Donald Doughface

This year has seen the return of open racism and misogyny to American politics. It has come about because of one man, a vulgar talking yam who rode the vicious populist wave, voter suppression, and Russian intervention all the way to the highest office in the republic. While this has huge contemporary repercussions, it has also opened a clear view of the fact that for many people the Civil War never ended. Prior to that conflict there was a term for a Northern man with Southern sympathies, doughface, and it is time to reintroduce that name to a man who fits the definition so well, Donald J. Trump. The true battle line of the Civil War that preceded and succeeded the military campaigns of 1861-65 was between the democratic vision of America and the aristocratic one. Doughface donny lied his way into the presidency by appealing to the worst aspects of aristocratic America, not by promising the republican working class voters a better life but by promising to stomp on nonwhite and liberal America and all that it stands for without any restraint.

Two days before election day a little article was posted on the History News Network by the Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University, Susan J. Matt that flew under the radar during that chaotic time. Titled This is What Liberals are missing about Trump's appeal Professor Matt presents a very detailed and in depth look at the pre-industrial concept of personal honor and shame that dominated Southern life even after the Civil War. Now that the industrial way of life has receded in so much of the United States this primitive lifestyle has experienced a revival unnoticed by all of us "elitists" in the city. What this looks like is described as:

Southern white men worried incessantly about how others perceived them. Any insult to their reputations needed to be quickly parried lest they lose face. Historian Keith Thomas noted that among English elites, the concern with honor “generated extreme touchiness, and hypersensitivity to any form of slight. As a result, honour was invoked as justification for almost any kind of self-aggrandizement.”

Some of that aggrandizement could be based on sexual prowess. Men could boast of their sexual exploits, for lust signaled virility and strength. Reputation also depended on outward carriage, for Brown writes, “honor was a state of grace linking mind, body, blood, hand, voice, head, eyes, and even genitalia.” Consequently, southerners were concerned with their own bodies as well as their ancestors’, for bloodlines and racial purity affected the ability to embody honor.

Those who believed in honor engaged in physical, sometimes violent displays of power to defend it. Historian Elliott Gorn found that to display honor, poor men had vicious brawls, gouging out each others’ eyes, as well as biting off ears and windpipes, while elites relied on duels as a more genteel way to defend reputation. To be honorable required men to take risks, display bravery.

Men were also supposed to risk their pocketbooks, for gambling too was a display of nerve. If men ran up debts, they must repay them, for those they gambled with were presumably honorable gentlemen; however, they need not pay back people below them on the social scale. William Grayson of South Carolina noted, “A gambling debt is a debt of honour, but a debt due a tradesman is not.”

Southern whites who subscribed to this cult of honor lived publicly, and when possible grandly, boasted about their sexual prowess and bravery, focused on outward appearances and reputation, and took forceful, even violent action when that reputation was assailed.

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164299#sthash.t9Y7fcRD.dpuf

This barbaric way of life persists in nearly any American community that is unencumbered by Enlightenment principles or even the industrial installation of bureaucracy or professionalism. The brutes may not be "biting off ears and windpipes" anymore but scratch the surface in any military base or impoverished small town and you will discover hypersensitive man-children endlessly bragging about their sexual conquests, the many slights suffered and punishments or humiliations dealt out, and the intricate web of hierarchy and domination forever being challenged and enforced. This system of honor has jumped the regional boundaries of the old Confederacy in much the same way that the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after WWI found strength in states such as Indiana and Oklahoma. It has even jumped color lines as African-American gang members on the South Side of Chicago worry endlessly about their "rep" and answer slights from others posted online with physical confrontation and often bullets. The link between this system of honor and white supremacy, however, is the focus of discussing Donald Doughface.

Thus far I have only found one other blog linking trump with the term "doughface" and although poignant it does not go deep enough to understand the causal factors, the driving force that gives so much energy to the republicans who voted against every democratic impulse to make this doughface president. The right wing in America is driven by a primitive honor system, while it may have started in the South before the republic was even founded, today this plague has spread to all points on the American map. Anywhere ruin has been visited on the American proletariat, anywhere average people have been stripped of a decent living by plutocrats in corporate America and Wall Street, the vengeful honor system has flooded in to encourage vulgarity, racism, misogyny, and hypersensitive aggression.

