The Great Disappearance Act

If you'd like to contact the U.S. Department of Education to discover what issues might be relevant to it, good luck. You'll have to find them first, as well as the department itself.

The gonzo, insipid excuse for our national administration completed a 70-year process of eliminating any essence of providing a place for educational priorities the other day, when it announced that for the most part, the USDOE would be gutted and absorbed into several other Cabinet positions.

Oh, yes. It started way back then. The minute that the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board, segregationists began planning and plotting for integration in our schools to disappear--even though at that particular moment, it hadn't yet started.

The first state to take a measured approach to this was, ironically, Virginia, which is now a state controlled by Democrats. But most of the rest of the old Confederacy has stood its ground, gathering up opponents of federal intervention into just about anything, including White Citizen's Councils and various other ersatz organizations which, among other things, scream about godless public schools (as noted in a recent book called Money, Lies and God, by Katherine Stewart. It'll open your eyes about the pervasiveness of these crazies.).

But it took Ronald Reagan, the emergence of the Federalist Society, and thorough funding behind a stubborn, closed-minded devotion to "originalist" legal philosophy that has kept education from becoming anything near a national priority. So did the Founding Fathers include education in the original Constitution? Well, no. But four years before the Constitution was written, the seriously self-hampered but functional Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which had as one of its parts the raising of funding for public schools by land sales. So you could say with some justification that they determined education to be so important that they included it as a priority before the rest of the country fell apart so badly that they had to start over.

No matter. It has culminated in the utilization of the same 'Deep State' that right-wing radicals have condemned for decades now--all the more useful in watching educational priorities dissolve, like the Mafia dumping corpses into acid vats or inside walls. Michael C. Bender notes in a New York Times article (11/18) that these have been adjustments in moving educational directives around:

• A child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation--to Health and Human Services;
• Fulbright programs and international education grants--to State;
• Indian Education--to Interior;
• About three dozen programs that provide funding for low-income schools will be siphoned--to the Labor Department;
• A serious reduction in the department's Office for Civil Rights, created to enforce Congress's promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, so that what's left will be shifted--to the Justice Department (and good luck for that initiative; they're too busy feeding 47's temper tantrums);
• Eliminated the DOE's research arm for tracking student achievement, which has dropped due to a number of things, including COVID-19;
• Adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education--to Labor.

All that will, of course, allow some empty desks created by DOGE to be filled up. But tracing them? Best wishes. All in line with making education as a national emphasis disappear. "We're going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible," said our unesteemed president of the DOE. Check back in six months to see if any of those programs, of course funding by Congress, have as much as a name plate on someone's desk.

The most important removal is that which will be missing after decades of activity: Lobbying by teachers' unions. Knowing who to contact, and where, is essential to monitoring attention and funding. With the absorption of educational programs into various other Cabinet agencies will come along with it a xeroxed response to inquiries: We'll get back to you. Which means: You might as well be looking for the Loch Ness monster.

The underlying idea of all this is to hand education back to the states, to avoid any federal commitment whatsoever. The most vital lynchpin to this is the guarantee that children of color get the same kind of instruction, supplies, and attention that white students have always had. Leave it to the states, and once again, they get swept under the rug. That was the idea behind the resistance to the Brown decision in 1954, and it hasn't changed a bit. 

The Republicans have finally managed to gain control over education so that it can back-handedly dismiss it. Lip service? Plenty of that. But little else.

Some time ago now, I recall a state legislator in Wisconsin who off-handedly suggested to me that the federal government just give its money to the states. That was Glenn Grothman, then a West Bend state legislator, now the Republican Congressperson from Wisconsin's 6th District. 

That conversation was about 30 years ago. I never asked him why he took that position. I wish I would have. At any rate, you won't find an objection to the dismantling of the Department of Education coming from his office, for one example. That would make the big crab in what's left of the White House very unhappy.

In the meantime, education, which has always struggled to find a place in national priorities, will be taking a very definite step backwards. 47 would rather you not worry about it at all. He'll use the bureaucracy he says he otherwise hates, creating a handy smokescreen so that you don't: the Great Disappearance Act. Out of sight, out of mind.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Fighting City Hall

I got an inside look at Milwaukee's justice system the other day, due to someone else's mistake. That did not deter me. I decided to fight City Hall. They say you can't do that. Oh, yes, you can. You just have to be willing to put up with the system that's not designed to please nor hurry to serve you.

Back in August, I was about to get into my car, parked outside in an alley lot available for those renting in my building and the one next to it. I've paid for a spot in that area for the past seven years. There are about 16 spots available; anybody with a parking sticker can park in any one of them. 

This particular morning, I was in spot #3, quite some distance from my back door. On the other hand, it gave me a chance to do a little more walking, not a bad thing for someone my age.

So you can imagine my utter shock when I found a parking ticket on my windshield. The ticket hadn't been issued by my landlord, either. It had been issued by the city of Milwaukee. It accused me of a parking violation, and fined me $40.

It was time for the famous outcry from John McEnroe: You cannot be serious. 

