South Dakota Top Blogs

News, notes, and observations from the James River Valley in northern South Dakota with special attention to reviewing the performance of the media--old and new. E-Mail to MinneKota@gmail.com

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Return of the witch trials



Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds.  Navajo Wind Chant

When people need to understand the world around them,  they turn to literature.  It is the repository of the cultural memory.  Our lives find meaning and direction in the stories we tell.  The literature of Salem and the  witchcraft trials is particularly pertinent and informing today.  The hysteria in the colony of Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693 is recorded by participants and observers of the time and is part of the canon of American Literature.  Samuel Sewall, one of the judges at the witchcraft trial, kept a diary, which records how he came to recognize the  serious error he made in judging, but also the mental process he went through to come to that recognition.  Five years after the trials, he prepared a statement of repentance which his minister read before the congregation of his church while he stood before it:

Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted upon the opening of the late Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem (to which the order of this Day relates) he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and shame of it, Asking pardon of men, And especially desiring prayers that God, who has an Unlimited Authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins; personal and Relative...
Sewall had fourteen children, few of whom survived childhood,  a fact of the hardships of colonial times.  But he was particularly affected by the anguish of an adolescent daughter as she tried to deal with the puritan doctrine of predestination.  In his daughter's suffering, he saw the injustice inflicted upon those accused of witchcraft.  

That time of hysterical paranoia was taken up as a major literary concern of Nathaniel Hawthorne whose great grandfather was also a judge at the witch trials and was distinguished by being the only one who never repented his participation.  A modern examination of the lethal hysteria of that time is playwright Arthur Miller's "The Crucible,"  which has become a classic of American theater.  That hysteria,  when remembered through the stories about it, has ominous relevance for our time.

The ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency has moved many people to turn to literature to understand and deal with what he means and portends for the nation.   They turned to an obvious book,  George Orwell's 1984, and 68 years  after its first publication, they put it on the best seller list again.  The psychological derangement it describes is a combination of hatred and abject fear induced through political conditioning,  a form of brain washing, that is recognized as what Trump has brought to America.  And it might be said that the particular derangement is what brought Trump into prominence.  A huge segment of the American population lost or has rejected science and factual information,  endorses the malignant spread of lies and defamation, and scoffs at probity as a condition of democracy.  To understand why about half the population abandons the cognitive principles on which democracies and any advanced civilization are based, one must turn to the accounts of humankind's biggest failures.  The Salem trials show the causes and consequences of the mindless hysteria that gripped the people at the time,  later repudiated when heads cleared and facts and reason and moral conscience prevailed.

The most obvious and significant parallel of the Salem hysteria to our time is the vilification of Hillary Clinton for things she did not do.  In Salem, the accusations of witchery were directed primarily at females from as young as 9 to elderly woman.    Mysogyny is recognized as a contributing motive behind the witch trials combined with other mental and moral failures and derangements.  The women accused of being witches were blamed as the cause of every social and natural disorder.

There are many reasons one can find to politically oppose Hillary Clinton.  Those  given to prejudice based upon personality can also find cause in their minds,.   But the behavior of Trump and the GOP went far beyond political premises into malignant derangement.  The main pretexts for the Hillary derangement were her email server and Benghazi.  Multiple investigations have been made of those matters by political opponents  dedicated to bringing her down and by federal agencies,  and they all ended up finding no cause for legal or executive actions against her.

She admitted that the private email server was a mistake.  Mixing personal emails on the same server with State Department business was unwieldy.  She initiated her  own server after being advised by predecessors that emails often became serious impediments in carrying out diplomatic duties.  However, the issue that the Republicans tried to pursue was that documents with security classifications had been put on a server that was not protected with official government devices.  The paradox is that her server was never hacked although the servers of security agencies in the government have been.  She did turn over all the emails that were not personal for review,  although some Republicans claim that she withheld 30,000 emails.  The FBI director said the handling of secure messages was sloppy, but there was no breach of security for which Clinton could be held liable.  

Congressional committees have conducted 12 investigations into Banghazi.  None of them produced information that Hillary did or failed to do anything that led to the deaths of four men, the ambassador and his security staff.  The families of the victims except for one have absolved Clinton.  One bereft mother, Patricia Smith, was exploited at the Republican National Convention where she was a featured speaker and accused Hillary Clinton of being responsible for her son's death,  of lying to her about why it happened, and stating that Clinton should be in jail.  The mother of the dead ambassador, Chris Stevens,  asked the Republicans to stop using Benghazi and her son as political propaganda.   

What Patricia Smith claims Hillary lied about was the motive behind the Benghazi attack.  She takes up the GOP party line used to besmirch Clinton and Obama's security adviser Susan Rice.  The day that Benghazi was attacked, there were anti- U.S. protests in Egypt and Libya against a video that mocked Muhammed.  In initial reports of the attack on Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens and his three staff members, it was assumed that the attack was part of that protest.  In her early comments,  Susan Rice referred to that protest.  Secretary Clinton was condemned by Republicans of holding to that explanation,  but the record of her communications show at the outset that she said the attack was carried out by an organized group.  Patricia Smith claims Clinton lied to her and the families of the men killed by insisting that their deaths were the result of the protest.  Other families say they never heard her mention the video protests.

