DEFEAT FASCISM

 There used to be a time when disasters brought Americans together. In my lifetime, some have done so. I remember well the assassination of John Kennedy and how, for a time, we all mourned as a country, not as parties or sects. One of the most enduring memories is not of a talk show host mouthing insults but of young John Jr. saluting his father's coffin.

 Then there was the bombing of the federal building it Oklahoma City. As the dust settled over the carnage, President Bill Clinton offered soothing words that convinced us that we would prevail though the gates of Hell had opened to offer us a peak.

For years, disasters damaged us but created harmony. When one part of the country suffered, we all felt pain.

Then there was 9-11. For days we joined hands and resolved that we were one. Then, as the smoke cleared, someone saw an opportunity for partisanship. It took us to a strange place. It eventually led us to a war that unsettled a large part of the Middle East and we still search for ways to overcome the effects.

The awful experience of the Covid pandemic showed us that the forces of evil will utilize a natural catastrophe to divide good people. Americans died needlessly because of the divisiveness but a political party gained traction which now threatens to destroy the America that once mourned together. It's a damned shame. What would the Galilean say?

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 CONSPIRACIES

 When I came to the state on leave from Navy Boot Camp, I encountered the first major conspiracy theory I can recall. Yes, of course, it was that “new information” was telling us that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a staged affair. Jack Ruby had been involved in the assignment to murder Lee Harvey Oswald and then he was somehow injected with drugs that would end his life soon from a pulmonary embolism.

It was a fairly simple conspiracy theory. Somehow “the mob” had orchestrated it by selecting the most unlikely hit man in mob history, the befuddled Oswald to carry out the complicated assignment.

Conspiracy theories evolve. From this simple offering, we now face a theory requiring more complicated interactions than nuclear physics. The array of conspirators grew from the mob to practically everyone occupying a high national government post since the act, all orchestrated by Lyndon Johnson who was a member of the motorcade himself. Oh, we must also include practically the entire public administration of Dallas, Texas along with a substantial portion of state officials. Oh, and the owners of the building from where the shots were fired. Some of shots that is. Another barrage erupted from the crowd on a nearby hill. Or so they say.

In all this time there has not appeared one verifiable—verifiable—tidbit of proof that the affair was anything more than the unfortunate act of a lunatic.

In all this time, there has not been one deathbed confession underlying the myriad theories.

In all this time there has, in fact, been no evidence to support this “Great Mother” of conspiracy theories.

That period of time is now approaching 60 years.

Putting that in perspective, let us consider a real conspiracy. Let’s take, say, the Iran-Contra Caper, a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration.

It consisted of a secret U.S. arms deal that traded missiles and other arms to free some Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua.

In short, the administration was secretly selling arms to Iran (yes Iran) in order secretly finance an illegal funding of a war in Nicaragua.

The caper fell apart in less than a year. Some of its participants suffered. Some didn't. One main actor, Oliver North (of whom one writer once said that "there is a faint smell of sulfur about him") Oliver North received a lifetime sentence requiring him to be a spokesperson for the Republican Party.

In her book, The Age of Magical of Overthinking, author Amand Montell calls conspiracy theories “sense-making narratives. This is consistent with historian William Manchester’s opinion not long after the JFK conspiracy began to sprout wings. The author of “The Death of a President, once said:

“ …, in a curious way, there is an esthetic principle involved. If you take the murder of six million Jews in Europe and you put that at one end of a scale, at the other end you can put the Nazis, the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern government. So there is a rough balance. Greatest crime, greatest criminals.

''But if you put the murder of the President of the United States at one end of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it just doesn't balance. And you want to put something on Oswald's side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that beautifully.

“Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever of that.''

But still we believe on.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 RESEARCH

Sometimes I read Harper’s Index and dream that if I happed to be younger, smarter, and more educated, I would consider my own topics, such as:

The percentage of the terrorists who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 who were card-carrying drag queens.

The ratio of women who said, in 2016, that they didn’t like Hillary Clinton but now say they analyze their voting decisions more carefully.

The percentage of evangelicals who affirm reading the Book of Numbers in its entirety and feel concern for the Midianites.

Percentage of affirmed MAGA voters who voted against Bill Clinton only because of his sexual misconduct.

Percentage of voters who feel multiple divorces is not a concern of Christians in selecting a president.

Who believe that the sexual orientation of married couples is.

Number of Trump supporters now in prison who worked as librarians.

Percentage of Americans who believe Lyndon Johnson personally fired the shots that killed John F. Kennedy.

Percentage of American registered voters who can name the U.S. Presidents in order since Herbert Hoover.

Percentage who can name the last ten Grammy winners for female vocalist of the year.

Percentage of mass murderers in the U.S. who were transgender.

Percentage of Americans who believe that the percentage of Americans serving in the military is greater than 25 percent.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 EGOS AND EMPIRES

I helped win World War Two. I can help free the Cubans.

I’ll not be the first American president to lose a war.

I’ll not be brought down by a third-rate burglary.

I can pardon whomever I wish.

I’ll say who uses the tennis courts and when.

Go ahead and sell them the weapons. I can act my way out of anything.

I’ll raise taxes just a bit to straighten out his mess. Who can stop me?

Who will care in the long run? If it feels good, go for it.

I’ll get the man who tried to kill my daddy.

People will love me in a brown suit.

Let them drink bleach.

It’s mine, my precious.

Morning Thoughts: February 18, 2018

President’s Day. Lots of things on which to dwell. I’ve been around since FDR but only aware since Truman. Even as a child, I wondered why some people hated him so.

For example, there was the time our family attended a rodeo in my hometown. Remember those “fill-in” jokes where the clown and the announcer bounce lines back and forth? Try this one:

Mary had a little lamb.

Its face was almost human.

And every time she raised his tail,

She’d look at Harry Truman.

I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember that joke. There were others, like the postcard that pictured a man just knocked to the floor by a cowboy, the man saying “I said Truman was raising taxes. I didn’t say Truman was raised in Texas.”

Years later, I learned the source of much, if not most, of the hatred: fair housing and the integration of the military.

I don’t remember much about Eisenhower. He didn’t get to be a good president until sometime in the 1980s.

We viewed John Kennedy as a great president from the day he was elected. His star has dimmed a bit over the years but, hell, he just looked like a president.

It was easy for me to hate Lyndon Johnson. I blamed him for my having been sent to Vietnam. With more reading, (I’ve read all of Caro’s work so far, along with Dalleck, Doris Kearns Goodman, Arkansas’s own Richard Wood, plus others). I probably know more about him that I do any other president. He gets more complicated with each paragraph. He’s what I call an “Ansel Adams” figure. Like Adams’ photographs, Johnson’s image in history goes from pure white to pure black, with all tones in between. The result is a masterpiece of contrasting elements.

Richard Nixon would have been a good man had he not been such a despicable person. He left many legacies for us to untangle. We’ve accepted the bad ones and we are now dismantling the good ones.

Poor Gerald Ford got the “double-whammy” of history. The first was being typecast as dense and clumsy by Saturday Night Live, and the second was for pardoning “Tricky Dick.” I, for one, thought then, and still do, that he did the right thing. We had, as a nation, been through enough.

Jimmy Carter was, without a doubt, among the best human beings we’ve had in the White House. He walked into a partisan ambush, the first of many to come and he was an unlucky president, in my opinion. He didn’t handle it all well, particularly when his upcoming opponent seems to have been working behind the scenes to bring him down. I suspect JC, like U.S. Grant, had a hard time believing in the baseness of some people.

His opponent, Ronald Reagan was … what can you say? He may have been not only what the country wanted, but what it needed at the time. He was the crazy old uncle that tells funny stories at family reunions and then goes behind the barn and teaches the kids bawdy sea songs. Of all the conspiracies this country is supposed to have endured, his administration actually had one, called “Iran-Contra.” It unfolded in short order, and still stains our national conscious. He further proved, to our current dismay, that Americans don’t mind deficits and a huge national debt as long as they get what they want. He left his next-in-line an economy in tatters.

