Immigrants and Ancestors: All Too Familiar Stories

 

Last week the western church marked the commemoration of All Souls Day, the day on the Christian calendar on which the departed are remembered. Those who have died in the past year are named aloud in catholic tradition services and many parishioners will bring photos of their deceased loved ones to place on the altar. It is a good day for thinking about those who have come before us, those whose lives made our own possible, those whose lives have touched our own and helped us to become who we are.

Keeper of the Family Archives 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I spent much of the past week sifting through a seemingly endless number of boxes of photos and papers from my family estate. As executor of my Dad’s estate, I became the de facto keeper of the family archives and have been making a valiant attempt ever since the closing on our homestead over in Bushnell last May to put those things into some kind of order. 

Toward the end of my Dad’s life, he became an avid genealogist. Fortunately, he provided me a series of family tree diagrams that places names of family ancestors into context of where they lived and when. Unfortunately, he died before I could ask him who all the people were in the stacks of old photos he had inherited from a beloved aunt in Kansas City. Their black and white, mostly solemn faces stare back at me from a century ago and I wonder if I will ever be able to identify who they were and where they fit into that family history. 

A Caravan like the one on which my immigrant ancestors arrived 

One of the most interesting aspects my Dad had uncovered was the origins of the Coverston family in America. The family came from the region of Germany near today’s Baden-Baden. Their surname there was Kupferstein, a name which took on several spellings as it was Anglicized in the Americas. Coverston is but one of those possibilities. 

The patriarchs of the family were two brothers named Jacob and Heinrich. They came into the port at Philadelphia around the end of the Seven Years War, sometimes called the French and Indian War in the American colonies, in 1763. The first American documents placing the Kupferstein brothers in the New World, now calling themselves Copperstone and later Coverstone, come from the period just prior to the American Revolution. 

Like many of the immigrants from southern Germany, these brothers were religious refugees as much as opportunity seekers. Their region of Europe had been embroiled in religious wars for the past two centuries. Much blood had been spilled since the Reformation arose there 200 years previously with Martin Luther at its helm. There’s nothing quite like the conviction that one’s tribe has gained the singular, exclusive favor of the deity to produce a self-righteous slaughter of those outside the tribe.

Described by scholars of religion as the Radical Reformers, Anabaptist groups from the Mennonites to the Brethren tradition, which my ancestors claimed, saw no need for hierarchy, apostolic succession or sacraments. They practiced a “believers’ baptism” which only permitted adults capable of stating that they bought into the tenets of the faith to be baptized. For those who had been baptized as infants in Catholic traditions, they would need to be baptized again. Hence, ana- (second) baptists.

Anabaptists found much support among the peasant class which had often been exploited and persecuted by the Catholic hierarchies in marriages of convenience with local princes. The Anabaptists were vigorously persecuted when peasants revolted against the lingering vestiges of the medieval society with the full blessing of both Martin Luther (see Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, 1525) and the Roman Catholic apologists. 

Most were opposed to war and prohibited their members from fighting in the military. Some went so far as to refuse to pay taxes which supported wars. Little wonder they became lightning rods in the turbulent maelstrom of Reformation era Europe. As in England where it was a given that Protestants hated Catholics and, within Protestantism, the Puritans and Anglicans hated each other - everyone hated the Anabaptists. 

A Port in a Storm - But Don’t Stay Here

My ancestors' entry point into the American colonies at Philadelphia is not difficult to understand in light of this history. The City of Brotherly Love had been founded by William Penn, himself an Anabaptist of the Quaker tradition. The colony at Penn’s Woods quickly made entry into the New World available to those fleeing religious persecution. 

But that is hardly to say that the elite of Philadelphia particularly wanted the new arrivals to stick around. As historian David Hackett Fisher details in his masterful Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America, Philadelphia’s fathers found ways to quickly move these immigrants westward, out of the city to an area that came to be known as Pennsylvania Dutch country. Deutsch is the word for German and my ancestors show up in public records there shortly after their arrival in 1768.

They would soon be joined by other family ancestors named Reed, Wright and MacAtee from Ireland, Scotland and the borderlands in England. Many of them were adherents of the dour Calvinism of their homelands that became the foundation of an evangelical Protestantism that would come to dominate the belly of America today called the Bible Belt. In an England which had just reinstated its monarchy with its state Anglican church there would be little tolerance for former devotees to a now defeated and disgraced Puritan Oliver Cromwell. 

The Scots-Irish and Borderlands immigrants, seen as contentious, even dangerous, would even more quickly be shuffled out of Philadelphia to the west. Their people would quickly spread down the chain of Appalachian Mountains to the south and west. Retaining some of the Scottish brogue and phrases that they brought with them, the echoes of their history of strife and survival can still be seen and heard in the Hillbilly culture today. 

My own history as the descendant of refugees and immigrants swam into focus as I worked through my Father’s research. And that awareness shapes the way I hear the incredibly dehumanizing rhetoric surrounding immigration today. 

I have not yet found the legendary horse thieves that every family tree supposedly contains. That’s hardly surprising. Ancestral families would be no more anxious to remember their black sheep then than today. But I hardly labor under the misapprehension that there weren’t any. 

What is clear from this research is that my ancestors knew what it meant to live in war-torn countries where political and religious ideologies were seen as more important than the human beings who held them. They knew what it meant to feel they had no choice but to uproot themselves and leave their homes simply to survive. And they knew what it meant to come to a country where the people they encountered would view them with suspicion and judgment, demonize them, even use the power of the law to punish them, simply because of who they were. And yet they came.

Some things never change. 

The High Price of Calling Out Structural Sin 

During the last weeks of the most recent version of obscenity that now passes for US elections, Donald Trump engaged in an ongoing vilification of a group of potential immigrants from Central America headed north toward the American border. He clearly designed this behavior to create a moral panic among his "base." 

The people in question had come places where their lives have been made untenable by violence. Called an “invasion” by a demagogue who unwittingly is projecting his own celebrated greed and willingness to use violence to satisfy it onto them, their flight from their homelands, leaving behind family and everything they have ever known, could hardly be seen as motivated by greed. It was ultimately a mark of desperation. 

But it has not arisen in a vacuum.  

The countries of Central America were the targets of US destabilization and terrorist activity for the last couple of decades of the 20^th CE. Driven largely by corporate interests, particularly those of agribusinesses like the Dole Fruit Company, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador were subjected to the might of the world’s largest fighting machine and its undercover “security” agencies. Honduras was essentially occupied to serve as the staging grounds for these ongoing undeclared wars. 

But these wars were driven as much by elements of ideological and religious conflict as the economic interests they legitimated. Campesino unions sought the right to grow and sell their own produce through cooperatives representing a challenge to agribusiness corporate privilege. The peasant families those cooperatives represented sought to insure their children would have a basic education and that their sick could receive basic medical care. These goals were in turn validated by the rise of liberation theology in the region. 

Catholic priests, utilizing a Marxist critique of exploitative economic and power structures, were busy preaching a gospel of liberation. Based in the teachings of Jesus, primarily found in the beatitudes, any structural forces which deprived any child of G-d of the dignity of lives without hunger, fear and oppression were rightly seen as sinful. 

Many of these clerics would ultimately find themselves forced to choose between the institutional church which had educated them and helped them to come to their understandings - only to turn on them in the face of pressure from elites in danger of losing their privilege - and their devotion to the people they served. Some, like recently canonized Oscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador, and the Maryknoll nuns who provided medical care to the campesinos, would eventually pay for their ongoing response to that calling with their lives. 

It’s important to recognize that the US supported the oppressive regimes in all of these countries whose elite served as suzerains to global corporate interests. Under the legitimating rubric of opposing a communism that was even then dying on the vine in Russia, enormous shipments of arms were imported into the region, arms left behind at the end of the 1990s as campesino organizations morphed into political parties that would eventually win the day at the polls. 

“This Could Happen to You…” 

But the more pernicious aspect of this two-decade involvement was the training of Central American military men in the techniques of terrorism. The School of the Americas, a taxpayer funded institute in Panama, routinely taught Central American soldiers how to “pacify” resistance through techniques such as tying tires around the victim and setting them on fire, a practice cynically known as “necklacing.” 

In El Salvador, those who would dare challenge the client regime of global corporate interests and the governments who had sold their souls to them often disappeared into the night. Many were never accounted for. Sometimes their bodies showed up in city dumps or on the highway to the airport in San Salvador, their tongues cut out, a clear warning to anyone who would support the rebels: This could happen to you!

 

This pattern was repeated in country after country from the border of Mexico’s Chiapas province to a supposedly neutral Costa Rica whose air strips would be used by US undercover operatives to illegally import weapons to the Contras and export cocaine to the US to pay for them.  

By the late 1990s, the fighting had subsided in virtually all of these troubled regions. But even with the departure of active US involvement in Central America (including the relocation of the School of the Americas - widely called the School of the Assassins in Latin America - to Columbus, Georgia) the region continues to be subject to the oppressive, exploitative and terroristic legacy that intervention left behind. 

With the dissolution of central governance, armed gangs filled the vacuum. But these are not just any gangs. These are gangs that have a wealth of armory left behind by American undercover agents and a wealth of terrorist techniques those agents taught them. It is an ongoing recipe for disaster. Little wonder a stream of asylum-seeking refugees streams out of the wounded heartland of Central America.

A Lot More in Common Than We Think 

I realize that my perspective about this subject that may differ from those of many of my countrymen and women. On the one hand, unlike many of them, I am now aware of my own immigrant ancestors and the conditions under which they fled their homelands to a New World. I know they encountered prejudice and rejection among those they first encountered only to create new, productive lives in places far removed from their ports of entry. In many ways, they represent the true American Dream – success in the face of adversity - a pattern we readily see in the lives of most immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. 

I also realize that the time I have spent in Latin America sets me apart from many of my countrywomen and men. Sadly, I know first-hand why the current waves of asylum seekers are coming. Were I in their shoes, I would likely do exactly the same. Indeed, I believe that if many of us actually knew our own family stories, we might find we have a lot more in common with these new arrivals than we think.

It hardly surprises me that the five-star alarm our media provided the Mr. Trump during the election regarding this alleged “invasion” essentially vanished from our screens as the last ballot was cast last Tuesday. The reality is that human beings have been fleeing the black hole of death and destruction into which Central America devolved at the end of the Contra era since the end of the 20^th CE. That they are no longer the menacing threat they were caricaturized as being before November 6 is hardly surprising.

But that does not mean there is no threat. 

Even as far too many white American voters bought into a cheap moral panic that a demagogue inhabiting the White House provided them, stoking their darkest prejudices, people who looked more like them than the “invaders” they feared have in fact gone on a rampage.  They have targeted people of color at a supermarket in Ohio, violated a temple in Philadelphia during Shabbat, blasted a public school in North Carolina and wasted patrons of a restaurant in California. 

These are indeed enemies of our country. But they are not invaders coming from the outside. Indeed, we are busy nursing them into deadly potency every day in our own country, arming them through irresponsible fundamentalist readings of our Second Amendment and then activating them with moral panics resounding within our echo chambers. 

Almost without exception, our “enemies” look like us. The come from our homes, our schools, our boy scout troops, our military. We don’t have to look outside our borders to find the real threats to our security. They are here already, waiting for an opportunity to make their deadly intentions known. 

The only thing that disturbs me more than the vacuity of Trump’s projection of American pathology onto nameless, faceless hordes of “aliens” is the willingness of people of supposed average intelligence and basic educations to buy into this deadly stupidity. So many found themselves mortally offended when Hillary Clinton engaged in an incredibly stupid form of reductionism which summed them up as “deplorables.” But the fact they should not be summed up by their worst understandings does not mean that these understandings they hold in the face of easily discoverable facts to the contrary and the behaviors that cause grievous wounds to the body politic which flow from this mindlessness, are not, in fact, “deplorable.” 

The truth often hurts - which is precisely why we tend to project it onto others.

I often conclude my Facebook posts with the admonition, “We can do better.” I honestly believe that with every fiber of my being. But, the ongoing willingness of voters to buy into the destructive fabrications that mark the very essence of Trumpland makes me wonder what it will take to prompt us to do so. 

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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Eulogy for a Once Noble Institution

This week an essay by Garrett Epps, professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, appeared in Atlantic Magazine. In it Epps lays out a very compelling argument that the politicization of the federal court system has reached its apotheosis in the confirmation of a Federalist Society ideologue with a history as a mean drunk and possibly of sexual abuse. I highly commend the essay to you as it provides a contextual history of the Kavanaugh debacle without which it is largely incomprehensible.

Epps’ recitation of the history of a once noble institution eroded away by partisan politics is thorough and convincing. But it is his sense of personal loss in the death of a childhood dream that spoke to me.

I, too, mourn the death of an institution I once believed was the redeeming feature of American federal government and pledged my life to serve. Here I offer my eulogy for that now vanished dream.

A SCOTUS Which Struck Blows for Justice

Like the author, I grew up in a segregated South increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge that its days of unchallenged white dominance were numbered. My school was desegregated – at court order – at the end of my elementary school years. Long running “traditions” and legal structures that served to suck the very life blood out of people whose skins were darker than my own in service of an unearned white privilege were being challenged.

The world was changing. And the Supreme Court was one of the engines driving those changes. America was being brought along into the 20th Century, sometimes kicking and screaming, as the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboard on I-75 near my home would evidence.

I watched as the Supreme Court ruled that children could not be forced to pray in public schools. It was a great relief for children like me who, though Christian, recognized innately the injustice of forcing religious behaviors on those who may not share those beliefs. 

I watched as the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not use coercive powers under the rubric of in loco parentis to stifle their students’ opposition to the Vietnam War, a war that loomed like a hungry mouth ready to consume a whole generation of young male Americans like myself. “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” the Court said in Tinker v. Des Moines Schools.

Tinkering with the Machinery of Death

Even the ultimate power of the state – the power to legally kill people - was being challenged in those days. In Furman v. Georgia, the SCOTUS recognized the inherent racist bias in the largely Southern states’ laws which made rape a capital crime. Some black men had actually been convicted of “rape by leering” at white women. Initially striking down all state killing laws, SCOTUS would quickly backtrack a few years later in approving a murder-only state killing plan which the Florida legislature would go into special session days after the court’s opinion to be the first to enact.

Two decades later, Justice Harry Blackmun would renounce his vote on the Gregg v. Georgia case which once again authorized states to kill their resident offenders saying:

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. [Dissent from the denial of certiori, Callins v. James, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994)]

What I observed in this process was something admirable, something beyond the rough and tumble of politics and its increasingly shrill tribalism that has now consumed our nation. What I observed was the only institution on the horizon that could even consider the possibilities of doing the right thing rather than the expedient. What I observed was an institution that had the potential to be an agent of justice. And by the time I had reached undergraduate, I had determined to pledge my life serving that institution.

Poisoned by a Toxic Presumption

Clearly I have always been an idealist. My MBTI profile shows a heavily iNtuitive and Perceiving personality type. My concerns have always been about the big picture, about context, focused on a vision for the future rather than an obsession with the past or the details of the present. For me justice is not just an ideal, it is an imperative to be sought at all times, particularly by those in positions to challenge the arbitrary use of power.

Somehow I managed to miss Plato and his Republic until 1991 when I had fled the practice of law to attend seminary. While Plato’s notion of philosopher-kings governing the republic based upon reason struck me as somewhat unlikely if not elitist, I saw an analogy in an impartial court system.

It was an ideal that I felt needed to be protected and fostered. While reason alone does not guarantee justice, it does provide the tools to critically assess the interests brought to bear in any given case including those of the enactors of the law itself. What seemed clear to me was that justice was a lot more likely when philosopher-judges presided over the highest courts in our lands than when partisan ideologues donned black robes.

Even so, it is important to note that I never romanticized the legal system. Indeed, I have long been acutely aware of the destructive power of courts. And there is a reason for that.

The default philosophical preference in American jurisprudence is legal positivism, an approach heavily focused on the letter of the law and the legality of its enactment while avoiding consideration of the impact of the decision-making. When legality – and not results -  is the exclusive concern of a court and all concerns for justice are bracketed in the process, judicial decision making becomes largely a question of power. The ultimate winners are always those with the power to make the laws in the first place.

That’s how you get away with murder in places like Sanford, Florida.

There jury instructions required the jury to completely ignore the context in which George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, stalking him with a gun in the dark for several minutes before shooting him when he fought back, behaviors that in any other situation would have been seen as evidence of criminal intent. The judge required the jury to follow the “Stand Your Ground Law” written by the American Legislative Exchange Council whose money insured its passage in Florida and many other states. The uncritical application of this law allowed a murderer of a young black man to go free simply because the letter of a law - legally enacted by a legislature dominated by corporate money - said so.

There, as in many other cases, the ultimate question was power, not justice.

And this is hardly the only case.

During my sophomore year in college at Lake-Sumter Community College I watched in horror as Willis McCall, sheriff of Lake County, ran for reelection even as he was on trial for murder. McCall was accused of kicking a black inmate to death in his jail cell in Tavares but an all-white jury in neighboring Marion County would refuse to convict him of the same.  Bear in mind, they were legally chosen from a voir dire that excluded most blacks because they were not voters, this in a state with a history of Jim Crow voter repression. Like the Zimmerman trial, McCall’s acquittal was clearly legal but hardly just. 

Finally, bear in mind that had the Allied Forces who convened the Nuremberg Court at the conclusion of World War II operated out of the American default presumption of legal positivism, none of the judges, doctors or governmental officials convicted there could have been found guilty. Positivism precludes considerations of justice – results and impacts – focusing instead on the legality of the behaviors in question. In fact, not only were the acts carried out in the Third Reich’s Final Solution legal, the agents who were later convicted of “crimes against humanity” - which then did not exist anywhere on the books - were actually following the law.

Ultimately the Court there chose to punish law followers, not law breakers, in the name of justice. Sometimes the concern for justice does prevail.

 “I’m Here to Help Change the World…”

Despite the failings of the legal system, by the time I reached undergraduate, I was clear that I was called to be a lawyer. In my naïve, if not somewhat presumptuous, manner, I took seriously the banner that greeted me my first day of college: “Hello. I’m here to help change the world.” And, at least at that point, I felt what better way to be a part of that change than working as a lawyer for justice.

My calling was reinforced by the political science and history courses I took. It was there I learned the history of caselaw that had moved America closer to a truly democratic state.

It was also reinforced by a SCOTUS willing to require a corrupt president to turn over his tapes containing evidence of his criminal behaviors surrounding the Watergate scandal. Shortly thereafter, Richard Nixon resigned, this occurring my junior year at UF.

In 1979, after three years of teaching special education kids, I knew my time in public schools was over. I felt the courts were the place I could do the most good for people like them. a place where I could be a part of something larger than myself, a project whose arc ultimately bent in the direction of justice.

That dream was not easily realized. I did not do as well on the LSAT the first time when I had to leave in the middle of the exam because of diarrhea and was not savvy enough to cancel my score. (Perhaps I should have listened to my body at that point!) On my second attempt I scored high enough to get me into all the law schools I applied to. But my scores were averaged and so I had to apply twice before being accepted into my first choice law school at the University of Florida. I persisted and on the second round my efforts were rewarded. My dream had been realized. 

It was during my junior year in law school that I first knew the dream was in trouble. That was the year the world shifted. The night Ronald Reagan was elected, I told anyone who would listen, “You don’t understand. Everything has changed as of tonight.”

And it had.

I had no idea then of the Powell Memorandum whose cabal of corporate elites pledged themselves to a complete takeover of American society and then set about funding the organizations and foot soldiers to carry out their slow-motion coup d’états. I had only vaguely heard of a Federalist Society who would groom a cohort of ideologues to place on the federal and state judiciaries. I had no way of knowing how effectively they would validate the evisceration of democratic process in America and insure the domination of their oligarch suzerains within a mere four decades of the launching of this agenda.

What I did know intuitively was that the agenda that an avuncular former actor and his band of ideologues articulated represented a clear and present danger to an independent judiciary. And now, 38 years later, that agenda has reached its apotheosis.

Long before then my own career in law would be one of its casualties. After five years struggling to defend juveniles in the courts in Central Florida, it was clear to me that the decks were completely stacked against them and their defenders. The notion of rehabilitation was clearly a second thought in a system arresting kids in schools in front of their teachers and classmates and railroading them into an adult criminal system increasingly privatized for profit.

One day I decided that I was part of the problem. I was making a decent living as an attorney. But the level of frustration I dealt with daily was making my life miserable. I fought like hell for kids in a system that was largely unresponsive on a good day, decidedly punitive on most. If I was going to be an agent for change, it would have to come from outside the system.

And so I left to attend seminary and later graduate school. There I found the analytical and expressive skills I had developed as an attorney came in very handy. More importantly, the insights I developed in the belly of the juvenile system beast and the stories of the human beings it devoured have repeatedly proven essential to my teaching, preaching and writing.

For me, the fight for justice continues, even as the venue has changed.

That said, I have nothing but admiration for those who remain in the practice. Truth be told, they are better human beings than me. And they serve desperate human beings who rely on their patience, their hard work and their skills to represent them in a system stacked against them.

G-dspeed to them all.

Stark Contrasts

Perhaps the saddest aspects of the Kavanaugh debacle was observing how the decline of this once noble institution is so readily reflected in the mediocrity of its appointees. Certainly there are still flashes of brilliance among the justices, most notably its female members. But the decline of quality justices which hopefully has reached its nadir in Kavanaugh had been apparent since at least the last debacle involving sexual abuse, the confirmation of Clarence Thomas in 1991.

There have been times in history when Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-judge court was close to reality. Names like Holmes, Brandeis and Marshall remind us of the potential for that court to draw brilliant jurists to its service. And they remind us of the court’s potential to be an impartial body devoted to the interests of the entire nation, not just the tribe currently in power. 

Ironically, they also remind us of how far removed our current SCOTUS is from this potential. That is particularly sad given the ability of the Courts alone to retain the trust of the American people as reported by consistent polling data even as the other two branches of the government have long since lost their capacity to do so.

These figures from our history provide a stark contrast to the mediocrity of character and fitness of the ideologue dominated SCOTUS we now must endure for at least a generation. It is a nightmare for all of us who once dreamed of working for justice in a court system in which that seemed a distinct possibility.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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A Fitting End to a Slow-Motion Coup d’états

I have avoided the media coverage of the ongoing debacle that is the Kavanaugh confirmation process this week. I am not one of those who are drawn to train wrecks, unable to avert my eyes as its horror unfolds. But the implications of the actions in Washington go well beyond my personal anguish and the only ways I have ever known to work out my grief are to garden and to write.

A Coronation, Not an Investigation

What has become clear this week is that any hopes still held out for an independent, impartial judiciary at a time when a divided nation most desperately needs it are going to be dashed. The supposed investigation ordered last week in the wake of the Ford testimony before the Senate judiciary committee has proven to be a sham. Dr. Ford was not interviewed nor was the third alleged victim of sexual impropriety along with the bulk of the witnesses offered as corroboration.

This was not an investigation. It was a coronation at the end of a foregone conclusion. It was a means for cowardly senators to rationalize conduct for which they know better. It was a means to rationalize advancing party interests over those of the country, bearing in mind that a perceived need to rationalize one’s thoughts, words and behaviors carries with it an implicit recognition that the same are not reasonable.

All of this occurs in the face of an unprecedented firestorm of opposition from the legal community itself, The ABA withdrew its earlier endorsement demanding a full investigation and a letter signed by 2400 law professors (including at least seven of Kavanaugh’s own Yale Law School) urged his rejection. It was also the rare occasion when a former SCOTUS justice weighs in on a confirmation process, also urging the Senate not confirm the nominee.

