From “The Scratching Post”: Tyranny

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, June 17, 2021, published here by permission of the author.]

In 2017, as America was beginning its obsession with a tyrant, a short book titled On Tyranny was published. Its author, Timothy Snyder, writes brilliantly about political tyranny, but I wish he had explored other forms of tyranny. As I studied it, my mind drifted to the Jefferson Memorial and the words inscribed there: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Every form of tyranny. Was Jefferson’s conception of tyranny larger than Snyder’s? I’m inclined to think so. I understand tyranny as Jefferson did: a cruel, oppressive power that denies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of human experience.

    In its simplest manifestation, in the family and the neighborhood, tyranny is a leech, sucking the joy from our conscious hours and leaving despair behind. I think of child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse, and bullying on the play ground. I think of gangs on inner city streets using swagger, contempt, and intimidation to hold their egos together. In their ambit, there is suffocating unease.

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Roger’s Reality: A crisis of our own making

By Roger Owens

Among those who attend to the political machinations of the day, I know of not one who does not believe our country is in a genuine crisis. We may debate upon the nature or the severity of it, but about its existence there is no doubt. The left sees what they consider literally decades of social progress threatened by people they regard as little less than barbarians at the gates. The traditionally quiescent right is aggrieved by what they consider the destruction of all they hold dear by usurpers, who, failing to advance their agenda at the ballot box, mangle beloved values via the courts.

Declaration of misstep

Captive Bolt Pistol

Yesterday, when I published "New Declaration of Independence," I cast it as a revision of our Declaration of Independence. Doing that was to stumble out of the chute, like a slaughterhouse animal whose skull had only been grazed by the captive bolt.
    I've republished the article with a new title and a preamble explaining something of what seems to have gone wrong.

A Declaration of Animal Rights

Sunday. Yesterday, when I published the draft below of the opening for a statement of the rights of animals, I stupidly cast it as a revision of the historical document, our Declaration of Independence. I did so thinking wrongly that I would be imitating the way my New Ten Commandments attempted to bring the Mosaic original up-to-date and replace it with a more enlightened set of ethical principles. I thought I'd be imitating the way a rewrite of "Twas the Night before Christmas" would dissolve the saccharine fantasy of Clement Clarke Moore's original lyrics and reveal some of the sordid underbelly of real Christmas as it is "observed" by most Americans.
    Neither imitation applies. Yesterday's opening should have been presented simply as inspired by the Declaration's opening assumption of the rights of man. Then go on from there.
    I still think, though, that a useful parallel might be developed with the 1776 document's declaration of independence—even if, in the case of animal rights, independence is a more complex concept than political independence from England. For in the case of animal rights, from what would independence be declared? And for whom or what?
    It's not simply a question of animals' independence from something (cruel treatment at our hands, for one essential thing), but also of our independence—from a variety of things: our meat-eating tradition, the market power of the meat industry, perhaps even our inner demons (in contrast to the "better angels of our nature")? A serious obstacle to achieving our "independence" from those (and other) things is that most of them would require a giving-up of something most of us now value—even value so highly as to consider necessity.

I've given the article a new, more accurate title. Its original title is shown below. Despite its being misleading, I'm glad I made a start, however halting and tentative my first step.
 

New Declaration of Independence

A couple of years ago, I wrote an alternative version of the Ten Commandments¹. And the other day, I suggested that, on behalf of animal rights, the poem "Twas the Night before Christmas" needed updating to show that all was not peace upon Earth at that time of the year:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    My impulse to revise the creeds by which we ought to live has been extending for days to our Declaration of Independence, which declared in writing the "unalienable rights of man."

Other animals, too, I do believe, have rights. And if "the rights of man" existed before they were championed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and codified in the Declaration of Independence, then so, too, perhaps, did those more fundamental rights of animals. Or, if the rights of man didn't really always exist, but came to exist only by the essential act of a people's pretending that they did and proclaiming them in writing, then a similar pretense and proclamation could be made on behalf and for the sake of animals who cannot speak for themselves.
    It is from that understanding and in that spirit that I propose a New Declaration of Independence. It might open like this:

When, in the course of animal events, it becomes necessary for the animals with a voice to speak for those that have none, and to assume among the powers of the earth the station to which their place in cultural evolution calls them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to speak for the unspeaking.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all animals are created equal with respect to certain unalienable rights, that among these are life....

