A nation flunking English and denying the White House slaves

Both of the Obamas have committed what has become an unforgivable sin in our current culture.  They went a bit literary on us.  

It may be that in our current digital state of affairs  we have lost the ability to handle any messages more than 140 characters long or to understand any expressions more complicated than howls of anger or squeals of delight.  Entering Facebook or the comment sections on news media and blogs is like stepping into a pit viper den.  Its inhabitants are able only to strike out at the intrusion,  and then coil back down to ready their reptilian brains to strike out again.  

Barack Obama's DNC speech had political purpose,  but it was largely an essay on how American democracy has evolved so that the facts of our political status fit the aspirations of the language in which the nation's founding was framed.  He emulates the speeches of Lincoln, which are part of America's literary canon.  

In providing courses in literature in our schools,  we strive to enable the students to understand communications that have cognitive content, that consist of more than squeals and howls.  Literature consists of much more than imaginative fiction, poetry, and drama.  It also consists of modes that deal with facts: exposition, narrative, and the methods of analysis, such as cause-and-effect and comparison-and-contrast. The objective is for students to recognize and understand such forms of communication when they encounter them and to be able to use them in their own thought and expression.  Working with language in its various forms is what literacy is.  

Michelle Obama's speech to the DNC produced an outpouring of illiteracy.  One part of the speech became the focus of many demonstrations of the ignorance of language: 

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.   [Emphasis is mine.]

And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

That phrase "a house built by slaves"  spurred some howls of rage from those who identify themselves as conservatives, whatever that means in their minds.  It sent Bill O'Reilly  off into claiming that the slaves who worked in building the White House were well fed and well housed,  as if that mitigated that they were held in bondage and required to do the work.  And a comment at the Dakota Free Press accused Michelle Obama of being a liar:

I see Michelle repeats her prevarication of a slave built White House. The historical truth is that the White House was built almost entirely by Scottish masons and their apprentices, local tradesmen, local carpenters, immigrant Irish and Scottish laborers and free blacks. Slave labor was used primarily for rough cutting stone and timber. Scottish stone masons were even used in the quarries to train the slaves on how to quarry the stones. To claim that slaves built the White House one would also have to claim that wheat farmers bake wedding cakes and lumberjacks build houses.

The White House Historical Association refutes that:

The D.C. commissioners, charged by Congress with building the new city under the direction of the president, initially planned to import workers from Europe to meet their labor needs. However, response to recruitment was dismal and soon they turned to African American—enslaved and free—to provide the bulk of labor  [my emphasis] that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings.

The significant aspect of those who fix on "a house built by slaves" is their illiteracy, their inability to handle any form of communication that is more than a howl or a squeal.  Michelle Obama's speech is devoted to showing what is right with America:

So, look, so don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn't great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!

She uses the story of her daughters to illustrate that the greatness of America is in its striving to live up to its call for freedom, equality, and justice.  To do this she uses the imagery of a house built by slaves and two young descendants of those save now being occupants of that house and playing on the lawn with their dogs. The imagery captures the progress the nation has made from being built on slave labor to the free and happy young women playing on the lawn of the house that represents their nation.

Michelle Obama's speech clearly states what she is illustrating:

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

The comments from O'Reilly and the Dakota Free Press display minds so intent upon diminishing and dismissing someone for whom they harbor a visceral, racist hatred that they cannot read or hear the the purpose and point of the speech.  They fasten upon a phrase that they would like to deny because of another reptilian aspect of their mentality.  Racism has wrapped itself around their minds  like the coils of a snake and so constricts them that they cannot apprehend a communication, but only a phrase that feeds their hatred.

This is why the "conservative" attacks on public education are so harmful.  In their purging of the curricula of the language arts and the fine arts,  they are reducing the number of people who have the intellectual skills to understand the history of our nation as it is contained in  language.  That has brought us to the point that half the people in the nation can endorse Donald Trump who is the antithesis of everything that education tries to develop in students:  the recognition and understanding of what it is to be free, equal, and just.  

There are many peoplewho are rejecting,  consciously or not,   the premise on which the nation was built.  

  

Anatomy of a defamation: the attempted lynching of Michelle Obama

As the GOP grappled with hard evidence that Melania Trump incorporated  verbatim portions of Michelle Obama's speech into her own, without acknowledging the source, it put forth the charge that Michelle's speech was plagiarized.  It is the juvenile tactic of 
trying to deflect blame for wrongdoing by accusing someone else of the same act.The claim is that Michelle Obama plagiarized a part of her speech from Saul Alinsky. 

Here is the part of the speech that was said to be plagiarized:  

Barack stood up that day and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about the world as it is and the world as it should be. And he said that all too often, we accept the distance between the two and settle for the world as it is — even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations. 

