a new march on washington

Short version:

I imagine a massive crowd gathers on inauguration day, no violence, no noise, maybe a few anti-Trump, anti-hate signs. They stand silently, their numbers the important part, and they turn their back on the proceedings.

Americans would hardly go for that, of course. We like to make noise, like to disrupt actively rather than (deliberately) passively. It is the American way. If the current method isn't working, you're just not putting enough effort into it.

Long version:

I was talking to my ex the other day about the protests this week, how it feels like they cannot possibly accomplish anything but to maybe satisfy something a little therapeutic in those participating, and to piss off those who are not. Not that there isn't a place for (deliberately) pissing people off. But, it feels to me--and for the record I am a white male so maybe I've just got the privilege of holding off until the protest is more convenient--like something more deliberate, more thought out, more... Really, I think it's numbers that that will matter. I mean, Trump's supporters don't care about women or those with darker skin--and yes, I generalize, but so the fuck what? They just de facto supported misogyny and bigotry, turning a blind eye to it if not outright promoting it. That there are women among them, that there are people of color among them--that is not as important as the institutionalization and normalization of offensive behavior that comes from all of those votes for Donald Trump.

It seems that what matters, in the face of an executive office and both branches of the legislative (and potentially the judicial) turning to the Right, is the numbers to really make a fucking point. That is, having enough of a mass movement that they have no choice but to listen. A protest in one city might help alleviate the bad feelings of some of those involved, but what does it really accomplish? Especially right now. The election is done, but Trump is not even president yet. These protests will not stop the process. Faithless electors are unlikely. The process will continue. January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of these United States. The only choice his opponents have is to make sure that they... we are heard.

Anyway, I was telling my ex that what we should do is all show up in DC on inauguration day, make it massive, make it impossible to ignore. That very same day, the Million Woman March event on Facebook was going around. But that's just part of what we need. We need not just one million but many millions of women. And, we need men. And we need people of color. (Ignore the intersectional bit of these arbitrary divisions for the moment.) We need natives. We need foreigners. We need gay people. We need straight people. We need everyone.

I brought up SNCC while talking to my ex about all this. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We need something like that, to bring together the women's groups, the Black Lives Matter groups, the LGBTQ groups, and to get all the straight white men who should be offended by the mistreatment of these and so many other marginalized groups. We do not need--though it may feel great in the short term--scattered protests in a handful of cities. We need a singular, coordinated, focused effort to gather together and be heard.

We cannot stop Trump from becoming president, but maybe.... No, no maybes. We WILL make him listen to us. There will be no banning of Muslims, no more disproportionate shootings of black men by the cops, no more conversion therapy or talk of marriage just being between one man and one woman, no more grabbing women by, well, any body part they do not want to be grabbed by.

Donald Trump may be president, and he may have both houses of congress on his side, but this is still a government of the people, by the people for the people.

That doesn't just mean the winners. That doesn't just mean white Christian males. It means everyone.

The winners want unity? They must be forced to include us. We must stand up and demand as much.

can't we all just burn it down?

On the other hand, when geographic lines are not as clear as they may have been at the start of the American Civil War, why the hell should we try to get along at all?

Regardless of the end results of last night's election, fifty milllion (plus) people just voted against Syrian refugees, against women, against people of colour, against the LGBTQ community, against government-funded healthcare, against the rich paying their fair share. They voted for conversion therapy, for trade war, for literal war, for misogyny and racism and so much white privilege that, honestly, I might support so many of my friends who are not white, not straight, not male, in leaving. Go where your pain might lessen. Or stay and fight with those of us white males who love you.

I wrote in favor of coming together late last night because that was the voice I needed in order to relax and to sleep. I put on my "practice reckless optimism" shirt this morning because that is the message I want to put out into the world. But, as I wrote last night, and upon waking this morning, I knew I would write something quite the opposite when I got the chance. I deliberately put away my anger last night because, fortunately, I'm good at compartmentalizing when I need to. Those who are already marginalized, though--including many of my favorite people--I understand that putting away your pain may be impossible. I am sorry.

For those of you who just won:

"Basket of deplorables" is the kind way of describing far too many of you. When some of you still call Barack Obama a Muslim, still call Michelle Obama a man in drag, call liberals evil, assume foreigners dangerous, assume poor to be poor by their own fault, assume that women should shut up and get back in the kitchen where they were when America was great, that black people should get into their inner city hells or find some other country in which to live, you damage the very ideal of what this country should have been. I made a point last night of separating greatness and goodness. America has been for a long time, and still is, great. It has been on track to becoming good and last night you derailed it. Your fear of someone coming for your guns, of someone coming for your religion, of someone coming for your right to speak your bigotry has, at least for now, ruined us.

