Month: September 2019

This is about law and justice, not politics

It is not surprising that, the morning after Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of formal impeachment against Donald Trump, the blither-blather in the media is all about politics. Impeachment certainly has political consequences. But must we agree that the impeachment process as specified in the Constitution is inherently a political rather than a legal process? To make that claim is tantamount to saying that facts and the law don’t really matter, that only the polls matter, or how senators would vote if the House sends impeachment to the Senate.

Nancy Pelosi’s short statement yesterday was a masterpiece. Clearly she was speaking to history, focused on the law, the evidence, and the Constitution. No doubt Nancy Pelosi has done, and is doing, plenty of political calculus. But politics is secondary. Regardless of the political consequences, Donald Trump must be taken down because he is a dangerous criminal whose goal is to turn the American democracy into a Russia, with Donald Trump as the American Putin. Even if bringing Trump to justice is somehow politically damaging to the Democratic Party, as some of the blither-blather predicts (I disagree), then impeachment must be done anyway. As Nancy Pelosi said, no one is above the law.

One of the factors that makes this morning’s blither-blather ridiculous is the assumption that the impeachment investigation in the House of Representatives won’t uncover and prove the facts of Trump’s crimes. It will. Those facts will be devastating to Trump and will horrify the American people, with the exception, of course, of the 22 percent or so (the “base”) that will unquestioningly follow Trump all the way to hell.

Regular readers here know that my expectation for a long time has been that Donald Trump is going to prison and that he is not likely to even finish his term, let alone run again in 2020. I hold that view simply because Trump has committed so many crimes in so many jurisdictions. His being installed in the White House surrounded by goons gives him many ways to throw sand into the machinery of investigation and justice. Part of his strategy is to posture as such a Big Man that the law and mere snowflakes in the Democratic Party can’t touch him. But Trump will be brought to justice, and he will go to prison. If he doesn’t, then the American democracy and the rule of law will have been defeated. We will have become Russia. But I don’t believe that will happen.

You can be certain that the Republican Party is doing political calculus. For example, yesterday the U.S. Senate was very quick to hold a 100-0 vote on a resolution calling for the release of the whistleblower report to Congress. That was a warning to Trump about how quickly the Republican Party will turn on him, when that becomes necessary. It will become necessary when Republican political calculus sees that Trump is going down and that Trump must be thrown under the bus to try to salvage the 2020 election. My expectation continues to be that Trump will resign sometime before March 2020, when the first state primaries will be held. An earlier resignation would benefit the Republican Party, because states with early primaries have filing deadlines in late 2019. The Republican Party has repeatedly shown that party power is all that matters. The moment Republicans determine that Trump is a loser, they will turn on him. The Republican Party will do everything it can to avoid chaos in fielding a new candidate for 2020 after Trump goes down.

Yes, Trump will be looking for some kind of deal in exchange for resignation. But no deal will keep him out of prison, because his crimes in New York State cannot be pardoned or bargained away. Trump’s dream, of course, is a criminal dynasty with Ivanka or Junior up next. But they’re going to prison, too.

I am not claiming to have a crystal ball. I hold the views I hold because I believe that the law is much bigger than Donald Trump, because many of his crimes have already been exposed (if not yet proven and displayed to the American people) and are sufficient to keep him in prison for the rest of his life, and because I see Nixon’s resignation as a template for what the Republican Party will do upon concluding that Trump is doomed.

Nigel Tranter

I wish I could say that the prolific historical novelist Nigel Tranter left us with a rich and readable lode of historical novels set in Scotland. Unfortunately, I cannot say that, having just finished Sword of State.

Sword of State opens in the year 1214, when the young Patrick, the 5th Earl of Dunbar, is sent by his father to take a message to the even younger King Alexander II of Scotland, who has just ascended to the throne. The two young royals immediately become fast friends. For the remainder of his life, Patrick was friend and fixer to King Alexander.

Tranter cranked out something like 90 novels in his long life. He died in 2000 at the age of 90. Sword of State has a 1999 copyright. Tranter wrote this novel when he was approaching 90 years old.

