Letter to the World

Dear World,

Not all Americans are deluded souls or ethically challenged losers. I feel it is important to insist on this point, believing, as I do, that there are those who would dispute it.

Granted, our president is an ethically challenged loser, as are some of the people he associates with, for example, Donald Trump, Jr., Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Rob Porter, Mike Pence, and…okay, pretty much everyone he associates with.

But please note that Donald Trump was not the popular choice of the voters in the last presidential election. Most Americans did not vote for him. Only 62,985,134 did. The rest of us are innocent!
 

Really, if it weren’t for the quirkiness of the electoral college system, along with at least one other factor (or, what is known in Moscow as a “фактор”), Donald Trump would not be in the White House today.

Recently Trump has argued that many of our school teachers should start packing heat. Yes, go ahead and read that sentence again; it is what I meant to write. And it is true. Trump really thinks it would be a terrific idea to have America’s teachers stride into the classroom with their shootin’ irons at the ready.
 

You may well ask, “What kind of incredible loser would want to see teachers and suicidal maniacs having shootouts in the halls and classrooms of public schools???”
 

The answer of course is a violence-prone or ethically challenged loser. The kind of loser that thinks the NRA, in its relentless quest to promote more profits for America’s gun manufacturers, needs a little boost from the White House. And this kind of loser, by the way, is characteristic of practically all the Republicans in Congress today, the Republicans being party that has decided that ethics are bullshit.
 

It is worth noting (as many others have) that every country in the world has mentally disturbed individuals, and every country has law enforcement officials who sometimes fail at their job – as did the deputy who declined to enter Stoneman Douglas High School last week to confront that school’s maniac killer. But not every country is awash with automatic weapons. That’s just us. This doesn’t make us all losers! Only the politicians who strive to put automatic weapons at everyone’s fingertips are losers.
 

America actually has some truly amazing people, people who are the opposite of losers. In support of this statement I submit to you the students who have been leading the discussion about our need for better gun control. These young people are incredible – and they’re Americans! See what I mean?
 

So please, World, don’t give up on us. We will be normal again someday, I promise you. And when we are, it will be because of people like these young Americans - who are striving with all their hearts to make our world better.
 

Sincerely,
Culture World

                       Photo: Newsweek

Guns and Posers

For about 30 years (ca. 1982-2012) I wrote a more or less monthly column for my old hometown’s newspaper, The Ledger, of Polk County. Sometimes my writing was rewarded with hate mail, and it gradually dawned on me that the two topics that generated the most hate mail from my fellow Floridians were guns and racial equality. The writers of the hate mail loved the former and hated the latter. At first I didn’t see a link between these two issues, but finally I got it: what connected them was paranoia, irrational fear of a supposed threat. So if you want to receive hate mail, I recommend you write a piece like the one I'm working on here - a quick blurb that does not show love for the gun industry.

Today Orlando, of all places, has become associated with gun control issues, and this, along with the Democrats’ Congressional sit in, forces me to think about guns, something I generally don’t like to do.

   Orlando, Florida - my Boring, Bougie Neck of the Woods

 Actually, when the killing at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub took place, I was in Canada attending a wedding with my family. Because of this, I didn’t feel the emotional impact as powerfully as I might have, had we been home at the time. The impact did get to me, however, yesterday when I visited the site of the crime and saw the many comments and symbols left by caring individuals on behalf of the victims. I was surprised at how quickly I was reduced to tears at the site. Perhaps it was because it is a hangout for a lot of people who are dear to me - friends and former students.

           Pulse - With Wall and Memorial Markers

While we were in Canada, my wife and I had dinner at a Toronto restaurant in which a friendly waiter chatted with us about our trip. When we mentioned we were from the Orlando area, the mass shooting came up at which point he said to us, “That was an attack on my community.” At first I didn’t get what he was saying, and I asked him if he was also from Orlando. “No,” he said, “I’m gay.”

I should have understood more quickly. After all the Orlando killer didn’t target Pulse because of the city in which it was located.

       Winter Park's First Congregational Church 
                Birthplace of Rollins College

But back to guns. A terrific article in the current New Yorker by Evan Osnos digs into the multiple strands that bind the arguments over guns together. One point that leaps out at me in his piece is the fact that the gun industry is fundamentally anxious to maximize its profits by boosting sales. This, of course, is normal capitalism, when normal products are at issue.

What makes the “maximize profits” precept problematic here is that the proliferation of guns is resulting in deaths that need not occur – a few of which Osnos’s article describes. The current scenario, in which the gun industry, bolstered by the lobbying power of the NRA, pushes gun sales to the limit, reminds me of the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s. Tobacco executives at that time, though they knew their product was killing people by the thousands, peddled a bogus story that helped it maximize profits, no matter the cost in lives.

As Osnos writes at one point, “…a whistle-blower named Robert Hass, who had been Smith & Wesson’s marketing-and-sales chief, said that companies knew far more than they admitted about how criminals obtained guns, and that ‘none of them, to my knowledge, take additional steps…to insure that their products are distributed properly.’”

Of course they don’t, because capitalism says you must maximize profits, and taking such steps would surely put a dent in those profits. It seems the magic of the marketplace can make both ethics and lives disappear in a puff of smoke.

Osnos concludes his terrific piece with the comment that the pro-gun and anti-gun worlds are growing further apart to the point where each side is coming to see the other as wishing to inflict harm. I can’t say I disagree with this entirely, though as someone who would like to see stricter gun controls, I don’t think of myself as exactly “anti-gun.”

I can sympathize with hunters, with people who, misguided though their ideas may be, would like to have protective guns in their households, and so on. What I don’t have any sympathy for are such grossly misguided notions as that household guns are necessary for our “freedom,” and that increased regulations are somehow the tools of tyranny. These ideas are - not to put too fine a point on it - nutty. And I am especially hostile to the linking of ever-increasing gun sales to the raw avarice of the profit motive – a motive that has no regard for the bloodletting it triggers.

             

            On the Memorial Wall outside of Pulse

Hell Is for Sleazos

There was a time when the only citizens who enjoyed “Second Amendment rights” were those belonging to a well regulated militia.

But, since conservative presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, began packing the Supreme Court with conservative fanatics, the originalist, common sense interpretation of the Second Amendment was rejected in favor of a looney interpretation that appeals mainly to gun profiteers.

Even Justice William Rehnquist, a  conservative Nixon appointee, regarded the newly emergent pro-gun court as guilty of fraud (his word) in its bizarre interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The amendment, in its entirety, reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

In other words, gun ownership is not an inherent right for every nut case or conspiracy theorist in America.

The post-Reagan justices, however, (by five to four majorities) have decided that gun ownership is indeed the “unalienable right” of such nut cases or anyone else who, for any given problem, likes to keep murderous options on the table.

God willing, we will see a Democratic president in the White House after 2016 and she or he will put normal human beings on the court who will return the Second Amendment to where it stood for 200 years – as an adjunct to well regulated militias.

Part of our problem is that there are some rather cunning conservatives who are much better than the rest of us at conjuring up misleading verbiage. The very use of the phrase “Second Amendment rights” is an example of this. The gun lobby supporters have effectively created the impression that this amendment has nothing to do with militias, when, in fact, that’s all it has to do with (or did, until the court fanatics began to pretzelize its logic). The country would be well served if we could insist on the originalist phrase “Second Amendment militia rights.”

Speaking of language, even the very name of the NRA is dishonest. The real purpose of this organization is not to serve the interests of gun owners, the majority of whom want to see tighter regulation of gun sales. No, the NRA’s purpose is to serve gun manufacturers and sellers. Since these profit-driven industries are focused on maximizing income, they will do anything to boost sales, and if this means the school shootings will go on, that’s not, apparently, a problem for them. The NRA promotes their agenda, not the interests of the gun owners who favor tighter regulations. So, I have to believe that we will all benefit if, instead of saying NRA, we were to refer to this organization as the “NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby.”

A little awkward, admittedly, but so much more honest than simply “NRA.”

While we’re on the topic of honest language, there are a few more phrases, foisted on the public by cheesy propagandists, that need to be modified or replaced. One of these is “job creators.” Republicans spout this term when they want to continue the trend that diverts all of America’s wealth into the hands of those who are already super-rich. “Don’t raise taxes on the job creators!” is the slogan, implying that taxing Donald Trump will mean that your unemployed brother will never get a job.

But the real job creators are the middle class and the poor. The so-called “job creators” only create jobs when these ordinary citizens boost demand by spending their money. These people, the middle class and the poor, have the potential to create jobs, or at least they do when conservative policies don’t break their economic backs as happened in 2008 (and 1929).

Think about it: if people like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump really are the “job creators,” why the hell didn’t they start creating jobs in 2008?

Even the phrase “free market” is 90% bullshit. I think conservatives like to toss it around because the word “free” is closely tied to the idea of all that is good in America. But how “free” are so-called free markets?

When WalMarts started taking over retail sales in towns all across America (except for parts of Vermont!), the immediate result was that thousands of small business families that had operated freely for generations were crushed. “Theoretically,” these families could have got their hands on several billion dollars in loans, established contacts with slave-labor manufacturers in Asia, employed illegal tactics to stifle unions, funneled money to members of Congress who would write laws in support of their practices, and then competed “freely” against WalMart on its own terms. But only “theoretically.”

In reality, their only freedom, once their longstanding family businesses were bankrupted by WalMart, was the freedom to accept minimum wage jobs at WalMart, often shaped so as to strip them of benefits.

So is this capitalist market really free? As an Animal Farm pig might have said, “In capitalism, all of us are free, but some of us are freer than others.”

Because of the deceptively positive tone of the phrase “free market,” I recommend that every time some right-wing pundit tries to promote lower taxes and looser regulations on “job creators” for the sake of the “free market,” we call Bullshit! on his or her use of the phrase “job creator” and, furthermore, insist that he or she replace “free market“ with the more apt term “capitalism.” “Capitalism,“ I believe, is more morally ambiguous, and hence, more accurately represents what goes on in the corporate-dominated economic arena in which we now struggle to survive.

                              Hell: Next Nine Exits

When Dante toured Hell, he found the Fourth Circle occupied by sinners whose souls were driven by Greed. Their punishment included spending eternity pushing huge weights, representing the wealth they had grasped at in their mortal lives. Here, I think, is where Dante might have encountered the “job-creating” Walton family, had 14^th century Florence been afflicted by WalMarts.

   Fourth Circle Dwellers with Their Money Bags

But where should the NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby end up? Well, there is the Seventh Circle, reserved for the Violent. But maybe they’d have to migrate back and forth between the Seventh and the Eighth, the latter dedicated to those guilty of Fraud.

I don’t know, though. After this week’s killing in Seattle, and especially after the Sandy Hook children’s massacre of 2012, I’m inclined to think the NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby belongs in the center of the Ninth Circle; I suspect this organization might be an avatar of Satan himself.

                            Dante's Cold-hearted Satan