At Long Last

It was during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, rebuked unrepentant demagogue and relentless smear artist Joe McCarthy with these words: “Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” There has been no shortage of information on the foolishness and demagoguery of Donald Trump. He has been fully exposed, and we know that he has no sense of decency. But what about his followers? What do they see in him? Who are these people who have so much admiration for this uninformed egotistical blowhard who trades in hatred, resentment, and fear. We’re a ways into this political season and the Trumpists have been steadfast and growing in number. At long last, have they no sense of decency?

An important clue is in the free-floating hostility they proudly harbor (and angrily express) toward everything and everybody they perceive as being aligned against them; which, apparently, is everything and everybody. It is to Mr. Trump they look to vanquish these ghostly tormentors, and their faith in his ability to do it appears to be based entirely on his swaggering, kick-ass attitude and carriage. It certainly can’t be based on anything he actually says because every word that has come out of his mouth so far has been either impenetrably vague, completely incomprehensible, or simply wrong. They live in a fantasyland of imagined enemies and armchair pugnacity.

A characteristic that true believers of every political persuasion have in common is the tendency (need?) to sanctify their candidate and demonize their candidate’s opponents. Their guy, they believe, will make everything all right. The other guy will make everything all wrong. They are, they seem to think, electing a king or a dictator, and not merely the head of the executive branch within a representative democracy in which making good on the wild promises one makes in a campaign setting is extremely (and deliberately) difficult. In fact, it is now clear that Trump and his people are quite impatient with democracy and its processes, and would prefer an office-holder who can make everything right for them by executive decree. Government by and for the people? Nah. We just want our daddy to tell us what to do, and make it all better.

Whatever “it all” is. In some quarters, followers of Trump are characterized as being perhaps wrong-headed in their embrace of Trump but having grievances that are legitimate, involving the changing economic and employment landscape of recent years. If that’s the case, there is an exquisite irony here, as these folks – staunch advocates of small government, free markets, individual responsibility, and rugged independence – whine about everything government hasn’t done for them lately.

You would think that they’re an army of the unemployed. In fact, these people are not, for the most part, unemployed. As for the economy in general, it has created 14-million private-sector jobs since 2010, dropping unemployment to under 5 percent. Housing and construction are strong, the auto industry is thriving, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled in the last eight or so years. So things are actually pretty good and the problems and conditions that have steam coming out of these folks’ ears are largely illusory.

No, chalking up their anger and frustration to economic dislocation gives them far too much credit. Because what they’re really about is bigotry, The message they get from Trump comes in the form of permission to hate – to believe in the existence of, and to blame their problems on, the hated “other.” Trump legitimizes the antipathy, the latent distrust, that this largely white, male, blue-collar constituency has for various groups – blacks, religious minorities, women, etc. They pine for the good old days when you could put these groups down without fear of violating “political correctness.” And, like the acolytes of demagogues everywhere, they are certain that whatever is missing from their lives is somebody else’s fault.

Whiner Leader

The people who revere Donald Trump are routinely characterized as “angry,”and their anger is often characterized  -- even by those who think Trump a buffoon – as justifiable or at least understandable.  An editorial in the Washington Post put it this way: “The grievances they speak to are real: a sense that the economy has left too many people behind, that globalization and technological change are helping the few while stranding the many.”

Please.  Or to put it another way, globalization-schmobilazation.

These people are not angry.  What they are is whiny. If there is a whinier, more put-upon group of people than Donald Trump’s followers I don’t know who it would be.  They hold these two ideas to be sacred and self-evident: (1) They are unhappy; (2) It’s somebody else’s fault that they are unhappy.  They love their victimhood, and they relish the prospect of Trump vanquishing their tormentors.  They do this even as unemployment is at historical lows, interest rates are miniscule, inflation is non-existent, and more of the vehicles of choice for these folks, pickup trucks, are being sold than have ever been sold in the history of the world.

And yet, they say they are angry. Foot-stompingly, sneeringly, smoke-coming-out-of-their-ears angry. What is their problem?

In a previous post, I wrote: “Normal people are mystified by the way Donald Trump can repeatedly say bizarre, even irrational things – he witnessed something that didn’t happen, he thinks members of one religion should be kept out of the country -- and his poll numbers go up. It’s as if a light bulb goes on over the heads of these newest Trump converts: ‘Wow. I knew he was a blowhard and a bigot, but now I see he’s also delusional. I’m voting for him!’ Unexplainable, seemingly. But, of course, what his people see in him isn’t about any of that. It’s about his promise to ‘make America great again.’ And by ‘great’ what his mostly white male followers understand him to mean is a time when people who looked like them had all the good jobs; when there weren’t all these weird non-Christian religions around; when blacks, Hispanics, and women knew their place; when political correctness didn’t prohibit decent white folks from putting down racial and ethnic minorities.“

Meanwhile, if you needed further proof of how utterly clueless the Donald Trump true believers are – proof that includes all of the above plus his belief in a mythical giant wall, his affinity for throwing tens of thousands of people out of the country, his call for the murder of women and children in the Middle East, his calling an opponent a pussy for not embracing water boarding, and on and on -- his remark about shooting people provided it. This is a perfect double whammy: (1) When he said “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” he was absolutely right. His followers wouldn’t care if he committed such an act because they are oblivious to everything he says and everything he does, and respond only to the persona he projects, the one that does such a good job of playing to and nurturing their many resentments and imagined grievances; (2) They don’t get that when he said that, he was making fun of them. He was telling the world that his posse is so dense, so zombie-like in their adoration of him that he could do anything and they wouldn’t care. To be a blind follower of an intellectual and moral lightweight, and to not understand that you are being told by that person how blind you are and being ridiculed for it – that’s clueless.