Donald Trump, who will never be normalized on this page nor accorded with the title he and his confederates have stolen for him, is the epitome of of this (dis)honor system. A Northern man with Southern principles, ever ready to strike down anyone who opposes or slights him, ever ready to take anything he wants and react with self-righteous fury anyone or anything that resists, Trump is the violation of everything we Americans are taught in school about what we supposedly value. And yet, his awful values are long-standing, everything that is wrong with America from racism and white supremacy, to misogyny and sexual conquest of women, this is the Civil War that eternally haunts our nation. It is a war that can only end in the complete destruction of those primitive honor-related values. Democratic America has had several chances to deal a death blow to aristocratic America, the military Civil War and the Civil Rights era to name two opportunities, but we can never bring ourselves to strike fully to excise the cancer.

And now that cancer has consumed us. The third strike has finally dealt us a permanent ascendancy of aristocracy. We, the democratic nation of America, are an occupied people. To be continued...

Good Guys with Guns are Not...

In yet another reckless and meaningless shooting spree, this time in Colorado Springs, CO a heavily armed man shot three people before being killed by the police. Halfway across the country in Chicago, a customer at a Mexican market who was carrying a licensed concealed weapon shot a man who was trying to rob the market. Both of these shootings took place on Saturday, the day before Halloween, Colorado Springs in the morning and Gage Park, Chicago that night. While firearm murders are routine and occur so regularly that the latest ones barely last more than a day as news, the contrast between these two incidents is rather striking and cries out for some examination.

Guns; as tools of death, as valuable merchandise, and as a worldview are the perfect alignment of fear and power among oligarchs and the mob. Rarely do popular and elite opinion combine around an issue the way they do with firearms. Regular people spontaneously jump to the defense of gun manufacturers in every instance of gun violence when they assert that buying as many as they want is their right. Despite billions spent propagandizing the masses on other right wing bugaboos, regular people rarely jump to the defense of other giant corporations with the same kind of enthusiasm.

Recently the enthusiasm has jumped from merely owning guns and being able to buy as many as they can without any restrictions, to actually using them. Whether the uptick in demands to open carry, concealed carry, and "stand your
ground" began with the scumbag George Zimmerman or the election of Barack Obama, there has been a definite shift from demanding the right to hunt deer to the right to hunt humans.

There is a clear implication in comments about the foiled robbery in Gage Park, Fox and Friends wrote that this was "Proof good can come from guns." Because... well, this is what the robber looked like. His name was Reginald Gildersleeve and he was not a bright kid who was going to college in the fall as many other shooting victims lately are described. No, he was kind of a bad guy with a long record of criminality. So good riddance says just about everyone commenting with one hand while the other seductively strokes their gun or concealed-carry permit.

There was a joke in the 1970's that a conservative was a liberal who'd been mugged. So many of the commenters I saw were pontificating on how awesome it would have been to pull the trigger on Mr. Gildersleeve. The Chicago Tribune reported that the police were unlikely to file charges against the shooter. The comment sections exploded with self righteous indignation. "Charges? That guy deserves a medal!" Was the oft-repeated refrain. The gun enthusiasts like to state that Chicago has the most strict gun laws in the country and that they don't do any good because 'Obama's home town is horrifically violent'. While that is a lie on many levels, what kind of a double standard is that? Gun nuts screech about how violent Chicago is, but cheer when a black guy is murdered while trying to rob a store? 

Anyway, it turns out that Gildersleeve didn't actually have a real gun. It was a paintball gun.

However, in Colorado Springs the killer was wandering around the neighborhood carrying an AR-15 but no good guy with his own gun was there to stop him. And the police were actually powerless to do anything before Noah Harpham took aim and opened fire because wandering around carrying an AR-15 is perfectly legal in Colorado Springs and many other places in our 21st Century Wild West. 

Of course, these insane perversions of law means that Harpham was a "good guy" right up until the millisecond before shooting random passersby. As opposed to Gildersleeve, who was a bad guy from the moment he got out of bed that morning, even though he wasn't actually carrying a weapon. But his killer was a licensed and perfectly legal vigilante even after repeatedly shooting an unarmed man because, gosh darn it you just can't trust those people in the city. 

