Democratic Doomsday: they slog around in wet shoes.

For many years, I was active and held county offices in the  South Dakota Democratic Party.  During that time, Democrats held both the U.S. Senate seats and the House of Representatives seat, and my county had Democrats in the state legislature. Today, Democrats holding those same offices doesn't seem like a possibility.  The current number of registered Democrats in the state is vastly outnumbered by Republicans and independents, and the latter seem to heavily support Republicans in the voting booths.

I began to note the decline in party membership during the time I was active.  Among the local party members, there was a significant outmigration.  Their children were leaving the state for higher education and to find jobs commensurate with their educations and abilities, and they seldom returned to live in South Dakota.  Many members moved out of state for better jobs or retirement.  As people left the party through  attrition, there were no younger people taking their places.

But there were other factors that affected the party.  One year the state party convention was held in Aberdeen, and local members were much involved in facilitating the work sessions.  We noted that factions were very aggressive about obtaining and holding on to power.  The delegates from the larger metropolitan communities, Sioux Falls and Rapid City,  often exhibited a patronizing attitude toward delegates from the rural areas.  On some matters, the internal politics were ruthless, approaching hostility.  At one point, a few people were offended and decided to leave and go home.  I recall that federal office holders had staff members go after the disaffected ones and try to conciliate with them.

A long-time staff member remarked that he wished the party members would show that kind of intensity during the election campaigns, rather than "pissing on their shoes" during our organizational meetings. At this time, there are no South Dakota Democrats holding national offices, so there are no current Democratic staff members at work in the state who possess contacts and political knowledge.  Staff members work directly with their constituencies, understand the concerns of the people, and provide the political intelligence that informs their bosses.  As a matter of full disclosure, I note that my spouse has staffed members of both the Senate and the House.

Staff members are acutely aware of how the public perceives the party, because they deal with the public daily.  They are aware of the dedicated opposition, of which people focus  on competence, integrity, and effectiveness, and which people are mindless partisan hacks.  When the elected officials asked their staff members to try to make amends with the people who were leaving that meeting, they were concerned about the way the party was presenting itself to the members and the general public.

The dwindling of registered members cannot be totally attributed to an outmigration.  The way the party conducts itself and the way it deals with problems determines to a large degree whether people want to associate with the party.  As Democrats are a minority in the state, they don't receive much press coverage.  They have received a lot of late, but it is of the pissing-on-shoes variety that makes experienced and savvy politicians cringe.  

The party has voted to recall the state party chair who had been in office for only four months.  Leaders say she violated the party constitution by taking actions without getting required approval from the central committee and that she created a hostile workplace, which caused a newly appointed executive director to resign.  The central committee vote to recall her was unanimous with a couple of abstentions.  This removal received extensive reporting by the press, which has the effect of telling the public that the party is in disarray.  It's a message that Republicans love to circulate.

When the recalled chair took office, she said, according to a report in the South Dakota Standard:

“I was honored to be elected as the leader of the Democratic Party here in South Dakota,” she said in a statement provided by the SDDP. “Democratic politics in this state is a challenging job. I know many of us feel ignored and looked down upon. Our voices are valuable and deserve to be heard. I intend to make that happen.”

That statement does not correlate at all with the reasons stated for her removal.  Her stated intentions appear to be in direct contrast with her relationships with party workers.  Her removal from the chair was angry and noisy.   And the result will be something political strategists fear most:  heavy collateral damage within and outside the party.  Once again, party members put on a spectacle of pissing on their shoes.

I have heard some of my colleagues in the communication arts groan and say, this is so South Dakota!  That raises the matter of the outmigration of people from South Dakota and the reason it reflects the dwindling numbers of Democrats in the state.  South Dakota, while it claims a superior work ethic and more freedom, has earned a reputation among many people for meanness. pettiness, and deficits of intelligence.  People of liberal values tend to leave, while certain brands of conservatism find it comfortable.  The brands I speak of are those which  cling to racism, sexism, class divisions, and which dislike programs that help the disadvantaged.  The rather boisterous removal of the Democratic chair demonstrated that the party is more motivated to respond to personnel issues than it is to formulate and promote measures that improve democracy.  

