Author Archives: Larry Franz

Justice Anthony Kennedy, Champion of Equal Rights?

Posted on by

On PBS’s Religious & Ethics NewsWeekly program this morning, a correspondent referred to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy as a “champion of equal rights” for gay people. He called Justice Kennedy a “champion” because Kennedy has voted with the majority more than once for gay rights, most recently this week when the Supreme Court declared the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” to be unconstitutional on a 5-4 vote.

Although Kennedy taking a liberal position on this issue is an excellent thing, it’s an exaggeration to refer to him as a “champion of equal rights”. After all, the only reason Kennedy stands out among the 5 justices who declared the law unconstitutional is that he tends to vote against equal rights (and common sense) in so many other cases. The other 4 justices are reliable votes for equal rights, so their votes aren’t newsworthy.

This week, for example, Kennedy joined his benighted right-wing brethren in throwing out the part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states to get Justice Department approval before tinkering with their electoral laws. The immediate result of this Supreme Court decision is that some of those states (ones whose leaders committed treason in order to defend slavery) have already announced plans to make voting more difficult.

Everyone knows that the purpose of these restrictive voting laws so popular in certain states is to suppress turnout among blacks, Hispanics and the poor (who tend to vote Democratic), not to eliminate voter fraud (which has never been shown to exist to any mathematically significant degree at all).

So in a couple of cases this week, Justice Kennedy voted for equal rights. In a case that was at least equally important, he voted to make it more difficult for people to exercise their right as an American citizen to vote — not their right to vote as the holder of one or more specific forms of identification. People all over the world vote by showing up at the polls and getting their hands stamped. They don’t have to “prove” that they live where they live.

For your consideration: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, champion of equal rights in a very limited sense.

Want to Read Something Really Depressing About America?

Posted on by

Journalist George Packer’s new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, has been compared to the U.S.A. Trilogy, the novels in which John Dos Passos used experimental techniques to capture the state of our union in the early 20th century. Except that The Unwinding is nonfiction.

To quote the publisher:

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown … (Packer) journeys through the lives of several Americans, (interweaving) these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures … and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics….The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Packer summarizes his view of the past 30 years in the newspaper column below: “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unravelled”. He doesn’t meet Marx’s challenge in these few paragraphs to change the world (not merely understand it): such as explaining how to get more people to vote intelligently, how to overcome the power of money in our democracy, how to avoid a race to the economic bottom in a global economy. But maybe more of us need to clearly understand what’s happened before we can do something about it.

(Or should we simply get out of the way, relying on our children and their children to do what needs to be done? Like the man said: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’ .”)

When we talk about America’s decline, it’s tempting to wonder if the situation is as bad as it seems. Packer’s book and the column below are honorable attempts to counter that temptation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

The Bogus IRS Scandal, with Biblical Commentary

Posted on by

The new director of the IRS has issued a report and provided documentation showing that the IRS targeted a number of groups for special attention based on their names. Among them were groups whose names included the words “Occupy”, “Progressive” and “Israel”, not just “Tea Party” or “Patriots”, as previously reported.

Some right-wingers, who love seeing themselves as victims, claim that this is the biggest political scandal since Watergate. Where do these people come from?

For relevant political commentary:

“I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:14, New Revised Standard Version)

Or:

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” (King James Bible)

You said it, brother!

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/24/irs_chief_tea_party_wasnt_ the_only_group_inappropriately_targeted_ap/

A Kind Word for Some Local Bureaucrats

Posted on by

In French, “bureaucracy” means something like “rule or power by the desk or office”, the idea being that powerful desk-bound officials exercise a type of political authority over us. According to Wikipedia, the term was invented in the mid-1700s by a French economist and was a “satirical pejorative from the outset”:

The first known English-language use was in 1818. The 19th-century definition referred to a system of governance in which offices were held by unelected career officials, and in this sense “bureaucracy” was seen as a distinct form of government, often subservient to a monarchy. In the 1920s, the definition was expanded by the German sociologist Max Weber to include any system of administration conducted by trained professionals according to fixed rules. Weber saw the bureaucracy as a relatively positive development; however by 1944, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted that the term bureaucracy was “always applied with an opprobrious connotation,” and by 1957 the American sociologist Robert Merton noted that the term “bureaucrat” had become an epithet.

