A YARDSTICK OF FACTS ABOUT 2016

Jerry Harkins

I am thoroughly amazed at the fog that has descended around our collective memory of the 2016 presidential campaign.  So many unimaginable stories have emerged from  the Wonderland on the Potomac recently that the brain has to purge itself of the old outrages every evening.  We tend to (and want to) forget as much as possible.  But you may recall that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the election by about three million votes but failed to become President because of a constitutional compromise reached in 1789.  If you believe in one-person-one-vote, which is to say the equality of all voters, the Electoral College was a betrayal of a fundamental democratic principle.  It and the even worse compromise that counted a slave as three-fifths of a human being were essential to getting the constitution adopted.  Nevertheless, however necessary, both were immoral.  Both were necessitated by the worst facets of our collective soul and only one was finally annulled seventy-six years later by the expenditure of vast amounts of blood and treasure.  The annulment was, of course, only theoretical for African Americans.  But the Electoral College compromise was never rescinded and so we arrived at 2016 with California having 68.2 times the population of Alaska but only 18.3 times the votes in the Electoral College.  In other words one Alaskan had 3.7 times more influence than one Californian.  Thus, for the second time in sixteen years, a Republican "won" the presidency with fewer votes than the Democrat who "lost" it.

Actually, it was not the Electoral College that cost Secretary Clinton the election.  What did her in was a conspiracy that cost her at least 107,000 votes, her margin of loss in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The plot had three and maybe four elements:  

-       The announcement eleven days before the election by FBI Director James B. Comey that the FBI was re-opening the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.  They had previously exonerated her even while castigating her “carelessness” and even while admitting that no damage was done;

-      The release of unflattering Democratic National Committee emails regarding the primary campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders by Julian Assange of Wikileaks on July 22;

-      The delivery of those same DNC emails to Assange by the Russian government which had hacked them in an effort to influence the election on behalf of Trump; and,

-      The collusion or attempted collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign which shared the objective of defeating Clinton.

There can be no reasonable doubt about the last three elements in that list.  Nor can there be any doubt that Director Comey’s unprecedented actions influenced voters in swing states.  He had the motive, means and opportunity to destroy Clinton’s credibility just eleven days before voters went to the poll.  Finally, on Sunday, November 6, Comey admitted that the re-opening had turned up nothing.  He has alleged that both revelations were the most difficult decisions he ever had to make but, in fact, they were both simple.  He knew he was influencing an election without any evidence that the new information had any validity.  He knew it would fuel the chant heard in Trump rallies, “Lock her up!”  Although the source of the newly found emails was not Assange, the FBI had been either careless or complicit in dealing with the earlier ones.  Comey knew this and should have followed the advice of the adage, “Once bitten, twice shy.”  But he did not.  We still do not know whether he was involved in any way with Assange, the Russians and/or the Trump campaign.  It seems unlikely but there is nothing likely about this story.  The Department of Justice, no friend of Comey, has investigated the matter and has concluded that, reprehensible as his actions were, there is no evidence that he acted for political reasons.  He has repeatedly said that he did it to protect the reputation of the FBI and preserve the rule of law.  In fact, his decision predictably made the reputation of the FBI lower than ever among both liberals and conservatives.  The President of the United States recently called it a “den of thieves” but, of course, no one in his or her right mind believes anything he says.

Comey or no Comey, Hillary Clinton was defeated by a conspiracy.  Sure she made mistakes and sure a lot of people didn’t like her, but:

-       There is solid evidence that Julian Assange despised Clinton, even resorting to the Trumpian (i.e., absurd) allegation that she tried to assassinate him using a drone.  

-      There is equally solid evidence that Assange conspired with the Russians to defeat her and elect Trump.  He certainly offered to provide defamatory information about her to the Trump campaign. The offer and the information were accepted.  

-      There is also solid proof that senior members of the Trump campaign sought the same kind of material from the Russians without using Assange.  

So, Comey or no Comey, there was a conspiracy which is defined as. “An agreement between two or more persons to engage jointly in an unlawful or criminal act, or an act that is innocent in itself but becomes unlawful when done by the combination of actors.”  No matter how often Mr. Trump shouts “No collusion” from the rooftops, if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. 

There are many aspects of this story that are truly eerie.  For one thing, there are millions of Americans who don’t believe any of it. These are mainly the same people who don’t believe in evolution, the fluoridation of water or climate change but the deniers include Republican office holders and a significant majority of evangelical Christians.  And don’t forget Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor, who is given to emitting the most asinine comments as long as they get him fifteen seconds on the six o’clock news.  He must make even his client, Donald Trump, blush.  But the most frightening aspect of it all is the fact that the conspirators were able to dispossess every American of the fundamental right of a free people to freely govern themselves.  We became, in effect, a colony of Russia, stripped of our independence by a cabal of political opportunists, thugs and religious fanatics.  We were reduced to a puppet state with no influence in the world except that which derives from our arsenal of doomsday weapons.

It is conceivable that Trump could be removed from office by either of two constitutional provisions.  It is even possible that we could find relief in the words of our Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

But that’s not the way to bet. Barring another Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre, it is probable that he will complete his term of office.  He might even survive pardoning himself given the craven tolerance of so many Republican officeholders.  As he himself has boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” 

Democracy isn’t easy.  Arguably there has never been a pure democratic government of any community larger than a couple of hundred people.  All larger ones have been forced to accept compromises that tend toward either authoritarianism or anarchy.  These tendencies run in cycles that can be driven by sudden events or long term trends.  America today – what we like to call the Great American Experiment – is showing signs of both extremes at the same time.

Subsequent Event

On March 22, 2019, Attorney General William Barr released a letter he sent to Congress which reported the key conclusion of special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.  He quoted Mueller's 300-page submission as saying that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."  That it did not establish conspiracy or coordination does not mean that one or the other did not occur, only that the evidence was insufficient to reach a conclusion.  The conspiracy statues rightly establish a high bar for criminality.  However, we may resort to a somewhat lower standard if our only concern is with logic and decency.  

As usual, the Republicans resorted to the Big Lie:  No conspiracy, no collusion, fake news, case closed.  Mr. Barr, who had "redacted" massive amounts of the Mueller report, refused to let Congress see what he had taken out or the evidence for parts he left in.  In other words, anyone who believes a word Barr says might find fellowship in the Flat Earth Society.  As the Psalmist said, "How long, O Lord, shall the wicked triumph?"