It was simply ridiculous. I had parked in a spot among which I could have chosen any that were open. At least, that was the arrangement I thought had been made by my landlord. 14 of the spaces are numbered and two aren't, for whatever reason. If you pay monthly, which I do, you can park in any of them that are open.

That was on a Saturday night. Sunday morning, this ticket greeted me. Something had changed, but I had no idea what.

Infuriated, I took the ticket to the office of the rental company, with which I'd had good relations these past seven years, despite some serious repairs that cropped up. They were always nice about it and responded with decent speed, considering their large territory.

And their response was: We know nothing about this.

Well, that answered that. Someone had made a mistake, thought I was parked wrong, must have called the police instead of the apartment management. Someone rushed right over and gave me a ticket. So they called the wrong person for the wrong reason and the wrong thing happened.

And I was stuck with it. I had no idea who made the mistake. The referred address was the portion of the apartment complex that was south of mine, so the only thing I could possibly do was knock on all those doors and find the culprit. But what if people didn't answer? What if they were still in error, and thought I had it coming to me? Ugly possibilities arose. I rejected that option.

There is a remedy, but of course you have to go to some trouble. The first step is to respond to the ticket by getting online and explaining yourself, putting it inside one of those boxes they create for that purpose. Fortunately, I thought, the landlord had given me a phone number for them to call to clarify the matter. So, in addition to telling them that a mistake had been made and that anyone who had paid the rental for a space could in fact park in any of the spaces, I gave them that number as well as holding back on my absolute indignance that I should have to go through such an ordeal. There, I thought: The matter will be settled quickly.

Except within about ten days, the response came back: Sorry, still guilty not guilty. But ah, there was another step: I could appear in front of a magistrate or someone like that. Then I could bring whatever proof I needed and get out of the $40.

But it led to this question: Was it worth the $40? Why didn't I send the fine into the appropriate post office box and be done with it? I would ask myself that more than once in the following days.

I arrived at the county courthouse parking lot with plenty of time before I was to appear in front of, well, someone to process my complaint about someone else's complaint. That was a wise move. I had no idea where this building and/or this room was, and fifteen minutes in, I still didn't. I wandered through hallway after hallway and reminded myself about how angry I was, as well as reminding myself that all I had to do was go home, put a $40 check in the mail, and that would be that. But I occasionally get hung up on principle, and this was burning a hole right through it. 

Turns out I was in the wrong building. Finally, I hailed someone who worked in the parking office, and she was a big help. I dragged myself into a room about five minutes after I had been told to report, and I wondered whether my case would be forfeited after all that. But no: a nice young man took my information, had a couple of questions to ask me, and directed me to have a seat in a waiting area. I asked him how long it might take to hear my case; maybe half an hour, he said.

He was about right. I was herded into a courtroom with used wooden benches. We had a female judge named Molly, who was as good-natured as she could be, all things considered.

She explained herself thoroughly to all those gathered with some kind of parking issue or issues. "You have three possible pleas today: Not guilty, no contest, and guilty," she said. "If you plead no contest or guilty, we can talk about your case. If you want to plead not guilty, I don't want to hear anything you have to say about it."

She didn't mention that doing so would be possibly incriminating yourself, which is a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, a document which, though our president is busy trying to maneuver his way around it each day, does really count even here in a traffic violation tribunal. But that meant that, if I should want to go on with this extremely unnecessary process, I would have to return on another date and talk to someone from the City Attorney's office and then I could finally have my day in court, or my second day in court, as it were. Maybe.

I was called fourth in line. Two people had already pled guilty and, as the culture has dictated these many years in various misdemeanor courts, if you go to the trouble of throwing yourself upon the mercy of the court, you have performed a form of plea bargaining, and you get a lower penalty than you otherwise would; one fellow, for instance, got his fine lowered from $195 to $100. I supposed that's what I could have done--maybe, say, have it shaved down to ten bucks or something. But damn it, I wasn't guilty. I had done nothing inappropriate or wrong or illegal. I would continue the fight.

Turns out I was to report right back there in a week at the same time on that next Monday morning. The hearing, as it were, was to be performed live, but on a laptop or phone--a carryover, the directive said, from Covid days. That might cause a problem. I had a couple of photos to show the magistrate, as well as the phone number the landlord had given me, and although apparently that hadn't worked in step one, it might on step three. I would come in with distinct advantages, though: I knew exactly where I was going this time, so no anxiety would result; I had already gone through a process that was nowhere near as daunting as I thought it would be; and, of course, I would finally have a decision made on it.

The "hearing" that took place, if you want to call it that, happened through a window (again, to avoid Covid) in a waiting room that couldn't, by any measure, be called a courtroom. This time, someone from the city attorney's office held the conference. He informed me, first, that if I lost my case, the worst that would happen is that I would be charged the original cost of the ticket, or $40. That, I assumed, was mentioned upfront as a guarantee that my own costs needn't be too overbearing, and that, if I were to dispense with all this bother, all I would have to do is to report to the pay booth on another floor, write out the corresponding check, and that would be that. Thus constituted the plea bargain, which of course wasn't one except to save everyone time for a minor issue, compared to the other things that city government has to deal with.

