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The Last American Aristocrat

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The Book of the Week is “The Last American Aristocrat, The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” by David S. Brown, published in 2020. This hodgepodge of a volume described the subject’s life and times.

In the Boston, MA area, Henry Adams was born in 1837 into a politically powerful, wealthy family. They were in the Whig party, which was anti-slavery. He graduated Harvard in 1858. In the 1870’s, he taught a class on the origins– an evolution over the course of centuries– of the legal systems in England and Germany, passed through generations via Anglo-Saxons.

Adams published his students’ writings, which were speculations. Since Adams was a major influencer in his place and time, such “history” was later published in textbooks. Like a game of “telephone” from one generation of students to the next, history becomes legendary. There’s no way to tease apart the myths from the truth.

In his scholarly lifetime, Adams’s cynicism about politics reached a crescendo by the 1890’s, when he believed there could never be honest government because it was exploited by the following parties (including but not limited to): Congressional movers, Wall Street shakers, bankers, robber barons, Irish, English, Germans, clerics, Jews, socialists and anarchists.

The Anti-American Imperialist League was formed in 1898 amid Theodore Roosevelt’s propaganda campaign to help Cuba gain its independence from Spain (a veiled way of taking a swipe at Spain’s empire). The group argued that America would be hypocritical if it took over the Philippines, given that the likes of the “Founding Fathers” fought off colonial-ruler England to gain its own independence.

Read the book to learn much more about Adams’s life, and how his teachings, writings and lectures inspired other Progressive activists in the generation after his death.

The Long Gray Line

The Book of the Week is “The Long Gray Line, The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1965” by Rick Atkinson, published in 1989. The author followed a handful of men who happened to attend West Point in the thick of the Vietnam Era. He detailed their adventures during and after their military training.

The nation’s situation in the early 1960’s, economically, politically, philosophically, and socially were described thusly:

At the end of Fiscal Year 1962, which ended at the end of June, the federal deficit totaled more than $7 billion.
Influential national and military leaders such as JFK, LBJ, Douglas MacArthur and William Westmoreland inspired an eagerness in the young American male to risk his life for his country in fighting America’s enemies. “A West Pointer’s place was at the front, even in a conflict [such as Vietnam] where there was no front…” West Point taught him to trust the nation’s leaders and be nonpartisan; he wasn’t even registered to vote.
“Communism was bad; America, freedom, and West Point were good. That was the extent of his political philosophy.”
In early November 1963, West Point (Army) beat Air Force in the football game at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Those athletes who didn’t attend the after-game party, went bar-hopping on Rush Street. Because they were wearing their military uniforms, they were surrounded by adoring young females who bought them beer and bourbon.

The next decade would be one of expensive stupidities and disillusionment. There is insufficient space here to even summarize it all. But read the book to learn much, much more about how radically the nation changed when its leadership fooled a sufficient number of people into behaving in ways that resulted in an unnecessarily excessive amount of death, destruction and protestations.

The Fifties

The Book of the Week is “The Fifties” by David Halberstam, published in 1993. This slightly sloppily edited hodgepodge of a volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s journalism entries. As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. The decade was characterized by alpha males with hubris syndrome, egos pushing and shoving, in all areas of American life.

“He delighted in control of the political apparatus, and he started each day by meeting with a trusted aide from the secret police, who brought him up to date on gossip gathered from wiretaps.”

Actually, the above was written about Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. For most of the 1950’s, he was the CIA’s friend. Until he wasn’t.

In connection with the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur exhibited “arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory… taking a small war that was already winding down and expanding it” to fight against Communist superpower China, so the war dragged on for two additional years; “he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China…”

Matthew Ridgway helped save a few American soldiers’ lives by personally visiting all of them in South Korea to boost their morale, while MacArthur stayed in Tokyo, thinking of himself as king of the world. MacArthur thought it was Truman who was irrational. As is well known, about twenty years later, president Richard Nixon repaired America’s relationship with China, but prolonged the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1950’s, the evolution of the American labor movement had taken an ironic, hypocritical turn: Unions allowed Wall Street to invest their pension funds in the securities markets on their behalf.

