No Cohens on the Mayflower

Rick Santorum, former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, gave a speech recently to a group of young fogeys at a Standing Up For Faith & Freedom Conference hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization. He made headlines—and created a backlash—by claiming that 

America was birthed from “nothing,” and that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”* 

One particular point he raised (and which has spurred me to action) is that the United States 

"was settled predominantly by people who were coming to practice their faith. They came here, because they were not allowed to practice their particular faith in their own country."

“And so they came here, mostly from Europe, and they set up a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles.” 

*

To test Santorum’s claim, I telephoned a man who should have great insight into the Europeans who early on settled in America, Christopher Jones, master of the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts.

*

Us: Hello. Is that Christopher Jones?

Jones: Yes, it is, matey.

Us: Master of the Mayflower?

Jones: Right again, matey.

Us: I hope you won’t mind answering a question or two about your journey from England and the passengers you carried.

Jones: Only happy to. You know I have been waiting for donkey’s ages for some recognition of what we—I mean my crew and me—went through to deliver those passengers safely across the ocean. The history books are filled with noise about Myles Standish and John Alden and William Bradford, but nothing about us.

Us: I’m sorry, Captain Jones, but I also want some information about your passengers, who are known to history as the Pilgrims.

Jones: Well, all right—as long as you mention us seadogs in there somewhere.

Us: Now, the general image of the Pilgrims, as represented in drawings and paintings, is of men dressed in solemn black clothing and wearing big hats. Would you say that is a true representation of the men?

Jones: Absolutely. And the women wore dresses down to their shoe tops.

Us: Aha. Recently, someone said that the settlers were determined to set up a country based on “Judeo-Christian principles.” Now we know that there were Christians aboard the Mayflower, but we here at drnormalvision have wondered whether there were Jews aboard as well, considering that claim about the founding of the country on “Judeo-Christian principles.” Did you have any inkling that some of the black-clad men with big hats might have been Jews?

Jones: I can state categorically that despite their dress, none of those black-clad figures were Jews.

Us: Why is that?

Jones: Because when they came topside to pray, they davened in English.

Us: Wow! So the Pilgrims weren’t intending to base their new society on yiddishkeit? 

Jones: Got it in one. You know there’s an interesting fact I just learned: There are approximately 35 million people worldwide who are Mayflower descendants.

Us: Really?

Jones: Yup. And not one of them is a yid.

***

* https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/550318-santorum-there-isnt-much-native-american-culture-in-american

The Granite Old Party

The Greek myth of Pygmalion goes like this:

Pygmalion, king of Cyprus and a sculptor, fashioned a statue of a woman out of ivory, with which he fell in love. He prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who made the statue come to life, and Pygmalion married his creation. The story was George Bernard Shaw’s inspiration for his play Pygmalion, which, in turn, was the source for the musical My Fair Lady. 

*

Republicans love statues too. They love statues so much--especially statues of  slaveowners and Confederate generals--that they can’t bear to see anyone touch a hair on their chinny-chin-chins. The Republicans’ embrace of nonliving granite and marble has led them in Florida to legislate into law an act imposing harsh punishment on anyone who disturbs the eternal rest of statues.

Under the act, any person who “willfully and maliciously” damages a memorial or other piece of historic property can be charged with a third-degree felony, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Meanwhile, the felony charge will be upped to the second degree for those who destroy or topple such objects, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years.*

Rocks have never before been so beloved.

*

While the GOPers of the Sunshine State were exhibiting their brand of rolling and rocking, their brethren in Oklahoma were engaged in a different project. They were trotting out legislation that would absolve drivers from blame if they plowed their vehicles, weighing 2 or 3 tons or more, into the bodies of human beings. 

When massive demonstrations against racial injustice erupted across the nation last summer, protesters used an increasingly common tactic to draw attention to their cause: swarming out onto major roads to temporarily paralyze traffic.

This method sometimes resulted in searing images of drivers plowing through crowds, causing serious injuries and in some cases, deaths.**

*

In December 2015 John Edward Parsley made a big mistake. Angry at having to pay cash instead of having his credit card accepted, he smashed his pick-up truck through the front doors of the Alva Comfort Inn and Suites and into the lobby of that Oklahoma hostelry. He spent the following night as a guest in the Woods County Jail, held on a $1 million bond and charged with

two felony counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and one count of malicious injury to property valued at more than $1,000.***

Of course, he would really have been in trouble if he chipped a statue of Jefferson Davis.

Now, Mr. Parsley’s real mistake was not his blowing his top, but in destroying property. Had he waited 6 years and plowed into human beings he would be getting an all-clear signal from the Oklahoma State Legislature. 

