We have been here before: Part II

  

Here is an excerpt of the book (p. 226) above. I have always found the rivalry between rural and urban America fascinating. What a happy coincidence that the Donald Trump/Ted Cruz dust up is occurring just as I was reading about the nearly peerless awfulness that was the presidential election of 1928.

The city made no effort to conceal its contempt for rural mores. [H.L.] Mencken contended that the farmer was not a member of the human race. The New Yorker, founded in 1925, the epitome of urbane wit light-years removed from country foolery, boasted that it was "not for the old lady in Dubuque." In Dorothy Parker's epigrams at the Hotel Algonquin, in the joyously raucous nasality of Al Jolson, and in the Manhattan provincialism of [Mayor] Jimmy Walker and Texas Guinan, the city created a world in which traditions of small-town America were almost unrecognizable.

Rural leaders in turn attacked New York as the modern Gomorrah. The Broadway theater, expostulated the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was "naked, profane, blasphemous and salacious." The city, rural traditionalists expounded, harbored hordes of aliens indifferent or hostile toward fundamental American values. "New York," wrote the Denver Post in 1930, "has been a cesspool into which immigrant trash has been dumped for so long that it can scarcely be considered American any more." New York was, as Bryan had long ago said of the East, "the enemy's country." It was cruel and impersonal, the abode of the rootless, a place where, as one writer noted, "nobody seemed to have parents."

So what does it mean today? Would it be unfair to assert that most if not all of the attacks on President Obama and Democrats today stem from this conflict? New York City is the stand-in here for all big cities, but would you be the least bit surprised to hear "Chicago" inserted in Gotham's place by some republican blowhard on the news? Today's rural folk have been neatly branded into "Real Americans" by con artists looking to exploit them. In the 1920s the split was real, there were liberal populists in rural America and liberal Progressives in the cities, and there were conservative bible-thumpers in the hinterland with conservative businessmen in the city. The parties were more or less split into regional concerns with a Republican North against the Democratic South. The fault lines were not as concrete then, but the conflict was still real.

Today it feels like the rural versus city values are more a matter of ideology than physical location. So many authors on liberal blogs have biographies that sound like "a blue American trapped in red America." How many liberal teachers, professors, librarians, etc. put up with being trapped in small towns where they are surrounded by ignorant rednecks? How do real ranchers and farmers put up with urban cowboys with their spotless boots, hats, and pickup trucks?

Of course the biggest mystery is how do the hateful rednecks and hillbillies who show up to Trump rallies not instinctively recoil from this embodiment of New York City and all of the "cesspool" images that that city still conjures in their minds? How does Trump not burst out laughing at these people whom he holds in such contempt and would never let rent one of his luxury high-rise apartments? Is the authoritarianism among "leader" and followers so strong that they are each willing to tolerate the others' faults in pursuit of sticking it to the liberals?

Then there is Teddy boy Cruz nakedly yukking it up with the other grifters of Duck Dynasty by pretending to go duck hunting. The scraggly head of the Robertson clan lies right into the camera for Teddy boy claiming that this  Canadian-born product of elite Northeastern universities is one of "us." I guess he is trying to succeed in this con where John Kerry failed by getting his face dirty?

The battles may be different, the players more slick, the parties aligned slightly more consistently, but we have been here before. It did not end well then, so far it isn't going so well for us either.

We have been here before

I recently picked up this book because a troll on a comment thread made the bold claim that the post-WWI recession was quickly ended by cutting taxes and government spending. "Huh?" Troll headquarters is getting more sophisticated in doling out the day's talking points. Putting that aside, it certainly is convenient that every problem can be solved by the liberal application of fundamentalist right wing policy prescriptions. It may be absolutely useless to try and argue with someone that delusional, they admit nothing and never surrender, but it dawned on me that despite taking a senior level undergraduate course on US History 1921-1945 I did not have the answer readily available in my head to even have an internal discussion on the end of WWI. That is the entire point I suppose, the troll was trying to make a "point" about something and brought up the post-WWI recession simply to obfuscate the discussion, derailing the thread while dissembling about his real reasons for inserting himself there. If you scan just about any news article on social media you see the same thing.