In order to support their claim that Clinton lied,  the GOP tries to insist that the protests and the Benghazi attack were totally separate incidents.  Intelligence analysts make the point that the group that attacked Benghazi used the state of unrest created by the video as an occasion to launch their attack.  The most recent testimony indicates there were attacks by both disorganized protestors and by an organized group with a detailed plan. The main perpetrator of the attack has said that part of his motive was in revenge for the video mocking his religion.

The attempts by the GOP to use differing perspectives on a complex event as the basis for branding Cinton and Rice as liars are perhaps the most significant facts to come out of the turmoil.  The Republicans don't care or wish to determine just what actually happened.  They wish merely to use the incident as a pretext for maligning Clinton and Rice.

After Patricia Rice made her accusations at the Republican National Convention,  the Republicans instituted, as right out of Orwell's 1984, the 15 minutes of hate in which crowds would rise to their feet at the mention of Hillary Clinton and chant "Lock her up" and other threats to her person.  It was the re-enactment of what Orwell describes:

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
This kind of malicious frenzy was experienced during the Salem witch trials, as neighbors turned on neighbors and accused them of evil.  Perhaps the latest example is in the accusation that Susan Rice in her role as security adviser asked for the names of people mentioned in intelligence reports about spies from other nations.  That is part of the  job, but Trump and the GOP try to make it a crime.  Susan Rice is a prime target for the reals motives of Trump and the GOP:  she's a woman and she's African-American.  Which adds another dimension of hatred to that "hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness."

Trump's accusations and threats against Hillary Clinton are wild, malicious hysteria not based on any facts.  The fact that so many people join in the frenzy indicates a reversion to an episode in America that is remarked in  literature as a matter of shame.  But that portion of people who join in the hate sessions are not that literature portion that reads and understands why episodes like the witch trials are recorded in literature as knowledge which warns of the dangers that lurk in the uninformed human mind.  

And once again humanity regresses to mindless rage.  

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Just another boil on Trump's nasty, festering ass

It is hard not to notice that since Trump became president, there are a lot of people who are not proud to be American.   He has reduced America to the status of a banana republic,  a contender with North Korea for being defined by leadership with a bad case of arrested development,  a petulant, deranged juvenile.  Kim Jong-un and Trump are temperamental cohorts.  They like to fire off missiles.  And threatening insults.  And  neither are equipped with the mental or moral restraints against carrying out their threats.


Trump has been useful to those who want to break America. Mitch McConnell is one of the most prominent and effective destroyers of democracy in America.  A native of the South,   McConnell was a fairly temperate politician,  but as he rose in power in the Republican Party,  he found political success in fulfilling the image of Jim Crow.   While his state of Kentucky  was not part of the Confederacy,  declaring itself neutral during the Civil War,  it was a slave state and the attitudes arising out of slavery are a tradition in the state.  McConnell's Jim Crow image came into focus with the election of a black man to President of the United States.  The intensity of McConnell's opposition went beyond policy disagreement to a malicious dedication to obstruct anything Obama proposed by any means possible.  His actions and demeanor went far beyond political disagreement into  unbridled racist fury.  He made clear that he was willing 
to break the nation to inflict his Jim Crow vengeance on  Obama.

Trump won McConnell's devotion by having launched his political efforts with the birther lie about Obama not being born an American.  He further endeared McConnell with his stream of denigrations and insults against Obama.  McConnell became a fanatical destructor of anything to do with Obama.

The act that set up Trump's only success in office so far was to refuse to acknowledge in any way Obama's candidate for the Supreme Court,  Merrick Garland.  At McConnell's order, the GOP-controlled Senate refused to even acknowledge the nomination with interviews,  let alone committee hearings and a vote by the Senate.  The insulting discourtesy and abuse of process was right out of the Jim Crow play book, and the Republicans carried it out with the viciousness and vengeance that characterizes racial hatred.  And so, Neil Gorsuch was whisked into the Supreme Court.  Republicans think it was a victory.  The majority who did not vote for Trump don't think it matters.  For them, America is over.  Its laws and rules are superfluous.  Good people do not abide by bad laws.  They do not obey bad leaders.  They snicker with derision at consequent court decisions.  Gorsuch may have qualifications, but they are meaningless because his appointment is the result of McConnell and Trump breaking America apart. He is merely a boil on a festering ass.

The nation's president is a pathological liar.  No one of intelligence believes a word he utters.  Those people long ago stopped listening to him.  We have a national congress whose majority thinks perfidy is clever politics.  Congress has been reduced to a mental institution.  The non-Trump and non-GOP supporters regard its antics with bemused distaste, as they lead lives apart from what happened to America.

There is much talk about resistance, but it has gone quiet.  That is part of the resistance. What person of intelligent values wants to contribute to the cacophony of a nation that has become an abomination?  Who wants to expose themselves to the festering asses?

