Three War Criminals, All in a Row

It's been entertaining to watch the various vultures squabbling over the remains of the late John Lewis. At the memorial service, Bill Clinton praised Lewis for being moderate in not Going Too Far as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) did.  This set off predictable fury in the left Twittersphere, but really, did anyone really believe the overall spectacle was going to be anything but embarrassing?  Clinton doesn't know or doesn't care (you decide) that Lewis was pretty extreme; his address at the 1963 March on Washington had to be pared back by Movement censors / PR people to avoid troublesome excess.  And of course, Martin Luther King was always Going Too Far for the comfort of white moderates, and Rosa Parks continued Going Too Far for the rest of her long life.

Then the Right threw tantrums over Barack Obama's eulogy of Lewis, which they claimed "politicized" the sacred event.  Leftists and liberals derided them, pointing out that politicians' funerals are always political, except when Bill Clinton is there. The fun part is that when Clinton and Obama croak, right-wingers will forget everything they said about keeping the memorials apolitical, and liberals will be furious that the Rethugs are dragging politics into it. I hope I live to see it. 

But Obama ... I heard a couple of clips from his performance, and I don't know if I have the strength to watch the whole forty-minute thing, so this will have to do for now.  The first one included a denunciation of the use of tear gas and clubs against peaceful demonstrators, which Obama was perfectly comfortable with while he was President.  (The crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street looked very much like the ones we've seen the past several weeks.)  In the second clip I heard, he did a very poor impersonation of a fiery black preacher, evidently under the impression that such low comedy was appropriate for the occasion - and I guess it was, because liberals have been wetting their pants over his inspiring and articulate oratory.  Some of what he said was unexceptionable, such as restoring protection of voting rights; but his support won't help it happen, and I would hope that no one needs his advice to see it as important.

How Far Down Do You Want to Go?

I just saw the second meme today that said "If Bill Clinton's past is 'fair game' so is this", referring to Donald Trump's gamy sexual past.  I'm not going to link to it or post it here; you can probably find it with an online search if you want to see it.

Now, first: way to go, Democrats, sinking to Trump's and the GOP's level! If you object to their atttempts to lower the discourse, the right response is not to mimic them.

Second: Democrats prefer it that way, because the last thing they (or the Republicans) want is a serious, rational discussion of Clinton's policies and actions as President (or Hillary Clinton's policies and actions as Senator and Secretary of State). That would be going too far.

Third: this version of the meme consisted largely of several naked or nearly naked pictures of Trump's wives/girlfriends. So it's not really Trump's past they're interested in -- they want to slut-shame the women in his life. (And probably to look at naked pictures of women -- it's a win/win!) Which establishes these Dems as the lowest kind of scum, right down there with Trump himself. (Some of the comments on the previous sharing ranted about "skanks" and such. Stay classy, Democrats.)

Most fun of all, the person whose share put this meme where I'd see it is a vocal feminist, highly vigilant about such issues on her own account.  But she didn't notice the slut-shaming or didn't care as long as it was aimed at women associated with an official enemy, but who are not running for office themselves and have no impact on policy. Sort of like the slut-shaming we saw, some years ago, of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky -- not only by the Republicans but by Bill Clinton himself, trying to save his worthless ass.

See why I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place? There is a dime's worth of difference between the parties, but a dime doesn't buy much these days, and the Democrats are hellbent on being as sickening as the Republicans.

The Results Will Count for Fifty Percent of Your Final Grade

Someone posted this on Facebook today, and I thought it mildly amusing.  It's marginally wittier than most of the political invective that floods the Internet.

But then someone posted this as a comment, remarking "what's sauce for the goose..."

A bit sloppy (there were two Clintons in White House in those days, for example), but I think it's as fair (or "fair") as the Trump meme.  Some of the replies were revealing, though, I thought.

See, the problem is that it implies that Mrs. Clinton's reason for being was to have sex with President Clinton. Now, even if you accept that's true, and I surely hope you don't, Bill Clinton had something to do with it; Mrs. Clinton did not delegate the blow jobs to Monica. And it completely negates Mrs. Clinton's actual responsibilities as first lady, and her rather significant contributions to public life since. So no, not "sauce for the goose." Logically void, misogynistic.

