When does something count as a “BIG LIE”?

A timely title, no?

The other day I bought a Wall Street Journal for the first time in months, curious to see what it would have to say about President Biden stepping down from the 2024 campaign and endorsing Kamala Harris. In an extraordinary opinion piece, headlined (and I realize that writers do not provide headlines themselves) “Democrats Will Pay for the Biden Big Lie,” Matthew Hennessey wrote that Biden’s announcement 

...brings to an end the big lie Democrats have been telling about the president for at least a year and maybe longer — that he is in full control of his mental faculties…. 

 

What can I say about such a leap of logic? But wait. Let’s go back to Hennessey’s first paragraph: 

 

President Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to abandon his failing bid for re-election. Well, someone call the Vatican: I’d like to report the second coming.

 

My first question: Do Christians say the Lord must appear again on earth for Him to speak to his believers? I never heard that.

 

Leave religion aside, though, and let's address politics: No one is ever in a race for office until that person officially declares. It’s all denial, denial, denial until the announcement. Similarly, no one is ever dropping out until that person announces his or her campaign is over. That’s the way the game is played. Grow up, Matthew. You didn't know that?

 

As for “lying” on the part of Democrats, how does MH conclude, from Biden’s dropping out of the race, either (1) that the president's mental faculties are failing or (2) that other Democrats believed that to be the case and have been lying about it? As I say, quite a leap. Reaching such a conclusion would require at least one additional premise, but, if MH does have another, he has hidden it well.

 

If you want to judge President Biden’s mental strength, you have only to watch and listen to his interview with Lester Holt. In that exchange, it’s obvious that Joe’s mind is still sharp as a tack. His voice is weak, and he is showing the fragility of age, but his thinking is clear — unlike that of the Republican candidate. 

 

As for “big lies,” who is the champion? Who kept claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who is still claiming, in the face of a mountain of disconfirming evidence, that the 2020 was “rigged,” “stolen,” etc., etc.? 

 

Has the Republican nominee, I wonder, made any true public statements? Let’s have one quoted, please. Just one substantive true statement. I’m waiting....

 

Did you ever in your life think it would get this bad – in your lifetime?

He whose name I shall not mention, the one who refuses to say he would accept the election results unless they met his fairness standards (translation: unless he were to win), he who is the tool of the Heritage Foundation and the one they depend upon to enact their Project 2025, he who blasphemously advertises himself as the next Jesus Christ (and is somehow accepted as such by people who were once people of true faith), promises to bring about a “Second American Revolution.” Irony hardly seems appropriate in this nightmare scenario, wherein the tool assures his followers that he will be a “dictator for a day” -- was there ever such a thing? -- to help them “take back our country.”  Those he wants to “take it back” from are legion: -- well, there! I saw a video in the morning and thought it would be easy to find again. It was not, and I wasted a lot of time looking through online crap. I do remember mention of "Communists" and "vermin." Naturally, undocumented workers would be rounded up, along with "criminals." (He forgets that he is a member of that category).

 

What the Heritage Foundation and presumably the Republican candidate (oh, how a once respectable party has fallen!) want to establish, however, is nothing like the U.S.A. but a government more repressive than any the United States has ever known. In this “brave new world” they would put in place, the teaching of history would be banished. (Teachers and librarians are already under siege in many places.) Many government agencies would be abolished and the ones allowed to continue purged of "disloyal" experts, to be replaced by loyalists, whether expert or not. Undocumented aliens would be swept up in the largest-ever dragnet for mass deportation. Not only abortion but also contraception would be outlawed. 

The devil in the details goes on and on, but the keystone is that the president, under Samuel Alito’s “unitary executive” theory -- only last week given a massive accelerative boost by the Supreme Court -- would have almost unlimited powers if and only if what the president did were approved by the Republican-stacked Court, so a president elected on the Democratic ticket obviously could not, literally, get away with murder, as could a Republican. 

 

Make no mistake: Call it what you will, this plan is not conservatism, which is why I call the Court “Republican-stacked” rather than “majority-conservative.” Privileging one political party over another is not conservative. Purging government agencies of the those denoted as “disloyal” is not conservative. Turning the president into a king, above the rule of law, is absolutely not conservative. 

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”

 

Confession: I post on Facebook. On July 4, I posted a link to Heather Cox Richardson’s July 2 podcast on three recent Supreme Court decisions, the so-called “debate” between the two presidential candidates, and the obvious truth: No one is coming to save us. As HCR notes, we certainly can’t depend on the so-called “liberal press”!