FINIS:

CHRISTIANITY AND THE IRISH VOTE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS

Jerry Harkins

On May 25, 2018 Irish voters overturned a constitutional ban on abortion by a landslide of two to one. They had already repealed the criminalization of contraception and approved a law that legalized gay marriage.  It is widely expected that they will soon repeal laws that give control of virtually all state-supported elementary schools to the church.  But the abortion vote was transformative.  Simply stated, it put an end to the church’s influence in this most Catholic of all countries.  Rejecting the most prominent teaching of the church since the Council of Trent, it also marked the end of the Christian Era in Europe.

The Irish did not vote for abortion.  No one actually likes terminating a pregnancy, even a doomed one, because everyone knows it is always a tragedy, always the result of an agonizing decision.  Every sane person knows that, to the extent state and church have any standing in the matter, it is limited to finding ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies.  At the same time, every sane person also knows that unwanted pregnancies do occur in the real world.  No one has ever needed a coterie of politicians or celibate male hierarchs with a cultish understanding of biology to express opinions they ascribe to God without the benefit of either reason or evidence.  No God ever proclaimed from Mount Sinai, "Thou shalt not abort a fetus!"

Over the course of history, the church has shown itself to be a despicable, criminal custodian of sexual morality and the Irish government has been an enabling partner.  The most recent example of this collaboration began to come to light about 20 years ago. For 231 years, at the behest of the hierarchy, Irish law regarded an unwed mother as a criminal and turned her and her child over to the tender mercies of the Magdalene Laundry system where she and her baby were subjected to slave labor and the sexual depravity of the clergy. The income generated from this demonic practice became a mainstay of the church’s income, much of which was forwarded to Rome.  What the Irish were voting for on May 25 was freedom from the self-serving mythologies of the Vatican and the Irish government.  To comprehend the unlimited reach of their influence and the basis of their despotic power, it is necessary first to understand those mythologies which are similar but not identical.

Ireland began to emerge from nearly a thousand years of brutal British colonialism in 1922.  One of the leaders of this process was Éamon de Valera, an aloof Irish-American introvert who became the principal architect of what he imagined to be the Irish ethos.  He had played a peripheral role in the 1916 Easter Uprising and surrendered to the British who tried him and dozens of other people for treason.  He was convicted and sentenced to death but the British did not follow through because he was actually an American citizen and Britain was desperately trying to persuade the United States to enter World War I.  As it turned out, Britain, America and Ireland would have been a lot better off had the Brits shot him.  For 54 years beginning in 1919, he was the dominant player in Irish politics as President, Prime Minister (Taoiseach) or Leader of the Opposition.  He thought of Ireland as a bucolic nation of small tenant farmers, contented peasants serene in the bosom of holy mother the church. His creed was “One faith, one church, one baptism and after that the fires of hell.”  He tried to create a nation intellectually and morally isolated from the corrupt modern world which led him to maintain Ireland’s neutrality in the face of Nazi genocide.  Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and the Germans surrendered eight days later.  In between, de Valera visited the German ambassador in Dublin to express his sympathy.  His major fault was that he was against change which he considered the work of the devil.  Like so many other twentieth century dictators, he was highly skilled at manipulating the levers of power.

The church promoted the same medieval vision of Irish society and backed it by its authority to condemn souls to eternal damnation.  The God marketed by the hierarchs warned, “…wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  Since the middle ages, Catholics had been taught to yearn and pray for salvation as the whole purpose of earthly life and its trials and that the bishops exclusively held the keys to the Kingdom.  Irish Catholics prayed mainly to the only womanly figure the church admitted to the divine pantheon as the Mediatrix of All Graces, the virgin uniquely conceived without sin or, in the words of the thirteenth century prayer Salve Regina, “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.”  Perhaps she was but very few attained the goal.  Christianity was a casino and, to keep its subjects playing the lottery, the church preached unquestioning obedience in the here and now.  As always, the odds were stacked against you but you can’t win it if you’re not in it.

In Ireland, the blended mythology translated into a bizarre system of sexual governance promulgated by the church and enforced by the state.  For generations, condoms were not sold in Ireland and, later, if you bought a morning after abortion pill online, the penalty could be life imprisonment followed by damnation.  No dancing in public.  No men and women present at the same beach.  No girls riding bicycles.  No female sports of any kind.  No civil service jobs for women after marriage.  No female ownership of property.  No female drinking in public.  No denying sex to a husband for any reason.  Such misogyny was not, of course, unique to Christianity or to Ireland.  Elsewhere, however, the theory supporting the misogyny involved (more or less) protecting the so-called weaker sex.  In Ireland (and everywhere else), the church taught that women are the cause of all evil.  As a concomitant, it taught that suffering is good for the soul and it would excommunicate a doctor who tried to relieve pain of any kind.  If the doctor was actually a midwife, the penalty could be death. In the Christian world, the theory was that God invented the pain of childbirth to punish women.  He invented sexual attraction to insure that they would bear many children and experience much pain.  Except for one woman, Mary the sinless, sexless Christ bearer.

Even many Irish women bought into these absurdities.  The laundries were, after all, operated by religious sisters, among them, the ironically named Mercy Sisters, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Sisters of Charity and Good Shepherd Sisters.  But the direction came from and the profits went to the bishops.

Ireland is presently going through its own Truth and Reconciliation process modeled in part on the pioneering work of the South African post-apartheid commission chaired by Archbishop Tutu.  One of the problems for the Irish, however, is that there is simply no religious figure with Tutu's credibility or compassion.  Another is that the Irish church was the central perpetrator of the evils it is supposedly investigating and it remains largely in denial.  There is hope.  Ireland’s strengths going forward – its economic success, increasing diversity and highly educated work force – are also among the forces of modernization that are driving the worldwide marginalization of the church and the accountability of the government.  But the mythology is strong.

The church’s dogmatic mythology holds that humans are born in a state of original sin, that the sin forfeited any claim people may have had to salvation and that the blame for this is attributable to Eve who “tempted” Adam.  The “son” of God had to suffer and die to “redeem” humanity and make it possible (although extremely difficult and unlikely) for individual humans to avoid the flames of hell.  None of this has any basis in fact or even in any rational understanding of the Bible but it is promulgated vigorously because it is the basis of the absolute power the hierarchy feels entitled to.  Mythology is useful for many social purposes, prominent among them for the assertion and projection of power.  Communities need a power structure but Lord Acton was right, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  If kings and bishops are seen to have the instruments of power and their power is thought to have magical roots, it becomes irresistible and virtually uncheckable.  Matthew reports that Jesus imparted to Peter the absolute power to “bind” or “loose” upon earth and in heaven whatever he wanted and the church claims (again without evidence) that the power was transferable to his successors.  (The only exception was Pope John Paul II’s assertion that he had no power to ordain women.)

The Irish rejection of the abortion dogma has no precedent.   There have been successful revolutions and even rebellions against papal power:  Luther’s Reformation comes to mind or, more recently, Garibaldi’s defeat of the Papal States.  But Luther was able to avoid the stake only because of German politics and the powerful support of Frederick III, the Elector of Saxony.  Garibaldi’s victory was only partial.  He was never able to destroy the Papacy itself which he referred to as “that pestilential institution” and the unification of the Italian peninsula, Risorigimento, has never resulted in successful governance.  But the Irish rebellion promises to be different.  All over the world, the pedophilia and other sex scandals have exposed the hypocrisy of the church’s perseveration on sexual sin.  In Ireland, however, it goes beyond horror and beyond evil.  It is nothing less than a betrayal of the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love by the one power that the people looked to for succor in the centuries of their agonies.  The church will crumble to dust long before it can be forgiven and the hour of accountability is at hand.

DOCTOR NO

Jerry Harkins

Ninety-two miles west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in Huntingdon County, about half a mile south of where County Route 393 crosses 829 and about four miles east of Raystown Lake lies the tiny hamlet of Calvin.  To say it’s off the beaten track is as much an understatement as can be made about Anyplace, Pennsylvania.  393 is – or was last time I drove it –  a dirt road, well maintained and graded twice a year but not plowed until there’s at least a foot of snow.  The ZIP code, 16652, serves the whole county and the post office is in a convenience store attached to a nearby gas station.  The population was 209 souls in the 2000 census which had fallen to 175 ten years later. Calvin isn’t on most maps.  Neither is either Wright Cemetery or Trough Creek Cemetery which makes it difficult for genealogists interested in the Glasgow family for whom, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Calvin served as home turf.  The American branch of that distinguished family of course.  

Just why so many Glasgows settled in and around Calvin is not clear.  They were Scotch Presbyterian Dissenters (that is to say Scotch Irish) whose forbearers migrated to the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania. By dint of thrift and hard work, a goodly number of them must have escaped the mines and wound up farming in Huntingdon County.  One of the family, born sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, was George Mileus Glasgow, Jr. (although he never used the “Junior”) later known as Doctor No for reasons that will be explained in due course.  (As to that odd middle name which he guarded as a state secret, perhaps his mother descended from the Eleventh Century worthy Galfridus Mileus, originally of Bayeux, France.  Galfrid was one of the Normans who visited England with William the Bastard in 1066.  A more likely possibility:  there is no shortage of people named George M. Glasgow in Pennsylvania town records. Most of the M’s stand for Miles which is a fairly common patronym.  In such a rural area, the Glasgows and the Mileses must have intermarried frequently over the generations.)

George Junior became the Kavanaugh Professor of Speech in Fordham University’s School of Education from the late 1930’s until 1961 or ’62.  At the time, the School was located at 302 Broadway, the old Astor Building at Duane Street.  Almost everything else said about him, including what you read here, is rumor, myth or inference.  He arrived at Fordham as a newly minted Columbia Ph.D.  He died in New York, probably in early 1963.  He seems to have been married and divorced without issue. Later there were rumors about a woman in his life spread invariably by people who did not know where he lived. But the back story was more consistent than other rumors.  After high school, it was said, he took a job as a coal miner and cured the mine owner's daughter of stuttering.  Mr. Kavanaugh was so grateful, he paid for three degrees and endowed the chair for him at Fordham.

Dr. Glasgow was one of God’s true eccentrics.  Imagining himself to have an ulcer, he lived on a diet of soft boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, coffee and chocolate marshmallow fudge, all purchased from Schrafft’s on lower Broadway.  He thought the coffee was bad for him but he loved the glass jars Schrafft’s delivered it in.  He had a large collection of them on his window sill which was culled every semester and returned for the deposit.  He drove the administration wild.  One spring, he decided to mount a student production of “Romanoff and Juliet” to which one of the  Deans objected because of a hot scene between the principals.  The objectionable scene took place with Romanoff on one balcony, stage left, and Juliet on another, stage right.  George dropped the Dean a polite note.  “In case you hadn’t noticed, the play is based on an older one with a similar title by Will Shakespeare.  However, if you still feel this threatens the chastity of our students, I will be happy to turn Romanoff into another girl.”  In the event, he cast a gay student in the role of Igor. He then proceeded to give the poor fellow intense Method Acting instruction in the art of kissing a girl. “Imagine you’re sitting on a hot radiator.”

He was an expert in several academic subjects.  One was public speaking which engaged him because it was (and is) the most common phobia in the United States.  Another was rhetoric which he saw as the bastard offspring of logic and semantics which, of course, it isn’t.  He was also a highly skilled phonetician (think of Henry Higgins) with an exquisite ear. He taught diction and dialect at the Actors Studio and developed a system of phonetics to enable actors to annotate scripts quickly.  He was a frequent consultant to speechwriters and their clients acting like a play doctor confronted with trouble in the second act.  Among those he consulted with was Harry Truman whom he considered a soulmate and Buffalo Bob Smith, the sidekick and voice of Howdy Doody.  In spite of his best efforts, Mr. Smith’s skills as a ventriloquist remained minimal.

Have I mentioned his eccentricity?  He was a master logician who believed that the proper foundation of a liberal education is the rigorous study of fallacy.  Modern logic, however, as propounded by Russell and Whitehead, was, in his considered opinion, a fraud.  He taught a course in semantics in which he argued that the first word invented by human beings was “No” and that all subsequent vocabulary consisted of unnecessary variations on “No” or words needed to shade the truth.  He was ready to concede that this might not be a universal law of nature but that it explained a great deal about the state of the world ever since our ancestors came down out of the trees.  He explained that there is very little truth to be had in this life and therefore truth is a precious commodity not to be squandered on the unworthy or the merely curious.

Which brings us to his obsession with General Semantics which had been a pretty big deal in the thirties having been pioneered by the Polish Count Alfred Korzybski,his students and acolytes including S. I. Hayakawa, Stuart Chase and C. K. Ogden.  The latter worthies became the authors respectively of such classics as The Smirnoff Brunch Book, The Tyranny of Words and The Meaning of Meaning.  A more formal approach was taken by the Harvard philosopher Willard Quine who is famous for insisting that, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” On its face, the idea of a “bound variable” is a contradiction in terms but there can be no doubt that language “binds” thought and thought is nothing if not variable.  For example, the word apple automatically excludes everything that is not apple.  It builds a fence between itself and berries, cherries, oranges, tomatoes and anything else you might find in a fruit salad.  By doing so, it channels thought and communication toward anything that is an apple, whether a McIntosh, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith or any other member of the genus Malus, including crab apples.  (Malus– Latin for evil – may have been named after the apple eaten by Adam and Eve.  Or not, sources differ.)

