“There are two ways of exerting one’s strength:
one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”

Booker T. Washington

 
Alright, so the working title for this post was “A House Divided”, which probably would have been a little less daunting than the final title, but it is my intention here to pursue a discussion that goes beyond the problem and toward solutions. Besides that, I had another post called “A House Divided” already about four years ago, and I don’t want to start repeating myself anymore than I already do!

The sidewalks of Washington have endured not a few scuffling feet over the course of the last week. First the inauguration of Donald J. Trump and the throngs of his supporters, only to be followed the next day by the larger than expected Women’s March on Washington where President Trump’s detractors were out in full force. Next came the perennially well attended March for Life whose views, at least on the subject of abortion, are diametrically opposed to the Women’s March faithful. Hundreds of thousands of people making the pilgrimage to the Capitol to demonstrate something we all already knew; we are a house divided.

We are always to one extent or another “a house divided”, but it’s been awhile since we were this fractured. The emotional slogan, slash hashtag, “Not My President” has replaced “Never Trump” as wishful thinking dissolves with the dawn of reality. Donald J. Trump is President of the United States. He was far from my first choice, but neither was the last President; yet in both cases, despite disagreements, disbelief and embarrassment, the President of my country duly elected is my President, just as are my senators and governor who I never voted for. If Trump is not your President, that begs the question… who is? The few anarchists, I suppose, have the political consistency to so declare; but the rest of us who proclaim the nation to be governed by the rule of law are consigned to accept the consequences of that Law, even when we find those consequences repugnant. The last time large segments of the population decided an elected President was too repugnant to be called their President they found a more acceptable substitute, Jefferson Davis.

If today’s Progressives were divided from the Union by the Mason Dixon line, as they were in the Civil War, there would be a very good chance we would be looking at a redux. Instead, the electoral map shows that the nation is divided along isolated county lines, with strong progressive support found in urban centers with their concentrated population. There are a few islands of college counties; but pretty much the rest of the nation is overwhelmingly red. This would make the radical choice of Civil War unlikely from the Progressive side, as it would be even more hopeless than was the Confederate cause, and of course unnecessary from the point of view of the party in power, which has historically been the party that advocates the preservation of the Union anyway.

While we are on the subject, it should be remembered that there was a President who was elected despite 60% of the nation voting against him, whose approval ratings at the time of his inauguration have been estimated at about 25%. His own party reviled him, critics insulted his appearance and lack of political experience, and his chances for re-election were considered impossible until the Democrats nominated a singularly horrible candidate to oppose him, and still he barely won. So hated was he that he had to sneak into Washington for his inauguration in secret, disguised, to avoid assassination, a fate that eventually befell him at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. The press hated Lincoln, “the obscene ape from Illinois”, he was labelled a dictator, a “simple susan”…

“As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head…”

Richard Henry Dana

 

There were riots against him in New York City, which aside from the Civil War itself were the largest insurgency in our history. Lincoln’s election was never attributed to his own popularity, as it was suggested that people only voted for him while holding their nose, and to keep others out. His unpopularity festered until that Good Friday in 1865 when only his assassination transformed him from pariah to martyr, from tyrant to The Great Emancipator. I’m not saying that Donald J. Trump is Abraham Lincoln, but I am saying that, in many ways, Abraham Lincoln was Donald Trump.

Breaking things is easy, division is in our fallen nature. Union is more difficult, and putting things back together is often a Herculean task. We will never know if Reconstruction would have been successful under the direction of arguably our greatest President; what we do know is that it was doomed without him. Washington lacked the political will to effectively put the nation together again, and Democratic control of the South was cemented for decades through Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Early political victories for southern Republicans electing black representatives were quickly swept aside with devious strategies by the white Democrats without appreciable interference from Washington. With the coming of the industrial revolution the plight of the southern black man, and for the poor urban whites as well, became not significantly better than the days before the Emancipation. Darwinism was extended to Social Darwinism, where wealthy industrialists justified their impoverishing of whole segments of the population as “survival of the fittest” and part of the evolution of the species; helping the poor and lower classes was going against the laws of nature. The problem is obvious, the impoverished still survive, they have children, they increase, and eventually they rise up to “eat the rich”. Even in nature the most vulnerable are guarded by their herd. Yes, they are sometimes lost, but not willingly sacrificed. We as a nation, in our zeal to push down our conquered enemy, failed to lift up his victims, and we continue to live with the consequences even now.

