If I were King I'd reduce taxes to the barest minimum

From an email from a disgruntled former reader (I won't post the whole thing - it's too long):

I first started reading your blog about 6 months ago. I found you on a Google search when you were criticizing the GOP. I agreed with everything that you said and I thought I had found another moderate Republican. Then you wrote something about "abortion is murder" and I left a comment which you ignored. That's why I'm sending an email instead.

I enjoy your writing but you are full of contradictions. Your writing is usually sincere but sometimes I think you are pandering to the Christians who read your blog. You don't criticize gays but you condemn abortion and call liberals "commies." You seem to be a kind and caring person but then you oppose healthcare reform and welfare for the less fortunate etc, etc, etc.

I replied because it was a polite email. Here's what I wrote:

Firstly I don't ignore comments. I read all comments with pleasure (mostly) and I remember what you wrote.

You said something disparaging about religious Southerners and I chose not to answer it because it would have been tedious to explain the obvious but I will do so now since you have taken the time to write such a long email.

I do criticize some - not all - gays. I don't like their leftist/collectivist group identity politics. I also don't like the "urban gay lifestyle" of promiscuity and abuse of drugs and booze. But sodomy is not on a par with abortion. Sodomy may be a sin but it is not an unforgivable son like murder. And abortion is murder. Maybe moralists are right that sodomy is bad for society but it still does not endanger anyone's basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but abortion is a complete denial of the most fundamental right: the right to life. It destroys human life. That's called murder.

I'm not saying that I want to throw a woman in jail because she had a D & C due to danger to her own health. But calling a spade a spade is essential if you want to dissuade women from having abortions, as I do. Abortion has to be stigmatized if you want to change hearts and minds about it. And I would prefer to change hearts and minds culturally through education rather than politically by bullying.

Now, I'm not a Christian and Christian conservatives irritate me at times - especially the sanctimonious types but they are no worse than the insufferably smug and self-righteous Marxists of the Church of the Watermelons. I'm not politically naïve. I agree with conservative Christians on 80% of the issues but disagree with the commies 99.9% of the time. So, tell me: who are my natural political allies?

And yes, I like using the word "commie" for people who believe in any form of "collectivism" (which is basically a euphemism for communism) and who stupidly chose to ignore the wisdom of our Founding Fathers - oops - I mean founding dead white "male parental guardians" - who envisaged a form of government based on the individual sovereignty, liberty and self-determination with which God has endowed us.

BTW I don't oppose health-care reform or welfare for the less fortunate. I would like to see people who cannot afford insurance or who have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own get help. I would prefer that that help come from private charities but I'm easy-going enough to not mind paying some taxes for government to provide a safety net in emergencies.

The operative phrases here are "through no fault of their own" and "in emergencies" and the help should only be temporary. The fact is that this sort of help is best provided by private charities who can assess individual needs personally on a case by case basis whereas government assesses cases by some sort of impersonal collectivist classification and more than often makes a mess of it.

As for the rest of your email: you're asking for my political philosophy. That's a book not an email reply. But I'll answer it simply by saying, "If I were King...."

If I were King, I would do only one thing. I'd put the Federal government on a strict diet - in fact a starvation diet - by using every legal means possible to reduce taxes and limit Congress, as our Founding Fathers intended, to raising revenue for national defense and foreign policy and for the regulation of interstate commerce. Everything else can quite easily be handled by the State, county and municipal governments and, if you don't like what's happening in your hood, move to another. Stick with that and we've solved 99.9% of all the ills that our society currently has.

Our treat this weekend

Up till now the finest dining experience in our town was a restaurant owned by husband and wife but last month we took friends to eat there and the owners seem to have lost interest and the food had really deteriorated. Now we discover that they are selling up and moving back to Portland. Haute cuisine will now be in short supply.

So I was very pleased to hear about a five-course wine-tasting dinner at the local Indian casino and we just made reservations for it. The casino has one of the finest restaurants in town and a tenant in one of my apartments is a sous chef there.

The featured wines are all from Hinman Winery which is in the Rogue Valley just southeast of us. The Rogue Valley was actually the first wine-producing region in the West, long before Napa valley in California.

First Course: warm roasted wild duck salad with Pinot Gris.

Second course: local bay clams with Voignier.

