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Since the cult classic movie Groundhog Day came out in 1992 the minor folk holiday of the same namehas taken on a new meaning. Now it denotes being stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over and over. It has certainly seemed so the last four years as I predicted with dread in 2017:
Wake Up!
Groundhog Day 2017
6:00 am
Wake Up!
It’s yesterday again!
It will always be yesterday again.
If you don’t
get your ass out of bed right now
and do something
today will replace it
in the time loop.
Trust me.
You don’t want that.
Today is going to be a
Motherfucker.
Wake Up!
—Patrick Murfin
But this year seems different, as if that old clock radio finally flipped over to a new day. Who knows? Maybe we learned something. Anyway, the old ogre is gone and something resembling hope is in the air. But whether there are six more weeks of Winter or not seems to depend on whether that hope is stronger than the despair of the raging Coronavirus pandemic that blew in like a lion last March. I know, I dreadfully mix metaphors
Meanwhile it is time to reflect on this strange demi-holiday.
Despite the despair of meteorologists and rationalistsGroundhog Day continues to grow in popularity and spread every year. From an obscure folk custom observed by a handful of German immigrants and their decedents in isolate pockets of Pennsylvania in the late 18th and 19th Centuries it has spread nationwide.
In 2015 Wikipedia identified no fewer than 38 woodchucks dragged from their winter hibernation and exposed to the sky across the U.S. and Canada. Come hell or high water virtually every news broadcast in North America today will feature stories about one or more of the creatures and whether he—almost always identifiedas a male but most frequently a she—will see his shadow supposedly signifying six more weeks of winter weather.
These local observations got big boost with the release of the movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in 1992. The film has become a beloved classic with a cult following often compared to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. It was filmed in my neck of the woods, as a noted TV weatherman used to say, in Woodstock, Illinois.
Just after 7 am Woodstock Willie will make his grumpy appearance from the Gazebo as he has every year since the film came out. The city has stretched the celebration into a week-long festival in hopes of luring pilgrims and tourists. It works. The Woodstock ritual is now the second-most famous celebration in the country behind the original at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which the McHenry County town portrayed in the film.
But this year due to the plague most of the festive events in town have been canceled. Willie will be yanked from his comfort but a thin crowd, masked and social distancing will observe standing in the deep snow on Woodstock Square. At this writing it is not known if Willie will himself be masked, a precaution that also might save his handlers from being bitten.
Part of the spreading appeal of the celebrations is because they are a welcome, if silly, relief from the dreary tedium of the depths of the winter, long after the razzmatazz of the Holidays have past when everyone in cold climes is sick to death of snow, ice, howling winds, and leaden skies. But a philosopher might speculate that the surging popularity of Groundhog Days mirrors the growing anti-intellectualism of modern America and the spreading animus to science now officially embraced by a major political party and reflected in rejection of evolution, denial of climate change, anti-vaccine hokum, and a general rejection of rationality. Or maybe that would be reading too much into a harmless custom.
So how did all of this come to pass? Some claim religious roots stretching back to Neolithic Europe. The growing neo-pagan movement is explicit in laying claim to it, but Catholics have their own customs which may, or may not have been cribbed from older traditions.
Groundhog Day has been traced to pre-Christian Northern European folk traditions stretching back in the mists of time. It isnotoriously difficult to pin down precise origins of such oral traditions or to know the complete religious significance of them. Tales about a beast—usually envisioned as a bear or a badger that had powersto predict or control the weather seem to have originated in Norse and/or Germanic tribal societies and spread by diffusion or osmosis to other European peoples including the Slavs to the east and the Celts to the south and west. The celebration of the animal was tied to the half-way point between Winter Solstice—Yule—and the Spring Equinox.
Although most of the animal and weather lore that leads directly to Groundhog Day are of Northern European origins, modern Wiccans and neo-pagans have identified it with the Celtic festival of Imbolcone of the four seasonal quarter festivals along with Beltane (Spring/Easter), Lughnasadh (Mid-Summer) and Samhain (Fall/Halloween) that fall between the solstices and equinoxes. Traditionally it was a festival marking the first glimmers of spring while still in the grip of the cold and dark of winter. As such it was distantly related to transition predicted by the Norse totem animal, but had no known direct corresponding myth.
Instead it celebrated the goddess Brigid patroness of poetry, healing, smith crafts, midwifery, and all arts of hand. In some stories her feast on February 1 celebrated her recovery after giving birth to the God—the Green Man—who will come into his own and rule from Lughnasadh to winter.
In Ireland with the coming of Christianity the Goddess and her festival became identified with St. Brigid of Kildare, along with Patrick and Brendon one of the three Patron Saints of the country. Now thought to be apocryphal, St. Brigid in lore was first recorded in the 7th Century and expanded upon by later monks and scribes. She was described as the daughter of a Pict slave woman converted by Patrick himself. Born in 451 in Faughart, County Louth she became a holy woman, nun, and abbess who founded a monastery on the site of an ancient temple to the Goddess Brigid in Kildare. She assumed many of the pagan goddess’s attributes and performed many miracles. Stories about the Goddess and the Nun are so intertwined that it is impossible to figure out if the holy woman was real or an invention of the Church intended to comfort convertswith familiar and beloved tradition.
Today the best known tradition associated with the Feast of St. Brigid is the making of the off-center straw crosses from last season’s straw that are hung as talismans in Irish homes through Lent until Easter.
Almost all of the original traditions associated with the Goddess Brigid and Imbolc had been eradicated or simply faded away 18th Century even in Gaelic speaking regions. In the 20th Century Wiccans and other neo-pagans have attempted to revive the old Celtic traditions and in the process invented rituals and lore to fill in the lost gaps. Many believe the Quarter Festivals and old Gods and Goddesses are accessible spiritual metaphors for worshipof the natural world and the timeless rhythm of the seasons.
That included borrowing from St. Brigid, as well. Her straw crosses are now described as not Christian at all but as ancient symbols representing the Four Quarter Festivals and the Four Cardinal Directions. There is no way to prove or disprove that assertion.
The Rev. Catharine Clarenbach, a Unitarian Universalist minister explained how modern practitioners view Imbolc in an entry on Nature’s Path, a U.U. pagan experience and earth centered blog hosted by the religious site Patheos. She called it “a light not heat holiday” in which the slowly lengthening days and first tenuous hints at Spring-to-come give hope to those trudging through the hard days. “When people are desperately ill, hope can fuel the long slog toward wholeness and healing, even if that healing is not a cure.”
That certainly ennobles the day beyond the giddy fantasy of groundhog magic.
But our trail to modern Groundhog Day does not end with the re-invention of Imbolc. Indeed other than sharing a date, the two celebrations have little in common.
Over in England and Scotland a different Christian tradition evolved—Candlemas observed on February 1, the eve of St. Brigid’s Day and often confused as British equivalent. But Candlemas has very early 4th Century Christmas roots as the Feast of the Presentationcelebrated by early Church patriarchsincluding Methodius of Patara, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom. It celebrated the presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem as an infant.