William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of this book, doesn't specifically have a chapter or section on the recession of 1919-21 but I was able to piece together the narrative amid the fight over the League of Nations and the Red Scare. As usual, it is the opposite of the troll's claim, Leuchtenburg writes that the government rolled back wartime controls on wages and prices too soon and all at once so prices skyrocketed while wages plunged. So people were squeezed and could not consume the products that the economy produced, when demand falls so does everything else. This led to mass layoffs, squeezing spending even more. Then government immediately ceased purchasing war material, removing still more spending from the economy. Then finally farmers, who had been encouraged to take out mortgages to more buy more land saw markets for their produce evaporate and prices for farm goods fall so banks foreclosed on them. Basically what Keynesian economics says will happen when there is a sudden and sharp drop in demand. The nail in sealing the recession was the government's brutal response to labor strikes that were in turn caused by the government's actions in withdrawing from the economy. Suppression by violence, arrests, replacement workers, and other anti-labor measures crushed working people on suspicions of "foreign extremist" ideologies at work, i.e. Bolshevism. This sent a clear signal to business that the good times of exploitation and profits while government turned a blind eye were back and corporations had nothing to fear from the liberal, "progressive" Wilson administration.

So much about this country's involvement in the Great War provides a textbook examination of how not to conduct a war. But that is a subject for another post. I started this book with a specific question in mind, I found so many more and the answers to them. Above all, this book in particular (the first edition was printed in 1958 and this edition released in 1993) says so much about where we are now, where we were then, and what not to do in dealing with all manner of political, cultural, and economic problems. Leuchtenburg wrote from the perspective of a professional historian during times of recovery from wars, upheavals, and financial peril. I think we can learn a lot from revisiting his work. I plan to spend a little time posting passages from the text and attempting to analyze and apply the examples of how screwed up the United States has always been. Hence the title of this post. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and we would be well-served to learn from events in the past so we don't have to deal with this particularly embarrassing era of American history again today.

A Student's Loan

Around here the Powerball lottery certainly has been in the news a lot. The estimated jackpot of the 36 state-spanning drawing is $1.3 billion at the time of writing. That's a lot of happiness the players are trying to buy. I will save the long-winded indictment of the system, everyone knows or should know that state lotteries got going in a big way during the awful Reaganomics years where the states tried to raise revenues to pay for public expenses and satisfy the often vicious backlash against property taxes. The very rich were trying and succeeding to become the super rich by pulling Reagan's strings for massively regressive tax cutting, deregulation of all sorts of industries to massively expand corporate power, and huge cuts to social spending. As a sop to the working class that has ever since been slipping from middle class status to working poor, someone came up with the idea of pooling the peasants' money so once in a while one of them could become somewhat rich. Not by coincidence the stigmas of gambling and greed were fading as fast as the idea of community and the public good. In effect, people traded (or more precisely, were scammed into trading) a decent, dignified, and stable economic system for the roller coaster casino of massive inequality we have today. But, as long as there is some little hope of striking it rich through the lottery people seem to tolerate the disintegration of our nation. What if we created a new system of a "public good" kind of lottery?

The lottery is not the only of anti-social institution that has led to our present reality of Donald Trump as front runner for the Republican Presidential nomination despite no experience for the job, but it is a piece of the puzzle. For every Joe Schmoe that feels justified in loathing his job and his boss or coworkers because some day he will win the lottery and leave it all behind, that is one less person willing to fight for reform. Before I was finally downsized and outsourced out of the working-class manufacturing community we had kind of an on again off again tradition of pooling some money for Powerball tickets with the understanding of sharing any big prize we might win. Our foreman was promoted to the job out of our ranks so we trusted him and he would voluntarily collect the money, buy the tickets, and then photocopy them as proof of the numbers. Now my coworkers were really into pools like this and organized little drawings for everything from fantasy football, other sports, and even the cents on our paychecks. We did piecework so our paychecks were slightly different each pay day. I never participated in those but it gave me an idea that I have kind of run with for a while. But it wasn't until the YUUUGE Powerball jackpot became news that I am finally motivated to write about it.

