#982: Loopy to the Tonsils, Barmy to the Back Teeth

Depending on who you ask, April 8 could go one of two ways. It will either be when a total solar eclipse happens, putting on a show for the roughly 44 million people who live within the eclipse’s path, or it will be the end of the world . . . which brings to mind a fabulous pre-rap song by the rock group R.E.M. (Each stanza ends with the lyric “Its the end of the world as we know it . . . but I feel fine.”

During a total solar eclipse, some places on Earth are entirely shielded from the sun by the moon for a few minutes. In North America, the eclipse will start on the Pacific coast of Mexico and travel a diagonal path northeast across the U.S. before leaving the continent shortly before 4 p.m. ET. The U.S. won’t see another total eclipse for the next 20 years. I for one have yet to experience this astronomic marvel. Luckily however they do occur far more frequently than most people could imagine. I have read that they occur somewhere on the globe approximately every 16 months. So, perhaps one of these days, Annie and I will take a cruise and, armed with eclipse glasses, partake in the phenomenon.  

Maddeningly, there are millions of people right here in the good old USA who are as frightened as Macbeth before Banquo’s ghost that tomorrow’s TSE spells doom and destruction for us all; that it is a portent that we are all about to be punished for the sins of others. How in the hell is this possible? From whence comes such loopy fear and dread?  The answer can be stated in 2 words: conspiracy hucksters - men and women who seek their fortunes and get their jollies out of peddling miracle cures, warning about the enemies in our midst and paving their paths by warning their victims that anyone who disagrees with them are, in fact, the true conspirators.  This is the world of Alex Jones and NewsMax,   QAnon and the “Watch the Water” charlatans.   

Alex Jones, for example, is claiming that the government is planning to use the event as a practice run for declaring martial law during the eclipse, which will allegedly be enacted if former president Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. And of course, it’s not just Jones. As Quartz reports, there are quite a few people on TikTok claiming the solar eclipse will mark the end of the world, drawing nonsensical parallels to biblical events. And apparently Carbondale, Illinois (population 25,000) is predicted to be doomsday's epicenter, because it sits at the center of an X of the totality paths from both this year's eclipse and the one that graced North America in 2017.

Then, there is a popular theory that the solar eclipse will pass over several towns named Nineveh in the U.S. and Canada. Depending on the post, some have said it’s six towns, others say it’s seven or eight. People propounding this inanity on social media claim it’s notable because Nineveh is also the name of a town that the biblical figure Jonah, visited, and some double down to suggest that an eclipse happened during the biblical visit too. From here, it’s just a hop-skip-and-jump to suggesting that this is a sign from God.

To Sir Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse, KBE, one of my absolute favorite British authors, these conspiracy hucksters are either “Loopy to the Tonsils,” or “Barmy to the Back Teeth.” And yet, despite what “Plummie” (Wodehouse’s nickname) thinks of them, people hawking various end-of-the-world hell-broths, are hauntingly successful. “How’s that?” you ask. “What kind of fools could find an evil conspiracy or divine portent in a TSE?” The same kind of people who believe that the 2020 election was rigged, that no chiidren were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and those who, against virtually every shred of scientific proof, continue “knowing” that the earth is flat.

According to a June 2023 article in psypost.org, “a flat-earther is someone who will have a low level of scientific culture but who nonetheless considers him/herself as someone with a high level of scientific knowledge.” It is terribly difficult for those who tend to find truth in science to understand that no amount of facts are likely to change the minds of flat-earthers or others addicted to the “truths” espoused by lunatics. Conspiracy hucksters, to my way of thinking, are in serious violation of one of the Bible’s most grievous taboos: that of “putting a stumbling block in the path of the blind.” (וְלִפְנֵ֣י עִוֵּ֔ר לֹ֥א תִתֵּ֖ן מִכְשֹׁ֑ל - Lev. 19:14).  Those who are in the “stumbling block business” are, to my way of thinking, doing a toxic disservice to a frightened, confused and often grossly unsophisticated segment of society.  By their very nature, these merchants of intellectual mayhem are arming their minions to go off to fight a war that will fill their coffers while flattering their egos.  And with the geometric growth of social media and now A.I., it is going to become even harder to open the eyes of the blind or the ears of the deaf.

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum notes in her must-read 2020 work Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism:

•  People have always had different opinions.  Now they have different facts . . . . 
  The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, and offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”

To a great extent, these loopy-to-the-tonsils, barmy-to-the-back-teeth conspiracy hucksters are the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Emperors of old: doling out bread and circuses as an expedient means of pacifying discontent, diverting attention away from real, demonstrable truths, and making it safe for autocrats to have their way. There are but 211 days to go until America goes to the polls. (Yes, I know; many of us will be casting and mailing off ballots days - even weeks - before November.) The best strategy I can suggest is that the forces of democracy make a continuous showing on the air, the waves, and the internet repeatedly holding up a megawatt spotlight on the blatant mistruths, the shirking of duty, the utter lack of patriotism, and humility displayed in both words and deeds by the challenger versus the incumbent. For now, more than ever, we need leaders whose conscious allegiance and loyalty are to the Constitution, not a self-professed, would-be dictator.

 And for those who will get to see the Total Solar Eclipse . . . drop me a line and tell me all about it!  (For those who ask “Rabbi, Is there a proper blessing for observing a solar eclipse?”, I’m afraid the answer is “No . . . just be cautious and feel the power of the universe!”

Copyright2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#979 Paul Alexander: Inspiration and Determination; Validation and Immunization

Throughout childhood, our maternal grandmother, Anne Kagan, would frequently read aloud to us her favorite poems from a dog-eared volume entitled One Hundred and One Famous Poems. Unbeknownst to us, she was providing the two of us with a glorious, absolutely pain-free introduction to some of the English language’s greatest (and occasionally, long-forgotten) wordsmiths. Time and again we would listen to her read (and quite dramatically, I must say), from Keats (Ode On a Grecian Urn), and Byron She Walks in Beauty); to Kipling (If) and Wordsworth (She Was a Phantom of Delight); and from Whittier (The Barefoot Boy) to Kilmer (Trees). 

         Paul Alexander, Esq. (1946-2024))

A couple of days ago, I read the obituary of a man named Paul Alexander . . . a man who, due to polio, was forced to live from ages 6 to 78 in an iron lung.  The opening  paragraph of the New York Times  obit told the entire story: Alexander relied on the machine to breathe. Still, he was able to earn a law degree, write a book and, late in life, buil[t] a following on TikTok.

The poem his utterly remarkable life brought  to mind was Frank Lebby Stanton’s Keep A-Going!, whose opening stanza I can still hear Grandma Anne reciting from memory:

                                                                          Ef you strike a thorn or rose,
                                                                               Keep a-goin'!
                                                                          Ef it hails, or ef it snows,
                                                                                Keep a-goin!
                                                                          'Taint no use to sit an' whine,
                                                                           When the fish ain't on yer line;
                                                                            Bait yer hook an' keep a-tryin'—
                                                                                Keep a-goin'!

I really, really urge you to read Mr. Alexander’s obituary. The story of his life is truly remarkable; in its own way, it rivals that of Helen Keller, who despite being blind and deaf, somehow managed through determination and pluck, a remarkable caretaker and a “never say die” attitude, managed to become the first deafblind individual to graduate from college (Radcliffe College, class of 1904), become a prominent lecturer and author (12 books) and learned to “hear” people’s speech via the Tadoma Method, in which she used her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. Keller even wrote her first autobiography while studying at Radcliffe. Without question, she, like Paul Alexander, are among history’s greatest inspirations.

     Paul Alexander, Attorney-at-Law

In 1952, the then 6-year old Paul was stricken with Polio.  It came on seemingly in a day, quickly paralyzed limbs and and left him incapable of breathing on his own - the muscles which control respiration had become incapable of movement.  He was quickly placed in an “iron lung,” became worse and worse, and was eventually sent home from hospital to die at home.  But he did not.  When he was 8, Paul learned to breathe on his own for up to three minutes by gulping in air “like a fish” and swallowing it into his lungs, he told The Dallas Morning News years later. He told the newspaper that he was motivated to learn to breathe by a caregiver who offered him a puppy if he tried to learn to breathe on his own. He got his puppy, and it later became the inspiration for the title of his book, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung.  He learned to write by gripping a long, narrow tube with his teeth; at the end of the tube  was a  pen or pencil.  By painstakingly moving his head, he could put words to paper.  He managed  to graduate from law school, and was a practicing attorney for  more than 30 years . . . all the while being trapped (except for upwards of 3 hours a day) in his iron lung.  At his death this week, there is now but one person still living in such a device.  

Those of us who were children in the 1950s well remember the panic and fear that Poliomyelitis caused.  As children, we had no idea of what caused it and had nightmares about catching it.  During the early 1950s, 25,000 to 50,000 new cases of polio occurred each year. Jonas Salk (1914–1995) became a national hero when he allayed the fear of the dreaded disease with his polio vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Bruce Sabin (1906–1993) introduced an oral vaccine in the United States in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s. (The main difference between the two vaccines was that Salk’s - the first - was made with a “killed” virus and administered by tiny needle pricks on  the upper arm, while Sabin’s  was made with a live though weakened [attenuated] virus and was administered orally via a sugar cube).  By the  1970s, Poliomyelitis was essentially eradicated . . . along with the post-war era’s other monster pediatric stay-home-from-school issues: mumps, measles and chickenpox.  Today, those 70 years and older have memories of staying home from school; of spots; of having to stay in darkened rooms and calamine lotion; of “chipmunk cheeks” and the possibility of lethal sequelae (side effects) such as a brain infection called encephalitis, which causes it to swell.  And then there was chicken-pox, which caused unbelievable pruritus  (eternal itching) and necessitated keeping one’s nails very, very short.  Some of us still bear its tiny scars . . . especially on the arms, legs and cheeks.

Although these mostly childhood diseases were finally brought under control because of vaccines - Salk, Sabin and  “MMR” (mumps-measles-rubella) -  the science behind them fired up debates that continue to this day.  Why?  Partly because many post “Baby Boom  Generation” folks (and their children and grandchildren) don’t  know drek from shinola about history;  they simply have little or no knowledge of these childhood diseases, and claim to have “knowledge”  (gained largely through mis- and disinformation spread by social media) that vaccines are a hoax, science itself is a hoax; that when a governmental body or agency mandates children  to be immunized before attending school this is a breach of parental authority . . . or part of  a Zionist conspiracy (remember: both Salk  and Sabin  were Jewish) or the CDC is a mere lapdog of the liberals . . . or a thousand other things.  Here in Florida, our Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, M.D. recently said in a letter that parents at an elementary school with confirmed measles cases can decide whether their children should attend school.  This simply contradicts widespread medical guidance about how to keep the disease from spreading.  And spreading it is. However, in all fairness to “The Doctor from Perdition” he’s merely serving the man who hired him, Governor Ron DeSantis, with every ounce of his being.  I’m sure he must have learned in his Infectious Diseases course at Harvard Med. that Measles is one of the world’s most infectious diseases. Cases and deaths have been rising across the globe, in part because health officials have struggled to vaccinate people in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing vaccine hesitancy.

The same goes for Polio - the disease which kept Paul Alexander imprisoned in an iron lung for more than 90% of his life.  It has resurfaced . . . in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and the United States.  Answering the  question “why now?” isn’t totally clear.  However, at base, it seems to stem from a growing percentage of the child population not being vaccinated at an early age. Then too, there is the whole “anti-vaxxer” craze in which “knowledgeable” parents refuse to have their children immunized with the aforementioned “MMR” vaccine because they have “read” that it can lead to autism. And even if you were to ask most anti-vaxxers “which studies state this?” they will be mute.  Professional anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who is now running as an independent for POTUS) will site 2 studies - both of which were determined to be fatally flawed.  The 2 studies, which were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (Published since 1823, it’s on a par with the Journal of the American Medical Association) were so egregiously, so dangerously flawed, that Wakefield (1956- ) was struck off the medical register in the United Kingdom - tantamount to losing his license to practice. And yet, even if anti-vaxxers don’t know his name and cannot identify The Lancet, they continue spouting their bilge.    

I think I understand why an ever- growing number of people believe in anti-vaxx myths; they are afraid, frustrated and taught to distrust science and the so-called “intellectual elite.”  What I cannot fathom are the creators and perpetrators of all these dangerous myths; what’s behind their willful perfidy?  Is it for political gain?  Is it for profit or ego enhancement? Or is it for picking off “low-hanging fruit” on the tree of society, in order to eventually fell the tree itself?   

 It is a pity that a significant percentage of the so-called “enlightened” populace are  anti-science . . . in  the name of personal liberty or religious freedom.  I think of Paul Alexander who, if he’d only been born a few years later, would likely have received a Salk vaccine and would never have had to live out his life in an iron lung.  What he was able to accomplish despite this multi-ton millstone that kept him alive is a story for  the ages . . . and hopefully a source of inspiration for us all. 

                                                              When it looks like all is up,
                                                                   Keep a-going’!
                                                               Drain the sweetness from the cup,
                                                                   Keep a-agoin’!
                                                               See the wild birds on the wing,
                                                              Hear the bells that sweetly ring,
                                                              When you feel like singin’ - SING —
                                                                    Keep a-going’!

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone               

#960: Meet the Johnsons: It's Not a Sitcom

                 Most of the Cast of “Meet the Johnsons”

One of the great advantages (and disadvantages) of living in a world enswathed in Internet technology is how even the most relatively anonymous person can, within a matter of hours, become as well-known as Benjamin Franklin or F. Scott Fitzgerald.  For those possessing but a scintilla of cyber competence, we have Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Openverse and You.com to act as our personal Library of Congress.  To paraphrase the old Westinghouse all-news-all-the-time tagline, “You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.”