Trump attacked America and its standing in the world when he campaigned with a barrage of disparaging lies.  But as president,  he made them come true.  A friend who is traveling in Europe writes:  "Experienced a new standard in arrogant, dismissive wait service tonight. The Muse  [his spouse] reminds me that we're Americans, not quite equal in humanity to Europeans now. The EU parliament just voted to require visas from American travelers. This would have made this impromptu excursion impossible. America First renders Americans second or third-class world citizens."

The idea of America will not die.  Its true adherents will, as their ancestors did,  will find a place where it can work.  Meanwhile on this continent,  it has become a subsidiary of the Trump Organization,  the United States of Jim Crow.




The face of Jim Crow



Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Obituary for a democracy

    The Preamble of the Constitution is  straightforward in explaining the document's  and the nation's purpose






  • form a more perfect Union, 
  • establish Justice, 
  • insure domestic Tranquility
  • provide for the common defence
  • promote the general Welfare
  • and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.


  • Those people who fret over the size of government ignore the goals of the Preamble.  If one is to take that sentence seriously,  our efforts should be to improve government and the implementation to achieve its goals,  not obsess over its size.  There is often much to decry in government.  Bureaucracies often are managed to accommodate the basest human motives.  Many operate as extensions off the pecking order model of social organization.  People get caught up in rivalries and resentment,  and spend more effort in competing for attention and undermining their perceived rivals than in carrying out the business of making government work.  The significant political question is not size of government,  but the honesty and competence of government in meeting its purpose.  Corporate bureaucracies in the private sector do not even put up the pretense of democratic values; they largely demonstrate human avarice and malice at its worse.  

    The matters of the integrity and efficiency of government get lost in a debate over the meaning of "general welfare" that began when the Constitution was being written.  Madison thought that Constitution authorized only the power to levy taxes, not to get involved in anything not specified as a duty of Congress.  Hamilton took "general welfare" to require the exercise of responsibility for anything dealing with the well-being of the nation and its people.   Contemporary citations of the two interpretations define the motives behind the divide that separates the political factions in our nation.  The "conservatives" use limiting taxes as the pretext to designate part of the population as undeserving, to exclude them, denigrate them, and oppress them.  The conservative movement is misanthropic, regards equality, freedom, and justice as a privilege for its members only..  The "liberals"  regard general welfare as a mandate to see to the well-being of all people,  something the conservatives claim we cannot afford.

    Healthcare is focal point that provides a stark contrast between people of good will and people of ill will.  As Bernie Sanders keeps reminding us,  the U.S. is the only major country in the world that does not provide healthcare to all its people as a right.  Furthermore,  the quality of healthcare in the United States ranks last compared to other leading countries.  The fact that a huge segment of the American people deny healthcare to those who cannot afford it defines the true moral state of the country.  And it is a moral state which is comparable to Nazi Germany.

    The gas ovens of the Holocaust were not originally designed to kill Jews.  They were designed to kill the handicapped and disabled in German institutions because they were considered a financial burden.  They were among those Hitler called "useless eaters."  So that no money was wasted on the disabled and infirm,  they were fumigated with Zyklon.  The anti-healthcare Americans aren't as humane.  If people can't afford healthcare,  it is assumed, that they aren't working or are spending their money on frivolity,  and so deserve to get ill and die.  The moral wonders of America rally to save the unborn so they may enjoy the full benefit of knowing exclusion and oppression when they are out of the womb.  Then maybe they can understand the denial of equality, freedom, and justice that the GOP so fervently has prepared for them.  

    The denial of healthcare is just one of the moral devices that is the Zyklon of our age. Another is the right of "law-enforcement"  to execute black people when they feel like it.  All they have to do  is say that they feel that their life is in danger.  Then, they can blast away,  The Obama administration made agreements with offending police departments to eliminate such abuse.  But the Trump administration under the orders of Attorney General Sessions will review those agreements to see if they infringe on the right to kill useless eaters.  

    Admit it or not,  but many nations have been more successful in achieving the goals in the Preamble than the United States has.  While conservatives rage about following the Constitution,  the one they follow conspicuously omits the preamble.  When the Constitution states a national purpose to promote the general welfare, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and extend the benefits of liberty,  it is an affront to the right to hold and prosecute ill will, and it conflicts with the Second Amendment,  which is all that matters in the GOP mindset.  

    But a savior has arisen to champion cause of ill will and abuse in Donald Trump.  Ill will reigns with full-throated triumph throughout the land:
     Our father  in Trump Towers 
     holler out your name,
     your companies come, 
     your will be done
    with pussies grabbed 
    on earth as in Mar-a-Lago.
    Give us today our daily Tweet,
    and take on great debt
    and conveniently go bankrupt
    And lead us not into liberalism
    but deliver to us the joys of evil
    For you are the corporation,
    the abuse of power,
    and the gory narcissist
    for ever.


    Democracy in America died an obscene death.  The city on the hill is on other shores.



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