Now, of course, that system is no longer "rigged", right? Because your people have control of the executive, of both houses of the legislative, and soon probably the judicial. Rigged does not mean that someone you don't like has won. Rigged means the poorest of us lack voice, lack power. Rigged means those marginalized because of their race, their sexuality, their place of birth are sidelined because history is written by the winners and straight white Christian men conquered this land and have laid claim to it as if their very lives depend on it.

So, the rest of us--the marginalized and the white men who do not want power taken through force of hateful rhetoric (or overt violence)--have two options:

1. The dangerous option, because rhetorically and literally it edges into violence, is to make their lives actually depend on it. Now, I do not mean that we bring it to violence. You need not take a life to make a life difficult. Republicans spent the past eight years hindering Democrat's political efforts, and far too often it worked more than it failed. And, when folks pronounce the race card expired this morning, we have driven ourselves backward. That is what they wanted. That is what they achieved. So, we do everything we can destroy them.

2. And, because that is edging too far toward violence (against the people who have all the guns, too), there is the more mindful approach. Keep speaking. Keep protesting. Keep demanding the right to personal choice, the right to immigrate, the right to be gay or transgender without being hated, the right to be black and walk down the street at night without being suspect, the right to have a vagina and a voice. Donald Trump is a populist. Show him what the populace really is. Show him the power of varied opinions, of varied backgrounds, of more than just one and definitely more than two genders, of numerous races and cultures and nationalities and show him that embracing a dangerous extreme only pushes the knife into the wound in the heart of this country further.

Wound or heal. Metaphorically. And do it so very loudly.

Barry Soetoro (my "after-dinner-speech")

7:24pm, 4 August 1961, a grand conspiracy is put into effect. A child is born in Kenya, but his parents place the birth announcement, as noted journalist Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz put it on his Daily Show, 22 July 2010, “in one of our fringe states’ local newspapers… your Hawaiis, your Alaskas, your Pennsylvanias. You heard me. And then…” they wait… “until this baby is a middle-aged man. Now the trap is set. [They] just [sit] back and let that child go out and win the election for president of the United States.”

But, during the Presidential Primaries in 2008, rumors of the truth begin to circulate, subversive emails calling for us to stop this usurper from coming to power.

This usurper’s name: Barry Soetoro… you might know him better under his conspiratorial alias, Barack Hussein Obama II. A Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Behind the ‘Birther’ Blather,” this past Wednesday, 16 February 2011, cited a PPP poll that “found that 51% of likely Republican primary voters believe that Obama was born outside the United States.” And, 11 states’ legislatures have introduced “birther” bills to challenge Barry’s eligibility in 2012. But, despite even these official attacks on his citizenship, he is still our President.

Today, I will explain how this Kenyan boy has pulled the wool over our eyes, I will show you how we can join the Birther Movement in applying the constitution to get him out of office, and then I will show you the implications of all this.

First, an explanation:

Here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:

Nevermind that Mombasa was part of Zanzibar at the time, not ceded to Kenya until December 1963. Nevermind that Kenya was not the “Republic of Kenya” until December 1964. And, nevermind, of course, that this document, submitted as evidence by Dr Orly Taitz—orlytaitzesq.com, the “World’s Leading Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Site”—was pronounced a forgery of this Australian document.

Oh, and nevermind the name, Barack Hussein II. As I’ll show you in a moment, his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro filled out an Indonesian school application with the boy’s real name.

But, first, here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:

Again, ignore the name. And, ignore the fact that, yeah, Mombasa wasn’t part of the British Protectorate of Kenya for another two years. Look at the footprint—it’s black—this is clearly the Birth Certificate for our usurper President.

Now, if you saw the Associated Press’ article “Final Nail in Obama’s Lack of US Citizenship Coffin,” 1 April 2009 (which they conveniently emailed rather than bother publishing), you know that Americans for Freedom of Information released Barry’s transcripts from Occidental College, where he received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia. Americans for Freedom of Information’s website, amfoi.wordpress.com, points out that the organization “is a completely fake organization that recommends hypotheticality to anyone looking to avoid the IRS,” but, if it shows up in one’s inbox, it has to be true.

And, here’s all the proof we need:

Note the name at the top, Barry Soetoro… ignore, of course, the listed birthplace of Honolulu. The key here is we all know that filling out a school application has legal auhority over any… birth certificate, no matter how many birth certificates one has.

