Choosing Between the Lesser of Two Insufficiencies

ALMOST BEYOND BELIEF, we the American people are confronted with a choice which really leaves us little real choice. We might wish to comfort ourselves by pretending that we deserve better, and that this dire set of circumstances has been forced upon us by forces beyond our control. That, however, would be dishonest. In reality, we deserve no better, we deserve our dire situation, because it is we who created it. The choice we have is between two too old men, both too old to be employed, arguably, both too old to serve as president of these United States, indisputably. Arguments against age discrimination are valid, but only to a point. We have reached and exceeded that point. During the first twenty or so years of one's life, one enjoys one's youth, and prepares for one's career. During the next forty years, one pursues one's career. Then, one retires, to allow the next generation to take over the responsibilities of making society function, and to enjoy the benefits of long years of preparation and productivity in an all too brief late life retirement. One gives up one's active employed place in society, and lets someone else, someone younger, have and benefit (as well as suffer) from it. We must take turns, from generaton to generation. Both Biden and Trump have had their chance to serve, to be productive, to govern. It is past time that they both retired, and leave the governence of the nation to the people who will be living under their own future governance. Arguments against Trump go far beyond mere age, and have been enumerated incessantly. He is a career criminal, criminally insane. He has no redeeming personal qualities, not a single one. He is and has always been unfit for public service. Again, the arguments are endless. They are more than arguments; they are facts. Arguments against Biden are several, having to do with his age, mental capacity, and length of public service. The two sides of the Biden mental state dispute are both using exaggeration, as people tend to do when trying to forcefully make a point. Those who say that he is mentally still fit and describe his debate performance as a fluke, an outlier, a mere matter of fatigue and a head cold, are ignoring reality. Biden is in fact cognitively diminished by age, as many people become. Those who insist that he resign as the Democratic candiate for president are exaggerating his mental decline. A friend of mine declared that his "brain is gone", and vowed to vote for nobody. Thus my friend is exaggerating and aiding and abetting Trump, even if unwittingly. No, Biden's brain is not gone, he merely suffers from the early stages of what used to be called "senility". His mind has slowed considerably, his ability to "think on his feet" seriously diminished. For what may or not be te first time in American history, we are confronted with a choice of two men neither of whom is qualified or competant to be president. Arguably, nobody is qualified, and we the American people have never been, nor could ever be, given an adequate choice among mere humans for president...Arguably, well educated academicians with extensive knowledge of politial science, law, sociology, and history, among other academic areas, are the only people qualified to serve in this highest, most demanding office. The irony and paradox is that the more intelligent and well educated one is, the less one generally tends to be inclined to want to endure the nightmarish circumstances inherent in seeking and serving in the presidency. John Quincy Adams, arguably the most intelligent, best educated president ever, was ultimately in ineffective president. Thomas Jefferson, whose brilliance and education are beyond question, described the presidency as "splendid misery", and had a poor second term, as most presidents do. The conclusion is painfully obvious; the American presidency requires of human beings abilities which, seemingly are beyond the reach of, not possessed by, human beings.

SCOTUS, Going Fascist

FOR ALL APPEARANCES, the United States Supreme Court, as well as the entire federal judiciary, is bending over ass backwards in its desperate attempt to get and keep a certain former United States criminal president out of hot water. The circuit courts, by finding one excuse after another to postpone due process and interminably delay proceedings in the nation versus Donald J.Trump until such time as the former scoundral-in-chief either gets, horror of horrors, reelected, or, the lord blesses us with his death by natural causes, the nominal republic becomes a fascist dictatorship, or, as a last resort, hell freezes over. Of the above alternatives, the one involving the U.S. of A. devolving into a fascist dictatorship seems far and away the most likley, particularly considering SCOTUS's latest fantastical, science fictiony, deluded ruling from the bench from hell. The ruling, as by now everyone not living on Mars knows, is that the president of the United States, any president of the United states, past, present, or future, enjoys absolute, unconditional immunity from criminal prosecution for any and all alleged crimes committed during the performance of his or her constitutional duties as president. In other words, the king, newly crowned, can do no wrong. England's King Charles II must be turning over in his grave in his zeal to sip celebratory champagne, albeit without his head, which he lost in 1649, for proclaiming precisely that doctrine, which was unacceptable then, but back in high fashion as of now. The question of the hour, and the century, becomes; precisely what are considered to be the president's official duties of office? Everything he or she does while in office, it almost seems. The constitution evidently provides a good place to start finding the answer, but, apparently, not the only or final place. It turns out that everything Richard Nixon did criminally while in office, including wire tapping, gang of thugs assembling, organizing, and instructing, breaking into the DNC national headquarters, and the infamous cover up of said activities, he might have been spared legal exposure from, if only he had waited until today to do it all. Nixon, off scott free, sans Ford's infamous pardon. Go figure, as they say. It may even be that Donald Trump won't be put on trial for anything, no matter what, ever again, and that his thirty four current felony convictions will be reviewed and overturned, being as how some of the hush money checks he wrote to Stormi Daniels were written while Trump was sitting on his fat orange ass in the Oval Office. Paying off a porn star thus becomes an offical act of the president of the USA. A right wing extremist legal expert assures us that not only is presidential immunity from criminal prosecution inherent in the constitution, somewhere, and that thus the constitution does not after all, enshrine any such nonsense as "nobody is above the law", but that, much to our relief, should the president, any president, order Seal Team Six to knock off a political rival, he would indeed not be immune to charges of murder. Oh, what a relief it is! In reality, a realm which seems unfamiliar to no fewer than six of the current Supreme Court members, there is nothing in the constitution protecting the president against prosecution for criminal acts, official or unoffical, and nothing which elevates the chief executive to the status of authoritarian dictator, which is precisely what conservative ideologues,especially those sitting on the nation's highest court, aim to do. They have abandoned democracy. But,all is not lost. After all, all else failing, and all else indeed seems to have officially failed, we the people of these United dictatorial States have left one last recousre; we can still, through our duly elected House of Representatives, bring impeachment articles against, vote in the affirmative for them, put on Senatorial trial, try and convict in the Senate, by a two thirds majority, and remove the Nixonian Trumpian son of a bitch from executive office. Breathe a sigh of relief.

Teaching the Bible and Religion, Properly

THERE REALLY IS NO CHOICE, no argument. The Christian Bible should be, needs to be, must be taught in public schools. No, students needn't be required to read the entire Bible, nor even parts of it. But the Bible must be mentioned, and must be placed in proper historical contest, within all ancient history classes, all European history classes, and all Amerian history classes. At my high school I took World History and American history, and the Bible was never even mentioned. That was a mistake, made in the days when the complete separation of church and state extended to public schools, and the Bible, its very existence, was not mentioned. I can hear the Christians hallelujah-ing, praising God, Christ, and the author of this essay. I can hear the progressive secular humanists hissing, wailing, gnashing, throwing stuff, and looking for a rope with which to hang the same author. Both violent mobs,both points of view, with their narrowness, insular idiocy, and stupidity, are woefully wrong, and hardly even worth illuminating. A pox on both their houses. Despite the fact that I despise the Bible, for its gratuitous violence, for its obscenity, for its ignorance of reality, and for the fact that it is widely regarded, amazingly stupidly, as the true "Word of God', despite its obvious shortcomings, the fact remains theat the Christian Bible is the most important book in history, and remains so today. Despite my hatred and utter contempt for the Christian religion, the Christian religion has long been and remains today among the most important,influential powerful institutions in human history, and remains so today, and to not study it, in an historical context, is academically, intellectually criminal. Teaching the Bible and the Christian religion in public schools from a devotional point of view, attemting to convince students that both are the true Word of God, is indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda, and..criminal. We should and must teach students how to think, but never ever what to think. When students read Shakespeare, or Faulkner, or Steinbeck, they the studnets should and must decide what to think about theses great books, what to think about any book they read, including the Christian Bible. All students, all human beings, should and must decide for themselves what religion, if any, to embrace. Religious indoctrination of children, either in the home, or in the school, is criminal child abuse. The mind is a terrible thing to indoctrinate. No western civilization history class sould omit mention of the Christian Bible, the Christian religion, or the Koran, and the Islamic religion, or the Torah, and the Judaic religion. All of these have played a seminal role in the history of western civilization, and must be included in the course, in high school or in college. These institutions must be taught from a critical, scientific, historical factual perspective, without any devotional content or indoctrination. Some might assume that the very act of teaching these things is a form of indoctrination, because teaching them at all, in any context, implies reverence for them. Nothiing could be further from the truth. All sacred scripture, being books, have human authors, and all religions are inventions of the human mind and culture, and have a history, and all can be explained in terms of their influence and significance in cultural historical development. The students can take it from there.