Academics who thought about such issues were certainly an odd lot and they bequeathed their oddness to the succeeding generation that included our man George Glasgow who took from them the notion that human knowledge is limited by the structure of language.  This, in turn, led him to think that what is called “truth” is an artificial construct, a sort of moralistic overlay on what we think our senses are perceiving.  But still we see the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.  Or, as Saint Paul had it, we see only through a glass darky.  We – or at least some of us – search for truth but, like Tantalus we will never be able to eat the fruit at our fingertips or drink the water at our feet.

General Semantics implied that language which is our most important invention also acts to amplify the limitations of our senses.  Which of course is true enough but is hardly the most important part of the story. Language, like mathematics (and music for that matter) allows us to focus our thoughts.  It needs no defense and requires no scholarly analysis.  The relationship between a word and its referent or a sentence and its meaning is imperfect but adequate for bringing us as far as we have come.

Like all academic conceits, General Semantics began to wane after a decade or so but, in the aftermath of World War II, it helped give rise to deconstructionism and other fanciful academic fetishes even if Jacques Derrida had never heard of Count Korzybski.  The notion that every text contradicts itself and that it is therefore impossible to know what any author means is a virtual corollary of the proposition that most uses of the verb to be are misleading.

Anyone who spends a lot of time worrying about such things is likely to wind up an incurable killjoy. Dr. Glasgow, however, didn’t seem to worry about anything except his ulcer.  The world amused him but never surprised him.  To him, academic fashions were playthings, pastimes to keep intelligent people occupied and out of trouble.  Otherwise, the value of an idea is measured only by its usefulness.  It is called Pragmatism and, in the half century since Dr. No passed to the multi-colored lands of the west, it is sorely missed. 

ISRAELI ROULETTE

Jerry Harkins

As President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder has long been a strong American supporter of Israel and a friend and political ally of its current Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.  Yet, on March 19, 2018, he published an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times which was nothing less than a cri de coeur.  He wrote:

But the Jewish democratic state faces two grave threats that I believe could endanger its very existence.  The first threat is the possible demise of the two-state solution…The second two-prong threat is Israel’s capitulation to religious extremists and the growing disaffection of the Jewish Diaspora.

Mr. Lauder’s reasons for these beliefs are clearly and persuasively articulated but they are not new and are unlikely to influence Israeli policy, American policy or Middle Eastern events. More interesting are two things he does not say.  First, he politely ignores the fact that the architect of the current one-state strategy is none other than Benjamin Netanyahu.  Bibi will deny this often and loudly but, like Donald Trump, he is an inveterate liar, a practitioner of Big Brother’s Big Lie.  Second, Mr. Lauder makes no reference to the fact that the Israeli electorate has given Netanyahu and the religious extremists a clear mandate on every occasion the question has come before them.  Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Israeli politics have been dominated by corrupt, fanatical ideologues disdainful of all traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Israeli Jews are entitled to their obsession with national security.  They are, after all, the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust, history’s most profound evil.  Moreover, for seventy years, they have been surrounded by enemies sworn to their destruction.  They are not paranoid.  The world – or at least most of it – is against them as witnessed by hundreds of anti-Israel votes in the United Nations over the years.  The UN and its various agencies believe that Zionism is a form of racism, not of self-preservation.  The Security Council has condemned Israel 225 times although most of these resolutions were vetoed by the United States occasionally joined by its allies.  The General Assembly has condemned Israel 78 times and the Human Rights Council 45 times.  The survival of Israel under all these adversities is due to two main factors, the genius and determination of a people committed to ensuring their own future and the consistent support of the United States.

In spite of all this history and massive amounts of military and economic aid, Israel does not trust the United States.  It frequently feels compelled to remind us that it is our only friend in the Middle East which may or may not be true.  But most of the time and on most issues the United States is Israel’s only friend in the entire world.  President Harry Truman extended de facto recognition to Israel eleven minutes after it declared its independence on May 14, 1948 and America has worked ceaselessly since to help it achieve peace and prosperity.  Israel has most often responded by disparaging the American government and people. The Israeli consensus seems to be that all Americans are fat, ugly, soft and stupid.  Mr. Netanyahu and some of his predecessors have conducted extensive, highly professional espionage on the U.S. government and American companies in the technology, military and financial sectors.  When caught, they have first adopted the Big Lie and then resorted to threatening politicians with electoral retaliation.  The Israelis torpedoed the Wye River Peace Conference at the last minute by demanding the release of the American-Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard who had been convicted of selling military secrets to Israel.  Israel had not only used Pollack’s stolen information but had sold it to Russia in exchange for the release of a number of Russian Jews.  Nor was the Pollard case an isolated matter.  In 2005, Lawrence Franklin, a Department of Defense analyst, pleaded guilty to passing top secret information to two executives of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.  He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.  In spite of his public confession, he continued to insist he had been “railroaded” by the government.  He then agreed to cooperate with on-going investigations of Israeli misbehavior and his sentence was reduced to eight years and 100 hours of community service. AIPAC, of course, denied everything. Vigorously.  Big Brother would have been proud.

Like every petty crook and every master criminal, the Israeli government seems to think, “They’ll never catch us because we’re too smart for them.”  On the evidence, they’ve been right more often than wrong. Maybe not because they’re too smart but rather because our own politicians believe their electoral threats. To a very large extent, Israel has enjoyed significant influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades.  That is as it should be among friends but it is a two-way street.  Indeed it is close to the definition of friendship and it is not surprising that both sides protest eternal love and respect for one another.  Sadly, for many years, that has been a sham to cover up a relationship based on fear on one side and arrogance on the other.

Establishing or perhaps repairing a productive alliance between the United States and Israel will not be easy especially while the principals are Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu. Both are beset by the Oedipal complex described by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams:  “It is the fate of all of us [i.e., all males], perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.” Both have a tenuous grasp on their jobs as well as their sanity;  Trump may be headed for impeachment and Netanyahu for jail.  In any case, voters in both countries may tire of the constant drama of governments unable to govern and politicians unable to work together. If they do not, we must all bow to the basic premise of democracy and accept with regret that the will of the people is the supreme value.  Either that or both countries must give up on democracy in favor of dictatorship. Under Netanyahu and his ultra-orthodox partners, Israel is already half-way there.  Under Trump, the U.S. is not far behind.

