is she getting it?

fnarr fnarr etc etc.  @pennyred, who is a posh girl called Laura I believe, is to be congratulated for trying to get it right on Assange.  Unlike the middle-aged and elderly males of the "international left" (and George Galloway), who have come out in their droves to say that Assange is a hero and that he should therefore not stand to account for the rape he has been accused of, she has tried to say that no-one should have to choose between freedom of speech and respect for women.  Good for her.  It's only shocking that so many appear to believe, without evidence or due process, that Assange must not stand trial in Sweden.  What message does that send, especially to men on the left?  Laura quotes teenage boys in her piece who say that they do not think what Assange is reported to have done was rape.  What is going to happen in teenage bedrooms, cars and the car parks of night clubs as a result of this?  Does anyone care?  Well, Laura seems to, and I am pleased about that.  Read on in her piece in the Independent (link higher up) and you will see that she says "I believe women".  Well, I don't.  We tell lies.  We shouldn't, but we do.  All humans do from time to time, although we try not to.  Always believing women who accuse men of rape ruins the lives of innocent men, and those of their families and people who love them.  Never  believing them, which is what the elderly male left are telling us to do, creates a world in which women become pieces of property.  Which is obscene.  Laura is tying herself in knots here, but she doesn't need to.  Believing in freedom of speech, and believing that women have the right to the integrity of their own bodies, are not mutually contradictory beliefs.  And Laura is straying on to territory in which that is how they are seen.  And then she spoils herself by saying this:

The answer is, of course, that Julian Assange should be held to account, of course he should, and he should be held to account in a system where due process means something and women are respected, and currently that system does not exist. Come back to me when the 19,000 annual sex attacks committed by members of the US Army and private contractors against their fellow soldiers are prosecuted. Come back to me when Private Bradley Manning is free.

he should be held to account in a system where due process means something and women are respected, and currently that system does not exist  Er, yes it does, Laura, in quite a number of places in the world, and one of them is Sweden.
Come back to me when the 19,000 annual sex attacks committed by members of the US Army and private contractors against their fellow soldiers are prosecuted. Why?  Rape and sexual assault happen all over the world, all the time.  They're not worse when committed by the US military.  I would argue that they are worse when committed, say, against girls in Afghanistan who then have the "choice" of marrying their rapist or being killed by their family.
Come back to me when Private Bradley Manning is free. Why?  He shouldn't be released, not now.  He is to be charged with very serious offences against national security.  What he should have is due process, and the US government, and President Obama, should hang their heads in shame that he has not had it.  They have other things to hang their heads in shame about too, not least failing to intervene in Syria, but that is for another post.

So, Laura, a good try, and your heart seems to be in the right place, but don't spoil it with meaningless anti-Americanism.  Intellectual honesty is not that hard to achieve, if you only try.

Robert A. Caro, "The Passage of Power", Part Two

I need to tell you about the rest of this book.  At the time JFK was killed there was an executive logjam, as bills were piled up to prevent a civil rights bill from passing - which LBJ had warned JFK about.  JFK had had the eloquence and promise on this, but LBJ, despite the "taint of magnolias" would now have to be the one to deliver on it.  On the plane, with JFK's body and LBJ on it, LBJ now had to make those decisions.  And when Bobby Kennedy met the plane he ran past LBJ, so as not to have to recognise him as President.

The Kennedy administration had, in October 1963, recommended stepping up the training of the Vietnamese army, so that American military personnel could be withdrawn, and assessed that this could be done by late 1965.  Robert McNamara had said, "We need to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it".  But then there was a coup in South Vietnam, and the National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) was contradictory in its message: it retained the withdrawal pledge, but its soundbite was that the Vietnam conflict was a war against communism, and a war that had to be won, and that it remained "the central objective of the United States isn South Vietnam, to assist the people and government to win".

LBJ was, you could say, populist, or maybe foolhardy, telling Martin Luther King he would "support them all" - Kennedy's policies, which MLK had described as "great... p;regressive".  LBJ told liberals he was going to reform the system, and conservatives that he was going to preserve it as it was.  A great political line he gave to a state governor whose support he needed: "You came to see me when I was sick.  I don't forget that.  Now you let me know if there's anything I need to know out there.  I'm going to depend on you."  While JFK's body was still in the East Room, on the Saturday after he was killed, Arthur Schlesinger, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, hosted a restaurant lunch, in a Washington restaurant with senior economists among others, to discuss the possibility of denying LBJ the nomination at the 1964 Democratic Convention, by running a ticket of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.  So that is what LBJ was up against.

