The Bullying of Mitch McCONnell

Mitch McCONnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is a bully.  And, like all bullies, he's fond of soft targets.

He found one in Barack Obama, who thought he could find a middle path between Democrat and Republican extremes to form a bipartisan consensus on dealing with critical national issues.  In other words, Obama tried to act like a President, or, at least, like the type of President polls are always telling us is the type of President we want to have.

But McCONnell knew better.  To paraphrase James Baldwin, he didn't believe in what polls said people wanted, because he saw how people voted.  Or, rather, he saw how people were willing to vote with the underhanded aid of a little manipulation of the truth, funded by some well-heeled supporters with a vested interest in manipulating the truth.

So when the hinge of fate (thank you, Sir Winston Churchill) swung in Obama's direction early in the final year of his Presidency, and allowed him to nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, McCONnell was more than prepared to swing back.  With the assistance of a typically unartful speech by then-Senator Joe Biden, he invented a brand-new Senate rule to the effect that nominations to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, if made in the final year of the President's term, would be ignored by the Senate, thus giving the voters in the next presidential election a chance to "weigh in" on how the vacancy should be filled.

And it worked, from a purely partisan perspective.  McCONnell got a Republican President out of the 2016 election and, with a little manipulation of Senate rules, got a filibuster-free confirmation of a Republican nominee to fill the Scalia vacancy.  After that, when polls suggested that a rising wave of Democratic voters might actually threaten his Senate majority, lo and behold, another vacancy magically appeared (and you can see me about this bridge I own if you think that was merely a lucky coincidence).  And when the President's nominee to fill that vacancy arrived at the Senate Judiciary Committee with more baggage than a train-full of Pullman cars, McCONnell magically made all of the baggage disappear (or most of it, anyway).

So it's hardly surprising that he would attempt similar political magic now that his partner in constitutional crime, D***** T****, has gotten himself into a legal pickle that not even Rudy Giuliani can get him out of, in part because Rudy appears to be hip-deep inside the same pickle:  using military aid to bribe a foreign country into playing dirty tricks on T****'s behalf.  The House of Representatives has examined witnesses, given T**** and his attorneys a chance to respond, drawn up and passed articles of impeachment in the absence of a response, and is now ready to refer those articles to the Senate for a trail..

Or will they?  Should they?  Or, at least, should they do so right away?

In answer to the latter question, there's a powerful argument for not doing so.  No one, even T****, benefits from a trial that has so little substance to it that it cannot even be said to be all form.  The point is often made that a trial by a court of impeachment (which is what the Senate becomes for such a trial) is more political than judicial in nature.  And there's a significant amount of truth to support that point.  The charges in the articles are more of a constitutional rather than criminal in nature, such as the second article in the T**** case, which charges him with obstruction of Congress.  The prospective punishment is losing his office, and/or the right to hold a similar public office.

In between the articles and the verdict, however, an impeachment trial is very much meant to resemble a criminal or civil style in two very important respects:  the right of each side to present and examine evidence to support or rebut the charges in the articles, and the obligation of the jurors (i.e., the members of the Senate) to examine that evidence and render a verdict on it in a fair and impartial manner.

Is that going to happen here.  Well, if McCONnell's public statements on the matter are to be believed, he's apparently determined to try running true to form, if not to his official obligations.

In fact, he has publicly stated that he will coordinate his Republican caucus with the White House defense lawyers in order to not merely declare T**** to be found not guilty of the impeachment charges, but also completely innocent of them.  This action would not only be completely illegal if it occurred during a civil or criminal trial, but is in fact a violation of the specific oath that Senators must take in order to perform their duties at an impeachment trial.

It's impossible to overstate how brazenly unethical McCONnell's behavior in all of this is.  I heard him state on television his plans to coordinate with the White House, and I found myself wondering if he knew that the microphone was on.  But I had and have no real doubt that what he was doing was purposeful on his part.  In any case, it illustrates the extent to which his success with Supreme Court nominations has enabled what seems to be a serious G-d complex, one that puts him in direct competition with T**** himself for the honor of displacing the King of the Universe.  Both of them are now in the position of attempting to get away with murder on Fifth Avenue.  I doubt that's something that McCONnell is going to be able to coordinate with the White House.

But where does that leave Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats?

The text of the Constitution does not specify a specific timetable for turning over the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  To the extent that there's a governing principle for doing so, it lies in the area of tradition and common practice.  There have only been two impeachment processes with regard to Presidents that resulted in a trial but, in both of those cases, the articles were transmitted without delay.  Then again, in neither of those cases did the leader of the Senate effectively attempt to announce the outcome in advance, or prevent the House managers from presenting evidence.  So there's an obvious limit to which history can serve as an effective guide.

In fact, McCONnell's gambit quickly led many in and outside of Congress to suggest delaying the transmission of the articles until assurances that can be relied upon are made that the trial will be conducted in a fair and impartial manner, as contemplated by both the Constitution's authors and as previously practiced.  Again, such a delay is not specifically authorized by the text of the Constitution.  On the other hand, the text does not forbid it, either.  And to assume that the House should transmit articles of impeachment to a Senate that has declared its intention to act unfaithfully is an assumption utterly unsupported by the Constitution, the record of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers published in support of the Constitution's adoption.

For the forgoing reasons, and after a certain amount of internal debate on my part, I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that a delay in transmitting the articles for the purpose of assuring the integrity of a Senate trial is not merely the right thing to do, but the essential thing to do if the purpose of the trial in the first instance is to honor our system of constitutional government.

In fact, one of the reasons that makes such a delay essential is T****'s own propensity for serving up evidence that demands a verdict, and could in fact lead to more impeachment articles, or at least buttress the case for the existing ones.  Since the articles were approved by the House, such evidence has already emerged.  It is continuing to emerge, in a big way.  And the House Democratic counsel has already argued for the possibility of additional articles.

Putting it simply, McCONnell, the master bully, is by all accounts being out-bullied by Pelosi.  But that's not the only way he's being out-bullied.

For one thing, he's being out-bullied by T**** himself.  As it turns out, he wants a full-scale trial as well, and is pressuring McCONnell to cave in to Democratic demands for one.  He is, unsurprisingly, deluded enough to think that a real trial will produce a real acquittal.  Naturally, he's the only person who feels this way.  But, for my part, I've always believed that everyone's entitled to their own fantasies, so long as they don't necessarily inflict them on others.  And this is one instance where I would be willing to give T**** exactly what he wants.  See?  Bipartisanship!

Then too, there's the Republican Senate caucus, which, after years of marching in lockstep with their leader, seems to be showing some signs of finally cracking.  Could it be in part because of news stories like this one?

Yes, when it comes to the court of public opinion, and the question of impeaching T****, the proverbial dam finally seems to be bursting.  Even in Kentucky, where voters have continually sent McCONnell back to Washington on their behalf time and time again, even though polls have continually shown that they hate him, his time just may be up at last.

Four bullies.  Pelosi.  T****.  The Senate Republican caucus.  And the American people.  A confederation of bullies that not even McCONnell may not be able to withstand.

*****

That wraps up TRH not merely for the year, but for the decade.  It's been tumultuous on both fronts.  I would not dream at this point of speculating what the future has in store.  I pray for all of us, and especially for all of you reading this.  May you have a New Year filled with nothing but the very best of everything.

In Praise Of Bureaucrats

I've spent a fair amount of my professional life as a bureaucrat, at both the state and Federal level.  For my father, whose study of bureaucracies was his occupation, and whose Depression-era childhood led him to prize stable employment, this was his dream occupation for me.  I did not prize stability quite as much as he and my mother did (see my previous post), but the work that I did in government gave me an appreciation for how much important work is done by bureaucrats behind the proverbial scenes, away from politics and media exposure. 

If anything, I think that one of the reasons Americans value government so little is because the media tends to focus its coverage on the political circus, which is both easier to understand and more entertaining, and thus easier to ultimately translate into profits.  It's harder to get a handle on the inner workings of many government agencies, and describe the workings of those agencies in a way that makes people think that their tax dollars are working, sometimes in ways they've never appreciated.  I'd like to take a few moments, and several lines, to try to do my part in correcting that imbalance.