Third course: grilled lamb chops in Sauce Paloise with two wines, a Pinto Noir and a Syrah.

Fourth course: cherry wood smoked buffalo prime rib with Cabernet Sauvignon.

Fifth course: Italian gelato with strawberries poached in Muscat with a Muscat dessert wine.

All for $65 per person. My tummy's rumbling as I think about it. So far only 13 of the 50 places have been reserved. We invited some friends but they declined as they don't eat duck, lamb or buffalo. Oh well, de gustibus non est disputandum.

Populism versus the bourgeoisie

Rupert made this comment under my post, The Perils of 'Populist Chic':

Patrick, I do not understand from this post what you mean by populism or why it is objectionable.

It seems to me you are saying that some people who call themselves conservative are populist (and therefore bad), while some are non-populist or anti-populist (and therefore good). If you could give some examples and explain what's behind the labels, it would help me understand.

I also don't understand what is admirable about William F. Buckley and what is terrible about Sarah Palin. I do not have strong feelings about these people, but I'd like to understand why they are regarded so differently and what that has to do with whether they are populist.

Well, I answered the last bit: "I also don't understand what is admirable about William F. Buckley and what is terrible about Sarah Palin" by wondering if Rupert was too young to understand the importance of Buckley and the relative insignificance of Palin. But I left the difficult first part till last.

Okay, I'll start with some generally accepted definitions of populism:

One of the latest of these is the definition by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell who, in their volume Twenty-First Century Populism, define populism as "an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice."

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Populists are seen by some politicians as a largely democratic and positive force in society, even while a wing of scholarship in political science contends that populist mass movements are irrational and introduce instability into the political process.

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It is believed by some that populist movements can be precursors for, or building blocks for, fascist movements. Conspiracist scapegoating employed by various populist movements can create "a seedbed for fascism." National socialist populism interacted with and facilitated fascism in interwar Germany. In this case, distressed middle–class populists during the pre-Nazi Weimar period mobilized their anger at government and big business. The Nazis "parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism." According to Fritzsche:

The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle–class constituents and at the same time advocated a strong and resolutely anti-Marxist mobilization....Against "unnaturally" divisive parties and querulous organized interest groups, National Socialists cast themselves as representatives of the commonwealth, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public....[b]reaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least rhetorically the populist ideal of the people’s community...

Populism has been a common political phenomenon throughout history. Spartacus could be considered a famous example of a populist leader of ancient times through his slave rebellion against the rulers of Ancient Rome. In fact, such leaders of the Roman Republic as Gaius Marius, Julius Caesar, and Caesar Augustus were called populares, as all used referendums to go over the Roman Senate's head and establish the laws that they saw fit.

And we saw where that led: a dictatorship, the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Caesars' and the Empire. We've seen how, in modern Europe, populism gave rise to the French Revolution and all its montrous offspring: Communism, Fascism and National Socialism. And Populism has long been a political force in South America:

Populism has been an important force in Latin American political history. In Latin America, many charismatic leaders have emerged since the 20th century. Populism in Latin America has been traced by some to concepts taken from Perón's Third Position. Populist practitioners in Latin America usually adapt politically to the prevailing mood of the nation, moving within the ideological spectrum from left to right many times during their political lives. Latin American countries have not always had a clear and consistent political ideology under populism. Most of these countries cannot be as clearly and easily divided between liberals and conservatives, as in the United States, or between social-democrats and Christian-democrats as in European countries. Nevertheless, the more recent pattern that has emerged in Latin American populists has been decidedly socialist populism that appeals to masses of poor by promising redistributive policies and state control of the nation's energy resources.

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Often adapting a nationalist vocabulary and rhetorically convincing, populism was used to appeal to broad masses while remaining ideologically ambivalent. Notwithstanding, there have been notable exceptions. 21st Century Latin-American populist leaders have had a decidedly socialist bent.

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The US has intervened in Latin American governments on many occasions where populism has threatened its interests: the interventions in Guatemala, when the populist Arbenz government was overthrown by a coup backed by the American company United Fruit and the American ambassador in 1954, and Augusto Pinochet's Chilean coup in 1973 are just two cases of American intervention. Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government in Nicaragua was also viewed as a threat to US foreign policy during the Cold War, leading the United States to place an embargo on trade with the Sandinista's Soviet-sponsored regime in 1985 as well as supporting anti-Sandinista rebels.

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Populism has nevertheless remained a significant force in Latin America. Populism has recently been re-appearing on the left with promises of far-reaching socialist changes as seen in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.

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In the 21st century, the large numbers of voters in extreme poverty in Latin America have remained a bastion of support for new populist candidates. By early 2008 governments with varying forms of populist governments with some form of left leaning social democratic or democratic socialist platform had come to dominate virtually all Latin American nations with the exceptions of Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico. This political shift includes both more developed Nations such as Brazil with its ruling Workers' Party, Argentina's Front for Victory and the Socialist Party of Chile Populist candidates have been defeated in middle-income countries such as Mexico, in part by comparing them to Venezuela's controversial Hugo Chavez, whose socialist policies have been used to scare the middle class.

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Wherever governments in Latin America maintain high rates of poverty and yet support unpopular privatizations and more orthodox economic policies without quickly delivering gains to enough people, they will continue to come under pressure from populist politicians who accuse them of focusing on securing more benefits for the upper and upper-middle classes rather than the people as represented by those in poverty and extreme poverty, and for being allied to foreign and business interests.

Meanwhile in the USA:

[T]here was the Greenback Party, the Progressive Party of 1912 led by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party of 1924 led by Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and the Share Our Wealth movement of Huey Long in 1933-35.

George Wallace, Four-Term Governor of Alabama, led a populist movement that carried five states and won 13.5% of the popular vote in the 1968 presidential election. Campaigning against intellectuals and liberal reformers, Wallace gained a large share of the white working class vote in Democratic primaries in 1972.

Populism continues to be a force in modern U.S. politics, especially in the 1992 and 1996 third-party presidential campaigns of billionaire Ross Perot. The 1996, 2000, 2004, and the 2008 presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader had a strong populist cast. The 2004 campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton also had populist elements. The 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has been described by many (and by himself) as a "one economic community, one commonwealth" populist. In the 2008 presidential elections Governor Mike Huckabee had an economic populist message supporting Main Street America and supporting the Fairtax.

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Over time, there have been several versions of a Populist Party in the United States, inspired by the People's Party of the 1890s. This was the party of the early U.S. populist movement in which millions of farmers and other working people successfully enacted their anti-trust agenda.

In 1984, the Populist Party name was revived by Willis Carto, and was used in 1988 as a vehicle for the presidential campaign of former Ku Klux Klan leader, and later member of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, David Duke. Right-wing Patriot movement organizer Bo Gritz was briefly Duke's running mate. This maligned incarnation of Populism was widely regarded as a vehicle for white supremacist recruitment. In this instance, populism was maligned using a definition of "the people" which was not the prevailing definition.

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In 1995, the Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA) was organized after the populist presidential campaign of Ross Perot in 1992. In the year 2000, an intense fight for the presidential nomination made Patrick J. Buchanan the RPUSA standard-bearer. As result of his nomination ans party candidate there were many party splits, no only from Buchanan supporters after he left the party but also moderates, progressivists and libertarians around Jesse Ventura who refused to collaborate with the Buchanan candidacy. Since then the party's fortunes have markedly declined.

The reason that I titled this post "Populism versus the bourgeoisie" is because it helps me to define what I think of populism. Populism, by its very nature, can only achieve power in democratic societies. Obviously populism was not viable under aristocracies and monarchies. Thus I define populism as democratic mob rule and the opposite of republican bourgeoisism (which is an awkward word but I can't think of a better one right now.)

Our Founding Fathers were bourgeois. They did not envisage a democracy - which they equated with mob rule. At the founding of our republic, most states allowed only landowners (the bourgeoisie) to vote. Being a landowner is one definition of bourgeois. Here are some others:

Historically, the bourgeoisie were a social class of people, characterised by their ownership of capital and the related culture. They were a part of the middle or merchant classes of European feudalism, where their power came from employment, education, and wealth, as distinguished from those whose power came from being born into an aristocratic family of land owners. The bourgeoisie emerged from late feudal and early modern towns, through the control of long distance trade and petty manufacture.

In contemporary capitalist societies, the term bourgeoisie is often used as a metaphor for the rich or influential or their lifestyle and values.