I was disappointed (though not, I admit, surprised) at how few Fb friends bothered to follow the link to the podcast. It wasn’t, after all, a cute puppy picture or a pretty garden photo they could simply “like”  before moving on, so they simply scrolled by. I tagged a couple of friends and edited my introduction to say that the link might take them to the most important words they would hear that day, but -- deaf ears, for the most part. Not that people don’t care. Some are so firmly convinced that the game is lost, so demoralized, that rousing them from their lethargic stupor seems all but impossible. 

 

This morning I was thinking about personality traits and what I would say if someone asked me to name my worst. Of course, I don’t know what others would say about me (and maybe don’t want to know), but I do know myself to be very stubborn. On the other hand (and this fits right in with my philosophy of life, i.e., that everything is a double-edged sword), if I weren't stubborn, my bookstore would not have survived for 31 years, because I would have quit when the going got tough, rather than taking on one part-time job after another to hang on by my fingernails. And in this case, which involves nothing less than the future of our country, I don’t see giving up as an option.

 

So if you have lost all hope, please ask yourself what you have to gain by infecting others with your defeatist attitude. You need to vent? Vent in the shower! When you speak your presumptive defeat publicly or smear it all over social media, you only give aid and support and endless amusement to the opposition. 

 

Fear is something to overcome. Defeatism is not a game plan. Another name for stubbornness is perseverance or persistence. If you can’t summon up any positivity or determination, then, if you got no sisu at all, put a sock in it. Or – 

When you just can't keep it zipped!

Random Thoughts: Buying or Judging?

Photo by Harris & Ewing, "between 1905 and 1935." http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hec.16410

A thought that came to me recently concerns the phrase “marketplace of ideas," not only as it occurs in everyday speech but specifically as I read it in a positive and pithy little book by Dan Rather & Elliot Kirschner entitled What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism. 

In the chapter on dissent (which also, coincidentally, mentions Eugene V. Debs as “the famous socialist labor leader” who ran for the presidency from prison, where he was incarcerated on a federal charge of sedition), the authors cite the case of Abrams v. the United States (1919), in which two justices dissented from the majority on a question of free speech. The Court had twice previously been unanimous in supporting limits to free speech during World War I, but Justice Holmes was convinced by friends that the court had gone too far in suppressing speech, so in Abrams he dissented from the majority, Justice Brandeis concurring in the dissent. 

Holmes wrote in his dissent, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market….” Hmmm....

We are so accustomed to hearing and reading and using the phrase that I wonder how many of us ever think much about it. A marketplace, whether physical or virtual, is a scene for buying and selling, and while we commonly say “I don’t buy that” to indicate disagreement or at least lack of interest, do we want to think of our own dearly held beliefs and firmly held convictions as something to “sell” other people? Are ideas and beliefs and convictions and principles nothing more than virtual products to be advertised and promoted for--personal gain? to "win"?

But how else, you may ask, should we speak about ideas competing for our allegiance? I like “court of public opinion” a little better, because it implies judgment. While in a market I may make an impulse purchase and have little to regret (if the price is low enough), serving on a jury I would be asked to deliberate more carefully, weighing all the evidence presented and not voting solely on the basis of which attorney was the better salesperson.

What do you think of when you hear "marketplace of ideas"? 

Resilience

Beautiful Great Lakes water
 

‘Resilience’ is a word we have heard perhaps much too often since the year 2020, and its omnipresence may have begun four years earlier. Who knows? As a widow, I have had personal encounters with the word and the idea, as well as meeting with it in casual news and important news stories day after day, and sometimes I get tired of the word. But then I think, what other word could possibly take its place? 

 

The movie “Bad River” that premiered in various U.S. cities on March 15 (mostly cities much larger than Traverse City, so we were particularly fortunate to have it there) is set in a small place beset with large issues that are pertinent to everyone on earth. The federally recognized Ojibwe tribe at Bad River, Wisconsin, numbered 6,945 members in 2010. In 2020, 1,545 members lived on the 193.11 square mile reservation, most of it managed as “undeveloped” forest and wetland. In this tribe’s culture, wild rice is as elemental as land and water, but all are threatened by a Canadian-owned oil pipeline over 70 years old and in imminent danger of failure at key points, as the film makes clear. 