In December 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks was the last straw– prompting the Montgomery bus boycott. A bunch of factors came together, one thing led to another, spurring great political changes. Just a few included:

Parks was so emotionally tired of the oppression she and her fellow dark-skinned people suffered, she felt she had nothing to lose by rebelling.
Parks had friends in high places in the Civil Rights Movement.
Approximately three-quarters of Montgomery, Alabama public-bus riders were black, and of those, most were women who took buses across town to get to their jobs as servants in the white community.
The white community refused to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
The articulate Martin Luther King, Jr. became the public-relations leader of the Movement, which was nonviolent, and his religious crowd had more money than other groups in the black community.

The blacks outsmarted the whites in an end-run around taking public buses, by carpooling. Donations allowed the purchasing of new vehicles. White Montgomery officials had no clue about how fed up the blacks were with the conditions of apartheid, voter suppression, etc., so they didn’t know what to do when dissatisfaction reached critical mass.

In January 1956, police began arresting carpool drivers. The blacks shed their fears that they themselves would suffer retaliation for protesting, and owned their fighting-back as a point of pride. The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper was used as the local white politicians’ disinformation outlet. Nevertheless, after a while, the whole world was watching, as the boycott story spread like wildfire among hundreds of media outlets– mostly newspapers and TV stations.

The major influencers of the initial incident– Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy– continued to behave in a mature manner, so the media sympathized with them. MLK Jr., remained a thorn in the side of the white community because he took a licking and kept on ticking. He was the recipient of a ton of hate mail, doxxing, death threats, fire-bombing of his residence, etc.

Anyway, another pivotal historical event occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus refused to allow segregation of a high school there in order to ensure his reelection. The orgy of hatred he unleashed, taught Southern politicians– George Wallace especially, “how to manipulate the anger with the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media.”

Just as legislation is a tool that can be used to spread hatred, technology is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes, too.

“Do you get the funny sort of sense that, so far, at least, there are no human candidates in this campaign?”

The above was written by Dean Acheson, addressing Harry Truman, about the 1960 presidential race, packaged by consultants. JFK won because he had the nicer-looking TV image. Nowadays, the candidates can be replaced by AI software, created by consultants.

Read the book to learn much more about both disturbing and progressive, seminal historical events, and the people who made them happen.

Morgenthau

WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Morgenthau, Power, Privilege and the Rise of an American Dynasty” by Andrew Meier, published in 2022.

In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted many of the historical events to which one family tree’s four generations of male Morgenthaus were witness in their lifetimes. Given the tenor of the times, there was probably less documentation on the females, so the author wrote much more about the men.

The story started in the 1860s, when the Morgenthaus began arriving in America. The fifty-five-year-old Lazarus, the family patriarch, along with his forty-one-year-old wife and most of their thirteen children had come from Bavaria. Due to the imposition of tariffs, Lazarus had been forced to close his businesses there.

The family, who considered themselves Jewish but weren’t religious, initially resided in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. Through the decades, Lazarus sold various products with checkered success. His son Henry became an attorney and a securities-industry businessman. Henry’s survival skills allowed him to emerge from a 1905 white-collar crime-scandal with his reputation unsullied. Corruption hearings resulted in new regulations to prohibit conflicts of interest… until the next financial crisis, no doubt.

Anyway, Henry was an opportunist who preached progressive reform but at the same time, was raking in big bucks for himself. He pressured president Woodrow Wilson to appoint him ambassador to Turkey so he could protect the Jews– who were in the minority– in the then-Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine. In spring 1914, Henry was impressed by the Jews’ industriousness there, but felt that if the Jews were all concentrated in one place, they’d be more vulnerable to genocide all at once at the hands of their enemies.

Russia, Britain and Germany all had their eyes on acquiring the territory of Palestine. A few Jews who had fled crushing oppression in their birthplaces were purchasing land from Arabs around Tel Aviv. But at the start of WWI, importation of food was interrupted and the Jews couldn’t afford to buy food. Wealthy German Jews of New York City rushed financial aid to them so that they wouldn’t starve.

