Author: Vita Historia

Macho Macho Man

 

On Wednesday, Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate for Montana’s lone seat in the United States House of Representatives, allegedly body-slammed and then punched a reporter for The Guardian newspaper, Ben Jacobs. Listening to the audio of the encounter, however, and reading the eyewitness reports of others who were present, there really was no “allegedly’ about it. Gianforte was supposedly upset with Jacobs over a question he asked and maybe how he asked it. As much as the Gianforte campaign tries to spin it, all that really doesn’t matter except to the true believers for whom he can do no wrong. Gianforte assaulted another man who was simply doing his job, and whether Gianforte and his supporters agree with the reporter’s politics or his methodology matters not one whit and is no excuse for Gianforte’s actions or reactions. Gianforte is in the rough and tumble of politics now, and he’s no longer the big shot in charge of his own business empire who dare not be questioned by the hoi polloi: grow a thicker skin or stay out of politics, Gianforte, a lesson you could learn alongside your colleague, Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).

Chris Masters and MVP (Dec 2009)
World Wrestling Entertainment superstars Chris Masters (left) and MVP (right) perform for the troops on December 4, 2009, in Holt Stadium at Joint Base Balad, Iraq; photo by US Army Sgt. Ryan Twist.

Not to excuse Gianforte in the least, but this kind of incident has been in the works for the past year or more, and the mainstream media has been complicit in its development. The Thug-in-Chief, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, routinely ostracized the media at his rallies and encouraged his supporters to berate them to the point of violence. Mainstream media outlets walked a tightrope regarding this behavior, because while it demeaned their efforts and made life harder for individual reporters, ratings were great and ad revenue was way up. Viewers and readers appeared to want some Jerry Springer style mayhem in their political reporting, and the media executives were prepared to give it to them and count the dollars rolling in, never mind that there would be a reckoning some day. The reckoning is now, but holding it in check may be too late for all of us. We were the ones who tuned in for this ugly, violent show, after all, and blaming the media does not get us off the hook. There’s no denying the television remote control comes with a channel changer and an off button, and there are other news outlets, particularly online, that do not cater to the basest urges of the voting public.

Greg Gianforte, now the Republican Congressman from Montana after his win on Thursday, has his own hypocritical tendencies to wrestle with after his assault on Wednesday, if in fact he is capable of that much introspection. Probably not. It wouldn’t be in character, given his background and proclivities. Public apology aside, he nonetheless probably feels entirely justified in his actions and recognizes no hypocrisy in them whatsoever. His supporters certainly don’t. The more important question that needs answering is how we the public will ultimately react to the ongoing freak show of thugs seeking political office, or already in office, who have been encouraged to let loose their worst behavior by the signals they are getting from the top. Do we reject them and say we will tolerate no more like them? Or do we continue to watch passively and ghoulishly like rubberneckers at a traffic accident, or the even more base viewers of the trashy Jerry Springer show? Don’t count on media executives to elevate the tone of civil discourse. They’re interested only in profits, make no mistake about that, and pay no attention to anything they say in contradiction to that imperative. In a democracy, what’s left of it at least, we get the government we deserve. Looking around at our politicians now, that doesn’t speak very well of us, does it?
― Vita

 

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The Pigeon and the Chestnut

 

Scientists are attempting to bring the Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, back to life from preserved genetic material. The Passenger Pigeon once numbered up to 3 billion in North America, but by 1914 the last one had died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Scientists are also working on reviving the nearly extinct American Chestnut, Castanea dentata, which had once totaled over 3 billion trees in North America before a bark fungus accidentally imported from Asia with some Chinese Chestnuts, Castanea mollissima, destroyed almost all of the trees in the first half of the twentieth century.
Male Passenger Pigeon
Male Passenger Pigeon; digital painting by Tim Hough.
PSM V84 D563 American chestnut central maryland
American Chestnut tree in central Maryland in 1914; photo by United States Forest Service.
The loss or near loss of both these species greatly changed the ecosystem of eastern North America to the point that a visitor time traveling from the nineteenth century would be hard pressed to recognize it as the same place, never mind all the modern infrastructure of concrete, steel, and asphalt. Both species were casualties of the first stages of globalization. The Passenger Pigeons had co-existed with Native Americans for millennia, but it was the mass immigration of Europeans which eventually drove them to extinction through habitat loss and hunting on a massive scale. The American Chestnuts had no immunity to the fungus which arrived with the shipment of Chinese Chestnuts, which had developed some immunity due to having evolved with the fungus in their native habitat.