So everyone make sure you study this handy guide for the next time an upstanding citizen is walking around the neighborhood in your area carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

Stupidity and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

Thomas Jefferson once stated that democracy and a republican form of government will not survive without an informed and thinking citizenry to support it. The United States has thrived and approached this ideal when education and critical thinking among Americans is high, and as suffered when these qualities wane. A very good example of the correlation can be found in Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce's book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. On the other side are the cranks exemplified by Ignatius Donnelly, who spent a lifetime trying to prove Atlantis once existed, and the con artists like P.T. Barnum, whose career of spectacle had the goal of simply separating fools from their money. Pierce then described the phenomenon of Rush Limbaugh, who lies somewhere in between but also dangerously apart from these two examples and is described by Pierce as simply a charlatan. Donnelly had fantastically silly ideas but they existed as a harmless curiosity. Barnum sold his audience a spectacle and profited handsomely from it but was not trying to build a movement out of it. Limbaugh and his countless clones on radio, in print, and on TV however, have harmful ideas that they sell to their gullible audiences for profit and to change society in ways that destroy freedom and impoverish the masses.

What does this have to do with PB & J? This story has popped up in many people's social media news feeds, claiming with little evidence that a school principle in Oregon deemed the sandwich racist. This automatically activates frames in the minds of gullible readers. Before the internet and social media these things traveled more slowly and usually started "I heard that..." followed by some outrageous claim. It took effort to repeat, and the audience was right there to roll their eyes or challenge the claim. But in today's world of "going viral" a stupid story about what may or may not have happened far away can be presented without context and manipulated by con artists and demagogues at will; then it can be repeated nearly infinitely and almost without effort to the feeds and inboxes of idiot america. This urban legend about racist sandwiches provides an interesting insight to Twain's adage:

The invention of the telegraph in Twain's day sped up the exchange of information in a way second only to the internet. Even if access to this revolutionary medium was limited to actual journalists, one need only shout "Remember The Maine" to know how the hare of lies can do incredible damage while the tortoise of truth tries in vain to put out the fires of sensationalism and yellow journalism. Although the US is unlikely to declare war on Spain over a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, claims such as the ones made in this story play into an established narrative drummed up by unscrupulous conservative culture warriors going back at least to William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. This is the contest of tradition stubbornly resisting change that picked up a great deal of speed and followers during the Great Backlash against desegregation, social justice, and other values of the 1960s.

The only link provided in the conservative post article is to another, exact replica of the story on Mr. Conservative.com. This one provides no links or source material whatsoever, but it does feature a gawdy proliferation of ads. So, while a google search for "peanut butter and jelly banned" produced a plethora of hits from right wing sources including fox news and the daily caller that are slightly more informative that the two wannabes first cited, they proceed from the same mistaken assumption that political correctness and racial tolerance has gone too far and an out-of-touch bureaucrat took arbitrary and unnecessary action that will slippery slope it's way into and across the entire nation. The actual story is from 2012, but seems to have flared up again in the wake of actual outrage over the official presence of the confederate flag on statehouse property in Charleston after Dylan Roof shot 9 people in a church there. "What next?" is the usual refrain, what next will you out of control liberals that have so much power to disrupt tradition do to wreck schools and things?

Politifact first debunked the story in 2012 because right wingers were clutching their pearls over that other great sin of liberals, spending tax money on frivolous projects. It was rated "pants on fire" then, it is still a ridiculous lie, but that does not matter. Two of the first comments on the undated mr conservative story debunk the misrepresentation but are ignored by the other commenters. Snopes rates the story completely false and fabricated out of deliberate manipulation of the principal's comments.

I wish it were as easy to say "use common sense" when exposed to the propaganda of charlatans but even the idea of "common" sense is gone when a significant number of the gullible simply make up their own facts and reject anything that does not conform to their existing prejudices. The worst part is that on line, the gullible idiots who fall for it every time just do not suffer the shame that once afflicted people in public. On the internet you can be insulated from any point of view you don't like, and experience no consequences for being fooled. On that note, it is perhaps best to quote Twain again; for he was the Great American Jester, telling the foolish uncomfortable truths during our last "Gilded Age." 

*Fingers comfortably but firmly inserted in ears* Nah, nah, can't hear you.