Dear Trump peeps: If you are unhappy with the circumstances of your life you are absolutely free to improve on them. Nothing the government is doing or not doing is stopping you. Same with Wall Street big shots, the mainstream media, Muslims, immigrants, the Chinese, minorities, and so on. Your problems are of your own making, and so are the solutions. Electing your man to the presidency (or congress or the governorship or the school board) won’t make it all better. You won’t all of a sudden get the job of your dreams or get along better with your spouse. Your guy keeps telling you you’re being “ripped off,” something you clearly love to hear because you’re so fond of seeing yourselves as victims. Perhaps you can explain how you’re being ripped off. He can’t. Please be specific. Otherwise, you’ll just have to accept the New York Daily News’ characterization of Trump’s win in New Hampshire: “Dawn of the Brain Dead”.

The Villain Stan Kroenke

I was a follower and fan of the St. Louis Rams and I enjoyed their company while they were here.  I rooted for them to win, and, like everyone else, was exasperated when they played poorly which was, as we all know, most of the time. I will miss them. Having thus established my bona fides in this regard, I will say this: The demonization of Stan Kroenke and the outpouring of vitriol against him – the foot stomping, the insult hurling, a lawsuit for cripes sake, and an undoubtedly very expensive Super Bowl ad by a local personal injury lawyer -- is misplaced and comes across as childish and provincial. I don’t know Kroenke and have no interest in defending him, but the crimes with which he has been popularly charged, singly and in combination, seem to have been borne of anger and disappointment but not rationality. To wit:

Kroenke callously blew off St. Louis and should be ashamed.  Kroenke is in the entertainment business.  He owns a show.  And when you own a show, whether it’s a football team, a tent revival, or the ice capades, you’re going to locate it where you think it will attract the most customers and generate the most revenue.  That’s your job and it’s certainly your prerogative.  Where you grew up has nothing to do with it.

Kroenke betrayed the people who “supported” the Rams all these years.  People
who say that make it sound like folks donated their money to the enterprise – that they didn’t want to buy tickets to and attend Rams’ games but did so out of a spirit of generosity or civic duty. They were doing Kroenke a favor. In fact what they did was hand over money in return for which they were granted admission to and given a seat at a football game.  Quid pro quo.  They did what they wanted to do and they got what they paid for.  As for so-called emotional support, I’m not entirely sure what that means but it doesn’t sound like something grown-ups ought to bestow on a sports team.  Enjoy your team’s victories, mourn (for an hour or so) its losses, and understand that emotional entanglements are not adult-appropriate

Kroenke put an inferior product on the field.  It was an inferior product for the most part but I don’t see how you can make the case that it was because of anything Kroenke did or didn’t do.

Kroenke lied. Well he did say at one point he’d try to keep the team in St. Louis.  Maybe he didn’t really mean it.  Or maybe he changed his mind.  Or maybe he lied.  So what? People lie, and they certainly don’t always tell the whole truth.

Kroenke has enough money and shouldn’t be trying to get more by moving the team. Not your call.  How much money someone has and wants, whether it’s Stan Kroenke, your next door neighbor or your co-worker one desk over, is none of your business.

Kroenke took cynical advantage of a dumb stadium lease clause. He did, indeed; “dumb” being the key word here. The stadium’s proprietors signed on to the ridiculous idea that the team could get out of the lease if the stadium failed to reach a certain level in stadium tier-dom, and Kroenke used it to get what he wanted.  You would, too.

Kroenke’s move is a blow to the region’s economy. In reality, it will have almost no effect on the region’s economy.  What football fans, in their anger and disappointment, have a hard time getting their heads around is that they are in the minority. The majority is in one of these categories: (1) Might check the Rams’ score Monday morning but never attend or watch games; (2) Are only dimly aware of the existence of the Rams; (3) Are only dimly aware of the existence of football.  Only hard-core fans see this development as a tragedy.  Nobody else does and the regional economy will shrug it off.

Watching and rooting for the home NFL team is fun.  Many, many other things are also fun.  We should quit worrying about Stan Kroenke, a guy we never even heard of until about five years ago.

Is It Good For You?

Release recently of the federal government’s latest diet guidelines reinforces, once again, what an exercise in futility it all is, as foods continue to get kicked off the list and then reinstated. . If we’ve learned anything from the relentless discussion and study of food over the decades, it’s that what we know for certain about the relationship of diet to health and longevity is next to nothing. The expertise various people claim is a stew of superstition, old wives’ tales, conventional wisdom, pseudo-science, and charlatanism. Study after study refutes the findings of the one that came before and is refuted by the one that comes after, even as the media, which never met a study it didn’t like, reports breathlessly on the latest “findings,” caring not in the least if the study has any scientific validity or if the numbers it reports have any actual meaning. Is there a subject that has more junk-science jabberwocky associated with it than that of diet?

