Vote early. Vote often.
Via Zoe Trope, we learn that the American Family Association is conducting a poll to determine America’s attitudes regarding same-sex marriage. They intend to present the results to Congress.
Unfortunately, they neglected to let a broad spectrum of Americans know about the survey. However will it be truly representative of our country in all its diverse majesty? So go, vote—then spread the word.
You know?
Happy anniversary.
We all know that George W. Bush is unelectable. After all, he lost last time; he’ll lose again. In every conceivable metric, he has failed to clear the bar set by even the most inept of presidential predecessors: whether it’s the gutshot economy, the punch-drunk war, the hamfisted cronyism, the Nixonian authoritarianism, or the ludicrous foreign policy, as conducted by a bunch of froshling poli sci majors on a Diplomacy binge, he’s presided over the most appalling collection of creeps, crooks, dolts, and faith-based dipshits ever to tap a Teapot Dome. His administration has been a miserable failure; any slob in a smelly T-shirt could beat him in a walk on that special Tuesday in November. The man is unelectable.
But he is selectable.
So here’s a clip’n’save vocabulary list of tricks and tactics we all ought to keep a weather eye out for, beyond the obvious black-box ballot-stuffing threat of Diebold and company:
Rehnquist v. tr. To purge voter rolls of blocs designated as likely to vote Democratic, whether by excluding anyone with the same last name as someone who might be a felon, or directly intimidating minority voters at the polls. Usage: “Katherine Harris really rehnquisted Florida in 2000.”
Kennedy v. tr. To gerrymander voting districts to prevent adequate representation of minorities; from the act of using specious legal reasoning to defend this practice. Usage: “The Republicans are getting more brazen about how they kennedy voting districts.” Note: overshadowed by the more virulent synonym, delay.
O’Connor n. The hypocrisy of strenuously attempting to appear principled while openly aligning oneself with unethical, amoral factions, lending them respectability in return for the tactical advantages gained by trampling the very principles one claims to uphold. Usage: “There’s an entire class of ‘good’ Republicans in this country, lost in an advanced state of o’connor.”
Thomas v. tr. To “work the ref,” manipulating rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and public relations to prevent crucial information from reaching the public, thus ensuring the vote goes your way. Usage: “The punditocracy appears if anything to be even more complicit in thomasing political coverage in favor of the Republicans than they were in 2000.” Note: thomasing differs from diebolding in that no vote tampering occurs, per se.
Scalia n. Any Supreme Court decision which is a one-time only deal, setting no precedent, engaging in transparent sophistry that makes a mockery of the articles cited, and effecting a naked power grab that shatters our much-vaunted system of checks and balances. Usage: “Bush v. Gore? Total scalia, dude.”
Over it? Feh. Move on? Ha! Happy anniversary, y’all, and remember: he’s unelectable—but selectable. The gang that can’t shoot straight is governing like there’s no tomorrow— certainly not one that belongs to anyone but them. They will not go gently into that good night.
But they will go there, by God.
Unelectable.
I’m gonna quote Atrios on this one:
...and another thing. Stop ceding the goddamn debate. Who here thinks Howard Dean can beat Bush? Why Ted, you ignorant slut, Fred Flintstone could take Bush with Barney Rubble as his campaign manager. Wesley Clark should stop saying that he needs to be the nominee because someone needs to be able to match Bush at foreign policy. What Clark should say is that Joey Tribiani could match Bush at foreign policy, though he, Clark, has the most experience. Stop acknowledging that Bush is strong on anything. He’s a big loser. He’s a miserable failure. He’s lost 3 million jobs. He got us into a screwed up war. Our soldiers are being killed by terrorists. The Middle East is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. OBL is alive. Hussein is alive.
Say it with me, everybody: George W. Bush is unelectable.
Reflexive decency.
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a faggot there from Boston—not a blue-blood Brahmin, neither, most as upright as a straight man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a lawyer in a big firm out that way, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could get married when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? Now, I’m sweet on Dolores, as you know, and I was just about to go and ask for her hand if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a state in that country where they’d let that faggot marry a man, or let some bulldagger swoop in on sweet Dolores, I drawed out. I says I’ll never get married ag’in. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never get married ag’in as long as I live.
With thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, for reminding me; apologies to Messr. Twain; and a great big dollop of neener dumped all over Jonah Goldberg and all his icky, phobic ilk.
The Devil, quoting Scripture.