I was once a bureaucrat myself, working as a court clerk in Los Angeles County’s vast judicial system. My job was to keep track of stuff and make sure that the rules of civil and criminal procedure were followed.

Nevertheless, the world being the way it is, I wasn’t optimistic today when I needed to get some information from our county government. Bureaucrats!

The Union County website didn’t have the answer to my question, so I called the county’s toll-free number. As the cliché goes, imagine my surprise when a county employee answered the phone after a ring or two. I explained my problem and he told me that I needed to speak to someone in the county clerk’s office. Well, imagine my surprise again when another county employee answered the phone after another ring or two. We had a brief, pleasant, even humorous conversation, and she turned me over to a third county employee, a nice woman named Laura. By this time, it was hardly surprising at all that Laura was very helpful. She quickly took my information and promised that the required document would be mailed to me forthwith.

What? No automated phone buffer (“our numbers have changed”)? No staring into space while on hold (“your call is important to us”)? No confusion? No impatience? No rising blood pressure? A remarkably pleasant, efficient, person to person encounter with some local bureaucrats.

A cynic might conclude that these Union County employees clearly had too much time on their hands, and that our tax dollars aren’t being used efficiently. An automated phone system might achieve substantial savings (“see you around, Laura!”).

I prefer to think that these particular bureaucrats were doing their jobs efficiently and patiently. And that, after our encounter today, they felt good about helping me and I felt good about them and the service they provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy

Peter and Gordon Go To Pieces

Posted on by

I’ve been puttering around with a YouTube playlist for a few months, adding songs that I especially enjoy hearing. Most of them aren’t the biggest hits — they’re songs I want to hear more of. So I haven’t included wonderful songs like “Good Vibrations” and “In the Still of the Night”. I’ve got “Let Him Run Wild” and “Ramble Tamble” instead.

Many of the songs are singles I heard on the radio when I was a kid — songs that I’ve never owned but can now hear whenever I want. It’s amazing, and somehow seems improper, that all of this music is available for free. 

YouTube apparently allows a playlist to have a maximum of 200 entries. Right now, I’ve got 199 songs or some 10 hours of music (plus unwanted commercials).

Certain artists aren’t well-represented on YouTube. For example, some law firm or corporation apparently makes sure that there are very few Bob Dylan album tracks available; otherwise I’d have included “Highway 61 Revisited” for sure. On the other hand, you can find just about every song ever recorded by many well-known artists. But songs come and go fairly frequently, so it’s never certain that a particular song will be on the list the next time around.

One of the surprises I got while compiling my list is how much I enjoy a particular song by the British Invasion duo Peter and Gordon. I was never a big fan of theirs and would never have thought of “I Go To Pieces” as a personal favorite, but I love it every time I hear it. Released in 1964 (not 1965), the single got up to number 7 in the U.S. It wasn’t a hit in the U.K., failing to make the top 50.

So, without further ado, thanks to our friends (or Masters of the Universe) at YouTube, here is “I Go To Pieces”, written by Del Shannon (“Runaway”), and performed by Peter Asher (the one who looks like Austin Powers) and the late Gordon Waller: 

And here’s a link to my rather large YouTube playlist (“I Go To Pieces” is currently number 70 out of 199 entries):

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1vCWCmzw3snpXOZ5eXUFEkEcCYm2eKkx

P.S. 6/25/13 — Looks like I’ll be moving to Spotify. I’ll pay $5 per month to avoid commercials, plus they’ve got “Highway 61 Revisited”.

P.P.S. 6/26/13 — Spotify is pretty amazing. It’s like being in the 21st century. Except it doesn’t seem right that all this music, including new albums, is so cheaply available, the price being either exposure to advertising or a small monthly fee, plus being observed by whatever tracking software they use.