Case in point: less than 72 hours ago, outside of his Benton, Louisiana neighborhood, the people in his church or the constituents in his 4th District House seat had ever heard of the newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. Upon first televised glance - and comparing him visually to the oft-uncoated “Gym” Jordan, he seemed like a pretty normal fellow: well-tailored, well-coifed, bespectacled, and about as benign as Clark Kent. The first published photos of his wife and 4 children, (minus his “adopted” African American son who, for reasons not yet known, was “expunged” from his official biography years ago), made them look like a “ready for prime time” super-photogenic family.

But alas, to paraphrase the Hebrew Bible (1 Samuel 16:7), Looks can be deceiving. To be both fair and honest, I have never met nor interviewed Speaker Johnson. Heck a huge percentage of elected officials on Capitol Hill (except, perhaps, his colleagues on House Judiciary or Armed Services) had to either check out his Congressional Website or find him on Wikipedia. It turns out that his relative anonymity among the 219 members of the House Republican caucus turned out to be beneficial; flying beneath the clouds (unlike Reps. Matt Gaetz, Gym Jordan, George Santos, Steve Scalise,  or Marjorie Taylor Green, to name but a few) meant that he had few - if any - hardcore enemies. Considering the amount of acrimony and waspishness that has been on display throughout the three-week Speaker imbroglio, Johnson’s relative equanimity must have seemed to like a gift from on high.

To use the words “a gift from on high” when referring to Speaker (and Mrs.) Johnson is no mere literary device; rather, it is purely intentional. For without question, no inhabitant of the Speaker’s Office has ever been as thoroughly besotted with the word of G-d than its newest occupant. Johnson has long described himself as “first and foremost a Christian.” An evangelical of the Southern Baptist stripe, Johnson has said: "My faith informs everything I do.” We should all prepare ourselves for a lot of “G-d speak” from the Speaker in the days, weeks and months to come. In his very first address to the House, Speaker Johnson got off to a start filled to overflowing with the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism: “I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time. This is my belief. I believe that each one of us has a huge responsibility today to use the gifts that God has given us to serve.”

If Mike Johnson was the very best person the Republican caucus could agree on to become Speaker of the House, it scares the living bejesus out of me. As a practicing traditional Jew (who also has a pretty well-developed sense of humor), I cannot feel comfortable putting the Speaker’s gavel - the very gavel wielded by the likes of Joseph “Czar” Cannon, Sam Rayburn, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, and Nancy Pelosi - into the hands of an election-denying, Christian Nationalist like Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Coming from a tribe that has long gone out of its way to stay out of the business of converting others to its religious weltanschauung (worldview), I find myself beset with insomnia over the thought of a Speaker - the person 2nd in line to the Presidency - who religious creed is based on saving my soul . . . or else.

Let’s take a look at what our new Speaker supports and where he expects to lead us.

• In a 2017 House Judiciary Committee meeting, Johnson argued that Roe v. Wade made it necessary to cut social programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because abortion reduced the labor force and thus damaged the economy.

  Johnson has co-sponsored bills attempting to ban abortion nationwide, such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021. All three bills would impose criminal penalties, including potential prison terms of up to five years, upon doctors who perform abortions.

• In 2015, Johnson blamed abortions and the "breakup [of] the nuclear family" for school shootings, saying, "when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it's expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters."

• In 2018, he was involved in GOP efforts to overhaul the Endangered Species Act, introducing legislation to do so. 

• In 2020, Johnson signed an amicus brief alongside more than 100 House Republicans supporting a Texas lawsuit that aimed to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Johnson also voted to object to the election results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021. 

• Johnson has been a long-term, outspoken opponent of LGBT rights. He has called homosexuality "sinful" and "destructive" and argued that support for LGBT equality would lead to support for pedophilia and bestiality, and that sex for any other purpose than procreation between a lawfully married man and woman should be considered a crime.

• Johnson previously worked as senior attorney and spokesperson for Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group that pushes its far-right agenda through the courts.

• On May 19, 2021, Johnson and all other seven Republican House leaders in the 117th Congress voted against establishing a national commission to investigate the January 6, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol.

• During a town hall in 2017, Johnson said that he believed that Earth's climate was changing, but questioned the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans.

  Under Johnson, the Republican Study Committee in 2019 called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal the "Greedy New Steal", called "wind and solar" "the most inefficient energy sources we have", and claimed that living near wind turbines could cause "depression and cognitive dysfunction".

• Johnson came to some prominence in the late 1990s when he and his wife appeared on television to promote new laws in Louisiana allowing covenant marriages, under which divorce is much more difficult to obtain than in no-fault divorce. In 2005, Johnson appeared on ABC's Good Morning America to promote covenant marriages, saying, "I'm a big proponent of marriage and fidelity and all the things that go with it".

• In 2016, Johnson delivered a sermon that called the teaching of evolution one of the causes of mass shootings: "People say, 'How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?' Because we've taught a whole generation—a couple generations now—of Americans, that there's no right or wrong, that it's about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there's nobody sacred to whom it's owed.

• In a one-on-one interview with Sean Hannity this past Thursday, just the mass murder in Lewiston, Maine,  Speaker  Johnson made an old Republican line new again, claiming that it’s not guns that kill people—it’s their hearts. “This is not the time to be talking about legislation.”  

If this were not enough, there is Mrs. Speaker Johnson, Kelly. a mental health counselor who, along with her husband, has a popular podcast called ”Truth be Told” With Mike and Kelly Johnson. You won’t find it on the top podcast charts — they haven’t managed to hit the top 100 in the “Religion & Spirituality” section of Apple Podcasts, where it’s designated due to its emphasis on their evangelical Christian beliefs. The project is a blend of political and religious analysis, occasionally featuring guests, that illuminates Johnson’s faith-driven views on governance — and is sure to inform how he approaches his new role.

After a career as a teacher, Kelly Johnson to working as a pastoral counselor at “Onward Christian Counseling Services” where she serves as founder and president. The practice provides religious-based individual, marriage and family counseling to people across Louisiana.  Onward Christian Counseling Services is grounded in the belief that sex is offensive to God if it is not between a man and a woman married to each other. It puts being gay, bisexual or transgender in the same category as someone who has sex with animals or family members, calling all of these examples of “sexual immorality.”  “We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,” says the eight-page business document. (Interestingly, over the past several days, the counseling services’ website has become subscription only.)

Mike Johnson, I am sorry to report, is going to be one of the few Speakers in history who will have to get on-the-job training while leading and shaping the House.  Unlike recent speakers like Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, Mr. Johnson has no deep ties or muscular network of allies across the country. As such, he lacks one of the most important strengths one looks for in a Speaker: an ability to raise vast sums of money. Say what you want about Kevin McCarthy, he is a six-foot tall ATM when it comes to putting the bite on people. There is nothing in Mike Johnson’s career history to suggest that he is in this league. And with the number of red seats open to question in the 2024 elections, money is going to be key.

So welcome to the world of Speaker and Mrs. Mike Johnson.  While it is definitely not going to be a sitcom, it will likely bring tears to the eyes of the American Eagle.

Copyright©2023 Kurt Franklin Stone

Sorry to Say, But Karl Marx Knew What He Was Talking About

Without question, Madame’s first cousin, Mercedes (Mitzi) Debardas Dworin (1922-2016) was my favorite member of the Hyman/Kagan/Chicago side of the family. For not only did Mitzi throw the party at which my mother and father first met in Beverly Hills more than 80 years ago; she was a literate, thorough-going political animal who had no fear calling a spade a spade or a virulent anti-Communist a fascist troll. (She was also the only one in the family who pronounced my name in the European fashion . . . “Kourt.” Up until nearly the end of her life, she was tweaking the political right; in 2014 she responded to an article on former Texas Governor (and then Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry on her Facebook page, writing: “Not even his new-fangled glasses can mask the fact that Gov. Perry is dumber than a bag of hair!”

For quite a few years, Mitzi would host a smallish December luncheon in her home at 313 N. Maple Drive for the surviving members of the Hollywood Blacklist.  As one can well understand, with each passing year, the number of luncheon guests dwindled until, by 2011, the sole survivors who were able to attend, were screenwriter Norma Barzman (who, so far as I know will be 104 this coming September 4), and Norman Corwin, "The Grand Master Of American Audio Theatre," and screenwriter for Kirk Douglas’ 1956 film “Lust For Life.” Mitzi always scheduled these lunch-gatherings for late December, knowing that Annie and I would be in town to listen to them discussing contemporary politics sharing their most difficult memories and letting them know that someone (moi) would keep their names, history and travails alive for yet another generation or two. . .

From the late 1930s through the beginning of the Kennedy era, to be a virulent anti-Communist generally meant being either an ultra-conservative Republican isolationist, or an unreconstructed Southern Democratic racist. These anti-Communists aimed their knives at, among others, union members and their leaders, teachers and blacks. When it came to the movie industry, these hellions of hatred became completely unhinged, hauling actors, screenwriters, directors and producers (a majority of whom were Jewish) before various Congressional committees in order to ask what became the most haunting question of the age: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Many took the Fifth, and were forced out of the industry; others “named names,” thus becoming pariahs to their colleagues. Some were sent to prison. Then, there were the self-taught “experts” on Communism who, at the drop of a hat, pointed fingers and told tales of precisely who was out to foment revolution within our borders. Such “experts” became so reviled by progressives that they became eternally damned, their names never again mentioned in polite company . . . among them were the likes of Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, was the only POTUS to ever lead a trade union . . . the liberal Screen Actors Guild . . . but then again, Ronnie at one time supported actress/U.S. Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas [aka “The Pink Lady”] over Richard Nixon in the 1952 California senate election).

Not only were people in those days attacked for having been a member of the C.P. back in their youth; they were accused of being “premature anti-Fascists,” “Fellow Travelers” and what today we might call either  “influencers,” or “groomers.”  (One of the actors on my paper route, the blacklisted Hershel Bernardi told me that indeed, he had joined a couple of left-wing groups in his youth due to a girl friend he sought to impress.) There were far too many victims, and not enough heroes or heroines.  It was a terribly difficult time; so many lives, reputations and the ability to earn a living were at stake. There also emerged a kind of PTSD; to the best of my recollection, Madame never, ever signed a petition - even if it was something she believed in - for fear that it would come back to haunt her.  The fear and paranoia engendered by the daunting conspiracies of a generation did not fade; many of the victims took the fear and paranoia with them to their graves.  (BTW: One of the best histories of this era of blacklisting was written by the late actor Robert Vaughn: Only Victims, which served as his PhD dissertation when he was a doctoral student at the University of Southern California. in the late 1960s.)

Being both a Hollywood Brat and a longtime student of American political history and its psychological underpinnings, I have long had my doubts about whether all these virulent anti-Communists really, truly feared Karl Marx’s “haunting spectre” — “the spectre of communism,” or whether they merely glommed onto a political cause which would pay dividends both in the press and at the ballot box. Remember that before “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy became the end all and be all of anti-Communism, he was known around Washington as “The Pepsi Cola Kid” - a tool of business interests who had accepted a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for).

From the time of his election to the Senate in 1946 until he gave a history-changing speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in February of 1952 (in which he held up a piece of paper proclaiming “I have here in my hand the names of dozens upon dozens of Communists who are infecting our State Department”), McCarthy was considered a light-weight. Once he gave that speech - and many just like it - he was on the front page of every newspaper in the country and soon found himself the leader of a movement . . . which up to the age of Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz, is still referred to as “McCarthyism.” Oh to be the eponymous ancestor of a movement!

In years past, anti-Communist Republicans and racist Southern Democrats loudly attacked and spoke and tried their damndest to legislate out of existence such “Socialist” programs as Social Security, Medicare and federal spending on everything from education and public housing to feeding poor children. The rhetoric never changes, just the names of the speakers. We recently saw another McCarthy - Speaker Kevin - promise to legislate against Social Security and Medicare in exchange for being given the gavel he has long dreamed of wielding. He has as much of a chance of succeeding as Robert Taft did back in the 1950s or Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.

Make no mistake about it: MAGA Republicans are just as much against anything and everything that smacks or smells of communism or socialism as were their predecessors. The one enormous difference between yesteryear and today is from whence these MAGAites see the conspiracy emanating. In an earlier age, the face belonged to Stalin, and the place was Moscow. Today, the faces are those of Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schiff, George Soros and anyone who believes in Democracy over autocracy or freedom over oligarchy. Unbelievably, where Russia was freedom’s greatest enemy during the Cold War, today, Vladimir Putin is more praiseworthy than the Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (How ironic it is to hear President Zelenskyy attacked as “nothing but a third-rate television comedian” by those who revere Donald J. Trump, a fifth-rate television presence.)

It makes one ill to hear Republican leaders deride the war in Ukraine, attack President Biden for his surprise visit to Kyiv, and for being more concerned about that war than about the needs of the American people, or warning that there should no longer be a “blank check” for that war. Whatever happened to proudly being a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world? Then again, perhaps the Clown Car Caucus has been spending so much time deriding the President, his family and his party, that they’ve failed to note all the bills he’s passed which will lower drug prices, beef up micro-chip production and rebuild bridges, highways and schools.

Will we ever awaken from this nightmare where Russian autocracy is preferred over American Democracy? Or was Karl Marx being spot-on when he noted nearly 175 years ago that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I for one am sick and tired of farce being played out by a bunch of political philistines.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

The 21st Century's Most Malignant Legacy?

This past Tuesday (Feb. 7, 2023) President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. delivered his second State of the Union (SOTU) address before a joint session of Congress. Depending on which side of the Congressional House of Worship you occupied, you were either witness to a political chess master easily parrying the jabs and overhand (far) rights of a bunch of punch-drunk amateurs, or cheering on the manhandling of a WOKE-supporting, mentally unstable octogenarian by a courageous group of young Republicans who understand that “there are no rules in a knife fight” (Yes, this is of course a famous line from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which the likes of Marjorie ‘Cruella Deville’ Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and the rest of the Hole-in-the Head Gang have, in all likelihood, never heard of.)