Paul Volcker, who died earlier this month, played two major roles in the 20th and 21st centuries.  As chair of the Federal Reserve in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, he played perhaps the most important role in bringing inflation under control by tightening access to money to an extent that was painful for Americans across the board, and led to what was accurately described as a "double-dip" recession.  The pain can't and shouldn't be minimized; those of us who lived through it remember it very well, and those who didn't can learn all about it from pieces like this one.  But it brought inflation under control for nearly four decades, and did much more than the Reagan tax cuts to set the stage for economic growth in the '80s.  Two decades later, when those tax cuts and later ones brought the nation to the brink of another Depression, he worked with Barack Obama to pull the the economy back from that brink, and to re-regulate the financial players that almost pushed all of us over it.

You can, of course, debate whether his Fed policies could have been less severe, or whether he should have been tougher on Wall Street when he worked for Obama, as the Nation article to which I've linked does  My own view does not go quite as far as the Nation does in taking Volcker to task on both fronts, but there's something to be said for its perspective.  It fails to take into account, however, of how inflation was eating the economic life out of America in the two decades before Volcker came on the scene, or Volcker's own willingness to concede, in his later work, that business excess needed to be reined in.  What is indisputable, at least in my opinion, is that Volcker's work overall has had an impact equal to, if not greater than, the impact of the Presidents for whom he worked.

The same may yet be said of the six witnesses from the T**** Administration who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and who uniformly established the fact that T**** put a political price tag on military aid to a crucial ally.  Some were political appointees--T**** appointees, for that matter--but others were career bureaucrats who saw themselves as working for the interests of the nation as a whole.  They put themselves in some degree of peril for reprisals from a political party that lives on reprisals, but they did it anyway.  They proved that the label "bureaucrat" can be shared with the label "patriot."

Then too, we all might not be here sharing our views electronically and/or otherwise if it weren't for the work of George Kennan, whose development of the policy of "containment" with respect to the Soviet Union and its expansionist tendencies may very well have prevented both nations from launching a war that neither one could win.  You can read more about Kennan and his work here.

If all of this feels a bit like a ramble, I apologize.  It leads, in any case, to a simple point.

We hear and read a lot these days about the "Deep State," or "the Swamp," an alleged invisible empire of sinister, intractable forces within the national government, supposedly self-interested to the point of leading the rest of us inevitably down the path to our destruction.  This empire is never described in detail, of course, and that's in no small part because the real swamp is not in our government but around it--the pollsters, the lobbyists, the various trade associations, the law firms, and even certain media outlets.  All of which have a vested interest in getting something out of government, and all of which can do so far more easily by getting the rest of us to hate government with all our hearts.  And, because all of these swamp creatures are skilled in the art and science of persuasion, they've had decades of success in generating that hatred.

Well, I am here to tell you that bureaucrats are not necessarily members of the swamp.  Or, for that matter, nothing more than bureaucrats.  They are people.  They are patriots.  They see themselves as public servants, often with far more conviction and clarity than many of the politicians who make it their business to deprecate bureaucrats.  They work hard.  They are willing to take risks, even personal ones.  And sometimes (and nowadays more frequently than is desirable) they are the last line of defense between democracy and kleptocracy.

I'm not writing this simply to defend my own experience in working within government, or to get you to think that government is always here to help you.  I am asking you--in fact, I am literally begging you--to remember that bureaucrats are an indispensable part of a government of, by, and for the people, that government can't function without them, and that they are people with lives, families, priorities, and concerns, just like you.  Probably like someone you know.  And, in any case, like me.

Think about that very carefully, the next time someone comes along in an election and tells you that they, and only they, can solve all of our troubles.

They're telling you that because they don't want to be watched, or thwarted, by the people who have the most knowledge and experience when it comes to solving them.  Because they don't want to solve our problems, or your problems.  Just theirs.

They'll tell you that bureaucrats are the enemy.  Because it makes it easier for them to conceal who the real enemy is.

Lillian Rourke, 1923-2019

I've written and published this blog over the past 11 years for a variety of reasons.  To express my views on politics, and the arts.  To develop my skills as a writer, which has offered me the best combination of personal fulfillment and financial success in my life.  And, mainly and more fundamentally, to make a difference.  Great or small, I didn't care.  So long as it was a good one.

At times, it has felt like a somewhat solitary and futile pursuit, as I have not gotten a lot of direct feedback from readers.  My blog stats and Twitter feed (to which TRH is linked) tell me that I have a readership, and I'm grateful for that.  It's not easy to generate Internet traffic if you're committed to doing it in ways that don't involve setting your hair on fire (which at my age, is not much of an option in any case).  But I am committed to doing it the hard way.  Yes, I promote some of my posts.  But no buying of followers.  Anybody who follows me does so because they want to.

And nobody was more devoted to following me, whether on my blog, in my acting career, or with respect to anything else, than this lady:

Lillian Irene Randall Rourke.  She was my mother, and the mother of my two sisters, as well as a grandmother to eight and a great-grandmother to another eight.  And, after a long life, she passed away peacefully nine days ago, at the age of 96.

When you see my blog, and read any of my posts, my hope is that you see a lot of things, perhaps without realizing it.  I hope you see dedication.  I hope you see what I hope are high standards, with regard to both are the content and the writing.  I hope you see a deep love of the best things that life has to offer.  And I hope you see a perspective that questions a number of assumptions, and a belief that all of us--this author included--need to be challenged on a regular basis, because all of us have room for improvement, and all of us need to wander around that room as much as we possibly can.

In other words, my hope is that you see Lillian.

Like my late father, with whom she has now been happily re-united, she was a Depression-era baby.  She grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, with her parents, her older sister (with whom she shared the gift of a long life), and her younger brother, who gave his life for his country in Europe along with many other young men of his generation.  Both of those relationships shaped her life, and therefor mine, in profound ways.  

With her sister, Rose Mary, she competed academically all the way through college, each of them trying to get more A's than the other.  This, of course, is another way of saying that both of them were very bright and very accomplished, with both of them pursuing careers at a time in history when doing so was not an option for many women--my aunt, in New York as a journalist with the Associated Press, and my mother as a registered nurse who became an instructor at the Yale Nursing School, where she met my father as a patient (a long story better suited to another post).

The foreshortened life of their brother was something that affected both of them very deeply, especially in the case of my mother.  She and Charlie were very close, and his death in World War II was a profound loss for her, one that shaped her views on war (and therefore on politics) for the rest of her life.

And both of these relationships shaped the way that she parented, and the expectations she had from me.  She wanted me to be a straight-A, Ivy League-bound student.  And she wanted me to live the most risk-adverse life possible.  As an academician and as a survivor of the Depression and the war, my father shared both of those goals for me as well.  And, I must confess that, as a son, I did not always do a great job of living up to those expectations.  Academically, although I managed to land in a good college (Oberlin), I had a very checkered career grade-wise in getting there.  In hindsight, that may have been partly a product of ADD, but it was also a function of being bored if I had a less-than-inspiring teacher.  As for risks--well, like a lot of boomers, I courted my fair share of them.  Taken together, these features of my life led to a lot of difficult moments with both of them.

But neither of them gave up on me.  Every time I needed either or both of them, they were there.  And, although I appreciated that quality in both of them when I was younger, it is only really now, having achieved orphan status at the age of 63, that I fully appreciate how lucky I was to have both of them.  Not every child is that fortunate, especially in an age when looking for a better life for your family can cost you both your freedom and your children.

And, just as I derived my fascination with politics from my father, starting to read "Newsweek" even when I was in elementary school, I derived my fascination with show business in general, and theater in particular, from my mother, who would tell me stories about visiting Rose Mary in New York and going to see shows together, including the original productions of "Death of a Salesman" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."  She and my father took me to see my first show on Broadway, "Butley," at the now-departed Morosco Theater, which helped give me my love of Broadway and its old theaters.  And they always attended the plays I have appeared in; it hurts to think that she can never see another one.

If I have mentioned my father a great deal in paying tribute to my mother, it should not surprise anyone who was privileged to know both of them.  My mother viewed her marriage as the greatest accomplishment of her life, and was as utterly devoted to my father and his best interests.  The love and understanding that the two of them shared for more than 56 years has done more than I can say to bless the lives of everyone with whom they came into contact.  Whatever strengths I have shown as a spouse (and, certainly, as a parent), I owe to their example, and their support of my family.

And, for almost the entire history of TRH, she was its most devoted reader.  Over the past several years, as I would call her and talk to her about various things, including our mutual dislike of the current White House occupant, she always made a point of telling me how much she liked reading it.  I never got tired of hearing her say that, especially during periods when I was wondering whether anyone besides me even knew TRH existed.

