“An empty stomach has no ears.”

                                                       Latin proverb

 

 

Aesop’s fable of the Wolf and the Lamb recounts the tale of a hungry wolf coming upon a lamb by a stream. The wolf, troubled somewhat by the innocence of the lamb and wishing to justify his impending murder, accuses the lamb of various slights and infractions deserving of the wolf’s wrath, all of which the lamb politely refutes. The wolf moves on to transgressions committed the year before, but the lamb explains that he was not old enough to have completed those crimes, whereupon the wolf blames the lamb’s brother. The lamb explains that he has no brother. The wolf, flustered and frustrated, insists that it must have been someone in the lamb’s family, and cuts off the conversation by saying that he won’t delay his meal to debate the matter any further, “You are guilty, and I am hungry”, and promptly ate the lamb. The moral of the story? “The unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent.”

It is of course a stretch to describe anyone in the highest levels of the political world as “innocent”, but the dynamics of searching for guilt to justify hostility is a well worn path through the battleground of party politics. It would seem the impossible dream to imagine the possibility that politicians might forego dirty tricks and needless witch hunts motivated not by a love of truth, but by hatred for the opposition; yet might not we, less consumed by the love of power, pursue truth with more innocence? Might not we, none without sin, lay down our stones, at least when it comes to minor offenses? Is our hatred such that we need to reprimand a woman we don’t know for kneeling on a couch in the oval office? Have we become so bereft of reason that we can justify hospitalizing a faculty member for assisting a controversial speaker in leaving a college campus? When did hatred and hostility become our spiritual center instead of love and forgiveness? We are better than this, or at least we should be.

It has always seemed to me a sad irony that we reserve our greatest antagonism for those we are closest to. Wives reserve their most pointed insults for their husbands, and men feel free to use their ugliest words to assail their wives. We say things to our mates, our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters; that we would never dream of saying to a coworker, a friend from church, or a neighbor. Those who most deserve our forbearance, forgiveness, and civility are often the last on our list to receive it. When love departs, hatred inevitably fills the vacuum left behind, and civil wars are always the bloodiest, as we slay our own countrymen on the battlefield of our disappointments. It requires a heart that forgives for the sake of forgiveness, an intellect that sees beyond passion, values that stand against the winds of hatred, to be the voice of peace and reason. Thankfully, as the tsunami of post election hysteria subsides, we are beginning to see a remnant of reasoned voices coming from the left. These will be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of the democratic party, if there is to be a Phoenix, and are our one hope to preserve us from an unchallenged single party rule. We are a nation of checks and balances and conservatives need the humility to distrust absolute power even when it is in our hands. Reasoned voices from the left who set aside their most outrageous positions to enter the political mainstream, should be engaged and embraced as friends with slightly different points of view, fellow travelers on the road to the future. As iron sharpens iron, these are brethren who keep us from becoming dull. The haters, the shouters, the crude and hostile warmongers; these do not require that we reciprocate in kind. These are lost souls mired in their hatred, and as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, if you wrestle with a pig you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it. Best to keep ourselves clean, best to respond with kindness and pity. They do not need us as an enemy, they are their own enemy.

As we watch those in the highest levels of celebrity and power engage in the bloodsport of ideological warfare, as we listen to their diatribes, are subjected to their tweets, and are bombarded with their bias; we must resist the temptation to be swept into the aura of their royalty, and the bloodlust of their cannibalism. Kings talk a good game, but they leave the life or death battle to their pawns. Common men need to embrace the commonality of their commonness. By that I mean, we need to see that the animosity that serves those who would enlist us into their armies will only serve to separate us from each other. Likewise, if we surrender ourselves to the even more powerful forces of hatred, anger, and vindictiveness; then we will always eat our own, and forever be divided. A hungry stomach has no ears; the unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent; and the heart at war will not regard the entreaty of peace.

 

 

“One Tin Soldier”

                        by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago
About a Kingdom on a mountain
And a valley folk down below

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore
They’d have it for their very own

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end

But there won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill
Asking for the buried treasure
Tons of gold for which they’d kill

Came an answer from the Kingdom
With our brothers, we will share
All the riches of our mountain
All the secrets buried there

Now the valley swore with anger
Mount your horses, draw your swords
And they killed the mountain people
So they won their just rewards

Now they stood beside the treasure
On the mountain dark and red
Turned the stone and looked beneath it
Peace on Earth, was all it said

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of Heaven
You can justify it in the end

There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end

There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

“Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice,
even his freedom to make the wrong choice,
is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet
and not a person.”

