Wednesday, December 5, 2018

George H. W. Bush: RIP


George H. W. Bush is dead and is being treated to a state-funeral worthy of kings. May he rest in peace. My guess is most people born after 1970 have very little idea of who he was or what his actual political contributions were. Perhaps many Americans will recall events that occurred during his 41st Presidency. Some might remember him as a funny, loving grandpa. Some might recall his touching relationship with that serial philanderer and charming liar, Bill Clinton. Others might remember his old-age penchant for fondling and pinching the butts of attractive women.

This short composition touches on what many Americans may have forgotten about G. H. W. Bush or never learned. It is sort of an antidote to the fulsome praise you can read online and watch on national TV. In the mid-1960s, when Bush was running for the U.S. House in the state of Texas that had been heavily Democratic but was in the process of making a hard right turn to a newly mean conservatism, he campaigned vigorously to white voters against the very unpopular (in Texas) landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned segregation in public places and employment discrimination.

Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, is credited as being one of the most racially biased and vicious in modern political history and featured the now infamous Willie Horton ad, which focused on a convicted murderer who raped a woman while out of prison on a furlough program Dukakis had supported as Governor of Massachusetts. The Bush campaign followed up with an ad that featured footage of dangerous looking prisoners going through a revolving door, a strategy that intentionally appealed to the fears and prejudices of white voters.

In 1990, when he was President Bush vetoed a civil rights act that would have expanded job protections for racial minorities, making him and Ronald Reagan the only Presidents to veto civil rights measures since the start of the civil rights era. Bush justified his action by saying the bill would have introduced the “destructive force of quotas into our national employment system.” It seems, like most conservatives, he didn’t believe that black people had suffered from nearly a hundred years of federal and state de jure discrimination and flagrant violations of their most basic property and civil rights and did not merit compensation for the federal and state governments' past bad acts.

No one should forget Bush’s most lasting legacies in race relations: his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court and his role in escalating the war on drugs. After a public spectacle in which GOP Senators viciously attacked the testimony and character of Anita Hill (Joe Biden should also be excoriated for his abject failure to support Hill), the typically silent, brooding Thomas was confirmed to the Court where he sits today in mute testimony to the long arm of presidential power. The bitter irony is Thomas was nominated by Bush to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, a giant in the civil rights movement.

In President Bush’s first significant policy speech, on September 5, 1989, he launched a new anti-drug program by lifting up a plastic bag and saying directly to the national news TV cameras: “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children.”

In that speech, Bush called for a $1.5 billion increase in drug-related federal spending to law enforcement and pushed to “enlarge our criminal justice system across the board, at the local, state and federal levels alike. We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.” It was a key moment in America becoming the world’s leading carceral state.

But how many Americans know that the arrest Bush was referring to was intentionally engineered by undercover federal agents who had to give the reputed drug dealer, who had no prior criminal record, directions as to where the White House was and to where to set up on the street to sell the drugs? The behavior of those federal agents was so egregious that the trial judge, Stanley Sporkin, formerly CIA General Counsel and later appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, advised the guilty defendant to appeal to President Bush to commute his sentence, which he did though commutation, of course, never seriously considered by Bush.

Naturally, I have saved the best for the last. And that would be the infamous Iran-Contra Scandal that forever tarnished the end of the Reagan Administration. For those who know relatively little about that period in American history, I’ve provided a very brief summary. The Iran–Contra affair was a political scandal that occurred in President Reagan’s second term. Senior administration officials facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an official U.S. arms embargo due to its earlier capture of the American Embassy and U.S. personnel during the Iran hostage crisis.

The Administration had intended to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund weapon purchases by right-wing opponents (contra-revolucionarios in Spanish and shortened to Contras) of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, and also hoped to negotiate the release of several U.S. hostages then held in Iran. Under the Boland Amendment, funding of the Contras by the U.S. Government had specifically been prohibited by Congress. The scandal is actually a great deal more complex than that and if readers are interested they should investigate on their own. For more detailed information, start with:

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/iran-contra-affairs.php

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/04/us/years-later-questions-remain-about-bush-s-role-in-the-iran-contra-affair.html

Bush always claimed that, even though he served as Reagan’s Vice President, previously was the Director of Central Intelligence, and was wired into the intelligence community through CIA Director William Casey and Deputy National Security Advisor John Poindexter, he was excluded from decision-making in the Iran-Contra affair, a claim difficult to believe on its face. Later analysis of Bush’s comments revealed numerous inconsistencies and outright conflicts between what he said and the mounting body of evidence in the scandal. On numerous occasions Bush claimed he wanted the truth to come out but never provided detailed accounts of how much and what he knew, when he had gained that knowledge, and what actions he took based on that knowledge. Instead, he dodged tough questions from reporters and other investigators, especially those from the office of the Independent Prosecutor, insisting that he had already revealed what he knew.

The kicker is that when Bush’s first and only term as President was about to expire, he pardoned six key Administration officials for their various illegal acts in the Iran-Contra Affair: former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan’s former national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, former assistant Secretary of State for Central America, Clair E. George, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine services, Duane R. Clarridge, former head of the CIA’s European division, and Alan D. Fiers Jr., who had been a key CIA agent involved in the scandal. Bush’s pardon effectively decapitated the investigations of Lawrence E. Walsh, the Independent Prosecutor. It is important to note that Walsh characterized Bush’s failure to turn over material evidence in the Iran-Contra Affair as misconduct.

So, when you mourn the passing of George H. W. Bush, know that he was a human with many faults, like us all. But readers should keep in mind that many of those faults directly and indirectly affected the course of American history. Like most politicians, he had good and bad impluses and acted on both throughout his long career. Our job is to not forget the bad simply because we only want to remember the good.

RIP, G.H.W. Bush.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

What America Should Be Thankful For


Every Thanksgiving Day we are asked to bow our heads give thanks to God for all that we have. For many years I have wondered exactly what America as a nation has to be grateful for on Thanksgiving Day. Here’s a partial list I’ve identified.

·         We are thankful that the indigenous peoples who occupied the area now known as North America were susceptible to the many diseases carried by the first European invaders and died by the millions when exposed to them, leaving tribes throughout the continent weak and ineffectual defenders of their lands and peoples.

·         We are thankful for President Andrew Jackson, who intentionally violated the U.S. Constitution when he defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, seizing nearly seven hundred thousand square miles of indigenous tribal land stretching from the East Coast to the Mississippi River and beyond, forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of native peoples against their will (an early example of brutally efficient government-driven ethnic cleansing) to today’s Oklahoma, leaving behind little more than cultural misappropriation, offensive stereotypes, and ghost-like indigenous names: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas.

·         We are thankful that our indigenous peoples, even the most hostile, were unlike the newly minted Americans, who proved themselves to be rapacious charlatans and skilled liars who used official treaties to coerce and swindle tribes of their land and livelihoods.

·         We are thankful for Congress that crafted hundreds of treaties with native tribes and then unilaterally broke them whenever it benefited greedy, land-demanding American settlers.

·         We are thankful that the huge stainless steel Arch in St. Louis, marking the Gateway to the West and memorializing Westward Expansion, reminds us that all the lands we now live on were once those of indigenous tribes we brutally shoved aside without compunction or twinge of conscience.

·         We are eternally thankful that the vast majority of Americans today identify the day after Thanksgiving only as Black Friday and not as the National American Indian Heritage Day it is officially because, to be brutally honest, a booming economy is hugely more important to Americans than honoring once savage redskins.

·         But, most of all, we are thankful that indigenous peoples did not recognize the enormous peril posed by the first Europeans who invaded their lands and never united as a collective dedicated to the merciless slaughter of the invaders.

Yes, dear Lord, we are eternally grateful for the many blessings you have bestowed on this great nation and offer our prayerful thanks. Now, let’s eat that fat turkey. And don’t forget to pass the cranberries. Burrrrrp.

Written on Thanksgiving evening, 11-22-18.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Americans LOVE Their Guns

Why is anyone surprised, shocked, horrified about the latest mass murders in California? Why? Seriously. Why?

If the majority of Americans were not sufficiently repulsed by the horrific slaughter of twenty children, just a little more than babies, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to work until the Second Amendment was repealed, we will never accomplish that goal. Never, never, never.

So, let’s stop with all the fake thoughts and prayers, all the sobbing crowds lining streets paying homage as black hearses roll by carrying the newly slain bloodless bodies, all the placement of white crosses, flowers, and soulful tributes near the sites of our oh so typical American mass murders. As a nation, we simply value our ability to own guns more than we value the lives of innocents. Period. Our lived experience has proved that fact beyond refutation. If that were not the case, we would have changed our present condition a long time ago.

It doesn’t matter what excuses we put forth. Hey, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Right. If we can only keep weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill, we’d all be safe. Sure, that supposedly would work if we had a system of national or even statewide mental health assessment, which we do not and will not in the foreseeable future. And strict gun control laws would be our salvation if only we could get them passed. Fat chance in today's political climate.

We do not want to admit it, but by this time we’ve all become accustomed to ghastly scenes of wholesale slaughter on national news. We’ve gotten more than a little jaded since, for the vast majority of us, none of our loved ones were cut down in cold blood by people who love the Second Amendment and bought their weapons of slaughter legally. Thanks to the NRA and their minions in Congress who claim to love the Constitution and to be appropriately saddened by the latest list of slain innocents, their bodies shredded by high-velocity bullets.