Even as I write this, I'm aware of how much more I could say about her.  Even now, I'm painfully aware, especially as I've already grieved for one parent, that I have a long road ahead of me when it comes to processing what Lillian Rourke meant to me, and sharing with others what I've learned as a result of having had her as my mother.  But I'm determined to walk that road as openly and as successfully as possible, and make the most of that experience.

She wouldn't have had it any other way.

Good night, Mom.  Sleep well.  See you again one day.  And don't let the GOP get you down in the meantime.

I love you up to the sky and back.

After T****, What?

That's the question that haunts me right now.

In the next-fifteen-minutes focus of national politics, the overriding topic of discussion of whether D****** T**** can be removed from office, and how that can be done best.  How far, and for how long, should the impeachment process go?  And if T**** is not impeached, can he be beaten at the polls?  Who can do that?  Who is tough enough?  Or clever enough?  Or both?

And these are the questions that overshadow the process of selecting a candidate to face T**** next November, even though the Democrats vying to do so are simultaneously trying to not only make the case that they can successfully take him on, but that they have the right ideas about what to do once they have replaced him in the White House.  About health care, about paying for college, about fighting global warming, about re-asserting our place in world politics, about almost every issue anyone could name.

But all of that assumes that it's possible for America to go back to life before T****, to a time when, at least once in a long while, it was possible for partisans to look at one another and see fellow patriots, rather than a fifth column that needed to be destroyed.

I'd like to believe that we can.  I'm trying as hard as I can to do it.

But I'm not succeeding, and, frankly, I'm on the brink of giving up.

And I recently discovered that I'm not alone.

Garrett Epps, a law professor at my wife's alma mater, the University of Baltimore, recently had this article published in the Atlantic Monthly.  It raises the question of whether or not the America we've lived in during the past three years is, fundamentally, the America that existed all along:  a nation of pious hypocrites, who wear Sunday manners as the thinnest of social and moral veneers, barely holding back selfish, destructive passions that, at their very centers, are who they really are and what they really want.  It does so through the framework of summarizing Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," a short story about a young man who is haunted until the end of his life by a vision of the people he knows, even his wife, as being worshippers of Satan, underneath the mask of Puritanical propriety.

Epps goes on from there to list many of the most egregious political sins committed most recently by Republicans on behalf of T****, and finds himself wondering whether we are all like Brown, unable to find a path away from his vision back to a place where he could once again believe in the fundamental goodness of the people he know, even the members of his own family.

I wonder that as well.  I worry that T**** is the snake that has found a way into the Eden of our democracy, and whose presence, even after retribution and punishment, will end up expelling us all from it, by exposing not all of us, but far too many of us, as putting many other things before their identification as Americans, if indeed they still identify with America at all.

That characterization of many of our fellow countrypeople is well illustrated by the examples cited by Epps in his article.  For me, however, it has been reinforced beyond destruction by the conduct of congressional Republicans, and their enablers in the conservative echo chamber, in reacting to the testimony of witnesses during the public, televised hearings of the House Intelligence Committee this past week.  Twelve members of the American foreign service operation--some career public servants, some political appointees put into place by T**** himself--testified in public and provided a clear, credible narrative of T****'s attempt to use military assistance to a foreign ally as leverage to help his own political fortunes in running for re-election.

And then, two amazing things happened.

First, the Republican members on the committee attempted, unsuccessfully, to attack the facts--or, if not attack them, attempt to manipulate to the point at which they could confuse the public about what was actually said by the witnesses.  And the right-wing chattering classes were only to happy to participate, even to pile on, in helping to sow the confusion as widely as possible.  Not one single Republican on the committee--indeed, not one single Republican in Washington--was willing to dissent from, or stand up to in any way, this systematic process of disinformation.

The second amazing thing, however, is far worse.  If recent polling is to believed, the disinformation campaign has largely worked.  Despite the televised testimony, public opinion is largely split on the question of whether or not to go forward with impeachment.

If congressional Democrats do go forward with it, as they now appear poised to be, it is very possible that additional evidence may yet break the balance of public opinion in favor of going forward at least with a trial in the Senate, and perhaps even a two-thirds vote against T**** on at least one article of impeachment--or, at least, a majority of Senate votes that would not remove him from office, but damage his political viability past the point of even Rupert Murdoch's ability to repair it.  If in fact that happens, it may yet be the case that public opinion as expressed at the polls will be enough to end T****'s presidency.

But what if it isn't?

What if, in fact, public opinion swings the other way?

What if a large plurality, even a majority, of Americans decide that this is really nothing more than the political witch-hunt T**** and his followers want them to believe it is?

What if they decide, in consequence, to not only re-elect him, but also give his party large majorities in both houses of Congress, and in statehouses across the country?  And what if, as now seems likely, those political outcomes are facilitated by foreign interests to whom T****, with the aid and connivance of his supporters inside and outside Washington, has effectively sold off the people he is charged with protecting, the Constitution, and the ultimate sacrifices of millions of men and women, in and out of uniform?

What if, in our own way as a people, are we facing Goodman Brown's dilemma?  We will have discovered that the majority of us are not only allied with the rest of us, but is cheerfully willing to sell all of us to the devil--figuratively and literally.

Even worse, as Epps himself points out, we have already discovered that a large percentage of us is willing to do all of these things.  If it is the case that the Democrats prevail on all election levels next fall, how will they be able to govern, when so many of the people they will be charged with governing are in fact committed to doing anything they can to destroy them?  And, unless everyone starts wearing MAGA hats or Resistance buttons to show where they stand, how can we tell who is friend or foe?

And, if the MAGA-hat wearers decide that you are the foe, how far are they willing to go in order to act on that conviction?  The increase in gun violence during the decade that is about to end gives me no reassurance that their are any limits to their actions.

Goodman Brown woke up from his nightmare, only to discover that, for him, it never truly ended.  I fear that, come next November, those of us opposed to T****ism, regarding of political affiliation, and everything that T****ism represents, will share his lifelong horror.

I hope and pray with all of my heart that I am wrong.

Whose Art Is It, Anyway?

American comedian and writer Mel Brooks was once asked what he thought of critics. “They’re very noisy at night,” he replied at once: “You can’t sleep in the country because of them.” When the interviewer tried to explain that he was asking about critics, not crickets, Brooks went on: “Oh, critics! What good are they? They can’t make music with their hind legs.” 

--as quoted by Peter Hay, "The Last Word," which you can find here

I confess to being a huge Mel Brooks fan, partly on a personal level (he loves Broadway, hates Hitler, and had the good taste to be married to Anne Bancroft), and on an artistic level too.  He co-created one of my all-time favorite television series, "Get Smart!" as well as two of my favorite movies, "The Producers" and "The Twelve Chairs."  So, perhaps it's not surprising that I pretty much feel the way he does about critics; he just used a lot more wit that I would have in making the same basic point, especially as it applies to my feelings about film and film criticism.

I've never formed an opinion about a movie based on what critics have said about it.  I won't go so far as to say that critical opinion has absolutely no role in determining whether or not I'll see a movie.  But, over the years, there are any number of critic's darlings that I've avoided for any number of reasons--disliking one or more of the people connected with it, disliking or being disinterested in the subject matter, and other reasons that don't immediately pop into my head, but that I suspect are out there anyway.  On the other side of the equation, there are a few critical bombs out there that I've managed to find at least some redeeming value in--more, perhaps, than the critics did.  It could just be me:  whether it's politics, the arts, or anything else, I don't like having someone tell me what to like and not like.

To my way of thinking, the single worst instance--up until very recently, which I'll get to in a paragraph or two--was the time Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, on one of their various television programs over the years, trashed the movie "Return to Oz," a failed film that attempted to combine elements of two sequel novels by L. Frank Baum to his classic book,  "The Wizard of Oz."  Part of the failure lay in the attempt to combine elements of two different books,which gave the movie the feel of a badly-made turducken.  Part of it (and this was central to the trashing Siskel and Ebert gave it) was the fact that the film was positioned as a sequel not to the original book, but to the classic MGM musical version of that book, some 40 years after the golden age of MGM and its personnel were no longer available.

