Letter 2 America for March 19, 2013

Dear America,

Ted Cruz, the Tea Party affiliated senator from Texas, must be the most tedious, presumptuous senator in congress, and there are a lot of tedious, presumptuous senators.  On March 14, he presumed to lecture the senators on the Judiciary Committee, and for that matter all Americans watching the proceedings on CSPAN, about the assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Feinstein and more importantly, about the U.S. Constitution and how to respect it.  Through the usual sanctimony and elliptical citation of fact, he pronounced the assault weapons ban being considered by the committee to be unconstitutional, ineffectual now and ineffectual in the past when, in a different configuration it was passed by congress and unchallenged by the Supreme Court for ten years.  Cruz cited two studies undertaken by the Departments of Justice of Presidents Clinton and Bush the Younger for those propositions, conveniently omitting the fact that both reports accumulated statistics that, while possibly construable as supportive of Cruz's position, were the subject of caveats in the reports--remember that one came from Bush's Department of Justice as run by Alberto Gonzalez, who believed that water-boarding wasn't torture--to the effect that the reports themselves, despite statistics, were inconclusive and that the effects of the ban would take more time to manifest themselves fully, and thus to be evaluated for their effects.  It was like when John Boehner claimed that a McClatchy-Marist poll demonstrated that the American people prefer to balance the budget through spending cuts rather than tax increases when all the poll actually showed was that the majority of those polled objected to federal spending on foreign aid, defense and unemployment benefits but opposed cuts...by substantial margins...when it came to education, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and infrastructure programs according to Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers themselves. The fact that the poll showed that the only measure voters endorse by a measure of 3 to 2 is imposing higher taxes on the rich--and the poll results were the same in December, right after the election that showed the same thing--somehow got left out.  Thus, just as Boehner is out on the wrong limb, Cruz has relied on a biased reading of statistics to favor his claim that banning sale of assault rifles won't prevent any gun crime.  It's a numbers game to conservatives, and they don't play even that game honestly.

But Cruz is a dangerous aberration even among Republicans.  He has that menacing Joe McCarthy swagger, and it is daunting...especially when you consider that the majority in Texas, the second biggest state in the union in both size and population, elected him.  He begs the question, where are we headed as a nation, not just in our attitude toward what I think of as the American Community, but with regard to all our rights to hold opinions other than those of people like Cruz.  I may have said this before in these letters, but when I was young and Richard Nixon was at the height of his power, there was talk of the "silent majority," and that was Nixon's constituency.  My father, who was a refugee from the Nazis as of 1939, but who was there in Austria until the day the Germans occupied Vienna, and thus had been close at hand while Hitler rose to power, said one day, "This is how it started in Germany."  He was referring to the Watergate burglary and the enemies list as well as the autocratic staff with which Nixon surrounded himself.  Of course, I wasn't there in central Europe when Hitler rose to power, but I find myself wondering if such a thing is possible in the United States.  It's a rational thought rather than the self-serving subscription to an idea of a young, sixties radical.  If Cruz was the choice of the majority of voters in a population of about 24 million Texans, how many votes could he get in a population of 330 million.  And if he could be elected nationally, how far behind would repression of those whose beliefs were contrary to his...and to the majority of those 330 million people be--not necessarily by institutional measures, but by popular demand.  As I used to say during my hippie days, it doesn't matter whether the hand holding it is that of a cop or the guy on the bar stool next to yours when someone is beating you with a club.  The fact is that "true believers" don't need no "stinkin' badges" to coin a phrase from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."  Krystallnacht was not an official campaign of violence against the Jews of Germany.  It was a paramilitary operation, unsanctioned by the federal government, but countenanced by silence and toleration of the event.  And it led to the incarceration in prison camps of tens of thousands of Jews just because they were Jews, which led to the incarceration and extermination of six million more Jews, not to mention as many as ten million others just because they didn't conform to the Aryan paradigm.  How many Ted Cruz's would it take to inspire that kind of outcome for our democracy?  His election begs the question, how many are there?

Your friend,

Mike