We are, after all, what most conservatives say we are, an EXCEPTIONAL nation. Only this time that vaunted status is demonstrably true because we stand out as unique in the world as a country whose citizens value gun ownership more than they value innocent human life. That’s just the way it is. Get used to it because the next mass slaughter of innocents by a gun lover is right around the corner.

And, please, no more hypocritical thoughts and prayers or weepy street-side vigils. They don’t mean a damned thing in a country where guns are GOD and the deaths of innocents are the price of our worship.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Mid-Term Election Thoughts

October 27, 2018


With the mid-term elections literally around the corner, I have been reading article after article in online journals published by conservatives and liberals on political polarization and why one party or the other will be rewarded or penalized if such-and-such happens. I have paid special attention to articles in conservative journals expounding on why the Democrats MUST dumb down their leftist rhetoric and move to the middle by targeting the unpredictable but critical independents (frequently labelled the Politically Disengaged and Moderates) in order to win. To put it as bluntly as my Irish-American grandmother would, all that hyper-sophisticated political bullshit makes my ass tired.

I believe this situation is far less complicated than is acknowledged in the national press. In the last nearly two years, we have lost our collective way in large part due to the powerful and unrelenting daily assault on our senses by an avaricious, fiercely narcissistic, demagogic President determined to confuse, obfuscate, and manipulate the American people with a constant shit-storm of blatant lies and far more subtle falsehoods created with one intent only: to stimulate his base into paroxysms of support that will allow him and his conservative minions to continue in power.

Holy crap, people, this situation isn’t that difficult. To understand where we are now you have to start with why Donald Trump won the presidential election. Although the answer to that question is not simple and requires some thought, it isn’t overly complicated.

Here’s how I see it. First, Trump attracted a fairly large number of disaffected people in states that had previously been reliably blue (and here you better be thinking Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), many of whom didn’t vote on a regular basis. That skewed the polling results, threw national polls off, and lulled the Democrats into a false sense of security. Second, die-hard Republicans who couldn’t stand Trump nevertheless held their noses and voted for him by the millions because they absofuckinglutely hated Hillary and couldn’t imagine living in a country where she was President. Third, Hillary ran a national Presidential campaign that was worse than piss poor and that failed in the most basic ways to get the vote out in key states. In other words, she proved herself to be an incompetent political novice and failed in every measurable way to run a successful campaign. And fourth, conservatives hated those eight years of waking up every morning with an intelligent black man with a Harvard education sitting in the White House, and here you better be thinking covert as well as overt racism no matter how much people love to claim we are now post-racial. No doubt those conservatives were bound and determined not to allow another Democrat to be elected President in 2016.

With Hillary and Obama thankfully gone from the national stage, only the first of those four factors is in existence today. And the Democrats are hopefully aware of the ginormous errors Hillary’s campaign made and have worked diligently to correct those egregious mistakes in local and state-wide elections. If they haven’t, God help us and the country.

My point is simple. The so-called “deplorables” have always been with us. They are not new to the political scene. Just read American history and you will find them in the ranks of slavers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and many others who claimed to be of high-minded morals but saw nothing wrong with owning human beings as chattel and torturing them into hellaciously hard labor and early deaths. Or among the greedy, land-hungry settlers who screamed their devotion to Manifest Destiny while dispossessing Native Americans of their land and livelihoods. Or in members of the Native American Party, popularly called the Know Nothings, a nationalist coalition that hated Catholics, was militantly xenophobic, and was openly hostile to immigrants. Or among the racist Southern Democrats who organized and led the state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism against black people that ruled the Deep South and Border States for nearly a hundred years.

Hello! The politically alienated are not new to American politics. But, let’s not give an inch in terms of legitimizing their animus to people of color, to recent immigrants, and to those whose religion is not theirs. Politically, our job is to insure they do not dominate the national stage while the rest of us, conservatives as well as liberals and libertarians, go about the business of grounding the aspirations built into the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence in a new reality of liberty and justice for all, no matter where you live or what your circumstances.

Yes, Russian attempts to disrupt our elections exist and are continuing, especially since our national government has shown no interest in stepping up to protect the electorate from that interference, thanks to Donald Trump.

Yes, highly organized vote suppression by Republican state politicians is alive and well. Some things never change and only get worse. Vote suppression will only be defeated when Americans who believe every citizen must be able to vote for the candidates of their choice rise up and denounce those highly partisan, anti-democratic efforts to keep Republicans in power.

All Americans want to live in a free country ruled by laws equally applied to all citizens and legal residents. Let’s make that happen by voting for people who want a country free of demagoguery and lies. Let’s get back on track to making this country as good as the Founders thought it could be, even though too many of them never rejected slavery or white supremacy. If we can demonstrate through actions that the aspirations in our Founding Documents are real and achievable for all citizens regardless of color, race, or religion, we will be successful.

Get your butts out and vote for Democrats who believe in justice for all.

Friday, October 19, 2018

Letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

John G. Roberts Jr., Chief Justice
U.S. Supreme Court
1 First St. NE
Washington, DC 20543


Chief Justice Roberts:

I write this letter, my first and dare say my last to a Supreme Court justice, in my 76th year. Before I begin the substance of this communication, some background information is required. I am Catholic, male, married for 52 plus years with three children and six grandchildren, and earned a PhD in 1973 from a brick and mortar institution, working as a full-time, tenured track university professor before abandoning academia to earn a living in the real world. Many years ago, I was an appointed a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission and later was publically elected as an alderman (running on the Republican ticket) in the Michigan municipality in which we lived. I am not an attorney nor have I ever taken courses or instruction in law. I have been retired for ten years from my final position as a senior urban planner with an international consulting firm. In terms of full disclosure, this letter is a cri de coeur and is but one result of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.

In my eyes and those of most Americans, judges must be fair, objective, impartial, unbiased, open-minded, and non-partisan. Those qualifications should apply in spades to Supreme Court justices; at least that’s the theory. At this point, I ask that you to recall Judge Kavanaugh’s second appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee as he repeatedly insulted sitting U.S. Senators and unrepentantly cast wild, baseless aspersions on their political party. Perhaps you can imagine those characteristics that all good judges should have as applying to him. I can not.

Now that Kavanaugh has joined the Supreme Court, it is time for Americans to finally acknowledge that the Court’s true identity as a political institution, one driven by personal values, transparent partisanship, and blatant conservative ideology. Throughout great swaths of American history, the Supreme Court has been aggressively pro-conservative, pro-big business, and openly prejudiced against people of color and the poor. I’m certain citations are not needed to support that statement; you know them far better than I.

In that long tradition, the Roberts Court has been and continues to be intent on protecting and enhancing the rights and privileges, wants and desires of right-wing conservatives; flagrant examples include its refusal to rein in the corruption that characterizes our political system by permitting unlimited spending on campaigns by the rich and powerful and by giving companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees. The Court has actively turned its back on the rights of progressives, organized labor, women, and people of color. You proved that contention with past decisions and now that Kavanaugh has brought his open and unapologetic partisan animus to your team those biases will be increasingly obvious to all citizens, many of whom, of course, given their political affiliations, will be nothing less than ecstatic about that state of affairs.

Congratulations to you, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and fellow right-wingers who crafted the political strategy that has made certain the Supreme Court will faithfully execute pro-conservative positions. Together you have succeeded in building a Court majority on a foundation of political partisanship and reactionary ideology. The only good thing is, at my age I most likely will not be around to witness the full flowering of your abandonment of the judicial principles most Americans hold dear.

I leave you and your fellow conservative justices to revel in your solid majority and to continue your concerted efforts to force America to the right while disingenuously holding up your hands in public protestations of faux impartiality.

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Climate Change Skepticism and Science

By the early 2000s, a small group of scientific critics contended that global warming studies had been methodologically flawed and concluded it was premature to form a solid conclusion as to the existence and possible causes of global warming. One of those skeptics, world renown scientist Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California—Berkeley, thought the skeptics’ arguments had merit and determined to put an end to that uncertainty by establishing Berkeley Earth, an independent, scientifically-based 501(c)(3) non-profit to investigate the global surface temperature record. Berkeley Earth was partly funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a well-known funder of climate deniers, and by the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, which was founded by Bill Gates. Muller was the lead scientist in Berkeley Earth’s Surface Temperature (BEST) study that systematically and objectively addressed major concerns or potential biases that global warming skeptics had identified by gathering and analyzing worldwide historical land temperature measurements that had been collected from around 1750 and extended continuously to the present, a period of about 250 years.

BEST’s data analysis focused on the most likely cause(s) of global warming rise by plotting the upward temperature curve against suspected climatic “forcings”. Its analysis of the warming effects of solar activity found that the sun’s warming contributions, which constituted a major factor in the opinion of climate change skeptics, have been “consistent with zero.” Volcanic eruptions were analyzed and found to have caused minor variations in the temperature rise in the period 1750–1850, but “only weak analogues” in the 20th Century.

After the global surface temperature record study was complete, Muller and his co-author, physicist Robert Rohde, reached the following conclusion: “Much to my surprise, by far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.” Muller emphasized that the match between the data and the theory did not prove that carbon dioxide is responsible for the warming, but the good fit makes it the strongest contender. “To be considered seriously, any alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does carbon dioxide.”