It's not as if that hadn't occurred to me, though, and I wanted assurance that this nonsense would never again happen. It had occurred to me that, since the original ticket had been issued some ten weeks beforehand and no other ticket had been issued--they weren't stalking me, at least--the bureaucracy had somehow gotten hold of the fact that they had committed a goof and had backed away, as they certainly should. But--there was left the 40 bucks that I, being the unfortunate pawn of someone's loss of temper for no reason, I still owed. The attorney offered me a cut rate, that of 20 dollars, if I would admit no contest. It amounted to a plea bargain: I would plead nolo contendere and write out a check.

Then there was the Constitution. There's a place where my concerns could be addressed: the 7th Amendment. That amendment guarantees that, in cases where the cost is over 20 dollars, I could have a civil trial, or whatever constituted one. So what the city attorney was actually offering me was a deal where I would give up my right to have a trial, a bargain rate, and a plea of guilty for something I hadn't done wrong or even badly. Again, I didn't feel like admitting that. So I said no--firmly, decisively, and with no hesitation.

So I walked back to the courtroom where they provided yet another hearing date, this time with some literature accompanying me. To wit: Since I had just decided to take on the court to prove my innocence, how best to do that? The advice was pretty simple: Hearsay evidence probably won't do me much good; get my facts in order; and rehearse what I was going to say.

I didn't have real solid facts, I had to admit. But I did have an e-mail sent out by the person in charge of parking for the rental company. About a month after the event, he had obviously heard from someone who, really angry about not very much, had insisted that someone was parked in his exact spot. Except he didn't have an exact spot, as neither did I. He alerted everyone, then, of something that nearly everyone already knew--anyone paying for renting a space could park in any of the 16 spaces without penalty. 

That kind of evidence could only be described as circumstantial, but it might just work, I figured. Why else would he have sent out the e-mail if there hadn't been a misunderstanding? That's pretty much all I had, but at least I had more than my verbal testimony.

I figured it was worth the gamble. I wasn't working, either, so I had the time to appear. But there would be one more attempt to get me to, I suppose they thought, come to my senses. That would be December 1. Once more, they would make an offer. Once more, I would have to say no. Hmmmm. Maybe I could bring the e-mail and show it to them. Maybe that would do it. I waited, this time patiently.

Eleven days prior, I received a call from the city attorney's office. It was from someone else other than the fellow who had made the first offer. He identified himself as the person who would be prosecuting my case. It felt odd that I would be the recipient of a prosecution; one would think that one would be in court for a serious matter, not this foolishness. But in the lexicon of the legal community, there was nothing else to call him. I would be coming to the stand, and he would be grilling me about this less-than-heinous violation I'd allegedly committed.

Except it was clear that he wanted to handle this over the phone, if at all possible. He focused for a moment at the difference between the address of the ticket itself and my address, which is actually next door in the same building. He thought he could get me there. But I explained myself accurately enough, so that the next question was: Who are the people renting out the spaces, and can I get hold of them? You should be able to do that, I said, and gave them the landlord's name.

This was at about five minutes to 4 on a Thursday. Less than five minutes later, he called me back, also e-mailing me with his decision that he would be recommending to the court that the case be dismissed. Oddly, instead of writing "dismissed" on the e-mail, he wrote "DM", which might have been what in their processes they were supposed to do. But he added that that didn't necessarily eliminate my need to report to court on December 1.

That, I thought, would be the final comedic conclusion to this fiasco. Would I really have to show up, stand there like a dolt, and have the attorney officially dismiss my case--all for a silly parking ticket? But, as had to be true, he had no power to actually dismiss the case; all he could do was recommend it.

At least he got it where it was supposed to go with some dispatch: back, I'm guessing, to Judge Molly. The very next morning, I received a call from the municipal court: Yes, the case was dismissed; and no, I wouldn't have to actually show up to have someone declare it as such. His docket was cleared. So was the judge's. So was mine.

At last, it was over, more than three months after the original ticket had been issued. Not exactly the efficient dispensation of justice, but I doubt that the taxpayers would go for better funding to open more parking courts. 

I wonder whether the legal system in larger municipalities like Chicago or Houston or LA shuttled you into a similar maelstrom, or if they created even more levels for someone to overcome. They were bigger cities. There had to be plenty more parking violations, bogus or otherwise.

Never mind. I had other things to attend to, like the very slow draining of my kitchen sink. I had to wait forever for it to empty. Funny: It felt like the same thing.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Two Years Later: Back from Hiatus

I'm reading--in parts; I leave it open for breakfast each morning--a book called Lessons on the Road to Peace, written by an interesting traveler, John Noltner, who doubles as a professional photographer. He'd decided to travel the country, with his wife, to find positive influences. There's one that particularly caught my interest, though.

This fellow, Neal Moore, decided to travel the country, too, but by kayak. He reckoned to start one year before the 2024 elections, and return one year afterward. He should be done about now.

I want to talk to him and find out that he's learned. He had high hopes starting out: "The idea was to paddle the year leading into national elections and then the full year after, no matter how it would have turned out. What would we look like as a nation the year after national elections?" 

