Tag Archives: Cotton

… A Man Unacquainted With Honor, Courage, And Character ….

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Writers are often advised to begin their work with a powerful sentence that will be remembered. Some of those come readily to mind. Charles Dickens gave us an entire paragraph:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….

Herman Melville was more succinct. The first line of the novel’s story is:

Call me Ismael.

Whether the first paragraph of the Prologue in Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning is of equal standing, I leave to the judgment of others:

This is the story of the moment when American democracy began to unravel. It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize. It is the story of the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office, and of the many steps he took to subvert our Constitution.

The title to this post is found near the end of Cheney’s book. The full paragraph:

One leader ceding power to the next, gracious in defeat, pledging unity for the good of the nation – that is what is required by fidelity to the Constitution and love of country. We depend upon the goodwill of our leaders and their dedication to duty to ensure the survival of our republic. Only a man unacquainted with honor, courage, and character would see weakness in this.

That man is Donald Trump.

To be clear, I abhor most of Liz Cheney’s views on politics and public policy. But her book is, I believe, required reading for everyone interested in understanding more deeply the events leading up to, through, and after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The writing is fluid, clear and pulls no punches. It is an easy read in the sense of flow. And deeply disturbing. Much of it will not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the nation’s politics since 2015 or so, but there is much new information and important detail. It is, I believe, entirely true. If you can stand the truth, you must read it.

I am not going to digest all the details here. Instead, I have chosen to highlight some of the lies told by some of the key players in the story Cheney tells with clarity and effect. The lies are organized by the people who told them. The list also includes some, though far from all, of the traitorous conduct of Trump and his enablers in Congress and elsewhere. It is important in the most fundamental sense that we record and understand the full extent of the mendacity, dishonesty, treachery and outright treason of Trump and his promoters.

Donald Trump –

(1) on November 9 Trump fired Mark Esper, his Secretary of Defense and appointed Chris Miller, described by Cheney as “quite possibly the least-qualified nominee to become secretary of defense since the position was created in 1947;”

(2) The next day Trump appointed Kash Patel, with zero military experience, as Miller’s chief of staff, and Douglas MacGregor, a pro-Putin propagandist, as Miller’s senior advisor;

(3) Nov. 17, 2020, Trump fired Chris Krebs director of Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency for having the temerity to assert that the election was secure; a Trump lawyer publicly said Krebs should be killed; no action was taken against him;

(4) Trump tried to co-op the Justice Department by replacing Jeff Rosen with compliant Jeffrey Clark as Acting Attorney General & only backed down when faced with threats of mass resignations;

(5) Trump supporters directed death threats at Liz Cheney and others who pursued the truth about Trump’s involvement in the January 6 attacks;

(6) Evidence that Trump’s plan to reject the election outcome was advance-planned and fully premeditated was overwhelming;

(7) flatly declared that the election fraud he claimed to exist, but knew did not, was sufficient grounds to suspend the law and the Constitution;

(8) Trump organizations paid for legal representation for Cassidy Hutchinson, among others. Her lawyer disobeyed her instructions and suggested she could simply “not remember” certain key pieces of information when testifying.

Kevin McCarthy – a California Republican, was elected to the House in 2007 and became the 55th Speaker in January 2023, a short-lived experience as he was ousted by his party in October 2023.

(1) McCarthy, like Trump himself, was fully aware that typical voting patterns would make it appear Trump was in the lead at the end of Election Day and that later counting of legitimate absentee and mail-in ballots could change the early result. Nevertheless, on November 5 McCarthy appeared on Fox News to declare that Trump won the election. When questioned about this the next day, McCarthy lied and denied he had said the election was stolen;

(2) McCarthy lied about whether he would sign a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Trump’s false election theft claims and stating the signers had specific proof of that theft;

(3) When Congress overrode Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, in 2020, McCarthy announced he would never vote to override a veto by a president of his own party;

(4) When pressed by House Republicans to explain his position on whether it was proper to object to the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6, McCarthy refused to answer;

(5) Even after Trump’s call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Raffensperger to demand that he “find” sufficient votes to change the election outcome, McCarthy announced he would be objecting to the election results;

(6) McCarthy falsely assured members of Congress that security measures were in place to provide for their safety on January 6;

(7) McCarthy joined Eric Trump in threatening first-term members of Congress they would be primaried if they did not actively object to the certification of Biden’s victory;

(8) McCarthy lied to Cheney about his position when the certification process resumed; he said he would oppose further objections, but that was not true;