My theory is that since everyone wants to postpone for as long as possible (or maybe even eliminate) the inevitable catastrophe of death, they’re eager to embrace the notion that something as relatively simple and controllable as what they put in their bodies in the form of food is a major player in that process. Eat this, live long and prosper. Don’t eat that, live long and prosper. If only. There doesn’t seem to be any real science behind any of it, but that doesn’t stop people from asserting unequivocally that food A is “good for you” and food B is not. What science there is – the interminable revolving door of “studies” – routinely reverses conclusions about the healthfulness of individual food items, food categories, food chemistry, and food properties, and then reverses them again.

Eggs could be exhibit A in this phenomenon. Leaving aside the whole business of the relationship of blood cholesterol to heart disease – a relationship that is now being characterized as not very well understood – there has been a 180-degree reversal of the thinking on how dietary cholesterol affects blood cholesterol. It doesn’t, the experts now tell us. So go ahead and eat eggs, the yolks of which contain a lot of cholesterol. You’ll recall that not so long ago, it was understood that egg-eating should be limited because of the cholesterol they contain; and not so long before that, they were to be strictly limited if not eliminated from the diet altogether; and not so long before that, they were nature’s most nearly perfect food. Which they are again. Oh, no, wait. That was milk, the full fat version of which, thought to be something akin to poison for decades, has now been rehabilitated, even as the entire business of fat in the diet has been completely rethought. (Fat, the substance, was equated with fat, the condition, and Big Food made billions, and still does, by peddling stuff as low-fat or fat-free.)

The list goes on and on. Various vitamins had certain effects and then they didn’t. And then they did again. Food fiber prevented bowel cancer, until it didn’t. Fish oil was a major player in good health and then, not so much. Red meat was good, then bad, then good, then bad. (I think it’s good now. Or at least pretty good.) Protein, carbohydrates – good, bad, good, bad. Dark chocolate, red wine are good for the heart because of the resveratrol they contain, say various studies. Then various other studies say we’d have to ingest 73.5 lbs. of resveratrol a day (or some such thing) for it to have any effect. Coffee. Beer. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. A study shows something-something reduces the risk of heart disease by 17-percent. But what does that mean? That I will have a heart attack at age 81 and 15 days instead of age 81 and 14 days?

An interesting sidebar topic to all of this is “fast” food, a category that is generally ranked somewhere between unwholesome and poisonous in the popular culture The problem: No one really knows what the term means. Is it that the food is cooked fast? Eaten fast? Both? Or that it’s produced and sold by large chain restaurants that have drive-through windows. What difference does it make? Answer: None. It’s just food. The typical fare – beef, cheese, and bread – is served up in diners, fancy restaurants, and homes around the world, daily. There is zero true scientific evidence that people who refrain from eating these things are any healthier or live any longer than anybody else. The demonization of “fast food” is completely irrational.

Bottom line: There is a good deal of knowledge – science – out there about the properties of the food we eat, but not much about how those properties, individually and in combination, relate to health and longevity. “Good for you” and “not good for you” are not science or knowledge-based concepts and are therefore essentially meaningless. Same with the term “healthy diet.” It appears the only thing we know with any degree of certainty about eating’s relationship to good health is this: Don’t do very much of it.

Black Lives Matter

Recently, a young black woman who worked at a food concession in a Chicago zoo lost her job after grousing on Facebook about “rude-ass white people.” What the woman doesn’t fully grasp is that rude is rude, and there’s no reason to specify the race of the offenders. It’s true that most of her customers were white, but it’s also true that if most of them had been black, she would experience rude behavior from about the same percentage of them. In short, mentioning race here added nothing to the validity of her complaint. Saying “rude people” as opposed to “rude white people” would have served her purpose just as well.

To which black folks across America would be fully justified in responding: “Welcome to my world.” In that world, race is always mentioned by white people, whether or not it has anything to with anything, even in the most benign of contexts:

“I ran out of gas and this black guy stopped and gave me a lift.”

“There was a huge black woman in front of me in line.”

“A bunch of black teenagers came into the grocery store.”

“An old black gentleman was having trouble getting out of his car.”

In none of these statements does specifying the race of the actor affect what is being communicated. And, importantly, in none of them would race be specified if the actors were white. No white person would say “a white guy stopped and gave me a lift,” or “a huge white woman in front of me...” And so on.

The days of the most egregious and obvious race-based affronts to justice and morality, as typified by Jim Crow laws and customs, are long gone -- laws and customs that openly segregated public facilities of every kind, right down to the minutiae of drinking fountains; customs that, for example, forbade professional black athletes from eating in the same restaurants and sleeping in the same hotels as their white teammates; laws/customs that kept white and black kids from going to school together, or that systematically kept blacks out of most colleges and all the professions. We’re past all that, and many young people are aghast when they learn that such an era ever existed. As condescending as it may sound, it is fair to say that many young black people – with that era as a backdrop – don’t realize how good they have it.