Madeline L’Engle

Society itself often acts in much the same way as the people it is composed of. People criticize each other by using adjectives such as “controlling” or “manipulative”, but truth be told it is pretty much basic human nature to try to control the world around us, along with the people in it, and to mold it according to our wishes. Existing at a higher level of our consciousness (or at least some of our consciousnesses) is the ethical consideration involved in coercing another human being to act in a way contrary to their own preferred convictions, and the imposition of our own will to dominate someone else’s. We have all been there, probably on both sides of the equation at one point or another. The parent who forgets that their child is an adult and entitled to make their own decisions, or the child who forgets that their parent was an adult before they were born. The husband who insults his wife to coerce her to lose weight, or the wife who nags her husband incessantly to get him to help her with the housework. The friend or coworker who somehow think they can run your life better than you yourself can. The situation becomes more complicated when the manipulator is right. Maybe that wife should lose a little weight. Certainly that husband should do his share of the housework. Possibly that adult child is making the mistake of a lifetime, or the elder parent is doing the same. Maybe that friend does know what you should do in that life situation. Certainly it is a good thing to talk, cajole, even argue in such situations, but at the point that we suppress free will; at the point we say I don’t care what you think, I will make you…; then we have turned the corner from being passionately helpful to being abusive. Free will is God’s gift to man, admittedly often to the detriment of both; but to take from a man that freedom is to rob the gift of God. Liberty is the extension of this freedom to society itself, and aside from the structure of laws implicit in the social contract, the use of force or manipulative tactics intended to coerce one segment of society to act in a way contrary to their preferences is the societal equivalent of the controlling spouse.

The way we settle differences in a civilized society is in the political arena. When President Obama was elected, and then re-elected, it was a crisis for us conservatives. We knew exactly what he stood for, and he did not fail to fulfill our expectations. It was the more discouraging because it meant that a majority of America wanted his vision for our country. If he had stolen the election, or taken over in a coup, we would have taken up arms to take back our country, but America had chosen him, and to disregard that choice, though we thought it horribly wrong, would have been un-american in itself. What was left to us was to change hearts and minds, and to prepare for the next election, hoping that people would come to their senses, but understanding that in a Democracy, the will of the people sets the course. To force our own will without changing hearts and minds is a kind of tyranny.

I have never been a fan of organized boycotts, sit-ins, blockades, or certainly riots. I suppose there might occasionally be a justification for a peaceful march, or other non-violent protest if the intent is to educate or raise awareness. That used to be the purpose of protests. Increasingly social protest seems to be being used to change behavior instead of hearts and minds. We block highways, boycott stores, hold up votes, not to educate, but to punish or coerce. We have replaced speaking with each other with yelling at each other, cursing at each other, controlling each other. That is not a society, that’s a jungle. With tools of communication beyond any man has known, we yet fail to engage each other in anything but war and insult. We are so intent on shouting down, shutting down, and putting down that we can’t appreciate a diversity of opinion and engage in reasoned debate.

It would be disingenuous to imply that this descent into the arena of coercion is completely one sided, but it would be equally disingenuous to say that it is not mostly one sided. Having lost everything but Obama’s re-election in the last four elections, progressives have apparently given up on playing the role of loyal opposition in favor of becoming the mortal enemy. This includes the liberal media. Everyone has a position, a bias, that they overcome to one extent or another in order to live peacefully with others, or in the case of an honest media, to do their job as impartially as possible. But when your bias tilts to hatred, it becomes the master, and it overcomes you. No longer do you consider how to live peacefully with fellow citizens, but how you can vanquish them. No longer, then, are reporters content to objectively report the news, but instead they crave blood and look to destroy. Hatred is rarely pretty, and it repels both those who are hated and the innocent onlookers. As jarring and over the top as Trump can be, as inaccurate or inept as he sometimes seems, as worthy of criticism as any President is sure to demonstrate, I can’t take my eyes off the haters. They are becoming the face of the left, and it’s a disturbing face to behold. Prudent democrats would be wise to begin looking for separation from them. The world is surprisingly dichotomous. Every story has a hero and a villain. We watch the news and see the anchor, self righteous and self satisfied with the latest bad news for the administration, we see the riots and destruction, the crude demonstrations, the screaming, the swearing, the chanting, the nuisances, the ridiculous costumes… the hate; then we see the Trump rally, opened by Melania with the Lord’s prayer, interrupted by an appearance by an everyman, a guy we probably wouldn’t agree with on everything, but a guy we can understand,  wearing a tee shirt and not a vagina costume. We see crowds cheering America, not criticizing her or anyone else, we see brotherhood, loyalty, support… love. What are we to think? We are Americans; we stand against bullies, we are repelled by the hateful who demand we hate as well, we stand for freedom and if you push us, we push back. We will not be ruled by domination, we won’t be controlled, we are not puppets.  In their vindictive hatred, unhinged coercion, and shot-gun rage, the left has cast themselves in the role of the evil antagonist, and left us with a most unlikely hero, Donald J. Trump.