Thus, the Elder George Bush had to raise taxes to clean up the mess. America has never forgiven him.

Then there was Bill Clinton, the man from Arkansas. If he had only “kept it in his pants,” they might be carving his image on Mount Rushmore by now. He had the opposition party warning us of a coming economic catastrophe if the deficit and debt got too low. This I remember: if you couldn’t make money during the Clinton Administration, you’ll never make money. I’m financially comfortable today because of the peace and prosperity of those years.

What next? When the Supreme Court of the United States elects your president, you have to take what you get. I still imagine that a look of complete surprise comes across his face when the Junior George Bush learns that he was President of the United States for eight years. He was the first to establish what I call a “Salvation Date.” That’s when you have had a checkered past, but find the date of your last arrest and claim to have found salvation next day. Then the press can’t ask any questions about your life before that date. Its value in politics is that it allows religious fundamentalists to vote for scoundrels and say their god told them to.

Then America elected a man referred to around here as “our n****r president.” Among other things, he inherited a “credit card” balance that had paid for the cost of two wars off-budget. For eight years, members of his opposition party used political ads showing a photo of their opponent on one side and a photoshopped-darkened photo of Barrack Obama on the other with a few code words translating as “they are coming for your daughters.” His election shook the foundations of our country with such fury that entrapped racial rage spewed to the surface like a volcanic gas, soiling and staining the very heavens. Its noxious fumes are still settling upon us.

Those fumes helped get us where we are today.

Just my take on things. Ignore it if you don’t agree.

From this to "I'm the
Greatest" in one lifetime.
Remarkable.

Morning Thoughts: November 27, 2017

It took me five days, but I put all my thoughts together of the day I heard, with all other Americans, that John Kennedy died. We would find out later that a deranged worker named Lee Harvey Oswald had stayed during lunch at this worksite that overlooked the route of a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Having slipped a mail-order rifle to work in brown paper wrapping, and having learned to shoot in the United States Marine Corps, he had one of those epochal opportunities that can change world history.

If you have memories, leave them in the comments. Mine:

I shared a house on Leverett Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas with another student. We were there for lunch during noon break, listening to the local radio station KHOG. Right at 12:30, there was a break saying that sounds were heard along the presidential cavalcade in Dallas. They may have been gunshots. They may have been fireworks. They may have been a car or motorcycle backfiring. We were to stay tuned.

The sounds were gunshots. We were to stay tuned.

The presidential cavalcade was headed for a hospital. We were to stay tuned.

Minutes elapsed. A song with lyrics, “I gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me,” started to play. It stopped.

President Kennedy is dead. Music resumed, “I’ve gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me.”

I couldn’t speak. My roommate could. “Well that’s what happens when you go up against the will of the people.” He was speaking of racial integration, of course.

What to do? I had a one o’clock class in sociology under a Dr. Grant Bogue, who became somewhat famous in the field in later years. I decided I should go. It was too lonely not to.

There was, still is, a small Catholic Church a couple of blocks from campus on Leverett. As I walked toward class, I still thought the whole thing might be some horrific mistake. Then I saw cars jammed up in front of the church and women running inside, clutching rosaries.

It was true all right.

About half the class showed up. Not many were prepared to speak. One sorority girl broke the silence by asking Dr. Grant what he thought about the claim of some numerology relationship between presidents who were assassinated and the year in which they been elected. It had something to do with leap years or some such relationship.

He pondered this bit of folk-related insight for a moment. “I doubt that it is any more ridiculous than some of the other things we’ll be hearing in the future.” Little could we have imagined his prescience.  Then, after a long silence, he dismissed class.

The following week is a blur. Next day was Saturday. The University of Arkansas was one of the few colleges in the country that didn’t cancel its game. I had no stomach for it, but I did walk over to see the protesters. One sign read, “The country prays. U of A plays.” That was probably the best one.

I had no access to television, so I failed to see Jack Ruby murder Oswald, or the funeral of the president. I saw them later on reruns, and of course many, many times since.

Later, at the home of a couple I knew, both severe and radical evangelical “Christians,” I watched young John Jr. salute the coffin of his murdered father. As I tried to stop the tears, I heard a voice boom, “I just wonder how many people have been ‘swupt’ off into Hell watching that Catholic funeral.”

It was over. I learned, for then and forever, that some things never change.

How the mighty are fallen. - 2 Samuel 1:27

            

Morning Thoughts: October 4, 2017

As one whose graduate education was in public administration, I’ve nothing but praise for the women and men who work for and protect the City of Las Vegas.

They have, in my viewing of the news, operated on a professional scale that could be a model for all. They must all be exhausted, shocked, and operating on pure adrenalin, but they press on. They are simultaneously working to discover the facts, analyze the facts, report the facts (accurately), and support and comfort the survivors and their families. I’m in hopes that someone will chronicle their actions from the first shots until the final resolution.

It is with dismay that I see the “conspiracy theory worms” already crawling from beneath the rocks and out of the cesspools around the city, anxious to spew their noxious filth. It is insulting beyond belief that they do so. It cheapens the acts of heroism and professionalism displayed by the elected officials and public personnel of the city, from the brave public safety personnel to the office workers. They all deserve better, as do the victim and survivors.

I can only hope that it will stop, but I doubt that it will. The urge to rewrite history to suit our own notions and prejudices is a strong one, perhaps best described by author William Manchester while discussing the decades-long efforts to distort the facts of the assassination of John F, Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. After publishing his famous work, The Death of a President, he wrote:

“In the end I concluded that [the Warren] report was correct on the two main issues. Oswald was the killer, and he had acted alone.… Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning … if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.”

As the beleaguered public workers of Las Vegas enter their third full day of a special kind of hell instigated by a special kind of twisted mind, my hope is that we give them the undiminished support that they deserve. This includes our not paying the slightest attention to the ill-reasoned attempts that will surely emerge, attempts aimed at disparaging the findings of the professionals and confusing a stunned and stupefied public.

Old Memories

On Nov 22, 1963, 53 years ago this week, I was having lunch between classes at the University of Arkansas in an old house near the intersection of North Leverett Avenue and Cleveland Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas—a place I shared with a college roommate. Several hundred miles away, a misguided psychopath was taking advantage of his lunch hour to unwrap a cheap rifle he had smuggled to work that day in brown wrapping paper.

            While taking our lunch, we tuned into one of the few radio stations around at the time, certainly the most popular. It was, of course, the famous KHOG, playing the sounds of the Ozarks. A voice broke into the music to announce that noises, possibly fireworks, had been heard in Dallas along the route President Kennedy, Jacqueline, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, and others were taking during the President’s visit to that city.

            The music resumed. Then the voice broke in again to say that the President’s vehicle had been diverted to the nearest hospital. The music resumed.

            By now, we were interested. We forgot about lunch and waited for more news. After a while, the DJ started a song with the lyrics, “I gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me …”

            Then the voice broke in again, saying, “We have word that President Kennedy is dead.” The music resumed, “I gotta woman, way cross town, she’s good to me.” I'll never forget those words.

            What to do? With no communication available, I saw no option but to make my 1:00 p.m. class in Sociology. Besides, my roommate had just voiced an idiotic statement along the lines of “That’s what happens when you don’t listen to the will of the people.” There was no option of remaining where I was. So, I walked up Leverett toward campus. I came to a small Catholic church and saw vehicles parked in all configurations and people running into the church carrying rosaries. I continued to “Old Main” where Dr. Grant Bogue taught us Sociology. I found the mood somber, confused, and tragic.

            A well-dressed female student began to ramble about some bizarre numerology theory concerning leap years and the years in which American presidents were assassinated. What did Dr. Bogue think?

            “I don’t think,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes, “that is any more idiotic than some of the other theories we will be hearing in coming days.”

            How right he was.

            My last memory of that dreadful time occurred several days later, as a group of us enjoyed the rare availability of a TV, watching the final services and the sight of young John Kennedy Jr., saluting his father’s coffin. A voice from one of the “Christians” in the room suddenly burst through the somber mist. “I just wonder,” it said, “how many people will be ‘swupt’ off into Hell watching that Catholic funeral.”