Henry naively believed Turkey could be convinced to stop supporting Germany, and become neutral like the United States. But already, the Turks had committed genocide and atrocities agains the Armenians, Christians and minorities, and had launched attacks in the Black Sea on behalf of the Germans. All Turkish men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were recruited by the military.

Unfortunately, Henry had no control over military leaders and war criminals, or over anyone, for that matter. But Henry enjoyed playing “James Bond” before the fictional spy character was even created. Henry’s son, Henry, Jr., considered himself a farmer, and worked on one in Dutchess County in upstate New York. Conveniently, his neighbor was FDR.

As is well known, geopolitics is a complicated business, and president FDR conducted all kinds of secret dealings in his 1940 and 1944 reelection campaigns.

As an aside, in the 2016 and 2024 elections, voters chose a profiteering, sexist man-child over well-educated, politically experienced women with law degrees.

Described that way, the women sound awfully threatening to men, don’t they?

Women who take charge are perceived as bossy while men who take charge are perceived as strong leaders.

True, Donald Trump inherited the mentoring and all the resources required to continue his father’s lucrative business over the course of decades, during which he skillfully arranged sufficient profiteering and patronage jobs for his cronies, and name-recognition everywhere he needed votes.

Arguably, the women had a few disadvantages other than their gender.

Both women had long political histories– all the more opportunities for smearing by the opposition.

The odds were against Kamala Harris specifically because in the last seventy years, only three out of six vice presidents first became president by winning an election rather than by inheriting the presidency via death or resignation: Richard Nixon (1968), George H. W. Bush (1988), and Joe Biden (2020).

Additionally, Harris’ candidacy was doomed due to its extremely late start. Until mid-summer 2024, incumbent Joe Biden refused to withdraw from the race in order to retaliate against his own party, furious that he didn’t get his full eight years. All three aforementioned vice-presidents did a full eight years as such before running for president.

Americans are now hyper-aware of gender issues, and discrimination against women– given the current political climate.

Anyway, early 1922 found Henry, Jr. running a farming-newspaper and making valuable political contacts for his father and himself.

During WWII, Henry, Jr. served as Treasury Secretary in FDR’s administration. In August 1944, General Eisenhower perceived that the German people were as much to blame as their leaders for attempting world domination through evil means, as they spread the hatred, too; they should be punished with economic hardship when the war was over.

The following month, in Quebec, Churchill met with FDR, who invited Henry, Jr. (even though he was Treasury Secretary) to discuss what to do with postwar Germany. Churchill’s preliminary thought was to simply prevent Germany from re-arming, by shutting down her operations in the Ruhr and the Saar. But he didn’t want her to become too debilitated, as in the future, she might help protect Europe against Russian aggression. Russia, which had helped win the war, was gaining a reputation for military strength, and so would have to be allowed to have a say in world affairs.

Henry, Jr. wanted to completely infantilize Germany by forcing her to feed her people via small farms only, with no importing of resources. Her heavy machinery and factory parts should be distributed to European nations (including Russia) whose infrastructure had been destroyed or damaged by her. In that case, since international trade is largely a zero-sum game, England would revive her decimated economy, getting more coal and steel. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, felt the plan to punish Germany was way too harsh, and was merely retaliation. Germany would be so resentful that her people would find a way to make war again.

In October 1944, Henry, Jr.’s aggressive attitude was leaked to the press. He got slammed and FDR’s opponent in the presidential election said Henry, Jr. had put American lives at risk; revealing America’s future plans would incite the Germans to continue fighting instead of surrendering.

Robert Morgenthau was born in July 1919. He became the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York in 1961. He worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General, who advised him to let J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI) take over an organized-crime case of his, so that the FBI would be forced to acknowledge that the Mafia existed, and it would start to investigate it.