(9) McCarthy joined Whip Scalise and 137 House Republicans in voting to object to electoral votes in Pennsylvania and Arizona; seven Republican senators did the same: Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Kennedy, Lummis, Marshall, Scott, and Tuberville;

(10) On January 11, McCarthy proposed options to impeaching Trump for his actions on January 6;

(11) McCarthy’s continued support for Trump, combined with Trump’s own rhetoric, instilled fear of physical attack against the person and families of any Republican voting to impeach Trump;

(12) McCarthy initially purported to support the legislation establishing the January 6 National Commission, but his support was withdrawn;

(13) On January 25, as the articles of the second Trump impeachment were being sent to the Senate, McCarthy said on Fox News that the impeachment was “a farce,” and reversed prior statements about the January 6 events;

(14) McCarthy traded support for Trump to get access to fundraising sources Trump controlled;

(15) McCarthy lied in claiming that the social media platform Parler, used by the Proud Boys to coordinate their January 6 attack, had been shut down merely because it was conservative;

(16) McCarthy negotiated with Democrats to establish an evenly divided commission to investigate January 6; got everything he asked for, then withdrew his support for the legislation;

(17) Having declined the opportunity to appoint Republicans to the January 6 Select Committee, McCarthy then disingenuously claimed the Committee was deficient because purely partisan.

Mark Meadows –

(1) to cover for Trump, and himself, refused to testify about messages related to Trump’s actions on January 6 that were not covered by any privilege;

(2) worked with Congressman Scott Perry to try to replace leadership at DOJ with people that would do Trump’s bidding without question;

(3) Lied when claiming that Trump had ordered National Guard troops to be on alert for January 6 trouble;

(4) Lied about Trump’s intention to go to the Capitol with the mob on January 6.

Rep. Jim Jordan –

(1) during the Republican leadership call on November 6, Jordan was not interested in discussing procedures and laws about challenging votes. He said: “The only thing that matters is winning;”

(2) During the attack on the Capitol, Jordan was in communication with Trump & plotting how to prevent counting of the electoral votes;

(3) refused to comply with a subpoena for testimony from the January 6 Select Committee, placing his loyalty to Trump ahead of his oath of office;

(4) praised the Department of Justice for investigating the January 6 attack, arguing that the House Select Committee was thus unnecessary, then claimed DOJ was being “weaponized” against Trump;

(5) almost certainly lied to the Congress about his conversations with Trump during which Trump said to instructed the then-Acting Deputy Attorney General to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert – sued VP Pence seeking a ruling Pence could refuse to count some electoral votes on January 6. When the suit was dismissed, Gohmert said that the only option left was violence in the streets.

Rep. Mike Johnston –destined to replace McCarthy as Speaker,

(1) circulated a “friend of the court” brief to support Trump’s false election claims while lying to Republican representatives about the contents of the brief that “made numerous false factual and constitutional claims;”

(2) when the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ lawsuit challenging the 2020 results in four states won by Biden, Johnston declared that the “rule of law” was dead;

(3) on January 5, declared that, despite being fully aware of multiple court decisions to the contrary, four states had violated the Constitution & Republicans would be voting to reject their designated electors;

(4) joined other Republican members in claiming power found nowhere in the Constitution to overturn the election but only in the five key states Biden won;

Katrina Pearson – senior advisor to the Trump campaign, at a December 2020 rally in Washington urged the crowd to “fight like patriots,” arguing that the entire government had been “weaponized against us.” Multiple speakers, including Trump-pardoned former general Michael Flynn, suggested there was some action the people could take that would change the election result.

Former General Michael Flynn –

(1) on December 17, 2021, in an interview on Newsmax, said Trump had authority to seize voting machines and could use the military to force a redo of the election in the swing states he lost;

(2) pleaded the 5th Amendment rather than answer questions from the January 6 Committee about his communications with Trump;

(3) Pleaded the 5th Amendment when asked whether he believed in the peaceful transition of power in the United States.

Senator Ted Cruz on January 2, 2021, led a group of Republican Senators announcing they would object to electors from “disputed states,” citing zero evidence to support “unprecedented allegations” of fraud and other unspecified irregularities. Cruz had coordinated the plan with Mark Meadows in the Trump White House.

Jenna Ellis — one of Trump’s lawyers

(1) announced on a January 4 call that seven states had “dueling slates of electors,” a legally impossible state of affairs since the authentic elector slates had already been certified by their respective governors;

(2) claimed, without evidence, that those seven states had violated their own election laws.

Freedom Caucus Members – even after being told in detail of the injuries suffered by Capitol Police on January 6, the Freedom Caucus Republicans persisted in pressing objections to certification of the election;

Rep. Andrew Clyde — lied to first-term Republican congressmen on January 8, claiming Republican leadership had decided Trump had not incited the January 6 violence.

Senator Mitch McConnell – helped sabotage the legislation to create an independent commission to investigate January 6.

Leader of Wyoming Republican Party – was a member of the Oath Keepers who participated in the January 6 attack.

21 Republican House Members – voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to police who defended the Capitol on January 6.

Rep. Jim Banks (Republican – Indiana) – falsely claimed to be the Ranking Member of the Selected January 6 Committee to which he had never been appointed.

Steve Bannon — knew about Trump’s plan, even before the election, to lie that the election was stolen; Trump’s plan was premeditated.

Ronna McDaniel – Republican National Committee Chair

(1) agreed to pay many of Trump’s legal bills to fight the charges related to January 6;

(2) actively helped Trump assemble and activate fake slates of electors in states Biden won.

John Eastman – attorney for Trump

(1) crafted and promoted a plan for overturning the 2020 election even while admitting that the Supreme Court would reject the legal principle on which the plan was based;

(2) Pleaded the 5th Amendment 100 times when interviewed by the January 6 Committee;

(3) Sued the January 6 Committee to prevent its examination of Eastman’s emails related to the January 6 scheme to overturn the election; the court found his legal theories specious and the plan unlawful; Eastman did not appeal.

Jeffrey Clark – slated to be installed as head of DOJ to do Trump’s bidding in overturning the election, pleaded the 5th Amendment in testimony before the January 6 Committee.

Ronnie Jackson – Trump’s physician in the White House, later elected to Congress from Texas, refused to testify to explain why the Oath Keepers were talking about him by name during the January 6 attack.

Jared Kushner –

(1) admitted he participated in pushing lies about the outcome of the 2020 election;

(2) dismissed White House lawyers’ threats to resign as merely “whining,” not to be taken seriously,

Kayleigh McEnany – Trump’s White House Press Secretary, twisted herself in knots and likely lied when asserting memory failures about information other White House staff admitted to and that she almost certainly knew at the time.

Ginni Thomas – wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and aggressive promoter of lies about the election, rejected the findings of the 60 courts that considered Trump’s claims of election fraud; she simply refused to believe the truth.

Senator Tom Cotton – actively supported Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Rep. Scott Perry – actively worked to support Trump’s effort to replace DOJ leadership with Jeffrey Clark who would do Trump’s bidding regarding the false claim of election fraud.

There is much more to the full narrative. Cheney’s book should be read by everyone who believes in the U.S. Constitution and that Trump must be held accountable for his many crimes.

Who Am I?

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The current upheaval over the treatment of Black people in America has stimulated some troubling memories and questions for me. I’m sure I’m not alone.

First, some history. It’s usually good to start at the beginning. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. One of the local “jokes” was that Memphis was actually part of Mississippi. This meant that the “culture” of Memphis, particularly race-related, was more like Mississippi than Tennessee. Tennessee had actually been “two states” during the Civil War, with the eastern part, heavily mountainous and not connected to the cotton-focused agrarian economy of the Deep South, aligned with the “north.”

In Memphis, it was often said that “cotton is king.” Indeed, situated on the mighty Mississippi River, Memphis at that time was a major depot for shipping of cotton delivered mainly from points south. One of the highlights of life in those days was the Cotton Carnival, a huge citywide series of fancy-dress balls, a large parade, selection of a King and Queen and various princesses plus other events celebrating the cotton that sustained the local economy. The reality that the cotton-based economy had developed on the backs of Black slaves was not much mentioned or considered. It simply wasn’t “relevant.”

The history of the Cotton Carnival, started in 1931 and now called Carnival Memphis, can be seen at https://carnivalmemphis.org/carnival-history/ including a brief but revealing video montage of the Cotton Carnival parade and this strange photo:

 

At the time, I did not know the origin of the “cotton is king” mythology but, come to find out, it originated, not surprisingly, with a South Carolina pro-slavery politician (owned 300), James Henry Hammond, who made a speech in 1858, declaring that,

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. … It constitutes the very mudsill of society …. You dare not make war on cotton — no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.

https://bit.ly/3fKWzbG That, of course, turned out to be quite wrong a few years later. If you choose to read Hammond’s story in Wikipedia, brace yourself as he is reported to have been, among other things, a serial rapist, a fact that did not prevent his being elected to the U.S. Senate.