While the recall of the chair may be justified, it adds to the image of a bumbling organization in the minds of many.  That is a major obstacle that Democratic candidates for office have to deal with.  The party certainly has the right and responsibility to take necessary actions to insure that it is properly run. But it also needs to acutely be aware of the messages its actions send to party members and the general public.  The message sent with the firing of the chair came across as a good, old South Dakota pissing contest, not a demonstration of responsible, honest, effective governance.

There is huge irony in this situation.  The kind of things party leaders accused the Democratic chair of are the kinds of things the press reports that the current Republic governor does.  

She won re-election, is very popular, but legislative leaders admit they don't talk to her.  There is much about her administration that is an offense against decency.  She provides young liberals with reasons for leaving the state.  If the Democrats can get their act together, there  is quite a story to tell the people.  If any are left in the state to tell it.

The gate keepers of the concentration camps

 

"[the] tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who aspires to the presidency of the United States, and Gov Greg Abbott of Texas put on an unusual display of emulating the Holocaust.  It involved immigrants.

What to do about the migrants piling up at our southern border has been a conundrum for decades.  We used to call it the wetback problem for the people who swam the Rio Grand to get across the border and then labored in the fields in sweat-soaked shirts harvesting America's produce.  Those people were driven over the border to find work and survival.  Today they are more driven to escape oppressive regimes.  There is a constant supply of them crossing the border.

Gov. DeSantis' solution was to put the migrants on a plane and send them to Martha's Vineyard, a favorite gathering point for wealthy liberals.  Abbott chartered buses and sent migrants to New York City.  People at the destination had to figure out ways to accommodate the migrants.

The governors said they took this action to give those northern liberals a taste for what it was like to have to deal with the influx of migrants. They were using human lives to make a mean and resentful point.

This was the same tactic that the Nazis used on people they didn't want.  They loaded Jews, Roma, and others onto trains, but they had preparations at the destinations:  concentration camps equipped with gas ovens.  DeSantis and Abbott did not send the migrants to death camps, but their trivialization of migrant lives was carried out in the same spirit.

And so, they sent "[the] tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free" to oblivion.

Can nurses keep NSU healthy?

One April day in 2021, the president of Northern State University suddenly left the campus.  He was obviously fired, but by whom and for what was never revealed publicly.    This summer he will take over the presidency of Minnesota State University Moorhead.  His hiring to be president of a larger university in the region serves as a rebuke to whatever took place at Northern.

The general public has no idea of what took place at Northern.  The South Dakota press doesn't get much involved in anything but processing press releases.   And local news coverage in Aberdeen is sporadic, at best.  Actually, there are no media left in the area that actually practice journalism. No one is asking from the perspective of public interest if Northern State is operating as a university of free and open inquiry or if it is under political control.  It is doubtful that anyone really cares.

Shortly before that day the president left, legislators had circulated the draft of a letter to him threatening to fire him if he put a plan for diversity at the university into effect.  Apparently, someone found reason to carry out the threat.  Which raises issues about what kind of place NSU is.

With the ditzy governor issuing directives to the Board of Regents defining for them what  universities are  and what they can do, one can assume that Northern is being managed as a political department of state government, rather than an independent academic institution.  Noem wrote to the regents  that liberal ideologies have compromised universities throughout the land and she orders them to do something about it.  That is a nakedly political charge and brands the state system as being reduced to an indoctrination center for small-minded and fallacy-driven conservatism.  As a retired professor who once headed the faculty union in the state, I could not recommend sending a student to a college system presided over by a peevish and ignorant shrew.  There has been some mild whimpering from the faculty about the Noem nonsense, but a competent, functioning faculty would quickly and emphatically make clear that the governor in no way represents the competence and integrity with which they carry out their work.  To not do so raises issues about the academic competence and integrity of the system.

In the past, the South Dakota faculty had a union through which they could address their professional concerns.  That is no longer the case.  The governor and legislature passed a law banning college faculty unions.  And that raises questions for prospective students and their parents  about education delivered by a faculty  cowed into a state of subservience by domineering and ignorant political bullies.  The ban violates a basic premise of authentic scholarship in that it limits freedom of inquiry.  It cancels academic freedom.  What is most significant is that no one seems to have objected to having a fundamental academic right and procedure taken away.

