RUTHFULLY YOURS

Five years ago, my husband and I bought a house in the emptiest county in America. We went there because the night sky is so dark, you can walk in the high desert by starlight and cast a shadow, so dark you can see distant galaxies and the zodiacal light. Three types of people live in our rural area: amateur astronomers, ranchers, and illegal aliens.

If you climb the mountains behind our house and look south, you look into Mexico. If you climb those mountains to the top, you are on one of the major drug trafficking routes into America. If you stay in the desert at the foot of the mountains, you are in rattlesnake country—the greatest biodiversity of rattlers in America, and the night path of illegal aliens.

It is not even a secret that the 60 miles between the border and Interstate 10 are treated as a no man’s land. We live and vote and pay taxes in America, but the government acts as if we are beyond the defensible perimeter of the country. Border Patrol is everywhere, but even with President Trump, they are just going through the circular motions of catch and release.

They have high tech listening stations in the mountains, trucks equipped with radar on the back roads. They know when drugs are moving through, know regular drop-offs, are adept at finding caches. But if they can’t secure the border, they can’t keep the families that live here safe—and they don’t even try.

We are the deplorables. All of my rancher neighbors have guns. Most are Evangelicals. To Democrats and open-borders Republicans, we are throwaway people. The Other. Disposable.

The reason I am not naming names, even place names, is that these are my neighbors’ stories, not mine, and my neighbors—farmers, cowboys, and ranching families, strong, resourceful, tough people—my neighbors are wary and they are weary. They fear retribution by the drug runners and coyotes who bring the illegals across, because they have seen it happen.

Comedian Tig Notaro, interviewed in the NYTimes, had this to say about the possiblity of disgraced men of influence returning to their various jobs: “If a janitor was so great at cleaning the building but also tended to masturbate in front of people, would the people at that building be like, “yes, he masturbated, but I’ve never seen anyone clean so thoroughly, and I was just wondering when he’s going to get his job back, he so good at it.” No it would be “that’s not acceptable.” It’s fame and power that people are blinded by.” (NYT 5/19)

Exactly so Tig, but you have it backwards. In fact, there were no janitors who were outed by the women of MeToo or TimesUp and there’s a simple reason for that. Women were looking for the men who had the fame , power or money – the important thing Tig omitted from her list. In fact, women who hung around these men, sometimes for years, were not blinded by their desire for a piece of one or all of these commodities – they were willfully motivated to preserve their proximity no matter what . We are talking mostly about professional women in publishing, movies, t.v. entertainment – not battered wives with a handful of kids and no marketable skills. The two women who claimed that Eric Schneiderman beat them, choked them, degraded them and made perverse sexual demands, voluntarily kept coming back to the Attorney-General, unwilling to let go of whatever gratification they derived from being in his aura. The women who sat and watched Louis C.K masturbate were voluntarily in his apartment, not out on the sidewalk as passers-by. The young men who purportedly succumbed to James Levine were in his orbit hoping to further their careers as were most of the accusers of Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, James Levine etc.

OUT OF TOWN

On May 15, 1939, philosopher John Dewey issued a statement to the press announcing the formation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Attached were the committee’s declaration of principles and the names of 96 signatories. The following day, at a meeting inside Columbia University’s Low Library, the committee adopted its official manifesto. “Never before in modern times,” the document began, “has the integrity of the writer, the artists, the scientist, and the scholar been threatened so seriously.”

The committee’s members included anthropologists, philosophers, journalists, dramatists, attorneys, educators, and historians. Politically, they ran the gamut from democratic socialists to New Deal liberals to nineteenth-century liberals who embraced the market without serious qualification. What unified them was their commitment “to propagate courageously the ideal of untrammeled intellectual activity.” The “fundamental criteria for evaluating all social philosophies today,” their manifesto read, are “whether it permits the thinker and the artist to function independently of political, religious, or racial dogmas.” The basis for this alliance between such disparate persons, they continued, was “the least common denominator of a civilized culture—the defense of creative and intellectual freedom.”

It was the existence of Popular Front groups who toed the Stalinist line in science, literature, social thought, and the arts that moved the committee’s chief organizer, Sidney Hook, to action. “It seemed to me that it was necessary to challenge this massive phenomenon that was corrupting the springs of liberal opinion and indeed making a mockery of common sense,” Hook wrote in his autobiography, Out of Step (1987). “I decided to launch a new movement, based on general principles whose validity would be independent of geographical or national boundaries and racial or class membership.”

The bicentennial anniversary of Karl Marx on May 5 came and went. This marginal thinker who became a curious voice of the disenchanted has haunted the globe with puerile economic analysis that a class of people has embraced as its own.

Curiously Marxism is a plagiarized version of early Christian doctrine relying on antipathy to usury; and a belief in historical determinism. The so-called class struggle was a function of widespread discontent evident throughout the European continent during the 1848 “summer of discontent.” Even Marx himself lost confidence in the ideas and their popularity, by noting in Das Kapital, “Je ne suis pas un Marxist.”

Yet these ideas have an appeal that crossed borders and cultures. From China to Cuba the Communist party reigns ripping through the cultures and creating an elite status for party leaders. As Lenin supposedly said you cannot have an omelet without breaking eggs. The problem, of course, is that the eggs are broken, but the omelet remains a figment of the imagination.

For Marx, capitalism is one stage of history to be replaced through historical materialism and the dialectic till it reaches its ultimate state, communism. According to Marx capitalists are compelled to engage in competitive acts, but the productive forces unleased by competitive acts, ultimately undermine the system they were designed to bolster.

Why then would so many worldwide read Marx as the Bible of the Working Class? In my judgment Marx provides simple answers for complex questions. From a psychological point of view Marx has cut the metaphorical chains of control. The bourgeoisie of capitalism must recognize the extent to which working people are exploited. Marxists turn the world on its head – from the exploitation of the worker through the owners of production to the Party leaders who cannot countenance any opposition, including workers themselves.

This week, when people who should know better were marking the birth of modern Communism’s founder, his socialist heirs were flinging the standard slur that conservatives are ‘Nazis’. To find the Austrian Corporal’s real legatees they should look much closer to home.

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital and the spiritual leader of Communism, a totalitarian ideology that killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We should expect the European Union oligarchs to show a bit more respect for the innocent victims of Communism. And yet, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission attended the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier and openly declared that he was ‘celebrating the father of Communism’. The media also reports that the EU President defended Marx by arguing that he is not “responsible” for mistakes and atrocities committed in his name after his death. He delivered ‘an impassioned speech praising the legacy of the German philosopher’.[1]

The celebration of Marx by the European Commission President is particularly appalling for the European countries which suffered for decades under Communist dictatorships. And yet, Marx is not just the ‘father of Communism’. He is also the ‘mother’ of Nazi-Fascism, another ideology that claimed millions of lives in that continent. Indeed, all the intellectual frontrunners of Nazi-Fascism were radical Marxists at some stage of their lives. Like Marx, the early fascists condemned economic freedom and individual liberty. Above all, they agreed with Marx that capitalism should be eliminated because it supposedly favour only the ‘unproductive classes’ of industrialists at the expense of the working class.

Marxist Roots of Nazi Fascism

The Fascist movement was introduced in Italy after the World War I by Benito Mussolini. Raised by a Marxist mother, at the age of 29 Mussolini managed to become ‘one of the most effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe’.[2] In 1912, he was elected the head of the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia, opposing ‘bourgeois’ parliaments and proposing that Italy should be thoroughly Marxist. ‘Marx’, wrote Mussolini, ‘is the father and teacher … He is the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence’.[3] Of his own political aspiration, Mussolini remarked: ‘I wish to prepare my country and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two basic hostile classes will clash in the supreme trial’.[4]

According to French historian François Furet, ‘Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian socialism’. As Furet also explains, ‘Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy’s entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party’.[5] On the eve of that war, Mussolini predicted: ‘With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution’.[6]

However, the coming of that war coupled with his determination to bring Italy into it resulted in Mussolini losing his official position within the Italian Socialist Party.[7] As a result, on March 23, 1919, he was forced to create the Fascist Movement which promised, among other things, the partial seizure of all finance capital; the control over the national economy by corporative economic councils; the confiscation of church lands; and agrarian reform.[8] And yet, Lenin’s economic failures in the Soviet Union had turned Mussolini away from direct expropriation of industry. Still, Mussolini’s greatest aspiration was to establish a socialist utopia that should dictate how private business would be allowed to operate.[9] According to the British historian, Paul Johnson,

Mussolini now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the pre-war ‘vanguard élite’ Marxism and syndicalism (workers’ rule) which was to remain to his death the most important single element in his politics.[10]

Elections are coming. Hold the Senators’ feet to the fire on the Iran deal. Remember that all the Senators of both parties, with the noble exception of Senator Tom Cotton, enabled the Iran deal when they voted for the Cardin/Corker bill in May 2015, which gave Obama a fig leaf. Although the bill promised tougher sanctions, it was a sham which cleared the path for the Iran deal travesty.

Andrew McCarthy explains it all:
Distorting the Iran-Deal Bill By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/obama-iran-deal-corker-bill/
rsk

Where to start? The phrase “unfettered power,” to which I will return, may put you in mind of Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the context of Acton’s mot was grand politics. “Great men,” he went on to say, “are almost always bad men.”

What we see in the present case—the case of the hall-of-mirrors, matryoshka-doll-like investigation tirelessly pursued by Robert Mueller and his band of merry Democratic prosecutors—is not grand but shabby.

In just a week, we will have reached the first anniversary of what threatens to be an interminable investigation of—what? It’s hard to keep track. Is it charges dating back to 2005 of bank fraud against Paul Manafort, who was briefly Donald Trump’s campaign manager? Or does it have to do with a taxi business in which Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, is involved? It’s hard to say.

Mission Creep
Robert Mueller’s original marching orders authorized him to look into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” That was the main thing. Acting Attorney General (as he was then) Rod Rosenstein also added that Mueller was authorized to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise [my emphasis] directly from the investigation” as well as “any other matters within the scope” of the governing statute.

That was last May. In August, Rosenstein issued another memo. I would like to tell you what it says, but can only give you the most general sense because, in the version released to the public, most of it is blacked out—“redacted,” to use the term of art that has replaced “collusion” as the political word du jour. Someday I hope to see a communication from the Justice Department or our intelligence services that is 100 percent redacted. The memo was released, just not the words on the memo.

“The sexual revolution stripped young women of the social support they need to play gatekeeper, just as it deprived men of a positive vision, or even a reason, for self-restraint. Recognizing those losses is where any reformation has to start.”

Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s superb new biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Hagan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff—male and female—was having sex with everyone else, under and on top of desks, on the boss’s sofa, wherever the mood struck them. Hagan quotes one writer claiming that Wenner told him that “he had slept with everyone who had worked for him.” Compared with Wenner and the early Rolling Stone crowd, Harvey Weinstein was a wanker.

Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of workplace harassment? They appeared to. In the company’s bathroom, women employees scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance—not, as they do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects and was rumored to have had threesomes with the Wenners.

Different as they seem, there’s a direct line between that revolutionary time and our own enraged, post-Weinstein moment. What started out as a clear-cut protest against workplace harassment has mutated into a far-reaching counterrevolution—a revolt against the combustible contradictions that the sexual revolution set in motion 60-odd years ago.

Exhilarated by the sudden freedom from the restrictive sexual morals of their mid-century childhoods and overflowing with youthful, and often chemically enhanced, animal spirits, countercultural kids like those at Rolling Stone gave little thought to the possible risks of their momentous experiment in sexual liberation. History is filled with social schemes, many cruel, some more lenient, designed to protect women and girls from sexually predatory males, as well as from their own risky but more discriminating desires: everything from codes of chivalry to chaperones, from burkas to single-sex dorms, from courtship rituals to romantic love.

I admit that I am absolutely unfamiliar with the music of Kanye West. But I also suspect that Mr. West is unaware of how his latest comments on slavery actually echo the interpretations of slavery that permeate Jewish classical texts.

When the people, later to be called Jews, were originally slaves in the land of Egypt, they were known as Hebrews and were considered the property of Egypt. After their release from bondage, they became Israelites. After three months of traveling toward the Promised Land, they received the Decalogue and it is here that they are introduced to “the fundamental and astounding idea” of freedom. As Rabbi Ben Zion Spitz, Chief Rabbi of Uruguay explains

God introduces to the world an entirely different concept of ‘slavery.’ It is a temporary condition. A Jewish man, out of luck and resources (typically because he stole something and then couldn’t repay), becomes an indentured servant for six years. He must be treated well and cared for. He must have a quality of life equal to that of his master. However, if he becomes comfortable with his servitude and his master, he can request to stay on longer. The Torah [Bible] prescribes that in such a case the master takes this slave to the doorpost and pierces the slave’s ear by the doorpost, marking him, branding him as a slave until the Jubilee year, when all slaves are freed, all men of Israel reclaim their ancestral lands.

This ear piercing is meant to signify that even though the newly freed people heard the First Statement (often called the First Commandment), they simply refused to listen to its incredibly revolutionary message. G-d freed them but they must be exquisitely careful not to become enslaved again and they must never make slaves of others. Thus, the piercing indicated that they refused to acknowledge that “man is meant to live free and not be the slave of any other human being.”