The study’s results mirrored those obtained from previous studies by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Great Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that, contrary to claims from many climate change skeptics and deniers, data selection, data adjustment, the urban heat island effect, and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from earlier studies.

Please note that the Berkeley Earth analysis did not depend on large complex global climate models that have been harshly criticized by climate skeptics for what are claimed to be hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. The conclusion that warming is a result of human activities is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

In an effort to achieve full transparency, all study data, analytical techniques, computer coding, and findings are available on the BEST website so they can be examined freely by scholars from scientific disciplines that study climate change. Here's the web site:
http://berkeleyearth.org/


Sunday, October 7, 2018

Liberals Acting Badly

When I read about the way Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was accosted and heckled at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, DC last June, I hoped it was simply a one-off example of rude and idiotic behavior by liberals whose innate, personal stupidity overcame their rationality. As a result, I failed to condemn those actions and actors. Several days ago I was appalled when Senator Ted Cruz and his wife were accosted and verbally assaulted in another Washington, DC restaurant by liberal idiots intent on destroying their privacy and disturbing their peace.

As much as I dislike the politics of both Nielsen and Cruz, I abhor the way those so-called liberals or progressives attacked their targets in public places where Nielsen and Cruz and companions were trying to enjoy a quiet meal and drink. What gives left-leaning radicals the right to invade people's privacy and ruin a peaceful evening? Those actions are more characteristic of brown-shirted, jack-booted thugs than people who profess to believe in the rule of law and Constitutional rights. What monumental hubris blinds people and enables them to think they and they alone are the sole arbiters or authorities of what is right and just in our complex society?

If protesters dislike what their political opponents do when they are in office, they should work their asses off to see their opponents are defeated in the next election. Rude, unconscionable behavior like that exhibited in those DC restaurants should be condemned out of hand by all thinking people on both sides of the present ideological divide. Violence, even if it is verbal and not physical, has no place in civilized discourse.

As a life-long leftist, I raise my voice in condemning those violent and unlawful actions as they can only lead to more violence and not to rational conversation and actions. The last thing we need during these perilous times is thoughtless fools resorting to unlawful acts while hypocritically claiming the high moral ground. Shame on them and on those who support their actions.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Patriot or Not: Living through the Age of Chaos

Written in December 2014 but posted on my blog in late-May 2018.

In common parlance, I’m not much of a patriot, especially if that definition focuses on people who have devoted their lives to serving their country, those who vigorously defend it against all detractors, and those willing to do almost anything for their country, and that includes lying, cheating, stealing, and far, far worse. I’m thinking CIA and other intelligence services here as well as those who have made black holes like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and torture infamous. This essay examines how that situation developed.

I first started questioning the “my country right or wrong” attitude as a pre-teen when I first became aware of the moral bankruptcy of U.S. policies and actions regarding the weaker “nations” or peoples then widely known as “Indian” tribes and our treatment of slaves and blacks before and after Emancipation. That realization came from reading what white British settlers, Colonial governments, and later the U.S. and state governments did to the Native American peoples who populated the continent. I remember as a youngster feeling helpless frustration and outrage over our purposeful drive to dispossess Native Americans of their lands and their lives in our ruthless elevation of greed and land acquisition as our national motive force and the God-given superiority of whites over “redskins.” As I grew older and more widely read, that anger over the systematic and purposeful destruction and later marginalization of Native Americans as whites stole the fat of the land and left the tribes the dross became a simmering anger that informed my understanding of American imperialism.

In retrospect, it’s difficult for me to separate the outrage I felt over Americans’ treatment of Native Americans from that accorded to blacks. Of course, I was only a kid but I distinctly remember reading articles in our local newspaper about whites disguising themselves as black and being treated badly by other white people. I also distinctly recall a visit of Aunt Mary Tobias from Los Angeles; she was my grandmother’s sister so really was my great aunt. It was in the early 1950s, almost certainly 1951 or 1952, so I would have been eight or nine years old. She hated flying so had taken a Greyhound bus to St. Louis.

Mom had driven to the bus station Downtown to pick her up accompanied by us three boys. The bus was a little late so I wandered around the busy station, taking in the unusual sights and sounds. I approached a water faucet and leaned over to take a drink when Mom grabbed my arm and asked what I was doing. I pointed to the sign over the fixture and said that I wanted to see what color the water was. The sign read: Colored Only. That’s when she told me only black people could drink from that spigot and not white people. When I asked her why she told me it was none of my business, but I knew it meant whites could drink cooled water from the new fountain while blacks had to drink room-temperature tap water from an upturned spigot.

After that, I couldn’t get enough information about blacks in America. For those readers too young to remember, the 1950s and 1960s were rife with lynchings, murders, and other violence to blacks throughout the south, including race riots in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Detroit, Milwaukee, etc. That was the start of the famous Civil Rights Movement with which I deeply identified and regarded people like Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, and many others as heroes.

During my undergrad years I became increasingly aware of the glaring differences between the way white Americans thought of themselves and the way we treat people unlike us in certain definable ways. White Americans’ grandiose self-conception with respect to immigrants is perhaps best expressed in the famous poem:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

But I quickly discovered that actions are far more telling of reality than are the self-aggrandizing myths we hold so dear. Witness the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, by which the U.S. government prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers. The Act was intended to last for 10 years but was renewed in 1892 and was made permanent in 1902—repealed in 1943 only because we desperately needed China as our ally in fighting the Japanese; oh, hypocrisy thou dost reign supreme in American history. Another example is how the federal government treated Japanese citizens during World War II. About 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry (some 65,000 of whom were U.S. citizens) were sent in concentration camps (euphemistically titled War Relocation Camps) without due process and scarcely a shred of evidence that they were Japanese agents. As a direct result, they lost their homes, businesses, and property all without recourse to the judicial system. It is telling that in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which admitted that those U.S. government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor, amounting to $1.6 billion in reparations. A mere pittance regarding  what they lost.

Prior to grad school, I had been an unenthusiastic and largely non-analytical supporter of the small but growing war effort in Vietnam. Interestingly enough, my anti-war beliefs developed about five or six months after my tender white ass was saved from the draft by none other than the Clerk of the Selective Service Board in St. Louis, a position equivalent to the Executive Director. Thus, it wasn’t a self-serving fear of being drafted that drove my growing antipathy to the war and distrust of our national government and national political figures, who, I came to understand, as a matter of course lie to the populace at every opportunity.

Another enormous influence on my growing mistrust of governmental authority came from talking regularly to a middle-aged sociologist named Eva Held (who at the time was a second- or third-year doctoral sociology student at SLU) and studying, under her guidance, the social psychology of race relations and the exercise of power in the U.S. That influence was grounded in and informed by my personality, one that instinctively bridled at authority, especially the heavy-handed, it’s-my-way-or-the-highway kind (“America, love it or leave it”), and by a sensitivity to racial injustice and intolerance that had been part of me since pre-teen years.

Through Eva I was introduced to such gems as Caste and Class in a Southern Town, The Nature of Prejudice, and The Wretched of the Earth and took off from there to discover Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Aptheker, C. Wright Mills, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, etc., etc. It’s hard for people born after the 1960s to understand how opposition to racial prejudice, support of civil disobedience, and resistance to the Vietnam War intertwined into a coherent anti-government, pro-peace, liberal movement. It’s almost certainly next to impossible for modern youth to understand the thrill of solidarity many of us politically left-of-center students felt with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Chicago Seven, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, American Indian Movement, Daniel Ellsberg, and the National Farm Workers Association.

In some not so mysterious manner, all those influences intermingled and generated an intense personal mistrust on my part of anything that smacked of nationalism and imperialism and the self-serving hypocrisy that inevitably accompanies those concepts. That was when I started voicing my dislike for the Pledge of Allegiance, which I came to regard as a fetishistic piece of nonsense. Pledge allegiance to a FLAG, a piece of cloth? How ridiculous.

Anyone reading this essay must realize that in the paragraphs above I’m describing a period of four undergrad years, five years as a grad student, plus seven and more years after that as a full-time university professor. So, I’m not talking about a fleeting, fly by the seat of your pants type of “conviction.”

It was during the initial years of grad study that I became increasingly aware of the imperialistic nature of the U.S. government, especially in its relations with Caribbean and Central and South American countries and then with Vietnam. Prior to that point I had fairly uncritically accepted U.S. pronouncements about the necessity of supporting right-wing governments in those regions to “repress” Communism or about the necessity of projecting American power and influence over our neighbors (Monroe Doctrine). As I became increasingly aware of our imperialistic history with regard to seizing Western territories from Mexico and later from Spain and then Hawaii and overthrowing democratically elected governments (e.g. Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile) I started shedding the snakeskin of patriotism and grew ever more cynical about the role of colonizing/conquering nations and whose interests were being served. It was only by understanding the U.S. as it has expressed itself in history—a self-interested expansionist state eager to dominate brown-skin others—that my eyes have been opened to reality.

To cut to the chase, if I had to pick a time that was most influential in my ceasing to be an unthinking patriot, it unquestionably would be the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, in what were substantially the LBJ-Nixon-Reagan years. Neither my children nor grandchildren can imagine the turmoil and angst of living through that period. Everything we believed in seemed to be turned upside down or inside out. That was when we learned our government could and would lie to the public without compunction or regret or even hesitation. Perhaps it is naïve to even think that our elected leaders and national government wouldn’t lie and obfuscate to advance their positions but the scale and scope of the lies and manipulation and lack of morals/ethics were something the general public never suspected would become the new norm. But certainly it did.

