Things Get Curioser and Curioser

 The trendiest words I've encountered over the past few years are "evidence-based" plans, programs, or findings. Although like most concepts that achieve great popularity, evidence-based started out as a genuine effort to bring some reality to project planning and other programs, its limitations have grown evident as it has gradually been incorporated into the lexicon of grantmaking and plannng.

However, I'm not entirely sure anyone expected to see the rise of argument without any evidence. This is what the legions supporting Trump have presented us as their crowning legacy. The American rejection of Trump by seven million votes (roughly 81 to 74) is being opposed by a campaign that has failed to present any evidence that the election was in any way "rigged" or otherwise stolen. 

This in itself is unusual--there's usually been chicanerr y in every election but it hasn't affected the result all that frequently. It's enough to make one admit after years of denial that the leftists of the 60s may have had it right after all: those ensconced in power will do anything to avoid relinquishing any of their suzerainty. 

We are facing on January 6 the spectatcle of a large number of Republicans in Congress object to certifying the electoral vote for Biden based on nothing. And we have a president encouraging armed supporters to come to Washington. He's also installed cronies at the head of the Defense Department and other powerful agencies. If you don't start thinking that a coup is possible and that some preparation to resist it is in order, I suggest you are delusional.

This whole totally false post-election protest has left our political structure and constitutional government hanging by a thread. A few individual members of state canvassing board have held the line against throwing out millions of votes just on someone's say-so that there was malfeasance or that rules weren't followed.

If anyone was messing with the system, it was the Republican-dominated legislatures that are successfully practicing voter suppression. Closing polling places, limiting mail-in voting, and restricting early balloting are all such suppression devices. Photo ID is another. No one has present any credible evidence that there have been violations of the rules to justify any of this vicious attempt to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

But we have top-of-their-class Harvard and Yale law grads like Cruz and Hawley demanding an audit where no one has shown any basis for needing one. We are depending on Pence not to throw a monkey wrench into the certification process. They even cite the 1876 electoral commission which was a totally corrupt fraud. Democrats went along with GOP theft of the presidency in return for the end of Reconstruction.

Like banana republics and other states we have often scorned, the U.S. may have to take on another pitched battle against the real enemy within--the reactionary right that has found its demagogue to lead both the unthinking and those dedicated to maintaining the 1% in control by any means. 

What Would Pete Have Thought?

 I've kept viewing commercials on television for a car that begin and are accompanied throughout with Pete Seeger singing about waking up early to start a hard day at the mill. It shows a family or couple getting into  the fairly fancy car and backing out of their driveway but just missing being wrecked by a car passing speedily on the road.

Pete's tenor is of course unmistakable. I immediately began thinking about what he would have thought of his labor song being appropriated by a capitalistic car company to sell automobiles. Even though I see myself as a pragmatist (not to be confused with a foreign policy realist, thank you), it's very difficult for me to hear Pete Seeger singing and not be swept up in his love for the workers and the downtrodden. 

It makes me consider what I haven't done to strive towards the kinds of goals he espoused. And his voice has that timbre that always cuts right to one's essence. One of my favorite renditions was on an old Weavers album--maybe it was their reunion at Carnegie Hall--when the three tenors who had clocked time in the group joined in giving the old chestnut Wimoweh (which has since been popularized and somewhat profaned since the Weavers got it from its South African creators) a rousing workout. 

You hear Pete coming in and standing out with his extraordinarily distinctive tenor. It's almost as thrilling as his leading We Shall Overcome, shouting out a line after a huge rally crowd sings the one before.  Another similarly exciting moment hearing an even more marvelous voice stand out from a group is a now You Tubed scene from Showboat where Hattie McDaniel, Helen Morgan, and Irene Dunne start into Can't Help Loving That Man o' Mine. Right near the end, Paul Robeson walks into this 1936 movie clip and lends his glorious bass to the finale. It makes it absolutely perfect. I believe Pete was driving with Robeson to the concert at Peekskill when a right-wing mob stoned their car.

I remember being delighted when Pete was given the Kennedy Center Honors back in the 1990s, a solid achievement for Bill Clinton's Administration. Not everyone recalls that Pete and the Weavers were blacklisted and kept off television--then becoming the major entertainment medium--for many years. If someone had told me that that could happen... It was even better that underneath his uncharacteristic jacket up there in the Presidential box, he was wearing a work shirt.

I ended up wishing that this commercial had been aired before Pete passed on last year at 92. But I took some consolation from the probability that his estate would benefit--probably more richly than from any concert payday--and through it some worthy causes.

There Went the Judge

 It's not often that you are faced with the death of someone who was both a model and a mentor, a judge and a natural leader. For me, that was the late Chief Judge William C. Pryor, who passed away last Thursday at 88. At the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where I was privileged to work when Judge Pryor was the Chief Judge, he was the effective man i n the middle, calming the judicial waters after the court had almost torn itself apart with personalities clashing.

As a judge, he brought to the appellate bench the skills and the attitude of a good trial judge, basing his decisions as much as possible on the facts with scrupulous impartiality.  He was soft-spoken yet firm when he reached a conclusion. And although he had no particular liking for administration, he led the court system in D.C. effectively through cooperation with Chief Judge Fred Ugast of D.C.'s Superior Court, the trial court. During the decade I spent at the court, that kind of collaboration hadn't occurred before him and did not exist after he stepped down.

So often it happens that the most effective leader is the one who does not seek the position but accepts the responsibility. By proceeding calmly but firmly, he earned the respect of contentious judges on both the appeals and trial courts.  He took no pleasure from ceremonial or social occasions--often, he would approach me during some get-together at the court or with the bar to ask if I wanted to go for a run with him. 

The testimonials in the media from a deceased judge's law clerks are invariably totally laudatory and also completely predictable. But everyone on the staff at the court appreciated how he would treat them as full colleagues. And although he focused on the evidence in criminal cases, never succumbing to demands for either excessive leniency or firmness, he often was hailed by men whom we ran by during jogs in D.C. After one such greeting, he remarked to me that he had sentenced the man to a term of several years.

He grew up in the District, starting segregated public schools. He was a good athlete, especially at basketball and tennis, and worked out for most of his life. He would chuckle at remembering that he had been recruited by Dartmouth where it had been assumed he was a good football player but which he hadn't played. He loved basketball and blamed his bad knees on playing on concrete courts growing up.

After Dartmouth and Georgetown Law, he took a Master's in Judicial Studies at the University of Virginia with my former boss, Prof. Dan Meador. Unlike many judicial education courses, this one was demanding and rigorous. He was not prone to parading his education. Once in a divorce case, where counsel for a well-heeled couple had condescendingly tried to explain to the trial judge, Judge Pryor, about the importance of the right summer camp for the couple's children, he saw that they assumed he knew nothing of that strata. He never disclosed his own attendance at Northfield Mr. Hermon, then Dartmouth and Georgetown.

In his last years, we would meet, usually serendipitously, at the same health club. Everyone in the locker room knew and respected him; he would enjoy getting into discussions with them about almost any subject. He was also proud of his two sons, doing his best to launch them on good careers. At home, the judge conceded that his wife of many years was in charge, pointing out that she was a teacher, who to him had more natural authority than a judge.

There have been far too few jurists who brought his temperament and skills to the job. In our ideologically-divided age, he has already been and will continue to be sorely missed. He was someone for whom you wanted to give nothing less than your best.

Things Get Weird

Over the years since first reading George Orwell's two masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984, it could be said that they prompted a look backward--we conjure up recollections of totalitarian and authoritarian states but have been less capable of recognizing rather than envisioning dystopic societies such as that depicted in 1984. But today there have been many clear indications that such a future is not so distant and unlikely. 

Orwell's perception, moreover, extended to a clear analysis of not only why socialism has not been widely accepted in the U.S. but the reasons why its prospects here remain dim--as evidenced by how easily the Republicans wielded the scare propensity of the very word to successfully resist any "Blue wave" that might have accompanied Biden's victory. This has usefully been summarized from what may be his most continually relevant work, The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 :                    

    Why then are we not all socialists?

Orwell attempts to answer this difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies five main problems:

1. Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle-class socialists do themselves no favors by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate the large section of the population that is economically working-class but culturally middle-class.
2. Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. He criticizes H. G. Wells in particular on these grounds.
3. Crankiness. Among many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people.
4. Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with "notwithstandings" and "heretofores" and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
5. Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

Applying Orwell's analysis to our milieu more than eighty years later, we can point to those who, in focusing entirely on economic factors, diminish the significance of the "culture wars". Recently, we have beginning to hear acknowledgment of the negative power of elitism, condescension, perceived favoritism toward minorities, and use of such terms as "deplorables" in firing up people who didn't go to college to turn to those who surely do not have their interests at heart or in mind except to draw on the anger of people who feel neglected, insulted, or passed over. Resentment remains and is now again being recognized as a powerful generator of negative voting.

This counts for a lot. Lincoln observed, "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them." He also employed the self-deprecation tack since successfully used by politicians who seek to counter the tendency of many who are struggling to make ends meet to express misguided respect for rich candidates who inherited or made a fortune on their own. Some rich men may not steal; we have seen, however, that that is not true across the board, any more than it is the case that any economic group has a lesser propensity to engorge off the public trough. 

Asked about how his early life led to his success, Lincoln said that his early years could be summed up in a phrase from Gray's Elegy: "the short and simple annals of the poor." Lincoln was able to use these responses so well because he did rise from an impoverished and hard-scrabble background. Only those who did live a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story are thus able to employ this approach: it is akin to the now-iron rule that only members of ethnic groups can make jokes about their group. 

Something to Cheer

 We were out walking along Connecticut Avenue here in the nation's capital at about 12:30 P.M. and suddenly we heard and saw a cacophony of horns honking, banners waving, flags flying in the breeze out of sunroofs, and a whole procession of cars parading down the avenue past the Zoo and on, presumably, to downtown DC as thousands cheered. 

It's been much too long since we had something to cheer about like this. Even election night was muted because of the Congressional results. But now it was as if all the pent-up enthusiasm--absolutely no curbing allowed, Larry David--was suddenly released and exploded in a merry pandemonium.