Matthew, Chapter 7, that ol’ Sermon on the Mount:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Some of the trees in question: Allen Brill introduces the Right Christians to the latest batch of the Christian Right, who’ll doubtless be spearheading the upcoming Last Stand for Bigotry against gay marriage. David Neiwert does some digging into recent efforts by Richard Mellon Scaife & co. to do to America’s churches what they’ve done to America’s conservative movement. One of Neiwert’s links leads us back to Brill and thence to a connection between black box voting and a particularly nasty brand of Christianist. And y’all did remember to make a copy of this Harper’s article from a while back, didn’t you?
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
(Which, you know, is fine and dandy for Him. But what about the rest of us, huh? Stuck down here with these corrupt and evil-fruited trees.)
Dennis Miller: Tax and spend liberal!
In a surprise move guaranteed to confound those who’d counted on Dennis Miller’s acerbic wit to lend a certain cultural legitimacy to the Bush administration and its lack of a popular mandate, the former SNL anchorman recently spoke in favor of not just rolling back the Bush tax cuts, but raising taxes—across the board.
In the course of a broader discussion of his politics, Miller said “he’d like to keep a dollar out of every two he makes.”
This would, of course, translate to a tax rate of 50%. The highest federal tax rate at the moment is 35%. American families near the median of income distribution currently pay one dollar in taxes for every four dollars they make.
Though it would mean an increase in taxes for almost every single American, the Miller Tax of 50% could easily raise enough money to eradicate budget deficits currently plaguing state governments, as well as address the structural deficits built into future federal budgets. It would also go a long way towards fully funding such underperforming Bush administration programs as No Child Left Behind, Americorps, the Department of Homeland Security, and the War on Terror, as well as help assuage fears of looming crises in Social Security and Medicare—yet it would be a far cry from the 1950s top tax rate of 94%.
But a tax increase of this magnitude would work against the avowed goals of many of Miller’s newfound allies on the right, such as Grover “Drown it in a Bathtub” Norquist, who has compared progressive taxation to the Holocaust. Still, the Miller Tax is a flat tax, and so would presumably avoid that particular criticism.
As of this writing, Mallard Fillmore could not be reached for comment.
Balls out.
Most of what passes for conventional wisdom on gender roles in this day and age, whether it’s differently feministed essentialism (“Dragging our scrotums through the underbrush,” says Utah, and I giggle every time. “We’d swing in the trees, and steal sheep”) or prim and proper Puritans, who insist gender is as immutable as sex—which is why we must raise our children well, guarding against the depredations of preverts (sic! sic!) who can derail the purity of God’s plan with a chance remark, or an eyebrow wiggle (wait: whether? or?), well, it all makes me think of an old skit from Mad TV from back in as we like to call it the day: Debra Wilson, doing an infomercial parody for Men Are From Mars, Women Are Also From Mars—Just a Different Part, turns to the camera and very earnestly says, “I’ve learned that when my husband says he’d like me to make him a sandwich, what he’s really trying to say is, ‘I’m hungry.’”
All of which is by way of saying to Professor Reynolds and Kim Du Toit: if you can’t stick your balls to the wall with the panache of a Dave Sim, well, hell. Don’t bother getting out of bed.
(Why, yes. There is a surfeit of bitter irony dripping from the undercarriage of that sentence. —I’m piggybacking off Roy Edroso yet again; I had to add value somehow.)
Smoking guns at Sylvia Beach.
We’re at the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast. Yeah, if you’re ever here, you’re going to want to stay here; it’s cool. It’s great. Go read up on it if you like. That’s not what’s important here.
Up on the third floor, in the library, among all the other magazines and books lying about, was an old Time magazine with Colin Powell on the cover. “Where have you gone, Colin Powell?” it says, on the cover. “The Secretary of State isn’t the foreign policy general everyone thought he’d be. What’s holding him back?” Up in the corner: “Colleges of the year.” And you flip through this magazine, and it’s weird: it’s from another world. They’re talking about Aaliyah’s plane crash and Laura Bush’s book club and China’s pandas; they’re worried about that JC Penney ad where the mom tugs down her daughter’s midriff-baring jeans; and yes, they’re talking about whether Israel has the right to assassinate leaders of the Palestinian Intifadeh and the misrepresentations behind Bush’s hypocritical stem cell policy, but they’re also talking about that 14-year-old ringer who pitched in the Little League; they’re talking about Ritalin ads and the Queen of Sheba and Jonathan Franzen and South American 20th century abstractionists and Band of Brothers and how to stop pop-up ads.
What they aren’t talking about is Iraq. What they aren’t talking about is Afghanistan. What they aren’t talking about is the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What they aren’t talking about is terrorism.
The date on the cover is September 10, 2001.
Oh, but wait: they do mention Iraq. In the profile on Colin Powell, when Johanna McGeary is talking about how Powell got “‘blown off course’ by Bush’s basic principle of anything-but-Clinton,” just before they hare off into how Powell’s sensible plan for North Korea was scuttled by a Bush Administration petulant over the plan’s Clintonianness, above a Rogue’s Gallery of neocons, the “group of true believers in missile defense” who help keep Powell stuck in a box—Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle, with his house in Provence; Paul Wolfowitz; John Bolton; Lewis “Scooter” Libby—there’s a bit on how the relatively new Administration is dealing with Iraq. Allow me to quote at some little length:
When the Secretary jumped out front on Iraq, pushing to “toughen” crumbling UN sanctions against old nemesis Saddam Hussein by making them “smarter,” conservatives scoffed that meant weaker. But Powell persuaded the President—because, say aides and rivals alike, he’s very effective when he “marshalls his facts.” The Administration—and Powell—was embarrassed later, when Russia rebuffed the plan.
And as soon as Wolfowitz, a zealous advocate of “regime change” in Baghdad—backing dissidents to overthrow Saddam—settled into his office, he told European parliamentarians that Powell was not the last word on sanctions or Iraq policy. Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam unhorsed, says an official at State. “But you need a serious plan that’s doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk.” Powell’s unwillingness to fight any less-than-total war is legendary, and the particulars of launching a covert insurgency among the feuding Iraqi opposition factions would give any general pause. The proposition is still “hypothetical,” he told Time. But plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.
So right now I feel a little sick and I’m going to close this file and put it away and open it later when I have a hook-up and can drum up some links to flesh this out. But right now I don’t even feel angry, and I’m not even surprised. The day before the towers fell, and terrorism became job one and missile defense took a back burner, and it’s clear as day we’re going to be making more of Iraq before the next election. Nothing changed the day after this magazine came out, for all that it’s from another world. We just got an excuse. We got our motivation. We got a backstory we could mumble to ourselves before we got into character.
And it’s not like this is something I suddenly learned or anything, and I hardly imagine it’s news to you. They’ve been gunning for Iraq since the late ’90s, after all. Why else do you think Rumsfeld scribbled “Judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not” while the Pentagon still smoldered?
It’s just that it’s still startling to see it all laid out so neatly and cleanly: a story so blatantly in violation of what’s supposed to be true in the pages of a popular news magazine, where just about anyone could stumble over it. Except it’s from another world: one just over two years old, and already just about lost over the event horizon of the memory hole. —It’s fitting, I suppose, that the lies we continue to tell ourselves are this naked and this easily pierced, this easily ripped away. (These lies are shredded every day, after all. The mediascape is littered with so many smoking guns that we can’t make them out for the smog.) —What we’ve done and what we’re still doing is so awful, so misguided, so monumentally stupid, that the arrancy of the nonsense we choose to believe is a sign of the lengths to which we’ll go to avoid seeing the truth.
No, I’m Atrios!
I think Billmon has the best possible response to the most recent round of I’m-gonna-tell! crap foisted on us all by a right-wing loser. (Link to him? I’m not even going to dignify his name.)
Climbing up and climbing down.
Post in haste, repent in leisure; get blind drunk on righteous invective and climb up on the bar and spill your fury till the the dudgeon’s knee-high and rising, then wake up the next morning and wonder who the strange fellow is in your bed, and what foul taste is in your mouth. —Always check your fellow pitchforkers and torch-wielders: not because it’s unseemly to find yourself chanting slogans with the “wrong” crowd, but because it’ll help you get some perspective on the nature of the monster you’re gunning up against. When I read—
About a year-and-a-half ago, people in the intelligence community came and said-guys like Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian and other terrorists weren’t being touched because they’d been ordered not to investigate the cases, not to prosecute them, because there were being funded by the Saudis and a political decision was being made at the highest levels, don’t do anything that would embarrass the Saudi government.