I don't think this works at all.  I don't think the HRC meme does imply that her "reason for being was to have sex with President Clinton."  True, as the commenter says, Mrs. Clinton did have other jobs -- she particularly infuriated Republicans for not being a mere Lady Bountiful as a First Lady should be -- but maybe the commenter meant "her reason for being in the White House" or something like that.  As for "Bill Clinton had something to do with it," that would seem to be true of Donald Trump and his immigrant wives as well.  (We needn't dally with "her rather significant contributions to public life since," which have mainly been corporate toadying and war crimes.)  "Logically void," maybe, but this is a joke, after all.  "Misogynistic"?  Also arguably true, but no more so than the Trump meme, which doesn't appear to have bothered this person.

The next comment:

Seriously, F-- T--?! Have some class. And, btw, there's a difference between a joke at one specific person's expense and a joke that's basis is misogyny.

I can't see that the Trump meme has any more "class" than this one, and again, it evidently didn't bother this commenter.  Appeals to "class," especially with respect to satire, are almost always a sign of intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  The joke in the Trump meme was not only "at one specific person's expense" but also at the expense of his immigrant wives, who seem not to have been the empty-headed trophies the meme assumes -- they got out of their marriages to him, after all. Like Mrs. Clinton, they rebelled against being relegated merely to providing service to their husband.  The Clinton meme is certainly at Bill Clinton's expense no less than Hillary's.  Neither one is sublime satire, but they seem to be about on a par with each other.

So once again, I find that Ellen Willis's law of humor applies: “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.”  Satire is funny if it's directed at someone you hate; tasteless and unfunny if it's directed at someone you like.  I personally think that if satire doesn't make you wince at the same time it makes you laugh, if it doesn't make you recognize yourself in the target, it's not very good satire.  Once again, liberals show they're not all that different from their conservative opposite numbers.

Somebody Up There

I'm pretty sure I was no more than seven years old when, after having wakened from a nightmare and gone to my mother for comfort and reassurance, I began to wonder who she went to when she had a bad dream, when she was afraid.  I had just come to realize that my mother was also a daughter, that one of my grandmas was her mother.  But she didn't live with her.  If she had a bad dream, she couldn't get up and run to her mother.  So what did she do?  What did all grownups do?

Democracy Now! broadcast excerpts today from a memorial to the late Maya Angelou, and what they chose to share was mostly gag-making.  First the war criminal and general congenital cheap pig Bill Clinton:

Here is why I think she died when she did. It was her voice. She was without a voice for five years, and then she developed the greatest voice on the planet. God loaned her his voice. She had the voice of God. And he decided he wanted it back for a while.

That got him an ovation.  Of course she really died because God needed another angel.  And this sort of thing, with its amoral sentimentality, is probably inescapable when someone dies, but coming from someone like Bill Clinton it's especially repulsive.

Next up was Michelle Obama, who claimed that "the power of Maya Angelou’s words ... carried a little black girl from the south side of Chicago all the way to the White House."  Well, no, I don't think Angelou should get the credit (or the blame) for Mrs. Obama's ending up married to a President of the United States.  Not even when I consider that Angelou also inspired "a young white woman from Kansas who named her daughter after Maya and raised her son to be the first black president of the United States."  (I'm sure I'm not the only person who reflects from time to time on what difference it would make to the discourse about President Obama if his mother were still alive.  Did she really "raise her son to be the first black president of the United States," or were her standards higher than that?)

Finally Oprah Winfrey took her turn, and she was in many ways the most appalling.

I was in utter despair and distraught and had called Maya. I remember being locked in the bathroom with the door closed, sitting on the toilet seat. I was crying so hard she could barely understand what I was saying. And I had — I was upset about something that I can’t even remember now what it was. Isn’t that how life works? And I called for long-distance cry on her shoulder, but she wasn’t having it. She said, as you all know she could, stop it! Stop it now. And I’d say, what? What? What did you say? And she said, stop your crying now. And I continued to sniffle and she said, did you hear me? And I said, yes, ma’am. Only she could level me to my seven year old self in an instant.

And so on, and on.  Winfrey's remarks sent me to the pages of Marge Piercy's 1973 novel Small Changes.  Piercy had a fair amount to say about the Strong Woman and the women who depend on her.  In Small Changes there's a Socratic dialogue on the subject.

“Don’t try to make me somebody up there,” Wanda said with quiet anger.  “On some higher level.  I’m older than you, yes.  I have a few things to teach you that you want to learn, though most of it is in you already.  But I’m not existing on some easier, calmer level.  If I’m older, I’m also more spent.  I have less reserves, less to spare.  I’m a woman the same as you, and it isn’t easier for me to fight and to survive and to get things done than it is for you!  It makes me angry when you pretend it’s different for me.”

“But you know so much more.  You never wonder who you are, I know you don’t!”

