Yup! To quote Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and they are us".
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Boardman writes: "Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, or
so the conventional wisdom left and right would have you believe. More
realistically, the greatest threat to America today is actually believing
that Trump is the greatest threat to America today."
Kiara Jacobs, 8, hugs her brother Quentin Stamen, 13, at a memorial in the
Cleveland park where Tamir Rice was fatally shot by police officers.
(photo:
Ty Wright/NYT)
National Mindlessness, Police to POTUS, Threatens Nation
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 May 16
"We are in serious times, and this is a really serious job. This is not
entertainment; this is not a reality show. This is a contest for the
presidency of the United States." - President Obama, May 6, 2016
Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, or so the
conventional
wisdom left and right would have you believe. More realistically, the
greatest threat to America today is actually believing that Trump is the
greatest threat to America today.
To believe that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, one
needs to be a little hysterical or dishonest (or both). Actually believing
in the mortal Trump threat requires believing that the Congress, the
Supreme
Court, the military, the security state, and all the other the other
agencies of government, as well as all the states and most of the populace
will suddenly become helpless to oppose the White House. That is an
imaginary helplessness with no basis in reality, as viciously demonstrated
by the Republican Congress of the past six years. For better or worse, the
Constitution is designed to enable gridlock.
Advanced Trump-phobia is mostly political posturing, as in the president's
quote above. The country is drowning in bad faith like this and worse,
because the country isn't ready to look itself honestly in the mirror. When
your political system produces bad results, it's all too easy, cynical, and
dishonest to blame the results. That's just politics. Intellectual
integrity
is quite a different orientation, one that is in short supply in a country
in the near death-grip of decades of national mindlessness. Examples are
plentiful.
"We'll pay $6 million, but we don't admit doing anything wrong"
On November 22, 2014, Cleveland police officers drove into a playground and
executed a 12-year-old boy less than one second after they arrived. The cop
who did the killing had had violence problems when he was with another
police department. The prosecutor, who failed to get an indictment from a
grand jury, later lost a bid for re-election. The family of the boy, Tamir
Rice, sued the city in federal court under the civil rights statute. In
April 2016, Cleveland agreed to pay Tamir Rice's estate $6 million, perhaps
the largest Cleveland settlement in a police-shooting case. Under the
settlement, the Rice family will drop its complaint against officers Frank
Garmback and Timothy Loehmann, the shooter, who are both still city
employees. While paying $6 million, the city admits no wrongdoing, even
though the event was rife with wrongdoing.
Failure to admit wrongdoing despite committing wrongdoing has long been an
acceptable corrupt practice in the American legal system. Instead of
accountability for killing or maiming people, the perpetrators are allowed
to lie legally as one means of limiting their damages in a fair trial.
Corporations that create Love Canal or Gulf Coast oil spills are the most
common beneficiaries of this class-based double jeopardy against the
victims. So common is this blatant injustice that it is rarely challenged
politically, or denounced, or more than mentioned. But it is a
soul-destroying practice embedded in American culture that enriches the
rich
and protects the guilty. Voters know this viscerally, so when Trump says
the
system is rigged, they know he's right, and they know almost no one else is
telling them that truth.
"Honoring slavers is our way of showing that slavery was wrong"
On April 28, 2016, Yale University president Peter Salovey tried to explain
the Yale Corporation's decision to retain the name of the residential hall
Calhoun College, named for South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, Yale 1804. A
lawyer, Calhoun owned dozens of slaves and defended slavery as "a positive
good." He fought for the expansion of slavery into new territories. He
argued that the federal government should defend minority rights, meaning
the minority comprising southern slave owners. He defended states' rights
in
general and in particular the right of the South to secede, either
peacefully or by force:
If you who represent the stronger portion [the North], cannot agree to
settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the
States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are
unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to
do,
when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.
