Kennedy, The Radical Right, Mein Kampf

As you know, Senator Ted Kennedy passed on last week. I’ve spent much of the last few days watching his funeral on TV or following it on the Web.

I was particularly struck by the celebration of his life that was held at the John F. Kennedy Library. As an aside, I know the building. I’ve done rather a lot of research in the archives there. And it is a magnificent site to recall the last surviving member of that particular generation of Kennedys.

It was interesting, and moving, to hear leading Republicans appear and express their admiration for the man. Orrin Hatch and John McCain made it clear that they had respected Kennedy, liked him, and, in a way, even loved him. Hatch put it best, I think, when he said (here paraphrasing) that he would miss most fighting with Kennedy in public and joking with him in private.

Those men were good and true.

But, Hatch and McCain are conservatives. They seek to “conserve” something they feel to be of value in America. Such men do not control the Republican Party any more, even as they are its most famous sons. The GOP today is the property of men like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, as well as the Radio Radicals—Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage, and so many others. These men are not conservatives. They find nothing to preserve in America as it has been these last two hundred years. They seek, instead, to sweep that America away and replace it with one of their own creation…an intolerant and regimented America—an America “managed” by a small cadre of executives and the population manipulated by cynically political Churches (Protestant and Catholic alike) and talk-show demagogues.

And already, these men and women have begun their Swift Boating of Ted Kennedy’s memory. The columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson has noted that within days of his death a Google search for radical right criticisms of Kennedy turned up two million hits. (“Hatin’ on Ted Kennedy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/hatin-on-ted-kennedy_b_270830.html)

Why this sudden and determined attack on a man who worked with Republicans and was admired by them? On, indeed, someone who is already dead?

Because the extremists cannot do otherwise. They cannot possibly be gracious or chivalrous. They must speak ill of the dead or their followers might begin to wonder if all liberals are really so terrible … if, perhaps, it was possible for two sides to argue and debate, and not regard the other as treasonous.

To illustrate, consider this sage advice from a famed work on political action: “Inasmuch as ones own propaganda recognized a shadow of right upon the opponents side, the ground is prepared for questioning ones own right. The masses are not in a position to distinguish where the opponent’s right ends and ones own begins. In such a case they become uncertain and mistrustful…”

The book? Mein Kampf. The author you know. The consequences, you will recall.


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Al-Megrahi

We were at breakfast with a friend of ours and Martha began talking about the news. Specifically, she was angered at the Scots for releasing Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. You’ll recall that in that attack 270 innocent people died in the sky. Al-Megrahi has never expressed remorse. Yet, he is being released as an act of compassion. He is dying of cancer—or so, anyway, we are told.

Martha was furious. Why should the Scots demonstrate compassion when this man had shown none for his victims? But, our friend gently rebuked us. It was the Christian thing, she said, to release the terrorist that he might spend his final days at home. All the more Christian since it required real emotional effort. One had, that is, to look into the twisted face of the murderer and still perceive the features of suffering humanity.

I suppose she’s right.

Yet, what concerns me is not so much what happened to al-Megrahi in Scotland, but afterwards. Upon arrival in Tripoli, he was greeted as something of a hero. High officials, including Gaddafi’s son, met him at the airport. “Several thousand” young men cheered him from the tarmac.

The pundits who cover such things write that one shouldn’t take this too seriously. The return of al-Megrahi was actually, they say, a low-key affair. The Libyan government might have easily made the man’s return a national celebration. The fact that it didn’t shows that Gaddafi and his heirs are working hard not to antagonize the West. Thus, they say, it is All Good. If anything, the release of al-Megrahi, who is going to die anyway, may have been an excellent trade. It cost the West nothing and betters our relations with Libya.

Which is all probably true. But I’m troubled by those “several thousand” young men at the airport. They came, it seems, quite without prompting. It was not their government’s idea to assemble on the runways, but their own. And that makes sense. For decades now, leaders throughout the Arab World, and the Islamic world beyond, have used Anti-Americanism as a conscious part of their statecraft. It, along an orchestrated hatred of Israel, has been the ever-effective means by which political elites distracted their subjects’ attention from their own corruption and incompetence.

Today, that popular loathing of all which we represent is as much a part of the political psyche of the Middle East as are national flags and monuments to fallen liberators. It has been long nourished, and now flowers energetically.

