Beyond the Pale - RFK, Jr.

 

This past weekend Washington, DC was the scene of a “Defeat the Mandates” rally, sponsored in part by the Children's Health Defense organization, a nonprofit anti-vaccination advocacy group founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in 2016.  It featured several speakers, including Mr. Kennedy, who criticized vaccination policies and mandates against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Last year the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Mr. Kennedy among a dozen individuals in the USA who are responsible for over half of the anti-vaccine content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  In early March 2021, Kennedy released an anti-vaccine video, "Medical Racism: The New Apartheid" that promotes COVID-19 conspiracy theories and claims that COVID-19 vaccination efforts are medical experiments on the Black community.  His YouTube account was removed in late September 2021 for breaking the company's new policies on vaccine misinformation.  

And one should not forget that Mr. Kennedy accepted an offer made by former President Trump in January 2017 to become the chairman of the Vaccine Safety Task Force, and later that year he reported that he had been meeting with the federal public health regulators to discuss defects in vaccine safety science, at the White House's request.  It was the Trump White House that later played down the effectiveness of anti-COVID vaccines at a time when the virus was laying scourge to the US and Americans were dying by the thousands.

These vaccine mandates have been instituted to help Americans protect themselves and their fellow citizens from the COVID-19 coronavirus and its variants that over the past two years have resulted in 5.6 million deaths worldwide, including ca. 868,000 deaths in the USA alone, by far the largest death count of any country.  Add to this the millions who have suffered and been hospitalized greatly taxing our health care systems, not to mention the countless thousands who have lost family and friends to the pandemic.

We should all be thankful that scientists have worked around the clock to design, test, and manufacture vaccines and boosters that, if not wiping out the virus, has gone to great lengths to lessen the threat of the pandemic and make COVID 19 endemic.  One might think there would have been universal relief that we can now benefit from a vaccine that has been distributed free to any who want it.   Yet there are those that refuse the vaccine thereby continuing to put their health and that of their families, friends, and communities at grave risk.  Not only that, but they also liken mandates to getting vaccinated or to wear a protective mask in public as attacks on their individual rights.   But what about the rights of the rest of us who want to live normal lives free from the threat of the virus as we go about our routines.  Or for our children to be safe and protected in their schools.  It makes no sense at all.

This past weekend’s rally in Washington took the anti-vaccine protest to more absurd heights.   One of the main speakers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the same steps, that “hallowed spot,” on which the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his iconic “I have a dream” speech almost 60 years ago, was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. whose father was assassinated just a few weeks after Dr. King in 1968.  Mr. Kennedy’s screed observed that the architects of our republic’s Constitution made a promise to every American that the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be guaranteed to all of us.  Not just to those who are more concerned about their own rights at the expense of others’.

Mr. Kennedy, whose family shared the same dreams as Dr. King and whose father died in the struggle for those same dreams, stood at the same hallowed spot to claim that the Biden administration's policies on vaccines were worse than the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, liken efforts by the US government to protect its citizens from the threat of a life-threatening pandemic to the actions of a totalitarian state.  He suggested that Germans living under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had more rights than those Americans who challenged the vaccine mandates.  These Germans “could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did."  I would like to remind Mr. Kennedy that Anne Frank was a Dutch Jew who along with most of her family was murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp.   He obviously did not read the book to the end.  And frankly, it goes beyond the pale to compare his misinformed league of anti–vaxxers with the fate of the European Jews.  Several signs drew comparisons to the Holocaust, including equating American scientists and health care professionals with Nazi doctors who perverted medical science by conducting inhuman medical experiments on Jews and other concentration camp inmates more often than not resulting in their deaths.    The Auschwitz Memorial responded to Mr. Kennedy and his ilk.  "Exploiting the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany - including children like Anne Frank - in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay."

And while we are at it, what is keeping Mr. Kennedy and his minions from fleeing to Switzerland if they so desire?  They might be surprised to learn that Swiss authorities have instituted similar mandates to protect public health and safety.   Mr. Kennedy also reminded them that he traveled to Communist East Germany with his father in 1962 where they met Germans who escaped over the Berlin Wall.  I highly doubt these meetings took place in East Germany, the country they escaped from 

Some anti-vaxxers have likened Dr. Fauci, the noted factotum during the pandemic, with Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz.  I should add that Mr. Kennedy released his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, this past November and he continues to hawk it at rallies like the one this past Sunday in Washington.  He falsely accuses Dr. Fauci (as well as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) of being a powerful “technocrat” trying to profit off a vaccine while helping to orchestrate “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”  Kennedy’s book advocates the use of unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.  He also accused Dr. Fauci of deliberately sabotaging treatments for AIDS.  Kennedy appeared as a speaker at the partially violent demonstration in Berlin on August 29, 2020, where populist groups called for an end to restrictions caused by COVID-19.

To suggest that Mr. Kennedy, who majored in history at Harvard, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about is putting it mildly.  Mr. Kennedy has now apologized for his “insensitive” statements (I characterize them as far more insidious than that).  Yet this is not the first time he has drawn comparisons to the Holocaust, and I am not at all convinced of the genuineness of his apology.  He also needs to apologize for spreading false and dangerous misinformation about the vaccine and those who urge Americans to get protected for their own good and that of others.

Mr. Kennedy has accused the Democrats of having “drank the Kool-Aid.”  I think it is the other way around.  As scion of one of the great Democratic dynasties, Mr. Kennedy has jettisoned his good works of the past to join forces with the extreme Right’s and its belief that it is the Democrats who are foisting authoritarianism on the American people.  It is the Democratic who are fighting to protect voting rights in this country, something not one member of the Republican Congressional caucus has stood up to support.  Members of his own family, including his wife, who called his references to Anne Frank as “reprehensible and insensitive," have gone public to state his “lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive" and they do not support his ill-conceived notions concerning the vaccine and its effectiveness in battling the COVID virus which has “helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicate in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

It is sad when an individual who has to his credit many good works in the past turns to the dark side and uses his celebrity to spread misinformation that puts so many lives at risk. 

The Defender of the Mothers will also Defend the Daughters

As George Washington traveled from his home at Mount Vernon, in Virginia, to New York City in the spring of 1789 to be inaugurated as the first President of the United States, he was met by a banner in Trenton, New Jersey reading “The Defender of the Mothers will also Defend the Daughters.” Think for a moment what that means.

Perhaps this is something the Supreme Court should also think long and hard about when ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. This Mississippi law bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and the Court's ruling may very well decide the fate of Roe v. Wade, the Court's 1973 landmark decision that women in the United States have a constitutional right to abort a pregnancy in the first two trimesters of pregnancy -- roughly 24 weeks -- when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb.  The current decision has stood for almost 50 years and what has changed during that time other than the political make-up of the Court?  Justice Sonia Sotomayer put it succinctly.  "Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?"

The original decision was made not only to protect women and mothers at the time who asked only to have a choice in the matter, but more importantly it also protects the right to choose for the generations of daughters that would follow.  This is not a decision that one state should be allowed to challenge when it will affect every state, every woman, in the union.

Perhaps we need to hang a banner outside the Supreme Court as a reminder to those sitting in judgement inside.   

The Defender of the Mothers will also Defend the Daughters.

Come Fly With Me?

 

“ Let's fly, let's fly away”  Very few people of my generation are not familiar with the opening lines of Jimmy Van Heusen’s and Sammy Cahn’s popular 1958 pop hit made famous by Frank Sinatra.  The song was later featured in the 1963 eponymous film in which it was performed by Frankie Avalon.  Bobby Darren and many others have covered it right up to the present day.   Remember when flying was an adventure, something one looked forward to with anticipation?  It was something to be enjoyed before deregulation and the so-called “democratization” the airline industry when everything began to go to hell.  It’s never been the same since

I flew commercially for the first time during the spring of 1964, a flight on a Northwest Orient Airlines DC-7 four-engine turboprop from Atlanta to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.  I grew up in a family familiar with commercial aviation.  My mother had worked for the now-defunct Eastern Airlines at the Atlanta airport in the late 1940s when my father was a graduate student at Georgia Tech and before they moved to Chicago where I was born a short time later.  My dad worked for a time as a consulting engineer and we would make twice weekly trips to the nearest airport on a Sunday afternoon to see him off, and again on Friday evening, when he returned home for the weekend.  At the time of my first flight commercial jets were beginning to replace piston-driven aircraft.  The last commercial DC-7 operated by Northwest Orient left service in 1968.

It was a memorable first flight.  Imagine . . . a trip on a major commercial flight with a capacity of only 70 passengers.  Two seats on each side of a wide aisle, some of them facing each other with a table in between.  The seats were spacious and there was plenty of leg room and space to get up, stretch, and move about.  The flight attendants . . . called “stewardesses” back then . . . all seemed to be young and attractive and decked out in crisp uniforms and a hat.  Some even wore white gloves!  They served proper meals.  They would bring the salad and entrees on a rolling cart down the aisle and serve your choices on regular china with metal utensils and a folded cloth napkin with individual salt and pepper dispensers.    None of these pre-cooked, pre-wrapped meals served in plastic dishes and trays with wrapped plastic utensils and a flimsy paper napkin . . . if a meal is served at all.  A good friend of mine recently flew from San Francisco to Washington with no food service.  Often one is lucky to get a tiny bag of nuts or pretzels.  

Imagine there was a time when people actually dressed up to fly.  Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was in college, I would wear a jacket and tie when flying between Tampa and Chicago on trips home for the holidays.  I can’t even wrap my head around this idea now.  Why bother when passengers are crammed into ever smaller spaces with fewer if any amenities?  Often one must pay for these as well as for the privilege of checking one’s luggage.  Because of this there is more demand for what little space is available for carry on luggage.  Remember when overhead bins were for blankets and pillows for the passengers’ comfort?  More often than not they are now packed tight with bags and one is forced to store what does not fit under the seat in front where one’s legs usually go.