In other words, Calhoun was a significant historical figure who was also a
slave-owning bigot and traitor, lacking only the opportunity to betray his
country because he died in 1850. Yale named Calhoun College after him in
1931, largely on the basis of his achievements - serving as vice president,
congressman, and senator (as almost no other Yalies had) - not on the basis
of his character. After months of public dialogue within the Yale community
and private consideration within the Yale Corporation, Salovey explained
the
decision to continue honoring Calhoun this way:
We are a university whose motto is "light and truth." Our core mission is
to
educate and discover. These ideals guided our decisions. Through teaching
and learning about the most troubling aspects of our past, our community
will be better prepared to challenge their legacies. More than a decision
about a name, we must focus on understanding the past and present, and
preparing our students for the future.
This explains nothing, and students were unhappy. What in this somewhat
lofty rhetoric makes it an educational necessity to honor a slave-owning
secessionist? Nothing. These are experiences that are not illuminated by
having students live in a place named for a horrible exemplar of a horrific
past. Calhoun and the legacy he represents will not be hidden if the place
is called by any other, benign name, Salovey's rationalizing
notwithstanding:
Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and
racism. Yale is part of that history. We cannot erase American history but
we can confront it, teach it, and learn from it. The decision to retain
Calhoun College's name reflects the importance of this vital educational
imperative.
The decision to retain Calhoun College's name demonstrates a
muddy-mindedness that can't or won't distinguish between changing a name
and
erasing history. By Yale's form of reasoning, Calhoun may as well fly the
Confederate flag. Surely people as smart as those at Yale can figure out
how
to confront the history of slavery and racism without honoring slavers and
racists.
Making the Calhoun decision even more indefensible, Yale has also announced
the names of two new colleges it plans to build. One will be Benjamin
Franklin College, in honor of the recipient of a Yale honorary degree in
1753. While the choice is ambiguous (and was greeted by laughter from
students at a town hall meeting), Franklin's brilliance and contributions
to
learning are undeniable. And the fact that he was a slave owner has real,
potential educational value in tracing how Franklin came to be an
abolitionist. Calhoun died unreconstructed and apparently unreflective.
Yale's other new college will be named for Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray, a
1965 Yale Law School graduate and 1979 recipient of an honorary Doctor of
Divinity. Born into a poor black family in 1910, Pauli Murray grew up to
spend most of her 75 years fighting for positive social change that should
make Calhoun roll over in his grave. As Salovey put it, without subterfuge
this time:
Pauli Murray represents the best of Yale: a pre-eminent intellectual
inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country. She
was at the intellectual forefront of the battles that defined 20th-century
America and continue to be part of our discourse today: civil rights,
women's rights, and the role of spirituality in modern society.
Yale, like most of America, is having trouble dealing fairly with minority
students and faculty. Yale, like most of America, is still part of the
national mindlessness about race and ethnicity. Of that, at least, Calhoun
would be proud. Trump, on the other hand, might note that at Yale's going
rate, $250 million could create a Trump College at Yale.
"Hey, be grateful, drones kill fewer civilians than carpet bombing!"
For almost pure psychic numbing, let's turn to the White House, where it's
needed most (except possibly at the Pentagon). What the Germans did to
London and Coventry in World War II constituted war crimes, unlike what our
side did to Dresden and Hiroshima. Killing civilians (at least
deliberately)
violates the law of war, or at least it used to. Having done a lot of
saturation bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, to little military or political
avail, the US decided to use the cheaper, more "precise" drone attack
tactic, also to little military or political avail. The more meaningful
accomplishment of drone warfare has been to turn the president (first Bush,
and now Obama, more so) from the chief executive into the chief
executioner.
There was a time when having the president of the United States start his
day by picking the names of people to kill from a list would have been
repugnant. Drone killing is, on the face of it, a war crime. And drone
warfare is waged largely in secret (except from the victims). No wonder it
goes unchallenged by Congress and presidential candidates alike.