The recognition of human rights took time, and so will the recognition of animal rights. Conscience calls upon me to begin speaking for the unspeaking, now rather than later.
_______________

1. My statement of the New Ten Commandments needs further revision, mainly to reduce their number so as to avoid redundancy. That was the motivation for the late George Carlin's radical reduction of their number to two.

No gata do it, no haeftu

Traditional Irish
Turnip Halloween Lantern

While fiddling around with an interesting if trivial idea for today's post—the question how the verb to have to (or have got to) came to be used to mean to be made or required to: Wikipedia's article on modal verbs suggests that have to and have got to developed in Hawaiian Creole English, in which "modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries...gata 'have got to,' haeftu 'have to,' baeta 'had better,' sapostu 'am/is/are supposed to'"—

While I was fiddling around with that, I realized that I hadn't paid enough (or any) critical attention to the reasons my friend gave who gently suggested it was because I had become a grumpy old man that I had dumped on Halloween. He had written to me:

This Halloween, I was reflecting on the fact that it's nice that our most celebrated Holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) all revolve around giving gifts and appreciating the company of others. Rather than abstain, I think it better to put your own twist on the holiday, because God knows, they've been twisted plenty over the millennia for a million different reasons.

    I think I gave this a bye because it's so hopeful and positive-seeming, and my friend has two young daughters, on whose behalf he and his wife have to make difficult parental choices.
    But do these holidays really revolve around sweetness and light? I've already examined Halloween a bit, as well, actually, as Christmas and Thanksgiving. They don't come off well. Christmas and Thanksgiving, in particular, promote an orgy of animal slaughter.
    On Thanksgiving, people go about giving thanks—some of it, admittedly, to the animals they're about to eat, but more of it to their Heavenly Father for "providing" it. Thank you, God, for putting me atop the Great Food Chain of Being. Second only to him.
    During Christmas, people pray for peace on Earth (but not in the abattoirs) and love one another, while participating in the culture of violence toward other animals. Clement Clark Moore's poem needs updating:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    And do you need reminding that the man whose birthday is associated with Christmas was put on Earth by a "loving" God, according to the pagan myth that came to ennoble it¹, in order to be cruelly tortured and executed? But we get to celebrate that on another holiday.

I think that these second thoughts on grumpiness were sparked by a recent interchange with Motomynd. We were talking about the grand-opening video shown on the Crystal Bridges website for its collection of American art. Among the images the video features are two eighteen-wheelers (like the rigs my Bentonville brother-in-law used to drive for WalMart); one sports a photograph of cooked cow on its side, and the other heralds the logo of one of the world's biggest factory animal farms.
    Motomynd commented:

Did you notice how the camera lens lingered noticeably on each of the logos on the trucks? It struck me as odd to be watching a video I assumed was in some way going to celebrate the grand opening of a wonderful new art museum, but in reality turned out to be mainly a commercial for WalMart and some of its favored vendors. Given the nature of the video, one has to wonder what is in store for visitors to the museum.

    The values embodied in the video clip seem to me to contradict art's essential role in challenging tradition, however useful the WalMart money may have been for the acquisition of Alice Walton's collection and the construction of a museum to show it to a public all too reluctant to be challenged.

I have one of those decorative calendars that comes with a frame in which, month-to-month, you switch to a new placard. The placard for this month features the image of a turkey. I display November with the same spiritual sorrow I feel when I eat "meat" because I'm served it by a host whom I choose not to offend or conflict with.
_______________

1. Another related myth is cited in a letter Thomas Paine wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on Christmas Day 1802: "I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas-Day, and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.²"
   
   –Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006, p. 138
2. Paine had in the preceding paragraph suggested that Jefferson, to help France out of her financial straits, purchase the Louisiana Territory, which Spain had just ceded to France. Jefferson did so the following year, for four or ten cents an acre, depending on the source.

You don't need God alive & well in Durham, NC

Madalyn Murray O'Hair
(1919-1995)

The Center for Inquiry, whose mission is "to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values," has posted "a big sign [in Durham, North Carolina that] proclaims: 'You don't need God to hope, to care, to love, to live,'" according to today's Durham Herald-Sun.
    The Center's spokesperson, Michelle A. Blackley, is quoted as saying, "The intention is to show you can live a positive life without religion." [At least, to proclaim it.]
    However, says the article (under the byline of Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, whose report seems objective),

David Silverman, president of American Atheists, thinks the Center for Inquiry billboard is too soft.
    "American Atheists believes billboards should call out atheists," he said. "So many are closeted because of the stigma."

