WOW

After listening to Republicans grill the unflappable Kitanji Brown Jackson during the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I wondered what a concerned, fair-minded nobody would say? What if that concerned nobody was me?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, after watching hours of questioning from those whose duty it was to ascertain whether you are fit to be appointed to the highest court of the land, I had many condign comments, but I shall leave the  descanting  on that all too often scurrilous testimony to professionals. I will limit my response to one word.

WOW

I am glad (in a way) that many Republicans performed so abominably. Their wretched darkness contrasted all the more with the bright light of your intellect and integrity. The sun shining at midday is striking--but if the sun shone at midnight, that really would be something. That beaming something, I'm delighted to say, was and is you, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

WOW

Slava Ukraini!

 "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!" An updated version would replace Mexico with Ukraine and the United States with Russia. Geography supplies a turbulent history in both cases. 

I was born a few months after the Second World War. Unlike many of my younger compatriots, I am familiar with the horror--millions starved--that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine and the even greater horror of the subsequent Nazi invasion, the brutality of which caused the death of millions of lives.

I periodically imagine the terror of aerial bombardment. Lying in a bed while the ceiling falls over me after a bomb struck my house. Running down a street flanked by exploding houses. Waking from a  nightmare to discover that my house and I are still there. For now, I tell myself, for now.

I once met a woman who survived the terrible fire-bombing of Dresden, which took place in February 1945. I wrote a poem a few years later to commemorate the fiftieth year of the city's destruction.

The Survivor

She saw on her home street
a host of Judgement soldiers
plunder everything,
crack shock troops of total war,
each one  a six-foot flame.

Moma, that was many years ago.
It's as if she hears angels,
confined to the head of a match,
scream in pain as it ignites: among them
her parents and their youngest child.

Her family fled to the cellar;
she ran outside, terrorized
by an army of flames,
running without looking back
until she reached New Jersey.

She never talked about it
until one day in her old age
the low drone of a jet became
a flock of bombers: she ran outside,
fleeing the heat of her stove.

Our house is on fire, our house is on fire--
Come, this will put the fire out,
I tell her, a Sisyphus task,
trying to put out the fires of hell
with spoonfuls of nursing-home Jell-O.

2.

Well, it has happened many times since. And it is happening again.

I remember talking with a man whose parents were both Holocaust survivors.  He told me he had been convinced that, after the brutalities of the Second World War, civilization had learned its hard-won lesson. No country would be stupid enough to wage war again; its citizens wouldn't let them, he told me. This was during the Viet Nam war. He had long since realized his illustion. People haven't changed at all.

For seven decades after 1945, much of the world has enjoyed a long stretch of unprecedented peace. Alas, this is due solely to the fact of the presence of nuclear weapons. Although individuals can act "Gospely," that is, treating each other with loving-kindness, in aggregate the old saying homo homini lupus (man behaves like a wolf to man) still very much holds. Individuals, however, often act savagely as well. If, say, a terrorist had his way, I, as an American, even if I were as good as Gandhi,  would be killed, felled by the poison darts hurtling from his vicious eyes. There is enough hate in this world to bury all saints and sinners alike. It's sad to say, but if you live in a major country, only nuclear weapons assure, however temporarily, that you haven't been incinerated yet.  Things haven't changed for the past 100,000 years; like chimpanzees, we can be loving and kind, like chimpanzees, we can be wickedly vicious. When one crazy, powerful chimpanzee has amassed weapons', including nuclear weapons, and is willing to use them, one realizes that the separation of humanity from thuggery is merely a step and a thought.

3.

Many years ago I translated from the German a group of poems and a diary by a young Jewish woman. Ruth Rosenfeld, who escaped Germany just before the border closed. Here is what she wrote in 1934:

Worse than beasts, they struggle, even kill
For power: men, more ruthless than a pack
Of wolves preparing to attack.
They eat, yet they remain unfilled,
Full-filled with one desire--hate, still?

