Bernie Sanders vs. Trump and/or Cruz: A Defining Moment

            My parents and others of their generation had an expression something like, "Ten years after America elects a Jewish president," meaning pretty much what the more secular and sardonic of their parents and grandparents meant by "When Messiah comes": that is, somewhere in the distant future, or never.

            Now hold that thought while I repeat a personal story from my days in the higher ed. biz and provide a link to a Mort Sahl routine from a generation earlier.

            After I'd worked at Miami University (Oxford, OH) for a few years — let's say 1980 or so — I found myself at a Faculty Senate meeting notably boring even by the high standards for boredom of faculty senates. I couldn't just walk out because I needed to be there for what was to be a close vote, but I could start a conversation with the guy next to me, a US Navy officer from our NROTC unit. If we'd been crass enough and clever enough to just ask, we probably would've found out that our votes would cancel out, and we both could've left and had a beer and not disturbed the slumber or stupor of the colleagues around us. Anyway, we had a low-volume conversation that lasted long enough that we exchanged names, and upon hearing mine the Navy guy said, "Oh — you're Erlich! They told me about you down at the unit." And I said something cool and sophisticated like, "Really?!? What did they say?" What they said was, "There are two really big radicals to look out for on campus, Momeyer in Philosophy and Erlich in English." And I repeated, "Really?!?", at which point he pulled back, stroked an imaginary beard, considered for a moment, and said: "Let's see, Jeffersonian republican plus a dash of Jacksonian populist, modernized to the sort of social democrat the CIA would support if you were foreign?" Assuming I could modernize out the racist stuff with Jefferson and Jackson, I said, "Close enough." And he said, "Yeah, I figured that's what a 'radical' would be at Miami University.

            Mort Sahl was a comedian and social satirist who is relevant here for a routine in 1967 on US mainstream TV giving a comic introduction to the US political system, labeling the middle with the handy term from European politics, "social democrats." I will repeat that: as just a handy label for the politics of the middle of the US political spectrum — from Communists on the Left to the John Birch Society on the Right — Mort Sahl in 1967 used for US moderates, "social democrats."

            Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination for president on policies of a social democrat, and if he is elected President with a miraculously progressive Democratic Congress and a quick series of appointments to the Supreme Court, the political "revolution" we will get is social democracy and not a more literal by-God revolution!! that will yield US socialism more Leftist than that.

            I'm writing in February 2016, right after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, and there is still a good possibility that the 2016 US Presidential race could be Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich — and there are possibilities of "and/or," with more exotic combinations involving third or fourth parties and a Hillary Clinton candidacy in the bargain. Kasich is a member of a socially conservative Anglican splinter sect who personally takes seriously Jesus's teaching on aiding the wretched of the Earth and has governed in Ohio mostly as an old-style, Ohio staunch conservative.

            And Kasich would be the most conventional Republican candidate against Bernie Sanders.

            More interesting would be Rubio against Sanders and most interesting — as in the curse, "May you live in interesting times" — would be Ted Cruz or, for other reasons, Donald Trump against Sanders.

            Rubio has had a complex spiritual journey — Roman "Catholicism to Mormonism back to Catholicism to a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated evangelical megachurch and finally back to Catholicism" — but now asserts firmly, "I’m fully, theologically, doctrinally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church," although the Pope may have some objections on economic doctrine.

            And Ted Cruz is a Southern Baptist son of a born-again convert from Catholicism, the candidate favored by religious-Right Evangelicals, and beautifully typified in a section heading in an article that handles his use of religion with, "Forget 'dog whistle' politics: Cruz has a trumpet."

            Trump is something else.

            Okay, Trump is something else in many ways, but relevantly here Trump isn't directly offering religion — or a coherent program — but the Leadership Principle, which is the translation of the German Führerprinzip but should not be limited to Germans of the Third Reich. Get enough human beings together, and a significant number will want strong leadership: a head-man, caudillo, the guy on the white horse who'll ride in and by sheer force of personality get things done. And sometimes that's not a bad idea, as with Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator. Some of Trump's ideas though, put into practice, would be fascistic: rounding up and deporting millions of refugees, a religious test for asylum in the US, repealing the 14^th Amendment citizenship birthright by "soil" — being born on US territory — and replacing it with citizenship by "blood," and recently claiming enough toughness to order the torture of prisoners, or maybe do it himself.