The celebration slowly spread from the Levant to the rest of the Church and Roman Empire. When the date of Christmas was finally fixed on December 25, the Feast of the Presentation was added to the liturgical calendar forty days later on February 2. That date by happenstance nearly coincided with the old Roman festival Lupercalia which simultaneously celebrated the Roman version of the Greek God Pan who was sacred to shepherds in the Spring lambing festival and Lupa the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, legendary twin founders of Rome. In evolving Roman practice it had become a major popular holiday in Rome itself and associated with the revelry and abandon of other feasts. Lupercalia was outlawed by the ascendant Christians but still widely, if covertly, celebrated by ordinary Romans. The official Feast of the Presentation, coming just before Lent was hoped to ease acceptance of Church teachings.
Pope Gelasius I began calling this festival, which set off the carnival season, the Feast of the Candles, later known as Chandelours in parts of France, the Alps, and the Pyreneesand as Candlemas in Britain. It connections to Lupercalia have caused some modern neo-pagans to view that celebration as a Latin equivalent of the German and Norse totem animal observations. That is highly speculative and tenuous at best.
But in Scotland we do find Candlemas as the first indication that the Northern European custom had been introduced to Britain. An early Scots Gaelic proverb went:
The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.
Although it was a serpent, not a bear, that was mentioned, the emergence of a totem animal to herald Spring was clearly there. Over time looking for badgers stretching their legs at Candlemas became a folk tradition in rural areas of Scotland and England.
Without mention of an animal witness this early English verse asserts
If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.
But that custom was never wide spread and did not seem to have traveled to the New World with early settlers from the colonies.
It took German peasants lured to frontier areas of Pennsylvania in the late 1700s to do that. The use of groundhogs for prognostication rather than bears or badgers—both of which were far more dangerous and hard to manage than the lumbering and common local rodents—was well established when the first recorded noteof the celebration was made in English in an 1841 diary entry by Morgantown shopkeeper James Morris:
Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.
All across central and western Pennsylvania where Germans had settled in large numbers local Groundhog lodges sprang up in many towns to celebrate the annual appearance of the weather predicting critters. An elaboratecommunal meal called a Fersommling featuring groaning tables, orations, skits, and music led up to a ritual presentation of the local groundhog. These lodges and festival gatherings were also an important tools to preserve German culturalidentity in communities pressed hard by Englanders—native English speakers. Only the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect was allowed to be spoken at 19th Century Fersommlings fines levied for each English word uttered.
In 1887 in a burst of civic boosterism Colby Camps, editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit promoted his home town as the official Groundhog Day home and the local beast, always named Phil generation after generation regardlessof gender, as the town’s official meteorologist. The first story rapidly got picked up by other local and national publications which eagerly reported the result of Phil’s observation. It became an annual tradition and publicity for the event and town grew year after year.
By the 1920 towns from the East Texas Hill Country and North Carolina, many with their own German immigrant populations, to Ontario and French speaking Quebec were hosting their own celebrations.
Then, as noted, the 1993 movie inspired still more.
Today the accuracyof the various groundhogs is in dispute. Backers, including local Groundhog society boost accuracy rates of between 80 and 90%. Cold hard statistical analysis refutes that unsubstantiated claim. A study of several Canadian towns with Groundhog celebrations dating back 30 to 40 years found only 37% rate of accuracy. The record at Punxsutawney dating all the way back to that first 1887 outing is hardly better—only 38%. Both are much worse than random 50/50 odds.
I found out about #SFFpit on Twitter with two days to spare. #SFFpit is a pitching opportunity on Twitter for people who write science fiction and fantasy (hence SFF). "Pitching" refers to distilling one's novel into three lines or less -- shorter for an "elevator pitch", longer for a pitch on Twitter.
I set up my pitches using a web app called TweetDeck, which is free and allows you to put in a series of pitches to be timed for posting throughout the day. So when I set up pitches, I put them into TweetDeck so I don't have to go back and remember to post them.
So this is another opportunity to hope. I take all the opportunities to hope that I can, and someday I may have an agent!
Each year on February 2, people congregate outside of the holes of groundhogs kept in various zoos to participate in the modern reenactment of ancient rituals that said that these furry rodents could predict the weather. Whatever one does or does not believe about the forecasting power of the groundhog, the ritual itself is a reminder that winter will end and spring is on the way.
When have you participated in a ritual whose form filled your spirit (if not its content)?
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Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110223159/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210131AJSermon.mp3
Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110223159/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210131AJSermon.mp3
At last, it’s over! I mean the last four years of suffering from an abusive relationship—with our former president. Why am I not alive with energy, ready to get back to my writing? Wanting to Zoom with friends? Pushing ever harder with my climate activism? I find that I’m simply exhausted, needing to recover.
The ethical and relational norms in our society have been breached, not just a few times, but almost every day for four years. Truth? Doesn’t exist. Decency? Don’t count on it. Integrity? So old fashioned. And so, for the duration of this time, I have felt upended, discombobulated—actually, crazy.
One day, years ago, when I was a single mom raising two tween boys, I got a call at work from the older one, saying that when he and his brother got home from school, they noticed that the kitchen window was broken.
“A big break?” I asked. “Big enough for someone to get in?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Go to the library right now. Right now,” I said.
I called the police and raced home, just a few blocks from where I worked. The squad car was already there when I arrived. Nothing of value was gone except my good camera, which had hung on the hall tree. But I’ll never forget the sense of violation I felt when I saw the muddy footprints planted on the blue carpet in the living room.
For these last four years, that same shock of violation has messed with my psyche over and over again. At every new offense, each more egregious than the last, I have been newly incredulous: Did he really do that? I’ve felt bushwhacked emotionally, old fears laid bare. So, no, I’m not yet over the crazed mob’s invasion of the Capitol, the culmination of four years of incursions on human decency and decorum by the former president, four years of selfishness and neglect from one who should be our protector, our defender. I’m not.
Sometimes frustrated voters are misled (remember Brexit?), but it’s heartbreaking to see scores of Republicans in Congress aiding and abetting a president who lied blatantly about all manner of things, who abused women with impunity, who made fun of disabled persons, who supported the Proud Boys and QAnon as “good persons.” Is anything holy? Is winning an election really a good trade for selling your soul?
I have been affected not only emotionally, but physically: the irritated gut, the lost weight, the dry eyes, the sore throat, and hoarse voice. Stress, my doctors said, stress. Then came the slowly encroaching horror of the pandemic. Hundreds died, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Is all this death really happening? My Buddhist friend told me I’m too angry, that I should be a “non-anxious presence.” I told her she’s not in touch with reality. We’re both right.
January 20 brought me palpable relief, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the forty-sixth President of the United States in a joyous and inspirational ceremony that promised very different values guiding our nation’s future. But my healing will take more time. Age has given me the privilege of working when and where I choose. For now, I have retreated to my fireplace and my easy chair. I’m on vacation from angst and despair. Doing a puzzle. Laughing at silly jokes a friend persists in sending. The frown that puckered my brow is gone. I’m beginning to smile again.
Just now, I’m waiting my turn for the vaccine. It’ll be a while, and that’s frustrating, but I can wait. As an elder, I do fear the virus, but I trust that our new president will do everything possible to protect us. Something like normality will come.
