The breathless reportage continues: Rick Perry has signed the "This Presidential Candidate Won't Allow Any Damn 'Others' In My Adminstration When I'm Elected" Oath, or something like that, the first name on the sheet. http://www.dailykos.com/... Mitt Romney has stated his firm intention to consider the possible utility of signing on, Michelle Bachmann is howling that she was promised, PROMISED, that she could go first, and each of the other little O.R.C.s ("Our Republican Champions") is queued up with several signing pens in hand, to hand out, post-attestation, to their various campaign contributors and bag persons as tokens of appreciation for their $upport.
No, I'm no Will Rogers, who would turn these idiots into laughingstocks, with a beautifully, artlessly crafted little anecdote with an inescapable moral. I've met a lot of men, and women, I didn't like, rightly or wrongly, and I tend toward the bitter and angry. When I see what looks like another trip through the bowels of all that's worst in our natures, with endpoints that seem so glaringly obvious and repetitive, I boil and fume.
So we are on the "loyalty oath" page of the Book of Anticommunal Prayer once again. Why, why, why? What the heck is wrong with our wiring, our institutions, our shared myths and all that?
You have to wonder: do these sorry examples of these the morally least of our brethren, empty suits and figureheads like Perry and Bachmann and the rest, have any sense of themselves at all? Are they really as banally evil as they look to be? Or are they just hand puppets in a crummy Punch&Judy Show? Signing OATHS, for Cliff's sake? Do they swear to their G_d to abide by them?
I mean, it ain't like this kind of silliness hasn't gone on before. Any of you kids out there needing a topic for a term paper could do worse than reading up on the history of "Red Scares" and "loyalty oaths" in America, like this little snippet:
Mainstream American political culture evidenced as much derision as hostility toward the democratic Socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), for some derision turned to abiding hostility and fear. The government's wave of arrests, deportations and trials during the period 1918-1920 is often referred to by historians as the "First Red Scare." During World War II, however, both the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union promoted Russo-American friendship out of the need for a solid front against the Axis Powers. With Hitler's defeat, then, came the mutual fear and rivalry that produced the new hostility of the Cold War era. American mainstream political culture saw Communist affiliation as fundamentally treasonous.
The Truman Loyalty Campaign
Under the demands of the Cold War's Truman Doctrine, the Truman Administration set up a Loyalty Campaign at home as well as funded anti-Communist efforts abroad.
In order to counteract charges that liberal Democrats were soft on Communists, the Truman Administration set up Loyalty Boards to rid the government of anyone suspected of Communist affiliation. Federal administrators--not judges-- ran the hearings without the constraining rules of evidence that would have governed a court. Witnesses did not testify under oath and there was no penalty for perjury. These Boards kept trial-like transcripts, however, and regularly leaked their results to the press. For many citizens, persons named as suspected members of the CPUSA were guilty of treason.
The Boards could not imprison; they could only fire people. Losing one's job, however, was less severe than the social ostracism and blacklisting that followed.
Further, the Truman Justice Department compiled lists of organizations that opposed American foreign policy. Since American foreign policy was essentially anti-Communist, then those opposed must surely be Communists. The Attorney General's office circulated membership lists of such disfavored groups.
HUAC v. Hollywood
The Congress's House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation into purported Communist influence in the movie business. HUAC subpoenaed writers, directors, actors and studio executives and inquired whether they "were now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party."
A panicked movie industry frantically sought good will with Congress and the public by launching its own Communist hunt. They brought in ex-FBI agents to clean up the studios. The agents recorded anyone thought to possess suspicious political beliefs on a blacklist. Such individuals did not work for the movie studios again. A similar wave of frantic self-purging took place within other news and entertainment media, including television and radio.
One group collected and published the names of people in the world of the arts and entertainment thought to be un-American in their politics. The most famous were able to successfully fight off such attacks but Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, ruined or harmed many people's careers. Among the best-known specifically named in Red Channels were musical director Leonard Bernstein, composer Aaron Copland, actor Will ("Grandpa Walton") Geer, actress Ruth ("Harold and Maude") Gordon, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, actress-singer Lena Horne, poet Langston Hughes, folksinger Burl Ives, actor Burgess Meredith, playwright Arthur Miller, actor Edward G. Robinson, actor-director Orson Welles and folksinger Pete Seeger.
Others were soon caught up in the atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Among the better known was comedic genius Lucille Ball whose experience was atypical in that she recovered her career and popularity. Ball's grandfather had been an old railroad man who idolized Eugene Debs and convinced young Lucy to register to vote in California as a Communist. Years later when her "crime" was discovered, the blacklisters banned Lucy from the studios, thus ending a promising movie career. She fought back by forming her own production company and making the well-known television series "I Love Lucy."
Public anxiety increased dramatically in 1949 when Americans learned that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb. For the first time in recent American history, the United States faced a realistic threat from abroad. Reaction was sharp and swift. The government began investigating possible links between American Communists and the passing of U.S. atomic secrets to the Russians. This led to a number of high-profile prosecutions, culminating in the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. During the sensational Rosenberg trial, a flamboyant young prosecutor named Roy Cohn caught the eye of an ambitious U.S. Senator named Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy recruited Cohn and the up-and-coming communist hunter became the Senator's chief of staff. Before they were done, their partnership would cut quite a swath across the American political and social landscape.
http://iws.collin.edu/...
Anybody that does not see the parallels between then and now was not paying attention in history and social studies and civics classes. My teachers emphasized the oddness of the notion of how frail the "American" identity was supposed to be, and how notions of social policy and organization not four-square behind General Motors were actually infectious diseases, requiring quarantine and harsh and toxic cleansers to extirpate.
How many "oaths" are circulating out there now, litmus paper for the candidates for high office to touch to see if they are too base to get elected? You got that thing by Grover Norquist, our own 21st Century Richelieu (or maybe Rasputin:)
So, who was Rasputin? This is indeed a long story.
Well, the story starts off with Alexis, Tsar Nicholas II's son. He suffered from haemophilia, where his blood was unable to clot after bleeding due to a lack of platelets in the blood. Rasputin claimed to be a holy monk from the remote wastelands of Siberia, and was able to use his "supernatural healing powers" to heal Alexis. Granted, Rasputin could ease some of Alexis' pain, but most of what he did seemed a scam. The Tsarina (the Tsar's wife) doted on her son and thus naturally treated the monk better. Rasputin abused his authority and replaced many ministers with his own family and friends, regardless of whether the previous ministers were good. Some of his decisions in the country's administration were also foolish and led to many problems. This naturally led to people disliking Rasputin severely and thus blaming the Tsar for his trust in this incompetent person.
http://library.thinkquest.org/...
But what I am trying to get to is a humorous handle on the "oath" phenomenon and the other perversions in our political processes. Too many people, maybe ineluctably, buy into the "power" of these "pledges" with their miasma of seeming sanctification. Why do people keep believing in the bona fides and faithfulness and I'm-on-your-sidedness of the creeps who play the "oath" card?
Best I can manage is to borrow the genius of a truly inspired writer/observer, Joseph Heller, whose "Catch-22" I've read maybe 15 times now, 8 of them while I was in Vietnam "doing God's work for Democracy." He illuminates the idiocy of the whole "oath" thing in just a few paragraphs, and I hope anyone looking to take a shot at the idiocy reads, learns and inwardly digests his trenchant prose. The whole thing is here,but my favorite bit is this excerpt from the excerpt:
Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again...
The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.
“The important thing is to keep them pledging,” he explained to his cohorts. “It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ means.”
But there is hope that there will be change, light at the end of the tunnel, all of that. All it takes is someone to stand up to the Oath Makers, as Heller so archly describes the transition:
Captain Black had boundless faith in the wisdom, power and justice of Major —— de Coverley, even though he had never spoken to him before and still found himself without the courage to do so. He deputized Milo [Minderbinder, remember him?] to speak to Major —— de Coverley for him and stormed out impatiently as he waited for the tall executive officer to return. Along with everyone else in the squadron, he lived in profound awe and reverence of the majestic, white-haired major with the craggy face and Jehovan bearing, who came back from Rome finally with an injured eye inside a new celluloid eye patch and smashed his whole Glorious Crusade to bits with a single stroke.
Milo carefully said nothing when Major —— de Coverley stepped into the mess hall with his fierce and austere dignity the day he returned and found his way blocked by a wall of officers waiting in line to sign loyalty oaths. At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrived still earlier was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there. The hubub began to subside slowly as Major —— de Coverley paused in the doorway with a frown of puzzled disapproval, as though viewing something bizarre. He started forward in a straight line, and the wall of officers before him parted like the Red Sea. Glancing neither left nor right, he strode indomitably up to the steam counter and, in a clear, full-bodied voice that was gruff with age and resonant with ancient eminence and authority, said:
“Gimme eat.”
Instead of eat, Corporal Snark gave Major —— de Coverley a loyalty oath to sign. Major —— de Coverley swept it away with mighty displeasure the moment he recognized what it was, his good eye flaring up blindingly with fiery disdain and his enormous old corrugated face darkening in mountainous wrath.
“Gimme eat, I said,” he ordered loudly in harsh tones that rumbled ominously through the silent tent like claps of distant thunder.
Corporal Snark turned pale and began to tremble. He glanced toward Milo pleadingly for guidance. For several terrible seconds there was not a sound. Then Milo nodded.
“Give him eat,” he said.
Corporal Snark began giving Major —— de Coverley eat. Major —— de Coverley turned from the counter with his tray full and came to a stop. His eyes fell on the groups of other officers gazing at him in mute appeal, and, with righteous belligerence, he roared:
“Give everybody eat!”
“Give everybody eat!” Milo echoed with joyful relief, and the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.
Captain Black was deeply disillusioned by this treacherous stab in the back from someone in high place upon whom he had relied so confidently for support. Major —— de Coverley had let him down.
“Oh, it doesn’t bother me a bit,” he responded cheerfully to everyone who came to him with sympathy. “We completed our task. Our purpose was to make everyone we don’t like afraid and to alert people to the danger of Major Major, and we certainly succeeded at that. Since we weren’t going to let him sign loyalty oaths anyway, it doesn’t really matter whether we have them or not.”
I guess maybe that last little bit kind of captures the essence of why these critters are putting up these "oaths" as the way to find out who's with you and agin you.
Anybody know where Major ___ de Coverly is, or how to get him to come 'round to our dining hall?