to believe that this coming April twenty-second, only five weeks from now, will mark fifty-seven years since the U.S. Senate's Sub-committee on Investigations inquisition, better known as "the Army-McCarthy Hearings; opened in our nation's Capitol. The title 'Hearings' itself was a travesty, because they were anything but. They were designed by Sub-committee Chairman, Senator Joe McCarthy, as a vengeful 'pay-back,' for the Army's release of details, on the shameful actions of the Senator's Chief Counsel, Roy M. Cohn, to extract special privileges and treatment for his friend and committee-consultant, Pvt. David M. Schine, who had been just drafted into military service. Unused to such overt pressures, the Army issued a detailed chronology of Cohn's unsavory arm-twisting shenanigans. The Senator then branded the Army's action, an attempt: " to deter his committee from exposing communists within the military's ranks." He even transferred his Chairman's gavel to South Dakota's G.O.P. Senator Karl Mundt and declared himself a "witness," believing that role would allow him to shock others into submissive silence, leaving him free to wave hinted lists of treasonous names, invoke groundless points of order and steal the hearings' limelight.
What the self-serving, duplicitous and despotic McCarthy hadn't counted on was, for-the-most-part, a still honestly inquisitive news media, not yet tainted by money madness and the unrestricted series of buyouts, that left them virtual captives of the corporate cabal, that a quasi-Quisling Supreme Court majority helped to install. Today's pre-scripted and corporate-controlled commercial radio and TV newscasts parrot points-of-view, as ordered by their possessors. There's no time on today's prejudiced channels of for-profit propaganda, for legendary muckrakers like Ed Murrow and a handful of other reporters and news directors, who shared his professional standards and courage.
This commentator still remembers with pride, hearing the righteous outburst of Special Counsel Joseph N. Welch, as he whip-lashed a hypocritical Senator McCarthy with the words: "Have you left no sense of decency, Senator?" And Democrat Senator Stuart Symington, in a later exchange with McCarthy, telling him: "The American people have had a look at you for six weeks. You're not fooling anyone." Alas, that was then. Now, without such voices to reawaken in today's Americans, a righteous indignation to reject an unearned and unjust sunami of prejudice, that's pushing this nation back toward a terrible precipice, from which this time, we may not be able to escape, one is left with the chilling recollection of "deja vu… all over again!"
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March 8, 2011
The author, Wilfred Sheed, once noted that suicide is the sincerest form of criticism. He might honestly have added a reverse version: that criticism often evokes that awful result. Some of the Democratic Party's most valuable assets are its specialized interests. 'Specialized' (as in: Fixated on single issues), as opposed to the "Special Interests," in pursuit of political profit and power, via pandering and pay-offs to leaders and key players in both political parties. The rub, here, lies in the arrogant and dangerous habit of many 'issue-oriented' liberal intellectuals, to censure and punish Democrat politicians, who fail to fulfill their issue demands: 'to the letter,' brushing aside proven party practice, based on the axiom: "It's sometimes better to settle for partial victory and return to gain the rest, at a later date." These 'all-or-nothing' bitter-enders put party leaders to egocentric 'loyalty tests,' in which failure earns annoyance and alas, too-often, defection.
Perhaps never in its history, has the 'Party-Of-The-People' faced the kind of determined, concerted and pervasive effort, as that now arrayed against it, to once-and-for-all, place this nation and its future firmly in control of the conservative/capitalist alliance and the corporate confederacy that bank-rolls it. Their ultimate goal, the indentured serfdom of middle-class workers and endless dependence of those mired in poverty, on the charity of do-gooders for "Good-for-nothing-people," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once put it.
What the Democratic Party absolutely cannot now afford, is the disapproval and/or departure of intellectual liberals, piqued at partial failures by its legislative legions to deliver total concession on issues, as they envision them. Now as never before, is the time for all-those who consider themselves 'progressives,' to mount a common effort. At stake is the right of all citizens, regardless of class, to have a voice in how this government: "Of, for and by the people," lives up to that definition.
In his "Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," the comic anti-hero, Laurence Sterne quoted him thusly: "Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting." In the battle already joined, to save the world's last best hope for a truly democratic nation, the Party Of The People cannot field a partial army. Veterans of the Specialized Interest legions can be key contenders in the coming battles. They need to put aside personal pique for the duration and assume vital roles, they've so ably filled in the past.
In an address at Cleveland, Ohio, just a few days after his fifty-second birthday, in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln said: "If we do not make common cause to save the good old ship of the Union on this voyage, nobody will have a chance to pilot her, on any other voyage." The context now may be different but in principle, totally apropos for carping specific issue critics to heed. For the sake of saving this Union for our children to inherit, we can only hope that they do.
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March 1, 2011
Today, this saddened commentator takes comfort from the words of one of the earliest great poets, the bard, Homer who observed: “”There is strength even in the union of very sorry men.” Eons before the United States was a nation, Homer understood the concept from which our national motto: “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” EVOLVED. But while the expression may have evolved, the concept did not. Whatever the cause that impels them, unions rarely evolve. They arise when individuals are moved by the utter logic of an idea or cause and unite in a common effort to make it a reality. Invariably that effort is spurred by a leader, earnest and impassioned enough not just to capture the sense of their intent but to inspire their devotion to it.
In The Iliad, Homer stressed that it was important for a truly persuasive leader to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. The gravity of that observation has become the source of this commentator’s sorrow. In events leading up to the past weekend, I’ve watched the worsening and futile struggle of working class Americans, against the stacked deck of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful, their corporate power brokers, political power panderers and judicial paladins on the nation’s highest court. As it became depressingly clear, that this unholy alliance has mounted an all-out onslaught, to destroy the independence of American workers, by depriving them of their vital defensive weapon, the right to collective bargaining, it was also apparent that only a determined response by a united workers’ alliance, could withstand the force brought to bear against them. But it was also depressingly evident, that their inspiring speaker of words and doer of deeds was missing.
Listening to a televised clip of our now President, Barak Obama, in a pre-election campaign speech promise, that should the right to Collective Bargaining by Labor Unions ever be threatened, he would don his walking shoes and join them on the picket line, to preserve this vital defense, it dawned on this commentator that our Chief Executive was not the leader we thought he was… a speaker, yes but also a political persuader, who (alas) has learned the practicum of “Go along to get along.”
The great founder and leader of Organized Labor, in America, Samuel Gompers was both a speaker and a doer, who claimed “the right of workers to be full sharers in the abundance that results from their brains and brawn.”
“It is the mission of the unions,” he said, “to bargain for the attainment of these.” Many leaders and followers, thereafter, have put their lives on the line to defend that bargaining right. Many are doing so now. Should the man they worked so hard to elect recall his promise and recant this fleeting but fatal lapse, his presence would still be welcomed where it belongs: at the head of the line where, to their credit, they still gather to march.
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February 15, 2011
In one of the most pointed observations of his many penetrating essays, the insightful Samuel Johnson made special note of the falsehoods that interest dictates and credulity encourages. The observation is much on this commentator’s mind, this President’s Day, as promoters of every sort of fiction seem bent on glorifying or destroying the public personae of targeted American heads of state: past and present. Most pointed, in recent days, has been the attempts to sully our current Commander-In-Chief, with the sly and persistent lie, that he’s a secret Muslim. A canard fermented from the snide analysis of remarks President OBamah made in an address to Muslim leaders in his first Middle-East trip after his inauguration. His detractors say his words sent listeners a coded message that he was one of them.
Such duplicity raises two urgent questions: First – Are there many Americans, stupid or hate-filled enough to believe such tripe? If so, are they willing to certify the basis for this conclusion? If they are, here are some others, even more damning: On the idiosyncratic side, there’s the defection of President John F. Kennedy who literally bragged to throngs of Germans on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’ – “ICH BIN EIN BERLINER,” which confused some, for whom ‘Berliner’ was also a slang term for “Jelly Donut.”
Far more treacherous was the treason of the now canonized and hallowed President Ronald Reagan who, en-route to a Normandy “D-Day” ceremony, made a side trip to a Bitburg cemetery, where he eulogized dead members of Adolf Hitler’s own SS Troops; blatantly beaming ‘Pro-Nazi’ sentiment, world-wide.
And while on the subject of falsehood driven by interest, let’s not forget, in this year of the ‘Reagan Legend’- made gospel, who really launched the initiative that vanquished Soviet supremacy to end the pro-Soviet dream of ghettoized collectives across Europe. It was then-President Harry S. Truman who, with General George Marshall, came up with the plan to prime Europe’s economic pump and revive its peoples’ personal pride with work and wherewithal. That miraculous model much resembles what our current President OBama seeks to apply, here and now, to reinvigorate a mordant American economy and the national malaise a prior administration imposed.
But pig-headed prejudice and pure political chicanery are imposing their own code of meanness on his plan, with open animosity by an ultra-conservative cabal with no secret code. Just their habitual brand of misplaced passion for mischief, plus faulty pronunciation, with which they attack Barak OBama – not to brand him a “Muslim” but to “MUSCLE-HIM” out of the running, altogether. Alas, their success would spell doom for the kind of democracy and prosperity that America misses and needs --- more than ever. If there’s a prayer of muscle left in our lean and lacking social conscience, now’s the time to flex it. Come on, Americans, let the world see your mettle once again.
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February 8, 2011
In a capitalist oriented ‘small-d’ democracy like ours, it’s altogether approropriate that from the outset, our real-politic has been accompanied by definitive catch-words, tied to its essence. Terms like “independence,” “liberty,” “freedom,” “rights,” are connected to its evolution. Reviewing our history as a nation, though, leads one to wonder about the constancy and geography of the meaning of these terms. Have they, perhaps, changed with time and tactics and the more nagging question: Do we apply them equally to individuals outside our boundaries?
To this observer, the present tense and the effect of regional cultures have made a noticeable difference in the way various groups of individuals across today’s U.S.A. interpret and apply the same terms.
As to those outside our borders, there’s an apparently noticeable difference in the meaning and influence of these terms and the weight and importance we give them. For more than half-a-century, to which this commentator can attest, American leaders of varying political persuasions and beliefs have used these terms to describe national goals and interests, reflecting a rationale, by which they have lent support to leaders and groups, in every area of the known world, whose actions have cast doubt on their and our understanding and belief in the same set of terms.
In 1845, writing in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one John Louis O’Sullivan wrote the following: “Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
This was what one so-called American, at that time, considered the entirely right and proper concept of all the aforementioned terms. As we think on this, think also, it was a time in which the place we now view as the great exemplar of independence and freedom hadn’t yet even stretched from sea to shining sea. In fact, many of those that “Providence” (so-called) had disinherited as its defenders, still roamed large portions of it and actually believed that the treaties its new discoverers had given them, were valid.
All of which gives one much to think about, as we watch and listen to manifold versions of the news, on this or any other evening, in the now year, Two Thousand and Eleven.
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January 18, 2011
In the last few fateful days, when no less a public personage than the Governor of Maine opined, he was too busy to attend this year’s Martin Luther King Day observance and those in the NAACP outraged by the slight, could “Kiss his butt,” this commentator couldn’t help but recall that Will Shakespeare put his all-knowing finger on the slur’s origin long ago, voicing the chagrin of Macbeth, for whom it wasn’t that easy to rid himself of a more perilous guilt, that weighed heavily on his heart.
The similarity in today’s stubborn inability of White Americans to erase the stain of race prejudice against African-Americans is uncanny but wholly understandable. No matter how much they desire their guilt to simply disappear, it continues to bedevil them. White Americans are forced to recall the guilt they must continue to carry, until skin color no longer colors their attitudes and responses, for whatever reason.
It’s all-important for all of us to recall, that it was once illegal for African-Americans to read or write our language. Every barrier to equality that African-Americans were forced to accept and then overcome was the result of a national action, designed to force and maintain their enslavement. What is perhaps most difficult for Whites to accept is the fact that the barriers erected by a White supremacist society were overcome by African-Americans, in spite of that society’s efforts to maintain them. Martin Luther King and the outstanding African-Americans who preceded and followed him are salient but still too few examples, to prove the color of prejudice no longer matters, to White Americans.
The Reverend Martin Luther King had a dream, that some day, acceptance of African –Americans in this nation would be based not on their color but their capabilities. Until that dream becomes a reality, for every capable African-American, Barak Obama and others like him must remain exceptions, whose color continues to rankle some White Americans. Not all but enough, to make race prejudice a problem for all Americans.
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January 11, 2011
The Roman satirist and poet, Horace, penned many axioms worth remembering but two in particular stick in this commentator’s mind, at present. The first: “Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled;” and the other: “It’s your concern, when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.” Both are especially relevant, as we contemplate the start of New York State’s newest Governor’s term and his promise of reform.
Representatives of so-called ‘Good-Government’ groups have pointedly noted the need for a Constitutional Convention to ratchet ethics reform, before State officials and political pundits take up the mandated task of re-drawing maps of the state’s voting districts. They point up the need to break the hold of the same old clique of power-brokers, on a process they’ve too-long controlled. In the litany of his assertions, our new Governor has included views of agreement, at least in principle. For this observer, the subject of such much needed reform raises the first sour note in a chorus of sanguine sounds. The discord emanates from the falsetto of former New York City Mayor, the egocentric Ed Koch, who suddenly seeks to superimpose his cacophonous dissonance on a performance which can only affirm its alien sound. A hideous harangue by this dyed-in-the-wool ‘Down-stater’ can only re-affirm the divisive effect of his pointed incivility, during a previous appearance.
In that weird charade, Koch chanted insults about ‘up-state apple knockers, in flannel shirts and gingham dresses,’ also about the area’s dearth of decent eateries, among other insulting references. His quavering attempt, now, to insert a new sound would surely add the effect of a cracked bell, to a concord of serious intent, bent on caroling the harmonious concept of one state, indivisible. In this case, any note from the voice-box of a self-seeking changeling like Ed Koch is better left unsung.
As to the assumption of shared responsibility, when a neighbor’s wall is on fire, what better example can be found, to impress the rabble of disparate temperaments in the teeming cities, states and regions in this, still fledgling experiment of “E Pluribus Unum,” that what hurts one, hurts all. The soul searing events of recent violence, visited on governmental officials and innocent citizens of our nation are stark reminders of the stake we all share, in this fragile experiment. Our leaders, especially, need to be mindful that the words they speak can have consequences for all and once spoken are not retrievable. Our mutual respect, though, is and their examples are more necessary than ever before, to help us regain it.
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January 4, 2011
The New Year traditionally being a time for resolutions, the outset of two-thousand and eleven finds this commentator inexorably drawn to a resolve, the lack of which rankles him more than any other in recent memory. The reason being, perhaps, the sanctimonious air of an incoming Republican congressional majority, misreading a scattered and ill-defined spate of voter anger, as a reason to reemphasize the shop-worn bag of resolutions they’ve been peddling, for the better part of the previous decade. Much of which, by-the-way, was the basis for the Second Great American Depression, which seems to have been erroneously misidentified as a “RE-cession,” by those with the least lost, as a result of it.
The gritty persistence, with which the apparent new G.O.P. congressional leadership touts its resolve, for this commentator recalls a quip, Samuel Johnson is said to have expressed, in 1770, that every man naturally persuades himself, he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility either by the length of time or frequency of experiment. In any case, this commentator is more-than-a-little nettled by the incessant deception, in which an apparently aroused corps of Republican congressional leaders and some cowardly ‘go-along’ Democrat members resolve to save Social Security, which they’ve discovered, to their horror, is in imminent danger of insolvency.
The financial deficiency they seem, so late to have noticed, has actually existed for some time and it’s not only strange but downright deceitful for them to sound an alarm, about a shortage they’ve not only known about from the outset but actually helped to create. The late New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called attention to it more than several decades ago, when he warned the then President, Ronald Reagan and leaders of both Houses of Congress, that the fraudulent practice of using the inviolable funds of Social Security for otherwise unaffordable and questionable purposes, and replacing them with I.O.U’s, would someday spell financial ruin for the system and the loss of public trust in their government, by Americans. That day has not only come and gone but those who’ve hastened its coming have known about it and continue the shoddy practice, to this day.
The scam is made even more onerous by its perpetrators’ knowledge, there’s no existing fiscal process, outside of passing the burden of debt and additional borrowing to cover it, to future generations of American children and grandchildren, who by then, may well be unable to do so. So much for the moans, groans and crocodile tears, of the incoming G.O.P. leadership, about their insistence on reducing the current debt load for as yet unborn Americans. They know, full well, the I.O.U’s they’ve left in Social Security’s so-called “Locked Box,” right now, are simply worthless pieces of paper. The real tragedy is revealed in the tax breaks they’ve promised to make permanent, for a small but special minority of patrons, who already possess a piggish percentile of our national wealth, at the expense of too many others, who need and have earned a right to it.
For far too long, now, finaglers in top leadership posts of federal administrations have bankrolled ventures outside the sanctioned province of the normal national budgetary process, by siphoning them from the sacrosanct safety of Social Security’s so-called “Locked Box” and covering their withdrawals with promises, that encumber future generations of Americans to repay. The honchos of the recent Bush/Cheney administration were the most flagrant miss-users of this devious process, to cover a multitude of unworthy and unseemly ventures. Now, an unholy alliance of power inheritors seeks to continue the shoddy process, in the name of fiscal conservatism and fiduciary flimflammery. It’s time for the multitude of a wised-up and fired-up citizenry to demand, that once-and-for-all, their government change and secure the lock, on Social Security’s ‘Locked Box.’
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December 28, 2010
In a letter to a friend, Mark Twain once wrote: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is a really large matter --- it’s the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.” In a recent appearance before an audience at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, two eminent U.S. Supreme Court Justices, now retired, missed a chance to strike true lightning, plus a blow for true reform of our educational system. Instead, they spent more than an hour of what could have been valuable time, giving clap-trap a look of praiseworthy provocative eloquence.
Former Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter were on a truly praiseworthy mission: to rescue the curriculum of ‘Civics’ from the ash-heap of subjects, discarded by the Bush-Cheney administration’s mad dash to ‘Leave-no-child-behind,’ in a rush to produce the world’s largest and most productive corps of Math and Science mavins ever tested. They’d discovered, many schools were dropping ‘Civics’ from curricula, to provide faculty more time to meet teaching-to-the-test requirements, for students under pressure to make-the-grade. Now both are inspired to return “Civics” to its once respected position, in the knowledge pantheon of America’s High School graduates. A noble quest but fraught with impossibility, if one is determined to give students a true picture of the subject, in today’s power-brokered and morals-mortgaged political culture.
In a nearly two-hour duo-recitation of ideas and suggested approaches to putting the subject on a par with the computerized gamesmanship, used to keep student-interest glued to the test-result-quotients of Math and Science curricula, neither justice bothered to mention that the High Court, itself, has placed the machinery of our working governmental system under the ironhanded rule of corporate and other institutionally dominated powers, to whom congressional leaders of both major parties are monetarily tethered. To put it bluntly, those who own the major means of telling citizens the way things really are and who-decides-what, in this so-called democratic (small-‘D’) republic, have the same status as private citizens, except their money allows them the power to drown all the singular voices out. They also pretty much now dictate how and how-high, elected leaders in both major political parties jump, when power-brokers demand it.
So despite the inspired efforts of two astute and sincere former U.S. Supreme Court Justices and several hundred movers and shakers of American political theory, gathered at the J.F.K. Presidential Library, plus thousands of us, tuned in to the miraculous montage of C-Span, the question remains: What could any Civics teacher teach students, about how politics and government really work and how they should relate to them, after comparing what they’re allowed to teach, with the sordid reality students daily ingest, from the high-tech lightning bug computers, that the Bush-Cheney ‘Magic Carpet Curriculum’ has already provided them? Mark Twain had much to say about our politics and he was right on the mark, with all of it. He likened political speech to thunder. Thunder is impressive, he noted but it’s lightning that does the work.
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December 21, 2010
Reading details of the historic congressional vote to end the offensive, insulting and unjust “Don’t Ask, Don/t tell” policy, of the United States Armed Services, this commentator couldn’t help but think of the perceptive and wide ranging observation, made more than five hundred years earlier, by Martin Luther: “Superstition, idolatry and hypocrisy have ample wages,” he noted, “but truth goes a-begging.”
One was particularly reminded of it, by the totally fallacious and unpatriotic defensive assaults repeatedly launched against the policy’s repeal, by the Senator and “once” military hero, John McCain, who simply couldn’t grasp the undeniable similarity, in untoward sexual behavior by any members of the military, who exhibit the same disruptive antics, regardless of their gender: ‘Gay’ or ‘Straight.’ If his own actions prior to his experience as a Viet Cong prisoner are criteria, the Senator should know better.