For students and their parents who are interested in educations that employ critical inquiry, Northern has a questionable history.  In the past, it was once censured by the American Association of University Professors and  had to correct its  administrative practices to get off the censure list.  Building and maintaining a sound academic reputation has been a struggle at Northern, but it has had faculty members that strove for a competitive reputation for the college.  However, it also has operated with a portion of the faculty willing to concede their academic freedom and collegial privileges in order to keep in the good graces of authoritarian administrations. When a faculty union was established, Northern professors were in the leadership in gaining and utilizing collective bargaining to improve the professional status of the faculty in the state.  The faculty has since abandoned collective bargaining as a means of exercising shared authority in the work of the universities. And the fact is that NSU is under pressure to be a political indoctrination center and not an institution of academic freedom.  

 With the closing of Presentation College this summer, Aberdeen lost a facility for training nurses. Up to this time, Northern was not involved in educating nurses.  Within the state higher education system, SDSU was the primary campus for training nurses. The Regents have now authorized NSU to start a nursing program.  The closing of Presentation College is a blow to the community, but Northern's expansion to include degrees in nursing restores an important medical education resource to the region.  But this expansion of Northern's mission comes at  the same time that its scholarly authority is being diminished by a governor and elements in her political party.  The college will have an arduous task in establishing cooperative programs in nursing education with local hospitals and clinics, but there is a public demand for developing such resources.  The nursing program at NSU will start in the fall 2024.  

If educators establish and run the nursing program, it should be a credit to the University.  The problem is if University leaders and the Regents can protect the system from the governor.  She is a threat to education.

Take cover! The Governor got out!

The South Dakota Governor's Mansion

The spike-tipped fence around the South Dakota governor's mansion cost $462,000.  (It was never made clear exactly who paid for it--tax-payers or donators or both.)  But wily as a coyote, good ol' Ditzy Kristi Noem still gets out.  A half million dollar fence ain't going to corral this gal.

Of late, she has decided to stalk the state universities.  Nose to the ground, she is sniffing out poisonous liberal ideologies she claims are lurking on the campuses.  She is really torqued that the graduation rate in the state universities is only 47 percent whereas nationally it is 63 percent.  We wonder if the universities have figures on how many students transfer out and obtain their degrees in other states.  

A lot of kids may take their fundamental courses at South Dakota schools, but go elsewhere to get their diplomas.  South Dakota universities have a bit of a reputation for being diploma mills run by political hacks rather than being full-fledged academic institutions, and good students like to hold degrees from more respected institutions.   Nobody contributes to a negative reputation more than the ditz herself.  She finally obtained her own degree when she held office as a U.S. congresswoman.  She said she took courses that she worked on while flying back and forth between her constituents and her office in Washington, D.C.  Professors and students alike question how it was possible to take senior college courses, do the study and research, write papers, and take examinations, while doing the full-time job of a U.S. congress person.  It would take heck of a lot of flying hours along with a much help from some servile faculty and some zesty amphetamines to pull that off.  However, that may well be how she came up the state slogan "Meth.  We're on it."

A good thing about South Dakota is that it has tuition reciprocity agreements with other states so that students can attend colleges in other states without paying out-of-state tuition. A degree earned in a place where some dippy governor does not intrude into setting academic standards and policy has more value and credibility. 

She did struggle to get through college.  She claims she  had to drop out of college when her father was killed in a grain bin accident and she had to take over management of the farm.  She also struggles with the truth.  She withdrew from Northern State University in 1992 and got married that year in Watertown.   Her father died in March 1994.

Apparently her surveillance of the campuses has revealed more crime, corruption, and extra-curricular diddling in the library stacks than she can deal with on her own.  She dealt with this crisis by establishing a whistleblowers' hotline.  The ringing telephone has kept her up at nights.  Apparently academic terrorists  have targeted the universities at Vermillion and Black Hills State for particularly insidious attacks. During the covid crisis, a  professor  told a student who refused to wear a mask that any deaths caused from spreading the disease were on him, her, it, whatever pronoun you choose.  Ditzy believes that any death by covid is the will of God and anything that interferes with his, her, its or their will is a desecration.  By God.

