“An American Creed”

“An American Creed”                      July 1, 2018             Dr. Roger Ray

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From Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

         I received a phone call last week from one of our listeners in Chicago. Tom introduced himself saying that he was a progressive before they were called progressives and he sent me a copy of a book he wrote 40 years ago to prove his point. And, in fact, 30 years ago, we progressive religious types were more often called “liberals” and before that we were called “academics.” I have no doubt that in a few years we will be called something else. I may more generally prefer the way that the Buddha is said to have described himself, he said that he was not a God, or a demi-god, nor even a prophet. He said simply that he was awake. 

Tom was understandably proud of having seen through the fog of religious supernatural teachings without the benefit of having gone to college or having had a mentor to help him. 

That is not a small thing to be able to say about yourself but I have made it almost a hobby to find examples this kind of awakening in literature and among the people that I meet. A last week we read a 2000 year old passage from Marcus Aurelius that revealed a very mature progressive insight and we often use quotes from Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, or Thomas Jefferson that reveal that a lot of people who did not spend years in seminary or a graduate school of religion were able to literally wake up from the illusions and magical thinking that have left so much of history in a fog.

For our Independence weekend, I had selected this passage from Walt Whitman’s most famous book of poems, “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman first published this collection when the United States was not yet even 75 years old, but it reflected the imagination and progressive view of religious and political liberty, and a deep respect for the rights and value of every person. I took this passage as almost a creedal statement for what it might mean to be a patriotic American:

       "Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

This is the America they told us about in school, isn’t it? The America that was a beacon of liberty, in which there was to be no aristocrat and peasant, and where there was to be no religious coercion, and where every person’s rights would be equally respected. 

I often run into people who act like our progressive views on faith and civics is some kind of brand new, far left, and uninformed concoction but see, this is Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, this is Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony. What we are trying to articulate, what we demonstrate and protest for, what we stand for, is not a new vision but it is one that is at risk. 

For people who are awake, this has been a bad week in the news. Even before Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, the Supreme Court handed down rulings that further the cause of the wealthy elite who want to break the back of labor unions to drive the wages of working Americans even lower than they already are. . . literally a political favor for the Koch brothers. And they voted to affirm the blatantly religious discrimination in Trump’s “Muslim ban,” a decision that anyone with a single freshman class in civics would know was unconstitutional but the constitution doesn’t say what it says, it says what the majority of Supreme Court Justices say it says and, right now, they are interpreting it so far to the right that it would seem to undermine the Revolutionary War and reinstitute a monarchy with its classes of lords and commoners in America. 

This week we had another mass shooting, this time at a newspaper office in Maryland. This is an example of what you have heard me say several times. . . the charged rhetoric from the right, when Trump calls journalists “the enemy of the people,” and the “lying media,” and when he points them out at his rallies and encourages people to boo and shout insults at the press, calling them “disgusting” people . . . it is not that Trump will have journalists shot, it is that their rhetoric encourages their unhinged followers to do it. 

When the President of the United States repeatedly and publicly derides the media, while praising the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jun-Un, and Xi Jinping, then there will inevitably be some gun nut who takes him seriously, someone who will kill journalists. 

I have lately been reading Tailspin, a book by Yale Journalism professor, Steven Brill, about the 50 year downward spiral America has been in, abandoning the noble vision of this country articulated by Jefferson, Washington, Emerson, Whitman, Paine, and Thoreau, that has been threatened by people and politicians who want to make themselves great rather than to make America Great. 

I’m a news junky and it is tempting to focus so microscopically on the current moment that we lose sight of the big picture in which the growing influence of money in politics and the massive transfer of our nation’s wealth into the hands of the few, is a process that has been going on for a very long time. 

I don’t understand how some movies are released on Direct TV or Netflix before they are released in theaters, even when they boast a cast of big dollar talent, but the 2017 movie, Shock and Awe, is worth figuring out how to see it. It documents the journalistic work of Knight Ridder in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Knight Ridder is generally recognized as being the only news agency to accurately call out the Bush administration’s false narrative that created their case for going to war. Sadly, Knight Ridder is a news agency, not a newspaper, so their associated newspapers elected not to run most of what their excellent and courageous reporters wrote. 

I know the feeling. During 2003, I spent most of my time and energy trying to wake people up to the evident fact that the Bush administration was lying to us, and my efforts didn’t amount to much except alienating a lot of formerly supportive church members. But the New York Times eventually apologized to their readers for just printing the lies of the Bush administration rather than the honest stories written by Knight Ridder. I’m still waiting for an apology from National Ave. Christian Church but, as Confucius said, “He who waits for roast duck to fly into his mouth, waits a long time.” 

But in case anyone has forgotten, let me retrace some of these 15 year old steps. The Bush administration used the Al Qaeda attacks on the US on 9-11 to manufacture a case for invading Iraq. It was a completely spurious claim, cooked up for President George W. Bush by Vice President Dick Cheney, 

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and advisor to the President, Condoleezza Rice,

and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and sold to the UN by then Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell. 

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this. . . I don’t want you to hear me as being partisan, or divisive but here are the facts, facts that I knew in 2003 and facts that virtually everyone has acknowledged for the past decade: These six people dismissed reliable intelligence and knowingly inflated what they knew to be entirely false intelligence in order to start a war with a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11 and which had not and could not attack the United States.

They lied to the American people to start a war where we still have troops engaged on the ground, 15 years later. A war that has already cost us $2 trillion dollars and in which more than 36,000 American troops have been killed or seriously injured, and, if you can stand to think about it, more than a million citizens of Iraq have been killed… a million men, women and children who had done nothing to us.

This is, in the most flat-footed, even handed, rational way of thinking, undeniably a war crime against Iraq and treason against the United States of America and yet none of these six people have ever been charged with so much as jaywalking! There are nations where they do not dare to travel because they would be arrested and charged with war crimes but here in the USA, they smile, appear on talk shows, write books, and paint while sitting in the bathtub. 

I heard Colin Powell speak at MSU a few years ago and I went fully expecting to hear him apologize for his role in selling the UN on all of the lies that let to this inexcusable war and he actually spent over an hour nearly breaking his arm, patting himself on the back for his storied role in American history. I was disgusted by Powell but even more, it has left me to wonder about the privileged class in America. . . the entitled, who, no matter what evil they do, are never charged with a crime and are never held responsible for their actions.

As soon as he took office, Obama announced that he would not prosecute the war crimes committed under the Bush administration because the nation needed to look forward and not backward. Now, folks, I can understand that when Ford pardoned Nixon, it was for the good of the country to avoid a trial that would have ended up sending a former President to prison. I am not sure that I agree with it, but I understand it.

But with two million Americans in prison for smoking pot, shop lifting, and burglary, how can you cook up a plot to waste $2 trillion American tax dollars, kill or wound 30,000 soldiers, and murder a million innocent civilians and just get book deals and six figure speaking fees? Are we a nation of laws? Is Justice blind? Or are there people who have to obey the laws or face severe consequences and another class of people who can do absolutely the most evil things done in the world today, and suffer no repercussions at all?

Am I a crazy, leftist liberal to believe that all of us are equally accountable to the law? Or am I just awake? I’m not trying to be strident about this. I think that our judicial system is out of control in being way too eager to hand out prison sentences. I wish that I could put at least 3/4ths of the people in prison on parole today. Prison should only be used to protect us from violent criminals, but these six people are directly responsible for having murdered more people than everyone we have in prison now, combined! 

And they have never been charged with a crime and for that everyone in America should be ashamed of our country. Is that too strong? Am I wrong here?

I want America to be great but I want us to be great for being a free nation, a nation that values liberty, civil rights, and has a justice system that is the same for blacks and whites, gay and straight, rich and poor, and for the powerful and for the rest of us. 

To get back to our current situation . . . Two years ago, Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Barack Obama. In an entirely unconstitutional and unethical political theft, he refused to give Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland a Senate hearing. Obama should have fought back hard but he seemed to accept it, and, frankly, most of the rest of us were passive about it because we were mistakenly confident that Clinton would win the presidential election, and when she didn’t, we were too shocked to muster much complaint. I didn’t get too excited because I thought Garland was way too conservative for the Supreme Court . . . you can mark that down in your little book as being at least one time that I was wrong. There may be other examples but I encourage you not to be petty.

So Trump was able to appoint the 49 year old, conservative darling, Justice Neil Gorsuch, to the court, giving at least 30 years to another anti-gay, anti-civil rights, pro-voter suppression, and anti-abortion voice on the nation’s highest court, and now Trump is cued up to appoint another nightmare to lock down the right-wing, anti-American nature of the court for another two generations.

Folks, I may be delusional. You will have to decide that for yourselves, but I do not see this current state of affairs through the lens of a battle between Republicans and Democrats, or between conservatives and liberals. In my mind, we are engaged in a battle for a free and democratic America. We are engaged in a struggle between those who want to take reproductive rights away from women, who want to take living salaries and job security from blue collar workers who want to take voting rights from minorities and the poor, and who have demonstrated that they are willing to literally take mothers’ babies from them in order to scare immigrants from coming to our country – we are in a struggle against vicious insanity and a morally awake America, an America about which we can be patriotic with good reason.

Now, I don’t want to be the kind of person who stands up here and wastes your time with a lot of political “woe is me” stuff, just pounding my chest over how angry I am about illegal wars, aggressive immigration tactics, and ham-fisted management of the government without giving some positive suggestions. I have a lot, but this is not a stump speech so let me narrow it down to just this immediate concern: 

Since Mitch McConnell clearly unconstitutionally prevented Merrick Garland’s rightful place on the bench, I think that Senators who are awake should make it clear that they will not vote to approve anyone Trump nominates other than Merrick Garland. 

We need to stand up for what is right and start insisting that our government do the same. And, yes, I know that it probably won’t work but that doesn’t mean that we should cave in so easily.

Secondly, we should vote this illegitimate regime out of office this fall and when we have control of the house and the senate, we should change the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13 or 15. There is nothing in the constitution about how many justices comprise the Supreme Court and if we have five right-wing justices who want to protect corporations and take rights away from citizens, we need to outnumber them with people who are more woke. 

And we need some real diversity on the court. Sure, we have some women and one sort of black guy but every single member of the Supreme Court for the past generation has been either a Catholic or a Jew and every single one of them attended either Harvard or Yale. That’s not diversity and that’s not reflective of America. 

However, I understand the value of appointed younger jurists so that they have a longer tenure on the court, but I would like to see this tactic and raise it one . . . there is nothing in the constitution that says that a member of the Supreme Court has to have graduated from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, any law school at all.

I’d like to nominate people who might not have experience on the bench but who have shown that they have courage and that they understand ethics. 

I would like to nominate David Hogg and Emma Gonzales, survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Florida. They strike me as being great citizens and exemplary leaders. And there might be a reason to expect sane gun laws to finally come to America.

I don’t know their names, but I would like to find a couple of the mothers of these kids who have been taken from their families and made to sleep on the floor of Trumps dog kennel prisons in Texas, I think they would make good jurors and I would have a lot more confidence in their ability to hand down decisions related to immigration than this Muslim-ban-approving-posse occupying the bench right now. 

And just to show that I can also be inclusive, I’d like to nominate one more Catholic and one more Jew . . . Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. 

Sure, they’re comedians but sadly, over the past 20 years, they have made more sense and shown more insight than any elected official, Republican or Democrat, that I have heard speak. And I can say this about them, something that I cannot say about many politicians I have ever known, I feel like we can trust them. That would make a court of 15 people and I believe it would be the best Supreme Court we have ever had. 

It has been a difficult week for people of conscience, but we are a part of a long and storied heritage of progressive people who have a vision for our nation, a nation founded in liberty and justice, and always striving for a kind of equality that we know is right, even if the world has never yet seen it. 

I refuse to give up on America. We have lost a lot of territory in the last two years but I am not ready to surrender and I pray that you are not either.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGUNvIFTQw)