A New Painting, Guns and Two Important Columns to Read

Art Department

When people retire, they have the opportunity to do things they were too busy to try in their earlier life.  A friend since the third grade back in Newark, Howard Silver practiced dentistry for over forty years, but when he retired, he turned his skills  from dental procedures to paint brushes.

Here is his latest work, accepted for exhibition by a panel of prominent judges, to be part of an important art show here in South Florida.

"Must Read" Columns by Gerson and Dowd

Two really great columns appeared last week.  I consider them to be mandatory reading.  The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote about our “national identity.”  She is pretty clear about what she doesn’t want it to be but doesn’t come up with precisely what she wants it to be.   And the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson points out that the history and heritage of the Oval Office deserves a better occupant than Donald Trump.  But like Dowd,  

Gerson fails to get to the core of the problem.  Read Gerson’s article by  CLICKING RIGHT HERE ! 

I couldn’t find a decent link to Maureen Dowd’s great article (without subscribing to the Times), so I am breaking one of the blog’s rules and including it.  Don’t tell anybody.  Here it is, and then, go back and check out Michael Gerson’s words via the link provided.

Our New National Identity Is Becoming Distressingly Clear

By Maureen Dowd

Donald Trump slipped into the Oval Office through a wormhole of confusion about the American identity.

We weren’t winning wars anymore. They just went on and on and on, with inexplicable and deceptive aims and so many lives and limbs and trillions lost.

We couldn’t believe in our institutions, with breaches of trust and displays of ineptitude.

We were moving from a white-majority, male-dominated country and manufacturing base to a multicultural, multilateral, globalized, PC, new energy, new technology world, without taking account of the confusion and anger of older Americans who felt like strangers in a strange land.

With the Russians sowing confusion, Trump surfed those free-floating anxieties straight to Pennsylvania Avenue.

And now, we are finding out fast who we are and who we don’t want to be.

We don’t want to countenance abusive behavior. And we certainly don’t want men like Rob Porter who have punched, kicked, choked and terrorized their wives to be in the president’s inner circle, helping decide which policies, including those that affect women, get emphasized.

We don’t want a president who bends over backward to give the benefit of the doubt to neo-Nazis, wife beaters, pedophiles and sexual predators — or who is a sexual predator himself. We don’t want a president who thinks #me is more important than #metoo.

We don’t want a president who flips the ordinary equation, out of some puerile sense of grievance, to honor Russia and dishonor the FBI.

We don’t want a president who believes that vile behavior is justified by a Vesuvial stock market.

We don’t want a president who is too shallow to read his daily intelligence report and too obsessed with the deep state to deal fairly with our intelligence agencies.

We don’t want a president who suggests that Democrats who don’t clap for him are treasonous and who seems more enthralled by authoritarian ways than democratic ones.

We don’t want a president who promises an A-team but surrounds himself with dreckitude, a president who vows to pass “the best” bills but then doesn’t care whether he’s selling steak, wine, condos or garbage policies on matters of life and death that he hasn’t even bothered to read.

We don’t want a president who goes to military school but never leaves; who loves generals but trashes Gold Star parents; who wants the sort of military parade that we mock Kim Jong Un for.

We don’t want a president who makes his version of make-believe real, and who looks with favor on deceit, hypocrisy, conflict of interest and nepotism.

We don’t want a president who merits a special prosecutor.

We don’t want a president who treats the hallowed house where Abraham Lincoln once wrote the nation’s most sacred texts as the set of a cheesy reality show.

We don’t want a president who treats the presidency as just another personal business franchise.

We don’t want a president who glides through the chaos he craves and conjures, while everyone around him immolates and shivers.

And, finally, we surely don’t want a president who seeks advice on foreign affairs from Henry Kissinger. Ever. Again.

What do I have to say about this?  Well, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States “fair and square.”  There was no election fraud or fiddling with the voting results.  Russian involvement, if any, in surreptitiously pushing Trump’s candidacy was probably far less that the business community’s involvement permitted by the Citizen’s United decision!  The American people in a sufficient number of States to provide a majority in the Electoral College voted for a TV reality show host and businessman of questionable ethics who accepts lies, if they can be gotten away with, as a routine way of doing business, managing his personal life and in running the country.  That’s what the voters bought into!

The real issue is why they did.  Is it a question of being poorly educated and perhaps gullibly susceptible to dishonest campaign rhetoric?  Is it because of a loss of faith in our government’s historic institutions, as Michael Gerson suggests? Is it because their primary attention has been conditioned to watch professional sports, use our vast computer technology to gossip and to dabble in “narishkeit” (a Yiddish word.  Go look it up)? 

All the while China, and soon the rest of the countries in Asia, are “eating our lunch.”  We’ve paid them enough for manufacturing our “stuff” with their cheap labor so that they have plenty of our money to invest in improving and rebuilding their formerly pathetic nations and in buying into our domestic economy with the financing we suddenly need.  True, they are not so “democratic” as we are, but even though dissent there can often lead to disappearance or death, they are slowly marrying their tough communist regime to a more democratic brand of controlled capitalism.  It seems to work better, at least for them, than the unregulated free-enterprise economy our government strives to maintain.

Asians send their smartest to the United States for the superlative post-graduate educational opportunities in our country while even their undergraduate college students at home get a thorough scientific education, not diluted by the distractions of the intercollegiate athletics, fraternities, sororities and beer busts American education features.

 

Start looking in this direction to find out what’s wrong with the American identity, Ms. Dowd.  (I call it the “narishkeit” factor.) And Mr. Gerson, I sentence you to watching Fox News exclusively for a month.  Then you will know why some Trump supporters who believe “the idea of nobility in politics is a sham,” prefer Donald J. Trump who, “in contrast, acts and talks like someone from the real world.” (quotes from the Gerson article.)  Please read his article if you have not by now!

Guns and the Second Amendment 

Skip the rest of this article if you wish to, but here’s the bottom line, with which to start off.   No matter how many millions, or even billions, are poured into mental health diagnosis, treatment and care, and no matter how detailed background checks of those purchasing weapons might be, there is no way of knowing which of the millions of Americans with grudges, anger problems or even criminal intent will be the ones who will carry out the next mass killing with an assault weapon. 

Guns do not kill people unless there is someone to squeeze the trigger. Rather than seek out potential "trigger squeezers," a close to impossible task, the sale of assault weapons must be banned immediately and assault weapons already in private hands turned in at local police stations, with the government offering a premium price to buy them back for a limited period.  After that, their possession should be made a felony, requiring a minimum sentence of two years.  That’s the “bottom line” up front.  

Here are some thoughts on the latest mass shooting:   It's sad, but real gun reform legislation is highly unlikely.  It won’t happen despite public outcry resulting from recent killings which might not have taken place if there were stronger gun control laws. It won’t happen because of the gross misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court majority which supported ignoring the first thirteen words of the Second Amendment as if they never existed.  (See the words of the Second Amendment at the close of this article.) 

Justice Scalia, who wrote the opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller in 2008 is deceased but the other four justices who voted for it are still on the court (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Thomas and Alito). 

Were it not for their action, there very well might be stronger local and State gun control laws, even ones banning assault weapons, but that horrid decision weakened the power of local and State governments to enact them. They may be Supreme Court Justices, but I don’t think they’re very bright.   I did submit a letter to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on this subject about the five men in black robes who are complicit in the mass shootings carried out since 2008.  I hope they publish it.  Here is what I wrote;

"In addition to the mentally challenged young man who carried out the mass killing at a high school in Parkland, culpability for this heinous crime must be shared by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Thomas, Alito and Kennedy as well as the late Antonin Scalia, the Justice who wrote the Court’s 2008 decision in the D.C. vs. Heller case.  They formed the majority which made this decision which, followed by lower court decisions, in effect eradicated the first thirteen words of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, making it difficult if not impossible for local governments to enact gun control legislation.  They should be ashamed of themselves,\."

The three recent mass killings which took place in Florida (Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale Airport baggage pick-up area, and now, Parkland high school shooting) will probably spur Florida’s legislature into action.  Because most of the Republican legislators there fear the loss of the votes of gun-toting, pistol packing Floridians who in their youth saw too many John Wayne movies, they are probably going to propose “open carry” for all teachers and students over the age of ten as the best measure to prevent future killings.  That’s the way this legislature thinks.  These dunces, mostly Republicans, think the Second Amendment gives anyone the right to own a weapon, be it a hunting rifle or an assault weapon, so long as it’s for self-defense, the misinterpretation created in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

The real answer, and don’t expect the Democrats to support it either, since they too know that gun advocates vote, is a repeal or a significant modification of the Second Amendment so that assault weapons are banned.  In any sane country, weapons capable of mass killings, as opposed to weapons for home protection, hunting or target shooting should be illegal. That’s the way they do it in China where such mass shootings (other than by the government) are rare.  But don’t put these sentiments on a bumper sticker on your car, unless you want it to be “keyed” and your tires slashed.  At least that is the way it is in Florida.

Seriously, if a state or any local government wanted to enact a law banning assault weapons, the aforementioned Supreme Court decision would provide a formidable obstacle along with the opposition of the nut-jobs who run the National Rifle Association, so long as the ‘self-defense’ excuse provided by the Supreme Court exists.

As I see it, the best course of action today, while legislators on all levels pontificate and pray would be the organized peaceful picketing of gun stores with signs reading “This store sells assault weapons capable of mass killings!  If you want one, join the Army!”  Now go back and re-read the "bottom line" up at the start of this article!

A few words about the Second Amendment:  To get the Constitution “passed” back in 1789, several of the richer of the thirteen colonies had to be reassured that the new Federal government would not prevent them from forming militias which required recruiting armed citizens. They wanted this guarantee because the Federal government lacked the resources to support a standing army (although they did support a navy) for protective purposes such as dealing with ‘Indians’ or slave rebellions in the new States and these States wanted the capability of doing it themselves.  To make that possible, they wanted a guarantee that their citizens would always be allowed to have their own weapons available when recruited into a State militia.  Some also feared that the Federal government would be less likely to encroach upon the rights of the new States if those States possessed armed militias.  

James Madison and George Mason came up with the Second Amendment to solve that problem and that is how the Second Amendment came to be. It read, and continues to read (despite the its misinterpretation by the Supreme Court in 2008) as follows:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The right of the people to bear arms in situations other than that described by the Second Amendment’s first thirteen words was never in the minds of those who wrote the Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights.  Eventually the horrid decision which legalized the emasculation of the Second Amendment, ignoring its first thirteen words, will be modified, but probably only after a few more mass killings made possible by the decision of those five men in black robes who formed the majority in District of Columbia vs Heller back in 2008.  

Fortunately, Justice Scalia’s 2008 opinion did strongly imply that there were indeed limits as to what the Second Amendment would allow in terms of gun ownership.  Short of reverting to the real intent of the Second Amendment, the Court must quickly define those limits at the earliest opportunity, and assault weapons would be a good place to start.

JL

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