“Beth, it’s recently I stopped being only Joe’s woman and mother of my kids.  That’s all I was for years, and don’t forget it.  Joe, my kids, and radical politics were my life, in that order.  I wasn’t on my own list of priorities.”

“But now you do know!  You do!  I feel you’re pretending.  Because I know you’re stronger than me.”

“You mean I’m louder.  How do you know I’m stronger, Beth?  Because you haven’t seen me break yet?” [454]

And:

She wanted to love, yes, but safely, without demands, from a distance.  She wanted Wanda for her own loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna.  Part of her froze and tucked in when Wanda wanted to make demands back, when Wanda wanted to talk about her aching legs or to worry about her sons or to be sullenly angry and defeated: when Wanda asked her to be her friend [456-7].

I haven't read that much of Angelou's work, but from what I have read I get the impression that she made her own weaknesses and fears clear enough.  She must have gotten so tired of people attaching themselves to her, demanding to be mothered and inspired.  It's no tribute to her to turn her into a wise, powerful oracle who was always on top of things, a "loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna" who'd make you whole if you but touched the hem of her garment.  Michelle Obama did better than Winfrey in this regard, recognizing that Angelou was honored better by learning from her weaknesses as well as her strengths.  I wonder who was there for the adult Maya Angelou when she had bad dreams.

A Good Day to Meme

I saw this meme on Facebook today, just a day after I read Richard Seymour's post on memes at Lenin's Tomb.  As is sometimes the case, it's fair enough as long as you keep your partisan blinders on: yes, the Republican candidates are not good on Social Security and Medicare.   But neither are the Democrats.  Obama also wants to raise the retirement age and cut benefits for future generations; as I've already mentioned, he has been quite open and consistent about this, and we can expect him to make a move after the elections, no matter how they turn out.  Former President Bill Clinton, who's been getting a lot of adulation from Democrats lately, was interested in privatizing Social Security until he got entangled in the sex scandal that almost cost him his office.  Obama even said during the first presidential debate that on Social Security, he suspected that he and Romney have "a somewhat similar position."  So what's his grade?

Go back to that last link for a moment, where Obama declared his agreement with Romney on Social Security.

Indeed, Romney, in his book "No Apology," said he backs changing the payment structure for Social Security benefits and said that there is a "certain logic" to increasing the retirement age at which one begins to receive Social Security payments, while protecting those who may be physically unable to work.

"Many older Americans are healthy, vital, and want to stay engaged in meaningful work," he wrote. "If we increased the retirement age, we would encourage seniors to stay healthier longer, keep their minds active and alert, and at the same time, we would relieve the terrible Social Security burden our children and grandchildren face."

That's some interesting sleight-of-hand going on there.  It reminded me of something an old friend from high school said the other day on this very subject: he also said that he wasn't interested in retiring, he wasn't happy unless he was working.  He said he'd retire when his health failed and he could no longer work.  But "the retirement age" doesn't mean the age at which you must retire; it means the age at which you can retire, if you wish to and if you can afford it.  Someone like Joe doesn't want to retire yet, so he doesn't have to.

This same move kept turning up during the fuss earlier this year, over the requirement that employees' health care plans must include contraception coverage.  The Right talked as though employees would be required to use contraception, whether or not they needed or wanted to.  But they wouldn't, any more than I have to have surgery every year just because my insurance plan covers it.  Do Republicans actually believe that "the retirement age" means mandatory retirement at that age?  Some do, I suspect.  So, I suspect, do some Democrats, and if Obama moves to raise the retirement age as he has said he wants to do, many of them will use exactly this argument to defend him.

I retired last year at the age of 60, and began drawing my state pension but not (yet) Social Security.  Quite a number of my age mates had done so at the same age or younger, not because they were infirm (though some were), but because they were eligible for a pension, or (like me) took advantage of an early-retirement incentive plan.  Yes, employers, public and private, often want their high-seniority workers to retire early, and will sweeten the deal with lump-sum payments and other incentives.  I know US military personnel who retired after twenty years -- which means, in their forties -- with full pensions, often quite comfortable since they were officers.  Some of them started new careers while continuing to draw their pensions.  Would Romney or Obama care to tell them that they are contributing to the tax burden of their children and grandchildren?  (If so, I'd enjoy watching.)

If anything, it's raising the retirement age and cutting benefits -- the same thing, really, in different guises -- that will increase the burden on coming generations by increasing the numbers of indigent seniors.  As Dean Baker wrote recently, cutting benefits "might be reasonable policy if we had some cause to believe that workers in the future will be better prepared for retirement than current retirees; however there is no evidence to support this view."

Earlier retirement, say at 62, doesn't contribute to any burden of present or future taxpayers anyhow: Social Security is fully funded by the contributions that go into the Social Security Trust Fund.  The same is true of the state pension I'm now drawing, as far as I know.  The currently diminishing interval before the Social Security fund will start giving out more money than it takes in is due in large part to drastically lower growth in the US economy.  I recall seeing, when I first began paying attention to this issue a decade ago, that the official estimates were based on the assumption of 2 percent growth per year -- which at that time was a very conservatively low assumption: growth was higher than 2 percent at that time.  Thanks to the economic policies that produced the crash of 2008, economic growth has slowed to less than 2 percent per year.  I'm not saying that was deliberate, but it was convenient for opponents of Social Security, and the overall lowered growth hasn't hurt the rich.  So one way -- practical and better in the long run, though unpopular among the richest Americans -- to protect Social Security would be policies that foster economic growth.

Another would be meaningful job growth, by which I don't mean minimum-wage, no-benefits jobs of the kind that most people are scrambling for since Reaganism took over this country in the 1980s.  Whether this is possible given the current political climate, it is necessary.  I've been seeing more journalists and economists raising the same question that a working-class interviewee in one of Michael Moore's films asked years ago: If all the jobs go overseas and people in the US can't earn a living wage, who's going to buy the products of American companies?  The answer, it turned out, was people overseas, buying products made by American companies in other countries: automobiles made by Jeep in Chinese factories for sale in China, for example, where the profit margin is higher.  Which is fine for the people who'll rake in those profits, but not for the rest of us.  (True, computers and other electronic gadgets have gotten progressively cheaper, which is fine as long as you have electricity; but try eating them.)

The US economy could support Social Security easily, and probably Medicare too.  The trouble with Medicare is that our privately-controlled profit-driven health insurance system is wasteful and, well, profit-driven, not directed by people's actual health care needs.  The Medicare system is cost-efficient itself, but is not allowed to have much effect on the costs of health care and medication.  Private insurance companies, even constrained slightly by the Affordable Care Act, are about making money, not about people's health.  And in these areas, there really is little if anything to choose between Obama and Romney.  I give them both an F.

This Woman Was a Prophet

Ellen Willis's writings are trickling onto a Tumblr run by her daughter, though the links keep breaking almost as soon as they are linked. But it gives me the chance to see some of her articles I hadn't seen before, like this New York Press piece on the Elian Gonzalez controversy. For those who've forgotten the case, five-year-old Elian was rescued from the waters off Florida after his mother and several other adult Cubans had drowned trying to reach the US. His parents were separated and his father, back in Cuba, hadn't consented to the project, so he demanded Elian's return, with Cuban government support. US Immigration ruled that Elian should go home, but his relatives and other Cuban exiles in Miami created a political circus that raged for seven months. In the end, federal agents raided his great-uncle's house in Miami just before dawn, took the boy, and returned him to his father.

I remember it vividly because I happened to be visiting a friend with a TV that weekend, so I saw the coverage. It occurred to me that perhaps the raid went so smoothly (and it did: no one was hurt, and despite theatrical wailing from his great-aunt, Elian was found and rescued without difficulty) because a deal had been worked out between the government and the relatives, to save face for the latter. Why had they kept a little boy up all night, till 5 a.m.? How did an AP photographer get there so fast? (At first I thought he'd been there when the raid began, even more suspicious; but I was wrong.) The relatives had threatened armed resistance -- as Willis wrote, "Elian was both their prize and their hostage. They had no scruples about putting him in danger" -- but luckily those threats were empty. The friend I was staying with, a heterosexual of conservative politics with a father's-rights focus, was a bit conflicted: on one hand he thought Elian should be 'allowed' to stay in the Land of the Free; on the other, he thought his father's wish for his return trumped his relatives' wish to keep him with them. Another even more reactionary masculinist I knew felt the same way.

Anyway, it's history now, and little Elian is now grown up. This retrospective is amusing, though, for its blatant dishonesty:

As you can see, Elian looks like a normal boy. His cuteness factor though, has dwindled because of what he now stands for. But he's 16-years old so he can't be blamed; we can probably thank his country's government for corning him into that. While Elian Gonzalez and his family originally fled their native country to escape Fidel Castro's communist regime, these pictures were taken of him at a Young Communist Union meeting.

"Corning him into that"? I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I want to know. But it's false that "Elian and his family originally fled their native country," because Elian was only five (a five-year-old taken to Cuba by his mother -- without his father's knowledge! -- would not have been described in the US as having fled George Bush's imperialist regime), and his father remained in Cuba.

