La Même Chose

There is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

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Three years ago I wrote a marvelous blog post called “Before You Wrap the Leftovers,” which, according to Google’s view counter, apparently got sucked into a black hole, and almost nobody read. I humbly ask that you read that post before we carry on. (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/01/before-you-wrap-leftovers.html)

Welcome back.

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Nothing New 1

Last month Stewart-Allen Clark, a pastor of a General Baptist denomination church (distinguished easily enough by insiders, one imagines, from a Lieutenant-Colonel or Sergeant-Major Baptist congregation), 

drew scorn for a sermon offering advice to wives he said would stop their husbands becoming "distracted" by other women, (1)

scorn he probably could have avoided simply by cranking up the old gramophone and spinning “Wives and Lovers.” After all, he could have protested, “Jack Jones won a Grammy for that!”

According to the BBC story, Pastor Clark told his congregation that it’s “‘really important’” for men to have a beautiful woman on their arm,” and he asks, "Why is it so many times that women, after they get married, let themselves go?” And then—what I really love—like so many clergymen, he looks into the mind of God and proclaims:

“Don't ever forget this, God made [men] to look and you want them to look at you - not some hottie out there or someone on a computer screen.”

And also don’t forget, as “Wives and Lovers” reminds women, there are all those barracudas in the office.

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Nothing New 2   

For this “Nothing New” I could have gone anywhere, but this NPR report about last year’s Republican national convention makes the point very compactly:

"Biden, Harris and their socialist comrades will fundamentally change this nation," Trump campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle warned.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asserted that Biden would be taking orders from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the four congresswomen known as the "Squad."

"Their vision for America is socialism," Haley said. "And we know that socialism has failed everywhere."

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said, "Democrats have chosen to go down the road to socialism.” (2)

As we all know in the 1948 presidential election the Democratic incumbent, Harry S Truman, prevailed over the supposed favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman laughingly held up the headline of the rightwing Chicago Tribune:

One person who wasn’t laughing was the bilious rightwing crank Westbrook Pegler. As reported by A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker (Nov. 20, 1948), Pegler exclaimed under the headline “ELECTION RESULTS CALLED END OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC” :

(I guess it's a little late in the day to point out to the long-gone Pegler that the brown shirts were the Nazis, not the socialists.)

Liebling commented:

I imagine Pegler will presently be shopping for a country with a future.

Apparently, Guilfoyle, Haley, McDaniel, and the rest of the GOPers who have been  crying out in the wilderness about the Democrats’ alleged determination to bring “socialism” (3)  into the good ole US of A have overlooked what Pegler discovered in 1948—we already have socialism thanks to Harry Truman. 

Wait—or is it that we don’t have socialism and the Republicans are just doing what they’ve been doing since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, waving a bloody red rag to distract us from their own failures?

Plus ça change . . .

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(1)   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56312443

(2)   https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905895428/republicans-blast-democrats-as-socialists-heres-what-socialism-is

(3)   “Pinning down a precise definition of socialism is a question that entire forests’ worth of books and articles have given their lives to answer, largely in vain.”

         Jonathan Chait