—I immediately started thinking about stonewalling 9/11 investigations and flying Bin Ladens around the country and the Carlyle Group and I went off the deep end. What I should have been thinking about was Alamoudi and al-Arian and the USA PATRIOT Act, and what I’d be saying if it weren’t Grover “drown it in the bathtub” Norquist in the hot seat.
Yes, it’s an ugly mess. Neither Alamoudi nor al-Arian are sacrificial lambs to bigotry and religious intolerance—but neither can I chuck them as evil evil bad bad traitors and throw away the key. Claims of moral clarity are always suspect. Nothing is ever clearly cut. Alamoudi could be a callow opportunist, and al-Arian a naïve fool; treason is a serious charge, and what it’s said they’ve done is no more in the name of destroying America than it is in the name of justice and liberty or a fast buck or self-aggrandizement. Let’s face it: the American government such as it is currently has a certain tarnish about its credibility when it comes to making these claims. There is doubt, and Alamoudi and al-Arian deserve the benefit of it. —And Grover Norquist could as easily and as genuinely believe that government has no business condemning a person for their associations and affiliations, and he could as earnestly and honestly believe that supporting these men was (and perhaps still is) a good way to get to the better America and the better world he sees when he closes his eyes. “In any case,” says Joshua Micah Marshall of Norquist, “after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he’d been naïve and then just dug himself deeper,” and Lord knows if you have to listen to him or me on something like this, please, please listen to him.
We are all hypocrites, we all do monumentally stupid things for reasons the angels could not assail. Treason is a serious charge. There’s doubt, and, God help me, much as I loathe and despise Grover Norquist and all things Norquististic, he deserves the benefit of it. I can’t in good conscience call him a traitor, not literally, not by the book of Article III, Section 3. (The devil on my shoulder whispers in my ear, “Not yet,” but we shall ignore it.) —And since naïvete and foolish pride isn’t illegal; since insisting on the moral equivalence of progressive taxation and genocide isn’t against the law; since it isn’t a crime to take cheap shots at people with more moral courage than you will ever know, well: I’m thinking maybe I should dial down the let-him-rot-in-jail rhetoric. (“For the moment,” sneers the devil. —It remains to be seen, after all. In the final analysis.)
(Do I still want the head of Grover Norquist? Geeze, I dunno. What the fuck would I do with it?)
But! I am not climbing down from the rooftops yet. His work as a tax “reformer” is morally hollow. What he’s wrought with his misguided, solipsistic, beast-starving rhetoric is a blight on our country and its political landscape; it’s a deadly threat to everything I hold dear. I’m still serious about the frogmarching and the pelting with garbage and the tar and the feathers and the riding him out of town on a rail.
Next Thursday good for you?
Bring me the head of Grover Norquist.
And I’m not too picky about whether the body’s attached.
We already knew he was a menace. This smirking, smooth-talking moral vacuum, this avaricious monster who masks his pathological greed as a pathological hatred of anything smacking of “gummint,” this peddler of shopworn lies who wants us all to believe that government is Something Else, some Other outside our control, that civic life and civic duty are beyond us, who wants us to think we are disempowered so that we will join him in smashing the very hallowed institutions that have empowered us all for centuries. This thug who hates anything and everything that looks like the America we know and love. This walking Enclosure Act, whose shit-smeared grin reeks with the tragedy of the commons. This parasite, whose glossy coat depends on the hatred he can churn up against people much better than himself. This nasty, hollow wretch who has forgotten if he ever knew what government is for, who actively works to prevent others from leaving this world a better place than they found it.
This traitor.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean it in the sense that he stands against everything I want this country to be—though he does. I mean it quite literally. I mean it in a Section 3 of Article III of the United States Constitution kind of way. If what John Loftus alleges is true, Grover Norquist has levied war against us. He has adhered to our enemies. He has given them aid and comfort.
He is a traitor.
We know why the mindless school of piranhas currently passing for the right wing in this country plays the game they do. In pressing for impeachment of a Democratic president on laughably flimsy—on insultingly hypocritical grounds, they have made that tool much harder to use, raised the bar necessary to clear before we will undergo that grinding process. In heightening the contradictions of our public discourse, flinging “treason” and “traitor” around with appalling carelessness, they have weakened those words, cheapened them, removed the teeth and claws we need to rip this rot out of our lives. “Oh, it’s just more partisan bickering,” the chattering classes will chatter. “He said, he said. On the other hand. In the balance. It remains to be seen.” And we will push against this apathy, and maybe something will happen, eventually. Maybe he’ll stay where he is, muddied but unbowed. Maybe he’ll resign and take up a less-visible post in a think-tank. Maybe he’ll run away to fight another day, maybe he’ll take up running state-wide initiatives to weaken state governments, instead: faux-populist scams designed to siphon off contributions from gullible six-packs while pissing on the foundations of the civic pride he affects to love. Maybe he’ll write a book.
That isn’t good enough. Not for me. Not anymore.
I want Grover Norquist destroyed. I want him smashed like a bowl of eggs. I want his assets frozen as the IRS audits every penny he tried to squirrel away from the greater good. I want the rich clothing stripped from his back, and I want him frogmarched into the town square through a gauntlet of the people whose power he’s leached away, whose lives he’s made that much the worse in countlessly grey little ways, so that they may pelt him with the garbage of their choosing, and then I want him tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail so we can do it all over again. I want him buried up to his neck in the dirt, and I want passersby to be invited to saw at his neck with their W4 forms—their badges of honor as productive, hard-working members of a civil society. I want his face seared into the collective unconscious, so that infants weep at his approach and decent people cry out, “Dear God, what is that thing?” I want him reduced to begging on the street for his bread, so that I can walk up to him and spit in his face and sneer at him to get a job and then hand out twenties to the gutterpunks beside him. I want the name “Norquist” to be as anathematized as “Hitler.” I want his head.
That will do for a start. —After that, I want him in prison. I want him held accountable for his crimes. I want him ground through the soulless, privatized Satanic mills he’s helped make of our penitentiary system with his beast-starving. I want him declared an enemy combatant. I want him pumped full of sodium pentathol so that we can wrench the names of his co-conspirators from his lying tongue. God help me, I want him tortured. I want to know he’s felt one tiny sliver of the pain he’s happily fomented.
I will leave it to better people than I can ever be to forgive him.
Claims of moral clarity are suspect in this world, but here is, at last, a case that’s clearly cut. This—man—is an outlaw. He has no place in decent society. He should be given neither food, nor drink; he should be denied fire and salt. —If there’s evidence disputing these allegations, I’ll entertain it—but if it boils down to merely a rehearsal of extenuating circumstances, of ghastly cynicism masquerading as realpolitik, I will get up from the table and walk away. I will work with anyone who will work to bring him down, in whatever way I can. I will fight anyone who would cover this up or hide it away or ignore it or pretend it is more expedient to work with this putrid blight. We must—we will see the day when this country wakes up from its horrible dream and shudders and asks itself, blearily, over coffee—how could we ever have trusted the word of fools like that?
And God willing, we’ll live on, all of us, to see the day when Grover Norquist’s name is utterly forgotten. When we no longer need him as a bogeyman, as an example of a mean life poorly lived, as a cautionary tale.
But first: bring me his God-damned head. —After that, we can start the long hard work of undoing the damage his ilk has wrought.
Another letter to President Hoover.
[Also from Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, edited by Robert S. McElvaine.]
Contractor and Builder Real Estate Insurance Mortgages
Annapolis, Maryland
10 September 1931
My dear Mr. Hoover,
It is my purpose to write you a short letter and to cheer you along with your trying undertakings. During the war I had a brief interview with you when I was fuel administrator at Annapolis, and although I well remember you, yet it may be that I am not even a memory to you. However, I was so favorably impressed that I worked for you when you were elected President, although I appear to have been born a democrat.
In these days of unrest and general dissatisfaction it is absolutely impossible for a man in your position to get a clear and impartial view of the general conditions of things in America today. But, of this fact I am very positive, that there is not five per cent of the poverty, distress, and general unemployment that many of your enemies would have us believe. It is true, that there is much unrest, but this unrest is largely caused,—by the excessive prosperity and general debauchery through which the country has traveled since the period of the war. The result being that in three cases out of four, the unemployed is looking for a very light job at a very heavy pay, and with the privilege of being provided with an automobile if he is required to walk more than four or five blocks a day.
National Relief Director, Walter S. Gifford, and his committee are entirely unnecessary at this time, as it has a tendancy to cause communities to neglect any temporary relief to any of their people, with the thought of passing the burden on to the National Committee. I am also of the opinion that the suggested five billion dollar loan, that the Hearst papers have been agitating, is an impractical, foolish and unnecessary burden and obligation that they would place upon the shoulders of future posterity to pay off.
One of these days, when I am in Washington, I shall hope to greet you in person for two or three minutes, and during the interval believe me to be one of your well wishers in this ocean of conflict.
Yours Sincerely,
WHH
A letter to President Hoover.
A letter to President Hoover.
[From Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, edited by Robert S. McElvaine.]
Vinland, NJ
18 November 1930
. . . Could we not have employment and food to Eat. and this for our Children Why Should we hafto [illegible] now and Have foodless days and [illegible] days. and our children have Schoolless days and Shoeless days and the land full of plenty and Banks bursting with money. Why does Every Thing have Exceptional Value. Except the Human Being—why are we reduced to poverty and starving and anxiety and Sorrow So quickly under your administration as Chief Executor Can not you find a quicker way of Executing us than to Starve us to death. . . . Why not End the Depression have you not a Heart. . . . Yet we are served from the Source of Live by setch an unjust System. . . . Why Isnt there an limitation to you people planning to get It all and Starve the rest of use. . . . Yet you have cut us of with plenty before our eyes—for your Selves. Yet You Can not use It. The people are desperate and this I have written, only typical of the masses of your Subjects. how can we be Law abiding citizens and Educate out children and be Happy Content with nothing to do nothing to Eat. when your System has Every Thing under control and cant use It. nor will you give any thing a way. why take more than you need. why make Laws. and allow Industry to take It all. why Isnt the Law fixed so Its Just as Just for one or the others then Industry couldnt take it all. and make us all victims of your Special arrangement. of things. . . . I am an Ignorant man and you are Supposed to have great Brains yet I appeal to you In behalf of thousands In your dominion who would be good americans Citizins If you would make It Possible. . . .
—Anonymous
But what have they done for us lately?
That Noonan-stalking funnyman, TBogg, alerts us to the fact that Aaron Bailey over at The Corner—excuse me, the Bad People Place—is all het up over the Lottesque ruckus raised by Hillsdale Academy’s “Bring Back ‘The Good Old Days’” ad:
To us, the good old days date back to the College’s founding in 1844. Hillsdale was the first college in the country to prohibit discrimination based on race, religion, or sex in its charter. The College sent the highest proportion of its sons, outside of the military academies, to fight on behalf of the Union in the Civil War. In 1955, the football team refused an invitation to play in the Tangerine Bowl because the event organizers would not let Hillsdale’s black students play.
Now, this is not to distract from some stellar accomplishments in diversifyin’ and just generally raising the all-too-low bar in treating fellow human beings as human beings. But I went to Oberlin College. I know a technicality when I see it. Oberlin, after all, while not the first college in the States to admit blacks, is among the first, in 1835; and Oberlin is the first college to grant BA degrees to women, in 1841. Hillsdale wasn’t even founded until 1844.
Of course, Bailey isn’t claiming any of those firsts; merely that Hillsdale was the first college to prohibit discrimination in its charter. I can’t find the text of Oberlin’s charter online (despite some rather desultory Googling), but I’m willing to concede that it’s possible they didn’t explicitly outline a prohibition of discrimination based on race, or religion, or sex, or any combination thereof. What’s more likely, though—given that Hillsdale and Oberlin were both chartered in 1850—is that Hillsdale’s the first by a matter of months, or weeks, or alphabetical order.
But we should all take a page from Orrin Hatch, shouldn’t we?
“We have to look at people who they are today, not what they may have done [...] in the past,” Hatch told the National Press Club Friday.
I haven’t been back to Oberlin since I went to watch the graduation that should have been mine. My last semester there I hadn’t even really been a student; I’d been a ghost, working part time washing dishes in the dining halls, cadging free meals, living in an $88 a month walk-in closet, hiding from what I’d thought was the phone police. (Long story. Longer than usual.) That graduation weekend a year later was a weird one, disturbed by interpersonal undercurrents roiled up from a muck that had been slumbering for over a year. Liquor was drunk in vast quantities and words were said that couldn’t be taken back, and nobody was sleeping with the people they had been except the folks you never would have expected to still be together. I stood in the sun in Tappan Square and silently toasted an imaginary gap between Mammon and Mao. “Power to the people. Teeth for shrimp. Plato was a fascist.” —Then we all went to see Hudson Hawk before I flew back to Boston, and you know what? I’m still inexplicably fond of that movie.
I’m not the best candidate for reporting on what Oberlin’s done lately, is what I’m trying to say. (Ask Amp, maybe. He stays in closer touch, and anyway Phil’s living with him now.) I do know that when I left in 1990, the President’s drive to attract a more shall we say lucrative student body was rather literally paying off; the number of froshling dorm rooms with TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens was staggering, and the froshling class gift that year outweighed the previous three years combined. Neuroscience was being courted, to the detriment of the English department. Old-timers were muttering darkly about how the place just wasn’t the same anymore, and you know what? It wasn’t. Nothing ever is. But I’m sure Oberlin’s stayed true to its pioneering liberal spirit—after its own fashion. The old alma mater sure as hell never pulled shit like this:
During Roche’s tenure from 1971 to 1999, Hillsdale College—in the words of William F. Buckley Jr.—“became the most prominent conservative college in the country.” Roche was a movement hero, adored by his followers for savaging a system of higher education hopelessly infested by government money and political correctness. He was propelled to right-wing stardom after the Supreme Court’s 1984 Grove City decision, which ruled that colleges enrolling students who used Pell grants, veterans’ benefits and other forms of government aid were “recipient institutions.” Grove City forced all recipient institutions to comply with Title IX provisions, which prohibited sex discrimination.
Grove City would have allowed the government to monitor the race, age, sex and ethnic origins of Hillsdale’s employees and students, which was ideologically unacceptable to Roche and Hillsdale’s conservative backers. To keep the government off its back, Hillsdale announced it would no longer admit students receiving government aid, thereby eliminating itself as a recipient institution.
Roche figured that Hillsdale’s refusal to accept students with government funding would attract big money, enough to replace the government’s cash with private aid. By all accounts, Roche excelled at coaxing conservative fat cats to open their wallets for Hillsdale. A former senior-level employee of Hillsdale calls him “one of the great fund-raisers in the history of political ideologies.” Roche had hauled in nearly $325 million by the time he resigned—enough to increase Hillsdale’s endowment from $4 million to $184 million, build modern facilities and provide ample student aid to any of Hillsdale’s 1,200 students who needed it. If Roche seldom made rounds on campus, it was understood: He was out raising money to beat back the liberal devils lurking outside Hillsdale’s gates.
Conservatives were delighted with their school, which they referred to as the “bastion of freedom,” the “citadel of conservatism,” the “city upon a hill.” They praised its traditional Great Books curriculum. And, as the student body became more hardcore Christian right, some may even have sung hallelujahs to God for sending George Roche III to Hillsdale College.
Deeds matter more than words, or charters, and we really ought to take into account who we are today, and not depend so much on what we might have done in the past. Especially when what’s done today is such a flagrant betrayal of that past. —Trust me, Aaron Bailey: we all know what “Good Old Days” means.
Sweet Home Chicago.
Now six and two is eight, and eight and two is ten
Friend-boy, she trick you one time, she sure goin’ do it again
But I’m cryin’, hey hey, baby, don’t you want to go
Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago
Actually, I was listening to something else entirely when I heard the news.
Fly us to the moon
High above our upturned faces
Booming in the bright
Send some good things down on this earth tonight
Maybe tomorrow I’ll find my get up and go. At the moment it’s done got up and went.
Ouch.
Noted on the way to somewhere else:
US Sen. Edward Kennedy will receive the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service.
The award, which recognizes an individual’s or group’s dedication to public service at the local, state, national or international levels, will be presented to the Democratic lawmaker at a dinner ceremony Nov. 7 following a speech by Kennedy at Texas A&M University’s Rudder Auditorium.
[...]
Former President Bush has the sole discretion on who receives the award, said Penrod Thornton, deputy director of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Thornton said he doesn’t think the award is anything other than a way for Bush to honor Kennedy.
“Knowing President Bush, it was more about personalities and contributions of the individuals and it didn’t have anything to do with politics,” Thornton told the Bryan-College Station Eagle for its Saturday editions.
Cutting 41 rather more slack than I myself am wont, Martial respectully disagrees with Thornton’s assessment. (Via Kevin.)
Keeping the bad people away from the good people.
Should future circumstance (in its ineluctable wisdom) require a link to The Corner, mgmt. humbly suggests this eye-rolling assemblage of conservative water-coollery might henceforth be referred to by one of Jonah Goldberg’s own discreetly charming coinages: the Bad People Place. (Thanks again to alicublog.)
