Peeling the Onion

Happy Birthday, United States of America. Happy 242nd Birthday to you.

You were born in strife, rebellion and uncertainty; in a duality of freedom and slavery; declaring rights to free speech, free association, freedom to worship (or not); freedom to assemble, with rights to a free, fair trial and to belong to an armed militia yet still in a dichotomy that allowed, without using the word in your foundational document, the importation of slaves for 20 years from the moment your charter, the U.S. Constitution, became ratified.

You have survived the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Know Nothings of mid-19th Century, slavery, slavery and slavery. You have survived the Klan, the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy and HUAC hearings and the Red Scare, Dixie and Dixiecrats, segregation, assassination of four presidents, of a would be and would have been president and of a prophet of Civil Rights.

Continue reading “Happy Birthday, United States of America”

The first paragraph of a Wikipedia article about the assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado describes how, on Nov. 27, 2015, a lone gunman attacked the facility resulting in three dead and nine wounded.

This happened as the Republican presidential primary debates were under way with a cast of thousands — well ok — not quite that many, but still over 20 sought that party’s nomination for the White House that year.

Continue reading “The Piece Politico Declined to Publish”

A very, very, very short post to the blog tonight, shortest from me you’ve ever read.

Didn’t know I could write briefs? Hey in the bad old days working the night and overnight desk for the AP in Newark once an hour we had to do what were calls “splits”, splitting off from the state news wire to serve the member radio stations with “rip and read copy”; you know, like:

“Gov. Smith (no such person) said today he favored taxing chocolate, bringing a ringing endorsement from his side of the aisle but a vow from Senate President No Name Jones that the opposition will, in his words, “will never let them tax your candy.”

Or, “A Marlton man died tonight in a two car collision on Route 38 in Cherry Hill. Police said the dead man, xxx xxxxx, was a father of two and on his home from work when a car driven by xxxx xxxxx crossed the median divide ad hit xxxxx’s car.

“And that’s New Jersey news, stay tuned in an hour for another report.”

So, you know, the 1 minute news report with stuff like that, written by moi, ripped from the wire and read by a DJ and then back to Rock ‘N Roll.

So in brief I wonder:

I wonder how many pregnancies that owe to Donald Trump’s sexual appetites have been terminated, with the terminations arranged by Michael Cohen and his predecessors as fixer?

Don’t you think there have been? But a year from the week with his next SCOTUS nominee, the U.S. Supreme Court will almost certainly, definitely, absolutely, nullify Roe v. Wade. Do I have a crystal ball? No. Do I have good instincts about this stuff? Oh, yes I do.

Two years ago about right now a young woman editor at Politico turned down a piece I’d sent her about how the most consequential issue in the election, yhea, that election, the one two years ago — the most consequential issue for any female in this county between the ages of 14 and 44, and for their mothers and grandmothers, was choice.

The then 28-year-old woman editor at Politico turned it down, not germane or some such she said. It is now. Not just as a general proposition but as a fact in her own life, huh?

Ok, this could have been briefer, so I’ll stop here now.

Except for this. Short of Sen. Jezebel, R-Maine (I leave her messages calling Susan Collins that), short of her changing parties (which would be smart because if she don’t she becomes the NUMBER 1 Democratic Party target in 2022 and she wants at least one more term). But short of that, there is no way to stop his nominee from being confirmed.

The only way to stop that is if Collins and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska, R) vote no. Don’t hold your breath on that. Collins is a sniveling, wheedling coward who believes McConnell even though she knows every time his promises to her are lies. Murkowski? Like all Alaskans in Congress representing that weird state where almost no one lives, she’s a shopper — she will have a list of things she wants, she will give it to McConell and he will fill her shopping bag and get her vote.

And then there will go Roe v. Wade, maybe the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, maybe even all the way back to the New Deal. They want to repeal the 20th Century.  The Federalist Society has laid it all out and they’ll use the high court to do it.

