The Difference Between Old-Timey Fascists and What We Got Today

Hitler? Mussolini? Franco? Salazar? NONE of them are here?  #$%@!

There are fascists and then there are fascists, just like there are Baptists and then there are Baptists.  You know what I mean- the Baptists with the nice, big, whitewashed churches and friendly congregations of about 100-150 regulars don't have much in common with the Mega-Churches, which in turn have almost nothing in common with the strip-mall storefront "churches," who all look down their noses at the donated-trailer-with-the-misspelled-sign-on-wheels-just-off-County-Road-114a.  Oh sure, they all profess similar beliefs, are all lead by charismatic figures who do their best to support their ministries  by any means possible --my Dad used to call it "fleecing the flock" --but besides that, they differ by class, race, degree of involvement in their respective communities, reach of ministry, etc.

Likewise with fascists.  The tiki torch-carrying Proudboys of today really don't have much in common with the originators of the fascist brand.  And who and when and where were those proto proud boys of old, Ex Prof? -I hear you cry?  Come with me to Europe before, during and after The War To End All Wars, which totally almost was except for the fact that human beings are basically apes who wear clothes and really really reeeeeely like killing each other.  We will meet fashionistas who wear black shirts, fasionistas who wear brown ones, Italians, Austrians, Germans, and may even have a surprise visit from Babu Frik.

He-Heeeey, I Babu-Frik!*

*Babu Frick is a copyrighted character by Disney (who owns every-frik-in thing)

 and has NOTHING whatsoever to do with fascism, past, present, or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away

Umm, ok, let's go to Italy where all this fascist stuff started. In the early to mid 20th century, Italy's Fashista party emerged from an unlikely alliance between the Christian right, corporate elites, and ultra-nationalists. Their message of a "Mutilated Peace" found fertile ground in the hearts of Italian nationalists who were dissatisfied with the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty, particularly with the disposition of the city of Fiume, an absurdly complicated problem which will be the subject of my next 40 pound book.  Out of this morass, a glib journalist and ex-socialist named Benito Mussolini emerged, and fascism was born.

Mussolini had a couple of talents that made him the ideal guy to drive the relatively new country of Italy --only in business since the 1870's --completely red-eyed, mouth-foaming, stiletto-stabbing bat shit crazy.  For one, he was a journalist who followed in the footsteps of Count Camillo Bensi di Cavour and the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, both of whom had a knack for inflaming the hearts of people already awash in nationalistic rhetoric.  What Mussolini brought to the table was fear- specifically, fear of a Bolshevik takeover in Italy.  After all, the Bolsheviks had taken over in Russia after the Great War, followed by a horrendous civil war; Communist parties in the former Turkish Empire, the United Kingdom and the United States had been founded and were proving very popular with their respective proletariat populations; and a Red revolution was expected daily in Wiemar Republic Germany.  So who would keep Italy safe? Mussolini and his Blackshirt followers answered: they would.

That would be the other thing Mussolini brought to the table: Il Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, a.k.a the Blackshirts (guess what color shirts THEY wore), a paramilitary group that included pissed-off retired soldiers, pissed-off unemployed guys, pissed-off guys that like beating other guys up, and one dude named Luigi Verconti who liked cannoli filled with sweet ricotta and thought that Mussolini's March on Rome in March in 1922 was just a bunch of guys on the hunt for better cannoli than could be found at his local pasticceria -which had run out of them anyway --so he just tagged along with them for the next 23 years.  Actually, the March on Rome was the critical confluence of fear, hatred,violence, ultra-nationalism, militarism and blind obedience.  Once it was over, King Vitorio Emanuel III cashired the current prime minister and asked Mussolini and his Fascist party to form a government.  The wolf was now in charge of the sheep.

It's-a me, Benito, back whenna I had-a
hair!  Woo-Hoo!

If you were an average Italian in March of 1922, you might have seen things differently.  You would have been really afraid of the violent strikes that shut down the Fiat automobile plant and saw workers occupy major factories in Rome, Turin and Milan during the so-called Red Two Years (1919-1920).  If you were a practicing Catholic, the prospect of atheistic Communists ruling Italy was especially appalling.  You might also have had a problem with the Versailles Treaty.  Itally did not get nearly as much as France and Britain did, yet they did most of the dying along the Austrian front during the war.  You may have liked the talk of reviving Italy's greatness (remember the Roman Empire?) and you probably would have welcomed those Blackshirts with their long knives as saviors.  Really.

Across the Alps, Germany was desperately trying to come to terms with some rough terms.  Under the Treaties of Versailles, Germany had to give up quite a lot: her overseas colonies, air force, big-ass battleships, most of their army, and- here was the bitter pill- the province of Alsace-Lorraine on the French border.  Ok ok, Germany had gotten this real estate originally from France after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, but hey, most of the people who live there spoke German and wasn't it a part of the Holy Roman (i.e. German) Empire back in the day?  But to the proud Germans, the very worst term in the whole treaty, the part roundly hated by Bavarians, Prussians and Holsteiners alike, had to be the so-called "war guilt" clause.

Article 231 of the Treaty stated:

"The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."

Any student of history will tell you that history class really sucked.  They'll also tell you that there were a bunch of causes for WWI including three wars in the Balkans, colonial rivalries, pan-Slavism, militarism, socialism, social-Darwinism, antidisestablishmentarianism, and plagiarism (ok maybe not the last two).  The point is that the Allies were total dicks in putting this clause in when they were just as much to blame for WWI as the Central Powers were.  Add this rage to the post-war German zeitgeist of fear, disillusionment, anger and resentment and you've got a toxic social/political cauldron just bubbling away.

...and furthermore, we shall all use Article 231 as bum-wadden for our Scheisses

Into this morass drifts an Austrian national, Adolph Hitler.  Everything about his early career had "Future Loser of the 20th Century" written all over it.  He hated school because he was constantly beaten for breaking the strict rules.  He hated his father for beating him because he broke school rules.  He hated the technical school his father later enrolled Hitler in because he wanted to be an artist.  He hated Vienna because he failed to get into the Arts Institute so he could become a painter.  He hated the menial work he did; hated the flophouses he lived in.  The only things he seemed to like were operas by Richard Wagner (the composer of Die Valkuri, the opera that gave us the immortal expression, "It ain't over 'till the fat lady sings")  Lucky for Hitler, WWI was about to give him something else to like, and lots of someones  to hate.