As a novel, Sword of State fails. Many of the most important ingredients of a good novel — mystery, subplot, suspense, emotion, complexity — are missing. What kept me going is that I greatly liked the characters, and it mattered that they were once real. Tranter’s career as a writer started with an interest in castles. So there is plenty of castle atmosphere. Clearly Tranter also was fascinated with maps and terrain, and my guess is that he visited and was familiar with most of the settings. Detailed topographical maps of Scotland would make a handy guide when reading Tranter. As with Tolkien, I learned new words for types of terrain and water, such as “mull,” “kyle,” and “burn.” This novel would be quite rewarding to a reader whose main interest is what life might have been like in 13th Century Scotland. But its weakness as a novel is that the narrative, long on exposition and short on action, follows a simple and single trajectory as Tranter checks off the main events in the lives of Patrick and Alexander. Characterization, and some of the dialogue, is pretty good, though.

According to the Wikipedia article on Tranter, his novels are “deeply researched.” No doubt that is true, though I wonder what his sources were. This taste of Tranter left me wanting to know more about early Scottish history.

If this novel has a villain, it’s the church. This does not surprise me. My guess would be that Tranter would agree that the Celtic world would have been vastly better off if the church had never existed. Tranter’s churchmen are greedy for land, money, and power. Popes should have names such as Avarice III or Ruthlessness VI rather than, say, Celestine IV.

I was angry when I finished this book, because of how Patrick died — miserably and uselessly, far from his Scottish home. He was killed in the Seventh Crusade. This crusade was sponsored by Pope Innocent IV, who pressured kings, including of course Alexander, to send money and men to fight “the infidels.” This particular bit of madness and genocide by the church cost 1.7 million lives.

Pope Innocent IV, by the way, was executing a decree written by Innocent III, Quod super his: “Innocent decides that if a non-believer refuses to accept and adopt the teachings of Christ, he is not truly a full human being and therefore is undeserving of humane treatment and subject to force.” This decree was used in the 19th Century to justify American genocide against native Americans. Some kinds of people never change. Today’s politics and the theologies that go along with it didn’t just come out of nowhere, did they?

Video: the Isle of Lewis and Harris

Here’s my video from last month’s hiking trip on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. I decided not to add a music soundtrack to this video. You’ll hear what the camera heard — mostly wind and water. This is a high-definition video, but you should be able to select lower definition in the toolbar if your Internet connection is slow. But watch it on a big screen, if you can.

Drag queens reading to children?


Photo credit: dragqueenstoryhour.org

What is it about the conservative mind that totally flips out at the idea of drag queens? Even most of us liberals, I imagine, raised our eyebrows in surprise upon first hearing about Drag Queen Story Hour. It’s edgy for sure. But, upon reflection, liberals realize that children love costumes, and that every single one of us wears a costume every single day, because, if we don’t, we’ll get arrested. And liberals like the idea of children learning that it’s the person inside the costume that really matters, and that we all get our own free choices in how we present ourselves to the world. On the other hand, where conservatives are concerned, Drag Queen Story Hour has been gasoline on the fires of the culture war.

The New Yorker has a new article with the title “David French, Sohrab Ahmari, and the Battle for the Future of Conservatism.” For those of us who try to make sense of the addled authoritarian mind, this article is a must-read. Sohrab Ahmari, who was born in Iran and who converted to Catholicism in 2016, calls Drag Queen Story Hour “a five-alarm cultural fire.” He argues that such a thing is so dangerous that conservatives should set aside the First Amendment and use whatever coercion is necessary to stop drag queens from reading to children. This must be done, he believes, to defend “traditional morality.”

As you might imagine with someone who lived in San Francisco for many years, it has been my honor to have met many drag queens and transexuals. People who have been misunderstood and mistreated all their lives, if they survive with their wholeness and goodness intact, are very likely to have spent a great deal of time thinking things through and drawing some conclusions about what really matters. I have learned a great deal from them about what it means to be human. I remember reading some years ago (though I have not been able to find a reference) that studies have shown that religionless gay people generally score higher on tests for moral maturity than do priests. That does not surprise me, because, to authoritarians, thinking things through is dangerous. One’s beliefs about morality are to be received from moral authorities and are not to be questioned. But, freed from tradition and authority, one might find one’s way much more quickly to the leading edge of moral progress. During the 1980s, for example, while most of America was in a state of moral panic and moral paralysis on the matter of AIDS, it was the drag queens who stood with microphones under the lights of America’s gay bars to educate the at-risk population about what was going on and how to stay safe. No doubt they saved countless lives.