The electoral map is a road map to the future, and what could be a strategy for war can be turned on its head to become a plan for peace. We are at the end of a battle, and with the proper actions, it could be the end of the war, or at least a turning point. The opposition to conservative government is almost entirely located in well defined, concentrated population centers. And make no mistake, aside from a few ideologues the opposition is more an opposition to poverty and a lack of opportunity than to the demonized conservatives themselves. If a rising tide lifts all ships, then it damn well better lift the more vulnerable as well. If we need to patch a few holes in our less sea worthy vessels, it behooves us to do that. Fix the cities, win the war. Our principles can’t be abandoned to please the opposition, but our values need to find a way to liberate their victims, to use our strength to lift up, to preserve our citizens from the predators of poverty and the poverty of spirit.

For the most part, there was no real reconciliation to be had with the leaders of the Confederacy. Reconstruction did not insinuate a return to the status quo for pro-slavery politicians. Despite some popular devotion to these, they were the vanquished, and finding common ground with those diametrically opposed to you can be an exercise in futility, especially for those devoted to your destruction. Likewise, in today’s climate of polarization in Washington, working across the aisle will be rare, if that is defined by cooperating with those who keep their power and money by opposing you. Their constituents are a different story, and Republicans should be open to finding common ground there. I have of late been called out by a few readers for being uncharacteristically less than gracious in my approach to progressive detractors. It has been said that sarcasm does not always translate well into print, and if wit was sacrificed to meanness, I indeed apologize. As Christ reserved his harshest criticisms for the Scribes and Pharisees, false leaders, the elite of their day, I feel no compunction in leveling criticism at those who use position to mislead. Likewise, we ought not suffer bullies to proceed unchallenged. If the best defense you can make for your own position is to insult the first lady’s accent, criticize Kelly Anne Conway’s attractiveness, or compare Donald Trump to a farting butt; then you have defined the respect you deserve. If you need to resort to hyperbole, allusions to Hitler, fabrications and unjustified recriminations, then you have relegated yourself to the fringe, and take your place along side the most outlandish conspiracy theorists; you have removed yourself from the conversation. You are still welcome to our television screens, our twitter feeds, our FaceBook pages, but we will address ourselves seriously only to those you no longer serve. By all means, though, share your crude insults, don your outrageous costumes, make your fantastic claims; we find you… entertaining. With the demise of the Circus, we will need more clowns.

 

 

On a personal note:  a few of you have done me the honor of sharing my posts with your friends and contacts, and it has resulted in an up tick in readership of late.  Thank-you so much, and for any of the rest of you, if you like or are challenged by these posts, I’d love if you shared them as well!

 

Kevin Cail+

 

“Regina, you’re wearing sweatpants. It’s Monday.”
“So…?”
“So that’s against the rules, and you can’t sit with us.”
“Whatever. Those rules aren’t real.”
“They were real that day I wore a vest!”
“Because that vest was disgusting!”
“You can’t sit with us!”

Mean Girls
Okay, so I may not have actually ever watched this movie, but I feel like almost anyone who went to high school has pretty much lived the movie. There’s always at least one group of kids who think themselves above their peers, and retain their exalted position by the ridicule and demeaning of their fellow students. If you’re fortunate, you fly beneath their radar and they are unaware of your existence. If you are less fortunate, you become their targets because your hair isn’t perfect, or your clothes aren’t the latest style. Either way, you can’t sit with them.

For years now, we have been at the mercy of the counterparts of these “mean girls” in our society. Repeatedly sacrificed on the altar of political correctness because we didn’t endorse the latest trend of societal change, didn’t use the enigmatic jargon of the academic left, didn’t understand the fantastical paranoia of what seemed like overstated and sometimes fictional crises. We walked on eggshells for fear of their condemnation. We were the geeks and nerds, the gear heads and the pimple faced, the less than best dressed, the fat kids; we were the regular people just trying to get along. But instead we were given all manor of deplorable labels, condemned for our heritage, demeaned for the color of our skin or the persuasion of our politics. We had a President who saw us as bumpkins and imbeciles because we disagreed with his politics; we had the glitterati of Hollywood with their endless lectures and commercials telling us how wrong we were, so un-cool; and we had a sneering slanting media snobbishly mocking us as a minority of pariahs and losers.

Of course such snobbery is like heroin, addictive to the point of self-destruction. So the media continues its bias, the Democratic politicians, for the most part, continue their kamikaze dives, and Hollywood elitists continue to repulse us with their self importance. The first lady was rejected by designers she never requested, and forced to wear Ralph Lauren, she looked hideous, didn’t she?   After death threats, boycotts and social media tirades frightened away many of the so-called “A-listers” from participating in the inauguration, the mean girls of the media jeered Trump for their absence and disparaged the few that did perform. Typical of such, Quartz’s Amy Wang ridiculed Jackie Evancho as a “fair-skinned, light haired… teen-aged game show contestant… who sang the national anthem in a shaky voice…” Wang’s criticism seemed to center around the fact that the girl was white, and wasn’t cool like Beyonce… maybe if Jackie had shown a little more leg? I’m really happy for Beyonce, but with apologies to Kanye West, when Jackie was 9 she was a better singer than Beyonce! Such was the entertainment I saw on Friday, plenty of talent, just not the “right” talent, not cool enough.

So today the mean girls anticlimactically try to close the proverbial barn door after the horse has already escaped by descending on Washington. We are told it is not an anti-Trump rally, just a call for unity; but Trumphobia seems to be the overarching theme and pro-life feminists were rejected from being sponsors (“You can’t sit with us!!). The original name of “The Million Women March” was changed to “Women’s March on Washington” because the original name offended blacks who saw it as coopting their 1997 Philadelphia march. Though pro-lifers have been excluded from sponsorship, apparently sex workers have been welcomed with open arms… let me rephrase that… “the march stands in solidarity with the sex workers’ rights movement”. For a moment, someone got confused on the rules, and altered that statement to indicate support for “those exploited for labor and sex.” There was outrage in the liberal activist world over portraying sex workers as victims instead of women working according to their personal circumstances, and the original statement was quickly restored. Jahmalia Lemieux writes for ColorLines explaining why she won’t be attending the march, “I’ve never felt anything resembling sisterhood with White women.” and “A tiny, tiny part of me felt a tiny, tiny bit of satisfaction at seeing how sad many white women were.” She says she’s “really tired of black and brown women being tasked with fixing white folks’ messes… tired of being the moral compass of the United States.” I guess she’s too cool to sit with them! It’s as though they’re in some exclusive club, and they keep kicking even more people out. Just more things us less enlightened cannot understand.

 

 

“Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”

Mean Girls

 

Please don’t get lost in my mean girls analogy. When I speak of not being allowed to sit at the table, I am speaking of elitism pushed to the extent of intolerance. Degrading others is often a misguided attempt to exalt ourselves. Of late this degradation has descended into destruction; conservative values have not only been demeaned, but denied the right to exist, and as Israel has found, it’s hard to negotiate with people whose ultimate goal is your utter annihilation. The mean girls need to finally understand that this isn’t their cafeteria anymore, it never really was. We won’t tell you where you can sit, but neither will we let you tell us where we can’t… we’re all free. It’s good to march on Washington, I’ve done it myself, almost everyone does now, but these advocacy causes seem to be dividing the nation into factions; women against men, black against white… as though some of us are heroes and others villains to be vanquished. If the women marching on Washington see themselves as courageous rebels and warriors fighting the good fight against the Orange Tyrant, do they not see us Trump voters as their enemy? But it is not so! We wish them well, pray for their safety, and encourage them to lift their voices to loudly express their misguided ideas. It is a free country and you can march, or sit where you please. While you march this weekend, we will sit at home, watching Fox News on Saturday, and football on Sunday, our work is done for now. If you do get home before the game is over… be an angel and get Daddy a beer.

“Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.”

David Livingstone Smith

 

 

 

With the rare exception of the sociopathic personality, or the somewhat less rare sociopathic excursions of our normally healthy personalities, we are creatures of conscience. We like to believe that we are doing the right thing, and we are troubled to believe that we might be feeling or behaving in a way that is evil or wrong. Reality shows us though that conscience seems to misfire regularly, and that while it keeps us from psychopathic chaos, it has flaws. We are influenced by our conscience, but also by our desires; and while we regularly bend our desires to conform to our conscience, we almost as often bend our conscience to appease our desires. We desire to hate and annihilate those who oppose us, but we understand they have the same rights as we do, created equal, human beings, not just beasts on two legs; and as humans, they should be treated with humanity. So how can we hate, delegitimize, and destroy those who our conscience would say by virtue of their humanity should be loved on some level, and treated with respect despite differences? First, we dehumanize.

When people, and not just white people, wanted to be able to own other people as slaves, those other people needed to be classified as sub-human to make the idea conscionable. A vocabulary developed that removed the enslaved from the the humanity of the group that enslaved them. Normal rules of ethics would not apply, slaves were property, not people. They would not be afforded human dignities like freedom, marriage, family, learning, any more than the other livestock. The masters could not afford an image of humanity to shine on their darkened conscience.

Again, with the eugenics movement here in the US, whole groups of people had their humanity diminished from their racially “superior” overseers, where “science” delved into the dark paths of the idea of elimination of “inferior” races or genetic disability. Nazi Germany went further into darkness by implementing the idea. Again, vocabulary was instrumental. Those destined for the gas chambers had to be dehumanized by the words they were called, and the ways they were treated, so they would be seen as less than human, and their elimination less than murder.

Likewise in every genocide, those doomed to extermination are first dehumanized, usually accompanied by twisted vocabulary. Hutus in Rwanda warned their children of the Tutsi “cockroaches” before the genocide there. Similar circumstances occurred in Cambodia and Yugoslavia, and now again in Iraq and Syria. When we needed to justify our own national genocide, we first needed to dehumanize what had always been referred to as a baby, by relabeling with the cold clinical terms of “fetus”, or “tissue”.

Political resistance is as American as apple pie. Conflict is consistent with the idea of a nation governed by checks and balances. Yet pitchforks and sledgehammers can hardly be considered checks and balances. Possibly the most egregious intolerance in our country is the intolerance of the left for any dissenting opinions. Boycotts are organized because a member of the board of LL Bean contributed to the Trump campaign. Conservative speakers are banished from college campuses under threats of violence. A blind tenor needs to pull out of performing at the inauguration because of the fear of threatened retribution. People are intimidated, belittled, vilified, and assaulted on the basis of how they cast their ballot, and the left seriously believe that they are taking the high ground. How can it be justified? First, they dehumanize.

The process crystalized with Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comments. The message could not have been clearer if she had called us cockroaches. Trump supporters could be viewed as deplorable, unredeemable… sub-human. As such, normal rules of decency and civility did not apply; these were not people the left disagreed with, these were not really people at all, they were monsters, and they needed to be vanquished. Now that Trump has prevailed, the monsters are in charge, and as such normal rules of democracy do not apply, rules of humanity do not apply. Sic semper tyrannis!

Fortunately, few among us are as devoted to our darkness as John Wilkes Booth. The over the top rhetoric, a tirade by Meryl Streep, and a few women marching on Washington are pretty much the extent of the insurgency. Of course there’s always the crazies inspired by the irresponsible. The guy who killed a UPS driver in a Wal-Mart parking lot because he thought he was Donald Trump. The youths in Chicago who kidnapped the kid in a three-for of dehumanization; he was a whitey retard who voted Trump. Cops are depicted as pigs to make them seem inhuman. A President is painted as a deviant, a Russian plant, a megolamaniac, a fascist… illegitimate. The demonization of Trump and those who support him will likely lead to more such atrocities. Dehumanization regularly is linked to projection, as we project the motives we see in ourselves to our nemeses. That which the left warned would come from the right with a Trump defeat, we can now fully expect to see from the left with the Trump victory.

One thing Trump has shown us, is that we no longer need buy into the left’s bulsh*t. We are not deplorable. We are not irredeemable. We are not powerless. We are not the minority. We have the ball; we do not need to play defense. We should assert our humanity, reject the attempts to take it from us, recognize and cherish our authentic value as Americans. The left must be informed that we will no longer be bullied by their elitist demonization. It is a time for restoration and repair, though not for revenge. We cannot become the evil we stand against. The human condition is common to us all, and those living in glass houses should not throw stones. Those who have walked in human skin for more than a few years should have compassion for even our adversaries. How do we forgive those who would have us silenced and neutered? How do we bridge the gap with people who think us fools, haters and monsters? First, we humanize them…