Without end, human animals wage war,
No longer heed their center. Tearing peace asunder,
They rush on, greed-obsessed, to plunder
Everything. What's good they godlessly ignore,
And God remains beyond us, more and more.

Hate, still? Yes, Ruth, unfortunately, yes. This poem could have been written today, and--if we survive--probably could be written tomorrow.

A thug with delusions of grandeur is running amuck. Over Ukraine, his neighbor. Fear of nuclear war limits intervention. The result is alas! the slaughter of innocents. Pity that poor invaded country, so far from God, like us all, and so close to Russia!

Putin obviously underestimated the resisitance of the patriots south of the border. They are fighting valiently for their country,  and will eventually win. When his identity is at stake, a thug, however, will not back down. That vile man has painted himself into a corner. Good news? Ultimately, perhaps; but it will take a lot of death and destruction before he reaps what he has sewn. When a rat is cornered, it bites.

The worst might be yet to come, but I am confident that Ukraine will survive. It has to. But at what cost?

Adam has Cancer

 You know Adam, you know Eve. No, not in the biblical sense, of course, but in the history-of-mythology sense. (If you believe literally in Partriarch Uno and Matriarch Una--and if I were a lot more devious than I am--I would be tempted to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.) Well, if you know those two, you certainly know what came between them. Though at my age I know a great deal about the problem of good and evil, I am not exactly their symbol, the apple. O yes I am. Or soon will be. Let me explain.

Plato recounted the myth that primordial man was neither male nor female,  but a combination of the two. Why did Zeus decide to split the androgenous thing apart? Let me guess. They suffered from fatigue; they lacked goals; they were phlegmatic; they were, no matter their age, old. After his sword went snickersnack, howwever, each half became obsessed with hooking up with the other. Sex was born; vitality increased; romantic love as well as sexual obsession have been with us ever since.

Now let us put both myths together. Let us write our own myth; let the  ruddy little sphere between them, the apple, represent a half-Eve, half-Adam androgynous blob. Now let's go from myth to reality: that adrogenous blob will soon be me.

An aggressive form of prostate cancer forces me to take a course of hormone therapy before I begin a six-week course of radiation. You  may recall that Alan Turing, so important in the development of computers, was also  the man who used his Turing Machine to break a Nazi code, which greatly aided the Allied war effort. His reward: chemical castration. Homosexuality was illegal in those days; he was given the choice to rot in jail or become an Eve-and-Adam apple.

What have I got to complain about? Old age unites old men and old women. Wrinkles and ageism go hand in hand.  Before one's forgotten completly, being ignored can help make a crabapple wise.

There I go again! Like most human beings, I have done some terrible things over the years, including acts of commssion and sins of omission, but, like most human beings, I've gotten away with it. My path doesn't lead to a fork in the road, hormones to the left, jail to the right; I have no choice but to walk straight on and join all those pitiful apples in the sad orchard ahead. There I go again!

If any reader is in the same condition as I am now, here is good advice; cheer up and walk on; it's not so bad. Since I made the decision to proceed, I have experienced feelings of relief. Go with the flow and all that. And, besides, there is a good chance that after treatment I will leave the androgynous apple of good and evil behind and become an  incarnation of good and evil, Adam, again. 

Yes, the fruit of research is good, very good indeed. Without it, without the support of the medical experts and staff at Hopkins, I would soon be looking up at that orchard for a very, very long time. Yet I have miles to go berfore I sleep. And I shall sleep soundly tonight.

(P,S,, I've read that women in Japan rarely suffer form hot flashes during menopause. This is probably due to the consumption of tofu, a food which contains naturally occurring estrogens. Arigato, Sisters!--lucky for me, we cook tofu a lot.)

To self and other selves all over the world: Be thankful! Keep breathing! And at the very least, survive.

Comments welcome. Especially from those who suffer from a  serious illness.