It is true that every nation gets the government it deserves.  In Israel, the ultra-orthodox Haredim account for less than 19% of the population.  Incredibly, most of them believe that Israel has no right to exist until the Messiah arrives.  At least one such sect makes common cause with Israel’s most determined enemies.  Yet the electorate has decided to grant them absolute control over many facets of family and civic life.  Their boys and men are allowed to spend their lives studying Torah and other religious texts while their families are supported by state welfare. Together  with Netanyahu’s Likud party, they constitute what is, on paper, a parliamentary democracy but is, in fact, a theocracy very much like that of Iran. Sadly, this is precisely what Israeli citizens want.  In the most recent national elections, voter turnout was a remarkable 72%.  The most extreme parties suffered minor losses but the overall conservative vote was decisive and Likud’s plurality increased by 8 seats in the Knesset which has a total of 120 seats.

In America, the situation is somewhat different.  The religious right is every bit as reactionary as that of Israel but it is riven by fractious quarreling over such basic issues as whether or not to participate in politics in the first place.  After more than four decades of intense engagement, many evangelicals seem to be withdrawing from the worldliness of partisan politics and ideology, which is to say from the world they themselves largely created.  They are being replaced on the right by disenchanted working class voters whose lives have been adversely affected by economic forces beyond their control.  This has become fertile ground for  a dramatic rise in xenophobia at home and jingoism in foreign policy.  The result has been a dangerous fanaticism in political rhetoric and a paralysis in government and governance.  In recent years, we have been witnessing a disturbing variation of Gresham’s Law.  Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristophanes noted that, just as debased money made of brass drives out coins of gold or silver, “So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names / These we spurn for men of brass.”

Degeneration, a sort of law of political entropy, may be a natural tendency of democracies or maybe of all governments.  It may also be cyclical and may wane as we learn to ameliorate the dislocations and discontents that come with change.  It took two hundred years for the United States to adjust to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, it is arguable that France never fully accommodated itself to its own 1789 Revolution, Spain has yet to adjust to the Peninsular War of 1808 and Italy is still trying to reconcile itself with unification, Risorgimento, that came about between 1815 and 1871.  After a century and a half of consolidation, the world is currently turning toward separation and disassociation, much of it being pursued with violence.  Long-established friendships and alliances among nations are succumbing to religious, ethnic and economic divisions.  The Soviet Union is one with Nineveh and Tyre and organizations like the United Nations and the European Union are on the brink of irrelevance.

Israel is a nation of 8.6 million people, roughly the size of New York City.  The population includes 1.7 million Arabs, 82% of whom are Muslims. It is surrounded by enemies formally sworn to its destruction:  Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.  These total almost 460 million souls and do not include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and, of course, Palestine.  Israel is outnumbered by at least 53 to 1.  It has survived for 70 years through the wit and grit of its people and, most importantly, through the implacable support of the United States.  Much as it might hate to admit it, the simple fact is that it cannot survive without that support.  In the light of this reality, Bibi is playing Russian Roulette with Israel’s existence and his Haredim partners would be perfectly content to see its destruction.  Bibi knows this because the Haredim have made no secret of it.  Admittedly, they are fantasists but he is hearing the same warning from Mr. Lauder and other sober-sided Jews and non-Jewish friends of Israel.

Fortunately, the Trump administration has not yet been tempted to abandon Israel but counting on it to maintain its forbearance is a fool’s game.  It would be well for the Israelis to note how casually Mr. Trump jettisons alliances of longstanding strategic and emotional importance.  In 2012, Mr. Netanyahu campaigned vigorously against Barack Obama and four years later he joined Russia and Wikileaks in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton.  It was a stupid and arrogant gambit in both instances, very much like the more recent Russian electoral interference except that Mr. Putin was smart enough to maintain at least a semblance of deniability.

Mr. Lauder is right:  Israel is confronting an existential threat largely of its own making. A two-state solution is the only way it can avoid disaster but the prospect of such a resolution recedes with every passing day.  The key constituency for such an outcome now resides in the American Jewish community which is handicapped by two obstacles.  First, it is coping with its own divisions and, second, the Americans have no standing with the Haredim who refuse to recognize their Jewishness or their social values. Netanyahu courts the diaspora for its financial support and as pawns in his games of intimidation but otherwise spurns them.  Their attachment to Israel is strong which is another barrier to any intervention that might be seen as hostile.

The outlook must be classed as bleak.  When one tries to imagine events leading to Israel’s destruction, the horror and despair are unbearable.  Before hope can be restored, however, the Israeli government and citizenry would have to radically revamp some of their basic assumptions, among them those regarding the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ aspirations and the value of America’s friendship.  The American government and American Jews must recognize that their unquestioning support for Israel has been counterproductive for all parties.  And the Arab/Muslim world must come to see Israel as a permanent and valuable neighbor.  Its right to exist may be tragic from their point of view but it is the ineluctable result of the decay of the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire coupled with the even greater tragedy of two world wars.  Short of divine intervention, none of these changes will come about easily but the simple reality is that there are no alternatives that do not involve copious bloodshed.

Note

Any criticism of Israel these days is sure to be met by outraged cries of "Anti-semitism!" by those who try to conflate politics and religion.  This is a primitive logical fallacy but one made easier by the theocratic nature of the Israeli state.  Like all nations, Israel is a work in progress.  If it is to survive, it  will necessarily evolve to an ever-closer embrace of the values its religious philosophy did so much to create and give to the rest of the world.  In the meantime, if it is not open to criticism, it will become a dead letter not worth saving.

 ALT REALITY

Jerry Harkins

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.  The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”                                                                                                                                     –Genesis 11:5-7

As a strategy for keeping the people in perpetual darkness, God should have known that a people smart enough to build the Tower of Babel would not have been seriously challenged by the need to translate.  Modern acolytes of the Great Deceiver – whether of the church, the state, business or the media have accomplished far more than that.  Indeed, they have learned to re-shape not only reality but the very definition of reality.  They are a talented species that has created a serious problem for themselves.  Alt Reality has become the new anarchy.

Oh, yes, we live in strange times.  Until about twenty years ago, the history of the human race was largely the story of a young species of intelligent animals trying to understand its surroundings and its place in them or, in short, to get a grip on reality.  That curiosity is not unique to humans but, unlike our fellow creatures, we developed tools and processes specifically to enhance our quest for truth.  And we were successful.  We learned to make fire and split the atom, to sow and reap, to read and write, to dance and sing and play and pray.  We learned that space and time are relative and, in 1969, we sent explorers to the moon.  In short, we cast out some of the darkness and tamed parts of nature.  We also came to understand that every time we answered a question, new ones popped up but we found the journey itself exciting.  We were hooked not only or even mainly on the ends but at least equally on the means we invented to get to the ends.  On science and philosophy and art and theology.  Our intellectuals were addicted.  But always there were some who regarded this obsession as either arrogant or heretical.  A few saw it as an opportunity for self-enrichment. 

The Book of Genesis depicts a Creator whose most important commandment was that we should stay away from the tree of knowledge lest we ourselves become godlike.  The specific knowledge that unlocked godliness was said to be the knowledge of good and evil but, as it turned out, all knowledge could be good or evil and you never knew which from one moment to the next.  We ate the apple but did not became godlike.  We became fully human, pilgrims on a journey with no final destination.  We were trapped, neither here nor there like Schrödinger's cat which could be both alive and dead simultaneously.  Truth was elusive and often counterintuitive.  A physicist, Werner von Heisenberg, discovered an inherent uncertainty at the heart of reality and a mathematician, Kurt Gödel, formulated a theorem that purported to prove that a provable system must necessarily be false.  For a time, it seemed that Lewis Carroll might have been right after all.  Needless to say, God, who does not play dice with the universe, was not amused and, ever since,  some of his principal agents have waged war on behalf of ignorance.  They are not the only ones.

The cult of willful ignorance is a characteristic of every kind of autocracy and an intimate  companion of deceit and dishonesty.  In the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984 this intimacy is made explicit in three slogans:  Ignorance Is Strength, War Is Peace, and Freedom Is Slavery.  Orwell modeled Big Brother on Joseph Stalin who was famous for re-writing history to obliterate enemies of the state.  “Socialist Realism” was anything but realistic whether in art or science or economics.  Trofim Lysenko was more a madman than a biologist but his crackpot agricultural theories enjoyed official favor for decades in the face of widespread Soviet starvation because Stalin saw in them a path toward creating the Soviet superman just as Hitler had seen the extermination of the Jews as the way to create the Teutonic superman.  It was madness and morally repugnant but it was also harebrained – contrary to established fact.  Yet the deliberate cultivation of ignorance and darkness dominated Russian life for seventy years and German life for twelve. 

The advancement of knowledge always involves the need to change one’s thinking and is, therefore, threatening.  Knowledge is power only in the narrow sense that it conveys an advantage to those who have it over those who do not.  Otherwise it is frustrating, especially for those who lack it and are most likely to fear it.  Today, the world faces what is the most profound revolution it has ever witnessed:  the Information Revolution and its inevitable consequence, the global economy.  Everywhere everything – religion, politics, national and personal economic prospects, cultural values, philosophical assumptions – is changing at warp speed.  We all live in a profoundly disconcerting world.  As King Mongkut of Siam sings, “Some things nearly so / Some things nearly not / There are times I almost think /  I am not sure of what I absolutely know.”   It is not at all surprising that a cabal of scoundrels has arisen to take advantage of these dislocations through deceit, deception and outright fraud.  Their weapon is being called “alternative reality” but George Orwell called it simply “The Big Lie” in his dystopian novel, 1984.  The idea is simply to lie outrageously about everything to everyone. Most people will believe anything if your lie is big enough, simple enough and repeated often enough.  

Leaders, of course, require followers, in this case followers willing to embrace what is obviously and objectively unreasonable.   The root of this vulnerability is fear of change abetted by simple incomprehension or mistrust of science or even an attraction to conspiracy theories.  People who think the earth was created in seven days some six thousand years ago and that the fossil record is the work of the devil are flying in the face of logic and evidence.  They are stubborn in their ignorance but their belief systems are not necessarily due to a lack of  intelligence or education.  They believe what they want to believe but they are also the victims of those who intend to profit from the social chaos they can engender.  The same is true of people who believe that space aliens landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 but here the case is more subtle.  It assumes the unproven but highly probable idea that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere in the universe but it ignores the engineering obstacles that act to reduce the probability of an actual encounter in 1947 (or 2018) to virtually zero.  At present, it is far more likely that the debris found near Roswell is exactly what the Air Force said it was, a weather balloon.  Only a person with a paranoid personality could believe that dozens of military and government officials knew about a crash landing of space aliens and kept it secret for more than seventy years.

One problem with alternative reality is that there is almost no such thing as reality itself if we insist on certainty.  In bygone years, students were introduced to probability theory with an example of a zero probability statement:  one day I will swim across the Atlantic Ocean.  Then in 1998, Benoît Lecomte swam across the Atlantic Ocean.  The most obvious thing about reality is that our perception of what is true constantly evolves.  It takes nothing away from the achievement of Christopher Columbus to note that he thought he had reached Asia and that the islands he saw were parts of India, China and Japan.  His discoveries were part of a learning process which was extended by Vasco Balboa who crossed the Isthmus of Panama to encounter the Pacific Ocean in 1513 and Ferdinand Magellan one of whose five ships circumnavigated the globe in 1519.  Intellectuals had long known that the earth must be spherical but after Magellan’s voyage any other hypothesis became untenable.  Yet there remain Flat Earthers to this day.  The pictures taken from space?  Their web site says, “…the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration.”  Sound familiar?

So “truth” or, more accurately, reality evolves – changes if you insist – but it does not go backwards.  Our understanding of the universe is incomplete but no reasonable person can ever again believe that it is six thousand years old or that it has always and will always exist in its present state.  The cumulative weight of empirical observation, measurement and experimentation has overwhelmed what once was a tenable belief.  The Big Bang theory did not close the book of cosmology but it did provide the evidence that precluded any version of steady state.  The discovery of the Higgs Boson did not cast the Standard Model of particle physics in bronze as truth for all ages but it did confirm it as the right direction toward such a truth.  Probably.  Always probably.  Those who reject Darwinian evolution in favor of the biblical creationism story are no longer within the pale of rationality on the subject.  When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he stressed in his summary that “this view of life” was a beginning, not an end; that it promised to open a wide variety of questions to scientific inquiry.  Most famously, he wrote, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”  And it was.  Darwin’s seminal work has been richly elaborated and validated especially by the discovery of its genetic mechanism.  But his fundamental ideas of common descent and natural selection are as indelible as any truth can be and theories to the contrary must be consigned to Wonderland.

But truth is always probabilistic.  For one thing, people make mistakes.  A third grade child trying to add three plus four and coming up with five is counting, not adding.  An adult who argues that the sun revolves around the earth because it says so in the Bible is substituting faith for fact.  There is an important difference here.  The child is invoking a reality, that of counting, even if it does not apply to the problem at hand.  The adult is appealing to what may have been a fortuitous eclipse of the sun during the Battle of Gibeon which was misunderstood by the author of the Book of Joshua.  But the politician who claims that climate change is a myth is simply lying for personal gain and is forfeiting the right to be believed about anything.

However, isn’t it possible that the climate scientists are overstating what is essentially a natural fluctuation in average temperatures?  Of course it is possible.  It is also possible that the changes we observe are not significantly related to human activity.  And it is possible that one day you will swim across the Atlantic Ocean.  But don’t bet the rent money on it.  The empirical evidence and the logic strongly point in a different direction.  Moreover if you want to entertain remote possibilities about the climate, you owe it to yourself and others to make a persuasive case for some other agent, something non-human that causes global warming.  It is simply not enough to appeal to “natural fluctuations” any more than it is to appeal to the work of the devil to explain the fossil record.

Of course practitioners of alternative reality readily reject evidence preferring to argue from the absence of evidence, an unknown that they can promote as a fatal flaw.   In the evolution debate, it used to be the lack of what was called “the missing link” without which it was obvious that homo sapiens had to be the result of spontaneous, unique and intelligent creation.  This is the fallacy of argumentum ad perfectionem, the idea that until every I is dotted and every t crossed a theory is false and its opposite must be true.  When that fallacy fails the next resort is to conspiracy theory which is why thousands of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings never happened and the whole thing was a government conspiracy.  It is also why dinosaurs never existed, why fluoridation is a Communist plot and why 65% of Americans reject the theory of evolution.

The Big Lie has been a frequent actor in world history, always available to sacrifice truth and rationality in the service of ideology.  Ideology is not itself immoral but it must follow truth, not lead it.  Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Grand Inquisitor in the Galileo trial, knew this well.  A year after Galileo had been silenced, the prelate wrote, “I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world, that the earth shares the same heavens where God lives and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them, than that what is demonstrated is false…”  Perhaps we can say that by 1615 he should have known what revolved about what but it would take the church another 380 years to accept reality.  At least little harm was done.  The most credulous continued to believe an error but life went on.  The same cannot be said of the Big Lies we have been confronting for the past century or so.  It is a long list – a veritable theater of the absurd – of claims that pose existential threats to our lives and well-being.

We indeed live in strange times when our most pressing need is for a child who will shout out loudly, “But the emperor has no clothes.”  Neither we nor that child will ever resolve the debate between Plato and Aristotle about the nature of reality but we can agree with them both that that reality is singular and moral and beautiful.  Even if our understanding of it is imperfect, it has no alternative.

Subsequently

"And a little child shall lead them." (Isaiah 11:6).  In 2019, along came a sixteen year old girl named Greta Thunberg who fearlessly explained not only that the emperor was intellectually naked but, more importantly, why his big lies constituted a crime against humanity.

 THE LAST MAN STANDING

Jerry Harkins

The problem with men is they are rapidly becoming obsolete.  Already it is possible to run a cattle ranch of 10,000 units[1] without the services of an actual bull.  Already scientists have created mice using sperm manufactured from stem cells harvested from female mice.  No males needed, thank you.  Within ten years they’ll be making the stem cells from recycled motor oil and within another generation women will be able to order bespoke artificial sperm from Amazon.  Maybe they’ll keep a few male specimens in zoos to remind them of the bad old days when men ruled the world and the roost which they had done ever since our ancestors came down out of the trees some twenty million years ago.  As John F. Kennedy said, life isn’t fair.  But it used to be that it was mainly unfair to women.

At the moment, it seems that things may be changing and not a moment too soon.  Take, for example, one of the most ancient forms of discrimination, the taking of young girls by older men as wives or mistresses or, in many cases, just taking them.  According to some authorities, Peter Abelard was 36 in 1115 A.D. when he met Heloise d'Argenteuil who was 14.  There ensued love at first sight and one of history’s great romances.  Their age disparity was not so unusual in the twelfth century and even Heloise’s youth was not a serious concern.  It is true that Peter was castrated but not for marrying her and not even for statutory rape.  Rather, thinking to protect her, he sent her to the convent.  Thinking to protect herself, she denied being married to him.  But that infuriated her uncle who took it to mean she had been living with him in sin.  Both had guessed wrong about the uncle’s moral priorities.

Important men have always and everywhere preferred much younger wives and mistresses.[2] Helen of Sparta (later Helen of Troy) is the mythical archetype.  She was in the first blush of youth when she married King Menelaus who was already famous for his military exploits when he and four other kings drew straws for her.  There is, of course, nothing strange about May-December romances unless you think it strange that in 99% of them it is the woman who plays May to the man’s December.  In living memory, we have Charlie Chaplin who was 36 years older than Oona O’Neill.  Leopold Stokowski was 42 years older than his third wife, Gloria Vanderbilt.  Woody Allen is 35 years older than his third wife Soon-Yi Previn and Hugh Hefner was 60 years older than Crystal Harris.  Melania Knauss was 28 when she met Donald Trump in 1998.  He was 52.  She was his third wife.  Callista Bisek was 27 when she and Newt Gingrich began their adulterous affair in 1993.  He was 50.  He made her his third wife seven years later after she insisted he convert to Roman Catholicism.

It is important to note that these were probably not forced marriages.  In each, the men and the women got pretty much what they set out to get.  It is likely that all involved love of one kind or another.  In addition, the men got youth, beauty and fecundity while the women got security, power and prestige.  Chaplin and O’Neill are prime examples.  There is no doubt theirs was a love match.  They adored each other in spite of having to live in exile from the United States where he was caught up in the red-baiting hysteria fomented by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  He got a beautiful and talented woman who gave him peace and love and eight children.  Having survived the dysfunctional family of Eugene O’Neill, she got pretty much the same things. 

But.  There’s always a but and in this case it is the fact that, throughout the ages, society has been simultaneously titillated and irritated by such alliances.  The women are often thought of “gold diggers” or “trophy wives” and the men are said to be “cradle robbers.”   There is always the suspicion that the men are exercising a sense of entitlement akin to the alleged medieval practice of droit de seigneur.  And there is the stark reality that such alliances reflect and reinforce the inferior status of women in general.  Whether they wind up happily or unhappily, more often than not they become fodder for the scandal media and late night comics.  Again, the pattern was set by Helen and Paris.  You will recall that she was awarded to him by Aphrodite and he was later mortally wounded in battle.  He or Helen (accounts differ) begged his first wife, the nymph Oenone, to save him but she, the spurned woman, refused and he died.  It seems Helen was then returned to Menelaus and they lived more or less happily together ever after.  Or perhaps only until Mephistophilis gave her to Doctor Faustus who sold his soul for her.  “Was this,” he gasped, “the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Illium?”  Well, it was complicated, even more so than Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde.  As Lysander tells his beloved Hermia, "The course of true love never did run smooth."  Which is true even when a great playwright turns the turbulence into a comic farce.

As Darwin explained. “…individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind.”  The Alpha males – the biggest, fastest, smartest and most aggressive members of the troop – could and did mate with any females that attracted their attention.  It was natural for them to focus on the youngest, the most attractive and the most fecund.  The biological morality of the system was impeccable.  Like Caesar boasting to the Roman Senate, Mr. Alpha could say, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”[3]  It may seem unfair to females in retrospect but the truth is most of them accepted the inequity as their natural condition.[4]  The title of the 1966 best seller seems to fit:  Been Down So Long, It Seems Like Up To Me.

But it had always been unfair because it both reflected and projected the attitude that the differences between the sexes rendered the female inferior.  Thus, male supremacy was necessary and natural and a whole range of female distinctions and disabilities was justified.  This is, of course, a logical fallacy but men needed it to cope with the tensions implicit in the knowledge that women were in a position to judge the central element of their self-image, their sexual prowess.  They wanted to think of her as the “little woman,” soft, weak, emotional, flighty and all the rest.  To a large extent, she was lovable specifically because she was so vulnerable.

It was never true that little boys were made of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails while little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice.  Nor was it ever true that women are merely imperfect men.  Thomas Aquinas believed “… woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence.”   Tom seemed to miss the  obvious conclusion from his analysis that God was stupid.  Either that or God himself was misbegotten.  For as Genesis insists, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them.”  Sigmund Freud was no smarter when he famously wrote, “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.”  His psychology was as vacuous as Aquinas’s physiology.  In fact, like Aquinas, Freud was a classical misogynist but change was already in the air. 

Like all social movements, women’s rights had antecedents but the flood gates began to open when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others convened the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.  The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was introduced in 1878, passed in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920.  The struggle for contraception rights was ignited by the arrest of Margaret Sanger in 1916 and was finally settled by the Supreme Court in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.  Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963.  Title IX giving women equal treatment in higher education became law in 1972 and Roe v. Wade affirmed the right to abortion in 1973.  These and other milestones rectified practices and traditions that were at least obsolete and often outright evil.  But the most important force that changed history was the introduction of Enovid in 1960.

Enovid, known as The Pill, was the first contraceptive that was simple, virtually certain and reasonably safe.  Moreover it was something that a woman could control herself.  Although at $10 a month it seemed expensive at the time, given its benefits, it was actually a bargain.  What it did was to separate sex from reproduction by removing the risk of unwanted pregnancy.  Relations between the sexes would never be the same even if a lot of men have not yet gotten the memo.  Freed of the risk of unexpected or unwanted pregnancies, women could now aspire to as much independence as they wanted and demand equality in every aspect of their lives.

Freud, ever the fabulist, said, "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”  The answer is and was obvious to anyone who listened to what women were saying.  The vast majority of them want equality:  equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity in the workplace, equal protection of the law, equal access to health care and, prominently at the moment, equal respect and dignity.  To one degree or another, they have made gains in these and other areas with the striking exception of respect and dignity.  Some churches, politicians and businesses have learned to say the right things but we still seem surprised at the intensity of the resentment women express at being groped or denigrated or made the object of lewd remarks.  When a powerful man is outed for harassment, abuse or even rape, other men may know it’s ugly but are ready to move on in the interest of more important things like electoral success.  When an antediluvian politician boasts about his sexual conquests, we brush it off as “locker room talk” and elect him to the  office of his choice.  The President of the United States recently implied that a female member of the United States Senate would prostitute herself for campaign contributions.  His spokeswoman said this was not sexist because he had used the same locution referring to other politicians of both sexes.  Women who object to this sort of thing are labeled “feminazis.”  It’s as though the progress made in other areas has had two unintended consequences:  an effort on the part of men to assert and protect at least their sexual dominance and an increased willingness of women to protest such treatment publicly.  Thus there is more abuse and we read about abuse more often.

Increased awareness of a growing problem may portend real change even in the face of the entrenched misogyny of powerful institutions including many religious denominations.  It may be that the legal system will find a way to balance the antithetical claims of equality before the law and due process of law in situations that almost always arise in deep privacy and involve significant power imbalances.  On that great come and get it day there will be no more glass ceilings, no more gauntlets in front of Planned Parenthood clinics, no more casting couches.  It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  It is however not necessarily something to bet the farm on in the short term.  Longer term it seems inevitable that women will achieve equality unless they don’t need it anymore because men have become extinct.  As Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

---

Notes

[1] A “unit” is a cow and her calf.  All the calves will be female, there being no further need for males.  And just so you know, today the cow still gets pregnant using real bull-provided sperm.  However, she never actually encounters the gentleman.  The bull is induced to mount an artificial vagina which has been infused with the scent of a real cow in heat.  Like many human males, the bulls are not especially smart and tend to be indifferent as to where their sperm is deposited.  Same thing is true of pigs.  All kinds of pigs.

[2] Well, not every important man.  Benjamin Franklin advised a young man to seek an older woman as his mistress for eight reasons.  The second was, “Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a thousand Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick.  Thus they continue amiable.  And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.”  And the last reason was because “They are so grateful!!”  [Emphasis and exclamation points in the original.]  Franklin did not follow his own advice.  He met Deborah Read in 1723 when he was 17 and she was 15.  They undertook a common law marriage in 1730 which lasted until her death in 1774.  She was a shrewd business person and a faithful spouse which is more than can be said for Ben who maintained stables of mistresses in Paris and London for years.

[3] Caesar had three wives and numerous mistresses including Cleopatra who was 31 years his junior.  As a teenager, he married Cornelia who was 13 at the time.  His third wife was Calpurnia whom he married when he was 41 and she was 16. His second marriage, to Pompeia, was a political deal that lasted less than five years.

[4] One exception was Heloise who disdained marriage and the subordinate role of women in general.  She wrote, “…whomever concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection for it is evident that she seeks not the man but his wealth and is willing to prostitute herself for it.”  Again accounts differ and some writers claim he forced her to marry him somehow.  But reading the letters, there can be no doubt she had loved Abelard and admired him even when she disputed philosophical issues with him.