Massive Protests in Caracas, Venezuela AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos
Don’t look now, but there are some very unhappy people with the state of the social revolution in Venezuela. As Ramparts has reported before, the Venezuelan revolution of late has been more fueled by hunger than the socialist philosophic concept of equality of outcome, though it is a foregone conclusion that, at this time, everyone is equally hungry. Normally two to three million people spilling out into the street for something other than an international sport victory is not a promising sign for a country’s ensconced leadership, but El Presidente Maduro and his ruling thugs are a particularly hardy and resistant bunch. There remains something unique about socialist dictators, in that they seem immune to the typical pressures that would normally cause a more democratically elected leadership to think the time to resign was imminent. The means of daily survival are critical ingredients for control – the more scarce the ingredients, the more dependence of the population on the rapidly diminishing resource. The secondary lever for all such socialist autocracies is control of the military, with troops well fed and troop leaders well pensioned. For autocrats like Maduro, the twin images of omniscience and omnipotence must always be present to maintain the veneer of confident immunity to “risks” to the glorious revolution. Maduro must present the synthesis of the Man of the People and the Man of Steel. Kevin Williamson of NRO may have devised the best description ever written of inevitable transformation of these would Stalins:
Inevitably as the peoples’ hunger grows and their desire for spectacle and fear for authority diminishes, the sashes and gold chains, the generalissimo outfits, no longer have their projected power. Venezuela, the South American country most closely aligned with concept of societal success prior to 1995, with a deeply educated and prosperous middle class, in twenty short years under the socialist schemers of Chavez and his pale imitation Maduro, has been plunged into the abyss of total breakdown. The only functioning market is the black one, and the most legitimate vote undertaken by Venezuelans in the last five years has been the vote of three million citizens with their feet as they left the country hoping to salvage their tattered lives, once supposedly liberated by socialist visions, now intensely focused on simple survival.
Maduro has walked his tightrope with tenacity, but cracks are widening and the chance for real violence, and potentially Ceausescu style violent overthrow grows. The growing crisis has many risks beyond the ruling Venezuelan Politburo, and the countries are finally belatedly attempting to do the right thing. The United States this week pulled diplomatic recognition from Maduro’s ruling clique and recognized instead the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guiado. Guiado himself is somewhat of a stand-in for the Maduro opponent, Leopoldo Lopez, under house arrest since opposing Maduro in 2014. The second important step the US took was offering Maduro safe passage out of the country. Dictators always have to weigh the continuing ability to horde assets from the country they lead, while risking the grotesque amounts they have already shepherded out of the country into safe havens. Trying to hold onto both of course risks ending up with neither, and falling into the hands of a very, very angry mob.
As the street protests grow in intensity, so does the dimwittedness of the leftist elites in the United States, who cling to the notion that this once more horrendous example of the epic failure of the socialist vision to improve anything for anybody, is evidence of the need to take another try and get it right. Socialist utopian visions cling to the notion that the missing ingredient is the vision minus the corruption, only to be blind to the obvious that it is the vision itself that is corrupted. For the idealistic mental snowdrifts that are newly elected US Representatives Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and other examples of the young American generation’s citadels of lighter than air intellect, the United States remains chief corrupter by its success with a capitalist model, and desperately needs an enforced cleansing, towards the world of Venezuela. The more cynical older generation representatives of the socialist dream like Bernie Sanders and the Hollywood elite, look instead for a more staid revolution, that would preserve their ability to get theirs, but secure the redistribution of wealth and eliminate individual incentive from, as Williamson so craftily describes in his NRO article , as the “Kulaks” .
We will need to watch carefully over the next weeks as the usual snakes in the grass position themselves to take political advantage of Venezuela’ desperate straits. For the long suffering people of Venezuela, hopefully there is a way out of the mess without further catastrophe and violence, that gets them their freedom back.
In dark times, one always looks for the Angel in the Whirlwind.
As Christmas Day approaches, our post modern world argues about whether the lyrics of a holiday classic must be censured to remove the potentially ‘hurtful’ lyrics from contributing to unsafe environments. If you are not familiar with the specific controversial song, you might have thought the offended class were referring to the callus injury of grandma inflicted by a poorly driven reindeer, or perhaps, a thievish grinch. But no, the scarlet letter this season has been pinned on a song by master song writer Frank Losser, who looked to hide his devilish intentions to inflict unwanted sexual advances upon a defenseless female by invoking the cruelties of the weather and fool her into submission. Apparently, a nation must be chastened by its previous willingness to enjoy “Baby, Its Cold Outside” without an accompanying explanatory document as to its inappropriateness.
If such silly arguments take away from you some of the beautiful sheen of celebrating an important day in our civilization, I would like to reintroduce you to a different song that reflects a more innocent time. Before gift exchange, family clashes, and the ramblings of a ‘woke’ society, Christmas did have a different level of significance. It is not entirely clear when the typical communal celebrations of the winter solstice were reoriented to coincide with the Christian feast day of the birth of Jesus, but there were rumblings long before St. Nicholas had his penchant for handing out gifts associated permanently with the same day, and resigned us all to a frenzy of consumerism.
Before the song styles of the secular holiday, there was a desire to provide a musical link to the Christmas miracle for common people that lay beyond the liturgical expressions of sacred music evoked only in sacred venues. The traditions beyond the church walls extended to local festivals and communal songs that were passed generation to generation telling the story of Christmas as laid out in the Gospels through a common humanity. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke spelled out in poetic detail the circumstances of God’s love for His Creation expressed through the birth of a Divine Son in the most humble of places. The Christ Child would come into the human world through human birth far from the comfortable and safe world of elite or connected of the time. The gift of the Christ child to remove for all eternity the calamitous fall from grace of the original creation Adam, would not occur in a luscious garden, a magnificent temple or a luxurious palace, but in the unguarded, vulnerable bed of straw of an animal manger, that every common person of the limited means circumstantially could directly relate. The tale of the Nativity – the Virgin birth, the faith driven acceptance of both parents of the extraordinary circumstances of the pregnancy, the support of Angels, the guidance and visitation of Kings to worship the miracle — relay a particularly beautiful environment for a musical creation worthy of the written prose.