Siskel and Ebert's criticisms along both of these lines were perfectly justified.  And, had they stopped there, I'd have no quarrel with their evaluation of the film.  But they didn't stop there.  After they completed their review of "Return to Oz," and came back from a commercial break, they devoted an entire segment to an extended lecture (supplemented with film clips) explaining why, in their not-so-humble opinion, no one should be allowed (yes, allowed) to make a film that might, to any degree whatsoever, infringe on their fond memories of a classic film such as the MGM adaptation of "Wizard."  Ever.  Under any circumstances.  In their view, and to borrow a line from another film, "The Ten Commandments":  so let it be written, so let it be done.

Is it really the proper role of critics to make statements like this?

Criticism is a singular profession in that sense.  Part consumer guide, part arbiter of cultural and aesthetic standards, it can be difficult for individuals in it to balance those competing demands and, in the process, make their own contribution to the promotion and development of the arts.  Personally, I lament the Internet-age loss of individuals (like Siskel and Ebert) whose experience, training, and skill enabled them to do it well, in favor of cheaper, younger stringers more interested in writing about their personal experiences than in addressing the concerns of a broader audience.

But I have to say this bluntly, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it in the process:  it should NEVER be the role of anyone--critic, artist, writer, producer, publisher, filmmaker or anyone else--to be able to say that such-and-such a subject or source should never be addressed, in the arts or anywhere else.  It simply isn't right.  Not morally.  Not legally.  And, frankly, not artistically.  No one's smart enough or talented enough to unilaterally decree what should or should not be created.

Which, in a very roundabout way (I have to admit), brings me to the subject of the recent media dust-up over comments made by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese over their lack of respect for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  If you wish to read something that summarizes the facts behind this dust-up, feel free to click here, read, and then come back (or, at least, I hope you will 😓😓).

Neither Coppola nor Scorsese are attempting to say, at least directly, that superhero films should not be made.  On the other hand, when Scorsese says that they aren't "cinema," and Coppola responds with "I see your 'not cinema,' and raise it to 'despicable,'" it's hard for me not to see this, as I did with the Siskel and Ebert effort at prior restraint against future Oz films, as a form of velvet fascism, a blanket condemnation in advance of the value of all movies made within a given genre, and made by individuals whose contempt for that genre is so transparent it could easily be sponsored by Windex.

Is that in fact their intention?  I tend to want to doubt it, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my own admiration for the films made by both men.  At the same time, it's worth noting that both men came to their cultural prominence by way of gangster pictures, a genre that suffers from its own creative limitations--every one of them can be boiled down to "crime doesn't pay"--in much the same way that superhero films can be boiled down to the idea that average individuals randomly develop above-average abilities and face challenges as a result.  This is, in fact, a game that can be played with almost any genre.

At the same time, it also doesn't preclude the possibility that films within a given genre can sometimes break the rules of that genre, adding to its potential while at the same time giving us the types of experiences that Coppola and Scorsese insist are the essence of true "cinema."  Actually, I would argue that the MCU films did exactly that, with several of their characters, and most notably Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance as Tony Stark/Iron Man, as his character grows from a state of obnoxious narcissism to complete self-sacrifice.  I could make similar statements about the story arcs of the other characters, or even the extent to which the films overall call into question what it means to be a hero, and what the value of sacrifice can be.  It's all there.  You just have to have patience and an open mind in order to experience it.

And, as a consequence, and as distasteful as ad hominem arguments are to me generally, it's hard not feel that, when Coppola and Scorsese are deriding the MCU films (even though, I should note, they have not seen all of them), they are reflecting their own experiences coming of age in the 1970s as auteurs in a more director-centric film universe.  Admittedly, the MCU Universe is a more producer-centered group of films than the ones created by the easy riders and the raging bulls back then.  But, even the more recent MCU films were made by directors who demanded and got more creative latitude than may have initially the case.  That was certainly true with the last Thor movie, as well as the last two Avenger films.

And yet, I sense that even that might not be what bothers the MCU critics.  I suspect that what troubles them most is what makes people in Hollywood either very happy or very sad in any case:  money.

And, when it comes to the MCU, there is one hell of a lot of it.  As you can see here, the 23 films that make up the MCU cost somewhere in the vicinity of $4.5 billion.  Even nowadays, that's a lot of proverbial lettuce.  But here's even more:  at the box office, worldwide, these films have, grossed more than $22 billion.  And that doesn't even begin to count revenue from cable, Interned and DVD distribution, as well as licensing revenue from toys, games, and other products and services that utilize the MCU intellectual property in some way, shape or form.

The reality is that, as long as superhero movies prove to be capable of producing profit margins like that, they're going to get made.  And, if they are as well-made as the Marvel movies have been to date, people are going to see them.

So, ultimately, I don't know what argument the Coppolas and Scorseses of the film world, and their supporters in the critical establishment, are going to come up with to get film producers and distributors to make more of the kind of movies they want to see.  And that's clearly a shame, because what the MCU is doing is putting into the hands of those producers and distributors enough money to make and distribute dozens, probably hundreds, of those films.

And what makes this especially important is that I know for a fact that there are people who want to make, distribute, and (most critically) see those movies.  I know.  I'm one of them.  I've worked as an actor on a number of feature and episodic projects, including a few that actually managed to achieve some level of distribution.  I would have loved, and so would my colleagues, to have had help from some of that Marvel money.  But I'm speaking not just from the vantage point of a professional.  I'm also speaking as a member of the audience.

To me, as much as art is about anything, it is about the full range of the human experience.  Putting it another way, it is about variety--which is probably why there's a show-biz publication with that word as its name.  It's summed up for me by the late, great Lord Laurence Olivier performing Greek tragedy and Restoration comedy in the same day--in the same show, for that matter.  And if the 1970s still lingers in my mind as a great movie decade, I am sure it is because of the variety of those films.  Sci-fi spectacle in the afternoon, art-house brilliance in the evening.

But not anymore.  Now it's tentpoles, tentpoles, and still more tentpoles.  And, as a consequence, it's more and more soulless multiplexes, and fewer small art-house and other single-screen theaters.  The 1-percenting of our national economic system is mirrored in our culture.  In the 1970s, it was acceptable to simply make profits.  Today, and for several decades before that, nothing less than obscene profits will do.  It is not simply the film industry that Coppola and Scorsese are fighting; it is quite literally the culture of our company and, to some extent, that of the world.

And I'm on their side.  Even though I think their views on Marvel movies are grossly unfair and, fundamentally not even honest, I'm on their side.  But when they decide to pick a fight with the people who attend these movies, including me, they are aiming all of their rhetorical ammunition at the wrong target.  This is ultimately about the larger balance of economic power in this country.  And, when it comes to films, that can only lead to one thing:  tentpoles, tentpoles, and still more tentpoles.

Short of a national election that produces an Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders type of government, one committed over the long term to redressing our current economic balance, what are we who care about a truly diverse culture to do?

Frankly, I don't have any silver-bullet answers.  I don't think anyone does.  But I do have a suggestion.

The late British art historian Lord Kenneth Clark, in his television series "Civilization," once stood in the grandiose Hall of Mirrors in Louis XIV's Versailles Palace and expressed his doubt that rooms as large as that would did not give birth to ideas equally as large.  I've always been fascinated by that observation, and I think it has some application to the dilemma I've been discussing.

As multiplexes and the Internet have come to be the dominant vehicles for film distribution, single-screen theaters, including many renowned art-house theaters, have disappeared by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands.  Even if Hollywood suddenly woke up one morning and said "Let's take all of those superhero profits and put them into art-house flicks," how would that new-age New Wave reach the public?  Not in multiplexes; their screens and auditoriums are simply too big for presenting these films on the intimate scale that they and the audiences for them deserve.  It could, of course, be done by way of the Internet.  But then, the screens would be disproportionately small compared to the themes and the emotions in the films themselves.  And, instead of true audiences, you have millions of audiences of one, not really thinking, feeling, laughing, crying, or truly talking to one another as part of a shared experience.

The solution, then, is to find ways to get these audiences of one back together in front of a shared, truly movie-sized screen.  And, in the process, save a lot of disappearing historic structures, and perhaps even rebuilding a few (full disclosure, in case you haven't read my previous blog posts:  I am and have been an ardent theater preservationist, and a member of the League of Historic American Theatres (www.lhat.org)).

Is that possible?

Well, here's one hopeful sign that it might.  This has the potential to serve as not only a whole new way of financing and distributing art-house movies, but preserving art-houses themselves.

It might make Coppola and Scorsese happy.

It would certainly make me very happy.

It would probably make a lot of critics very happy.

I'm not sure what it would do for Mel Brooks, but one might hope that it would make him happy.