Thus, I worry. Even if Gaddafi and his imitators want to better their standing with the West, is it too late? Have they done their work too well? So that, no matter what governments may want and Fearless Leaders decree, we will still have to confront someday the people who so energetically danced and sang when the Towers fell…and thousands died in horror and flame?


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Men With Guns

I had not seen MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show until a week or so ago. It wasn't that I had avoided her. I simply don't watch lot of TV.

But, a while back I did tune. It was quite impressive. In this particular episode, she listed the seemingly endless stream of insults, injuries, and even violence that Democratic (and some Republican) Congressmen have suffered at the hands of the Right Wing during the ongoing Health Care debate. She concluded with the remarkable case of the man who appeared at an appearance of Barack Obama with a gun strapped to his leg and carrying a sign that was a more or less overt death threat to the President. (He was later presented, rather sympathetically, by certain elements of the conservative press.)

That most of this chaos has been orchestrated by a combination of corporations that would be impacted by any health reform and the GOP is more or less universally known. That the leading "moderate" elements of the Republican party have stood apart from the excesses of the "Birthers" and the "Deathers," while being more than willing to encourage, organize, and exploit it, is also well known. It is, in fact, nothing more than the standard program of dirty tricks, lies, hysteria, demagoguery, smear, and blatant disregard for civility which has been characteristic of certain (albeit, not all) circles within the Republican party since Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts of the 1950s.

What I had not thought, but which Maddow pointed out, is that there is something new going on here. The GOP is now using proxies who are not just confrontational, but who more or less openly calling for violence against elected officials. They are not just calling for impeachments or recall elections. They are openly talking about killing people. And, more, they are doing this with the support of not only fringe politicians but senators and representatives. Maddow went on to compare the current situation to the Abortion debate, which is now no longer a debate but rather a controlled war in which anyone supporting the procedure may well find themselves in the cross hairs of a sniper rifle.

She noted that the pro-life/pro-choice discussion too began in relative civility, then moved to aggressive confrontation, and then ended with firearms as anti-abortion mainstream activists discovered that they could use "extremists" to silence dissent while still remaining on the moral high ground. (In a genuinely just society, those who incite violence would share the blame with those who carry it out. As such, indictments for the murder George Tiller would begin in Rome and the offices of Operation Rescue and work their way down.)

Maddow concluded that it is all too likely that we shall see the Rightists following exactly the same course. I fear there is some truth in it. Simply put, terrorism works and certain people within the GOP have discovered that fact. If you cannot "Swiftboat" your rival, or cheat him of his electoral victory by manipulating the vote, or shout him into silence at town hall meetings, then encouraging an extremist (and then disavowing his actions) is cheap, effective, and relatively risk free. It's all too likely that within 20 years or so, we will see violence (or at least the threat of it) implemented as a regular part of Republican strategy.

Which is frightening—for all of us, and, indeed, even the Rightists who today employ the technique. It is a game anyone can play. Eventually, Democrats, too, will follow the Republican lead. And, after them, still other actors, perhaps more dangerous than we can imagine.

For you see, the Bible is quite right. The Republicans have sown the wind. The peril is that they, and we, shall harvest the storm.




Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

New Mexico #4

Okay, so, this time, I’m finally going to get to the next installment of the tale of my recent trip to New Mexico.

This time we’re going to have Rail Runners, filthy rich dingbats, dogs that poop in the night (or, anyway, in the street), and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

Plus…

A death.


*

Okay, I’m going to skip over a lot of things now. I’m not going to tell you a lot about my visit to my parents or their home in Albuquerque. That’s because we had a good time. And good times are good…but, well, they don’t make for interesting writing. I suppose that’s not particularly profound. Everyone from Tolstoy to Tolkien has already said something like it. But, it’s amazing how true it is all the same.

So, I won’t tell you about the flight there, nor our arrival, nor meeting my parents and finding them fit and hale—which is good news for me, really. At the age when many people are barely able to move, they are up and active, eager to travel and explore. Every year they drive (with their two dogs, Sarah and Princeton) to and from their beach house on South Padre Island on the Texas coast, which is not a small journey, particularly when you have two full-grown Welsh Corgis with you.

Every year, too, they travel at least once to Las Vegas. They do not gamble. They never have. But it amuses them to go and watch the shows, eat in the casino restaurants (where the food is cheap to encourage the gamblers), and, at most, play the “penny slots” where they can find them. These are a dying species of slot machine, designed not to take quarters, or the heavy dollar coins that the Treasury still promotes in a futile attempt to placate the makers of vending machines, but rather (obviously) mere pennies. A penny a pop, in other words, to watch the little wheels go round. Payments, in the unlikely event of a jackpot, are of course tiny. But, that doesn’t matter, particularly. And so my parents will take a dollar and play it away in an hour or so. Then they’ll go do something else.

Sometimes, too, I think, they go to watch the other players—the men and women their own age or older, who have no interest in the pennies. Rather, they are at the big machines, the quarter slots and above, and who you can see squatting in their wheel chairs, smoking but connected by long and transparent tubes to the tanks of oxygen beside them, pulling the handle or punching the button of the Machine, as compulsively as a heartbeat, watching their social security checks vanish in the flash and fury of simulated ecstasy.

*

And I won’t tell you, finally, about our time at my parents’ house…the place they have in what’s called the North East Heights. It is suburban but not exactly in a suburb. That may need to be explained. Easterners, and some from California, misunderstand Western cities. They expect a city core, like New York’s or Boston’s, and then a circle of microtowns around it—the Dariens and Greenwichs, or, on a more modest scale, the Lexingtons and Concords…or even, in its way, little Winchester, Massachusetts (where I am now).

But Western cities—Albuquerque, El Paso, Dallas, others in Texas and Arizona and beyond—aren’t like that. Or, at least, aren’t yet. They may be someday. But, for the moment, they sprawl vast across the land, advancing their borders with each new subdivision or development, and their suburbs are not bedroom villages but rather the oh-so-better sort of neighborhood, middle class and quiet, as opposed to the (said in faint tones of distaste) the “other” ones. The ones downtown, or on the river, where one can find the crystal and the crack, the gangs and the decay, the Illegals in their thousands…

Another thing that Easterners don’t understand is Western downtowns. They expect Western cities to have cores, again, like New York. They expect to go “into the city,” and find Life…people living in high-rise apartments, or brownstones…theaters, stores, crowds, restaurants. But, with a few exceptions (and those mostly on the Pacific coast), that’s not the case. Rather, Western cities have dead, concrete, and empty hearts—the inevitable consequence of the fact that they had their major growth in the auto-centric 1950s and 1960s, rather than the horse and the trolley of the nineteenth century.

And so, Western cities are full enough on weekdays. Everyone works downtown in office buildings and courthouses. But they work there only. At night, on holidays, or weekends, they go home. The city core empties out almost completely. To walk downtown on, say, a Saturday is to be alone. Your footsteps will literally echo between the cement facades of office complexes.

That’s if you’re lucky. If you are not, you will have company—the gangs and their knives, the junkies and their needles, the homeless and their untreated schizophrenia…

And, indeed, it was exactly into that world of concrete and emptiness that we were about to … albeit briefly…descend.

*

My parents were eager to do something new with us. And, newest of all the state’s attractions was the “Rail Runner.” This is an innovation in New Mexican affairs. It is a train that runs from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. As a rule, riders include both tourists eager to see to New Mexican countryside without having to drive through it, and commuters who work in Santa Fe but cannot afford to live there.

No one can live in Santa Fe. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But, it has become an expensive place, indeed. In my boyhood, it was simply one more city in the state—the capital of the state, yes, a tourist city, and recognizably a prettier city than Albuquerque, but a city all the same. Middle class people could live there easily, and working class people, too. At one point, my parents considered moving there. It was only a matter of luck that I did not spend my youth as a Santa Fe boy.

But, as I say, Santa Fe had been uniquely burdened. For one thing, it really is beautiful. More, it has long had a certain cache among artists and intellectuals. It isn’t quite Taos, with that town’s associations with D.H. Lawrence and all the rest, but Santa Fe does sport a considerable colony of painters and sculptors and writers. The wealthy, for whatever reason, followed as a kind of intellectual tourist class. These formed a diverse and weirdly interlinked community of money and the arts—a mix more common than you might think. (Recall Cape Cod.)

By the 1960s, movie stars had begun to settle there as well. Seeking relief from Hollywood, and association with the presumed purity of the desert and its more exotic (if stereotypical) inhabitants, they came in droves…first to stay in the ancient and romantic hotels in the center of the city, then to buy (ever more costly) homes within and round it.

The result of all of this has been to drive real estate prices through the roof and REAL people with REAL incomes find it increasingly difficult to discover places to live in the city. So, they take up residence in little towns that have sprung up around Santa Fe, or else live in Albuquerque.

If Santa Fe isn’t careful, it will eventually become one of those places that have somehow drifted off the map. They are, that is, no longer quite real, like the sort of seaside community that attracts yachts like flies to garbage, or ski towns in pristine mountains where even the snow-machines project Perrier. Once that happens, it can be very difficult turning back. You become artificial and irrelevant, at best an entertainment, like Main Street U.S.A., and, at worst, an insult to human intelligence, like certain college towns, where tenured professors in air conditioned offices proclaim reality an illusion, and add that you don’t understand this fact because, after all, you (unlike them) are too stupid to see it.

But, still, perhaps Santa Fe will escape that awful fate. There are, you see, still places in town—at least away from the city center—where you can find dust in the streets. That is a hopeful thing.

*

Two things strike me on re-reading that last. First, I realize that Santa Fe and cities like it are suburbs in reverse. That is, the typical Levittown is the place to which the middle class (and, sometimes, the rich) flee the poverty and dangers of the city. What’s happened in Santa Fe and its cousins is that the affluent have occupied the town’s center and driven everyone middle class or below to communities outside city limits. It is not, actually, without precedent. In the Paris built by Napoleon III, the working class was re-settled in suburbs just outside the city proper. The idea was to make certain that proletarians wouldn’t be able to threaten the state by occupying its capital. So, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Paris was circled by the “Red Belts,” working class neighborhoods that voted consistently for the Left and terrified All Right Thinking People.

Second, I have made cutting remarks about those cities or towns which become fashionable and wealthy because of their ability to attract celebrity, fame, and (as in the case of some college towns) the children of the rich. Perhaps I have exaggerated. Well, of course I have exaggerated.

Yet, there is some truth to it. There really are communities whose entire existence depends on the fact that they find themselves celebrated by association. Aspen’s place in the world is as much a product of Hunter S. Thompson and John Denver as of its ski areas. Sundance would not be what it is without Robert Redford and his film festival.

And, one wonders, what happens when fame ebbs away? When some other community or coastline becomes THE cool place for cool people to be? When the famous and the infamous discover that, by George, all the REALLY interesting artists and Neo-Vorticist potters and Reformed Tonalist HTML novelists have gone somewhere else? And beckon them to follow?

What then?

An aside: North of Boston there is a string of little seaside communities. At one time, they were the toast of New England, and perhaps New York City as well. To them, came the rich and the mighty, as well as the creative and the artistic. You can still see the huge wooden structures of their mansions and their hotels up and down the coast.

They are dead.

The rich and powerful long ago departed for other places. The wooden hotels and resorts emptied out, were abandoned to decay, or burned in mysterious fires. The communities became bankrupt and empty. Only today, and only in certain places, have these towns begun to return, and then only as suburbs and bedroom villages, or tourist traps by the coast, where visitors on buses can get fried clams and fake Scrimshaw and tasteful souvenirs of superglue and seashells.

There is a prophecy there, somewhere.

*

But getting back to my parents…

They wanted to take us someplace fun and new…and to go there a new way…

So, one morning, we clambered into their mini-van, and headed off to the depths of the city on a Saturday, all concrete and silence.

And from there we would make our way to roads of steel.

But that’s for next time.







Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

DC Beer Summit...

So, like a lot of people I’ve been watching with interest President Obama’s attempt to smooth over the small but national crisis that grew out of the confrontation between Harvard professor Skip Gates (who’s Black) and James Crowley, the (White) Cambridge policeman who arrested him. You’ll recall that Obama invited the two of them to the White House for a beer and a tranquil chat.

It seems to have worked. The two men “agreed to disagree” and said nice things about one another. The crisis itself has receded from the headlines. If society’s underlying assumptions that led to the confrontation in the first place haven’t been overcome, at least they’re being discussed.

And yet, a day or so ago, there appeared in our local paper an angry letter from an outraged woman critiquing the Beer Summit from a Feminist perspective. She informed her readers that it was a shameful display of patriarchal attitudes, with sexist good old boys working out their typically shady deals over alcoholic beverages.

There is, of course, a message here, to wit: whatever you do, no matter how benign, benevolent, humane, and successful, there will always be someone—usually, albeit not always an academic or an intellectual—eager to tell you that it was shameful, and you, yourself, ought to be hanged, drawn, and quartered on public TV.

Oh, and disemboweled after that.

But not before you apologize. In a nice way. Ever so contritely. And in triplicate.