In a kayak, by oneself, though, figuring out what the country would look like seems to me the wrong way to do it. In fact, he probably was better off traveling that way, along quiet, unobtrusive waters, taking oneself away from the tempest, rather than take on the head-banging ferocity we continued. Because here's what happened:

• About two years ago, it looked as if Joe Biden was going to edge The Monster for another presidential term. Things seemed upbeat, the inflation was easing, and government, chugging along as it does, seemed accessible and trustworthy once again. There was no name-calling being thrown around, at least not by his adherents. We knew that his opponent was going to insert all kinds of gloom and doom and trashing, but since he had proven his incompetence during a previous four years, it would be folly to suggest that he would once again buffalo the public into accepting another four.
• As Moore began, the Middle East became awash with the Palestinian ambush of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Whether Hamas was expecting Iran and/or Hezbollah to join them actively we might never know. But they were left hanging on that limb. Israel responded as it always has--it sought to grind the perpetrator into sawdust. And so it has. Hamas has dreamed of killing every single Israeli; It has had the tables turned. Two years hence, Gaza is now a wasteland; over 60,000 have died. No one knows what to do with it. The Palestinian cause became attached to Biden and the Democrats; they didn't know what to do with it, either. Both sides took hostages and these became the major pawns in the growing devastation. Just now, two years later, most of them have been exchanged--or, rather, their dead bodies have.
• Then, disaster at our end: last June, Biden wandered into a presidential debate that would, if he once again wielded the panache and brush-off disdain he showed in the State of the Union speech of 2023, prove decisive and stonewalling to The Monster. Instead, the opposite happened. Biden, for the first time demonstrating his fading mental acuity--which, understandably, came and went as staffers constantly scrambled to hide it; read Jake Tapper's book on it if you want details--made himself look like someone who had no grasp of situations, and if so, couldn't tell you if he tried; The Monster kept putting the ball on a tee, and he kept missing it. The Monster was his normal ridiculous, lying, insulting, egomaniac self; clearly, he hadn't learned a thing in his four years. He was ripe for the taking, but his preposterousness faded in comparison to the severely damaged Biden revealed for the first time. Biden not only didn't take advantage, he managed, in one terrible moment, to turn the campaign against him. His backers panicked.
• The Democrats spent a month both denying the obvious and slowly accepting it. Biden, for his part, came around and withdrew from the race, but that month proved decisive. His vice-president and anointed successor, Kamala Harris, came out of the gates like a ball of fire, and it looked for a while like she, now oddly the underdog, would overcome the situation and we would be perhaps free from The Monster forever. In the debate between the two of them, she completely dominated him and for once displayed the dismissal of his nonsense that all Democrats should have been displaying for eight years. Her performance was masterful.
• Then, as Democrats are great at doing, she managed to bring her growing momentum to a screeching halt. She did what sports teams sometimes do despite the obvious need not to: She sat on her lead. Someone told her not to tempt fate; she followed instructions and in doing so she succumbed to it.
• When Republican money poured into making a much bigger deal out of trans-people and gays than needed to have attention, young adults turned on the Democrats. The Democrats did not have an answer for that; they felt that, with the election coming in with its usual closeness, they couldn't afford to clarify their attitudes towards trans-people in any way. The Republicans scare tactics flourished, people ignored the Democrats' warnings about the end of democracy, and with it the election was sealed.
• Now, we have a big, beautiful mess. Quoting Jamelle Boule in The New York Times: "In 2024, the Americans who decided the election voted for lower prices and a lower cost of living. What they got instead were soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public."
• The first opportunity for Americans to vote on these horrible changes came Tuesday, just as Moore was pulling his kayak out of the water for the last time. Virginia and New Jersey elected Democratic women to governorships; California decisively passed its redistricting answer to Texas' attempt to use a back door method to add more Republicans to the House of Representatives; Pennsylvania decisively voted down an effort to flip its state Supreme Court. All responses to a president who has been constantly trying to steal power from the Congress, and mostly succeeding. People are starting to get pretty tired of it. But we will see, in another year, whether this is a blip on the screen or a real electoral unrest: the whole House is up for election then.
• That should pretty much catch him up. Oh, and this--the latest issue of The Atlantic outlines in detail the illegal and unconstitutional efforts 47 will probably try to steal a Republican majority in the House. Read it and think about it. This is truly a person who will stop at nothing, who is driven by rage and a craving to dominate, who sees democracy only as something in the way. I think of The Who's song "Behind Blue Eyes":

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man,

To be the sad man, behind blue eyes.

No one know what it's like to be hated,

To be fated, to telling only lies.

But my dreams, they aren't as empty

As my conscience seems to be:

I have hours, only lonely--

My love is vengeance that's never free.

No one knows what it's like to feel these feelings

Like I do--and I blame you:

No one bites back as hard on their anger;

None of my pain and woe can show through

"I think our greatest strength is empathy," he wrote, and that may be. But a great deal now thwarts that, and our elected leader has none. That is becoming dangerous beyond measure. Moore wanted to see our common humanity, and I'm sure he found some out there. But 47 respects none of that. He is a white supremacist, and sees nothing remotely close.