What if we had a smaller scale lottery with a more progressive, socially-minded goal? The Occupy Wall Street movement had an idea to pool their money and pay off members' student loans and other debts. I am not a tech-savvy web design kind of sea monster but with technology the way it is now and getting more impressive every year, I cannot imagine this kind of association would be impossible. Why not start a little website where members can buy in with a small subscription, say two dollars a week, and have a drawing each week to make a payment on student loans, or credit cards, car payments, etc. This would require a degree of trust that most people do not have anymore thanks to con artists and scammers, along with pervasive media propaganda about con artists and scammers. There has to be a way to give an online collaboration enough transparency to get off the ground. Would you pay eight dollars a month for a chance at retiring some debt? I am pretty sure I would.

Here's how I imagine it running. Most sensible people would agree that debt of all kinds has reached a level that is a genuine social problem. Even from the plutocracy's point of view, student loans in particular have surpassed their purpose of social control and become a real drag on economic growth. Therefore the plutocracy may not crush an independent initiative like this the way they would actual union organizing or cooperatives. There may even be individuals in high places that would be sympathetic to a mutual aid organization. Perhaps someone high up in a credit union, or alumni association, or even a progressive church could donate server space or start up capital. Again, I don't know how these things are done, this is just a brainstorm.

A plain website where you create a unique account and subscribe with your credit card or pay pal. I would think people would have to commit to a full year or they might just cancel after winning once. You enter in an account and designate or authorize the site to make payments on your behalf. Then choose numbers for the drawing. You have to choose numbers each week. Then there will be plenty of space on the landing page so you could put an ad or two in to defray some of the expenses, though some of the revenue will have to go towards administrative and tech costs. Then a random number generator can determine the winner(s), it would be more in keeping with the idea to have one large pot and then several smaller prizes. That way a chunk of a members principal can be retired while others can get their payments made. If the cost of subscribing is low enough it won't hurt anyone's living expenses but do some real work towards liberating people from the burden of debt. And give members the experience of gambling without the peril of blowing the winnings on crap.

Of course, the people who most need restraint in managing money will not be interested in this idea. There are numerous articles floating around social media since the jackpot was announced discussing not only how bad the lottery system is for society but that most winners are crushed by the prize in various ways. I think this system I described is a more healthy alternative but I used to feel that way about Internet poker and that was banned. 

If something like this lottery won't work then we need to think of something that will. Something that won't be as easily demonized by the trump crowd as occupy or black lives matter has been. But I won't hold out hope, if a group of people whose major goal is "please don't kill us" and a lot of people say "no" what chance do we have?

Season's Greetings: Frank Capra was a what?

Happy Holidays everyone. If you are like me you probably spent at least a little time watching holiday movies this past week. After rushing around trying to travel, buy gifts, wrap them, exchange them, eat too much, and so on we all need a break right? So what would be more natural than watching little Ralphie pursue his Christmas dream of a Red Rider BB gun, or Scott Calvin transition into being Santa Claus, or the Peanuts gang, the Grinch, and Rudolph to try and unwind a little? Or the timeless Frank Capra classic It's A Wonderful Life. Then, if you are a certain gloomy sea monster you might follow some Facebook comment sections about something or other and come across a conservative troll making one of the most counter-intuitive claims you've ever heard; that Frank Capra was a conservative Republican who hated FDR and the usual litany of supposed conservative bugaboos.

I wish I had book-marked or screen-shotted the thread because it was a fascinating demonstration of reality control. I mean the right-wing fantasy about the New Deal actually worsening the Great Depression is a fairly well known talking point. The co-opting and re-imagining of American leaders as actually encompassing contemporary right-wing values is fairly commonplace. While portraying great Hollywood actors and directors as actually rebels against the liberal and even communist film industry is also not unknown, the attempt by movement conservatives to claim Frank Capra as one of their own was not one of those. I became intrigued and started researching this idea. On its face, the idea that 'Capraesque' could be inverted in the same way that National Socialism became socialism or Liberalism remade into Liberal Fascism was rather preposterous. People knew that Capra's films were about the little guy standing up to the greed of powerful and uncaring men in a way that is instinctively understandable where the finer tenets of Nazism or Fascism is not.