Decades later, Morgenthau took over cases of violations of international banking laws, when at least $700 million was illegally wire-transferred from Iran to U.S. and British banks, with information omitted from the transactions. Morgenthau’s bigger concern that Iran was sucking up to Western banks in order to learn how to build nuclear weapons, more than the financial wrongdoing. In summer 2009, the Israelis and Americans cooperated to use malware (the details of which are still classified) to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

“Once again, to Morgenthau’s surprise, Washington stonewalled. The more he demanded that someone go to jail, the more the attorneys from Justice and Treasury spoke of a ‘deferred pros’ — legal shorthand for a deferred prosecution agreement.”

Read the book to learn much, much more about the Morgenthaus and their times.

Zbig

The Book of the Week is “Zbig, The life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet” by Edward Luce, published in 2025. In this slightly sloppily edited tome, the author threw in the kitchen sink on every historical event that occurred during Brzezinski’s lifetime. Yes, Brzezinski was a major influencer of certain events, but such brief descriptions are overwhelming (or tedious and boring!) for young students of history. For more knowledgeable readers, this is a reference book.

Anyway, Brzezinski’s ancestors were royal family members in what is now Poland. Brzezinski was born in 1928 in Warsaw, but spent his early childhood in various European countries. In autumn 1938, his family fled Europe for Montreal, Canada. He became a Canadian citizen in 1951, and an American citizen in 1958.

Academically, Brzezinski was a genius. He won all sorts of awards. Together, he and Carl Friedrich of Harvard’s Department of Government theorized about totalitarianism of the U.S.S.R. In their book, they wrote of its traits: a monopoly on violence and communications, a majority group who truly believes in their ideology which is imposed officially, ruling by fear and force via law enforcement, and a government-directed economy. But the U.S.S.R. didn’t have a majority group of true believers; it was comprised of diverse territories and peoples. Sounds familiar.

In the second half of twentieth century, Brzezinski’s counterpart turned out to be Henry Kissinger, president Nixon’s foreign-policy sidekick. Kissinger had been born in Europe, had a foreign accent in the United States, was multilingual, and was enjoying a brilliant career. When Brzezinski saw what Kissinger had achieved, he realized he himself had a chance to do the same. He did, as president Jimmy Carter’s foreign-policy sidekick.

After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the CIA claimed that Khrushchev said the U.S.S.R. would economically catch up to the United States by 1970. Kissinger agreed with the CIA, that that would happen. Brzezinski personally visited the U.S.S.R. and saw that it was in decline. His writings contradicted the prevailing Cold War nonsense.

It was unclear whether the CIA was extremely incompetent in its intelligence-gathering, or was lying in order to incite Cold War animosity among the American masses. Journalists would call such dishonesty, “disingenuous” but nowadays, the public is wise to propaganda such as that. There is hyper-awareness of the general conditions of every country of the world.

Brzezinski became obsessed with convincing those around him that the world should simply let the U.S.S.R. dig its own grave. In 1972, he, along with a few other alpha males with hubris syndrome, founded the Trilateral Commission. It was a nonpartisan think tank that contemplated the geopolitics of the future. The opinions the Trilateral Commission expressed were perceived as evil in different ways on both sides of the political spectrum. That might have been intentional. Currently, all think-tanks are partisan, but there is still this kind of super-rich boys’ club running the United States.

Kissinger, knowing journalists find it easier to write stories about colorful characters who make foreign-policy rather than write stories about complicated foreign-policy issues, played the media. He stroked their egos. Brzezinski accused him of flip-flopping, but the two maintained a relationship of healthy disagreement and civil discourse; they kept the drama going to stay in the headlines in order to stay relevant.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Brzezinski and his times.

The cliche is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the last forty years, three presidents of the United States have become senile while in office: Ronald Reagan, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a song about that, and other universal political conundrums.

EVERYTHING IS CYCLICAL

sung to the tune of “Everything is Beautiful” with apologies to Ray Stevens and to whomever else the rights may concern.

A politician loves his flock of voters,

all the voters of his world.

He’s always ready to fight.

He cares nothing for wrong or right.

A politician loves his flock of voters in his world.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

The voter is in a bind, as backroom deals he cannot see.

We must prepare for what’s in the minds, of our leaders who say we’re free.

At every election, the hypocrites are standing by.

You know candidates’ resentments smolder.

It’s time to take action on ethics and grow up.

Honest stakeholders need to get bolder.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

We shouldn’t care about Trump’s unruly hair, or his apish orange skin. We must focus on his crimes and make sure they don’t happen again.

We need to work together now. Dictatorship is out. Fine.

Stop wasting time on trivial distractions, my friend, and pay liars no mind.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America…

The Making of A Leader

The Book of the Week is “The Making of A Leader, The Formative Years of George C. Marshall” by Josiah Bunting III, published in 2024. This short volume detailed the career of a war hero, up until the late 1930’s.

George C. Marshall, whose name is fading from the public’s memory, was best known for playing second fiddle to Eisenhower in WWII, but he still did a good job. He was born in December 1880 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. As a military officer, he played well with others, even his subordinates.

During WWI, Marshall got glory for deploying American troops and equipment across France, more efficiently than was thought humanly possible. He made a small dent in reducing the total number of deaths (close to 52,000) and wounded (close to 200,000) in that war.

In summer 1919, after having experienced or heard about the horrors of the war gone by, most Americans’ attitude was anti-authoritarian and pacifist. They highly doubted a new dictator would rise up anytime soon; moreover, military aggression was so expensive. Contradictorily, perhaps desperately clinging to his job, General Peyton March, secretary of war, believed the United States should have a large military of half a million already-trained men at-the-ready to deal with future threats. General John Pershing, a WWI hero, thought half of that might be necessary, as additional men could be trained quickly.

The government assigned Marshall to be an instructor at military schools on and off through the years. In the early 1920’s, he became gatekeeper and assistant to the aforementioned Pershing, military chief of staff. This new Washington, D.C. administrative job also stalled his career. Commanding soldiers in a war was the fastest way to win medals, and get a promotion to a better military title and rank.

One time, a group of men from the Tennessee GOP came to Marshall’s office when Pershing happened to be out of town, to urge Pershing to run for president. Marshall turned them away. For, he knew Pershing would be another Ulysses S. Grant as president– a naive leader whose administration was horribly corrupt.

Through the decades, Marshall was paid very little money, but when stationed overseas, his family was provided with household help in what was considered luxury accommodations in those locales.

Read the book to learn much more about: Marshall’s personality, his colleagues, and how his talents were arguably wasted when he was assigned to sit behind a desk and push paper instead of training men to fight; and the first forty years of his working life.

The Playbook

The Book of the Week is “The Playbook, A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War” by James Shapiro, published in 2024.

In the 1930’s, American president FDR implemented programs to help the unemployed during the Great Depression. One was the Works Progress Administration, a sub-program of which, Federal Theater (hereinafter referred to as “FT”), put thousands of people to work. However, there were numerous complications every time the group wanted to put on a play, because there were a dozen unions with whom to negotiate.

FT produced thought-provoking shows that starkly portrayed the dangers and immorality of fascism, totalitarianism, slavery, racism, etc. It risked having its funding cut for its political correctness. In autumn 1936, FT was able to stage the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here because MGM had decided not to make a movie of it.

FT opened the inflammatory play in eighteen big cities across America. In Seattle the cast was inter-racial. New York City performed the play in Yiddish. The traveling version lasted 133 performances. Fortunately, audiences interpreted the play all different ways politically.

In September 1937, FDR signed affordable-housing (what activists for the downtrodden would call “gentrification”) legislation that was diluted due to fears of:

government competition with the private sector;
over-regulation;
budgetary excesses;
and Southern states’ getting short shrift because they were more rural than urban.

In response to the above, in 1938, FT staged One Third of a Nation. That theatrical production demonstrated how stakeholders treated America’s slums, which accounted for where one third of the nation’s population resided, according to FDR, as of early 1937.