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The term bourgeoisie has been widely used as an approximate equivalent of upper class under capitalism. The word also evolved to mean merchants and traders, and until the 19th century was mostly synonymous with the middle class (persons in the broad socioeconomic spectrum between nobility and peasants or proletarians). As the power and wealth of the nobility faded in the second half of the 19th century, and that of the merchant and commercial classes came to be dominant, the bourgeoisie emerged, by definition, as the replacement of the deposed nobility and the new ruling class.

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Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class which owns the means of production in a capitalist society. As such, the core of the modern bourgeosie is industrial bourgeosie, which obtains income by hiring workers to put in motion their capital, which is to say, their means of production - machines, tools, raw material, etc. Besides that, other bourgeois sectors also exist, notedly the commercial bourgeoisie, that earns income from commercial activities such as the buying and selling of commodities, wares, and services.

So, to me, populism is the opposite of bourgeoisism. I'm one of those "elitist" snobs who detests the 17th Amendment and rues the day that the President was elected by a popular vote. I prefer that "landowners" and businessmen (yep - like me) make those decisions. I do not want Glenn Beck and a bunch of semi-literate opportunist talk-show pundits telling what to think or making decisions for me.

Buckley saved the GOP from the populism of the John Birch Society (with which our current populists, like Beck, have a lot in common.) To me the GOP was the bourgeois party, the party of the independent-minded, self-reliant, responsible middle class, not the Democratic Plantation Party of slaves and their pseudo-aristocratic slave-owners.

Populism to me means following (and pandering to) the lowest common denominator instead of inspiring people to be better than their base instincts. But I will concede that American populism has achieved some good in the USA. It's a mixed bag but I'd rather put my money on the cautious and conservative middle-class than the radically revanchist populists.

Populism has been the ideology behind the Plantation Party since William Jennings Bryan.

Sunday afternoon drive drama

After lunch today Andy and I (Chas is in Maine visiting his sick mother) headed out to explore the parts of our county that we have not yet seen.

Coos County, at 1,600 square miles, is bigger than Rhode Island at 1,000 square miles and only a few miles smaller than Delaware at 1,900. But the Coos population is only 60,000 compared with Rhode Island's population of over a million and Delaware's of 3.5 million (same as the whole of Oregon.) Two-thirds of our county's population lives in the five towns of the Bay Area. So large tracts of our county are unpopulated (BLM and timber company forest) or very sparsely populated (farms.)

Well, we were tooling along down a small lane when we saw up ahead what appeared to be a man lying on the ground under an ATV (dune-buggy.) From afar it looked like he was working under the vehicle but as we got closer, we saw that he was lying face down with the ATV pinning him down. We jumped out of our vehicle and ran to him and, with much huffing and puffing (on my part - Andy's nearly half my age and strong as an ox) and gas leaking everywhere, we lifted the ATV off him.

The guy was about my age so I wanted to make sure that he had not been injured. I asked if he was hurt and should I call 911. He said no; he was fine. Apparently he had been trying to drive the ATV up a ramp onto the back of his truck when it tilted over and trapped him. He thanked us and we drove away. Only afterwards did I wonder how long he had been trapped there before we serendipitously drove by.

After that all we saw was a few guys on a bridge fishing in a river for coho salmon and lots of cows, sheep and horses.

Today's naked redneck chick blog post: The Hobbit hybrids of Robin's Wood

Our regular-sized hens lay more eggs than our bantams but they are not as street-smart as the bantams. Also the bantams can fly from danger but the hens can only run rather awkwardly. As a result we lose more regular-sized hens to predators than bantams. Also the bantams are Old English Game fowl and are fierce and brave compared with the rather timid and ditzy regular-sized hens.

So this year we tried an experiment: cross-breed Old English Game-cocks with Turandot, a Cochin hen, who is larger than the bantams but small enough for the Game-cocks to mount her. Turandot is a great brooder and will sit on any eggs you give her. She once hatched a brood of quails and, this past spring, she hatched her first four Cochin/Game-cock hybrids: two roosters and two hens. Last week Turandot hatched nine new hybrids.

Here's an Old English Game-cock:





















Here's a Cochin with it's distinctive feathered feet:


















And here's the very regal Turandot with seven of her nine new chicks worshiping the Great Mother Hen (the other two are snuggled under her):


















Here are the four original Hobbits Turanditto and Freezerburn (the hens) and Bilbo and Frodo (the cocks of course):















So far all of Turundot's hybrid hatchlings have inherited her feathery feet which is why we call the new hybrids Hobbits (who have hairy feet.) Also the four older Hobbit hybrids have inherited the Old English Game-cocks' fierceness and ability to fly. Hopefully they will also inherit Turandot's prolific egg-laying trait and we will soon have a whole new race of predator-proof feathery-footed fierce flying egg-factories.

9/11 - Let's never forget

This year I chose to do a tribute to Mark Bingham for my Project 2,996 contribution.

Mark Kendall Bingham was born on May 22, 1970 in Phoenix, Arizona and died on September 11, 2001 on board United Airlines Flight 93.

Bingham is believed to have been among the passengers who attempted to storm the cockpit to try to prevent the hijackers from using the plane to kill hundreds or thousands of additional victims. In a cell phone call to his mother, Alice Hoglan, shortly before the plane went down, he told her, "some of us here are going to try to do something." Hoglan, a former flight attendant with United Airlines, instructed Bingham to reclaim the aircraft after it became apparent that Flight 93 was to be used in a suicide mission.

Mark was a walking contradiction:

He was gay, yet a staunch Republican; accepting, yet willing to fight bigots; a peacemaker, yet someone who once single-handedly foiled two muggers. He started his own business, a PR firm, The Bingham Group, in San Francisco.

After he grew up, he used his size -- 6 feet, 5 inches, 220 pounds -- to his advantage by playing rugby. His mother, Alice Hoglan, said he first played the bruising game in high school, and she believed his personality blossomed from it. Bingham went on to play at the University of California at Berkeley, and was a member of two national championship teams in the early 1990s.

Timing was a strength. He opened his public relations firm on the cusp of the high-tech growth in the mid-1990s. His mother marveled that he paid three times as much in taxes as she earned.

In July, he and several friends traveled to Pamplona to run with the bulls. They dressed in the traditional white, with red sashes. The first day was so uneventful, they returned for a second running. Bingham was scooped up on the horns of a bull, tossed to the ground and stomped. He loved showing off the hoof print on the back of his left leg.

"He didn't fit into anyone's mold," Hoglan said. "He was a force for good in the world. He just lived his life as if there were no tomorrow. I guess there's a lot of wisdom in that, looking at what happened."

Mark was the last passenger to board Flight 93:

Bingham had overslept on the morning of 11 September and the friend with whom he had been staying, Matthew Hall, drove like a lunatic to get him from Manhattan to Newark, screeching to a halt outside Terminal A at 7.40am.

Bingham sprang from the car, hauling an old blue and gold canvas duffle bag. He ran to gate 17, down the jetway, boarded the Boeing 757 and sat down in seat 4D, just behind the cockpit. Then he called Matthew on a cell phone: 'Hey, it's me. Thanks for driving so crazy to get me here. I'm in first class, drinking a glass of orange juice.'

Flight 93 was due to take off at 8.01am. It pulled away from the gate, but there was a delay of 41 minutes, leaving its passengers to sit and wait before setting off on what would have been a six-hour journey across the continent to San Francisco.

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Bingham's call was to his mother was strangely formal: 'This is Mark Bingham,' her son said. Then only: 'I love you,' and he hung up.

Such behaviour may seem strange, but not to Bingham's friend and former employer Holland Carney, who sees in his economy of language the first indications of revolt aboard UA 93. 'If I know Mark, he would not have said anything about what he intended to do. I remember him coming to work one day with a huge black eye. I asked what had happened, and he said two guys had jumped him and he had fought them off. I said that was dangerous - better to give them the money - but he would have none of it. That would have been him on the plane. He was not someone afraid to act.'

John McCain attended Mark's memorial service and said this:

I never knew Mark Bingham. But I wish I had. I know he was a good son and friend, a good rugby player, a good American, and an extraordinary human being. He supported me, and his support now ranks among the greatest honors of my life. I wish I had known before September 11th just how great an honor his trust in me was. I wish I could have thanked him for it more profusely than time and circumstances allowed. But I know it now. And I thank him with the only means I possess, by being as good an American as he was.

I will never forget this date. I can remember it like it was yesterday but I'm hoping others won't forget.