"Around the bend, we're going to be okay," he said. Only if this is stopped somehow. Only if this need for domination does not become our fallback position. And it will not take care of itself.

Ever the victim, ever the bully, acting in pure spite: Nothing can satisfy him. He is the singular danger to our future. We must stop him. Moore, in his kayak, took a hiatus from the fray. But now that the pushback has begun, it is here in full electrical force. The showdown is coming. 47 will fight back desperately.

What do we look like as a nation, Moore asked? If he sees clearly, he now knows that we hang by a thread.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

A Murderer's Row of Nonsense

Not too long ago, I read a book entitled Money, Lies and God, about the Christian nationalist movement to destroy democracy. Very well cited, Katherine Stewart names names on the road to destroying what America used to be about: Living with opposition, living and let living.

She started out by naming self-appointed groups bent on straightening out all that sinning going on out there and fencing it all in. The number of them were amazing, so I decided to write them all down. Note that this is not, in all likelihood, an exhaustive list: These are just the ones she found. You may have heard of some of them, but I'm betting far and away not all of them:

Alliance Defending Freedom

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

American Center for Law and Justice

Bible Literacy Project

Biblical Voter

Bradley Foundation

Child Evangelism Fellowship

Council for National Policy

Concerned Citizens for Education

Conservative Action Project

DonorsTrust

Essentials in Education

Eternal Word Television Network

Exodus Mandate

Extinction Rebellion

Faith Wins

Family Research Council

Family Watch International

Fellowship Foundation

Federalist Society

40 Days for Life

Good News Club

Heritage Action for America

Heritage Foundation

Home School Legal Defense Association

Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty

Liberty Council

Life Challenge Church

Manhattan Institute

Moms for Liberty

National Christian Foundation

New Apostolic Reformation/Fivefold Ministry Pentacostals

Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic

Parents Defending Education

Patriot Mobile Leadership Institute

Political Network for Values

Priests for Life

Protect Our Kids

Public School Exit

QAnon

Rachel's Vineyard

Reawaken America

Reform Prayer Network

Religious Freedom Institute

Salt and Light Council

School Board Leaders

Servant Foundation

Seven Mountains Dominions

The Signatory

State Policy Network

Truth and Liberty Coalition

U.S. Coalition of Apostolic Leaders

Wall Builders

Watchman Decree

Word of Faith Fellowship

World Congress of Families

Ziklag Group

I'm not even sure I got all of those listed in the book, but you can see likenesses within several names; many of them concern themselves with 'godless' public education and striving for a remedy to it. Others are catch-all names for a number of people within a number of groups: the Ziklag Group, for instance, another of an exhaustive supply of Biblical references, is named for "A secretive organization for 'high new-worth families' that vacuums in funding for the [Alliance Defending Freedom, which gains quite a bit of attention from Stewart as a central organizing entity] and its allies."

You've heard of some of these: the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, and most recently, Moms for Liberty and QAnon. The rest seem upon first glance as sliver organizations, but Stewart assures us that their dollar contributions are funneled toward the most beleaguered and best-known groups, which all have focused their attacks on some aspect of liberalism.

Undoubtedly, they are better organized than liberal groups, which tend to stay in silos, says an editor of Inside Philanthropy, a digital media site, and miss the concept of building a broad political movement. "Liberal donors can be a bit technocratic and think you make social change by coming up with solutions that are evidence-based. And that's not really how politics works," he said. "People are less rational than a lot of liberal funders would like to believe."

They still can't believe it. I must admit thinking this way for most of my political life--that victory belongs to those who can sell the most logical approach, and represent people's best interests. But the past three presidential elections, along with the coattails that have accompanied it, have clearly demonstrated otherwise. It is said that people don't vote with their minds, they vote with their guts. I think it could more easily be said that voting with one's guts create the reactionary base from which this chaos can function successfully.

Along with that, there is the implication that Democrats can't appeal to the people whose votes are vital to keeping them in power--so they keep losing the close ones. It seems counterintuitive that Democrats have to find something more emotional to pull in those on the fence, and campaign with harsh, one-way-or-the-highway rhetoric--but they may be in a position where they now have to. The results of ignoring those approaches are above: Religiously-directed campaigning breeds autocracy and authoritarianism, just the feeding ground that Christian nationalism craves. 

Do Democrats have to sell religiosity, then? I'm not sure. I don't think they want to. But something decisive with which to strike back at the lies, exaggerations and innuendoes has to be out there. It's clearly missing. Without it, Democrats will fade into the distance, and what used to represent democracy will fade with them. But this murderer's row of nonsense has plenty of momentum now. It makes no sense to say what must take place "or else," because "or else" is here. It is growing out of control or rationality.

And the facts aren't working. There's too much of all the other stuff. It drowns information and logic out. It fills our heads whether we want it to or not. And if a genuine attempt is made to clarify things, others come out and say so, lying through their teeth, sowing confusion and discontent. It encourages us to shut down access to those facts--the worst possible scenario.

Constitutional protection isn't working, either. Ask Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. There is no protection if corporate powers won't defend what late-night shows are supposed to represent--decent, creative satire. Instead of considering these shows to be examples of decent commentary, corporate executives at ABC and CBS don't want anyone, especially 47, to mess with their playthings. So the show has been taken away from Kimmel. Although he has been allowed to return, it's an abject warning that it may happen again--and not necessarily to only late night shows. Stephen Colbert has also been removed permanently, and although cost issues were listed as the number one reason, his relentless parodies of 47 cannot be discounted.

The First Amendment only matters if you have the resources necessary to take ogres into court--and then, you have to win. 47 understands that if you get into people's money bags, they aren't as high-minded as they thought they were.

Note, also, that education seems to be the leading basis upon attacks on liberals. Reactionaries are trying to depict children as helpless waifs who are victimized by naughtiness. They're getting away with acting on behalf of God in removing sinfulness from curricula. This is nonsense, of course, but the grinding away at the position of the freedom of minds to think as they please has that residual effect.

Does that mean that Christian nationalism is winning? You could say that. You could also say that it's a wall upon which to nail the pelts of those who would dare to challenge the anti-truths that 47 and minions mouth. Either way, it serves a purpose for those with grievances and complaints with newly-found governmental power to interrupt them.

And with the above noted groups supporting these awful actions, they carve out places in the body politic to spread their poppycock, overlapping where they will. I highly doubt that the liberals have this many groups to represent their interests; if so, I'd like to read a book that lists them. If not, they'd better hurry up. They're getting run over with this pretentious bulwark. The meaning of America will disappear.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

The Normality of Brutality

I belong to a book group, and this month's reading is the work The Other Slavery, by Andres Renendez. It describes a world that I, as a once American history teacher, never really knew.

The Spanish, who took over the Southwest part of what is now the United States, and Mexico, back in the 16th Century were brutal to the Native peoples they conquered. That much I knew and imparted to my students. But what followed that, all the way into the 20th Century, is something that I and I'm betting a whole bunch of my fellow history teachers missed: the pervasive slavery of Native Americans.

The Spanish found caches of silver and gold in America, and enslaved indigenous peoples to mine them. the descriptions of the kinds of workdays these peoples had are terrifying and disgusting. They make the horrible cotton picking of the South by black peoples relatively easier by comparison.

But there were also guilty consciences. The Spanish crown came to try to ban slavery by the New Laws of 1542, which, of course, appalled the Spanish viceroys who were making enormous profits by the mining. The crown ran into a problem that the British crown did 200 years later: How do you enforce something that unpopular that's some 4000 miles away? They couldn't, and they didn't. The New Laws, gradually, were ignored. Slavery continued.

But it was practiced, too, by some Native peoples. When they conquered other tribes and/or defeated them in battle, they took prisoners and either put them to work themselves or utilized them as trading pieces for other things they believed they needed. This was practiced throughout the Americas. Thousands, even millions, of people lived deprived, short lives of subsistence.

Some of that was interrupted by a Native rebellion in 1680, which to a great extent succeeded in chasing the Spaniards out of New Mexico. But within a generation, they returned. By then, Native peoples had re-established conquered areas of their own, forcing the Spaniards to find newly profitable places--which they did, this time utilizing presidios and missions to launch their conquests from.

Renendez has done massive, tremendous research, so much so that this is the kind of book that almost writes itself. It must have taken him years to do it, and it won the Bancroft Prize in 2017. But his thoroughness in reporting is, upon reflection, staggering. It points the finger at many of what we might call "civilized" peoples, Native or European, and exposes them being quite the opposite.

Even Natives attacked and enslaved other Natives. Comanches were particularly active and adept at doing this. They raided settlements over an enormous acreage, considering it was done only with horses. 

All this was done in Mexico, in New Mexico, in Arizona, and in California. It went as far north as present-day Nebraska and Utah. People who needed extra labor to accomplish their tasks went on the road and rounded up those who were not themselves. There were hundreds of thousands of them, all told. And those who write the history textbooks missed nearly all of it.

What the captors must have thought--like the Europeans in Africa and the Americas, like the Muslims in the Near East--is that if they happened upon or heard about other peoples in lands they were visiting or exploring, they must by nature be inferior beings. No matter where or when, if you make that assumption, it makes it easier for you to attack, carry off, and subjugate them to doing your will.

That fundamental assumption has saturated humankind, probably from its beginnings. We mourn the unnecessary activities of those, like 47 and his ICE, who are still going out of their ways not to understand and assimilate newcomers who aren't European in ancestry. We reel in shock at this backwards, even barbarous treatment. 

But the sad fact is that it is merely continuing what part of humankind has always done to those it has brought under their control, based on some kind of supremacy. The one that is practiced inside the U.S. is ginned-up white supremacy; the one practiced in the hope of acquiring gold was based on the Christian religion. Over time, the two never drifted far apart.

It isn't necessarily hate that drove this, though plenty of it existed. It was condescension, too. For some reason, Homo sapiens has a need to consider themselves above someone else--and not just recognize and dote on it, but make captives out of those they judge inferior so they can stay that way. Our slavery, which debuted in 1619,  came along right in the middle of a great deal of it worldwide. 

Ironically, The Other Slavery notes that mandates that were called the New Laws, created by the Spanish crown and its king, who grew a conscience about it all after more than twenty years of it in North and South America, were supposed to end all new slavery there. But of course, enforceability proved difficult, with an entire ocean between the orders and the disagreeing ordered, not to mention settlements in this massive new land that were hundreds of miles apart at times. After a while, the New Laws were ignored.

As silver and gold mines grew, thousands were needed to pry the ores out of them. Superior Spanish war technology left the Natives helpless to resist.

Resist they did, though. Today, we think of the Navajos as a peaceful, gentle people. When they were captives of the Spanish in the 17th Century, though, they turned pretty nasty. 

In 1680, the Navajos somehow concocted a civil war which killed hundreds of Spaniards in New Mexico, and allowed them to gain a semblance of independence. The Spanish had tried to intimidate them by telling them that the Spanish god would be displeased with them if they resisted their new lifestyles, and that, if they obeyed like good little boys and girls, they would someday find a heavenly reward. But that meant that they had to be worked to death, and realizing that turned them sour toward Catholicism. The Spaniards made sure to remove all vestiges of the Navajos' former religious attentions. This they resented deeply, and made revolution easier to consider and attempt.

The more you read about Native slavery, the more it looks just like the brand we're used to considering more deeply in the American South. The sharecropping and tenant farming that created economic conditions that created a trap for many of the so-called free blacks during Reconstruction found an imitator in the encomiendas and the repartimiendos of the Spanish, as well as debt peonage, which held Natives in debt forever.

Slavery is still practiced worldwide. It has other names: Sex trafficking, for instance, or the smuggling of children for adoption. It all has the same basis: taking the lives of other peoples right out of their hands and forcing them to work in terrible conditions for a ripe and endless profit motive. Attempts to stem the human slaughters emerged with time: Mexico's independence movement, for instance, and U.S. Congressmen tried, but with only mixed results.

It's a shame: a shame that it happened at all, and a shame that a book exposing it took until 2017 to be written. But it's yet another indication that history needs cultivation. The deeper people dig, the more they find. The normality of brutality is again upon us--indeed, it never really went away--and we must continue to find its base. 

We must conclude, too, that it takes effort beyond the norm to continue to be good to ourselves and others. There continues to be too much dragging us in the other direction.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Win for the First Amendment? Not So Fast

As usual, the 'victory' for the First Amendment wasn't restorative. Instead, it was predictive. And limited.

Jimmy Kimmel came back onto his after-hours show last night, filled with some remorse, some emotion, and a great deal of posturing about free speech. All of which was fine, and somewhat restorative.

Aha, but not so fast. Two things have stood out in the detritus afterwards:

• Not all affiliates are showing Kimmel anymore. To be noted is the Washington, DC area, where the Sinclair network is making sure 47 doesn't see it; and
• A new, especially notorious, prevention of free speech, potentially far more contentious and far more devastating, is presently taking place within the Pentagon.

To the first: A reminder that, to paraphrase A. J. Liebling, that the only way to guarantee a free press is to buy one. Kimmel is back on about 80% of the stations he once was, but as he himself pointed out, in significantly large population areas such as Portland, OR; St. Louis; and Louisville, he continues to be blacked out. Which means that free speech continues to have a price, whatever that price continues to be. Yes, of course I'm glad he's back, and bemoan the temporary banishment of him from the airways because, as he so aptly put it, "The president can't take a joke." 

What he should have added was, on him. I sincerely hope that Kimmel will get right back on his sarcastic horse, because 47 just made a horrible, incredibly embarrassing (if you're paying any attention and are mindful of his ego problem), speech to the United Nations that will go deep into the annals of complete nonsense. 

And--I might add--his talk at a dinner given him by King Charles of England, in which he looked like a 3rd grader trying to read for the second or third time, is another poorly reported (I found it on You Tube) moment that should make everyone pause about just what we've done to ourselves. The richness of those pathetic performances should give Kimmel and Stephen Colbert plenty of fodder to load their cannons.

To the second: This is The Pentagon Papers writ large. The Pentagon is now demanding that, to report any information inside it, reporters must run it past them first. This is a repeat of what happened more than 50 years ago, when the New York Times and Washington Post discovered, and at first ran, what became known as the Pentagon Papers--a secret, running account of the decisions and strategy encircling our participation in the Vietnam War. They revealed that the government had, in effect, conspired on an ongoing lie as to how it looked upon the fighting that ensued. Predictably, the Nixon administration sued to have these and other papers (including the Milwaukee Journal), in effect, muzzle themselves for reasons of National Security, but the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

Looks like this situation will have to go to court as well; some media moguls will have to go after it. This is "prior restraint," as it's called: The effort to keep information from the public by creating a self-sustaining barrier. It's exactly what The Pentagon Papers case sought to bar, and--at least back then--exactly what the newspapers sought to overcome. 

