North Sonoma County Democratic Club: News

DOG WHISTLE POLITICS

You might wonder why the ancient Chinese built the Great Wall. It was to keep out Mexicans, Canadians and Mongols; it didn't work.

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William Rivers Pitt wrote in Truthout about "dog whistle" politics. "Dog whistle" is a new name for an older Republican practice. Wikipedia, Pitt notes, defines the term thusly:

Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is an analogy to dog whistles built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can.
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Pitt is concerned because of coded messages coming from places like Pat Robertson's "700 Club." Robertson has nothing but praise for attempted Adolf Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a trained theologian.
Pitt wrote: "The interview basically stated that it is the holy work of any good Christian to assassinate a fascist tyrant, and given the serial ways these right-wing media people have used those exact terms to describe the President, it is a pretty short leap to realize the "700 Club" was essentially sending the [CODED] message that whoever puts a bullet in Obama will be considered a saint on the level of Bonhoeffer."
---Gary Goss

The invention of lying

A turning point in the history of American political dementia came when the Confederacy trudged home from the Civil War with a silver medal. The pathological thinking the South had needed to justify slavery lives on 150 years later in the current hate campaigns against people of color, against science and education and against the elected national government.

Some racists today threaten to adopt what they call "second amendment solutions." That's a call for a second Civil War. There will be--of course--no war. Even the badly warped Republican leadership, trained in hateful lying, will stop short of another open rebellion. What concerns me are attempts to reason with these addled prevaricators. It cannot be done successfully. They are not equipped to participate in rational discussion.

The Second Amendment

Recently our dismal Supreme Court--may five of them burn in Hell with broken backs--ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution granted individuals the right to bear arms. What interests me, though, is the fact that for many years leading liberal intellectuals argued that the founding fathers had passed the second amendment to make sure that militias, not individuals, could bear arms. (Not all of the left agreed. My closest Marxist friend, ready for the revolution, owned a submachinegun he used to fire off his back porch on the Fourth of July. When I attempted to fire my 1873 Winchester, he stopped me on the grounds that it might explode and endanger the children.)

The argument that Mason and Jefferson and Madison had written a Constitutional right for militias to bear arms but no parallel right for the cavalry to ride horses or for the navy to sail ships had long troubled me. In fact, all militias have the right to bear arms--it's part of the definition of a militia. The argument that the second amendment protects the rights of soldiers to carry rifles makes no sense.

Here is what really happened. The founding fathers granted each of us the right to carry a sword or a one-shot musket. Looking ahead, they correctly envisioned the Sergeant Yorks and Audie Murphys of future wars, draftees who had learned to shoot accurately on their own time. It did not occur to Madison that some sociopath might invade a public school, hold hundreds of children prisoner and massacre many of them with a one-shot weapon. The times (and arms) have changed.

If we want to ban guns entirely, we will have to amend the Constitution. If we want to regulate guns (as we regulate cars), we might have to amend the Supreme Court.

--Gary Goss

THE FUTURE OF OUR FORM OF LIFE

Some American voters tend to vote thoughtlessly. If they are annoyed by the weather, they may vote someone out (and vote into office an idiot). That's a sad fact of life.

Consider the Republican agenda below. It's what we will get if the Republicans win in 2010.

Privatize Social Security
Cut taxes for the rich
Log the national forests
Expand offshore gas and oil drilling
Privatize highways and waterways

Not to speak of more wars. Not to speak of climate change and its impact on the future of our species.

We need to make a maximum effort to turn back the Tea Party Republicans.

Gary Goss

WINTER'S BONE

About once in two years I see a striking movie, something original. Recent examples include MONSTER'S BALL, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and MICHAEL CLAYTON. Last night I saw WINTER'S BONE, and I'd like to recommend it.

This is a film impossible for me to compare to others, but after a night of troubled sleep I 'm going to try. I'd say it combined EMMA (or CLUELESS) with the Orson Welles thriller TOUCH OF EVIL. It's like a novel of manners set among violent hill people who are cooking crank. A teenage girl sets out to keep her family together. . . .

Reactions to the movie will differ, I believe, according to one's background. A major part of my family left Kentucky four generations back in order to escape from the Hatfield--McCoy feud. We came from people somewhat like those depicted in the film, and I felt the cultural kinship. I saw something upbeat in the movie. My wife, with nothing like that in her background, experienced the film differently, perhaps because she lacks a "been down so long it looks like up to me" mentality. She found the movie grim but memorable.

----Gary Goss

IDIOCRACY

Recently Keith Olberman referred to Republican leaders as resembling "dogs chasing a car."

Dogs chasing cars, yapping, aren't dogs at their best. Dogs can't take on cars. They sometimes get caught under the wheels. Their tremendous effort is wildly brainless, and so dangerous you'd rather not watch.

The last forty years have witnessed a steady decline in intelligence among Republican leaders, and now the party is headed by people who seem genuinely clueless. That didn't happen by chance. Step by step, over the years, the Republican Party has been moved to the Right when centrist politicians lost in party primaries. Finally they fell off a cliff.

At this point, to win a Republican primary, you have to agree that the world is 10,000 years old, that climate science is a Marxist plot, that Hawaii is Kenya, that corporations are people, and that, although the government supplies you with social security and medicare, you stand alone, a proudly free individual who doesn't need government (except for food, clothing, shelter, water, safety, highway maintenance, and entertainment). You take for granted that progressives exist as a form of unmotivated absolute evil. You're willing to make the planet uninhabitable if you can get rich in the process.

To believe the above you must be mighty dumb, but American politics has long been shot through with absurdities, including the belief that slavery was a good thing for people with dark skin, and proof of this was to be found in the Christian Bible. Learning to accept that rubbish built a level of political lunacy into the South that might last until the end of time, which some expect in a month or two.

The running dogs of Transnational Corporations are seen most clearly in elected leaders who continue to defend BP in ways that even BP finds embarrassing. When it comes to electing stupid people to congress, we have finally reached bottom. And that's the way some of us like it. Some hope to live in an Idiocracy.

--Gary Goss

The Reasons the Left Loses

1. I was watching Amy Goodman a few days ago. She is almost the only source of genuine world news on TV. She's the best source of bad news. But when Amy runs out of bad news to report, she fills in her free time by recalling atrocities that occurred ten years before.

I wonder how many of her followers have become totally discouraged? (There's one in my house.)

2. The moratorium on whaling is ending. Time is running out. It wasn't a total moratorium--it had loopholes, and the Japanese and two other nations continued to kill whales and munch on them. Recently representatives of the human world met and attempted to set up up a new plan. Japan, backed by the African nations it supplies with foreign aid, blocked a moratorium. The USA offered a compromise that allowed some whaling (but less whaling than the current loopholed moratorium). The American Left cried out at their own wretched compromising government. But no worries--the whaling commission rejected the pragmatic compromise so condemned by people like me. We have a different kind of compromise: Japan is free to kill whales at will, while I retain my moral purity.

3. The leaders of the Left in Sonoma County seem in some cases to be Truthers who get their information about 9/11 from a source that broadcasts through their dental fillings. Yet to succeed we need able leaders who can communicate with centrists.

So it goes.

--Gary Goss

Why The Tea Party Is Mad

We live in strange times with Birthers to the right of us and Truthers to the Left, but little seems as odd to me as a state government, that of Arizona, taken over by teabaggers. The Tea Party is mad, a topic taken up by J. M. Birnstein, a philosophy professor writing for the NY Times Opinionator (called to my attention by John Cascone). Birnstein's conclusion is that teabaggers are enraged because they dearly love the ancient American myth of individual autonomy. Arizona's Tea Party activists are rightwing anarchists, a "libertarian mob." They want to deny vaccination, school their children at home, treat emotional problems with beer, and treat medical problems with water and chanting. They want to be left alone, yet they find themselves dependent on government for road maintenance, fire safety, social security checks, Medicare, etc. And government is tottering, calling attention to itself.

Arizona is short of everything but retired Republicans. The state lacks industry. Liquid life, sucked from ground wells, is running out--which why some cities are cutting down their woods. As State Senator Sylvia Allen put it, trees were "stealing Arizona's water supply." Madness.

Birnstein's hypothesis is that events have demonstrated to teabaggers the absolute dependence of everyone on government action, and this is exactly what the teabaggers do not want to know. Social Security was fine as long as we ignored it and pretended to be autonomous. That was the social bargain: pretending to be independent of others. Today the teabaggers cannot ignore the role of government, and like the rest of us they can't control Washington. Hence we see rage and madness produced, Birnstein writes, not by politics but metaphysics. The Tea Party, he points out, "wants nothing." It expresses a nihilistic fury of destruction. At its peak, it breaks up meetings.

As apt as Birnstein's analysis is, it's obviously incomplete. The July Harper's published an article by Ken Silverstein that helps fill in the picture. Arizona's legislature, he points out, is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists and cranks. They have to respond to the country's worst budget crisis. Naturally, they fired hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors, saving $25 million and costing $174 million in lost revenue. They sold their capitol building and then rented it back. Madness.

Arizona is the first (and one hopes the only) state actually taken over by tea party activists, who dominate the local Republican Party. These people (mostly old white people) are, Silverstein writes, fixated on taxes and immigration; and they control the Republican primaries. They believe that government exists to help the undeserving. Funding for GED programs "has been reduced to zero."

Much of the anger, of course, has been directed at Latinos. Some of this is racism. Some of it is a hatred of diversity--which is why it is now illegal to teach Latino children about their heritage in the public schools. Teabaggers want their (imaginary) country back. They feel the rage of betrayal. They hope they can stop change and live in an unchanging world.

The BP Gusher

I like to think that my undistinguished working class family does have one claim to fame. My ancestors labored in the industries most responsible for California's environmental disasters. When ridding the Sierras of redwoods was the main thing, my people were lumberjacks. In fact one great-grandfather, a master carpenter, designed and built the world's longest wooden flume (later used as a thrill ride) to bring lumber 60 miles down from Hume Lake to Sanger. When the redwoods gave out, my forebears moved into the oil fields of the Big Valley in time for the Lakeview Gusher, which blew oil a hundred feet into the air for 540 days, which brings me to this.

The BP "oil spill" in the Gulf is not an oil spill. That's BP rubbish. An oil spill takes place when a tanker springs a leak. What BP did, in the name of greed, was bring in a gusher in water so deep the well couldn't be capped. They killed nine workers. All of that should be a crime.

--Gary Goss

McGuire and Fudge

The Democratic & Progressive Club took no position in the supervisor's race. Both candidates had strong backers. I supported both Debora Fudge and Mike McGuire for supervisor in the 4th district, where I live. They are admirable people and strong progressive candidates. McGuire won by a twenty point margin--which I had predicted--and some people are asking why.

Several factors were involved, but the crucial factor was that Paul Kelley, the incumbent Republican, decided not to run for re-election. McGuire, as he has done in other races, campaigned hard for every vote in the district, including the Republicans. Fudge made McGuire's effort to gain Republican support a campaign issue. When votes were counted, Fudge and McGuire had split the progressive vote (I'm guessing), and McGuire took everyone else.

I note that McGuire won despite the endorsement of Fudge by the Press Corporate Democrat's rather dim editorial board.

We owe Debora Fudge and Mike McGuire our thanks for the efforts they put into representing progressive causes in a demanding campaign. I can't recall another election in which I had the luxury of admiring two candidates.

Our club has had a nice rest. The time has come, I believe, to get it back on the road. We have a membership list, a meeting place and money in the bank. Part of our effort should be to find some fresh leadership.

--Gary Goss