Parallels

California flashback

Only in mathematics can parallels be exact. There's always some element of divergence in real life. Nevertheless, we can learn lessons from them, as Santayana observed.

There was an election in which the Republican nominee was widely regarded as doomed. His negatives were sky-high and his opponent had assembled a broad coalition against him. The Democratic nominee had won statewide election in her own right, even though critics accused her of riding the dynastic coat-tails of her political family. The outcome was foreordained.

Except it wasn't. The hapless GOP candidate won and relegated the Democratic candidate to the ranks of the also-rans. The Republican was Pete Wilson, the Democrat was Kathleen Brown, and the election was the 1994 gubernatorial contest in California. Although Wilson was the incumbent governor, the sorry condition of the state economy had negated the advantage that usually accrued to a candidate running for re-election. (The Golden State had not turned its back on an incumbent governor seeking a second term since Culbert Olson in 1942.) As the third member of the politically prominent Brown family to seek the governorship, state Treasurer Kathleen Brown was considered a strong favorite.

So how did Wilson turn it around and rescue his political career? Very simply: He shed all pretense of human decency and launched a blatantly racist attack on the state's immigrant population. “They keep coming! Two million illegal immigrants in California,” intoned the voice-over narrator of the Wilson campaign's best-known political ad. “The federal government won't stop them at the border.” It didn't matter that both major political parties were skilled at avoiding the issue of California's southern border. Republicans mostly looked the other way because cheap immigrant labor was the backbone of the agribusiness workforce during harvest season. Democrats hesitated to offend the Latinos in their political base by cracking down on the family members who were the principal component of the undocumented migration. The political parties used different rhetoric whenever forced to address the issue, but the tacit consensus was to kick the can down the road as long as possible.

When Gov. Wilson decided to exploit white fears of a flood-tide of undocumented brown immigrants (characterized as lawbreakers instead of farm laborers), he was aided by the inclusion of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 on the November ballot, along with the Republican wave that gave the GOP a House of Representatives majority for the first time in forty years. With some help from the Kathleen Brown campaign, which had taken her lead for granted till it was much too late, Wilson snagged a second term.

And the California Republican Party has never recovered. The Democrats have super-majorities of two-thirds in both houses of the state legislature. All statewide offices are held by Democrats. Both candidates for the U.S. Senate in 2016 were Democrats because the top-two primary system advanced them to the November general election run-off; between them, the Democrats received 59.2% of the vote, while the Republican in third place garnered only 7.8%. The GOP in California is moribund.

After the Republicans lost the presidential race in 2012 to Barack Obama, they engaged in some introspection that resulted in a trenchant post-mortem document that detailed the party's plight with minorities—which were growing to constitute in aggregate a majority of the population. While white voters are disproportionately likely to turn out at election time, they also constitute a shrinking demographic. It's not a sustainable platform. The bizarre 2016 election demonstrated that circumstances can still produce a winning (though not majority) coalition, but it required a convergence of racial fears, voter suppression, dirty tricks, and foreign interference to pull it off.

It could be pointed out that Pete Wilson was not California's last Republican governor, but that fact sends a mixed message. We have had three governors since Wilson left office: two Democrats and one Republican. The identity of the Republican gives little solace to the state GOP. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose celebrity status in a blanket primary in an unlikely recall election was his ticket to success. His election was more of a fluke than a Republican resurgence.

California General Election votes for Governor (in millions)

Our next Republican president is also a celebrity fluke, but one burdened with a divisive Pete-Wilsonian campaign that stamps the GOP with a badge of xenophobic exclusiveness that has the potential to make the national party as irrelevant as its California branch. Does its success in 2016 invalidate the 2012 post-mortem or merely postpone the consequences of not learning its lesson?

We'll see what 2018 brings.

What's "Christian" about it?

The Church as thug

Nothing epitomizes right-wing Catholicism like the media ministry of Church Militant. Its principals (like the amazing Michael Voris) diligently churn out their rigorously medieval perspectives on current events as they fight the evil heresy of modernism. An excellent example of Church Militant's approach to Christianity was poured out on June 30, 2016, in a 40-second clip that fairly brims with vitriol.

In case you have any difficulty with the video, here is a word-for-word transcript:

A 30-year-old Utah man has become the country's first transgender Senate nominee from a major party. Referred to as "Misty Snow," the Mormon from Salt Lake is challenging Sen. Mike Lee for the U.S. Senate seat as the nominee of the Democrat Party. As self-described "conservative" Democrat currently working as a marriage therapist, Snow began acting as a woman in 2014, and believes his identity as a transgender will assist him in the upcoming election. Similarly, another man, thinking he's a woman and also named "Misty," clinched the Democratic nomination for Congress in Colorado Tuesday.

Several items stand out. First of all, spokesperson Christine Niles lays it on with a trowel as she refuses to use the gendered pronouns appropriate to Snow, who is deemed to be merely “acting” as a woman. Also, as a true disciple of the Prince of Peace, Niles makes a point of referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party,” using a ploy made famous decades ago by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Finally, note how she closes her report, referring to the successful transgender candidate in Colorado as “another man.”

I suppose it's fortunate that the people of Church Militant fancy themselves a beleaguered remnant, standing together bravely for their one-dimensional version of Christ while the forces of Satan assail them from all sides. For one thing, their unremitting nastiness is scarcely likely to swell their ranks. For another, this way they can glory in their martyrdom of being ignored as insignificant.

Confederate pseudohistory

The flag game

The most vigorous defenders of the flag always bring up “heritage” and “Southern pride.” They cite the bravery of fallen ancestors, whom they imagine fighting till their last breath and last drop of blood for states' rights beneath the waving Confederate flag. Ah, but which flag? Ironically, many of those revered rebels probably never even saw the flag that their descendants regard as sacred to their memory. Unless they were part of General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which used the infamous banner as its battle flag, Confederate soldiers went to war under other colors—including even Lee's troops.

The official flag of the Confederate States of America was the Stars and Bars, first adopted and flown in the CSA's provisional capital city of Montgomery, Alabama. Its resemblance to the USA's Old Glory made its use in battle problematic, insufficiently distinguishing the two sides. The Stars and Bars acquired additional stars as the CSA incorporated (or pretended to incorporate) more renegade states and remained the Confederacy's official banner till it was set aside in 1863 in favor of a new design.

The so-called “Stainless Banner” was characterized by a now-familiar image embedded in a field of white. The white was described by the flag's designer as representing “the cause of a superior race.” Now a different problem arose. The generous use of white made the Stainless Banner appear in some circumstances to be a white flag of surrender. It was back to the drawing boards one more time, resulting in the third and final iteration of the CSA's national banner in 1865.

The “Blood-Stained Banner” never had a chance. Although the addition of a broad red stripe mitigated the problem of confusion with a flag of surrender, surrender was, in fact, at hand. The final CSA flag was adopted in March 1865 and General Lee conceded to General Grant in April. Most Confederate soldiers never saw the new national flag, which was defunct with the defeat and dissolution of the CSA.

Both the Stainless and Blood-Stained CSA banners featured a canton displaying the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which had adopted the starred saltire cross in late 1861 in preference to the confusing Stars and Bars. Despite the battle flag's role as the banner under which General Lee surrendered, it had a vigorous post-war life. Decades after the war was over, the battle flag (often in rectangular rather than square form) was favored as the official emblem of various associations of Civil War veterans in the South. It outlasted the official flags in its identification with the Confederacy and its Lost Cause.

Later the battle flag found favor with the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations that promoted “white power” and suppression of the civil rights of black citizens. It can hardly be mere coincidence that Georgia chose to revive the battle flag and incorporate it in its state banner in resistance to the desegregation mandate of 1954's Brown v. Board of Education.  (The illustration depicts the change enacted in Georgia's flag in 1956.)

The racist component of Southern heritage was there at the outset, as detailed in the constitution of the seceding states and the declarations of the Confederacy's officers, but it was compounded and exacerbated by the era of Jim Crow and the South's segregationist state governments. The Confederate battle flag can no more be purged of that association than the swastika of Germany's National Socialist Party can be restored to its pre-Nazi status.

It's time for the battle flag to fade away, the sooner the better.

Scott Adams changes his tune?

Another victim of the matriarchy

It was clever of Scott Adams to include his e-mail address in his Dilbert comic strip. The readers are a constant source of grist for the cartoonist's mill, enabling Adams to demonstrate the existence of endless variations on the theme of corporate mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. I long expected Dilbert to grow stale over the years, but I've been pleased to discover how well it has held up. I make a point of reading it every day.

Last week I picked up a copy of Your New Job Title is “Accomplice,” the latest in an endless stream of Dilbert compilations. Since I'm the kind of guy who always peruses the front matter, I took a minute to skim over the cartoonist's introduction. It contained a passage that took me by surprise:

Eventually, corporate America excreted me. My bosses explained that I was unqualified for any sort of promotion because I had boring DNA and a scrotum. That's a true story, by the way. Reverse discrimination was a big thing in California in the nineties. And for what it's worth, that was not the first time my scrotum had caused me trouble.