The Actual Apple

If you are still trying to figure out the meaning of life, stop looking: the answer is here. Love and wisdom. In other words: human relationships and a cosmic connection. Western research has shown that success, expecially monetary successs, though important, is not the most important thing in life. In Donisetti's opera, Anna Bolena, Anna sings (loudly over a full orchestra) what is most important to her: Amore e Fama--Love and Fame--well, she is half-right, and her emphasis on the lattter goal will cost the diva her head in the last act. How many other heads and hearts have been lost among those for whom competition and greed are primary? Countless? Countless.

As I've written many times before, when the concept of separation, the idea of individuality, that is the human ego, arose by natural selection, humanity (or perhaps even pre-humanity) made a large step forward. Without the conviction that one is a separate individual, culture and scientific progress would not be possible. Yes, but we must not forget that we livc in a  fallen world: man's inhumanity to man is everywhere in evidence. (I'm writing this during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.) As the Buddha taught, the root cause of mental suffering is tanha, striving, desire, greed or however you want to translate this seminal word. 

There are only two ways to avoid, at least briefly, the trap of tanha--you guessed it, love and wisdom. Love provides relief from the burdens of ego by devotion and service to others. As Augustine taught, Love, then do what you want. Easier said then done, of course, but one can put love to work whatever one's situation. (If you already know this and are putting this truth into practice--and you're under forty--you're lucky. Keep it up! If you know this and are putting it into practice and you're well over forty, you are heading for an old age where love and wisdom more than balances the burdens of years.)

The other route to transcend the limitations and problems of ego is through wisdom. Wisdom is the insight, the fact, that everything is connected. The little self is an illusion. The immensity of the cosmos is not frightening to the wise. The splendor of the vast universe induces awe, and awe always trumps ego.  Whenever the vastness makes one a bit dizzy, one regains one's balace by praciting our other primary task, service to tohers.

In this little essay, we will discuss the interconnectedness of all things. I will start with a quote from the wonderful book, The Art of Happiness, a discussion about the important things of life between the Dalai Lama and a psychiatrist:

Yet that afternoon, as I listened to the Dalai Lama, something happened. As "Our Dependence on Others," was not my favorite topic, my mind started to wander again, and I found myself removing a loose thread from my shirt sleeve. Tuning in for a moment, I listened as he (the Dalai Lama) mentioned the many people who are involved in making all our material possessions. As he said this, I began to think about how many people were involved in the making of my shirt. I  started by imagining the farmer who grew the cotton. Next, the salesperson who sold the farmer the tractor to plow the field. Then, for that matter, the hundreds or even thousands of people involved in manufacturing that tractor, including the people who mined the ore to make the steel for each part of the tractor. And all the designers of the tractor. Then, of course, the people who processed the cotton, the people who wove the cloth, and the people who cut, dyed and sewed the cloth, the cargo workers and truck drivers who delivered the shirt to the store and the salesperson who sold the shirt to me. It occurred to me that every aspect of the shirt came about as the result of others' efforts. My previous self-reliance was a complete illusion. As this realization came over me, I was overcome  with a profound sense of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings.

--The Art of Happiness, Howard Gutler M.D., page 66.

If this is true for a shirt, and it is, imagine how true this is for living things, an example of the epitome of which (as far as we know) is an amazing concatenation of matter and ?, namely, you!

How long has evolution been going on? How old is the age of the Earth? The great scientist, Lord Kelvin, estimated the age of the Earth to be 300 million years maximum. He knew that the Earth and the Sun evolved at the same time, but he knew nothing of the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs in the Sun. This is the reason his estimate of Earth's age was way-off. Scientist today know that the Earth (and Sun) are over 4 billion years old. Life began over 3 billion years ago. Evolution involved single-cell organisms (viruses and bacteria) until the Cambian explosion, 541 million years ago. Plants and animals have been evolving ever since. Humans, as we would recognize them today, have been around for only 100,000 years. 

That evolution has produced so many fascinating creatures over the eons is a 'secular miracle.' Each creature is a 'miraculous' result of evolution, including us, but not only us. (To paraphrase Whitman, do not criticize the tortoise for not being something else.) Each has followed its own path to greater complexity. Humans, smart as they are, have been dumb enough to be causing the many extinctions of the present age. Once magnificant creatures like the white rhino disappear, and there  are only two left, they go, bar cloning, forever. Tragic.

But the subject here is different. The rhino and other animals didn't appear, as the bible would have it, all at once: they are the products of eons of life on earth. They didn't appear 'out of the blue'--if plants hadn't increased the oxygen in the atmosphere, animals would not have evolved. If the cosmos didn't exist, the Earth and Sun couldn't exist; if the Earth didn't exist, life couldn't exist; etc etc. The great chain of being is dependent on living links, which are/were in turn dependent on the inorganic properties of Earth and Sky. In other word, everything is interconnected!

I will end this little piece by quoting in full the best poem I know which celebrates the interdepencence of all things, a poem by the German author, Michael Ende. It is a wonderful illustration of wisdom, the knowedge of the many factors that have resulted in everything we see and are.

The Actual Apple

A writer and a  realist, well known
for literality,

searched for something found at home

to delineate from A to Z:

an apple, for instance, an organic bit,

and all that goes along with it.

He described the core, the pulp, the skin,

the stem, the leaves, the branch, the tree,

the roots, the ground the roots grew in,

and Newton's Law of Gravity--

But that wasn't the actual apple at all;

he must include spring, summer, winter, and fall,

the sun and the moon and the stars--

He filled enough paper to paper a wall,

yet the ending seemed farther than quasars:

for actually he belonged there too,

(this man of prose who hated verse,)

and Adam and Eve and I and you

and God and the whole universe--

Finally he became fully aware

that apples are just indescribably there;

neither he nor another shall ever define

something so common, something so sublime--

He lifts his apple to the light;

smiling now, he takes a bite.

Michael Ende

--translated from the German by

Thomas Dorsett

Misery Repeats Itself: August, 1968 and February, 2022.

 On August 20, 1968, I sat alone in my railroad apartment on the fourth floor of a dark walk-up located at 214 East 85th Street in New York City.  It was nighttime when I heard the news. A National Geographic map of Czechoslovakia was next to my bed on the wall. The Russians had inavaded! It made me so sad that I began to drink. I don't remember what I was drinking, but I do remember that I took too much of the stuff. I was at the point of tears.

I was young then; I am old now. Now it's a map of Ukraine. The Russians have invaded once more. What good are an old man's tears?

I will not drink too much this time; my health will not permit it. But once again, with great sadness, I think of a country full of men, women and children being viciously  attacked militarily by its northern neighbor. What can I do? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Except document my sorrow with a blog.

I hope those that read this blog in the distant future will be living in a better world. I doubt it.

It is the night of February 25, 2022. The Russians have entered Kyiv, the capital city. The Ukranians are putting up a stiff resistance, but they are up against a vast army of Russians. I just saw a young man on TV--He could hardly speak Engish, but told the CNN reporter that it was his duty to defend his country. Was he married? Yes. Did he have children? Yes. Was he afraid?  His face assumed a tense expression as he said the following, "Only stupid persons aren't afraid!' What will happen to him? I don't know, but I know what will happen to many like him. 

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?  Is it sweet and fitting to die for one's country? No, Horace. Amarum et decorum est pro patria mori. Replace 'sweet' with 'bitter' and there you have it. Old people have known this for centuries.

Trump's support for Putin--he claims that Putin's  strategy is 'pretty smart'--that along with the pro-Russia stance of so many of his followers is especially outrageous now. I have yet to hear the liberal media use the 'T' word. They are traitors, nevertheless. 

Once again, the vanity of one man is about to cause the death and suffering of many. He has failed his country as he shells another. 

When will we ever learn? As the chorus of the high priests reply to Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute--Bald, bald, oder nie! (Soon, soon, or never!)

Life is very hard as it is. (If you don't agree, Putin or no Putin, one day you almost certainly will.) To mow down human beings, the wise and the foolish; to deliberately make the latter earth before Earth has a chance to set them on age's arc, which tends to lead one to wisdom, is despicable beyond words.

When will we ever learn?

Bald, bald, oder nie?

In Memory of an Unknown Cousin

 1.

They took you on a German day,

Europe still under its clouds.

You, who were certainly my cousin

however many times removed,

were removed from passive neighbors

still in unbombed houses, by night;

you were going to live and work and play

somewhere in Poland, they said.

2.

A scientist, a cook, a movie star,

a balding neurotic, or my son's teacher

(he hates him)--fifty years later

up from a nightmare, I wonder,

smoke, what you would be? Black

coffee. Morning's ritual begins. Again

water comes out of my shower, not gas;

I have no right to write your eulogy.

ll.

Fifty years later? You can tell that this poem was written long ago. It is now eighty years after the Holocaust began, a hell that still seers this old man's mind.  It occurred several generations ago, a great-grandfather's lifetime ago, yet we forget those times at our peril. Is jack-booted hate rising from the ashes of the past? I wish I could be sanguine; instead, I am scared.

The poem first appeared in a magazine, The Other Side, that is long since defunct. I better change the subject or I'll need an anti-depressant.

lll.

The poem was written in memory of a fictive cousin. My real cousin, the only one I had left, died yesterday. His name was William Dorsett. He passed away, I'm told, comfortably in his sleep on January 15, 2022.

Well, I guess I have the right to write a eulogy for him. It is, however, another eulogy for an unknown cousin, for we only had minimal contact in the past sixty years. 

Bill was born in September, 1940, a few days before my brother's birth. His namesake father and his mother, Ceil, had a second child 1n 1944, a boy named Richard; I was born a few months later. Soon tragedy struck: Richard died at about one year of age, from (perhaps) meningitis. My uncle Bill and my aunt Ceil took it hard and decided to move out of the area. They moved to Kirkland, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. There they remained and there they died.

They visited us often, at least for a while. I remember as a young lad waiting on our porch in Jersey City, waiting for their arrival. They drove cross-country and had just called to tell us their arrival was imminent. Our family sat on the outside steps of our house, located at 163 Congress Street in Jersey City. which my grandfather purchased in 1949. (He and my grandmother lived on the ground floor; my father, mother, brother and I lived on the two upper floors. There was no separation between us; we had the run of the house).

There were about a dozen steps on the outside of the house which led to our family's entrance on the second floor.  We could use the downstairs entrance as well, the door to which was located behind the outside stairs. Under the stairs was a huge coal bin--we heated the house by coal in those days. I remember crawling into it on several occasions and tossing lumps of coal about in the dark. I couldn't have been more than six years old.

There we were, my mother, father, my brother and I, arrayed on the front steps awaiting the arrival of the West-coast section of our family., circa 1956. After waiting an hour or so, I remember thinking, "I thought they were almost here. Where can they be?"

They arrived. I almost still can hear our shouts of merriment.

My Aunt Ceil was a stout woman who stood about five foot five. She was very sensitive about her weight. I remember one time, during a later visit, we took the local bus to New York City. We were in Central Park on a beautiful day. My bother wanted to snap a photo; Aunt Ceil made sure that her torso was hidden by the nearest tree. She thought she was too fat to stand full-bodied in a picture that was sure--in her mind--to cause embarrassment! This was well before our current let-it-all-out age; she wasn't obese at all. Aunt Ceil was adopted as a child from an orphanage in Finland. Whatever Finnish she had  known had long since been forgotten.

My Uncle Bill was slightly shorter than my father and stood at about 5' 7''; he was not overweight. He was a jolly sort; as an example of his humor, I remember him telling us that his wife 'had been vaccinated by a Victrola needle.' No, he couldn't have made it as a stand-up, but he was a good man.

