Republican Identity Crisis

Mitch McConnell

"I am not a scientist."

*

Kellyanne Conway

"I am not Inspector Gadget."

*

Richard Nixon

"I am not a crook."

Starboard Whores

It seems that I was mistaken. I had always reckoned that the first question recorded in the Bible was Adam's asking Eve, “Is that a McIntosh or a Delicious?” 

Thank goodness for Google for setting me straight (and thank goodness for the internet, because before its existence, I suppose I would have only been able to find the correct answer by renting a hotel room and scanning the Gideon).

It also turns out that the famous question “Am I my brother's keeper?” wasn't even the first one on its line of text (Gen. IV, 9), being the response to the Lord's own question: “Where is Abel thy brother?”*

***

The two presidential candidates whom I most enthusiastically supported in the past were:

The Biblical Cain's favorite candidate, I believe, would have been Herman Clabbercutt, the fictitious politician created by “TV-comic, newspaper columnist, humorist-writer,” as the Saturday Review styled him, Roger Price in his 1952 satirical look at politics, I'm for Me First. 

Raising the serious charge that neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties have "cut him in on the take," he calls in his book for the formation of a "Me First Party," a grass-roots movement of greed which (he hopes) will sweep the country.**

Just short of four decades later, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley asserted:

If you take a clinical look at the evolution of these United States over the past couple of decades, it is self-evident that the Me First Political Party won all the elections and that its papers and memorabilia soon will go to the National Archives.***

***

The other week McKay Coppins of The Atlantic visited CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference).**** He reported that the place to take “the temperature” of the conservative movement was not in the main auditorium listening to speeches but “The Hub,” Exhibit Hall D on the ground floor of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, where CPAC was being held.

It was there that young conservatives waded past “booths set up by right-wing think tanks, media outfits, pressure groups, and publishers—shopping for future careers.”

And it was careerism trumping (pun unintended) principles as scads of “blue-blazered and high-heeled” conservative wannabes began to bend and bow to the hot wind of Trumpism. Coppins notes that

[n]one of the young CPAC-goers I talked to told me definitively that they were undertaking a wholesale career recalibration in response to Trump’s rise. Instead, most seemed like they were hanging back, cautiously assessing the landscape, trying to stay flexible.

However, it took an attendee who wished to remain anonymous who--off the record--said he “noticed that some of his amateur blogger friends have begun to adopt a more Trumpian posture lately in hopes of making it big.”

Principles be damned! 

The “Me First Party,” the political movement of greed, is alive and blue-blazered well.

***

*Do we spot here the prototype of the Jewish habit of answering a question with a question?

**Saturday Review, August 4, 1956.

http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1956aug04-00020

***April 11, 1994.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/04/11/paying-homage-to-our-heroes/3a1db76d-c81c-4019-86cc-2f1e18747e60/?utm_term=.5470bf001a3e

Quite coincidentally, in this 1994 column about collecting autographs and baseball cards, Yardley wrote:

I'll admit that I'd pay a pretty penny for a Babe Ruth or (better yet) a Honus Wagner or (best of all) a Christy Mathewson, but the market in baseball memorabilia has gotten so out of hand that these are now the tastes of a Rockefeller or (God forbid) a Trump.

****https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trumpism-tempts-career-minded-young-conservatives-to-rebrand/517866/

Uncommon Property

The last few days have been good days for the Millwall Football Club of Bermondsey, South London. The Lions, as they are known, on Sunday defeated Watford FC, of the Premier League, 1-0 in the fourth round of the FA Cup. This was an upset, as Millwall plays two divisions below Watford in League One.(1)

Even better than that sporting result, on the previous Wednesday the club learned that it could remain in South London, as a compulsory purchase order (CPO) which would have sold the club’s ground from underneath their feet to some redevelopment schemers was abandoned by the local government council. The council’s would-be development partner was “an opaque offshore-registered entity called Renewal.”(2)

The actual details of the disingenuousness of Renewal and its cosy intertwining of business and politics is too complex (and irrelevant to our purpose) to outline here (see the afore-referenced Guardian article for those details). One thing we can be sure of is that had the project gone through, the principals of Renewal would not be going hungry.

***

A few hundred years earlier—481, for those of a pedantic nature—common people in the North of England arose in protest against what they saw as many intolerable actions by the King, Henry VIII, and his ministers. To focus on only one grievance: the rebellion, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was that of “a nation already made uneasy by the treatment of its Queen [Katherine of Aragon] and by the alienation of its Church from Rome,” stirred further “as the lesser monasteries were suppressed and their fabric was laid waste.”(3) 

It is Geoffrey Moorhouse’s belief that the rebels could easily have overcome the King’s forces at Doncaster and descended upon London had they not temporized, believing that they could negotiate with the sovereign’s representatives. But they eventually disbanded, and an enraged Henry took bloody revenge against the leaders of the Pilgrimage.

And what happened to the seized monastic lands? The overwhelming majority of allotments were sold off to the highest bidders.

***

While we looked at the Pilgrimage of Grace and the reaction to the confiscation and subsequent selling off of ecclesiastical property, it’s public property we are concerned with here. Between the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and this week's victories of Millwall FC there have been many instances of common land in Great Britain being lost to the majority of the populace for the benefit of the already wealthy. In “A Short History of Enclosure in Britain” Simon Fairlie offers a long history of such happenings. He opens his account thusly:

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.(4)

We could expand this discussion with examples beyond public land and Great Britain (think post-Soviet Russia and gas, mining, and other industries, for example), but the point we are trying to make here is that there is a mindset too prevalent (especially here in the United States) that everything that exists in the world is allowed to be sold to the very rich so that they can become even richer. 

*

Note to my fellow Americans: Looking at Trump’s choice for Education Secretary, how long will it be before there are no more public schools? 

***

1—In reality, the third division of English football. The second division is called the Championship. The English, surely, can match any other nation in the use of euphemism.

2—https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jan/27/how-local-resistance-and-press-scrutiny-saved-millwalls-stadium

Also note the wonderful euphemism for “destruction.”

3—Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Pilgrimage of Grace: The rebellion that shook Henry VIII’s throne. The north of England, then as now, was economically worse off than the south, and many monasteries there provided basic welfare services to the common people. 

4—http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

***

UPDATE

A few hours after this post was put online the Guardian published an article on the pushback in the US against public financing of facilities for millionaire-owned sports teams (specifically focusing on soccer). One example from the article:

Newly-elected Missouri governor Eric Greitens, sensing an electoral no-brainer, said before he took office in early January that public money for the construction of a downtown St Louis stadium was “nothing more than welfare for millionaires.”(5)

5--https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2017/jan/31/mls-expansion-funding-stadiums-soccer

UPDATE 2

One more day and one more example in the news of what the richest people can do: add a new citizenship without leaving one's old home:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-became-zealand-citizen-063211660.html?ref=gs

The Dog Ate My File Cabinet

. . . and other excuses.

<>

Monica Crowley, the foreign policy adviser tapped for a White House job under President-elect Donald Trump, will relinquish the post, a transition official told Reuters on Monday. 

Crowley had been chosen to serve as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council. Her appointment had been shadowed by reports of plagiarism in news outlets including CNN and Politico. 

“After much reflection I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said in a statement quoted by the Washington Times. 

“I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal."

A CNN review found this month that Crowley plagiarized thousands of words of her 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D. 

In addition, Politico reported that it found more than a dozen examples of plagiarism in Crowley's Ph.D. Dissertation.*

*

Dr. (ha, ha, ha!) Crowley's claim that she has decided to remain in New York “to pursue other opportunities” is a neat revision of the classic declaration by disgraced politicians that they are resigning to spend more time with their families. Actually, her action makes great sense to me; who would trade the opportunity to remain at the home of the Met, the Met, and the Mets for some Washingtonian grilling on the provenance of her paragraphs?

I must confess, though, that I am rather disappointed that Dr. (ha, ha, ha!) Crowley did not own up to the plagiarism and offer some risible excuse that we all could kick around for a while. As much as I hate plagiarism, I love the excuses the perpetrators come up with.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's explanation for her own plagiaristic misdeeds is too long and complicated to quote here, involving as it does attics, boxes, folders, etc.** But her defense actually allows us to level another accusation against her. “Fourteen years ago,” she writes,

not long after the publication of my book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, I received a communication from author Lynne McTaggart pointing out that material from her book on Kathleen Kennedy had not been properly attributed. I realized that she was right. Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not hers.

What Doris Kearns Goodwin is telling us is that she can't tell her own writing from another writer's. “I have no style of my own,” she is really confessing. That's one hell of an admittance for a writer. Now, I cannot read my own handwriting, but I know goddamn well when I see the words printed out, I can tell what's mine and what isn't. I have a memory (I hope not a false one) of seeing a film clip of Salvador Dali walking along an art gallery wall with a big paint brush in his hand decisively making black crosses on canvasses that he recognized as fake Dalis. Whether the scene actually happened or not, it should serve as an example to all creative artists: recognize your own work, and deal with the unfamiliar as necessary.

Kearns Goodwin opened her defense in the article cited below by stating, “I am a historian. with the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am.”*** 

Well, I for one would hope that she recognizes her flesh-and-blood offspring better than her literary ones. 

***

*http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-crowley-idUSKBN15024K?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

(And a tip of the hat to Kathleen Farrell, who emailed me: "Wouldn't you like to know who was on her committee and missed this?")

**http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,197614,00.html

***There's obviously an error in the original, either in punctuation or capitalization. I've copied-and-pasted directly from the Time website.

*

Also:

Consider these excerpts from two articles worth reading.

One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.… 

No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing. 

Plagiarists steal for reasons both profound and mundane. In a few cases, plagiarism flows from some deep psychological wellspring: [Jacob] Epstein, the son of eminent literary parents, stole so much and from such an obvious source that he was clearly "committing literary suicide," writes Mallon. Some writers plagiarize because they are rushing a project through and probably don't think they'll get caught. Some are just exceptionally careless.  

David Plotz,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2002/01/the_plagiarist.1.html

*

[Fareed] Zakaria strongly denied that any assistant or intern wrote his work, and said that his mistake came from mixing up different notes from different sources. That account does not quite explain how the plagiarized paragraph was so closely aligned with its original source, nor how it was unattributed to the writer, Jill Lepore. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/fareed-zakaria-plagiarism-scandal-tough-week_n_1810139.html

Insanity Claus

George Carlin claimed that he knew why Santa Claus was always smiling: He knew where the naughty girls live.

This past Christmas Mr. Claus got an early start and gave out goodies to naughty people ahead of time. Specifically, he laid a document on Bob Dylan telling him he was being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (this to a man who wrote: “Then time will tell just who has fell.”)

Once upon a time I loved Dylan. I saw him on a Boston TV show, and came back to New York raving about him. But as the years went by, something struck me about the man: He was nasty and self-centered!

Consider the closing words of “Positively 4^th Street:

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

And just for that one moment I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you.

That's how he reacts when he feels he's been hurt by friends.

Here's an even a better example of his solipsistic view of life. Compare these two contemporary lyrics about the failure of a love affair:

Bob Dylan (1963)

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

It don’t matter, anyhow

An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

If you don’t know by now

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

Look out your window and I’ll be gone

You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on

Don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe

That light I never knowed

An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe

I’m on the dark side of the road

Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say

To try and make me change my mind and stay

We never did too much talkin’ anyway

So don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal

Like you never did before

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal

I can’t hear you anymore

I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road

I once loved a woman, a child I’m told

I give her my heart but she wanted my soul

But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe

Where I’m bound, I can’t tell

But goodbye’s too good a word, gal

So I’ll just say fare thee well

I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind

You could have done better but I don’t mind

You just kinda wasted my precious time

But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

(Emphasis mine)

*

Tom Paxton

"The Last Thing on My Mind" (1964)

Are you going away with no word of farewell

Will there be not a trace left behind

Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind

You know that was the last thing on my mind

It's a lesson too late for the learnin'

Made of sand, made of sand

In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin'

In your hand, in your hand

Are you going away with no word of farewell

Will there be not a trace left behind

Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind

You know that was the last thing on my mind

You've got reasons a-plenty for goin'

This I know, this I know.

(Emphasis mine)

One singer accepts responsibility for his role in the break-up; the other shoves it all on the other person.

Oh, the tunes sound good all right. But step back from the music a bit and consider who is the self-centered one and who is the grown-up here.

Who is the nasty one—who the nice one.

Santa blew it.

To Hell With Everybody Else!

In the 1949 film The Third Man, Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles), mastermind of a penicillin scam in post-war Vienna, and his naïve friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) are in a cabin at the top of the Prater amusement park Ferris wheel.

Holly Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims? 

Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.

***

From a Mother Jones report on Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Labor:

Andy Puzder is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent company of fast-food chains Hardee's and Carl's Jr. Since CKE is privately held, his compensation isn't publicly disclosed, but in 2012—according to CKE's final public disclosure after going private—Puzder made more than $4 million in salary and bonuses. Meanwhile, he has been a tireless campaigner against raises to the minimum wage and rules proposed by President Barack Obama in 2014 that would expand the number of employees who qualify for overtime pay.
It's not surprising that Puzder, who has been CEO of CKE Restaurants since 2000, would have strong opinions about overtime. Back in 2004, the company agreed to pay $9 million to settle claims that it had not paid overtime to store managers. In 2013, CKE was hit with a class-action suit for "allegedly failing to pay its general managers overtime, even while requiring them to be on call 24 hours a day," reports Law 360. The suit is still pending, with a hearing scheduled for December 14 in Los Angeles.
In response to widespread efforts to boost the minimum wage at the state and local levels, Puzder vowed earlier this year to replace workers with machines.*