But if the president thinks he's king and isn't to be challenged, this is what you get: a firewall that, in case we should be preparing for war--note that 47 wants the Department of Defense's name switched to the Department of War--we would never know until it was imminent.

That doesn't prevent what happened to Jimmy Kimmel from amounting to a big deal: It sure was. But the  Pentagon deal is far, far more important to sustaining the kind of conversation that should happen in a democracy: whether or not to put our young people's lives at risk, or whether to expand the use of the military to take over cities. I wonder whether that has, or will, become common anti-press policy in the other Cabinet departments--State and Treasury Departments come to mind--and if it will soon become accepted practice.

47 and minions are always 'trying stuff' to see if they can get away with it. Jimmy Kimmel's firing and resulting hubbub were perfectly timed to distract us from what might have been surreptitiously planned for weeks, perhaps months. Remember--Project 2025 was in the works, enough to entertain plausible deniability, for quite some time before the last election. All the administration may be doing is continuing to follow the pre-planned script. 

Also note this: along with the reporters' ban comes the story that generals and admirals are being called to the Pentagon for some kind of meeting with Secretary (I hate to capitalize that) Hegseth. Nobody knows why. Could we be going to war without anybody knowing, including Congress? Inquiring minds need to know.

Democracy remains at risk, now more than ever.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

You Can Feel Both Ways About Charlie Kirk

One of the most ironic things about extremists is their absolute anathema of feeling ambivalent about anything. To them, all the answers are simple. You just have to sit down and figure it out.

It was so with Charlie Kirk, too. He thought--and this has been re-published several times now--that the unwanted deaths of some Americans was worth the maintenance of what he believed to be viable and deserved gun rights, that that was the price that needed to be paid for his concept of 'freedom.'

Thus are the machinations of those who believe that they, too, will live forever, and that nobody would dare mess with their lives and their very existence. He, instead, became a sought target, and a recipient of the very philosophy that he espoused.

Will I miss Charlie Kirk? No, but I'm sad for his family. His ideas, though, are still out of the mainstream of American thought, though follow-up articles will suggest otherwise. I'm sure he became quite rich because of the intensity of his presentations of them. With that comes some semblance of deservedness and lack of perspective as to what exactly his worth really is in the bigger picture of things. His potential to do far more harm to our public discourse, largely because of the lack of effective resistance to his absolutist notions, stood to propel him to what some may have called future greatness.

Is he a tribute to our First Amendment freedom of expression? Only if you accept it as a gateway to his insistence that his way is the only right way. Did he want to take people on? Yes, we know he did. But only in surging to prove his point, not to accept anyone else's. He didn't flourish in the exchange of ideas. He wanted to bury and destroy others' adequacy. That didn't feed his intellect. It fed his ego.

But did he deserve to be attacked and killed? No. See? I can feel both ways about him. That he became a recipient of his own twisted values shouldn't be surprising, though, the way that political violence has never drifted far from our consciousness--and that goes back quite some way, at least to Lincoln's assassination if not farther. Our very nation, in fact, was borne out of the inability to compromise and willingness to shoot it out with the British rather than sit around and wait for them to recognize Americans as equals.

Few people alive remember the shooting of Huey Long, he also of a certain form of craziness and deception disguised as sincerity, and also known for his sweat-drenched, hyper-emotional populism. In 1935, at the height of the attention being paid to him, someone planted a bullet in him and he died from its complications. Being a U.S. Senator and what appeared to be an intraparty presidential candidate who was about to challenge FDR for nomination to a second term, he was a far greater threat to democracy than Kirk, though we will never know what kind of threat Kirk would have been now.

But he understood it. Kirk understood what kind of influence he could be. Because he did what everybody agrees one has the right to do, but few actually do it: He contrived a style of thinking and never relented about informing others of it. We all say we have that right, but only those of us most daring ever afford ourselves of it.

Why? Because few of us are ever as hard-baked as we need to make ourselves to absorb the impact of it and the feedback that will inevitably ensue. But Charlie Kirk likely figured out that, if he hung in there, he would gain a following that would make the naysayers irrelevant. It would take work, and it did. It would take time, and it did, though far less than most people thought. 

He must have also seen, and in a sense copied, the effects of someone else who had made the decision to go national with his irrationalisms and--surprise!--he found that people were hungering for it, hungering for the simple, force-filled, pseudo-religious, absolutist ideas. Suddenly, he found that his demagoguery took hold, and we have had to endure ten years of it--and running, finding its way to the White House and its dangerous power.

That's what happens when someone decides to utilize the freedom they have and twist it out of recognition. That is what happens when nobody takes it upon themselves and calls out the nonsense of it, or at least doesn't do it enough. That is what happens when the fierce undertones of the lies and innuendoes aren't responded to with facts laden with equivalent, fierce undertones: Nonsense becomes truth, and truth disappears.

Someone stopped Charlie Kirk from rising to the top of the culture with his piles and piles of illogical conclusions. But there will be another like him, soon enough. Kirk may be made into a martyr of nonsense: someone who, in death, may become larger than the life he was leading. His legacy will be reflective of our inertia and neglect, which also continue.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark