Is it easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission?

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, as he was wont to do, about presidential history in times of crisis. In particular he cited Abraham Lincoln and the extraordinary measures he took during the opening months of the Civil War. That was a real state of emergency, the slave states organized with incredible speed and moved quickly to steal Federal buildings and property. Slave power propagandists in the border states printed wildly seditious stories about the North and the newly elected president. It was not a time for careful deliberation and the slow wheels of government to take action. Schlesinger wrote that it was easier for Lincoln to do what needed to be done and explain his actions later.

Other presidents have taken questionable actions in times of crisis as well, Andrew Jackson's bank war and Indian removal, John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, Wilson's roundups and deportations of revolutionary aliens, and so on. In each case, it appeared to much of the public to be a real crisis. Okay, maybe not with Jackson because he was just an asshole, but most of the time action was at least perceived to be necessary. The constitution was bypassed, the crisis resolved and officials took responsibility for their actions, most of the time anyway. It was easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. This idea isn't limited to presidents, military commanders, police chiefs, businessmen, and even parents who need to take their children to the doctor all occasionally take action and answer for it later. This has also been a core tenet of all the torture porn films and television shows, "do we torture the shit out of the guy with the location of the bomb now and take our chances on punishment later?"

I'm no leader and I hate these kind of hypotheticals but we are rapidly approaching a turning point in American democracy. Another republican president is about to declare an emergency to get some awful thing they want, as has happened at least informally, for the last half century. Let's think about a few. Nixon's operatives went on their merry way bugging opponents, blackmailing and intimidating activists, planting provocateurs in anti-war groups and others, and generally acting above the law until they finally got caught. And even then,they would have walked away laughing had it not been for the courage of democracy's defenders holding their feet to the fire. Reagan's basement conspiracy in Iran-Contra likewise just ran their clandestine operation to sell arms to one enemy so they could supply an army of terrorists in Nicaragua. A few of them got caught and did their time as just the cost of doing business. Most just laughed all the way to the bank though, including the doddering old man himself. The list of authoritarian monstrosities of George W. Bush's administration is incredibly long and would make for many posts and book fodder. Sure, there was a real attack on America, although in hindsight it is fairly clear that it could have been foiled if that band of republican hacks had tried. But the cynical opportunism of denouncing opponents as traitors, and blasting out terror warnings that most likely were exaggerated in the extreme to fearmonger and drown out news of their myriad failures certainly fits this pattern.

Doughfacedonny is widely expected to declare a state of national emergency as outlined in an Act passed by Congress after Watergate that was and is supposed to stop the pattern of doing this very thing during his TV time tonight. Why the networks are still falling for his shit is a mystery we will never fully know the answer to. No one in their right mind would give this orange disgrace permission to do anything, or forgive him afterwards. Not that he would care. He already stole the presidency with the help of monsters at home and abroad. He stole two supreme court seats now and blew up the deficit with his corporate welfare tax giveaway. Has he asked for forgiveness for any of those things? No, of course not. He and Mitch McConnell have not asked permission to reopen the damn government that they run and aren't exactly trying very hard to be forgiven for the latest mess they caused.

It has made the rounds, in liberal commentary circles anyway, the idea of a Reichstag Fire moment coming from this crowd of traitors and imbeciles. And as the meme so often points out, "it's no longer whether trump has any decency, but whether we do." Are the networks, "the enemy of the people" as doughfacedonny so often calls them, really going to go along with this? Maybe he will just go out and feebly rant and lie about immigration and walls and other such nonsense. Nothing will come of it and we can all go back to our regularly scheduled resistance. There certainly is a national emergency but it's not on the border with Mexico. It isn't a legitimacy crisis, all the evidence of Russian meddling has rendered the occupant of the Oval Office illegitimate. It isn't an economic crisis either, the stock market is tanking because of the real crisis though. It is that one major political party in the United States is a death cult of human suffering and that about 40% of the electorate supports that cult.