Take a glance at the events the U.S. experienced from the 1960s through the 1980s during what I call the Age of Chaos and imagine living through that time and not having your feelings about the country you lived in unchanged. The Age of Chaos began, at least for me, with the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
  • Published in 1963, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique quickly became a best-seller and laid the foundation for the second-wave feminist movement that swept the U.S.
  • In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and changed the political face of America for the next one fifty or more years, a fact confirmed later that year when Barry Goldwater ran as a Republican for President and won only six states, his home state of Arizona and five states in the previously solidly Democratic South.
  • The horrors of the Civil Rights violence and murders: Emmett Till, 14; Medgar Evers, 37; William L. Moore, 36; Addie Mae Collins, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; Viola Liuzzo, 39; James Chaney, 21; Andrew Goodman, 20; and Michael Schwerner, 24; Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26; Reverend James Reeb, 38; Samuel Younge Jr., 21; Vernon Dahmer, 57; Samuel Hammond, 18; Henry Smith, 18; Delano Middleton, 17; who are only the best-known of hundreds of murders.
  • On February 21, 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, was one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th Century and affected me more than I can say.
  • On “Bloody Sunday” March 7, 1965, several hundred civil rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were savagely attacked by an angry mob of terrorists and white supremacists, among whom were also dozens of state and local police.
  • In 1966, Lester Maddox, an openly and unrepentantly racist and segregationist restaurant owner, was elected Governor of Georgia largely because in 1964 he publically chased blacks from his restaurant with an axe handle. He sold the restaurant in 1965 rather than submit to a court order to serve black customers. It should be noted that Maddox was a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which was considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to be a white supremacist organization.
  • Race riots occurred in the mid-1960s in Rochester, NY; Harlem in New York City, NY; Philadelphia, PA; the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; Jersey City, Patterson, and Elizabeth, NJ; Hough neighborhood, Cleveland, OH; Orangeburg, SC; and others.
  • In 1967, John Bell Williams, a white supremacist running for Governor of Mississippi, won election based in large part on his openly racist platform, typified by his infamous quote: “NAACP stands for Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.”
  • In 1967, the Kerner Commission (formally titled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots and to provide recommendations for the future. One of its main conclusions was that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
  • Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968 on April 4 and June 6, respectively.
  • Increasingly violent anti-war protests were held throughout 1968 across the U.S., including the Chicago Democratic National Convention, notable for the police riot against peaceful demonstrators.
  • U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Australian silver medalist Peter Norman protested racial inequality on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Mexico, and subsequently were kicked out of the Olympics by their Olympic Organizing Committees and their running careers destroyed.
  • On March 16, 1968, between 345 and 505 unarmed South Vietnamese men, women, children, and infants were massacred in and around the village of My Lai by U.S. Army soldiers. Although twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, only one, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., was convicted. He served only three and a half years house arrest as ordered by President Richard Nixon. Later, his prison sentence and parole obligations were commuted by the military to time served, freeing Calley.
  • In April 1970, a national Gallup poll found that 76 percent of those polled maintained that the First Amendment should be suspended if that meant no more disruptive protests in the streets. America, land of right-wing assholes.
  • On Monday, May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, 28 members of a 76-men Ohio National Guard unit fired nearly 170 rounds of live ammo into a large assembly (over 2,000) of unarmed, protesting college students, most of whom were more than a football field away and a few of whom were throwing stones. The Guard killed four students, one who was an ROTC student walking from class, and wounded nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. As a result of those murders, four million students across the U.S. protested and over 900 American colleges and universities closed during the student strikes. A Gallup Poll taken immediately after the killings founded that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion. America, land of right-wing assholes.
  • Ten days after the Kent State murders, two black students were killed and 12 others wounded when city and State police at Jackson State University opened fire on a crowd of about 100 protesting students; more than 400 rounds were fired. That event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings since those killed and injured were black and racism was then and is still alive and well in the U.S.
  • Organized opposition to nuclear war and weapons as well as to nuclear power plants became widespread in the early 1970s and resulted in few new nuclear plants being built.
  • Daniel Ellsberg (former Marine Corps officer, Harvard PhD in economics and protégé of Henry Kissinger, RAND strategic analyst, Special Assistant to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs) leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and caused a national furor when they were published. He later characterized the Pentagon Papers, which he helped write when he worked for RAND, as “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.” The FBI illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s phone and broke into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, searching for materials with which to blackmail Ellsberg. Ellsberg was charged by the Department of Justice with theft, conspiracy, and violations of the Espionage Act. The case was dismissed by a federal judge when evidence surfaced about illegal federal government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins and other misconduct by the FBI and other government agencies.
  • The Attica Prison riot occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, in 1971 when approximately 2,200 inmates seized control of the prison, taking 42 staff hostage. The riot was based upon prisoners’ demands for political rights and better living conditions (e.g. prisoners were only given one roll of toilet paper per month and were only allowed to shower once a week). By the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, state police armed with shotguns stormed the prison, firing more than 2,000 shells, killing 43 people including ten correctional officers and civilian employees and 33 inmates, many of whom were trying to surrender. In 1972, the New York State Special Commission on Attica chastised prison officials for poor planning and use of lethal methods. The Commission also criticized Rockefeller for his refusal to visit the prison site and hear the prisoners’ complaints first-hand.
  • Five men were arrested for breaking and entering into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, in a major political upheaval that became known as Watergate scandal and resulted in the trial and conviction of more than a dozen officials in the Nixon Administration and Nixon’s resignation from office.
  • Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on 1/22/73.
  • On October 10, 1973, Vice-President Spiro Agnew turned in his letter of resignation to President Nixon, becoming only the second Vice-President to resign his office. He later pleaded no contest to criminal charges of tax evasion as part of a negotiated plea to charges that accused him of accepting more than $200,000 in bribes while governor of Maryland and Vice-President.
  • A paroxysm of right-wing book banning across the country in the early 1970s resulted in the following books being banned from schools and public libraries: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain; Animal Farm, George Orwell; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger; The Crucible, Arthur Miller; Deliverance, John Dickey; Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury; For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; In Cold Blood, Truman Capote; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Native Son, Richard Wright; Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; and, improbably, Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak.
  • The Boston Busing Crisis over federal court-ordered busing from 1974 through the late 1980s witnessed riots by violent right-wing whites, the decline of public-school enrollment, and white flight to the suburbs. It was but one of many such attacks by conservatives and white supremacists on court-ordered busing plans. One of the endearing slogans from the Boston riots was, Whites Have Rights.
  • In February 1974, Patricia (Patty) Hearst, a newspaper heiress, socialite, and actress, was kidnapped by and later was said to join the Symbionese Liberation Army. Arrested after having taken part in a bank robbery with other SLA members, Hearst was sentenced to 35 years in prison but was released after two years when her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. In 2001, she was granted a Presidential pardon by President Bill Clinton, his last official act before leaving office. Her kidnapping case is regarded by many as an example of a Stockholm syndrome victim being persecuted by overzealous prosecutors.
  • On August 9, 1974, facing certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction by the Senate and the extraordinarily high probability of criminal prosecution after that, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. On September 8, 1974, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, granted him “a full, free, and absolute pardon,” ending all hope Tricky Dick would be tried for numerous felonies committed while he was President.
  • In a New York Times series published in December 1974 and January 1975 by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—who also exposed the My Lai massacre, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize—it was revealed that the FBI and CIA had conducted “massive, illegal” spying operations against American antiwar protesters and other dissident groups. It resulted in a brief but nasty scandal in Washington, DC, that quickly faded from view due to a lack of public interest.
  • In Congressional hearings in 1975 on the functioning of American intelligence agencies, Gen. Lew Allen, director of the National Security Agency, testified that NSA had been reading cables and telegrams and listening to telephone conversations of American citizens residing in the U.S. and overseas for more than 40 years without legal authorization from any court and without specific presidential order. In other words, what NSA was doing was flat out illegal. The national news media basically ignored his testimony, as did a jaded public too exhausted by the tumultuous events of the past decade to give a shit.
  • In 1975, a national poll of public trust by the Gallup Organization revealed that 68 percent of those polled believed that the country’s leaders “consistently lied to the American people”; in 1972, only 38 percent had responded in the same manner.
  • In 1975-1976 the Church Committee (formally titled U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) revealed for the first time U.S. government involvement, especially by the CIA and FBI, in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, particularly Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, and General Rene Schneider of Chile as well as covert attempts to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments, even those that had reached power through open, democratic elections. Although the Committee investigated and revealed systematic and illegal intelligence gathering acts by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the IRS, little of positive value resulted other than the establishment of the permanent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
  • In 1976, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the counterpart of the Church Senate Committee, revealed more secret illegal operations of the U.S. government; the report detailed illegal activities by the CIA and the FBI but the Committee was stonewalled by the Ford Administration and the report basically went nowhere.
  • In 1976, an ex-CIA case officer, Philip Agee, published an expose about covert CIA operations in Latin America titled, Inside the Company: CIA Diary. In the book Agee wrote: “. . . millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports.” He also wrote, “U.S. policy at the time, executed by the CIA, was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. And that’s only to name a few.”
  • In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974 by ruling that giving money to a presidential candidate was the same thing as speech (Buckley v. Valeo).
  • The Jonestown Tragedy occurred when on November 18, 1978, nearly 920 people died in a mass suicide in a sect’s settlement in rural Guyana as a result of the actions of the sect’s founder, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement, Jonestown, became synonymous with the incidents at those locations. It was the largest mass death event in modern history and resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9-11.
  • The Iran hostage situation was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States that was precipitated by a group of Iranian students who attacked and took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, holding 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days (to January 20, 1981). The crisis grew out of the CIA’s orchestrating, with Britain’s MI6, the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in August 1953 and replacing him with a dictator, Shah Mohammad-Rezā Pahlavi, who was overthrown in February 1979 in the Iranian Revolution organized by the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
  • The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown that occurred on March 28, 1979, in a nuclear reactor in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. It was the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history and was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale.
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Although the Vietnam War wasn’t only social-political movement that drove feelings of alienation, of being cut adrift, it was the force that pushed many of left-leaning people into more critical examination what we thought our country was and what it stood for (Yes, we were pitifully naïve). When the counter-culture movement of the 1960s/1970s and the great Civil Rights struggle were added to the War protests, the result was a perfect storm of rage against the “establishment” that birthed the Students for a Democratic Society, Free Speech Movement, Youth International Party (Yippies), Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, the Chicago Seven, Woodstock Nation, the Weather Underground, etc.