"Laaaaaa...! Nope, not yet! Laaaaaa!"

For some weird reason, Hitler served in the German army during WWI instead of the Austro-Hungarian army -remember he was an Austrian citizen -but Germany let him anyway.  A brief aside here: the Austrians are often called the smartest people in the world because they made Beethoven (German) an Austrian, and Hitler (Austrian) a German.  But I digress.  In the army, Hitler's job was a dispatch runner, carrying orders and official stuff from headquarters to the forward trenches.  He saw action in some pretty hairy battles, was wounded, got awarded a couple of medals,  and by all accounts liked being in the army.  Which is why Germany's defeat hit him pretty hard.  It was about this time that Hitler probably began to believe the "Stab in the Back" conspiracy theory, which ran something like this:

1. Germany is great, so Germany always wins; but
2. Germany lost WWI; so
3. Germany must have been stabbed-in-the-back by
   a. Communists
   b. Jews
   c. degenerates
   d. Jews
   e. Jews

To be fair, lots of people believed this and lots of people were talking about it, and Germany had a long, well entrenched history of hating the Jews ever since the Jews first wandered into Germany probably as slaves or Roman mercenaries or merchants or bakers specializing in bagels, rugelah, challah bread, matzohs, chocolate babka -pardon my drool -so that makes it ok, right?  Nope, hating someone hard and long enough eventually makes you think it's ok to hurt or kill them, so STOP  HATING EVERYBODY RIGHT FRIK-IN NOW!

He-Heeeeyy, I Babu Frik*

*Babu Frik is a copyrighted character from the Star Wars universe which Disney owns (yup, a whole frik-in universe)

 and is in NO WAYat ALL associated with hate against any sentient being(s) in the entire multiverse, 

even the bits that Disney doesn't own -yet.

Still in the army and living in Bavaria after the war, Hitler came across a political party that didn't have any members -it only had a board of directors- called the National Socialist German Worker's Party (the DAP).  Tasked by the army to infiltrate its ranks, Hitler discovered two things: one was the DAP shared his antisemitic beliefs; the other was that he had a way with words.  My Arizona cousin would tell you that Hitler "could talk a buzzard off of an entire Interstate's worth of roadkill."  This was exactly what the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei needed more than anything: members.  After hearing Hitler speechify, the crowds in the Bavarian beer halls where the DAP did most of their recruiting literally fell all over themselves joining up.  The time seemed right for bold and divisive action: The DAP would overthrow the Bavarian state government and... I guess take over the world next?  What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant plan?  -are you thinking the same think I'm thinking, Pinky?

I think so Brain, but what would
Megan Markle do with so many
pounds of  Gorgonzola? Narf! Poit!

It turns out, everything that could have gone wrong actually did go wrong.  Hitler and his DAP buddies were arrested, tried, convicted and sent to prison.  Seems that the Bavarian police were competent enough to notice an armed coup happening in broad daylight, and the state prosecutor agreed to finish his beer and schnitzel after Hitler was locked up, so now Hitler had plenty of free time to write a book, Mein Kampf, wherein he planned in horribly specific detail how to take over the world.  Cue the "Pinky and the Brain" theme music.  

It was also partly now, partly later, that Mussolini and Hitler both begin to actively work out just what it means to be a fascist.  Mind you, lots of other people from lots of other countries had a hand in fleshing-out this new 20th Century abomination, but let's give credit where it is due.  Fascists are, first and foremost, nationalistic, way-way-way too nationalistic in fact.  Not only would they die for their country --they'd kill for it too.  Lots of people.  All people who weren't as ultra-nationalistic as they were.  Or were different, either racially or ethnically.  Fascists were thus really crazy about identifying just who is US and who is THEM.  This is an important distinction, because the US are the masters, and the THEM are the slaves.  In Italy this played out mainly in North and East Africa where Italian armies tightened their grip on Libya and defeated Haile Selassie's less mechanized army in Ethiopia.  

"So what if the Italians have tanks and planes? We've got... wait, what?  I'm out."

German fascism took the US and THEM distinction further, however and added a new category: NOBODY.  This group of people didn't even count as people.  They included Jews, Romani, homosexuals, mentally and physically retarded people.  German fascists held that these were not people in the strict sense- they were corruptions of humanity -and as such should be exterminated less they pollute the so-called pure Nordic Aryan race that German fascists believed were humanity's master race.

Fascists were also expected to do their duty with unquestioning loyalty.  The fascist state, through its supreme leader, is what informs people of what their duty is, and also what punishes people for not doing their duty.  In order to accomplish this task, the fascist state must be able to know what its citizens are doing at all times, and must be able to communicate to its citizens constantly.  It does this by using lots of police, both regular and secret police, and a larger network of domestic spies and informers.  Communication is done on a massive scale and is usually one-way, using print, photographic, cinema, architecture and the arts.  A society that exercises such a great deal of control over its citizens has been termed Totalitarian; however, not all totalitarian societies have fascist governments.  China, North Korea and the former Soviet Union are communist totalitarian countries, whereas Germany, Italy, Portugal and the puppet-states that Nazi Germany created all over Europe were fascist totalitarian states.  

What differentiates the communists from the fascists is macro-economics.  Fascist governments enforce private property rights, even though productive capacity may be called on to serve state ends.  In Germany, Alfred Krupp's vast iron works made all the heavy armaments the fascist state used during WWII, but the iron works themselves stayed in Krupp's hands.  And yes,l Krupp got obscenely rich as a result of all those munitions orders.  In communist USSR, the state owned all means of production and distribution, so no individual factory owners got rich off of Society Red Army tank orders.  But neither did the workers, either- they made just enough to keep them alive and working.  

No bourgeois exploiters of the proletariat were enriched by these lovely weapons.