The claim is that she plagiarized that from Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals:

3. As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.

Michelle Obama is not  claiming or implying that the words about the "the world as it is" are her own.  She is recounting a speech she heard Barack Obama give to some people in Chicago at a neighborhood organizing event.  Her reporting of the words she heard in someone else's speech can in no way be contorted into an act of plagiarism.  The question could be raised about whether Barack Obama gave attribution for those words, but that would be straining to make a blameworthy point.  The words about the world as it is and as it should or could be have been used in discussions by social philosophers throughout recorded history.  Socrates raised the issue with quite a different take:  “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” 

Snopes investigated the claim against Michelle Obama and also found it abjectly and stupidly contrived out of malice, not fact:

A simplistic comparison of Alinksy and Mrs. Obama's uses of "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be" (phrases that were arguably exceedingly common in concept for policy speeches) suggested a surface likeness. But Alinsky's purportedly plagiarized half-sentence was part of a passage about adopting a realistic approach to "the world as it is" versus "the world as it should be." By contrast, Michelle Obama was paraphrasing her husband's lamenting acceptance of "the world as it is" when "the world as it should be ... reflect[ed] our values and aspirations" and was not expressing it as her own thought. 

As such, the plagiarism claim applied to Mrs. Obama was weak on its face, given that it involved a mere eight common words supposedly lifted from the oft-invoked Alinsky and expressed a notion opposite to the one offered by Alinsky.

Alinsky was a social organizer in Chicago.  His radicalism was not based on a particular political idea other than that social organization can be used to help people who need it.  Conservatives intensely hate Alinksy because his causes addressed economic and social inequalities imposed on them by the system under which they lived.  What enraged conservatives was his success in throwing off the oppressive factors in south Chicago.  He thought that ruthless repression had to be met with ruthless opposition.  

When Ben Carson identified Hillary Clinton with Saul Alinsky and Lucifer,  he did so with profound ignorance and malice.  Hillary wrote her baccalaureate thesis on Alinsky and had personal contact with him,  but she also had reservations about some of his tactics.  Barrack Obama was a social organizer in the same area that Alinsky worked, and he would obviously be acquainted with Alinsky's theories and methods, but own approach was often the opposite of Alinsky's.   Too conservatives, Alinsky is a pariah, and they constantly try to link their opponents with him.  

Politics has always had the willfully ignorant and malicious.  In our time, cable news and the Internet have given them amplifiers.  Those who circulate the charge of Michelle Obama plagiarizing Alinksy are members of that group and need to be identified as such.  What they say rises from endemic untruthfulness and malice.  And that is what defines defamation.  

Fussing over the fuzz

JT, the managing editor who had worked his way up from city hall and police beat reporter,  said that police department corruption ran in ten-year cycles.  Every ten years,  police departments would have a  scandal in which some of its members were exposed for corrupt relationships or practices.   He said   that low pay and constant contact with criminality wore away at some officers and they gave in to the temptations of money or angry rage.

I remember the night that the Rock Island Police Department teamed up with the sheriff's department and raided Mills' whorehouse, which had been in operation for decades.  They arrested Jenny, the madam, who was allowed her one phone call and made it to the chief of police.  "Goddamnit, Klaus," she said,  "we paid you to warn us when a raid was coming."  Klaus soon found himself out of a job and opened an antique store.   Jenny retired, too.

And  I remember Big Joe, a lumbering 6-foot-6-inch cop who wasn't the brightest but maintained a rigid Irish Catholic honesty and an intolerance for police misbehavior.  So,  he was assigned to the night beat foot patrol in the merchant area of the downtown  when there were no enterprises open that might invite police collaboration.  There were some bars where workers from the factory area would stop by after the second shift for boiler makers and occasionally get a bit out of control.  Big Joe would lumber in, wrap the offender in a bear hug, and assist him out the door.  Often,  he'd summon a squad car to drive them home, even though the squad drivers wold protest that they weren't running a taxi service.  Other times, he would call for a family member to drive the drunk home.  Joe arrested very few people.

There wasn't much gun violence back then.  It was against the law at the time to carry a gun into a bar.  When one was displayed or discovered,  Joe would approach the armed person and tell him that weapons had to be checked outside.  Joe would "take charge" of the weapon and check it in at the police station,  where it could be retrieved when the owner was fully sober.  A factor in Joe's ability to maintain the peace was that he was the department's best marksman.  He consistently scored the highest in the qualifying tests and was a frequent winner at sports shooting contests.  He was known for stopping attempted night time burglaries of stores on his  beat and of spotting incipient fires and busted waterlines and of helping vagrants find shelter for the night.  He knew his beat so well  and was  so alert and conscientious that he could spot problems in the making.  He was affable but no one messed with him.  If someone misbehaved, they would usually straighten up when people threatened "to call Joe."

I knew him from the time, as a college student, when I had a job in a shoe store.  I special ordered his work shoes for him.  They were size 18.

Joe was a peace officer from a different time and a different theory of policing.  Many of his colleagues operated on the theories of "police science,"  which  advocated a more commanding presence for the police.  Their relationships with the public were more authoritarian.  They dominated the hierarchy and were the kind that  reporters dealt with most often.   They tended to not like reporters.  That was because reporters kept track of habeas corpus matters and insisted upon reviewing the records on a daily basis.  Police found this inconvenient at times.  One reporter was grabbed by the neck by a duty sergeant and lifted off the floor.  JT published the incident in the metro section and sparked an investigation of police brutality.  That reporter and I are still friends on Facebook.