The movie version was Hollywoodized– its funders were purchasers of distressed assets and profiteers. They made it a story about poor whites with a romantic subplot involving a “kindly capitalist” (the absentee landlord, or in the real world– a slumlord). A suicidal arsonist prompted the landlord to rebuild the place with trees and a playground. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Anyway, FT’s most vicious enemy turned out to be Martin Dies, a U.S. Congressman from eastern Texas, first elected in 1930. He had the KKK mentality, with xenophobia and misogyny thrown in. In 1935, he got himself on the Rules Committee, the most powerful committee in the House.

Dies also fast-tracked his power accumulation with his endless persistence. In 1938, he finally got himself appointed the head of a special committee that investigated a hot-button political issue; this, by chance, through teaming up with the exact right person who could help him– Samuel Dickstein, a Congressman from New York City who was equally driven to amass power and attention. They secretly allied with vice president John Nance Garner, who was on their side.

By spring 1938, their committee was claiming it was trying to root out subversives, Fascists and Communists, and prevent violence at Nazi rallies in America’s streets. But they had questioned a politically active Nazi who stayed right under their noses, and they failed to investigate him further!

Their real motive was to execute a smear campaign against FDR himself, in addition to his New Deal, and unions. So FT became an easy target, too. Ironically, “He [Dies] envisioned the hearings touring nationally, moving from city to city, beginning on the West coast and ending back East.”

One of Dies’ star investigators, Hazel Huffman, ignorantly equated Progressivism, racial integration, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism with Communism in her testimony. She recited verbatim lines from the FT’s scripts, out of context as evidence of Communist propaganda. Dies backed her up. They were so entertaining– newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasters presented her nasty, biased utterances about the FT, as fact. Dies realized he needed to keeping directing fresh accusations at FT and the WPA to keep the media in his back pocket.

Read the book to learn yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun, in terms of demagogues who use age-old propaganda techniques to amass sufficient power to commit crimes, oppress their fellow citizens, and spread hatred far and wide with total impunity.

Tip and the Gipper

The Book of the Week is “Tip and the Gipper, When Politics Worked” by Chris Matthews, published in 2013.

Exactly two weeks after Republican (and former Democrat!) Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, both of Irish ancestry and of the same generation but with class differences, met to see how they could cooperate in the new administration. They found little common-ground politically, but were able to socialize outside of work.

Reagan’s agenda on the budget was as follows: pass a tax cut for the rich, increase military spending, and reduce the national deficit at the same time. He expected major savings would be had by cutting programs such as education, the arts, food stamps, college loans and Social Security– the sacred cow of the Democrats. He truly believed that that would balance the budget, and maintain America’s national security against the “evil empire” of the then-Soviet Union.

Reagan ended up needing Democrats’ House votes to raise the debt ceiling. O’Neill shrewdly told the head of communications on Capitol Hill to personally send a letter to each of his fellow House party-members urging them to vote “aye” on debt-ceiling legislation, thus putting a political favor in writing.

The following video details the sleight-of-hand Reagan employed.

An additional way of looking at Reagan’s dogged mentality of refusing to face reality is this quote, from Bertrand Russell: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” Also called “hubris syndrome.”

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about how Reagan and O’Neill clashed at work, but were still able to have civil discourse and healthy disagreement, while passing legislation that maintained America’s democracy.

Speaking of democracy, here’s a little song that describes the current messaging of the Trump administration– however unsavory it may be, but allowed, because free speech is a major ingredient of democracy.

WITCH HUNT ON BIDEN

sung to the tune of “Wichita Lineman” with apologies to Glenn Campbell and to whomever else the rights my concern.

They’re the leaders of the Trump PR team,
and they drive the main smears.
Searching everywhere for what his base,
wants to hear.

They put propaganda on the news wires.
They’re desperate to fill air-time.
And the witch hunt on Biden, distracts from Trump’s slime.

America needs a long vacation,
from this criminal reign.
A lot of GOP insiders’ consciences are cracking, from the strain.

Trump’s media thinks it can brainwash you.
They’re doing this on your dime.
And the witch hunt on Biden,
distracts from Trump’s slime.

Troublemaker

The Book of the Week is “Troublemaker, A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties” by Bill Zimmerman, published in 2011. The author was a true activist– he sacrificed his livelihood and risked his life to work for causes he believed in. Kudos to him.

In his twenties, the author made a major life-decision that made him look like a righteous prick (excuse the crudeness). He opposed the powers-that-be via participating in street demonstrations and civil disobedience. Later on, he felt he was more likely to change the world via engaging in humanitarian actions and working within the system.

Born in December 1940, Zimmerman grew up on Chicago’s West Side. In 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, he helped African Americans register to vote. In May 1966, the author and other anti-Vietnam-War protesters occupied the administration building at the University of Chicago. He learned from an experienced activist, what to do in connection with making demands of the school officials, to get what they wanted.

President LBJ was running out of cannon fodder (who were mostly non-white, poor men) for his war in Vietnam. So he had the Selective Service System (the government’s military-draft authority) do away with students’ ability to defer their service until after graduating.

The older generation of men– WWII veterans– viewed draft dodgers as cowardly, unpatriotic and selfish. They were unaware that their tax dollars were paying for the U.S. military’s committing of atrocities; one kind involved torturing pairs of enemy soldiers (National Liberation Front guerrilla fighters) by taking them up in a helicopter, and throwing one out the door so the other would be terrorized into revealing his side’s State secrets.

The author wrote, “Flower power [a 1960’s idea pushed by antiwar activists and people in the counter-culture] meant freeing men from outdated norms of masculinity that sapped their sensitivity, their poetry, and their urge to share instead of dominate.”

It was widely known even then, that the three major ways to redistribute societal wealth, consist of: 1) reforming campaign financing practices so that election winners are those who get the most votes, not those who are wealthiest; 2) having the least unfair tax system– encouraging citizens to start entrepreneurial ventures via financial assistance while also taxing the super-rich on the back-end for having taken advantage of existing infrastructure and front-end incentives; and 3) having a social safety net for those individuals who have unluckily been born into sucky situations, and providing opportunities for everyone, as far as egalitarianism is possible.

As is well known, in the first half of the 1970’s, there were lots of behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving president Nixon’s sidekick Henry Kissinger, with his secret diplomatic missions and his role at the Paris Peace Talks, to purportedly end the Vietnam war. South Vietnam’s leader, Nguyen Van Thieu, ran a corrupt regime, and he was eventually forced into exile, compliments of American taxpayers.

That theme– the propaganda-suffused, and CIA-assisted ousting of various dictators around the world– had already become a cliche since the 1950’s. A Mad Lib could be made of it: “He then consoled himself by fleeing to ______ [a place that would accept him] with $_______ [money he had looted from his homeland that supplemented his offshore financial stashes, that also might serve as tax shelters if he had U.S. income] stolen from the aid the U.S. had given to _______ [his former territory].” In recent decades, for obvious reasons, there has been less of this Cold War nonsense.

Anyway, as is also well known, the Japanese in WWII dogmatically would have fought to the last man, guerrilla-style. It was known that America’s supposed enemies in Vietnam had the same mentality. Yet, regarding Vietnam, the unbloodied elites and chickenhawks in the U.S. government failed to take a lesson from both the WWII’s Japanese and from the French in Dien Bien Phu.

Fortunately, the vast majority of current world leaders have had enough of genocide and atrocities, and are ready to sit down at the bargaining table to negotiate the distribution of rare resources (especially those that will fulfill their energy needs) crucial to their homelands’ economic development for decades to come. Slowly but slowly, the world is making progress in the humanitarian arena.

Nevertheless, worldwide, human beings have evolved so that the super-rich now own:

show business;
professional sports teams;
gambling entities;
Silicon Valley, and
Wall Street.

They have become one big, incestuous network, married to politics. The situation has spawned excessive (especially in the United States):

pardoning of criminals;
lawsuits;
deregulation;
smearing;
lies;
conflicts of interest, and
deception via AI-generated images, and pre-recorded video clips (especially of the president!)

This calls for a funk reggae fusion rock parody.

