Dan Riley's Blog, page 25

The Dan Riley Donald Trump Interview

Donald J. Trump

LIVE VIA SATELLITE, the exclusive Nobby Works Interview with Donald J. Trump


With apologies to Academy Award winning director Clint Eastwood for ripping off both his idea and quality of execution.


Are you media or are you mice?

Not Standing with Colin Kaepernick

I thought of posting about Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for "The National Anthem" in protest against black oppression last week when the story was all the rage…and I do mean rage. But then I thought, No, this is one of those evergreen stories. Every five years or so, the nation’s outrage is stirred by someone doing that most American of things: protesting. The Tea Party, the original one...the one directed at taxation without representation, not taxation all together, was of course a protest against the ruling order of the time…and an act of outright vandalism against a flag as opposed to mere disrespect of a flag.
Though not a high profile figure like Kaepernick--an NFL quarterback who started in a Super Bowl--I’ve had more than a couple of go’s at public protest. Oddly, not counting editorials in student papers from high school to college to underground—my first overt public protest was in church. Later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, I engaged in precisely the protest that Kaepernick is doing right now…at ball games I would refuse to stand for "The National Anthem". Unlike Kaepernick, it could not be said that I was trying to start a national dialog with my protest because mine was so small and isolated that the only ones who might talk about it were those sitting immediately around me in the bleachers. (After 9/11, when shows of patriotism were close to becoming mandatory and excessive…and actually codified in the Patriot Act…I refused to have God Bless America forced upon me as a second national anthem and was confronted by a jingoist at Dodger Stadium who ordered me to take my hat off for it. I glared back at him, and with my hat firmly in place turned and walked away. So much for national dialog…)  
My protest was more in line with Henry David Thoreau, the putative godfather of American protest, who wrote: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience…? Why has every man a conscience then?” My protest was a matter of individual conscience against my country’s attack on and conduct in Vietnam. Much of Thoreau’s writing in his great essay Civil Disobedience was motivated by his moral objections to America’s military venture into Mexico and slavery…thus war and race, the two persistent blisters on our body politic. 

One can get lost in the particulars of any one protest, as many have done over Kaepernick’s. The most glaring distraction in Kaepernick’s case is that it’s a racial thing, as if a recognized white player sitting out "The National Anthem" would get a pass on it because of…well, what else? White privilege. Yeah, let’s just see how much of a pass Tom Brady’s whiteness or privilege would get him if he dared do what Kaepernick is doing (on second thought, let’s not see...TB12 has enough problems). Anyway, once you start breaking down protests into racial, gender, religious or even partisan terms, you get away from the larger, more fundamental questions of protest…which is fine, but that’s not the way the Nobby works. Here, we love to explore the bigger questions, and in this case there are two.

The first concerns the Enlightenment ideal expressed in the actions, if not the exact words, of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That would be an attitude more attuned to a time when humanity was just rising up against centuries of oppressive, rigid, religious and hereditary rule and anyone who spoke against it in general was a natural ally of everyone else who spoke up against it, regardless of the details. It was a clear case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and there was a natural alliance among free thinkers and would-be free thinkers. Nowadays, the President of the United States, the head of the ruling order, actually has to go before a college audience and plead with students and academics to be tolerant of differing opinions. The prevailing attitude today is “I disapprove of what you say, and I will legislate, hashtag, troll, block, boycott, and protest to yourdeath your right to say it.”
The second question is Thoreau’s question: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience…? Why has every man a conscience then?” Acts of conscience are part of the fabric of American life, back to Thoreau, through the Abolitionist movement, to the conscientious objectors of World Wars I & II, but acts of conscience seemed to attract a higher level of condemnation round about the time Dylan sang: “If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” That would be about the same time Muhammad Ali was pretty much setting the template for what would be our (ahem) national dialog over acts of conscience. Acting on conscience came to be seen as an affront to the nation, rather than an expression of deeply held personal conviction...the right to which the nation was created. The thing had turned against the thing that had given it birth.

An act of conscience is not an end in itself of course. A public act of conscience, like Ali’s or Kaepernick’s, is as likely to provoke a counter act of conscience as inspire a similar act. If I’m going to dare to wear my cap at the ballpark during the playing of "God Bless America", I should not be surprised that I might incite the conscience of another citizen to confront me. That seems to be a trade-off that all of us living in a free democracy should be willing to accept. And when your conscience and my conscience conflict, we should also agree that we resolve that conflict through legal, rational means…not by letting brute might determine whose conscience is right. For all the hostility directed at Kaepernick, we have yet to see the police or military attempt to physically pull him to his feet and make him stand for "The National Anthem". If and when that happens (and it could be sooner than we like to think), the essence of the country will be lost surer than on any battlefield. But so far, so good…the Colin Kaepernick episode assures us that it’s still as okay to display individual conscience in America as it is to display the flag.

Dad Was a Union Man

My dad, Cliff Riley, third from the right
Unionism was a big part of my years growing up in the 1950s. My father, Cliff Riley, was active in organizing the union at the Bigelow Sanford Carpet Company, which was the largest employer in our town of Thompsonville, Connecticut, at one point employing more workers than the entire population of the town. To escape the union, the company, like many others in the industrial North and Northeast, fled South in the 1960s to what were euphemistically called "right-to-work states," which were in actuality anti-union states. That was surely the most traumatic union-related event in our family history. The one detailed in the union newsletter below simply shows that Dad was still doing his Norma Rae thing more than 20 years later...and for that I remain immensely proud of him. 
It's election time again and lots of talk about where the jobs have gone. Well, they're gone to where they usually go to: Wherever the owners and stockholders can get the job done cheaper. Scorpions be scorpions, as the story goes, so you can't really blame the capitalists for doing what comes naturally. But you really, really have to wonder about the foggy-minded froggy that keeps falling for the same shell game over and over again. I can write about this forever, but sometimes it's better just to turn things over to the audio-visual department...