One of my first journalistic encounters with police came as a student newspaper reporter in Chicago.  Some students who worked at concession stands during sports events witnessed police accosting people in restrooms and arresting them for various  violations such as soliciting sex.  Then they would try to extract a bond or a "fine" from the accused.  The editor of the student newspaper, who was a veteran of the Korean War,  was told about the scam and managed for reporters to witness the operations and then interview the victims and other people who were witnesses.   The stories were picked up by a major newspaper and some reform ensued.  But the Chicago police departments have a long and varied history of cop crime.  JT would point out that they aren't alone.

There are good cops and bad cops.  There are cops who act with respect for liberty, equality, and justice and try to follow the requirements of due process.  There are cops who think only in terms of their badges of authority.  Some are focused on their clearance records.  And there are cops who make one question if they are bright enough to be wearing a badge.

Police departments are often fractious organizations.  The rivalries, resentments, and animosities threaten their ability to function.  Aberdeen went through an extremely tumultuous period about ten years ago when detectives and patrol officers suddenly resigned or were fired,  chiefs resigned or were fired, and the public did not know if the city was running police department or  producing a reality television show.

This kind of dysfunction was demonstrated last week when some off-duty officers were working as security for a Minneapolis Lynx basketball game.   When the players, in response to the police shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop,  came onto the floor in T-shirts that supported Black Lives Matter in protest of the pointless shooting, the police walked off the job.   Their petulance and support from the police union spokesman received a rebuke from the mayor and police chief.  Their action demonstrates the racially charged attitude that questioning police actions in the apparent executions of black men is an attack on law enforcement.   Exhibiting that attitude places the police in a posture of justifying lynching,  rather than making earnest attempts to deal with gratuitous killings.  The more police try to dismiss or justify the executions, the more reason the public has to be wary and skeptical of the police.  When the public "honors" the police, it is put in the position of honoring the executions.

The killing of five policemen in Dallas and three  in Baton Rouge exposes the added complication that our gun culture adds to racial discord.  A few years ago,  the Colorado legislature reacted to the mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater with a number of restrictive gun laws.  Those laws were later repealed, but they caused a sharp spike in the sales of assault rifles.  The gun advocates contend that people need to arm themselves against their government in case it tries to take away their liberties, and the increase in gun sales was attributed to this faction.   However,  one gun dealer said it wasn't only the NRA types who were buying guns.  Many people were arming themselves to protect themselves against the NRA types should they go on a rampage.

When the advocates of arming the citizenry said arms were needed if the government encroached on their lives,  the message got through to some people.  Micah Johnson and Gavin Long were paying attention. Both military veterans, they armed themselves with assault rifles* and semi-automatic pistols.  They used their training and their weapons to attack the police. And both men cited the police executions of black men, some unarmed and others not showing any evidence of drawing weapons, as motives behind their attacks.  They saw the police shootings as evidence that the government was engaging in combat against black men.  They were acting upon what they saw as the eventuality that the gun advocates warned about.

The police serve an essential function in society, often at the peril of their own lives.  No one disputes that.  And no one disputes the fact that the police are assigned the task of protecting the public and most do it well.   But that does not mean that when the public sees corruption and unwarranted killings on the part of the police that its expressions of concern and protest are anti-police.  Its concerns are anti-corruption and anti-murder.

When the police hide and defend actions by their members that violate the right to life and due process,  they comprise a danger to the public.  They are seen as the blue  menace, not the badges of protection and service.  Anti-police attitudes are something that the police have earned through their tolerance and protection of misconduct of their own.  They need to fight the crime in their own ranks as stridently as they go after civilian offenders.

That would be their strongest antidote for a bad public attitude toward them.  And a more scrupulous image would diminish the motives of people who see them as a part of government that has declared war on black men  That is something that  Big Joe understood.








*  Johnson had  an IWI Tavor SAR 5.56-millimeter rifle and a Stag Arms M4 variant 5.56-millimeter, and Long had the same set,  an IWI Tavor SAR 5.56-millimeter rifle and a Stag Arms M4 variant 5.56-millimeter rifle, according to police accounts.

How the electronic media became lethal to humankind

The question raised among many of my colleagues in language and communications is how to deal with the social media.  As one colleague put it, we used to warn students that drugs and alcohol can make you stupid, but they never had the overall effect that the social media has had on the human mind. 

This Internet and the World Wide Web were invented by professors who saw the unlimited benefits that instant digital communications would have for the creation, refinement, and dissemination of knowledge.  For a couple of decades,  those expectations were in the process of being realized.  However, from the outset there were people who used comment sections and the social media for malignant purposes.   Students of communication recognized that the these people detracted from honest communication,  like farts at a gourmet banquet, but were regarded as manageable among people educated and literate enough to see the warped and twisted personalities they are.  