Maybe I’ll be able to get back to the book I was writing—there has been too much static in my brain of late to tap into my creativity. Each evening for many long months, I have written in my journal. I record the date at the top of the page and the hour. This lets me know, oh, yes, another day has passed, and I know what it is. Then I mainly just reiterate what I’ve done during the day—remembering what I had for lunch is another way of being present. And lastly, I record the number of cases and the number of deaths in our nation and in our state, both an acknowledgment and an act of mourning.
Today is Sunday. Yet another Sunday. This morning, I heard Rinpoche Yangsi, the founder of Maitripa, a Buddhist college here in Portland, talk about what it means to be a bodhisattva. I’ve got a ways to go. I think, for now, I’ll give thanks. For the constancy of the river outside my window and the nests of blue herons across the way. For the man in the bright yellow jacket I see walking his dog. For the sunshine breaking through the clouds.
About the Author
Marilyn Sewell is the editor of Claiming the Spirit Within, Cries of the Spirit, Resurrecting Grace, Breaking Free. and recently, In Time’s Shadow: Stories About Impermanence. She is minister emerita at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter at @marilynsewell.
A few emerging public policy theories build on past work on eliminating systemic racism and creating a more equitable nation. One is the Abolitionist Model. The other from Tulsa's own Hannibal Johnson. The three pillars of racial reconciliation - Acknowledgment, Apology, and Atonement.
The post Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? appeared first on BeyondBelief.
Beth Casebolt
Probably the story of our time in politics is that the Republican Party is radicalizing around an explicitly anti-democratic violent white nationalist ideology, and that most of elite establishment media is uninterested or editorially incapable of accurately telling that story
This week’s featured posts are “The Biden Blitz” and “The Republican Party Chooses Not to Change“.
One featured post goes through the flurry of executive orders that Biden has already issued. For the most part they are important orders that turn the country in the right direction. But to really be successful, Biden has to get legislation through Congress. The first item on his agenda is his Covid relief plan. It provides economic relief to individuals, sends money to states to use distributing vaccines, funds the changes necessary to reopen schools, and institutes a national testing-and-contact-tracing plan.
Ten Republican senators — exactly the number needed to overcome a filibuster — have approached Biden with a much smaller effort: $618 billion rather than $1.9 trillion. I’m not sure exactly what the differences are. Biden is meeting with the senators today.
Biden has three avenues open: Pass something small with bipartisan support (assuming all ten of these senators stay on board, which I regard as a large assumption); pass something large through the reconciliation process with only (or almost entirely) Democratic votes; or pass a small bipartisan bill now and then come back with a larger Democratic bill later. (This would give Republicans cover: They voted for something and opposed something.)
I’ve been pleased that so far Biden has been unwilling to close off his options without getting any concessions back. If he had pledged, say, not to use reconciliation, then I doubt Republicans would be making a counter-proposal.
Chuck Schumer did something similar with the filibuster.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about why the Senate should abolish the filibuster. (My argument transcended any particular legislation that might get filibustered: If a tiny slice of the electorate — say, small majorities in the 21 smallest states — can block what most of the country wants, the American people are going to lose faith in democracy.)
Well, this week Mitch McConnell essentially filibustered to save the filibuster: He blocked the organizing resolution that would allow the Democratic majority to replace the Republican committee chairs, holding out for a stipulation that the Senate would not alter the filibuster during these next two years. Chuck Schumer held out for the agreement Tom Daschle and Trent Lott worked out the last time there was a 50-50 Senate, which made no such promises.
Schumer held his ground and McConnell yielded. What McConnell got instead of an amended resolution was that two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, repeated filibuster-supporting promises they each made when they were elected in 2018.
It’s important to understand that this all about appearances: Whatever the organizing resolution says, and whatever individual senators might pledge, Democrats can end the filibuster any time they want — if they are unanimous. The question is how the politics would shake out: Will Manchin and Sinema look bad to their voters if they change their minds? Would the entire Democratic Senate majority look bad if they had passed a resolution defending the filibuster and then later reversed themselves?
And the answer to those questions is entirely situational: What will McConnell use the filibuster to block? That partly depends on how clever Democrats are in using the filibuster-avoiding maneuver known as reconciliation (which is how Republicans passed the Trump tax cut and nearly repealed ObamaCare).
If some very important, very popular legislation gets filibustered, that creates an opportunity for Manchin and Sinema to say “When I supported the filibuster, I never imagined Republicans would misuse it like this.” (Both say they’re not open to changing their minds, but who knows if they will? Neither comes up for reelection until 2024, and by then the filibuster could be ancient history.) Or maybe Schumer will come up with some trick for negating the filibuster in that particular case without getting rid of it completely, giving Manchin and Sinema some cover.
In short, this is not the best time fight this battle, and Schumer wouldn’t have the votes to win right now even if he wanted to fight it. That explains why the party’s progressive wing isn’t pushing too hard for it right now. At the moment, it’s an abstract battle about Senate procedure. Soon the terrain will shift to something voters care about, and then the situation will change.
Having the option of eliminating the filibuster pushes the Republicans to negotiate in good faith. Democrats should not give that up without getting something back.
Most of what I had to say about this is in one of the featured posts. But a few odds and ends didn’t fit.
The trial starts a week from tomorrow. But Trump is having a hard time finding lawyers willing to defend him.
Former President Donald J. Trump has abruptly parted ways with five lawyers handling his impeachment defense, just over a week before the Senate trial is set to begin, people familiar with the situation said on Saturday. … Mr. Trump had pushed for his defense team to focus on his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him, one person familiar with the situation said.
And that’s a problem because, unlike the Republican Party, the legal profession has standards.
Any defense attorney holds a broad obligation to represent his or her client zealously. That’s a crucial part of our adversarial justice system. But there are limits on what a defense attorney can argue. For example, per the American Bar Association, it would be unethical for any attorney to raise an argument “that he knows to be false.” The “rigged election” narrative certainly fits that description.
According to the NYT, something similar happened as early as November 12: Trump’s lawyers told him there was no fraud on a scale sufficient to flip the election in his favor, so they parted ways and Rudy Giuliani took over.
Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
Conservatives sometimes try to divert attention from Majorie Taylor Greene with the “What about left-wing radicals in Congress?” ploy. But Democrats are responding with a bring-it-on attitude. And they should: AOC, like Bernie Sanders, is more liberal than some Democrats want to be, but I think everybody understands that she lives in the real world. Progressives want the US to be more like Denmark, not Camelot. Denmark is a real place that is doing fine.
Greene, on the other hand, does not live in the real world.
Another typical whataboutist move diverts discussion of the Capitol Insurrection by bringing up the violence associated with the George Floyd protests (most of which were peaceful). The best description of the difference between those two incidents comes from Tom Robinson on Quora:
One of these things was protesting murder while the other was protesting Democracy.
Typically, an American political party that loses the presidency by seven million votes asks how it can appeal to a larger slice of the electorate. The GOP is asking how it can stop Democrats from voting.
An MTG-endorsed conspiracy theory (about how Jewish-funded space lasers caused a California wildfire) makes this Mel Brooks clip timely again.
An Atlantic article on impeachment-supporting Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger focuses more on his criticism of his church than of his party.