Keep on Googlin'

First, let’s kick things off with a little Credence Clearwater Revival song parody.
Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Googlin',Googlin'.
Maybe you don't understand it,But if you're a curious mind,You got to LOL and have a good time,And that's why you go Googlin'.
You Porn Mary, lookin' for hairies,She gotta Google tonight.There goes Lou, searchin’ the Alt Right sewerHe gonna Google all night.
Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Googlin',Googlin', Googlin'.
Black is whiteUp is downYou can find it onlineThe earth is flatThe sky’s an illusionIt’ll all blow your mind
Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Keep on Googlin',Googlin',Googlin'.
If you can choose it, who can refuse it?Y'all be Googlin' tonight.Go on, take your pick, info tailor-fit Just gotta Google tonight.
Keep on Googlin',Derp on Googlin',Slurp up Googlin',Googlin',Googlin',Googlin', Googlin',Googlin', Googlin'.
Just before the California primary I got into it online with a couple of Bernie supporters who were telling me that the media was so in the tank for Hillary that they were suspending exit polling because it had consistently exposed the “rigged” results and shown that Bernie was really winning. I told them I thought that was absurd because, political conspiracies aside, the networks depend upon exit polling to provide content for their endless hours of primary coverage. I asked to see the source of their hysteria. They presented a link to a story in the Sacramento Bee, a reputable source, indeed reporting that the media was suspending exit polling for the California primary. Only problem…for my adversaries…was that the story was clearly dated 2012, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had essentially wrapped up their nominations so exit polling in California was a moot point. When I pointed this out to my (ahem) worthy opponents, they cut off the exchange and blocked me from further contact with them. There are walls…and then there are walls.
Then in a thread commemorating the anniversary of Ann Frank’s family going into hiding in Amsterdam, someone commented that the family was condemned to its fate by Franklin Roosevelt personally who refused to allow them into the US because he was “a rabid anti-Semite.”  I replied that I didn’t think the commenter understood the meaning of the word "rabid" and probably didn’t know what an anti-Semite was either since FDR had appointed his life long friend Felix Frankfurter, descended from a long line of rabbis, to the United States Supreme Court. The commenter then came back with links to three websites supporting her claim and invited me to Google to see for myself. Well, of course, having played this game before I knew how easy it would be to find such reinforcing online sources if one were so inclined…just as easily as it would be to find online sources supporting the claim that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control worldwide banking and media. 
And then “Google it” jumped the shark with Rudy Guiliani’s embarrassing performance when asked to support his contention that Hillary Clinton is facing severe health issues. Just search Hillary Clinton illness on the internet, he claimed, "there are pictures". Yes, and just Google Rudy Guiliani dressed in drag in Donald Trump’s arms: 
Giuliani-Trump troubled romance...it's on the Internet!I love the Internet. If I have to submit a closing ledger on the day I die, the Internet will definitely be in the plus column. All those resources and information at your fingertips…it is a paradise for someone like me who really enjoys research. I can and have let entire days go by hopping from one website to another tracking down the truth of a thing...like a busy bee searching a flower garden for the ultimate honey shot. But like most everything else in human existence, the Internet does not come without its darkside. For all the useful, reliable information it contains, it also struggles under the weight of outright lies, deception, manipulation, and simple ignorance disguised as fact. The sheer mass of information…good, bad and ugly…makes it hard for the ordinary, workaday, social media butterfly to sort out. There was a time when you could tell someone peddling errant information to just look it up, but now when you do there’s no guarantee that they won’t find confirmation of their bias. 
In the field of Logical Fallacies, which the Nob will be exploring in posts to come, there's one called "Appeal to Authority":     

Saying that because an authority thinks something, it must therefore be true. It’s important to note that this fallacy should not be used to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus. Appeals to authority are not valid arguments, but nor is it reasonable to disregard the claims of experts who have a demonstrated depth of knowledge unless one has a similar level of understanding. (Example: Not able to defend his position that evolution ‘isn’t true’ Bob says that he knows a scientist who also questions evolution.) 

Making this one even more fallacious is that “the Internet” itself has now achieved the status of universal, indisputable authority. Merely saying “It’s on the Internet” is presumed to end all argument. What’s a body to do? Friend Dean Stevens alerts me to this helpful link from a group of historians…and historians should be the most vested in helping keep Internet wheat separated from the chaff. Their post, however, puts “Google it” at the top of their list for checking the reliability of information, so after this post I can’t fully endorse that. But Snopes.com comes in at #2 on their list, and Snopes is a national treasure…though overworked and constantly under attack for bias by those with…wait for it...bias. The other items on the historians' list are helpful, but I’d add a few of my own:Once you’ve been burned by a source or a source has been shown to be blatantly unreliable, steer clear of it...make your sources earn your trust.Don't assume that just because a source confirms your personal bias, it's a good source...know thyself and the human weakness for flattery and affirmation.Check things out on the mainstream media…The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. Whatever faults they have and whatever egregious errors they’ve made in the past, they are still subject to review by their peers and professional organizations and that means a lot to them. Even if they bury corrections at the bottom of page 33, they still make corrections, which cannot be said of any of the agenda-driven websites.Find two sources you know you can trust from past experience for any story you want to question…all the better if the sources have dissimilar takes on things.Follow The Nobby Works upcoming series on Logical Fallacies or research them on your own.  A working understanding of what logical fallacies are is the best tool you can have for sorting through the bullshit. 

Midnight in the Shebeen of Good and Hackery

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Last week was a bad one for Charles P. Pierce. Though not as bad or entertaining as Donald Trump’s bad week, it was bad nonetheless…and I take no pleasure in noting it. Up until last St. Patrick’s Day, I had been among Charlie’s most loyal readers, for more than 30 years following him around like a favorite bar band from the big Boston papers to the alternative weeklies to glossy magazines to his books to the time when his stuff was only available black market-style on Eric Alterman’s pioneering blog. In 1991 Houghton Mifflin published The Red Sox Reader, an anthology I edited to great success and satisfaction that included an essay of my choosing by Charlie. And in the early days of this blog, The Nob served as a foster home for fellow fans of Charlie, who had been orphaned during his transition from The Boston Globe to Esquire. In the life of this blog, I’ve provided many adoring links and references to Charlie’s blog. As a prelude to all the critical words I’m about to direct at him, I still find him capable of occasionally producing some awesome pieces. But today, as I say, I come to bury Charlie…or at least dust him up a little…not to praise him….
Charlie likes to refer to his blog as a shebeen, which has a nice, eccentric Irish pub feel to it. But it’s more like Cheers if Cheers were overrun by Frasier Cranes turning the air thick with self satisfaction.  That’s one of the reasons I checked out last March, but there were many others, so let me count the ways: Charlie’s penchant for tiresomely epic nicknames for his targets—Paul Ryan is always “The Zombie-eyed Granny Starver.” Scott Walker is always “The Goggle-eyed Homunculus hired by Koch Industries to Manage their Midwest Subsidiary Formerly Known as the State of Wisconsin.” Newt Gingrich is ALWAYS "Definer Of Civilization's Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces." Marco is always "Little Marco"...oops, wrong guy. They were passably humorous when introduced, but grew downright tedious after years of repetition. Tedious and mean—veteran CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer held the distinction of having Charlie make up a new--persistently ageist--nickname for him each week (“One-time Ashurbanipal The Hairy Biographer”). Even after Schieffer had retired and was no longer a disturbance on Charlie’s TeeVee machine, Pierce still went after him in what seems like the journalistic equivalent of a teenager egging the house of the old man down the street.Charlie’s penchant for beating dead horses—His readers are repeatedly told how useless are the Sunday morning talk shows, National Review, Politico, David Brooks, etc. and yet he devotes countless posts to dissecting bits and pieces of all of them, like some obsessed monk poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls trying to unsolve the mystery of existence. (And then there’s this: “HRC's e-mails is not a major national story,” or so he writes in the midst of a blog post helping to keep it so).Charlie’s penchant for shooting fish in a barrel--How many times can you get off blowing the heads off the likes of Louis Gohmert and Steve King? (And still they keep saying stupid things and getting re-elected. Don't they read Charlie's blog?) In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey describes the chicken peckin’ parties Nurse Ratched conducted with her therapy group each morning…throwing a chicken with a spot of blood on it into the flock and sitting back while the flock pecks the chicken to death. Fish…chickens…mixed metaphors, I know…but sometimes Charlie likes to let his bastids do his dirty work for him. (Full disclosure: I actually participated in one of Charlie’s peckin’ parties over at Ann Althouse’s blog spot one day. It was like Lord of the Flies, but now we add pigs to the stew.) Charlie’s penchant for promoting Idiot America. That’s Charlie brand…he wrote a book called Idiot America and his blog is almost entirely dedicated to reinforcing the belief that everybody who exists outside his shebeen is an idiot. That’s the premise of "Laboratories of Democracy," his weekly rundown of all the stupid things going on in the various state legislatures. Charlie's too busy painting it black to bother with the expansion of Voting Rights in Washington, the Right to Die in Oregon, a Connecticut legislature bravely standing up to the NRA. A few years ago, Charlie peed his pants through several blog posts over Republican initiatives to pass voter suppression bills, while over on MSNBC Chris Hayes hosted a parade of lawyers, politicians, and black activists who were already fighting back at the local level. If Laboratories of Democracy was your source for what’s going on down in the states, you would think the recent court rulings against those voter ID laws was a sheer act of deus ex machina.Charlie’s penchant for demeaning more or less benign figures--Ezra Klein who earnestly interviews, researches and crunches numbers before turning out exhaustive, comprehensive reports on big, complex issues (like his yeoman’s reporting during the ACA debate) is dismissed in Charlie’s blog like some digital age Jimmy Olson. Edward Snowden, the Daniel Ellsberg of the 21stcentury, is diminished as “The International Man of Luggage.” George Stephanopoulos is belittled as “The Clinton Guy Shocked by Blow Jobs”. Jonathan Chait must get a nervous twitch every time he reads how Charlie likes his writing, knowing by now that it’s a set-up for Charlie to rip him a new one for once again daring to challenge liberal orthodoxy. Oh, and then there’s what Catholics call sin of omission…his baffling failure to rarely if ever boost Chris Hayes for either of their mutual benefit. Hayes frequently has Pierce as a guest on his MSNBC  All-inshow, even though Charlie hardly ever brings anything to it except some warmed over snark from one of his past posts. Yet CP never promotes these appearances or throws any bouquets Hayes’s way for some of the great work he does, like his coverage of the Rev. William Barber’s efforts to combat voter suppression in North Carolina. Why is that? Perhaps because it conflicts with CP’s mocking impression of MSNBC’s “so-called liberalism"….or perhaps just because it undercuts the idiot brand.    Charlie’s penchant for perverting the meaning of John Lewis's life —Charlie will invoke the sacrifice and bravery of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis a number of times in the course of any year…always with the aim of humiliating one of Charlie’s targets. Lewis is as close to a living Jesus as we've got. He's dedicated his life to reconciliation, a quality openly disdained by Charlie and many of his readers, who have an uncanny, unforgiving recall for the sins of others. Turning John Lewis into another weapon in your partisan arsenal is no better than those who use Jesus to bludgeon gays. If you're not holding John Lewis up as a model for overcoming long-standing grievances and forgiving old grudges, you're really missing the point of his life.Although all these contributed to my personally taking leave of Charlie’s shebeen, they are only peripherally involved in the making of his just bad week. It began when he wrote a post warning Hillary Clinton not to accept an endorsement from Henry Kissinger or else He, Pierce, was going to take his vote in November and give it to William Weld…well, Gary Johnson actually...but The Commonwealth, God damn it. (The Nob has already stated its view on vainglorious lines in the sand). For pulling that particular litmus test out of his Masshole, Charlie was given a "Sully Award" by the Balloon Juice blog. That had to hurt because the award was named for long-time Charlie punching bag Andrew Sullivan, so recognized by Balloon Juice for his penchant for seeing the sky falling on any given bad news day. Charlie then came in for a good deal of comment fire both on Balloon Juice and the growing number of dissidents on his own blog. He answered that by doubling down and wagging a stern finger at HRC for accepting an endorsement from John Negroponte. Then topped it all off by telling his hometown critics, mostly female: “And if anyone thinks I'm going to drop this because Donald Trump is a crazy person, by all means, find another shebeen!” In other words, Get off my lawn! In his final post before going on vacation, he made a point of refusing the Balloon Juice award in print. Why not just ignore it? My guess is that Charlie was looking to start a peckin’ party over at an offending blog.
The irony of this blog post of mine is that it’s forced me to go back and catch up on what Charlie’s been up to since I left the shebeen all these months ago...with special attention to his treatment of Hillary Clinton, which was reliably passive-aggressive before I left. Since March, I’ve found it has become less passive, more aggressive, condescending, and headmasterly. He spends a lot of time warning “that woman” about what she should and shouldn’t do, how she should behave and present herself, and who she should and should not be seen with. Most recently warning her campaign that Rev. Barber should get to do the invocation at her inaugural or someone should be fired. (What’s with this appropriation of transcendent black men dedicated to redemption and reconciliation as a cudgel?) If I were more of a woman, I’d take offense, but since I’m not I’ll take it as permission to proceed with this post. After all, if Charles Pierce can critique Hillary Clinton, surely I can critique Charles Pierce. 
Though he has not come up with a nickname for her, he routinely describes Hillary as a plodder, which in more generous eyes would be a grinder, a gamer, a baller. Here’s a passage he wrote about her that he used both before and after she announced her run for the 2016 nomination. “And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use.” He’s certainly not alone in scoring HRC down for style points and in assessing her (way-closer-than-Bernie) loss to Barack Obama the way he does. But in light of the recent Democratic primary it might be time to reassess her loss without the demeaning sports metaphors. Given the determinative role of the black vote in her primary win, perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of wrong footedness that cost her in ‘08 but wrong skin color…perhaps if Barack Obama had been a whiter shade of Bernie Sanders there’s no way he would’ve taken the black vote away from her (as Charlie repeatedly says with tongue in cheek, it’s never about race).   I wouldn't think of calling Charlie sexist (too many throw that word around too often and too easily). I will say, however, that in addition to being a loyal reader of Charlie’s, I share significant portions of his background with him—both being Boomer-age Irish-Catholics, steeped in New England sports, journalism and politics. As such I’m familiar with how those baptismal waters can doctor your eyes to see women as either virgins or whores. I think I know what it’s like to be a pre-teen boy on the mean streets of, say, Worcester where all the girls seem to have cooties. I can imagine being in a newsroom in the 1970s and encountering your first emerging feminist, who calls you out for "not getting it" and you don’t even know what “it” is. I can see where long hours at the bar with the boys from the political beat or sports beat can breed a bit of disdain for that peculiar gender that doesn’t seem to know how to deliver a precinct or turn a double-play. I can understand how all that can subtly seep into your mind (like a leak from our friend the Keystone Pipeline) so you don’t even know it’s polluting the aquifer of your conscience…especially when confronted with a woman who seems to embody all those various uncomfortable stages in your life, including the woman as whore.  
Another thing Charlie and I share is our comparable esteem for Bob Dylan. Yet even with that, I'm sure that if either of us had owned a blog back in the day when The Master was veering too damn close to hackery for his own good we both would’ve thought it was well worth 2,000 words to warn him. So, Charlie, this verse is for you:
When you’re lost in the rain in JuarezAnd it’s Eastertime tooAnd your gravity failsAnd negativity don’t pull you throughDon’t put on any airsWhen you’re down on Rue Morgue AvenueThey got some hungry women thereAnd they really make a mess outta you



This photo accompanied a recent Charles Pierce post in which he praises Barack Obama for taking ownership of US international misdeeds. As you can see in the photo, the President is rubbing elbows with alleged war criminal Henry Kissinger and other architects of those foreign policy missteps. Yet, unlike Hillary, the President gets no wag of the Pierce finger for the company he keeps...no idle threats about maybe refusing future White House dinner invitations. Outside the shebeen there are the Clinton Rules; inside just the Hillary Clinton Rules. 

Sophie's Choice, 2016

For Meryl Streep’s 1991 Oscar winning performance, Sophie’s Choice, she played a mother being marched into the Auschwitz death camp with her two children, Jan and Eva. Outside the camp a malignant Nazi (is there any other kind?) offers her a rare, but diabolical deal. He allows her to choose which of her children she wants to send to possible survival at a work camp and which she wants to send to certain  death in the gas chamber. After as much anguish as the situation allows, Sophie designates her daughter for demise, and thus Sophie’s choice became the deadly alternative to the more jocular adage about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rock and a hard place may apply to the position many voters say they find themselves in as the American Presidential election of 2016 makes its relentless midnight creep. But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to stick with the darker, direr Sophie’s choice because many of those in the greatest state of agita over their election options seem to be of the belief that they can successfully make a better deal for themselves…that they can offer the Nazi something else in exchange for the lives of both their children. What they think they can do is pull a button off little Eva’s sweater and a button off little Jan’s coat and proffer them both to the Nazi, who will accept the substitutions with a smile and let the whole family pass on without harm. In terms of the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson are those buttons.
The essential choice…whether it be Sophie’s or the rock and the hard place…is binary, either-or. To manufacture another choice to escape making the real one does not alter or prevent the inevitable consequences of the only real choice. I say this with no little sympathy for the many young voters who came into the election process for the first time this year, attracted as the young often are by the perceived idealism of the Bernie Sanders campaign. I once walked in their shoes…I walked for Gene McCarthy in 1968…and I walked “clean for Gene” just as his campaign requested. And when at last he had lost the nomination to Hubert Humphrey I still walked into a polling booth armed with a list of 25 electors pledged to vote for McCarthy and wrote in each of their names in what may go down as the longest polling booth visit in Connecticut history.  So I can’t really fault this generation of young voters who don't feel they have a moral obligation to support the “establishment” candidate over the one who best represents their views. I wish they’d listen to the advice of those who’ve been down this path before them, but when has any generation ever done that? I don’t know that I was given such advice in 1968, and if I had been whether I would have taken it.
My quarrel is with those of older generations who not only saw how the purity vote of ’68 deprived the nation of Humphrey’s eminently qualified good and decent leadership, but handed the Presidency over to a man who would actually need and accept a pardon for his criminal behavior. Silver linings that Nixon opened the door to China (for which Humphrey would’ve been labeled “soft on communism”) and signed the EPA into law (for which Humphrey would’ve been labeled a socialist) notwithstanding, the storm damage from that cloud was a leadership that willfully undermined the Constitution and stoked a fear and divisiveness that plagues the nation to this day. 
The purity vote struck again in 2000 when its chief spokesman and Presidential candidate Ralph Nader claimed there wasn’t a bit of difference between Al Gore and George Bush—one a man of obvious intelligence and ability and the other an intellectual lightweight and career slacker whose incompetence would haunt the nation long after he left office. The innate schizophrenia of the purity voters is evident in their decades' long protest against the idea that their protest vote for Nader elected Bush while at the same time continuing to advance the argument for current and future protest voting. So, which is it, kids?
What it is is that they want both clean hands and clean minds because essentially they are preening moral peacocks. Their fondest desire is not to win any elections, but to look down on those who do the dirty work of civics by going to the polls with full knowledge and acceptance of the truth that democracy more often than not requires choosing between lesser evils.  As Internet guru Clay Shirky explains, with clarity rather than snark, voting third party or refusing to vote at all in protest is at best an empty gesture and at worst an act of supreme self-indulgence:

Throwing away your vote on a message no one will hear, and which will change no outcome, is sometimes presented as ‘voting your conscience’, but that’s got it exactly backwards; your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people. Citizens who vote for third-party candidates, write-in candidates, or nobody aren’t voting their conscience, they are voting their ego, unable to accept that a system they find personally disheartening actually applies to them.

Kubuki politics aside, the real embarrassment of the purity voters on the left is how their protest votes or non-votes reveal the shallowness of their intellect and their character. I say the left because most of this embarrassment redounds to the NeverHillary ilk on the left since the NeverTrump ilk on the right has mostly been a burlesque. The moral poseurs of the left fringe are the loudest and most obnoxious. Not content with building on the anti-Hillary narratives firmly established by the media and reflected in the polls around questions of emails and honesty, the I/Me voters have an unquenchable need to always proclaim their exceptionalism from the rest of us. Thus they push their own narrative about the blood on Hillary's hands. But even in this they seem to be vying with each other for grimmest tale to tell. Some buy whole into wanna-be Bond villain Julian Assange's aspersions that HRC had a former DNC staffer murdered because he had provided Wikileaks with internal DNC emails. Then on a recent Bill Maher show, absinthe-minded professor Cornell West put the knife allegedly used to sodomize Mummar Ghadaffi into Hillary's hands. And now various bloggers and irredeemable Berniebots have gone wild with the law of transitive property in arguing that if Hillary Clinton drinks Long Island teas with Henry Kissinger on Martha's Vineyard vacations, and Henry Kissinger has decades-old coagulated Laotian blood on his hands, then Hillary Clinton, too, has that same blood on her hands. So proprietary are they about their ghoulish accusations that none on the left will even touch the ready-made collection of murdered bodies diligently assembled for them by the right back in the 1990s.
Leave The Hardy Boysmystery of the missing Goldman Sachs speeches to that sell-out Bernie Sanders; the new NeverHillary wave needs blood...life and death...war crimes...mass murder to elevate their upcoming Election Day Tiananmen Square charade to proper heroic proportion. But here's the thing--like Sophie's cruel Nazi--the moral universe won't buy it.  The choice is Jan or Eva...Trump or Hillary. And the moral universe laughs at their stinking buttons.

10 Wishes

With the second anniversary of Robin Williams's death coming up next week, I’m put in mind of my favorite Robin Williams movies, which brings to mind Aladdin, which reminds that I’ve always had a weakness for make-a-wish scenarios. As little boys, Brother Tim and I used to have a make-a-wish face-off. He always wished he could fly; I always wished I could be invisible, and then we’d argue the relative benefits of our wishes. Then as an adult chasing a Hollywood screenwriting career one of my earlier efforts was one called Three Wishes about an Iraq War widow (the first Iraq War) who belatedly opens a gift package from her lost soldier only to find a lamp that contains a genie who announces she has three wishes which he’ll answer at her command. (Eager to please producers who were adamant about making a movie that will attract teenage boys, I changed the title to Rub Me Tender…alas, to no avail.)
All this wishfulness has inspired this blog post wherein I list my 10 top wishes…at least for this day, because as we know our wish lists change on an almost daily basis. So without further ado…
Wish One, especially for this political season, I wish all arguments I encounter as participant or observer are grounded in charity, reason, and good humor.
Wish Two, I wish multiculturalism would be embraced by all as a positive and natural evolution of a good and open society.   
Wish Three would normally be a wish that the Red Sox and Patriots win more championships, but since both have already won enough to keep me satisfied til the day I die, I wish that of all the Seven Deadly Sins greed be eliminated from our souls. 
Wish Four, I wish I could teleport myself (and Lorna) so we would no longer need to endure air tarvel to see all the wonderful places we’d like to see.
Wish Five is too dark and dangerous to put into words, so I won’t…but I’ll wish it anyway.
Wish Six, I wish God would settle the question of His or Her existence once and for all by showing up on All In with Chris Hayes on September 7, 2016, and anointing Chris God’s representative on earth for all time (and if God does not show up on the appointed time, we all agree that He/She/It is an illusion and get on with our earthly existence without all that bother).
Wish Seven, I wish The Nobby Works would become the most popular blog on the planet.
Wish Eight, in thanks for Robin Williams's inspiration I should use a wish to wish him back alive, but then why not wish all the dead back alive...or at least the dead I like and admire, but that would make me God, and I have no wish to be that, so let me just cop a wish from any Miss America candidate ever and wish for World Peace.
Wish Nine, I wish climate change would turn every place on earth into San Diego weather…and then let’s see who gets the blame.
Wish Ten, I still wish to be invisible whenever I want.   

Bonus Track
Here's an excerpt from my screenplay Rub Me Tender (aka Three Wishes) from early on when war widow Terry first meets Geno the Genie.

Terry slams the bottle of wine down on the table and looks straight into Geno's face.TerryWhat did you say I had to do to get rid of you? Make a wish? Okay, Buster, here goes. I want a hot pink Humvee that gets 108 miles to the gallon.Geno gladdens instantly, closes his eyes, lightly squeezes his fists together in front of his chest and begins descending into a slight squat.Terry (cont'd)It never gets a flat, never needs a change of oil, and never gets stuck in traffic. I wish my checking account to balance to the penny every month. I wish my stock portfolio to come with a gauge that tells me when to buy and when to sell. Geno reacts as if he's been jabbed with a cattle prod.Terry hardly notices, as she turns into her refrigerator and starts pulling items out. Terry (cont'd)I wish someone would invent a hot fudge sundae diet that really worked. I wish they'd make movies like they used to, write songs like they used to, and I wish the guys in the white lab coats would get out of the business of growing tomatoes and give it back to the rain, the sun, and the bugs.She slams a tomato down on the counter. It bounces like a tennis ball. The cat chases it across the floor. Geno goes into a paroxysm of pain. His eyes widen in panic and he helplessly looks to Terry for mercy.Terry (cont'd)I wish I had the face of Garbo, legs like Tina Turner, and the soul of Mother Theresa. I wish I could fly. I wish I could be invisible. And I wish I could turn myself into a man every time I had to use a public toilet. Geno has nearly doubled over in pain. He weakly holds up a hand, begging her to stop.Terry (cont'd)I wish that Jack were here, that you were gone, and this whole lousy year in my life never happened. Geno falls to the floor like someone who's just been pummeled. He desperately tries to catch his breath.Terry (cont'd)Is that enough wishing for you, Mister?GenoDear lady, please. No more. You can't...I can't. It's too much. Overload...overload. Terry commences making herself a sandwich, cutting a loaf of French bread with a vengeance. She looks down at Geno with utter disdain as he picks himself up off the floor. He returns her tomato.The cat has jumped up onto the counter and is trying to get into her sandwich fixings. She shouts at it.TerryPeople food! People food! She shoos the cat off as Geno collects himself.GenoOne wish, please, lady. One wish at a time.He struggles to regain both his equilibrium and his dignity.Geno (cont'd)Please. You make it. I make it come true. Then we do another. Then we do another. Then our business is done, and I'm gone. But please, no more multiple listings. The cat makes another assault on Terry's sandwich, this time getting so far as to get a snout into it. Terry snaps the sandwich away from the cat and waves it around in disgust.TerryDammit! Cat nose on my sandwich!She storms across the kitchen, stuffs the sandwich into the garbage disposal, and ZAPS it.The cat starts sniffing the unguarded sandwich makings.Terry chases it off the counter, then looks at Geno.Terry (cont'd)You want a wish? Here's a wish. I wish I would never have to feed that cat again. I wish that from this day forward the cat feeds himself. Herself. Whatever. She picks the bottle of wine and loaf of French bread off the counter and heads into the living room.Delighted, Geno quickly resumes his wish-fulfillment pose: eyes closed, fists lightly squeezed together in front of his chest, slow descent into a slight squat. He looks like a man finally getting free from a long-running case of constipation.

LIVING ROOMWith her back to the kitchen door, Terry sits on the edge of a straight-back chair, chewing on her bread.Geno (o.s.)Now we're getting somewhere.TerryNo, we're not! We're not getting anywhere until you get out of here.She turns to him and her face freezes in mid-bite.Geno has the kitchen knife in his hands as he stands with his back to her, perusing her shelves of books, photos, knick-knacks, CDs, DVDs. She casts a desperate look at her fireplace and quickly settles on the poker. She chokes down her mouthful of bread, quietly places the wine bottle and bread down on the floor, and slinks her way to the fireplace.As Geno's interest in her things grows, he can hardly restrain himself from touching them.GenoVery nice, all these things. Terry advances on him with poker. Geno (cont'd)I would love to have things like these...mementos... music...figurines. She raises the poker to strike position.Geno (cont'd)But who has room for such things in a lamp? I don't even have a change of clothes.

Taking the knife delicately by its blade, he offers it to her.

Geno (cont'd)For your bread.
Terry studies him. She studies the knife. She cautiously lowers the poker and takes the knife away. With a bewildering shake of the head, she returns the poker to the fireplace.


Geno follows her with DVD in hand, reading from its label.Geno (cont'd)Lawrence of Arabia. I made Lawrence of Arabia.Turning on him with knife and zero patience.TerryAnd I made Gone With the Wind. Will you please, please get out of here?She slumps back down in her chair.GenoOh, lady, maybe this will help you understand. He was just Lawrence the map-maker. And one day he was digging around in the desert and found my lamp. He rubbed it. I appeared, and he said, 'I wish to be Lawrence of Arabia.' Geno kisses the tip of his own index finger, twirls his hand three times downward in front of his body and bows. Then, triumphantly:Geno (cont'd)The next thing you know he's galloping across the desert on a camel, tweaking the Turks, and whistling Scheherazade in the shower.Geno stands by, eagerly awaiting Terry's approval for his role in history.Terry wearily leans forward in her chair. TerrySo?GenoSo?TerrySo, what were his other two wishes. You gave him three, right? I mean, I get three. Lawrence of Arabia must have gotten three. At least. Huh?GenoOh, yes, yes, yes. Three. Certainly. No more. No less. Yes. He wished to die on his motorcycle. And he wished he could digest figs. Although not in that order.DOORBELL RINGS Terry leaps up from her seat and races for the door.TerryThe cops. New cops. Better cops. It's gotta be. She opens the door to PIZZA MAN, who holds a pizza box out to her.PIZZA MANPizza.TerryI didn't order pizza.Pizza man checks the number of her door, then checks his order slip.PIZZA MANForty-four forty-four Destiny Court. Yes, Ma'm. A large with everything...extra anchovies. The cat appears at the kitchen doorway - MEOW.Terry looks at the cat, then to Geno. Geno smiles and nods. Terry, dumbfounded, looks back at Pizza Man.PIZZA MAN (cont'd)
That'll be $l8.50.

People Hate Politics

Posted with a prayer that I don't have to post it again after Election Day
Just two days ago a friend of 60 years…back to sixth grade…asked me if her support of Donald Trump would be the end of our friendship.
Then last night another friend joined us to listen to Hillary’s acceptance speech…when she arrived, she reported how stressful recent months had been because her closest friends are Trump supporters.
And then as Hillary was being introduced, I received a message from a long distance contact whose emails I’ve been avoiding for weeks ever since he revealed himself to be one of these nihilists who believes a Hillary presidency will only prolong a corrupt system which deserves to be destroyed by Trump so it can be reborn into a new, enlightened age of progressivism.
This truly is the summer of our discontent. We can sense the stakes for our country in the way the politics is affecting personal relationships. The evident tension reveals again the truth of what Prussian General von Clausewitz meant when he famously said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." We can feel a war in the offing if our politics fails us now. A few posts ago in another context I lifted this bit of complicated intelligence from my man Norman O. Brown

The ego to be sure must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from reality of living and dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying and this more active form of denying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of the self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation…is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted image of what is officially denied.

One of my best and brightest readers complained that he read that passage three times and still didn’t get it. I get that, but since I’ve been at it so long and it’s so important a point let me try to clarify it again. In the id state, we are given to our primal instinct to take sex (the means of self-reproduction) and territory (the means of self-protection) where and whenwe want because we sense death is always looming. In the ego state, we attempt to control the panic of losing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to conquer and acquire by sublimating our individual primal needs to mediating social institutions…thus marriage instead of rape and politics instead of war. I think this has a lot to do with why so many people hate politics, as it brings them so close to a state of war and they can feel it in their bones. In these increasingly polarizing times we live in, it’s difficult for people to see politics as a safe alternative to war…to see that the tediousness of politics is a small price to pay for avoiding the horror of war.
I was fortunate to grow up in a household where the benefit of political action was a life lesson. As I’ve written before, my mother was somewhat a community activist (and at 89 and with her life given over mostly to dialysis treatment these days, I suspect that this election day she’ll be manning—or womanning—a polling station once again as she’s done every election since I was a kid.) Still I get why people hate politics.  Over 20 years ago E.J. Dionne wrote the definitive book on the subject, Why Americans Hate Politics. After citing Gallup 1990’s polling data that showed huge numbers of Americans both favoring women in the work place and women staying home to raise children; both agreeing that big business has too much power and that the strength of the country is based on the success of big business; and both endorsing government assistance for the disadvantaged and the virtue of self-reliance, Dionne offers this key passage:

The failure of American politics is to allow these complicated feelings to express themselves. As a result, substantial numbers of Americans see the political conversation as too polarized, too remote from their concerns, too caught up in false “consistencies” that are seen only by the political, cultural and economic elites…The current revolt against American politics is the mainstream’s rebellion against this false polarization.

As I say, that was written more than 20 years ago...as they say, same old same old. One of the many great ironies of this presidential election is that the candidate most attuned and dedicated to the civilizing effects of politics is labeled a war hawk and taunted by chants of “No more war.” The grotesque caricatures of Hillary Clinton by the right and the extreme left have me walking around these days humming the old Stealers Wheels song over and over again: Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right of me/here I am stuck in the middle with her.
Meanwhile the right and extreme left open their arms in welcoming the raging id that is Trump because he simplifies life for them in the most infantile way possible. All those complicated, mixed political feelings? All that resentment built up over life’s disappointments? All those feelings of frustration and inadequacy at controlling fate? Surrender to the illusion of the strongman. Give him the power to make your destiny…vanquish the people who bother you…be the Viagra of your sagging self-esteem. 
I’ve tried to make it a rule of life not to let politics ruin a good relationship. There are a few tricks to pulling that off. “How about them Dodgers?” is one of the most common, among guys at least. I don’t recall the exact cultural reference where that particular line encapsulated it, but I’ve used my own variation on it for decades. Back in the 60s when I had a co-worker who was gung-ho for the Vietnam War and I was not, it was How about them Red Sox?…a safe haven from letting a political argument break into an actual fistfight. (This perhaps the most elementary illustration of what Brown is getting at in that somewhat esoteric passage above...my co-worker and I about to go to war over war form a protective alliance over the Red Sox...the ego, too often confused with vanity, taking over and saving us from our wilder selves). When I received that email from my friend the nihilist during Hillary’s big night, I saw the subject line was not some variation on what a monster she was, but news that his beloved godfather had died. For the first time in many emails, I responded by sending him the picture posted above of the lovely memorial from the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome. He immediately responded: Grazie mille. Un abbraccio (A thousand thanks. A hug). The human connection allowing for a momentary truce in our political battle…or to cop a currently popular line: Love trumps hate.
But I must admit…it’s going to be hard to maintain relationships in the months to come with people who reveal that their values are reflected in objectively repellent Trumpism. For the sake of the relationships, it might be best to avoid contact from now until after Election Day. However, one of the things that stood out for me in the wake of Great Britain’s recent and disastrous Brexit vote was the revelation that so many who voted for it were not only uninformed on the arguments against it, but didn’t even understand what it was. This, I believe, is a result of hating politics…of avoiding discussing politics because certain people find it boring and confusing and thus settle for the quick and easy answers to enormous and critical problems. So, we can preserve the relationships by avoiding discussion of the great choice ahead of us, or we can do what friends should do: Friends don’t let friends vote stupid.  

Final Exam

In June 1980 I gave my final exam as a high school teacher. Pretty simple. I gave my students 20 random questions to choose from--how do they feel about boys who wore shirts with alligator logos on them, what was "a fag" (the routine insult of the day), how would they most like to die...or vice versa. All they had to do was write for 90 minutes on one or all of them. I came upon the archive recently...here's a sampling. To paraphrase Bill Simmons in another context, "Yep, there were my students." Take it away, kids...
The most disgusting thing I have ever seen was a movie. This movie was really degrading, it was groce (sic). I left half way through it. This movie did every sick thing you could think of. It was pure pornography. If I had any say in it Walt Disney should have been locked up for producing it. That’s right! You guessed it: Snow White and the Seven Drwaves. Just for starters, I’ll list the names of the seven dwarfs. There was Sleazy and Wimpy, Burp and Slurp, Dill and Doe and last but certainly not least Leather.The story goes something like tis: One daty while the dwarfs were on their way back to their cottage they nboticed smoke billowing oout of their chimney. Now Leather was kind of a take charge dwarf so he sent Burp and Slurp ahead to check it out. Now Burp and Slurp were groce, beer guzzling swine. They stunk and were  vulgar and disgusting little creatures, but other than that they weren’t bad guys. When they peeked into the cottage they were shocked to see Snow White, the slut of Enchantment Land. She was in there with 3 guys and a Clydedale all at once (Don’t worry, Dan, I’m not the kind of guy to get groce on you). Well, these two little horny dwarfs hurried back to tell Leather and he was a very with it dwarf so he got out his plutonium reactor and blew the shit out of the cottage, Snow White, her three studs and the horse. Now these dwarfs were cheap. They were about as cheap as dwarfs come. What they did was go through the rubble and scrape up any kind of flesh they could find. (This is the part that totally freaked me out, it was so groce). They fed the burned flesh to Tinker Bell. I threw my popcorn out the window, started my car, put the speaker back in the rack, put the car in drive and changed the TV to 60 Minutes, which is on oppositye to The Wonderful World of Diusney every Sunday night at 7:00. –M.H.
The dumbest thing I ever saw anyone do was my father to marry my stepmother. It was the most dumbest mistake of his life and he don’t even realize it. I feel like Cinderella, only with 4 stepsisters and 1 stepbrother. The only problem is there’s no ball to go to and no handsome prince, especiallyn this town or state. Oh, well, better luck next year. –K.S.
How do I want to die? When I die I don’t want any pain, but I want to go out dramatically. I also would really like to die at work. –P.R.
What qualities do I despise the most in my peers? I wouldn’t say I have any peers. I don’t have a chance to and wouldn’t want to anyway. – P.R.
I want to die in my sleep so I won’t feel any pain or know in advance that I’m dying. I want to be sleeping one minute and dead the next. K.G.
The most disgusting thing I ever saw was Mike E hanging from a rope beating off. I went down to his house one day to get something and asked his mother where he was. She said he was down in the barn with his cousins. As I started that I way I saw his cousins, but Mike wasn’t with them so I asked where Mike was and they said with a sort of smirk that he was down in the barn. When I sent to the barn I saw Mike half naked with his point straight up, suspended by a rope. When I saw that rather disgusting and comically scene I started to laugh. I guess Mike must have heard me because soon after that he came running after me with his pants on. –D.C.
What I like about living in the Upper Valley is that it’s peaceful. Where I live there is only 3 people that are close so we can turn up the stereo as loud as we want without disturbing any of the neighbors. Another thing I like about living in the Upper Valley is that in Plainfield we only have one cop, so the chances of being caught doing something illegal is pretty low. That means you can sit around drinking your beers without worrying. What I also like about where I live is that it’s secluded, but still not very far from Lebanon and Windsor. –D.C.
I’ve thought about dying a lot. I know quite a few ways I wouldn’t want to die. One big one is ants. I had a bad experience with ants in Arizona. Ever since I’ve cringed around a bunch of them expecially the big ones. I’ve never been too afraid of spiders or anything. I’ve even held a tarantula. –K.P.
If a nuclear war broke out, I’d try to find the perfect place of courser. Jim Jones had the right idea. He found the nine safest places in the world and he built Jonestown at one of those places. Once I got there, I would dig down deep just in case. –K.P.
After much consideration I have decided that I would like to die trying to find the answer to life or by getting laid too much. Probably the latter. –T.M.
The high point of this school year is this Final. Even though it’s easy, you have to think about it. What you’re going to write and does it make sense and to make it last for 90 minutes all takes a lot of work. –K.S.
The low point of this school year was the other parts of the year. All of it before this Final. –K.S.

Anarchy in the USA

Sacco & Vanzetti
When I was still more boy than man I had an infatuation with anarchy. I had just outgrown traditional American poetry—I Hear America Singing, The Gift Outright, etc. …and was getting intoxicated on the Beats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who I would one day get to meet and interview, was one of my favorites, and his poem I Am Waiting was one of my favorites, and this verse from I Am Waiting was my absolute favorite:

I am waiting for my case to come up   and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting   for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier   and I am waiting   for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder
What is it about anarchy that is so appealing to the young, especially the young and male? My man Norman O. Brown, drawing as he does from Freud, believes it’s less about a dangerous political philosophy and more about the psychological need of the young to overthrow the authority of the parents, especially the male parent. My father was far less authoritarian than most, which is why I suppose my “Up with Anarchy” stage was brief. I eventually grew into a more mature understanding of anarchy as a civic tantrum, thrown by those with no patience for the imperfect, plodding, frustrating, often unjust course of human events. Anarchism is the political equivalent of tossing over the board when you look around and see everyone else in the game seems to own the railroads, the utilities, and hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk and all you have is shitty little Baltic Avenue. The romance of anarchy is that it will, as Ferlinghetti writes, yield a "rebirth of wonder." The reality is, as history has shown, it leads to rule by lawless gangs...a Hobbesian landscape where bullies prevail. 
Lots of talk in the air these days about anarchy in the streets of America. Last week--with more reckless cop shootings of black men and the retaliatory murderous ambush of white police by a deranged black man--injected the talk with a near-lethal dose of blood and tears. It wasn’t exactly anarchy, but did seem like a prelude to it…or rather a sequel to America’s danse macbre with anarchy from the early decades of the 20th century. Back then it wasn’t black lives that didn’t seem to matter, but Italian lives. The Nob holds a special affection for most things Italian, and it’s hard not to feel sympathetic to the anarchism that was widespread throughout the immigrant Italian communities of the Northeast through the pre- and post-World I period. The anarchists, many of them among the most literate of the immigrants, were reacting radically to the disillusionment they experienced in their encounter with the reality of life in this somewhat over-promised land—the job discrimination, the impoverishment, the prejudice, the brutality of the established order as manifest in the thuggish behavior of the police. There was neither ambiguity nor moderation in their reaction. They openly called themselves anarchists, printed leaflets calling for anarchy, manufactured bombs in their homes and exploded them in and around public buildings, and shot cops and other officials dead. They openly dedicated themselves to an incessant violent assault on what they believed to be a corrupt and oppressive system.
Out of that period emerged one of the most famous murder trials in American history…the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of killing two innocent men during a payroll robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. After a controversial trial filled with dubious evidence, contradictory testimony and presided over by an openly prejudiced judge, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of first-degree murder on July 14, 1921…95 years from this posting. Their convictions aroused worldwide street protests and ringing condemnations from some of the most famous names of the time. Among them, this from H.G. Wells:

The guilt or innocence of these two Italians is not the issue that has excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were actual murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit about the crime.... Europe is not "retrying" Sacco and Vanzetti or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge Thayer. Executing political opponents as political opponents after the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as bandits; but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.

Like Wells, my concern is not with the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti…that issue has been chewed over much of the past 100 years. Also, like Wells, I’m more concerned with the broader issue raised when he writes, “this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.” To bring this statement more in line with our current paroxysm of injustice, allow me to rewrite Wells thusly: this business of trying and executing on the street illegal cigarette vendors; people possibly guilty of robbing cigarillos and walking wrongways on a city street; people walking around with toy guns; people walking around with real, but legal guns; people playing music too loud; people you don’t like walking through your neighborhood, people stopped for routine traffic violations; people not showing proper submissiveness or respect…it all seems to be a new and very frightening turn for the courts, the legislatures, and the citizens of the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.

Italian immigrants, barely recognized as white, protest injustice.Due to my heritage, I guess, I have a wide circle of friends and relatives of both Irish and Italian descent. I must repeat that it fills me with shame and embarrassment when I see so many of them jump on the redneck bandwagon to condemn black protestors, be they Black Lives Matter or not. Those of us descended from Italians and Irish… people who took to the streets both peacefully and violently to fight oppression…should empathize better than most that the struggle is often neither easy nor orderly (I'm looking at you, Rudy Efffin Giuliani).

And here’s the struggle…it’s against a de facto, insidious anarchy that hides beneath the veneer of law and order. It's a law and order that allows gangs of lobbyists and elites to roam over a Hobbesian landscape of their own design. It's a law and order that says these are the rules for everybody, but some can break them and some can’t...and we decide. These covert anarchists look at the game board and the only thing that matters to them is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card because for them controlling crime and punishment is what matters most. And they'll tip over the game board, too, if they see anyone they view as underserving getting their dark and dirty hands on that card.