My cousin Bill was tall, smart, lanky and high-strung. His parents loved him, but often--especially his mother--criticized him a lot. I think she expected perfection.

Every December for several years, we looked forward to receiving a box of Christmas gifts from them in the mail. I suppose they looked forward to receiving ours as well. I don't remember what any of those gifts were, but I sure remember that they had been lovingly and colorfully wrapped.

Cousin Bill and I corresponded for a while. Now that I think of it, I'm sure Aunt Ceil made him write to me--how else could you get a fifteen-year-old boy to write to his ten-year-old cousin? In one letter, I made a reference to 'Mow-Mows.' Somewhat later I received a reply in which I was informed that both he and his mother had been greatly amused by my misspelling of 'Mau Mau,' a reference to a Kenyan secret society bent on expelling Europeans from Africa.  Funny how some things stick in your mind despite so many things that have been forgotten!

In 1960, my mother and I took a trip to visit them in Washington state. (My mother wailed softly as we went over the Rockies in a propellered plane. She thought we were going to be 'sucked down into the mountains,' she later told me. This was the first plane trip for both of us.)

Our relatives had a small house surrounded by an acre of greenery. We had a good time, but most details of our trip remain a blur somewhere in my mind. One often recalls only emotionally charged events, and this trip was no exception. On one occasion, we were climbing down a hill in a national forest. It was a very hot day; my mother got overheated. While she lay on the grass to recover, I can still see and hear my aunt chewing out my poor cousin  for not having watched  over my mother more carefully. On another occasion, while visiting Mount Ranier, my uncle suddenly felt ill. He pulled the car over. Cousin Bill, then about 19, volunteered to take over the wheel. He didn't get very far. The car bucked and shimmied a bit, then came to a stop. (Perhaps my cousin forgot to disengage the emergency brake?) Well, Aunt Ceil yelled at Cousin Bill and wouldn't let him drive farther. I can still see the disappointment on my cousin's face; I think he wanted to show off his driving skills, poor guy.

Cousin Bill had developed a prominent nervous tic by this time, which included twitching of the mouth and eyes. Let me repeat: Aunt Ceil was a good woman, but could also be a stern critic.

Well, 1960 was the last time I saw Cousin Bill in the flesh, though we remained in periodic contact.

He contacted me about ten years ago. He had found an article in a German magazine that had to do with a sad event in the family. Another first cousin of mine had been shot down over Germany in 1944. He was the gunner of a bomber. He apparently survived the crash with a broken leg but didn't survive the war. What exactly happened to him we do not know.

When my uncle was informed over the phone, he apparently shouted, "Junior's been killed! Junior's been killed!"  I was born shortly after that terrible war was over.

I translated the article for him. We had a long and pleasant phone conversation at the time.

After that we lost contact again. 

Cousin Bill spent his professional life at a hospital in Regina, Canada. I'm not sure, but I think he was responsible for ordering technical equipment. This, I do know: he was quite intelligent.

I don't know how I knew, but Bill had been engaged to a woman with two children in Canada. It apparently didn't work out; Bill remained a bachelor until his death.

Another cousin--my father had been the youngest of nine--kept in contact with Bill. I talked with Cousin Jean many times. She was about to arrange a visit to the NBC Studios in New York, where another first cousin, David Dorsett, had been the chief cameraman for David Letterman for years. But the visit never occurred; Cousin Jean, who never smoked in her life, had contracted cancer of the lung and soon died from the disease. (She had told me that the doctors didn't want to aggressively treat the tumor, since she had become old and 'would probably die of something else.' Indeed.)

Jean had told me that Bill had become obese and a bit of a recluse. He died alone in a nursing home in Kirkland. Sad.

