Category: Constitutional Issues

It’s Not Just The Guns, It’s The Ammo

The Daily Escape:

Antarctica – May, 2022 photo by Jason Row Photography

Wrongo shot the AR-15 at Fort Ord, CA while in the military in 1966. Back then, the US Army had its Combat Developments Experimentation Command, known as CDEC, there. Fort Ord is now closed, but its location on Monterey Bay in California, made it a beautiful place to spend a weekend, if not military training.

In the 1960s, Fort Ord was the home of the 4th Replacement Training Center, with upward of 50,000 soldiers preparing for their upcoming tour of Vietnam. As part of our training, we participated in the night fire tests of the AR-15. Those tests simulated the conditions that small squads faced in combat. The idea was to compare the performance of the AR-15 against the M-14, the incumbent weapon.

The Army adopted the lighter AR-15 in a model they called the M-16. James Fallows, writing in 1988 in The Atlantic, said this about the weapon:

“By the middle of 1967, when the M-16 had been in combat for about a year and a half, a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their unreliable equipment and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen to attract the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, which formed an investigating subcommittee.”

The subcommittee examined the problems caused by the M-16, and Fallows’ article is worth reading to see how badly the Army procurement process failed the US soldier in Vietnam. The Army made several changes to the AR-15 as it became the M-16. All of them served to make the weapon unreliable in combat conditions and less useful as a weapon of war.

But Wrongo wants to focus on the M-16’s high velocity bullet. From Fallows:

“Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers had made a discovery in the science of ‘wound ballistics.’ The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into….a human body…”

On Sunday, 60 Minutes re-broadcast a story on the lethality of the AR-15. The focus was on how the gun’s high velocity rounds cause devastating and often lethal wounds that first responders and emergency rooms have great difficulty repairing.

The Intercept brings this back to the Uvalde shooting: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“Many circumstances of this week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are incomprehensible….The [wound] damage was so severe that agonized parents had to give DNA samples to identify their children.”

Imagine. The request pointed to the obvious: Many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was impossible to identify their bodies. And that DNA identification process took hours.

Much of the damage was because in addition to the killer using the AR-15, a weapon of war, he also used hollow point bullets, one of the most physically destructive forms of ammunition. Hollow-point bullets open upon impact thereby causing more damage to their targets:

Source: Guns and Ammo

They can easily be purchased throughout the US, but the rest of the world thinks the use of expanding rounds on the battlefield is a war crime. The International Criminal Court bars their use, and they are prohibited by a declaration of the Hague Convention (which of course, the US has never ratified).

The US military has authorized hollow-point ammo. Civilian ammosexual proponents of the hollow-point ammo argue that the bullet reduces harm to nearby civilians, since it’s less likely to pass through its intended target or to ricochet. They also say that it’s useful in hunting big game, so the animal can be killed in one hit. Just like it works in 10 year-old grammar school students.

More from the Intercept:

“Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde, purchased 375 expanding rounds. In 2019, a 21-year-old gunman in El Paso, Texas, bought 1,000 of the same type of bullets for his Walmart rampage. The 20-year-old gunman in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting managed to stockpile 1,700 of various rounds, including hollow points.”

None of these purchases raised any flags with ammo retailers.

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. Back in the 1960s during those early field tests, the military learned that the AR-15 excelled at blowing people apart. Let’s give Rod Miller the final word:

“Armed Americans are killing our schoolkids while they study. They routinely kill them by the dozens for various reasons all across our country. Let me repeat that, armed Americans are killing our schoolkids.”

Can we at least ban hollow-point ammo for use by private citizens?

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Saturday Soother – May 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Memorial Day, Arlington National Cemetery – May 2013 photo by William Coyle

Welcome to America’s Memorial Day weekend, when we remember those in the military who died in service to the country. But this year, we must also honor those who have died from mass murder by gun right here at home.

We need a three-day weekend. We need a break from the slowly unveiling and depressing news out about how shamefully the police of Uvalde, TX reacted to the killer. We also need a break from listening to the tepid responses by both political Parties.

