CLEARING AND STRIVING

 Let's start by busting one all-too-common assumption.
The 'Palestinians' are not guiltless. Not at all.
The earliest mass murder of Jews which I remember reading about in Eretz Israel took place in 1834. I believe it was in Safed. There might have been a pogrom in Hebron at about the same time.
This was when most Jews in Europe still had faith in assimilation and the Jews living among their Muslim/Arab cousins were viewed as were 'common n***ers' in the Jim Crow USA as a whole, not to mention the Jim Crow South as the heart of that evil mindset and practice!
And that mentality is still all too prevalent among Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, in that part of the Middle East. Arabs only started speaking of 'Palestine' in 1968, after Israel won it all in the Six-Day War.
One Arab said in 1938, "This is our land, it is South Syria, and the Jews are our dogs."
Not to mention the uncharged war criminal who was Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, who helped Hitler and hoped to build extermination camps in the Dothan valley. Or Zahir Muhsein, who in a 1977 interview for Trouw magazine, admitted that all the talk of 'liberating Palestine' was just that: talk. He, too, referred to the area as 'South Syria'. And Hamas has to be utterly destroyed.
The really tough question is, is Israel acting in such a way as to do that successfully? And so far, no one I know has a really satisfactory answer. Making Gaza itself into a bigger pile of rubble than it was already seems to have a very limited utility, especially since too many of the cowards who lead Hamas, and their families, are safely and luxuriously ensconsed in plush hotels or apartments in Qatar.
Yes, I know that if someone is determined to kill you, your whole family and all your neighbors, there is nothing for it but to kill them first. But is there no better way of determining who is who than killing them all and, as an infamous shirt says, letting God sort 'em out? I would really hope there is!
For example, has anyone thought about putting together a caravan which would supply power to the Gazan hospitals--especially the ones with neonates in ICU and/or dialysis machines? As heavily armed as they might need to be?
Speaking of neonates, I personally think that Israel ought to copy something done by the native peoples here, while the frontier was along the Alleghenies: the natives used to take young children of the settlers and raise them as their own. According to Parkman, when Bouquet demanded those abductees be returned--not a single one returned to white society willingly! Not one!
Jews and Arabs are cousins. If Israel were to do this, would it give pause to genocidal maniacs made drunk on bad religion; the idea that the IDF soldiers might include some of their own children?
And, after all, Israel is the natives' state and Arabs are the 'settlers' in this case.
This is one time I wish there was a REAL Jewish Laser Squad, Mazel Tough and all! Maybe lasers could find and kill Hamas members and sympathizers with far more precision than bombs. At least, I'd imagine so.
And what about encouraging ways of building peace from the ground up? I have heard of such groups and that they've had at least some success. How can we help in doing that?
I see two things at work here: Christendom and Islam both need to get used to Jews not being helpless victims anymore but actually winning battles and, yes, wars as well. And Israel needs to stay where it is without putting its national soul in serious danger. I suspect that has been a bad side-effect of having been, willy-nilly, an occupying power of sorts for the last 56 years and that a full-scale ground assault on Gaza might well aggravate it.
Maybe we all need to think again of the meaning of the name 'Israel': they that have striven with God and men and have prevailed. I know that Israel has a hard road before it, but I also believe that God has faith that Israel can not only walk it but improve on it. And let those who yell, "Submit! Submit! Submit!" take notice and grease the dusty wheels of their spirituality with those improvements.

CHILE, 1973. USA...????

It was suggested to me by a trusted advisor that I write a short post about the parallels between Chile just before the 1973 coup and our country unto this very hour.
I have mulled the parallels over as I mixed and baked honeycake and then challah today. It seems to me that two and maybe three parallels stand out.
First seems to be that, half a century ago, the democratic forces were caught quite flat-footed. Now, at least some of us (including me, I hope and believe) are doing our damnedest to make sure we are not caught flatfooted. How successful we have been, and still are, remains to be seen. And while we can't see how successful we might be, we'll keep up the drums to awaken as many who care for democracy as there might be.
The flip side of this, of course, is that we need to be hopeful that we can and will win decisively and conclusively over 21st century fascism. My wife finds it hard to maintain hope and, fairly often, voices that we ought to flee while we can. I snap at her for her Vichyite moanings, even while I wonder inwardly if she's right.
The DOJ, including the FBI, has a big part to play. The fascists need to be watched like purported 'Com-symps' were during the 1950s.
Second, the Chilean democrats didn't seem to know who their real friends were. I think I read something by Ariel Dorfman a few days ago in which he mentions that Allende considered Pinochet as  a sympathizer to his government!
It is imperative that we know who our friends are in the Services, the FBI, and the police forces and those of us who have served in those organizations. We need every single one of them and then some! Not least for the purpose of pointing out our enemies and those of democracy!
Third (and I am not sure whether this was true of the Chilean democrats, but I can believe it was) they insisted on staying within the law. This may not avail for saving democracy this time, to put the brutal truth out! And also, I personally suggest that those who have sought to destroy the rule of law should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to hide behind the law when cornered!!
This applies only for those who are known to have done this. So, all you liars at Faux News, all you Murdochs et al., when we win this one you'd better be getting some plastic surgery done, or grow a large beard, or something. Because you will be treated as outlaws and the traitors you are!
This last is not, so far as I know, a parallel but it is something very, very necessary. Everyone, of any and all denominations, who call themselves Christians, MUST denounce white 'Christian' nationalism as the blasphemous heresy that it is! No ifs, ands or buts about this; it MUST be done by all!
We shall need to stay mobilized for as long as fascism threatens democracy here and elsewhere!
Part of reducing fascism's appeal will have to be the reduction of wealth and income inequality; on such a skewed picture the anti-democratic fungi of both fascism and Leninism feed!

A TWISTY THOUGHT SEQUENCE? MAYBE

 'O...o, po' little Jesus, dis worl' gonna break yo' heart.....'
So starts a spiritual. This particular train of thought begins with my thinking of how my late first wife's heart, had she been alive to see the Penn State scandal of 2010, would have been broken (she loved Penn State, of which she was an alumna). From there, I mull over how, sooner or later, this world breaks the hearts of close to all us bipeds.
Then I ask myself, and maybe ask God, What do we expect? We all need to grow up and know our parents, our countries, our 'tribes', including our faith communities, are human beings or human communities, with all their failings as well as their points of light. Why, then, do such shocks hurt as they do?
One reason is, how bad most humans (we Americans are, unfortunately, by no means unique in putting together theologies in almost every way but the God-centered way; anyone remember about Islamism and/or Hindutva, to name but two other bad examples?) are at understanding, and acting like, God.
One thing that I see as indispensable here is drawing a clear, sharp line between acting in the same way God looks to be and 'playing God', which is what humans do when they imagine God in all-too-human ways.
For us in what used to be called Christendom, Jesus is the primary exhibition of what God is really like, shorn of all (or most?) of the human projections we all put on God. Maybe Krishna is like that in Hinduism. Anyone who can enlighten me and my readers on this, please feel free. Jews and Muslims have their own, sometimes wonderfully idiosyncratic, 'takes' on these matters.
I've reminded my readers before of the meaning of the name 'Israel'; it means to have striven with God and man and...prevailed. Say WHAT?! Prevailed?! With GOD, no less?!!?
That's what our reaction might be if we read this seriously. Now, one can say (and be almost certainly right) Jacob 'prevailed' with God in the same way that a small boy might think he's 'prevailed' with his daddy, who he thinks he's just wrestled to the ground--that is, if he's one of the lucky ones who gets enough of the affectionate horseplay dads ought to give their children as needed. I'm happy to say my sibs and I are among that fortunate cohort.
To turn to probably the most immediately relevant example: the machinery of democracy always needs keeping up, and can always use improvements. We've been all too negligent in that since 1980, perhaps at least partially by design. Because an indispensable part of doing that is to have a citizenry with at least some time and gelt to spare from the struggle for our daily bread and a dry roof over our heads. Having those blessings has grown considerably harder since too many of us decided we wanted to live in Disneyland--by design? I wonder, myself. Those readers of mine who know of the economist James Buchanan (NOT the 15th president!!) should also wonder about that!
And I wonder if our anxieties about imagining ourselves to be Good People have a connection with this: could it be that those anxieties have grown as we've become so much more atomized and individuated? Could this be behind us growing more 'tribal', or is that aspect of our society only more apparent than it once was? Certainly the sense that our own particular parts of the economy are shrinking has something to do with our scrunching more into hostile 'tribes', although the extent of that is quite debatable.
I also think our anxieties about wanting to at least look like Good People are at the bottom of today's 'culture war' over CRT, living with LGBTQs, and the teaching of truthful history. A (shrinking) majority of us , including yours truly, are still Christians of various types. Being Christians, aren't we supposed to know our Scriptures? Jesus hit a deep mark when he said what is now Matthew 6:5-8, for one thing.
I mention this as those who are the loudest 'Christians' also are most conspicuous for acting the most unChristianly.
But more importantly, we need to remember something Jesus said to a rich young man who asked him how to obtain eternal life: "Why do you call me 'good'? No one is good, except God alone." (Mark 10:18, NIV)
If we remember that more often, maybe we can concentrate more on doing what is just for all of us, including restoration of what has been taken from people belonging to 'marginalized' groups and indeed to restoring whole ecosystems and our planet home as well. And not worry about looking like Good People.

WE NEED SOME NEW 'TRUTH-IN....' LAWS!

 Our fascists, and their fellow-travelers who hide it progressively less (if at all) are making it clearer each and every day: their outlook and their foolosophy is based on lies. Little else, almost nothing more.
We see this more and more in cases that come before the courts without real plaintiffs, injunctions seeking to keep lies on social media platforms, armies of online thugs intent on squelching any real discussions of any kind of baked-in inequality, be it racial, religious or class-based and a Taney Court that is intent on locking in the rule of white males who are also obscenely wealthy at the expense of all the rest of us!
And one thing I see us in serious need of is new laws! Specifically, either omnibus or as a set of more specific laws which will do the following.
First, make sure that all parties to any legal action are actual individuals or organizations.
Second, that parties to legal actions can claim some real and present injury. None of this bullpuckey (thank you, Rachel!) about possible or anticipated injury! To put what I think of that politely, copulate that!
Third, that posters on social media can be yanked for posting crudely offensive threats. I would want to exempt counter-threats to such postings, which might be possible if the counter-threats are phrased to say, 'Come at me, sucka, and no one will find your remains' or any variant thereof. Lawyers and judges are not stupid; they can get at the basic meaning of phrases. We will need laws which might sanction for rapid-fire rhetorical questions which are intended just to stifle discussion, as shown that answers are given no space except by shouting the verbal thugs down.
And in these matters, I'll leave the details to the worthy ladies and gentlemen of the law; we have lots of real and hopeful (not to mention wannabes) legal eagles in this land.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we need to do a lot of discouraging of bullies and legal thuggery coupled with teaching all of us, beginning with all our children, how to recognize and defend ourselves against such thuggery. The Sermon on the Mount, properly explained, includes some instances of such nonviolent resistance which might also be termed moral jujitsu: using the adversary's weight and motion to throw him or her.
We also need one or more truth-in-reporting laws which, with luck, might put certain 'news' networks out of business. And most of us know which ones, am I right?
If anyone has other suggested remedies for these problems which might be at least as good as what I suggest here, let them come forward now and share their ideas with the rest of us.
This is something of a new legal frontier, sure, but can any one of us deny that such laws are very sorely needed? If anyone thinks so, let them stand forth and put their case. For real, I mean; no hypotheticals or fictional plaintiffs allowed!

BASED ON LIES OR TRUTH? CHOOSE!

"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is still putting its boots on." Mark Twain

Our reactionaries and fascists seem bent on bearing out the truth of this saying to the point of rubbing all our faces in it!
First (and these are only the most recent and egregious cases) the Taney Court 2.0 has 'decided' not one, but two, cases with no actual plaintiffs!! The 'case' which struck down Student Loan Forgiveness was not brought by any actually injured party but by a group with no direct interest in the outcome!! And then, they go and 'decide' an essentially hypothetical case because the supposed 'defendant' in the case of the bigoted web designer is actually straight and has been married to a woman for fifteen years! And, sez I, may they continue as happily for at least another fifteen! But you see the point; the 'plaintiff' actually made up the 'defendant' and yet the Taney Court 2.0 took no notice of this!!!
It seems to me that the Taney Court was preparing pink triangles for same-sex couples. What think you, O Gentle Reader?
Second, a University of Chicago professor named Rebecca Journey was scheduled to offer a seminar this coming fall semester titled The Problem of Whiteness. An apparent young fascist named Daniel Schmidt was so agitated by this that he posted what are probably dishonest rhetorical questions on TikTok and Twitter about it. Professor Journey then received an avalanche of hate messages heavy enough for her to postpone her seminar till next spring semester.
Third and probably most egregious of all, a Louisiana federal court has enjoined the Biden administration against keeping anti-scientific, anti-vaccine cranks from spewing their utter, total, complete ROT on social media!!!
Obviously, much needs to be done to counteract these lies and knock all such liars into history's dustbin!
For starters, I suggest the courts need to be regulated in such a way that only individuals or organizations directly concerned or injured can bring suits. Suits must be real, not hypothetical; at least as real as the suits one can get at any Men's Wearhouse! No more suits by 'interested parties'; the place for them remains in amicus curiae briefs!
But as to Professor Journey's case, any solution needs to involve all of us who believe in multiracial, multiethnic, multi-faith, expanding democracy and in such a democratic republic that human history has not yet seen. All of us who believe in the truth and in justice that really is equal for all!
Many of my fellow liberals, who have been so well-brought up to be such Polite and Good Boys and Girls, won't like what I will say next. But I defy any and all of them to deny the ugly reality which makes this necessary.
 We will have to take time and answer whatever 'questions' from them as we can. We need to be 'battle-ready' in this respect. We also need to be battle-ready in answering their threats. We may need to do a little googling to refresh our memories about the more horrendous punishments of days gone by and use them in our replies to threats, basically daring them to try to carry them out and that no one will find their remains afterward.
The English ancestors of many of us, including me, had a particularly nasty way to deal with traitors (with which, at least verbally, we can threaten vicious liars as well) known as hanging, drawing and quartering. Only thing is, today we wouldn't be exhibiting pieces of their carcasses except electronically.
But my point is, we need to be ready to fight bare-knuckle against the fascists who hate both democracy and the rule of law--verbally and, maybe, otherwise. But let's be peaceable as long as we possibly can. For myself, I fairly itch to loose some verbal counterpart of boiling oil, or some politico-religious fire and brimstone on their dough-faced heads! And don't be afraid to go ad hominem/mulieram. Just keep that truthful, too, and as relevant as possible. Mehdi Hasan agrees with this, so it's not just me talking. Think about this, brothers and sisters, and let's prepare ourselves for a long, hard and sometimes bitter fight for truth, equal justice, and expanded democracy.
Ain't no Superman coming to save us; both George Reeves and Chris Reeve are long gone. It's just all of us who believe in the things I just named and know we must now fight for them. So let's do it!

A HOWL AGAINST APATHY

It occurs to me, I can't be the only straight white male (Anglo-Scots, no less) that wants to SMASH whatever's left of the white male near-monopoly on political and economic power in this country and, for that matter, around the whole friggin' globe. Even at my age (almost 67) I can't be the only white man who feels this way; who wants to throw the gates open to all colors, creeds, peoples and orientations in a way never before seen on this marbled bowling ball, as Joni Mitchell once called the earth.
And my being a Catholic Christian only intensifies these feelings.
I also want to shout at my 'fellow' palefaces on the other side. I want to roar at them, "You make me, and so many more millions of us, ASHAMED to be  white male Anglo-Scots Americans! YOU hollow out the best in our heritage and make a hollow shell of it! YOU invite the mockery of us from the rest of the world as reeking hypocrites! And you have the nerve, or rather the cowardice and the hypocrisy, to whine about how bad YOU feel about being a white American after having to read some REAL history!!" And probably more, which I haven't yet articulated coherently.
I WANT those fascists to look at me and mutter, "Race-traitor!" I ache to be part of the attack force against hate. I want my articulation of what this country still means to me to be heard, what a wonderful human experiment we are. And that we're NOT just a place to get as rich as you can however you can, with minimal attention to what's legal and hardly any attention to what's ethical.

THROW EVERY LIE BACK AT THEM!

 There is something I want to do.
I want to take every single lie our domestic fascists, who still persist in calling themselves 'Republicans' (there's a growing lie right there!) tell about anyone on our side and show the monstrous extent to which the 'Republican' party now lives by the maxim attributed to Little Joey Goebbels:
"Whenever you are accused of anything detrimental, always accuse your opponents of what you yourself are doing."
Now let's just mull that over a good while. First, anyone with half a brain and a quarter of a heart must know that, whenever the 'Republicans' are able to, they spend our money on making the already obscenely wealthy wealthier still. Soon, they'll try and figure out a way to enserf the rest of us without us knowing what's going on; indeed, that may have already been done. And they'll probably try and bring back property qualifications for voting and the droit de seigneur for all the evil lechers among them.
Second, they accuse us of all sorts of crime involving children and underage teenagers. But where do we find actual reports of such crimes? Among them, almost exclusively! Not to mention turning blind eyes to such abuses on college campuses and within certain churches and certain dioceses of the Church.
Third, they accuse us of being 'soft' on crime when it is they themselves who claim to be above the law-- as if they were, collectively, God's Own Anointed! (And I suspect they may well think of themselves as that!) There is a bit of difference: they basically accuse us of not using the law as a cudgel against the poor and minority groups. The crimes they accuse us of being soft on are generally petty crimes against property and the persons of the paler and richer among us. But we can see that, for them, there is almost no such thing as 'white-collar crime'!! And yet, their crimes take endlessly from We The People! Not only in underpaid, or stiffed, wages but in our health and in the very years of our lives when they make Cancer Alleys of the places we live because of pollution! In our inability to leave anything to our grandchildren except a defiled planet and endless paper debts! Tell me the truth: are they not the 'greater felons' of whom a rhyme was written centuries ago in old England?
The law locks up both man and woman
That steal a goose from off the common
But lets the greater felons loose
That steal the common from the goose
In a democracy, taxes are contributions which citizens make according to their respective abilities to do so in order to accomplish, for the country as a whole, what a majority of its citizens want done. Taxation is not theft; it is the paying of dues. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Taxes are the dues for civilization." Just so, Mr. Justice. We pay taxes for the upkeep, and improvement, of our country and all its citizens.
Finally, they project onto us endlessly. Because they live for more money and power, and don't really care a rat's ass about how they get it, they project the same onto us. Too many of them really are personifications of John 1:5. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not."
Not to say that we're all light (indeed, most of us know ourselves better than to think so) but, let's put it this way: more life is 'real' to us than just ourselves and whatever else we call 'ours' or, more often for our fascisti, what they call, 'mine, mine, MIIIIIIIIIIINE!' I think that sort of 'reality' in our hearts and minds might have more to do with where we're bound after this life than any creed we might recite while, in too many cases, barely thinking about it at all.
Do they need all that 'incentive' to do anything commonly beneficial with their obscene wealth? Do they really cherish idleness so much? For myself, if I had regular work which I could see was a benefit to those who needed my services, a primary reason for my charging for it at all would be not to undercut my fellows too much--along with a more comfortable, but never an extravagant, life for myself. I could contribute more to charities, for one thing.
I think most of us need some kind of regular work even when we don't necessarily need the money Either we find regular work or we try to make some regular work for ourselves. For me, Mama Vecchione in Abraham Rothberg's novel, The Song of David Freed, has the last word on that subject:
"Is no good to have too much time. Must have work." Most of us need to feel we're 'pitching in with the rest' some way or other. And yes, I very much include myself in this.
To all Democrats and progressives: take all this and make these things part of the center of our campaigns this year and next year, along with the Biden administration's concrete accomplishments for the good of our country and its people. We need to emphasize both if we are to build to the blue tsunami which we need very badly indeed!

TO ALL MY FELLOW TENNESSEEANS

To all my fellow Tennesseeans:
Two Democratic state legislators have been unjustly ejected from our State House because they were fed up with being deliberately passed over, ignored and effectually forbidden to speak. And only now are too many of us learning how the lopsidedly gerrymandered 'Republican' legislature has shut off effective debate on many a measure for which our troubled state has a screaming need.
I guess this attempt to discuss common-sense firearms safety laws in the wake of still another school shooting may be the final straw. I know it is for me; I hope it is for you.
And instead of attending to the state's actual legislative needs, these fascists have been trying to divert us with drag queens and other such irrelevancies, building up the spectre of drag queens 'grooming' little kids at story times and with everything they say about drag queens being a foul slander!
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather trust a drag queen reading a story with any child I might have rather than with a Smackwater Jack or Jill with a Bushmaster and a hundred-cartridge magazine!
Be warned, fellow citizens: when fascists don't need your vote anymore, they stop thinking about you except as a thing, a marionette who either does what they're told or, if they don't, as an inconvenient object that needs to be broken, one way or another, or exiled. That day, when state elections are either no more or may as well be nonexistent, is dangerously close to us here in Tennessee!
By expelling two young Democratic state legislators on transparently phony pretenses, our fascists have shown their hand! It is past time for all of us to wake the blank up and organize to turn both houses of our legislature a heavenly azure! That's a chivalric word for 'blue', btw!
I'm not sure how much of the state Senate is up for re-election next year, but, as in all the other states, members of the House are chosen every two years. Which means, next year, they are all up for re-election.
We need to take our chance and excise from our political body the cancer still calling itself the 'Republican' party, but would be more accurately known as the Trumpery/QAnon cult!
Next year, we need to vote out every single elective officeholder with (R) after their names! They are all too weak to listen to criticism when they need to (and we all need to listen to criticism of ourselves at least now and then, right?).
I hope our Democratic party has enough ready candidates so that no 'Republican' runs unopposed next year. We need to oppose them in every legislative and senatorial district. We need to both explain to the people what's going on and we need to connect our program to images and hopes we all cherish for both our state and our country!
If we don't thus prepare for next year's elections, will we have another chance to do so? Don't count on it; we are closer to being a one-party banana state than I dared to believe was possible!
Next year will be make or break for democracy in this state and very likely around the country as well!
Let's get ready for the fight!

POSSIBLE DISLOCATIONS

 Now that even Orange Julius Caesar himself has said that, 'no Republican should vote to cut so much as one penny from either Social Security or Medicare' (although God alone knows how sincere this is) we need to take a good, l-o-n-g look at everything that would be lost by the deep cuts over which the MAGA fascist Randians are salivating,
"Get a job," the Randians snarl. 'Join the makers'. That is, those who will make already obscenely rich white males (whether they're really men or not is very questionable indeed) still richer. Nothing else but that.
In point of fact, a great many, if not most, able-bodied recipients of government money (and many that aren't) actually do have jobs. Those jobs might not pay any, or little, money, although, so long as those who do them have their moderately comfortable incomes, more than make up for that in job satisfaction. That is, a great many of the people who do very necessary, albeit unpaid, jobs--that is, volunteers--are retirees or only partially disabled. That's a whole segment of very necessary work but work for which people are unable or unwilling to pay. What happens when those who do them need to be better paid?
And think of the grandparents, both grandmas and grandpas, who provide either primary or backup childcare for their grandkids and other children. What happens if and when they can't afford to do that anymore? There'll be a lot of people who won't be able to afford child care. If you run a business, you know what a headache that can be, am I not right?
Now let's go to the sections of the economy that depend to a large extent on money spent by retirees or the disabled, medically and otherwise. How many sectors of the economy collapse if these people don't have money to spend on what are necessities to them? Still with me? Want to contemplate that? Does it or doesn't it amount to a wholesale cave-in of some pretty necessary parts of our economy?
These biped monsters basically seem to think that, if some white males somewhere are not made rich by some endeavor or other, those endeavors are, ipso facto, worthless and don't deserve any consideration! At least that's what it looks like to this aging palefaced Anglo-Scot!
And I feel that outlook reeks, to put it quite mildly! It reeks of undeserved self-importance and, above all, of unslakable, downright satanic, GREED! And that greed is NOT GOOD AT ALL!!
Unfortunately, I don't have the facilities to do this, but I think someone (or groups of people) ought to take a comprehensive look of everything and everyone in our country who would be adversely affected by deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--primarily but not exclusively--and publish it and share it virally! If you can think of anything and anyone, feel free to share with, where necessary, explanations of how these people and their endeavors would be so affected!
Come one come all: let's make a long, long list, bring it to Congress and shove it into the ugly face of the House's current majority! Who's with me in this? Let's get rolling NOW!