Another month down, and I haven't been productive, at least not here. I've been too active, if anything, in comments under some videos on YouTube and Facebook. I hope to bring some of those thoughts here.
Meanwhile, I found Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary uplifting. But I quickly began to worry. As with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' upset against Joseph Crowley in 2018, I noticed that many celebrants forgot that Mamdani won a primary, not a general election. She did win and go to Washington, and has so far managed to defeat Democratic party-hacks and MAGA scumbags hired to try to dislodge her. I hope Mamdani will do as well, but the struggle isn't over yet. The frenzy of bigotry being hurled at Mamdani, not only by Republicans but by Democratic elites, outstrips what I remember seeing aimed at AOC. On the other hand, Mamdani has a little more political experience than she had, and seems well-prepared to take on his bigoted haters. But I'm taking nothing for granted.
For an old guy, I have to concede that Donald Trump has a remarkable level of energy. He travels around the world, he posts a flood of deranged, subliterate junk online, he's face-to-face with the media constantly. His speaking seems to be getting rapidly less energetic and coherent, but overall he's not slowing down. That doesn't make him good, it makes him even more dangerous. What chills me is how little even people I know who dislike Trump know about what is going on. This is boosted by a poll I saw reported today, which found that "Nearly half (48%) of Americans haven’t heard anything about the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’" and "Only 8% of all Americans name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill they have heard about." While the corporate media should be criticized harshly, I think my fellow citizens need to be responsible for their inattention to matters that will affect them. As I think Ta Nehisi-Coates said: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
Speaking of corporate media, NPR continues to appall me. In the wake of the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses by a MAGA assassin, Morning Edition's A Martinez baited one of their colleagues on June 17:
MartÃnez: If you have a gun, are you thinking about taking it with you when you go places? And if you don't, are you thinking about buying one?
Scholten: Personal protection is certainly top of mind for lawmakers today and especially after this incident. We are reviewing a lot of our own internal safety protocols to see what else we might be able to do to keep ourselves safe, even in our own home. Even with the best security, we see here that it wasn't enough to stop or wouldn't have necessarily been enough to to stop the shooter in this instance.
I encourage everyone to read the whole story, and even more, to listen to the audio so you can hear Martinez working himself up to a peak of excitement at the idea of gun battles at political events in Minnesota. State Representative Hilary Scholten stayed calm throughout; Martinez, who often confuses news with sports and action movies, should be fired.
Yesterday was the first day of Amy Coney Barrett's COVID-19-laden confirmation hearings before the US Senate. I didn't watch or listen to them, of course. Whatever I need to know will be reported in the news media -- what else are they for? And she will most likely be confirmed, because Mitch McConnell wants it done and even if there's anything the Democrats could do (which there is), they aren't interested in doing it. So here we are.
In the meantime, I've been impressed by the liberal caterwauling over Barrett's religious beliefs. I take for granted that she wants an American theocracy as run by far-right Christian theocrats, which I don't want either, but Mitch McConnell wants her on the Court and the Democrats refuse to do anything but wail and gnash their teeth.
So, for example, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added to her recent run of righteous indignation: "When politicians use faith as an excuse to pass and uphold laws that seize control of people’s bodies but not guarantee them healthcare, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, or welcome the stranger, you have to wonder if it’s really about faith at all." Right-wing theocrats do a lot of charitable work, and Barrett is apparently no exception. It's a safe bet that she would agree with AOC about the importance of feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and welcoming the stranger; but she wants that work left in the hands of private charity, which is always inadequate over the long haul -- that's why we have government programs. Not for religious reasons, but for practical ones. Even though I might get along better with AOC than ACB on theology, I don't like her using her faith as the norm for government or social action. It is worrisome that she takes for granted that "faith" means her faith, to the exclusion of anyone else's.
Sick and tired of Republicans who co-opt faith as an excuse to advance bigotry and barbarism.
Fact is, if today Christ himself came to the floor of Congress and repeated his teachings, many would malign him as a radical and eject him from the chamber.
She's probably right on that point, but she'd be among the many. If Jesus stood up before Congress and proclaimed, "The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and believe in the good news!" and denounced them for not keeping every jot and tittle of the Torah, I don't think she'd find it any more congenial than most of her colleagues would. If he ranted about plucking out their eye if it leads them to sin, I'm sure she'd consider that radical. And if he singled her out and said, "Go, woman, and call your husband," she'd have to reply that she has no husband.
Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.
Would that go over well?
I suppose she was thinking of the usual stuff about love and charity, and ignoring all the less cuddly stuff, as liberal Christians do. When they imagine Jesus appearing in our midst, they never imagine him reading them the riot act, or demanding that they hate their own families if they want to be his disciple. That's for the bad, false Christians, the Pharisees, not for good noble Christians like them. It's pointless to tell them to read the Gospels, because they'd just skim, looking for the good parts about love and suffering the little children and stuff. Which is there, but it's not all there is, and if you claim you follow the teachings of Jesus, you're stuck with all of them: fire and brimstone, the final judgment coming soon, the self-mutilation (it doesn't matter whether it's literal or figurative, it's still draconic).
As I started reading the replies, I noticed something else. Some of her antagonists accused her of claiming to know what was in their hearts. And you know, they were right. But then, they did the same, accusing her of not being a Christian, for example. But that doesn't let her off the hook for being judgmental, it just means she's not as different from them as she wants to think.
Then there's "faith," as in "You have to wonder if it's really about faith at all." Ocasio-Cortez assumes that faith means what she thinks it is, just like her antagonists. But faith has no specific content. The word means trust, loyalty, without regard to what or whom you trust or are loyal to. A Mafia goon is loyal to his boss, and trusts his boss to take care of him and his family. The religious Right are loyal to Yahweh as they conceive him, and they trust him to take care of them. He doesn't, but they don't let that weaken their trust.
Somewhere along the line "faith" came to refer to sectarian affiliations, and it always sets my teeth on age when I encounter that usage. But it has no inherent content either. It contains whatever doctrines and ritual practices a sect pours into it, and that's historically a source of "interfaith" friction, best avoided by not thinking about the weird things Those People do: how they pray, when they kneel and when they get up in services, whether they cover their heads or not, the hymns they sing, the foods they won't eat or how they prepare the foods they will eat. It's like what your married neighbors do in the sack at night, better not to think about it. Better indeed not to think about what you do in the sack at night, because it's simultaneously beautiful and holy and gross and unnatural. Better not to think at all.
Ocasio-Cortez and Barrett are both Catholics, which shows you how little it means to share the same "faith." It's like "gender," which quickly shatters into a million pieces if you examine it too closely.
It bothered me to see Ocasio-Cortez carrying on so shallowly, because she's usually very good at demolishing Republicans. Religion is something else, though. People of faith confronted with people of a different faith generally try to paper over their differences under a vague ecumenicalism; if they have to deal with differences, they don't do very well. You're supposed to pretend that all roads lead to the same god, so you discreetly don't specify which god. Politics has a better tradition of debate, and anyway Ocasio-Cortez isn't trying to pretend that they're all brothers and sisters in America.
It doesn't matter what Jesus taught, or what Christianity demands, as Amy Coney Barrett sits before Congress determinedly refusing to answer pertinent questions, because we have separation of government and religion here. We don't have it because secular humanists tried to drive God out of the public sphere, but because the framers knew from recent history that without it, Christians will literally tear each other apart: it was Christians who wanted religious freedom the most, for just that reason. But the same applies to Ocasio-Cortez.
If someone declares their intention to use their office to advance the will of God, they've disqualified themselves. It doesn't, of course, take much intelligence to avoid such a declaration. Arguing about the proper relation between Christians and the state, or about what Jesus really wanted, breaks down that uneasy truce among the cults. It's also a waste of time that should be spent sorting out policy, especially in the cocktail of crises we're in now. It's not up to the government to decide what is true Christianity, or what President Jesus would do. I've been bothered by Ocasio-Cortez' occasional flaunting of her faith, but she's going further now, and that's disturbing. I expect and demand better from her, as I do from all people who are concerned about the threat posed by the religious Right.
Liberal and left reactions to Trump and Senate Republicans' expressed intention to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court do not make me feel that the American future is in good hands.
Do tell. Who is "we"? Is Aslan speaking for the People's Liberation Front of Judea here?
CNN pundit Don Lemon had to walk back a remark about "blow[ing] up the system", explaining that it had been taken out of context. He's almost certainly being paid far too much to be shooting off his mouth carelessly on cable, don't you think? I do get tired of being told that we must take the corporate media seriously, because they are responsible, objective news professionals, unlike all those crazy bloggers and nutcases on Twitter.
"This is one of the most important times that we have had for everyday people to stand up," Ocasio-Cortez said. "We all need to be more courageous and we all must act in unprecedented ways to make sure that our rights are stabilized. And to Mitch McConnell, we need to tell him that he is playing with fire. We need to make sure that this vacancy is protected, that our election continues and that the American people have their say."
I want to know how Representative Ocasio-Cortez proposes to burn McConnell's fingers. There are apparently a lot of procedural tools available to Senators to slow and even block action in Congress when you don't hold a majority, but AOC's rhetoric here sounds a bit stronger than that. So she sounds like her House colleagues, saying how concerned they are, and how they're not going to stand for Trump's naughtiness for one second longer - and then they do nothing. What happened to the calendar that AOC demanded Postmaster DeJoy deliver to Congress in August? A subpoena was issued, which is more than the Democrats have done before, but I can't find any updates. It's all very well to strut and preen and posture about all the tough things you're going to do, but if you don't carry out your threats, you just look foolish, and no one will take succeeding threats seriously.
I don't really expect or want Aslan or Lemon to blow anything up, but all the prattle about Revolution and guillotines and killing Nazis and burning it all down that I see from leftists on social media is embarrassing. For me, it's all summed up by the guy in Charlottesville who lit an aerosol spray to defend himself against a neo-Nazi with a gun - which, miraculously, misfired. (Heather Heyer wasn't so lucky that day.) I would sympathize, because I feel helpless too, but some of the people promising fire and fury, the like of which the world has never seen, are old enough to know better. But cheering on street violence from the sidelines on Twitter, while other people get hurt or killed, is criminally irresponsible. And people who think that giving Nazis the bird is effective are no better than the Never-Trump Resistance they deride.
Last week Representative Ted Yoho (R-FL) approached Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on the Capitol steps and attacked her for some remarks she'd made about crime at a town hall earlier in the month. "You are out of your freaking mind," he said, called her "disgusting," and according to a reporter who was present, turned away and muttered "Fucking bitch" as he moved along.
Ocasio-Cortez criticized him publicly for his obnoxiousness, and Yoho took to the House floor to make the standard fake apology for such occasions: he denied having used the obscenity, claimed he was just so upset he hardly knew what he was doing, and flaunted his wife and two daughters as proof that he'd never use such disrespectful language. Ocasio-Cortez deftly raked Yoho over the coals some more.
Something odd, though. Yoho said he was offended because of his own experience with poverty, and accused Ocasio-Cortez of equating poverty with crime. Here's how The Hill reported what she'd said:
During the event, Ocasio-Cortez was asked about gun violence in New York, which has spiked this summer as the nation's largest city — which was clobbered by the coronavirus — slowly reopens from a months-long lockdown.
Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, has long advocated for policies that cut police budgets and shift that funding to education, mental health and other social services. In her response, she stuck to that theme, suggesting the surge in crime stems from the economic hardship facing New York's poorest communities — and a failure of policymakers to fund programs aimed at leveling economic disparities.
“Crime is a problem of a diseased society, which neglects its marginalized people," she said during the July 9 event. "Policing is not the solution to crime.”
Right-wing media attacked her for, as they saw it, justifying violent crime as the result of poverty.
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez defended her position, saying she made clear during the town hall that she was referring to "petty crime and crimes of poverty."
Conservative media, she said, has purposefully taken her comments out of context.
"I say, 'Listen, I'm not talking about violent crime, I'm not talking about shootings. But when it comes to petty theft, a lot of these are crimes of poverty, and people are desperate,'" she said. "So the right wing cuts up this clip, per usual, in a very misleading way. ... They basically [want] to make it seem as though I'm saying people are shooting each other because they're hungry."
Fair enough, I guess, but the question she answered was apparently about a spike in gun violence this summer in New York. It seems, then, that she dodged the question before her as disingenuously as Yoho tried to justify his outburst: "I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country."
Further, it appears that she didn't hear his parting epithet until it made the news. A sitting politician should know better than to let off steam near a reporter, but I wonder if Ocasio-Cortez' vocabulary is squeaky clean when she's alone and thinking about her colleagues. If Yoho had said it to her directly, it would be a different situation, but it seems that Ocasio-Cortez and sympathetic media framed the story to make it sound as if Yoho had cussed her to her face. In any case, throwing a tantrum at a colleague on the Capitol steps was bad optics, though in the old days Congressmen were prone to strong insults and fisticuffs in the Congressional chambers. Boys will be boys.
But the point I wanted to make here was, one more time, that a lot of the lefty-liberal-progressive types who jumped to Ocasio-Cortez' defense use misogynist language like Yoho's publicly, on Twitter, all the time. (So do the right-wingers, but one expects that of passionately Christian patriots.) They're in no position to cast the first stone at Yoho. I've been tweaking some such by addressing them as Representative Yoho when I reply to their frothing. It hasn't diminished in the regions I frequent since this story blew up. Nor has homophobic abuse. But of course, it's different when the good guys do it.
I'm caught up with pretty much everything except reading (which I'll never catch up with), so I've run out of excuses for not writing. Then the Subway where I ate lunch was tuned to a broadcast of one of those Nuremberg rallies we call American professional football, one of the broadcasters announced that people would stand for the National Anthem, a lugubrious basso began singing it badly, and I had the impetus I needed to push me to the keyboard.
A few weeks ago, the notorious Fasco-American provocateuse Tomi Lahren attempted to mock US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by tweeting that she -- that is, Lahren -- was going to dress as Ocasio-Cortez for Halloween.
Responding to critics, a seemingly unphased Lahren refused to back down, tweeting: "I mean this truly and sincerely, being a former bartender is the best and most admirable thing about @AOC."
She lied, of course. Like most Republicans, she believes that having been a service worker somehow discredits Ocasio-Cortez. But then, so do right-wing Democrats. Numerous AOC fans and supporters pointed out that though elites pretend to care about working people, putting us in our place is one of their go-tos. They'll usually back down, as Lahren did, when they get called on it, but if they didn't believe it, their ids wouldn't spew out the contemptuous dismissals in the first place. What it amounts to is that while they value proles in our place, we had better not get too big for our britches by, say, getting elected to Congress.
I've often come up against versions of this pattern myself, from my liberal law-professor friend who refused to recognize that mocking college dropouts was not only invalid, it included me. "It didn't refer to you," she protested, "You're not a newscaster." But I am a college dropout, so it did refer to me.
I came up against this same mindset several times earlier, on a university-owned BBS in the 1990s, which was open to university staff, students, and faculty. Someone would dismiss my opinions by pointing out that I was a dishwasher, what did I know? Usually some of my friends would defend me as being real smart anyway, and the offender would backtrack and protest that he (it was always a he) totally respected me and would be proud to have me teach his children. This was still irrelevant, and I don't think I ever got an answer to my follow-up question, which was why, if these people respected me so much, why did they begin with a pointless ad hominem dismissal? The important thing, I take it, was that they should never actually have to engage with a rational argument. That's a right guaranteed by the Constitution, you know.
The worst thing about social media, as far as I'm concerned, is not the right-wing loonies, toadies, and thugs who populate it, but the liberal and left loonies, toadies, and thugs who populate it. That's a personal reaction, since both do equal harm to rational discourse, but it bothers me more because the liberals and leftists are supposed to be on my side, my allies and shields against the Trump threat, defenders of reality-based, fact-based discourse in a post-truth world.
Take my liberal law-professor friend, who posted authoritatively on Facebook just last week that hate speech is not Constitutionally protected. She was either ignorant or lying, and in either case I'm concerned for her students, just as I am for the students of right-wing bigots who teach in public universities. Even in the red state where she teaches, even in law school, she may encounter people who disagree with her from the left, the kind of people liberals hate even more than they hate Donald Trump. I don't know that she'd fail a student who corrected her factual errors, but I'm confident that she'd try to pull rank based on her education and authority as a professor.
That doesn't work on me: she can't hurt me by giving me a low grade, and I don't even give her the benefit of the doubt anymore. But it could intimidate her students, and that's not good. I hope none of them have worked as bartenders, table servers, or in other low-class jobs.
I was pleased when I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweet that "for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps." At least she knows the difference. A lot of people don't.
Right-wing gentiles like [Lynne] Cheney are not credible advocates for Jewish Americans; their invocation of the Holocaust is a bad-faith ploy to distract Americans from the horrors of the current camps. But it’s a bad-faith attack that can easily find fertile ground in the American imagination because of a fundamental, and apparently widespread, misconception that the phrase "concentration camps" somehow belongs solely to the history of the Holocaust.
But it isn't only "shrieking Republicans" who cling to this misconception. Quite a few of Ocasio-Cortez' fans and supporters believe, and say even in comments on her tweets, that she was in fact invoking the Holocaust, and was in effect lying about the distinction she drew so explicitly. At best they ignore her denials and bring up parallels to Nazi Germany. This isn't surprising, since Americans (among others) love to draw parallels to Nazi Germany, despite an ample supply of parallels in our own history, and every foreign leader who gets in our way will be compared to Hitler. (Actual admirers of Hitler can be excused if they are Our SOBs.) It's so much easier to dwell on the crimes of official enemies than to recognize or admit those of one's own country, and safer to blame whatever one deplores in one's countries on the evil influence of foreigners. From anti-Papist agitation in the early 1800s to blaming Trump's presidency on Putin now, Americans have preferred to play it safe in this way.
So, for example: "Those soldiers on the train platforms in Germany loading the freight cars with people were just like this." Why rely on foreign suppliers when such we have an ample collection of such behavior made right here in America? Those soldiers who massacred civilians in Korea and Vietnam and every other US war down to the present were just like this. Those soldiers who drove Indians off their land on forced marches in which thousands died were like this. Those Americans who returned escaped slaves to slavery were like this. Those Americans who flocked to lynchings were like this. Those Americans who did nothing when American citizens of Japanese descent were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps were like this.
Besides blaming our problems on foreigners, it's easy and safe to rend one's garments over "what we've become," as though herding brown people into cages were a Trumpian aberration. Again, there is nothing new about Trump's policies and actions; they're as American as apple pie. There's been a wave of liberal fury, fully justified, at the federal government attorney who argued in court on behalf of the Trump regime that denying child detainees soap and toothbrushes, suitable food, and proper shelter, was compatible with the legal requirement to provide them with "safe and sanitary conditions." But it must not be forgotten that the same attorney was in court four years ago, defending the Obama regime's policy of putting detained children into solitary confinement to punish their parents for insubordination. Yet almost every day I see forlorn Obamaphiles lamenting that their god-king no longer holds the reins of power, and wishing he would return on clouds of glory to judge the quick and dead.
I've been wondering, though, how "concentration camp" came to be the standard name for the Reich's death camps. It feels comparatively euphemistic, though like most euphemisms it came to acquire negative associations. It might have been partly because not all the camps were death camps, and "concentration" was chosen as an umbrella term. It's not surprising that the pre-Nazi history of concentrations camps has been forgotten by most Americans -- it would be uncomfortable and so unnecessary -- and that they prefer to focus exclusively on the use of the camps by our enemies to the exclusion of our own. And I can't help thinking that although Ocasio-Cortez knows the difference, the term has power for her because of its association with the Nazis. I'm sure it does for her fans.
Another annoying motif is the Slippery Slope, that Hitler began with baby steps and became worse only gradually, because people elsewhere in the world didn't realize how bad it would get. This comes partly from Martin Niemöller 's famous litany, and it's not entirely invalid. But it overlooks that coming for the trade unionists was just fine with many people, not just in Germany but around the world. So was stomping on Jews, and homosexuals, and Communists. So was sterilizing the allegedly unfit, which had after all been pioneered by the US at the turn of the century. There was widespread support for fascism in the United States in the 1930s, and that was a major reason why there was less concern about the implementation of fascism in Europe: not "isolationism," not "America First," not even myopia about how bad things would get; but active endorsement of Hitler's agenda, and a wish to emulate it here.
If Trump's concentration camps are a slippery slope, it's one that we've been careening down for some time now, on a bipartisan sled. Perhaps bearing down on the accurate history would make many liberals uncomfortable. If so, so much for the worse for them. Take a cue from Martin Luther King Jr.: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." White liberals didn't like King's criticism of Lyndon Johnson's war, but so much the worse for them. But it's more comfortable to draw a line between Us and Them, locating all the evil with Them, the Others, than to start looking for the source of the trouble at home.
There's been some complaint online about "quibbling over semantics" instead of acting against the camps. I don't see them as mutually exclusive, and I believe that at least some people will learn something useful from the debate. When the Right claims that "concentration camp" refers only to the Holocaust, they are lying, and it's always important to challenge lies. Here's the thing: if the term you use for the US concentration camps
makes them sound less bad than they are, it's the wrong term to use.
On the whole I'm fond of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite her lapses, for who among us is perfect? And I realize that she probably had little choice but to slap back at Kellyanne Conway for this attempted slur:
But still, public disputes about who's a good Christian and who isn't discredit everyone involved. (Which applies also to Pete Buttigieg.) It's like public squabbling over dick size. A politician's religious affiliation or lack of it is not a qualification for office. The Constitution (Article 6, par. 3) explicitly rules out religious tests, and while that's not binding on voters, we should be able to balance personal creed with political judgment. "Should" is the catch, of course; "should" and a transit pass will get you on the bus.
One of the very few matters on which I (an atheist, remember) agree with C. S. Lewis was his refusal in Mere Christianity to define "Christian" in any but a very formal sense, "to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity" (xii). (It's almost a behaviorist definition.) He didn't do this because he didn't think that heartfelt faith was important, but because:
It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.
We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to ‘the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were ‘far closer to the spirit of Christ’ than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian [xiv].
This is worth quoting at length because of that dig at unbelievers who will, Lewis believed, "cheerfully" use "Christian" as a compliment, to mean a good person. I'm one unbeliever who won't. For one thing, I don't think "Christian" has any moral content. (The same applies to "atheist.") For another, as an atheist, I'm not interested in judging who's a real Christian and who isn't. If someone "identifies as" a Christian, to use the current buzzword, I'm not going to tell them they aren't. But many believers and unbelievers still do, and Lewis here shows why they shouldn't.
Someone else had a good take on the proper response to personal attacks, namely C. P. Snow in a postscript to his book The Two Cultures:
However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.
Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.
But then, as self-admitted, card-carrying Christians, Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg predictably will see their claim to good standing, indeed to goodness (though there is none good but God, as somebody declared), on the line. In the US, it's only what their fans will expect, since they no less than their opponents put a high premium on religious affiliation and proving their superior spiritual discernment. That, as Lewis and Snow both said in their different ways, is not on. It would be nice if Americans paid more attention to matters of more importance, but we're not likely to change overall in the foreseeable future.
It seems that the Trump regime's coup against the government of Venezuela isn't going as smoothly as he expected, and I take some comfort from that.
I'm not surprised that most Democratic Party politicians and fellow-travelers have supported the coup. Even Bernie Sanders couldn't oppose it without including some US propaganda against Maduro; but then he's always been weak on foreign policy. Representatives Ro Khanna of California, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have condemned the coup forthrightly, but they're the exceptions.
I am surprised, I admit, that new Democratic Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hesitated to take a firm stand. On January 30 the journalist Max Blumenthal reported:
I caught @AOC rushing into a committee hearing today on the Hill and asked her about Venezuela. "We're working on a statement," was all she said before entering the room. Don't think her name was on @USProgressives letter against intervention. Will have more reactions soon.
“Our office is monitoring it closely. I think that, you know, the
humanitarian crisis is extremely concerning but, you know, when we use
non-Democratic [sic] means to determine leadership, that’s also concerning, as
well,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Daily Caller on Thursday. “So, we’re
figuring out our response and making sure that we center the people of
Venezuela first and foremost.”
This won't do, though the capitalization of "democratic" there is amusing and presumably not Ocasio-Cortez' fault. I see nothing here that would justify her hesitation about issuing a statement before. It's just typical both-sides equivocation. The "humanitarian crisis," as she must know, is largely the US' doing, thanks to its support for the anti-democratic Venezuelan opposition, and especially the sanctions that are intended to harm the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans. If she doesn't know it, she should probably have admitted her ignorance and refused to comment. But it doesn't take much background to oppose US support for coups. The burden of argument lies not on opponents of US interference in other countries, but on those who support it.
Ocasio-Cortez' customary forthright readiness to snap back at Trump's malfeasance is on hold here, and I wonder why. The other frosh Representatives she calls her sisters are on record opposing the coup; why doesn't she follow their lead? I've been wondering if perhaps significant numbers of her Latinx base support the coup, but I haven't seen any evidence one way or the other.
For me, it's pretty simple, given the US' horrific record in Latin America generally, and in Venezuela specifically. It's difficult to distinguish lies from truth in US coverage of the situation, which has been fanatically hostile and indifferent to factual accuracy ever since Chavez was first elected. If you want an introduction to the matter, Alan MacLeod's Bad News from Venezuela (Routledge, 2018) is a good place to begin, and will point you to other discussions. But even if Maduro were as bad as we're told, that wouldn't justify US interference in Venezuela, which our gangster leaders are not even bothering to hide. (A "dictator"? "Corrupt"? "Incompetent"? These are all qualifications for US support of a regime.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some good positions and proposals, and I still approve of her more than I don't. But I'm monitoring her closely, and I find her reluctance to speak out against the US-backed coup in Venezuela extremely worrying.
Now, this is ... interesting. In a Facebook comment on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' primary win in New York, someone wrote (angrily? I think so):
'working class New York.' By which she did not mean ethnic white hardhats but multicultural, multiracial men and women who have to kowtow to other people just to make ends meet." You just couldn't not exclude the white working class from the working class, could you?
This is a lovely example of a common attitude, most visible among Trump's base but also evident in certain Democratic circles. "Working class New York" includes the white working class on its face. So does "multicultural, multiracial," unless you assume that whites, even white hardhats, are not a "race." But to this mindset, if you include people of color in the working class, you are excluding whites. If you let women into the big tent, you are driving out the men. I've seen it often, but rarely spreading its plumage so openly in the wild.
While I'm on the subject of Ocasio-Gomez, several people passed along the reaction of a leading liberal cable-news pundit (and voice of the #Resistance!) to her victory.
Bear in mind that Reid is referring to a woman of color running for office in her own city. But of course she hadn't paid any attention to her campaign before. Another funny thing is that, as a commenter pointed out with links under her tweet, Ocasio-Gomez has actually received a fair amount of coverage. But political journalism, c'est Joie.