Normally, when I come across a misattributed or fictional quotation mauled into supporting gun fanaticism or free market fundamentalism I can simply go to google and start to piece together where it came from. If you come across a meme claiming that George Washington or James Madison was all for a heavily-armed and totally unregulated paranoid populace ready and willing to overthrow the government they created, then chances are you can find a few hundred cut and paste jobs repeating the lie ad nauseum with a quick google search. The informal, shadowy Ministry of Truth out there in cyberspace that is constantly trying to rewrite history to conform with the GOP party line is rarely so subtle that it cannot be spotted with a little diligence. However, the Capra as conservative Republican may be a new attempt. Or this could be a failed attempt merely making a zombified appearance for the many viewings of It's A Wonderful Life during the holiday season. After all, I only read of the one troll on one comment thread making the assertion, perhaps it was simply a weak attempt to derail the conversation. Though he was pretty adamant about the veracity of his claim and felt that it proved that only his side (you know, the ones always talking about "second amendment solutions" and that poor people scamming bankers to get houses they could not afford because government political correctness forced banks to securitize mortgages and crash the economy, then wailing like banshees about bailing out the losers) could be compassionate. If this goofball meme gets legs they will be calling Mr. Potter a liberal next.

I started by looking up Capra on Wikipedia. Now, there is a reason why the internet encyclopedia is not a suitable source for schoolwork, anyone can go on it and edit entries. Most of the time this is a good thing, the idea of many minds contributing to the commonwealth of knowledge is a very democratic concept. However, when a group of committed activists sets their sights on hijacking the discourse by editing a Wikipedia entry with misinformation or outright lies it can do real damage. Therefore Wikipedia is a good place to start research, to acquire some background information and especially to follow the citations and bibliography on a subject, but not reliable for serious citation. I remember once looking up the artist formerly known as Prince when he performed during the halftime show of the Superbowl one year and marveling at the dogged determination of racists to edit and re-edit the entry in real time. Anytime there are ideologues whose agenda is more important than facts in a controversy you can bet that they will try to be the Ministry of Truth and mess with things.

This is what I found under "political beliefs" for Frank Capra's Wikipedia page:

Capra’s political beliefs coalesced in his films, which promoted and celebrated the spirit of American individualism. A conservative Republican, Capra railed against Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his tenure as governor of New York State, and opposed his presidency during the years of the Depression. Capra stood against government intervention during the national economic crisis.^[58]

The footnote reads "Wilson 2013, p. 266." This is the only citation for that book, that you then have to scroll down through the bibliography section to find that it refers to: 

• Wilson, Victoria. A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 978-0-6848-3168-8.

I have so far been unable to read the actual page asserting that Capra, a lifelong resident of California after emigrating from Italy, was concerned with the governor of New York or what followed for the nation. Opposing government intervention seems out of character for a man who, as the Wikipedia entry also states,

Within four days after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Capra quit his successful directing career in Hollywood and received a commission as a major in the United States Army. He also gave up his presidency of the Screen Directors Guild. Being 44 years of age, he was not asked to enlist, but, notes Friedman, "Capra had an intense desire to prove his patriotism to his adopted land.

The director of a series of government morale-boosting films called "Why We Fight" who volunteered for the military seems a poor candidate for hating government. Nevertheless, I kept digging. Though it seems unlikely that a biography of an actress who appeared in some of Capra's films would be strong enough source material to justify the unqualified statement that he was a conservative Republican. Especially when it is only cited once, and only for one page. It is possible that Capra may have said something about a New Deal program or a policy of Roosevelt's administration while governor of New York, but one utterance does not endorse that kind of certainty. This kind of thing seems like an important bombshell revelation, considering the continued relevance of It's A Wonderful Life and other populist films. The charge of political identity never made it into any reviews of Wilson's book that I looked at. This seems to be a pretty thin reed, even if Capra's politics were not manufactured from whole cloth by some overzealous partisan and inserted into Wikipedia in an act of ideological espionage.