They have been planning this for 60 years. By Oct. 1 they will have the 5 votes on the SCOTUS to do it. So, why would they not do what they now can after lusting after it for 60 years or more. Of course they will.

In 1912 Spain and France divided the independent kingdom of Morocco, until then independent under its sultan, (today Morocco is united and a free kingdom).

The Spanish got the worse part of the deal but they did get the territory opposite the Rock, Gibraltar, held by the British by then a century since the Napoleonic wars on the Iberian Peninsula (the Napoleonic king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, half-brother to Napoleon, fled Spain and ended up in Bordentown, N.J. of all places, where I lived for 36 years. His once grand estate there is now a small, nearly abandoned Catholic seminary/retreat).

Spanish Morocco held a strategic position on the Straits of Gibraltar. It was held by the Spanish Army of Morocco and the Spanish Foreign Legion, from both of which sprang the uprising against the Second Republic of Spain on July 17, 1936 led by “Los Quatros Generales”, the four insurgent generals (this is the title of an important song of those loyal to the Republic and so called, the Loyalists).

The war spread to Iberian Spain the very next day and by October had become the full-blown Spanish Civil War in which 1,000,000 died; in which 100,000 foreign volunteers called the International Brigades, including 3,000 Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion/Brigade and several hundred more in the John Brown Artillery Battery served. Like most of the men in the brigades, these Americans were committed men of the left, yes, many who were Communists, served the Spanish Republic.

The Americans came home to ostracization, persecution and hounding for years. (In this piece published in 2016 ago on the New York Times Op-ed page, our conservative Sen. John McCain pays the homage of the brave to the brave in a tribute to the last member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to die (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html).

Loyalist/Republican Spain and its lost battle epitomizes all great lost causes and may have been the most romantic of all lost such causes. Certainly, Ernest Hemingway made it so in his “For Whom the Bell Tolls”.

Among the four insurgent generals the one intended to lead the rebels, called the Nationalists and with their civilian far right supporters the authors of the Falange Movement, died in a plane crash. The equivalent of the Fascist Party in Italy and the NAZI Party in Germany. NAZI Germany and Fascist Italy (the latter apparently lately reborn in the new Italian government) actively and quickly entered the war early on the Fascist/Falangist side, leading to the German bombing at Guernica, in the Basque Province.

That event is seared in human memory by one of the masterpieces of 20^thCentury Art, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, depicting the first mass bombing ever of civilian populations. Picasso was a Basque. He was a Communist. He was a Republican in the full meaning of that word in Spain. He left Spain and refused to set foot there again until after the death of Gen. Francisco Franco 40 years later.

Why Franco? Because that first general in charge of the rebellion died in the plane crash, it is written the plane crashed or may have crashed because it was overweight as he insisted on moving all his weighty worldly goods with him when he flew from Africa to take command of the rebels as they advance through southern Spain from Ibiza to Majorca, onto Sevilla and Valencia and across Andalusia, aiming for a quick end to the war by taking Madrid.

His place was quickly assumed by Franco, who had commanded the Spanish Army of Morocco, made up mostly of Moroccans led by Spanish officers, which was the seedbed of the rebellion. Indeed, Franco had been the chief plotter of the rebellion. He now took command of it and within a year proclaimed himself El Cuadillo, the Leader, the Spanish equivalent of Il Duce in Italy, of Der Fuhrer in Germany.

The first 500 American volunteers in the Lincoln Battalion/Brigade were bloodied at the Second Battle of Jarama on the Jarama River near Madrid in late February 1937, immortalized by Woody Guthrie in his song “Jarama”, sung to the tune of “The Red River Valley”.

In the First Battle of Jarama, the 15^thInternational Brigade, a composite of internationals including British, Canadian and German volunteers (the Germans in the Thalmann Brigade, named for the concentration-camp incarcerated German Communist Party leader Ernst Thalmann, who died at Buchenwald in 1944) helped mightily as the Republican forces held, then counterattacked and absorbed the second Jarama assault by the Nationalists, in which the Americans fought.