What stigma? The American Atheists website identifies the organization to be nonprofit, nonpolitical, and educational, "dedicated to the complete and absolute separation of state and church, accepting the explanation of Thomas Jefferson that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was meant to create a 'wall of separation' between state and church." The Jeffersonian stigma, I suppose?
    American Atheists arose out of a court case begun in 1959 by the family of Madalyn Murray O'Hair that challenged prayer recitation in the public schools.

Maybe neither race nor "another type of conflict"?

"No, It’s Not About Race," writes David Brooks in today's New York Times about the recent demonstration in Washington against the Obama administration:

I was [at the Capitol] last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government "tea party" protesters...I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with [some] mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands....
    ...These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum...Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them....

    I'm not sure that Mr. Brooks's inability to discern any tension settles the matter. I've noticed that people often instinctively make nice when they come face to face with particular persons from groups they feel negatively towards. But be that as it may, Brooks writes that "It's not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old...for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers" [emphasis mine]:

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates...to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates...to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

There could be something to this; David Brooks has a way of seemingly effortlessly making a reasonable case. But I'm not sure it's all about either racism or populism, as Brooks's otherwise thoughtful piece seems to assume. Racism and populism are only two available possibilities, if attractive ones for writers to embroider (as Brooks has just done with populism and as Maureen Dowd did recently with racism, in "Boy, Oh, Boy").
    But any particular protest will likely have more immediate provocation: a perceived threat to one's tax bill, one's small business, one's access to health care, one's safety on the streets or in one's home, and so on.
    Of course, if someone is a racist or perceives "the educated class" as some sort of elitist enemy, then the person's feelings about that could modulate the specific threat into a racist or populist key. And I grant that the racist and populist strains are ripe for exploitation by the Rush Limbaughs and Lou Dobbses of the world—and by our political parties.
    To tease out just what motivated the recent protesters at the Capitol, I wonder whether, with adequate preparation, it might have been possible for a statistically significant sample of the "tea party" protesters to be surveyed soon after the event with a carefully designed set of questions. The resulting op-ed column might have been as good a read as David Brooks's and probably more informative.

To the believers go the spoils

"As far as I am aware," writes Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great,

there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran. This returns us to the retort delivered, in the very early days of the Republic, to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. These two slaveholders had called on the ambassador of Tripoli in London to ask him by what right he and his fellow Barbary potentates presumed to capture and sell American crews and passengers from ships using the Strait of Gibralter. (It is now estimated that between 1530 and 1780 more than one and a quarter million Europeans were carried off in this way.) As Jefferson reported to Congress:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take prisoners.

      Ambassador Abdrahaman went on to mention the requisite price of ransom, the price of protection from kidnapping, and last but not least his own personal commission in these proceedings. (Religion once again betrays its man-made conveniences.) As it happens, he was quite right in what he said about the Koran. The eighth sura, revealed at Medina, deals at some length with the justified spoils of war and dwells continually on the further postmortem "torments of fire" that await those who are defeated by the believers. It was this very sura that was to be used only two centuries later by Saddam Hussein to justify his mass murder and dispossession of the people of Kurdistan. [p. 181]

"Spoils of War"

If I were going to post some comments on this, I thought I'd better have read the eighth sura myself, so I got out my copy of Thomas Cleary's English translation of The Qur'an and three times read the sura titled "Spoils of War." It opens as I think all of the suras do with the invocation, "In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful." Then:

1. They ask you about the spoils of war.
      Say, "The spoils are for God and the messenger
            [i.e., the Prophet Muhammad].
      So be conscious of God,
      and reconcile dissension among you.
      And obey God and God's messenger,
      if you are believers."...
II...
12. Then your Lord inspired the angels,
      "I am with you, so steady those who believe.
      I will cast fear into the hearts
      of those who scoff,
      so strike above their necks,
      and strike off their fingertips."
13. That is because they contended
      with God and the messenger of God;
      and for anyone who contends
      with God and the messenger of God,
      God is severe in punishment:
14. "There you are, so taste it—
      for the atheists there's the torment of the fire."
15. Oh believers, when you meet
      the atheists on the march,
      never turn your backs to them.
16. Whoever turns his back on that day,
      except when turning to fight
      or withdrawing to regroup
      has brought down wrath from God;
      and his abode is hell,
      and what a miserable destination!...
V.
38. Say to those who scoff,
      "If you desist, what is past
      will be forgiven you;
      but if you resume,
      the example of the ancients
      has already occurred."...
41. And know that a fifth
      of anything you gain as spoils
      is for God and his messenger,
      and for relatives, and orphans,
      and the poor, and the traveler,
      if you do believe in God
      and what We sent down to Our servant
      on the day of distinction,
      the day of the meeting of the two armies;
      for God has power over everything...
VII.
57. So if you prevail over them in war,
      then disperse their followers with them,
      that they may take a lesson.
58. And if you really fear
      treachery from a people,
      default on them equally;
      for God does not like the treacherous.
IX.
65. O Prophet, rouse the believers to battle:
      if there are twenty of you
      who persevere patiently,
      they will defeat two hundred;
      and if there are a hundred of you,
      they will overcome a thousand
      of those who scoff,
      because these are the people
      who do not understand....
X.
70. O Prophet, say to the captives in your hands, "If
      God recognizes good in your hearts,
      God will give you better than what was taken
      from you, and God will forgive you.
      And God is very forgiving, most merciful."
71. But if they intend to betray you,
      they have already betrayed God;
      so God has given power over them.
      And God is all-knowing, most wise....[pp. 84-88]

      What a fluttering thrill this must give the believer. To be led by an all-powerful (but benevolent and merciful) father protector. And to be assured of victory on the battlefield. But what a shudder for the freethinker to read even the invocation:

In the name of God, the Benevolent (but not to me!), the Merciful (but not to me!)

I am, against these warriors of God, destined to become spoils, a slave. Or have my head lopped off, or my fingertips, or both!
      "Of course," I'm thinking, the belief that this twaddle came from God is a fantasy. It's just men, with no more human resources than nonbelievers have, whipping themselves up into the delusion that they are not only irresistible and indestructible, but also morally superior into the bargain. But people so whipped up are not to be messed with lightly. Our own cops are often sorely challenged to take down a crack-head.

Kill Alle

Less than an hour after preparing the material above for posting, I was startled out of impending sleep while listening to Kingsley Amis's The Folks That Live on the Hill:

While [Fiona, Harry's stepdaughter by a previous marriage] waited for the minicab she sang a little—a hundred years ago she and her parents too had thought she might make a singer, which was a laugh if ever there was one.

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln
Und mit Fünfzig Kanonen
Wird leigen am Kai...

She had known some German too at the same sort of stage, which was another laugh, even bigger when you thought about it, but she had long forgotten what it was exactly that the ship with eight sails and fifty guns got up to after reaching the quay, though she did remember that at the end the crew asked the girl Jenny who was supposed to be singing the song how many of the people in the town she wanted killed and, speaking not singing the word, she answered, "Alle!" [pp. 128-129]

      For I had heard not the German word "alle" but the Arabic word "Allah," as though the girl Jenny were voicing the secret desire, Death to Allah! Be done with Islam once and for all! My creative hearing struck me as uncannily appropriate in the context of Barbary pirates and sailing ships with cannon. The magical thinking part of myself of course wanted this to be a divine signal of some sort, hopefully telling me:

Right on, Islam is a crock of thuggery and brutishness, too many of its Arab adherents caught up in a death cult stemming from some no doubt interesting psychological complex, if not, as Thomas L. Friedman and others have suggested, from their ambivalently feeling at the same time both superior in their status with God and inferior on social, cultural, and scientific scales.

But such a reaction on my part could be but the mirror image of the predictable response of "good Muslims" (following another of their seeming moral imperatives) to condemn Hitchens for not really knowing anything about Islam, by which they really only mean that he doesn't know it sympathetically and apologetically—the way they do—so how dare him tell them about Islam. He, they jeer, emphasizes the wrong things, they emphasize the right things (the same way that Christians play down Leviticus and play up God's loving mankind so much that He gave his only begotten Son, etc.).
      So I'll not claim that hearing "Allah" was any sort of divine inspiration or sign, but will only assume that it was an unconscious mental act helping me deal with cognitive dissonance, as if I'd decided at the last minute to buy a Ford instead of a Chevy and proceeded to see a lot of bad Chevies on the road, so wasn't I lucky I switched to a Ford.