Next I found a conference on Capra held by AHA through the Journal for MultiMedia History featuring three eminent historians who presented on Frank Capra's populism. Very interesting, but no official judgement that the director was indeed a populist of the knuckle-dragging Donald Trump type. Though professional historians are not usually going to fix a label like that to a subject. This series of talks from Robert Brent Toplin, Lawrence Levine, and Dan T. Carter is much more interested in the nuance of Capra's values and how that relates to the American experience than dropping him wholesale into an ideological slot as the anonymous editor of Wikipedia did. Moving on I became a little frustrated, the original troll presented the idea that Capra was just as angry and deluded as a typical tea partier as though it was plain as day. Clearly Frank Capra's ideology and political affiliation was more nuanced and less apparent than checking off some box.

Keeping in mind that this is just an cursory examination of online sources, not an exhaustive academic research project. It sounds like this subject will take a lot more work but I will end with one book that asserts Capra's secret identity is as "...the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater."

This is "Joseph McBride's masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography, 'Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,'" as reviewer Barry Gewen put it in the New York Times. The tone of this review just drips of conspiracy theories, Capra's whole life was a lie and he was actually ashamed of everything he did in public. And never told anyone. It was up to this author to discern and distill Capra's big secret. Now, it seems Joseph McBride is a rather accomplished scholar and a fellow Wisconsinite but the first paragraph of his own biography on his own website states:

McBride was a volunteer worker in Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign and spent thirty-one years researching and writing [Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013)], which is structured as a memoir of his personal journey in understanding the case.

I'm not going to judge McBride based on this statement but it does indicate that he is no stranger to conspiracy theories. How influential being steeped in JFK lore for over thirty years is on an unrelated subject cannot be stated with any certainty. It would, however, explain how McBride came to the conclusion that Capra was a closet reactionary when no one else, as far as I can tell, has agreed with this assertion. Instead of a million cut and paste dittos from right-wing blogs and forums, there is this lonely book out there from over twenty years ago

This project will require more investigation but it can be said that Frank Capra as conservative Republican is not a self-evident assertion that Internet trolls can lob around with confidence. The GOP has not yet been able to co-opt Capra or his films to their sick fantasy. Nor can they toss it out there to support some other talking point of the day the way trolls like to dismiss Democratic support for minority issues because once upon a time southern conservative Democratic senators voted against the Civil Rights Act. And trolls like the one who prompted my investigation will not be able to invoke Capra's name in support of bank deregulation or the supposed war on Christmas. At least, not this year.

Trump; Why Worry?

The left of center blogosphere still seems to lack consensus on the oft-bankrupt scion of undeserved wealth and failed businessman Donald Trump's ideology. Is he a fascist, is he merely an opportunistic right wing demagogue? Or maybe a carnival barker, basking in the adoring glow of rabid and delusional ghouls to further sell his "brand"? There is even an hypothesis that Trump is actually a plant by the Clintons to finally push the whole frothing mass of extremists over the cliff and win the presidency for Hillary.

There are two problems with any of these theories. First is that the extremist right wing never goes away, the paranoid style can be pushed back to the fringe for a while but never locked away in a padded room as it should be. Trump's supporters have waited for a man on horseback to appear for a long time now and they will not be satisfied by a run of the mill corporate "conservative" again for a long time. The bar for crazy will have to be raised each cycle until the inevitable day one finally wins. 

Which brings us to the second point. Since Watergate, Democrats only win the presidency after a Republican wrecks things so badly that no amount of money or propaganda can keep a Republican in office. A Democrat has not succeeded another Democrat since LBJ's landslide over Goldwater in 1964. Ideologically, Reagan broke the New Deal consensus and replaced it with sunny, optimistic extremism that embraced naked class warfare on working people, hammered a wedge between government and the populace, and continued Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Since then the metaphorical 50 yard line of American politics shifted far to the right. The Democratic Party became the conservatives and the Republicans became reactionaries.