The rebels failed and the Republic held Madrid where a Communist woman leader of the Republic, Dolores Ibarurri, daughter of a Basque father and called “La Passionara” (the passionate flower) raised her fist in the Loyalist popular front salute and declared in a famous speech, “No Passeron” – “They shall not pass. They did not that winter. Eventually though the Fascists would pass and take all of Spain.

On the fall of Madrid, Franco declared “Hemos passada” (“We have passed”) and La Passionara went into near 40 years in exile in Moscow, returning to Spain in 1977, where she died in 1989 after a life spent as a hardline, un-repenting Stalinist internationalist. She bore considerable responsibility for savage infighting and persecution during the Republic by Communists of anarchists and others who were loyal to the fallen Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky. The world is complicated. Always.

There is another famous song of the Spanish Civil War titled “La Quince Brigada” (“The 15^thBrigade”). In the song Los Quatros Gengerales (best versions to search for all these songs are the versions sung by Paul Robeson) there is a lyric that in English goes:

Madrid, you wondrous city,

Madrid, you wondrous city,

Madrid, you wondrous city, Mamita mia,

They wanted to take you,

They wanted to take you.

(And with intervening lyrics then continues)

We shall avenge them

We shall avenge them;

And all our bondage,

And all our bondage,

And all our age-old bondage, Mamita mia,

We’ll break asunder,

We’ll break asunder.

(Here are the songs one by Robeson, the other by sung by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers about 80 years ago. But finish reading and then listen, they will be the more powerful and pertinent if you do)

The war of course ended with the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic as the western democracies and the United States, in one of their first, worst and greatest acts of cowardice and appeasement embargoed all weapons sales and shipments to Spain while Germany and Italy went all in.

Only the then Soviet Union, calling for a united international “Popular Front”, sent aide to the Republic. But not enough to overcome the Nazi/Fascist/Falangist onslaught and so the Republic fell in April 1939: Terror and dictatorship fell over and across Spain until 1975 when Franco died and the present Spanish constitutional monarchy was born with the consent and, indeed, the active participation of the late King Juan Carlos, who was determined it have a democratic constitution.

But in all the retelling of that epic event, there was a moment, is a moment in all of the terrible history of the Spanish Civil War that resonates today in the United States of America.

Miguel de Unamuno, another Basque (interesting the influence of that province on Spanish political, artistic and intellectual life) was perhaps the greatest, most world-renowned scholar, writer and philosopher of Spain in the 20^thCentury, perhaps in its history (I admit I have read little he wrote but others so describe him).

When the rebellion and war started Unamuno, then 72, was Dean of the University of Salamanca, founded in 1164, 68 years after Oxford, 45 years before Cambridge.

On Oct. 12, 1936 a great crowd attended a celebration at the university of Día de la Raza (now called Día de la Hispanidad), celebrating what we call Columbus Day, the day Columbus made landfall in the New World, the day the Spanish language and culture began its conquest and spread throughout the Americas (as it continues to even today in our country).

As Unamuno had watched the spread of the rebellion, which he first supported, and the horrors of a war in which no quarter was given by either side as it moved across Spain, he began to doubt and finally to believe it was a terrible mistake.

Presiding that day at the Salamanca University Día de la Raza celebration, which heard from several vehement supporters and participants in the rebel Fascist cause, Unamuno saw in the audience the crippled (by war wounds from fighting against insurgents in Morocco when they rebelled against Spain in the 1920s)—the crippled, feared Gen. Jose Millan-Astray, who as commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion was a key Franco general.

From somewhere in the crowd a voice shouted “Viva La Muerte!”, which means “Long Live Death!”. Millan Astray responded “Espana!” and the crowd responded “Libre!” (“Freedom!”), and then the same again (Wikipedia and other online sources are reflected in all this for much of the detail here to supplement my memory and knowledge and this story owes to the greatest historian of the Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas).