And what about the growing hassle at the airport before boarding a flight?  Long check-in lines followed by security checks where one is often treated as a criminal just for the audacity of wanting to fly.  And now there are the added requirements of vaccinations, a test to determine if one has COVID, and the mandatory wearing of masks.  How is it possible to be in a good frame of mind before boarding a crowded flight?  I just want to get where I am going as quickly as possible. 

“Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue.”   Yeah, right.  No thanks.  Fuck the friendly skies!

An Act of Sedition

It was just one year ago that Congress convened at the Capitol to certify the results of the Electoral College and the election of Joseph Biden as the 46th President of the United States, and Kamala Harris as the first woman to serve as Vice President.  It was to be a historic day although an event that has been a pro-forma exercise since the beginning of the Republic over 200 years ago.  But it was not to be.

During the morning of January 6, 2021, with the White House in the background, the President of the United States addressed a “Save of America” rally of his supporters gathered on The Ellipse and added more fuel to the “Big Lie” . . . his and his followers’ skewed belief that he had, in fact, won the election and by a wide margin, and that his re-election had been stolen by the “emboldened radical-left Democrats.”  He called Republicans “weak” if they did not support him 100%.  He repeated several times that the election was stolen; “we're stuck with a President who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years.  We're just not going to let that happen.”   The President told the crowd it was now up the Congress to halt “this egregious assault on our democracy.”  With his followers chanting “Take the Capitol,” and “Invade the Capitol,” the President, who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States four years earlier, incited his supporters to march on the Capitol to stand up for what he felt was right.  “And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”  And the President said he would lead the way . . . “we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.  Because you'll never take back our country with weakness.  You have to show strength and you have to be strong.  We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.”  

Despite his call to action, the President did not lead the march to the Capitol.  He returned instead to the safety of the White House to watch on television what his free-wheeling and irresponsible words had wrought.  The protestors who marched to the Capitol were not satisfied with cheering on the legislators they hoped would defeat the certification of the election results.  We would soon learn that nothing less than a potentially violent insurrection was already in the work and that it was the President’s careless rhetoric and his litany of falsehoods leading up to the election and beyond that would further fuel what evolved into an attempted coup and the overthrow of democracy in the United States . . . “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”  And fight they did.

The insurrection that followed was the first time the citadel of our republic had been breached since the British sacked Washington in August 1814.  Five people would die along with numerous injuries before order was restored and Congress was finally able to certify the election.  During the siege the House chamber and various Congressional offices were invaded and sacked while other protestors committed theft and did grievous damage to other parts of the Capitol building.  Throughout the melee during which the Vice President and members of Congress were safely evacuated from the Capitol, the President remained in the West Wing of the White House where he continued to urge various members of Congress to do whatever necessary to object to the counting of the electoral votes in order to overturn the election.  White House staffers were cautioned by the White House Counsel not to interact with the President as his actions that morning may have constituted sedition.  Although he was finally convinced to call for order at the Capitol, the President’s response was lukewarm at best.  By the time things began to settle down the President finally sent a Tweet: "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long."  In other words, he did nothing to halt the violence he had incited.

The American people have been living with the aftermath of that sad day in the history of this once great republic.  Many of those who participated in the insurrection have been brought to some degree of justice and Congress continues to investigate the events of that day to determine what role the former President played in instigating the violence.  According to a January 3, 2022 CNN News report, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has now learned that the former President did nothing to stop the attack as it was unfolding.  The leaders of the committee have characterized his failure to intervene, despite being asked to do so, as a "dereliction of duty".  Others, including this writer, call his actions traitorous and nothing short of sedition.   A traitor, by definition, is one who betrays a friend, a country, or a principle.   Here there is no question.  On January 6, 2021 the President of the United States, sworn to uphold the US Constitution, encouraged a mob to overthrow a duly elected government and destroy the democratic principles which have ruled the country for over two centuries.   And to this day he continues to spread his Big Lie while numerous courts have ruled that there is no validity to it. 

Those self-named “patriots” who invaded the Capitol are anything but.  They don’t come anywhere close to those true patriots who fought to free this country from the tyrannical grip of a colonial master; those who fought to restore the Union, or the those who fought and died to free the world from the fascism that has proven to be the benchmark of the former President of the United States.  And now they are answering for their traitorous crimes.  It is high time the man who instigated the violence should answer for his crimes to guarantee that he may never again be able to assume a position of power or influence.  And he should go to prison.  America deserves better than this.  Too many true patriots have sacrificed so much so that democracy might flourish in this land.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

It was one year ago today that we sat in front of our televisions and watched in horror as a horde of domestic terrorists attempted a coup to overthrow the elected government of the United States of America.  It wasn't a protest.  It wasn't a riot.  Some have called it an insurrection and maybe so.  But let's not mince words here.  It was an attempted coup instigated and encouraged by the then sitting President of the United States.  It was the act of a traitor.  I will have more to say about this very soon, but I wanted to mark this anniversary of a very sad day in American history.  Never forget!