The Supremes

Here's a thought on the Supremes, not the ones who sang "Stop! In the Name of Love" but the ones who form our highest court. Most Americans seem to think that the Court has the final say on what is constitutional. That belief springs from civics classes taught in high schools. 

The Founding Fathers, in the belief that power corrupts, divided  the power to govern among the President, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court. In effect they set up a permanent but shifting four-way tug-of-war. All four entities keep trying to gather more power, and all four interpret the Constitution. When the Affordable Care Act was passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President, all three were claiming that the act was constitutional. Millions of people gained health insurance. By the time the act reached the Supreme Court, the justices had only one workable choice, which was to go along no matter what they might believe. Events had put the interpretations of the other branches of the government in charge. To rule against the ACA might have crashed the country and its economy, and that would have destroyed the Court. First, the Court protects itself. Something similar happened in the Court's vindication of gay marriage. A situation where a same-sex couple was married in the city but not in the desert was ultimately unsupportable. It was nuts. The nation couldn't work that way. The Court had to make marriage rights legally universal. 

Decisions of 6-3 and 5-4 are carefully put together to give the loonier justices a chance to posture in front of their political friends. My guess is that only three justices are genuinely enslaved by weird metaphysical passions. Look at the most radical-right court we've seen in 80 years, and then look at how many times they've carefully carved off chunks of their own noses. They had no reasonable choice. 

A Transitional President

For the last six years, as friends of mine complained that President Obama has been ineffective and a centrist, I've been responding that these are the good old days. That is, we will look back at Obama the way some look back on FDR or I look back at the 1960s.

Obama has been a transitional President, helping to mold massive shifts in our national reality. We recovered from a Great Recession. Health care for everyone has been established as a human right. Gays have achieved something close to full rights. We elected an African-American President twice. We pulled our military back from massive vigilante invasions. Latinos have stepped forward. We no longer have to pretend that Robert E. Lee was a nice old dude who treated his slaves well and fought brilliant campaigns he inexplicably lost. Lee's flag is descending.
 
In our history we've had only a handful of good Presidents. In this lifetime we may not see the like of Obama for some time.

The End of Gay Marriage

Just when you think the nation is governed by greedy damned fools elected by lesser apes, the Supreme Court makes a series of pragmatic and sensible decisions. 

The court saved health insurance and made all marriages legal. Some right-wing governors in the South, responding to terrorist hate crimes against African-Americans, start hauling down the KKK's stars-and-bars flag. If it weren't for the drought, I might cancel my move to Canada (just kidding).

There is no such thing as gay marriage now, just marriage.  

Plumbing the Depths of Ignorance

Some of the controversy about the KKK / battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is based on god knows what. In a nearby town in my liberal county, a young fellow, saying he is nonpartisan, has raised the KKK flag to demonstrate his rights under the First Amendment.  From what I can tell, this man is not a racist or white supremacist. He's a Civil War reenactor who wears the Union (or American) uniform. I'm uninformed, but I'm guessing that the reenactment movement teaches that both sides of the Civil War, no matter how evil their cause, were equally admirable. General Grant did not agree. He thought that the South fought extremely well but for the worst cause possible.

Our local flag raiser seems to be too unschooled to have read that the battle flag was not the flag of the Confederate States. He's too out of touch with facts to understand that the KKK adopted the Virginia battle flag in the last century and made it popular. He doesn't seem to grasp how a KKK flag or a Nazi flag might offend people. Of course the First Amendment gives him the right to fly on private property his own choice of flag, no matter how foolish. (I'm glad he doesn't live across the street from me.)

The Races of Mexico

This is a brief history of races in Mexico. I'm no expert, of course, but I don't let that stop me. 

Mexico was first populated by tribes of Native Americans (immigrants from Asia).  The Spanish arrived and brought African slaves with them. The Spanish had an elaborate legal racial caste system. If a Spaniard married an African, the children would be mulatos, who had a higher legal status than blacks but lower than whites. If a Spaniard married an Aztec, the children would be mestizos, who had a higher status than mulatos but lower than the Caucasians.  If a mulato married a mestizo, then etc., etc. After Mexico became an independent country, the citizens junked the Spanish caste system and officially thought of themselves as a nation of mestizos.  Private prejudices continued. Today roughly 5% of all Mexicans are of purely European descent. The Vallejo family of Northern California were of Spanish descent, for example.

I used to wonder how just about any hapless American sailor in 1840 who deserted his ship in San Diego would end up marrying the daughter of the richest Mexican rancher in the area. Those sailors had blue eyes and blond hair.  They sunburned easily. The old Spanish prejudices still worked in memory. If you could arrange to get paler grandsons. . . . 

As you might guess, when the Spanish conquered California, the soldiers and settlers were mostly mestizos and mulatos. The hoity toity stayed in the comfortable ruling metropolis, Mexico City. Los Angeles was settled by Latinos who were part-black. The most famous of them was Pio Pico. the last governor of Mexican California. Without leaving town he became the citizen of three different nations: Spain, Mexico and the USA. As governor Pico had dismantled the mission system, leaving the churches to perform their religious rites but freeing the Indians and redistributing the vast church ranches. Pico became quite rich and famous in his third nation, until he was cheated out of all he owned.  He lived well into the age of photography. I don't think people said this out loud, but by 1860 American standards he was black. That may have been one reason he served as Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager in California. 

Who Owns the Guns

In a given year, roughly 100,000 Americans are killed or wounded by guns.

Only one American in five owns a gun, but each owns an average or four or five guns. 

If only one in five Americans owns a gun, why is the gun lobby so powerful?

Horrifying

This morning the First Lady commented that the racist murders committed by nutter in South Carolina were particularly horrifying because they happened in a church.  Why "particularly horrifying"? Mrs. Obama didn't say, but what makes the church massacre particularly vile is a combination of white supremacy (nurtured by some Republican leaders) and God's inexplicable failure to protect hopeful houses of worship. Churches are frequently soft targets of home-grown terrorists and, for that matter, of hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. It's as if God could not care less.

Fox News, a grinning tick that sucks blood from the edges of white supremacy, would have us believe the South Carolina massacre was an attack on religion, but the killer has made it clear that he was after African-Americans, not Christians. 

Donald's Essence

Of  Donald Trump, Hadley Freeman wrote in THE GUARDIAN: "The truth is, he is the essence of the Republicans boiled down into the figure of a bullfrog topped with a Weetabix."

(Weetabix is British for shredded wheat.)

A Context for Rachel Dolezal

The media discussion of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who passed and became African-American, seems largely to have overlooked the context of what she did. 

The missing context is the history of passing in the United States, which goes back several hundred years. Our definitions of race are, as you know, shifting and arbitrary. The definitions are largely fictions. In our history many thousands of women have passed from the black race to white race and--this is the part that seems almost unknown--from the white race to the black race. Rachel Dolezal is one among many.  We don't know exactly how many have passed because we don't look at this phenomenon or count the people involved.

Every woman who changed races constructed a false identity and became, in a sense, a liar. This made them uncomfortable and led them to look for justifications or rationales for their claims. For example, white women who married black men used to cut the arms of their husbands and drink their blood. Then they could claim "black blood." (By claiming they were black, these women could avoid the problems that assaulted biracial couples.)  Rachel Dolezal, raised in a different time, has claimed a kind of existential blackness, an interior quality. She believes she was, in modern terms, born black in a white body. I suspect that she also believes she was born into a family that would betray her.

Black Like Me

About  56 years ago, a southern white man named John Howard Griffin took pills to turn his skin dark. For some time he lived as a black man and then wrote a book about his experiences called BLACK LIKE ME. I read it at the time. In my memory, at least, no one criticized him or called him deceptive.

This week the mother and father of a white woman in Spokane outed their daughter, Rachel Dolezal, a white woman passing as an African-American, who had become a leader and spokesperson for the NAACP.  Why the parents exposed their own daughter is unclear. The behavior of the daughter has become a huge topic in the media. Generally speaking, the reactions to Dolezal have been negative. Many issues have been raised. 

1. Dolezal has been accused of misrepresenting herself and lying. A woman who passes for black or white is lying by definition. The question raised here is one of existential authenticity. 

2.  The NAACP is backing Dolezal on the grounds that the organization has always been open to people of all races.

3.  Most authorities on race will tell you that race is a social creation. We define the races any way we like, arbitrarily,  but in nature the human race is one species. Dolezal's claim challenges a changing and arbitrary definition of race; it does not challenge biology.

4. Some on the left believe that people should be free to be whatever is genuinely themselves. Bruce Jenner took medicine and had surgery to give himself breasts (keeping his penis). Many who consider Dolezal a fake and mentally disturbed praise Jenner as a brave transgender woman who has become her true inner self. The argument is that Jenner was born to be transgender. Mother Nature required Jenner to undergo surgery. Dolezal was born white and darkened her skin and is a nut and a fake.

5. The question of who is legitimately black has been raised by those who believe that blackness is matter of experience. That is, all African-Americans have the same experience of racism from birth, and Dolezal has only experienced this as an adult. But is it true that all black people have the same experiences or are some blacker than others?

6. Dolezal could pass back into the white community, not a possibility for most (but not all) African-Americans. This makes her different from most but not all black people.

7.  Terry Southern, back in the 1960s, wrote a story about a white man who loved jazz and hung out all the time with black musicians in Paris, until they kicked him out on the grounds that he was "too hip." Has Dolezal become too hip?

Intolerance

 As you may have noticed, the North Carolina state senate and house of delegates, largely composed of reptilian dodos, recently overrode their own Republican governor's veto and passed a bill allowing public officials to stop performing weddings to which they had "any sincerely held religious objection."  This was a dim-witted attempt to block or stigmatize same-sex marriages. The legislative argument was that it is bigoted to limit a public official's religious bigotry.

Never mind that a bigoted public official is paid to serve every citizen and sworn to uphold the Constitution. In return he or she feeds copiously from the public trough. Now, in North Carolina, if it is his religious conviction that people with dark skin should not marry people with lighter skin or that Jews should not marry Gentiles, he can send couples away, while waving the American flag.

Today's Police Video

Today's police video shows a frantic police sergeant charging this way and that into some kind of fracas at a fancy pool party, then drawing his gun on some teenagers. Other officers attempt to calm him down. He ends up throwing a 15-year-old African-American girl in a bikini face-first to the grass and kind of sitting on her as if she is a trophy he's won by doing good works. Something obvious finally occurred to me. Many of us have been talking about how the police have been militarized and so on, about how things have changed. But has policing changed? Maybe it's always been like this, only now people have cameras. Are black and Latino Americans surprised by these videos?

Here's a weird thought. The sergeant pulled his gun but did not kill any unarmed young black people. He had just enough self control not to shoot. In the society in which we live, that's a happy ending.  

I Am Rachel Maddow's Filler Writer

Hi, I am Rachel Maddow, and today Rick Perry did someone few expected. We have news from Rick Perry. We did not anticipate this, not on a Monday. Rick Perry, of all the people in Texas, has made news. He's said something of importance. The former governor, Rick Perry, made news today. Coming up next. More repetitive filler to follow. Watch this space.

How to Spot a Terrorist

In the May edition of HARPER'S, we learn that the city of Jackson, Florida, produced an instructional video on how to spot a terrorist. Viewers are told to beware of people who display "average or above average intelligence." Watch out for folks who seem to have made a "conspicuous adaptation to Western culture and values." You should suspect any turkey who "demonstrate religious behavior" such as "mumbling prayers."

I can buy a lot of that, especially the part about mumbling prayers. Okay, I might have been for mumbling when I was a young hot-head and more radical, but that was decades ago.  

More important, from the above criteria we can deduce the sort of people we ought to trust.  Americans can depend on the man or woman of below average intelligence, like the guys who made this video.  Put your faith in those who can't seem to adapt to our culture and values and don't pray. Or maybe the trusted dude can pray if he enunciates clearly. That part isn't clear.