 

Now scientists are attempting to restore these two species once so numerous that they helped define the environment of eastern North America. Both restorations will require the expertise of geneticists, along with help from ornithologists and botanists, as appropriate. Ultimately the success of both projects will depend on the cooperation of the public by giving both species space and peace, two things that humans struggle to allow for the other beings sharing this planet. People were responsible for the demise of both the Passenger Pigeon and the American Chestnut, and with the ingenuity people are known for perhaps they can restore both species. Successful restoration will also require two things people have not often enough been known for, which are a generosity of spirit towards life and restraint of their violently destructive impulses.
― Vita

 

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Hail the Conquered Heroes

 



The 1944 film Hail the Conquering Hero, written and directed by Preston Sturges, satirizes our need for heroes and the lengths we will go to in order to assert myth over reality.

 

People seem to have a deep need for heroes, and will invent mythologies around the ones they anoint and erect monuments to them. If worshiping their hero and fetishizing the symbols around him or her serve as a poke in the eye to some others, well then that’s too bad. Those in power decide who gets a monument, and the powerless have to live with it. When some citizens criticize the symbolic nature of those monuments, the powerful react with anger, as if some people have a lot of nerve for objecting to getting poked in the eye.

 


All around the former Confederate States of America, civic arguments are going on over the proper role of Civil War symbols and monuments in public places. Almost all of these symbols and monuments are martial in nature, with an undertone of defiance. For some, the War Between the States continues, 150 years on, and those whose eyes are poked because of it need to remember their place. One wonders how they would feel if a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman was put on prominent display in Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. How about a statue of the English King George III in New York City’s Central Park? Since at least a third of residents of the American colonies were Loyalists during the Revolution, that war can be considered the first American Civil War, or War Between the Revolutionists and the Loyalists, if you prefer.


He burned atlanta
General Sherman Memorial, Washington, D.C.; photo by Flickr user debaird.

 



New York City. After a public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776, a crowd pulls down the statue of King George III to be melted into bullets. Contemporary engraving.


The Civil War monuments should not be removed, as that would silence part of history, like the activists who want to silence speech they don’t agree with. A better policy is to acknowledge and memorialize those other people from history, the ones who have been ignored while the powerful played up the mixed accomplishments of generals and statesmen. In Charlottesville, Virginia, where one of those civic debates is going on about the desire of some to see statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson removed from public parks, the former head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1950s, Eugene Williams, believes the statues should stay, but the city should also memorialize the slave auction site at Court Square. Auctioning slaves within sight of the seat of justice, the local courthouse, is a stark reminder of the contradictions in our culture, and memorializing both the auction block and Generals Lee and Jackson on their horses would yield a more complex, adult understanding of history than listening to only one side of the story.
― Vita

 

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Sink or Swim

 

“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
― Will Rogers*(1879-1935)

 

Last Saturday, April 22, was the 48th celebration of Earth Day, and the first March for Science in Washington, D.C., and in hundreds of other cities around the world. Just when we might have congratulated ourselves that reason and scientific inquiry had pushed aside superstition and muddled thinking, the medieval mind rises again and reasserts itself, now with a in-over-his-head champion in the Oval Office who is quite pleased to indulge the self-interest of his oligarchic cohorts in the fossil fuel industry. The lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder grunt their approval of his policies because those obnoxious policies appear to rile up the fancy pants pointy-headed folks, and that’s always a nice, satisfying feeling. The folks higher up on the ladder are only too happy to let those lower down bear their weight, and the reasons they bear that weight are not important to the higher ups, only that they continue to hold up the whole enterprise without asking troubling questions. It’s worked well for Wayne Tracker, aka Rex Tillerson.

It’s not the fault of these hard-working men and their unfortunate mules they’ve been told to “keep digging”.

The amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere is higher now than it has been in human history, based on what we know from ice cores. Sea levels are high and getting higher as the climate warms, and are already affecting coastal communities. It has been at least thousands of years, possibly millions, since Earth last encountered conditions like those we are entering into now. There is no basis for comparison for humans in the present age, now known as the Anthropocene on account of the profound effect people have had on the Earth, because in the interregnum we have settled the coastlines so densely that in geologic time it would appear as no more than the blink of an eye. Around the world now there hundreds of millions of people living within 100 miles of the sea, and accompanying all that settlement there has been an enormous investment in infrastructure such as housing, office buildings, and roads, along with the economic fortunes and personal hopes of all those people. And all of those people will feel – are feeling – the impact of a warming climate sooner than other groups living in other situations farther inland. Around the world, most of those people living along coastlines are poor. Ironically, in the United States, the richest country in the world and one where having a beachfront property is often a status symbol for the wealthy, the effects of sea level rise will possibly be more severe than average.