LBJ had an interesting and quite compelling use of language.  He referred, on the night of JFK's funeral, to Jackie "holding his skull in her lap" - Caro calls him a great storyteller, and he is right to do so.

In the illustrations to the book, photographs mostly, all the politicians look overweight, unhealthy and tired.  LBJ,although older than many, towards the end of this book, looks relatively fresh.  Only RFK, in those pictures, is good-looking.

When lBJ made his inaugural address it had to be typed in large type  Because LBJ was in his late fifties, and most people that age need glasses to read.  He started, "All I have, I would have given gladly not to be standing here today".  And almost straight in after that, urging that "Civil rights be written in the books of law".  The southern senators sat silent.  Previous Majority  Leader Reston had written, "President Kennedy had a way of seeing all sides of a question.  President Johnson has a way of concentrating on his own side of a question."  Johnson had a gift for political phrasemaking: To Republicans: "I am the only President you have: If you would have me fail, then you fail, for this country fails."

There is more in this book, and it is a stupendous insight into a brilliant politician, and into the exercise of power.

Robert A. Caro, "The Passage of Power", Part One

the fourth in Caro's masterly series on the years of Lyndon Johnson, a character I thought did not much interest me until I started reading these books a few years ago.  This one is perhaps the most readable of the four (he tells us there is another in preparation) and covers a very short period, that of the transition from Kennedy to Johnson and the early part of Johnson's Presidency.  It is informed by LBJ's hatred of Robert Kennedy, something which was known about in political circles at the time but is explored psychologically most interestingly here.  And made me wonder how it would have developed later, if RFK had lived.  "To watch Lyndon Johnson during the transition is to see political genius in action" - and so it was.  I was too young at the time to understand, but fairly un-political people in the UK were agog with interest in American politics, as they have almost never been since - I remember the adult conversations around me.  Johnson's background - his father going broke, and his family having to walk past shops that would no longer give them credit - made him terrified of failure.  So he said he wouldn't run for the 1960 presidential nomination - because if he didn't run, he couldn't fail.  And then he changed his mind.  Politics was no stranger to fraud,then as now - in Johnson's 1948 Texas Senate race, very late, after polls had closed, 200 new votes were found for Johnson.  All had written their names in the same ink and the same handwriting, and had voted in alphabetical order.  The selection by JFK of LBJ as running mate caused a storm among northern liberals, but one journalist, Doris Fleeson, had it right when she wrote that the choice was "a decision to win the election".  There is a parallel with the UK and recent times too obvious to go into here.

During JFK's brief Presidency LBJ kept silent, mostly, as vice-presidents must.  He was also routinely humiliated and sneered at.  LBJ, the briefer and leaker, did none of this during the Kennedy years.  He never criticised the President, and would not allow anyone else to do so in his hearing.  The Kennedys and their acolytes laughed at LBJ's clothes, his accent and his manners, and LBJ knew they were doing it.  We learn that it was LBJ who told the media that the Cuban missile crisis had erupted.  Johnson's remark on what to do about it was, "All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was take a stick and chop its head off."  We  know of course that that is not what happened in 1962.

A great speech LBJ made, and which has been forgotten until now, is worth quoting from: "One hundred years ago, the slave was freed ... one hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.  The Negro today asks justice.  We do not answer him - we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil - when we reply to the Negro by asking, 'Patience' ... to ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough ...the Negro says, 'Now'.  Others say 'Never'.  The voice of responsible Americans - the voices of those who died here and the great man (Lincoln) who spoke here - their voice says, 'Together'.  There is no other way."

A big story which might have destroyed LBJ, to do with a man named Bobby Baker, an associate who later went to prison, and a possible source of LBJ's wealth, was brewing in November 1963.  In those days of much slower-boiling news stories it was building up as November went on.  The headlines on 22 November 1963 were full of LBJ's waning star, and that he was being snubbed by the President's people.