***

Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was a master spy for the USSR. After operating successfully underground for many years in the United States, he was eventually discovered and was arrested in New York City on June 21, 1957. His court-appointed defense counsel, James B. Donovan, in his book about Abel, Strangers on a Bridge, tells of one exchange Abel had with a prison official during his incarceration: Abel told the official

that he was unwisely spending the meager funds available for vocational training in prison—that the bulk of the money should go to the more intelligent and more adaptable inmates, rather than those with lower IQs and less able to absorb training. The official said to me [Donovan], “A part of his philosophy was being expressed here; he always seemed to show a disregard and mild scorn for people who were not self-reliant and who had to depend on direct supervision and guidance.”

***

I suppose there’s a moral here:

Whether from a Criminal, a Capitalist, or a Communist, the cry is always, “TO HELL WITH EVERYBODY ELSE!”

***

*http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/puzder-labor-secretary-trump-hardees

See also my earlier blog post:

http://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2013/10/gesundheit.html

Holy Cheeseburger, Batman!

Candida [to her husband, the Reverend James Mavor Morell]:“Look at our congregation at St. Dominic's! Why do they come to hear you talking about Christianity every Sunday? Why, just because they've been so full of business and money-making for six days that they want to forget all about it and have a rest on the seventh, so that they can go back fresh and make money harder than ever!” George Bernard Shaw, Candida (Act II)

*

Hershey H. Friedman retells the following story from the Talmud:

One day, while Rabbi Safra was praying, a man offered to buy some merchandise from him. He made an offer, but Rabbi Safra did not want to respond in the middle of a prayer. The prospective buyer assumed that Rabbi Safra was holding out for more and kept increasing the bid. After Rabbi Safra concluded his prayer, he informed the buyer that he would sell the merchandise at the first price because he had "agreed in his heart" to this price.*

***

Charlie Kushner as a businessman was no Rabbi Safra. While the Rabbi would adhere to the lower price that he had agreed to “in his heart,” Kushner would not even adhere to a price he had contractually agreed to. As Lizzie Widdicombe relates,

Kushner was no Trump [he avoided the press]. But he had Trumpian qualities,** such as a tendency to withhold payment from venders like contractors, cleaners, and architects, forcing them to accept a fraction of their fee. [A] former Kushner Companies executive told me, “Every week we’d have meetings at Charlie’s house, and we’d go through the bills—the larger bills and corporate bills. And he’d sign them, or he’d say, ‘Offer them forty per cent.’ Or ‘Offer them fifty per cent.’ ”***

(The mention of Donald Trump was not gratuitous. Jared Kushner, Charlie's son, is the husband of Ivanka Trump—and a strong supporter of his father-in-law's candidacy. Indeed, Ms. Widdicombe's New Yorker article is entitled “Family First: How Donald Trump came to rely on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.”)

As happens often enough when family members and business mix, family members and business split apart. As a result of the Kushner family feud, Charlie Kushner ended up in a federal prison, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. 

Widdicombe quotes from a Charlie Kushner trade paper interview in which, forgetting that he was the guilty party, hurls brickbats at his siblings who opposed him:

“I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite.” [See the Widdecombe article for the wonderfully juicy details of his plotting against his family.]

What is interesting here is the contention that God has it in for the innocent. Perhaps Kushner felt that he could speak for God because he is a follower of the Modern Orthodox Jewish tradition, keeping a kosher home and observing the Sabbath. He also gave a shedload money to Hebrew schools in New Jersey.****

*

Dr. Friedman points out that “in Jewish law, the legal content of the law is totally conjoined with ethics, religion, and morality.” He cites the Ten Commandments as mixing laws that are

the foundations of every legal system (e.g., those dealing with murder, theft, and bearing false witness) with laws that are religious (e.g., against idolatry and observing the Sabbath).

Somehow, however, the injunctions of the Talmud to observe fair business practices and the Commandments to shun theft and bearing false witness eluded Kushner.

But, I guess, he figured that's ok, because he doesn't eat tref.

***

*http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/economic/friedman/impactjewish.htm

**“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will 'protect your job.' But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans . . . who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.” http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/humankind/2016/08/16/88876888/

***http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushners-power-play

****A lot like Robert Brennan, another businessman-felon, who gave a shedload of money to Catholic schools in New Jersey. La Rochefoucauld doesn't have it as one of his maximes (but he should): “It's easy to give money to charity, especially when it's other people's.”

See my earlier post: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7509882774440556801#editor/target=post;postID=2003961560377530609;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postname