Hopefully, it would give the best possible answer to the question I posed in the title.

Whose art is it, anyway?

Everyone's.

After all, if even Godzilla can make his way into the Criterion Collection, who is anyone of us to say what art can or cannot be?

Can A Free Press Survive The Internet AND T****?

I've been a newspaper person for as long as I can remember.  When I was very young, Sundays consisted of church, meals, and going through not one, not two, but three newspapers:  the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.  Newspapers did more to educate me about what was going on around me than school ever did, in part because newspapers were far more entertaining than school ever was (apologies to all but a handful of my teachers).  When I was in school, I worked on student newspapers, even having a column in one of them.  When I moved to New York, I purchased all three of the city's daily papers, and sometimes some of its more specialized publications.  I continued to read at least the Times, as well as the Sun, when I moved back to Maryland, and have done so well into the Internet age.

Ah, the Internet.

It's been no friend to newspapers, certainly not as we have traditionally imagined them to be.  In the Net's early days, newspapers published sites on the Web along with their hard-copy editions.  The limits of technology were such that an online presence could peacefully co-exist with a businesses' bricks-and-mortar operation peacefully and profitably.  But, as those limits started disappearing, the convenience of getting everything online for free (except for ads) began to outweigh the value of getting news as a physical product, just as online shopping began to wear out the personal value of going to a store to shop.

Unfortunately, while people were willing to pay for online shopping, they weren't willing to pay for online news quite so much.  They got used to the idea of "free news online," and most attempts to establish paywalls for online access ended in failure.  And so, slowly but surely, newspapers have largely disappeared from the landscape, or were bought by large, physically remote corporations that economize by using syndicated content and freelance writers.  The few career journalists that remain are often reduced to begging in social media for their followers to buy newspapers, reminding me of the dark days of Broadway attendance when marquees frequently advertised a show called "Just for the fun of it … SEE A BROADWAY SHOW!"

Now, as a preservationist, I'm as sympathetic to appeals to tradition as anyone can be.  But, likewise as a preservationist, I also know that saving the past, or the past way of doing things, often requires some degree of adaptation to changing circumstances.  And there are reasons why newspapers, particularly the ones in major cities, might not be well-equipped to be adaptable.

Ever heard of the expression "freedom of the press belongs to the person that owns one"?  Well, it has always been true.  Freedom of the press is the only right guaranteed by the First Amendment that also is, to some degree, a property right.  You can't have a newspaper without the means to print one, as well as to gather and write stories.  In consequence, as the nation grew and its cities along with it, owning and publishing a newspaper became an increasingly expensive proposition.  By the turn of the previous century, if not before, newspapers were for the most part published by large, well-heeled corporations--corporations that tended toward the kind of politics that protects those with money:  conservatism.

And the conservative people who run these corporations don't take kindly to being accused of promoting liberalism.  This, however, has been the bane of American journalism for the past half-century--to be accused of "liberal bias" by political operatives who understand that the only way conservatism can win in the United States is by "working the referees."  In this case, that means accusing all of American journalism of representing a brand of politics that could only be ascribed at best to three sources of journalism:  the Times, the Post, and CBS News.  And, because of the endless repetition of this argument, combined with the fear of being seen as "unfair," the argument eventually achieved its desired effect.  Even the three "liberal" sources of news just mentioned began chasing their tails to achieve the conservative brand of "fairness,"  meaning 100% favorable coverage of conservatives and 100% negative coverage of liberals.  Along came Fox News in the 1990s, and that was the last nail in the coffin of liberal journalism.

Speaking of 100%, I am 100% convinced that, more than any other single factor, this neutering of the press in the performance of what should always be its real job:  telling the truth, and letting the public weigh the question of "fairness" for itself, rather than having it resolved exclusively by conservatives has led American politics in a straight line of corruption, from bad to worse to totally off the scales, from Reagan to the Bush family to T****.  Faced with 40 years of corrupt behavior by Trump, where the due diligence practically does itself, and endlessly exaggerating the seriousness of Hillary Clinton's use as Secretary of State of a private server for her e-mail, what does the press do?  Focus on the e-mail!  Which has just been established by T****'s own State Department to have been a non-story in the first place.

Nearly three years of unrelenting corruption by T**** and company, the American press has, to some degree, shaken off the fear of being tagged as "biased" by self-interested wingers who don't care in the first instance about the proper role of the press in a free society.  But that hasn't done enough to reverse the downward trend in hard-copy circulation.  And online advertising, while it provides a revenue stream, doesn't provide enough of one to sustain what I believe would do the most to promote journalism, offline or on:  a return to publishing the unvarnished truth about events in the world and at home, without fear or favor.

So, whither a free press?

Perhaps the answer can be found here, in the trend of college newspapers to pick up the slack of local coverage when the general-circulation newspapers in their towns fold.  Maybe this could be the start of a new, non-profit business model for newspapers, one that would allow them to be supported by donations (with transparency about the identities of donors).  Perhaps that would enable newspapers to not merely survive, but to flourish and to, above all, be completely free to publish not what some of us think we should know, but what all of us need to know.

Just Where Do The Homeless Come From?

By now, you've probably read a lot about the homeless crisis in California.  Calling it a crisis, in fact, may be putting it mildly.  As of 2018, California had four times as many homeless people as Florida, which had the second-largest homeless population of all the states.  You can look here to see the exact numbers, as well as to get a sense of where your state ranks relative to others with respect to its homeless population.

With a budget surplus of well into eight figures, to say nothing of a broad range of charities and foundations, California's state government would not seem to lack the financial resources to address the problem of homelessness.  From a public policy standpoint, the biggest culprit in all of this goes all the way back to the 1970s and the decision made then to de-institutionalize the mentally ill, on the theory that they could be more effectively treated on an outpatient basis.  In retrospect, the patently obvious failure of this theory seems to have been a precursor of our current, broader health care crisis, brought about in part by the for-profit age of super-pharmaceuticals that work miracles but cost the patients a small fortune to use.  Man (including all genders here) does not live by drugs alone--or profits alone, for that matter--when it comes to health care needs, regardless of the nature of those needs.

Reversing this trend would seem to be one obvious solution, along with public policies that addressed the need for a higher minimum wage and more affordable housing.  But it's that latter point that seems to be the real sticking point in addressing the homeless crisis.

Commentators on the right often blame California's problem with homelessness on allegedly excessive land use regulations for the purpose of preservation, whether of eco-systems or historic properties.  This line of commentary, even putting aside its inherently self-serving nature, runs into two problems.  The first is the afore-mentioned surplus, something that would not exist if all of those pesky regulations were as crippling as conservatives keep forcing themselves (and the rest of us) to believe.  The second is the fact that California, to put it mildly, is a very big state.  Finding room for all of the homeless in it, as large as the number of homeless is, should be relatively easy.

The core of California's problem, apart from its mental-health dimension, is the fact that the vast majority of its homeless population is concentrated in its largest and fourth-largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  That makes it not merely highly visible; it also has reached the point at which it has come close to shutting down otherwise functional neighborhoods.  And, because both cities are filled with thriving neighborhoods, relocating the homeless within city limits runs up against the NIMBY problem in a hurry.

And here is where we come to the heart of the problem:  California, due to its success under Democratic government, has become the most popular place in the nation to live.  Correspondingly, the value of property is sky-high, and those who own it have an incentive to sell it to people who then want to develop it in ways that will make even more money.  That means luxury developments, not middle- and lower-middle-class ones.  And fewer places in which to live and work for the majority of people who have come from other states to try cashing in on California's success.

Then again, are California's homeless simply a cohort of people who took Horace Greeley's famous advice about going west and struck out?  In part, perhaps.  Is it a case of people finding work that simply doesn't pay enough to afford housing in a superheated real estate market?  Again, in part, perhaps.  State and local governments have recently made increases in the minimum wage; in time, those could have an impact on the homeless numbers.

Then again, are most of these people here voluntarily?  Or is this the consequence of red states deciding that the only spending their failed policies permit when it comes to the homeless is a one-way ticket out of town for each of them?  Take a look.

I'm going to raise one more possibility.  One that has a personal dimension.