Now, onto the difference between today's fascists and those of yesteryear.  Today's fascists really like the pageantry and a lot of the rhetoric of mostly German Nazi fascism.  Try as I did, I wasn't able to find much love for Mussolini amongst the 8-chan and dark-web hate group crowd.  What the current crop falls for are all the bogus racial theories and antisemitism.  In the USA, African-Americans and Latino-Americans have been added to the list of sub-humans, as well as practicing Muslims of whatever racial background.  Some groups also hate on Indians (East and Native), Chinese, Mongoloid Asians, and Pacific Islanders.  Extermination isn't as popular a solution, however; contemporary hate groups are down with individual murders, mass deportations and wholesale exclusions.  Thankfully (?) their "Final Solution" features a big-ass wall between the U.S. and Mexico instead of gas chambers.  21st Century fascists also like alpha-dog leaders, which helps to explain the appeal of Donald Trump and the current rogue's gallery of  tin plated dictators around the world.  

There are a number of frightening developments, however.  Remember the alliance between capitalists and fascists in Germany and Italy?  Those industrial capitalists were at their collective wit's end in the 20's-30's with the Great Depression.  Today's capitalists personally hold more wealth than even our friend, Albert Krupp had if you adjust for currency inflation.  These capitalists have enacted laws, bought lawmakers and judges, and even launched their own propaganda blitzkrieg.  In America today, there is an attack underway against legitimate media outlets, an attack lead by the current President.  At the same time, low-level fascist messaging and authoritarian rhetoric is spewed-out on talk-radio and cabel tv's Fox News.  The President's lies and attacks on American democratic institutions are aided and abetted by so-called conservatives and the so-called religious evangelical community. 

"F is for FOX News.  -and for Frickin' Democrats and f*ckin' lying CNN"

HehHEYYY!  I Babu Frik!*

*Babu Frik is a copyrighted character
totally frik-in owned by Disney and
has NOTHING to do with FOX "News"
or Don "The Con" Trump

Just as in Germany and Italy, the U.S. President came to power in an election, with one important difference: he had the advantage of Russian intelligence help.  While there was already a groundswell of support for Trump's brand of authoritarianism, there are doubts as to whether or not he would have been as successful without Russian aid.  There are parallels here to V. I. Lenin getting material help from Germany in 1916-1917 for his return to Russia which ultimately lead to Russia pulling out of the Allied side in WW I.  Although this German success did not end in ultimate German victory, it was a success nonetheless.  And while Trump has not given Russia as free a hand in the world as they would like, he has succeeded in tying up U.S. aid to the Ukraine, a move that resulted in his impeachment.

Trump also has allies in Congress and the Judiciary.  House and Senate Republicans mostly toe the Trump line because they are afraid they'll get tweeted-at and face political backlash at home from FOX News-brainwashed voters.  Trump's judicial support stems from the great number of federal judges he has appointed, all of whom were vetted by the ultra-conservative pressure group, the Heritage Foundation.  And since the Senate, which is Republican controlled at the moment, has the power to confirm judicial appointments, an alarming number of judges within ultra-conservative credentials and authoritarian leanings are in place at a number of levels within the federal judiciary.  This fact alone will influence American civil life for a generation to come.

More puzzling is our fascist dog-whistler's popularity with Evangelical Christian groups.  One would think that a political figure with his documented moral lapses would have no religious support at all.  If one digs a little deeper into these insular, authoritarian-friendly groups, the picture becomes clearer.  Evangel Christians in the U.S. are even more splintered than the Baptists at the beginning of this post, but they have a few core beliefs in common.  The first and foremost is an abiding distrust of the U.S. government, which they see as either in the thrall of zionists, or is at least unfriendly towards their brand of Christianity.  While this is not new --Mormons fought pitched battles against U.S. soldiers in the 19th century --the degree of distrust has broadened and deepened.  Another core belief is in forgiveness.  The way this plays out with Trump is they see a massively flawed figure who needs only to confess his sins, act contrite, and then then, through the grace of God, he will be worthy to lead them.  Fascist dictators are adept at exploiting this simple faith: as long as they parrot religious rhetoric and declare opposition to, say abortion, then he can count on their support.  Evangelicals also feel threatened by the science and education communities- science because it contradicts their literal reading of the Bible, and public education because of their inability to teach the Word.  This is a feeling shared by fascist dictators.  A citizenry of well educated people are difficult to control.  And scientists are just as difficult, because they are really good at seeing through a dictator's lies.  

"And while it IS true I hate educated, sciencey dipshits, I love Liberty U. because it's just a diploma mill for idiots"

Lastly, evangelicals believe in a flaky scenario called the End Times.  We supposedly live in those times right now.  Essentially, it's John of Patmos' scary pop-up Book of Revelations come to life.  I encourage you to read it while smoking weed.  All kinds of strife and turmoil will happen, as well as some crazy A.F. shit straight from the special effects department, all ending in Jesus Christ coming back and ruling (over a vastly depleted human population and a totally destroyed planet Earth) for a thousand years.  And Trump figures into this frickin' nightmare somehow.

Finally, old-timey fascists were all confined to Europe, but today, thanks to the Internet, fascists are spread out all over the world.  The good news is that fascism is still an unpopular political belief- that whole WW II thing.  The bad news is that with the growing rise of authoritarianism in the West, fascists are feeling emboldened to come out of the shadows.  It is beginning to feel more and more like the end of the world just MIGHT be at hand, what with an authoritarian leaders in Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, and the United States all having the ability to launch nuclear missiles.  I'm pretty sure that even the neo-fascists of today don't relish the prospect of dying in a hydrogen bomb blast.

I know that I sure don't.  And probably that frikkin guy down there doesn't want to go that way either.

"HehHeyyyy, I Babu Frik!"*

*Babu Frik is etc.  etc.  yadda-yadda
and is definately NOT Jesus the Christ.
Really.  wink-wink

Blinded, Stoned and Excommunicated by Science

Um, Science? Dude, I'm in the wrong class

I saw this T-shirt for sale on the internet the other day: "Science Doesn't Care What You Believe." This got me thinking about the intersection of science and belief throughout human history.  Talk about abusive, dysfunctional relationships! I totally believe that scientists need their own "Me Too" movement for every incident that they have had to endure whenever some ignorant religioids disbelieve scientific shit that is ABSOLUTELY REAL, just because they're pretty sure Jesus would have disapproved.  Like these human bobble heads:

*Editor's Note: after widespread availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, every one of these women

 have died of the disease, except for the one in the upper right who was arrested for storming

the U.S. Capitol without a mask 

Is it un-Christian of me to hope that natural selection, a.k.a. evolution, removes their genes from the gene pool?  Come to think of it, they probably don't believe in that "Evil-lution" in the first place.  The thing that gets me about those dangerously irresponsible Barbies pictured above is that they just don't have any excuses.  They all live in the 21st Century and have the world of human experience at their fingertips, yet they choose to blame vaccines that can SAVE their autistic, learning disabled brats' LIVES for problems that are either genetic (read THEIR FAULT FOR HAVING CHILDREN) or environmental (read SHITTY FOOD ADDITIVES and POLLUTION ).  At least ancient people had a valid excuse: science hadn't quite been invented yet.

If you think about it, religion was really humanity's first attempt at science.  Why does it rain?  No barometers or high altitude cloud particulate gathers around, so let's invent a story: it's because the Corn God is pleased by your sacrifice of 500 prisoners' beating hearts, so he got Tlaloc to rain on the corn crops so that the People can have tacos, tortillas, nacho chips, tamales, burritos and fajitas.

Why is the sky blue? -it's the same color as the sky-goddess' eyes.  Where does lightning come from?  It's Zeus tossing lightning bolts at monsters and evil people.  And so-on.  

This all began to change in a major way during the Golden Age of Athens (AU-en Age for you chemists) when a certain subset of philosophers including but not limited to Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras and Eratosthenes began to look beyond the amusing stories of the gods and goddesses they had been brought up on.  Prior to this burst of Greek scientific inquiry, there had been serious scientific progress in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, building engineering, agriculture and animal husbandry, and even civil engineering.  All of these advances yielded practical benefits to the society that invented them.  

Some of these ancient engineers, such as the Chinese hydrologist Li Bing of the firm Li Bing and Son were actually deified- made into a god after they died- because people were so freaking grateful for what they did.  Li Bing's contribution was to control the disastrous floods on the Min River that would regularly rip whole villages from their foundations and kill all the people and animals in its path.  To the Chinese of the Warring States period, it was as if Li Bing had actually vanquished the bloodthirsty river god.

That's him on the left, but he's gotta go- he was just Li Bing, hahaha!

Staying with the Chinese briefly, it really cracks me up that some solid advances came about because of some pretty weird, pseudo-religious reasons.  Take that useful invention, gunpowder.  Chinese emperors and nobles were pretty much concerned with keeping all their money and stuff forever, and also living forever.  To help them with the second item, they hired alchemists to invent an immortality pill, but they accidentally invented shit that blew up.  This was then quickly put to use by Taoist priests who used firecrackers to scare away devils.  At some point, the army got a hold of it, tied some to an arrow, and presto, the world's first exploding missile.

And speaking of immortality? Medical historians are pretty certain that it was the Chinese who isolated mercury, iodine and arsenic from their naturally occurring compounds and used them in medicine.  These elements are great sterilization agents because they're so toxic.  However, they also have the unpleasant side effect of death, so it takes a really careful druggist and doctor to have, emm, healthy patient outcomes.  Weird as all this sounds, mercury was used up until the 20th Century to treat syphilis, which wasn't a problem in ancient China.

That is one seriously big-ass Greek fish

Going back to the Greeks for  a moment, I'd like to take the famous Aristotle down a peg.  As much as historians like to call him the first scientist, Aristotle was more like one of those Victorian gentleman amateur "natural philosophers" who indulged their curiosity about the world by traveling around, observing things and philosophizing about causes for what they observed.  Aristotle even went down to the bottom of the bay in a sort-of submarine called a bathysphere.  While this is very cool, it doesn't actually make him a scientist.  To do that; you need to add the scientific method of inquiry, something that would have to wait for Bacon, Newton and Descartes.

These three worthies were a bit closer to being scientists than Aristotle.  Unfortunately, they had the bad luck of existing at different times in history.  Bacon came up with the reasoning process known as inductivism, whereby observations lead to a general law to explain it.  Descartes championed rationalism, where reason, not previously philosophized explanations were the measure of human knowledge.  Newton more or less synthesized Bacon and Descartes' approach and created the scientific method, where the scientist makes a hypothesis, then tests it with rigorously careful and controlled experiences, which either confirms or disproves the original hypothesis.  This is then used to further refine the hypothesis until the ultimate is discovered.

Now I ask you, who can argue with that approach?  Apparently quite a lot of people, both then and now.  Although science owes its beginnings to religion, the parents didn't take too long to distance themselves from their smartypants children.  Take astronomy for example.  In China, Babylon, Baghdad and Mezo-America, the real stars were the astrologers, those pseudo-scientists who had the knack of relating what was going on down on the Earth to what was happening in the Heavens and --get this --predicting what was going to happen based on stars doing their thing.  Astronomers were the sleep-deprived, achy necked, math nerds who did the observations and calculations for the astrologers, who brought home the bacon by fixing errors in official calendars or predicting a prosperous reign for the local despot.  

Enter Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.  This quartet figured out: 1) the Sun is the center of the Solar System; that 2) the Earth and all the other planets go around it in; 3) elliptical orbits, and that 4) these other worlds are far from perfect (sunspots, moon craters, etc).  The religions establishment of the day did not waste too much time going after them.  Copernicus published after he died so as to avoid the inevitable shit-storm he knew would result from writing that the Church was all wrong.

I am Johannes Kepler
and these are not chopsticks

 Galileo wasn't as fortunate.  He was sentenced to house arrest instead of being executed because he recanted his view that what he had observed through telescope with his own eyes actually effing existed.  Brahe and Kepler both had run-ins with the theocratic state on their way to discovering the three laws of planetary motion.  These were science's awkward teenage years: breakthroughs followed by repression and charges of witchcraft.

Why were people so afraid of scientific advancement?  Part of the reason lies in the political power structures of the day.  Rule by hereditary monarchs relies on the religious establishment to legitimize their rule.  Attack the irrationality of religion with the logic of science and you'll provoke a response from the state who, quite rightly, sees any attack on religion as an attack on the state.  Another part of the reason is the sheer popular ignorance of the times.  The world would have to wait for free public education and universal literacy.  Science can be hard to get a handle on, and especially hard to believe if it goes against generations of traditional beliefs held by a people.  One final reason may be the generic one that people are usually afraid of change.  Seeing the world through scientific eyes requires a fundamental intellectual and emotional realignment of one's sensibilities.  Society was just not ready.  But what about later, when scientific ideas and technology had had a chance to percolate through the cultural zeitgeist?

Its now the 19th Century and science seems to have come of age.  Evolution explained creation, electricity explained lightning, and psychology provided an alternative to the confession box.  And yet it is in the 19th Century that the germs of scientific resistance begin to coalesce.  Because of the fundamental attack on religion that evolution represented --an attack at the very existence of God in the universe --the creationist narrative was born.  God created everything, including fossils, and evolution is just a theory, an evil one at that.  To the masses, new technology really looked like magic, something which they could somehow understand better than what it actually was.  And the methods psychology used to help people could also be used to shape and control their minds.

Skipping over the 20th Century's bloody wars and genocides, here we are in the 21st Century and science has taken one on the chin.  People have more information today than they did in pre-modern times, but they are no less ignorant.  Today is witnessing the rise of militant state-sponsored religious intolerance and extremist violence, fed by recruiting marginal personalities off of social networks.  We also see the rise of totalitarian dictators who command total allegiance to their word, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which also spreads their lies and disinformation.  Anything critical is branded "fake" or "sacrilegious."  Assaults are arranged on any variety of change, from changing sex roles, gender identification and advances in microbiology.  Medicine and technology are under attack in ways not seen since the days of the witch hunts.

Rigged witch-hunt!  -that's how they caught me :-(

Science is surprisingly ill equipped to deal with this current threat.  Scientists are by training and nature very rational people.  Their opponents are not.  In order to prevail, science won't have to win converts, because the evangelical anti-vaccine pro-life non-gmo crowd has things they believe and things they will never believe.  No, science needs to open up a can o' medieval whuppass on these ignorant dipshits.  Mandate vaccines as a public health measure.  Quarantine them and their dirty kids if they refuse.  Institute anti-propaganda laws and give some teeth back to the libel and slander laws.  Choke off their mega-churches and radicalizing mosques with civil taxes.  And do it pretty soon, or else we take a Great Leap Backwards.

A Tale of Two Tea Parties

Haven't heard a whole lot from the Tea Party lately, ever since they changed their name to the Freedom Caucus, and one of their higher profile members has taken a new job, delivering letters between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  I haven't seen too many of their expropriated "Don't Tread On Me!" flags, either.  But then again, with all the air being sucked out of the atmosphere and spewed back as bloviated hate mongering or silent dog-whistles to the violent, racist fringe groups that our *President (asterisk intended) counts as his political base, it's no wonder that a quasi-respectable insurgent group like the Tea Party might want to lie low for a while.

And to my friends in the Tea Party, let me say that you have
Un-Be-Lievable Spec-Tac-U-Lar taste in friends, like ME!

This current low profile of the Tea Party got me to wondering: what about THAT OTHER Tea Party?

No no, the other, OTHER Tea Party -the one held in Boston, back when it was a fairly important trading port in the British Empire.  What was the perturbed state of mind of the good people of Boston that produced this touchstone of American resistance to imperial rule?  Why did the British overreact the way they did afterwards?  But the biggest question we all have: why did Sam Adams & Co. take out all their frustrations on tea?  Crumpets just wouldn't do?

Ah, what a pity that zis war is so..., so,... meaningless!

Faithful readers of this blog will be disappointed that the roots of the Boston Tea Party don't go all the way back to the Sumerians (the rest of you will be relieved).  We've only to go back a mere ten years to the end of the French and Indian War.  Besides being blamed on a colonel in the Virginia Colonial Militia named George Washington who was sent to support General Braddock in the Virginia back-country, the French and Indian War was not, in fact, a war between the French and Indians.  It was a war that pitted the French, their colonials and their Indian Allies, against the British, their colonials and their Indian allies against each other. My town of Methuen, Massachusetts produced one of the heroes of that conflict, a character named Richard Rodgers, who helped to teach colonial militia and British soldiers how to fight "Indian style" so they could whack the French, who insisted on fighting the French way by drinking wine, eating exquisitely prepared meals served in redolent sauces, and making ironic, existential comments on the futile condition of the world in general and their own armies in particular.  There isn't any monument to him because he picked the British side during the Revolution.  Oh well...

The war ended with the French kicked out of Canada and the Ohio Valley, the American colonies right where they were, and the British in possession of about 1/2 of North America.  Oh, and they were also broke.  You see, the world of the 18th Century hadn't yet figured out that the way to finance wars was to invent a Federal Reserve Banking System and have a floating currency, whose value would constantly fluctuate relative to other currencies based on investor confidence in the underlying macroeconomic soundness of a national economy.  Silly British! THEY thought the best way to pay off their war debt was to ratchet-up taxes on their subjects.  And WHO should pay these new taxes? Why, the colonial Americans, whose collective butts were just saved by the expense of British Blood and Treasure, that's who.

Jolly-good! Now: who fancies a spot of tea?

There was one small problem with this scheme, besides the economic mumbo-jumbo cited supra: colonial people just hated to pay taxes!  -and nowhere was this more the case than in the Province of New England (New England: more wild and barren and with nastier weather than Old England).  Those cheapskates insisted that the only valid taxes were those that their legislatures voted to impose on themselves.  They had this strange notion that tax money should be spent on stuff they could see and stuff that benefited people in the community, like fixing roads, caring for widows and insane people by -and I am SO not making this up! -auctioning them off to the LOWEST bidder, and building schools.  Colonial legislatures specifically DID NOT think spending money on maintaining a standing army to protect themselves against the beaten French and the vanished Indians was a good idea AT ALL.

But no matter, the British went ahead and instituted the Stamp Act, a revenue raising scheme where a bunch of goods like anything printed (calendars, almanacs, tide charts, newspapers, playing cards, porno-mags), glass, lead, and legal documents, all had to have a tax-stamp on them, showing that the manufacturer had paid the penny or so tax on it.  This cost was then passed onto the seller, who in inimitable capitalist fashion passed it onto the consumer.  

The Stamp Act touched a raw nerve in the New England colonies, who were already struggling under a post-war economic recession.  Tax collectors were harassed, tar-and-feathered, had their housed broken into and in some cases burned down.  Tax offices were similarly attacked by mobs who styled themselves "Sons of Liberty" instead of "That Great Big Scary Bunch of Drunks with Crowbars and Torches."  Broadsheets and newspapers attacked the tax, boycotts were organized, and committees were formed to coordinate resistance in other colonies.  It was at this point that the King and his Ministers had the extremely good sense to repeal the hated Stamp Tax, and All Sang Hallelujah!

Suck it, Jim Koch, I'm a
Maltster, not a Brewer!

However, one Boston son-of-a-b... errr, Son of Liberty was not all that happy.  Samuel Adams was a leading figure in the Boston Town Meeting and a leader behind Boston's resistance to the Stamp Tax.  By the time the tax was repealed, Adams had run his father's malt business into the ground and had become a full-time political agitator.  Now that the King had repealed the hated tax, what was he going to do -work for a living? Not our Sam!  Here's what he did: he and his group of radical Whigs (High-top Fades? Beehives?) seized on the one puny, little tax that remained- a tax on the import of tea- and blew it up into a giant conspiracy theory aimed at the heart of colonial America.  Without the rhetorical invective, here's how his tinfoil-hat-wearing argument went: 

1) everybody liked tea 

2) tea only came from India and China 

3) the crown had granted the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade

4) NO COLONIAL MERCHANTS like Adams' friend John Hancock could legally ship tea, so they were forced to smuggle it 

5) this made everyone connected to the tea trade a de-facto criminal who might be arrested and thrown in prison at a moment's notice 

6) the tax on tea was part of an evil plan by George III's ministers to SET A PRECEDENT for taxing colonials WITHOUT CONSENT of their legislative assemblies, leading to 

7) eventual slavery of EVERYONE in colonial America, or 

8) their eventual sale to France or Spain, which would put them in the clutches of the dreaded Catholics and their Pope.

Again, I am not making this shit up.

In reality, the tax was a minuscule tax on middlemen merchants to help defray the cost of inspecting cargoes and policing thieves and smugglers (which was pretty much everybody in colonial Boston).  The average consumer would have to drink an entire gallon of tea every day to pay a $1 tax at the end of the year.

The rest of the story is familiar to grade school kids and even a few of my undergrads: a bunch of rowdies dressed themselves up as Mohawk Indians, broke into three tea laden ships in Boston Harbor, threw the tea into the sea, and took care to try and NOT do any harm to people or other property that night.  On a personal note, my wife's family counts as one of its ancestors a character named Boardman who was somehow identified through his Indian disguise and arrested afterwards.  He later jumped out of a second story window and ran for it, not stopping until he had reached Isleboro Island, Maine, where his direct descendants live to this very day.

For the LAST TIME, there is NO SUCH THING as ICED TEA! Just dump what's THERE!

What happened next was exactly what Sam Adams and his radical Whigs (French Braids? Beatles Bowl-cut?) knew would happen: the British took a complete nutty, closed the port of Boston, shut down the provincial legislature, moved Massachusetts' capital to Salem (yep, THAT Salem!), shut down courts of law, and sent a couple boatloads of red-coated Regular Army regiments to keep the peace.  This was all spun by Adams and his crew as a preposterous and tyrannical assaults on their English liberties, blah-blah-blah etc. and b.s.  You see, Adams knew that the English would go off their collective crumpets if the colonials made a deliberate attack on the PROPERTY INTERESTS of the British Empire, i.e. tea and the tea trade monopoly.  Remember that this was an era where most crimes against property carried the death penalty.  By provoking this arguably unreasonable reaction, Adams could then advance his Deep State Plan of replacing the British governing elite with a home-grown American governing elite.  

The Boston Tea Party was, therefore, Samuel Adams' last ditch effort to remain politically relevant in the Anglo-Colonial back-and-forth of the 1760-1770's, an effort that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  Once troops were quartered amidst a rebellious population, it would not be long before shots were fired, Continental Congresses were formed, armies raised, allies sought, and the Anglo-American Civil War (we call it the Revolutionary War -I wonder what it would have been called if we had lost it?) was raging up and down eastern North America.

But how do YOU know so much about what Samuel Adams was thinking and planning, Ex-Prof, I hear you all cry.  Simple: I read a lot.  That, plus I am a direct descendant on my mother's side to Sam and his cousin, John Adams.  Call it family insight.

No family insight is needed to explain the current day Tea Party.  What started out as a protest on April 15 highlighting government waste and fiscal irresponsibility, quickly took on a more socially conservative and libertarian cast as its organizers parlayed their popularity into elected seats in Congress.  Once there, the Tea Party members caucused with the Republicans, becoming an ultra-

conservative wing of that party.  Now calling itself the Freedom Caucus, they have used their influence to frustrate Democratic legislation like the Affordable (Health) Care Act, and, ironically, blocking Republican attempts to repeal and replace the ACA with a more watered-down version.  Like those behind the original Tea Party, the contemporary organization uses the press and that new terror, social media, in order to further its agenda.  Also like their predecessors, today's Tea Party manipulates patriotic symbols in order to lend political legitimacy to their cause.

I think that their fiscal frugality smacks more of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicanism, but Monticello just isn't as cool a symbol as the Don't Tread On Me snake.  That, and there's also the problem of Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings on the d.l. that might not play to the more racially discriminative members of their caucus.  

But the real reason for the decline of the Tea Party's influence in today's political blood-splattered arena is this: it's being quietly absorbed by the Republican Party and will probably become a footnote to some boring historian's thesis on the influence of third parties on the American legislative agenda.  Which sounds like an awesome title for a thesis paper.  If I ever wanted to get a PhD. And go back to teaching bored undergrads for slave-wages.  Just sayin'.

So, one night in 1773, American colonials threw tea into Boston Harbor as a symbolic protest against taxation without representation.  And in the late 20th Century, American taxpayers threw copies of their 1040's W-2's, 1099's and 403-B's into bonfires to protest taxation with representation.  Patriots both? -or mere political opportunists struggling to retain their relevance?  I leave it to you, my wise and discerning reader, to decide.

Is he still, like, talking and junk?

That's Just Impeachy

Sure, we all know how we GET a president.  In November, we walk into a little cubicle with a curtain, color in a bubble on a form (a VOTE) and whomever has the most bubbles, erm, votes, wins!  Usually.  Ok, not if you're Al Gore.  Or Hillary Clinton.  See, they flunked out of the Electoral College.  Bet they both wished they had stayed awake in ol' Ex Proff's class, eh?  Then they too might have been president.  But who cares how we get 'em?  The hot topic today is how we GET RID of them.  Hypothetically, what if the man anointed by the Electoral College turns out to have, I don't know, colluded with a foreign power to steal the election through information theft and a massive campaign of propaganda and disinformation.  Let's say further that the "President" then used the office to enrich himself and his family at the expense of the national interest.  Oh, and finally, what if the individual in question is a real douchebag?

The biggest, best, most un-be-lievable douchebag ever seen...

Why, just impeach them, I hear you cry.  Weeelllll, not reeeeeaaaalllllly.  The real answer is that nobody's all that sure, because since our nation's founding, we've never had to get rid of a president before today.  Wait a minute, you say, what about Andrew Johnson?  Richard Nixon?  Bill Clinton?  Weren't they all impeached?  Wrong again.  Only Clinton and Johnson were impeached.  Nixon probably would have been impeached but he resigned first.  Clinton was acquitted, and so was Johnson, though the latter was just one vote short of being convicted.  But all this isn't to say we haven't gotten rid of presidents before.  The only problem is that they've all been assassinated.  And I don't care how big a douchebag anybody is, nobody deserves to be assassinated.  I think.  Unless you're talking about someone who's really, really horrendous -a complete threat to our democratic way of life.  And is a colossal douchebag, a literal douche-pontoon-aircraft carrier.  So, back to our original problem: how do we get rid of Tr-- err, a hypothetical Douche-Bagger-In-Chief?

I think it should start with Impeachment.  That much is certain.  That's how to get rid of recalcitrant executive department officials that won't leave when asked, and Federal judges who would rather take bribes than do their jobs.  Not just anybody can be impeached, however, The Constitution specifies that in order to be impeached, the impeachee must have committed a "high crime or misdemeanor."  What this means is that they had to break a law slightly greater than sidewalk spitting.  Heck, that's easy.  Any crooked cop can plant some pills on an unsuspecting traffic stop and presto, the defendant goes to trial.  However, what the Clinton impeachment shows us is that in order to get rid of the President, you have to have the votes in Congress --a super majority at that.

I was NOT convicted by THAT Congress

So, impeach, then try them by a Congress that will convict them, then,,, then what?  Again, nobody knows for sure because it's never gone this far before.  There are a few very important "what ifs?"  Let's start with this one: what if the President leaves the country for, I'm just spitballing here, Russia and claims that they're the victim of a legislative coup d' etat and they'd really appreciate Russia's help at getting them back in the driver seat over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?  What if a lot of other countries around the world believe it too?  What if the United Nations weighs in, calling the impeachment trial "problematic" or "of suspicious motive?"  Does Congress then defy the world?  What if the convicted president doesn't skip the country; who arrests them?  The Capitol Police?  Supposing they are arrested; where are they held?  Or is it enough that they have been kicked out of being president?  Do we just forget about those high crimes and misdemeanors that cost them the job, or does some attorney general or other indict them in front of a grand jury and then go try them --in which court?  Federal?  The state court where the crime took place?  The Washington DC Municipal Court if it happened in DC?

So many questions... I have the best questions... my questions are spec-tac-u-lar...

Once again, nobody knows.  We'd be making up all this shit as we went along.  That said, there have been judges who have been impeached and subsequently prosecuted for their crimes, so Congress could just copy what happened in those events and apply them to the problem of what to do to a wayward president.  But these questions pale in comparison to the one, big, unstated question:  what the heck do we do if he just won't go?

This is not as far-fetched as it seems.  At the beginning of our republic, John Adams was convinced that Thomas Jefferson was getting ready to unleash the horrors of the French Revolution --complete with guillotines in the public squares --onto the American people following his election in 1800.  There was talk, some of it quite heated and serious, of Adams barricading himself in the White House and summoning the army to arrest Jefferson and his supporters.  Adams took the high road, however, choosing only to leave tacks on all the seats in the East Room and swipe all the soap and monogrammed towels.  Jefferson did the same to Madison, by the way.

I also left all the chamber pots full.  Of poop.  Haha!

What I'm getting at here is the very real possibility that an impeached president just may try to brass-balls-it-out and go on national TV or, let's just see here, Twitter, and complain that it's all the result of a Deep State Conspiracy against him, engineered by Obama, with the collusion of the Fake News industry, and all True Americans need to help their legally elected president by taking their constitutionally protected guns and hurrying to Washington.  If this happens, about half of those NRA KKK MAGA* dipshits would head for Washington state and get arrested by a bunch of Washington State Police, but the other half would spread murder and mayhem all over the country until downtown Sheboygan resembled the Kabul Green Zone.  While they were doing that, their political allies and apologists would do everything in their power to aid and abet them from the sidelines, until the country settles down into a comfortable civil war.  And let's remember how much fun the LAST one was: 650,000 soldiers dead, famine, disease, social upheaval and foreign meddlers on the doorstep just itching to step in and carve the United States up into spheres of economic and political influence.  Planet Earth will then be lead by another power (China probably), while the United States enters a period of cultural, economic and social decline, from which it may take centuries to recover.

*National Riflemen's Association, Ku Klux Klan, and Make America Great Again

Introducing North America's next great Superpower...

But let's not let a little thing like uncertainty stop us from doing what needs to be done.  If a president acquires the office through the collusion of a foreign power, they must be removed.  If they use the office for their private enrichment and their family's gain, they must be removed.  If they are too dumb to do the job or too lazy, then they should resign.  Either way, Donald Trump should resign or else be impeached.  But that doesn't stop the problem that created Donald Trump.   If they want to hold onto their jobs, Democrats and Republicans need to see to the good of the American voter who voted for Trump.  Some meaningful constraints must be placed on the real fake news, ie., Breitbart, Fox and the dark, racist corners of the web, in order to silence the lunatic fringe's propaganda machine.  And finally, American politics needs to purge itself of rancour and ideology and raise high the moral standard of public service.  The American Presidency is not a prize to be fought over by billionaires.

I WON'T live in the White House, Mummy!  It's to old and small
and there are NO gold toilet seats!

Idiocracy? It Can Happen Here

Since nobody was paying attention last class,
consider this a remedial session.  Ahem!

Have you all seen this wonderful B-grade movie, "Idiocracy?"  It's got a marvelous premise. Essentially, people in the future are really, REALLY dumb, but the United States is still a democracy, so instead of electing smart leaders, the idiots in this "idiocracy" elect leaders who are slightly smarter, but way more flashy.  Check it out:

This begs the question: can our republican democracy prevent the U.S. from electing a really dumb, silly, dangerously uninformed, mentally unbalanced or otherwise five-fries-short-of-a-Happy-Meal president?  To answer this question, we will have to go back to the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

In or around the year 1787, democracies were rare in the world: we were pretty much it.  Even the much talked about Dutch Confederation still had at its core a hereditary prince called a Stadholder, who was usually Orange --that is, usually the Prince of Orange.  There was a decent reason for all this aristocracy in the world.  Only aristocrats had the free time to become educated and thus make wise, informed decisions about what a country should or should not do.  They had all this free time because the reason for their existence had pretty much evaporated.  You see, the aristocrats were at the top of the social heap because they were supposed to spend all their time training how to kill and maim people while riding on a horse.  Since kings now used smaller, professional, paid armies, all tricked out with the most expensive new killing technology (black powder muskets with --wait for it! --bayonets on the end!), there wasn't a reason to call out the feudal host any more because someone would probably blow them all sky-high with a cannon.

Come to think of it, going to Kings College, Oxford sounds a good deal
more jolly than going to the Holy Land and having my balls cut off en route.

And most of the time, these aristocrats did make good decisions.  What the English aristocrats didn't count on was the fact that their ugly stepchildren in America --or at least the part that wasn't owned by Spain, France or Indians --were so damn cheap and stingy that they didn't want to pay any taxes at all which their colonial assemblies didn't, ahem, vote for.  The nerve!  Things got so bad that the otherwise sensible King George III fought a terrible war with the Americans over this issue, and he lost, first the Colonies, then his mind, then he got it back again, then he lost his life to old age.

For all their talk about democracy, America's Founding F-ers shared the same reservations about unbridled democracy as the Brits did, because let's face it: the average American in 1787 believed every word in the Bible was literally true, was pretty sure that grand-dad had done him a solid when he burned all the witches in the colony, and that Indians could fly, change color, sprout as many arms as they wanted, and probably had at least one parent that was a horse.  In order to stop the Ship of State from being skippered by these bumpkins, the Founding F-ers had a few rules about who could vote and for whom they were allowed to vote.  For instance, of the newly minted Federal Government, only Congressmen were elected by the voters.  And those voters had to be male, white, over 21, and own a certain amount of "property," which could be real estate, money, or even people, just as long as those owned people were black.

See if you can spot the new American Voter!
Hint: it's no one on the top row!

Senators were elected by the members of a state's legislature, who had to pass all the other qualifications as a regular voter, plus be one of the "popular kids" back home.  And the President of the United States?  Here's where the Founding F-ers got really, really creative.  Each state had a number of people chosen as Electors.  How many Electors a state had was based on its population, plus two extras thrown in just for giggles.  These people would gather after a Presidential Election and cast their own votes for president.  Whichever candidate had the most votes would be the President; whomever had the next most votes would be Vice-President.  And it was this half-assed shit show that elected Washington and Adams as POTUS and VPOTUS not once, but twice.

Over the years, the system has been tweaked around a bit, but it is still the Electors who actually elect the President and Vice President.  Sure, there are formal and informal rules that pretty much say that Electors must vote for whichever candidate gets the majority vote in the state on Election Day, but things are sort of vague about what happens if an Elector goes off-script and votes for someone who --and I'm just speculating at this point --the Elector believes would actually make a good president.  I'm guessing they have to pay for their own lunch at the meeting of the Electoral College (I am so not making this name up!).

So okay, now this guy is running for President:

Whoops, wrong country, wrong election.  Wait a sec... ah, here he is:

Long story short, he makes "Idiocracy's" President Commacho look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison.  And who do the Democrats have lined up to run against him?  Either Hillary who for some reason is liked less than her skirt chasing husband, Bill "Bubba" Clinton, or some old, transplanted to Vermont New York dude who has an actual Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream flavor named after him (again, so not kidding!)  There is a very real chance that this dipshi-  uh, Donald Dude could become our next president,  Who can save us?  Superman?  Batman?  Nope, they are for reasons still unclear to me squaring off to fight each other this year.  Well, can the Supreme Court?  Nope, they're too old and they're down a member besides.  Who can help?  I'll tell you who: The Electoral College!!!

Horse and I would help, but you're not in the
British Commonwealth of Nations any more.  Sorry!

I'm telling you, if Trump does somehow manage to win in November, we've got to go to the one firewall standing between us and worldwide ignominy.  We've got to make sure that the Electors elect someone, anyone else.  Hell, at this stage Sarah Palin would be a better risk.  She at least had been a state governor --in a state that has more caribou than people, and more Arctic fox than minority people, but at least she can hire a bunch of handlers with some solid experience, while the Donald would probably move a bunch of his corporate ass-lickers and hatchet-men into Cabinet level positions and stack the Supreme Court with Celebrity Apprentice fails. 

So give it up for the Electoral College, my peeps!  And be sure to know WHO THEY ARE from your state and threaten them with an infinite number of noogies and purple-nurples if they cast one friggin' vote for Trump.  Because although they were flawed men, the Founding F-ers usually knew what they were doing.

Your Electoral College at work: Electing Presidents since George Washington.  We could be America's last hope :-0