Most of the young boys I grew up with were overt racists. The n-word was used in normal conversation to refer to all Black people. These boys thought all Black people were ignorant, dirty, untrustworthy and dangerous. I seriously doubt, however, that any of them actually knew any Black people, except possibly in their role as maids or people who performed menial tasks for their parents. For reasons I still cannot explain, I was the odd- man-out in this racially problematic environment. This was partly because I did know two Black people, one a Black man who worked in my father’s carpet business and the other was Beanie, my grandmother’s maid/housekeeper/cook/attendant. Both of these people were naturally kind, among the best people I have ever known.

I am still bothered by an incident involving Beanie. When I returned to Memphis from college at Christmas holiday time my freshman year, it was expected that Beanie would prepare all my favorite foods for a true feast at my grandmother’s place. Beanie was an extraordinary cook. When it was time for Beanie finally to go home, I insisted on driving her. She reluctantly agreed but insisted on sitting in the back seat. When I pressed for an explanation, she said it would be trouble for her if she were seen in her neighborhood driving in the front seat with a white man. Such were the wages of our sins.

The hostility of whites to Black people, and Black people’s apparent acceptance of that reality, made no sense to me. As a non-practicing Jewish person, I was acutely aware of the oft-heard theme in my family and elsewhere that Jews were the subject of class discrimination, placing them below other white people but above Black people in the social/economic hierarchy. That discrimination didn’t make sense either and felt like a constant wounding. I could not understand what these considerations (being Black or Jewish) had to do with anything important, with what kind of person you were.

In any case, I think my personal interactions with Black people from a very early age likely shaped my thinking and left me “out” of the typical racial attitudes held by my friends. Whenever the subject came up, which was rare, and I asked, “why do you hate Negroes,” no one could ever answer coherently. They just did. They thought it was obvious why they should fear and hate them. And it was not a question they thought was important. It was just how things were.

One of the consequences of my upbringing in this environment was that I “identified” as “southern.” Questions of “identity” as such did not come up in those days, of course, but it was clear to me that I was “southern.” When fate delivered me to Yale University in 1960 in New Haven, CT, the “southern” contingent found its members quickly and during early and long nights in Vanderbilt Hall on the Old Campus quadrangle, students would sometimes open their windows to shout. It was common for someone to scream “I am not a number” and slam his window. A contest of sorts emerged and we “southern” boys met the “Yankees” singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic with robust renditions of Dixie.

This exchange wasn’t about race; there were few Black students in that class, and I don’t believe anyone thought of it as a racial thing. It was just “who we were.” We missed home and this was a way, I suspect, of proclaiming that. We didn’t much think about the complex and troubled history of the key words:

I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten,
….
In Dixie Land where I was born in, early on a frosty mornin’,
….
Then I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! hooray!
In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie….

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_(song) for more on that. Looking back, however, it is horrifying and shameful that we were so ignorant about this subject. The words of the song are prescient because those who still believe in it are stuck in what they imagine are the “old times” and happily proclaim their willingness to “take my stand to live and die in Dixie.” The question is, stand for what?

Fast forward a full lifetime in which I have been blessed to, among other things, have traveled the world and interacted with people from many cultures, some quite alien to our own. From those experiences I came away with one major impression – ordinary people everywhere want pretty much the same things: an opportunity for personal development and security from want. In short, they desire personal freedom, the chance to grow, to have a family, to get an education. Everywhere I went, it was the same.

Fast forward again. The United States is torn apart by the realization by many, almost certainly the majority, that something is fundamentally wrong with our society. While Donald Trump is not responsible for this condition, he has sponsored, promoted and encouraged division from the very first moment of his presidency. The reality is that he is playing on something that already existed. It took the murder of a Black man by police, one of many such events over many years, to once again shatter the veneer that has enabled American society to overlook this gaping hole in our history and in our national morality.

One of the many consequences is the movement to take down the symbols of our hateful past – the statues, the paintings, the flags and other indications of our troubled history. The central question now, at long last though not for the first time, is “what does it mean to be an American?”

That question is really one of identity. What symbols do you identify with? And why?