As I've said previously on more than one occasion, I am a former evangelical Christian who is now a converted Jew  During the peak of my born-again fervor, I went through a period during which I"bought into" (pun intended) the prosperity-gospel nonsense that many evangelical leaders (I hesitate to call some of them preachers) promote that the more faithfully one tithes, the more G-d rewards the the tither.  Like many before me, and many more since, I learned the hard way that this is simply not the case.  Indeed, if one reads the New Testament very carefully, one will discover that the so-called "prosperity gospel" is not even part of the Gospels.  It is a line of "theology," however, that is very effective in lining the pockets of the false prophets with real profits provided by the spiritually bereft and easily gullible.

How many members of the homeless population in this country, including the ones in California, are among the bereft and gullible?  How many of those people were systemically robbed of their hard-earned money to support the criminally rich lifestyles of the pious and hypocritical?  Especially by this miserable excuse for a man, who shouldn't be allowed on television anywhere, anytime (and don't you love the fact that Wikipedia describes him as a felon before it mentions his checkered career as a televangelist)?  I swear, if we took all of these people, turned them upside down, and shook them until all of their money fell on the ground, we'd have more than enough money to pay for the homeless.  That is, the people that Jesus told people again and again they should care about the most.

I don't have an answer to that question.  But I do know that, whether due to fake political policies or fake faith, there are too many people in this country who suffer unjustly.  I hope and pray that we can do something to end this state of affairs.  And, due to its successes in other areas, I feel confident that California will be able to lead the way.

A Follow-Up RE: The Republican Party Is No Longer A Party

This morning, I was thinking about two things regarding yesterday's post.

First, I meant to (and forgot to) say something about the fact that the GOP Animal House stunt took place on a day when Pelosi was in Baltimore, at the funeral of her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, a former Mayor of the city.  It was also the day before the body of Elijah Cummings was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.  Cummings was, among many other things, the late chair of the House Oversight Committee, which happens to be one of the committees taking part in the impeachment investigation.

There's no need for me here to recite the life history and accomplishments of Cummings.  They have been more than adequately chronicled elsewhere, as they should be, and we should all mourn his passing and look to him as a role model for our own conduct going forward.  Indeed, coming at a time when his leadership skills and moral authority were perhaps more sorely needed than they ever were before, one is forced to wonder what G-d, fate, kismet, or whatever prime mover you believe has in mind for the Republic at this point.  Personally, I'm inclined to think that G-d loved Cummings so much that he took him ahead of the Biblical allotment of threescore and ten, and is now demanding that the rest of us step up to fill the void he leaves for all of us.

In any case, the fact that the Gaetz Gang would pull their "prank" at a time like this only underscores the inherently cowardly nature of their actions.  That's something to keep in mind as well, especially if events in the near future are going to follow a similar pattern, as I expect they will.  What's left of the Republican Party is little more than a rump gang of bullies--and bullies are cowards at heart.

I don't think that the Speaker wanted to address the attack of the Gaetz Gang on federal statutory law, congressional oversight, and due process in general during a 48-hour period during which she was observing a personal and civic day of mourning, especially for two men to whom she was close.  I respect her for that.

But, come tomorrow, if she does not recommend formal charges against the gang's members, including the confiscation of their cell phones to determine whether they have been compromised by their actions, I will be worse than deeply disappointed.  However much one prizes civility in government, one must always remember that civility is a two-way street.  All the more so when one is the person in charge of maintaining that civility.  There is, in the last analysis, such a thing as going too far.  And that's exactly what the Gaetz Gang did.

Second, there's the alleged pretext for the Animal House action:  the alleged violation of House rules regarding the investigations.

The investigations are being conducted under rules adopted by the House when the Gaetz Gang and its party were in control.  Had Pelosi and the Democrats attempted to change them, the GOP would have found a way to have a juvenile snit over that.  Rather than giving them a chance to do so, they went forward with the status quo, which ought to be credited to them as a form of "bipartisanship."

And, once more time:  under those rules, Republican members, including members of the Gaetz Gang, have been present and able to participate in the investigations all along.

Enough said.  For now.

The Republican Party Is No Longer A Party

"See you in October."  Those were my last words last month.  And here we are.

My sports-style sign-off was based on the fact that, not long before my last post, Nancy Pelosi finally announced that the House of Representatives was going to begin a formal impeachment process against T****.  Since then, quite a bit has happened to fuel the media and political frenzy surrounding the process, much of it related to the now-infamous Ukrainian quid pro quo and the evidence that establishes its existence beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise.  On top of that, and worse in so many ways, there was the systematic  slaughter of our erstwhile but highly effective allies, the Syrian Kurds, green-lighted by the Criminal-in-Chief himself.

Like much of what has happened in this country over the past almost-three years, I find myself thinking that these events, like so many similar ones before them are shocking/not shocking.  That is, they would be shocking coming from any of the other 43 individuals to have held the office.  But not from this one.

The only given with T**** is that he has absolutely no ability to separate any aspect of his life--his family, his businesses, and now the country he's supposed to lead--from his individual interests.  He thinks that being responsive to the needs of others is for wussies, even though the Constitution and history ought to bind him to doing exactly that.  Whatever can be said about his mistreatment of the Ukrainians and the Kurds, there is only one clear winner as a consequence of it--and it's not the United States.

It's Russia.  And Vladimir Putin.  Putin's Nos. 1 and 2 foreign policy objectives, as part of his overall plan to restore Soviet-level hegemony, are to push westward against NATO and southward against American interests in the Middle East (i.e., Israel and oil).  And T**** has spent the whole of his presidential term serving both interests, culminating in the revelations (in the case of Ukraine) and the events (in the case of the Kurds) of the past several weeks.

All of this has made the impeachment work of Pelosi's House committees much harder in one sense.  There's now more to investigate, which may delay the completion of their work well past the original informal Thanksgiving deadline.  At the same time, it may make it easier.  In fact, I have believed for some time (and continue to do so) that all of the T**** shenanigans boil down to one basic and highly criminal issue:  rather than viewing his office as a public trust, one that requires some level of personal sacrifice for the good of the nation as a whole, he simply sees it as just another property among many property that he "owns," something to be used and abused for personal gain.  

This, of course, is why he can't show his tax returns; those returns almost certainly would provide a road map of how this process has worked for him in business, and how it continues to work for him as President.  In particular, it would show how far he has been willing to go in the selling of his public office:  to the point at which he has been actively working as an agent for a foreign power against the interests of the country whose fate has been placed in his hands by a theoretically democratic election.  And now, based on recent events, we may not even need to show what the returns would show:  that T**** is guilty of bribery and treason, to say nothing of other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The real problem, however, is that this is no longer just about T****.  If it were, I would treat his eventual removal from office as a foregone conclusion.  But I can't do that.

T**** didn't come to us out of nowhere.  His presidency is the culmination of fifty years of systematic betrayal by his party of both the Constitution and the values it embodies.  Richard Nixon, and his intervention in the Vietnamese peace talks as well as Watergate.  Ronald Reagan, and his betrayal of the Iranian hostage negotiations as well as the Iran-Contra scandal.  George W. Bush, and his "election" to the White House as well as--well, do I really need to say more than WMD in Iraq?

And now, the congressional Republicans who wanted to impeach Bill Clinton over the constitutional equivalent of double-parking his car now desperately want you, me, and everyone else to pretend that T****'s entire term in office is as pure as the driven snow.  And they're so sure of this themselves that no level of bullying is too much in making the non-existent point.

Not even this.

What's instructive about this episode, I think, is twofold.  First, as the article recounts in some detail, the behavior of House Republicans is far from an aberration; it's part of a part of systematic abuse of the political process, and the deceit that goes hand-in-hand with it, that party members have been honing at the state level for some time.  In other words, this can't be considered "rouge" behavior.  The people engaged in this egregious behavior aren't outliers.  They are the mean, medium, and mode of the modern Republican Party.

Second, it should be noted that the House Republicans who "crashed" this committee hearing--and keep in mind, some of the "crashers" were committee members who had the right to be in the room without resorting to fraternity-level (or worse) behavior--brought their cell phones into a setting where full security procedures are meant to be followed, including the securing of all electronic devices in snoop-proof lockers.  These clowns, however, were having none of that.  In fact, they were using their phones to record what were supposed to be closed proceedings, exposing the proceedings and their phones and the contents thereof to foreign monitoring.

From this latter point, you can only conclude that the Gang of Gaetz--a House member who has his own checkered career with the law--is either stupid or corrupt, although the possibility of both can't be completely discounted.  But, when you compare this incident and the potential consequences of it to the past half-century of corruption of the part of the Not-So-Grand Old Party, it doesn't seem like an isolated case.

So one is left to conclude, based on all of the evidence, that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, is no longer a political party.  It is more properly viewed as a criminal enterprise.  Perhaps, far worse, it is little more than an agent for one or more hostile foreign interests, led by a real-life Manchurian Candidate.

If this is true--and I for one see no other conclusion that one can fairly draw from the available facts--the party and its members must be opposed by every lawful tool available to the rest of us.  And, by "us," I'm including registered Republicans whose own beliefs and interests have been betrayed by the actions and inactions of their party.

In any case, the elephant's share of the party must be stopped.  In the courts.  And at the ballot box.

And beyond that?

Well, if they won't rule it out, perhaps the rest of us shouldn't.

Three Small Reasons To Smile--AND One Big One

It's an understatement to say that we live in troubled times--a pretty spectacular understatement, as a matter of fact.  But that's all the more reason to look for good news wherever you can find it.  Here are three recent examples.  Actually, it's going to be four--there was one late-breaking development about which we'll all happily know more by the time you read this post.  I'll still save that one anyway, because the magnitude of it outweighs all of the others put together, along with many more added.

First, a little bit of news about "1984."  No, not the year, the book.  It's notoriously famous for its utterly bleak ending, possibly the bleakest in all of English-written literature.  Its last sentence are four words, which I won't repeat here so as not to create a spoiler for all of you who have not yet read it.  And, if by chance you've failed to do so, read it, not in spite of the bleak ending but because of it.  George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian state dedicated solely to preserving its own power into eternity is what all who have written about it have said it is--a cautionary tale about the dangers of such states and the perversion of language in the service of their perpetuation.

And yet, language, which in one sense is the major subject of the book, is also referenced therein as a source of hope, in a time beyond the bleak ending.  I'm referring to the book's Appendix on the principles of Newspeak.

I had read the novel several times, including the Appendix, and cannot believe that I did not pick up on something that, in hindsight, seems blindingly obvious.  Blindingly obvious, that is, after reading articles like this one.

It had never occurred to me that, tucked carefully into what seems like something less of interest to the average reader, and more like something aimed at scholars, that Orwell was sending, even as he was dying, a message of hope to a world he saw as falling apart around him.  Language, in "1984" is the vehicle by which Big Brother and the Party maintain control over Oceania.  But language is also, ultimately, the vehicle by which that control is one day subverted.

This ought not to be interpreted as a "happy ending" to the novel.  Orwell's oppressively bleak view of what might happen to us, if we let it, should always shape our thinking about politics, and life in general for that matter.  If anything, it should be even more reason to fight as hard as possible against the possibility of a totalitarian state, one whose destruction of humanity is as senseless as it is ultimately futile.

And, speaking about the fight against totalitarianism, there's reason to think that we haven't forgotten how to do it.  Not even in ruby red Kentucky.  Take a look.

It's worth remembering in connection with this news that Reagan's first major move was breaking PATCO, the union representing air traffic controllers who had gone on strike.  That move was not about air traffic control, or the safety that the controllers' work provides to million of Americans every day.  It was about creating a template that could be used against any union, against all unions, to blame them for double-digit inflation and interest rates, and to make voters, including many union members, believe that corporations would be their very best friends, as soon as all of that nasty union stuff went away.

And, sadly, people bought it, which is why inflation-adjusted wages have steadily declined over the past four decades.  Thanks, in a signal of the massive level of irony to come under right-wing domination of American politics, to the first President who was also a president of a major union, the Screen Actors' Guild (full disclosure:  I am a member of SAG-AFTRA, its successor).

Even worse, during this same time period, many states enacted so-called "right-to-work" laws, which are in fact right-to-work-for-LESS laws.  By forbidding the collection of union dues from non-union workers in unionized workplaces, these laws dilute the power of unions to act politically outside of the workplace, i.e., to work on behalf of legislation that would promote the interests of employees generally.  These laws, permitted by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, were intended to prevent labor from doing what capital has been doing for centuries--organizing and fighting for its interests.  And this intention has been so fully realized that, thanks to a conservative Supreme Court, corporations are now treated as people--which is much more than can be said for American workers.

If a lesson like that can be learned in Mitch McCONnell's home state, and put to ingenious effect as is the case here, there may finally be hope for those workers.

Changing the subject for a moment, to one that's near and dear to my heart--historic preservation--here is a tale of two New York movie theaters, one that is being renovated and will eventually be re-opened, while the other is being closed forever and is more likely than not to be replaced, given its location, by high-end retail.

The common thread in both stories is that single-screen theaters, after years of onslaughts by television, cable, video recorders/players, and, finally, the Internet, have finally bitten the dust.  This is a sad occasion for folks like me who enjoy movies as both a spectacle and a social experience, and the fact that multiplexes now serve as replacements for many of these lost palaces is thin gruel indeed.  Multiplexes, for the most part, look a lot like each other, a common failing in much of urban/suburban architecture.

In contrast, even a small theater like the Paris had in own quirky personality, in part because of its status in New York as the city's premiere art-film house.  Now, it has the distinction of being the last single-screen movie theater in the city to close.  My father and I went there on the day I moved up there for a civil-service job, and saw "Get Out Your Hankerchiefs."  We were not impressed by the movie, but liked the theater very much.  It's a shame that someone can't find a way to preserve it as an event space, like the former Ziegfeld Theater, perhaps even as one with a film focus.

On the other hand, it's great to see the Sanders/Pavilion Theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to something that will at least suggest its former glory, even though it will essentially be a multiplex.  The company behind the theater's new lease (pun intended) on life has committed to restoring the few original decorative elements of the building, which is great news.  There are many more buildings like this one, in New York and around the country.  Preserving them and bringing them back to life has been shown, again and again, to be the key to reviving communities all across the country.  I encourage you to take a look at www.lhat.org to learn more about this.

So, there you have it.  Three small reasons to smile in the midst of the darkness.

And one BIG reason to think that the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is not an oncoming train.

Right here.

Finally.

See you in October.

Is Socialism The Future Of America?

We are now thirty years beyond the collapse of governments in Russia and eastern Europe that were, allegedly, based on communism, a philosophy advanced by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in which the "means of production" were owned by the workers, and not an exclusively investor class.  That collapse was touted by global media, especially global business media, and the politicians it supports, as settling once and for all the question of which economic system--capitalism or socialism--was history's "winner."  Every major government in the developed world, including the United States, committed itself to expanding the power of market economies throughout the world.  And expand they did--beyond the boundaries of anyone's expectations.

History, however, is never a march in one direction.  It may be useful to think of it as a kind of spiral, one that moves upwards as we learn more about mastering both ourselves and the world around us, but one that touches many basic points over and over again as the spiral goes around and around.  In the current circle, our experience has taken us a long way past the capitalist point on its circumference and back to a word that had been effectively declared a dead letter in 1989:

Socialism.

Socialism has been so often used in our politics as a kind of swear word without meaning or context (except, more often than not, that you should hate people who believe in it, whether in fact they do or not).  So it's useful to take a few moments to discuss what socialism is and isn't.

It's been said jokingly that capitalism is a theory of production without a theory of distribution, and socialism is exactly the opposite--a theory of distribution without a theory of production.  While there's some truth to the joke, it lies more on the capitalism side.  For capitalism truly is a theory of production without a theory of distribution.  At its most extreme, in the late nineteenth century and today, its proponents place their emphasis on the need for all property, or the maximum possible amount, to be owned by private actors and not governments or agencies thereof.  They have absolutely nothing to say about the distribution of products and services.  They simply assume that, so long as private owners are allowed to maximize the profitability, the distribution problem will take care of itself.

But what that latter point means in practice is that distribution "takes care of itself" in the form of excess, excess that has the effect of squandering human potential in both directions.  At one end, many people aren't able to acquire enough resources to live minimally decent lives, regardless of how long or how hard they work.  At the other end, a handful of individuals are able to acquire a share of those resources well beyond what they could rationally use in a dozen lifetimes--and often end up putting those resources into efforts to leverage their existing power to even greater levels.  Sadly, this country currently has a "President" who is the embodiment of this type of individual, as are many of his supporters and many members of his Administration.

Socialism, in contrast to what you may have heard or read elsewhere, is far less interested in the issue of ownership than capitalism is.  The truth is that socialism comes in many different forms of ownership--the key linking these forms, however, is the concept of collective benefits, rather than individual ones.  A privately-owner cooperative, for example, is a form of socialist enterprise, one in which the economic benefits are not inextricably linked to investors, but are shared by the workers.  More common, of course, are democratic socialist economies that use taxation and regulation to ensure the existence of a social safety net guaranteeing that the minimum needs of everyone are met.  But, unlike Marx's concept of socialism, these societies don't ban private ownership of businesses; in fact, many of them are the homes of some of the world's most profitable companies.

On the other hand, in the economies of the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact governments, China and Vietnam, governments made attempts to virtually eliminate private ownership of businesses, attempting to put Marx's idea into practice by acting as a "trustee" of the people that owned the means of production to ensure maximum fairness in the distribution of goods and services.  All of these societies did so, however, without any form of meaningful democratic input that would serve as a check on the self-serving impulses of the governments--and, as a consequence, much of the output of these economies was squandered in fruitless military adventurism, not unlike our own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Ironically, in the end, China was forced to salvage its economy by embracing many practices of market economies, while still doing so under the name of "Communism."  As a consequence, China has the worst of both worlds:  a country controlled by a class of plutocrats pretending to be avatars of the masses, who have no way of influencing the political or economic direction of the country

What can be learned from all of this, and what I've believed for decades, long before the end of the Cold War, is that both extremes are the enemies of a vibrant economy and a world in which the will of the people is a reality.  In both cases, corrupt ruling classes answerable only to themselves sabotage the distribution of goods and services so as to prevent them from reaching the maximum possible number of people.  However, in the case of democratic socialist countries, where ownership of private property is not restricted by state ownership or political freedom by oligarchical investors, people enjoy the ability to freely participate in all aspects of society and receive a share of its total outcome that ensures the means to participate as well.

In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how to organize capital or labor in a nation, so long as the extremes ends of the organizational spectrum are avoided.  Some societies will lean a little bit more toward private economic ownership, and some will lean a little more in the other direction.  Neither is right, and neither is wrong, so long as society is stable and individuals can maintain there own autonomy with it.

What is important to keep in mind, ultimately, is that private ownership of property can never be absolute in any society, if that society is to function at all.  Government needs the ability to contract for services and purchase property if it is to have any chance of performing the functions that everyone agrees it should perform:  providing a criminal justice system, including police, and a national defense. 

And then there's the dirty little secret about property itself:  without the existence of government, property rights would not exist at all.  In a state of nature, which seems to be what most libertarians are aiming for, there would be no true property, for there would be no government to create rights to ownership that could subsequently be enforced.  And, if government is to exist at all, then property rights must give way to that existence, to the maximum extent necessary to maintain it.  Think that this is some bizarre, Marxist concept?  Nope.  Benjamin Franklin, no stranger to property interests, said it himself.  Don't believe me?  Read all about it here, in an article that effectively argues for a balance of interests when it comes to property ownership.

As a society now in the grip of a shrinking number of plutocrats, it's high time we had a robust but thoughtful discussion amongst ourselves about the future of our economy, and focus on the question of whether "socialism" is truly a dirty word, especially in light of the fact that we already have a good deal more "socialism" than we commonly acknowledge---or, perhaps, care to admit.  We are, indeed, an affluent society, to borrow from Galbraith, but that affluence is concentrated in such a way that America may not be the land of the free very much longer.

Our politics, for far too long, has been about labels and personalities, which is hardly the state of affairs the Framers hoped for.  We need, in particular, to get past the idea of socialism as a label for some unmentionable evil.  The truth is that some greater measure of socialism than what we already have may be the only way toward, to twist a phrase, making America America again.

9/11, And What We've Forgotten

Another September has arrived, and, with it, more commemorations of the anniversary of the event that has done more than anything else to define the politics and culture of our current century.  A human tragedy of epic proportions.  A shock to our sense of security.  And a new understanding of the extent to which our planet has shrunken in a globalized, digitalized economy, and of how connected events in the farthest corners of the world are to each one of us.

I remember thinking to myself, and saying to others, as they and I were attempting to pick through the fog of our emotions to sort out the path forward for us all, that you don't measure recovery from a disaster such as this one in days, weeks, and months, no matter how much all of us wanted to somehow feel better than we did.  You measure it in years, and even decades.

Well, we have certainly had years, and almost decades.  Two years from now will be the 20th anniversary of the hijacking of four airplanes and their transformation into human missiles against New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and yet another target that was never reached because of the courage of the passengers on the fourth plane, as well as the cellphones that gave them the information they needed to act on their courage, and say goodbye to those who meant most to them.

Where are we today?

Are we safer, stronger, freer, and more compassionate than we were on the day before September 11, 2001?

I wish I could say we were.  But I can't.

Because I have seen this nation descend from that day into a cesspool of profiteering and paranoia that threatens the survival of our democracy and our civilization more than any terrorist ever could.

We have seen the need to arm ourselves against new threats turn into an unending stream of public money for a war in Afghanistan that seems without end or achievable goal, a war against Iraq that was based on lies and gave birth to ISIS, and a potential war with Iran that seems perpetually ready to start at any minute.

We have seen a newfound respect for the role that government plays in our everyday lives, as a direct result of the sacrifices made by first responders and their families, disintegrate into the same endless battles about the size of the government that we need.  Even though the answer to that question is obvious:  In a democracy, the size that the people decide it should have, for the purposes they choose to pursue.  People.  Not money.  And yet, with each passing day, we continue to confuse the two more and more.

Perhaps worst of all, we have allowed the religion and ethnicity of the hijackers to reinforce--and perhaps, to some extent, revive--the bigotry towards people of color and religions other than Christianity that existed long before Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.  (Even that limitation to "men," and the omission of a clause denouncing slavery, is a testament to that existence.)  We have, in fact, carried that bigotry to the point that we are presently caging children, and allowing them to die, for the sake of a security that does not need to be obtained by those means, which should never be tried in the first place.

And the fear that allows a sizable minority of Americans to make war on anyone who doesn't look, sound, or act like "them" is also allowing moneyed interests--here and elsewhere--to distract us from taking care of each other, and to take from us the means by which to build a better society, and line their already overstuffed pockets with it.

How did we get here?

As Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg pointed out, by forgetting how we felt on September 12, 2001.  When we felt we were willing to work together at any cause to protect each other, and to rebuild a better America from the ruins of the attacks.  When we looked at each other and saw allied Americans, not partisan enemies.  When, for a moment, we understood the fact that, in a democracy, the only opponent who could defeat us was ourselves.

And then, slowly but surely, we set out on the path to defeat.  By outsourcing our willingness to sacrifice to an all-volunteer army.  By believing in an long-discredited theory about self-paying tax cuts.  By failing to understand that we are not fighting a race, or a religion, but an ideology that can only be undermined from within, not by fighting on the front lines, but through covert operations that get inside the other sides' operations and planning, and take it apart far more effectively that a clip of bullets ever could.

I'll be blunt.  All of this is due in part to a lack of political leadership at all levels of this country, and there is blame on both sides for that lack of leadership.  But, far more importantly, it's due to us.

To all of us.

For failing to go beyond jingoistic, once-a-year graphics on social media to stay engaged in what is obviously a complex, stress-inducing issue, and to be willing to give more in time and in treasure.  For failing to understand that when a nation goes to war, the whole nation goes to war, and does whatever it has to do to win it.  It shouldn't take an entertainer masquerading as a journalist to remind us of our most basic obligations to serve and protect us.  But, apparently, it does.

Most of all, for failing to understand what our enemies understand:  that fear is a weapon, and it can be weaponized against a nation like ours, one that has taken a long holiday from history in terms of understanding what it takes to protect a civilization, and the ideas that built it.

The War on Terror, as it has been called, will require paying for the government services that protect us on the front lines, and operate behind them and within the enemy camp itself to undermine and ultimately defeat them.  It will require political leadership that both requires that level of sacrifice, and offers transparency with regard to its own actions in leading the fight.  Perhaps most of all, it will require us to pay not only with our wallets, but also with our hearts.  The last thing that terrorists want is an America that continuously strives to live up to its ideals of equality and freedom.  They want an America filled with fear, willing to give up those ideals forever if doing so will buy even a little bit of safety.

It won't buy any at all.

We are at the precipice of destruction by our enemies, despite all of the annual exhortations to "Never Forget."  We have, sadly, forgotten what we felt on September 12, the day after.  We desperately need to remember it, before we let indulgence and fear consume our existence, our legacy, and our place in history.

In other words, before the terrorists have won.