The Republicans are saying the same as always: The country should not have stricter gun control. Why do Republicans refuse to act? Beyond the fact that many believe stricter gun control would not prevent such mass shootings, recent polling data reveal that there’s less political pressure on them than you might have thought.

Let’s examine the public mindset on the gun control debate as shown in Gallup’s polling conducted in October 2021 and January 2022. Both polls found a slight decrease in support for stricter gun laws compared with the prior year’s measures. Here are the top line results:

Last October, 52% of Americans indicated they wanted stricter gun control, while 46% either thought laws should be kept the same (35%) or made less strict (11%). The headline is that Americans’ support for stricter gun control fell five percentage points from October 2020 to the lowest since 2014.

That decline was driven by a 15-point plunge among independents, while Democrats’ desire for more restrictive gun laws ticked up six points to 91%. Republicans’ views were essentially unchanged, at 24%, (after dropping 14 points in 2020).

Of course, these numbers can be hard to understand when polls also indicate that north of 80% of Americans want universal background checks for guns, which Democrats have been pushing for in Congress and which most Republicans won’t go along with.

Why? There’s no sign that the polling on background checks holds up when its on the ballot. CNN’s report (March 2021) showed that ballot measures for background checks have appeared on ballots in California, Maine, Nevada, and Washington.

In all four, the pro-gun control side’s vote margin was worse than the Democrats’ baseline in the same state. In 2016, Clinton won California by 30 points, while gun control won by 27 points. In Maine, Clinton won by 3 points, while gun control lost by 4 points. In Nevada, Clinton won by 2 points, while gun control passed by a single point. Lastly, Washington passed its gun control law by a little less than 19 points in 2018, while Washington state’s House Democratic candidates won by a bigger margin in the same year.

The question is: Why would Republicans feel political pressure to support more gun control, when something that polls as well as universal background checks doesn’t draw as much support as the Democratic presidential candidate?

And here are a few more depressing thoughts. First, before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994, there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America. Today, there are 20 million.

Second, it’s doubtful that you were aware that there is an active group of school principals who have survived a school shooting. It’s called the Principal Recovery Network, a support group of sorts that mobilizes to help principals in the immediate aftermath of a school shooting. Frank DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine High School says:

“It’s like that club that no one wants to belong to,”

They provide support for a principal who’s having his/her worst professional day. In every scenario, the goal is to help a principal in crisis. This is America: We put all this energy into dealing with the aftermath of a preventable trauma, and that now includes therapy for principals. We’re in this dark place because we will not open our eyes.

And for the 21st time since a mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif. in 2014, the satirical site The Onion republished its saddest headline:

“No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

The best way to stop a bad guy from getting a gun is prevention.

Time for our long weekend Saturday Soother. The blog may be taking some time off, so don’t expect to see another column before Tuesday.

In view of the Memorial Day observance, and to remember those who died in Texas, listen to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, played in the original version by the Dover Quartet. Barber finished the arrangement in 1936. In January 1938, Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber.

Toscanini later sent word that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it! It was performed for the first time by Toscanini in November, 1938. Here, for the third time on the blog, is the quartet version of “Adagio for Strings”:

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Free Speech Is About To Get Tested

The Daily Escape:

Lupine bloom, Beeks Bight, Folsom Lake, CA – May 2022 photo by Kaptured in Kamera

We’re back from France where we had fantastic weather, wonderful food and wine, and a break from the loud drumbeat of dystopian American news. One issue that Wrongo followed from afar was the continuing assault on free speech by America’s Right Wing.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“It seems like every week, Republicans propose, pass, or enact another outrageous, authoritarian, retrograde policy. Book bans, abortion bans, efforts to turn back the clock on marriage equality and contraception. Each is a fleeting political firestorm and then it’s on to the next….amidst this parade of retrograde lawmaking, there is a pattern…”

Despite claiming to be for small government, the Republicans want to dictate the terms of speech in America.

Consider Florida where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had passed legislation taking away the rights of Facebook, Twitter, and others to ban people from their platforms:

“The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Monday ruled it is unconstitutional for Florida to bar social media companies from banning politicians, in a major victory for tech companies….the court rejected many of the legal arguments that conservative states have been using to justify laws governing the content moderation policies of major tech companies after years of accusations that the tech companies are biased against their political viewpoints.”

The 11th Circuit court found that tech companies’ moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from regulating free speech. Interestingly, this comes after a different decision on the same issue by the Texas 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, that allowed a Texas law banning companies from discriminating against people based on their politics to remain in effect.

We now have completely opposite decisions by the 11th Circuit and the 5th Circuit courts on the issue of whether corporations must follow the Constitution’s First Amendment. This will invariably lead to the Supreme Court weighing in on whether private social media companies’ content moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment. From the WaPo:

“Some lawmakers pushing for laws governing online content moderation and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have argued that tech companies should be regulated as “common carriers,” businesses like phone companies that are subject to government regulation because of the essential services they provide.”

But Florida’s court rejected those arguments, arguing states can’t force such restrictions on private company social media platforms. While the phone companies cannot stop callers or calls that may be objectionable, or even illegal, social media companies have different rights. From the Court’s ruling:

“Neither law nor logic recognizes government authority to strip an entity of its First Amendment rights merely by labeling it a common carrier…”

The “Terms of Service” (TOS) agreements between social media platform companies and their users are a contract. When someone agrees to the TOS, they are saying that they will abide by it. Violating the TOS, whether by Trump, Musk, or some random ideologue, is a violation of contract law.

When the TOS is violated and the violator is suspended or barred from the platform, it doesn’t demonstrate bias, or a restriction in free speech. It demonstrates equal treatment. The TOS isn’t there only to restrain Conservatives, despite their protests of discrimination.

Florida passes a “don’t say gay” bill to police free speech by public educators in schools. They then pass the law to prevent private companies from policing speech on their platforms. This irony is lost on those who claim they’re against federal or state overreach unless it’s their Party that’s doing the overreaching.

The First Amendment says the government cannot punish you for speech (with some exceptions). The same Amendment also protects free association—meaning that it’s perfectly legal for private organizations to exercise their freedom of association even while excluding some speech.

Networks like Facebook and Twitter exert a lot of power over the flow of information. They are a primary method of news and expression for millions. That means they must be broadly inclusive and promote healthy discourse. Their business model includes wanting to attract as many users as possible. From Nicholas Grossmann: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The big social networks—Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter—aim to be the online mainstream, appealing to a wide variety of users and the businesses that sell to them. That requires stopping behavior that isn’t illegal, but makes the platform inhospitable, such as hate speech.”

The large private social networks have a responsibility not to let the doctrine of free speech make them give a right of way to bad actors. There is zero reason to cede the concept of free speech to the trolls who are trying to drive people they hate off private social media platforms.

Now we wait to see what Alito, Thomas and the other Conservative Supremes have to say about the limits of Free Speech.

You shouldn’t be optimistic about the outcome.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 8, 2022

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle”. Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.” And Justice Thomas of Ginni said:

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want…We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like…”

So suck it up American women! They’re sure that the leak is worse for America than their outrageous decision, and nothing you say will change any Republican minds. It is likely to be a long time before this (anticipated) decision is reversed. We will be a nation divided between states where reproductive freedom is guaranteed and states without it.

Major judicial errors in American history have been reversed before. The Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol was repealed in 14 years. The Supreme Court opinion upholding laws that criminalized gay sex was overturned after 17 years.

Women have many reasons for choosing abortion that have nothing to do with not wanting to be a parent. They may have medical needs; a fetus may carry genetic defects; the woman may be an underage child or a survivor of rape or incest. Adoption does not erase either the medical effects or the psychic scars that forcing a mother to term might inflict, and that may persist long after pregnancy is over.

And on this Mother’s Day, it is particularly ironic that they call themselves pro-life. Except, of course, for mothers. On to cartoons.

Who should be feeling violated?

Alito changes the rules:

Barrett shows she’s one of the boys:

More of the hypocrisy:

Oh, the places you will go:

Anybody else think Republicans are too controlling?

Mother’s Day 2022:

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Thoughts on Alito’s Draft Opinion

Daily Escape:

Chama River, near Abiquiu, NM – 2022 photo by James C. Wilson

Wrongo’s last column spoke about how the Republican Party had become the Party of White Christian Nationalists. And that was before the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the world. It seems that this likely decision is a key example of how radical Christians are assuming a political role in America that isn’t dissimilar to the Taliban’s in Afghanistan.

Justice Alito’s draft opinion reinforces the view that there’s a very dangerous Christian movement afoot in our nation. It’s not enough for them to live in a country where they are completely free to practice their own religious beliefs. They require the rest of us to live by their religious code, too.

Two thoughts: First about the Court’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public when they overturn a 50-year-old precedent. The Editorial Board of the WaPo summarized the damage to the legitimacy of the Court that Justice Alito is likely to inflict:

“The Court’s legitimacy rests on the notion that it follows the law, not the personal or ideological preferences of the justices who happen to serve on it at any given time….What brought the Court to its current precipice was not a fundamental shift in American values regarding abortion. It was the [result of] shameless legislative maneuvering of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who jammed two Trump-nominated justices onto the Court.”

For some time, you’ve been able to predict the votes of Supreme Court Justices by knowing the Party of the president that appointed them. That is particularly true if the issue is either overtly political or a Culture War proxy for Republican Party doctrine.

The American people want to believe the law is fair and impartial, because everyone wants to live in a just and predictable society. But this isn’t what Conservatives want. Their so-called love of religion and love of authority move them to reduce or eliminate voting rights, and now, to eliminate women’s rights.

Second, Wrongo thinks that the Conservative Court has gone a political bridge too far. Most polls show that the rights granted in the Roe v. Wade decision are broadly popular, even among Republicans. And Americans have lived with those rights for almost 50 years, assuming it was an inviolable Constitutional right, you know, like owning a gun.

Heather Cox Richardson says that the Supreme Court has never before taken away a Constitutional right. That means there will certainly be a political backlash against those who have supported this attack against women specifically, and against privacy rights in general.

Pew reports that women are more likely than men to express support for legal abortion (62% vs. 56%). And among adults under age 30, 67% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 61% of adults in their 30s and 40s.

This describes the foundation of a political movement: Young women as the vanguard of an anti-Republican crusade (pardon the Christian pun). We also know that young people historically have had the lowest voter turnout, dating back to the 1960s. Here’s a graph showing what percentage of women have voted by age group:

Source: Stastia

It was only in 2020 that very young women reached the 50% turnout level for the first time in 50 years. They still lag all other age groups in voting. This means that a wealth of untapped political power lies waiting to be flexed this fall, and overturning Roe is the spark that can light the fire.

Add to that Black and Hispanic women who according to a Guttmacher Institute report are, respectively, three and two times more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than white women. Nationally, Black women had 37% of abortions, white women had 34%, and Hispanic women had 22%. Black women are also more than three times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death compared to white women.

Pew also reported that two-thirds of Asian (68%), and Black adults (67%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 58% of Hispanic adults.

All of this creates the basis for a national political movement to defeat anti-abortion candidates at local, state, and national levels. Think about how a young woman like Mallory McMorrow who spoke so effectively against the Republican Culture War, could be a leader in the fight.

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball lists seven states that offer the biggest potential for a Democratic backlash driven by abortion rights: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Each of these states has a highly competitive gubernatorial or Senate race on tap for this fall, and several of them have two.

Before you say it’s impossible, remember that in Ireland in 2012, the death of a young woman who had been denied a medically necessary abortion became a rallying cry for the abortion rights movement. In 2018, this Catholic country held a referendum to change their Constitution to legalize abortion, which passed with over 66% support.

The non-Christian-radical path forward is via the ballot box, where women should be poised to lead us to a rebuilt society. Even as the Roberts Court and Republicans turn their backs on the Constitution, we must still embrace it.

The Roberts Court’s radical Christian majority is, intentionally or not, administering a fatal blow to the Court’s legitimacy.

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Saturday Soother – April 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Water Lilies, Balboa Park, San Diego CA – April 2022 photo by Sharyl Edmiston Mitchell. Like Monet but in focus.

Three items for your review this Saturday. First, the watchdog group American Oversight published emails that revealed Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to join a weekly coalition meeting of conservatives with ties to a group she founded called Groundswell.

She suggested that DeSantis’ office would be familiar with her because her husband had been in contact with the governor “on various things as of late.” That was in February.

DeSantis has two policy items that are likely to go before the Court: Florida’s Congressional redistricting map (drawn under DeSantis’s supervision) and Florida’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. Could these be among the “various things” that DeSantis and Clarence Thomas discussed?

We may never know because the Supreme Court has no enforceable code of ethics and no mechanism for reporting ex parte communications between justices and politicians or lobbyists. We’re headed backwards in America: Our sadness is that a minority, aided by the Supreme Court will now define what America really is.

Second, A 26-year-old black Grand Rapids, Michigan man was administered the death penalty by a cop for a minor traffic violation after he resisted arrest. Patrick Lyoya was a Congolese refugee who came to the US fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. Wrongo will not present one or more of the gratuitous violence porn videos of the incident that are all over the internet.

Here’s a chart showing just how many more people are killed by cops in America vs. those killed in other wealthy countries:

Note that cops in other developed countries don’t kill very many people. For a cop to kill somebody in Western Europe or Japan, it is extraordinarily rare. In comparison, three people are killed by cops every day here in the land of the free.

On the other hand, there are 300 million guns out in the wild in the US. That’s surely making police more trigger-happy than cops in the rest of the civilized world. While that’s true, US police work isn’t nearly as dangerous as the police unions want you to believe, since death by Covid was the leading cause of police death for the second year in a row.

The typical take on this will be “You won’t die if you don’t run from the police.” That’s reasonable in the abstract, But should failure to comply with established Best Practices for America’s Docile Citizenry be a death sentence? That’s an authoritarian mindset.

There may be situations where it is legitimate to shoot a fleeing suspect to prevent the actual threat of death or severe bodily injury; but this was not one of those cases. Police now have the mentality that their primary goal is achieving compliance with their orders in every situation, and whatever they need to do to achieve that is ok. They’re wrong, it isn’t ok.

Third, old US Senators have got to retire. We currently have the oldest Senate in US history. From the WaPo:

“Twenty-three members of the Senate are in their 70s; only one is under 40. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average age of senators at the beginning of this year was 64.3 years — the oldest in history.”

And this part of the story is both sad and unnerving at the same time:

“Colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve, citing recent interactions.”

The article quotes other Senators on her failing mental acuity. Feinstein’s term runs until January 2025.

With all that’s wrong, it’s time to leave the news of the week behind and focus on centering ourselves so we can try to handle next week’s horrors. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Spring has sprung on the fields of Wrong. The forsythia and daffodils are blooming. We’ve mulched all plants and trees; the lawns have been dethatched and seeded. It’s still too early to put out the garden furniture, but our plans to create a pollinator garden are proceeding.

To help you center yourself, start by brewing up a big mug of Dark Matter coffee ($17.00/12 oz.) made by San Diego’s own West Bean coffee roasters.

Now grab a comfy chair by a south-facing window and since this weekend is important to three of our great religions, settle back and listen to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus”. Mozart composed this motet in D major in 1791 during the last year of his life to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi.

Here it is performed by The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge directed by Daniel Hyde. It is from the BBC’s “Easter from King’s 2022” broadcast on BBC Two today:

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Monday Wake Up Call – April 11, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Cactus flowers – April 2022 photo by Renee Phillips

The Right-wing Washington Times quotes Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) saying on CNN’s “State of the Union”, that Congress is mulling whether to issue a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Donald Trump for “unlawfully” seeking to obstruct certification of the 2020 election.

Cheney said that the Jan. 6 House Select Committee has uncovered significant evidence that Trump and aides had acted improperly:

“It’s absolutely clear that what President Trump was dealing with, what the number of people around him were doing, that they knew it was unlawful [and] they did it anyway….I think what we have seen is a massive, well-organized and well-planned effort that used multiple tools to try to overturn an election.”

But talk is cheap. At a dinner last week, Wrongo was asked if he thought anything would come of the work by the committee. He wasn’t encouraging.

We can infer from Rep. Cheney’s comments that the House panel may have sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Trump (or some of his advisors) to the Department of Justice (DOJ). But recent reporting seems to indicate that some Committee members may not have the will to pull the trigger. From the NYT:

“The leaders of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack have grown divided over whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of former President Donald J. Trump, even though they have concluded that they have enough evidence to do so…”

The question seems to be whether the Committee’s work would somehow hurt the DOJ’s ongoing investigative work:

“The debate centers on whether making a referral — a largely symbolic act — would backfire by politically tainting the Justice Department’s expanding investigation into the Jan. 6 assault and what led up to it.”

Can anyone imagine Republicans having what they thought to be sufficient evidence of a crime acting conflicted about delivering a criminal referral to the DOJ? Say about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton, because it might saddle the DOJ’s criminal case with partisan baggage? That’s unimaginable.

For Democrats, this is another failure of political analysis. Even if there had been no Select Committee, and the DOJ decided to prosecute Trump or some of his enablers for Jan.6, the political firestorm would  be consequential, and unending.

Wrongo believes in following process and in patience, but soon, the politics of the mid-terms and the looming 2024 presidential election must also be considered. If the Republicans take control of the House, the Select Committee will be disbanded. In that event, it must wrap up its work right after the November elections.

If you’re hoping that the Democrats will hold the House, then a referral to the DOJ needs to happen right now, regardless of whether that fact has any impact on the deliberations inside the DOJ.

We already know what is the worst thing that can happen. It’s that Democrats lose both the House and Senate in November. Having the Select Committee stay silent now as an act of political expediency simply shows voters that Democrats do not have what it takes to lead in the 21st Century.

Voters need to see Democrats willing to fight for justice. No one gets excited about voting for the conflicted or the meek.

This is the third time that we’re trying to hold a thoroughly criminal man and his corrupt regime accountable for the harm they have inflicted on America. The DC Dems’ efforts are a combination of Lucy pulls the football out from under Charlie Brown meets “Groundhog Day”. We’ve seen this over and over and over again.

It is now time for Merrick Garland and the DOJ to prevent a seismic collapse of our civil society and our democracy.

It’s also time for Congressional Democrats to wake up! There is nothing to be gained by failing to deliver a tsunami of criminal referrals to the DOJ. To help them wake up, here’s the masterful slide guitar player Roy Rogers (not THAT Roy Rogers) doing his version of “Terraplane Blues”. “Terraplane Blues” was written and recorded in 1936 by legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Back then, the Terraplane was a brand of car built by the Hudson Motor Car Company between 1932 and 1938. They were inexpensive, yet powerful vehicles.

In the Terraplane Blues, Johnson uses the Terraplane Car as a metaphor for sex. His car won’t start, and Johnson suspects that his girlfriend let another man drive it when he was gone. Here’s Roy Rogers playing at the Sierra Nevada Brewery Big Room in 2001:

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MLK’s Assassination

The Daily Escape:

Vermontville, NY with Whiteface Mountain in the background – April 2022 photo by William Adamczak Photography

Just a short note today to say that we shouldn’t forget that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis 54 years ago yesterday. On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a site that’s now a museum dedicated to the civil rights champion’s life.

We should also remember that at the time, he was pursuing economic justice, building the Poor People’s Campaign and supporting the striking sanitation workers of Memphis, TN.

When you look at 1968 versus 2022, in a lot of ways we’ve become more like the country we were back in the 1960s. We’ve seen the near-gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. We also see efforts to end any teaching in schools of the truth about race in America, and about King’s legacy.

We’re being told by Republicans that a highly qualified Black woman isn’t Supreme Court material.

We spend more time celebrating Dr. King’s birth than acknowledging where he was politically when he was killed. Beyond economic justice, perhaps more than any other social-movement leader in American history, King proved capable of looking at different strands of political and social injustice, then tying them together to form a coherent narrative capable of leveraging dissent into concrete policy change.

That’s what we should remember: There’s less than three months between the observance of King’s birthday and his martyrdom. The way each is recognized by politicians reveals the contradictions in his legacy. Politicians of all ideological stripes extol the virtues of racial equality, while most ignore his criticisms of war and poverty.

King’s last book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” posed a question that resonates more today than it did at the time of its release in 1967: Where do we go from here?

Here’s an idea: Develop a narrative that unites people to win back the country from the MAGAs and their fellow travelers. Take that narrative to your neighbors. Work to get out the vote.

Our democracy is in an existential crisis, and only you (and your narrative) can save it.

That was the lesson of Dr. King’s life.

Let’s close with a musical statement that echoes MLK’s message. Watch and listen to “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize“, a folk song from the American civil rights movement. Although the song was composed as a hymn well before World War I, the lyrics in this version were written by civil rights activist Alice Wine in 1956. It is based on the traditional song, “Gospel Plow”, which is also known as “Hold On”, and “Keep Your Hand On The Plow”.

In this version from 2006, Bruce Springsteen starts on vocals, but when Marc Anthony Thompson (with hat) joins him, it becomes a great soul-stirring anthem:

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Dog Whistles in the Senate

The Daily Escape:

Poppy bloom, Lancaster, CA – March 22, 2022 photo by Matthew Mactaggart

There are many urgent issues that the Supreme Court is considering, but whether a children’s book should address racism isn’t one of them. At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the qualifications of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court, the curriculum at a private children’s day school in Georgetown was among the questions Republican Senators felt she needed to address.

This is more than simply a performative effort by a few Republicans to dog whistle to their supporters. It’s part of a decades-long effort by conservatives to control public education.

Bob Oakes of Boston’s WBUR had a report about how local Massachusetts school boards, like school boards across the country, have been facing angry questions about everything from Covid restrictions to the way schools teach about racism:

“WBUR found dozens of districts have faced criticism over how teachers discuss race and diversity in the classroom, as well as sex education.”

Oakes reported on the school committee at Dudley-Charlton, two small towns that share a school district and a high school. For years, local school committee meetings had focused on routine items such as staffing and trips by the marching band. More from WBUR:

“….that all changed last July when dozens of parents and residents packed a committee meeting to protest the school’s efforts to combat racism, including the hiring of a new diversity consultant.”

That led some residents to push unsuccessfully a recall of five school committee members over issues including Covid mask requirements and the hiring of the diversity consultant.

Jill Lepore has an article in the New Yorker about the history of efforts to control public education stretching back to the 1880s. She notes that for more than a century, from the teaching of evolution to anti-racism, parents have clashed over who gets to tell our origin story. She points out that community control began in the 1880s with the move to mandatory public education:

“Some families objected, citing “parental rights,” a legal novelty, but courts broadly upheld compulsory-education laws, deeming free public schooling to be essential to democratic citizenship.“

By 1916, nearly every state had mandated school attendance.

We have generally accepted that local and state school boards set curricula with the intention of having our students absorb a consensus-approved range of subjects which collectively tell a story about how we want our children to develop into adults.

This means teaching math and science, history and civics, the novels of Steinbeck and Toni Morrison in English class, along with the foundational myths we feel are important to the American story. All of this – the curriculum and the teaching – cohere to mold young citizens.

As Lepore notes, some Americans keep their children out of public schools because they don’t believe in a community of interests. That isn’t what they say of course. They put their children in charter and private schools, because they prefer their “quality.” What they won’t admit is how their search for a “quality” education also implies a question: What kind of information and what kind of child will their private school keep away from their children?

From Lepore:

“A few parents around the country may not like their children learning that they belong to a much bigger family—whether it’s a human family or an American family—but the idea of public education is dedicated to the cultivation of that bigger sense of covenant, toleration, and obligation. In the end, no matter what advocates of parents’ rights say, and however much political power they might gain, public schools don’t have a choice; they’ve got to teach, as American history, the history not only of the enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 and the English families who sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, but also….everyone. That’s why parents don’t have a right to choose the version of American history they like best, a story of only their own family’s origins. Instead, the state has an obligation to welcome children into that entire history, their entire inheritance.”

Parents trying to bully school boards into changing the curricula to suit their worldview is inherently wrong. The argument that “parents have the right to control what is taught in public schools because they’re our kids” is un-American. The Supreme Court found that to be true in 1943 in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when the Court struck down a statute that required schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, saying it was a violation of the First Amendment.

The purpose of public school is to teach kids what society needs them to know. It’s the parents’ job to teach them what they WANT them to know.

Listen up Republicans: the “customer” of the public school system is the entire community, not individual parents or specific political parties. Those parents aren’t harmed, and they haven’t lost any “freedom” when curricula are set by school boards.

They still have the right to send little Jason and Janey to the private school of their choice at their own expense.

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Monday Wake Up Call – Remembering MLK, Jr.

The Daily Escape:

After an ice storm, Taos NM – January 2022 photo by Bob Benson

“Freedom without consequences is a myth. Our actions always have consequences. The question is: who will bear them?” – Seth Godin

The year 1968 was pivotal. In addition to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it brought the Tet Offensive, student protests across the country, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the student and police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, Black Power salutes at the Olympics, and the triumph of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy.

MLK, along with others in our churches and a few courageous politicians, came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK gave a voice to that Big Idea. His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was completely unthinkable in 1954 when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court.

Wrongo participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. He left active participation in the movement believing good ideas and a morally sound position would change our politics. He was wrong.

Legislation has recently passed in eight states that will restrict what students can be taught about our past. This is an effort to segregate certain subjects from our common history. These Republican states want to diminish or exclude the stories that speak to slavery, to Jim Crow, and to other moments in which America’s deepest shortcomings around the subject of race in America are told.

Wrongo wishes that this represented a minority of the Republican Party. But when Biden spoke in Atlanta, he said:

“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Dr. King had said that stripping the right to vote from Black southerners laid the groundwork for laws that further disadvantaged poor people, even across racial lines. Then as now, Southern legislatures justified limiting the franchise to vote with specious claims about electoral shenanigans.

Biden’s words set Republican teeth on edge. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Biden:

“…called millions of Americans his domestic enemies…and that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace….If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well you’re Jefferson Davis.”

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer tweeted:

“Now he says disagreeing w/him on voting laws means you’re a segregationist, like George Wallace or Bull Connor. How low can he go?”

The linkage between trying not to teach America’s true history with the censorious outrage shown by Republicans over Biden’s comments is clear. Biden said America needed to be on the side of voting rights.

That was Dr. King’s great struggle, and his great success.

But Republicans want to whitewash that history. They also condemn Biden’s efforts to tie today back to our undemocratic past. As Jelani Cobb says this week in the New Yorker:

“This holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., sees a nation embroiled in conflicts that would have looked numbingly familiar to him. As school curricula and online discourse threaten to narrow our understanding of both past and future, it’s more important than ever to take stock of our history and its consequences….

Time to wake up America! We are docile sheep heading back to the barn, the place where we will be shorn of our democracy, just as surely as wool is shorn from the sheep. The smoking guns are all around us, and yet, we seem hopelessly divided about what we should do to change course.

To help you wake up, let’s listen to Wrongo’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their 1986 album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we remember as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech in “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why focus on that part of the speech? One day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, or how whatever remains of their civil rights, came to be.

Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, take the time to teach a child about why MLK is so important.

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