If our traditions as we think of them today grew out of the changes in American society that were in turn a response to the Great Depression and World War II, then the defenders of those New Deal changes are the actual conservatives in American politics. And the Democratic Party's platform, such as it is, is dedicated to preserving that legacy. Including but not limited to; a minimum wage, progressive taxation of wealth and income, the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain, social insurance, and so on. It was a system that worked fairly well at home and abroad, not perfectly of course, no human system is ever perfect. But it was something to build upon.

Instead, since the 1980 election, the Republican Party has been dedicated to dismantling the system piece by piece, and return the nation to the 1920s. A time that bears more than a superficial resemblance to today. Immigration was very high, interrupted by the Great War of course, and suspicion of immigrants was equally high. From worries about assimilation, to huge numbers and high birth rates squeezing out political power and privilege from the native-born Americans, to theft of jobs and driving down wages, to outright danger from disease and crime. The Great War also brought a new fear, that of mixed loyalties and whether immigrants would attack or sabotage the United States on behalf of their home countries.

The U.S. also participated in wrecking a country through armed force and demonizing its people to the point of renaming sauerkraut "liberty cabbage." Historical comparisons are always difficult, but the extremists that crawled out of the collapse of authoritarian regimes in Germany and the Middle East also bore a mutated resemblance to darker aspects of society. No, ISIS or Daesh or whatever it is called is not like the Nazis but the fear it generates in the paranoid parts of American society is real and clouds rational judgment. The simple fact that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a foreign-born terrorist cannot seem to penetrate the irrational, paranoid mindset of those people supporting Trump. It could happen, therefore the only answer to keep America safe is to bomb and invade any area that could possibly, theoretically, threaten Americans.

It does not matter that this approach has been tried, repeatedly, throughout American history beginning with Bacon's Rebellion to drive out the Native Americans, to Andrew Jackson's war to occupy Florida, right on through to Bush's Iraq occupation. Expansion means security and vice versa, the only acceptable defense against any possible threat is to attack immediately. The paranoid style will accept nothing less, and the demagogues jockeying for the GOP nomination will always deliver.

The emergence of Trump as the completely uninhibited Id of the paranoid style is already a disaster for America. What does it matter if he checks off enough boxes on some arbitrary chart for fascism? Putting aside the fact that fascism is chameleonic and will adapt itself to the society it infects, what Trump is selling and what the Republican base is demanding is the abandonment of all American principles for the right leaders. The rule of law, checks and balances, division of power, and the fear or at least suspicion of concentrated power are all destined for the dustbin of history. The very idea of a republic where leaders are not above the law, where disputes are settled through elections and debate instead of violence. All of these and more are what the extremists enabling Trump are in reality demanding. But only for "one of them," obviously President Obama is an illegitimate usurper and so shall be evermore any non-fascist occupying a government office at any level.

These are not the attitudes of a "loyal opposition" or any political force in a republic, and why, whether, fascist or authoritarian or some other non-democratic ideology, it must be stopped. Trump, and any and all political figures after him, cannot continue down this path. His irresponsible rhetoric only drives and empowers the undemocratic and un-American segments of the population who operate only on fear and hate. This is why we should be worried.

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.

Teaching The Paranoids To Fish

Even Sea Monsters get high blood pressure sometimes...

Last night this picture popped up in my news feed. Let's grin and look at it for a moment, anything look... askew? That's an awfully big head you've got there Osama, hmm, could this picture possibly be... fake? When it popped up again half a dozen times from the same source, an amateur hack named Ed Dane from Idaho, I assume that it was just shared from the original poster. I did not even get through typing "Hillary shakes..." before Google knew what I meant and spit back another version and a link to Snopes.com. This photo was originally faked for a Photoshop contest back in 2007. Way to be cutting edge guys!