All of this ignored.

Sadly, in the process, the last remaining branch of the national government that our citizens report actually trusting has now gone the way of a Congress dominated by ideologues and a White House in which resides a classic demagogue. Less than a majority of those polled report being able to trust either one.

It is also the final conclusion to a long running subversion of what was at one time a nation promising to live into its own highest ideals. Robert Reich describes this entire process as a slow motion coup d’états. The drive to dominate every branch and every level of government was the ultimate goal of the Powell Memorandum of the mid 1970s and the resulting Reagan Devolution beginning in 1980. After nearly four decades, the coup d’etat is now bearing fruit.

The window for reversing this domination is fleeting. If this November’s election does not at least put a roadblock in this juggernaut's path, there will be little more to talk about thereafter.

A Sense of Urgency

At a very fundamental level, the gutting of the Constitution and the corruption of its prescribed processes that we have seen up close the past two weeks are the product of a will to power that has come to take on a sense of urgency. That urgency is driven by three factors.

The most immediate is the demographics change. In a truly democratic republic, a population that is no longer WASP dominant (as is already the case in several states and by 2040 nationally) can elect people who look like the electorate and reflect their interests. Not only is the power to dominate lost in that shift but the loss of the expectable entitlement of those who have historically dominated without challenge creates a sense of urgency.

The median range factor is the ongoing decline of American empire both economically and militarily. Increasingly the US ' ability to control and exploit the natural resources of the planet at will is in question. The cost for a global military to insure corporate plundering has become prohibitive and is likely to become more so. 

The insanity of fighting two losing and interminable foreign wars halfway round the globe has depleted both our national morale and our finances. Hence you will see increasing plundering of the public realm (social security, EPA, national parks, spending on public education and health, et al) to both pay for the cost of what is increasingly a mercenary fighting force (think Blackwater) and to enrich the oligarchs fleeing the sinking ship.

The long-range factor is the coming ravages of climate change. The potential ill effects of this factor, which will begin to be felt with a vengeance by mid-century if not before, include disruption of food supplies and resulting waves of climate refugees (already a major factor in the Syrian/Iraq conflicts); the displacement of nearly 2 of 3 of the world's inhabitants from coastal urban centers affected by sea level rise; the badlands created by chemical and nuclear sites abandoned to rising seas; the extinctions of larger and larger swaths of the planetary flora and fauna and the migration of those that survive to cooler climes bringing with them diseases and pests not previously known.

While I don't give the WASP oligarchs much credit for insight, I do think they at least intuitively recognize that the world which brought them to dominance is threatened. Hence the desperate measures we see.

In the Spokes of a Turning Wheel

That said, their vision is incredibly myopic. Such is hardly surprising. A sense of entitlement tends to orient one to self-interest and to the immediate, to what can be taken without much concern for what impact those behaviors have on others. There is little sense of big picture notions like legitimacy of institutions or integrity of its actors in such views. But the fact the context is ignored does not simply make it go away.

John Kennedy brilliantly observed over 50 years ago that those who do make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolutions inevitable. The changes that our nation and our world are being called to make will come. The only questions is how that process will occur and what the result will be on the other end of it.

Resisting the turning of the wheel only tends to result in being pounded by its spokes. Brett Kavanaugh warned us during his testimony that we would “reap the whirlwind” of this conflict. Of all the things the man said, I would point to that observation as not only unquestionably true but potentially prescient.

And Yet I Continue to Hope

Finally, I know this sounds bleak and I do not offer it to depress people. Despite appearances here, I am not a doom and gloom prophet, it's simply the big picture that I currently see.

I do continue to hold out hope for a New America rising from the ashes of Trumpland. And I do continue to hold out hope for a planet whose peoples come to consciousness, recognize the existential threat they face and work together to meet those challenges. But much will need to change from where I sit this day before either of those things can happen.

There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm. - John Heyl Vincent

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.comhcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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