Shame on You, Pete

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia

 

Some time ago, your Head Trucker concluded that the only person left in the Administration with good sense was Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation (who is young enough to be my son).  But now I see I was mistaken.

My truckbuddies will have already read about Buttigieg's defense of the protesters outside the restaurant where Justice Kavanagh was dining the other day, citing their First Amendment rights.

Now I have no high regard at all for Kavanagh and the other Trumpists who voted to overturn Roe - and by direct and indirect statements, threatened also to undo the whole concept of a constitutional right to privacy that has been settled law for half a century, and which underpins many other rights that have come to be accepted as normative - like the right to contraception, and to same-sex marriage, to name but two.

It was a nasty thing those five justices did, who voted to overturn Roe and have precipitated us all into a constitutional crisis whose full extent and effects have yet to be seen.

Nevertheless, no matter how much I despise a public official's acts, I cannot endorse hounding and harassing him in the ordinary course of private life - whether at home or in a restaurant or store.  This is a repugnant thing, and I will give you three good reasons why:

1.  It violates the Golden Rule - often summarized as "Do as you would be done by."  Although it was stated by Christ, it is not an exclusively Christian rule; in fact, it appears in the same or very similar form in the teachings of just about every religion around the world, and even among primitive tribes without a set of scriptures.  Even oh-so-modern atheists are sometimes heard mouthing it.

2.  But if course, if you don't give a flip for anything even remotely connected to religion, well then, surely you must consider an invasion of privacy to be at the very least a violation of the good manners you learned at your mother's knee.  What's that, you say?  Free speech trumps good manners?   Well, I can only reply that my mother also taught me that Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right.  Free speech is not the only right, and it does not justify doing anything you feel like doing, to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

And how do you justify disturbing the peace - a crime - of the other people in the neighborhood, the restaurant, the store?  Perhaps you will say that the end justifies the means - a favorite line of dictators.  But just exactly what good result will come of your disturbance?  What exactly will it accomplish?

3.  And if all that rings no bell with you, how about this:  if it's just fine and dandy to harass the hell out of people at their homes and in restaurants, why then, what's sauce for the goose is certainly sauce for the gander, is it not?  This nasty behavior invites retaliation in kind.  Suppose a crowd gathered outside the Buttigieg home, or around the place where Pete and his husband were dining, shouting ugly words and carrying signs - would you like to see that happen?  Say what?  Oh, you wouldn't?

Well, I guarantee you it will be happening if you and Pete and the rest of the good liberal folks don't wake up and stop this stupidity.  It's a great way to spark that civil war we have all heard rumors of.

I've warned about this kind of stupidity before.

Shame on you, Pete.  I thought you were a bigger, better, wiser man.  Now I don't see anyone under 80 on the Democratic side to admire.  You were my last hope.  

The Democratic Party that I knew is changing beyond recognition and dwindling rapidly into insipid uselessness - a cake left out in the rain.  It makes me ill to see what is happening to my party and to my country, the steady erosion of common decency, the fragmentation of society, the descent into madness.  I really hope I don't live to see the final act of this tragedy.

My hat is off to the valiant Liz Cheney, though - one of the few Republicans left with moral character and BALLS.

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Notes from the Revolution, 6/9/20

. . . a revolution of hearts and minds . . .

After his funeral in Houston today, George Floyd was carried
to his final resting place in a horse-drawn hearse.

- - - o o o O O O o o o - - -

As I said in Sunday's post, I can't keep up with all the news that's going on right now, but I will continue to post from time to time, under the above heading, my thoughts about where we are as a nation and where I think we ought to go, and how.

And let me say, for the benefit of any new readers, something that I suppose has been apparent to my longtime truckbuddies:  I represent a party of one, and this blog is my personal forum in which I express my own independent thoughts, not all of them necessarily in tune with the zeitgeist of the modern world.  My party's platform includes the Golden Rule, the Golden Mean, and the Baptismal Covenant, as well as a plank in favor of the Oxford comma, and another one denouncing the use of gift as a verb.

Being fairly well versed in the English language, I say what I mean and I mean what I say: it's my privilege as a free, though flawed, man in a free, though flawed, country.  I don't want to argue with anyone.  If you don't agree with me, just move on and find someone else you do agree with:  that's your privilege.  There are millions of other voices in the world, and mine, small and obscure, has no influence over the course of events, one way or the other.  Which may be all for the best; at least it passes the time for me here in retirement.

- - - o o o O O O o o o - - -

"Defund the Police" Needs a Rebrand:  It certainly does, for all sorts of obvious reasons. As Kevin Drum says:

We can write thousands of pieces telling people that “defund” doesn’t really mean defund, but honestly, you can hardly blame people for nevertheless thinking that defund means defund. That is, cut police budgets to zero and get rid of them entirely.

There’s not a Democratic politician alive who thinks we should do this, and keeping the phrase in use is just an invitation for unnecessary conflict between politicos and their base. Maybe it’s too late, but can’t we come up with something better? Rebuild the Police? Reform the Police? Demilitarize the Police? There’s got to be something.

Notice how Senator Kamala Harris, a former state prosecutor, struggles to explain what the phrase really means - "not that we get rid of the police, of course not" - which is baffling to any intelligent listener who believes that words have meaning:



Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis was booed out of a protest march on Saturday after he refused to accede to the demand to "defund the police." He was quite right to decline, in my opinion. Here he explains his stand:




Now I certainly agree with Sen.  Harris that increased funding for public schools, healthcare, job creation and training is necessary to make better communities:  you get what you pay for.  Although I do have to wonder why, more than fifty years after LBJ called for the building of a "Great Society" in America - and the countless billions of dollars that have been spent on those very issues - why is our society not great?  Why are black communities still impoverished, with all the unhappy outcomes that go with poverty?  Why have fifty years of massive federal aid to cities and minorities had no better effect on its intended beneficiaries than what we see today in this country - the richest and most powerful in the world?

Please understand that I do not know the answers - I am simply asking the questions.  Questions that are long overdue a proper answer free of bias, one way or the other.

Some uninformed people in this great country think that it was established as an exclusively Christian nation and intended to be such forever.  The facts are otherwise, but even if that were true, they should not boast about it, but weep.  Jesus did say, "The poor are always with you."  But this hardly justifies complacency about the fact; I think it likely that He was quoting, in part, Deuteronomy 15:11, where God commands the Israelites:

For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.

And of course, Jesus himself told the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, enjoining those who love God to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, care for the sick, and comfort the prisoners; in other words, to do whatever was needed to alleviate poverty and misery.  In the Sermon on the Mount, He blessed the poor, saying the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to them.

Now, you need not believe in God or Christ or the Bible to grasp the exalted moral imperative here, which is expressed in different words in all other religions worthy of the name:  love your neighbor as yourself.  Believer or non-believer, conservative or liberal, rich or just getting by - if we are not barbarians, we must as individuals and as as a nation do what needs to be done to help and heal and lift up the poor among us - poor in body, mind, or spirit - and that is what will truly Make America Great Again.

This Is So Wrong (Revised)

The world is heating up far too much these days, and I don't mean the climate.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that your Head Trucker often used to rant and rave in these posts about fools, frauds, and fanatics - but in recent years, he has simply tired of wasting his breath on the heedless, madding world that seems maniacally intent on tearing itself apart.  When the party degenerates into a knock-down, drag-out brawl, the only sensible thing to do is to get out of the way and not get sucked into the fight.

It has become more and more necessary, in the face of the utter madness that seems to be sweeping across the whole world, like a mass psychosis, to pay less and less attention to the news and try to keep one's inner self centered in thoughts of peace and goodwill, so far as possible.  Tempers are so dreadfully inflamed and minds are so thickly clouded with me-ism and us-ism and to-hell-with-them-ism that I do greatly fear we are living in the calm before the storm - as someone has prophesied:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It may be that cooler heads will somehow prevail; or it may be that a colossal storm will engulf what within living memory was known as the civilized world.  In either case, this old man knows he is powerless to influence the masses.  The best I can do is to try to remain sweet and sound of heart here in this little house, and to do the small things I can do, with as much love - simple and unselfish - as I can muster.  Beyond that, I must leave the world where it has always been, in the hands of God, and trust in His ultimate redemption of our wretched human natures, as my religion teaches me to do.


Revision, 8/15/19, 10:30 p.m.:

Last night after writing a long post here, I felt relieved.  But strangely, I awoke this morning feeling both soiled and exposed, somehow.  Dirty.  Unsettled.  I can't say why, exactly, but all that rant just felt very wrong.  Perhaps it is enough that I just express as best I can the goodness in my heart, and let the rest go.  (I have no pretensions to be a saint, by the way - merely a sinner with a conscience.)

Great evil is roaming the world today, but I no longer feel called to speak about it.  There is no dearth of voices in the world, all screeching and shouting across one another.  I have my opinions, to be sure - and they do not necessarily coincide with what is politically correct, or What Everybody Thinks, at any point on the political spectrum.  And I believe that we are in the middle of a great shift, a turning point of history - a worrisome thing, but of course all civilizations have had their turning points, crises, and conflicts - and through all the ups and downs of this mortal life, we obscure folks can only do our duty to those we love, and hope for the best.