As with every time one gets loaded, there'll be sober second thoughts in the morning, but today is just a great beautiful--70 degrees and sunny here--day for celebrating. Reminds me of the ancient ad slogan from my much much younger days: "They said it couldn't be done..."

Sermons and soda water tomorrow, comedy tonight! Everything is forgiven for Joe--and yes, over the years, there was plenty. But everything changes--now and then. I just received a note saying that the Year of Living Dangerously is over. As one who lived for a while in Indonesia, it really was like that here. Only it was for four years. 

Skip Happy Days Are Here Again, even if they are. I like Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead!!

About That Court

 A good friend said to me yesterday that the new Supreme Court justice does have excellent qualifications, meaning legal ones. My response was that it was a given and should be a given that any nominee these days has the traditional academic success story. But teaching at law school and serving as an appellate judge for two years don't really provide much in the way of understanding the problems of ordinary people.  

I don't judge judicial nominees by their academic standing but I do pay attention to their previous decisions and writings. If  a nominee espouses down-the-line extreme conservatism, I'm not interested in how well she did in law school. She denied having fixed positions on major issues; this was ludicrous, because she has written specifically about why certain key past decisions were wrong. You expect her to reconsider those positions? 

We're in for a bad time. We may need a new president to expand the court's membership just as FDR was finally inclined to do after four years of the Four Horsemen of Reaction: Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. And they were only four. Despite what you may read about the "court packing" episode of 1937, it failed not because the public was against it but because FDR muffed it. He didn't even go over it with his legislative leaders or prepare the ground in any way for the effort.

And FDR acted precipitously, without adequate planning as well as spadework, because his strongest political adviser, Louis McHenry Howe, had just died. Louis Howe never would have let him go into this legislative battle without extensive advance work. He would have made sure that depending on the legislator, either he or FDR or both would have button-holed all of them. 

As has been noted, expanding the court has been successfully proposed and effected by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. Another proposal in today's paper was to set up screening panels made up of rotating members selected from federal appeals court judges to decide what cases should go to the Supremes. That way, the high court justices cannot put a series of cases on the docket to move toward their own personal ideological goals, as several of the current reactionary bunch have been doing.

It's unlikely that we can ever go back to dealing with court membership apart from total political domination of the process. The cats are out of the bag. It's become increasingly partisan as the GOP has returned to its bad old days of putting extreme reactionaries on the court. Democrats for the most part acted as if things hadn't changed--they nominated candidates who were only slightly left of center or actually in the center. The so-called liberal wing hadn't been so liberal for a long time. But just as with the whole Republican party, their nominees have moved way over to the right. Scalia and Thomas set the pattern.

Now that the Supreme Court has jumped right into the political thicket that Frankfurter claimed with little basis that he tried to avoid, and as to which he was wrong, because gerrymandering won't go away when the pols who drew the district lines are the ones in office. Roberts's claim that the nation didn't  need the Voting Rights Act's preclearing was as much of a lie as Trump's saying the pandemic is over.

 

Two Papers: Their Coverage Diverges More Than Ever

 

For as long as I've lived in Washington, I've had the Washington Post and New York Times delivered every morning. It always was obvious that each had its strong and weak points; over the years, one never seemed clearly superior. But recently, major shifts in the way the Times covers many subjects bolster a strong feeling that the Post has taken a significant lead in quality.

National politics has always been the Post's stock-in-trade. It devotes many pages and many signed columns to this cornerstone of its news and opinion coverage. Both papers, despite having superb reporters covering the White House and environs, have of course devoted far too much attention to the current President. But both have probed and published major exposes of the corruption and malfeasance of this administration. Even the authoritative Bob Woodward, while holding the title of Associate Editor at the Post but not actually on current staff, still produces newsworthy accounts based on direct contact with presidents and their top staff members. 

The Times, however, seems to have fallen off in terms of its full coverage. It has produced some amazing exposes in recent weeks--the President's taxes, for one. Yet when one looked at its front page this morning, Sunday, October 25, the right lead was a story datelined Bethlehem, Pa., about why people there felt the current President had done a fine job with the nation's economy. The reporter apparently spoke to no one who disagreed with this dubious finding. Nor did the story suggest that there might be anyone who differed from this conclusion.

The need for significant improvement in both staff diversity and coverage when addressing gender and race issues was long evident. Now, one can rarely turn to the Times without every other story focused on one or both of these subjects. In the Times's arts coverage, in particular, there rarely seems to be room for anything but these two topics, as important as they are. If we still had satirical magazines, or if satire relating to these sensitive matters were allowed to be published, the Times's total focus on them would be ripe for targeting.

In contrast, the Post has had a columnist for the past year or more who addresses issues relating to how women are treated in our society; for much longer, it has had a succession of columnists who focus on problems of race.  News stories that involve these topics receive full coverage. Eugene Robinson is a top-notch writer and has been so recognized for his perceptivity; Monica Hesse strikes me as a fair-minded writer who has identified important areas where women's rights are threatened or unfulfilled, and dealt with them well.