Unamuno rose, acknowledged the crowd and that it been awaiting his words. He said a great deal at that moment including this:

“…Now I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, “Viva La Muerta!”, and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.”

He then singled out Millan-Astray, noting his war injuries and said, “But unfortunately Spain today has too many invalids. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millan-Astray might dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. It should be expected from a mutilated who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes to find solace in seeing how the number of mutilated ones multiplies around him.”

Millan-Astray responded with this: “Muera la inteligencia! Viva la Muerte!”, which means “Death to Intelligence! Long Live Death!”

Wikipedia says this account of the events is disputed but the weight of history finds historians like Hugh Thomas confirming it happened. In the prevailing accounts, Unamuno answered Millan-Astray by declaring: “You will win but you will not convince” (said to be the slogan of the city of Salamanca). And the rebels did win, did defeat the Loyalists and instituted a horrible, autocratic dictatorship summed up in the words “Muera la inteligencia”.

If this has a familiar ring today in the United States it should, because if there is a single phrase that captures the ethos and the ethics of the Trump regime it is that, it is “Muera la Inteligencia” – “Death to Intelligence.”

Only those dead to moral intelligence would tear 2,300 children from their parents and lock them up in concentration internment camps. It is a morally insensate, morally insensible, morally reprehensible act. And so they have and the spirit of the Falangist General Millan-Astray resides now in the America White House.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a reasonable and reasonably respected conservative voice on the great paper’s Op-ed page, had a column a few days ago, a laudatory column about right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer.

Stephens noted that Krauthammer has announcedthat he is going to die soon of cancer. What vanity, to announce your  own impending death.

That means Krauthammer, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since a diving board accident while a student at Harvard Medical School will die at age 68. He must be admired for finishing that course of study and becoming a psychiatrist and the work he did in that capacity  — but for nothing else.

He need not be admired for his second career so praised by Stephens; his years as a faux philosopher of conservatism when in fact he has been a voice enabling the extreme right and the misshapen world it has wrought.  Stephens would have you believe Krauthammer represents an acceptable perspective in his writings different from this monstrous regime, when in fact he is one of those who spawned it.

So the Stephens column is in large measure the obituary of a still living man. In it Stephens extols Krauthammer. I will not explain why or quote from it at all, much less at length. It is easy to find and read the column if you want. But why would you waste your time doing it?

The Times’ regular Op-ed columns are spaces in which The Times always permits its readers to post their responses. So I did. I do frequently. I do not like Charles Krauthammer. So I did.

It may be unkind to say so but I have always privately believed that the bitterness and anger that comes through in his often vitriolic writings (Mr. Stephens of course sees great, wisdom, charm and balance in the same writings — he is entitled to his opinion and I to mine). I have always thought them to be a response to the circumstances that put him in and kept him in a wheelchair most of his adult life. A man containing an inner anger about that happening to him needs some way to strike out against his circumstances.

I don’t know the man, it’s simply intuition as to what would have made him so resentful of anything generous and liberal in our society. My conclusion may be unkind and entirely wrong. But no one would, could or ever will convince me that the damage to his body needed to leave him with a damaged view of the world.

So this is what I posted on the Stephens column. Read it understanding that in these perilous times, when the nation is at war with itself, when some of the nation is at war with our friends in the world, that this is in fact a war in which no prisoners are tbeing taken and the wounded are being left to die (so far at least in the figurative, not the literal sense).

And so this I posted this on Mr. Stephen’s column:

“I beg to differ with Mr. Stephens. Charles Krauthammer has been a voice for division, inequality, internecine political war and resentment — resentment rooted perhaps in his own circumstances.

“If you do what he has done and you are not one of his intimates, one of his family or friends, then you can only judge a man by the way he has conducted himself as a public man.