While enjoying the light breeze in Central Park Sunday morning, my wife observed that there were many statues in the Park whose provenance she did not know. I thought, that’s pretty normal; many of these things we “see” but do not really think about unless we have a particular reason to observe more closely. These are in a sense failed symbols most of the time. Even tourists often don’t pay attention; these symbols are no different to our conscious minds than the trees and rock formations that cover the Park.

But there are some such symbols that we do notice. In our case a good example was the Confederate soldier statue that, until recently, stood in the middle of the intersection of South Washington Street and Prince Street in Alexandria, VA where we lived for many years.  I suspect that we were conscious of it because of its peculiar location that forced you to veer slightly around it when driving north on Prince. We often wondered aloud why the statue was still there in what had become a politically liberal community.

The many proposals to remove these symbols of the Confederacy have sparked a fierce reaction among many Americans who claim that these monuments are not symbols of racism but are only reflective of their “heritage” and their “history.” These are puzzling claims.

It is 2020. Americans are still arguing that statues of Confederate soldiers who fought against the country in order to preserve the system of slavery – the ownership of one person by another in which the slave was forced to provide free labor to enrich the other – on which the economy of the south had been based are related in some way to their current conception of themselves.

The question that puzzles me about this is: why would anyone in 2020 see his identity as tied to the “heritage” of slavery and treason against the country?  The Confederacy lost the Civil War. Why are so many people attached to the iconography of a defeated political entity? Americans typically do not think of themselves as “losers.” Most astute observers agree that the Vietnam War was lost, but even then, many Americans refused to accept the idea that America “lost” a fight.

Why then do so many Americans reimagine the Civil War as a conflict over “states’ rights” when the main, if not only, “states right” at issue was the power of people to own other people for the purpose of extracting free labor from them? These folks are not going around regularly pondering the complex relationship between the federal and state governments or how that relationship is affected by the structure and language of the Constitution.

There are many options available for building an identity, but these people are passionate, sometimes to the point of violence, that these symbols reflect who they really are.

I strongly suspect that the Confederacy identifiers’ actual knowledge about the conditions that led to the Civil War, and its aftermath is shallow at best and for most it is just a set of simplistic and false ideas about what happened and why. And I am even more convinced that they have blocked out, if they ever knew it, the history of what happened after the war and that continued until at least the mid-1950s, sanctioned by the Supreme Court throughout.

I recall that in my own eighth grade American History class, our teacher informed us that in our reading and discussion of the Civil War there was to be no mention of slavery. That was not, she said, what the war was about and therefore we were to avoid the subject. Instead, we spent our time memorizing the names and dates of major battles.

That was in the 1950’s, of course, more than a half-century ago. While I hope that educators today are more informed than that, the truth is I don’t really know what is taught to children these days. Maybe that is part of the answer to my question.

But I suspect there is something else, something deeper, at work and I think it’s just plain racism. I just saw a video on Twitter of a white woman sitting in the back of a pickup truck covered in Confederate flags. She is holding a large such flag and shouting at someone off-camera: “I will teach my grandkids to hate you all,” as she drapes herself in the flag, raises a fist and says “KKK.”

This is not a unique event. Huge swaths of Americans are in thrall of Donald Trump’s overtly racist policies. Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting Nazi slogans and Trump said there were “fine people [pause] on both sides.” Trump has facilitated the public emergence of an overtly racist class of Americans who are attracted to his idea that America was once “great” and that he will make it “great again.” It is these same people who identify with the Confederate flag and statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians who tried to destroy the country and waged war that killed 750,000 men in arms and an untold number of “civilians.”

Racism seems to be the only unifying principle behind all this. The virulent response to the removal of statuary that, bizarrely, sits in, among other places, the hallowed halls of Congress cannot be explained by anything else. The “history” and “heritage” represented by the Confederate flag and monuments of traitors who fought against the country so they could retain the slavery system is the concept at the heart of racism historically: that Black people are a subordinate and inferior people whose biological destiny is to be under the heel of the superior white race. There is much scholarship on this history, including recently Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, the documented revelations in which will stun you.

If it’s not racism, what could it be? Adherence to a mythology that conflicts with the very “idea of America,” the notion of American “exceptionalism” on which we have for so long rested our moral-superiority hats, must have a powerful source. If you stood up at a meeting and announced only that, “I want to be identified with losers, people who identify with a vile ideology from the distant past,” most people would think you had a screw loose. But if the meeting were in rural West Virginia or South Carolina and you then broke into Dixie, it’s likely most of the people there would immediately understand and rise to join you in the chorus: In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie.

Good old times are not forgotten.