Paying Reparations

THE WHOLE ISSUE of paying reparations to living African-Americans for injustices done to mostly dead African-Americans has gained a surprising amount of traction in recent times. It is no longer an outlier, a peripheral issue attracting interest from radicals, but rather, something which is receiving serious consideration among not only the black and progressive communities, but among academicians, political scientists and sociologists in particular, and the greater intellectual community in general. The devil, of course, is in the details. Slavery began in America in 1619, and extended two hundred and forty six years to 1865. That was, has been and continues to be followed by one hundred and fifty nine years of unfair, unequal treatment; segregation, discrimination, and our more subtle current forms of racially unjust inequality, systemic and otherwise. Pen has been put to paper, the calculations have been completed. Starting by reckoning the broken post Civl War promise of forty acres and a mule for each freed former slave, a promise broken by Andrew Johnson after the death of Abraham Lincoln,it has been calculated the the total last value to Arfican-Americans predicated on this broken proimse amounts to roughly fourteen trillion dollars,including the value of the acres of land rescinded, and the value of all the value which would likely have been gotten from this large stretch of land, stretching from South Corlina to Georgia, from lost agricultural crop value. It doesn't even take into consideration the tragic, horrible, incalculable damage done to all slaves between 1619 an 1865. How could that ever be determined with any degree of accuracy and verification? How does one use pen, paper, and computer to figure the amount of emotioal damge done, psychological damage, day after day, to millions of ensalved human beings in all their pervasive, never ending misery throughout their entire lives? One doesn't. Unpaid medical bills, lost time from work, unemployment due to repeated beatings and whippings? Impossible to determine. Most of the harm, indeed a huge perentage of it, was done, inarguably, to the actual enslaved people, not their descendents, certainlly not to those who experienced the pain of twentieth century segregation and discrimination. The living have hardly suffered, in real terms, great though their suffering has been, compared to the nearly incomprehensible sufferrng of those now long dead. The true victims are not among the currently living. To calculate the total value of the reperations necessary to give just redress for past injustices is in fact quite impossible, and would doubtless greatly exceed the fourteen trillion dollar amount named above. Whatever reparations would be paid to America's roughly twenty million living African-Americans they would recive not because they have earned and deserved all of it, but rather, because they would be getting payments which were due their ancestors, long ago, and can never be paid. To whom, among the lving would these reparations be paid? Lebron James has earned close to a billion dollars during his life, and has donated much of it to charity, mostly education. He might turn down his reparations check. Beyonce doesn't need the money either. The NFL and NBA are full of athletes whose accumulated wealth defies any immediate need for reparations money earned by their ancestors. The more closely one examines the actual circumstances involved in doing the accounting, the murkier and more impossibly difficult it becomes. It may well be that the best and indeed only way to actually make appropriate compensation for history, which can never be changed, is to change the present, and thus the future, by elminating forever the one true source of all the injustice ever perpetrated upon any race whatsoever; racism itself.

Dreaming of Jennifer Jones

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, I had a dream about her. It was 1985, I was thirty years old, teaching at the university, deep into a Ph.D program in European history. In my shared office, grading papers, or something, I heard her talking to a professsor next door, plea bargaining for a grade. He asked her what happened on October 31, 1517. When she said "Halloween" I laughed out loud, she heard me, and giggled. That was our first conncection. When she left the office next door, I stepped out into the hallway, and spoke to her. I wish I could remember our precise words. The pretext was studying, and my alleged talent tutoring. She knew where to find me. She found me, at my basement graduate student cubby hole of an apartment, which I loved, and would happily inhabit today, if the house hadn't been torn down and replaced by a university shopping gig. She showed up wearing a "I heart love NY" sweatshirt, with both the red heart and the word "love" redundantly on the shirt. She didn't like that, thought the redundancy was stupid. She offered to bring the shirt back to me after washing it, which she did. I had it and wore it for years. I wish I still had it. She was eighteen, a freshman, cute face, large mouth, full lipe, short brown hair with bangs. Nice figure. A family girl with seven year old twin little sisters who came from a city two hours away, and had a VW bug on campus. She was adorable, and she liked me, as many ladies did and still do. We kept our clothes on. We sat next to each other on my tattered grad student couch, side by side, bodies in full contact. We studied a little. I looked at her, she looked at me, and I kissed her. I kissed her again. Then, she laid down on the couch, and I knew what to do. Our clothing never came off. When we were finished, she buttoned up her bra, and said that she had never kissed a thirty year old before. When we started meeting down in the college town bar and restaurant district she was obviously nervous, and obviously was trying to make herself look plain and unattractive, which was not possible. She mentioned the importance of finding a good husband. I knew we wouldn't last, and that she would leave the university in another three years with a degree and a fiance. It wouldn't be me. A few weeks later I saw her for the last time, walking with a young man about her age. She was on her way. In my dream, just the other day, she was there again, and still looked eighteen. All I can remember of the dream is that our exchange was warm and friendly, but I knew that she would again go away. I awakened wanting to be with her one more time, and needing to write about her. She would be fifty seven now, soon to turn fifty eight. My best guess is that she graduated, found her husband, had a family, and now has grandchildren. With a name like 'Jennifer Jones", googling her I assume would be impossible. I hope all that I assume about her is true, and somehow sense that it is. I cannot resist the thought that I, now sixty nine, and she, now fifty seven, would no longer be an innapropriate match, and that we haven't been for many years. At what point does a thirty year old eighteen year old brief romance grow into an age appropriate match? At thirty three and twenty one? That's getting closer, if nothing else. Maybe a bit later...maybe...Maybe I didn't miss out on her by as much as I thought. She just wasn't ready for me, back then. Maybe she will come to me in a dream, again. I doubt it, but..maybe.