But back to Ellen Willis. What I want to pass along is her judgment on the Clinton administration, though Democrat-wise, not much has changed since then.

The far right has lost the culture war. Americans may be social conservatives, guilt-ridden about sex and self-righteous about the undeserving poor, but they don't like theocrats, sex police and antigovernment fanatics. Nor can they whip themselves into a frenzy about Castro, in this 11th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They much prefer Clinton's mushy corporate neoliberalism, not to mention his softer brand of masculinity. The irony is that Clinton, who thinks a principle is someone who runs a school, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease. He has pandered to the right on family values and welfare. He has been its staunch ally on censorship and the drug war. He allowed the Elian crisis to burgeon out of control by not ordering [Janet] Reno to take action back in January. He stayed silent on Elian until the last possible minute and then spoke with all the passion of Alan Greenspan announcing a rise in the interest rate. Al Gore was even more pathetically eager to lie down for the Miami Cubans; never mind that he can expect as many votes from them as Giulani could from blacks in New York City. Hacking at a sponge with a razor blade, the right manages to look both ridiculous and insane. Yet somehow they keep afloat, waiting for their next chance at something like a coup.

I wonder what Willis (who died, too young, in 2006) would have to say about the Obama administration if she were still alive. (This 1992 letter to the New York Times on corporate violence is suggestive, as is this 1998 Nation piece on the need for a radical left movement.) Obama, too, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease, and has pandered to the right when he hasn't been its staunch ally. I think Willis's reading of the American public is correct too; only a small, if vocal, fringe wants theocrats, sex police, and antigovernment fanatics in charge of the country. The Democrats continue to try to win these frothers over, instead of brushing them off, let alone confronting them, which turns off the majority. The hopeful sign is the recent emergence of a third option, not asking either party for its support. I'm not sure it will succeed, but it appears that the Occupy movement is not going to be intimidated by Red- or hippie-baiting, so it might manage to survive. And then we'll see.

I Know: Picky, Picky, Picky

I don't really expect any better from the corporate media in general, but I do wish that nominally liberal commentators would stop talking about Democratic politicians moving "to the center" when they mean "to the right." Maybe Robert Reich was being a tad sarcastic when he wrote today:

After a bruising midterm election, the president moves to the political center. He distances himself from his Democratic base. He calls for cuts in Social Security and signs historic legislation ending a major entitlement program. He agrees to balance the budget with major cuts in domestic discretionary spending. He has a showdown with Republicans who threaten to bring government to its knees if their budget demands aren't met. He wins the showdown, successfully painting them as radicals. He goes on to win re-election.

Now, Reich's point was that he wasn't talking about Obama but about Bill Clinton, whom the above passage also describes. It's not quite accurate in other ways -- for example, both Obama and Clinton were already much further to the right before their "bruising midterm elections" than Reich seems to recognize. In both cases, those bruising midterms had something to do with their right-wing policies: Clinton's pushing through NAFTA and Obama's general service to Wall Street and his other big corporate donors, like the insurance companies. Obama hinted at his wish to assault "entitlements" before he was elected -- even before he won the nomination. Both Clinton and Obama would have to move drastically to be the left to be in the center, if we're talking about American public opinion at large instead of the right-wing political, corporate and media elites to whom they belong.

So please, no more talk of "moving to the center." It's just a small step toward honesty in our political discourse, but it might embolden liberals to be more honest on other topics, like Obama's wars.

I'd Like to Join the Party, But I Was Not Invited

Actually, I was invited, but I didn't like to join the party -- either party -- that much. Here's a story which may help to explain why, from Driftglass via the Sideshow:

Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name. Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict 'Pay as You Go' fiscal regime, a boom in technology jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized. And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis. Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name.

The writer is absolutely correct: Clinton (and now Obama) was subjected to the kind of sliming that Democrats reserve for Ralph Nader, and even then, not with the same whole-hearted dementia. Reading the whole post, I'm inclined to think that I don't rant enough.

Oh, and then there's this, from Whatever It Is, I'm Against It:

Monday, the Obama admin filed a brief in District Court arguing that prisoners at Bagram Airfield have no habeas corpus rights because it is located an active war zone, glossing over the fact that some of the prisoners were only in an active war zone because they were kidnapped from other countries and brought there. Reminds me of the 2,264 ethnic Japanese the US seized from Peru and other Latin American countries during World War II and transported to the internment camps in the US. When the US began paying reparations to interned Japanese-Americans in 1990 it excluded these internees because they had been... wait for it... illegal immigrants.

But the truly faithful (via) can overlook such small peccadilloes.