            Any of these guys, but emphatically Trump or Cruz, running against Sanders would make for a defining election in US and perhaps world history. Not quite up there with the election of 1860, let us hope — a US Civil War with nukes around would not be a good thing — but really defining.

            It's not so much that Sanders is Jewish, but that he's not Joe Lieberman's brand of Jewish: Lieberman is religious, Right-ish, and eventually became a fellow-traveller with Republicans. Sanders is a secular Jew, which is not a contradiction in terms in large swaths of the US Jewish tradition, but will make him even more alien to the Christian religious Right — and to parts of the Likudnik Jewish religious Right — than if he were religious. Against Trump's strongman populist appeal, Sanders offers a democratic social-populism; against the Christian religious Right, Sanders comes up empty: for sure Sanders does not accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his personal savior. If America is a Christian nation, Sanders may've been born on US territory, but he is by definition outside the American nation, and his election would mean for many on the Religious Right a seal on their loss of America as theirs.

            (I'm old enough to remember formulas of the US as an "Anglo-Saxon Christian nation" — with "Christian" in the sense of a student of mine who said, "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — and then "White Christian nation" to bring in assimilated Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants. The election of Barack Obama undercut the White part of the old formulas; Sanders threatens the "Christian" part of formulas still current.)

            There wasn't "a vast, Right-wing conspiracy" against Bill and Hillary Clinton, but there was a relatively small group of rich people, notably Richard Mellon Scaife, who worked to get dirt dug up and flung at the Clintons. Such people will go after Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee, and she's been around long enough to have made legitimate enemies and get some people to just not like her.

            A Sanders candidacy, though, has the potential against Trump or Cruz to bring out some real nastiness, with accused of being a godless commie, obviously outside the community of the Saved. And however long Sanders lived in Vermont, he is guilty of being born and raised in Brooklyn, learning enough Hebrew to be bar mitzvah-ed, and getting most of his higher education at the University of Chicago, where he was an antiwar and civil rights activist. Cruz may accuse Trump of New York values, but if there was ever a Big City product living the stereotype of the secular Jewish Prophetic troublemaker, it's Bernie Sanders.

            In 1964, Barry Goldwater offered Americans "A Choice, Not an Echo" and lost went on to lose the Presidential election to Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater's defeat, though, laid the groundwork for a Right-wing backlash and resurgence that has gone so far that Mort Sahl's 1967 analysis of the American political spectrum seems downright weird. The American middle as "social democrats"? No way! Except broken down by issues, "Yes way," or, more exactly, issue-by-issue a lot of Americans hold social-democratic views.

             And a lot of Americans don't, as John Kasich is learning when he cites Matthew 25.31-45, and that Jewish Prophetic troublemaker Jesus's injunction to aid the sick deprived and even the imprisoned ("You can at least pay a visit!" to paraphrase the last point).

            So: We are getting down to basic conflicts in the 2016 election, and that will be clarifying and fascinating … and very, very dangerous.

Reparations Debate: John Conyers, Ta-Nehisi Coates and House Resolution 40

            During the US National Student Strike in the spring of 1970 — after the US Invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and Jackson State — there was a meeting of Illinois "student leaders" in Chicago or Springfield or some such appropriate place, and I went there as one of the representatives of the Graduate Student Association of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

            Early in the meeting, an undergrad got up and started making a speech, and, after a few minutes, I said something like, "Point of order, sort of," at which the undergrad stopped and told me he was making a speech. I replied that I understood that, that I'd heard his speech from others, that I could make his speech myself. (It was against the War and for peace and racial justice and other good things, and, actually, I had made that speech or soon would.) I noted that there was a useful custom in parliamentary procedure to start with someone's making a motion, which usually gets seconded, and then people start speechifying and debating and discussing: "Something specific! What do you want us to do?"

            The undergrads looked at me with bemused disapproval as the graduate students in the room applauded. If you were in "The Movement" and over 23, you'd heard The Speech and had attended many too many meetings with people working on our consciousness and enthusiasm and really just wanted to know what someone wanted you to do.

            There was and is much to be said for putting a motion on the floor to do something and have the debate and arguments start there. Even if it's a bad idea, if the motion is well stated, it focuses the discussion and can lead to a better idea. In any event, having a motion on the floor — as they say in parliamentary jargon — having something specific that at least a couple people want done is a better place to start a practical political debate than philosophical First Principles or appeals to shared sentiments.

            If you’re the American Continental Congress, first you decide whether or not you want independence, and then you get some bright folk to come up with a Declaration proclaiming and justifying the act.

            Sooooo … So here I want to repeat a suggestion from Ta-Nehisi Coates: "For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. […] has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies.' […] A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions," Coates adds, "But we are not interested." We are not really interested, he says, in "The Case for Reparations" for "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy," not interested even though, "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Atlantic, 24 June 2014).

            I'm interested.

            Partly I'm interested because "the old schooling sticks," and I was brought up in the "Justice, justice shall you pursue" tradition; and Justice, the Prophet Amos insisted, should "flow forth like rivers / And righteousness as an every-flowing stream," not trickle down drop by drop. Also, I'm interested in the debate in itself and how simply — if honestly — pursuing a serious debate in itself ensures this much justice: making us examine our history and ourselves.

            The reparations issue is complex.

            Women as a very large group — a majority of the American population — have an argument for money owed for uncompensated labor, and, God knows, if we are going to talk about White Americans as receivers of stolen goods, the descendants of peoples Europeans weirdly called "Indians" have some bills to present for the deaths of a number of cultures and theft of two continents.

            (Minimally, we might stop celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday: Matthew White estimates the death toll from the "Conquest of the Americas" on at 15 million, making it #12 on his list of the 100 worst mass homicides in recorded history, with about the same body count as World War I, and nobody celebrates Kaiser Wilhelm.)

            Irish Americans might note that the word "plantation" comes from English colonization of Ireland, and the descendants of poor Irish and English in colonial America could argue that the high death rates among indentured "servants" — contract slaves — was one of the reasons African slavery got introduced and became, among the planter class, popular. Which gets us into useful discussions of what I have called (following Steven Pinker) "the continuum of cruelty" of which Black African chattel slavery in the New World was the most horrifically extreme case.

            Alternatively, many of us Euro-Americans can argue that our ancestors weren't around during the era of slavery but back in Europe getting the shit kicked out of us until the family got over here (where we were usually just exploited for a couple generations). My incandescent-White Scandinavian-American colleague who taught a course in The Immigrant Experience pointed out that people doing well back in The Old Country usually remained back in The Old Country; Americans generally are the descendants of European losers. He could note that his ancestors managed to fight on the defeated side in some six different wars; and I could note that my grandparents fled the goddamn Russian Empire of the goddamn Romanoffs, with my father's father one step ahead of a murder rap for killing the goddamn Cossack who was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom.

            "We weren't even in America to profit!" is an argument we need to consider; one kind of counter-argument, however, might remind me that I grew up in Chicago, "The City that Works," and it worked better for me than it might have because it systematicallydidn't work well for Black people. Further, my family was in the car wash business, and we made a higher profit than we might have because Black labor was cheap, in part because Black workers were systematically betrayed by unions that were supposed to represent them (and in one case would've been betrayed worse if "the old schooling" hadn't stuck enough with my father that he drew some lines when offered "sweetheart" contracts).

            Another counter-argument to "we just got here" suggests that that "one nation" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance has real existence and duration over time and that Americans of all ethnicities in complex ways participate in — are part of — that nation. If the nation as a whole owes some debts and dues, we might all have obligations, if different ones, whenever our ancestors arrived and however badly they were treated.

            Now I find the idea of America as "one nation" as overly abstract and metaphysical and "one nation under God" —and given its unity by God — downright mystical and vaguely blasphemous. But that's a minority view. Further, I do believe in the American Republic and have sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend it," insofar as it's most directly embodied in our evolving Constitution. So if not a "nationalist," I'm a republican (by God!) and would have to admit also to debts of honor owed by the Republic.

            And so forth.

            We may decide that there's just no way we can work out an equivalent of "Forty acres and a mule" nowadays, and what we will do about reparations is nothing directly. But at least that would be a conscious decision — choosing not to act is an ethical/political action — and the discussion would almost certainly get the American government doing things we should be doing anyway to mitigate present inequities, whatever their causes.

            So, a motion is on the floor, and I for one urge the Congress of the United States to adopt House Resolution 40, or whatever might be its current form. Serious talk aims at action or a decision not to act, and establishing a serious Commission to Study Reparations for African Americans is a solid, sensible first step.

"Don't Panic the Herd" (Unnecessarily) [24 July 2014]

             In a way this post supplements my rather insistent request for some apologies from the late 20^th-century "Lefter-than-Thou" Left, this time adding in some issues of pretty much just style.

            Part of what's going on is old resentment on my side. No one on the Left ever threatened to kill me, nor even put a riot baton upside my head, but what I did get from some of my radical colleagues on the was, back when I was visible among the local 1960s peaceniks, quiet contempt for "the short little Lib with glasses" and, later, a kind of active disregard.

            You may now ignore that opening; I included it for, not full disclosure; no one can do that, but to admit some of the personal, and petty, that is always part of the political.

            The more political portion of the political that concerns me here is that some to my Left both did necessary and important work, for which they will usually take credit, but also messed up a bit, about which we hear less.

            One job they did was crucial for me: the loudest and most radical were always useful to those of us dealing with The Powers That Were (and Still Are) trying to negotiate what we hoped would be progress.

            It is always essential in such negotiations that "the Man" in his various incarnations look out the window and see and hear a mob — however small or nonexistent the crowd out there — and think, "If I do not compromise with these relatively moderate Moderates, I will have to deal with THEM outside."

            Indeed, on one occasion there was just too little rabble being roused for even the most paranoid administrator to grow concerned, so on the way to a meeting I had to take off my jacket and tie and go outside and whip up the crowd a bit myself.

            "Always have someone to your Left" if you're on the Left, to the Right if you're a conservative: either way, radicals that make you look eminently reasonable (even if the radical arguments are often more logically consistent than moderate compromises).

            And to a great extent many of us tried hard to look like moderates. 'Cause — in part, as usual — many of us growing up in the gray middle of the 20^th century grew up with the unspoken or spoken rule, "Don't panic the herd."

            Among my friends, the maxim was spoken and should have been expanded: Don't panic the herd unnecessarily, or even (unnecessarily) annoy them.

            We were quietly cocky little bastards, my friends and I, but it's hardly bragging to note that we were smart enough to figure out that our high school's student council was a "toy government" and that class president and similar faux-democratic offices weren't even that.

            And toys are to be played with, and, being wise-asses, we played.

            We saw ourselves as something cooler than kids at play, though; if we were conscious of it at all — and here we were pretty unconscious — we thought of ourselves as cowboys moving along the little dogies, or, just maybe, now and then, a lion sneaking up on the herd at the water hole.

            Anyway, we quietly, offhandedly, and in our spare time, manipulated graduation-class politics and student politics more generally — what there was of student politics at Lake View High School in the late 1950s — and figured if we couldn't be "the popular kids" we'd be the quiet manipulators.

            It was a Chicago high school, Lake View High, so such exercises were good training for adult life if we stayed in the neighborhood; and it was crucial if very basic training for my future political life in downstate Illinois, the academy, and what is now John Boehner's Congressional District. (Hint: However negative the news coverage can be of Mr. Boehner, it's better than we were used to in the Ohio 8^th CD: no phrases in the media like "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and "counts of bribery and conspiracy.")

            We called our group "Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu," from the initials of our initial motto of "Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk" and because it has a rhythm (at least with an Omega and not an Omicron) appropriate for singing, so we kind of automatically had most of a club song.

            One high point in our brief corporate life — Year Clubs are people, my friends — was when one day junior year I was sitting in the school cafeteria and a kid came up to me and asked me if I was president of Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu, and I replied "I think so." This actually wasn't a wise-ass answer since DCOSM handled transfers of authority in the tradition of the late Roman Empire, but without the violence, and I was pretty sure I had just been impeached. I finally decided I was as close to a president as we had at that moment and asked him what he wanted. He said he was running for some school or class office, and I said, "Well …?" And he asked, "Is that all right?"

            Ah, if only The Godfather had been out, and we had gotten our class rings! It hadn't and I don't think we had, so I just said, "Uh, sure" and tried to look warm and sincere and earnest and wished him luck.
            That was my personal best, but what's relevant here — I will get around to the point, honest — what's relevant here is a group achievement, and its eventual celebration.

            One day, one of my club brothers (one of the guys behind the impeachment) came up to me and asked me for a name everyone in the school would know, or think they knew. I paused and said, "Carlson. Robert Carlson — Robert A., A for Allen, but everyone calls him 'Bob'" and asked why. And my friend said that we were running him for Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council.

            I noted that I'd made up the name, and he said he knew and that that was what he wanted.

            So one of the year-club brothers wrote up a student folder for Bob and filed it appropriately, along with other subsidiary documentation. I didn't follow this part: no "Need to Know," you know, and our, well, forger was very professional about the operation (he went on to become a significant expert in encryption and had a notable run-in with the NSA before that was fashionable). Others worked on the Carlson campaign and wrote a speech for Bob to deliver at the school's election assembly.

            Getting the speech given was something of a challenge, but poor Bob came down with some medical affliction, and we got a hotshot from the current Student Council officers — a guy the speechwriter didn't like — to deliver the speech. The Council officer did an excellent job, and it looked like Bob was a shoo-in.
            And this brought us to a decision point for the, well, conspirators. Some of us wanted to get Bob elected; others noted a problem.

            Lake View did a good job running realistic elections for our toy student government, and we used actual Chicago or Cook County voting machines. Those came cheap, but there was a rental charge; and if it became clear that there'd need to be a new election based on the non-existence of the winner, or even the death or nonexistence of one of the candidates; and either way the machines would have to be rented again or there'd have to be a hand count.

            And costing the school money or making the Student Council election committee count by hand over 2000 ballots: neither was going to be taken as just good clean fun.

            So we killed Bob.

            After all, he'd been too sick to deliver his election speech, and even back before well-publicized school shootings and some poor schmuck's managing to OD on caffeine, high school students did die with sufficient frequency that the story was plausible.

            Fortunately for us, this was before the time of bringing in grief counselors for basically routine deaths; and also fortunately we were able to stop the collection of money for flowers or a contribution to … whatever-Bob-had-died-of fund — and we "pulled the string" as they used to say and whispered it around that good old Bob whom everyone knew had a terminal existential issue.

            There was an investigation, spearheaded by the current Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council, the guy who initially came up with the Carlson-for-Office idea. And we went to ground and kept our mouths shut.
            And the herd was quiet, and we sort of celebrated getting away with the prank by buying ΔΧΩΣΜ club shirts (knitted short-sleeves in blue with black letters: ugly — really ugly — but appropriate for us).

            And then someone got a bad idea, and we upped our celebration of our success by all of us wearing our shirts to school on the same day.

            Hubris yields Nemesis as the Greeks used to say, or in a more decorous formulation: Chutzpah — dumb-ass arrogance — is the pride that goeth before a pratfall.

            We made it obvious who had gotten elected to many of the offices of the toy government and such, and the herd wasn't panicked so much as the flock spotted the owls out in the daylight and mobbed the shit out of them. Less metaphorically and far less melodramatically put, we pissed off a number of our classmates, and the next election that came up — senior class officers —we were out.

            It made little difference who became class president, although the candidate elected instead of our guy made that his first step on a successful career in the cop business and then as owner of McDonald's franchises. Important for me here were lessons about the dangers of arrogance, the limits to how far people (not cattle or zebras or sheep) can be annoyed, and how something as banal as ugly short-sleeve shirts can have unanticipated effects.

            Which returns me to heavier matters.

            "The sixties" as a period in political history didn't correspond exactly to the decade of 1960 through 1969. If you need dates for it, one might say the sixties started in late 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, got caught in a backlash in 1968 with the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States, got shot down at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970, twitched a bit and then got indecently buried in an electoral landslide with the re-election of Richard M. Nixon over George McGovern in 1972. With some important ups and downs, primarily with the Watergate Scandal, the sixties were well over in crucial aspects by 1972, symbolized by Nixon's successful "Southern Strategy" for Republicans and the successful campaigns for President — to overstate — of Southern Eisenhower-Republicans by the Democrats.
            The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s f. (the Margaret Thatcher Revolution to give credit more accurately) helped "roll back" a good deal of the sixties and "the Movement."

            Why? Too big a topic for my pay grade, but let's start with "the Movement's" being far from monolithic — a good thing — and at its roots too incoherent (not a good thing). Hippies were not Radicals; the Civil Rights movement and Peace Movement overlapped but were not identical; Malcolm X was emphatically not Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power as a movement was not Civil Rights and integration.

            And finally moving into the topic announced in my opening paragraph — the social and cultural movements of Hippies, feminists, gays, and associates (GLBT) overlapped with the other small "m" movements in American society but were far from identical, and not always in agreement on goals and tactics.

            "The personal is the political" is true indeed, but the personal also can and does compete with the more purely political, defined in traditional terms of broad-scale power and economic issues. Identity politics are politics, but they are necessarily particularistic and complicate coalition politics.

            And religious politics are always and necessarily incredibly problematic and dangerous, as can be seen by a quick look at the body counts from the 17^th-century European Wars of Religion as well as those from the older Crusades and battles within Islam.

            Short form here: Some of my colleagues on the Left weren't colleagues at all but provocateurs, and there's a history to be publicized of infiltration of Movement groups by people assigned to act offensively and provoke trouble. More, though, were sincere people who got important work done, but work with costs.

            Obviously, the wise-guys of ΔΧΩΣΜ had the right to wear our shirts to school individually and conspire to all come to school in them on the same day. It was, however, not prudent to do so. Old adolescents and young adults have the right to wear their hair as they like, and it is progress that people nowadays can wear a wide range of hair styles without worrying about what sort of political statement they're making. And that you can display tatoos and that mi-level executives can be pierced — etc., except that fights over hair and clothes and fashion are far less of a drain on the status-quo Right than on the Left, and for the serious politics of Who-Gets-What are largely a distraction.

            And the "life-style" fights of the 1960s and following much too frequently panicked the herd. Indeed even far more serious conflicts — ones with excellent results like getting acceptance of gay marriage — came with upsetting traditionalists more than prudent.

            It can be useful and often necessary to "appall the bourgeoisie," but bourgeoisie is a Frenchified way to say "middle class," and it can be a very bad tactic to appall a middle-class that must be brought into any effective alliance against the reactionary among the very rich.

            It can be galvanizing to attack any orthodoxy, including religious orthodoxy, but go back to the old image with "galvanize" and picture putting electricity through people. They may object, strongly.

            After the American Left lost the power to threaten widespread disruption — basically after Kent State and Jackson State and convulsions that followed them — it was time to cool it and avoid unnecessarily annoying the conventional.

            Plenty of annoyance is already necessary.

            So, a sensible atheist can deal with theist by mildly re-formulating the probably apocryphal assertion by Pierre-Simon Laplace, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — the God hypothesis — and then shutting up unless the theists are trying to control your behavior.

                        * Effective politics are coalition politics, and there are a lot of religious people out there who can be drawn into progressive coalitions on the basis of their/our beliefs.

                        * In the United States, there are a lot of religious people, period.

                        * Historically, going back to the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, science, and "Reason," a standard response to overstated Enlightenment and "modernism" has been calls for a return to unquestioning faith and various fundamentalisms. Hold your ground civilly, but don't encourage that return. You don't have to say the "under God" part of the pledge of allegiance — or any of the Pledge — but you can stand there quietly when others indulge the patriotic impulse.

            All Americans of any, all, and every sexual orientation can cool it with Public Displays of Affection when PDA means public fondling.

            Having established the right to decorate one's body however one pleases, in public cover up anything overly outrageous — and do not think that making an artwork of your body is some sort of significant contribution to a just society.

            And so forth.

            The "sixties" in one sense lasted maybe five years, and after that it's been largely backlash. Most of that backlash was and remains inevitable; those of us Left of center, should not add to it.

            Back in high school, Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu had the excuse of inexperience in unnecessarily goading our classmates. Older folk have no excuse. Unless it is really necessary, do not panic the herd.

            Unless you have a mob at your back — or your opponents imagine one — civility and restraint are always good options in dealing with people who just might give you what you want.

            You don't have to love your enemies or even your neighbors or "the stranger who resides with you" as on alien in or midst — not unless you Believe. Still, you can be nice to them, where possible, and, prudently, avoid unnecessarily throwing them into a panic, or a snit.

            Pranking people and arguing with them is fun; but it's better to deal with them so they'll give you their aid.