It is thought somewhere in the 12 century in the area of Wexford, the musical genesis of telling the Nativity story specifically through a celebratory song, or carol, was borne. The Mixolydian Mode that forms the basis of the song’s structure revolves around a medieval chant tonality that extended in a diatonic scale’s three whole steps and a half step from G to G7, resulting in a warm yet somewhat otherworldly quality. It seems somewhere before the 16th century the English verse was translated to Gaelic, but the English roots of Wexford led to the version we most know today as it was put down formally on paper in 1684 by Bishop Luke Waddinge who connected the words to traditional music in a little song book called “A Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs” further expressing the purpose of the collection as “composed by a Devout man, for the Solace of his Friends and Neighbours in their Afflictions.” The collection of carols, including the carol now referred to as the Wexford Carol, is known as the Kilmore Carols. In 1928, the organist in Enniscorthy, Dr. William Henry Grattan Flood, published the modern version we know today, and hear the ancient and modern coming together to recreate the unique spiritual rapture of the Wexford Carol :
Good people all, this Christmas-time, Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done, In sending His beloved Son. With Mary holy we should pray To God with love this Christmas Day: In Bethlehem upon that morn There was a blessed Messiah born.
Although the Wexford Carol is performed by many artists of both sexes around the world, it never sounds more central to the Christmas miracle or releases its otherworldly power better than when it is inflected with its Irish roots. The Kilmore Carols are performed in Wexford traditionally by a male choir of six voices, but the beautiful words married to elegiac music have never been more beautifully linked then when they received the treatment of Wexford’s own world famous Irish tenor, Anthony Kearns. Mark Steyn brought the story of the Wexford Carol and Kearn’s beautiful version to his Christmas show several years ago, and made the ancient carol ring anew. Enjoy the framing of the carol and Kearn’s ability to bring the 12th, 16th, and 21 centuries into a beautiful communion. And that is my Christmas gift to you – Have a Merry and Blessed Christmas! (Addendum: the video has been disabled on Ramparts, but the You Tube link will take you directly to the video in its entirety)
An original 1951 economic compact developing a proposed improved internal post war trade zone between the former allies France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and their erstwhile enemies, Italy and West Germany, was seized by idealists and over the decades grew into something altogether more imposing. By 1993, the dream of a continental free market was realized in the Treaty of Maastricht, forming the birth of a democracy inspired concept of a shared European destiny and citizenry, the European Union, and now comprises 28 member states and over 500 million people. The United Kingdom, twice thrown into vicious continental wars, was a wary but foundational participant in the European experiment. Conceived as a means of economic linkage that would effectively bind the European nations in such a fashion that the horrendous rivalries that caused a previous century and a half of bloody conflict would have no oxygen for existence, the European Union has instead metastasized progressively into a somewhat autocratic political bureaucracy answerable to no one. The British, never comfortable with the most identifiable element of loss of sovereignty, the Euro currency, chafed at the other elements of loss of control of decisions they feel befitted a free people.
On June 23, 2016, the people of the United Kingdom shocked the world. A referendum that asked the basic question of modern times only a democracy could risk answering – should a modern society maintain a cozy, passive, somewhat indentured but secured life , or risk an uncertain but independent self determined future – was resoundingly answered in the direction of freedom. Brexit, the act of leaving the political and economic responsibilities associated with being a signee of the Treaty of the European Union, was voted in the affirmative by over 52% of the United Kingdom. The stunning outcome has had enormous reverberations through the British political establishment ever since. Prime Minister Cameron, who campaigned on the need for Britain to Remain, held an untenable position with the loss and resigned. The foremost Leave supporters in the cabinet, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, ended up shooting each other in the proverbial foot, and were out-organized and outgunned by Theresa May. May, every bit the Remainer as was most of the British Cabinet and elites, implied that with her new position as leader of the elected representatives of the United Kingdom, she had had an epiphany with the vote, and emoted that “Brexit means Brexit”.
On March 29, 2017, Article 50 of the European Union Treaty was evoked, and the two year negotiating period to formally exit the union was initiated. A deadline of March 29, 2019 was felt more than enough time to establish the rules of a divorce.
If you had bet, however, upon an organized enlightened process from the elected British government representing the interests of the British people who voted so strongly for independence, you have lost badly. Prime Minister May has shown the political dexterity of a wildebeest and the stubborn grip of a python on progressively weaker negotiated stances. First, wildly overestimating her personal connection with the people, a flash election in 2017 meant to extend her significant House of Commons majority instead ended with a humiliating Conservative Party retrenchment. The radical Labor Party markedly strengthened its hand , and May was forced into a political marriage with a minority Northern Ireland Unionist Party, just to maintain her position as Prime Minister. Misreading the loss, May lurched into a Remainer Lite philosophy, alienating the passionate Leave base of her own party, and seeing a never ending cascade of Cabinet Ministers resigning in disgust over the inability to formulate any semblance of an aggressive, independence driven negotiation with the European Union bureaucracy. Last week, May, after affirming in speeches time and time again, a series of “red lines” an independent Britain could not abide in any post Brexit relationship, produced her long awaited Magnum Opus agreement for a potential House of Commons vote-which proved to be laced with red line surrenders, leading to a whole new group of resignations.
With less than four months to go to the Brexit conclusion date of March 29th, 2019, the apparent best agreement May could negotiate positions Great Britain to maintain subservience to the EU Courts, trade restrictions as required by the EU Custom Union, dependence upon EU immigration rules, billions in payments to the EU – and no residual say in EU parliament where the rules are formed. A Brexit much worse than no Brexit. If you think that’s the sound of independence and self determination, you are reading the wrong blog.
Needless to say, as with most modern governments, the elected elite have always assumed that the people who elect them, need to be led, not represented. Prime Minister May and the phalanx of government bureaucrats that had no intention to ever separate from their fellow continental bureaucrats, always hoped for a strategy of delay until the populist’s passion to leave would wane, and the better minds would prevail. Now, she is attempting to look stalwart, clinging with a two fisted death grip on a loser, knowing that the impending March date arriving without any kind of agreement , looks like a disastrous cliff to most.
Great leaders in history have frequently been required to defend unpopular positions, but the great ones have had an innate sense of the people’s will. Theresa May has managed to have an almost surreal genetic absence of instinct for historical trajectory, and could find herself without a political friend in the world. The European Union negotiators have relied on her lack of commitment to Brexit, the Labor Party is standing by to watch her flop, the Conservatives realize the people will reject them for having bungled completely the Brexit process, her supporters will look for a way back in to the EU, and May will get to join the commanding political heights achieved by only the most profoundly ineffectual.
The sad commentary is that democracies have really forgotten how to do the tough things, the things that rely on a sense of confidence and destiny inspired by their past contributors. When you believe in yourself and the unique qualities that led to past success, to your liberties and free will, the future does not hold a right path or a wrong path, only your own path. Theresa May like all modernist politicians has a fear of failing, and will therefore never look to succeed.