That is not to say they have it good. The residue of Jim Crow that they’re left with is a more pernicious and subtle form of racism that is all the more infuriating to blacks because of white blindness to it. The consensus among most white people regarding the goings-on in Ferguson, for example, was that the protests were, at the very least, an over-reaction; that the sleights and injustices about which so much anger was expressed were overstated or even imaginary; that the protesters, while having some legitimate grievances, would be better off if they’d stop complaining and get on with their lives. In short, most of my white friends and acquaintances were unable to empathize. This, despite the virtual certainty, in my opinion, that these people, being intelligent folks with healthy egos, would be among the most virulently militant about the subtle and not-so-subtle indignities they would routinely experience if their faces were to turn black. My guess is they wouldn’t be so dismissive of the anger and frustration felt by a grown man or woman who gets pushed around -- figuratively and sometimes literally – and treated like a recalcitrant child, by a young white policeman.

Which brings us to “black lives matter,” a slogan and sentiment that many white reactionaries now characterize as an aggressively racist “movement” aimed at raising up blacks and putting down whites – a sort of latter-day Black Panthers thing. Their counter-slogan – which they believe to be a piquantly effective one – is “all lives matter.” The problem with that: the fact that all lives matter has never been in question. That black lives matter has been – in a thousand ways both subtle and overt – and is in need of re-affirmation in a way that the importance and value of lives in general is not. That all lives matter is a given. That black lives matter isn’t. People justifiably feel the need to re-affirm that blacks, just like whites, are individuals with strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears, goals and aspirations. They are – like whites – short and tall, meek and bold, smart and dumb, athletic and ungainly, wise and foolish, industrious and lazy, pretty and ugly, strong and weak. They are not interchangeable. Racial stereotyping renders them interchangeable, and says, in effect, that their individual lives don’t matter. And that’s what the black lives matter idea is pushing back against.

Black Lives Matter should not be understood as a threat, although it will undoubtedly be employed in an aggressive way here and there, but as a plea for understanding and compassion and a reminder that even in this era of comparative racial enlightenment, a subset of the population struggles daily with indignities that range from subtle put-downs to flagrant injustices because of the color of their skin. Advice for white people: (1) Don’t indulge in racial stereotyping, even when it’s thought to be benign; (2) Have empathy for those who face it every day of their lives.

Political Correctness

It has become a favorite dodge of some folks to characterize themselves as victims of political correctness when they are called out for the mean-spirited, dumb, or simply wrong things they say, and to characterize themselves as forthright and courageous for saying utterly mindless things in defiance of this PC trend.  In the good old days before political correctness took hold, they seem to be saying, a person could, for example, insult great swaths of society -- blacks, Jews. women, etc. -- openly and without remorse or reprisal.  That was before people got so persnickety about this stuff.

War on Christmas

“Nation’s Oppressed Christians Huddle Underground To Light Single Shriveled Christmas Shrub”

That’s a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, taking dead aim at the incessant whining of a segment of the body politic about how put upon they are by secularism, the “mainstream media,” non-Christians of various persuasions, and their all-time favorite bugaboo, political correctness. By way of reassuring these folks during this holiday (Christmas) season, I offer up the following: Between now and December 25th the words “Merry Christmas” will be spoken 1 bazillion times (that’s just a round number, of course). Hundreds of millions of person-hours will be spent in churches of various denominations, observing the “true meaning” of Christmas. There will be as many nativity scenes around town as there were in 1953; Christmas trees will be put up all across the land. Millions upon millions of Christmas presents will be opened. Glasses will be raised, lights will be strung, lavish meals will be eaten, movie classics will be watched, many of which have the word “Christmas” in their titles, like “A Christmas Carol,” “A Christmas Story,” and “White Christmas,” and Christmas music will be played and sung to distraction.  All of this, and more, will be done out in the open without any interference (or criticism) from anybody. Hello, war-on-Christmas worriers: There is no war on Christmas. If you wish to participate, no one is stopping you. If other people don’t wish to participate, that’s none of your beeswax.

What Trumpists really want

Normal people are mystified by the way Donald Trump can repeatedly say bizarre, even irrational things – he witnessed something that didn’t happen, he thinks members of one religion should be kept out of the country -- and his poll numbers go up. It’s as if a light bulb goes on over the heads of these newest Trump converts: “Wow. I knew he was a blowhard and a bigot, but now I see he’s also delusional. I’m voting for him!” Unexplainable, seemingly. But, of course, what his people see in him isn’t about any of that. It’s about his promise to “make America great again.” And by “great” what his mostly older white male followers understand him to mean is a time when people who looked like them had all the good jobs; when there weren’t all these weird non-Christian religions around; when blacks, Hispanics, and women knew their place; when political correctness didn’t prohibit decent white folks from putting down racial and ethnic minorities. You just know – because he is unable to restrain himself – that Jews will be his next target, as he explains, using “just common sense,” that they control the media, Hollywood, and the banks. This is a turn of events that in a sane world would bring his candidacy crashing to earth in a ball of fire. But it will probably just end up recruiting a whole new wing of the slack-jawed to his bandwagon. Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that the poll numbers Trump is garnering can be a little bit misleading. Recently, those numbers showed he had 35 percent of Republican primary voters in his corner. But Republican primary voters were just 38 percent of the people interviewed in the New York Times/CBS polling. Thirty-five percent of 38 percent is about 13 percent of the electorate.