For proof of this bipolar analysis of last Tuesday’s SOTU, all one needed to do was catch the “post-game” recaps provided by either MSNBC and CNN on the sensible middle, or Fox News and OAN (One America News) on the freaky far right. To watch and listen to both would give one the impression that there were actually 2 totally different realities surrounding the President’s speech; one with heroes (and heroines) sitting on either side of the aisle telling nothing but the truth (i.e. that MAGA Republicans are on record as wanting to cancel both Social Security and Medicare), the other totally incapable of anything but utter dishonesty, putting masks of incomprehension on their faces and shouting out “LIAR!  YOU LIE.”  While watching all this take place, I was reminded of something I read long ago: “Never attempt to destroy someone else’s life with a lie when yours can be destroyed with the truth.

                Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Cruella Deville” Greene (R-GA)

 I for one gave President Biden’s State of the Union address an “A.” (Personally, I have never given any student an ““A+” and certainly don’t believe that there should be any G.P.A. higher than 4.0.)  He was everything a POTUS should be: warm, upbeat, unflappable, occasionally showing that Biden 20 megawatt smile, humorous when called for, and above all, presenting a full-bodied, well-conceived legislative wish-list with a minimum of ho-hum political bromides.  One of the longest-lived politicians in American history (36 years as a Senator, 8 years a Vice President and now 2 years as POTUS), Joe Biden understands better than most the dignity demanded of his office, as well as knowing how to handle himself in front of a camera, and how to deflect a political haymaker with extraordinary éclat (striking effect).  He is, in brief, everything his predecessor was not.  Unlike '45, he doesn’t affix nasty nicknames to his political foes, nor carry himself about like a deranged cult master.  He really, truly believes in working across the aisle (note that was he who initiated the handshake with Speaker McCarthy) and is a gentleman.  

Sara Huckabee Sanders, the newly-elected Governor of Arkansas was, against all reason, chosen to give the response to the State of the Union . . . historically, a position which adds next to nothing to a politician’s c.v. Sanders was likely chosen for two, perhaps three reasons: first, she is 40 years old where President Biden is twice her age; second, she is a woman . . . a demographic which the Republicans are seeing slip through their fingers in the post Roe v. Wade era; and third, she can sling red meat to the MAGA base with the best of them. And if Donald Trump faces a large field of Republican office holders in the 2024 primaries, he’s going to have to capture every last MAGA vote in America . . . that’s where Sanders likely comes in.

In her 20-minute rebuttal, the former Presidential press secretary painted a dystopian portrait of the country leaning heavily into Republican culture war issues and accusing Biden of pursuing “woke fantasies.” “While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” said Sanders, the former White House press secretary. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” She didn’t mention Trump by name, which to the base, is tantamount to a preacher delivering an impassioned Sunday sermon without once mentioning Jesus. Instead, she embraced conservatives’ fights against the way race is taught in public school. She called Biden’s administration “completely hijacked by the radical left.”

“The dividing line in America is no longer right or left,” she said. “The choice is between normal or crazy,” she said. Democrats made much of that line, giving it full-throated support while endlessly running video captures to prove the point that its the Republicans who are the crazy ones . . . Indeed, this line may go down in history as the 2022 equivalent of Senator Marco Rubio reaching for a bottle of water during his 2013 response to President Obama’s SOTU.

In other words, Governor Sanders, like the Republican’s Capitol Hill “Crazy Caucus” are planning on running (and winning) in 2024 on the lies and mistruths of the past many years . . . likely their most malignant legacy to America.  Lies and mistruths have become so endemic to politics and society in general - thanks  in part to the growth and omnipresence of social media and cable “news” outlets, and in part to the moral albinism of its most hypocritical practitioners - that it’s become neigh on impossible to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of mendacity.  For far too many, that which goes against their grain is the product of “fake news.”  This is incredibly dangerous for the future of civilization.  When lies become nothing more than a commodity to be sold under the brand name “truth,” then our republic - let alone civilization itself - is definitely imperiled and likely subject to autocratisation. 

It never ceases to amaze me how much trash and dishonest bloviating a goodly segment of the public is willing to accept as the god’s honest truth.  A few examples: going into the 2020 election, a photo was posted on Facebook claiming that “Joe Biden lives in the biggest mansion in his state and just bought another mansion in Washington, D.C.”  It was quickly shared more than 1,000 times and became “a well-known fact” shortly thereafter.  Stuff and nonsense!  Delaware is the ancestral home of the DuPont family . . . ergo, no one has ever - or shall ever - possess a residence larger than theirs.  The  Winterthur Estate could be considered Delaware's largest mansion. The house was originally built in 1839 but has been enlarged considerably over the years. Henry Francis du Pont renovated the building between 1929 and 1931, resulting in a 175-room mansion sitting on 2,500 acres. This estate was turned into a museum in 1951, however, so some may not consider it to be the "largest mansion" in Delaware.

The Du Pont family built another massive property in Delaware in the early 1900s. While the Nemours Mansion dwarfs the properties owned by Biden at 47,000 sq. ft. (compared to 7,000 for the 2 Biden properties), this property, too, no longer serves as a single-family residence and therefore may not be an applicable comparison.  

Then there is the entire universe of Hunter Biden tales.  Depending on the source of your news, the president’s son made anywhere between $45,000 and $83,677 per month for a position on the board of the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019 - a time when his father was V.P. through the beginning of his presidential campaign.  Recently, rocker Ted Nugent (“The Motor City Madman”) posted a Facebook meme falsely insinuating that Hunter’s payments from the company ended with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then there is Fox’s Tucker Carlson who issues negative reports on President Biden’s profligate son so often, that somehow he has forgotten the days when he actually asked Hunter for his help in getting his son into Georgetown University, including writing a letter of recommendation. And by the way, why hasn’t anyone suggested looking into all the money the Trump and Kushner families made during the time ‘45 was in office?  What Jared and Ivanka pulled in in a single  year would have taken Hunter nearly 640 years to make.  (And this does not include Jared’s $1.3 billion loan from the Saudis . . . )

One of the first items on the House Republican’s agenda in this new congress is the impeachment of President Biden, based largely on the many so-called corruptions of his son.  Indeed, Hunter is about to become the “Hillary Clinton Benghazi Hearings” of the 118th Congress.  Many will recall that Congressional Republicans spent more than 2 years and $7 million looking for something - anything - which  would lay guilt at the feet of the former Secretary of State in the death of Chris Stevens, the American Ambassador to Libya.  What they were hoping for, of course, was an indelible stain on her at the beginning of the 2016 presidential election cycle. After 6 hearings, they issued their 800-page report; it landed with a thud.  And yet, to this very day, there are those Republican House members who want to reopen the Benghazi probe.  And so do their most hypnotized followers who, to this day, “know for a fact” that Secretary Clinton was guilty of murder.

As Mark Twain (or Winston Churchill) once noted, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Or better still:

 Lies are like a pain killer; it gives instant relief, but has lethal side effects forever.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

Just When We Thought We'd Heard It All

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Let’s face it: nearly all Republicans (we’ll give a pass to the 4 or 5 remaining moderate ones) have little to add to the current political dialog. Other than complaining and blaming Democrats for nearly everything under the sun, they rarely say anything worth listening to, let alone seriously considering.

An example or two or three: Republicans continuously blame Democrats in general (and President Biden in particular) for inflation, high gas prices, high rates of violent crime, the stalled consumer pipe-line (which leads to higher prices), increases in the number of immigrants, asylees and refugees entering the country, and a thousand-and-one other things. (Oh, if only Donald Trump had been able to complete his wall . . . the one the Mexican government was supposed to pay for.) 

On the other hand, Republicans rarely - if ever - offer concrete suggestions about containing, constricting or curtailing - let alone solving - any of these challenges . . . short of legislating deep cuts to entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, lowering corporate taxes, impeaching President Biden, A.G. Garland, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis and Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swallwell, and passing a so-called “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” which  ordains that all infants born after attempted abortions must get medical care. (Do remember that the number of babies actually surviving late-term abortions is infinitesimal . . . save in the imaginations of some truly warped individuals;  it is already a crime [it’s called homicide] to intentionally kill an infant that is born alive.)

Besides not possessing any concrete plans or proposals for dealing with the above referenced political challenges (as amply proven in both the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections), many of these challenges are easing due to the efforts of both the Biden Administration and two years of a Congress controlled by the Democrats. Do note that although high, the rise in inflation is beginning to be contained; gas prices are slumping due to a production surplus; (note that the millions of barrels of oil we “lent” ourselves from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves have already been returned . . . and at a lower price) and regardless of what the disloyal opposition broadcasts, the national debt has been reduced by nearly $200 billion, with more reductions on the way . . . assuming that troglodytes do not prevail.

So what is a political party and their mouthpieces to do? Simple: raise new issues guaranteed to consume the attention of their base . . . even if they are untrue and/or simply asinine. The first of two such attempts to keep their base fired up and fearful deals with gas stoves. According to reports popping up on such slanted sources as Fox, the Washington Examiner and the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, President Biden and his administration are about to take away even more of our personal freedom by “coming to take away our gas stoves.”  (Is that before or after they take away our guns?)

It goes without saying that this canal water about gas stoves is not true.  So how did this rumor - one which numerous Republican members of Congress have been scaring the pants off their constituents over - come to be such a hot issue?  Well, recently, Richard Trumka Jr., a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) agency commissioner, said in an interview with Bloomberg that there was rising concern about hazardous indoor pollutants caused by gas stoves.  In the interview, he floated the idea of a ban as a possible solution to the problem. “This is a hidden hazard," he said. "Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned." 

In a public statement about Commissioner Trumka’s interview, a spokesperson for the CPSC explicitly stated that the agency is not considering new guidelines for regulating, or banning, gas stoves. Anything the group proposes, the spokesperson firmly averred,  would “undergo a lengthy review process."  The CPSC spokesperson further stated that Trumka's views do not reflect the views of the entire organization. While the agency was not considering new regulatory measures, nor a ban, the spokesperson said they were planning to gather information from the public "on hazards from gas stoves and potential solutions to hazardous gas [emissions].

 And yet, despite a welter of information which shows that no one is going to be forced to get rid of their gas stoves on pain of legal penalty, the lie persists. You had better believe that it will continue playing a role in conservative talking points from now until the 2024 elections.

But this is by no means the nuttiest, most mind-numbing of fears tearing at the minds and hearts of the right. Believe it or not, one of the greatest fears is a “. . . no-doubt fury that Mars Wrigley, the candy company that manufactures and markets M&Ms, has gone “WOKE.”  Over the past couple of years, M&Ms has adopted new interior flavors (such as pretzel, strawberry shake and espresso) and a host of new colors.  Additionally, Mars has rebranded six of its iconic mascots to represent "more nuanced personalities to underscore the importance of self-expression and power of community through storytelling."

Mars Wrigley has debuted a new promotional wrapper for M&Ms that features three female candy characters, and introduces a new Purple M&M along with Green and Brown. Mars Wrigley has announced they would be donating some of the profits from these M&M sales to organizations that support a variety of professional pursuits by women. The "sexy" green M&M's character has traded in her signature go-go boots for a pair of "cool, laid-back sneakers to reflect her effortless confidence," while the orange M&M's character will suffer from anxiety "to better reflect young people." From a marketing point of view this makes sense; every product goes through changes in order to attract new customers, thus keeping up sales.

Ah, but according to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson,  whom we are told is the single-most popular and influential face on cable, the newest changes are a conspiracy in order to push a “WOKE” philosophy.  According to Carlson, the “Paul Revere” of this conspiracy “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous—until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”  Personally, I don’t know anyone (myself included) who has ever had the desire to down a pint or gigger with a chocolate icon.  Methinks Mr. Carlson needs to get a life.

One of the things which bothers and concerns me the most in issues like gas stoves and WOKE M&Ms, is that those who speak the loudest and most passionately about them in reality, could give a rat’s rump.  They don’t really believe that the Biden Administration is coming to take away their gas stoves any more than Florida Governor “Rhonda Santis” believes that children reading certain books will make them want to change sexes, or that the newest shapes, accoutrements and colors of M&Ms are a danger to America’s moral fiber.  No, they are after more political support, more votes, and higher offices.

Just when we think we’ve heard it all, we discover that we’re wrong . . . 

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

A Memo to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

TO: Marjorie Taylor Greene

FROM: Kurt Franklin Stone

RE: America’s Most Asinine Political Troll

Congratulations MJT: you’ve hit absolute rock bottom. Within hours of President Joseph Biden’s speech condemning MAGA Republicans and the danger they pose to the future of American Democracy, you had the gall to compare him to Hitler . . . and then run an amateurishly-doctored video of the speech with the president wearing a Hitler moustache along with a backdrop of Swastikas and a soundtrack provided by Der führer. Even for you - who have accused George Soros and the Rothchild family of causing forest fires in California via lasers from outer space, and proclaiming that the January 6 insurrection was the work of Black Lives Matter radicals (among many, many other conspiratorial whoppers) - this is going way too far.

We all know that you don’t believe for one second that Biden is Hitlerian . . . or that Democrats are pederasts involved in sex-trafficking children out of a Maryland pizza parlor. It’s all for show . . . and increasing your standing amongst your QAnon supporters. Tell me Marjorie: if Biden is Hitler how is it that you’re still receiving a biweekly paycheck in the amount of $6,692.30 (minus FICA) for your service in Congress? How is it that if Biden is Hitler you aren’t in jail . . . or a concentration camp, or that your family isn’t under arrest? Or that you are free to lie in public and post incredible, altered twaddle on the Internet? The answer is obvious: Biden isn’t a Nazi any more than the troops protecting the U.S. Capitol aren’t members of the “Gazpacho” police or that COVID vaccines are made in “Peach Tree” dishes . . as you so ignorantly called them.

Marjorie: a large majority of the American public has long known that you are an ill-lettered horse’s ass. But to liken the President of the United States to the most evil person in world history is going way too far . . . even for a miscreant like you. Has Joe Biden murdered 6 million Jews? Has his administration firebombed the House of Representatives, burned books he’s disagreed with or denied Christian children the right to attend school? (Herr Hitler did that to Jewish children.) Has the American President ordered the military to invade and take over both Canada and Mexico . . . as well as Central America? The answer, of course, is “NO!” But you wouldn’t know that for the simple reason that you learned world history not from your teachers at South Forsythe High School in Cummings, Georgia or at the University of Georgia where you earned a B.A.A. in 1996. You learned history through conspiracy theorists associated with QAnon.

Your accusing Joe Biden of being Hitler led an Israeli diplomat to condemn you to a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency - something an Israeli diplomat would never do: "I am appalled by this cynical use of Nazi imagery and Hitler comparisons by a member of the United States Congress. As we face a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, in the US and around the world, rhetoric like this only fuels the persistent threat of hatred, extremism, and violence." (It should be noted that the agency had granted the diplomat anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, as it is extraordinarily rare for an Israeli diplomat to criticize an individual American lawmaker.

The American Jewish Committee (whose new leader, Rep. Ted Deutch will take over as President next month) also commented on Twitter that the doctored video was "vile, offensive, and completely unbecoming for a member of Congress." The AJC text also called for Republican members of Congress to condemn your attack. To date, none have had the guts to do so. Talk about cowardice! I hate to think of all the goodies they are going to bestow upon you should the Republicans recapture the House; you could easily become a committee chair!

Marjorie, I really don’t know what is worse, more reprehensible or most unsettling: that you do not believe what you say or proclaim, or that you do. If it be the former, then you are an immoral opportunist; if the latter, then you have the I.Q. and scruples of a carnivorous plant.

 Whether you care or not, Marjorie, you are never going to be anything more than a footnote in American history. Your entry will be nothing more than an example of a long-forgotten, thoroughly unqualified  backbencher who accomplished virtually nothing during her brief time in Congress.

If you believe I’ve libeled you, sue me. I will no doubt have my choice of the greatest First-Amendment attorneys, all offering their services pro bono.

Good luck in your next life . . .

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Replacement Theory: Eugenics Refitted in 21st Century Rags

Of all the professional pursuits I have engaged in over the past half-century (Oy!), none has been more challenging or rewarding than the field of Medical Ethics. (Yes, I can hear the quip “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?” for the thousandth time . . . and no, it is decidedly NOT). Medical ethics is the one field in which I truly feel I am making a difference in this world. At the same time, each day, each week, requires a tremendous amount of study, and a lot of learning. One of the things that takes up quite a bit of learning time is cramming tons of medical acronyms (such as ARDS, BPD, DVT or PML, to name but a teeny-tiny handful) and then translating them into understandable lay English for the masses. Please know that for purposes of this essay, we won’t  get into even a small sampling, lest you, dear reader, fear that any of the abbreviations or terms will become part of some final exam.

G-d forbid! 

Whether or not one knows the difference between “PK” (Pharmacokinetics) and PD (Pharmacodynamics) is not terribly important; it can easily be solved by asking a question or two from an expert.  However, in the world of modern politics, there are tons of terms (which may or may not have their own acronyms) which are terribly important . . . such as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory), “Let’s Go Brandon,” (a right-wing code for “F*ck Joe Biden,”) and one of the newest, “Replacement Theory,” which has come back onto center-stage as a result of this week’s massacre at a Buffalo-area supermarket which took the lives of more than a dozen African-Americans.

“Replacement Theory” (often prefaced by “The Great”), first came to public attention in July, 2017, when bands of White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis, attending a “Unite the Right” rally, marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “You will not replace us!” Nearly two years later, two consecutive mass shootings occurred in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacks were carried out by a lone gunman who entered both mosques during Friday prayer; 51 people were killed and 40 injured. Prior to going on his murderous rampage, the shooter, who was eventually sentenced to 51 life terms without the possibility of parole, issued a 74-page manifesto entitled The Great Replacement. In it, he expressed several anti-immigrant sentiments, including hate speech against migrants, white supremacist rhetoric, and calls for all non-European immigrants in Europe - who he claimed to be "invading his land" - to be removed.

In last week’s mass murder up in Buffalo, the eighteen-year old terrorist, like his counterpart in the Christchurch terrorist tragedy, posted a manifesto in which he accused “Jews, Democrats and Communists” of doing everything in their power to bring about “white genocide” - of “replacing” white people with “illegal immigrants, blacks, browns and Asians” who would then vote a straight Democratic ticket with an eye to eliminating “White Christians.” Somewhat lost in the shuffle was a murderous terror attack on a Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, a community in Southern California’s Orange County.  Once again, the shooter - who was hogtied by members of the congregation with an extension cord - killed because he was a racist who wanted to get rid of as many “aliens” as possible.  (The one person killed in the attack was John Chen, a 52-year old doctor of Sports Medicine in nearby Aliso Viejo.  If not for the heroic Dr. Chen, more congregants would have been murdered. Hauntingly, he was one of my niece Julie’s physicians some years back.)

“Replacement Theory,” got its name from a 2010 work (Le Grand Remplacement) by the French writer Renaud Camus. In his book, Camus depicted a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations. The French migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas, while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview. It didn’t take too long for his worldview to turn into a conspiracy theory and find fertile ground in the rest of Europe and the United States. When all is said and done, Camus’ theory is not all that dissimilar to the 19th-century atrocity known as “Eugenics” - a set of beliefs and practices which aimed to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. The Nazis - particularly Dr. Josef Mengele (Der Todesengel, the “Angel of Death”) comes to mind. From Eugenics to Replacement Theory isn’t that great a leap.

Lest we sneer at “The Great Replacement” as the special provenance of political crazies, lovers of loony conspiracy theories, fans of Tucker Carlson and garden variety Neo-Nazis and racists, consider a few horrifying facts:

• About 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains;

• About 3 in 10 also worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence. (Republicans are more likely than Democrats to fear a loss of influence because of immigration, 36% to 27%.)

• Replacement Theory has moved from the fringes into the mainstream among Congressional Republicans. With the exception of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who ripped their colleagues for not speaking out against White Supremacy which lay just beneath the Buffalo massacre (for which they have been roundly condemned) not a single member of the Republican caucus has said word one. Indeed, the number 3 member of the House Republican caucus (Elise Stefanik) chose to attack Democrats in general, and President Joe Biden in particular for the massacre: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.

Has the whole world gone crazy?  Why oh why do so many people get their news and views from conspiracy-mongers who neither believe nor give a rat’s rump about so-called “White Genocide?  Anyone who could come up with an answer to that question would be in the running for the Nobel Prize in either peace or medicine.  As to what we can do to stifle the voices, the violence and the virulence of these monsters is a bit less confusing, but a hell of a lot more cumbersome.  It is up to us, the masses of ordinary citizens - those who seek a saner and safer society in which to live, love and learn - we MUST banish the bigots, the lovers of totalitarianism, those who are more concerned with the freedom to own weapons of mass destruction than to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and live up to the nation’s slogan e pluribus unum - “Out of many, one.”

I can see no reason why we, the masses of the ordinary, cannot band together and send the haters of humanity back to their humdrum lives . . . far, far away from seats of power.   Put up lawn signs; go knocking on doors, drive neighbors to the polls, and always, always remember the words of Churchill:

“NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE UP!! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,NEVER NEVER-NEVER-NEVER-NEVER!!!”

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Mother Nature's "Self-Propelled Flowers"

Without question, one of G-d’s most unique and fascinating creatures is the butterfly, of which there are more than 24,000 individual species. Scientifically, they are of class insecta, order lepidoptera, and suborder Rhopalocera. They are among nature’s most colorful entities and unlike virtually any other thing on earth, spend far more time metamorphosing from seed to fully actualized creature than living as an adult. (Depending on the species, it can take upwards of a year to go from seed to caterpillar to chrysalis to full-fledged butterfly. And yet, the average lifespan of an adult butterfly is no more than 40 days.)

And, unlike just about anything that lives, it starts out as a work of great physical ugliness - a caterpillar - and winds up as one of nature’s most colorful beauties. The late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers) referred to them as “. . . self-propelled flowers.” Another writer, Anton Chekov, in comparing butterflies and moths to human beings noted: “In nature, a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is [often] the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.” Me thinks both writers were on to a great truth.

Heinlein, because his terse description is so apt; Chekov, because he understood that many otherwise good people inexplicably devolve into base, gullible and purely repulsive creatures. In the first instance - that of understanding butterflies to be Nature’s “self-propelled flowers,” we here in South Florida have only to get into our  cars, drive a few miles, and treat ourselves to a glorious afternoon at Butterfly World in Coconut Creek which bills itself as “The Butterfly Capital of the world.” Located at 3600 W. Sample Road, Butterfly World encompasses 3 acres of butterfly aviaries, botanical gardens, a working butterfly farm and a research center. Over the past 30+ years, the park has expanded to include 2 additional aviaries for tropical birds and an interactive lorikeet encounter, as well as a skilled aviculture care and research staff to support these endeavors.  Today, Butterfly World is the home to thousands upon thousands of different species of these colorful winged creatures.  It is a marvelous place to spend an afternoon, and to my way of thinking, is one of the holiest spots on earth . . .

For his part, Anton Chekov (1860-1904), the greatest of all Russian playwrights (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard) and short-story writers (Rothschild’s Fiddle, The Lady With the Little Dog, The Death of a Government Clerk) was a close student of the human condition, who easily grasped both human weakness and misdirection . . .  the beauty of the butterfly and the repulsive nature of  the caterpillar.  I have to believe that were Chekov alive today, he would not be at all surprised by how a butterfly refuge at the Texas border had become the target of appalling lies created by the conspiratorial crazies who fly the flag of QAnon.  

What in the world could a butterfly conservatory have to do with QAnon . . . the anonymous online lunatics who a couple of years ago somehow tens (hundreds?) of thousands of gullible souls that a popular Washington, D.C.-area pizza parlor (“Comet Ping Pong”) was engaged in a child sex trafficking conspiracy - all under the watchful eye of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Originally born in 2016, the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy - despite world-class debunking - is still alive and kicking, mostly on Tic Tok.

A week ago last Wednesday, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, closed indefinitely after a couple of years of wild QAnon conspiracy theories and mounting threats of violence, including a physical altercation with a Republican congressional candidate from Virginia demanding ". . . to see all the illegals crossing on the raft," according to a piece in The Texas Tribune. On any given day, hundreds of species of butterflies travel through the 20-year-old nonprofit sanctuary, the Houston Chronicle reports. "Birders from across the country visit the refuge to observe and photograph birds unique to the Rio Grande Valley, and thousands of local schoolchildren take field trips to the center each year."

The center’s founder, Dr. Gary Glassberg, a lifelong lover of butterflies who also developed the process of DNA fingerprinting, issued a statement about the current conspiracy which forced the center to close its gates: “We know it’s a dangerous lie . . . .  People say you’re raping babies, then unhinged people come out of the woodwork.”  Marianna Trevino Wright, the center’s longtime executive director, who has actually received death threats, told the New York Times “When I took this job, I thought I would be able to spend a good amount of time outdoors: butterflies, birds, educating children, writing grants . . . . Now every day my children literally worry whether I’m going to survive a day at work.”  What in the  world could have brought this all about?  In a word: Trump’s Border Wall.

In 2017, the National Butterfly Center sued the Trump administration to block construction of a border wall through its property. Two years later, "We Build the Wall" chief Brian Kolfage posted doctored photos of the butterfly sanctuary's dock, claiming it was being used for migrant transport and child sex trafficking. During the wall-funding campaign, Kolfage repeatedly attacked the butterfly center on social media. “Instead of enabling women and children to be sex trafficked like @NatButterflies, we are taking action! This is a war for control of the most powerful country,” (It should be noted that Kolfage was later indicted for allegedly misusing funds for his nearby crowdfunded border wall.) In a country where many believe that Satan-worshiping pedophiles run the government and that the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. will restore a Trump presidency in 2024 (if not sooner), the butterfly center has become the latest unlikely victim of wild misinformation and outright lies spreading rapidly online.

Simply - and hauntingly - stated, the National Butterfly Center has become a borderland version of Comet Ping Pong.

So what can the majority - the ones whom Anton Chekov sees as being beautiful - do about the growing minority of caterpillars who believe every conspiracy put out by Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the anonymous, eponymous “Q?”  It seems to me that responsible members of the mainstream media should bluntly, unhesitatingly question every right-wing, ultra conservative politician during their campaign appearances and press conferences and ask them how they respond to charges that the National Butterfly Center is running an underground child sex-trafficking ring or that John F. Kennedy Jr., never died and is going to reemerge to campaign for Donald Trump in 2024 or any of a number of other ludicrous notions.  Force them to admit they know it’s all a crock . . . or that they whole-heartedly support these conspiracies.  Force them to answer whether or not they support the likes of QAnon, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and all the others who have devolved from butterflies to caterpillars.  

To a great extent, various types of media share a mutual responsibility for the growth and spread of toxic and even lethal conspiracies. And in the long-run, it will take the concerted effort of various types of media to act as a rampart against the onslaught.  

Let every caterpillar evolve!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

RFK Must Be Turning Over in His Grave

Many of us remember precisely where we were and what we were doing in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968: we were glued to the television and shedding tears. For it was shortly after midnight, that New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the man many of us were supporting for POTUS, was gunned down by the 24-year old Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, who was then gang tackled by journalist George Plimpton, former Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson and former NFL great Roosevelt “Rosie” Grier. I well remember sitting in paralytic astonishment, my mother next to me on the couch in the family room. The next several hours would turn out to be the first (and only) time I ever got drunk with her . . .

Senator Kennedy was such a good man.  Perfect?  No, of  course not, but he was pretty damn close for my taste.  I well remember his brother, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy’s eulogy, delivered at his memorial service held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral: 

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

RFK and his widow Ethel Skakel Kennedy (who turns 94 this coming April) had 11 children over 18 years.  The third of them (after Kathleen and Joseph), born in 1954, was Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.  Like his late father and a majority of the Kennedy family, Robert Jr. is a graduate of Harvard and earned a juris doctor at the University of Virginia.  For most of his professional career, this Kennedy has specialized in environmental law, advocating and litigating for the protection of waterways, indigenous rights and renewable energy.  He created a bottled-water company which, before being sold to Nestlé in exchange for a significant donation to local waterkeepers, turned over all its profits to Waterkeepers Alliance. Additionally, for nearly 30 years, he held the post of supervising attorney and co-director of Pace Law School's Environmental Litigation Clinic, which he founded in 1987.  Through other projects and investments, RFK., Jr. has engaged in a lot of  good works . . . typical of most Kennedys past, present and, we can only pray, future.

But then too, there is a disturbing side to Bobby Kennedy’s namesake . . . one which began evincing itself as far back as 2005.  RFK, Jr. was a founding board member of the Food Allergy Initiative. His son suffers from anaphylactic peanut allergies. Kennedy wrote the foreword to The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, in which he and the authors falsely linked increasing food allergies in children to certain vaccines that were approved beginning in 1989. Kennedy is the chairman of Children's Health Defense (formerly the World Mercury Project), an advocacy group he founded in 2016. The group alleges that a large proportion of American children are suffering from conditions as diverse as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), cancer, and various autoimmune diseases due to exposure to certain chemicals and radiation. The Children's Health Defense has blamed and campaigned against vaccines, fluoridation of drinking water, paracetamol (acetaminophen), aluminum, wireless communications, and others “dangers.” Kennedy's group has been identified as one of two major buyers of anti-vaccine Facebook advertising.

All this is merely the tip of a potentially lethal iceberg.  It should perhaps come as no surprise then that RFK, Jr. has been a longtime anti-vaxxer, anti-masker whose lies and anti-science rhetoric have fueled the anti-vaccine movement. According to a study by The Center for Countering Digital Hate (PDF) there are just a dozen people who are responsible for 65% of the COVID-19 disinformation being spread on social media platforms; unbelievably, Kennedy and his organization, Children's Health Defense, were the second biggest offenders.

Goodness knows, many of us have become sadly enured to the anti-vaxx, anti-mask conspiratorial rantings of everyone from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Rand Paul and Representatives Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz and Madison Cawthorn, to loonies like radio talk-show conspiratorialist Alex Jones and soon-to-be confirmed Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. Whether they really, truly believe the shund (that’s a dismissive Yiddish term meaning, roughly, “dramatic theatrical trash”) or not is beside the point. Some are vaccinated liars who are merely doing what they do and saying what they say in order to gratify and thus solidify their political base. But Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.? What in the hell is wrong with him? I mean, he’s neither running for office nor attempting to fill his already overflowing bank account.

And, to make matters even worse - if that’s possible - RFK, Jr.,  like the worst of the anti-vaxxers, has, on many occasions likened the directives of science and medicine to the Nazi’s “final solution.”  This past January 25, appearing at an anti-vaccine, anti-mandate rally in Washington, D.C., Kennedy Jr. told the crowd that today’s COVID-19 mandates, along with technological advances in surveillance, had rendered anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers more persecuted than Anne Frank. (Pardon me while I brekh’n - that’s Yiddish for “upchuck.”)

His exact quote was: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father, and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped. So it was possible. Many died [inaudible], but it was possible.”

Anne Frank?  Doesn’t Jr. care or realize that Anne Frank is one of the world’s best-known symbols of the profound tragedies of the Holocaust; that she is a reminder of what was lost when humanity failed to stop the rise of Nazi fascism?  Bobby Jr.’s comment - and this is certainly not the first time he’s made it - brought about a torrent of negative comments. So much so that he did issue an apology on his Twitter feed: “I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.” But this was far from enough.  Both his sister Kerry and wife, the actress Cheryl Hynes (of “Curb  Your Enthusiasm” fame) issued  stunning condemnations.  Kerry Kennedy wrote: “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric. He does not represent the views of @RFKHumanRights or our family.

His wife, who has a recent history of throwing house parties that expect visitors to have proof of vaccination and other sensible COVID-19 public health precautions—tweeted out: “My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive. The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.”

I for one simply cannot fathom how anyone with an ounce of sense or an education can buy into the anti-vaxx, anti-mask, anti-Dr. Fauci, anti-Bill Gates world of conspiracies.  I have a feeling that the late Senator  Robert F. Kennedy would not have been able to either.

His son and namesake must be giving him many sleepless  nights in the world beyond . . .

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Follow the Money

In the nearly 17 years this blog has existed (on February the fifth we begin our 18th year) more than a handful of the now 874 posts have dealt with the history, nature and psychological underpinnings of political conspiracies. Regardless of whether the conspiracy involved Masons or Jews, Communists, Socialists or the Hollywood film industry - to name but a few - they all seem to have found an audience prepared to believe that they were true, thus explaining that which was both frightening about contemporary political society or making understandable the otherwise deeply inexplicable.

Goodness knows, we are once again in the midst of “Conspiracy Land.”  To many of us, it seems like the wheels have become detached from the democratic wagon, becoming replaced by a kind of pilotless drone searching out the quickest path to autocracy.  In seemingly the wink of an eye, American politics have become obsessed with the “Big Lie” (AKA “Stop the Steal”); the danger of teaching “Critical Race Theory” to public school students (which they are not); the dire necessity of curbing voting rights in the name of keeping elections free of dishonesty (which demonstrably, they are not); and enacting laws which, if allowed to stand, will make a woman’s right to choose all but impossible in more than half the states of our now teetering Union.

The late conservative pundit/Harvard-trained psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer (whom I read regularly . . . and just as regularly disagreed with) once noted “In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.”  In another place he wrote “Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.”  These are likely the only 2 “Krauthammerisms” in which I ever found more than a soupçon of truth.  For when it comes to the various conspiratorial bits floating about these days, it’s really, truly difficult to imagine them being dreamed up and led by the MAGA crowd.  Look back on the people he surrounded himself with during his 4 years in office.  The only qualification  for appointment to the cabinet or his personal staff was loyalty . . . not experience, nor accomplishment nor vision nor even a scintilla of competence.  If experience, accomplishment, vision or competence were required, he never would have  made John D. McEntee ii (his onetime “body man” who carried his golf clubs and suitcase) the Director of Presidential Personnel, or Daniel Scavino (who was general manager of the Trump International Golf Club) Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications or Hope Hicks, (a former model of - and P.R. person for  First Daughter Ivanka Trump’s fashion line) his Director of Communications. 

As the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continues to issue subpoenas and invitations, hold hearings and work alongside the Department of Justice, it seems only logical that they would follow the advice so succinctly stated by “Deep Throat,” as played by the late actor Hal  Holbrook in All the President’s Men: “FOLLOW THE MONEY.” For all we know, perhaps that is part of the Select Committee’s strategy; to determine where all the money for organizing the January 6th insurrection came from, as well  as  to determine who is underwriting all the various issues - CRT. library book banning, anti-vaxx demonstrations as well as state and municipal legislative efforts to give Botox injections to the American system of voting.  By following the money behind all these efforts, we exit the world of the incompetent and begin the journey to the land of the capable.  For all we know, perhaps the trail will lead abroad,  and one day the face of Vladimir Putin will  begin appearing in the mirror. 

Sound overly conspiratorial . . . too 1984ish?  Well, we do know with a degree of certainty that Putin and his cronies played a major role in the 2016 presidential election . . . putting their favorite "useful idiot” into office.  What’s to say they ever stopped? 

Dear Chairman Thompson and members of the Select Committee . . . do whatever you have to in order to get to the bottom of this ghastly insurrection and all that surrounds it.

And please, please, by all means, follow the money!

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

For What It's Worth . . .

                          The Buffalo Springfield, c. 1966

According to an urban legend, rocker Stephen Stills wrote the 1966 classic protest song “For What It’s Worth” as a response to the Vietnam War. As with many such legends, it’s simply not true. Rather, that which provided the motivation for his writing one of Rock’s all-time legendary protest songs was the long-forgotten Sunset Strip Curfew riots in 1966 - a classic countercultural clash between the L.A.P.D. and young people on the Sunset Strip in my hometown, Hollywood, California. This song, as recorded by the then 21-year old Stills and his band, The Buffalo Springfield, became an instant classic.  So much so that here in 2021 - 55 years after it was first recorded - it is just as vibrant and meaningful - even if misunderstood - as during the Capitol Hill invasion by President Donald Trump’s militant crazies just this past week.

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

 I think it's time we stop
 Children, what's that sound?
 Everybody look, what's going down?

Many of you reading this blog will remember various marches on Washington, in which we came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s to protest the war in Vietnam.  I myself attended many . . . not as an angry protester, but rather as an “insider,” whose task it was to teach the many, many protesters coming largely from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Berkeley, to teach them the basics of decorum when meeting up with members of the Cabinet and elected officials in Congress.  (While they stayed on the floors of youth hostels, I had the great fortune of being put up at Averill Harriman’s home in Georgetown.)  We wanted to make sure that these largely teenage protesters,  regardless of their political pique, and addiction to both pot and Country Joe and the Fish, acted like civilized adults.  It must have worked; shortly after our “attack” on the nation’s capitol, LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection. 

There's battle lines being drawn
 Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
 Young people speaking their minds
  Getting so much resistance from behind

  It's time we stop
  Hey, what's that sound?
  Everybody look, what's going down?

Mind you, we did not storm the Capitol bearing weapons of harm and hurt;  we were content to have our presence duly noted, our voices and lyrics heard.  For the most part, we were a pretty literate, well-educated mass . . . so totally unlike the mob of right-wing insurgents who acted far more like criminal cultists than engaged citizens. We - yesteryear’s mass gathering of anti-war, anti-draft protesters - were just as angry back then as the largely White Supremacist, racist criminals who shot an arrow into the heart of democracy this past Wednesday.  We were against what a tone-deaf administration was engaged in; this new gathering - ironically made up largely of people  (mostly males) the age of our eldest children - were attacking and attempting to bring down an entire society.  We were armed with tons of facts, blamed LBJ for the war and General Hershey for the Selective Service System and had a lot of negative feelings about what was then collectively known as “The Establishment”; we were accused of being immoral Communists and Socialists. Today’s insurrectionists are motivated mostly by lies they believe to be the utter truth;  lies perpetrated  by their cult leader, the President of the United States.  The one thing that remains the  same is that we, the protesters of yore are still being called immoral Communists and Socialists.  One major  difference is that back during the “Days of Rage,” many of us actually knew what the difference between Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyites and Titoists were, whereas to today’s Trumpian seditionists, a lower-case “communist” is simply someone who has not bought into the lies, the fears, the conspiracies or stereotypes spread about by their beloved leader.

 What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)
  A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)
  Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)
  Mostly say hooray for our side

It's time we stop
Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what’s going down?

With each passing day, we are learning more and more about what this horrifying event: 

• About how it was all planned in plain sight;

• About how much culpability Donald Trump and  his many cowardly Congressional enablers possess;

• About what these craven thousands brought with them to Washington, D.C in terms of weaponry;

• About how far they were willing to go in their attempt to overturn the  2020 election;

• About the conspiratorial nature of the event;

• About just how lucky that things were not worse.

Without question, what  Donald  Trump and his hypnotized hooligans carried off was the absolute low-water mark in all American history. Drawing upon his childhood in post-World War II Austria, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, compared Wednesday's riot at the Capitol to Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, the rampage of violence by the Nazi regime against Jewish communities, synagogues and businesses in Germany and Austria in 1938. "Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States," he said, referring to broken windows in the Capitol building. But the mob also "shattered the ideas we took for granted" and "trampled the very principles on which our country was founded."  Not a particularly successful governor of the nation’s largest state, the “Governator” firmly placed the blame on Donald Trump for continuing to make baseless claims of election fraud and "misleading people with lies." 

"My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies and I know where such lies lead," the  former actor said. "President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst President ever." 

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
 It starts when you're always afraid
 Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 We better stop
  Hey, what's that sound?
  Everybody look, what's going down?

It has long been clear that Donald Trump is a psychological train wreck; a person who never should have been elected president. Some of the harshest, most on the money criticism of him was voiced more than 5 years ago by people like Senators Rubio (FL), Cruz (TX) and Graham (SC) who of course are still in his enabling corner. In all, it turns out that 8 senators and 139 representatives voted to overturn the 2020 election results. And despite the fact that there were and are a tremendous number of anti-Semites among the most fanatic and delusional of Trump supporters, all three Jewish Republican members of Congress (Tennessee’s David Kustoff and New York’s Elissa Slotkin and Lee Zeldin) voted to decertify the electoral college returns. To my way of thinking not only these three - but indeed all 147 members of Congress should be held accountable in the next election.

As I write these words, Vice President Mike Pence - who is currently in his boss’s dog house - is visiting the White House.  Whether he’s there to convince Donald Trump to resign (in exchange, perhaps for a pardon), submit to being replaced by his #2 under terms of the25th  Amendment, or be impeached for the second time is anyone’s guess.  Two  things which are reasonably certain:

1. Donald Trump is in a very, very dark place; scared to death of what’s going to happen to him the moment he leaves the White House, and

2. He’s going to known throughout the rest of history as America’s biggest loser; the  man who, ironically is going to hear the words “YOU’RE FIRED!” every hour of every day for the rest of his life.

Then too, it is possible  that the movement he and his enablers have created is going to suffer a tremendous loss of political potency.  Historically, cults begin to fade once the leader leaves the stage . . . whether through imprisonment, mortality or suffering from the  “Wizard of Oz syndrome.”  President-elect Biden  and Vice President-elect Harris are going to have their hands full bringing America back from the brink and reintroducing what is best about this  country  to not  only our friends and allies, but our enemies  as well.  

We better stop
 Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

For What It's Worth lyrics © Cotillion Music Inc., Ten-east Music, Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music, Cotillion Music, Inc.

Politics As a Poorly Played Chess Match

Anyone who has ever been a student in any of my “All Politics All the Time” courses at Florida International University (now beginning their 23rd year), knows that I liken big-league, big-time politics not to a game of Texas Hold-em Poker, but rather to a chess match. Why? Because the former, as I understand it, is pretty freewheeling, while in chess, participants, in the main, have two different possible strategies by which to play: either ascertain your opponent’s next 4, 5, or 6 moves (in an effort to get you to play their game), or to force your opponent to unknowingly play your game. Either plan can lead to victory . . . or defeat. To my way of thinking, that’s the essence of hard-core politics . . . if played with intelligence, foresight and a first-rate crystal ball. My preference is to get my opponent to play my game . . . to fall into my trap.

The same goes with politics. Played correctly, few things happen accidentally or out of sheer luck. That’s probably why world-class campaign managers and political strategists are in such high demand; they know what they’re doing. Or at least that‘s the way things are supposed to go. In the age of Donald Trump - where the candidate/incumbent is also his own master strategist and chief political bottle-washer, things can be unbelievably confusing and tending to suffer from high levels of incomprehensible anomie (a term invented by Emile Durkheim, the French father of Sociology meaning “a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals”. Unlike with previous presidents and presidential candidates, Boss Tweet listens to almost no one but himself, rejects and dismisses those who disagree, and only uses the narcissist’s pronoun: the first person singular. 

Well before the November 3, 2020 election, Donald Trump was already telling his favorite entertainers at Fox, News Max and One America News that the only thing that could keep him from being reelected would be a massive act of fraud. More than 2 months after his defeat at the hands of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and California Senator Kamala Harris, he is still performing from the same script.  Whether or not he and his pigeon-hearted acolytes (whether on Capitol Hill, Fox News, or out in the American hinterlands) really, truly believe there was a massive conspiratorial fraud which  led to his defeat is absolutely irrelevant.  Each group has its reason for continuing to back his lunacy.  For  those in office, there is the constant dread that to oppose him - to call him out - would be tantamount to political suicide.  Take Texas Senator Ted Cruz as but one  example.  I mean, here is a guy who, despite his Harvard law degree and the fact that then-presidential candidate Trump accused his father, Rafael Cruz of being part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK in 1963 and referred to his wife Heidi as “ugly,” is nonetheless  at the forefront of those looking to overthrow the Electoral College come January 6. Then there’s Missouri Senator Josh  Hawley who, despite his Yale Law School degree, was the first member of the Upper Chamber to support what The Atlantic’s  Eric Wehner called “an act of civil vandalism.” 

As of today (Monday, January 4, 2021) along with Cruz and Hawley, there are an additional 10 Republican Senators who will support overturning the Electoral College:  Sens. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Mike Braun (Ind.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), John Kennedy (La.) and James Lankford (Okla.), as well four who were just sworn in yesterday (Sens. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.), Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.), Roger Marshall (Kan.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.).  Over on the House side, there are close to 12 dozen Republicans who have declared themselves in favor of overriding the already certified electoral votes from upwards of 6 different states. In other words, when faced with a choice between supporting Donald Trump’s quixotic quest for what at best would be a pyrrhic victory and protecting the Constitution (specifically Amendment 12) which each of them has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend,” they are bigger fans of Mussolini than James Madison.

Back in the late 1920s, Will Rogers - vaudevillian, movie star, essayist, humorist and honorary mayor of Beverly Hills - wrote “I am not a member of any organized  political party; I am a Democrat.” Had he an ounce of wit about him, I’ve got to believe that the (hopefully soon-to-be former) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might turn Rogers’ bon mot on its head and sadly proclaim “I am not a member of any organized political party; I am a Republican.”  And he might be correct. For indeed, over the past couple of years, the G.O.P has begun splintering like a piece of old weather-worn balsa. The issues which have brought about this disorganization are not about their leader’s inability to lead, tell the  truth, or show concern for anyone but himself; no, they are more strategic . . . like spending every waking hour bellyaching about the vast conspiracy which denied him reelection, or threatening those who do not bow before him with political annihilation.  Indeed, as I finish writing this paragraph, it has just been reported that ‘45 has  targeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) a day after the senator said he would not join Wednesday’s effort to object to the certification of Electoral College votes affirming Joe Biden as the next president.

"How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Trump tweeted, suggesting he would falsely claim during his rally in Georgia later this evening that he was a true winner of the election despite multiple audits and court cases confirming Biden had won and that Trump claims lacked standing.  At one point, the deeply conservative 43 year old Cotton (who is a graduate of both Harvard and Harvard Law) was thought to be a possible presidential candidate in either 2024 or 2028.  Through his tweets, Donald Trump has done his best to put an end to Cotton’s presidential aspirations: "@SenTomCotton” Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!” 

But the balsa is beginning to creak.  

Just the other day, the Republican-controlled Senate handed ‘45 the first veto override of his presidency.  More and more GOP institutionalists (including Leader McConnell, Utah’s Mitt Romney, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse [who called those who refused to override the veto “institutional arsonists”]) have admitted that Joe Biden did win the 2020 election.  Now under normal circumstances this would be neither especially newsworthy nor a brilliant bit of political strategy.  But these are not normal times.  It’s not just one election that is being called into question.  The endgame here is not so much the reelection of Donald Trump (which no one - and I mean no one) believes for one second is going to happen.  Rather, it is the trashing and ultimate destruction of our representative democracy; it is the willful replacing of Trump with Putin and small-d democracy with capital-A autocracy. 

Just yesterday, ‘45 began his endgame.  The strategy?  Engaging in an hour-long phone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State in which he told the Republican Brad Raffensperger "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state." The phone call featured Trump, just days before he is set to leave office, pleading with Raffensperger to alter the vote total and launching into a barrage of discredited conspiracy theories about the election. He even suggested that Raffensperger may face criminal consequences should he refuse to intervene in accordance with Trump's wishes. During the conversation, Trump floated fragments of several baseless conspiracy theories that were primarily pushed by QAnon followers over the last two months, including a widely debunked theory about voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.  Once a printed transcript of the phone call (accompanied by a full audio file) of what Trump had said became available, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him to “open an immediate criminal investigation into the President,” citing statements from the call that suggest Trump was illegally “soliciting election fraud.”

Trump’s endgame strategy is so unbelievably warped that nobody seems to have asked themselves “Who would ever support such a fatally flawed creature again?  People like Senators Cruz and Hawley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis  (a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law) are clinging as tight as they can to their mentor in the hopes of becoming the G.O.P.’s 2024 nominee for POTUS.  That is probably the worst opening move anyone could ever play . . . short of pulling out a gun and shooting their opponent.  

Polls open in Georgia in just about 12 hours.

2 weeks and 1 day until the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

 Might I suggest beginning the match with 1e-4, the “King’s Pawn Opening?” It immediately stakes a claim in the center, and frees two pieces (the queen and the king’s bishop) for action.  Try it: it’s been known to work!

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

The Politics of Pandemics: a Primer

                                    The Black Death Hits Venice

In October, 1347, the Black Death, a variant of bubonic plague, arrived in Europe and began killing about half the population, thus changing the social order and transforming the European continent forevermore. Although it was no means the world’s first pandemic, it did carry with it the most memorable of all history's fatal taglines: “The Black Death.”

Despite being largely discredited by the vast majority of medical historians like the Swiss-born Iris Ritzmann, millions of central Europeans fervently believed that Jews were to blame for the plague, and as such gruesomely killed them off by the hundreds of thousands. Hey, if you’ve got to blame someone for being the cause of an otherwise inexplicable disease which wound up killing off more than 200 million men, women and children, why not make it the Jews?

The first of history’s horrific pandemics was known as The Plague of Justinian (541 C.E.). It was caused by a single bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, and hung around most of the inhabited world for more than a thousand years. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was then carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, a recently conquered land paying tribute to Emperor Justinian in grain. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the black rats that snacked on the grain. This plague decimated Constantinople and spread like wildfire across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people, perhaps half the world’s population.

When the Black Death finally made its way to Venice in 1347 the Doges (city fathers), although possessing no scientific understanding of contagion, were able to fathom that it had something to do with proximity. As a result, forward-thinking officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they weren’t sick. At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a trentino. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a quarantino, the origin of the word “quarantine,” and the start of its practice in the Western world.

In England, the Black Death kept popping up every decade from 1348 and 1665; each decade found nearly 20% of the population succumbing to this plague. Then there was smallpox, which wiped out entire populations in Mexico, North Africa and parts of Asia. In 1801. British doctor Edward Jenner famously inoculated his gardener’s 9-year-old son with cowpox and then exposed him to the smallpox virus with no ill effect. Jenner’s vaccine was right on the money, but wouldn’t totally eradicate the disease until 1980.

The 1918-1920 “Spanish Flu,” the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide —about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million men, women and children, including some 675,000 Americans. Here in the United States there were 2 waves; the first wasn’t nearly as lethal as the second, which saw the Wilson administration ordering U.S. citizens to wear masks, close and shutter schools, theaters and businesses; bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march. There is little evidence that people declared these steps to be illegal obstacles to freedom . . . unlike what we see and hear today during our current COVID-19 crisis.

In brief, the history of pandemics has shown progress on many fronts including the superstitious, the social, the scientific and today, something rather new: the political. The progress with which biochemists, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists have created, tested and vetted innumerable vaccines (two of which have just this past week received FDA emergency approval) is nothing short of the miraculous. In my work with the medical and scientific experts at Advarra (for which, by law, our primary mandate is to protect the rights and safety of participants in clinical trials), it has never ceased to amaze me how much distance there is between pharmaceuticals, procedures and just plain politics. From our side of the aisle, it has been both deeply tragic and utterly laughable to observe the countless roadblocks and phantasmagoric pronouncements of politicians who haven’t got the slightest idea of what they’re talking about. They have placed an altogether psychotic roadblock on the pathway to cure.

More and more, we read or hear the declarations of so-called community leaders who aver that COVID-19 is a “hoax” nefariously created and funded by the likes of the late Hugo Chavez, Bill Gates and George Soros; that vaccines created by the likes of Pfizer and Moderna have not been created to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic but rather to implant microchips into those receiving vaccinations for the express purpose of tracking every human being on the planet. Further, these same people claim that the wearing of masks, observing social distancing and other sensible precautions represent nothing less than the death of liberty.

Then there are those who are scaring the daylights out of people by telling them that these vaccines are purposefully made to inflict lethal harm, not healing.

A couple of examples might be useful. Just the other day, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Pfizer, bizarrely warning that their BioNTech vaccine could result in such strange side-effects as women growing beards and people turning into crocodiles. He also announced that under no circumstances would he submit to being vaccinated.  And by the way, Bolsonaro is one of the autocrats that our current POTUS most admires.

Closer to home, just this past Friday, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that he will not be taking the coronavirus vaccine, explaining that he is “more concerned about the safety of the vaccine” than the “side effects of the disease.” “It is my choice,” Rep. Buck told Cavuto: “I’m an American and I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and, in this case, I’m not going to take the vaccine.” Then there are all those “super spreader” gatherings we see covered on the nightly news in which hardly anyone is wearing a mask or keeping their distance. It seems that for a troubling minority, refusing to wear a mask or keep six-foot distances are marks of all-American machismo or marianismo. (Do note, being a hardcore anti-vaxxer is by no means the exclusive purview of conservative Republicans and political lunatics; If you look at some of the places where opposition to vaccinations for children is highest, it’s places like Santa Monica, Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge) and Seattle, none of which are part of the right wing.

Here in Florida (which, with a few exceptions is the reddest part of the Deep South)-, Governor Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. in umbra Trump (Latin for “In the Shadow of Trump”) has made it next to impossible for counties or municipalities to initiate their own pro-mask, pro-social distancing ordinances and has further mandated that restaurants, bars, gyms, nail parlors and other such businesses remain open so as not to interfere with the state’s supposedly reemerging economy. (It should be noted that DeSantis is giving serious thought to running for POTUS in 2024 should his revered leader not. As such, he is doing everything in his power to keep on the good side of Trump’s right-wing, Libertarian base.) DeSantis has also managed to distort both COVID-19 and COD (Cause of Death) stats so as to make it seem that deaths attributable to the pandemic are much lower than the more trustworthy stats provided by the Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center.

While the scientific/medical progress made in the pursuit of corralling COVID-19 has been nothing short of a breathtaking miracle, the politics behind it all have been as terrifying as any Wes Craven-directed slasher film. On the science/medical side of the pandemic, researchers and ethicists have done their jobs with tireless alacrity, going through tens of dozens of clinical trials in order to develop vaccines which are both relatively safe and more than reasonably effective. Are these vaccines perfect? No . . . no drug, vaccine or medical procedure is 100% safe. There is always the possibility of “adverse events” (side effects) depending on a host of issues like “comorbidities” (other medical conditions like HIV, diabetes, immune system deficits or advanced age). And of course, any medicine or vaccine must by law include the majority of these possible known side effects. Anyone who has ever watched drug ads on television knows that the majority of a 60-second spot is consumed with telling you all the possible things that could go wrong. Although both the legal and ethical thing to do, it’s nonetheless enough to keep many people from telling their physician to try the drug - although why a patient should be telling the doctor what to try has always seemed to me a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Knowing that I have been working on COVID-19 protocols for most of 2020 (along with the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Project” for the past 5), I am frequently asked if I will be taking one of the various anti-COVID-19 vaccines. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” I tell them. “I will be doing it for me, for my family and friends, my students, neighbors, coworkers and congregants . . . for anyone and everyone I may come into contact with.”

I always conclude my answer with: “And always remember:  the acronym for “United States” is “U.S.,” as in “us.”

We are all in this together.

15 days until the Georgia Senate elections

30 days until the beginning of the Biden/Harris administration.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Where’s Smedley Now That We Need Him?

Back in 1852, Karl Marx published an essay entitled The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. The genesis for this brief essay was an event which occurred on December 2 1851 when followers of French President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

    General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940)

In this minor - though fascinating - work Marx traced how the conflict of different social interests manifests itself in the complex web of political struggles. In other words, as is stated in the Hebrew Bible (Koheleth [Ecclesiastes] 1:9), ““There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Unquestionably, the most famous (though frequently misquoted) statement found in The 18th Brumaire is still regarded as one heck of a truism even during the waning days of the Trump Presidency in 2020: that historical entities appear twice, "the first as tragedy, then as farce." Marx, of course, knew nothing of Donald Trump the man; he did, however, know tons and tons about autocrats like Donald Trump. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx was aiming his pen at - respectively - Napoleon I and then to his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III).

The haunting truth of Marx’s old chestnut came to mind yesterday, when SCOTUS (the Supreme Court of the United States) gave the shortest of shrifts to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal brief (along with amicus briefs from 17 other states’ attorneys general and a majority of Congressional Republicans) to overturn - and thus invalidate - the 2020 presidential election. This legal kick in the privates came just days after the Roberts’ Court took all of one sentence to tell Trump et al to take a long hike on a short pier in their case against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Ever since it has been understood that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and Senator Kamala Harris will be the next President and Vice President of the United States of America, Donald Trump and his [il[legal team have filed more than 4 dozen cases in state and federal courts, seeking to have the 2020 presidential election overturned.  Their batting average has been near zero.  For this we can offer prayers of thanksgiving to the American judiciary which, for the most part, refuse to be drawn into any conspiratorial coup.  Come tomorrow, December 14, the 2020 presidential election will have become part of American history; Donald Trump will be a loser,  Joseph Biden a winner and the attempted coup will begin melting into the scummy slag of history. 

“So where,” you may well ask, “is the tragedy and the farce?”  The farce, to put second things first, is the attempted coup created by Donald Trump, his autocratic billionaire buddies, a gaggle of different Nationalist, Racist, White Supremacist, uber-libertarian and conspiratorial groups; and all those who wish nothing more than to  dismantle virtually everything ever done or dreamed by former President Barack Obama and his administration. These coup-masters are a frightening cult made up of folks who disdain Ivy League graduates, progressives, immigrants, scientists, most Jews, environmentalists and feminists; they are, for the most part, made up of all those Second Amendment-loving Americans who seek a return to the days of the Cold War when political correctness was unheard of, Ozzie And Harriet were the typical American family, and moms stayed at home in order to raise a family.  It is a “farce,” precisely because it is a misguided dream of yesteryear.  

So far as “tragedy” goes, let’s hop into the “Wayback Machine” and alight on the earliest days of the FDR administration. Shortly after his inauguration in March, 1933, a group of the wealthiest men in America started putting together and funding a campaign which they hoped and prayed would punish - and eventually remove from office - the most aristocratic of all American presidents. Their reason?  Because, as the most blue-blooded member of the Mayflower-Groton-Harvard-patrician breed, he turned out to be very much on the side of the working middle class; a progressive with deep ties to the Jewish/immigrant/rural community. To his classmates and club mates, he became nothing short of an anathema – a traitor to his class and culture. And that is why that group made up of the richest of the American rich sought to overthrow him through a coup in early 1933. They were also deeply afraid that he might raise their taxes. Although not necessarily widely reported in history texts, this group was at the epicenter of what historians have called either “The Business Plot,” or “The Wall Street Putsch.”

It was a dangerous time in America . . . much like the times we have been living through of late. Then along came FDR who soundly thrashed incumbent President Hoover in the 1932 election and then embarked upon an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. During FDR’s historic “first hundred days,” West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield (a member of the “Hatfields v McCoys” clan) worriedly wrote a colleague that:  "This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."

Times were extraordinarily tense.  According to historian Sally Denton in her excellent 2012 book The Plots Against the President, “. . . fascism, communism, even Nazism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills. . . . Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.”  In addition to the bankers who underwrote the “putsch” (one of whom, Brown Brothers/Harriman partner Prescott Bush would eventually become a U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the father of future President George H.W. Bush) thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to a basically fascist, military-type government.  It was, in the words of historian Denton, “a cockamamie concept.” The conspirators had several million dollars (and this was in 1933!), a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces.

Smedley Darlington who?  General Butler (nicknamed “Old Gimlet Eye” due to his feverish, bloodshot eyes) was, in 1933, the most highly decorated Marine in American history - the only one to be awarded the Brevet Medal (awarded for “Extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force”) and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. Following “The Great War,” Butler quickly became a household name in America. People trusted him; his name and fame were right up there with Charles Lindbergh and General John J. Pershing. Butler would meet on quite a few occasions with the principles of this plot - including the aforementioned Prescott Bush, bond salesman extraordinaire Gerald MacGuire, Bob Doyle of the American Legion, members of the DuPont family and Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark.  Their topic was, of course about overthrowing FDR and instituting a Fascist form of government. They then sent Butler out across the country, making speech after speech about the absolute necessity of getting rid of Roosevelt and his band of “communists, socialists, Jewish Marxists and anti-capitalists.”  They would eventually coalesce into “The America First” committee

But somewhere along the way, Butler became convinced that these bankers, heirs and white-shoe, blue-blooded Wall Street attorneys represented a vile danger to our form of government. When he finally got around to asking bond-broker MacGuire what specifically was wanted of him from the group, Butler was told he would be the ideal leader of a vast army of veterans, promising him an army of 500,000 men and all but limitless financial backing, so long as he would be willing to lead a march on the White House to displace Roosevelt.

With time, General Butler moved further and further to the political left, and actually became so anti war that he picked up a new nickname: “The Fighting Quaker.” Finally, unable to remain a part of the crowd of conspirators - let alone leading an anti-Democratic, anti-Semitic putsch - Butler decided he had to do something about it.  But who, he thought, would ever believe what he  had to report?  It was such an outlandish plot as to sound like a story-line from Mark Twain at his fabulist best. Increasingly troubled by MacGuire’s plans, Butler knew he would need someone to corroborate his story if he was going to stop the intended coup. Having previously worked as a police captain in Philadelphia, Butler reached out to a reporter from the Philadelphia Record named Paul Comly French, who agreed to meet with MacGuire as well.  (French, by the way, had gained fame for covering the Lindbergh baby kidnapping - one of the most sensational stories of the early 1930s). During this meeting, MacGuire told French that he believed a fascist state was the only answer for America, and that Smedley Butler was the “ideal leader” because he “could organize one million men overnight.”

Armed with French’s mutual testimony, Butler appeared before the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee, also known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal what he knew about the plot to seize the presidency in November 1934. (The committee’s co-chairs were Massachusetts Democrat John McCormick [1891-1980], an Irish Catholic who would serve as Speaker of the House from 1962-1971 and New York Democrat Sam Dickstein [1885-1954], the Lithuanian-born son of an Orthodox rabbi who would eventually serve 9 years as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court.  The two men did not get along with one another at all.  Whenever McCormack wielded the gavel, Dickstein absented himself; whenever Dickstein led the committee, McCormack was nowhere to be seen.)  

Listening to General Butler, along with the testimony of both French, and the erratic MacGuire, the committee began to further investigate the plot. The final reports of the committee sang a different tune, finding that all of Butler’s claims could be corroborated as factual. However, they also stressed that the plot was far from being enacted, and it was not clear if the plans would have ever truly come to fruition.

Quickly becoming known as the “White House Coup” and the “Wall Street Putsch,” many major news sources derided Butler’s claims, as the committee’s final report was not made available publicly. Those implicated, ranging from the DuPont family to Prescott Bush, laughed off Butler’s claims; they believed that they were “above the law.” Evidence of the validity of Butler’s testimony was not released until the 21st century, when the committee’s papers were published in the Public Domain. No one was ever prosecuted in connection with the plot.  And yet, without General Butler, there is every reason to believe that some sort of coup would have occurred and likely succeeded.  When America needed what today we would refer to as a “whistle blower,” Smedley D. Butler was there, doing what he did best: being a hero.  (BTW: General Butler wrote a brief book in 1935 [still in print] that for years, was taught in American public schools: War is a Racket.  It is one of the most profound antiwar essays in all American history.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump will no longer be occupying the White House after this coming January 20, (fingers crossed, lucky Dodger socks pulled tight), he is likely not going to be leaving the American political scene.  He and his henchmen (which include Ivanka, Jared, Eric and Donald, Jr.) have already amassed more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in their own PAC - ostensibly to keep paying their attorney fees for cases they cannot win . . . let alone get on any court’s docket.  Mostly, the money will be used to fund the Trump lifestyle as well as keeping him on the campaign circuit supporting those who bow before him and destroying those who have seen through or had the chutzpah to criticize him.  He is by no means finished with his task of destroying America while selling the Trump brand and - who knows - creating his own media empire.  There are dire consequences for both America and indeed, the world - in having an unhinged, amoral narcissist go unchallenged.  The fact that a clear majority of all elected Republicans are either incapable of - or afraid to - stand up like Smedley Butler and tell the truth about this miscreant from Manhattan (actually Queens) is both a curse and a stain on the fabric of civil society.

To all those Senate Republicans who are hinting that they won’t be holding hearings for any of Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees until they are 100% convinced that Trump’s loss wasn’t a case of fraud (i.e. never), I have one thing to say: don’t ever refer to yourself a patriot. You are cultists driven to do whatever your dictatorial master commands - even if it will bring down the American political system. You actually see no danger in declaring the next POTUS illegitimate in the eyes of nearly half the American people. Do you have any idea of how foolish and robotically puerile you look to the rest of the world? Are you that feverishly  fearful of Donald Trump that you would eviscerate the body politic in the hopes that he won’t find someone to challenge you in the next Republican primary?  Where is your spine?

And so, permit me to issue a call for any and all true American patriots (in the real sense of the word) to step into the shoes of General Smedley D. Butler and tell it like it is.

Goodness knows, we need each and every one of you. NOW!

23 days until the Georgia elections.

38 days until the Biden/Harris administration gets to work.

Here’s wishing our Jewish friends a chag chanukah s’maycha! May your latkes (and/or sufgan’yot be delicious and calorie-free . . . And do remember: this is the season for miracles!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

"A Hot Mess Inside a Dumpster Fire Inside a Train Wreck"

For the past 36 hours or so  just about every pundit, columnist, newscaster and political creatures both insightful and ignominious have offered up their thoughts and opinions on the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden. Predictably, the Fox/Breitbart/National Review crowd found the president’s performance to be on a par with anything they’d ever heard or witnessed, and firmly believed that he had wiped up the debate floor with the former Vice President’s entrails. Likewise, much of the CNN/MSNBC/Daily Kos assembly awarded high marks for Biden’s clarity, and strength of character in standing up to - and making short shrift of - the Bully of Mar-a-Lago. Depending on which political bunker you were hunkered down in, moderator Chris Wallace was either found to be a traitor to the conservative right, a hero, or a fellow doing the best he could under the most trying of circumstances.  Few if any Republican office-holders or seekers had any comments to make about the manner in which their leader disported himself.  That few - if any - found anything objectionable in his unsportsmanlike, serial abuse of his opponent,  speaks volumes.  And while the former veep’s overall game plan won’t cause anyone to confuse him with the likes of FDR or Barack Obama, he did manage to stand his ground and maintain a strong-willed, if gentlemanly civility.

I came away from the 90 minute debacle with two immediate thoughts: 

1. There was but one person possessing presidential mien on the dais, and

2. Einstein was absolutely correct when he wrote that “politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.” (Then too, in a time when some rely on science and others scoff and mistrust it, one remembers another of his tongue-in-cheek bon mots: “Politics is more difficult than physics.”

Asked what he thought about the first debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper replied “It was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.” His colleague, Dana Bash had even sharper words: ““I’m just going to say it like it is. That was a s--- show.” Finally, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, a previous primary debate moderator, said “As one who has watched presidential debates for more than 40 years, that was the worst presidential debate I have ever seen.”

Regardless of whom one thinks won the debate, two things are crystal clear:

1. The biggest losers of the night were the American people. I cannot imagine what it must have seemed like to people watching the debate in Europe, South America, Asia and other former allies of the United States.

2. While the pundits zeroed in on Trump’s constant interrupting and talking over Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace’s inability to gain control over the night, one moment in particular caused extreme distress for several commentators: Trump telling the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” when asked by Wallace whether he would denounce white supremacists.

Over the past 20 or so hours, there have been responses to this debacle ranging from rewriting debate rules to include the use of a “kill switch,” by which the monitor can cut off the mic of a participant if he keeps interrupting his opponent, and up-to-the-minute notifications of lies being told.  In the first-night debate, both sides uttered untruths or mendacious exaggerations.  The president, of course has, by far, the worst track record when it comes to straying from the truth.

As we get closer and closer to November 3, there’s only a tiny percentage of the American voting public who have yet to make up their mind as to whom they’re voting for.  This 4-5% of the voting public is the group that Republicans and Democrats are most interested in impressing and winning over.  Otherwise, all the speeches, commercials, placards, bumper stickers and interviews are directed towards the so-called “base” — those who will, without question, vote for the Democrat or the Republican.  With the way polling has been going for the past several months, it is Donald Trump who is most in need of expanding his base to include suburban women, African Americans and white college graduates.  Last night’s performance would lead one to believe that he simply does not care about adding new voters to his base.  He is so afraid of losing even a single vote from his base, that he cannot bring himself to put a “STOP!” sign in front of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, members of Q-anon and Proud Boys. Indeed, this is frightening stuff.

Then too, during the last moments of the debate, a question was posed as to whether the candidates would accept the election’s outcome regardless of whether they won or not.  Joe Biden quickly and unequivocally announced that indeed, he would.  By comparison, POTUS refused; in his world, the only licit election is one he wins.  Should he lose, he will declare that it was either rigged or stolen.   

As of this morning, it would appear that regardless of what Trump’s marching and chowder society says, he was the clear loser.  Overnight polls show that he has dropped more than 5% among all voters.  At the moment, he is down by more than 9 points; not a particularly comfortable place to be. I’ve been thinking over whether or not Joe Biden and his Democratic advisors and campaign staff should drop out of the debate schedule due to the president’s utterly atrocious behavior. I have concluded that the debates should continue.  Uncle Joe has shown himself a capable man who does not let his opponent turn him into a hypertensive idiot.  He is well controlled, possesses a guilt-edged smile and knows how to speak directly to the camera . . . to where American voters live, work and struggle.

Is Joe Biden the second coming of FDR, JFK or Barack Obama? No, he is not. What he is is a gentleman with a phenomenal track record, a thorough knowledge of the issues and governance, and a genuine love of people.  

After nearly 4 years of bombast, lies and near lethal egotism, who  could ask for anything more?

There are 33 days until November 3. Mail in you ballot today!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

From "I Cannot Tell a Lie" to "I Shall Never Tell the Truth" is a Long, Long Journey

For the past several years, Madame (Mom), my slightly-older-sister Erica (Riki). nephew Adam, Madame’s special gentleman Fred, and the Pentagon have been conspiring to create a special birthday gift for yours truly. The only thing I knew about it was that Fred - a longtime Navy veteran and highly-skilled framer - and the rest of the clan had been working on some sort of “art project.” Having no idea of what they were doing, I decided to stop asking questions. Well, I celebrated my 71st (gasp!) birthday a couple of weeks ago, only to discover that over the past dozen years, they have been retrieving my late father’s war ribbons from WWII in order to put them into a marvelous shadow box, which now adorns the wall in my home.

Dad, who at the time he entered the Army Air Corps shortly before Pearl Harbor,  was known as “Henry E. Schimberg”; he  had yet to legally adopt his “Hollywood name.”  He remained in the service until 1946, serving mostly as a weather forecaster in the CBI (China-India-Burma Theatre), where his main task was keeping planes  from flying “over the hump, the name given by Allied pilots in WWII to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew military transport aircraft from India to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces based in China.  Although largely unsung, their role was crucial.  Without their highly developed technical skills - matched by good old-fashioned intuition - dozens, if not hundreds, of planes would have gone down in the Himalayans.

Dad’s medals and battle ribbons were next to impossible to retrieve, due to the fact that he served under his birth name; he wouldn’t legally change the family name to “Stone” for more than a decade. But for those who know Madame and Erica, you can understand: nothing is impossible; when they get their claws into a project, watch out!  

Dad rarely, if ever, spoke of his military service; he was both humble and an extraordinary gentleman.  And yet, he was  proud of serving his country.  He was definitely neither a loser nor a sucker.  Far, far from it. He served 6 of his first 31 years in the military, leaving behind his dream of becoming  a movie star, and emerging as as a newly-wed who eventually became a highly successful stock broker in Southern California.  Were he alive today Dad (1915-2002), would have been 65 kinds of P-O’d at the current POTUS: “How dare you call us “losers” and “suckers  . . . we’re the men and women who saved the world from fascism!” Dad wasn’t an overly political sort, spending his life as a moderate FDR-Democrat.  The one time he even suggested the possibility of voting for a Republican (Nixon in ‘68) Madame read him the riot act and urged him to recall Lysistrata - Aristophanes’ comic account of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnese War between Greek city states by denying all the men of the land any sex.  Thank G-d Henry was literate enough to understand the illusion . . . he wound up voting for Hubert Humphrey.

Fast forward to a September 3, 2020 article in which the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that ‘45, “the president who cannot tell the truth,” canceled a presidential visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 - the centennial of the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry. (This cemetery, which sits at the foot of Belleau Wood, contains the graves of 2,289 American war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918.) According to the Atlantic’s Goldberg, Trump blamed rain for the last-minute cancellation, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

In  his astounding article - backed up by incontrovertible facts - Goldberg writes: Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. 

Sir Nicholas Soames, a Conservative member of the British parliament and Winston Churchill’s grandson, tweeted his utter disapproval of Trump’s snub and lame excuse:

“They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.”

True to form, the White House and Trump’s Twitter account found in Goldberg’s meticulously reported, well-crafted story,  a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the “left-liberal-socialist media.”  Even Fox News went back-and-forth on whether or not to find any truth in Goldberg’s article. When ‘45 learned that Fox New’s political reporter Jennifer Griffin supported Goldberg’s piece, ‘45 demanded that her employers immediately fire her.  For Trump, all this is, of course, “fake news.”  But then again, throughout his public career, Boss Tweet has been a volcano of untruths, misstatements and outright prevarications . . . many of which have actual video and/or audio backup . . . such as the number of times he said of the late Senator John McCain “he’s no hero,” due to his having been captured, tortured and imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” by the North Vietnamese.  

I don’t like losers,” he repeatedly stated even before announcing his candidacy back as far as 2015. Trump went on to dismiss McCain’s war service: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”  45’s “McCain’s a loser” meme began when the Arizona Senator lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama . . . again, “I don’t like losers.”  In her new book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (which sold more copies on the day it was released than her uncle’s The Art of the Deal has in nearly 30 years) presidential niece, Dr. Mary Trump (she earned a PhD in  Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University) clearly stated that what DJT fears and loathes the most is being called a “loser” or "a sucker.” She has also “revealed” what oh so many of us without doctorates in psychology have long suspected . . . if not fully known: that he is a psychopathic liar who is incapable of feeling empathy or compassion, and is imbued with an inferiority complex the size of the Grand Canyon.  

Listening to Donald Trump endlessly praise himself is a form of self-torture;  hearing him disavow any knowledge let alone familiarity of any indicted person who has ever worked for or served him (until the time comes for a pardon); or endlessly bragging about how much more he knows about medicine, history, economics, diplomacy or the philosophy of Edmund Husserl (the school of “Phenomenology,” which is generally defined as “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view”) for all I know. To listen to ‘45, as POTUS he has accomplished more for blacks than Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King; more for women than Susan B. Anthony or Eleanor Roosevelt; more for Hispanics than Caesar Chavez'; more for the modern State of Israel than Theodor Herzl or David Ben-Gurion; and that “Veterans have no better friend than President Trump.”

To a majority of those with eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear or minds with which to think and remember, all these are demonstrable lies; the product of a man who is taking both our nation and our planet down into the swamp of delusion.

It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, our very first - and likely greatest - POTUS, George Washington. was once known by every school child in this land as a person who could “never tell a lie.” What could be more honorable, admirable and moral? Then there was Lincoln, our 16th president, whom every school child knew was nicknamed “honest Abe.” Today, our 45th POTUS has been saddled with an overabundance of monikers - none of which, so far as I know, is even slightly endearing.

It grieves me deeply that so many people in this land are willing to give ‘45 a pass and ignore his gaffs, his lies, his immoral nature . . . his very presence. What we need is not a self-proclaimed genius-about-everything but a person who seeks wisdom and guidance from those who truly know what they’re talking about. Not a blatherskite who blows his own horn, or a braggart whose only script is the one he provides himself. And certainly not a man who may one day be convicted, but rather a man of convictions.

Indeed, from “I cannot tell a lie” to “I shall never tell the truth” is one hell of a long, long journey . . . a journey into fear and damnation.

There are 56 days to go until November 3, 2020.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F.  Stone

Can Hate Ever Be Conquered?

April 12, 1945: Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley at Ohrdruf

On April 4, 1945, soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered and liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. What they discovered was far worse than anything from Dante’s Inferno: piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf: the things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick ... . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.” (Today, Eisenhower’s words are etched on a plaque which hands outside the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.)

Eisenhower also ordered every soldier who had a camera to snap as many photographs as possible, as a way to begin documenting the horror they found. Further, on April 19, 1945, Eisenhower again cabled General Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could convey the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. Within days, congressional representatives, senators and journalists began arriving to bear witness to Nazi crimes in the camps. The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp, and the subsequent liberation of  Dora-Mittelbau (April 11), Flossenbürg (April 23), Dachau (April 29), and Mauthausen (May 5) opened the eyes of many US soldiers and the American public to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Without question, the Holocaust was - and is - the most thoroughly documented act of mass murder - the product of irrational hatred - in all human history.  And yet, despite the tens of millions of photos and films, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and survivors who provided eye-witness testimony and all the German citizens and soldiers that Eisenhower forced to see what had been done in their name - there are those who believe with all their hearts (and to this very day) that the Holocaust never happened . . . that it was all a heinous fabrication on the part of the very people who claimed that they were its victims.

Indeed, Anti-Semitism - the irrational hatred of Jews - seems to be of greater antiquity than the religion or people themselves. It has forced more than one wit to wonder what came first: Jews or Anti-Semites. There are times one satirically wonders if G-d, in Co’s (my pronoun which is gender infinite) divine wisdom had not created the Jews, then the devil would have in order to have an eternal object of hatred and obloquy. Certainly groundless hatred is as old as the world itself. Witness the Biblical enmity between Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, as well as Jacob and Esau. Over several millennia, these hatreds expanded to the point where any people or group who was seen as being different - possessing “otherness” - became the object of scorn and derision as well as the source and cause of whatever was wrong or incomprehensible. Got a plague spreading across your continent? Blame the Jews for poisoning all the water wells. Suffering from a devastating economic downturn? Blame and punish the immigrants for stealing jobs and creating crime, or what today we refer to as the LGBTQ community for forcing the hand of the Lord and inflicting us with Divine wrath because of their “immoral” lifestyle. Suffer a devastating surprise attack by foreign fanatics? Turn every member of that group - whether be members of a particular country, culture or religion - into a collective, conspiratorial force of ultimate evil.

Read between the lines; you get the point.

We all know that hate crimes, incidences of violence against Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and members of the LGBTQ community are at an all-time high.  Groups which track these events and the groups behind them - such as the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center - provide chilling statistical evidence of this rise.  It’s gotten to the point that just as soon as one act of lethal hate-provoked violence becomes front page, top-of-the-hour news, another comes along to replace it.  This past Wednesday, a lone gunman mowed down 9 people at 2 different shisha (hookah) bars in Hanau, Germany. The suspect and his mother were later found dead of gunshot wounds in his apartment. This is the 3rd mass killing in Germany so far this year. Attacks have likewise taken the lives of Jews, Muslim immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community in the United States, England, France, Italy and other countries since the beginning of 2020.

Responses to these murderous attacks include public vigils with plenty of prayers, placards and flowers, calls for new gun legislation (especially in the United States), finger-pointing . . . attempts at ascertaining just what or whom is most likely responsible for the startling upsurge in violence, hatred and intolerance. And while pointing a fist and finger at a president, prime minister, political party or economic inequality are all understandable, they are largely of the “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” variety. Attempting to assign blame - social networking sites and the “dark web,” too many guns which are too easily obtained, a serious lack of education, etc., does little more than permit people to vent, which is not altogether a bad thing,  However, to attempt to understand and ameliorate that which is inherently incomprehensible solves nothing. Trying to change the mind of a bigot, racist, homophobe, Islamophobe or Anti-Semite by providing facts, statistics or slices of history is next to useless. It is akin to banging one’s head against the wall which, so far as I know, produces little save concussions and cracked skulls.  The bigot, the racist, the homphobe and other such such cretinous blots on society all suffer from a disease called certitude, which as Mr. Justice Holmes noted long ago in a 1897 Harvard Law Review essay, “generally is illusion . . . is not certainty. We have [all] been cocksure of many things that never were . . .”  

Having expressed quite a bit of negativity, is there, in truth, anything which we - who are neither inherently bigoted, systemically violent nor willfully ignorant - can do to help stem the tide of hatred? Without slipping into the netherworld of idealistic innocence, there are a few suggestions to be made:

1. Always keep close at hand the names, phone numbers and email addresses of those organizations and/or individuals to whom we must report acts or threats of hatred. Shining a bright light upon the merchants of mendacity can have a sanitizing effect.

2. Be in constant contact with your elected officials . . . we must all be their eyes and ears.

3. Make sure to work and vote for those who share your worldview, your humanity and your outrage. Do not, under any circumstances decide to stay home and not vote because you don’t think it will make a difference.

4. Attend marches, vigils and meetings; if nothing else, to meet and get to know like-minded individuals.

5. Never give up.

When my sister Erica and I were toddlers, our Grannie Annie used to read us poems at bedtime.  One of the most memorable was Keep ‘a Going by the American poet Frank Lebby Stanton (1857-1927), which said in part:

If you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
If it hails or if it snows,
Keep a-goin'!
'Taint no use to sit an' whine
When the fish ain't on your line;
Bait your hook an' keep a-tryin'--
Keep a-goin'!

So, is it possible for hatred to ever be conquered?  Don’t know for sure.  But one thing I do know was taught to us by our beloved grandma:

KEEP -A-GOIN’!

255 days until the Presidential election.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone