Marching for Our Lives - March 24, 2018

I’ve written before that racial hatred and the love of guns seem to fester together as part of a noxious stew in the hearts and minds of some Americans. But recently I’ve become aware of another correlation, one between domestic violence and mass killings. According to an NPR report of November 7, 2017, “perpetrators of domestic violence…accounted for 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014.” The data for this statistic comes from the FBI and media reports as analyzed by Everytown for Gun Safety.

I’m not sure how we can put this information to practical use, except possibly by keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. This means, for one thing, current regulations have to be enforced. The same NPR report cited above points out that “the Texas gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley [who shot up a church congregation], was court-martialed for assaulting his wife and their young child in 2012, although this information apparently was not included in the formal government database that tracks such things.”

The domestic abuse-mass murderer correlation makes me weep for my fellow males. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not hostile to men in general. As I’ve said before, I am not anti-male and, in fact, many of my best friends are men. But there is in our society a certain way of being male that can spell Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for Violence. A key feature of this troubling version of masculinity is its glorification of the male capacity to whup ass or otherwise wreak havoc. I feel sure that this concept of maleness underlies the actions of domestic abusers who wind up killing so many.

I have a suggestion to offer with regard to dangerous males, and I will broach it here even though I realize it is utterly impractical: What if males were to be made ineligible to own guns? Wives, mothers, daughters and female friends could own them, but the men would have to check them out for temporary use - only with the women’s permission.

Okay, this is an impossible dream, but I would like to point out that if it had been in place over the past 20 years, many hundreds of people whose lives have been lost in mass shootings would be alive today.
 

On a slightly more practical level, why not amend the Constitution to nullify the individual’s right to bear arms? For decades the Supreme Court used to rule that this “right” was restricted - as the framers intended - to those participating in “well regulated militias.” But, when conservatives gained control of the Supreme Court, they overturned these customary rulings and expanded this right to all Americans, militias be damned.

Now please note that most democratic countries don’t insist on the right of citizens to weaponize themselves, and yet these countries all continue to be securely democratic. We Americans could do the same. And think about how out of date the Second Amendment is. After all, a militia in the eighteenth century had the capacity to effectively resist federal forces, but this is clearly not the case today. I don’t believe anyone with a lick of sense thinks that the citizens of Lubbock, Texas, (for example) could fend off an incoming division of U.S. Marines by relying on their household arsenals – no matter how many AR-15s those arsenals contained.

In other words, the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect citizens from an overweening federal government, but this Amendment is useless for such a purpose today. What protects us from having a division of Marines overrun our home towns are the values instilled in those Marines and their commanding officers – basically, their devotion to American democracy. We can thank their high school civics teachers, among others, for those values.

I don’t believe it’s necessary to deprive every American hunter or responsible gun owner of his or her guns. But I do think it would be a step in the right direction if we could get gun owners to admit that democracy does not depend on or even benefit from private gun ownership.

In the meantime, what practical goals can we hope to reach today? Well, taking my cue from the remarkable young students who flooded the streets of American cities yesterday, I would say we should hope for:
 

1. A ban on assault weapons
2. A ban on high capacity magazines
3. Universal background checks for all gun purchasers

And about those students, Wow. Hats off to them. Who would have thought, before the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy, that hundreds of thousands of young people could mobilize and organize in such a dramatic and at the same time touching way? I am so impressed. May the Force be with them as they shake Congress to its NRA-funded roots.

In case you missed them, here are a few pictures of these young heroines and heroes.

        Marching in Washington, DC. 

 From Evelyn Hockstein, The Guardian

         11-Year-Old Naomi Wadler, Washington, DC

                      By Andrew Harnik, AP

                           Athens, Georgia
Photo by Joshua L. Jones, Athens Banner-Herald via AP

Once these young activists have achieved their goals, maybe we can start rethinking the Second Amendment.

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

Trump : Iranians : : Holden Caulfield : Ancient Egyptians

Wouldn’t it be cool if our president weren’t an idiot? Of course, even if he weren’t intellectually challenged, he would still be a pathologically dishonest narcissist, so there’s that.

But still, you could argue that Nixon was not as horrible a president as Trump is because at least Nixon was not stupid.

What started me thinking about this was a comment by my keen-eyed spouse when she pointed out the similarity between Trump’s language and that of Holden Caulfield, adolescent protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. Her comment was provoked by a New Year's Eve tweet from the Doofus in Chief.

More on that tweet later, but right now I’d like to make a point about Trump and Iran that seems to have escaped his notice: He is neither admired nor respected by most of the people of Iran. His anti-Muslim bigotry is well known, and his UN speech last September was widely scorned by the Iranian people as insulting to them.

Besides this is the obvious contrast between the clownishly belligerent Trump and the intelligent and open-minded Obama. One thing I learned on my 2015 trip to Iran is that Obama is widely liked and admired there. Since Trump took over, the Iranians don’t feel they have a friend in the White House, and they certainly don’t see in Trump a leader who respects them.

It is true that the Iranian government is authoritarian and it is particularly unpopular among Iranian liberals, but right now President Donald Trump is equally unpopular. His “words of encouragement” are not helpful to freedom-loving Iranians.

And now, back to those words: here is what Trump tweeted on New Year’s Day:

“Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!”

The simplicity of the language and the utter ignorance it expresses are what call to mind Holden Caulfield's pathetic “Egyptian” essay. Here, as a sample, is a passage from The Catcher in the Rye about the conversation poor Holden has with “Old Spencer,” his disappointed history teacher:

“We studied the Egyptians from November 4th to December 2nd,” [Old Spencer] said. “You chose to write about them for the optional essay question. Would you care to hear what you had to say?”

“No, sir, not very much,” I said.

He read it anyway, though. You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.

‘The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere.’

I had to sit there and listen to that crap. It certainly was a dirty trick.

‘The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.’

He stopped reading and put my paper down. I was beginning to sort of hate him.

“Your essay, shall we say, ends there,” he said in this very sarcastic voice.

If Holden were a real person I would feel obligated to apologize to him for having compared him to Donald Trump. After all, Holden is at heart a decent guy. But still, Trump’s level of thought about the Iranians, and his clumsy and misguided way of talking about them are uncannily similar to Holden’s take on the Egyptians.

I should add here that I have a special place in my heart for the people of Iran, since I was the Iranian students’ club adviser in a university where I once taught out west. Also, on my 2015 trip to that country, with my buddy, Professor Li Wei, I learned that there was (at that time) a great deal of good will toward the United States among most Iranians. We have a lot to offer each other, we Americans and our soul sisters and brothers in Iran, if only we didn’t have a crude, anti-Muslim blowhard occupying the White House and standing between us.

             Iranian Protestors Taking It To The Streets
                  (From the Washington Post)