The problems that led to the January 6 insurrection are not just political. They’re cultural. Roughly half of Protestant pastors said they regularly hear people promote conspiracy theories in their churches, a recent survey by the Southern Baptist firm LifeWay Research found. “I believe there is a huge burden now on Christian leaders, especially those who entertained the conspiracies, to lead the flock back into the truth,” Kinzinger tweeted on January 12.
I think conservative Christians won’t solve this problem until they realize how deep it goes. The original “fundamentalists” in the early 20th century were reacting against two developments in modern thought: Darwinian evolution and the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which applied to scripture the techniques of interpretation scholars had invented to understand ancient texts like the Homeric epics. The fundamentalist response was to avoid these challenges by encouraging the development of bad thinking habits among Christians. Any kind of denial or logical fallacy was fine if it came to the right conclusions.
Well, a century later, those bad thinking habits have been exploited by purveyors of all kinds of nonsense: climate-change denial, Covid denial, QAnon, “Stop the Steal”. The conservative Christian mind is now like a poorly designed software application; it has back doors that allow hackers to circumvent the usual protocols and make the app serve purposes unrelated to its designers’ intent. That’s how we arrive at the situation Kinzinger diagnoses so clearly:
There are many people that have made America their god, that have made the economy their god, that have made Donald Trump their god, and that have made their political identity their god.
Christianity in general is not going to fix this problem until until it goes back to the source: It needs to figure out how to deal with the reality of evolution, and with the uncanny resemblance of the Bible’s oldest sections to many other texts from the same eras. A few of the more liberal sects did this work a long time ago, but the bulk of the movement would rather build a fortress around its errors than change.
What if an electric car could recharge in five minutes?
Ever since the Inauguration, the Bernie meme has been everywhere. This is my favorite.
Space.com collected some other Bernie-in-space images. He’s also been in famous paintings, at historic events, and in classic movie scenes.
Several writers have tried to explain what this phenomenon “means”. Like, why is it happening? Why Bernie? Why this particular image? I think it’s not hard to understand: The original Bernie-at-the-Inauguration photo captured a truth we all recognized: Wherever Bernie goes, he’s still Bernie. The historic grandeur of an inauguration doesn’t change him, so why would anything else?
Biden had a phone conversation with Putin.
In his first phone call with Vladimir Putin since taking office, President Biden pressed his Russian counterpart on the detention of a leading Kremlin-critic, the mass arrest of protesters, and Russia’s suspected involvement in a massive cyber breach in the United States.
In short: we’re an independent country again. Our president is no longer under the thumb of the Russian president.
Hakeem Jefferson on this weekend’s snowstorm:
DC’s so white today the GOP might vote to grant it statehood.
I can’t decide between a good-bye-Trump or a hello-Biden song, so I’ll post one of each. On the last day of the Trump administration, James Corden did this wonderful send-up of “One Day More” from Les Miserables.
And after President Biden suggested that Janet Yellin — the first female Treasury Secretary — should get a musical just like the first male Treasury Secretary did, Marketplace got Dessa, a member of the hip-hop collective Doomtree and one of the artists who contributed to “The Hamilton Mixtape” working on it. That led to “Who’s Yellin Now?“
Impeachment is a chance to put the Trump Era in its rearview mirror, but instead the GOP is doubling down on authoritarianism and conspiracy theories.
Less than a month ago, then-President Donald Trump incited a mob to attack Congress, for the purpose of hanging onto power in spite of having decisively lost the November election. At the time, that crime seemed to put the capstone on the most lawless administration at least since Richard Nixon’s, and maybe in all of American history.
Republican members of Congress, who (like Democrats) had to evacuate the House and Senate chambers in fear for their lives, briefly seemed willing to reconsider where their unquestioning support of Trump had brought them. Trump’s attempted coup — the culmination of a months-long plot attempt to undo his loss and effectively end American democracy — brought to a head a theme that the country has been debating since 2015: How far will Republicans let Trump go?
Back then, the debate was about norm-violations that look small compared to insurrection, but had previously been beyond the pale: calling Mexican immigrants rapists, or claiming that American POWs are not heroes, or ridiculing a reporter by imitating his disability, or encouraging his supporters to be violent, or bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Trump critics raised a reasonable question: If those actions aren’t over the line, where is the line? We never got an answer, but instead were accused of paranoia. Trump was unorthodox and not “politically correct”, but imagining that he was dangerous to the American Republic was just “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a particular form of craziness induced by an irrational hatred of a man most of us didn’t care about one way or the other before he began running for president.
Closing ranks. This week we got some additional information: For the majority of the GOP, physically attacking Congress and trying to end democracy isn’t over the line either.
Tuesday, 45 of the 50 Republican senators signaled their unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol lnsurrection by voting not to hold an impeachment trial at all, on the grounds that the Constitution doesn’t allow impeachments of former officials. (That’s not a credible position, as explained in the Appendix.) Among the 45 was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who previously had seemed open to conviction.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to get back in Trump’s good graces. In the wake of running for his life, McCarthy had said Trump “bears responsibility” for the insurrection. But Thursday he needed to kiss the ring.
Purging anti-Trumpists. Instead, the party has decided to punish those Republicans who showed some loyalty to America’s constitutional system of government. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), went to Wyoming to raise ire against Rep. Liz Cheney, who said “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution” than Trump inciting a mob to attack Congress, and then voted for impeachment. Don Jr. spoke to the anti-Cheney rally by phone. A state senator has already announced a primary challenge.
The Arizona Republican Party has censured Governor Ducey, ostensibly for taking action against Covid, but the fact that he refused to misreport Trump’s electoral loss was probably also a factor. South Carolina’s Republican Party has censured Rep. Tom Rice for his pro-impeachment vote. Trump is calling for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to face a primary challenger, again because he refused to overrule the voters and give Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump.
Defending extremism. Simultaneously, the GOP is doing little to distance itself from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-supporting freshman Congresswoman from Georgia who has brought a new level of insanity to the Capitol. Here’s one good summary of the full range of Greene’s unhinged-ness and here’s another one.
But if you prefer to see for yourself and make your own judgments, Greene posted a 40-minute rant to YouTube in 2018. (Warning: that’s 40 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I recommend skipping the first half, which is mainly about how Facebook is censoring her — by applying the same community standards it applies to everybody.) If you’re looking for a point to it all, she never really gets around to making one. But along the way you’ll learn such fascinating things as
The GOP House leadership has appointed Greene to the House Committee on Education and Labor. McCarthy intends to have a talk with her this week, but it’s hard to imagine that talk leading to any discipline, since Trump is backing her. (AOC to Chris Hayes: “What is [McCarthy] going to tell [Greene]? Keep it up?”)
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) is introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress, but without some Republican support it won’t get the 2/3s majority needed to pass.
Prague Spring. The best analysis of the GOP I’ve seen came from New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who used a Soviet analogy. While the post-insurrection openness to criticizing Trump may at first have looked like Glasnost, it was actually a Prague Spring, “a brief flowering of dissent and questioning of dogma quickly suppressed by a remorseless crackdown.”
Chait breaks the Party into three factions:
The heady predictions that the party would break free of the Trumpist grip already seem fanciful. If anybody is suffering repercussions for their response to Trump’s autogolpe, it is the Republicans who criticized it. Conservative Republicans are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. … Adam Kinzinger, another pro-impeachment Republican, is facing censure. The Michigan Republican member of the state board of canvassers, who broke with his party to certify the state’s election results, is losing his job as a result of his refusal to go along with Trump’s lie. Fox News is firing journalists associated with its election call that Biden won Arizona. …
The path of least resistance for the soft authoritarianism will be to oppose Trump’s conviction on technical grounds, and then hope he fades away quietly.
Least resistance. The sad thing is that the soft authoritarians could get their wish if they weren’t such cowards. They have the power to push Trump off the stage, if they would only use it. But they won’t.
McConnell, McCarthy, and the rest need to ask themselves where this going. Trump’s behavior is not going to improve. The domestic terrorist movement he has allied with isn’t going to stop. Next-generation Trumps like Greene aren’t going to tone it down. The soft authoritarians are tying themselves to people whose actions they can neither control nor predict.
This is how bad it’s gotten: Eric Cantor is the voice of reason. The GOP’s problems didn’t start with Trump, he writes. They started when Republican politicians started pandering to their base voters’ fantasies rather than telling them what is and isn’t true or possible.
For Cantor, the government shutdown of 2013 was a key moment. Ted Cruz and some other leaders told the base that the party could defund ObamaCare, if only its leaders fought hard enough. They couldn’t and didn’t, but pretending that they could put the nation through a pointless crisis. Here’s how Cantor sees the path forward:
In many ways, it is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. If the majority of Republican elected officials work together to confront the false narratives in our body politic — that the election was stolen (it wasn’t), that there is a QAnon-style conspiracy to uproot pedophiles at the heart of American government (there isn’t), that a Democratic-controlled government means the end of America (it doesn’t; it may produce worse policy, but the republic has survived 88 years of Democrats occupying the White House) — all Republicans will be better off. If instead most elected Republicans decide to protect themselves against a primary challenge through their silence or even their affirmation, then like the two prisoners acting only in their own interests, we will all be worse off.
Trump’s impeachment trial is a golden opportunity to start rooting out those false narratives. But for that to happen, Mitch McConnell will have to provide leadership. That seems unlikely.
Slate does a good job explaining why former officials can be impeached. It’s not even a close call.
Let’s start with the Constitution, which never directly addresses the question. Article I says that the House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments”. It limits the punishments for the convicted to “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States”, leaving any further punishment to the courts. Article II stipulates that convicted officials “shall be removed from office” after conviction, but it is silent about whether former officials can be disqualified from future office.
That’s all the guidance it gives. The implication of these sparse instructions is that people at the time of the founding already knew what impeachment meant. (Similarly, the Constitution also doesn’t define “Money” or “credit” when it gives Congress power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States”.)
What everyone would have known was how Great Brtain handled impeachments. (In Federalist #65, Alexander Hamilton said the Constitution’s notion of impeachment derived from Great Britain’s.) They also would have known how the already-existing state governments did it. Slate spells it out:
Indeed, the British impeachment that most informed the Framers’ thinking about the impeachment power was the impeachment of Warren Hastings for improprieties as the governor-general of Bengal. Hastings had been out of this office for two years before his impeachment by the House of Commons. Moreover, at least two states—Virginia and Delaware—had established that their impeachment power extended to former officers.
Also, Congress has faced this issue before, and resolved it during the Grant administration:
Congress has also expressly addressed this question and resolved it in favor of the original understanding. In 1876, the House drafted articles of impeachment against President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, but Belknap resigned before the House could vote on the articles. The House debated whether Belknap’s resignation deprived the House of jurisdiction. After the debate, the House voted to impeach Belknap, implicitly rejecting the argument that it lacked jurisdiction. The Senate also took up the issue and voted 37–29 that Belknap’s resignation did not deprive it of jurisdiction.
So the question has an obvious answer, for those who are willing to know it: Trying Trump after he has left office is entirely constitutional. Claiming it isn’t is just an excuse to let Trump off the hook without considering the evidence against him.
What the new president’s flurry of executive orders do and don’t do.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, all the issues facing the Biden administration have a background theme: proving democracy still works. Beating Trump at the ballot box and thwarting his attempted coup didn’t end the threat of authoritarianism in America. (That’s clear from the way Republicans are circling the wagons around Trump now, even after he launched an insurrection to try to hold on to power.) Most likely, Biden is going to wind up resembling one of two political leaders from the 1930s: Franklin Roosevelt, who held the line against a global wave authoritarianism by leading the US through a major transformation without abandoning democracy; or Fritz Von Papen, the German chancellor whose floundering induced President Hindenburg to bring Adolf Hitler into the government (in spite of Hitler having previously led an insurrection).
The best way to prove democracy still works is to get major legislation through Congress. We’ll see how that goes, but even if it works, it will take time. To his credit, though, Biden has grasped the need to demonstrate quickly that his election matters. The people voted, so things will change.
What he can do quickly is issue executive orders — 22 in his first week, as opposed to Trump’s four and Obama’s five. ABC News has listed 33.
This is a tricky business, because a government that runs by executive order is not a democracy, even if the executive was elected. So it’s important that Biden’s orders have three qualities: They need to be popular, so that he is seen to be speaking for the American people rather than dictating to them. (Maybe a few could be unpopular, but the broad sweep of his orders needs to garner public support.) They also need to effective, because orders that sound like something but turn out to be nothing will just erode trust in democracy even more.
But most of all they need to be legal, so that he’s not furthering the authoritarian drift of the last four years. That legality needs to be bulletproof, because the judicial branch is now full of Trump appointees who would be happy to find a reason to block Biden’s efforts. So he can’t appropriate money (as Trump did for his wall), or change laws.
He is even limited in the ways he can alter or revoke regulations, once an agency has officially announced them in the Federal Register. Congress has specified a procedure for promulgating new regulations, which may require official studies, reports, or public hearings — all of which take time. (Most of the Trump executive orders that got hung up in court suffered from failures of process.) That’s why many of Biden’s orders instruct some department or agency to begin a process, rather than implement some change immediately.
But that doesn’t mean the new president is powerless, as we’ve seen. Let’s take the Biden EOs by subject.
Executive orders can’t appropriate money; that’s what Biden’s Covid-relief plan in Congress is for. But the Trump administration often worked at cross purposes with itself: one department saying one thing, a different department something else, and the White House pushing some other point of view entirely, which might change from one day to the next. As a result, the country was denied something only the federal government is in a position to provide: a coherent plan for moving forward, based on the kind of data only the federal government is in a position to collect.
The US is rejoining the World Health Organization. Quitting it was one of Trump’s dumber ideas, which this letter undoes.
Mask-wearing and social distancing have been mandated in federal buildings.
to protect the Federal workforce and individuals interacting with the Federal workforce, and to ensure the continuity of Government services and activities, on-duty or on-site Federal employees, on-site Federal contractors, and other individuals in Federal buildings and on Federal lands should all wear masks, maintain physical distance, and adhere to other public health measures, as provided in CDC guidelines.