But, what does all this matter, as long as Barry won the election? Here’s the thing. In this country we have a Constitution. It’s this long boring document that lays out how our government works and what it takes to be President. Now, while it doesn’t specifically rule out Kenyan “slash” Indonesian boys who may or may not be Muslim (Hussein… really? It’s like they wanted us to suspect him of something.) and may or may not be black, depending on the racial math one uses, Article I does say that only a natural born citizen can be President. And, this is where the Birther Movement gains the higher ground…

See, according to attorney Mario Apuzzo—who because of similarities to a certain author’s name, I will hereafter call the Godfather—in his essay entitled, “The Framers Used Emer de Vattel to Define a Natural Born Citizen,” Before It’s News, 2 November 2010, the framers used Emer de Vattel to define a natural born citizen… the essay title kinda nailed it. Anyway, as the Godfather points out, de Vattel defined a natural born citizen as “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens” in the Law of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 19 Section 212. De Vattel further suggests that if one is born of a foreign father, then his birth country “will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.” He mentions only two paragraphs later, section 214 that “there are states, as, for instance, England”—where we got our common law, I would add—“where the single circumstance of being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner.”

But, nevermind that last part. Since Vattel wrote that first part before the framers used the phrase natural born citizen, and an English translation of his French book was not available at the time, they had to have been copying him. Besides, if a law existed before our Constitution, we have to follow it. Why write a Constitution if not to ignore it whenever we find something that predates it?

So, let’s say, for argument’s sake, all these birth certificates are fake—well not this one:

For argument’s sake, let’s say Barry was born in Hawaii. His father was a British subject, born in Kenya, so by de Vattel’s standard, Barry might qualify as a 14th Amendment citizen of these United States, but not as a natural born citizen, so not Constitutionally eligible for the position he has usurped.

There are two obvious implications to all this:

First, we have a foreign president who has taken office without constitutional right to do so. And, this from a grand conspiracy to—if you listen to Glenn Beck, who did a whole week-long exposé on his hard-hitting news program this past November—destroy America from within… see George Soros and his Shadow Party are using the Cult of Obama to, achieve some sort of, um, socialist, Marxist, Jewish, fascist, communist, Muslim plot—the one started back in ’61 when Barry’s parents signed their newborn up for his future presidency and maybe even Antichrist-ed-ness… It’s a word.

As Joy Tiz put it in “George Soros: International Man of Misery,” Canada Free Press, 18 February 2009: “it’s important to understand that George Soros doesn’t want to ‘change’ America. He wants to destroy it.” A nefarious conspiracy by Kenyans, Indonesians, Muslims, Jews to take down America, begun with a simple newspaper announcement and compounded with fake birth certificate after fake birth certificate. Here, by the way, is the real one…

…nothing suspicious there.

Strangely, the second implication is even scarier. For you see, if Barry was born in Hawaii, if Soros isn’t trying to destroy America, then there is something wrong with all of us that allows for ideas like this to keep going. Brian Montopoli points out, in “Who Are the Birthers?,” CBS News, 23 July 2009: “conspiracy theories often flourish in the wake of traumatic or game-changing events—the September 11 attacks, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination—and the election of America’s first black president has been no exception. Almost as soon as Barack Obama emerged as a serious candidate for the presidency, rumors about whether or not he is really an American began popping up online.”

The question we have to ask: does our kneejerk reaction stem from racism, from some Cold War remnant fear of socialism, or are we all simply so insane that when something happens we don’t like, there has to be a conspiracy? Montopoli quotes Michael Barkun, expert in conspiracy theories, saying, “there are people who firmly believe that the truth is always hidden, that whatever is presented as public knowledge is necessarily false.” He says, “conspiracy theories are [actually] comforting. They give us a feeling that we have secret knowledge, we know how the world really works.” Of course, they also make us believe some crazy stuff; according to an Onion poll, 22 September 2010, one in five Americans believe Barack Obama is a cactus.

Today, we’ve seen how the facts, or lies, of Obama’s birth have lingered, we’ve seen that the Godfather may have a point and there may legitimately be some constitutional issues involved, and we’ve seen the implications of this conspiracy… even if it is just a crazy theory. While even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called for Obama’s birth certificate, 27 December 2010, Dr Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health confirmed in USA Today, 28 July 2009, that she has “seen the original vital records maintained on file… verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii.” Then again, Fukino’s last name, transliterated back into the original Hawaiian is… Fuck if I know.

The point is: no Kenyan boy can pull the wool over our eyes if we are onto his plan… unless, we are all so stressed by the economy, so damaged by the shadow of 9/11 and wars abroad, by Jersey Shore, by partisan politics throwing the blame around like a hot potato, that we don’t know how to see what’s real. Maybe we can only see, not what we want to see, but whatever illusion best fits a world so out of our control that it’s easier to believe that a socialist conspiracy has put a foreign usurper in the Oval Office than it is to accept that maybe America just isn’t on top anymore.

F--k the Birthers! (seriously, I've been reduced to such profanity)

I’ve been reading a lot about birthers lately… you know, the folks who can’t find it in their white conservative hearts to believe our black president could have possibly been born in this country. Oh, and of course there’s the small wing that accepts that sure he might possibly have maybe been born here but that doesn’t matter because by Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations (which, even if it inspired our Constitution, does not dictate the terms of said Constitution until the Supreme Court says it does) says Obama still isn’t a “natural born citizen” because his father was not a US citizen. I’ve put together an ADS (after dinner speech) about the whole thing—and once I’ve run the thing at a few speech tournaments in the next couple months, I’m sure I’ll post the text of it here, but for now, a more angry rant

See, here’s the thing. Get past (or, literally, before) the whole mess of whether or not the Hawaiian governor can “find” Obama’s original birth certificate (the latest headline on the subject), get past military-involved court attacks like those filed by Orly Taitz, get past the kind of people who post stuff like the following: “I'll bet the only proof he was ever born sits in the mud hut of the VooDoo Doctor that conjured him.” That one just came up on a facebook group called Americans Who Are Sick and Tired of Obama (aka AWASATOO). Get past all that and see what Brian Montopoli mentiond in “Who Are the Birthers?” (CBS News): as soon as Obama seemed like a viable candidate for President (maybe even before that), rumors got going about him not being an American. There was no reason for these rumors. No Kenyan birth certificate had come out yet (and the two of those that have gotten around online are both fake (at least one of them (used by Orly Taitz, actually) has been proven a forgery)). His old grandmother hadn’t said in passing that she was there for his birth. Kenya hadn’t really started claiming him as one of their own. So, the only reason anyone had to distrust Obama’s Americanness was, well, racism, with maybe a little hint of Conservatives being insane bastards who get frightened if anyone drifts too far left. Obama was black

There was a fake dollar bill image going around with Obama on it a couple years back (during the campaign season) that had a bucket of chicken and watermelon on it, two staples of anti-black racist imagery (you can see the dollar here). Not sure of the exact quote, but what the person who made it said when questioned about it was that he just wanted to show how different looking Obama was from what was usually on our money… in other words, all those other money guys were old and white and Obama was not quite so old and, more importantly, black. Our first black president—obviously that would be a scary thought for racist right wingers. People hadn’t gotten started on him supposedly being a Muslim just yet—they were too busy commenting on his Christian minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, probably. But, what they could do was poke at his birth. His opponent, McCain was born in Panama, technically US soil at the time, so while his birth was maybe a little iffy compared to previous candidates, he was fine… plus, bonus, he was white. Gotta love that

But, Obama. He was born in one of our fringe states; actually, Hawaii wasn’t even officially a state yet, so that just makes it a little more suspicious. But, still, no fake Kenyan birth certificate had shown up yet. That Indonesian school application hadn’t even shown up yet, and already people were questioning whether or not Obama was born in America… or more importantly, if he was “American.” His ideology certainly had a hand here, as conservatives are so very afraid of socialists and communists and Marxist, so afraid that they can rarely tell the difference between the three. Here was this guy who didn’t look right for the job he was applying for, and who was sounding even more left than his fellow Democrats. Not to mention that name (a little too close to both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for comfort). What to do?

Lynching him was probably an option before he was running for President, but you lynch a Presidential candidate and the liberal authorities are sure to crack down and throw you in prison if they don’t just shoot you on sight, ‘cause we all know its liberal police that are the most triggerhappy

Anyway, no fake Kenyan birth certificate yet meant there was really only one fuel that would lead anyone to question Obama’s Americanness: hatred. Well, hatred and fear. And, we Americans are so good at fear. It’s driven numerous “scares” as new waves of immigrants came to our shores. It fueled the Cold War. It’s fueled the War on Terror. And, now it’s fueled the War on Obama

And, hatred is self perpetuating. You hate Obama then you hear a speech of his, all you hear is self-serving liberal bullshit; of course, on the other side, you like Obama and all you hear is hope and change and maybe some promise of release from the grips of the Right. After a while, if you’re able, you get sick of both sides and it’s a lot of the same rhetoric you hear from any President... well, any liberal President, anyway, plus the all-American extension of war, even if not to the proper cheerleading level. He wants to get healthcare to millions who don’t have it, when medical bills are said to be the biggest reason people go into debt and our economy’s shit, but it’s socialist and we ain’t havin any of that commie bullshit in this country, no sir

It’s pro guns, pro war, anti universal healthcare, anti abortion and all the other right wing extremes we’ve got in America or obviously YOU ARE NOT POSSIBLY AMERICAN

Well, here’s what I have to say to that: FUCK YOU, you ignorant, racist pigs. Get the fuck over your paranoia and move the fuck on