And when we sparrows have lived our day and sung our song, there shall be rest.  Many a troubled soul who fretted and feared for the future has now been sleeping the long sleep for centuries in churchyard or cathedral.  And still the world goes round and round. The long, golden Indian summer of the postwar era is coming to a close - if it has not already ended - and exactly what rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem remains to be seen. Nothing lasts forever in this mortal life, neither men nor the works of men.

Well, so be it.  My grandparents, born in the slow-paced Victorian era, grew up on the farm with little education and did not move to town until 1925.  By the time I was alive and becoming aware of the world's doings some forty years later, the world had changed beyond all recognition for them.  They read the daily papers and listened to the evening news, but most of what they read made no sense to them, hard workers and clean livers that they were.  I'm sure now that the frenzied world of the 1960's - the music, the movies, the clothes, the hair, the protests, and all that was so exciting to the younger generation - must have seemed to them bewildering, senseless, and ugly:  just as the parlous present seems to me now.

But instead of complaining and moaning, they simply went on with their quiet life together just as they always had, living by their own timetable, unruffled, unhurried, heedless of change, still getting up at the crack of dawn every day to begin their chores around the house and yard, and going to bed with the chickens - only there were no longer any chickens to tend, nor cows to milk.

Through all the furor of those times, they remained impassive and steadfast, and their humble little home was a rock of stability for all who needed a refuge or a rest.  Perhaps that is the best way to handle the unfathomable:  just go about your business, tend your garden, keep a steady head, and don't dwell on the madness of the world.  Certainly when I look about me now, I am amazed and alarmed, if not to say outraged, by the breakdown of all that seemed so necessary for the peace and happiness of the world and its peoples.  But what can I do about it?  I seem to be learning a valuable and unexpected lesson here.

As a professor of mine once said, the world is very wicked, and even more foolish than it is wicked.  It needs correction, badly, but I know I cannot reform it, or anyone in it. The fact is, I have enough to do keep myself held together and on track, in body, mind, and spirit.  So for now at least, I think I will leave it to others to denounce the crimes and follies of the times, and close with my only message to the world, an ancient message often repeated, that I am sure would serve to right all that is wrong among us - if only the world would listen for once, and take it to heart:

Time and Again

Socrates:

For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private. . . . The unexamined life is not worth living.

Buddha:

One should seek for others the happiness one desires for himself. . . . Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

Confucius:

Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.

Micah:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Hillel:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Mohammed:

As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them.

Jesus:

And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. . . . Love your neighbor as yourself.

Rupert Murdoch:

The News of the World phone hacking scandal, which has heaped such disgrace not just on the paper but on Murdoch himself, making him the object of an entire nation’s disgust and anger, is at once inexplicable and predictable. On the one hand, reporters who work at pressure-packed scandal sheets quickly become inured to crossing lines and destroying lives; it’s what they do. On the other hand, it’s still hard to believe that not a single reporter or editor at The News of the World had the sense to realize that tapping into the cellphone of a murdered teenager was deeply wrong — no matter how many great scoops resulted. That, however, appears to be the case. The Murdoch culture had stripped them of their conscience. . . .

Most people outgrow their twentysomething selves. As they age, they realize that the impulses and excitements of youth need to be tempered with the judgment, empathy and caution that come with maturity. They get a better feel for the lines that ought not to be crossed. Journalists, in particular, learn that there are stories that ought not to be pursued. Not every scoop is worth it.

Murdoch’s essential problem is that he never grew up. His instincts as a journalist are the same as when he was 22. “I love competition,” he said at the end of that Esquire interview. “And I want to win.”

A little too much, it turns out.

(--Joe Nocera in the New York Times)

The Queen's Christmas Message, 2010

A beloved tradition in Britain, broadcast every Christmas Day at 3 p.m., and transmitted to all the Commonwealth too.  This is one of the Queen's few public utterances not written for her by Government ministers, but reflecting her own themes and thoughts.  The video quality is very good, watch it in full screen mode.



I like the way the Queen very deftly ties several different themes together here; there's a profound message woven between the lines, and one that all of us ought to take to heart.

The Queen's grandfather, King George V, began the tradition in 1932 with a radio broadcast to the Empire.  You can read more about the history of these broadcasts at the Queen's website here.  Compare this year's broadcast with the very first televised version from 1957:



Your Head Trucker deeply admires the Queen for her devotion to duty and believes she has been a quiet force for good, for tolerance and compassion and understanding, behind the scenes all these many years. I well believe that history will appreciate her accomplishments and rate them much more highly than the present age does.

And I will share this with you, which never fails to raise a tear in this old shitkicker's eye:  a young slip of a girl on her 21st birthday, pledging her whole life to the service of her people. I don't know that I could have done that - and lived up to it. Could you?