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“To the last, I grapple with thee;
From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee;
For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

 

 

It’s one thing to plaster your FaceBook wall with lofty inspirational quotes, and quite another to actually live your life by them. How often have we seen the admonition of Martin Luther King Jr. that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”? Yet despite the imploring of Dr. King, the “resistance” to the Trump administration resembles less the teachings of Ghandi as it does the wrath of Khan.

When the concept for this post first came to me I envisioned the self destructive animus of the left with an image of the insanity of Captain Ahab; and so the great whale, naturally, had to be Trump. Upon further consideration though, I saw that the whale was something bigger than the President. The hatred and anger I see is not for Trump alone, neither did it begin with Trump. Consider the treatment in Congress and on the internet for such people as Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Mike Pence, or Jeff Sessions. Trump’s personality makes him easy to hate, but do we really believe that a President Cruz, Huckabee or Fiorina would have been treated more gently? Possibly a more moderate candidate (as long as his name wasn’t Bush) would have been given a slight reprieve, had they been spineless enough to appease the Progressive gods, but any candidate that took a stand to reverse the disasters of the last eight years would have fit the bill as Ahab’s nemesis. The enemy of the left is the right. The great white whale is not Trump himself, but the people and the ideas he represents. Trump only personifies it. The hatred is broad in scope, and cancerous, not restricted to Trump but extended to his cabinet, his wife, his children, his children’s clothing, the stores that sell his children’s clothing, the people who shop at the stores that sell his children’s clothing, the people who don’t reject the people that shop at the stores that sell his children’s clothing…

Haters are always part of the equation when it comes to society, particularly in politics, and I have previously warned against too quickly judging whole groups by the worst segments of that group; but it is troubling when reasoned and measured voices from the left are the exception, the embattled remnant; and when those most disturbing in their level of rage and hatred include friends and family. Aggression is a motivator, and is self-reinforcing. It activates chemicals in our brain in much the same way as sex or drugs. Lab animals exposed to aggression with other subjects, become “addicted” to it, and will actually unnecessarily invite more conflict. Likewise, it is not unusual to find people who thrive on conflict. Men who enjoy a brawl as much as a woman, trolls on social media who enjoy crude insults more than sharing opinions and ideas, demonstrators who derive more pleasure from violently silencing their opponents than reasonably refuting their ideas. It stems from a biological imperative to survive, and to insure survival through aggression. We’re kind of hard-wired that way. Morality, humanity, and civil society are higher constructs that we employ to channel our aggression into less destructive directions; hence we try to follow the law of the land instead of the law of the jungle. When we permit those motivated by their baser instincts to set the course for our interactions with each other, and these are not always stupid people, then, as with any addiction, it will consume us until all that is left is our hatred and rage.

Much has been made lately of the attempt of the left’s resistance movement to mimic the success of the Tea Party, by becoming what has been termed “The Reverse Tea Party”. Unfortunately, the Reverse Tea Party resembles the Tea Party about as much as the Antichrist resembles Christ. Whereas the Tea Party intentionally avoided social issues in order to be more inclusive and focused on Constitutional issues, the resistance of the left is animated and driven almost exclusively by social issues. The strategy of descending on town hall meetings for Tea Party faithful was to engage representatives and call them to account; the “new” strategy of the left seems more in keeping with their tired tactic of shutting people down. The 9/12 project, the Tea Party group that marched on Washington at the height of the movement had in its mission statement a focus on “building and uniting our communities”, not being “obsessed with political parties, the color of your skin, or what religion you practice”. Despite the propaganda you may have heard, the group stressed inclusion, unity, forgiveness and liberty devoid of hatred for leaders or fellow citizens, and the demonstrators were almost universally of the same mind. There was protest, but no violence. There was anger, but not rage. I know; I was there. The Reverse Tea Party group, “Indivisible”, begins its introduction by calling Donald Trump a loser, racist, an authoritarian and a tyrant. The first requirement for inclusion with this group is that chapters resist Trump’s agenda and embrace progressive values, all others are presumably excluded. There is a false assumption that the tactics of peace can be used for war, or that the success of virtue is in strategy, instead of virtue itself.

It seems an odd strategy, and I use the term loosely, to attempt to punish a man with that which he seems to enjoy most. To use conflict as a weapon against a man who has mastered the art, who actually seems to like it and be undeterred when he loses, is reminiscent of Brer Rabbit’s plea not to be thrown into the briar patch. Just by virtue of the unending, unreasoning, often petty, hatred unrelentingly being leveled at Trump, this singularly unliked President is garnering sympathy from independent voters. Regardless, a man who seems to enjoy being hated almost as much as he enjoys being loved, for whom a failure to be reelected would mean having to go back to his billionaire lifestyle and empire, Trump himself is untouched by most of the vitriol aimed at him. His agenda can possibly be slowed, but this shotgun approach of hating all things Trump is already becoming tedious, and likely to result in even more mid term losses for Democrats who are already vulnerable. Rage is intoxicating for its possessor, but repugnant to observers. The protestors see themselves as heroes in their resistance, but come off as the obscure superhero, Mr. Furious, from the movie Mystery Men, whose dubious superpower was excessive anger. (see here if you’re unfamiliar) Rage is actually not a superpower, and rageaholics are not heroes.  Anger can be a motivator for the base, but we will have several months to witness the lawlessness and outrageously unfocused behavior of the protestors. Anger can be contagious, and while the left take to the streets to express theirs, the right takes to the polls. It will likely require the next next election for either side to alter course. My money is on the whale.

 

 

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“Give me your lazy, your thieves,
Your huddled criminal gangs yearning to sell drugs,
The wretched terrorists and teeming hordes,
Send these, the murderers,
The lust driven to me.
I lift my skirt beside the broken door.”

With Apologies to Emma Lazarus

 

 
For those of my readers who consider themselves liberal (which is becoming a misnomer), you can probably stop reading now. You, no doubt, have already decided what I think, and have determined your reaction to it. Make your disparaging comments on what I didn’t say, on what I didn’t mean, or on what I never was. Perhaps some exaggerated insults involving fascism, nazis, some mangling of my name, or some unrelated allusion to my hair or the size of my hands. Maybe you just want to punch me in the face. Possibly you have decided that my racist, xenophobic, hateful views are so disgusting that they must be silenced through riots and violence. I live in a rural area, so there aren’t any bicycle racks to throw, or Starbucks to vandalize. We are kind of 2nd amendment folks out here, so you might need more than flags and pepper spray… just sayin’.

There are fringes in every group, and if we judge the whole by the fringe we will be deceived and unjust; our views will be shrill, irrelevant, and disconnected from reality. The antifas anarchists that rioted Berkeley clearly don’t represent the majority of the liberal left, any more than my mangling of Emma Lazarus’s iconic verse is reflective of their suggested immigration policy. What is discouraging is the lack of condemnation for the tactics of such groups because of sympathy with their cause, and the common enemy. Indeed, as I have looked for reasoned objections from the left for these anarchists and their strong arm tactics, I have instead found more insults for the right, pseudo-apologetics instead of genuine apologies, escalations instead of calls for calm. We see your fringe, and when you don’t distance yourself from their tactics, if not their outrage, then your silence becomes disturbing. Never let the fringe define you. The same is true on the right; we can’t condone the actions of mobs of rioting right wing demonstrators should they ever arise, or the actions of the few unhinged individuals who violently break the law or express true racism.

Immigration policy has always been a contentious issue. There are those who would prefer that Mr. Trump’s wall had no gates at all, just as there are those who would prefer that there not only be no wall, but no fence, no border security, no borders at all. Do these groups define us? They don’t define me, or the vast majority of people I hear. Most Americans treasure immigration as the bedrock of our nation. Most Americans want that immigration to be legally sanctioned, with some mechanism for vetting to lessen the possibility of inviting criminals, terrorists and other negative influences from entering our home. The differences arise from the emphasis we place on compassion versus security. Compelling arguments can be made from both sides, but once the debate descends into exaggeration to the point of dishonesty, and insult to the point of unbridled hatred, then we have become children shouting at each other with our hands over our ears.

I have always had a big heart, often to the exclusion of my brain, and were the decision mine to make I would probably welcome more refugees than would be wise to take. I’m a risk taker, and honestly, I would be more than willing to allow for a little bit of risk for the sake of compassion for those from war torn nations. All that being said, I recognize I do not live in this nation alone. There are reasons for fear and there are other citizens whose concerns and thoughts are as valid as my own. The decision is not mine to make alone. I liken it to a man wishing to adopt a family of kids who were victims of abuse. His wife is less sure, and says no, or at least that she would like more time to think about it. The husband can make his case, cajole, encourage her sympathy, make a deal with his wife, but how effective do you think it will be for him to start insulting her, “You heartless bitch! You call yourself a Christian!”   Maybe he throws a rock through the window, threatens to punch her in the face. If he becomes unhinged enough, maybe she will even succumb to his coercion. Has he done well? He has not. It is perhaps sad that the wife allowed fear to overcome her compassion, but it is tragic that the husband decided that his will, even if righteous, entitled him to forcefully impose that will. Likewise, the wife needs to understand that her reticence can quickly turn to belligerence, and in her adamant refusal she is imposing her own will on the household. Do we hear anybody, anybody at all, talking compromise, or talking to each other at all? More each day we embrace coercion over consensus.

There’s a danger that Lady Liberty will lose her head. Mindless devotion to your nation’s leader is indeed the path to totalitarianism. The existence of a “loyal opposition”, a reasoned resistance is just one more check and balance crucial to our liberty. Bear in mind though, the counterbalance for mindless devotion is not mindless opposition. During the tenure of Barack Obama, there were some who resorted to crude insult, conspiracy theory, and outrageous hyperbole… these were the mindless opposition, and their existence only bolstered the mindlessly devoted. Those who rather spoke with reason and balance were the real resistance that slowed the onslaught of executive tyranny, as they should be now. Instead, most of the left have left their minds aside, and are being played by President Trump, the Lord of Chaos. He has taken the idea of distraction by shiny object to a whole new level, with pyrotechnics, explosions, and Twitter. His mind works in a distinctly non-linear fashion, and while you are guarding the barn, he’ll be robbing the hen house. If you jump to the hen house, it’s his chance to break into your house. You need to march on Washington, he needs only tweet. If you use only your heart, he will wear you down, thin you out, and turn you into the fringe (See this upcoming Superbowl commercial!). It isn’t easy to be the reasoned resistance, easier to start a mindless revolution and burn down the house, but that’s a revolution you can’t win. Possibly now the left understands what we on the right meant about the danger of centralized government, the advantages of Federalism, and the removing of the strings of Federal funding as the ties that bind, the defunding of Leviathan. What seems perfectly fine while your guys are in charge, is suddenly a disaster when your guys aren’t. As long as power is so concentrated and precious we will be facing perpetual civil war, and the Hell that war brings. Without rational discussion, peaceful protest, and honest regard for our leaders and fellow citizens, we resort to the kind of mob rule that we saw in Berkeley. Make no mistake, most of us have no desire to respond in kind to hatred, violence or unlawfulness; but neither will we be ruled by mobs. Eventually other mobs will rise, flags and bricks will be replaced with guns and knives, and then eventually troops; and you will have created the tyranny you feared. Anger and hatred are poor substitutes for high mindedness and good will; yielding to darkness leaves you blind and vulnerable. We need people of truth and light from all political persuasions. I know I’ve used this quote before, but it seems apropos to end:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich Nietzche

 

 

“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…

“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled
people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and
intrusively invaded.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 
Just to be grossly generalistic, you can put half of the Trump haters into what I call the basket of detestables, right? Misandrists, anti-semites, welfare mothers, baby killers, cop killers, pedophiles, god haters, Russophobic, androphobic, Christophobic… you name it. They are beyond redemption and haters of America.