For chapters on end Jackie seems to be wearing the bloodstained pink suit - but a lot was going on, including LBJ being sworn in on board Air Force One.  Jackie was drinking a Scotch at the time, we are told.  The first one she had ever drunk.  And she did not like it.  Lady Bird Johnson had a wonderful, dignified, Southern turn of phrase when asked when the Johnsons would be moving into the executive mansion in the White house, "I would to God I could serve Mrs Kennedy's comfort.  I can at least serve her convenience."

More soon.

in fairness

and following the previous post, here is an open message from the male accuser in the case.  He might have been better advised not to put this message in the public domain, but he has, and I note the ugly dead-trees have been sent it too.  btw I don't know the protagonists here, I picked this up from various Facebook friends and online postings, I just thought the response of the Episcopal bishops to this matter was spot on and should be shared.

Erik Campano, the accuser of Ginger Strickland, has sent the following open letter.

From: campano@gmail.com [mailto:campano@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Erik Campano
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 7:03 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: Public Message

Bishop Matthews, Bishop Henderson, and Presiding Bishop Katherine
Jefferts-Schori: please note that I see in my inbox that there is another decision from the reference panel, but I will not be opening that email for reasons described below. I wish you all PLEASE only the COMPLETE LOVE of CHRIST OUR LORD -- as I wish everyone.

To all my friends and family that I can find to list right now: please publicize the following note, which I have posted on the website of the New York Post and on my Facebook page.

To the Internet:

I do not feel now as I felt when I made that quote. It was immediately after I received the decision, and it was a hasty reaction. I do NOT think it was in the spirit of spiritual reconciliation that I called for. I do not know how I feel now: but I wish to express something more charitable than that comment to the Episcopal Church.

If I have broken any laws, I ask you to point this out to me and take fair legislation against me. Please do not take any illegal or unethical action against me (or anyone else). I have never believed my actions to be illegal, but I may have been unable to judge that, because I am not a legal expert.

I am going, after I post this note, to seek full psychiatric treatment.

I believe I am unstable.

I have asked my family, after I write and post this note on Facebook and the Post website, to physically restrain me from the Internet for one month, or I have been judged by a psychiatrist stabilized. I ask this of everyone. Actions sometimes have unintended consequences, going to the public with this information has produced horrible consequences that I did not intend, and I cannot control. When I made this decision, I believed it to be ethically true. I do not know now.
THAT DOES NOT mean, however, that I discourage any sexual misconduct survivors, male or female, to come forward publicly.

If anyone can definitely figure out whether I have done anything ethically wrong, I would like you to point this out to me. I expect to be constantly examinating my conscience over the next month. When I have become stable again, I will do everything I possibly can to right, personally, any wrongs I have done.

When I initiated the complaints against Ginger and Bishop Whalon, I believed that action to be ethically correct. I still do. However, please note that by the Canonical process I was required to make the cases AGAINST them. I did the best I could, and I think these cases are reasonable. I always did my utmost to only speak TRUE facts.
However, reasonable people can also make the case FOR them, and I encourage both sides to present the most reasonable cases possible, as seems fit for public dialogue. Ultimately, I do still believe that both of them have violated Title IV of the Episcopal Canons.

Beyond this, I am extremely confused about other questions of right and wrong related to this case.

The Post has copies of these documents. So does, obviously, the Episcopal Church. However, I do not know, legally, if they can be shared fully with you.

There are probably other things I should say here which I do not understand now, and more elegant or less sensationalistic ways of expressing them.

Please repost this letter wherever deemed appropriate.

I wish only GOODNESS and RECONCILIATION for Ginger, Bishop Whalon, the church, and all our brothers and sisters - that is, everyone.

Erik Campano

that's the way to do it

an assistant curate of the Episcopal church in New York has been subjected to vile, misogynist and apparently entirely untrue coverage (which I will not reproduce) , after she ended a relationship she was having with a parishioner at her previous church.  She was effectively accused too of being a paedophile, although the man she had had a relationship with, who instigated the media coverage, was an adult.  As assistant curate she is an office holder in the church, and accountable to her bishop, to whom she made full disclosure.  If you are an office holder in an organisation and there is lying shitbag media coverage about you, this (below) is the kind of statement those who are senior in the organisation should make to its members.  Usually, they don't.  Take heed.  Especially those in politics.

July 9, 2012

Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We write to express our unqualified support for the Reverend Ginger Strickland, curate at the Church of the Incarnation in Manhattan, over an inaccurate and misleading article which appeared about her in Sunday's New York Post. The article reports the complaint brought against her by Mr. Erik Campano, a person with whom she had a romantic relationship while working as a lay minister at the non-denominational American Church in Paris. In 2011 she broke off the relationship with Mr. Campano and subsequently moved to New York to begin her employ at Incarnation. He then filed a complaint with this diocese stating that he believed that she had violated the church's policies regarding romantic relationships between clergy and parishioners.

The Episcopal Churches in Europe are under the jurisdiction of the Presiding Bishop, and the investigation of this matter was referred to her offices, where it has been conducted in full accord with established church policy. Our own preliminary investigation, though, showed that Mother Strickland had met every canonical obligation in such a relationship by disclosing her friendship with Mr. Campano to her bishop and superiors, and that there was no canonical breach of church policy.
We have complete confidence in our sister Ginger, as do the rector and congregation at the Church of the Incarnation. She is an able priest of good standing, and a person we believe to be of exemplary character. She did not deserve to have this story reported as it was, and we deeply regret the embarrassment this has caused her. We ask the prayers of this diocese for her and assure you of our complete support for her and her continued ministry in the Diocese of New York.

Read, and learn.

Update: Ginger Strickland has been fully exonerated by a range of church investigations.  Now will the media SHUT UP.

super size me

Boris Johnson (for it is he) writes here that Mayor Bloomberg in New York has banned the sale of giant-sized paper cups for soft drinks, as an anti-obesity measure.  Coca-Cola, apparently, is pissed off.  But this stuff really works.  I was idly looking at shops here in Strasbourg on Saturday, and I noticed a range of children's lunchboxes.  Packed lunches are actually rather rare in France, but they do exist, and are increasing in popularity.  Those lunchboxes were tiny. And French children, and adults, are quite slim for the most part. Every now and again the French media get in a froth about obesity (which is increasing) and they inevitably show those pictures on TV of the bottom halves of people walking along the street.  I always think when I see them, "But those people aren't really fat at all!"  It's relative.  But most people eat and drink whatever is put in front of them, and then stop.  Not long ago I broke my favourite wine glass, and have been using another one, which is quite a lot smaller (I bought it in France).  Yesterday I found myself thinking "There's a lot more left in that bottle than I thought there was."  I had drunk less of it, without noticing, because my glass was smaller.  Now for dinner on smaller plates...

Kennedy assassination - at last the truth

Well, maybe.  Marbury points us to some work on this.  We have all seen the film (no, not the Oliver Stone one, silly), we know where Lee Harvey Oswald was, and we see the President hit a third time, apparently from the other direction.  From this sprang a thousand conspiracy theories.  The third bullet was, allegedly, fired by a security team member who panicked, and was the one which actually killed the President.  Could be  could be.  The mystery deepens...

Next year, readers, will be the 50th anniversary of that event.  I was nine when it happened, and remember  the adult conversations about it well, although I didn't understand them.  My parents were not on the right politically, though there were times when they weren't sure where they stood (mostly they voted Labour) but they hated all the Kennedys with a passion.  I have never understood why, especially as at the time the more questionable character issues were not known about because of the different media in those days.  I had better ask my mother while there is still time.

Anyway, next year there will be new books out, films probably, TV programmes, interviews with people who were there, a mini-series about the Doomed Dynasty I should think.  Makes you tired already.

Hey, anybody want to commission me to write something?  I can DO this stuff.

the passage of power, by Robert Caro - LBJ

is the title of the new volume in the series which forms the great biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.  It is the best study of political power I have ever read.  I have been waiting years for the latest one, and have just pre-ordered it.  Read the others now if you can, but be warned, it is "du boulot" as the French say, there is a lot in it.  The books are long, and they are detailed, and they are fascinating.  The effect of the coming of electricity to rural Texas on the politics of the state?  How rural women did washing in that state?  How the farming was done?  How the Senate was taken over and controlled?  How civil rights legislation was introduced, after decades of failure?  How the Senate election of 1948 was stolen?  It's all there.  There has been about a ten-year gap between the appearance of each volume, and Caro is 76 now, so I am relieved that he has found the time to write it.  You can read a lovely profile of him here and you can start with volume 1 here if you haven't discovered these books yet.  I love his style - the long looping paragraphs followed by one-sentence ones.  I wish I had had the chance to read these before i went into politics, but they came out during those years.  Highly recommended.