Great Britain, in voting for Brexit, was asking for a return to the self determination and freedom that had defined its history, and will find this particular group of British leaders wanting nothing of the sort. Winston Churchill once famously stated about the British people , “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job”. Soon we will see if the country has enough gumption to take back the rudder, stabilize the ship of state at this critical time , and find the people who can get the job done.
November 6th, 2018 brings that time honored tradition in the United States – the biennial national election day. Ramparts has had its own election tradition – of generally doing a poor job of predicting results – maybe just a little too much leaning on hoped for outcomes, and not enough objective recognition of the fickle nature of the American electorate. This is a country that uniformly blames the side they just elected, and looks to throw the bums out. Ramparts doesn’t show prejudice as a wrong headed prognosticator – picking Romney over Obama, Clinton over Trump, and missing the 2010 backlash entirely. Then again, significantly more qualified observers and pollsters managed to blow those calls as well, particularly the herculean Trump upset. The 2018 battle has been at various times promoted as a blue wave, a disastrous Senate map for Democrats full of Trump states, and High Noon for the Resistance. The so called off year election, where absent a Presidential candidate at the head of the ticket, has in the past been assumed to focus more on local factors. The ubiquitous nature of social media and reams of money aligned with the ever increasing polarization of views has, however, made even local dog catcher elections ‘pivotal’. No, really. Pivotal. Pandering, buying influence and votes, denigrating an opponent, describing an opposition triumph as Armageddon for the country – well, that’s what we would call the American Way. And don’t you know , millions are going to go to that voting booth and proudly do their part, to celebrate the process one more time. I will be one of them.
If there is no earthshaking prediction based on inside information I am able to offer to either assure you or appall you based on the outcome, at least a few observations are in order.
The House of Representatives – A Lighter Shade of Blue: The 2010 election was epical for Republicans. Feasting off disillusionment with the creaky health care shenanigans of the Obama administration, a massive wave of contrarians were voted to both state house legislatures and governorships, the effects of which are still mightily felt today. Put in position to interpret the 2010 Census, these legislatures re-configured the electoral map and republicans have held a natural advantage at both the state and national legislature level since. Recognizing the impenetrable coalitions of urban suburbs and inner city democratic machines that keep the voting loyalty of even the dear departed, republican legislatures let the cities have their wins, and carved out their own districts of winnable voters. this has led to an 8 year dynasty of a republican led house, and has infuriated democrats who see the people’s house as theirs by eminent domain. A flurry of lawsuits by democrats to overturn the districting maps has begun to bite, mostly prominently in Pennsylvania, where the state’s liberal Supreme Court overturned the map and likely overturned 5 republican districts into the democrat column. This is a terrific head start in a world where a switch of 24 seats would lead to a Democrat majority and a return to a Pelosi run circus. The traditional trend of the next election after a Presidential election is for the President’s party to lose significant seats in Congress – in keeping with the American tradition of never give carte blanche to any party. The Trump phenomena however is the most unpollable electorate of modern political polling and all bets are off picking the outcome. A democrat win of the House means Speaker Pelosi and Committee Chairmen Nadler, Waters, and Clyburn. Let the circus commence! True, juicy justice in outcome would be a Democrat pick up of 22 seats, so close to victory, yet frustratingly just short of power, pulling the hypocrisy wool off everyone’s eyes for good, as the self destructive liberal wing would devourer what little carcass of what was left of any discerning progressives that still believed in their country, More likely? A painful two years of nonstop Trump badgering, bashing and hectoring if they win, and two years of nothing ever getting done.
The Senate – Where has All The Money Gone?: Since the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1913, the election of Senators have been by the direct vote of the people. Given that each state staggers its Senate elections, the Senate races tend to have very intense individual focus on the candidates, and as such, have elevated the job to national prominence and influence. And we are talking serious influence. Take for instance the Texas Senate race between Ted Cruz the incumbent Senator and his challenger Beto O’Rourke. Apparently the job of a Senator is so influential that over 130 million dollars ( that’s 130 million!) will have been spent in the effort to engage in the race. The outside money pouring in doesn’t care about local issues; it cares about converting that money into power on the national stage. There are many other examples of similarly egregious expenditures for what is supposed to be a contest of ideas rather than influence peddling, but the mass of money spent has made any developed discussion of ideas an archaic concept. Blank slates like Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin will win, not because she brings any of her own talent to the solving of the nation’s problems, but because the money will allow the destruction of her opponent as any kind of recognizable alternative. Millions of dollars are standing behind Baldwin because she is a willing shill for other people’s ideas. The fall in intellect from Russ Feingold to Tammy Baldwin is steep indeed.
The Trump rallies , with his ever present ability to pull massive, enthusiastic crowds suggest that the President will likely have real influence in the Trump carried states of 2016. Every election there is a race or two from each party that presents as a total surprise. I suspect the pattern will continue with a prominent Republican and a prominent Democrat going down to defeat, but the Trumpian gravity is likely I think to pull 3 or 4 uphill candidates into a position to win. Likely states? Indiana and North Dakota – but the tally could easily include Florida, Missouri, and Montana. 54-55 Republican Senators I think is not out of the question. If the House flips, the Senate will need every one the 54 to somehow keep the country on track.
As soon as the results are tallied on November7th, the process of reassessing the power players will begin, and with it, the landscape of challengers to Trump in 2020. The unbound economy, the flourishing job market, relative peace, and a returning sense of confidence that is part of our current national landscape would normally be a potent force for staying the course. America will always remain uncomfortable with such bounty, and look for ways to do penance for success. A sharp leftward turn in the 2018 election would suggest the country looked at the prospect of America becoming great again, and decided it turned out to be not worthy after all. A stay the course election, and we may all have to get out our MAGA hats.
Jair Bolsanaro has just capped off a most tumultuous month. Surviving an leftist assassination attempt in September, 2018, the former Brazilian army officer and long time congressman has blown through a primary, then, run off election, with a crushing defeat of his socialist opponent. Brazil, a country that has been dominated by socialist populist rule since its military dictatorship was overcome in the 1980s, has been drawn to Bolsanaro’s message of a nationalist socially conservative agenda of privatization, gun rights, and law and order. A surge of support from Brazilians tired of seeing corruption and stilted progress dominate the government of their massive country, has now catapulted a traditionalist conservative to the very pinnacle of power.
Beginning with the stunning Brexit win in Great Britain in the summer of 2016, followed by the ascendancy of the Trump phenomena in the United States, the world has been rocked from its globalist moorings by election reactions of democracies towards more nationalist overtones. No continent cohabitant with democratic process has been spared. A supposedly unified Europe has seen strong elective resistance to trans-national European Union overlords, in Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. North America has seen nationalists win in Mexico, and most dramatically, the United States. Now, South America, watching the real time suicide of a once prosperous Venezuela under the boot of disastrous socialist autocracy, has seen its largest country radically swing away from any dalliance with the virus that has strangled the Venezuelan prosperity.
At the turn of the century, there was a brief communal awareness that perhaps the world had, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seen the “end of history”, with global coordination of borderless trade positioning governments to remove the concept of borders altogether. A dominant military superpower in the United States allowed bureaucrats to resist developing national power structures in favor bureaucrats who would reign by regulation rather than martial projection of power. The need for national exceptionalism was to progressively give way to global universality dominated by an intellectual elite that would bypass the need for borders by eliminating the cultural uniqueness that in their mind supported inequality through border separateness. Globalist thought saw borders as an anachronism, and therefore, encouraged removal of any impediments to immigration, to further blend the cultural soup into an indistinguishable compote. A post religion, post language, post inequity world was in sight, where martial energies could be directed toward global dragons such as “climate change” and “redistribution”. The wrenching effect on individuals of enforced cultural change, derision of time honored traditions, and a feeling that their way of life was wantonly considered an “acceptable” sacrifice on the altar of a ‘better’ future never entered into globalist calculations.
The first reactionary slap was the fundamentalist violent recoil of radical Islam on 09/11. Despite the transient collective national response to the attack, the left almost immediately sought to demonize an aggressive national reaction , and sought to invent a rationalization that would seek global bureaucratic “legal” recourse to terrorism, rather than military destruction of terrorists. Despite the enormous associated risks, global bureaucracies stuck to the stated goal of unfettered immigration, regardless of the obvious risk to their citizens of additionally allowing the virus of radicalism, terrorism, and destruction of rule of law to proceed apace. With the election of Barrack Obama, the bastion home of the clarion call for sovereignty, limited government, and individual freedoms, the United States, was now positioned to lose its exceptionalism, and be assimilated to the future, like its European forebears themselves.
Historical dissonance once driven too far into an unnatural human posture, inevitably leads to reactionary strains, and we are in one now. The only consensus that currently exists is that there can be no consensus between a increasingly globalist, social uniformity championed by the left, and a large and growing reactionary pull back toward traditional virtues and competitive national stories. I can’t see that this division, so intensely demanded by the proponents of each future, will somehow end in comity. The recent hysterical outrages claimed by the left, and the progressive successes on the right in the ballot box only intensifies the divide.
Unfortunately, a chasm is developing, and the first violent outbursts and simmering hatreds are beginning to find root. Violence at the periphery from the disaffected is increasingly finding its way to more and more dramatic expression. The left has never accepted the idea that the “arc of history towards social justice” could ever be thwarted. The threat of violence has been the left’s tool for ultimate submission of those who do not see the future the way they do. The reaction in the not so distant past to the violent tendencies of the over reaching left, has been in past times an equally over reaching right. We will see if the skill set of such men as Trump and Bolsanaro prove up to the task of ably setting things right, without resorting to pulling as far right as the left has pulled left. If they are not savvy enough, pressure pot may boil over, and we all might unfortunately end up looking back to this tumultuous time, as the quiet before the storm.
When you are so sure you are in the right, that there is no place for the concept of truth, you have arrived at mob rule. America and its reliance on the two hundred and forty some year old Constitution, and a tradition of rights of the individual and rule of law, teeters at the brink. In a circus of innuendo and show trial, half the country is willing to throw away the incredibly hard won rights that protect the citizen against the tyranny of the mob, for the prize of a judicial seat on the Supreme Court.
The role of advise and consent that was applied to the Senate by the framers of the Constitution could not have predicted the bastardization of the process that has infected the last forty years. the Supreme Court was considered the weakest of the three branches, positioned only to make sure that the laws applied by the other two branches respected the limitations of the Constitutional document. Laws were to be proposed and passed by the people’s representative, the Legislative Branch, and executed by the Executive Branch. The Court was to secure that laws carried the weight of their intent, and the limitations of their scope as referenced in the Constitution, not formulate the laws themselves.
Somewhere, this went terribly wrong, when the Supreme Court determined to define a law’s intent rather than its constitutionality. The Democrat Party, having failed through election to achieve societal transformation rapidly enough to secure its permanent position of power, looked to the court as the extra legal way of securing the transformation without being answerable to the voters,
Of all the torrents of societal tumult that led to the wholly unexpected triumph of the renegade candidate Trump to the Presidency, the balance of the Supreme Court was likely the overriding decision maker for the discerning voter. Trump promised to resist the transformers, and secure textualists to the bench, that would restore the court to its appropriate place in the governance of the country. When the impossible happened and Trump won, the initial intent was to wound Trump so severely that he would be distracted from his court conversion with the overriding task of defending himself against the onslaught. It turns out Trump has thus far proved immune to the crushing attacks, and the internal deep state efforts to create subtrifuge have become to crumble. Gorsuch was the Scalia seat, so the game of destruction was not likely to succeed, but Anthony Kennedy has been the “swing” vote that had allowed the court to maintain undue influence on extra-constitutional processes. The wound of losing the swing vote was too much to bear, and the politics of destruction were advanced to all out war. Avoiding the hundreds of hours of testimony and attestations, the party waited until the clock shortened suffienctly to assure the trap was set correctly, than supported through the arm of the accomplice media, pressured the deliberation into an effective show trial. An accusation without collaboration is the ultimate weapon, as one must deny the accuser rather than the unsupported accusation.
The Soviet show trials of the 1930s and the Red Guard public humiliations of the 1960s did not make any assumptions of fact or truth – none were required. The process simply put the indiviual on trial for standing in the way of the mob’s justice, and the decisions were preordained.
Brian Kavanaugh knew his judicial philosophy represented a threat to the radicals that had determined as President Obama had stated, to literally transform the nation regardless of the nation’s desire to be so transformed. He could not have recognized, however, that the simple reality of having grown up male in the 1980s would be a dagger to the heart of a fair and respectful review.
Its not clear that Kavanaugh will survive the attacks politically and achieve the seat on the court that he is overly qualified for. Regardless of outcome, he has been wounded permanently by the new Red Guard that are willing destroy the country before they give up the fight to resist those that would restrict their power.
Sad to say, the people likely felt the same way in 1860. Let’s hope we find some way out of the vortex.
Zuni Rocket sets L.Cr. John McCain’s plane aflame on the USS Forrestal
At 10:51am July 29, 1967, the USS Forrestal, an American aircraft carrier positioned in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam prepared a flight deck for participation in the strategic bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, and had a deck full of fighter aircraft loaded with ordinance. Completing the dangerous process of loading live ordinance , an A-4 Skyhawk captained by Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III was docked at the stern of the carrier when a Zuni rocket secured to a craft on the opposite side of the deck, due to an electrical surge on the craft, spontaneously fired and released, shooting across the tarmac directly into McCain’s jet fuel tank, spilling hundreds of gallons of highly flammable fuel.
Deck crewmen, quickly realizing the extreme gravity of the situation, rushed to douse the flames. McCain got himself extracted from his cockpit, jumped down off the craft and raced across the deck as the fire crews ran past him to spray fire retardant.
McCain got half way across the deck when the first 1000 lb bomb beneath his craft ignited from the fire’s heat, blasting him 10 feet in the air, peppering him in shrapnel, and instantly disintegrating the courageous fire team behind him. Before the conflagration was over, scores of bombs exploded on the deck of the Forrestal tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel ignited, and in the worst on deck accident in U.S. history, 134 servicemen were killed, another 161 injured. John S. McCain, so close to the center of a death defying ordeal, managed to come out of the conflagration to live another day.
Yesterday, the Maverick met an ordeal beyond even his unique survival skills, and succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 82. Like every other adversary he had the misfortune to face in his life, he proved himself both courageous and circumspect in his place in the battle to survive.
John S. McCain III left an indelible mark on the world in the 50 or so years he was a public figure. History called him from birth to be a participant, not an observer. His grandfather John McCain was an integral part of carrier actions in World War II. Foreshadowing his grandson, he was a Naval Academy graduate, hard driving, profane individual who liked to take responsibility on his shoulders, and was empowered by the proximity to danger and action. A top Pacific commander at the end of the war, he died of a heart attack just four days after the Japanese surrender, completely worn out by the demands of the job. His son, John S. McCain, Jr., followed his father’s footsteps to become a four star admiral in charge of Naval Pacific Operations in the Vietnam War. It was an unavoidable destiny, therefore, for John S. McCain III, nondescript student and having a reputation as a hell raiser at the Naval Academy, to follow his father and grandfather’s path as a Naval aviator in the midst of the Vietnam War and a participant in the fighting during his father’s command.
The Forrestal was just the first of MCain’s life altering brushes with death. The second occurred three months later from the Forrestal disaster, when on October 26, 1967, when on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, McCain was shot down by a surface to air missile. Forced to eject from the plane, McCain fractured both arms and a leg on the ejection impact, nearly drowned when he parachuted into a lake, then was dragged out by North Vietnamese troops, who permanently crushed his right shoulder with a gunstock and bayoneted him. Transported to the notorious ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison camp, the severe injuries were left untreated, and further torture followed until it was discovered who his father was by the captors. This led to a hospitalization for basic treatment in hopes that McCain could serve as a propaganda tool against his father, and country. McCain lost fifty pounds in the ‘hospital’ and was not expected to live. When he revealed to the enemy the Maverick survival orneriness that everyone back home already knew about, he was placed in solitary confinement for the next two years. The beatings resumed in an effort to get him to sign a ‘confession of guilt for war crimes’ and he was offered early release if he would sign. The horrendous treatment could not break him, refusing any preferential treatment. He remained steadfast in the five and one half years that he was imprisoned until his release in 1972. He carried the physical and mental scars of his brutal treatment to the end of his life.
McCain returned from the war a different man, but as events that are as severe as the ones he had lived through, reinforced both his good and bad impulses. He returned to navy command and performed well, but recognized he would never achieve his ambitions to the extent that his father and grandfather did in the Navy. He turned his direction out of the military — and away from his faithful wife, who had been injured in a car accident, and suffered much of the same rehabilitation requirements that McCain endured upon returning to the States. He requested a divorce, and remarried, this time to an Arizonan who was an heir to a fortune and who’s father related to Arizonans of real influence. McCain entered Arizona politics, and won the congress seat for the Ist district as part of the Reagan wave of conservative victories, then subsequently, won the Senate seat of the retiring legendary senator Barry Goldwater.
Assumed to be a pure conservative, Senator McCain began the conversion to a contrarian that would earn him the title of political Maverick by a conflicted press, that, while enjoying his willingness to destabilize his own party unity and his love of the battle, confounded by his residual tendency to hold, for them, abhorrent conservative foundations and ‘warhawk’ persona.
He enjoyed the public world, never shying from a headline, and relished the discomfort his ‘reach across the aisle’ attitude caused his fellow Republicans. His ambitions showed full flower when he engaged in a bitter race for the Republican nomination for President in 2000 against the front runner George W. Bush, losing , but holding a fairly significant grudge in the process, that led to McCain functioning as an unpredictable thorn in the eventual President Bush’s side in legislative issues such as tax cuts, carbon taxes, campaign finance, and gun rights. He remained illogically close to John Kerry, a radical anti Vietnam war protestor following a controversial Vietnam combat experience, leading to a timid support of Bush in the 2004 election, and a further distancing from the party’s conservative core. Yet, when a quagmire and a potential ignominious defeat in Iraq loomed, MCain was unwavering in his support for President Bush’s decision against all odds and advice, to support an American military surge tactic, that turned the conflict and removed direct war in Iraq as an obstacle for future Presidents.
The moment of truth for John McCain came in 2008, when his ambitions and the party’s presidential opportunity coalesced in a Presidential nomination at the party convention. McCain worked tirelessly, but his contrariness and his lack of party discipline got him into trouble from which he never recovered. McCain made several crucial mistakes that doomed the already difficult task of defeating a Bush weary country against an unknown idealized Democrat candidate, Barrack Obama – young, sophisticated, and of mixed race — an exotic combination that proved intoxicating for a compliant press and a country looking to get a way from a war footing. McCain became disappointed that his personal rapport with the press held little sway when up against someone that exemplified their idyllic view of government. He selected an obscure candidate for Vice President in Governor Sara Palin of Alaska , who he hoped would restore his shaky relationships with conservatives, only to nearly abandon her when she proved shaky in her grasp of facts and unexperienced with the full court pressure applied by the press. He grossly misread the effect “suspending” his Presidential campaign when the October 2008 banking crisis hit, traveling to Washington to ‘work for ‘solutions’ where he was easily tarred as an accomplice in the disaster. Obama, also a Senator, wisely stayed away and let Washington flail, allowing Obama to remain clean of all the necessarily politically unpleasant decisions required to survive the crisis. McCain’s likeablity and hero status translated to nearly 60 million votes, but he was swamped in the electoral college by nearly 200. John McCain had reached the pinnacle of his political life, only to come up against a more presidentially projectable maverick than he, in Obama.
He spent his residual years in the Senate prior to his illness trying to fashion the illusory middle ground that he felt was the way forward for the country. Opposed to the Accountable Care Act as an unworkable and undemocratic bill, he ended up being the crossover vote that protected the bill against rejection in 2017, when he felt the alternative was equally unstructured and undemocratic. He sided with the Obama administration in the ill conceived actions in Egypt and Libya, but was virulently against the inactions in Syria and the process of negotiating with Iran’s theocratic dictators without Senate treaty submission. Despite being the Senator of a border state, he could never find a comfortable position on the need for border security and immigration reform. Regardless, as with all historical moments in his life, McCain positioned himself in the center of the action, and determined a course he felt he could live with, and a priority and principle he felt was consistent with his personal calling.
John S. McCain saw himself as a maverick, and like all mavericks was comfortable with the inconsistencies and flaws the maverick nature tends to expose. But more than maverick he was heroic, living through pain, torment, and controversy as if they were ennobling, rather than dehumanizing. He was authentically American in his heroism, sometimes losing the consistent and realistic for the ideal, and never, ever wavering in his love of country or mission his family had taken over multiple generations to sustain it. Choosing politics as his ultimate personal mission, he exhibited some of the recklessness that lost him the coalescence of support from all the factions that are necessary to ultimately prevail. The maverick model was, perhaps, a little ahead of its time, and McCain stopped just short of the populist impulse that would eventually position another maverick candidate, Donald Trump to achieve the ultimate prize.
John S. McCain III was above all, one great American story. His core is described in both his own memoir, Faith of My Fathers , and in the brilliant reporting of Robert Timberg in The Nightingale’s Song. We will miss John McCain as we will miss a crucial part of our Americanness, – action oriented, courageous, occasionally impulsive – but trying to find the right and true way forward.
Rest in Peace, John McCain. God Speed to the Maverick.
JMW Turner (1775-1851) lived the life of a radical genius. You know you are making an intense impression when two avowed art critics can look at your work , one critic seeing an artist that “most stirringly and truthfully measures the moods of nature“, the other that sees only “blots“. In 2016, I had the opportunity to visit the British Tate Museum in London and see Turner for myself, by the means he had requested his works to be seen — en masse in a comprehensive collection at a single site. Taken as a compendium of a lifetime of work, the radical genius shines through. As a collector of contemporary artists, it is no small coincidence that I am drawn to artists that acknowledge the foundational influence upon them of Turner’s unique color palate and his interpretation of the natural world as an unbounded sublimity.
Turner was born into a world of commoners and limited means, and he never rejected his birth circumstances, despite his fame at times reaching rockstar celebrity status. At every opportunity to set anchor in the quiet harbor of accepted technique and contemporary adulation, he sailed farther and farther out into unsafe, radical places. By the end of his life, his paintings bordered on swirling, indecipherable, impressionistic and existential art scape. He was happy to coexist in all intimations of the real, the ideal, and the surreal and make you as the observer uncomfortable in interpreting where the painting foundationally lived. Turner lived in very modern circumstances — a recluse, in non-traditional relationships, and combative academic worlds — but generally cared not a wit what others thought of his interpretation of his world. Regardless, his effect on art during his life and afterward was immense, and he remains a titan today.
JMW Turner typified the world of art that lived at the edge of Romanticism, the movement that returned to the concept of Nature as ungovernable and unconquerable, the modern rational, globalist world of the Enlightenment as antithetical to the individual’s need to absorb the sublime and emote in the language of feelings, rather than definitions. Turner saw Britain’s emergence in the 19th century as a dominant sea power as a perfect canvas for man’s intrepid spirit against the awesome power of nature. He repetitively told the apocryphal story that he had personally experienced his unique interpretations of nature’s chaos and color at sea by having requested himself to be lashed to a ship’s foremast in a violent storm. Whether that had ever truly occurred, his seascapes are embellished with rule breaking light, color, and chaos that suggest intimate knowledge of an unstable entanglement of water, wind, and foam in the deep ocean that speaks to a very personal, emotional viewpoint. Nature awesome scope and power is ever present, but man’s romantic need to risk all for a fulfilled life overlays the paintings.
Turner – Self Portrait 1799
Turner’s confidence never wavered as an artist. It is seen in his idealized self portrait in his twenties. He looks out on the world as a young man that will be an oracle not a passive recorder of the world around him. A classic portrait technique of its time, turner manages to imbue the dash and confidence of youth in the manner of a much earlier portrait, Albrecht Durer’s confident 1494 gaze directly at the viewer, suggesting the talent ready to emerge and take on the larger world.
Turner – Battle of Trafalgar 1806
In the first decade of the 19th century, Turner’s ascension to prominence mirrored Britain’s own. Europe was under titanic siege on land with the indomitable armies of Napoleon, but on the ocean, Britain showed the rest of the world the Napoleon was not omnipotent. At Trafalgar in 1805, the British fleet led by Lord Nelson crushed the larger French fleet in a massive sea battle that ended any hopes of Napoleon subduing Britain in the manner he had the rest of the continent. Instead it elevated Nelson to iconic status, and inspired Turner to reimagine the historic sea painting. Turner’s Trafalgar reenacts the battle’s series of events in a simultaneous projection, increasing the sense of tension, chaos, smoke and opacity that suggests a very intimate reconstruction, despite the painting’s immense 8 by 12 foot scope. The colors have begun to ‘turnerize’ with the sky pewters and ambers coexisting with the dark sea and isolated shafts of light.
The destructive nature of the sea fit Turner’s view of the encroachment of industrialization on the restless impulse of nature to resist. Sea and sky are progressively intermingling and the desperate calamity is highlighted centrally in a shaft of light massing the powerful waves, the broken ship and the desperate survivors clinging to life in a single maelstrom. Soon Turner’s vision progressively loosened itself of the need for specific detail, and he brought increased contrast between hazy contrasts and impressions of light and dense crimsons and onyx of both objects and sky.
Turner The Shipwreck 1810Turner The Fighting Termeraire 1839
The final dissolution of form to the emotive quality of color and shade dominated the final projection of Turner’s art. As the art world held to an academy of proportion, realism and comfort, Turner pushed completely off into the surreal, where edge, form and content are sublimated to the evoked emotion as expressed in color and light, presaging the twentieth century before the nineteenth was half over. Paintings such as Rain Steam and Speed-the Great Western Railway and Snow Storm are glassy sheens of color in which form is sublimated to the creative impulse of the artist to the point of near irredeemability.
Turner Rain Steam and Speed – Great Western Railway 1844
Turner Snow Storm 1842
The over 2000 images that Turner created can not possibly be given justice in an essay of a few paragraphs and images. Needless to say the importance of Turner is reflected in the need to see more and more of the work to try to gauge the artist’s creative journey as an unbounded romantic in a world of assimilation. Turner, much like Beethoven is revered for what every succeeding artist thought they saw in his work, and the sense of having to answer to it artistically. The bountiful diversity of artistic expression ever since owes much of its confident willingness to test boundaries on Turner’s willingness to leave the safe course behind.
A trip to England for the art lover must leverage time for the Turner experience. Perhaps, you will never see the world quite the same way again.
A respite from this blog for a few weeks to recharge my creative juices hasn’t made the world seem to be an any more enlightened place. We are seeing across the world a progression in dissonance and downright strife when anything short of a passive acceptance of another’s world view is expressed. Express free speech against the grain and you are banned from speaking in universities or physically harassed. Reveal a thought or collection of thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, or You Tube that manages to offend others and risk erasure from the social medium. If your thinking survives the initial onslaught, a phalanx of labeling invectives are hurled against you in an effort to humiliate you into silence. Have a reputation for alternative views, and you risk violent harassment in public when you sit down to eat, or socialize with friends.
At a political level, socialist governments designed to redistribute wealth, horde it among a few elite, and can’t even distribute the most basic in sustenance. Democracies are held hostage by parties that cling to power rather than solutions, and can’t marshall even a tepid response to the simplest challenges . Dictators….well, they at least, dictate. Overwhelmingly, regardless of foundation, all governments are progressively corroded by corruption and clogged up with incompetence.
And yet… the world has never had more globally available sustenance, opportunity, reduction of poverty, clean air and available water, health care, and general aversion to war to resolve conflict.
Maybe we have lost our collective minds. Why must the world that has positioned itself for the future so well, submit to our need to bollux it all up so?
Loss of Civility
It starts with our current inability to recognize that the rules of civil discourse developed over thousands of years served a purpose. Being considerate of others – provided the environment for a basic respect for their discourse, and your willingness to listen. Think before you speak-implied an effort on your part to organize thoughts, reflect upon your past experiences and understandings, before assuming your view. Agree to disagree – submitted a pact of understanding that ideas are always in flux, and you absorb from others and mature your own opinions. Courses in civics, how various views are elucidated, how discourse is organized, how problems are solved in a civil society have lost favor with a modern tendency to consider one’s own views superior at face value to all others. Civility is a foundational cornerstone to returning to a public discourse that converts our modern advantages into the building blocks of real progress.
Loss of Responsibility
The collective no longer expects the individual to hold up his end of the donkey. The modern charge is for security, not responsibility. The loss of freedom , the ability to effect one’s own life journey and outcome by accepting personal responsibility, is not mourned in the rush to level the playing field and reduce risk injected by individual choice. With the loss of responsibility has come the plague of incompetence. Roads crumple, bridges collapse, and projects lapse because it is always someone else’s responsibility to confirm the decisions made. Yet, the great advances of the last several hundred years have come out of individuals take risk, taking owner ship and pride in performance and competence, and being incentivized for it. It is the freedom to fail, that has lifted the great majority to succeed. The gift of freedom, so casually tossed aside by those who are ignorant of its enormous power, forms the way forward out of the current malaise.
Loss of Morality
In a twentieth century where the world almost eliminated itself in horrific slaughter, morality died. The recognition that a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, existed required the combined will of all that was right and good. Creating such supreme sacrifices to ultimately prevail exhausted the human capacity for objective morality. A religious world became an irreligious one, where residual religion retreated to relativism, or in the case of Islam radicalized into death cult lunacy. People have accepted progressively relativist arguments regarding abortion, spiraling crime rates, and sexual and drug promiscuity, ignoring the moral questions in favor of the relative — if it feels right, it must be right.
Loss of Truth
The concept of the narrative has strangled the search for the truth. Narratives are nefarious memes to enforce behaviors and squash the skeptic. ‘Human caused Global Warming’ declared man as the dominant actor in the 3.5 billion year history of earthly climate change, not because the world had not been warmer or colder before man, but that humans were uniquely flawed and could only ‘save’ themselves by surrendering their modern mobility and trillions of dollars to a global elite that would redistribute it to “appropriate climate friendly” causes. Facts have butted up against the hysteria, presenting a much more measured reality as to the complexity of climate, but that hasn’t stopped the increased righteousness of those convinced by the narrative. Decades of victimization designed to elevate the narrative of a genetically controlled otherness, whether race, color, or sex, has led to the narrative of intersectional oppression – literally the cumulative victimization obstructing the oppressed from succeeding in a world where the “fix” is in, needing the ‘oppressor’ to stand aside. The facts of poverty, education gaps, the incongruity of continued vast safety nets helping the ‘oppressed’ the least have no place in displacing the narrative of oppressed and oppressor. On and On.
We Got Here, Now What?
Can society restore civil, responsible, moral, truthful conditions of discourse? The progressive anarchy would suggest we may need to return to a dark place to be shaken back to the classic foundations of a productive engaged society. In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, a politician flawed in his crudity and venality may have applied a slight break to the runaway train. His unwillingness to allow the narrative to dominate, his determination to provide conditions for opportunity and reward to individuals, may prove to provide more corrective than all the think tanks seminars passively pontificating about how the world should be, if only people would see the light. This crass man responding instinctually is upsetting the apple cart and waking us up a little. Now, if he can only somehow recover his long lost civility gene, when one is called for.
In 1776, the highest form of capital crime in the United Kingdom or the vast expanse of colonized lands under the sovereignty of King George III was the crime of high treason, disloyalty to the Crown. The concept of high treason represented the ultimate attempt to distort or erode the authority of the sovereign and for hundreds of years represented the ultimate moral stain on a subject of that sovereign. As such, the punishment for such a heinous crime was defined under law as equally heinous — drawing, hanging, and quartering. The traitor would be drawn to his place of execution, hung in a fashion insufficient to kill him outright, then eviscerated and quartered while still alive so that he could experience the full extent of the torture before being beheaded. The sentence of forfeiture, the assumption of all lands and possessions of the traitor and all relations followed the direct sentence, assuring the position of the traitor was forever wiped from any societal stature forever more. Among the various crimes reflective of such high treason was a subject undertaking premeditated war against the sovereign.
The 56 men who formed the Second Continental Congress could not help to have a visceral foreboding sense of such a personal outcome potentiated by the proposed actions they debated through the spring and hot summer of 1776. The Second Congress had been called as a consequence of the outbreak of war against the sovereign’s army in April, 1775 outside of Boston, culminating in a surprise victory for the colonials and an ignominious defeat for the king’s forces in March, 1776, resulting in the withdrawal of British royal forces from Massachusetts. If the colonial representatives of the Congress had hoped the King had any intentions of pulling back from brink of total insurrection, he quashed them rapidly with the passage of the Prohibitory Acts, that blockaded all American ports and declared all American vessels enemy vessels, assuring a continent wide crushing economic burden. it was fully apparent to all thirteen colonies that their persistence in meeting as a collective assured them a collective consequential verdict in the King’s eyes. Bandits. Rascals. Traitors.
The Age of Enlightenment began as a scientific revolution, but exploded into a golden age of philosophic thought not seen since the ancient Greeks. The power of reason surged through a 100 year renaissance of the ideas of Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Kant and Smith that dominated the advanced education of any gentleman of the 18th century and infected an entire generation learned men not only in England, Scotland, and France, but the entire continent and the New World. The concepts of innate individual rights, rational society, and the concept of common men in charge of their own reason and destiny struck directly at the heart of the concept of divine rights of kings. The concept that a King through edict could impel subjects to defer these rights without any representation of their opinions to influence seemed antithetical to the generation currently standing as leaders of the American colonies. Americans saw themselves as having lived an almost 170 year experiment in independent incentive required to survive the harsh consequences of having to colonize and civilize a harsh and wild continent, and though loyal to the concept of being essentially British, assumed that the process that was borne at the Magna Carta, Glorious Revolution, and ascension of Parliamentary representation was their history as well. Great Britain had many colonial dominions, however, and the King could not cotton one set of colonies securing rights and privileges he would then have to inevitably accede to in all others.
In the spring of 1776, there was certainly no unanimity of thought as to the direction to take to address the developing crisis. Each of the thirteen colonial legislatures felt themselves unique in governance and provided contrary instructions to their representatives of the Congress, but the tide of opinion was swelling toward a more profound separation than most wanted to admit. The radical north, having felt the violence of insurrection directly, led by John Adams of Massachusetts, proposed a Preamble of a potential resolution for separation from the mother country. At the same time the Virginia convention, the legislature of the most prosperous and influential colony, on May 15th, 1776, proposed that the Congress debate a resolution to declare the colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to great Britain. In light of this edict, Richard Lee, the Virginia representative, proposed to the Continental Congress a debate over a three part resolve to declare independence, form foreign alliances, and prepare for a trans-colonial confederation of states. The motion was seconded by John Adams, and cold hard reality of the commission of high treasonous acts was now an unavoidable possibility for every delegate. The profound maneuver was truly revolutionary and multiple delegations did not feel they had sufficient power to declare for their associated colonies without further instruction. The resolution was therefore tabled, and a three week recess was called, while delegates could return home to their legislatures for further instruction. The Congress appointed a committee of five, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to develop a definitive declarative statement. The language was definitively Jefferson, but contributions of Adams and Franklin brought clarity to important segments. The above photo shows the influence of corrections applied to Jefferson’s hand written document in real time by both the committee and subsequently the congressional delegates themselves. The eventual Declaration of the Continental Congress as envisioned by the authors became a document of the very principles of the Enlightenment highlighted by the single statement that defined all subsequent actions and has resonated through all humanity for the next 242 years:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness.
No statement had ever firmed the conviction of undertaking the obvious risks of separation from a ruling power based on the stance of inherent rights borne of men. The argument that such rights were endowed by the Creator, and therefore preceded any worldly declaration of governance was so revolutionary that the very statement if somehow able to be realized, would forever remove the divine rule concept that had dominated all society since the dawn of the tribe. To sign such a declaration was to state the sovereign never held any such rights of dominion in the first place. There could no rationalization of the statement as anything other than the highest treason in the case of an eventual defeat for any of the delegates who would endorse, and they knew it.
On July 1st, the Congress reassembled and the Declaration was debated in earnest, with significant adjustments and substantial shortening agreed upon to strengthen the document and improve its impact. Considerable angst was felt by many, and the capacity for an unanimous declaration was in doubt. Benjamin Franklin rallied the delegates with the clarifying focus of the importance of unanimity:
‘We must hang together, or surely we will hang separately.’
On the evening of July 1st, the Congress after a full day of debate took up the edited Declaration of Independence and advanced to the roll call of the individual delegations. No doubt each faced the enormous weight of history of such a declaration against the King of the most powerful nation on earth, both personally and as the leading edge representation of their fellow Americans. The initial roll call had dissent from South Carolina and Pennsylvania, and abstention from New York. The exhausted delegates determined to table the resolution until the following morning. The overwhelming weight of holding back history smothered the Carolina and Pennsylvania delegations through the night. On the subsequent morning July 2nd, 1776, the roll call was again taken and South Carolina reversed its vote, and the lonely dissent fell to Pennsylvania. Though personally against the declaration, John Dickerson and Robert Morris bravely abstained so the declaration could be voted upon by the residual five members of the delegation. A 3 to 2 vote in favor resulted and the last holdout Pennsylvania fell into the approval column. With no residual dissent the Declaration passed, and the convention declared the colonies Free and Independent States.
One can only imagine the sense of stunned silence that must have permeated the hall as the delegates fully absorbed what they had just done. Though the public proclamation followed on the 4th of July, the future of the world was sealed on July 2nd, 1776 as the foundation of a concept of a governance underwritten by individual liberty and property, self governed, would have its birth forever recognized from this seminal vote.
Two hundred and forty-two years later, living testimonially in the greatest semblance of liberty and individual rights ever assembled, we celebrate the gentlemen on that oppressively hot morning in Philadelphia who faced an impossible task fearlessly because of the overwhelming surety of their cause. In an age where the liberties so dangerously promoted and so painfully sacrificed for are frivolously given up for a transient sense of security, the moment needs to be re-lived.
Life. Liberty. The Pursuit of Happiness. Let the bells ring out and the drums peal! Happy Independence Day.
In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap’n Crunch. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro does look a sight in his beauty-pageant sash and Mr. T-worthy gold chains.