Even Bernie Sanders as president would continue to send drones to kill
people on a list, people with no due process rights, no rights of appeal,
nothing but the right to be imperial sacrifices in the name of imperial
security. In March, Sanders defended his non-pacifist cred, citing the wars
he's supported and defending the party line on drone warfare:
Drones are a big issue, and drones have done some good things. They've been
selective; they've taken out people who should be taken out.. [Drones have
also done] some terrible things, which have been counterproductive to the
United States. But would I rule them out completely? No, I would not. But I
am aware that they have in some cases, you know, you use a drone and you
end
up killing 40 people in a wedding in Afghanistan; that is not a terribly
humane thing to do or productive thing to do.
In the past, Sanders said he would continue to wage drone warfare, but
would
use drones "very, very selectively and effectively." This is American
politics today. The good guys want to do as little evil as possible, the
bad
guys are ok with as much evil as seems necessary. In April, "Obama put the
lesser-evil argument this way:
There's no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone
strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly, you
know,
"Let's bomb a village." That is not how it's-folks have operated. And what
I
can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any
drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that
occur in conventional war.
Never mind that the rate of civilian casualties in conventional war was
driven to new highs with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So
the president is using an obscene level of carnage to make his personal
assassination program seem reasonable. Presidential assassination by
autocratic fiat was new in American life when President Bush first crossed
that line. Presidential assassination, aka executive action, used to be
against even American law. A decade after the first drone strike, the
country in its muddled mindlessness pretends we're not all proxy assassins.
That's too hard to swallow, to admit, to address, to stop, to prosecute.
That's reality. It's much easier, and less dangerous, to pit illusion
against illusion, to pretend that Donald Trump is a freak-out lethal threat
to an America that hasn't existed for a long time. That's a reality show
for
real. The president and the people collude in the same unconscionable
charade: he doesn't want to tell the truth and the people don't want to
hear
it.
The possibility of healing America continues to recede in the rearview
mirror. A nation that creates a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo
is not a healthy nation. A nation that maintains a torture concentration
camp like Guantanamo is not a healthy nation. A nation that cannot come to
terms with a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo and close it down
and hold those responsible to account is not a healthy nation. Guantanamo
has nothing to do with Donald Trump beyond being another visible symptom of
the same metastasizing spiritual cancer.
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Kiara Jacobs, 8, hugs her brother Quentin Stamen, 13, at a memorial in the
Cleveland park where Tamir Rice was fatally shot by police officers.
(photo:
Ty Wright/NYT)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
National Mindlessness, Police to POTUS, Threatens Nation
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 May 16
"We are in serious times, and this is a really serious job. This is not
entertainment; this is not a reality show. This is a contest for the
presidency of the United States." - President Obama, May 6, 2016
onald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, or so the
conventional
wisdom left and right would have you believe. More realistically, the
greatest threat to America today is actually believing that Trump is the
greatest threat to America today.
To believe that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, one
needs to be a little hysterical or dishonest (or both). Actually believing
in the mortal Trump threat requires believing that the Congress, the
Supreme
Court, the military, the security state, and all the other the other
agencies of government, as well as all the states and most of the populace
will suddenly become helpless to oppose the White House. That is an
imaginary helplessness with no basis in reality, as viciously demonstrated
by the Republican Congress of the past six years. For better or worse, the
Constitution is designed to enable gridlock.
Advanced Trump-phobia is mostly political posturing, as in the president's
quote above. The country is drowning in bad faith like this and worse,
because the country isn't ready to look itself honestly in the mirror. When
your political system produces bad results, it's all too easy, cynical, and
dishonest to blame the results. That's just politics. Intellectual
integrity
is quite a different orientation, one that is in short supply in a country
in the near death-grip of decades of national mindlessness. Examples are
plentiful.
"We'll pay $6 million, but we don't admit doing anything wrong"
On November 22, 2014, Cleveland police officers drove into a playground and
executed a 12-year-old boy less than one second after they arrived. The cop
who did the killing had had violence problems when he was with another
police department. The prosecutor, who failed to get an indictment from a
grand jury, later lost a bid for re-election. The family of the boy, Tamir
Rice, sued the city in federal court under the civil rights statute. In
April 2016, Cleveland agreed to pay Tamir Rice's estate $6 million, perhaps
the largest Cleveland settlement in a police-shooting case. Under the
settlement, the Rice family will drop its complaint against officers Frank
Garmback and Timothy Loehmann, the shooter, who are both still city
employees. While paying $6 million, the city admits no wrongdoing, even
though the event was rife with wrongdoing.
Failure to admit wrongdoing despite committing wrongdoing has long been an
acceptable corrupt practice in the American legal system. Instead of
accountability for killing or maiming people, the perpetrators are allowed
to lie legally as one means of limiting their damages in a fair trial.
Corporations that create Love Canal or Gulf Coast oil spills are the most
common beneficiaries of this class-based double jeopardy against the
victims. So common is this blatant injustice that it is rarely challenged
politically, or denounced, or more than mentioned. But it is a
soul-destroying practice embedded in American culture that enriches the
rich
and protects the guilty. Voters know this viscerally, so when Trump says
the
system is rigged, they know he's right, and they know almost no one else is
telling them that truth.
"Honoring slavers is our way of showing that slavery was wrong"
On April 28, 2016, Yale University president Peter Salovey tried to explain
the Yale Corporation's decision to retain the name of the residential hall
Calhoun College, named for South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, Yale 1804. A
lawyer, Calhoun owned dozens of slaves and defended slavery as "a positive
good." He fought for the expansion of slavery into new territories. He
argued that the federal government should defend minority rights, meaning
the minority comprising southern slave owners. He defended states' rights
in
general and in particular the right of the South to secede, either
peacefully or by force:
If you who represent the stronger portion [the North], cannot agree to
settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the
States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are
unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to
do,
when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.
In other words, Calhoun was a significant historical figure who was also a
slave-owning bigot and traitor, lacking only the opportunity to betray his
country because he died in 1850. Yale named Calhoun College after him in
1931, largely on the basis of his achievements - serving as vice president,
congressman, and senator (as almost no other Yalies had) - not on the basis
of his character. After months of public dialogue within the Yale community
and private consideration within the Yale Corporation, Salovey explained
the
decision to continue honoring Calhoun this way:
We are a university whose motto is "light and truth." Our core mission is
to
educate and discover. These ideals guided our decisions. Through teaching
and learning about the most troubling aspects of our past, our community
will be better prepared to challenge their legacies. More than a decision
about a name, we must focus on understanding the past and present, and
preparing our students for the future.
This explains nothing, and students were unhappy. What in this somewhat
lofty rhetoric makes it an educational necessity to honor a slave-owning
secessionist? Nothing. These are experiences that are not illuminated by
having students live in a place named for a horrible exemplar of a horrific
past. Calhoun and the legacy he represents will not be hidden if the place
is called by any other, benign name, Salovey's rationalizing
notwithstanding:
Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and
racism. Yale is part of that history. We cannot erase American history but
we can confront it, teach it, and learn from it. The decision to retain
Calhoun College's name reflects the importance of this vital educational
imperative.
The decision to retain Calhoun College's name demonstrates a
muddy-mindedness that can't or won't distinguish between changing a name
and
erasing history. By Yale's form of reasoning, Calhoun may as well fly the
Confederate flag. Surely people as smart as those at Yale can figure out
how
to confront the history of slavery and racism without honoring slavers and
racists.
Making the Calhoun decision even more indefensible, Yale has also announced
the names of two new colleges it plans to build. One will be Benjamin
Franklin College, in honor of the recipient of a Yale honorary degree in
1753. While the choice is ambiguous (and was greeted by laughter from
students at a town hall meeting), Franklin's brilliance and contributions
to
learning are undeniable. And the fact that he was a slave owner has real,
potential educational value in tracing how Franklin came to be an
abolitionist. Calhoun died unreconstructed and apparently unreflective.
Yale's other new college will be named for Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray, a
1965 Yale Law School graduate and 1979 recipient of an honorary Doctor of
Divinity. Born into a poor black family in 1910, Pauli Murray grew up to
spend most of her 75 years fighting for positive social change that should
make Calhoun roll over in his grave. As Salovey put it, without subterfuge
this time:
Pauli Murray represents the best of Yale: a pre-eminent intellectual
inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country. She
was at the intellectual forefront of the battles that defined 20th-century
America and continue to be part of our discourse today: civil rights,
women's rights, and the role of spirituality in modern society.
Yale, like most of America, is having trouble dealing fairly with minority
students and faculty. Yale, like most of America, is still part of the
national mindlessness about race and ethnicity. Of that, at least, Calhoun
would be proud. Trump, on the other hand, might note that at Yale's going
rate, $250 million could create a Trump College at Yale.
"Hey, be grateful, drones kill fewer civilians than carpet bombing!"
For almost pure psychic numbing, let's turn to the White House, where it's
needed most (except possibly at the Pentagon). What the Germans did to
London and Coventry in World War II constituted war crimes, unlike what our
side did to Dresden and Hiroshima. Killing civilians (at least
deliberately)
violates the law of war, or at least it used to. Having done a lot of
saturation bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, to little military or political
avail, the US decided to use the cheaper, more "precise" drone attack
tactic, also to little military or political avail. The more meaningful
accomplishment of drone warfare has been to turn the president (first Bush,
and now Obama, more so) from the chief executive into the chief
executioner.
There was a time when having the president of the United States start his
day by picking the names of people to kill from a list would have been
repugnant. Drone killing is, on the face of it, a war crime. And drone
warfare is waged largely in secret (except from the victims). No wonder it
goes unchallenged by Congress and presidential candidates alike.
Even Bernie Sanders as president would continue to send drones to kill
people on a list, people with no due process rights, no rights of appeal,
nothing but the right to be imperial sacrifices in the name of imperial
security. In March, Sanders defended his non-pacifist cred, citing the wars
he's supported and defending the party line on drone warfare:
Drones are a big issue, and drones have done some good things. They've been
selective; they've taken out people who should be taken out.. [Drones have
also done] some terrible things, which have been counterproductive to the
United States. But would I rule them out completely? No, I would not. But I
am aware that they have in some cases, you know, you use a drone and you
end
up killing 40 people in a wedding in Afghanistan; that is not a terribly
humane thing to do or productive thing to do.
In the past, Sanders said he would continue to wage drone warfare, but
would
use drones "very, very selectively and effectively." This is American
politics today. The good guys want to do as little evil as possible, the
bad
guys are ok with as much evil as seems necessary. In April, "Obama put the
lesser-evil argument this way:
There's no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone
strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly, you
know,
"Let's bomb a village." That is not how it's-folks have operated. And what
I
can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any
drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that
occur in conventional war.
Never mind that the rate of civilian casualties in conventional war was
driven to new highs with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So
the president is using an obscene level of carnage to make his personal
assassination program seem reasonable. Presidential assassination by
autocratic fiat was new in American life when President Bush first crossed
that line. Presidential assassination, aka executive action, used to be
against even American law. A decade after the first drone strike, the
country in its muddled mindlessness pretends we're not all proxy assassins.
That's too hard to swallow, to admit, to address, to stop, to prosecute.
That's reality. It's much easier, and less dangerous, to pit illusion
against illusion, to pretend that Donald Trump is a freak-out lethal threat
to an America that hasn't existed for a long time. That's a reality show
for
real. The president and the people collude in the same unconscionable
charade: he doesn't want to tell the truth and the people don't want to
hear
it.
The possibility of healing America continues to recede in the rearview
mirror. A nation that creates a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo
is not a healthy nation. A nation that maintains a torture concentration
camp like Guantanamo is not a healthy nation. A nation that cannot come to
terms with a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo and close it down
and hold those responsible to account is not a healthy nation. Guantanamo
has nothing to do with Donald Trump beyond being another visible symptom of
the same metastasizing spiritual cancer.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