“As a public man I have found him to be despicably dishonest, divisive and disingenuous in a manifestly far right expression of views as he participated in the poisoning of American political discourse.

“Like all those who know only his public voice, I am left to judge the public man, the man who insisted on being a public man. That man I judge harshly.

“We are told not to speak ill of the dead. He is not — though he says he will be. I’ve suffered the same general disease, twice. I let family and friends know. I did not announce it to my larger world, tho that is a smaller one than his. Were I a more public person, I would not ever announce it to the world.

“The world can know we have died when we do. It need not know we are dying. Announcing that condition is to seek a handout of sympathy and empathy. Save that for the tiny children at the border. For us individually, that’s not for the world to give but for those close to us.

If you choose to be a public man or woman, keep your private lives private with the understanding the greater public will know and judge you without mercy by what you do and did and said as a public figure.”

Continue reading “The Art of the Deal? It’s Photography”

Oh, I know, we are supposed to pose photos of our grandkids and/or our lunch on Facebook, but I use it as a billboard because it is a great place to advertise political thought.Well we all know that. Vladimir knows that.

We also all know by now about the little twerp who runs the thing, Zuck, and his smug self-entitled billionaire hench-woman Sandberg (with lots of advice about childcare for women making 40 grand a year a — well just hire a nanny for shitsake).

Continue reading “Postings and Musings”

(Note, I had no idea what would happen when I inserted the link at the end of this so I tried it. It will not play directly but will give you the choice to click on the You Tube version and watch. And if for any reason it doesn’t work, well you know the drill, just Google it — Frank Sinatra, “The House I Live In”)

That being said, I first saw this at the age of 7 at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn in what was called a G.O. (General Organization) Assembly. The other GO Assembly I remember in those years was a performance by a troop of Hoppi Indians.

But this little 10 minute film made a profound impression on me. Well it was supposed to and especially supposed to make one on kids. The direct subject was anti-semitism but it applies across the board and never more than now in Donald Trump’s America for all the obvious reasons.

You don’t need me to recite those reasons. You know them. You probably of course know this wonderful little film made in 1945, produced and directed by Merwyn Laroy I believe and of course the music by Earl Robinson, who also wrote “Ballad for Americans”. Yep he was a Communist. So was my father.

So? It’s over 70 years since I wore red diapers.

So, as I said, so?

Frank Sinatra, who stars in this small but important statement about our nation was you know a real lefty back in the day. He was not a Communist or even, what they called so unattractively,  “a fellow traveler”, the kind of person that people like Ronald Reagan who “named names” named.

Nope back in those days Frank was just a good fellow, a true blue liberal. A man of strong, definite and definitive progressive views. To the degree his politics changed somewhat over time don’t blame Frank.

No blame Bobby Kennedy who hounded and double dealt him and J.F.K. who used and discarded him and especially the patriarch, the twisted Joseph P. Kennedy, who with his complete corruption recruited Frank Sinatra to the Kennedy campaign and then made sure his sons did the worst they could do to the incomparable Frank Sinatra.

So here it is. I am going to post it on FB and then going to post it there once a week from now until Trump is no longer living in our White House, because remember that house is our house.

The White House is the house we live in, we the American people live in it no matter who occupies it for four years.

We are about to turn the calendar page to June. June is the month the U.S. Supreme Court hands down the bulk of the decisions and rulings it makes each year on the cases it has heard since the first Monday in October, the traditional opening day of the court’s calendar. It is also the time of year when by tradition justices who plan to retire make that announcement.

One of the foremost cases before the court this year is one that stalemated when the court effectively was knotted in a 4-to-4 tie after the death of Antonin Scalia. That case has to do with the ability and right of unions to collect dues from non-members who benefit from the contracts that unions negotiate and achieve for their members. It is aimed squarely at public sector unions.

Continue reading “Peril on and of the High Court”

Continue reading “In Fate’s Crib”