There may come a time when the American people are finally pushed so hard that they must collectively ask whether it is easier to ask forgiveness for destroying the death cult after the fact, or whether we sit back and civilly wait for permission from the Democrats to defeat them. If doughfacedonny does indeed declare a national emergency and fumble around stealing enough money to build the stupid wall, it won't stop there. I suck at predicting the future, I really expected death squads on day one, but this time might prove more dangerous. Donny's back is against the wall, it is no longer a whisper that he should resign and bolt while he still can. The previous crises of Republican malice gave the criminal-in-chief a path out of danger, therefore they left when their time came but will donny? You can almost trace a line in the escalation of authoritarianism in republican governance since the late 1960s, pushing but never quite closing the door on democracy. Tonight the trap might spring shut. Stay tuned.

Civics and the Republic

What is empirical evidence?
What are logical fallacies and why not a valid way to argue issues?
What does the Constitution actually say? And why is that document more important than the Declaration of Independence?
Why do both sides of an issue often accuse each other of the same things? And why are our political rivals ALWAYS LIKE HITLER AND THE NAZIS!?!

The zombie recently posted this picture:


What's the difference? I sometimes forget in my gloominess and cynicism that there are actually people out there who, in spite of great intelligence and skill in other areas, just do not know much about that black hole we call "politics." And why not? After all, if you think about it rationally, what does one actually gain by being "informed?" There are only so many hours in the day. Once you start ladling family and bills and home maintainance, planning for retirement, "" "" weddings, death, and everything else that gets in the way of a responsible person's leisure who the hell wants to read or watch the bad news? That's on top of learning a skill or profession, finding and keeping employment, advancing into a career, and on and on.

In that spirit, a friend commenting on this picture noted how he keeps meaning to read this article about how to avoid sounding like a idiot when discussing politics. Zombie and I chatted for a moment about what it means. No conclusions but maybe there are lots of educated professionals,  certainly not limited to that demo, out there who have mastered their skill, feel comfortable in their career and now want to be involved in the Great Experiment. A bit of irony there, if any truth can be found, that is exactly the reason zombie founded this blog in the first place. He even tried to build a second one called "New Deals and Great Societies" as an educational site. As academics, wannabe intellectuals, scholars even, we thought maybe we could provide a minimally biased and patient environment for a sort of adult civics class.

However, this site is called the Gloomy Historian and it is run by one now. Whatever the zombie's intentions, I feel trying to market information to the frustrated individuals with a deficit of republican virtue would be a complete waste of time. After all, we live in an age of incredible access to information. If there is a substantial population of Americans unable to understand, analyze, or process it, I do not think I can help. Who am I to even think I can make any difference either?

I would trade all my knowledge and wisdom of history, politics, ideology, and human nature for one truly marketable skill. But this is what I have, trouble is that the only politically-engaged folks out there seem to already be pretty set in their ways. Certainty, like consistancy, is a hobgoblin of small-minds and there is nothing to be gained by continuously jousting with cretins.

I would love to be proved wrong.

Misfire, notes

I had a feeling Al was stepping into a trap from the first lines of his column. Opening with a straw man when the radical impulse behind the decision to take down the "no guns allowed" sign in the library would be self-righteously asserted as common sense despite its ridiculous premise was an unfortunately poor start. Al's prose is in quotation marks, Owen's responses are in red.

"Are we really going to allow firearms in the library where our children go for Story Time, to study and do projects?"

Yes.

"Do guns in the library align with our conservative values?"

Yes.

"Hunting with friends or older children might be a family value,

Might? It is.

but morphing that into guns in the library doesn’t make any more sense than guns at work, guns in the hospital or guns in church."

Since the premise of gun rights being based in hunting is false, the conclusions aren’t valid.

Instead of demolishing the straw man, Al not only abandoned it but legitimized the absurd premise of his first statement. Owen, shameless fascist that he is, endorsed the absurd part and then was freed from what should have been a stigmatizing statement to dilute a shocking mix of guns and children. "Our conservative values?" Whose? By drawing the unacceptable into the acceptable, Al has already lost. The first rule when debating sociopaths must be "do not expect a rattlesnake to stop being a rattlesnake." I am sure Al was making his case to the large number of self-described conservatives in West Bend who actually respect tradition and are skeptical of change, but it only takes one fascist in conservative's clothing to blunt this case.