I wanted to skip the Dostoyevsky quote and go right into my mockery of Hillary’s slander, but recognizing the reality that sarcasm is often lost in print, I felt the need to preface those comments with an identifier. Truly, we are surrounded now with such outrageous nonsense that over the top sarcasm goes greatly unrecognized, with people just assuming that someone is saying something stupid again. It’s stupid to lump half of your ideological adversaries in with the few and worst representatives of their political preference. It’s stupid to then blame your loss on the bigoted voters who elected a black president, twice; on an FBI director who calls you out for your stupidity, on hackers and WikiLeaks for exposing the corruption of your campaign, or on “fake news” when it was the real and barely reported news that sunk your ship. It’s stupid to continue as a party on the road that has brought you only failure, but in the words of Forrest Gump’s mama, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

And so, in the face of devastating defeats over her tenure, Democrats choose to stick with Nancy Pelosi for Minority leader in the House; President Obama continues to exhibit voluntary blindness mistaking personal popularity for support for his misguided policies, blaming Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for the caricature he himself has drawn. The legacy media continues in its death throes to consume and regurgitate the poisonous bias that has brought them to the point of irrelevance. Elitist celebrities continue to act as though their political opinions should be worshipped, Trump haters refuse to recognize how unbecoming hatred is. After clamoring for pointless recounts, attempting to intimidate Trump electors (though transgendered gun control advocates are unsurprisingly not all that intimidating), and pointing to a popular vote statistic that has never been the basis for election; the haters have now turned their vitriol, as did their Queen, to the supporters of the President elect. They defend the boorish behavior of the couple who conspired to crudely harass Trump’s daughter on a plane in front of her children and their child because she supported her father’s presidency. They bully a blind tenor from singing at Trumps inauguration. They make crude jokes about the Rockettes keeping Trump occupied so he won’t molest the fifteen year old singing the inaugural national anthem. They use hateful invective, crude language, and cheap insults to impugn not only Trump, but those who voted for him as well. They use a vote for Trump as a basis for witholding employment, for discrimination in service, for boycotts, and yes for directed violence. In a Wal-mart parking lot in Ithaca NY a UPS driver was shot to death by a deranged gunman who thought the driver was Donald Trump. I’m not saying he represents all Trump haters, but hatred is contagious, and hyperbolic hysteria can trigger the psychologically fragile; bathing the nation in rage may start fires that will burn the innocent. Dissent is one of the checks and balances that has made our nation great, but hatred is stupid.

Having established to their own satisfaction the complete inadequacy of Trump for the office of President, Democrats were left with the dilemma of explaining how they were defeated by someone completely inadequate. After resorting to their default “America is stupid” response, they’ve since moved on to more sophisticated excuses. In language reminiscent of Hillary’s “vast right wing conspiracy” comments, Democrats have moved through a series of conspiracy theories to apparently finally settle on blaming her defeat on Russian hacking. Of course, if conservatives were progressives, we would warn the Democrats against labeling the hacking as “Russian”. After all, Russians are a good people, contributing to the rich tapestry of our own nation and the world in general. This Russophobic language could easily lead to unjustified discrimination against Russians in general. You have more chance of getting hit by a car than being hacked by a Russian, so by all means open that suspicious e-mail, accept that FaceBook friend request from the hot Russian girl; we can’t punish all Russians for a little non-indigenous computer interference… remember what we did to the Japanese in WWII; never again! The President’s own Russophobia is reckless,flying in the face of long established standards of diplomacy and risking conflict with a nuclear power to make a political justification of a lost election. Poking your finger in Vladimir’s eye would be like, well, taking a phone call from the President of Taiwan… yeah, more sarcasm.

IMHO: What appears to be stupidity and tone deafness in the democratic response to the disastrous election is actually an attempt to salvage their progressive dreams from the tides of public opinion. Where it would make sense to modify their extreme agenda to more closely align with the public at large, that is not who they are, and not who they wish to be. So instead of facing reality, they seek to impose their will, solidify their base, eliminate the electoral college, and legislatively create voters more easily manipulated. They double down on their base comments, double down on their atrocious behavior, double down on their elitist desire for control. They continue down the path wherein they were rejected, following in lockstep Paul Krugman, Lena Dunham, Michael Moore… the pied pipers who have led them to this place. President Obama finishes his presidency as he began it, with a ridiculous energy policy; standing down for Israel, proving he never “had their back”; and while Rome burns, he is on the golf course yet again. They seem unable to even pretend to be something other than what the nation rejected. Stuck on stupid.