If there is one thing Ditzy can't stand, it's people interfering with open inquiry and expression of ideas.  Some years back, the faculty in state universities were organized into a union, which collectively negotiated the terms of the contracts under which faculty work.  In a letter to the Regents, she complained that professors have abandoned logic and reason and the search and the open exchange of ideas in the search for truth.  She put a stop to that nonsense.  In 2020, she signed a law banning faculty unions on college campuses.  

There was a governor named Noem

About whom was made this poem.

She hated liberals and the Chinese

and other things that made her sneeze.

She vowed to keep the state free of speech and gluten,

and run it just like Vladimir Putin.

The man in the purple suit

 I don't remember exactly what his name was, but it began with a K.  Koraba possibly.   I did not have much contact with him because our assigned duties were in different sections of the guided missile base, and our work schedules rarely coincided.   He was a mild and naive soul who never adjusted to the crudities of Army life.  He did and said things that drew ridicule from the troops.  In Germany, we were often visited by a sales representative from a custom tailoring company who we called Hong Kong Charlie,  named for  where the clothes were sewn.  K. ordered a suit from him with an iridescent fabric that flashed from purple to maroon when the light struck it.  He thought it was nifty.  It was actually ugly. The troops shouted out warnings to put on sun glasses when K. wore it.  He often remonstrated with his fellow soldiers about their carousing and their pursuit of loose women.  He prayed before eating his food in the mess hall and before going to sleep.  He meekly protested when treated with unkindness or cruelty, which was often.  His meekness seemed to attract the attention of bullies.  The ridicule was constant, but some of the men sternly told the ridiculers to leave him alone.

One morning when we fell out for reveille, we were unable to wake K. up.  We reported this to the duty sergeant who tried to arouse him, then summoned the medics.  The last time I saw K. was on a stretcher as he was being carried to an ambulance.  We heard that he was taken to the Army hospital in Heidelberg, then to an Air Force hospital that had a psychiatric ward and staff trained to deal with mental issues.  Our post medic told us that K. had regressed into an infantile state in which he sought refuge from his problems through lapsing into  unconsciousness.  We never heard if he was ever awakened again.

For some of us, it was a hard experience.  It was like losing a fellow soldier in combat, except his own side inflicted the wounds.  We talked among ourselves about the insane depravity that a person could be drafted to serve his country and end up like K.  We talked about whether the military needed to be more attentive in dealing with cases like K.'s, and the irony of the fact that the Army which had liberated Germany from the concentration camps had created just such a place for K.  For many of us, it was a sad tragedy.  It still haunts me.

I didn't know him well enough to remember his exact name, but I never forgot him and the forlorn life he lived.  Some of us had tried to be kind and friendly to him, but he did not fit into the lives we lived as soldiers.  He wasn't the kind of guy who would join you for a friendly beer or go on pass with.  After he was gone from the barracks, one of the men asked if there was anyone in our outfit that K. could call a friend.  Another man asked if there was anyone in the world he could call a friend.  K. projected a desolate and pain-filled life.  No one knew his background or the kind of life he led as a civilian.  However, his departure left most of his fellow soldiers in a deeply saddened state.

This all happened more than 60 years ago, but the case of K. still comes to mind.  He was a peculiar sort of fellow, which made him the object of ridicule and cruelty by some people.  The man who bunked next to me suggested that a group of us pay a visit to K. at the hospital where he ended up to wish him well.  We thought that even if he had not regained consciousness, a visit from fellow soldiers would register on him.  But we learned that he had been moved again, presumably back to the U.S., and we were unable to get anymore information on his status.  

What happened to K. was a failure of our battery in basic humanity.  Its treatment of K. was a refutation of what our schools and churches try to teach us.  Most of the men realized this, and there was a very noticeable drop in morale.  One man expressed it:  we'll never forget the man in the purple suit.

He was right.

How "woke" identifies the mean and stupid

 I cringe when white people bandy the term "woke" about as if they know what they are saying.  It is a term that has a special meaning and a special history.  It comes out of the American black community where one might hear a person say, "He be woke."