A portion of a BBC Newsnight interview with Noam Chomsky from June 8, 2012. The situation he bemoans has not improved in the nearly five years since the interview.

Whether a person believes climate warming is caused by humans or not is, at this point, almost immaterial. It is happening; it’s here. If scientific evidence is not persuasive to some folks, then common sense should tip the scales for them. Sticking their heads out of air conditioning into the natural environment for more than a few minutes at a stretch ought to help. Too many people unfortunately are willing to ride along with Wayne Tracker, despite their common sense and their personal experience. If the Earth is a lifeboat in the cosmos (and what have we found so far to tell us otherwise?), then we are all in this together, and at this point arguing about how we got here serves little purpose. Certainly there are some people in the lifeboat who seem to feel it’s perfectly fine to flourish their revolvers and shoot holes in the boat, which of course makes things worse. What to do about them? If we can find the political will among our fellow survivors, we take away their revolvers, for they are imperiling everyone’s chances, and their ideology be damned. They should know better than to pound in the stakes of “Global Warming is a Hoax” yard signs in insufferable heat, throwing themselves into a tizzy, giving themselves a paroxysm of the vapors. They are dangerous nitwits.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 masterpiece Lifeboat holds our attention despite the limited setting because of the universal behaviors we can all recognize.

What would you do if you were on a lifeboat at sea and one or more of your fellow survivors exhibited behavior that was detrimental to your own survival, as common sense dictated it? If your children were with you on the lifeboat, and therefore your progeny were endangered as well? It’s hot, and your patience is growing short. What’s particularly annoying is that you notice some of the unhelpful survivors appear to be cynically manipulating the others, the true believers, for their own gain. Besides the danger, this behavior turns your stomach. If there were another lifeboat nearby, you’d dive off this one and take your chances with the sharks until you reached the other boat. But there isn’t another lifeboat as far as the eye can see. You’re stuck with these people. Nevertheless, with water everywhere, it’s good to know how to swim.
― Vita

 

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Gee, What a Swell Guy

 

“This is a service. No one here pays me to go.”
― Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) speaking to constituents in 2017.

 

Earlier this week a congressman from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, told his constituents at a town hall gathering that their notion that they paid his salary was “bullcrap” and that he alone had paid his own way through taxes over the years as a businessman. Hallelujah! Congressman Mullin further elaborated that his tenure should be considered a “service” from him to his constituents, and damn glad of it! This is truly a man who is God’s gift! If he took a side job at a convenience store rather than in Congress, those of us buying lotto tickets and fast food from him would feel blessed to have him deign to notice our proffered treasury bills. Glory!

From the founding of the nation, there have been calls from some to withhold all payment to those who selflessly serve in our nation’s deliberative bodies. Honor itself is its own reward, they argued, and no doubt Markwayne Mullin, selfless civil servant, would have been right there with them, refusing his congressional salary and cushy benefits, along with the extremely lucrative possibility of reaping even greater rewards from private sector lobbying once he left office. Not for Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who proclaims loudly for all to hear “Bullcrap!”

Markwayne Mullin, whose daddy left him a profitable business at the age of 20, and who lined up for government largesse while decrying the distribution of the same, we thank you for telling it like it is. That’s what’s important these days! BULLCRAP, in belligerent all caps, that’ll set those lib’ruls back on their Birkenstock heels. Markwayne Mullin, according to your bio on Wikipedia you are a Cherokee Indian, and naturally that leads to considerable cognitive dissonance for the lib’ruls when they try to reconcile your heritage with your arrogant, bellicose ignorance in relating to your constituents. All the better for you, because you are in your own dickish way standing up for what you believe in, which apparently is tone-deaf entitlement and your own testosterone-addled studliness, and how many Indians can lay claim to that after 500 years of bloody history of white folks pushing them around?
― Vitawayne – Booyah!

 

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Shut Up, Messengers, and Sing

 

The controversy in January over Meryl Streep’s remarks upon accepting an award at the Golden Globes seemed to have centered on whether an entertainment industry ceremony was the appropriate time and place for a famous actress to air her political concerns. Lost in all the hullabaloo were Ms. Streep’s actual remarks and how they concerned a humanitarian issue more than a political one, namely that we treat each other with respect and dignity, and that a good example should start with the president of the country.

Perhaps the most notable incident of humanitarian protest at a Hollywood awards ceremony occurred in March 1973, when Marlon Brando refused his Oscar for best actor in 1972’s The Godfather and asked Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the podium. Brando was upset at the treatment of Native Americans in movies and television, and he also wanted to shine a light on the siege by federal agents of the Wounded Knee occupiers, which until then had drawn little media attention. Brando and Littlefeather succeeded in getting American news media to note what was happening at Wounded Knee. Their long term goal of turning around the portrayal of Native Americans in popular media is still a work in progress. The momentum of centuries of stereotyping by the dominant European culture is slowing but not stopped.

Meanwhile Ms. Littlefeather, more than Brando then and Streep now, took a tremendous amount of abuse in the press over her role in the incident. She was not a famous actress known for a lifetime of work in the public eye, she was female, and she was part Indian. Some in the press even intimated she was not Indian at all, implying she was a phony and therefore no one need pay attention to anything she said. In an interview on The Dick Cavett Show after the Oscar ceremony, starting at the 6:30 mark of the video clip included in this post, Mr. Brando expressed regret for having put her in such a vulnerable position. Beating up on the messenger is an old tactic, for some a gut reaction to unwelcome news, and for others a cynical ploy to distract from the message, and anyone who tells unpleasant truths has to prepare for it as much as possible. Still, withstanding the onslaught can be an ordeal.

The Dixie Chicks learned that unpleasant lesson in 2003 and beyond when, on account of humanitarian concerns, they made remarks critical of the rush to war in Iraq. It seems that calling out jingoism is the most unwelcome news of all for sunshine patriots, considering the level of vitriol they heaped on these singers. Fourteen years later, what has the uncritical pose of much of the major popular and news media toward the Bush administration’s justifications for war in Iraq brought to Iraqis and Americans that has proved worthwhile, that has proved anything but a destructive waste? And where do the jingoists stand on that now? They have not learned a thing, and instead have turned their attention elsewhere in the world, fanning embers into flames.
― Vita

 

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The Bully’s Pulpit

 

Audio of FDR’s first Fireside Chat on March 12, 1933. The respectful, civil discourse of a leader speaking as an adult to adults. Listening to this does take a little over thirteen minutes, however, while reading a tweet takes less than a minute.

 

Last Sunday, March 12, marked the 84th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Fireside Chat, as the series of thirty evening radio programs he did over the twelve years of his presidency came to be known. It was one week after his first inauguration (inaugurations up through 1933 took place on March 4), and he spoke on the banking crisis. He spoke in calm, even tones, with the intent of calming down a populace which had lost confidence in the banking system and withdrawn their funds in a panic. FDR’s fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had famously touted the use of the Bully Pulpit when he was president at the beginning of the twentieth century, and now that radio had come into widespread use, FDR found himself with a Bully Pulpit that enabled him to speak directly to millions of his fellow Americans at a time, without the filter of the national press. FDR, to his credit, used the privilege of his Bully Pulpit to explain his policies in plain, respectful language, and to garner direct support for those policies from the populace.
FDR-Exiting-Car-1932
FDR exiting car with assistance during a campaign trip to Hollywood, California, on September 24, 1932. Photographs like this are rare because press and official photographers avoided showing FDR’s debility out of consideration for the man.

Reminding us of all we have lost and may still lose. A poignant scene from Out of Africa, a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who by all accounts are good people as well as fine actors.
Now we have found ourselves in an age where a new technology enables the president to use the Bully Pulpit in a new way, but sadly we don’t have a TR or an FDR available to make the best use of it. This is our own fault. This is the culmination of a sequence of bad cultural and political choices by all of us over the past forty years or more. Now a reality television bully of no intellectual or humanitarian distinction whatsoever occupies the Oval Office and has the Bully Pulpit, both technologically from his tweets and personally from his rallies, and his ugly pronouncements echo through a press that eagerly pursues the latest noisy distraction as if chasing a fire engine, all while his deputies commit atrocities on the economy, on the environment, on the very working and middle class people who voted him in, on everything and everybody that isn’t part of the Club. If you have to ask, “What Club?” then obviously you don’t belong. Look at Rex Tillerson, aka Wayne Tracker, formerly head of Exxon Mobil and now Secretary of State, and you will be looking at a member in good standing with the Club.
There’s little point and less fun in belaboring the obvious that the current president abuses the Bully Pulpit to air personal grievances and distract the press and the populace from his administration’s shortcomings, and to gloss over policies that take away from the many, who have little enough, in order to give to the few, who already have more than enough. Here’s a recommendation on how to deal with that: as much as possible considering the position of preeminence granted by the office he holds, ignore his Bully Pulpit abuses. Take a lesson from the actress Meryl Streep and don’t refer to him by name. Deny him the satisfactions of power that he seeks. Yes, it is that childish; yes, it is that schoolyard. He has given evidence of that himself. In all other matters political, do as your conscience dictates, of course, but in this matter of the Bully Pulpit recall past experience with schoolyard bullies by denying him the attention and deference he craves.
― Vita