The alarm bells began to ring when Obama was elected president.  The kind of racism which seemed diminished, if not vanquished, by the civil rights movement re-emerged with a furor.  In the country at large,  racism had come to be regarded as a defect of mind and morality that few people would admit to, but electing a black man as president of the United States was more than those possessed by lingering racist tendencies could handle.  The worst kind of racist reactions began to be displayed on the Internet.  The racist expressions proliferated.  People who would keep their racist feelings private and subdued began to feel encouraged to give them full voice.

Anti-black racism, anti-semitism, and all the other forms of hatred, prejudice, and malice became a staple of electronic communication.  The hate squads realized that electronic media could affect and shape the way society thought and reacted.  Some countries with predatory and domination motives, in fact, sponsor and train hate squads to attack people and ideas that interfere with their designs.  An example is the Russian-backed trolls who have gone after a Finnish journalist.  While hackers who get into government and corporate documents receive the most consternation among cyber security experts,  those forces who influence, shape, and even control the minds of vulnerable people are more dominant and threatening.

Cases of bullying among school age childlreln and among adults involving internet posts have resulted in numerous suicides.  The internet has become a huge force in the human environment through computers, tablets, and cell phones.  Many  people devote the better part of their day to being online, so that the Internet becomes a major influence in their communication and thinking,  in fact a dominant part of their consciousness.  My colleagues who are still active professors note that the occupation of students with Internet sites is a formidable impediment to the development of critical intelligence.  Students are so caught up in the blizzard of information that they are dysfunctional about separating accurate, verifiable information from the misinformation and disinformation.  Cable news, talk radio, "reality:" television, and tabloid journalism have created a population that has lost the capability of critical thinking, of distinguishing between truth and falsehood.  In fact,  many people no longer care and simply fit into the trends of their electronic environment with no regard for what is intellectually and morally defensible.

The softening of the mass mentality is no more evident than in the rise of Donald Trump.  As  personal attacks, false information, and appeals to ignorance and resentment fog the communications atmosphere,  people fall back on primitive instincts.  A large part of trump's appeal is that he is a billionaire (some have questioned that) and seems to be successful in exploiting business for wealth and power.  Just as during the democratic revolution that overthrew feudalism in the Old World,  there were people who thought their best options were to cower behind the aristocracy and curry its good will and hoped-for largesse for their survival and well-being.  They chose lives of unquestioning subservience and class ranking over independence, equality,  and the integrity of the self.  They chose to remain ignorant and biddable to the whims of their chosen masters.  Their model of social organization is the class rankings of the dog pack and the chicken flock,  not the equal society of free yeomen.

Global corporations are reversions to the feudal system in which a very few people control the wealth and, therefore, exercise the power over the masses.  While people resent the inequality and the lack of good jobs,  they still support the forces that create that inequality and push the middle class into poverty as means of control.  Donald Trump can get away with inane bragging,  with flagrant lies, with unforgivable insults and abuse,  but his supporters remain unfazed because he appears as the alpha dog who can lead the pack.  His plans are incoherent, unfeasible, and stridently antidemocratic,  but his pack seems to have no destination to which it wishes to be led.  It seems happy to merely join in the juvenile, unthinking belligerence that comprises Trump's campaign.

Trump is the quintessential example of arrested development.  His ideas, his vocabulary, and his total demeanor is on the level of a grade school bully.  He seems incapable of dealing with facts or to reason cogently.  There will always be such cases of arrested development, we can suppose,  so the real question is what happened to so many American people that they would choose him as a leader.  They answer is a massive intellectual and moral failure, the loss of ability and desire to apprehend facts and analyze the causes of the trends that affect us.  The popular media has softened their minds to the point that they are impressed only with the most boisterous yapping in the dog pack.  

The political divide in America is no longer a matter of conservative versus liberal.  It is now a matter of the informed and educated versus the mindless and anti-intellectual.  Our founders, particularly Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin,  saw the future of our democracy invested heavily in education and means of productive discourse.  As communities developed throughout the nation,  the first effort in their establishment was providing schools.  The political dialogue of the past quarter  century or so has trended more toward demeaning and interfering with public education,  with denying the place of science and  the arts in a viable national life,  and with attacking liberalism as the vector of equality, opportunity, and justice  for all.  We have regressed to open racism and violence toward others is advocated and practice in the electronic media,  so many people think it is now permissible and desirable.  Since the 1980s,  America has taken giant steps backward in economic equality,  productive education, and democratic rule.

We often read George Orwell's 1984,  as a warning about Soviet style totalitarianism.  We neglected its portrayal of how the electronic media could invade our lives as a means to monitor, influence, and control us.  We did not pay attention to the idea that large corporations are bureaucracies, too, and that their impulse is to eliminate competition and establish monopolies which will be unchallenged in what they produce and how they treat people,  customers and employees alike.  

