ARIZONA CAN FIND GUIDANCE IN NUREMBERG

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Now that Arizona cops will be stopping people with brown skin and asking to see their papers, there’s consternation among state authorities who must follow the will of the voters. Just how will they fulfill these grave new responsibilities in their brave new white world?

Well, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. All they have to do is study how similar governments in the past executed their own citizen-defining policies. For this, there’s no better standard than the German Reich of 1933-45, which also had to identify and deal with a portion of the population whose position was no longer tenable.

There are differences, of course. The Arizona law makes the very existence of some people illegal. In Germany being Jewish wasn’t illegal, just penalized. But there are enough similarities between Nazi Germany and 21st century Arizona to learn from past mistakes and successes.

Also of use to Arizona will be the Nuremberg Laws that defined who could hold certain jobs or study at certain schools and all manner of other matters that will soon come up.

In order to exact the penalties required by law, the German government found it useful to require all Jews to wear yellow stars. This necessitated sending the Gestapo and other thugs out into the neighborhoods asking questions so that all those who ought to be wearing yellow stars were properly identified first. It worked fine. There were always neighbors around happy to cooperate with the process. Clearly there are plenty of civic-minded Arizonans willing to provide similar services to police.

Jews that wore stars could be rounded up because they wore stars. Jews that didn’t wear stars could be rounded up for not wearing stars. After arriving in the camps they received tattoos on their arms to help guards ascertain just who was who.

At first the Reich thought it might be a little touchy if they were to round up Jewish World War I veterans along with the other Jews, so they were given a pass. But eventually the population got used to Jews being rounded up and no longer made such distinctions, so the government, unimpeded, rounded up veterans too. Anne Frank's father Otto Frank was one of these veterans. Similarly in Arizona when the cops stop brown veterans and ask them for their papers it might weigh on the consciences of some white Arizonans, but like the good Germans, they'll get used to it in time.

Yellow stars and tattoos would be particularly useful in Arizona when it comes time to break up those families in which some brown people are citizens and some aren’t. When the state sends people back over the border, if they’ve received the appropriate tattoos it will make the identifying process oh so much easier should any of them try to return.

I hope I’ve eased the minds of Arizonans who feared they may have to solve all these questions on their own.

Exit Blue, a political satire by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010), is now available. See http://blackheron.mav.net/Exit%20Blue.html for more information.

FORECAST CLOUDY FOR TEA-PARTIERS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The political forecast is cloudy with a chance of sanity.

Yes, Sarah Palin gathers big crowds and extracts millions of dollars from her tea-party zombies. At the same time an Associated Press poll released this week found that one-third of those surveyed consider themselves tea-party supporters. A New York Times poll released simultaneously said 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea-party supporters.

The difference between 18 and 33 percent is huge, statistically speaking. One or both polls must be way off. But the discrepancy is also understandable. Just look at the placards these people produce. Many crowd members are functional crazies, and their answers to questions are liable to change minute to minute. What remains constant is their unreliability and susceptibility to nutty ideas that have little or no factual foundation.

A Massachusetts tea-party chieftain, complaining about high taxes, was recently confronted with the reality that Obama has cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. How did she react? She said she doesn’t believe it. You can’t change the minds of these people with mere facts. They’re governed by the fear and loathing the late, great Hunter Thompson found in so many corners of our nation.

It’s a little scary to know loonies walk among us and register to vote. They also get elected to Congress. But here’s another statistic worth noting: Demographers say that 2010 will be the tipping point – the first year in which more non-white babies are born in the U.S. than white ones. Just how many non-white faces did you spot at those tea-party rallies? Exactly. A party and a movement that excludes so many Americans is doomed to fail.

Each succeeding generation is less bigoted than the one before. The world is closing in on these jerks. They know it, they feel it, and it makes them crazier.

Now the bad news: The public is poorly educated, and increasingly, so are teachers and journalists. The public is fed more and more news that runs the gamut from sloppy and puerile to downright false. As resources grow scarce, so does good schooling, and the ignorance builds on itself, making the public easier to fool. Goofy slogans crush thoughtful positions.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck don’t have three semesters of college between them, and they’re not voracious readers either. They appear to secure their facts through bouts of mysticism that, at least in Limbaugh’s case, are heavily fueled by drug use. They don’t seem to know or care that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their followers (that includes most of the Republicans in Congress) don’t care either.

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend as much money as they like on political ads is an ax hanging over the heads of politicians who might otherwise be tempted to do good work. Cross Exxon-Mobil or GlaxoSmithKline and they can come after you in the next election with millions of dollars. That threat alone will help these corporations get what they want at the expense of everyone else. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect, for example, air, water, food, and medicine to grow increasingly dangerous while Congress concentrates on decoy issues like gay marriage, which is really none of its business.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is available online and at better stores everywhere.

WHAT ABOUT GIVING SECESSION AOTHER CHANCE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Republicans and their govnoed legions, crazier than Cubs fans, are so distraught that health care will now become available to more Americans that some of them are pining for the good old days of the Confederacy.

Govnoed, by the way, is what members of the old Soviet intelligence apparatus used to call people dumb enough to believe their bullshit. It means, literally, shit eaters. Govnoed, many of them in the West, would battle against their own self-interest even though, unlike well-placed party officials and KGB/GRU agents, they received no special perks in exchange for their efforts. Kind of an apt word for tea-party-ers and other right-wing goofballs who act as shock troops for the corporate country-clubbers still running the GOP. How do you explain these crazies? As Voltaire pointed out approximately 250 years ago, it’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently worried over Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling the state’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America, you know, back when certain kinds of people he was too polite to categorize more precisely knew their place. The Georgia State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy, and there are similar nostalgic murmurs sweeping across the old Confederacy like the aroma of mint juleps in springtime. It’s becoming apparent that a black president in the White House enacting any of his agenda at all is just too much to take for these folks. And this go-it-alone sentiment isn’t confined to the South. Ex-Gov. Palin’s hubby has been known to pine for Alaskan independence, for example.


Good liberal Collins says she’d worry less about a “national discussion” of Civil War history “as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea.” Wait. Let’s back up a minute. Why should we automatically assume secession by some of our wackier states is a bad thing? Bear in mind that barely populated places like Wyoming and Utah have two senators apiece. Check out the voting records and character of their senators sometime. Who needs 'em? If any of these backward regions and their shit-eating camp followers elect to leave the union in a fair election, then what, may I ask, are Collins’ grounds for resistance? Think how much sweeter our country would be if we no longer had to try to compromise with right-wing maniacs? We might have a government that actually cares about its citizens.

The Republicans’ answer for the broken global economy, the broken health care system, and virtually every domestic problem we face is to deregulate corporations, mutilate social programs, and trim taxes for the very rich. When it comes to foreign policy questions, their answer is to shoot first and figure the rest out later. Climate change? Easy to fix. Just pretend it’s not there. And think how much more coal we could mine if owners didn’t have to answer to those pointy-headed safety inspectors. Church versus state? No problemo. The church is the state, and visa versa. At least that’s the way they think it oughta be.

In my new novel Exit Blue (warning: shameless plug follows) the union breaks up in another way. A too-familiar Texas dynasty retakes the White House and promptly invades Denmark, calling it the central front in the war on terror. The Blue States, having had enough, secede. How does that work out? I won’t spoil it for you.

But the fact is, the Constitution we’re taught to revere veered off well to the right of true democracy when it established a system that now gives voters in Idaho approximately 90 times the clout in the Senate as voters in New York or California. So should we be surprised that the Senate made things even worse by making sure nothing important can get passed without approval by 60 senators? That same inequality is also reflected in the Electoral College, which is why George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House even though Al Gore won approximately 540,000 more votes. A key drawback to allowing crazy states to secede is that it would leave their sane minorities at the mercy of the marjority lunatics.

Republicans have veered so far to the right in the last few decades that their long-time friends the British Tories are creating as much distance from them as they can in the looming UK election. That's because Tories are actual conservatives, whereas Republicans, having purged their party of moderates, are mostly reactionaries. They want to return to the pre-New Deal era, and some of them, as Ms.Collins points out, seem to be flirting with the pre-Emancipation Proclamation era.

Note that I don't claim Democratic politicians are pure. Many of them, for example, tickled to pick up contributions from Wall Street greedheads, are helping Republicans block banking reform even as we speak. But if corrupt blowhards like Saxby Chambliss and Orrin Hatch could go do their own thing somewhere else it might breathe some fresh air on our polluted landscape, literally and figuratively. Or at least, as Hemingway’s Jake told Lady Brett, isn’t it pretty to think so?

Political satire Exit Blue by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron; 2010) is available at virtual stores everywhere.