ELITIST REVENUE

sung to the tune of “Electric Avenue” with apologies to Eddy Grant and whomever else the rights may concern.

[Ploys. Ploys.]

Now ov’r resources, there is violence.
And profi-TEER-ing to be done.
One hand washes the others.
And in charge, are fortunate sons. Oh, no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Abortion, wars, and the border.
Can’t bear to watch a thing on TV.
In their world, it’s a challenge,
to push the envelope infinitely. Good God?

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

We’ve gone extreme in this country.
Money and revenge are job-one.
Lawyering and manipulation,
and our Constitution is done. Oh no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Oh, Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

AI is Fox’s playground, on the dark side all-around.

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh yeah

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

$ $ $

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Zimmerman’s life and times.

Yankee From Olympus

The Book of the Week is “Yankee From Olympus, Justice Holmes and His Family” by Catherine Drinker Bowden, published in 1944. The bulk of this volume recounted the lives of the members of Supreme-Court-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ family, beginning with his grandfather.

Born in March 1841 in the Boston area, Holmes was born to the white male privilege typical of his generation. His father was a prominent medical doctor. The Protestant Work Ethic dominated the aristocracy. Due to the potato famine in their homeland, Irish families were arriving on America’s shores in droves. “Boston had developed a caste system toward them almost like the Southern feeling for the Negro.” The South End neighborhood’s Irish boys threw hard snowballs or mud at boys such as Holmes, who attended private school.

Holmes acquired life-experience in psychological and physical trauma as an officer in the American Civil War. After his military discharge, he simply went over to Harvard Law School to sign up, paid the $100 a-year tuition, and in autumn 1864, began attending lectures. There was a total of three professors at the school. He didn’t need to take any tests, or do any assignments. Yes, times have changed.

Holmes practiced debating fellow students, though, and was told to read various texts written by law students or attorneys, that expounded on contracts, jurisprudence, or jurisdiction. At that time, academic culture consisted of males who were (presumably passionate about the law) mostly self-starters, sufficiently mature and disciplined to undertake independent study. Working at a law firm after graduating, Holmes became somewhat famous for writing articles for the Harvard Law Review.

Through the 1870’s, Holmes hated the drudgery of practicing law, and basically wanted to be a one-man legal think-tank. At the dawn of the 1880’s, he presented a Harvard lecture series to lawyers and their ilk, but his new theory was heretical for his generation. He suggested that public opinion should play a role in how the law was shaped. In 1882, as a Harvard law professor, he used the Socratic method along with the newly instituted case-analysis curriculum.

In 1904, a case reached the U.S. Supreme Court that tested the Sherman (antitrust) Act. If the monster-sized Northern Securities Company of merged railroads was going to restrain trade, then it should be dissolved. President Theodore Roosevelt believed in free-market competition and therefore became known as a monopoly-buster. But he was a political hack, and aroused public opinion whichever way was expedient for himself. Holmes (by then a Supreme Court justice) believed the law should be crafted pursuant to the economic tenor of the times, without regard to conscience, morality, politics, self-dealing or art.

Holmes was a quick study. He had already formed his opinion about each case before arguments of both sides were even finished. The other justices took months to give the impression that they had spent a long time thinking about a case, so as to come to the correct decision. That’s still the situation today.

The reason some justices make everyone wait, is that they use the delay as a form of control. Or, they are putting on a show of discussing weighty issues because they have big egos– they think they’re saving the world with their decisions, though some issues are not a matter of life and death, and affect only a tiny percentage of ordinary Americans. Anyway, Holmes’ fellow justices complained that his writings were too brief, so his meanings might be misconstrued.

As is well known, in early 1932, the United State was suffering extreme economic hardships from the Great Depression, at which time Holmes humbly realized he was no longer mentally competent to do the job of Supreme Court justice. The nation shuddered at the scary prospect that President Herbert Hoover got to choose the next justice. Ordinary Americans were crying out for more regulation. The Court already had a solid conservative majority, and adding another conservative would worsen most Americans’ situations by (excuse the cliche) making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the lives of the Holmes family members.