Op-Ed
I spoke with Senator Mike Gravel on Thursday and asked him whether it seemed fair to him to be excluded from Democratic Party Presidential Primary debates on the basis of his performance in polls that did not include his name among those whom people could say they supported.
Of course, he said that it did not. But he also raised some additional questions, and told me what he would say if included in a debate.
Gravel said that 70,000 supporters had donated to his campaign. That means he has qualified for the debates by the factor that he couldn’t be prevented from competing in, namely number of donors. In this regard he differs from some of the candidates being included in the debates; they have not achieved the required number of donors, but are being included on the sole basis of their performance in polls in which they had the distinct advantage of their names being included.
“The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military industrial-complex in operation.”
I was utterly stunned when I read these words of former Wisconsin senator William Proxmire, quoted in an essay by William Hartung, not because of the point he was making — like, what else is new? — but because he said them in . . . 1969.
Oh my God, fifty years ago!
You’d think a publisher with this many names could check for glaring errors in its books: “Currency, Crown Publishing Group, Penguin Random House LLC.” And you’d be right. So this isn’t an error. It’s a lie accepted as a desirable myth:
“Today it’s widely accepted that meritocracy and aristocracy have become one and the same. The lords of the universe are not sitting on trust funds. . . . [M]ost of the new lords achieved perfect or near-perfect scores on their SATs at age sixteen or seventeen. . . . We now live in a world where the highest-IQ people earn the greatest financial rewards.”
The author is Rich Karlgaard. The book is an otherwise perfectly reasonable one called Late Bloomers. Its topic is the United States, so the word “world” quoted above should not be taken literally. The book is chock full of criticism of how SATs are used. But the statements quoted above are not satirical. They are meant quite straightforwardly, and they are false. They are presented without any footnotes or citations. So, here are some:
“Sooner or later they end up in a cage, where (they) belong.”
This is hardly a surprise: A recent study by the Missouri attorney general’s office shows that black drivers are at least twice as likely — in some towns, much more than that — to be stopped by police as white drivers.
“He enlisted in the Virginia National Guard in April 1996, according to spokesman A.A. Puryear. He was assigned to the Norfolk-based 1st Battalion, 111th Field Artillery Regiment, 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team as a 13B cannon crew member. He was discharged in April 2002 and held the rank of specialist at the time, the spokesman said. His records did not indicate overseas deployments.” —CNN on latest mass shooter
We’re supposed to overlook this bit of information. We’re supposed to focus on mental health questions or the inscrutable incomprehensible mystery of the inevitable human tragedy of mass shootings, which bizarrely and unfairly are inflicted by the universe on this particular 4 percent of humanity living in the United States, which quite irrelevantly has been glorifying violence through endless wars for many years.
White men rule!
That’s the uber-message quietly emerging from the new anti-abortion laws recently passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri, no matter that the public remains predominantly supportive of safe, legal abortions.
That doesn’t matter, see. The fact that the Republican Party controls the legislatures in so many states where it lacks majority status, not to mention is able to put presidents in office who fail to win the popular vote, indicates that we live in a rather limited-definition democracy: rule by the most determined cheaters. Or as some would put it, rule by divine decree.
As Ari Berman pointed out recently in Mother Jones, this divine decree is achieved primarily by voter suppression and gerrymandering, as exemplified last year in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.
Like you, I’ve had countless experiences of pointing out a new fact to someone, and seeing them acknowledge it and incorporate it into their thinking and their talking from that point forward. I’ve even had this experience with public petitions pushed on powerful people. But, I’ve also had a different experience. There are some facts that some people just will not accept, and for some of them I have a very hard time understanding why. Can you help me understand?
Give a judge a couple of years and he’ll eventually blurt out that the sky is blue.
That’s now happened in Charlottesville, where a court has finally concluded that the statues of Lee and Jackson in their war uniforms on their war horses are war monuments.
People outside of Charlottesville will of course be scratching their heads and wondering what that matters. But that’s because nobody has bothered to tell them why Trump’s favorite statues are still standing and what it means.
The state of Virginia forbids taking down war monuments. The Heroes of the Resistance refrain from criticizing such hyper-militaristic laws. This means that we have a war-mad society, and that it goes unchallenged. The wars of recent years blow back into the streets of Charlottesville in the form of racist violence, but Charlottesville has spent the past many months telling itself that war is not the problem.