To paraphrase Rodgers and Hammerstein:

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,

And the cars come smashing into humans.

***

* https://news.artnet.com/art-world/florida-felony-topple-confederate-monuments-1961315

** https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/legislation-protect-drivers-hit-protestors-76016885 

*** https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/watch-video-disgruntled-guest-ramming-truck-oklahoma-hotel-lobby-n480026 

A Republican Tells the Truth

By now, all of you should be au courant with the attempts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact a series of voter-suppression laws. The state that’s the poster-boy for this democracy-denying activity is Georgia, the state that fell to Joseph Biden in the recent presidential election and then sent two new Democratic senators to Washington.

The result of the 2020 election has sent Republicans into fits of conspiracy-seeking amid claims (all rejected in multiple court cases) of an election stolen by voter fraud.

However, mirabile dictu (as Cicero might put it), the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, (who, in the past, has not proven to be the most scrupulous practitioner of voting ethics; when running for governor while serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, he refused to recuse himself from supervising his own election) proclaimed loud and clear that the new voting legislation “has nothing to do with potential fraud or not.” (1) 

What a breath of fresh air! No BS about dead people voting or smuggled ballots or the rest of the crap that other GOPers were peddling. The Georgia Republicans were simply intent upon breaking a system that worked perfectly in order to keep thousands of fellow Peach Staters from voting because they would mark their ballots for the wrong party. 

One provision of the new laws that got the attention even of that noted pinwheel Lindsey Graham, GOP senator from South Carolina, was the criminalization of volunteers’ providing drink or food to voters waiting on line. 

Chris Wallace: “Senator, why on earth, if Americans are willing to wait hours to vote, would you make it a crime for people to come and give them a bottle of water?”

Graham: “Well, all I can say is that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, I agree with you there.” (2)

Governor Kemp, however, saw something very American about such a ban:

"They can order a pizza," Kemp said of voters waiting to vote. "They can order Grubhub or Uber Eats, right?” (3)

In other words, freebee handouts are an un-American criminal offense—but capitalism should be rewarded.

*

The Moral:

In Georgia, that Kit Kat must be purchased!

***

(1)  https://www.theroot.com/georgia-governor-says-states-voter-suppression-law-isnt-1846599302

(2)  https://www.thedailybeast.com/chris-wallace-grills-lindsey-graham-on-georgia-voting-law-banning-giving-voters-water

(3)  https://news.yahoo.com/georgia-gov-brian-kemp-says-175707994.html

Admissions

Closing yesterday’s “Hockey Central” broadcast on Toronto radio, host Jeff Marek stated, “My preseason predictions: I should be fired.”

*

I'm a glum one

It's explainable

I met someone

Unattainable

Life's a bore

The world is my oyster no more

All the papers

Where I led the news

With my capers

Now will spread the news

"Superman

Turns Out to Be Flash in the Pan!”

Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin, “I Can’t Get Started”

*

“When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,” I find that almost all those remembrances are negative: mistakes, errors, assumptions jumped to, enthusiasms uncurbed, passive aggressions, insults received and delivered, and on and on. I look in the mirror and proclaim: “You big dummy!”

*

How could you believe me when I said I love you

When you know I've been a liar all my life

Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner

*

Without a doubt the most astonishing admission of the past week was delivered by Sidney Powell, a lawyer in the forefront of efforts to negate the results of the election for president of the United States, in order to keep Donald Trump in that office. She asserted in her work for Trump that she would “release the Kraken,” supposedly killer evidence of illegal behavior and fraud in the voting and the counting of ballots. Among her numerous outrageous claims,* aspersions against the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems have led to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against her.

Now, in the shadow of Dominion’s lawsuit, Powell’s lawyers released an alleged defense of her many claims about fraud and other misdeeds—asserting that “[n]o reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”** 

The mind boggles.

You go on television, you hold press conferences, and, most importantly, you argue before courts of law—and now you try to get off the hook by claiming that all of your “evidence,” your “truths,” were complete bullshit, and on that basis you should be let off the hook for the damage that you have done. After all, you claim, reasonable people weren’t going to buy what you were selling. And what of all the unreasonable people. . . ?

I have to lie down. 

***

*  Too numerous to list here. Wikipedia has a compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell

**  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims

La Même Chose

There is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

*

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.

*

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.

*

  

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 . . .

***

(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

T'ain't funny, McGee!

In 2009, I wrote a post entitled “De Mortuis . . .,” (1) which was inspired by the death of a conservative columnist whom I refused to even name. One of his claims to fame—such as it was—was the coining of mindless alliterative quips for the later-disgraced Spiro Agnew. 

Another celebrated Republican quipster—at least celebrated amongst that tribe as a latter-day Oscar Wilde—was Saint Ronald Reagan. His most famous mot, still lovingly repeated by his acolytes, is: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” I always wondered if anybody with half a brain would accept the opposite statement: “I’m from the government, but I don’t give a damn.” 

Well, this week we learned of one Republican—obviously without half a brain—Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, who believes that the role of government in a time of crisis is to do nothing except to espouse a brand of Social Darwinism. (2)

*

About half a century ago during an energy crisis, bumper stickers in petroleum-rich Texas read, “Let New England freeze in the dark.” Today, Yankees of the nicer sort are not affixing “Let Texas freeze in the dark” stickers on their vehicles.

*

To return to the swampland of conservative quipsters, are you willing to say nothing but good about Rush Limbaugh, the loud-mouthed racist and misogynist who kicked off the other day? De mortuis be damned! He was another of those personages who passed for wits among the right-wing tribe. But as Conor  Friedersdorf of The Atlantic notes, “[N]o Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.” (3)

Perhaps Limbaugh’s most famous coinage was “feminazi,” which is a locution that really gets up my gourd. Whatever distaste one might have with feminists (I don’t have any) the attempt to equate what they are about with the murderers of the Third Reich is beyond disgusting. Some early feminists might have burned a bra or two, but they did not gas millions of Jews or start a horrific world war. Limbaugh was worse than a Holocaust denier; he was a Holocaust trivializer. The ashes of Auschwitz served only to soil the proponents of equal rights.

Friedersdorf ends his article on Limbaugh saying, “May he rest in peace.”

Conor is a much nicer person than me. I say, “May he rot in hell!”

***

(1)   https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2009/10/de-mortuis_09.html

(2)   https://news.yahoo.com/texas-mayor-says-government-utility-001034037.html

Thankfully for the residents of Colorado City, Boyd has since resigned.

(3)   https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/rush-limbaughs-rise-and-conservatisms-fall/618058/

 

Duck Soup

Recently, I posted in this blog about RINOs, the alleged Republicans In Name Only; that is, GOPers who haven’t swallowed the Trumpian Kool-Aid. (1) Apparently there are other INOs roaming the wilds of America, for I learned the other day of a tribe of JINOs—Jews In Name Only. They were discovered in the jungle of American politics by Ben Shapiro, described as “a conservative commentator and columnist.” (2) These JINOs are Jews who performed an unkosher act: They voted for Barack Obama. (I assume that Shapiro proclaimed his excommunication of thousands of once fellow Yids after consulting holy texts at the Jared Kushner School of Talmudic Studies.) Now, considering the fact that in 2008 79% of Jewish voters cast a ballot for Obama, (3) it does seem to be a bit presumptuous for Shapiro to declare that his rump group of Hebrews are the true bearers of the flame. In any case, how can a religious declaration be determined by a political test? 

As I pointed out in the earlier post cited above, this INO business is akin to the No-True-Scotsman fallacy. (In Shapiro’s case I guess we can call it the No-True-Yid fallacy.) 

This fallacy is an attempt to maintain the fiction of the purity of one’s cohort. Slice away the murderous Glaswegian from the group—and, voila, “true” Scotland remains pure. 

What may be considered a cousin of the NTS fallacy is the number-one defensive claim issued by those whose actions or words have been condemned as racist, sexist, misogynistic, etc.: “That’s not who I am/who we are.” Well, all I can say is, if that wasn’t you who said/did that, then you must be hosting a dybbuk that speaks or acts separate from your own will. (That is in opposition to the dictum that says, “If it looks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s a duck!”) 

One of the more recent examples of this NTS cousin was encountered in the case of country singer Morgan Wallen, who was accused of using a racial slur in a video. (4) Two country artists, Kelsea Ballerini and Cassadee Pope, came to the defense not of Wallen, but of country music, claiming that Wallen “does not represent” it. However, Andrea Williams, a Black journalist and author based in Nashville, disputed that defense of the country music scene:

That’s more hurtful than people who didn’t say anything because you’re diminishing the very real experiences of people who know for a fact this is actually indicative of the way this entire industry works.

In other words, it is what it is. It quacks like a duck.

***

(1)   https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2021/01/on-brink-of-extinction.html

(2)   https://news.yahoo.com/capitol-riot-revealed-political-chasm-174301809.html

(3)  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections

(4)  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/arts/music/country-music-racism-social-media.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage