Sir Anthony Hopkins, one of the most gifted actors of our day, was reported to have passed away recently. Fortunately it was a hoax and he is still very much with us; hopefully we can enjoy his fine work for years to come.  Among his prolific contributions was an underrated film called “Instinct“, a movie lauded for its animal rights theme, but more properly viewed as an allegory on the nature of freedom. In one particularly poignant moment of the film (beginning around 1:40), Hopkins character, Dr. Ethan Powell, a primatologist who has devoted his life to the study of gorillas, bemoans the plight of a group of caged gorillas, and in particular one that he is responsible for having brought into captivity:

“…These are shadows of gorillas. Born in cages. Only the old male- he was free once. Still alive, Goliath? I named him that. I brought him here. This cage has broken him. Broken his heart, broken his mind. Made him insane. I did that.”                                                              
Powell opens the door to the old gorilla’s cage over the objection of his companion,
“…He won’t come out. You see? Even if he can. Not far from here is a fence, and on the other side of that fence is freedom, and he can smell it. He’ll never try to get there, ’cause he’s given up. By now he thinks freedom is something he dreamed…”                                     
No, I’m not changing this to a movie blog, and I suppose I’ve taken the long way round to begin making my point, but Hopkins role fit perfectly the concept that we lose our freedom sometimes because it is taken from us, and sometimes because we fail to take it back.

Here in upstate New York, our local Community College baseball team recently fell short in its quest for the national championship and it’s season came to an end in defeat. The only reason that is significant to anyone beyond the team and its fans is because it makes moot the fact that they would never have been able to pursue the championship had they been victorious. You see, this year the championship was to be played in North Carolina, and our dear leader, Governor Cuomo, has issued an edict in protest of that state’s “bathroom law”, prohibiting non-essential travel to that state for our state’s employees. Of course, eager young college kids playing America’s sport are hardly state employees, but the college administration, apparently cut from the same cloth as the governor, opted to back up the policy and prohibit the boys from playing in the championship had they succeeded in attaining to that level. Whether having nothing to play for contributed to their ultimate defeat, we cannot know, but we do now know that the college is willing to sacrifice students’ dreams and potential lifelong memories for a political statement. God forbid that the school might have afforded the team the freedom to decide for itself.

Up the ladder of government to the Whitehouse and we find the Obama administration releasing a letter to school districts “suggesting” that they tow the line on Title Nine, and interpret it to include gender identification as a protected class, making no prohibitions to who can try out for athletic teams or use specific restrooms, locker rooms, or showers on the basis of their supposed sex (the one they were born with), or their outward (or inward I guess!) sexual organs. Posed as a helpful suggestion for how to interpret title 9, the administration saw fit to include an unveiled threat concerning the loss of federal funding for districts who fail to comply. While this whole discussion, at the moment, is rightly referred to as a solution in search of a problem, it takes little precognition to recognize our destination from the direction this road is heading. Beyond our schools, the logic of carving out a protected status for gender identification will, to be logically consistent, need to eventually extend to women’s colleges, men’s clubs, girl scouts, boy scouts, our prison system, and beyond.

But something more basic is in play here than what makes a man a man or a woman a woman. Though such a controversy would have seemed absurd to all people who have lived before this decade; we have always had, and will always have, disagreements about how things should be run. Imagine if every disagreement between states was to be dealt with by boycotts and travel bans! I am not a fan of legalized prostitution, if governor would I then be compelled to follow Cuomo’s lead and prohibit non-essential travel to Nevada? (North Carolina is one thing, but Vegas? State employees would surely mutiny!) Colorado has legalized recreational marijuana; fortunately for us in New York, they are presently too mellowed to consider boycotting travel to our state for what they must consider our unnecessary infringement on our citizens’ right to get high. There was a time when local control of school districts was considered advantageous to education, now we see that federal money always comes with strings, nay, ropes that bind. It is a fine line, but an important one, do we elect a government to lead us… or control us?

Our nation was founded on a system of checks and balances. Those checks and balances do not insinuate a weak government. We were not founded to be a nation of weak leaders, nor of weak citizens. America was not to be a place where no one has power, that’s anarchy, but we were to be a place where everyone has power, even, by way of basic rights, the minority of the individual. In such a model we eschewed the stability of a static all powerful monarchy for the eternal struggle of freedom. The checks and balances of our system are the surging, oscillating, alternating dynamic of our republic. It is the dance of power, moving from the executive, to the the legislative, to the judicial, to the states, to the people themselves and then back again; it is the Tango of governments:

” In tango there is a ‘leader’ and a ‘follower’. Through the embrace, the leader offers invitations to the follower for where and how to step. The follower decides in what way they will accept the leader’s invitations. Both the leader and follower try to maintain harmony and connection through the embrace, and with the music, and so the dance is born.”

Tangolingua.com

 

 

IMHO: With Donald Trump becoming the presumptive candidate for the GOP much has been said about people now “falling in line” to support him. We on the conservative side need to decide if after eight years of Obama we now want our own emperor to assume the template Obama has cast. Rather I think it high time to return to the dance floor and tango. Much in the way that Paul Ryan has been slow to blindly cast his lot with Trump, it is no crime to let our candidate know that he needs to dance, and that we will consider his lead on the merits and on how acceptably it will take us where we want to go. That kind of parrying has already yielded fruit for conservatives with the release of his “Supreme Court list “; he’s left himself a little wiggle room, but his lead is a response to conservatives playing hard to get. We may find Trump an intriguing partner, but we still need to be wooed. We do neither Trump or ourselves any favor by swooning into his arms. Absolute power corrupts not only the leader, but the led. A harmony of power strengthens us all; the music is playing… let’s dance!

 

 

Publisher’s note:  The original publication of this post reported the false reports of Sir Anthony’s passing as factual.  One of my reader’s corrected my gullibility in not doing my fact checking thoroughly, and for that I am both humbled and grateful.  I have corrected the text to reflect the hoax.      

K.C.+

“I’m just deeply disappointed that once again we may have to
settle for the lesser of two evils.”

Howard Dean

 

In our now all too familiar four year cycle we are engaging once again in our presidential election ritual where we are asked to choose the less offensive of two offensive candidates to become the next leader of the free world. As always, we are told that the choice is obvious; in this case, better the narcissistic buffoon who at least makes claims of conservatism, than the progressive criminal who, despite dishonesty being her default position, proudly and truthfully eschews any hint of conservatism. Trump supporters are frustrated by the reticence of party bigwigs, talk show hosts, and principled conservatives to now and at once fall in line behind the presumptive candidate. If you’re not supporting Trump, then you’re supporting Hillary. The argument is a logical one, but how odd to be chided by those who supported a candidacy based entirely on emotion without reason, for a moment of irrationality regarding choosing between bad and worse.

This is not a case, as has been painted, of people needing time to heal from the disappointment of their candidate failing to win. Though there were many candidates, few except Trump had passionate followings, and Cruz was particularly a hard candidate to love. That being said, I don’t begrudge the Bushes, Lindsay Graham, or most of the other candidates for being slow to come around. Trump made the campaign intensely personal and not policy or performance based. He insulted their integrity, their appearance, their patriotism; and I can’t fault them for having difficulty in following Dr. Carson’s example, who Trump came close to comparing to a pedophile, and maybe being a little slower to join the group hug.

But ultimately, the reticence to support Trump is greatly due to who Trump is. All the talk about the lesser of two evils is fine, and given the imperfection of human beings I suppose we are always choosing someone who is flawed, but at some point the “evil” becomes more than a simple equation. Trump was of seventeen candidates my seventeenth choice. I will likely pull the lever for him, but certainly not enthusiastically; and since living in New York makes my vote moot anyway, I will at least momentarily consider the advantages of being able in years to come to truthfully proclaim, “Hey, I didn’t vote for him!” The lesser of two evils argument cannot be axiomatic. If somehow our only choice was between Hillary and Bernie, would we not be forgiven if we sat this one out? If forced to choose between Lucifer and Hitler, is there not an acceptable dignity in rejecting the choice altogether? Ah, but despite liberal bloggers’ insistence, Trump is not Hitler; and no, Hillary is not Lucifer; Lucifer is taller. In all likelihood, after some merited hesitation, the lesser of two evils argument still probably holds, if only because of the situation on the Supreme Court.

And so we move to the process of reconciliation. Media Trumpsters on Fox News and elsewhere are beside themselves that Republicans in huge numbers are pausing in their support for a candidate they find well lacking. The oath that the candidates took to support the eventual winner has been greatly ignored, which shows how meaningless oaths are when you’re dealing with politicians. The establishment Republicans see Trump as a threat to their power base, yes, but he is also their self proclaimed enemy, and he continues to ridicule them. It is reminiscent of President Obama mocking congressional Republicans and then criticizing them for being slow to cooperate; newsflash: people are human. Movement conservatives and Tea Party types having had highly successful mid term elections, and failing to beat Obama in his second run only because of their inability to flex enough muscle to find a more electable nominee than the establishment’s choice of Romney, thought that with this election their time had finally come. Hence, of 17 candidates, probably 13 or 14 at least would have been acceptable choices… and that was their doom. Having had the rug pulled out from under them, these rebels have seen their revolution apparently derailed by a rabble who have grown impatient with the plodding reasoned approach. These don’t care to hear about the history and fundamentals of our Republic. They know things are broken, and they want them fixed; they don’t care if it’s done by a rule book or a constitution. They don’t know or care what made America great, they just want to make it great again. They are oblivious to the sentiments of de Tocqueville and the quote attributed to him that America is great only because of her goodness, and instead look to the supposed shortcut to greatness, power.

The problem is that the rabble is insufficient to elect Trump, and other Republican office seekers will be slow to tie their wagon to what they perceive to be a sinking anchor. Conservatives will continue to be less than enthusiastic when like Romney and McCain before him, though for different reasons, Trump’s main selling point is that he is not as horrible as the alternative. I know that irks Trump fans, but that is the way things are. You have a few months to convince these folks one by one to join the ranks of the Trumford wives, or you could ask one man to adjust his disposition, Donald J. Trump. Trump needs to begin looking to build coalitions. He needs to stop insulting people whose support he requires, and he needs to warm up to his most natural ally, movement conservatives. Much of his allure has been his bravado, his brashness, and his confrontational approach, and that’s fine, but if he is the presumptive candidate, he needs to reserve his animosity and aggression for his opponents. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Trump’s most sympathetic moments with conservatives were when violent protestors tried to shut him down. There will be more of that, and conservatives and even moderates will be repelled by it and gravitate toward Trump, that is if he is not in the process of insulting or denigrating those who could be his constituents with a little diplomacy.

IMHO: Rebels find rabbles regrettable. The rabble puts an unfortunate cast on the cause of the rebel. That being said, noble revolutions seldom occur without the attention garnered by screaming demagogues, and rioting throngs. Along with the high minded movement of Martin Luther King Jr. were the less lofty race riots of the sixties. Half a century before the American Revolution “risings of the people” were common enough, with sailors, freedom seeking slaves, laborers and youth. The rabble of the day were not as well versed in the writings of Locke, or the Natural Law, but they knew that things weren’t right. Not all can respond with the same measured dignity as a Ghandi or an MLK, not all have the wisdom of a Thomas Paine, or a Jefferson. Not all possess the strategic mind of a Washington, or the genius of a Benjamin Franklin. Some only know their anger and impatience with those dragging them through the mud. These are the rabble, these are the mob, and truth be told they are as much an agent for change as their more noble brethren. They can not be left on their own though, lest our world descend into chaos, and it does no one any good for the adults in the country to take their ball and go home. Instead, the rabble needs to be educated, accepted, and respected. Rabbles are but rebels yet unredeemed.
Any poker player will tell you that every hand isn’t a perfect hand, but only fools fold every time they don’t get the cards they wanted. Professionals know how to make winning hands out of losing ones. Ultimately you need to play the cards you’ve been dealt, and this round we’ve been dealt Trump. If we play our cards right, we can still win.

 

“I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers– and it was not there. In her fertile fields and boundless forests– and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce– and it was not there. In her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution– and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America, and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”