My wife's family, of which I am still a part, is large; mine isn't. I had been trying to contact my cousin to reconnect; I am ashamed to say that my attempts, however, were minimal. I didn't know about the nursing home until I had been informed of his death on the day after his passing. Strange to say, but I had been trying to find information on him online on the day of his death. I had a feeling that he was no longer with us. Unfortunately, I was right. 

The sketchy life of my cousin I have provided indicates that he was also an 'unknown cousin' like the one in the first poem. After Bill's death, I composed another "In Memory of an Unkown Cousin" which follows:

In Memory of an Unknown Cousin

                                      --William Dorsett (1940-2022)

 

1.

A peach shares its secret--

Misquoting a more famous

poet and pediatrician

I take communion from the fridge

and eat it in Bill’s memory—

The peach is delicious;

so juicy, so cold.

 

2.

Hope our shared genes 

expressed our shared humanity:

before you left, I hope you knew

what I know now: despite the pit,

life and death are exquisite,

inexplicable and whole

as an ordinary peach—

Last first cousin, rest in peace.

Thomas Dorsett, January 2022

The Wallace Syndrome or Liar, Liar, Earth's on Fire

1.

Barack Obama once made a comment that I now paraphrase: Politicians must stretch the truth sometimes (often?), if they want to stay in power, but they must know where to draw the line. If they don't have core beliefs--one of Obama's core beliefs, for instance, was the passage of universal health care; if they will do anything to stay in power, their core is like that of a not too recently discarded apple's, rotten mush, even as they present their deliciously shiny outer selves to the public. Sometimes (often?), they go too far and their inner core dies, like a spruce destroyed by climate change. I call this phenomenon, which plagues current politics, the Wallace Syndrome. George Wallace, (1919-1998). served as governor of Alabama for four terms; he is best known for his opposition to integration.

Quite possibly the most notorious day of his career occurred on June 11, 1963, when he stood in front of the door of Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama in a failed attempt to block the passage of two Black students from entry. This occurred nine years after the Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education, began the process of ending racial segregation in 1954. Federal authorities demanded that segregation be ended, to which Wallace had the following reply, "The President (i.e. John F. Kennedy) wants us to surrender the state to Martin Luther King and his group of pro-communists..."

From that comment and from his attempts to thwart desegregation, one might conclude that Wallace was one of the most rabid racists in the history of Alabama, but this is not so. Earlier, he had demonstrated some liberal tendencies, at least for a man who practiced law in the Jim Crow South. For instance, it was the custom at the time for lawyers to address African-Americans in court by their first names only, while whites were addressed with first and last names. Wallace broke with that tradition. A Black lawyer, J.L. Chestnut, said that "Judge George Wallace was the most liberal judge I ever practiced law in front of. He was the first judge in Alabama to call me 'Mister' in a courtroom.

What happened?

Power politics, you might say. In 1958, he was defeated for the governorship by John Patterson, a rabid racist and Ku Klux Klan supporter. As judge, Wallace granted probation to several African-Americans, which, among other things, such as Wallace's opposition to the Klu Klux Klan, probably cost him the election. Hard to imagine it, but Wallace was endorsed by the NAACP.

After his defeat, Wallace made the following vile statement to an aide, "You know why I lost the governor's race? ...I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again."

Wallace thus provides a clear illustration of the subject of this essay, namely, that many  politicians are willing to sacrifice what they know to be right in order to hold onto power. 

Wallace said of his efforts to hold onto the little integrity he had, "You know I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. Then I started talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

The 'good Christian' Wallace might have been reminded of the words of Jesus, "For what should it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?"

Wallace proceeded to blast to smithereens whatever core of decency he had. He played the race card with a vengeance--and won. During his inauguration speech in 1963, he said the following words which have stuck to him and tarnished his reputation forever: "In the name of the greatest people who ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

2.

Wallace is history, but history has a strange way of repeating itself. No politician these days can be as overtly racist as Wallace. Those days are over--thank goodness! (A good deal of racism, of course remains.) Yet examples of giving up integrity to hold onto power abound. I repeat: every politician needs to stretch the truth to get elected. Stomping on the truth, however, is another matter.

An example of a politician without core values is, well, you-know-who. I understand Trump's inability to admit that he lost the last election. He is a pathological narcissist, programmed by his father to believe defeat is a fate worse than death. His Big Lie, namely, that the election was fraudulent and that 'he won it by a landslide,' is part of his pathology. He reminds me a bit like a patient I encountered during a psychiatric rotation in medical school many years ago. This poor lost soul was convinced that he was the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. He would have been devastated to realize that he was a powerless man whom the world ignored. Believing that he was someone special, thus covering up, at least temporarily, the inner realization that he was anything but, was an essential belief for him. Deep within he believed he was nothing--an extremely destructive feeling; to survive, he presented himself to the world as the reincarnation of one of the most powerful men in history.

Similarly, Trump's psyche, in order to compensate for a shaky core, demands that he be better than everyone else. Calling him a loser is one of the worst insults one could hurl at him. Therefore, he constructed the Big Lie. I get that; he's a sick man. But what about the millions of his supporters; what about the leaders of the Republican party? About seventy percent of Republicans still believe that Trump won the election! Worse, very few Republican have stated publicly what so many are reported to admit privately, namely that the Big Lie, is, well a big lie. 

3.

Most Republicans in Congress, in my opinion, have made a pact with a two-faced devil,  Greed and Power.  As I have written before, the Republican  Party is the party of the rich. The rich, of course, are a minority; to win over majorities in elections, Republicans have decided to cheat rather than go directly to the majority of voters with new programs that might help them. Therefore, they want to limit voter participation; therefore, they want to gerrymander voting districts; therefore, they want to lower taxes for the wealthy; therefore, they are out to screw the working class. Many of them have lost whatever core of integrity they had. Money, money, money, aka Power, Power, Power, that's what has corrupted and displaced that spark of decency without which a politician is a con.

Many Republicans are shams, but not all. A case in point is J.D. Vance, the author of the 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegies, and who is currently running for senator in Ohio. As many know, he grew up poor and was deeply affected by the moral decay around him--drugs, dysfunctional families, etc. He previously advocated that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Now he blames the loss of industry, among other things, for devastating working-class America. He is against big-tech and very much against tax cuts, which have done their part in destroying much of America, at least according to him. And, as one might expect, he rails against woke liberalism.

In order to run as a Republican, and hope to win, he believed he had to make peace with Trump--whom he previously had called 'an idiot.' 

He is a proponent of 'National Conservatism,' a movement which advocates strong borders and nationalistic trade policies in an attempt to bring back America's lost industrial base.

Has he gone too far? I think he has. He says he is against tax cuts. How can one be an advocate for tax cuts in the Republican Party? He is running against a rabid Trumper. Vance has deleted all his anti-Trump tweets and has made up with the Big Liar.

Will being against immigration bring jobs back? I doubt it. Will being anti-tech bring jobs back? I doubt it. And if it were possible, would one be able to accomplish this as a Republican?

A tell-tale comment of his says it all. He said he was willing to shut down the government until Biden rescinds his  vaccine mandate. Shouldn't an advocate for the working class be for vaccine mandates?

Vance is willing to lie to gain power in order to achieve noble goals. To accomplish them as a Republican in today's America is wishful thinking.

Soon symptoms of the Wallace Syndrome will take over. He is too willing to kiss up to Trump and  his supporters. If elected, he will like his personal power so much he will forget what he had stood for as he kneels down before a golden idol. 

Decency will say, Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

Republicans and Democrats--all politicians--are subject to the temptation of wealth and power, but there is a marked difference in the degree to which they give into it. For instance, fascism has always existed; Nazi Germany, however, was its classic manifestation. Similarly, Republicans are the classic manifestations  of the Wallace Syndrome today.

Liars, Liars, Earth's on Fire!