 

“Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

William Faulkner

 

 
Well, it appears we’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the miraculous loss of the Democrats in the presidential election, and nearly every other election that occurred in November. As it works out, the Russians were the only followers of American politics to discern that Donald Trump had a chance to win the election, or so the theory goes, and took it into their computer grubbing paws to meddle in our election by doing the job of the American press in revealing the nature of the Democratic National Committee. Yes, apparently the indiscretions in the Podesta and Wasserman Schultz correspondences were the ice berg that sank the Clinton Titanic. Of course, Clinton’s candidacy was already vulnerable because of all those fake news stories, though I’m afraid I can’t recall any that I took seriously. They sprung up on-line, undermining our devotion to the well spring of inerrant truth, the mainstream media; and the gullible, the naive, and the moronic were obviously seduced from their natural abode, the Democratic party, to vote for the Trump juggernaut.

“Looky-here Ethel, says here that Hillary Clinton is really the secret girl child of MaoTse Tung! Says she’s gots kids chained in her basement, and wants to give Californy back to them Mexicans. We best change our votes to Republikans this go ’round… says here Trump gonna fix the ‘conomy and make us all rich… must be true, it’s on the intra-net!”

And so the supposed gullibility of the American voter (anywhere outside of the coastal meccas of the illuminated) was wooed by the lies of fake news, and then ravished by the truth exposed by the Russian hackers. In much the same way that an amateur video on You-Tube was the cause of the the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, and the taking of four American lives, we are now to accept that fake news and Russian hackers are the nefarious cause of the Trump victory, especially now that the re-counts seem to have come up empty on delegitimizing the rust-belt surprise.

It’s a tough sell. First we’re to believe that along with a basket of deplorables, there is also a gargantuan basket of gullibles swept away in their naivety by fake news on FaceBook and Twitter. Then, we are to accept that the Russians had some secret knowledge, that with a hacking operation showing the American public the truth, they could somehow do what every expert said could not be done, the election of Donald J. Trump. If the Russians were somehow involved, and by Russians I mean government operatives, not bored Ivan with a bottle of vodka in his mother’s basement; then I suspect their goal was just to keep Hillary from having a mandate by shaking things up a bit. If, as the CIA suspects, the GOP was hacked as well, then possibly the hackers were more interested in general mischief, or maybe Wiki-Leaks were the ones who discriminated against the Dems, or maybe the GOP emails just weren’t scandalous. But Chuck Schumer seems to think this is on the level of the Cuban missile crisis, that we should be “shaken to the core” over Russian meddling in our elections. Seriously, don’t they realize that we are the only nation allowed to meddle in other countries’ elections? Of course, we don’t want enemy nations to mess around with our elections, or violate our digital information banks; that’s something our Government should protect us from, the Government currently headed by Democrats. It would be poetically ironic if the Russians who Clinton and Obama poo-pooed in the last election were truly their undoing in this one. The truth is the hacking only served to confirm the things people already suspected. If your enemy shows your wife that you’re cheating on her, you can’t say that he broke up your marriage, you did that; whatever his motivation he only showed your wife what she already knew, that you don’t deserve her.

No, there’s been a revolution. The old paradigms no longer hold, and the Democrats can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The strangle hold the mainstream media had on information (read propaganda) is done, and fear mongering over “fake news” and veiled threats regarding censorship will not bring back the glory days for the liberal press. The next progressive idol to be torn down is education. The only way we retreat at all from this vector is if Mr. Trump brings us there by committing the error of spineless republicans and milquetoast men, trying to please those who cannot be pleased with anything short of your destruction. President Obama, after insisting that the election was a referendum on his policies, now insists that it was not. After all, he harkens to his high polling for popularity… yes, the same polling that said Trump couldn’t win… and translates that as support for his agenda. It’s like the hot girl in high school who thinks the boys appreciate her for her intelligence. Barack looks good in a suit, he’s got a good sense of humor, good oratorical style and timing, good family, no real scandals, was gracious at the beginning of his term, and now again at the end; he’s black, he plays basketball, knows Beyonce, and looks good in a bathing suit… he’s cool. That’s what people like. That’s what I like. Give the devil his due, but nothing more, it’s his persona that is popular, not his policies; wrap up his policies and stick them on Hillary Clinton, and they go down in flames.

IMHO: Democrats tried to move too far, too fast, and in the wrong direction. 2016 is when the voters, no longer encumbered by the likability of Barack Obama, said, “enough already”. Blaming the Russians or fake news sites is evading the truth… you would have been bad for America. Like the old Scooby-Doo cartoons always ended, so ended the Clinton/Obama legacy, “I’d a gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling Russians!”. Truth is, it was the truth that offended most Americans, not the lies, and more lies won’t fix anything.

“If you don’t read the newspapers, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspapers, you are misinformed.”

Attributed to Mark Twain

 
It seems serendipitous that in researching for this essay on the bogus nature of internet gossip and its close cousin, mainstream news reporting, that the quote I chose, almost universally attributed to Mark Twain, may never have been said or written by him at all. It sounds like something he would say. A superficial search appears to indicate that he said it; but dig a little deeper, and it seems to be in doubt. After killing about a half hour researching, I came up with no definitive answer. That is the dilemma of the journalist, which I am not. To do their job right takes a lot of time and hard work, and so, like many in other professions, the typical journalist takes the path more easily travelled, and does their job wrong.

Like so much of the Left, journalist Christiane Anampour seemed to double down on the mistakes that created the lane for the most unlikely of presidential candidates to cruise to victory. At a recent awards banquet organized by the Committee to Protect Journalists her remarks (link here) began with a call for the Press to recommit to fact based reporting, but immediately devolved into the same bias, fear mongering, innuendo and guilt by association insinuations that have caused millions of Americans to rightly distrust what used to be their most trusted source of information, mainstream media. She mourned the ability of Trump to bypass the media, going straight to the people, and the development of the new progressive bogeyman, “fake news”. She finished with the predictable allusions to the stupidity of the American public, and the importance of using the media to impose values, the values determined to be universal by these elite journalists, on the rest of us.

There is certainly a need, I suppose, to protect journalists from the undo intimidation of government, and as such the inevitable “committee” to organize that protection. Yet, in assuming the role of victim, protectors like the police, military, even parents, and yes, the media, can lose sight of their primary role… to protect. What is it that the media is supposed to protect us from? Misinformation, ignorance, biased filtering of the news. We expect them to be able to set aside their own opinions to uncover the actual facts. Like a judge or a referee, we expect neutrality as a professional and ethical imperative. Unfortunately, as in so many other areas of academia, ethics have taken a backseat to ideology in the education of our journalists.

When a child is raised in the absence of a parent, or in the presence of an abusive one, they look for surrogates to fill that void. Young men join gangs, young women become infatuated with older men, and predators find easy prey in the unprotected. Likewise, the corruption of the fourth estate, coupled with the proliferation of technology, made the ascension of the fifth estate inevitable. And so the rise of “fake news” had it’s fertile field. What Anampour and her ilk are oblivious to, is that “fake news” has to a great extent found its success due to the failure of “real news” to be the neutral arbiter of information. We have always had “fake news”, but people were for the most part savvy enough to recognize that tabloid headlines such as “Man Born Without Body”, with the accompanying doctored photo of a man’s head connected to just a foot, were in a word, bogus. Back then, we depended on “reputable” news sources for accurate information… but it seems that the election has shown a light on an uncomfortable truth, reputable news sources are an endangered species.

IMHO: The word “bogus” is relatively new in common parlance, it finds its origin in the early 1800’s as the name used to describe counterfeit coins prevalent at that time. More recently it was incorporated into the slang of the surfer culture, and only commonly used as a term by the rest of us since the 80’s. Returning to the counterfeit overtones of the original definition, today’s fake news sites have moved beyond parody to propaganda, and are bogus imitations of real news sites. In what can only be described as a tragedy of poor timing, the real news sites have themselves diverged into bogus territory leaving the public without a gold standard. It is as though counterfeit bills were disseminated at the same time the US Treasury lowered its standards and starts producing hundred dollar bills on photocopiers. It’s one thing for us to be fooled, by our own biases, by liars and counterfeits, it’s quite another for the supposed truth experts to be fooled, and in turn to fool us. A combination of the decline of journalistic ethics regarding neutrality, with the more generalized rise in incompetence in the performance of trades and professions, has greatly transformed a once noble resource into a suspect and undependable source. Until there arises a new faithful media, or a resurgence in integrity of the old, we the public are orphans without faithful advocates, urchins on the streets who must look to ourselves for what we should believe. To those who were once reliable guardians of objective truth, I adjure you! Dig deeper, set aside your own opinions, put in the time it takes to get to the bottom of a story. Don’t just regurgitate the talking points force fed to you in press releases, but do the work it takes to find the real truth, not just the truth as you assume it to be. It is not your place to instill values, not your place to shape society, not your place to be our elite conscience. Your job is to give us information, facts… the truth untainted by opinion or bias. Here’s a thought, do your job!