It would be too easy to get side-tracked by diving into the details of the counter-culture movement and the Civil Rights struggle, but in reality it was the Vietnam War that drove me and many thousands of others over the edge. And it started with President Lyndon B. Johnson lying outrageously about what the American military was doing in Vietnam. People basically ignorant about the details of those times might wonder how I can be positive that LBJ and other high government officials intentionally lied to the public about the War. But it’s easy when the government collected the truth about what was really happening in Vietnam in an official report titled, United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, that detailed the history of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Although the Department of Defense published the report it was classified and no one outside of a very few in Washington saw it until Daniel Ellsberg discovered it and released it to the New York Times and the Washington Post as the Pentagon Papers and LBJ’s duplicity and lies were revealed for all to see.

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It wasn’t long before national events of breathtaking dimensions served to solidify and intensify those various “subversive” leftist ideas that had taken me by storm, as it were. Enter stage right Richard Milhous “I am not a crook” Nixon, our 37th President and the only one to resign in utter disgrace under the very real threat of impeachment and prosecution for any number of heinous felonies committed at his direct order and at the direction of his political appointees. Young people today cannot begin to fathom those days of political intrigue and turmoil as it was revealed that the FBI and other federal agencies had committed any number of illegal acts against Nixon’s political opponents. As an aside, my favorite 1972 presidential election bumper sticker was the very popular:
                                  Dick Nixon before he dicks us.

Of course, the Dickster was elected and promptly proceeded to fuck his political enemies and the American public until caught and threatened with impeachment and criminal prosecution. And then was issued a sweeping Presidential pardon by his replacement, Gerald Ford, who paid the ultimate price in the next election of being beaten by the clueless peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. I have to say that after the Watergate events had completely unfolded and Nixon had resigned and been pardoned, the default position for the rest of my life would be to regard politicians on both sides of the aisle as untrustworthy and corrupt, meaning ready, willing, and able to provide support or favor in return for profit or other tangible rewards. Rare exceptions to that rule may be possible but they are threatened with extinction if they exist at all.

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A thorny issue for me always has been the concept of American Exceptionalism that is so beloved by conservatives, though also touted by many moderates and even some uncritical liberals. Most conservative exceptionalists see the U.S. as constituting a political-social-economic model of democracy and success that should be envied and emulated by the rest of the world. As an historical aside, it should be noted that as America and Europe have changed over time, so have the attributes that exceptionalists claim distinguish us from them. It may have started with our rejection of royalty-nobility-privilege associated with structured class systems but the contemporary right basically has three flashpoints regarding exceptionalism: the belief in the efficacy of organized religion and that people who practice their religion are better morally than those who don’t; that the U.S. has a special mission to spread democracy, individual liberty, and human rights across the world; and that we are a classless society where, through limited government, rugged individualism, and free enterprise, anyone can get ahead on their own. I should also mention that many right-wing American exceptionalists claim to believe that power flows directly from God’s hand to American politicians. Newt Gingrich is closely allied with that preposterous idea.

I wholeheartedly detest the exceptionalist concept that the American form of government should be admired, even worshipped, by all because it’s largely unhistorical and is little more than a self-serving, self-aggrandizing myth that smokescreens our reality of nationalism/imperialism and cynical lip-service to ideals while the federal government engages in actions that are illegal and morally reprehensible. We are a country built from the earliest colonial “plantations” and then as a new nation on the systemic and ruthless dispossession of Native Americans and the despicable treatment of enslaved blacks. Slavery and continental-scale land confiscation are what made this country what it is, yet those realities are nearly totally ignored or dismissed out of hand, especially by conservative exceptionalists.

Some readers may think that my emphasis on race and slavery is an over-focus on a small part of American history that is an aberration as it were and fails to adequately represent the true nature of America. Rather, I am convinced that a nation supposedly founded on liberty and equality (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”) while thriving on land coersion so blatant it approached outright theft, inequity, and slavery is a shameless two-faced hypocrite and charlatan. To say that most Americans are disingenuous about their history is to be too kind and far too uncritical.

This country has never addressed institutional racism or structural inequality and most likely never will because the greater majority of Americans deny both exist. The fault, they say, simply lies with blacks, the poor, and Native Americans, who as separate groups have deliberately chosen not to participate fully in the quintessential American Dream. And that attitude quite nicely summarizes what I think of as the American Condition: that the average or typical American either refuses to let herself acknowledge the harsh realities of our history or closes her eyes to their adverse effects. Those Americans hold tight to their glorification of our country as having been made exceptional by God and therefore worthy of uncritical love and devotion and patriotism. It is far easier and far more comforting to ignore historical reality than it is to confront it.

Much of the way I feel about the U.S. is grounded in our history of institutional racism and white supremacy. It is safe to say that the Founders personally regarded the “peculiar” institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. But I firmly believe Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were blatant hypocrites because they supposedly worshipped at the altar of liberty/freedom and equality but owned black people and never publically acknowledged their humanity or the immoral contradictions of slavery in a country purportedly dedicated to liberty/equality. Although they may have recognized the many conflicts generated by white ownership of blacks with respect to rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence, they purposely turned their backs on resolving those conflicts.

For four of the five Founding Presidents the public rights of all to liberty and inalienable human rights were trumped by individual property rights, wealth, self-interest-greed, and status. Because the very existence of their world and their personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, they elevated money over morality and over the aspirational myths in our founding documents. Eight of the first ten Presidents owned slaves (not both Adamses) as did ten of the first 15. Yet, today so many conservatives boast about our collective freedom and equality under the law without even a nod to the fact that our nation was founded on monumental hypocrisy that continues unchecked today.

Contrary to what some historians today propose in their attempts to gild the Founding Presidents’ reputations, it wasn’t enough for them to believe in private that slavery was intrinsically evil. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison proved thought itself is ineffective by continuing to own slaves until they died and by refusing to free them in their wills. What those slave-owning Founding Presidents did was to enforce the principle that property rights and self-interest were far more important than human rights, positions still held by many conservatives.

If some readers do not find much to agree with in my point of view, consider the reasons the “three-fifths” clause was inserted in the Constitution (Article I, section 2) to determine a state’s representation in Congress and the number of Electors in the Electoral College. That insertion wasn’t an accident; it was an intentional act with intentional consequences. Through exercise of the “three-fifths” clause, slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress and in the Electoral College than their free population justified, even though, naturally, slaves were unable to vote. Thus, slave states had greater voice in Congress and in presidential elections than a straight popular vote would have earned them. That meant southern states collectively gained an advantage that often provided the margin of victory in close elections, for example in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson won over northern rivals John Adams and Aaron Burr.

We know the results of those seeds: the Civil War, Reconstruction, economic slavery imposed by tenant farming and share cropping, Jim Crow laws, KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, lynching and other mindless violence, voter “registration” laws in the South, separate and inherently unequal education, laws forbidding inter-racial marriage, de facto and de jure segregation in federal and local housing programs, racially restrictive zoning and property covenants that enforced neighborhood segregation, and red-lining by banks and insurance companies. The list goes on and on.

From the end of Reconstruction until the late 1960s, the U.S. allowed state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism throughout the South, Southwest, and Border States where white citizens and white police forces used overt physical violence and the threat of violence to subjugate black Americans. Some may deny that statement since not every U.S. state engaged in Jim Crow terrorism but as the nation permitted those evil acts to continue without substantial effort by the federal government to intervene until the late 1950s. It is not an exaggeration to say that white Americans used the official power of local and state government to ensure their supremacy over blacks and that that legacy of state-sponsored terrorism has never been fully addressed and is with us today.

In 21st Century America, racism is definitely not extinguished or even totally sub-rosa, though many stary-eyed optimists believe it can be minimized if not eliminated. But not in the short life left to me or in the lifetimes of my adult children. Those seeds were planted too well and have established deep roots. That’s what I see, an old white guy who’s been leaning left for a long time.