As a heretic and beneficiary of the First Amendment (which people like Ahmari would set aside), I think it is important not only to speak up for those who are different and whose differences are good and benign, but also to heap ridicule on the foolishness and hypocrisies of authoritarians. For example, Google for “Jerry Falwell Jr. and pool boy.” That’s a story worth following. Don’t miss the stories about that West Virginia bishop and his depravity: “A penthouse, limousines and private jets: Inside the globe-trotting life of Bishop Michael Bransfield.” While searching for photos for this post, I had a lot of good laughs at the photos of churchmen in their robes and finery, which I would call drag. I’ve included an example below, as well as the famous video of a priest slapping an infant during a christening.

I feel mean, and a bit guilty, when I write snarky posts like this one. But I do believe that public ridicule and public expressions of contempt are our best defense against the moral defectives who tell would people how to live. “Traditional morality” is a harder and harder sell. Why can they not see why?


Bishop Michael J. Bransfield, now disgraced. Would you trust your children to someone in this kind of costume?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dtITrtpyEE

Or this one?

Envying the U.K.’s public transportation


Paddington Station, London. Just look how clean it is.

I added up the number of hours of travel required to get from Acorn Abbey in the Blue Ridge foothills of North America to Stornaway on the isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It comes to about 28 hours. Of those hours, 25 hours were on a plane, several trains, a bus, and a ferry. Only three hours was by car — getting from the abbey to the Raleigh-Durham airport for the flight to London Heathrow. Can you guess which part of that long trip was the most unpleasant?

Purely by accident on this trip, the ferry was the most unpleasant. That was because storms and gale-force winds off the North Atlantic were blowing into the sea channel between the islands and the Scottish mainland. The ferry, which was not small, reared and bucked through scary wave after scary wave, with seawater crashing against the windows way up on the passengers’ observation deck. Everyone tightly held onto their seats, and there was a great and contagious chorus of gagging and throwing up, which would have been funny but for the exhausting work of keeping one’s eyes on the sea, one’s grip on one’s seat, and one’s lunch down. But, had the weather off the North Atlantic been more placid that day, then the ferry would have been a lark, and the worst part of this 28-hour trip would have been the drive to Raleigh over America’s rude highways.

Even the 6.5-hour flight, on a Boeing wide-body 777 operated jointly by British Airways and American Airlines, was not that bad. Those two airlines have figured out that the best way to keep passengers entertained on long flights is to keep bringing free food and drink.

While the U.S. continues to pave itself over with ever-meaner highways, the U.K. remains a nation of trains. Yes, the trains tend to be crowded. Passengers more than doubled between 1997 and 2014. The U.K. is investing billions to expand and upgrade the rail network. The rail system is a true network, with carefully constructed schedules that usually give you just enough time to change trains when your destination is off the main routes. The British people are brilliant at boarding trains quickly, so station stops are short. Often you meet interesting people. I had planned to sleep on the train from Oxford to Edinburgh, but I ended up having a long conversation with a retired gentleman from York who gave me a good perspective on how people feel about Brexit and the state of the world. Unsurprisingly, most of his questions about the U.S. were about guns and Trump, two facets of American life that Europeans have a very hard time understanding.

The U.K. trains are nicely tied in with the Internet. You can buy tickets with your smart phone. While you’re on the train, the Trainline app will use GPS to show you what train you’re on and what stations you’re approaching.

Where the trains don’t go, the buses will get you. Even on the remote western side of Lewis and Harris, the buses out of Stornaway dropped us off a short walk from our Airbnb accommodations.

In the U.S., it’s just a given that conservatives hate trains and love to kill them off. George Will once said, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Liberals’ love for trains is often attribued to “Euro-envy.” I enthusiastically plead guilty.

Note: I’ve had a number of things to attend to and haven’t yet had a chance to work up my photos and video from this trip. I hope to get that done within the next week or so.