Justice has also gone a-begging, in the senseless and viciously cruel denial of citizenship to the most deserving and promising, would-be Americans: those brought here as children, who then attended our schools with other young American students, now pass rigorous background checks and willingly make themselves available for military or other public service. A denial, born of purely cantankerous political one-upmanship, on the part of hard nosed G.O.P. senators, many of whose own constituents, already citizens, couldn’t meet such rigid requirements, if they had to. The senatorial miscreants who killed this eminently just and honestly patriotic piece of legislation, should be exposed to the demeaning public shame they deserve, for such un-American behavior.
Public service and sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of offering to put oneself in harm’s way for one’s country, is worthy of the most honorable and honored recognition given to any citizen or aspiring citizen, by any political official of this allegedly great nation. Those of us who bear witness to these actions, including this unabashed ‘Liberal,’ must continue to believe there’s still hope for its greatness to evolve. Why else, would so many outsiders persist in risking life and limb, to become part of it? It’s time for all who understand this, to bear witness to the begging truths, for which Martin Luther grieved. Perhaps then, the dream for which we all continue to yearn may yet become a reality, in which we all can take justifiable pride, together.
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November 16, 2010
No one seems to have been more correctly ‘on the money,’ about America, than Alexis de Tocqueville. The love of wealth, he noted, can be traced as the principal motive of all that Americans do. What makes this observation so discouraging is its current connection to those we’ve depended on, to identify the most flagrant exemplars: our news media, once touted as the tireless divulgers of truth. Now, it seems, they and especially their electronic partners are the vanguard of the acquisition sweepstakes. Once fixated on being first responders, in the rush to reveal the most money-hungry amassers of ill gotten gain, our news media have now literally muscled the fiercest pursuers out of contention, in their own mad rush to the top of the profiteers pile.
Worsening the dearth of trust is the application of technology, not to enhance the speedy revelation of the most flagrant money mongers but to confound it. If there’s a new gimmick or gadget that can make it easier to pack more return-per-impulse-per minute-per-transmission, you can bet the moguls of the blandly misnamed electronic “news” media will utilize it, to the utmost.
To make matters even worse, the explosive growth of technology is yet another means by which any money-hungry medium can cadge callous coinage, without having to vouch for the verity of its product. Creating mirror-image projection with connected computers, electronic “news” media (so-called) can now physically manipulate people, to suit its own concocted scripts. Now, in the all-out battle for communications conquest, truth becomes the first real casualty.
So what’s a fact-hungry citizen to do? Believe the faceless bloggers and Facebook finaglers, who come to us on faith and their own “trust-me” intent? Until enough of us demand that our buck-beleaguered Congress un-tether itself from the addictive teat of corporate sweetsop and put the needs of ordinary Americans ahead of all other considerations, regardless of party politics or personal power, we’re doomed to wallow in the never-never land of finagle and fiction, dished up by the dollar driven disseminators of what once made American news media the envy of the world. For now, though, facts we really need to know are just another product America has outsourced for money, that a mostly unworthy few of us will actually ever see.
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November 9, 2010
If this commentator were to reveal some vivid impressions he retains from the mid-term elections, just past, most certainly one would have to be that of the quasi-elderly TV actress in one anonymously sponsored ad, lambasting Congressman Scott Murphy for a spate of mostly fictional improprieties, that her libelous script accused him of and practically spitting the prediction that come election day, he’d be “Fired!” Now, I find myself wondering what will become of her Medicare and Social Security benefits, once the Congressman’s successor takes over?
Of course it was just "a gig" to her and she was reading the script she was given but that’s the point with actors, isn’t it and perhaps there’s a lesson in this for all of us, when we’re faced with the prospect of allowing an actor to assume an actual role, for which our founders established this system of selecting and investing leaders with the power of actual governance. For an actor, when – if ever – does the acting leave off?
In the case, say of a Ronald Reagan, whose script allowed him to identify ordinary members of his own union, some of whom simply might have signed some petition for a friend, as out-and-out Communists and supporters of Soviet espionage. Or after Hitler’s terrible tyranny, to pay homage, not to those of his own fellow citizens who fought and died for freedom but members of The Fuhrer’s own hated Waffen SS, at a Bitburg memorial ceremony, without a simple "oops" or "sorry, wrong script!"
Now the problem for that actress and those many gullible members of TV’s ‘dumbed-down’ audience she swayed is how they’ll react to the reality of the chaos they’ve helped to create, especially when they’re numbered among its victims. True, Adolph Hitler was one of history’s worst tyrants but in one respect, he was smarter by far, than too many of today’s well-meaning but I-Pod addicted Americans. "The great masses of the people…" Hitler said, "will more easily fall victim to a big lie, than to a small one…" and the one’s told abut Congressman Murphy were whoppers.
One also can’t help but wonder if the members of our U.S. Supreme Court, who voted to legalize those anonymous, libelous media ads were aware of this piece of wisdom, before they approved its use for certain favored Americans?
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November 2, 2010
If there is a fault to be found with the way in which President Barak Obama led his party’s campaign for the all-important mid-term election of 2010, this commentator would have to say that the President, himself a former professional organizer, neglected the principles of his own profession. When he at last awoke to the need, what he brought to the task was too little and too late, to be either credible or compelling. His flaw is even more tragic, because it also reveals a primary principle he also overlooked: While money is essential to every election campaign, people can be more effective. As William H. White put it, those of the great middle class who take on the vows of its organizations are the mind and soul of our greatest self-perpetuating institutions. Having convinced literally millions of willing volunteers to join his cause, the President then failed to fully include them in the most important tasks he faced.
Can this President still persuade his many essential volunteers to rejoin the cause he initially convinced them to adopt? Perhaps, if he can also convince them they’re essential to its triumph. This commentator hasn’t always agreed with the widely respected General, Douglas MacArthur; except for his one cogent statement: “There’s no substitute for victory.” Easy to believe, because it’s true. Barak Obama launched his Presidential campaign with a series of slogans that touched and ignited the spirits of young people who were distrustful and hostile to a milieu, that bore no resemblance to the clichéd picture of America their parents offered. But slogans don’t make history. They’re only its incendiaries. Aroused people make history. Their re-arousal is still Barak Obama’s to accomplish. Those who understand this, pray he still can.
On October 19th, 1915, in one of the great deliberate miscarriages of American justice, the Swedish immigrant labor organizer, Joseph Hillstrom (better known to American Labor history as ‘Joe Hill,’) was deliberately and wrongfully executed for a crime with which he had no connection, by seditious Salt Lake City law officers, seeking to cover their own illicit actions. As supporters gathered to mourn Hillstrom’s death, a message he’d left for them was delivered. It read: “Don’t waste any time grieving. Organize!”
Whatever the outcome of today’s elections, important as they admittedly are. The message to President Obama and those who claim to want a more inclusive and responsive government for all Americans is still clear and valid: “Don’t waste time grieving or bickering. Organize!”
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October 26, 2010
At this time and date, most members of the news media are too fixated on the many facets of the looming mid-term elections and the utterances and activities of candidates and the possible impacts on their outcomes, to pay attention to much else. This commentator’s involvement in a much more intense experience, with more extensive and longer lasting results, more than sixty years earlier, impels his attention to the date of November 11th, but a few days later and the nation’s observance of Veterans Day; which supposedly notes the price of our electoral freedom and honors those who paid for its continuance, many with their very lives. As a combat radio operator, in World War II, I was hugely concerned with the speedy transmission of urgent messages, so the great advances in technology that enhance today’s transmission speed and distance are of intense interest to me. They’ve also driven home an even more compelling truth: Code is of critical importance, to sending a message. But it adds little or no value to human discourse and for the citizens of this once great democratic republic, discourse is now a critical commodity, in dangerously short supply.
Command of codes and their conveyance has made us masters of transmitting our values and outsourcing our monetary manipulations world-wide. But for crucially lacking communication with each other, code is a rampant killer of conversation. Once the world’s only nation with a citizenry of diverse opinions but unshakable unity of good-will, all of our negativism, anger, incivility and disunity now stems from our inability to discuss differences in a language of shared mutual respect. We can and must recapture, through discourse, what once made us the envy of the world. We can do this with simple adherence to a ‘Three-‘D’-Rule: “Don’t Discourage Discussion!” Then, add this simple guide-line: Show each other the same respect we’d wish for ourselves.
The American men and women we’ll all be honoring, on November eleventh (just a few days after the elections), have come from all races, backgrounds, religions and opinions but they have and had a commonly held human value: respect for each other and the nation they share. Sure, there were and will always be the few stubborn and destructive dissenters among us but an overwhelming majority has kept their shared mutual respect strong and alive. It’s given them the strength of will to serve and sacrifice, with honor.
Fellow Americans, you owe our veterans no less in return. This debt is the easiest you’ll ever be asked to repay and if you only take the time to think about it, You and your descendants will also inherit the irreplaceable value it accrues. One of America’s greatest but less appreciated pop composers, Johnny Mercer, put the mind-set I’m urging into an unforgettable song, that recently enjoyed a live land-mark revival. As you listen to Mel Torme and George Shearing reprise it, take the words to heart. Don’t let them be the last good advice we failed to heed.
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October 19, 2010
It’s generally acknowledged, that where outright concoction and malicious uncivility are concerned, the current political campaigns, at all levels, are flagrant examples. One such seems to have blossomed, between the second longest serving and most powerful State Senate Republican, after Joe Bruno, Senator Hugh Farley and the Democrat leader of the Schenectady County Legislature, seeking to unseat him, Susan Savage, whose burgeoning attack barrages are proving to be harshly illustrative of her name.
While there’s no denying the extent of their unpleasantness, there’s something to be said for some elements of truth involved. Farley simply writes her verbal onslaughts off as slander but as former President, Abraham Lincoln once noted: “Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.” And on this point, the Senator registers stark failure.
Savage has finally picked up on an issue long pursued by this commentator, when he headed New York State common Cause; also by the resolute leader of NYPRG, Blair Horner: the blatant misuse by Farley and other legislators of the franking privilege, to send patently brazen campaign broadsides, as information for constituents, at taxpayer expense. To this day neither Senate nor Assembly leaders have ever provided an accounting of the millions they’ve thus written off, for their own political purposes. Farley fills his fliers with flat-out shots in typical campaign-mode photo-op poses, which he defines as important State Government information.
Obviously, New York State’s legislative leaders are so certain they’re invulnerable on this issue, they just continue to ignore all references to it, as Senator Farley does. True to her sobriquet, though, Susan Savage isn’t easily diverted from purpose. She’s now added the more insulting charge of ‘falsehood’ to the Senator’s sins-list and while the impetus for this stems from untrue statements, she claims he made about her record, there may be more serious proof she hadn’t counted on. In a flurry of Farley-TV spots just released, one of them shows the Senator boasting of job-producing businesses he claims to have drawn to his district, that allowed entrepreneurs to claim corporate tax credits for many new jobs created, via enablement he helped pass, to provide them. Five years ago the New York Times reported that more than three thousand New York State businesses had bilked the state out of millions by taking tax credits for jobs that never existed. Many were warned of disqualification, if the practice continued. A more recent story, in a Capital District paper, reported much of the bilking still goes on, with few jobs created but millions in corporate tax credits taken and allowed, by corrupt government connivance. As a facilitator of such practices, if he was, the Senator could be in serious trouble. After all, we have his own boasts about it, captured on TV for everyone to see.
How did H.G. Welles put it? Lies, he said, are the mortar that binds the savage individual into the social masonry. There may not be a Savage (capital-S) involved here. But in this case, the mortar appears to be clinging to her opponent’s feet.
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October 12, 2010
Long before anyone scratched a quill to paper, there was the human voice. A runner brought the news of a great victory from the plain of Marathon but it wasn’t a written message. He gasped it with his last breath. Eons before the spark of Marconi’s wireless or the truncated I-pad code of “l-o-l” arced through space, town criers capped the time of night with “All’s well,” as they made their rounds. Not only news but sagas and astute advice, verdicts and verse were carried from town to town and country to country by savants and raconteurs, narrators who added color and emotion to epics and epigrams. What they aired was more than the words conveyed. It was the impact of ideas and impressions that moved humans to higher realms of understanding and expression… gave them the ability to convey their thoughts and feelings.
Now at the zenith of incredible technological accomplishment, we’ve gained the ability both to move and to communicate with unbelievable speed and diversity. In the process and as a result of it, profiteers whose resources and initiative made such accomplishment possible have blunted the very sensibilities that endowed us with comprehension and caring. Those still able to perceive this call its victims members of “a dumbed-down society.” More tragically, though, it is also a numbed-down society, devoid of the feelings that give birth to great ideas and also incapable of expressing them.
When the emperor of China sent his first plenipotentiary ambassador to the United States, the then President, Theodore Roosevelt gave a state dinner in his honor and invited the most important figures of finance, corporate business and industry as guests, among them the great financier and budding railroad tycoon, J.P. Morgan, who immediately set out to impress the far-eastern visitor with America’s accomplishments. “Do you know, Mr.
Ambassador, our newest train just knocked three and a half minutes off the transcontinental record for travel, coast-to-coast!” gloated Morgan. “Ah so, three and a half minutes,” the Ambassador replied. “And what will you do with them?” Abashing Morgan to stunned silence.
Today’s technology has by far surpassed that early train’s accomplishment, outstripping its record by light years. Alas, though, the same question confronts us and now lacks an additional answer: Not only what will we do with them? But who will be able to do it?
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September 28, 2010
When Karl von Klausewitz observed that war is merely a continuation of politics by other means, he was so right. Take it from one who’s been involved in both, except for the mortality factor, there’s little difference between them; especially from the perspective of the participants. There are honest-to-goodness patriots, out to give their all for a cause; hard-nut patriots who see the enemy as less-than-human and all related ethnicities as equally evil and therefore objects of equal hatred; conscientious citizens who consider their involvement a civic duty and pursue it with quiet competence. Then, there are the glib tough talkers, who treat each situation as another political possibility.
The once Navy pilot, now U.S. Senator, John McCain, it seems, is one of these. His terrible ordeal as a long-suffering, brutalized prisoner of the Viet Cong, notwithstanding, some of his comrades remember him as a hot-shot, girl chaser who played fast and loose with rules, to get the most out of every social or political possibility and often succeeded. The senator’s current concern over the prospect that allowing Gays or Lesbians into military service could have a negative effect on morale, unit cohesion and efficacy reveals a total lack of understanding about the true nature of the Armed Forces in which he has served. Several factors affirm this: First, he completely ignores the point that while improper attitudes or behavior can have a damaging effect on unit cohesion and morale, the gender of those who exhibit them is irrelevant. The same effect can result from improper behavior by anyone, as some of McCain’s own past actions might have done. Also ignored is the question of priorities, in which the Senator allows his obvious prejudice to outweigh critical needs that competent and dedicated professionals of any gender could alleviate. Would he have denied his own possible rescue and that of others from being attempted, except by military personnel selected on the basis of gender? At a time when all military services are hard pressed to offset crucial shortages, such blind bias is unconscionable.
Several thousand dedicated and highly professional Gay and Lesbian members of the military, who’ve already risked their lives to provide critical combat service, have been expelled, worsening serious shortages of military personnel. For a political opportunist to play ‘Russian-Roulette’ with military needs he claims to understand and incite fears he should know are unwarranted, is the kind of false patriotism and politics this nation cannot afford nor should we tolerate. It’s a short and deadly step from gender bias to prejudice against physical traits, ethnic intolerance and racism. We all know where they lead. That step must be altered, now.
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September 21, 2010
It’s interesting that of all the avowed change-agents, angry citizens and political figures who now seem bent on reforming New York State’s government, by every means from cleansing to reconstituting it, not a single reference has been made to a demand, that those currently practicing willful acquisition and misuse of taxpayer funds cease and desist from such dishonest practices. Members of the New York State Legislature have been employing criminal acts of deceit to obtain services and revenue amounting to millions of dollars, for decades, in fact continue to do so with impunity, without a word of complaint from any source. The means used for this deceit is the fraudulent misuse of the franking privilege and the deliberate falsification of materials to legitimize it.
A typical example of this deception is a recent piece mailed by State Senator Hugh Farley and identified as a “Report On The State Budget.” In fact, the few bits of information included were already available from other state agency sources. On opening this so-called “Report,” other panels reveal it to be a blatant piece of campaign literature, replete with pictures of the Senator and slogans proclaiming him a watchdog and defender of taxpayer interests. This piece of outright promotional campaign material then compounds the original fraud of misnomer, by being sent at taxpayer expense which literally means that voters who even oppose the Senator’s election are forced to pay for promoting it, without their consent.
Fraudulent misnomering and misuse of campaign materials by State legislators of both parties has been an arrogant standard practice for years, at taxpayer expense literally running into millions of dollars. An expense, by the way, that the legislature has assiduously kept unreported. At a time when the Governor is struggling with the prospect of having to lay off state workers who actually perform necessary services, such fraudulent deceit is truly criminal and should be treated as such.
The millions of dollars already siphoned from taxpayers without their knowledge or consent could have averted New York’s current budget crisis. Until taxpayers demand to know how much has been stolen from them by this ruse and for how long and insist that the practice cease, New York State legislators will continue to fleece the people whose interests they’re supposed to protect and no matter who wins the next election, New Yorkers will still be the losers.
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September 14, 2010
The tragic consequence of the barbaric Bible-burning threat by the contemptible, self-seeking and irreverent-counterfeit Pastor Terry Jones is deeper and direr than any slur-stirring headline or ratings-rousing TV tripe can convey. That this egotistical obviously un-Christian culprit was bent on a bald-faced blackmail scheme is as conspicuous as the oxymoronic name of the bogus Dove World Outreach Center he claims to represent. The shattering reality of this calamitous carnival is the totally self-serving way in which even the most pretentious journalistic organs and electronic news outlets dropped all pretense of reportorial responsibility, to stimulate the story’s most catastrophic prospects. Readership and ratings were their overt aims. Compounding the mercenary media’s mindless fall from grace was the pusillanimous pandering of politicians and public officials, none of whom could find the words for requisite rhetorical responses or critically lacking countermeasures.
It took little brainpower or backbone to remind all concerned of the chary churchman’s First-Amendment right to make such a detestable threat and even, if were he daft enough, to carry it out. What no political leader or public official had the courage to utter was the correct and necessary response, that the certain and catastrophic result of such a threat and even more-so of its fulfillment, must and would compel the speedy, most effective application of deterrent power and punitive justice available. No leader, from the Commander-In-Chief, down and no reporter, of any media outlet involved, could say the totally appropriate words, that not only would send a clear message to Americans, their government was in safe and steady hands but to friend and foe world-wide, that this is still a government they can count on for the right actions, at the right time.
The choleric cleric, Terry Jones, has confirmed what our founders warned us about, early on. Given time and opportunity, self-sanctified theocratic tyrants will surely elevate themselves, from being a deity’s official spokesperson, to acting as a deity’s surrogate.
Benjamin Franklin issued a warning that became the Constitutional basis for a strong separation of church and state in this nation. Any religion, he wrote, that must depend on civil authority for support is a bad one. Slowly but surely, our government has become overly enmeshed in the exertions and affairs of organized religion. Agents of organized religions are also exerting greater influence on our government than ever before.
Religious belief and practice is the personal right of every individual American but he or she must afford the same right to every other American, without reservation. Reverend Jones’s threat and announced intent reveal him to be no different than the Islamist terrorists he condemns but more than that, they have confirmed his determination to commit a hate crime. Others have been apprehended and charged on lesser evidence. Failure of appropriate officials to do so, in this instance, makes a mockery of American justice. We must salvage whatever tattered remnants of it are still redeemable, now.
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September 7, 2010
Yesterday, Labor Day, September sixth, this commentator found the world he thought he knew turned upside down. Throughout my youth, I remember the watchword of the revolution by which we became a nation, a revolution all the experts predicted we were doomed to lose, was a simple declarative statement: “United we stand; divided we fall.”
On this labor day, 2010, we were anything but, preceded by the letter’D.’ The former ‘united’ states is being rent asunder by a disdainful, deceitful, discordant and destructive populace. What’s more, it’s become a populace for which the operative phrase is not: “out of many, one” but “one, in spite of many.”
We seem to have entered a new age, the era of the singular super-hero; the egocentrist who spits in the eye of the time-worn tradition of togetherness, that enabled us to become the most prodigious, prosperous and provocative nation on this planet. What’s more, our newly minted superheroes seem to be admired, not so much for their accomplishments but for the brazen and boorish behavior they exhibit, in the new personae they acquire as a result of them.
The elements most relevant to this impulsive, flourishing social-eccentricity are speed and money… a driving desire for instant answers, results and gratification, paced by both the acquisition and expenditure of capital, with little apparent concern over how it’s obtained. The evidence of its attraction is the span of its allure, with ardent addicts among religious zealots, political pursuers, media moguls and especially, those hungry for the high that fame for its own sake and no other reason brings.
The procession of put-downers itching to divide us for conquest seemingly grows with each passing day. Even more mind boggling is a readiness to place trust in champions with little to offer, except distortion, disrespect and disaffection. The trashing of people desperate for the right and opportunity to find honest work at a decent wage is prime proof. It’s no coincidence, that foreign cars, once models of production excellence and now crowding U.S. factory yards with recall flaws, were assembled in states that acquired them with promises of freedom from union-organization, enforced by law.
These are the same smug pietists who insult Christian ethics with unchristian falsity and concocted concern for a middle class, they claim will be saved by the charitable response of religious rich-folk, as their tax-cut plates are passed.
When he composed The Liberty Song, in 1768, John Dickenson wrote: “Join hand-in-hand brave Americans all; united we stand, divided we fall.” Well, it worked for a country, why not its workers? Who knows, “Made in America” just might come to mean something special again.
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August 24, 2010
Whomever it was that observed: “Change is certain, progress is not,” couldn’t have been more incisive. If there was ever a measure of the lack of progress made in religious tolerance, since the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, in 1692, the present uproar over construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center, in downtown New York City is pointed proof of what Somerset Maugham described in his Writer’s Notebook as “the cruel things men do for the love of God.”
One would think that when Thomas Jefferson outlined legislation for religious tolerance in the State of Virginia, with these words in 1782: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods , or no God,” that we were on a progressive path toward tolerance of personal religious preference and or practice but if anything, we’ve retrogressed.
We are now at a place in time, where every American citizen must make a choice; not in his or her own personal preference for or against a specific religious belief but whether or not they will respect the right of others to maintain the same privilege, even though it may differ from theirs. Our retrogressions have made this almost an impossibility, since most views are based not on fact but pure, willfully insistent prejudice. To make matters even worse, religious provocateurs of almost every denomination have reconfigured the issue, shrouding it in political camouflage, with the introduction of insidious references to terrorist connections and associations; unproved but disquieting enough to generate emotional angst, which is their calculated intent. The aim, to mute the will of elected officials who might tend toward a different view.
It’s the so-called infallibility of Christian doctrine and the singular power of its affirmation, in the hands of ‘fallible’ humans, that has created the current impasse. Similarly, the tenacious attachment of certain Jewish sects to their own theocracy, excluding Jews with differing viewpoints, is as dogmatic and detrimental as the most inflexible Islamic code they claim to decry and oppose. Unwillingness to accept the Constitutional emphasis on a universal right to any or no personal religious belief and practice, plus the steadfast separation of any religious dogma or doctrine, from governmental intrusion, is the crucial component we all lack, to resolve the current religious dilemma that bedevils us. Frankly, erecting any meeting place in which those of differing beliefs might gather to learn about each other and perhaps, even initiate some form of peaceable mutual tolerance, would not only represent a miraculous achievement but one worth every effort, to make it a reality. Such an edifice would ennoble and enshrine this precinct of pain forever.
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August 17, 2010
In his analysis of the method of Leonardo DaVinci, the poet/mathematician, Paul Valery wrote, that the folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths is inborn in us. This commentator was sadly reminded of this by an article by Jacob Weisberg, in the most recent issue of Newsweek magazine. In the piece, titled “Palinism 101,” adapted from a book he edited: “Palinisms – The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin,” Weisberg asks (and wryly attempts to answer) the question: “Is her babble scary or just funny?” He then proceeds to devalue his own proof, with the denigration, that: “Palinisms consist of a unitary stream of populist blather--- Fox News without the punctuation,” as he puts it.
Cheapened from the start, by its appearing to be a promo for his own volume, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Weisberg further devalues the piece; missing the most important point of the answer to his own question, in an effort to achieve a clever put-down. It’s not that his assessment of Palin’s “blather” or Fox News’s shoddy ethics is wrong. His all-out attempt to malign both impels him to overlook a larger and more frightening truth.
This commentator believes that although much of the negative assessment by pundits is valid, Sarah Palin actually serves an important and chillingly necessary purpose, for which thoughtful Americans should not only be grateful but strongly concerned about. She is an awesomely accurate barometer of America’s current dumbed-down national intellect. If, as many pundits and pollsters seem to have determined, Sarah Palin’s following is as broad and varied as they claim, our social fabric has decomposed to a dangerous level. In the plainest and most explicit context, our political fate is on the brink of being determined by elements of our society, motivated and willing to abandon bellwether standards and beliefs, on which this republic and its most revered concepts and institutions were established.
It’s not enough, though, just to identify and characterize Sarah Palin’s appeal as a sorry sign of the times. Someone has to assume responsibility for our having sunk to this level. First and most compelling has been the pure-profit motive, which produced and huckstered the technical gadgetry, with which corporate capital has captivated and addicted our populace; enslaved them to the many manipulative indebtednesses of the ‘company store;’ made us abandon the tradition of ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ by which we’ve achieved ever higher levels of comprehension and accomplishment, for all of our society. Alas, we’ve allowed and encouraged this for the convenient comfort of impermanent things, over the practical and lasting profit that honest collaboration provides.
Now, we teeter on the brink of a national intellectual abyss, in which the sounds of Me! My! And Mine! over ride the verbal promise our founders made, to extend the fruits of our mutual strivings to a deferential and deserving populace of partners.
The ultimate answer to Weisberg’s question won’t come from Sarah Palin, her Palinisms or the impertinent and impermanent Palinist coterie. As with all of this nation’s most important questions, the ultimate answer must come from us… All of us.
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August 10, 2010
In his Oxford History of the American People, Samuel Eliot Morrison points out that America was accidentally discovered by someone who was actually looking for something else. When discovered, it wasn’t wanted, in fact most of the next fifty years afterward were spent seeking a way around it. He also noted that America was named after someone who discovered no part of it. History is like that, he wrote, very chancy.
Those now raising a hue and cry for the rest of us to “Take our country back!,” tend to overlook this. They urge a return to a time (by their account) when the rights and privileges of citizenship were restricted to White, Christian, native-born Americans. To set the record straight, the only native Americans were members of aboriginal tribes who considered themselves custodians of lands which White, mostly Christian explorers either conquered or obtained by fraud or legal flim-flam; enabling them not only to divest the natives of custody but turn them into stateless wards and victims of an endless campaign of expatriation, domination and decimation, through institutionalized disinterest.
If those who would return to renowned tradition truly desire reliving a time in which we all can rejoice, they should rediscover and re-explore what it was our ancestral pioneers came here to find, in the first place. True, a few – but just a few – came for property and profit. Most, though, came to escape the same kind of tyranny that many of today’s ‘Tea-baggers’ seek to re-impose: the forced adoption of dogmatic and harsh religious credo and custom, with punitive penalties for disobedience or disbelief… a carbon copy of what the instigators of Islamic theocracy are now attempting to force, on countries in the Middle-east, where thousands of irreplaceable American men and women endanger their lives daily, to free unwilling victims and where many are losing their lives, in the effort.
What most of those who came here sought was the individual dignity that a fair return for honest labor allows one to feel and the opportunity to find a need for such labor. They also sought the comfort and conviviality of neighborly affiliation; involvement with others who were ready to socialize, celebrate or help, depending on the occasion… who could put aside differences in religion and politics, for a greater good of the moment and with a common effort, overcome problems and dangers with a strength born of unity.
Those who came also sought the right to disagree with neighbors or the policies and practices of those who govern them, without a response of snub or slap. They understood, no two humans can or will always think alike. The fabric of our Constitution shows how important this is but somehow, we’ve lost the ability to understand it. Can we rediscover it, before it’s too late? The poet Carl Sandburg may have given us the answer.
In his great poem, “The People, Yes,” he reminds us that “ the learning and blundering people will live on… they’ll be “tricked and sold and again sold but… go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.” Our hope, he says, is with them. “The people... yes.”
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August 3, 2010
Back around 1800, in a note to the British painter, Joshua Reynolds, poet William Blake wrote: “Degrade first the arts, if you’d mankind degrade.” It was an insight, still worthy of note. In fact, an interview with the young concert pianist, Kirill Gerstein brought it to mind for this commentator. Having mastered just about every musical style, from Jazz, to Classics and beyond, this driven artist still has hopes, that exposing young people, to what past masters in the arts have achieved, can save our society from degradation. The problem is, there seems to be too little interest in such exposure. Or perhaps, there’s too little opportunity and time. As the Nobel prize winning novelist, Saul Bellow once explained to an interviewer who asked why he’d never written poetry: Bellow said, “Poets have to dream and dreaming in America is no cinch.”
Let’s face it, ours is a nation embroiled in a multiplicity of multi-task micro-management. A visit to any local outlet of the retail emporia in our shopping malls provides graphic proof. A long checkout line of purchasers awaits the attention of a cashier, who’s paging a manager with a discount query. This, while in the act of conversing with a friend on a cell phone, as with a miraculously free hand, she releases security tags from a pile of just- purchased merchandise, at her side. Most of the waiting purchasers, by the way, are also engaged in conversations with unseen parties, via their own cell phones or I-pods. How would one, thus involved, begin to address an issue like the influence of J.S. Bach on Jazz improvisation? This also explains why there’s so little interest in the actions of today’s members in our nation’s Federal Legislature. This observer’d be willing to bet, most informed opinions (so-called) are gleaned from a flurry of unidentified and undocumented ‘blogs,’ available at the drop of a web address.
Not too long after Blake’s assertion, the bard, Shelley, claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If that was true, then, it certainly isn’t now. A fair number of today’s most notable poets are busily engaged in travels to areas which support major retail outlets, at which their publicists have arranged for them to read from newly released books of their poetry, most of which is about personal travails or triumphs, which leaves little creative time for critiques on legislative issues. Those not so engaged are deeply involved in the lively pursuit of poetic enterprise: deciding on awards of honors and grants, to poetic pals and artistic acquaintances, who in similar capacities, honor them in return… all of which makes for a busy but somewhat restricted milieu, with little time or thought for interest in legislative ethics… or the lack of them.
John Stuart Mill wrote that the fatal tendency to cease thinking about a thing when it’s no longer doubtful is the cause of half of mankind’s errors. With most young Americans engaged in erasing all doubt, on any number of subjects, via instant multi-messaging, don’t expect to hear informed opinions on issues needing a Congressional legislative response, soon. As for homing in on thoughts that artistic masters might have, on any subject, try the nearest retail ‘big-box’ store. With any luck, you might just end up standing behind one of them, in a check-out line.
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July 27, 2010
AThis commentator has made the tragic discovery of a new quid-pro-quo, as legal tender of world-wide villainy. It’s a currency more powerful than the Dollar, the Euro or any other accepted token, exchanged for endeavors in the nefarious pursuit of power and total human control. The new unit of exchange for universal dominance is death; a form of payment that trumps any other in acceptable value, even to those who claim human life as invaluable and non-negotiable.
How’s this for simple proof? Republican congressional leaders who pride themselves as defenders of the most stringent principles of conservative Christian theocracy have stonewalled legislation and Presidential action on every issue, from stem-cell research, to medically necessary abortion and also for cases of incestuous rape. In all, they cite the irreplaceable right to life of a single fetus, regardless of circumstance. These are the same leaders who stubbornly refuse to ratify a world-wide climate change treaty, the lack of which will certainly doom millions of children, yet unborn, to suffering and death from deterioration of the earth’s environment, without mutual agreement to reverse the effect of deadly, world-wide industrial pollution. Their reasons? The effect would be too detrimental to American industry and too burdensome on our economy.
Then there’s the issue of all that off-shore drilling for oil that’s destroying our country’s marine environment beyond repair, threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands; not to also mention the rampant use of life-threatening chemicals by agribusiness. Scientists warn us of deadly consequences to untold generations of Americans but hypocritical pro-life supporters in the Theocratic-led ranks of Christian conservatism stand silent, as G.O.P. leaders dampen every move to abort corporate actions, to squeeze more profit from the irreversible human destruction that such pursuits can only ensure.
Finally, there’s the ultimate and deadliest duplicity, of super-patriotic pietism… the ‘Holy Willies’ who support warfare for irrational reasons… who condone sending America’s best and most selfless citizens to commit almost-certain-death sacrifice, on a false altar of national defense. In truth, their goal is to help dogmatic mullahs impose doctrinaire despotism that honest Americans would never tolerate, on hapless victims in the name of Democracy. No prayer, offered by any faith, can ever mitigate such sightless sophistry. But with each passing day, we replay the solemn rite of another casualty’s passing… the haunting sound of honor guard steps and ritual commands… the symmetrical slap of weapons to the ready position and the bugle’s sorrowful call, as the volleyed echoes fade. All performed with practiced poise, except that awful look of parental pain. As you who’ve enjoyed another day of what you call freedom, do what you’re used to doing, especially those still concerned with dogmatic debate, political pride and potential profit, consider the cost of these and in terms of the world’s new coinage, tell us… what’s today’s market price for a human life?
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July 20, 2010
According to the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. Hearing reports of President Obama’s new interest in high speed rail development and a forthcoming grant to reconfigure rail designs from Utica to Schenectady, one couldn’t help but think of Weinberg’s observation, especially when various rail interests and their hard-right Republican congressional lap-dogs began to grumble about costs and government subsidy of railroad property development; property they say rightfully belongs to private industry. They’re talking, of course about railroad right-of-way now owned by corporate interests and the old socialist bugaboo, of government support for unprofitable passenger travel and mass transit, that profit making freight movers grumble, they have to pay for.
It seems that short memories and Right-wing intellects somehow always compliment each other. Back in the days after the Civil War, when the then Federal Government was hell-bent to span the continent with a transcontinental railroad, corporate interests were thrown together for the precise purpose of picking up huge tracts of unclaimed land, much of which had only just been cleared of Indian tribal custody, then literally turned over to corporate railroad ownership, with adjacent property, often several miles deep on either side of the track. This was property the government wasn’t exactly sure of who had ownership rights to but claimed anyway and persuaded the railroads to accept, on a basis of profitable development, that was sure to follow.
You see, in the corporate mind, it’s perfectly okay for government to underwrite initiatives that prompt eventual development and profit, especially if it also provides the labor. Especially, too, if workers are either underwritten or acquired at wages pegged and paid-for, at cheaper-by-the dozen provisos. That’s exactly what happened, with all those foreign workers who helped build the transcontinental railroads, for which many were denied citizenship in return for hard labor, at slave-wage levels.
Today, corporate freight interests own endless miles of track right-of –way, they all but inherited and derive additional profit from connective linkages with other corporate entities, involved in profitable ownerships of other properties along the right-of-way. Nice work if you can get it and they did, for most of America’s post-Civil War history.
Now, they beef about the cost to them, for poor-relative passenger carriers, while their congressional G.O.P. puppets huff and puff protests about government subsidy for make-work, socialist-like projects. Of course they overlook the taxes that workers pay, much of which goes to keep them well heeled and well treated, in health care programs they still deny to people who truly pay the freight, that keeps them ensconced, in their posh Washington sinecures. Thoreau wrote, we do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us.
For far too many, outside today’s corporate American cabal, that remains a sorry truth.
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July 13, 2010
If someone were to ask this commentator to identify the greatest problem facing our nation, at the present time, his immediate and unequivocal answer would be: the decriminalization of bribery. The ‘fix’ or ‘payoff’ has become standard operating procedure for most legislative enactments, involving members of the United States Congress, especially those in the Senate but the epidemic hasn’t stopped there. Similar ethical infections have spread to others at state legislative levels, the most blatant and depraved, now rampant among legislators in New York State. Agents of special interests who have the impudence to identify themselves as “lobbyists,” have larded legislators with monetary payoffs to the point of addiction, so that their dependence on regular payments is literally viewed as an inclusion, in anticipated political budgets.
It now also appears that the only reliable immunity to this iniquitous largesse is evinced by elected officials who, by choice or misfortune, have opted out of reelection efforts and are thus able to exert ethical courage, unthreatened by special-interest vengeance. David Paterson, who became New York State’s most recent Governor by default and fell prey to a vicious and sinister campaign of political chicanery, carried to unbelievably offensive proportions, is a notable example.
Undeterred by considerations of a possible plethora of vicious political paybacks, with which disgruntled manipulators might seek to punish him, Governor Paterson has now mounted a stubborn, yet admirable defense of actions, based on an obvious sense of fiduciary honesty. One might intellectually or emotionally disagree with these actions but in truth, one must also recognize his honest courage, in standing up for something he believes a critical necessity, against forces that have successfully cowed an impressive list of elected officials, at every level of federal and state government.
Beyond this, though, one has to be saddened and disheartened by the realization, that the only options left to elected officials with a continuing desire to be honest functionaries, given our nation’s current climate of pecuniary political intimidation, are expulsion or disenfranchisement.
At which point this commentator recalls the dismal observation of one notorious athletic coach, that good guys finish last… which apparently will remain a prevalent truth, as long as there are those in politics who continue to believe, that winning isn’t just the important thing. It’s the only thing.
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July 6, 2010
Perhaps more than any Independence Day in this commentator’s memory, the holiday just past put one in mind of an observation of the famed social psychologist, Erich Fromm, who noted that although freedom has brought us both independence and rationality, freedom has also isolated us and thereby, made us anxious and powerless.
More than ever, we seem to be in the grip of forces meant to denude our independence, in the name of independence; forces that institutionalize regimentation, purely for economic reasons of control. The agent of this subjugation is technology, a means that has spawned a multiplicity of masters, to whom we’ve become addicted. Ours is now a less empathic, self-involved, multi-task society, irrevocably connected to gadgets like cell-phones, I-pods, Blackberrys and lap-tops, all of which tether us to pre-planned dependence on corporate contrivance.
Our annual Independence Day celebration, itself, has become a mockery of the kind of freedom our founders envisioned, jammed into a holiday weekend, re-designed to meet the leisure and commercialized ends of working families, labor unions, and a vast assemblage of vendors, who use this and many other, similar holidays, merely to move merchandise. Nothing more.
At this point, one would like to urge listeners, to “Think about it…” but contemplation takes time, the one commodity we lack and the critical element, that corporate connivers cannot and will not consider allowing. The whole point of their connivance is to keep our attention fixed on the magnetic diversions they’ve invented to systematize us. After all, thinking might just move us to rediscover the ethics our founders believed would make and keep us a truly workable democracy.
Our real problem is, that within what could be this wonderful country, we’ve allowed contrivers of corruption to amass more and more power. As Lord Acton so rightly once put it: “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Now, if we could only take the time to think about this, we might still be able to make our independence a credible reality.
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June 29, 2010
Through more than twenty years of on-air opinions, this commentator has never targeted a single recipient, by name, with critical remarks. It’s been a personal rule. But if ever a rule demanded exception, that time is now and never more deserved than by a fellow American citizen, of sorts, one Rupert Murdoch. In recent remarks, on U.S. energy policy, in which he urged piping oil and natural gas from Alaska, down into this country, despite opposition from those concerned about environmental issues, Mr. Murdoch had this disdaining retort: “We didn’t buy Alaska,” he snorted, “to save the moose.”
Mr. Murdoch, you owe every American citizen an apology. Not only the bona fide ones, by birth or immigration but also the émigrés, still struggling to achieve legitimate certification. Not because of your snide mockery but your care-less unconcern, for what American citizenship really means, plus your obvious ignorance of our nation’s history, that made it so easy for you to mock us.
First, I take issue with the arrogant use of the word “We,” by a Johnny-come-lately, who knows or cares little about our Alaskan purchase. When then Secretary of State Seward arranged to buy Alaska from the Czar of Russia, for a mere seven million-two hundred thousand dollars, it wasn’t for the furs and fish for which he was ridiculed in the Congress. It was – as he explained it – to erase the last vestige of Monarchy from the North American continent. Those who sincerely seek the kind of freedom our nation can still provide, understand the aversion to that constraint and its impetus. You, on the other hand, only sought U.S. citizenship, as a means of entitlement, to buy radio and TV properties here. Matter of fact, you cared more for that ownership than you did for your former Australian citizenship, of which you were stripped, by the purchase; which shows how callously you discarded that previous allegiance and how little you valued it.