We have not paid attention to the dismantling of an informed democratic society that has made Donald Trump possible.  Many prefer to bury their heads in their cell phones and tablets and let the totalitarian forces take over their minds.  That is what troubles my colleagues in language and communication.  So many people have surrendered their minds to the electronic dog packs.

The Lord of the Flies comes to America

Whoever thought in years past that America would be acting out "The Lord of the Flies"?  For many, that question is remote and obscure to their experience and knowledge.  It refers to a novel by William Golding, a British Nobel prize winner,  that came out in 1954.  It is a book that, like George Orwell's "1984,"  came in the aftermath of World War II as the West faced the growing threat of nuclear war and the Cold War detente with the Soviet Union.  It was an effort to explore how it was possible for Hitler to take over Germany.  For years, it and "1984" were standard reading fare in high school curricula in the U.S.  Americans were familiar with the allegorical implications of the pubescent boys whose plane crashed on a deserted island and went through the struggles of forming some kind of social organization, which grew out of their dog-pack instincts, ignorance, and superstition.  

The rise of Donald Trump has an uncanny parallel to the moves of the character Jack in "Lord of the Fllies,"  who wants the power of leadership over the boys.  He does so through incivility and irrationality that appeals to the primitive savagery in humanity which civilized culture attempts to control.  The book portrays the mindless desire for power and consequence in the boys and the power that bullies have over their schoolyard peers by promising them power.  In their quest for status and consequence, people line up behind the bullies in the hopes that their support will move them up in the dog pack and give them favor which is gauged by how much they can demean and inflict their will on other people.  

Donald Trump openly uses the tactics of juvenile insult and abuse against his rivals and opponents and promises to make America great again.  He defines greatness as bullying the rest of the world,  and promises to force Mexico to pay for a wall that will keep Mexican immigrants out of the U.S.,  to ban Muslims, and to create a multitude of high paying jobs for Americans.  He offers no coherent plans for how he can actually achieve his promises, but the poor gulls to whom he appeals slaver at the thought of strutting around and imposing their will on the rest of the world,  with no inkling of the consequences. 

Many pundits offer explanations for Trump's success based upon their theory that politicians did not recognize the dissatisfaction of people with big government, the loss of jobs to China and the Pacific Rim, the slow recovery from the great recession, and America's changing role in the way it leads the free world.  There is little acknowledgment that the current American economy was created by the Reagan-regime's devotion to trickle-down economics and the deliberate efforts to change the U.S. from a manufacturing to a service economy.  The inequality that Bernie Sanders has made a central issue of his campaign is rooted in economic policy that creates and cares for the richest of Americans. Donald Trump is the voice of the one percent.  He represents and speaks for a segment of population that is looking for scapegoats to blame for their dissatisfactions and disappointments.  

That segment of the population is bereft of intellectual functions,  conditioned by a media of "reality" television, talk radio, tabloid cable news,  bumper sticker internet, and education systems geared toward docility rather than coherent thinking.  Orwell's "1984" was not merely a warning about the danger of totalitarian government, but also a warning on how the electronic media could be used to condition people into mindless automatons.  We have in previous posts noted the similarities of America's political situation with the people who  fell under Hitler's spell.  The parallels to Germany of the 1930s and the current political climate  in the U.S. are striking not just because there are leaders, such as Trump, who are advocating the massive oppression of people based upon race and religion; the parallel is that there is a critical mass of people frothing at their mouths in anticipation of inflicting oppression, exclusion, and violence on their chosen hate objects.  All they need is a bully to lead them into action.

The situation recalls the events of Kristalnacht, November 9, 1938, when the German people took to the streets and smashed synagogues, homes, and businesses of Jewish people in a demonstration of racial hatred.  The incident has often been claimed to be orchestrated by Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.  However, a segment of the German population had been fostering anti-semitism as part of the resentments that grew out of the humiliation of losing the First World War.  The people blamed minorities for the demise, and Hitler and his minions rose to power on the promise of making Germany great again. Goebbels did not create Kristalmacht.  He knew how to tap into the reservoir of hatred and resentful stupidity existing in the German people.  Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was eventually executed by the Nazis for his opposition to them, analyzed the situation while being held in prison:

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

He observes, "the power of some needs the folly of others."

That is a penetrating definition of the relationship between a malicious bully and his minions.    It is the relationship William Golding portrayed in "Lord of the Flies."

In a serious moment,  political satirist Any Horowitz sees that relationship in Trump and his supporters.  He sees the decades of the conservative subversion of the education system as the underlying problem in the rise of Donald Trump:

In a democracy, while people may rail at the quality of its leaders,  the people eventually get as their leaders who the majority votes for.  So,  the character of the leaders reflects the character of the people who comprise the majority.  The rise of Trump, therefore, does not reflect the brilliance of his personality,  but, rather, the intellectual dullness of his supporters.  

The argument that leaders can reflect an electorate of defective mentality is also used by the right wing to suggest that the election of Obama is the result of a "confederacy of fools," as shown in this quotation which has circulated on the internet,  particularly after Obama's are-election in 2012:

Snopes has debunked this alleged quotation,  citing misattributions to  Czech newspapers and that Vaclav Klaus and Obama had a respectful relationship.  

The alleged quotation is a symptom of the intensity of the political division among the American people.  It is based upon a presumed discrediting of Obama, and the raging resentment of having a black man occupying the White House.  It is the crying out of devotees of Jim Crow for their good, old days of segregation and racial hatred.    In contrast,  Andy Borowitz's comment has the documented evidence of a segment of the electorate that has abandoned any pretense to intellectual integrity in favor of an attitude that rejects all facts and standards of decency as political concerns.  Donald Trump tells proven lie after proven lie, as the Washington Post fact checker points out,  and his supporters cling to his insults and abuse of those they hate as speaking out for them.  A number of observers of the current political scene have stated that among the Trump supporters,  facts and truthfulness do not matter.  They have rejected the very standards of enlightenment and intellectual integrity out of which America grew.  

The big question that will come out of the election of 2016 is a not a matter of who will be president.  It is a matter of whether there is any way or even any desire to rehabilitate a country whose founders made education and rational coherent thought the main underpinning of the democracy. 

"The Lord of the Flies" ends when a passing naval ship sees the conflagration that the warring boys have set on the island .  An officer tells the boys that their  "fun and games" are at end and civilization has come to their rescue.  For America,  the only similar hope is for some alien race from another planet to come to earth and rescue the people who are still interested in a republic that wishes to continue the expansion of the principles of its founding documents.  The alternative is the inevitable violence of those who wish ignorance and racial hatreds for the future of humankind.  Right now,  we are reenacting "The Lord of the Flies."

Don't jerk. Don't jackley..

Last Sept. 10, a Thursday,  police officers from the 14-man South Lake Minnetonka,  Minnesota, Police Department were asked to make a welfare check on a home.  The family members of the home had not shown up for work or school for a few days nor had anything been heard from them.  The police found the five family members dead.  The three children and the wife were apparently killed by the husband with a shotgun, who then killed himself.  The medical examiner estimated that the deaths had occurred the previous Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

A week later, Sept.17,  the fire department from Platte, South Dakota, was dispatched early in the morning to a house in flames at the edge of town.  After the fire was doused,  authorities found another family of five dead.  The three children and the mother were apparently killed by the father with a shotgun, which he then used on himself after setting the house ablaze.

There was a big difference in the way information about the two incidents was handled by authorities and the press.  The press in Minnesota asked for and reported on developments in the case as they occurred.  The police chief who had the lead in the investigation said  "he’s trying to balance public requests for information with the progress of the investigation. 'We will do our best to work through this tragedy.'”   The reports revealed that the company the Minnesota man had founded was dealing with a law suit and some financial issues. but nothing that seemed to involve anything shady or illegal.  They also revealed the man had been treated for depression.  While the evidence indicated clearly that the  man had committed the murders and suicide,  after a matter of weeks the authorities concluded that they could not identify a motive that explained the magnitude of the act.  The last reports on the incident mention the mental health issues and leave any conclusions to the readers.  A focus of the Minnesota reports was on the work of investigators in attempting to sift out motives and explanations for the horrendous crime.  As the police tried to unravel the situation,  the public was kept abreast of their efforts,  and while no explanation was produced,  the public understood.

The South Dakota incident was handled quite differently.  The investigating agency, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation under the direction of the Attorney General's office,  made no attempt to supply the public with a coherent narrative of how it was proceeding.  Instead, stray bits of information were released to he press.  Only one of the state's legacy news agencies made a concerted effort to go beyond the piece-meal bits of information and  attempted  to report on the facts and issues involved in the investigation.  But the KELO reporter had to, in effect, conduct her own investigation and pursue her own speculations.    The Attorney General's office does not--and has not in the past--think it owes the public a report on how it is performing.  In November,  Attorney General Jacklegy held a news conference in Platte, which he purported would inform the public about the investigation.  It raised more questions than it answered.  He did the same last month..  Rather than provide a thorough and coherent account of what took place in Platte,  the press conference left people confused and uninformed,  which produced exactly the kind of rumor and speculation that a competent press operates to dispel.   The comment section in the Dakota Free Press demonstrates the level of pubic discussion that the staged "news conference"  left it its wake.  

Criminal investigators in South Dakota, especially involving  the Attorney General's office,  have a burden that the Minnesota officials do not have:  they have to cover up government criminality and complicity in graft with business schemes, which spread and infect counties and the municipalities.   The laws of South Dakota regarding public information are designed to facilitate cover-ups and misdirection so that the public is kept from knowing what its alleged servants actually do.  The EB-5 scandal is a classic example of a Kremlin-like manipulation of information to protect culprits and their scams.  The handling of information of the Westerhuis killings is also a prime example of misdirection and selective information to create confusion.