A separate order mandates masks in airports, airplanes, trains, intercity buses, ferries, and all other forms of public transportation. This takes the onus off private companies like the airlines, who can now tell recalcitrant customers: “We may not like it either, but it’s not our call. Those are the rules.”
School reopening. The legislation Biden has proposed would appropriate money to pay the expenses associated with schools reopening safely, something he can’t do by himself. But he has ordered his administration to produce a single coherent set of guidelines and practices for safe in-person schooling.
Creating a White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator. This sounds a lot like what Mike Pence was supposed to be doing in the Trump administration. We can hope that Biden’s team — a Coordinator (Jeff Zients) who knows how government works and a Deputy Coordinator (Vivek Murthy) who knows public health — will be allowed to do their jobs without so much political interference.
OSHA will make guidelines for Covid-safe workplaces.
A Pandemic Testing Board will produce and coordinate a national strategy for Covid testing.
The government will also take responsibility for organizing the supply chain of material needed to fight the pandemic, invoking the Defense Production Act as necessary. There will be a plan for helping local hospitals, including using the National Guard where appropriate.
The US rejoins the Paris Climate Agreement. By itself, this announcement doesn’t change US greenhouse gas emissions. But it is a powerful symbolic step.
The permit to construct the Keystone XL Pipeline is revoked. This is part of a long order with many parts. It also put a halt on oil leases in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. Trump had announced a leasing program last August; a lease sale was held on January 6; and the first leases were announced publicly on Trump’s last day in office.
It’s not clear how much of that Biden can undo. He can certainly prevent any new leases. Whether he can undo the ones already granted probably depends on how serious the “legal deficiencies” in Trump’s program are.
In light of the alleged legal deficiencies underlying the program, including the inadequacy of the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Secretary of the Interior shall, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, place a temporary moratorium on all activities of the Federal Government relating to the implementation of the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program, as established by the Record of Decision signed August 17, 2020, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Secretary shall review the program and, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, conduct a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.
Yale School of the Environment website E360 outlines the difficulties Biden faces. Basically, it’s the same problem anybody might run into: Once the government signs a contract, it’s hard to back out.
The same order instructs departments to examine all Trump-era environmental regulations and see what can be rolled back. It mentions specifically Trump’s shrinking of several national monuments, including Bears Ears; allowing gas-drilling and gas-transporting companies to leak more methane; rolling back automobile fuel-economy standards; and rolling back energy standards on new appliances. (Looking at all those actions in one list makes me realize just what a force for evil the Trump administration was.)
Electric vehicles. In the comments he made Monday on his “Buy American” executive order, Biden announced his intention to phase fossil-fuel-burning vehicles out of the federal fleet. That provision didn’t actually appear until “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” came out on Wednesday.
The plan shall aim to use, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, all available procurement authorities to achieve or facilitate … clean and zero-emission vehicles for Federal, State, local, and Tribal government fleets, including vehicles of the United States Postal Service.
This is both a great idea and a big deal.
It’s a great idea because much of what the federal fleet does is a perfect job for electric vehicles. Think postal trucks, for example (225,000 of them): They don’t take long trips that would expose EVs’ range problems, and they return to the same depots every night, so they’re not going to get stranded somewhere in Montana, far from any charging station.
It’s a big deal because the federal fleet is huge: 645,000 vehicles, of which only 3,215 were electric as of last July. Knowing that those purchases are coming would put a floor under the US electric vehicle industry, creating economies of scale that would make EVs more affordable for the general public.
This order is also a sweeping policy statement whose full implications are hard to predict. In general, the US pledges to use its international influence to fight climate change rather than sabotage that fight, as the Trump administration had been doing.
It’s hard to know whether to post this under climate or public health, but Biden also has elevated the role of science in this administration by establishing a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, similar to the existing Council of Economic Advisors.
The easiest and most obviously legal changes Biden can make is to undo Trump’s executive orders, many of which were legally shaky to begin with.
Ending the Muslim ban. Probably the most egregiously bad of Trump’s immigration executive orders was his Muslim ban, which required several iterations even to become legal. Biden’s rescinding order calls the ban “a stain on our national conscience”, “inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all”, and “a moral blight that has dulled the power of our example the world over”.
He promises “a rigorous, individualized vetting system” for people applying to come to the US, and orders US embassies “resume visa processing in a manner consistent with the revocation of the Executive Order and Proclamations specified in section 1 of this proclamation”.
The countries that had been subject to the ban were: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, and Tanzania.
DACA deportations halted (maybe). By itself, Biden’s executive order on DACA doesn’t appear to do much; it simply instructs DHS to “take all actions [deemed legal and appropriate] to preserve and fortify DACA”. Trump frequently used such language to appear to be doing something when he really wasn’t.
But Biden’s order led to a memo from the acting secretary of DHS ordering “a 100-day pause on certain removals”. The Texas attorney general filed suit to invalidate the 100-day pause, which led to a temporary restraining order from a Trump-appointed judge. It’s not clear how this will play out.
The phony border emergency is over. When Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, even after he forced a government shutdown, he declared a state of emergency and moved funds from the Defense budget into wall construction. Congress passed a resolution canceling the emergency, but Trump vetoed it and Congress was unable to muster the 2/3 vote to override his veto. In effect, this meant that the President plus 1/3 of one house of Congress can appropriate money.
Biden has terminated the emergency and paused border-wall construction while his administration looks into legal options for canceling the existing construction contracts.
[B]uilding a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security. … It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.
Trump’s Executive Order 13768 is rescinded. The EO-13768 tried to do a variety of things. It restricted “sanctuary cities” from getting certain kinds of federal grants; increased the number of immigrants defined as “priorities for removal”; attempted to raise public ire against undocumented immigrants by publishing a weekly list of crimes they had committed; and tried to deputize local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. A lot of that had already been blocked by the courts, but Biden’s order ends it.
Liberian refugees can stay a while longer. In 1991, President Bush the First granted temporary protected status to refugees form the Liberian civil war. (In this context, it’s worth noting the historical connection between the US and Liberia, a country established by freed American slaves.) Their legal situation has been complicated ever since, and then Trump targeted them for repatriation in 2018. Various obstacles have prevented their expulsion, which Biden has now blocked.
The census will count undocumented immigrants. Trump tried to change the census so that the population figures used to apportion representation in the House of Representatives (and consequently, electoral votes of the states) would only count US citizens and documented immigrants, rather than all inhabitants. This was counter to the 14th Amendment:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
At no point since our Nation’s Founding has a person’s immigration status alone served as a basis for excluding that person from the total population count used in apportionment. … [T]he Secretary [of Commerce] shall report the tabulation of total population by State that reflects the whole number of persons whose usual residence was in each State as of the designated census date in section 141(a) of title 13, United States Code, without regard to immigration status.
Phasing out federal contracts with private prisons. The order is self-explanatory:
The Attorney General shall not renew Department of Justice contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities, as consistent with applicable law.
This is not an explicitly racial issue, but is deeply intertwined with mass incarceration of people of color. NPR interviews the ACLU’s David Fathi:
[T]he order to the Justice Department to end its contracts with private prisons is a very important step. It will not by itself end mass incarceration, but it will curb an industry that has a financial interest in perpetuating mass incarceration.
Letting these contracts run to the end of their term will take years, and the order doesn’t apply to the private prisons holding detained immigrants. Reportedly, Biden is considering such an order, but some sources don’t expect it to happen. I’ll take a wild guess about the obstacle: So many immigrants are detained that no existing federal facilities can hold them, and Biden still doesn’t know exactly how many such immigrants he wants to continue detaining. Releasing just one guy who turns out to be dangerous — think Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton — could be a political disaster.
The “gag rule” is on its way out. Current law doesn’t allow federal money to pay for abortions or to be used in family-planning clinics that also perform abortions. Biden can’t change that by himself. But HHS regulations go further, and stipulate that a federally-funded family planning clinic can’t even tell a woman how to get an abortion or refer her to a clinic that does them. Similarly, regulations deny federal funding abroad to organizations that have anything to do with abortion, even if they use non-US-federal money to do those things.
To the extent those policies are enshrined in regulations, Biden can just ask the regulating agencies to review their policies and start a regulation-altering process. To the extent he can order more than that directly, he is.
Trump’s order banning diversity training is revoked. In September, Trump issued an executive order that labeled diversity training — basically, any program that mentions “white privilege” or “male privilege” — as “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating”, and banned federal agencies and contractors from spending money on it. Biden’s order rescinds Trump’s order.
The same order revokes Trump’s order establishing his 1776 Commission, which produced a very shoddy report telling a whitewashed story of American history in which racism barely figures, and “progressivism” is covered in the same chapter as fascism and communism. Trump had hoped that report would form the center of an American history curriculum counteracting the NYT’s 1619 Project. No federal money will now go towards that purpose, though of course the report exists and can still be adopted by local school districts that want to propagandize their children.
The order includes more abstract things that could turn out to be important, like this policy statement.
Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government. Because advancing equity requires a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making processes, executive departments and agencies (agencies) must recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.
So we can hope that we’ve seen the last of roomfuls of white men discussing women’s health or racial discrimination.
Transgender troops can serve in the military again.
Therefore, it shall be the policy of the United States to ensure that all transgender individuals who wish to serve in the United States military and can meet the appropriate standards shall be able to do so openly and free from discrimination.
The order instructs the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security (which covers the Coast Guard) to “immediately prohibit involuntary separations, discharges, and denials of reenlistment or continuation of service on the basis of gender identity or under circumstances relating to their gender identity”. People already drummed out of service will have their service records “corrected”, presumably to eliminate any less-than-honorable discharge associated with their gender identity.
Where appropriate, the department concerned shall offer such individuals an opportunity to rejoin the military should they wish to do so and meet the current entry standards.
A different order denounces discrimination on the basis of gender identification or sexual orientation and instructs all agencies to review their regulations with that in mind, but it’s not clear what the practical effects will be.
Respecting tribal sovereignty. This is more of a policy-and-process announcement than an immediate change. It should give Native American tribes more weight when they protest against actions (like the Keystone XL pipeline) that threaten the environment on tribal lands.
It is a priority of my Administration to make respect for Tribal sovereignty and self-governance, commitment to fulfilling Federal trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal Nations, and regular, meaningful, and robust consultation with Tribal Nations cornerstones of Federal Indian policy. The United States has made solemn promises to Tribal Nations for more than two centuries. Honoring those commitments is particularly vital now, as our Nation faces crises related to health, the economy, racial justice, and climate change — all of which disproportionately harm Native Americans.
Another order freezes changes to federal regulations that had not been finalized by the end of the Trump administration, and advises departments to delay implementation of changes that got in under the wire for 60 days, so that they can be reviewed.
Biden extended a Trump order to stop collecting on federal student loans and temporarily stop charging interest on the outstanding balance.
John O’Hara was one of those mid-century American novelists who soared to fame and acclaim. But like a supernova his flame seems to have burnt out. In his day he was as controversial as he was famous. His defenders like John Updike compared him to Chekhovand wag Fran Lebowitz tagged him “The real F. Scott Fitzgerald.” But many critics dismissed him as a hack turning out sensationalized pot boilers for a low brow audience. O’Hara himself said simply, “Being a cheap, ordinary guy, I have an instinct for what an ordinary guy likes.”
Of course O’Hara never really considered himself neither cheap nor ordinary. He spent a life time chaffing against the social slights suffered as an outsideron the edge of social respectabilityand resenting that his father never sent him to Yale. All of this became grist for his short storiesand novels, but also earned him a well-deserved reputation as a needy social climber.
O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1905. The town, 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, was in the heart of the state’s coal country on the banks of the Schuylkill River. The river also provided power for a textile industry that included the Phillips Van Heusen Company of shirt fame. The mines and textile mills generated enough local nabobs to populate mansions in a swanky part of the otherwise grimy city. O’Hara’s physicianfather grew rich enough to live there. But the O’Hara’s, Irish Catholics, were excluded from polite society tightly guarded by a WASP elite. Both father and son bitterly resented it.
John’s father imbued him with the idea that if he went to Yale, it would be the ticket to respectability and acceptanceboth yearned for. In pursuit of that dream his father had high academic expectations for his son and little tolerance for not meeting them. He was sent to Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York where he was named class poet but was otherwise a lackluster student. To teach the boy a lesson of what life would be like without college, his dad sent him to work in the steel mills over summer breaks. John hated the humiliation even more than the back breaking labor.
His disappointed father felt he had not earned the right to attend Yale and refused to send him. Moreover when the elder man died shortly after John’s graduation and he left no provision in his willfor his education. It was a bitter blow from which he literally never recovered, spending the rest of his life pining for Yale and all it could have brought him.
Rather than attend a lesser school which he might be able to work his way through, O’Hara went to work as a reporter on the local Pottstown paper. Among his assignments was covering the PottsvilleMaroons, the town’s short-lived entry into the infant National Football League.
But he soon threw even that up, going, as he described it, “on the bum. I traveled out West, worked on a steamer, took a job in an amusement park.” Great experience for a writer, but for him a constant reminder that he had been “cheated” of a better life.
Eventually O’Hara drifted to New York City determined to become a writer. He took a cheap room and began writing. He supported himself with book and film reviews while concentrating on short stories. In 1928 the first of those stories appeared in the still young New Yorker. He would soon become a fixture in its pages, publishing more than 200 stories in the magazine over the next decades. The stories featured a keen eye for the detailsof life and sharp, believable dialogue. They were often set in a thinly veiled version of Pottsville named Gibbsville and chronicled the lives and foibles of both the local elite and those who aspired to crash their party.
The stories were highly regarded and established O’Hara’s reputation. They were even said to have established the New Yorker style of short story. Updike and other future contributors like Saul Bellow were directly in his debt.
In 1934 O’Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra which he had been working on for years. The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English, the owner of the Gibbsville Cadillac dealership and a younger member of the WASP social clique, destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide. O’Hara never gives any obvious cause or explanation for his behavior, which is apparently predestined by his character. The novel was a critical—mostly—and popular success. No less than Ernest Hemingway enthused, “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra.” On the other hand Sinclair Lewis castigated the book as vulgar for it oblique but frank sexual episodes.