The other version is a little cleaned up but why in the world are they depicted wearing the Star of David? It does not really matter. My point is this particular meme has been in the cyber circulatory system for EIGHT YEARS and there are lazy, gullible people still floating it around as though it was genuine. Are "conservatives" really so caught up in their fantasies that they are incapable of shame? When supporting "evidence" can be cooked up in an hour using Photoshop to go along with made up facts, is there any more reason to fight this fight? These memes are the experiment that broke out of the lab. Cyberspace dog catchers like Snopes can try to net the worst ones and put them back in cages, but that is not what anyone living in the reality-based world should be shooting for.

When people like me, who are politically active and look around online for news, ideas, dialogue, etc., encounter anonymous trolls in the comment sections in less savory internet destinations, the natural impulse is the dismiss them outright as hopeless idiots. Then you can ignore or engage them without having to take anything they say personally. Most of the time trolls are just deliberately provoking the community. But, you guessed it, these are from my former brothers-in-arms. I have cut ties with the larger community of tankers online, but am still friends with many of the guys I actually served with. It personally upsets me to see my friends repeatedly spout nonsense like this without any shame, uncritically passing along memes made by others with an agenda that will negatively impact my friends and their loved ones. I get it, you don't like Hillary, I'm not exactly her biggest fan either but these attacks on her are ridiculous.

I know for a fact that the guys who shared this picture do not like being made fools of. We all went through the hazing rituals in the Army that sent young Privates fresh from OSUT all over the place looking for squelch oil, boxes of reticles, and so forth. I was sent to Squadron Commo once for a "Prick E-5" by the guy who posted this "Fake and Shake" picture. As young and naive as I was, I did not fall for it. Nor did I ever waste time hazing the guys who came after me. Maybe that is why I study history; I want facts, not silliness. Since there are no footnotes on blogger I will explain: a PRC-77 was a radio, commo was the communications equipment office, an E-5 is a sergeant so he was trying to get me to call the NCO on duty there a prick. The guys that are already in the unit throw a million bits of jargon and acronyms at you in short order, so they just sneak one in now and then that sounds legitimate but is actually a joke on you. That is what the vast majority of right wing memes are, a joke on the person sharing them.

In spite of this, I don't want my brothers to be laughed at for falling for these partisan political hazings. Which is why I'm not using names. When you post a meme like this one in support of the conspiracy theory around Benghazi, it only takes a few seconds to look it up on Snopes and shove your nose in the fact that this meme is nonsense. But that is the beauty of the conspiracy theory, the paranoids believe anything negative about Hillary Clinton and will be taken in by this, if you point out that this manufactured meme is easily debunked then you must be part of the conspiracy or you are a sheep. I want to take the intellectual lightweights aside and explain the order of argument to them. If you make a claim, it is on you to provide the evidence. Actual evidence that can be independently verified, not the other way around. Making a claim this intricate without evidence and expecting anyone skeptical of your assertion (that was made by some remote and anonymous third party) to provide evidence to disprove it is just laziness. Sharing memes with no supporting evidence is the political equivalent of masturbation, it may be fun for you but you look ridiculous and should feel ashamed when caught.

These stupid memes are the same as ordering a Private to fetch up some squelch oil. I fear that the "think tank" or whatever warehouse of conservatism that keeps serving these things up is called, knows that this stuff is bullshit and they laugh whenever one of their little creations goes viral off of the gullible, lazy social media users out there.

The questions for those gullible people I have is: "Do you like being taken advantage of? Do you get something out of sharing these things? Does it ever bother you that those of us outside the bubble are laughing at you for being so gullible? Have you ever considered taking a moment to look up that delicious and sexy anti-liberal meme? Why not? Afraid you might find out something you don't want to know?" In the previous paragraphs I have detailed the conflict inside, I don't suffer fools gladly but what is the point of making a fuss? Will I gain anything from confrontation? Most likely not.

Sayings and cliches are an intellectual crutch and I shouldn't have put a play on one in the title of this post, but seriously, debunking these things could be a full time job, one I don't want, and I get so disgusted trying to swat them down that it is no fun. Is there a way to teach some elementary critical thinking to the average Joe out there?

I'm definitely not giving any fish to the paranoids. They don't deserve a free ride.