DEFEAT FASCISM

 A Song For The Victors

Some things make sense. Some things don’t. To a degree, i understand the genesis of what has happened to America. By this I mean that a majority has voted in a government designed to repudiate everything I feel my life has stood for.

Am I justifiably aggrieved? I don’t know. My life has been somewhat disjointed. But, and I believe this sincerely, it has exhibited seeds of goodness. I firmly believe in the views of the Galilean as presented on the Sermon on the Mount.

In short, I am on the losing side of this segment of American history.

As an amateur reader of history, I understand the attitude of the victors. I even appreciate their long-view approach to achieving their ends.

One can easily date the beginning of their war to August 14, 1935, some few days short of 90 years ago.

Yes, that’s a long time to hold a grudge. It is the day that the Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It is fair to choose the act as mascot of the New Deal Legislation, the most hated output of laws in history to social and economic conservatives.” Key benefits included providing direct relief to the unemployed, stimulating economic recovery through public works projects, and establishing long-term social safety nets. These programs also aimed to regulate industries, strengthen labor rights, and provide relief to farmers.” (AI)

The battle to overturn these wasn’t always successful. Americans learned first to appreciate them, next to depend on them, and finally to accept them as a part of America’s greatness.

Brilliant political maneuvering reversed this view. A big step was mentally to disassociate the benefits as being a part of every American’s life and to lock it into the public sentiment of millions as simply tools of the lowest dregs of society, as defined by the ultra-conservative leaders of the opposition. Anyone with a view that government could be a positive force in their life was a sexual deviant, a criminal, an economic leach, or someone who didn’t belong in America in the first place.

It worked. It now forms the governing philosophy of a majority of our elected officials at the national and many state levels. Whether their government will be good or not remains to be seen. What is true is that Americans are about to get it good and hard, as H.L. Mencken once observed.

What is one thing that is hard to understand? They’ve won. They now rule. The battle now must shift to the underground. What is strange about it all is that those at the highest levels of command, each unknown like the mysterious “Mr. X” of old movie serials, have chosen such a dismal, decadent, depraved, and decency-challenged clown as their front man.

Comfort

A person can’t help getting a bit discouraged these days. It dismays the strongest American heart to realize that we have gone from “fireside chats” in 1933 to “tweeted” threats of civil war and murder of our political opponents in only 86 years. That’s a normal life span of one of us these days. Not a very long time, would you agree?

Contrast that with Ancient civilizations. Egypt’s dynastic period started with the reign of its first king, Narmer, in approximately 3100 BCE, and ended with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30. That’s a longer period of time than that which has elapsed since the fatal asp bit its way into history. We seem to destroy with a speed and vengeance rarely matched in history. It ain’t hardly reason to hold up a “We’re Number One” glove, now is it?

Something has happened to us. A president in 1933 came on the radio to comfort our parents and grandparents who were distraught and suffering from the devastating effects of The Great Depression while, at the same time, they were watching fascist monsters threatening countries across both oceans. I’ve heard that families gathered around the radio and held hands when FDR spoke and felt a little better when he finished. It was going to be all right. Somehow, it was going to be all right.

Now, a different president avails himself, at hours, with digitized diatribes against any American who isn’t, at least for that moment, on his team. Only a relatively few Americans actually read his threats, insults, and terroristic blather. But the press repeats each blustering bit of babble as if it were carved in stone on the heights of Mount Sinai itself. After each outburst, we feel a little worse. America’s not going to be all right. Somehow, this time it’s not going to be all right.

Some blame technology. Maybe. But the ancient Egyptians toyed with technological advances that must have been as dramatic and mysterious to them as the advancement of artificial intelligence is to us. Do you think those pyramids at Giza were simply great stones piled upon one another? Would you believe that they involved intricate and masterfully imagined structural techniques that kept them from sliding past one another, or collapsing? There were even failures. One, the so-called “Bent Pyramid, located at Dahshur, seems to have started at an untenable angle before corrections saved the day. Our ancients made adjustments.  Does “Twitter” need to be re-oriented in like fashion?

Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was partially right when he ended Gatsby with “So we beat on, boats against the current …,” but wrong about being “… borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We seem to be riding the rapids into a terrifying future while we ignore the past lessons of history.

Mister, we could use someone like FDR again.

Egypt's Bent Pyramid. Like Twitter, the
 demands of reality required rethinking.

Growing Up Southern: January 5, 2018

My father augmented the income from our little country grocery in several ways. One that involved me was the sale of firewood. I’ve thought about that many a time during this spell of cold weather.

Mostly, it involved slab wood, which is the outer portions left over at the sawmill when they square the logs. I don’t know whether he paid anything for it or not. If he did, it wasn’t much, for the slabs were generally considered waste. He hired men to pick the wood up at the mill and haul it to a vacant lot beside our store. There he had a hand-made saw rig that would cut the slabs into pieces for burning in stoves. They were maybe a little over a foot long. I never knew exactly.

Sometimes, in the slow part of the afternoon, he would saw the wood himself. He rigged a monster bell on the side of the store from which he could hear the phone ring. This was back in time when the phone would ring until someone answered it or the caller became gave up. There was no answering machine to interrupt after two rings. He would saw until the phone rang or a customer showed up. Things were different back then.

When business was brisk, though, as cold weather approached, teamwork kicked in. One man would hand over a slab, one would saw it, and one would pitch the pieces into a pile. That’s where I came in.

He would sell the wood to folks who still heated their homes, and cooked, with wood-burning stoves. They were not the richest folks around by any stretch of the imagination. He sold it by the “rounded” pickup truck load. As a teenager, I delivered it. It was one of my early introductions to real poverty. Sometimes I would arrive, in frigid weather, to meet shabbily-dressed children waiting to rush the first pieces into their homes.

One of my favorite customers was a lady of indeterminate age who lived alone in the east side of town, an area inhabited mostly by “railroad workers.” She lived in a small, but well-maintained, shack just across the levee from the Arkansas River. She would meet me and supervise the unloading. She directed me in her best broken English, her long dress, partially covered by an apron, brushing the ground as she walked. I remember that she always clapped her hands and smiled when the last piece fell on the pile.

You would surely forgive me if I stretched the definition of “rounded load” for some customers. And I'm sure that there are still unpaid bills my father never collected for my deliveries. Business sometimes involved more than perpetually-increasing profits back in those days.

I never knew how these folks supported themselves. Under FDR's New Deal, some measures were passed to provide a measure of succor for the poorest of those among us. It couldn’t have been much. While home from college one winter in the late 1960s, I saw a piece in our hometown newspaper about a woman who lived on $300 a year. I’m not sure if it was true or not. If it was, shame on our species.

Probably, the only income for many in those days was from the government. I’m sure that, even then, there were those who considered them, including my “East-side Lady, as “takers,” and resented the taxes paid to assist them. These days, there are those who spend time concocting laws against them from, as Alistair Cook put it, “… a warm place on a full stomach.”

At least back then we didn’t demand that we be allowed to drug test the poor, or even those poor in spirit, as a condition for our Galilean-ordained love.

Morning Thoughts: November 6, 2017

Once again, we are numb. As a Charlie Chaplin character, a certain Monsieur Verdoux, said, "One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.”

He was talking of war, but the boundaries between outright war and everyday life blur more each day.

It takes more than one murder to transfix the news for us now. We are that inured to the insanity. We learn of the act. We become transfixed and attentive, not for the threat to the soul of America, but for a sign that our side is right. We then look at the numbers. Are there any new records set?

Then we look for the location and assure ourselves that the dangers lies nowhere near us.

For a tragic and alarming percentage of us, we await the identification of today’s monster. Will that person’s background fit some position they hold? Can they profit politically?

Perhaps, as we stand closer than ever in our planet’s history, to the final planetary war, or environmental implosion, these minor warmups, no matter how transfixing they are on the micro scale, serve to divert or prepare us for the macro disaster.

It seems as, in the words of Matthew Arnold, “I, on men’s impious uproar hurled, think only as I hear them rave, that peace has left the upper world, and now sleeps only in the grave.” And of all our nation’s populace, I’m the only person who has no idea of a solution.

One group demands a cure that will never happen. Their demands only strengthen and further enrich those who don’t agree with them. The barriers grow more strongly constructed. Where leaders once spoke, following tragedies, to heal, comfort, and provide hope, they now speak—or in more cowardly fashion, tweet—for political gain.

We insert the insipid phrase “thoughts and prayers” as a universal balm that replaces reason, analysis, and action. One can only wonder at the result, had FDR simply offered thoughts and prayers to those who lay at the bottom of Honolulu Bay, and their families, or to the farmers starving to death on the plains comprising the Dust Bowl.

I’m left, once again, with the pure and sanctified knowledge of one sure thing, following yesterday’s tragedy. There is one certainty on which we may count in the near future:

Nothing will happen except that we will receive more mind-deadening facts. We will do nothing, learn nothing, agree on nothing. Our addictions to violence and the tools of violence are simply too great. The desire for political and monetary benefits profound in our culture now, and they demand profound disagreements.

Which of these great philosophers is right?

“Das ist die Dämmerung der Götter.” - Richard Wagner

“So long, it’s been good to know you.” – Woody Guthrie

“Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny.” - René Dubos

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” – William Faulkner

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” – Helen Keller

“I have a dream …” Marin Luther King, Jr.

“… choose you this day whom ye will serve …” – The writer of Joshua 24:14-15 KJV

Is in up to each of us" So be it. As for my family and me, we choose peace, hope, and compassion.

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