This seemed a slight departure from Adams's previous accounts of his departure from Pacific Bell. Consider, for example, what he told Inc. in 1996, a mere year after he received his walking papers:

I'd told all of my bosses I would resign if they ever felt my costs exceeded my benefits. One of the benefits, of course, was the positive PR. I get interviewed often. Anyway, in the spring of 1995 I got a new boss, and I reiterated my offer to resign if asked. A few weeks later he asked. The reason given was budget constraints. I'm pretty sure it was a local management decision, not one from the top.

Adams gives no hint that he was cashiered because of genital deficiencies. Perhaps he was concealing the sexist policies that forced him out of corporate America and now feels that masculine empowerment has freed him to tell the whole truth. I rather doubt that. He has never been too tongue-tied to express himself on such matters in the past. Adams infamously compared women who espouse equal pay for equal work to children who beg for candy. His credentials as a men's rights advocate seem bright and shiny, buffed to a high and slightly belligerent gloss.

I noted in particular the claim that California was a hotbed of women versus men “reverse discrimination” in the 1990s. From my own perspective and recollection, it seems to me that Adams's claim is untrue. In the decade of the nineties I was in the midst of academia, the unapologetic ground zero of diversity and unashamed “political correctness.” Our college president during that period was (gasp!) a woman. She presided over the hiring of six tenure-track faculty members for the mathematics department. Four of them were men. She was doing a remarkably poor job of oppressing the guys.

Proof by anecdote!

Prevaricating priests

More liars for Jesus!

Former Boston mayor and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn was talking to Bob Dunning on “The Bishop's Radio Hour” on Immaculate Heart Radio, bemoaning American Catholicism's loss of political clout and savvy. “We knew how to frame the question,” he said, explaining why Catholics were more successful in the past.

Flynn was specifically addressing the Church's difficulty in responding to the Health and Human Services mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptive services. From his point of view, it was a pity that both Catholics and non-Catholics are so accepting of birth control. Quite apart from indicating the laxity of current Catholic practice, general acceptance of birth control creates a “framing” problem for the U.S. bishops as they attack the HHS mandate on contraceptives:

We don't have that voice that is framing the question the way it should be framed, so just average Catholics picking up the newspaper or listening to the radio and casually hears the conversation or hears the headlines, you know, will be attracted to our point of view. If it's framed in a way of contraception and the bishops are trying to tell the country they can't practice birth control, then they win. There's no question about it. But if we keep it on the issue of religious freedom, first amendment, constitutionally protected human rights, religious rights, we win. So there's the battle. The battle is over terminology.

Of course, it's not Mr. Flynn's job to put things in strictly religious terms. He's a canny old politician, so political advice is what you should expect. Are the bishops listening? It seems that they are. For the benefit of his listeners, Dunning read “Protecting Consciences,” a document from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It spins like a top:

The church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens.... Catholics and many other Americans have strongly criticized the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring almost all private health plans to cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. For the first time in our history, the federal government will force religious institutions to fund and facilitate coverage of a drug or procedure contrary to their moral teaching, and purport to define which religious institutions are “religious enough” to merit an exemption. This is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide such coverage even when it violates our consciences.

What we ask is nothing more than the right to follow our consciences as we live out our teaching.

Truly shocking, isn't it, to see how the cruel and hyper-secular Obama administration is attacking religion freedom and trampling the conscience rights of individuals. No wonder the American bishops are clutching their pearls and reeling in the face of this unprecedented attack.

Because it's convenient for them to do so.

The U.S. bishops are full of shit. They hope that people have forgotten—or never knew—how meekly they rolled over to contraceptive mandates in the past. Sure, there was a bit of whining, but most people are undoubtedly unaware that most states imposed contraceptive mandates on healthcare insurance years ago and U.S. bishops somehow managed to live with it. As the Boston archdiocese incautiously admits, “In more than half of the states, Catholic officials have been living for years with mandates that health insurance plans must cover FDA-approved contraceptives in their prescription drug plans.”

The prelates have a riposte ready for the argument that the HHS mandate is nothing that new. No, no, no! they cry. The state mandates are much less draconian than the HHS version and contain more generous conscience clauses. There is a kernel of truth in the argument. Just enough to make the lie more effective. Here's what the bishops say:

The federal mandate is much stricter than existing state mandates. HHS chose the narrowest state-level religious exemption as the model for its own. That exemption was drafted by the ACLU and exists in only 3 states (New York, California, Oregon).

Oh. So it's not “much stricter” than state mandates. Equally tough mandates already exist in multiple states. You have to love the way the bishops cite only three states, when two of them are California and New York. The mandate and its supposedly too-narrow religious exemption have been in place in California for nearly a decade. The Golden State's Catholic bishops did not feel it necessary to call down thunderbolts from heaven until the mandate went nationwide with the president's healthcare reform. Now, suddenly, it's an abomination from the pit of hell that threatens our precious religious freedom.

The California bishops who miraculously kept their peace about the existing state mandate are now singing from the same page in the political hymnal. Here, for example, is Armando X. Ochoa of the Fresno diocese, roused from his slumber and sounding an anxious call to arms:

[T]he Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).

The American bishops have lost touch with the commandment against bearing false witness. In their unremitting campaign against birth control, they have devolved into little more than the Catholic auxiliary of right-wing opposition to the president and political propaganda is their second language (if not first). The Church's radio stations lard nearly every program with extreme conservative rhetoric. The Catholic Church in the United States used to have ample cause to look down its patrician nose at the antics of the religious troglodytes at the Moral Majority or Bob Jones University.

Not anymore!

The unfunny uncle

Who won't shut up

Most families have one. It's the relative who just has to share his “latest” joke (although, unfortunately, it's more likely a “late” joke — as in dead). He is a reliable blight on family gatherings and there's always jockeying for position at dinner tables and picnic blankets so as not to be the one who has to sit next to him.

This week—God knows why—Bill Donohue decided he should demonstrate his comedic talents. I was immediately and powerfully reminded of my unfunny uncle. And—just to make the package complete—you can tell that Bill is powerfully proud of his cleverness. The preening just oozes from his prose:

Bill Donohue's Open Letter to Maureen Dowd

March 23, 2012

My Dearest Maureen,

In today’s New York Times, you write the following:

“The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really, it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church. It’s about conservative bishops targeting Democratic candidates who support contraception and abortion rights as a matter of public policy. And it’s about a church that is obsessed with sex in ways it shouldn’t be, and not obsessed with sex in ways it should be. The bishops and the Vatican care passionately about putting women in chastity belts.”

I have a confession to make. While some may think you sound like a delusional weepy woman, don’t listen to them. You see, I was in on those meetings with the bishops when we hatched plans to stick it to women and sabotage the Democrats.

This, you see, is side-splittingly funny because Donohue is pretending to be a sexist bastard. See how good he is at it?

We met over drinks. Plenty of them. Except for one bishop who said over time women could become our equal, all of us agreed that you gals need to be kept in your place. As you properly note, this means being subjugated to the lower caste, just the way we snookered Mother Teresa.

Now this part is funny because we've all heard that Mother Teresa eventually admitted that she lived a life of acute clinical depression. In case you've forgotten the details, here are her own words: “In my heart there is no faith—no love—no trust—there is so much pain—the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted. I want God with all the powers of my soul—and yet there between us—there is terrible separation. I don’t pray any longer.” This is not, of course, the lesson we are supposed to learn. As Mother Teresa became more inured to her condition of dead faith, she prostrated herself before God's will: “I want it to be like this for as long as he wants it.” God didn't bother to answer back or ease her pain, but Teresa's reward is secure, since she's on the fast track to canonization by the Vatican. It's the perfect posthumous consolation prize after decades of misery.

Naturally, the heartwarming story of Mother Teresa's life makes her the perfect foil for Bill Donohue's winsome sense of humor.

You are only partly right about the Democrats. In fact, starting last year our goal was to rig the Republican primary so that Romney would win. Why? Because then we could pull his Mormon strings without being accused of running the government. So far, so good. Just don’t tell Mitt.

Not even Twain could have penned a more cleverly wry paragraph. Why, at times it almost sucks you into believing it and forgetting the writer's satirical purpose. Gasping for breath in the wake of uncontrollable laughter, we soldier on:

We are obsessed about sex. Indeed, when I meet with the bishops, it’s the only thing we talk about. Admittedly, it sometimes feels like I’m at a frat party, but boys will be boys. There is one difference: at frat parties, chastity belts for women are never discussed, but with the bishops, nothing is more important. The goal is to make a “one size fits all” belt, one that is not removable. Velcro works for all sizes, but it comes off. Not to worry, my dearest Maureen, we won’t give up. That’s because, quite unlike the stately New York Times, we’re obsessed about sex.

One wipes the tears from one's eyes while shaking the head in stunned admiration at the clever juxtaposition of bishops and chastity belts. The Velcro punch-line has all the impact of a sudden blow to the stomach.

I say without fear of contradiction that Bill Donohue's mastery of humor is all but unparalleled in the annals of political writing. We shall seldom—if ever—see its like again.

So give thanks.