The problem here is one of definition. What does conservatism mean? Now I am not a conservative but I have studied the ideology going back to Edmund Burke. Fancy book learning, not fly by my gut and accept what those in authority spoon-feed me. It is probable that back when Al was on the rifle team "conservative" meant what he thinks it means, but today's conservative movement of which Owen is openly a part of really shares little of those assumptions. The audience he was trying to reach probably feels the same way, but buy into the redefinition of conservatism that was painstakingly engineered over many decades. Conservative today no longer means, respect for tradition and not wanting things to change, accepting authority of government and that society is made up of many groups, not simply a collection of separate individuals that owe nothing to each other. In other words, a conservative would question why this change to library policy is necessary and would be skeptical of simple assertions that guns around kids is something parents should desire. A real conservative would ask why, when there is no problem with violent crime in the library, do we all of a sudden need the right to carry concealed weapons in the library or anywhere else the individual who owes nothing to his fellow citizens desires.

Unfortunately, Al began with a rhetorical question real conservatives could follow, skepticism about consequences, but dropped it to focus on bigger social issues.

Owen's rejection of hunting as the base of gun "rights" speaks volumes about his conception of these rights. He can blather on about the constitutionality of the right to bear arms, but really it is about his right to feel secure at your expense. For years, the central argument of gun "rights" people was the reasonable proposition that they wanted to hunt, Owen just evicerated that reasonable idea. Let's get down to the lowest common denominator here, a gun is a tool of violence, it is nothing else. I will repeat Homer's aphorism that "the blade itself incites to violence," a truism of the ancient world that has not lost its validity today. The current "mania," that Al rightly identifies but Owen waves away with a snooty retort about the constitution while wishing away the first and more poignant part of the 2nd Amendment, is about power and domination, not defence or security.

It can't happen here

A poignant book review written when I was still but a small fry. That's sea monster humor son, get with the program.

Fascism in America: an all-too real work of fiction

            In Sinclair Lewis’ novel It can’t happen here, totalitarianism overthrows our constitutional government in the guise of down home traditional values. Set just before the 1936 election, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a fictional Southern Democratic Senator with a demagogue’s flair and team of cynical operators behind him, sweeps into power on the promise of redistributing wealth to all the workers of America. Oh, and he has a 15 point platform to subvert Congress and the Supreme Court, throw unemployed people into camps and specific plans for all of the enemies of our country, namely Jewish bankers, communists and African-Americans among other things. This story sends a chilling message to Americans that benign, liberal government is not written in stone and the constitution is just a piece of paper unless good people stand up for what’s right.
          Sinclair Lewis was “the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature”; he wrote novels critical of rural America, the dreariness, materialism and perils of ambition found there. (The Sinclair Lewis Society) “His concern with issues involving women, race, and the powerless in society make his work still vital and pertinent today.” (SLS) His wife was instrumental in this book’s inspiration as she had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and discussed European political developments at that time with her husband, who was at the same time seeing, “the irrational demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the proliferation in America of fanatical political groups” (Tanner 57) “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights… with Lionel Barrymore cast in the lead role, but early in 1936 the film was abandoned… for fear of international complications and the displeasure of the Republican Party.” (Tanner 58) The objection of the GOP is odd, in my view, since the leader of the resistance is a Republican. In any case, It can’t happen here would have to wait until 1983 to be brought to the small screen as the mini-series “V” in which the fascists are recast as extraterrestrials. (Wikipedia)

            The reader sees events mainly through the eyes of a small town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, an educated, intelligent man of sixty years who sees through the façade around Buzz. Nestled away in an archetypal small New England town called Fort Beulah, Vermont; Doremus feels that even if the insanity surrounding the Windrip candidacy doesn’t subside, he figures that life will go on. Personally, Doremus is a “small-town bourgeois Intellectual”, “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal”. (68-9) None the less, his editorials often took a position considerably to the left of his readers and when “[h]e got named Bolshevik… his paper lost a hundred and fifty out of its five thousand circulation” (69) Life does go on, but with horrible consequences for Doremus when his gardener, Shad Ledue, becomes the new county commissioner and takes revenge on his former employer for perceived past slights.

          If Doremus is the hero, the villains are played by a remarkable coterie of individuals and organizations committed to wrenching the reins of power into their own hands.  Buzz himself was a powerful orator, after hearing him speak in New York City and being deftly moved by it; Doremus remarked to himself “[b]ut what Mr. Windrip actually had said, [he] could not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.” (140) Bishop Paul Peter Prang was a radio preacher whose “League of Forgotten Men” delivered to the senator votes in order to win, these are characterizations of the late Huey Long and Father Coughlin that Mr. Lewis was so concerned with addressing. (60-1) Muscle was provided by Colonel Dewey Haik and his paramilitary Minute Men, “a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs… the shock troops of Freedom!” (129-30) Intellectual power was provided by Lee Sarason and Dr. Hector MacGoblin, who coined the phrases and songs used by the campaign to more or less distract people and persuade them to vote the right way. The new regime’s ideology was called “corpoism” after the United States was renamed “The American Corporate State” with Windrip soon becoming “The Chief” instead of the president. (142, 214)
            The country was reorganized into Provinces, Districts and counties; with the old geographical distinctions being discarded. The unemployed were rounded up into “enormous labor camps” to work on state projects or hired out to the private sector. (216) Political opponents (like Doremus and most of his friends, eventually) were eventually interned in concentration camps for torture and often execution when “caught trying to escape” (422) The corpos preferred method of torture was a combination of flogging with a “steel fishing rod” and forcing the victim to drink caster oil. (423) Eventually Doremus escapes to Canada and joins the resistance, which does invade and take control of a large area of the US. However, the counterrevolution bogs down and the book ends in a stalemate, even though it is clear that corpoism is largely a spent force due to overreach.  By the novel’s finish, much intrigue has occurred at the top leaving Buzz exiled, Sarason assassinated and Col. Haik as the new Chief.
           This book was written in 1935, before Americans fully understood what totalitarianism was and it was subsequently turned into a play for the WPA theatre, perhaps as a reminder to stick with the mostly moderate policies of Franklin Roosevelt. I feel this novel is overshadowed by George Orwell’s 1984, also warning against totalitarianism of the Stalinist formulation, which was published after the full horrors of World War II were revealed. But Lewis predicted quite a few of the horrors of fascism, right down to concentration camp inmates betraying each other to get out. (430) I believe this story, told on the stage and on the page, helped inoculate America against fascism and in that way played a small part in saving the world from fascism during the 1930’s and 40’s. Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Doremus comments that: “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.” (258)
            The author’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, “was an expert on European fascism” and no doubt a major source of research, however the edition I read contained no acknowledgements. (Tanner 59) The edition also lacked a preface and I was left somewhat unmoored at the beginning of the story, with only a passing knowledge of the content it took a while to orient myself in this world. Mr. Lewis mentions so many real-life individuals mixed with his fictional characters it was sometimes hard to differentiate them, a reader without historical knowledge of the period and the several references to the Civil War era that Doremus draws strength and reflection from. The book paints a lucid picture, with most of the good guys in the story unable to believe what has happened and even less able to protect themselves from the madness; a representative example is Dr. Fowler Greenhill, who attempts to rescue his father-in-law Doremus from jail and give the local corpos a piece of his mind as though freedom of speech and due process of law still existed and is summarily shot on one corpo’s whim. (269-72)
            Although I could hardly put this book down I did find it overly detailed, with too many simultaneous plot-lines going on at once and far too many characters. I can imagine that this chaotic style helped to reinforce the chaotic events described; and the extensive character development certainly helps the political discussions in the book seem less like the author arguing with himself. “In a remarkable burst of creative energy in 1935, [Lewis] wrote It Can’t Happen Here in a matter of weeks, and his publisher rushed it into print.” (Tanner 57) As such, it is a remarkable effort and great public service, relevant to all Americans interesting in preserving the rule of law in our nation. Above that it is valuable to a college course on this time period because it does an excellent job of relating what life was like in the 1920’s and 1930’s; mentioning the technological innovations, political atmosphere and above all translating the rise of  home-grown fascism for people who think that revolution and dictatorship can only happen elsewhere.