Now, from the rarified bubble of your wealth and self-conceived importance, you cast imperious glances at thousands you automatically undervalue, as ‘lesser-Americans’ and scatter smug and mostly inhumane solutions to problems, countless numbers of our citizens and would-be citizens are striving to help us solve… with service that endangers many of their lives or encumbers others’ efforts to earn the merest necessities of life.
So, Rupert Murdoch, for all your wealth and the spurious citizenship it’s purchased, this true citizen, who willingly placed himself in harm’s-way for his country, still believes our future rests with those, who by birth or desire are also willing to dedicate the best of themselves, for a better America. About that apology… somehow, I can’t quite shake the feeling that something else, somewhere else, again will capture your fancy, and you and your fortune will be off in pursuit of yet another entitlement… to CAPTURE IT!
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June 22, 2010
In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge noted: “Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory, emancipated from the order of time and space.” It seems, a fancy for money and the power it produces has created a national amnesia, from which Americans (alas) may never recover. Those of us lucky enough to be numbered among the nation’s aged are given numerous warnings on the dangers of memory loss, with no end of advice on how to keep our minds alert and functioning. What no one yet seems able to do is remedy the retention of one’s memory, when everyone else seems to have lost theirs.
This commentator remembers well, the battles waged to reform New York State’s government ethics laws, when he was executive director of New York State Common Cause, more than twenty years ago. The copies of bills signed into law and the pens then Governor Mario Cuomo used to sign them, in 1987, still adorn the wall over my desk, attesting to my efforts in that battle. Yet here we are some twenty-three years later, with our state government tied in knots by political shenanigans and candidates from both major parties, promising to achieve reform of the state’s ethics laws. And elders like myself wondering, whatever happened to the reforms enacted in 1987?
There are some politicians, much younger than I, with even more serious cases of memory loss. For instance, there’s the former G.O.P. minority leader of the New York State Assembly, who, as a candidate in the last Congressional election, opposed every effort of the newly elected President to effect reforms and supported Republican efforts to thwart them. Now, his is not only among the loudest voices demanding state reforms but he’s actually calling for sterner measures against British Petroleum Corporation, while his Republican Congressional colleagues literally oppose every Presidential effort to achieve them. He of course must be hoping that come next election time, voters in his district will have even shorter memories than he does and they well may.
One also wonders about the painfully short memory span of political and governmental leaders in both major parties of New York State, who enacted tax rewards worth millions, for years, to corporations that ostensibly created new jobs. Now, they’re suddenly aghast to learn that literally none were created but the rewards were awarded anyhow. Now, the money’s not there and the jobs never were and New York’s taxpayers are that much poorer. It’ll be interesting to find out who remembers what, when it comes to restoring the loss.
There was a time this commentator remembers, that we could actually depend on most of our elected officials to do what we elected them to do, despite differences of opinion and/or ideology. Believe it or not, there was such a time. Trouble is, no one seems to remember, when it was or how to reclaim it.
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June 15, 2010
For those of us, raised in a tradition of respect for American institutions, based on sheer merit, it’s become depressingly difficult to accept the distortions applied by wordsmith hirelings of those with agendas tied to personal/political ends. Such is the fate of our nation’s flag, which yesterday, was again a prime target for perversion. Typical is the ongoing attempt to turn our national emblem into a religious symbol. A true patriot, who understood the totality of a national insignia, the Methodist clergyman credited with the text to the Pledge of Allegiance, specifically made no mention of religious belief. It was just a matter of time, though, for God’s self-elected spokespersons to usurp Godlike power, by adding words to the text, to that effect. A travesty of theocratic tyranny, to which Congressional hypocrites rushed to affix their signatures.
For this commentator, the words of Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregational Minister, himself, still provide the best description of our national emblem’s importance:
“A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag,” wrote Beecher, “sees not only the flag but the nation itself, and whatever may be its symbols, he reads in its insignia, the government, the principles, the truths, the history that belongs to the nation that sets it forth.” Beecher also understood, that among the founders’ most profound fears was the suffering and tyranny produced by the unholy collusion of kings and clergy, that endowed the rich and robbed a powerless populace of the freedom of individual worship and the right to equal opportunity and equal justice. They were so stirred by this troublesome prospect, they enshrined their opposition to it in the Constitution, as a first priority. Their own number included both deists and non-believers and they gave equal latitude to both. Their intent was the individual right to believe in and practice religion or not but to do so, as a personal privilege, not an all-inclusive duty. All the more reason, that the national flag should be equally free of such an onus.
It’s asking a lot of an article of designed cloth to convey as much as we’ve asked, of our flag. That’s precisely why it must be free of undue influences or inferences that the founders themselves did not intend. It’s still a bedeviling mystery to this observer, how the same hypocrites who proclaimed it a religious symbol, could then have cavalierly allowed it to become a tawdry accompaniment, to the endless sales projections of corporate profiteers.
Beecher had it right. Looking at our flag, a thoughtful person sees the truth of the nation it represents. The key word, here, is – “thoughtful.” Given the current Congressional addiction to extra-monetary rewards, just for showing up to do, what they were elected to do in the first place, don’t expect to see any restraints on commercializing our National Emblem, any time soon. But for sure, you can expect to hear a loud Congressional “AMEN!!!” at the end of the next national prayer breakfast, regardless of who delivers the invocation.
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June 1, 2010
If there’s one fatal flaw in the stimulus that seems to be motivating current actions by Americans of every political ilk, it would have to be a demand for guarantees and their apparent failure to obtain them. It also should be clear to private sector champions and government involvement advocates, alike, that what they seek will never be reliably provided by technology. The reason for this is clear: human involvement, in which outcomes are only as accurate as their input and oversight allow.
Andrei Sakharov whose genius provided the former Soviet Union with the H-bomb and then resolutely launched a human rights campaign that brought Soviet dominance via weaponry to an end, made this perceptive observation about guarantees:
“Intellectual freedom,” he said, “is the only guarantee of a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economic development and culture.”
The intellectual freedom to which Sakharov referred is the ultimate freedom, that not only fosters and allows differences but discussion and opportunity to consider all possibilities and possible outcomes. Those of us who believe in and practice intellectual freedom know that though it may become an artifact of the past, in other venues of communication, it will continue to be a reality on this radio station, for as long as its listeners support it. True intellectual freedom, Sakharov said, allows for the expression, not only of correct ideas but dubious ones as well. This commentator is especially appreciative of those listeners who respectfully disagree with him and continue to support this public radio network and the diversity of perspectives and opinions it airs. Such support is essential to its continuance.
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May 25, 2010
If, as former President Calvin Coolidge said, “The chief business of the American people is business, “ then the ghouls of American business have taken things too far. This commentator always thought it was unlawful for anyone to profit from the death of American service personnel, killed in the defense of their country. Apparently, if this was ever true, it’s not anymore.
Over the Memorial Day weekend just past, a number of ghoulish entrepreneurs blatantly advertised special deals on the sale of bedding, furniture and pre-owned cars, purchased at special Memorial Day discounts, benefiting both buyers and sellers from the deaths of unfortunates killed in action. The loss of someone to family and country, in war, is a heavy enough burden to bear, without the added insult of some entrepreneur profiting from it.
This is an issue on which every veterans organization can and should put their mouths where the money is. For them, the watchword should be: “NO GAIN FROM KIA PAIN! BAN MEMORIAL DAY SALES!”
The addition of a simple clause to existing law, making it a punishable crime to tie special sales promotions (offering discounts and other monetary rewards) as “Memorial Day” observances, would restore and ensure this day as one of respect for the Nation’s honored dead… who gave up their lives for their country and fellow citizens.
It’s time for every veterans organization and every family that’s suffered such a loss, to send the word to their Congressional representative:
“NO GAIN FROM KIA PAIN!” STOP PROFITEERING FROM “MEMORIAL DAY”!
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May 18, 2010
The wisdom’s as ancient as 550 BC, when Aesop first penned it: “United we stand, divided we fall…” The proof of this insight’s been shown in every age since; most recently, in the struggle of New York’s unionized state workers against being made scapegoats of one of the most miscreant political establishments, in this state’s history. Anti-union bias has been a preoccupation of profit mongering entrepreneurs, since the first companies chartered by European monarchs established acquisitive domains, in virgin territories of North, Central and South America.
Attempts to unify opposition to corporate efforts at gaining all-out control of workers’ labor, livelihood and lifestyle have been attacked with disparagement and ultimate brutality, wherever they’ve been attempted by work-force members, who showed any inclination to organize. The earliest gains by such pioneers as the Railroad Pullman Porters Union, the Garment Workers and United Mine Workers unions were literally won, at the cost of life and limb.
In recent times, bodily harm has been replaced by duplicity, one of the most notorious examples of which was displayed by a former head of the Screen Actors Guild, who parlayed his anti-labor antics into political profit. Ronald Reagan’s spewing of spurious charges of Communist conspiracy, against hundreds of innocent fellow union members, fuelled his political ambition, which then flowered from an alliance with the notoriously mob-dominated Teamsters Union. As President, Reagan’s decimation of the Air Traffic Controllers union left wounds and weaknesses in labor, that persist to the present day.
Organized labor has never really recovered the strength and stature it lost, to Reagan inspired campaigns that became stock-in-trade, for Republican subversion of any attempt by working class Americans, to obtain justice through unified representation. Now, power-hungry politicians of both parties, in both houses of New York State’s Legislature, have goaded a frankly frustrated and harried Governor to victimize and punish New York’s unionized state workers, for failures and chicanery that the legislators themselves created. To their credit, retaliating workers have shown respect for the highest principles of labor and the law. The victory they yet may win, will be the sort that organized labor has needed and vainly sought for years.
In an early speech on the rights of American workers, Samuel Gompers stressed that the mission of unions was: “…to protect the inalienable rights of workers to a better life, not only as equals before the law but in their health, their homes and their liberties as citizens; to overcome prejudice and antagonism; above all, to be full sharers in the abundance which their brains and brawn help to create.” Gompers understood, the only weapon that could make workers equal to the power of corporate tyranny was their own unified strength. The same kind of unity that made the United States a strong nation. That’s a strength not to be feared or disparaged; but respected and emulated. (MORE)
New York’s Governor can’t furlough a miscreant legislature. New York’s voters can and should. It’s time a mostly dedicated State work force received the respect and support that it’s consistently earned. And while we’re at it, we might try emulating their example, not as partisans but participants in a unified effort, for a better future we can all share… together.
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May 11, 2010
The United States Constitution was not written in stone. In fact, its authors were impelled by their knowledge of the savagery and enslavement, imposed on whole populations of Europe and the Middle East, by dogmatic alliances of monarchy and theocracy. Our founders were determined to deter the prospect of such perverted partnerships. What they didn’t envision nor could they predict was the ultimate, all-powerful effect of monetary tyranny, imposed by corporate coalitions. Fortunately, the same restraints are available, to curb the effect of these villainous deceptions. What appears to be lacking is the will of the Constitution’s current monitors to impose them.
Never, even in their most flagrant forms, were corporate entities construed as singular individuals, by those who chartered and supported their collective ventures. To have done so, would have left them open to civic responsibilities and singular guilt, for breaching them. In effect, their collective anonymity was a shield for shady actions, to increase corporate profit or investor enhancement, at the expense of the public good.
Now, an obviously biased Supreme Court majority has applied a new and implausibly incredible uniqueness to money, as being comparable to speech. This gives it the same freedom of expression that the Constitution applies to the speech of individuals; despite the proven power of corporate wealth, to mute the voice of any single person or group of individuals, especially given the corporate advantage of literal control over all current modes of mass communication. There’s still a factor which outweighs the right to free expression. It’s the people’s right to know the truth of all government actions and policies, which affect them. This automatically separates media, engaged in the professional reporting of such actions, from any other expressions of opinion; even from reports on subjects of passing or unimportant public interest.
The Constitution has invested both houses of Congress with the right to investigate and regulate activities, that embody aspects of inherent harm to the public. This right also applies to specific Executive branches which administer such activities, as drugs and pharmaceuticals, firearms and volatile chemical substances. Based on this premise, there’s no reason why activities which withhold vital public information or deliberately falsify information, the lack of which can create public harm, should not be open to similar investigation and regulation. It’s time for Congress to separate the professional reporting of necessary public information, from all other forms of public expression. This can be accomplished with legislation, establishing the same kinds of professional standards now required of Doctors, Psychologists, Sociologists and other specialists, as for those engaged in the professional reporting of news (outside the areas of commentary, opinion, entertainment and the many copy-cat versions of reading materials which fictionalize or lampoon news formats. Licensed news reporters and publishers would be required, simply, to meet standards of factual accuracy, in order to retain their licenses.
We’re talking , here, of a vital and necessary public service in which licensure could provide the means of preserving a trustworthy and dependable working press for Americans. It’s time that true speech was given the same level of Constitutional protection, now accorded any corporate expression, backed by the means to pay whatever the asking price might be.
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May 4, 2010
Recent talk on our nation’s news media: print, radio, TV and sundry electronics, has been riddled with words about a new and (for some) frightening force on our political process. They call themselves: “Tea- Baggers,” inspired by colonials who opposed King George’s Tea Tax and adopted the slogan: “No taxation without representation.” Contrary to the colonial original, present-day insurgents blame their ire on the efforts of the government, to rescue huge corporate institutions, whose decline is seen as a basis for a more widespread and calamitous failure of the national economy, itself. Republicans in Congress, paid lip-service to the Tea-Baggers and egged them on. Now, they’re in the quandarous position of aiding their own self-destruction, especially when their cat’s-paw mutineers realize, they’ve been playing both ends against the middle, swelling the “Lynch-the-bankers” chorus, while sub-rosa shaking bankers down for secret political pay-offs. Where logic’s concerned, the Tea-Bag insurgents and their Congressional connivers are out in left field. Here’s why: King George-The-Third made no bones about it. He was out to profit a corporation he’d chartered and funded, by taxing the colonists, forcing them to pay more for each cup of tea they drank and sharing the proceeds with beneficiaries, who owed him their existence.
The way this democratic republic was constituted – or supposed to be – corporations, whatever they offer: loans or cars, are answerable to the government. That’s us or U.S., however you spell it… or so it was thought, until a subversive Supreme Court majority, decided that corporate cabals are just like individuals and gave them the right to let their money – out-shout everyone else, while escaping civic responsibilities the rest of us are required to meet.
If you’ve followed the dots, this far, you now know why the so-called Tea-Baggers are distorted copies of the originals and also all-wet. Beyond this, the latest research shows they’re neither as populous nor popular as the Fox network’s baying hounds paint them; nor do they mirror all the rest of us. They’re a small percentage of mostly well-off, White, Protestant, Right-wing, often-Racist, believers in despotic dogma; yearning for a time when others like them determined the fate of Native Americans, plus other racial and ethnic immigrants, also women, whom they considered undeserving and of lesser status. Oh, and by the way, there are exceptions to government-run programs, they favor, like Social Security, Medicare, Military ( sent abroad to fight), Police and Fire services, etcetera. Now we learn that the founder of the bigoted John Birch Society’s decided to join them. He wants to help cleanse the country of impure elements, like those who came as African slaves or immigrant Jews and Hispanic Catholics. He’s begun in Arizona, naturally. They’ve got a “Let’s see your papers!” law that makes ethnic cleansing easier.
As to the recession? The very rich and the Tea-Baggers will recover. The working poor and those already mired in poverty, alas, will still echo the old Tennessee Ernie song: “…another day older and deeper in debt. Because, by then, like most of the country, they’ll owe their souls to the corporate store.
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April 27, 2010
Witnessing the news media’s inexplicable restoration of Eliot Spitzer to political prominence; and his vocally aggressive responses to the sudden turnaround in their disparagement, for no apparent justifiable reason, other than a boost in reader or viewer interest, one is reminded of an observation by the twenty-fourth century B.C. savant PTAHHOTPE, who called flaunting one’s knowledge, simply, “arrogance.” In his Oedipus Rex, Sophocles put it this way: “The tyrant,” he noted, “is a child of pride.”
How else can one explain Mr.Spitzer’s abrupt rush to flout his denigration of just about every elected official still holding office. And the media’s willingness to trumpet his unflattering evaluations, that seem to be based on nothing but a spate of soured Spitzerian opinions. For all those, still struggling to make logical sense out of the former ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ and transient-Governor’s meteoric self-destruction, there’s really no other way to explain this but the arrogance of super-intellect, added to a sanctimonious self-appointment, not only to evaluate but to judge, condemn and apply harsh punishment. This might be strategically approved behavior for a “Sheriff,” but an absolute ‘no-no!’ for a Governor, installed by a vote of near-landslide proportions. In fact, for this observer, the former Attorney General’s seeming inability to adopt the more political demeanor, his newer office demanded, was the first evidence of impending doom for the Spitzer-led administration; a sense intensified, by the new Governor’s hot pursuit of the wily, long-serving Republican Majority Leader of the State Senate, Joe Bruno, while still flaunting his Sheriff’s aura and twirling his verbal six-guns, for emphasis. It was an opening act, better left to those with the legal resources and authority to do the job right.
In his newly chosen role as self-appointed spoiler, the failed former Governor shows evidence of an essential trait he still lacks: the common touch of humanity, a critical characteristic of every great politician, in our history. His gross insult to the current Governor, who succeeded him: virtually admitting by his denigration, that his choice was simply a sop, to attract votes from the African-American community, is proof of his own inadequacy. If David Paterson was obviously as inept, as Mr. Spitzer now paints him, why did he still select him as a successor? Or was he so blinded by his own brilliance, it never occurred to him that one might be necessary? Whichever the case, it only makes his own lack more glaring.
Some have temporized, that the betrayal of his wife, by Mr. Spitzer, was an act of which countless public officials, plus even ordinary citizens , have been guilty. Here, too, his use of the legal dodge, that adultery with a paid prostitute was somehow, more tolerable, shows a kind of connivance that only puts his words of regret in question, not as expressions of credible contrition but only self-reproach for a foul up. Either way, he conveys a level of penitence, that merits him a political second chance at nothing - but anonymity.
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April 20, 2010
It’s high time someone exposed the ‘bilge’ that Republican political leaders stand and spew, on the nation’s front porch, in opposition to government control of anything, as ‘Socialism,’ but then sneak in the back door, to parlay pay-offs from corporate tycoons, for whom they’ve promoted this pejorative, to help fleece the very taxpayers they’re supposed to be helping. They know they’re dealing in duplicity but somehow, many Americans who are prime targets in this betrayal, seem to have swallowed the con.
Before the ‘Ghoulish Old Pols’ pull this swindle off and laugh all-the-way-to-the-bank, with their corporate confederates, someone must set their victims straight. And who better, than the one President, G.O.P. pitch-men like to cite, more than any other? Who else but honest Abe Lincoln, the icon of every so-called sterling Republican principle. Back around 1854, this is what Lincoln had to say about government: “The legitimate object of government,” he wrote, “is to do for the community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do or so well do, for themselves --- in their own capacities…. If some men kill, or beat or constrain others; or despoil them of property by force , fraud or noncompliance with contracts, it is a common object of peaceful and just men to prevent it.” In the McConnell/Boehner lexicon, that’s ‘government control… or even worse: “Socialism!”
As any thinking person and more than anything else, he was a studious and thoughtful man, Lincoln understood this linchpin of the “E PLURIBUS UNUM” principle: that a diverse society seeking to become a successful composite, depends not only on the combined talents and capabilities of its individuals but – in some specific cases, the oversight and restraint of members expressly designated for such purposes. The key, here, is that this was determined by people who cared and thought more about long-term prosperity, than brief, quick-buck bubbles.
At this point in our deterioration, those who want to “take back” control of a country, that was never meant to be exclusively theirs, are hoping to keep the minds of our robotically addicted millions fixed on their I-pad, Blackberry and other diversionary gadgets, long enough to dismantle the once-workable means of a fragile yet essential independence. As in similar but less imminent and damaging crises of the past, the only effective antidote is in the hands of those still capable of thinking for themselves, while caring about others.
The time has come to stand proudly and firmly for a view that Lincoln never abandoned: “Government,” he said, “is a combination of the people of a country to effect certain objects by joint effort.” Note the absence of private or political party emphasis. If you’re among those still willing to put our destiny in the hands of thinking Americans, let every elected official you know, know it. There’s not a moment to lose.
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