A key piece of information withheld from public knowledge involved a telephone conversation Scott Westerhuis had the day before the killings of his family.  Westerhuis, the chief financial officer for the Mid-Central Education Co-operaive had been informed that a contract his organization had to administer a $4.3 million grant was being canceled.  During the day while traveling from the Takini School in Howes back to his home base in Platte, Westerhuis was on his cell phone in a conversation that was tracked from cell tower to cell tower.   During that first "press conference" in Platte,  Jackley never indicated who the conversation was with or what it was about.  However,  reporters were informed by community people that the conversation was with Dan Guericke,  head of the Mid-Central Co-Operative.  

The timeline compiled by the AG's office  tracking Westerhuis' telephone calls does not include to whom his calls were made, except for those to his home.  The recipients of those calls are indicated by the telephone records, but the AD's office chose not to include those identities in the information it released.  The subject of those calls and the state of mind of Westerhuis are matters of essential relevance to the investigation.  And if a man spends hours on the cell phone with someone while driving,  he has something on his mind that he needs to discuss.  The reports on the investigation and the two "news conferences" provided no information about interviews with the recipients of the telephone calls, who they were, and what was the subject and nature of the conversations.  

Any responsible investigation makes a thorough inquiry about the interactions of a perpetrator with victims and witnesses.  In the Minnesota incident, investigators could not determine a precise motive, but were able to define apparent circumstances which may have motivated the crime.  In the South Dakota, the motive is most likely involved in the financial scam run by the Mid-Central Co-Operative,  but no information has been released about whether Scott Westerhuis' conversations and interactions indicated a mental state that would result in the murder of his family.  

The withholding of that information has implications of cover-up.  Agencies of the State of South Dakota are involved in both the EB-5 scandal and the Gear-Up scam, which led to suicide and murder.  In both cases, the Attorney General's office has withheld information that might reveal motives for the deaths.  That information would reveal just what the role of state officials and agencies played in the corruption and their degree of complicity, if any.  If such information was exculpatory for the government officials and agencies,  one can surmise with certainty that the AG could not be fast enough or profuse enough in supplying it. But the AG's office is charged with protecting the officials and agencies.  So, one can assume with equal certainty that such information would be embarrassing, if not dangerous, to those involved.

The Attorney Generl's office  has a history of being more like  a KGB unit which carries out political vendettas than an agency concerned with protecting the public from crime and dispensing justice.  This all became open knowledge with the case it promoted against Shirley Schwab and Brandon Taliaferro.  When the discharge 0f their duties to protect children from predations  came into conflict with some of the business-as-usual graft operations of some public agencies,  the AG's office dispatched some of the thugs in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to concoct a criminal case against them.  When the case was brought to trial, the judge threw it out,  citing misperformance by the BCI and the internal politics of the Brown County State's Attorney's office and the AG's office.  The case presented by the prosecution was described as being composed of "perjured Grand Jury testimony, falsified documents and perjured affidavits to try and convict" Schwab and Taliaferro of acts they did not commit.  When Taliaferro filed an appeal to have his record expunged of the false charges,  Jackley persisted in claiming the charges were justified, even though all the legal proceedings indicated they were not justified.  

Although this case is a classic example of malicious prosecution, none of the participants in the prosecution were in any way disciplined.  It reveals the cancerous defects in state law and the justice system based upon it.  In many ways the real scandal is in the law.  It exempts officials from any responsibility to the people they allegedly serve and permits them to serve themselves at their pleasure.  

The Scwab-Taliaferro prosecution and its dismissal on the grounds of lack of evidence has not gone unnoticed by people who work in justice and wrongful conviction projects.  What a number of legal scholars who reviewed the case have noted is the absence of any response by the South Dakota Bar Association.  The Brown County State's Attorney was found to have a serious conflict of interest between her duties as a prosecutor and a contract attorney for the Department of Social Services,  which led her to file the criminal charges and proceed with the prosecution.   The whole affair raised serious questions about competence and honesty in the State's Attorney's office,  which the judge alluded to in dismissing the case.  The Bar Association purports to be the agency in charge of monitoring the integrity of its profession,  but the absence of any reaction to a carefully planned and executed abortion of justice that was eventually stopped by a judge belies the state of the justice systems in South Dakota.  The Bar Association seems more dedicated to the promotion and protection of shystering than to any principle of justice.  

Such is the environment in which the EB-5 and Gear-Up scandals with their suicides and murders have grown.  They were not things that just happened.  They were made possible and encouraged by bad law and the people who wrote those bad laws and tend them--and the voters who put the officials  in office and allow bad law to foster corruption. 

The remedy?  Don't jerk. Don't Jackley.

Occupy Trump

The political divide in he U.S. is no longer over what is the best way to achieve the liberty, equality, and justice set forth in our founding documents.   The argument is now about whether liberty, equality, and justice are  desired national goals.  

In September 2011,  we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement surround the financial district with the message that Wall Street rigged the economy to serve only the top one percent and the protesters represented the 99 percent.  They pointed to Wall Street as the direct cause of the Great Recession.  The movement spread across the country,  disrupting some activities,  but it was a peaceful movement.  As police evicted the Occupy protesters from their occupation sites,  they quietly retreated.  The media commentators dismissed the Occupy movement as a disorganized flash-in-the pan, and concluded they the protest was over.  People who supported the movement had an agenda that was a bit too cerebral for the shallow media-minds to grasp.  Their agenda was to demonstrate to the American people how all but the top economic percentages were being systematically disenfranchised from the economy.  With the implementation of Ronald Reagan's trickle down politics,  masses of people were pushed out of the middle class with an alarming increase in the poverty rate.  They pointed out that welfare recipients were not people who refused to work, but were, in fact, largely people who worked with two or three jobs trying to survive in an economy designed to benefit only the very rich.

The message was taken  up by Bernie Sanders who seemed to come out of no where as a contender for presidential candidacy.   But to those who understood the message,  Sanders is no surprise.  He has long substantiated the message and spread it with eloquence and without malice.

In contrast,  the Republicans are advancing the quintessential one-percenter in Donald Trump.  Trump demonstrates all that is destructive and offensive in a corporate ruler.  He divides the world into winners and losers.  His political rhetoric consists of unsupportable claims based on patently false information.  His exchanges with rivals consist of juvenile insults and taunts, and  his monologues are racist, sexist, misanthropic rants. Although some claim he is smart politically, his effectiveness is in his primitive, alpha-dog intimidation and promise of power to those who harbor the lust to exercise racist oppression and return to Jim Crow and beyond.  The America he claims is a loser is the America which  has advanced a social struggle from slavery and Jim Crow toward racial and ethnic equality, sexual equality, and equal rights for all gender identifications.  The America he wants to make great again is the America that discriminates against people,  lavishes insults, abuse, and poverty of those designated for oppression.  The America he calls a loser is the America which won World War II and through diplomacy and cooperative effort built its defeated enemies into two of the world bastions of democracy.  It is the America which has built peace and reduced the threat of nuclear disaster, not an America modeled after the belligerence of Vladimir Putin or  Kim Jong Un.  Trump's appeal is to those who side with the playground bullies as the source of power,  whose notion of freedom is the right to torment and humiliate others with belligerent crudity and cruelty.  

Trump's speech after winning primary elections last night demonstrated the depth of his politics.  He insulted the press that was allowed into his victory rally.  (His campaign staff maintains a list of news organizations and reporters banned from covering his events.)  He bragged about his wealth and his deal-making.  He promised to turn the running of America over to corporate leaders, saying they were the best in the world.  He emphasized his support of the Second Amendment.  As the rally was held in a ballroom on his personal estate in Florida,  he was not bothered by protesters, as they were carefully excluded from the event.  However,  when protesters exercise their First Amendment rights against the Trump hate speech,  he whines that they are thugs who are trying to abridge his free speech.  Trump never engages in a dialogue with others unless it is to cast his insults and abuse at them.  

In a word,  Trump is mindless.  There is no evidence of thought or contemplation in his words.  His political success is in following Schopenhauer's rule:  “The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”   Trump's large audience is a sign of the intellectual deterioration that corporate rule has brought about in America.  The analysts say that Trump's supporters are angry at being ignored and left out of the recovery following the Great Recession.  The deadly irony is that Great Recession was caused by those corporate CEOs and money managers who are driven by avarice and a status gauged by how much oppression they can inflict.   They think that Trump, who is the poster boy of CEO avarice and whose campaign was ignited by his promises to oppress huge groups of people, is going work in their behalf.  Trump gives voice to their anger and malice,  and he makes promises about making deals which will make America "win,"  but he never addresses the causes of the decline some people feel.  That's because he and his kind are the cause. 

According to recent studies,  the top 1 percent received 95 percent of the gains made in the recovery from the Great Recession.  Obama's recovery was greatly hampered by corporations and their Congressional toadies.  Bernie Sanders has led the struggle against the economic inequality that underlies the anger and frustration of many Americans.  In their anger,  they have not been able to identify the causes of their torment.  Rather,  they have clung to old racial hatreds and assume that a black guy win the White House is the source of their plight.  Guns which can dispatch the minorities they blame with a little bad scripture thrown in are what they cling to.  Trump gives them voice.  And the very people he and his ind exploit turn to him as a savior  

The Republican Party is behind the foolery of the angry Americans.  Christian philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard identified what has become its rule:  “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” 

Donald Trump is a symptom of America's larger problem:  a mass of people who have not the wit or education to be anything but fooled.  They are the product of the attacks on education and conditioning by he popular media that has identified reality as totally inhabited by fools.  And they have chosen the most flamboyant fool of all as their savior.   

If there is any attempt to bridge the divide between Americans that is assuming a lethal hostility,  it must be done in the recognition that those who believe that democracy functions on intelligence and education have to find a way to talk to those who have been indoctrinated into detesting intelligence and education.

That might well have to be done by demonstrating what a fool Donald Trump is and what fools he makes of those who believe in him as a solution to their plight.