Nightmare Number one, wide awake: In the summer of 1959, my father, an Air Force bomber pilot, was transferred to a base near Cheyenne, Wyoming.
“Peace Is Our Profession” said the billboard by the base gate.
There my mother sent me and several of my siblings to St. Mary’s, the Catholic school downtown. It was across the street from the state Capitol. St. Mary’s was run by Dominican nuns, whose convent was next door.
I could have objected, but thought better of it. Although I had become more or less an atheist, I was also a senior: one year left. I figured to keep my head down, get through it, then escape to college somewhere.
Far away in Rome, a new pope was settling in, replacing the late Pius XII. Pius had taken over in 1939, three years before I was born. When I thought about Pius, which was rarely, he had seemed like a permanent fixture, as solid as the thick stone walls of the old church in Kansas where I was baptized, as unmoving as the statues there yearning toward their timeless crucified Christ.
But no, Pius was a mere mortal, and his successor, John XXIII, was quietly preparing to shake up the church’s seemingly impregnable status quo. I mention these items, not because anything about them had penetrated my teenage male brain, but rather because I realize now that our nuns, an educated and alert group, were no doubt keenly aware of them. In fact, this must have been a very exciting year for them: not only was there a new pope, but Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy was making a serious run at becoming the first Catholic U. S. President in 1960. Continue reading A Tale of Two Nightmares: One Asleep, One Wide Awake→
I won’t hold it against anyone who feels stunned and numbed by the travesty in the Senate, and needs to take some time to scream, cry & regroup. (Just don’t forget the midterms!)
Yet soon enough, those on the progressive side will need to look beyond the next election to the long work of coping with other aspects of what Kavanaugh’s arrival on the court portends.
And yes, the outlook is mostly bad; terrible, in fact. And it was a terrible prospect even before any of us knew who Christine Blasey Ford or Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick were.
The upside down flag signals an emergency. I rest my case.
Have any news media mentioned in your hearing that southeast North Carolina, in the wake of Florence, is due not only for “major hurricane flooding” post-Flo, but along with it will face a Great Brown Wave of toxic, stinking liquid Pig Poop (& Pee).
Down here, they have mentioned it. Like yesterday.
Yes, that region of NC is the second largest center of industrial hog raising in the country (looking at YOU, Iowa). The NC industry is 8 million hogs strong, and it features, in Smithfield Packing, the biggest hog slaughterhouse in the world.
Unless you’re a bear for punishment, you could have skipped most of the first day of hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, settling for the highlights on TV or in text. But then you would have missed the high point, a stunning tour de force of truth-telling from an overlooked member.
For opening entertainment, there were shouting protesters, soon removed, with reportedly70 arrests. Other protesters paced somberly outside in costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale.
The specter of Gilead at the hearing.
Democratic Senators on the Judiciary committee loudly (but futilely) protested the orchestrated coverup of the vast majority of documents from his time working for George W. Bush, from which (I strongly suspect), Kavanaugh is still trying to wash the blood of the tortured innocent from his hands.
I don’t know why Senator Sheldon Whitehouseof Rhode Island isn’t better known. Maybe it’s Rhode island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.
Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. Further, this time he did a bunch of relevant homework.
In the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, there’s an episode which is called “Things Fall Apart.” It appears to center on an incident of violence during the January, 1968 Tet Offensive that produced one of the most unforgettable images of the war. This image still produces intense reactions. Indeed, this photo was back on the front pages after that Ken Burns episode.
And I have something to say about that.
Not commentary, exactly, or film criticism. More of a footnote. A real-life footnote. It’s not in Burns’s documentary, and I’ve changed a name or two. But what follows is as true as when I lived it. I’ve called it “The Secret Life of Pizza,”and the connection to Vietnam will be clear enough in short order.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.
This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day.
This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. l am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands.
I won’t try to predict who will be nominated for Anthony Kennedy’s seat. I only vaguely recall the list of names that was floated before the 2016 election; the ones I recognized ranged from the outrageous to unthinkable.
I didn’t recognize Gorsuch then; but now we know that anything is possible, and lily Tomlin was RIGHT:
Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers. And other people.
The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:
I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me.
He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.
“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it on the counter and made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.
I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category:
Was it “Sarge,” who at best might have considered my image some very bad joke that didn’t play; or was it I, who brought such a patently offensive message into his patriotic establishment?
A good friend works the late shift in a 24-hour diner near here. During the slow hours, the diner is a stopping place for homeless people. For the last couple of nights, one particular homeless man has come in. Last night he handed over a grimy five dollar bill and ordered some eggs & bacon.
Halfway through eating it he stood and asked for a take-out box. When handed it, he walked around the nearly-empty diner, scooping into it all the scraps and leftovers from plates that hadn’t been cleared, then left.
Such scavenging is strictly against the house rules; but my friend studiously ignored it. She’s become particularly permissive since she met up with two young women camping out behind the dumpster in the back parking lot.
She met them during the recent dry weeks. Then the rains came for several days, often pelting and blowing, and the young women left. We’re in the third week of another dry spell, and newcomers are here, crouched behind a different dumpster by the gas station up the block. They sweat through the mid-nineties days and scrounge for food that’s enroute to becoming trash.
Which brings me to Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN, who just threw a fit because that body’s poverty investigator (aka special rapporteur) after making an extensive study trip cross the nation, dared to call for examining poverty in America.
“It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” Haley wrote in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday. “In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.”
Why “ridiculous”? Because, she said, there are other countries which have higher poverty rates than ours. (True enough, but that doesn’t feed our hungry or homeless. Read the article for her short “Whatabout” list of countries; interesting that they were places populated by dark-skinned children of God.)
This outburst was not surprising. For that matter its deep roots in southern hypocrisy were easy to expose. Haley is the former governor of South Carolina, which has long been among the states with the highest rates of poverty. Further, it is the runaway leader, Numero Uno for decades, in slurping up federal welfare.
Last year, for instance, South Carolina received almost eight dollars in federal payments for every one dollar the IRS collected there. It’s also in the top ten states for the percentage of residents getting food stamps.
And its poverty figures show some familiar skews: it’s among the top 8 for child poverty, and top 11 for working women who are still poor.
But who could forget race? As you might expect, Haley’s home state is a pace-setter here too. This chart lists poverty by ethnicity:
There’s another key indicator, the proportion of citizens living in mobile homes. Here South Carolina is in front again, beating out even my state:
Nonetheless, Haley declared that
“I am deeply disappointed that the Special Rapporteur used his platform to make misleading and politically motivated statements about American domestic policy issues,” Haley said. “Regrettably, his report is an all too common example of the misplaced priorities” of the United Nations.
Well, tell it to the guy who asked for the takeout box at my friend’s diner. Speaking of whom, he mentioned that he was taking his box of scraps back to the tent camp down near Exit 13 on the Durham Freeway. Was he going to share it there, or keep it and try to stretch it through the long hot day, unless he dozed off and the rats got to it? He didn’t say.
I know that camp. Drive past it almost every day; less than a mile from my house. As such places go, it’s been relatively innocuous. After the last spell of rain, most of the tents seemed to disappear. Besides the downpours, the state had posted a sort-of eviction notice, telling them to clear out or face arrest. A few left; others said they had nowhere else to go. As of yesterday, the tents were back, and no one has yet been arrested.
The camp will probably be cleared soon; nearby property owners will relax. Then it will reassemble somewhere else. The latest report from HUD says homelessness in the US is declining as the economy strengthens; but such numbers are suspect, and disputed for me by data gathered by my own eyes.
Nevertheless, Haley’s indignation is all too common, especially among our current rulers. The UN report clashes with the official story that America is being made “great again”, and poverty ipsofacto is on the way out, or doesn’t actually exist, except maybe for welfare cheaters, (or Republicans indicted by rogue federal prosecutors).
Perhaps I’m not doing her justice here. But in gauging her reaction, beyond Palmetto hypocrisy, there’s the fact that the Special Rapporteur on poverty was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley had just taken the US out of.
Philip Alston
Most observers saw the US departure as a way of deflecting its criticisms of Israel. But reviewing Haley’s outburst about its investigating US poverty suggests that there may be more to her agenda here.
I turn now to my report on the United States. My starting point is that the combination of extreme inequality and extreme poverty generally create ideal conditions for small elites to trample on the human rights of minorities, and sometimes even of majorities.
The United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world, and this can only be made worse by the massive new tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million of those live in extreme poverty. In addition, vast numbers of middle class Americans are perched on the edge, with 40% of the adult population saying they would be unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense.
In response, the Trump administration has pursued a welfare policy that consists primarily of
(i) steadily diminishing the number of Americans with health insurance (‘Obamacare’);
(ii) stigmatizing those receiving government benefits by arguing that most of them could and should work, despite evidence to the contrary; and
(iii) adding ever more restrictive conditions to social safety net protections such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and cash transfers, each of which will push millions off existing benefits.
For example, a Farm Bill approved yesterday by Republicans in the House of Representatives would impose stricter work requirements on up to 7 million food stamp recipients. Presumably this would also affect the tens of thousands of serving military personnel whose families need to depend on food stamps, and the 1.5 million low-income veterans who receive them. . . .”
Bernie Sanders didn’t think so: “You are certainly right in suggesting that poverty in many countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi is far worse than it is in the United States,” Sanders said. “But … as it happens, I personally believe that it is totally appropriate for the U.N. Special Rapporteur to focus on poverty in the United States.”
And never mind Haley & the UN, or Alston and Bernie. Tonight my friend will be back at the diner, gathering her own data. She hasn’t talked to Philip Alston. But I bet she could give him quite an earful; along with some good waffles.
Or for that matter, she could tell Haley a thing or two as well.
Such scavenging is strictly against the house rules; but my friend studiously ignored it. She’s become particularly permissive since she met up with two young women camping out behind the dumpster in the back parking lot.
And its 
I know that camp. Drive past it almost every day; less than a mile from my house. As such places go, it’s been relatively innocuous. After the last spell of rain, most of the tents seemed to disappear. Besides the downpours, the state had posted a sort-of eviction notice, telling them to clear out or face arrest. A few left; others said they had nowhere else to go. As of yesterday, the tents were back, and no one has yet been arrested.