A fuller rendition of the same theme, by the Chamber Orchestra of New York, Salvatore Di Vittorio, Music Director, based on the great John Barry‘s original arrangement.

 

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They Can’t Help It

 

Price Waterhouse Cooper accountant Brian Cullinan has possibly tweeted himself out of a job after his distraction from handing out the correct envelopes to the presenters at the Oscars ceremony on Sunday evening caused an embarrassing mixup announcing the best picture winner. The kerfuffle that ensued amounts to something less than a tempest in a thimble in the scope of world problems, but it does serve to illustrate how far the obsession some people have with social media overrides their common sense. Here is a man who has built a career over thirty years with the same company, a rarity nowadays, and has been elevated to partner status, which means he not only must be pulling down six figures per year, but possibly seven, and he blows it all off because of a lack of self-control when it comes to his social media habits.

 

Before we shed any tears for Mr. Cullinan, we should remember that considering his position within a prestigious, wealthy company such as Price Waterhouse Cooper, he will most likely receive a golden parachute before they toss him off the balcony of the executive penthouse, if they ever do. After a major foul up, being frog marched out the door and booted onto the street without a severance package or even a thank you for years of service is reserved for lower echelon types. In the Executive Club, however, membership has its privileges.

The Muppets always help with retaining a light, proportional perspective.

Cranial rectumitis. Don’t do this!

 

Does the compulsion to engage social media even when doing so can be self-destructive amount to a psychological disorder? Not according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, for which it is not heavy duty enough to meet the criteria. The compulsion Mr. Cullinan shares with so many others, infamously including Supreme Leader, is a lesser tier of disorder related to lack of self-control, or poor willpower, or even to cranial rectumitis. Whatever the cause, overcoming the compulsion starts with personal accountability and recognition of priorities. In other words, do you really need to be doing that now?

 

Throughout history, spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, and a select number of their followers have been an example for the rest of us of the difficulty in exercising willpower and the ultimate reward for doing so. The majority of us muddle along as best we can, quitting smoking and fatty foods and a hectic pace when it becomes absolutely necessary to our well-being or it just seems the sensible thing to do before it’s too late. We don’t usually call on the help of a twelve step recovery program for these things. Instead we perform a fairly simple cost/benefit analysis and then bring our willpower to bear on the goal, calling on our reserves of self-control to see us through day by day. Whether you’re an executive accountant, the Chief Executive of the nation, or a person struggling with difficulties that affect only yourself and maybe a small circle of friends and family, the demands of willpower, self-control, and thoughtful deliberation are the same. The social media sharing buttons are at the bottom of this post: Please tweet responsibly.
― Vita

Just because some folks are “loons,” doesn’t mean loons aren’t interesting birds worthy of our respect.

 

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Casino Banking

 

The passage of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from investment banking, and for 75 years there were no enormous financial meltdowns in the United States originating from the banking sector of the economy. In 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the main provisions of Glass-Steagall and, in the view of critics of the repeal, the countdown to financial meltdown began, culminating in the Great Recession which began in 2008. The meltdown, like the Great Depression which gave birth to Glass-Steagall, had worldwide repercussions, but in the aftermath there have been only watered down reforms of the banking industry in the US such as the Dodd-Frank Act, and no high level banking executives have gone to jail, been taken to court, or even been indicted. It’s only a matter of time therefore before a similar financial crisis strikes the US, particularly since the new presidential administration is talking about dismantling Dodd-Frank.

 

Depression-stock-market-crash-1929
Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the stock market crash on October 25, 1929.
Like other European nations, Iceland was swallowed up in the 2008 financial crisis. Like the United States, it had its own unruly banking sector contributing to the crisis – casino banks, in the sense that they used the money from depositors in their commercial operations to gamble on dubious investments, always passing along losses to customers while reaping the profits mostly for themselves. As in casinos, the house rarely loses, and in the case of casino banks when it appears they might lose the government will be there to bail them out. That’s the deal banks have come to count on, particularly if they are “too big to fail.” Unlike other European nations and definitely unlike the United States, Iceland allowed its casino banks to fail and then vigorously investigated and prosecuted the casino bankers responsible. In Iceland, 26 top bankers have gone to jail since 2008, and moreover their economy has rebounded robustly. In the US, 0 top bankers are wearing orange jumpsuits as a consequence of causing the 2008 financial meltdown, and the economy has limped slowly toward recovery ever since.

 

It’s interesting to note that the 2016 Republican Party platform included a plank about reinstating Glass-Steagall. Wall Streeters were alarmed at first, but then everyone realized it was merely politics as usual and that the incoming Republican administration and Congress had no intention of taking the idea seriously. They have been proven correct. Democrats make rumbling noises occasionally about reinstating Glass-Steagall, but even if they had the will, they don’t have the votes. It’s all just politics at this point, since Wall Street money has long since turned heads in both major parties.


“Let them eat cake!”

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

― Gore Vidal, from his 1975 essay “The State of the Union”.

Social reforms wrought from identity politics are all to the good, but as always in our culture the primary fixation should be on the money. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this when he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 to speak to striking African-American sanitation workers. Without work and the personal dignity that comes from a living wage, people cannot begin to address their social situation and have the energy to improve their lot within society as a whole. For the poor and the middle class it all starts with money, and for the rich it ends there as well. The oligarchic elite take advantage of social issues like gay marriage to divide and distract the majority while they continue to concentrate wealth and power in their own hands. There are two financial reforms which would go a long way toward stemming the rising power of the corporate oligarchy and restoring power to the majority of Americans: reinstatement of Glass-Steagall or something very much like it, and the legislative or constitutional rescission of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010.
― Vita

 

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Toddlers and Their Tantrums

 


Wednesday evening, February 1st, University of California-Berkeley administrators canceled a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor for the right-wing Breitbart News website, after violent protests made the situation unsafe for attendees and Mr. Yiannopoulos. Whatever might have been the content of the speech given by Mr. Yiannopoulos is immaterial to the discussion of free speech here. Indeed the more unpopular and distasteful his views might be to the majority, the more important it is that his right to express himself be protected. The College Republicans invited Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak on a campus famous for giving birth to the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and it makes no difference in the exercise of free speech that their political beliefs are polar opposites to those expressed by the founders of the movement 53 years ago.

 



“Flibberty Jib” from Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz album of 1957.
The freedom to listen to unorthodox views.

 


There were approximately 1,500 people gathered in peaceful protest of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s appearance when about 150 Black Bloc agitators showed up and started throwing Molotov cocktails and smashing windows. Black Bloc has been hijacking peaceful protests for thirty years now, and it is they the media give the most attention to, discrediting by their wanton violence the objectives of the peaceful protesters. Many media outlets have mistakenly or lazily lumped the Black Bloc agitators in with the peaceful protesters and chosen to make the narrative about student “snowflakes” too upset about the possibility of an alternative view being expressed on their campus to allow it to happen, and therefore throwing a tantrum violent enough to prompt university authorities to cancel the event. Ironically, and with a touch of surreality considering his own inability to accept criticism or countenance alternative views, Supreme Leader, the Snowflake-in-Chief, had to chime in with a tweet bending the reality of the situation to suit his own pre-conceived notions. How he can hold the UC-Berkeley administration to account for the actions of the loose cannon Black Bloc is anyone’s guess.

 



The ending of the 1978 remake of the 1950s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The original movie made a statement on McCarthyism, and the remake could equally
be viewed as a statement on calling out and exposing the unorthodox among us.

 


Political correctness has certainly gone too far in its own way on the left as McCarthyism did on the right in the 1950s. If you’re having to walk on eggshells around people with regard to what you say it makes little difference whether the easily offended parties are on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Insensitivity and hate speech are problems certainly, but to try to legislate that behavior into oblivion cannot and should not be done. If your own ideas are strong and their ideas are built on lies and ignorance, then open and public argument will eventually – not overnight – shed light on both sides. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “but it bends toward justice.” You have to have faith, and not a little patience.
― Vita

 

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