But, what do black people see? And I don’t mean about whether prejudice still flourishes in America because they all see that even if whites refuse to. They saw Ronald Reagan launch his 1980 Presidential election campaign by invoking states’ rights, meaning white supremacy, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that bastion of White Citizens’ Councils and unrepentant racial hatred. They’ve seen a war on drugs that, if you judge by convictions and incarcerations, looks like an out and out war on black people. They saw George Bush gleefully drag the specter of Willie Horton from stump to stump and across national TV news. They saw the George W. Bush campaign’s scurrilous and blatantly immoral attack in South Carolina on John McCain’s mythological black love-child. They’ve seen the pathetic failures of half-hearted school busing and federal fair housing and desegregation programs. They’ve seen mortgage companies/banks and insurance firms redline neighborhoods to ensure blacks could not obtain housing loans or home or car insurance. They’ve seen de facto and de jure segregated school systems that produce poorly educated students. They’ve seen Senator Trent Lott praise Strom Thurmond for his unadulterated racism, claiming the U.S. would be a better country if Thurmond had been elected President. They’ve seen the horrors brought by Hurricane Katrina as black citizens pleaded on national television for their government to help them and were turned down by a pathetic Bush Administration who obviously cared little for their safety or their lives. Black people have seen unarmed young black men shot down like dogs by police. They’ve seen America for what it really is while whites allow themselves to see only what they want to see.

Yes, our ideological and hypocritical blinders are working perfectly.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in April 2008 in The Atlantic, a considerable portion of the black electorate consists of an “organic” tradition of conservatives “who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention.” But the black American who feels that way inevitably “votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.”

American history is one of blatant and unrepentant imperialistic colonization. We fought, conquered, stole from, lied to, and subjugated native peoples by force of arms from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and celebrate that history while refusing to acknowledge the true nature of those events. We mythologize that imperialism as the triumph of Manifest Destiny, our frontier/pioneering spirit, free enterprise, and rugged individualism, never wanting to look beneath that slick veneer to see the ruthless greed that drove white Americans to rob native peoples of their lands, their livelihoods, and their essences and to enslave more than four million blacks. We had a “natural right” to the North American continent so we forced native peoples into areas we thought were worthless and seized the best, most productive, and most beautiful lands and natural resources for our exclusive use. As a direct result of that coersion, Americans were able to expand rapidly across more than 2,500 miles of rich land and natural resources and exploit them to the maximum. In effect, we colonized the central core of North America while piously sneering at England and other European nations for being imperialists. We are a nation, like so many others, founded on hypocrisy, hubris, and self-serving violent nationalism but present ourselves as an Exceptional democratic nation endowed by God to be admired by all others.

Today white people no longer have to rely on redlining, restrictive covenants, or overt racial discrimination to keep the races separate. Today we have more subtle legal mechanisms like exclusionary zoning that protect us from being blamed for segregation and housing discrimination. We aren’t the Jim Crow Southerners, the KKK, the horrid race baiters. We publically repudiate overt racism as something from the past. We had nothing to do with that ugliness. But whites do not want to admit they have helped create a situation of plausible deniability, a narrative of racial innocence that allows them to benefit from discrimination and segregation but to avoid the guilt and the shame.

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Sort of in summary, here’s what I think is wrong with our political system. Perhaps the best place to start is with an 8-11-11 quote from Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic on why Progressives are losing the national debate:

Most Americans are convinced that their government is fundamentally broken. And if progressives want to sell the public on the idea that government can solve our problems, they first need to identify, and explain how they will fix the problems with our government.

For me the problem is agonizingly simple and doesn’t need 25 paragraphs slicing and dicing WHAT’S WRONG IN WASHINGTON. Our government is broken because we have allowed politicians at every level to be bought by the rich and powerful. As an example of exactly how far that process has become embedded in the American political system, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled fairly recently that corporations have the same right to freedom of speech as individuals and that their donations to political election campaigns are a form of speech and can largely be kept secret from public scrutiny. I am unable to summon sufficient words to even give an impression of how much I detest those rulings or how much contempt I have for the Supreme Court, which has been an object of my scorn since their totally partisan, corrupt, and unforgiveable Bush v. Gore decision—and here you better have O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas in mind.

What we have is a system of legalized corruption wherein politicians are in the pockets of their rich and powerful contributors and do their bidding. Naturally our system is broken. How could it be otherwise? If you don’t believe that critique just look at the role Joe Lieberman played for decades as the national shill for the insurance industry. Or the way the Florida sugar corporations contribute to the majority of national congressional election campaigns to ensure they are always granted tremendous financial favors in terms of agricultural price supports. That list is endless.

Readers who do not believe my point is accurate should do a bit of research on their own as to how many registered lobbyists were in Washington 40 years ago and how many there are today. Ka-ching, Ka-ching has become our national anthem and the functional motto of both parties. And we American so arrogantly look down at the way developing nations function and raise our lips in a gratuitous sneer at their disgusting culture of corruption and avarice. How sad we are today, not able to run our own soiled system and not knowing how to FIX the problem. The game is rigged and everyone in politics is involved and yet we refuse to acknowledge the evidence in front of our eyes. And all the right wing assholes want to do is blather on and on about what an exceptional fucking nation we live in. Right.

In a directly related point, the refusal of the Bush and Obama Administrations to prosecute the big banks and Wall Street for their numerous roles in causing the Great Recession has put a huge exclamation point on my feelings about this country. The real reason for the failure of the federal government to prosecute is that the financiers are too entrenched in the pockets of both the Democratic and Republican Parties for that to happen despite their criminal deeds. Money not only talks but also rules the U.S. Ka-ching, Ka-ching.

I want to conclude by listing several other things I absofuckinglutely hate about the U.S.
  • We regularly prosecute children as young as thirteen as adults and sentence them to long prison terms.
  • We regularly incarcerate and execute the mentally challenged and mentally ill.
  • We regularly torture people in our prisons, not only in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and in countries where we have sent those poor bastards who have been subject to extraordinary rendition, but also in countless prisons in the U.S. where prisoners have been forced into decades-long solitary confinement and subjected to brutal treatment by prison administrators and guards.
  • According to the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can declare war, but that has been routinely ignored in modern history, leading to an imbalance between the legislative and executive branches that has enabled presidents to unilaterally expand their powers and become quasi-dictators free from Congressional oversight.
  • Today, the phones and data centers used by nearly every American citizen in the country have been tapped without court authorization and no one has been investigated or tried for it, creating a country where the government no longer bothers to justify shredding, through secret surveillance, the personal liberties and rights of ordinary citizens who have never engaged in criminal activities.
My final complaint is that throughout its modern history the U.S. has seldom acted in ways compatible with its soaring aspirational rhetoric. The U.S. regularly promotes and claims fealty to its core liberal principles and insists that other countries honor them as well, human rights being a good example. Yet time after time we fail the test of action by engaging in torture, political repression, assassination, spying on our friends, and overthrowing democratically elected regimes we think we need to play realpolitik. Or by not calling a coup a coup, which of course is contrary to U.S. law, as the Obama Administration did in 2013 when the Egyptian military overthrew Mohamed Morsi’s elected government. We are, in our heart of hearts, a hypocritical nation that talks a good game but doesn’t hesitate to act on our self-interests while pretending we didn’t really do whatever bad shit went down. Hypocrisy is as American as apple pie and has been so incorporated into our national fabric that it cannot be separated from the warp and woof. Instead of promising fealty to a flag it would be more realistic if we pledged allegiance to our national sin: hypocrisy.

To paraphrase Daniel Ellsberg, who will always be one of my heroes, politicians and governments lie all the time, not just occasionally, but all the time. Not every word they utter is a lie, but anything they say could be a lie depending on their motivation du jour, especially on who is putting money into their pockets or into their election campaigns. And that is exactly why neither politicians nor governments should be trusted by any citizen at any level at any time.

I freely confess that I am not and never will be a patriot if that means to encourage a government to trample the rights of its citizens, intentionally benefit the powerful while demeaning the powerless, lie through its teeth and then hypocritically deny on-the-ground reality, or commit imperialistic acts against native peoples and other nations. But, if being a patriot means acting on the best interests of one’s country by protecting the rights of ordinary citizens, and here I’m thinking about Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, or by helping disadvantaged individuals and groups that have limited ability to help themselves, then that’s a different matter entirely.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Why Are the “Most Desirable” [1] Suburbs Largely White and Inner Cities Largely Black?

Let’s dive into the thick of this discussion, not by answering the question in the title, but by posing a related query that hopefully will get us started on the right track: why haven’t black Americans followed the pattern of European immigrants and fended for themselves without decades of reliance on handouts and special aid programs from the government? A reality-based answer is straightforward, at least in part. Here’s that straightforward segment. Once recent European immigrants and their children had mastered English and started earning a decent income, which happened fairly quickly since many had a basic education and soon acquired employment-related skills if they hadn’t had them before they moved from their initial places of residence in ethnic enclaves to neighborhoods with newer and larger homes and from there to mostly white neighborhoods and suburbs where they were gradually accepted as part of the highly vaunted, if mostly illusory, American melting pot.