What is left of O’Hara’s literary reputation today rests on the short stories and this first novel. In 1998, long after the literary establishment had turned on O’Hara, Modern Library ranked Appointment in Samarra 22nd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. As a result at least one critic said its placement on the list “was used to ridicule the entire project.” Harsh.
If contemporary critics thought O’Hara’s first book was vulgar, they hadn’t seen anything yet. BUtterfield 8 was based on a real life juicy scandal of speakeasy days when the dead body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull was found drown on Long Beach in Long Island. She was shown to be a goodtime girlof easy virtue who drank and partied too much. Her back story even included a childhood molestation by a former mayor of Boston. O’Hara made her Gloria Wandrous and put her in a mutually destructive an obsessive relationship with—you guessed it—a wealthy WASP. A classic O’Hara story, according to one reviewer, in which he “He plumbs the fault lines of society where the slumming rich meet with the aspiring poor.” Of course the book had plenty of juicy sex.
It is best known now for the 1960 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey which took considerable liberties from the book—including resetting it in contemporary New York. But like the novel, it sizzled with sex and won Taylor an Academy Award as Best Actress.
In 1940 O’Hara stitched together a popular series of stories that he ran in the New Yorker about a second rate nightclub entertainer in Chicago, a certified heel and louse, with big ambitions. Written in the form a series of letters from Joey to his much more successful pal Ted, Pal Joey was more character study than story.
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart inspired by the success of Porgy and Bess, which was based on a gritty novel, were on the lookout for darker, more serious material when they came on O’Hara’s book. They enlisted the author to write the script for a new kind of musical. The show Pal Joey opened to acclaim in 1940, just months after the book hit the stores with Gene Kelly in a star making turn in the lead. The show featured two great American standards, If They Ask Me, I Could Write a Book and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered. It became the third longest running show of Rodgers and Hart’s long collaboration. But it was also controversial. Radioeffectively banned playing songs from the show through most of the 1940’s because of their frank lyrics. It was considered un-filmable in a Hollywood built on sunny, optimisticmusicals.
It was not until 17 years later that Pal Joey finally made it to the screen in an adaptation staring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak and featuring additional Rodgers and Hart songs cribbed from other shows, including My Funny Valentine. The play, now considered a landmark classic, has been revived several times on Broadway and in London.
During World War II O’Hara returned to journalism. He was a war correspondent in the Pacific Theater, although he would have preferred a gentleman’s commission like the graduates of Ivy League colleges received—or maybe an OSS posting like so many old Yalies.
After the war he returned to New York more confident in his own greatness as a writer on one hand and more than ever resentful of what he believed was the back hand snubbing by the snooty aristocrats of publishing and critical circles. The more wounded he was, the harder he tried to become one of them. He aped their manners, style of dress, and distinctive speech patterns. He studied and memorized trivia and minutia about the Ivy schools and even the elite prep schools that fed them. He stalked social gatherings.
But in perfect imitation of the self destructive social climbers of his fiction, O’Hara only further alienated the closed club he yearned to join. Then he would get belligerent. A leading critic referred to him simply as “a well known lout.” The harder he tried, the harder the critics—most of them—got on his work.
He continued to churn out novels—O’Hara was nothing if not prolific—but most did not catch on. Finally in 1955, the same year his reputation was somewhat buoyed by the release of the film version of Pal Joey, he won a highly controversial National Book Award for Ten North Fredrick, the story of Joe Chapin, an ambitious man who yearns to become President and his long suffering patrician wife, two rebellious children, and mistress. The book was made into a film in 1958 starring Gary Cooper.
O’Hara had one more moderate success as a novelist before critics started simply ignoring his work and the public stopped buying. In From the Terrace he painted a picture of a young lawyer from a family of small city aristocrats. His mother has been driven to drink by a neglectful and distant father. His wife is socially ambitious, self-pitying, and unfaithful. The man finds solace with a young, tenderhearted exotic—read Jewish—do-gooder in the city. O’Hara himself wrote the screenplay for the 1960 film version starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Ina Balin.
Probably contributing to O’Hara’s fading reputation as a novelist was his decision to become weekly book columnist for the Trenton Times-Advertiser, and a biweekly column, Appointment with O’Hara, for Collier’s magazine. In both venues he proved himself to be, “simultaneously embarrassing and infuriating in his vaingloriousness, vindictiveness, and general bellicosity.” He bemoaned never receiving any academic honors, despite his firm conviction that he was the greatest living American Novelist. He openly invited Yale to finally recognize his genius. Yale considered it groveling and did not deign to respond.
But he still yearned for vindication. Privately, he told friends that he expected to be the next American recipient of the Nobel Prize. He wrote to his daughter “I really think I will get it,” and “I want the Nobel prize... so bad I can taste it.” It was not to be. The next American to win the prize for literature was John Steinbeck in 1962. He could barely conceal his disappointment.
When he took this act to a broader stage as a nationally syndicated columnist based at Newsday in 1964, O’Hara showed himself to be not just a conservative, but a vicious reactionary. Many young writers had suffered the stings of class prejudice. Most of them became liberals, even radicals. Not O’Hara. Just as he assumed the proper suites and accents of the WASP elite, so did he assume what he believed were the politics of the very richest barons of theboardroom and denizens of the old school clubs.
In his first Newsday column O’Hara proclaimed his willingness to spit in the eye of his critics: “Let’s get off to a really bad start.” He endorsed Barry Goldwater for President claiming that he spoke for the stolid fans of Lawrence Welk and blaming the downfall of the country on those who loved the jazz of Black musicians like Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie. Then he railed at Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize. It was downhill from there, week by week more antagonistic and outrageous. Papers started dropping the syndicated feature. In 53 weeks Newsday canceled the column.
The super rich graduates of his beloved Yale might have nodded approval, but the literary establishment was notoriously liberal. The columns were like thumbs in their eyes. O’Hara had successfully poisoned the well.
O’Hara continued publishing to diminishing success. The last novel published during his life time was The Ewings in 1970. A sequel to that novel more came out posthumously. Neither was successful.
O’Hara died in Princeton, New Jersey, his longtime home, on April 13, 1970 at the age of 65. Just to make sure that everyone knew just who he was, he had this inscription carved on his headstone, “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” The final hubris of Pal Johnny.
Today is National Dark Chocolate Day. Oh no! I have no dark chocolate in the house! I must go out and buy some!
But do people actually go out and buy ice cream on National Ice Cream Day (July 18), or pickles on National Pickle Day (November 14), or avocados on National Avocado Day (July 31)? According to the above article, they do.
(Right now, my cats are trying to convince me that National Cat Day is every day, and that International Cat Day (August 8) is also every day and they get double treats).
Every morning, my husband announces the National Day of the day, which is how I know that today is National Dark Chocolate Day (today). I don't really care if I'm being sold to; I just have fun hearing how ludicrous some of the candidates can be.
I'm not sure what behavior the keepers of the National Day Calendar are trying to support with National Grab Some Nuts Day (August 3), however.
At the end of staff meetings in a job I used to have, we used to list things we liked and didn’t about our day, as well as what we called “signs of the spirit,” moments when things just felt right, when things fell into place unexpectedly, or when it felt like we were experiencing grace.
How have you experienced “signs of the spirit?”
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