 

Challenge and threat are nothing new to the people of Bad River. Removal of their children to boarding schools (where their language was prohibited, physical and mental abuse rampant, and where many children died), removal and relocation of whole families to cities far from their homes, broken treaties, pressures from the dominant culture that shrunk the tribe’s lands time after time, an allotment plan that divided the land (all the better for lumber companies to buy their land and gain control), along with all the ills that follow poverty and disculturation. 

 

“Bad River” the film is a story about much more than the dangers of an oil pipeline that could spill into Lake Superior and from there contaminate the Great Lakes, because the Bad River people have been fighting to maintain their land and way of life and identity for much longer than the pipeline has been in place, but in a 1980s court case the judge ruled in favor of the tribe, saying that the Treaty of 1854 does indeed guarantee their rights to hunt and fish and gather food. Sport fishermen were incensed, but the fact is that the tribe manages its own fisheries, more than replacing the fish they take each year. See details of that history here. 

 

Now the tribe comprising roughly 7,000 Native Americans has been defending, at their own expense, not only their own lands and waters and resources, but the entire Great Lakes system, freshwater on which the entire world depends. The Canadian corporation, Enbridge, has been ruled a trespasser on tribal land since the tribe chose not to renew the corporation’s lease, which expired in 2013 – and yet a judge ruled that the trespass could continue until 2026 -- and the corporation has no intention of shutting down the pipeline and removing it then. 

 

Line 5 originates in Canada, passes through Wisconsin, Michigan, tribal lands, and the Great Lakes, only to end back in Canada. Apparently it was easier and cheaper for the foreign company to build the line below their national border. What would the energy cost be without Line 5? The company’s own experts estimate that gas prices might increase by half a cent per gallon. 

 

As is much too often the case with cost/benefit analyses, profits do not go to populations bearing the risks. Almost always, the few and the poorer bear the risks in order that the already wealthy can become wealthier. In this particular case, however, the risks are born by all Americans and Canadians within the Great Lakes system, now and into the future. “We’re not there yet,” said someone in the trial that found the corporation guilty of trespass. I.e., we have not yet had a disastrous break in the line. That, of course, is just the point: to prevent a disaster that could not possibly be contained.

 

The Bad River people have had to be resilient for generations in order to survive. Nature, we often note, is also resilient. The span of time needed for nature’s resilience, however, is not always limited to the span of a human life. What do we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, let alone to the seventh generation in the future?

 

SHUT DOWN LINE 5 NOW!

 

What Would Bruce Catton Have to Say?

After reading Bruce Catton’s Michigan: A Centennial History and his memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train (several times), I long ago decided that he had a tragic view of our history (the history of Americans whose culture brings change faster than we can adapt to it), so when a little paperback, Catton’s last book, Reflections on the Civil War, came into my hands, I did something I never do with fiction and turned right away to the last pages. What did the famous historian from northern Michigan have to tell us as he reflected on everything he had learned from our country’s bloody, brother-against-brother conflict?

 

Reflections on the Civil War was edited by John Leekley, much of the text a collaborative effort undertaken with the author himself from transcripts of audiotapes. Leekley’s father, Richard, a dealer in rare books, had bequeathed to his son the Civil War sketchbook of John Geyser, a Civil War soldier, and that book formed the basis for many conversations between John Leekley and Bruce Catton, creating what the former called a “shared vision.” – But as I say, I am beginning at the end….

 

Bruce Catton (1890-1978) began his research into the Civil War because he wanted to make young again in his mind the old veterans he had known. As his research proceeded, other questions came to his mind. What motivated men on both sides, not only to enter the conflict but to continue fighting? What kept them from running back home? And finally, he asked himself if he thought the war had been worthwhile. In the end he concluded that it did, after all, accomplish something. 

 

…It gave us a political unity in the sense that it kept the country from fragmenting into a number of separate, independent nations. The North American continent was not Balkanized; the geographic unit that made possible the wealth and the prosperity of later days was preserved. Beyond that, the country made a commitment during that war; a commitment to a broader freedom, a broader citizenship. We can no longer be content with anything less than complete liberty, complete equality before law for all of our peopleregardless of their color, their race, their religion, their national origins; regardless of anything. We are fated to continue the experiment in peaceful democracy, and I don’t think any people were ever committed to a nobler experiment than this one [my emphasis added]. 

 

Catton’s Reflections first appeared after his death in 1981 – that is, over forty years ago. He believed and wrote that the Civil War had been “worth its cost,” although he added:

 

…We have not yet reached the goal we set ourselves at the time, and I’m not sure we ever will be satisfied with our progress. But at least we keep going.

 

He notes that civil wars, in general, are “most likely to leave angry feelings” but says, “That did not happen in this country.” The very idea of the “Lost Cause,” he believes, is that it was recognized as lost:

 

It is part of American legend…. It moves men mightily, to this day, but it does not move them in the direction of picking up their guns and going at it again. We have had national peace since the war ended, and we will always have it….

 

What, I wonder, would Catton think of the “state of the union” today, were he to return to us? 

The night before his assassination, Catton tells us, Abraham Lincoln dreamed he was on a boat, moving toward a “dark and indefinite shore,” and we are still moving toward that dark, indefinite shore, Catton wrote at the end of his own life, “toward a destiny bigger than we can understand.

 

Maybe we will get there some day if we live up to what the great men of the past won for us. And when we get there, it is fair to suppose that instead of being dark and indefinite, that unknown continent will be lit with sunlight.

 

Have we lost our way at present? What would Bruce Catton say? What do you say?

 

"What seems to be is not always --"

 What seems to be is not always --

    Light years, the distance

    Between ‘is’ and ‘seem,’ 

            It seems.

    To sleep, to dream 

    Is my reward

            For days 

    Spent in work and sun.

    With you, then, ‘is’

            Was everything.

    Now you are gone.

    But to friends

            I seem okay.

    P.J. Grath, 6/28/2023

“It Isn’t Fair!” Why Can’t We Say So?

When I was young, that was every kid’s natural objection, almost an automatic response, when given an unpleasant task or punishment. Clearing the ground of rotten apples that had fallen from the trees was a particularly loathsome seasonal chore in our household. Why should the kids have to perform that disgusting job? Not fair! As for punishment, rarely were we “grounded” (though our friends were, often), because our father and mother, knowing what a pack of little readers they were raising (those apples didn’t fall far from the trees, either!) knew that the loss of library privileges would be a far greater punishment than having to stay home (with books to read!). Forbid us the library? So unfair!

 

As we got older, we learned to distinguish the difference between being unhappy and being treated unfairly. More than that, we learned to recognize when other people were being treated unfairly. That was a huge step.

 

I’ve been looking into the question of values teaching in public education, apparently a battleground in the present-day United States. Those opposed to the teaching of values usually point to “liberal” values and call such teaching “indoctrination.” One site I looked at, under the heading “Public Schools Shouldn’t Be Teaching ‘Values,’” objected to students being taught “tolerance, egalitarianism, diversity, and globalism.” The author of the piece thinks this teaching has no place in American public school classrooms. 

 

I understand keeping values specific to a particular religion out of the classroom. There are Catholic schools, Jewish schools, Amish schools, etc. for parents who want their children taught only within the strictures of the family’s religion. As for “moral values” in general, though? I admit I am confused. 

 

What does even mean to teach “globalism”? I have no idea. As for tolerance, egalitarianism, and diversity, those look to me like bedrock American values – honored more in the breach than in practice, perhaps, but certainly part of our country’s ideals. At least, so I was taught by my conservative, Republican, Lutheran parents.

 

Another site I looked at, “Education on moral values a must for school children,” cites the following as values needing to be taught in school: “truthfulness, honesty, charity, hospitality, tolerance, love, kindness and sympathy.” Kindergartners learn to share. They are taught to take turns. They are told that it is wrong and against the rules to hit each other. These are moral values, and a classroom without such values would be absolute chaos. It is impossible to teach if students have tacit permission to cheat, lie, bully, steal, etc. “Neutrality” on these questions has no place in a classroom.

 

(Some people say schools only have to teach values because parents have not done so. That’s bullshit. Parents and schools have an obligation to children to teach them right from wrong. It is the job of adults to be responsible for children in their care, and that means teaching right from wrong. Some parents will fall down on the job, as will some teachers. All the more reason for building redundancy into education.)

 

Now in more than one state there are moves to require, by law,“neutrality” when teaching historical subjects such as slavery in America and the WWII holocaust of Jews in Europe. Neutrality???Opposing views??? We are supposed to tell students that bullying is wrong but then cannot tell them that human trafficking and genocide are wrong? Refrain from judgment??? Neutrality on the buying and selling and robbing and killing of other human beings, treating them worse than we treat livestock??? 

 

That one state governor calling himself “conservative” can deny college credit for an AP class carefully put together and implemented across the nation is appalling. 

If this is what American “conservatism” has come to, it deserves to wither away.