On the other hand, and here’s where it gets complicated, blacks were and are seen by whites as non-white, which is understandable, lower-caste, and in the main highly undesirable as neighbors or, far worse, as potential in-laws and thus historically were forced by restrictive legal covenants and zoning ordinances enacted by cities throughout the U.S., as well as by social convention, to live in substandard housing in overcrowded inner city ghettoes characterized by schools with marginal resources and by low-paying, low-status jobs. Later, after those racially restrictive de jure devices were tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917), similar neighborhood-based housing covenants and redlining enforced nationally by federal housing agencies, the Veterans Administration, banks, mortgage firms, real estate companies, and the insurance industry combined to continue depriving blacks of their property rights and prevented them from moving into white neighborhoods and suburbs. Those actions that kept blacks from living in safe neighborhoods and in houses that would appreciate in value were supported by U.S. Supreme Court decisions, especially by Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926) and Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. 429 U.S. 252 (1977), that permitted and even encouraged discrimination by socioeconomic class, effectively forcing blacks and Hispanics, who typically earn far less than whites, to live in less desirable areas. As a direct result of that de jure and de facto denial of property and human rights of black Americans, the primary ways in which Americans accrue wealth and pass it along to their children were denied to them.

In other words, the initial prejudice against certain white European immigrants—and here you should be thinking Irish, German, Eastern European, Italian, and Jewish among others—diminished owing to their gradually being accepted as mainstream white and to their directly related propensity to be absorbed fairly quickly into the labor force and then into the larger white culture. However, the prejudice directed at blacks from Colonial times and the founding of this nation has decreased but has never disappeared, largely because blacks were and are demonstrably non-white and were deemed lower caste and thus culturally unacceptable to the majority of white Americans.[2]

Some might ask why people don’t address racial issues by sitting down and talking to each other. The real world answer is that conservatives think about race a lot differently than progressives and therefore an open and honest exchange of ideas is fraught with difficulty. A critical issue is that the far greater majority of Americans do not think of themselves as racist or prejudiced since they associate “racism” with people like Birmingham (Alabama) Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, politicians like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, Southerners who committed vicious, indefensible acts against blacks during nearly one hundred years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, or with vicious white supremacists like the convicted murderer, Dylann Roof. They somehow fail to identify with ordinary white Bostonians, Chicagoans, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, Milwaukeeans, and residents of many other Northern and Western cities who fought like cornered wild animals for decades against any kind of integration with black citizens, whether in schools or in their segregated neighborhoods. Therefore, most whites, knowing they aren’t like those horrible proto-typical racists, deny with high indignation that they have a racist bone in their bodies.

Many Americans conclude that because overt race-based hatred is rare today the history of slavery and segregation is not relevant to modern life. Here’s what Jonah Goldberg wrote on that topic in a 2013 National Review article: “I think racism should be defined as knowing and intentional ill-will or negative actions aimed at an individual or group solely because of their race.” Thus, since racism can only be conscious bigotry, the greater majority of Americans do not see themselves as racist even though the policies and programs they advocate have disproportionately high adverse effects on minorities.

So, what do Americans really believe about race? They frequently start with the critical assumption that racial equality exists and then base their understanding of the present on that assumption. Thus, many Americans are much less apt to adopt sympathetic attitudes toward racial minorities on the basis of the historical record, which they typically ignore or deny its relevance to the contemporary world. In addition, a great many Americans believe that the way our lives turn out is primarily the result of decisions made by each individual. That core value arises from the concepts of rugged individualism and self-reliance that combine to create the primacy of individual responsibility, a view that minimizes and even denies the reality of structural-institutional racism.

Many Americans who are opposed to the government’s delivering certain kinds of assistance to known classes (poor, minorities, legal immigrants, etc.) typically describe themselves as strong supporters of individual responsibility. But such people often simultaneously favor strengthening social institutions like the family, church, or community. In that respect, they are not acting as individuals but as proponents of non-governmental collectivism. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that those Americans find non-governmental collectivism beneficial and denigrate governmental collectivism as unproductive and even evil.

Many Americans loudly proclaim their belief in virtues and that our social order and concepts of freedom and justice have been built on a moral foundation. Then they turn away from and refuse to acknowledge the real world effects of the most protracted evil acts in American history: the 300 plus years of chattel slavery, the 100 years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism inflicted on black American citizens, and the white culture’s systematic denial of the property and human rights of blacks throughout the U.S. For them, the past is past and we should be willing to put it behind us and simply move forward. They tend to disparage the historical record as irrelevant as they do many decades of social science research that document discrimination by whites against blacks in terms of property and human rights depredation whose effects have carried over to the present.

So, by this point the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper should be obvious. Americans as a collective want the “Most Desirable” suburbs to remain largely white and inner cities largely black and are very happy with that arrangement. If we didn’t want to live in mostly white suburbs while blacks live in mostly black residential areas, we would change that situation. Of course, blacks no longer live only in inner cities but have followed whites to the suburbs. But an interesting thing has happened; as blacks move to suburban municipalities in any numbers, whites leave. As an illustration, in 1970 ninety-nine percent of the population of Ferguson, Missouri, was white and one percent was black. As of U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in 2018 66 percent of that City’s residents was black, and 30 percent white.

Most white Americans have never allowed themselves to see the drastic changes that would be necessary in our national fabric if we truly addressed the 350 years of slavery, 100 years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, 150 years of the federal government denying the property and human rights of black Americans, widespread racial animus on the part of white Americans, and the structural racism characteristic of the larger American culture. Whether that failure to understand the barriers we as a nation have historically erected to insulate and isolate our white selves from black Americans is intentional or is based on indifference, ignorance, or ideology is a question I have neither the time nor the energy to address in this paper although I am strongly convinced that racial polarization is real and affects many if not most white Americans.

Notes:
1. I briefly struggled with the descriptive adjective in the title to this paper until deciding on the one used. Among the other adjectives considered were “nice,” “nicer,” “nicest,” “desirable,” “more desirable,”and “best.” I finally settled on “Most Desirable” because that seemed to best express the cultural sensibilities of those who chose to live in such places, an unashamedly subjective decision.

2. See: John Dollard. 1937. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Gunnar Myrdal. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Bros.; Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Patriotism: Virtue or Vice?

Let’s start with what it means to be a patriot. The American Heritage Dictionary tells us a patriot is: “One who loves, supports, or defends one’s country.” A definition of patriotism offered by professional philosophers is: “love of one’s country, identification with it, and special concern for its well-being and that of compatriots.” [1]

Among the most visible American patriots are those who proudly display the flag on the Fourth of July, stand for the National Anthem with hands fervently covering their hearts and pride shining from their eyes, recite the Pledge of Allegiance with zeal, contend the “Support the Troops” bumper sticker is non-political, and often pay little attention to or even acknowledge governmental actions that may not pass the scrutiny of objective observers concerned with ethics and morals. [2]  A great many patriots believe the U.S. is Exceptional, a city on a hill envied by the world, the greatest country on Earth. “America, love it or leave it” and “My country, right or wrong” are two popular nationalistic themes I remember well from the turbulent 1960s that characterize the type of blind loyalty to country and the military demanded by conservatives who believe that they and only they are worthy of the title, patriot.

That definition leaves me out, since, although born of parents who were both American citizens and raised in the Mid-West and thus thoroughly American by birthright and culture, I’m a lifelong believer in the inability of nations to consistently act morally or in any manner except ruthless self-interest, which means Machiavelli has been our mentor, not Jesus, who finishes dead last in that race.

Throwing out pious birth-of-a-nation myths and the utopian aspirations that proliferate in our foundational documents, if a country pursues self-interest as its primary mission, how can anyone who tries to base her life on moral principles be patriotic? Because actions based on self-interest can and do result in a country like the U.S. being unapologetically founded on white supremacy and white privilege, enslaving and systematically dehumanizing blacks, and coercing Native Americans to “sell” their lands to a federal government monopsony that arbitrarily set the purchase price and then unilaterally and happily abrogated practically every single treaty it signed to ensure the land dedicated to Native Americans was reduced to the bare minimum.

Of course, at our peril we fail to consider the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow with its de jure and de facto forced ghettoization and marginalization of black Americans, its systemic denial of the property and voting rights of blacks by all levels of government, and its separate and patently unequal systems. We can’t ignore our imprisoning Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps during WWII, the illegal forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Hispanic-American citizens to Mexico, the extraordinary rendition and torture of “enemies” at CIA black sites, political assassinations, forced regime change (here you should be thinking Iran), supporting right-wing dictatorships (far too many to enumerate here), the los desaparecidos system U.S. support allowed to flourish in Argentina and Chile, or today’s U.S. political system that runs on legalized corruption thanks to the right-wing ideologues in the U.S. Supreme Court (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), etc.

Since I cannot give my unqualified support, defense, or love to a country that has committed the acts listed above, as well as others far too numerous to list in this paper, I’m not a flag-waving, chest-thumping patriot. Of course, I have never denied the essential truth that in many respects the founders of the United States did something breathtakingly original and praiseworthy. But neither can I close my eyes to the ugly reality of what happened well before and immediately after the ink was dry on the Constitution. In my eyes, a country is not a compilation of magnificent aspirations contained in its founding documents but the sum of its real world actions. In that equation, the U.S. falls short of being worthy of adulation or unqualified support.

However, that last condition seemingly opens the door for redefining patriotism as “qualified” love, support, and defense of a country. So, what does qualified mean in that context? For some, it means understanding your country’s history, its actions good, bad, and ugly. It means honest acknowledgement of where your country went off the track in terms of acts that either violated the letter or the spirit of morality and what it did that was laudable. It means never closing your eyes to our collective failures to live up to the awe-inspiring aspirations we all regard as sacred:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Thus, the “qualified” patriot loves her country but has a moral code that prevents her from supporting ruthless, immoral acts committed by her government, whether those acts occurred in the past or the present. In other words, qualified patriots love and defend their country but hold it accountable to moral standards. Although I accept the sincerity of those who self-identify as qualified or moderate patriots, I question the very premise of their existence. History, I contend, has few if any examples of countries that consistently act morally or contrary to their self-interests. Rather, history documents countries acting in ruthless and aggressive selfishness, with no regard for moral considerations, Christianity be damned. Examples from American history include the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, allowing the U.S. to seize control of all public property that had formally belonged to the Government of the Hawaiian Islands without benefit of legality, effectively declaring that the U.S., founded on the principle that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, could annex Hawaii without thought of obtaining the consent of the governed. In 1898, Might Makes Right became the new policy of the American Imperial State.

Beginning in 1980, the U.S. supported the brutal right-wing El Salvadoran government by training their military officers, allowing senior American officers to serve as the heads of Salvadoran military commands, and funding Salvadoran purchase of arms and materiel in a “dirty war” run by government-supported death squads that raped Catholic nuns, school girls, and village women and murdered Catholic priests in churches and on university campuses, including the March 24, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero while celebrating Mass. After Romero’s assassination, members of the Salvadoran National Guard gang raped and murdered four American nuns and a laywoman. Despite those horrific atrocities, which were well-publicized in the U.S., the Carter and Reagan Administrations increased military aid to the Salvadoran armed forces that included millions for war materiel. A U.N.-sponsored truth commission later held the U.S.-backed right-wing regime responsible for massive atrocities in a civil war that continued for twelve years after American military support and advisors came on scene.

From 1984 through 1986, in the Iran-Contra scandal the Executive Branch of our government funded the right-wing faction of the civil war in Nicaragua with arms sales to Iran in willful violation of U.S. law and, thanks to a gutless Congress, got away with it. More modern examples of the manner in which the American government regularly operates includes the CIA’s torture of captives at overseas black sites and President Obama’s refusal to prosecute the perpetrators as well as the thousands of non-combatant civilian deaths that were caused by drone strikes across the Middle East ordered by the U.S. military with Obama’s blessing.

The first of two specific examples of the type of patriotism I wholeheartedly reject is from a speech the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, gave on the topic of patriotism on December 9, 1998, at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.:

American patriotism was the repetition, reaffirmation, and celebration of our founding ideas, and it gave rise to a brilliant tradition of celebration, and of celebration's symbols: the flag—that beautiful flag; the parades and bands and bunting; Betsy Ross, Uncle Sam, the tradition of patriotic speeches, the reading aloud of the Declaration of Independence; the sparklers like the candles on a birthday cake.  [3]

The patriotism of Noonan and a great many conservatives focuses on democratic ideals, celebrations, symbols, rituals, and traditions that are totally separated from real world actions or their consequences. That type of idealistic, bloodless patriotism is almost always intertwined with a deep, quasi-religious commitment to American Exceptionalism. Believing the U.S. is better than all other nations is a recipe for uncritical and even aggressive support of national power/dominance as well as contempt for and intolerance of other countries and, ultimately, is a recipe for armed conflict. That point of view allows conservatives and like-minded others to ignore the harsh realities of life as lived in America and of the often ugly facts of American history while they exult in the glory of an imaginary, aspirational country.

The second example is from a David Brooks column in the New York Times titled “We Take Care of Our Own” (July 15, 2016). In that column, Brooks noted that America, unlike most other countries, was founded as a universalist nation. His conclusions included:

The way out of this debate is not to go nationalist or globalist. It’s to return to American nationalism—espoused by people like Walt Whitman—which combines an inclusive definition of who is Our Own with a fervent commitment to assimilate and Take Care of them.

Whoa! Two problems arise immediately from that column: first, the notion of the U.S. as an universalist nation; and second, his use of the label, inclusive. Let’s refer to American history for elucidation. The United States was founded as a slave country, meaning blacks were chattel, not human, and thus had no legal rights whatsoever. And from 1789 to the mid-1950s, U.S. law held that only whites could be citizens, not blacks (until after the Civil War), not Native Americans, not Asians, and not Hispanics. Like Noonan, Brooks is claiming the IDEA of America trumps the REALITY of America, a view I reject as false in every respect as well as dangerous because it creates a deceptive narrative that this country is far better than history and lived experiences demonstrate.

The nature of countries and their patriotic supporters is to place governmental actions above morality and truth or to claim morality and truth are what the government says they are, especially when the issue of “national security” is raised. Those who disagree with that position are typically derided and ridiculed as “Boy Scouts” unable to make “hard” decisions. Those dissenters have not only been marginalized but frequently have also been arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for stating their opinions, so much for our vaunted freedom of speech. Thus, it is my opinion that national government by its very nature is, at minimum, amoral as are the overwhelming majority of politicians who serve that government.

Perhaps the most chilling, cynical, but truth-telling quote about the nature of government and patriotism was uttered in 1946 by the infamous Nazi, Herman Göring, at the Nuremberg trials:

Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

No better example of how the U.S. acted in concert with Göring’s observation was the way President George W. Bush and his Administration flat out lied to Congress, the United Nations, and the country to get us involved in the 2003 Iraq War.

Of course, governments, like politicians, do not always act in ways that are amoral or immoral. Countries, like humans, are flawed and make mistakes but also do things that occasionally are beneficial internally and with respect to other nations. But, occasionally appropriate behavior does not make government an agent of morality or one entitled to adulation. After all, would you love, support, and defend your adult offspring if he were a proved killer of innocent civilians; a proved torturer; a proved violator of the laws of his own country as well as international laws; an enthusiastic financial and military supporter of people who have kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered their political opponents; a supposedly former white supremacist and racist; and an aggressive militarist who advocates pre-emptive, first-strike attacks against his enemies, etc., etc., even if he occasionally takes his kids to the movies and buys them cheeseburgers and French fries at the local squat-n-gobble? I truly hope not.

Some who self-identify as patriots are sure to claim that it is unrealistic to demand perfection from any country, perfection in the sense of always acting morally/ethically. After all, few of us choose a spouse or friends and demand or expect perfection. That analogy is inappropriate as the actions of countries are characterized by a different geographic scale and temporal scope than are the actions of individuals. Bad acts committed by countries have scalar and historical consequences far beyond those of individuals. As an example, consider the U.S. invasion of Iraq that was ordered by President George W. Bush without benefit of legal or moral justification and that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Also consider the far-reaching, long-term effects of the Naturalization Law of 1790 and later amendments that limited American citizenship to whites and later specifically excluded Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, East Indians, Native Americans, and others from citizenship until the mid-1950s.

However, at least some “true” patriots argue that America is good and deserving of our love and support because it does act, occasionally, in ways that may be interpreted as benevolent, altruistic, and selfless. But how do those patriots justify the many occasions when the U.S. acts in ways that cannot be supported as ethical or moral? That turns out to be easy; they simply deny those acts are unethical or immoral and, in their very act of denial, downplay or ignore their significance or they are indifferent to those charges. The following examples are illustrative. Our Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery. The federal government has never engaged in white supremacy. Torture is good because it leads to effective results. Non-combatant civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen were few in number and amounted to unintended, collateral damage. A strong, aggressive military with first-strike capabilities is necessary for our national security. Etc., etc. That strategy doesn’t work for me and never will.

Here’s what Mark Twain had to say on this topic after having been labeled a traitor for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines (the First Philippine Republic):

The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: “The King can do no wrong.” We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: “Our country, right or wrong!” We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had—the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. [4]

Historically, the American government has justified many of its “bad” acts in the name of accomplishing “good” in the long term, especially if that “good” was accrued by the U.S. The Vietnam War is one sordid example (the Domino Theory). Another example: we celebrate in books and film and popular culture the conquering of our country’s indigenous population so the federal government could open previously tribal land to land-hungry white settlers. That celebration of white supremacy includes such popular monuments as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota and the Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis as well as the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and an untold number of college sport teams that have usurped Native American identities as their own. Americans collectively close their eyes to the real world results of that coercion and demonstrate an almost total indifference to the lasting poverty and devastation inflicted by the federal government and its citizens on Native Americans. But patriots persist in celebrating that egregious land swindle as Manifest Destiny, Westward Expansion, and truth, justice, and the American Way.

Throughout history, the U.S. and other nations have committed atrocities on scales ranging from local to global and seldom if ever expressed regret or remorse or even acknowledged their specific bad acts. The flawed nature of humans, and that of their countries, is not likely to change. The prospect of nations and their citizens deliberately participating in atrocities against other nations and even against their own citizens has a probability of 100 percent.

Therefore, what compels me to love, support, and defend a nation whose history is grounded in immoral and unethical acts and that will certainly, given human nature, act immorally and unethically in the future? Not one thing. My position is simple and can be boiled down to one short statement: patriotism is abhorrent and morally unjustifiable.

Notes:
1.   See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/patriotism/#MorStaPat; Section 1.1: What is patriotism?
2.  Note: in this essay I try not to navigate the slippery slope of moral or cultural relativism.
3.  Source: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/what-patriotism
4.  From: Albert Bigelow Paine, ed. 1924. Mark Twain's Notebook. New York: Harper & Brothers. 
http://uwch-4.humanities.washington.edu/Texts/twain/Monarchical%20and%20Republican%20Patriotism.htm