Bile

Re Iraq: “We went in there for a reason. Now we’ve got to finish it.” Thus a nationalist in support of John 100 Year War McCain. Evidently, nationalism is like testosterone; a surfeit of it makes you particularly stupid.

Once, long ago, Hillary Clinton modestly suggested that the Palestinians were human beings, too. In 2000, shitbags Rudy Ghouliani and Little Ricky Lazio both tried using Clinton’s smooch with Suha Arafat against her in her carpet-bagging Senate run. That failed because she had quickly retracted; she’s has been a faithful supporter of the Israeli effort to deny Palestinian statehood and, indeed, even identity, since. So her desperate attempt last night to Farrakan Obama was particularly disgusting, but then she’s learned from the pros like Rudy G. The stench of desperation surrounding her flailing campaign is getting rank.

William F. Buckley is dead. One of the last of Joe McCarthy’s buds; a Catholic nationalist who always defended his daddy’s dirty money, quite the quintessence of American conservatism. Combined with his queenly manners and his mean-spirited little magazine, he was some kinda guy. See you in hell, Billy boy.

I’ve been reading the Stephen Jay Gould omnibus, The Richness of Life, and want to share this from one of his essays, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter.” In 1927, the Supreme Court declared compulsory sterility fine and dandy when Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v Bell, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Part of the eugenics craze of the late 19th & early 20th century, forced sterilizations for “hereditary defects” (including alcoholism, blindness, and deafness) were so popular that more than 30 states had them on the books by the 1930s. These laws were much challenged, and most states didn’t enforce them, but California did, performing about half the total 20,000 forced sterilizations that occurred in the US by 1935. Infamously, the Nazis based some of their thinking and laws on US precedents. Virginia was another state that was zealous in applying sterilization (care to bet on the color of the majority of the victims?) The 1927 case concerned Carrie Buck, who was 21 at the time and incarcerated in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. She was supposedly mentally defective. Evidence was presented that her mother, Emma, was likewise mentally defective; there was also evidence that Carrie’s daughter Vivian was defective, hence Holmes’ “three generations.” Mental deficiency was heredity according to vulgar Darwinism (as Gould points out elsewhere, “social Darwinism” should really be named after Herbert Spencer). Vivian had been examined at six-months, a tad early to be sterilized even by Virginia’s standards, but certainly early enough for the alleged expert, a Red Cross social worker, to declare that she wasn’t “quite normal.” By gawd, three generations were enough! The old men of the Court ruled, and Buck was sterilized (so was her sister, but under cover of an appendicitis).

Vivian died at the age of 8. But in 1980, while Carrie Buck was still alive, the records were brought back to light. Turned out that Carrie Buck was in the Colony because she’d gotten pregnant (raped by a relative of her foster family) and her foster family wanted her out of sight. They dumped her there to get rid of the embarrassment and to cover up the crime. There was no evidence of mental impairment anywhere in the three generations, beyond assumption, pseudo-science, and notoriously flawed IQ tests. Vivian, in the few years of schooling she had, was a perfectly average little kid. The case was really about poverty and sexuality; add “race” to the mix, and we hear its echoes in debates of intelligence, IQ, bell curves, the “cultures” and “pathologies” of poverty, and so on to this day.

Damn, but Gould’s voice is sorely missed in our pestilentially reactionary age.

Trouble

I’m not usually a member of the Democratic Party; before yesterday I can’t remember when I last voted in a Democratic primary. So I come to party machinations late. But it’s beginning to look like the Clinton/Obama contest will go down to the wire of the convention, where the super delegates, some 20% of the total delegates, could well make the difference. What, you might well ask, is a super delegate? Another manifestation of the fear of democracy, that’s what. This short piece explains it nicely: essentially they are the contemporary equivalent of the smoke-filled backroom, the party apparatchiks who maintain party control over the insurgents, grassroots, and other troublemakers. They are the ones who gave us Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, & Kerry. (If Perot hadn’t run, Clinton would have made it five out of five). Nice work, team! Note to self: little wonder I’ve been voting Democratic all my voting life. Since these SDs are mostly politicians (every Democratic member of Congress, for instance, and the Dem governors) and party regulars, you can bet the Clintonoids are working them hard, if they haven’t already stuffed 'em into their pockets.

Prediction

The GOP ticket is going to be McCain-Huckabee.

ABC, damn it!

Now, as usual in our wretched politics, I rarely have good words to say about the candidates. You already know my ABC mantra, Anybody But Clinton, and her top-down, big money, DLC-dominated campaign stuffed by the likes of the corrupt Terry McAuliffe, the ghastly Rahm Emanuel, and Chuck Schumer, the senator from the financial services industry, not to mention all the rest of the hacks who have thrown election after election rather than give in to the grass roots. Thanks to these people -- who every four years pulled out the threat of GOP takeover of the Supreme Court to make the lesser of two evils distinction -- voila, the Supreme Court is the most reactionary since the early 1930s. PLUS, that war she voted for. Shame! Shame! SHAME!

Obama, on the other hand, with his background in community activism, is buoyed by the grass roots. I find this heartening. His politics are currently tepid, but the point of grass roots is that they can push. (This is why the DLC has been so concerned with keeping us penned out.) Most Americans have the mistaken notion that we need leaders. But we are not children. We should be forcing our surrogates to represent us, to follow us... for in a democracy, the people are the leaders. Maybe someday…