To white people, it sounds like an ungrammatical term for being awake.  Most white people don't realize that much of black language that sounds ungrammatical to them is code language that means something quite specific to an American black.  There is a vocabulary and a body of songs and stories that fool the honkeys but sustain the blacks.   We refer  to Negro Spirituals and assume they are songs about going home to Jesus, such as "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."  It is actually a song about the UnderGround Railroad and escaping slavery.

When a black says "he be woke,"  it means a person who understands the oppression that black people have been subjected to and is willing and able to provide a way out of it.   The term woke comes directly out of the Underground Railroad.

William Still, a black man in Philadelphia, who had family held in slavery, operated an Underground Railroad station.  He compiled a book of letters exchanged in conducting the business of helping people escape slavery.    One of the letters he received announcing that some fugitive slaves were being sent to him was from Petersburg,  Va., in 1860 signed by an agent who called himself Ham and Eggs.  In part, the letter says,

I want you to know, that I feel as much determined to work in this glorious cause, as ever I did in all of my life, and I have some very good hams on hand that I would like very much for you to have.  I have nothing of interest write about just now, only that the politics of the day is in a high rage, and I don"t know of the result, therefore, I want you to be one of those wide-a-wakes  as is mentioned from your section of country now-a-days, &c.  Also, if you wish to write to me, Mr. J. Brown will inform you how to direct a letter to me.

No more at present, until I hear from you; but I want you to be a wide-a-wake.

                                                    Yours in haste,

                                                    HAM & EGGS*

To be aware of the failures of our democracy and endeavor to correct them is what t means to be woke, in the jargon of abolitionists. A woke person will understand that slavery and segregation have vestiges that still operate in our institutions.  Critical Race Theory posits that remnants of discrimination and oppression linger in some of our laws and institutions and can be identified and rooted out, as part of making democracy more perfect.  Some people who rail against anything woke are simply too ignorant and stupid to understand the origins of the term. And some actually long for the good old days of racial oppression. Critical Race Theory is not a subject matter that can be taught in schools.  It is a process of being aware that racial discrimination still exists and is practiced in parts of our culture.

It really gets tiring to hear the term woke because it is so misunderstood and misused.  At one time it referenced the efforts to make democracy more perfect.  Its contemptuous use identifies those who would repeal the Thirteenth Amendment and re-establish racial oppression as the American way.  Rather than call oneself woke, it is better to simply advocate for the principles of American democracy--liberty, equality, and justice.

But if you want to know who the opponents of democracy are, note who rants and raves against woke.  Then you have to decide if they are simply incredibly stupid or if they are among those who would like to end democracy.  

 *William Still, The Underground Railroad Collection:  Real Life Stories of the Former Slaves and Abolitionists

 

 

A pall descends

A pall fell over the Memorial Day weekend.  A woman who was a close friend of my daughter's committed suicide.  Suicides produce a darkness of spirit in people who are touched by them.  Surviving friends and acquaintances are devastated.  They question if there was some way they could have helped the victim deal with the agony and misery that drove the person to take one's own life.  

I had met the woman, but did not actually know her.  But I saw the effect her death has had on my daughter and her friends.  My daughter became friends with her in middle school.  Her friends have said she had a rough life in which she endured maltreatment.  She also had a substance addiction, probably as a way of dealing with the distress in her life.  As is the custom in public obituaries, no mention is made of the manner of death or suffering that drove her to it.  It emphasizes the "positive" aspects of her life.  Obituaries customarily avoid the truth.

Suicides are the canaries in our social coal mines.  They signal that poison is in the atmosphere.  People die from the toxins in our society, but our society is too stupid or too brazen to pay attention, to take notice that there is something lethal in our environment.  When bad things happen, we make mutterings about mental health, even though we have no idea about what constitutes good mental health.  So, we have mass shootings regularly which provide opportunities to recite our rituals about thoughts and prayers and mental health and then wait a week or less for the next shooting so we can make our recitation again.  But we don't even know about suicides, because our news media doesn't mention that manner of death in order to keep from adding more anguish to the survivors.  

My acquaintance with suicides occurred when I was working on a newspaper and the reporter who covered county government wrote a story that reported that in a vey short time in the community, the coroners' office had recorded 29 suicides.  Only a few had been reported as such in news reports and published obituaries.  The chief editor of the paper decided that we needed to do an accounting of this many suicides, not by revealing their identities, but by finding out their causes and effects. A team of reporters and editors was assembled to develop the project which turned out to be lengthy and complex.  I was assigned to the team.  We were to see what we could find out about each individual case and try to determine what factors compelled the person to act.  I eventually left the newspaper to go to graduate school, but the editor asked if I would still participate in the project until it was published.  I worked on it when I had time over the years, but it was never published because it was never completed.

We interviewed law enforcement and mental health authorities to obtain a comprehensive background.  Then we searched out relatives, friends, workmates, and any acquaintances of each of the victims who might provide insight into why they chose to die.  We emphasized that no identities would be revealed, but wanted to get details as to causes and effects.  That is where the project bogged down.  Most people did not want to talk about the suicides initially.  Some changed their minds and consented to be interviewed because our project might help them come to terms with the deaths that were a lingering disturbance in their lives.  We consulted with psychologists, lawyers, and clergy about how to conduct the interviews and keep them on an empathetic level.  We were accumulating a tremendous amount of information, but had not reached the point where we could make a coherent summary of it.  A problem was that it was taking so long that there was a turnover of personnel.  Still, the editor and people who worked on the project thought it was important and unique enough that it should be completed in some way.  Somewhere there are boxes of copy files and notes from a project that was too big to ever reach completion.

It took a toll on the people who worked on it.  One of our copy editors who assisted with some interviews ask to be excused from the project because dealing with the ongoing suffering of people was affecting her own emotional health.  Other team members said they also needed a break from the desolation they encountered.  We could feel the despair that the suicides passed on to their survivors, and while we believed that the project would be a significant work of journalism, we recognized that it weighed heavily on our own minds and had many imponderable aspects.  The news of the woman's death over the Memorial weekend cast that same bleakness of spirit that suicides produce among the people who knew of her.

A suicide is the ultimate rejection.  In some cases it results from an illness and the prospect of an agonizing death and is an act of euthanasia.  But in many cases it is a way to put an end to a life that is torturous.  And the survivors are left with the assumption that they were part of the torture or did not offer any relief from it.  It makes them feel that they are the referents in Sarte's line that "hell is other people."  Most suicides  involve a harmful relationship with some people.  We prefer to think we are not those people who do things that influence people to give up their lives.  Still, we feel the sting of rejection when we learn of  a suicide, and it is something that signals to us that something is wrong.

The interviews from that failed journalism project indicated how suicides were deeply unsettling to most people who hear about them.  The sense of rejection, especially in a democracy, projects a failure of society.  A pastor said that when it came to suicide, there really was no comfort that could be offered to the survivors.  Death by suicide is not part of the natural life cycle, but is a conscious and deliberate rejection of it.  Survivors of it have a question branded deep in their very souls:  why?   Even though I did not know the women who died over Memorial Day weekend well, I knew that she was troubled and had some bitter relationships.  She left behind two teenage children.  They will live with a wound that will never heal.

As a society, we have never approached the causes and effects of suicides with the kind of comprehensive effort that we apply to biological pathogens.  It's one of our nation's failures.  As I write this, the news reports that seven people were shot at a high school graduation in Richmond, VA, with two being killed.  Such shootings are so common that many media are not publishing a story about it.  America has some spectacular successes as a country, but it also has some spectacular failures which nullify those successes.  When it comes to keeping people safe from gunfire, our country is at the bottom of the list.  Guns are a common instrument of death in suicides.  They are the highest-ranking cause of death for children.  They are the badge of our nation's moral bankruptcy.  And suicide is a major cause of death.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued this report:

Suicide rates increased approximately 36% between 2000–2021. Suicide was responsible for 48,183 deaths in 2021, which is about one death every 11 minutes. The number of people who think about or attempt suicide is even higher. In 2021, an estimated 12.3 million American adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.5 million planned a suicide attempt, and 1.7 million attempted suicide

While it is important to acknowledge America's successes, its refusal to acknowledge its failures nullifies its successes.  Until America confronts its failures, it will live under the pall of violence.  We have millions of people wishing to get into America, but we also have millions who are thinking about leaving it through death. 

Folks will blithely ignore suicides and say life goes on.  But that's the point. It doesn't.