Is it terrorism? Does it matter?

A recent trend is for members of one segment of the political spectrum to accuse others of bowing to political correctness by refusing to identify terrorism as terrorism. The thought is that this refusal stems from the fear of offending members of a religious minority. But it’s important to understand the actual meaning of terrorism. This definition comes from the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies:

“Terrorism is defined as political violence in an asymmetrical conflict that is designed to induce terror and psychic fear (sometimes indiscriminate) through the violent victimization and destruction of noncombatant targets (sometimes iconic symbols). Such acts are meant to send a message from an illicit clandestine organization. The purpose of terrorism is to exploit the media in order to achieve maximum attainable publicity as an amplifying force multiplier in order to influence the targeted audience(s) in order to reach short- and midterm political goals and/or desired long-term end states.”

In other words, terrorism needs to be understood as a tactic for changing the internal politics of a country, or even conquering that country, when it’s impossible to do so by more conventional means. Not every murderous act qualifies. But for the folks who routinely call others out for refusing to call a spade a spade, the only qualification necessary is that the act be committed by a Muslim. If the act is committed by a Muslim, it’s a terrorist act. If it’s committed by a non-Muslim, it’s something else.

To the folks who say gun laws are of no use in preventing “terrorist” attacks: When a member of the unhinged stockpiles guns and thousands of bullets and uses those things to kill and injure scores of innocent people – and anyone who would do that is a member in good standing -- their reasons don’t matter. Pick one: They heard voices through their tin foil hats; they’ve pledged allegiance to the grand wazier of ISIS; they hate all members of the you-name-it minority group; they like the smell of cordite in the morning. These peoples’ thought processes are off the rails, whether or not their acts are defined as terrorism. They can’t be allowed to have guns. There’s every reason to believe that if procuring an arsenal was more difficult and involved than it is, the mad plan of the San Bernardino murderers would have been abandoned or sniffed out in advance.













T

Guns, Part 4: Conclusion

From an organization called the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence we get these statistics:

In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings.  This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour. 73,505 Americans were treated in hospital emergency departments for non-fatal gunshot wounds.2Firearms were the third-leading cause of injury-related deaths nationwide, following poisoning and motor vehicle accidents.3Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers – less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.4In the first seven years of the U.S.-Iraq War, over 4,400 American soldiers were killed. Almost as many civilians are killed with guns in the U.S., however, every seven weeks.5

These numbers are (one would hope) eye-opening.  And distressing.  They can’t be explained away by bumper-sticker sloganeering, as in “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” (Unless there are dramatically more of the types of people who kill people in the U.S. than there are in, say, Canada, the UK, France, or Germany.)  The problem of firearm injuries and deaths is clearly related to the immense number of guns out there and their relatively easy accessibility.  That’s not the only reason for the ridiculously high injury/death rate – sure, people do kill people – but it seems certain that the rate would be reduced, perhaps dramatically, if it weren’t so easy for people who kill (and injure) people, accidentally or on purpose, to get guns.

A big part of the problem is what has come to be known as the “gun culture” – a disturbingly large subset of the population that has a weird fascination with these implements – a fascination that borders on love or even worship, and one that appears to be borne of equal parts paranoia and fantasy:  We are always in mortal danger and we will be the hero of any scenario that develops when that danger manifests itself.

And so, according to reliable statistics, there are 88 guns for every 100 people in the U.S. The result of the ubiquitousness of these instruments whose primary reason for existence is destruction: Huge numbers of injuries and deaths that have nothing to do with protecting oneself or one’s loved ones from predators.

Let us be the first to acknowledge, however, that this is a complicated, multi-faceted problem for which there are no obvious (and/or easy) solutions.  The banning of guns in private hands, something that’s advocated by a sizeable number of presumably well-intentioned people, is a non-starter. – politically impossible, constitutionally questionable, and probably unnecessary.  Better to narrow the focus to steps that can actually be taken and that can be expected to significantly ameliorate if not fully solve the problem.

• Find a way to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.  This is not a solution for all the different ways people get killed or hurt by gunshot – suicide, accident, street crime, gang activity, etc. – but it would put a dent in one of the most appalling: the slaughter of innocent people, en masse or otherwise, by people with unhinged thought processes and revenge fantasies.

• Close the loopholes in the gun laws we do have, by which buyers and sellers can avoid background-check requirements by way of private and gun show transactions.

• Make guns safer – devise and employ technology that makes it impossible to discharge a firearm accidentally.

• Abatement of gun crime by swift and severe punishment.  This may include creation of a special docket in the courts dedicated to weapons offenses -- specified judges handling bail, trial, sentencing, and supervision of offenders. Proposed legislation to create such a docket has called for such measures as minimum cash bonds of up to $50,000, and swift and meaningful consequences for people who violate probation for weapons offenses. 

Responsible members of the National Rifle Association should disavow the leadership of this organization and publicly repudiate its role as lobby and mouthpiece for gun and ammunition manufacturers. 

People who own hand guns for protection should carefully think through the need they perceive for that protection and ask themselves if theft of their gun and/or its use in an accidental death or injury is more likely than the use they imagine for it; viz., thwarting an assault.  Private gun ownership is an important contributor to the tens of thousands of annual gun deaths and injuries.  Fans of concealed carry have their own particular danger-and-fantasy demons to deal with.  Fans of open-carry cannot be reasoned with.  Fans of the need to have and use guns to defend themselves (and the country) from their own government and/or from any number of other shadowy conspiracies can’t be reasoned with either, and need to be carefully monitored.  It appears they are mostly talk, paranoia, and swagger, but they  have the potential to be every bit as dangerous to the homeland as foreign terrorists.

As for the constitutional right to bear arms, I will leave it to legal scholars to parse out and argue over the wording of the 2^nd amendment and the meaning(s) that wording was intended to convey, and suggest only this:  The motives of gun-enthusiasts who wrap themselves in the flag and position themselves as courageous defenders of the constitution are suspect.  Those folks would be more persuasive on this point if they were as passionate (and knowledgeable) about other parts of the constitution as they are about the gun part.

Guns, Part 3: Government Conspiracies

In Part 2 of this multi-part discussion of guns, the focus was on the fantasy component of hand gun ownership and concealed carry:  People envision using their guns -- and rationalize the keeping of guns -- to defend themselves and their loved ones in circumstances that almost never occur in real life. The cost of the widespread nurturing of this fantasy is injuries and deaths by gunshot – many thousands a year -- that are largely unintended.  So widespread gun ownership – an “armed citizenry” – instead of deterring criminals as its proponents argue will be the result, has the real-world effect of increasing exponentially the number of opportunities for tragic gun-related accidents.

Another corner of gun fantasyland altogether – one that makes a significant contribution to the culture of gun worship and the proliferation of guns in America -- is typified by the reaction from a tiny but vocal minority to something called Operation Jade Helm.  Jade Helm was a thing that came and went this past summer without most Americans being aware of its existence let alone bringing about the gun-confiscation and martial law apocalypse that wing-nuts in Texas and elsewhere had said was its hidden purpose.  In fact, Jade Helm was the name of a seven-state Army command and control mission – an otherwise obscure military training exercise – that right wing conspiracy theorists said was part of a plan to impose martial law and “population control.” Others said it was a plan on the part of the federal government to “invade Texas.” There was some stockpiling of guns and ammunition, at least one quasi-militia was formed to keep track of Jade Helm troop movements, and, incredibly (and shamelessly) the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, ordered the state’s national guard to keep an eye on things – to make sure that the U.S. Army wasn’t, you know, invading Texas. Also promising to look into the matter, thereby giving some patina of credibility to the whole ridiculous theory, were members in good standing of the very government supposedly employing Jade Helm to ruin our lives, including U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) and Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. A particularly interesting and remarkably delusional (even in this world, where delusion is the stock in trade) component of the theory was that closed Wal Mart stores were to be used as FEMA detention centers, or as places for the military to stockpile supplies for Chinese troops who would be arriving to disarm Americans. 

For this corner of fantasyland, the one whose inhabitants believe the government plans to take away their guns, impose martial law, and take down the democracy, and that they are going to heroically fend it off with their six guns, I would offer this from turn-of-the-century commentator and contrarian H.L. Mencken:  “Communism, like all religions, consists mainly of prophesy.”  Replace “communism” with “gun-government conspiracy” and you pretty much have it.  The government never actually does this thing.  It is always going to do it.  Thus the great takeover is repeatedly and forever pushed into next week, next year, or some dystopian future.  Nor do they worry too much about the logistics of such a massive nationwide undertaking.  Would the U.S. Army participate in this?  The FBI?  Local police?  Or is there a secret (but necessarily gigantic) gun-confiscation force (possibly being housed and trained in the basements of closed-down Walmarts) that is poised to start knocking down doors, confiscating guns, and imprisoning citizens – quite an undertaking in that it would require billions of dollars, many years, and tens of thousands of people willing to participate in such a thing and  able to keep quiet about it until launch day. Gun conspiracy and perpetual danger religions, like all religions, consist mainly of prophesy.  Thus the true believers never have to be held accountable for the up-in-smoke fate of their nonsensical predictions.

For a complete rundown of the most current right-wing conspiracy theories, all of which are related in one way or another to the perceived need for gun ownership, see “Margins to the Mainstream,” an article in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s publication “Intelligence Report.”  It covers in detail Jade Helm and other conspiracy magnets such as Common Core, Agenda 21, the North American Union, Shariah Law, FEMA, money manipulators, secret Muslim training camps, and the homosexual agenda.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/margins-mainstream

Another astonishing idea, equally loony but far more reprehensible, is one in which armchair tough guys blame the victims of mad dogs with guns for their own injuries and deaths.   They should have defended themselves – rushed the shooter and taken him down.  Each should have been willing to sacrifice his or her own life for the sake of the rest, as they, the courageous purveyors of this theory, assure us they would have done. All people have to do is be willing to take one for the team and throw themselves at the muzzle of a blazing assault rifle.  By gad, that’ll put a stop to this mass shooting nonsense; there’s no reason to keep guns out of the hands of crazed shooters by limiting their availability.  Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is leading this particular confederacy of dunces.

Another idea we’ve seen lately from the gun-obsessed is one that could be dismissed as simply cockamamie were it not so objectionable: that German Jews could have and would have prevented the holocaust had they not been prevented by the government from owning guns.  Or, to put it another way, had there been no gun restrictions, the Jewish people of Germany and occupied Europe, a significant percentage of whom were women, children, and the elderly, all would have had pistols and rifles and would have used those pistols and rifles to do what various countries’ armies couldn’t do and what it took the U.S. and the Allies many years to do – thwart the vast war (and “final solution”) machinery of the Third Reich.  The sheer reprehensibility of this appallingly stupid idea stems not just from its blame-the-victim overtones and its blind disregard for the facts, but also from its attempted use of the wanton murders of six million people and the devastation of the survivors and their progeny to advance a political agenda and pet cause. 

Of note: People who have advanced this theory have cited the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 as evidence of what can happen when would-be victims get their hands on guns.  What did happen: About two-dozen Nazis were killed.  All who participated in the uprising – some 750 people – were killed by the Nazis and some 50,000 people were sent to concentration camps.  As incredibly brave and courageous as those who rose up were, their procurement and possession  of guns did not do what latter-day gun enthusiasts apparently believe it did, and makes no case for private gun ownership as a defense against predatory government forces. The uprising was, in relatively short order and mercilessly, crushed.  Guns or no guns, it never had a chance.

There’s a more detailed discussion of the “if-Europe’s-Jews-had-guns” theory in this Huffington Post article…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/did-gun-control-prevent-jews-from-stopping-the-holocaust_n_2635989.html

Earth to gummint conspiracy theorists:  The United States government is not planning to confiscate people’s guns.  There is no plan afoot to declare martial law or to dismantle our democracy or to become part of a world government or to poison our children’s minds with socialist propaganda in the public schools.  There are no secret Muslim training camps or FEMA-sponsored concentration camps, and Muslims are not trying to overthrow the government and impose Shariah law.  There is no need for you to prepare to take pot shots from your kitchen window at forces trying to make these things happen.  Beat your guns into plowshares and find employment that makes you happier.

Guns, Part 2: Concealed Carry Fantasyland

Gun enthusiasts apparently see themselves and law-abiding folks in general as being in mortal danger at all times, and they see an armed citizenry as the way to keep that danger at bay. If criminals think you are armed, the thinking goes, they are less likely to act. That is undoubtedly true, and so, as a remedy for gun crime, has a certain surface plausibility. The problem: Stemming the predatory behavior of criminals won’t have much of an effect on the overall problem of death and dismemberment by firearm, because relatively little of it actually happens that way. The model – criminal accosting innocent person in situation that would be prevented or ameliorated by the victim’s possible or actual possession of weaponry – is a relatively rare circumstance. 

The sad reality is that most gun tragedies are not perpetrated by armed predators who make a practice of hunting down victims with pre-meditated intent to rob or rape them at gunpoint and injure or kill them if necessary -- the only class of people who might logically be expected to be cowed by the possibility that their would-be victims are “carrying.”  On the contrary, most gun tragedies are perpetrated by people we don’t think of or classify as criminals – people whose acts of violence would not have been affected one way or the other by the foreknowledge that their about-to-be victims might be armed.  That being the case, the most likely outcome of more guns in the possession of citizens is more gun violence, not less.

We saw a pretty good cross-section on a news magazine show some years ago which reported on a week’s worth of gun-related violence involving young people across the U.S.  Not a formal study, true, but nevertheless illuminating. The report included several suicides, several accidental shootings, a “desperation” shooting (a 16-year-old ran away from home and ended up killing a young policeman in rural Kansas), one involving a fight between a boy and his girlfriend, one in which a woman previously convicted of firearms violations shot and killed her 3-year-old child, and some gang-related incidents…thirty-five in all.

In exactly three of them, the fact that the victim was or was not armed clearly mattered.  In two cases, a store clerk shot a holdup man.  In the other, a store clerk was shot by a holdup man. In a fourth incident, a man was killed in his car and was thought to have been a robbery victim. Giving that last one the benefit of the doubt, that’s four out of almost three dozen, about 11 percent, in which any rational reading would conclude that gun possession by the victim – or the perception of gun possession by all possible victims -- could have either prevented the incident from happening or changed its outcome for the better.  (The gang-related shootings are a good example:  The shooters undoubtedly would have had a reasonable presumption that their victims were armed, yet they weren’t deterred.  And, if the victims had been armed, there’s some likelihood that the violence would have been exacerbated, not stemmed.)

Recent example (October 2015): A woman with a concealed carry permit pulled her piece and squeezed off a few rounds at a purported shoplifter fleeing from an Auburn Hills, Michigan Home Depot.  If a bystander had been hit by way of this incredibly reckless act, that person would have been injured or killed and the woman would have ended up in prison.  That’s how the use of a concealed gun is more likely to play out:  Not good-guy-takes-out-bad-guy, but Barney Fife-like pretend sheriff sprays bullets at innocent people.  Other examples – children getting accidentally shot (often by other children), people shooting other people in bar fights, people waving and discharging guns in disputes over who cut off who on the road – abound. An armed citizenry will almost certainly mean a hundred of these kinds of incidents for every one in which our hero saves the day by stopping an evildoer.  It will also mean – already does mean – guns being stolen from the good guys by the bad guys.  It’s estimated that 1.4 million guns were stolen in household burglaries and other property crimes between 2005 and 2010, and gun thefts from vehicles has become a bigger problem than ever. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has said this: “Lost and stolen firearms pose a substantial threat to public safety and to law enforcement. Those that steal firearms commit violent crimes with stolen guns, transfer stolen firearms to others who commit crimes, and create an unregulated secondary market for firearms, including a market for those who are prohibited by law from possessing a gun.”

The elephant in the room when it comes to concealed carry – and for that matter, hand gun ownership in general -- is that the need for it is less real than it is rooted in a Clint Eastwoodesque fantasy.  Or, more accurately, a small but powerful collection of go-ahead-make-my-day fantasy scenarios: (1) A bad person invades my home and I bravely defend it by shooting the rotten bastard; (2) I am accosted on a dimly-lit street by an armed robber, and much to his shock and amazement, I turn the tables on him by pulling my own gun, shooting the scumbag through the heart; (3) There is a crazed shooter in a public place, and I save the day by cutting him down with my pistol.

The likelihood that any individual will live out his life without ever encountering any of these scenarios, or any other scenario in which possession of a hand gun resolves the problem successfully, is near 100-percent.  When such things do happen, they are big news and generally treated as man-bites-dog stories, reinforcing not how frequently these things occur but how rarely they do. If you own a hand gun, what you should step up to is this: it’s not to defend yourself and your family from an actual meaningful threat. If you own a handgun (or a rifle that looks like an AR-15, an Uzi, or a grease gun), it’s because you like to imagine using it.

Guns, Part 1:The Slaughter of Innocents

Clearly, the gun people will say anything to steer the conversation away from any action that would prevent anyone, anywhere from having a gun. So, we get this exquisitely irrational plan: To prevent mass shootings by mentally ill people, instead of focusing on keeping guns out of their hands, the thing to do is focus on treating mental illness. Or, to put it another way, it’s important to protect the 2nd amendment rights of the unhinged to keep a dozen or so firearms and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition in the trunks of their cars and to use them to carry out their revenge fantasies on people in classrooms and movie theaters, while we search for the cure for mental illness. Same thing with, say, airline pilots, I guess: The remedy for keeping a mentally ill person from flying an airliner full of people into the ocean isn’t to keep the delusional out of the cockpit. The remedy is to cure mental illness. A few hundred people may die while we’re doing that, but, oh well. In the gun discussion, it would seem the one thing everyone could agree on is the need to keep guns and the mentally ill separate. But apparently not. In the nonsensical words of Gov. Chris Christie, we must, instead “get tough” on mental illness.

So, let's be clear. The way to prevent mentally ill people from shooting up movie theaters isn’t to cure mental illness, as laudable a goal as that is. It is to not let them have guns. End of story. And it is not unreasonable to say that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, et. al. – and now Chris Harper Mercer -- is by definition mentally ill. At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire.

Like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows these shootings. And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected. Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in the effort to stem the tide of gun deaths, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible. It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings or suicides. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment.

Yes, there are obstacles. It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, privacy considerations (and laws), the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there. But there has to be a way to prevent the Chris Harper Mercers of the world from getting their hands on guns and ammo. Never was the cliché more apt: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But it’s important to avoid getting distracted by blue-sky remedies like curing mental illness or, on the anti-gun side, ridding the country of guns altogether or banning them by law, neither of which is ever going to happen. Keeping guns and mentally ill people apart isn’t everything. But it’s a lot. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If You Build it, Will the NFL Come?

So, Joe Buck enters the fray and says this: “…when you step back and look at the timeline and realize how hard a ticket this was when the team was good ... Dome or no Dome, it didn’t seem to matter. As we sit here in 2015, I would agree the stadium isn’t good enough. It doesn’t make fans want to trudge down there.” Thus, Buck posits in the first sentence that it’s the quality of the team that matters to fans, and in the second that it’s the quality of the stadium. Memo to Joe: It’s the team. When the Rams were good, no one stayed home because they were unhappy with the stadium. And the “trudge” would be the same, new stadium or old.

This much is clear: The fans don’t care about a new stadium. Most of them are mildly critical of the existing one and like to grouse about it, but the reality is this: Fans, being generally sensible people, understand that when they go into a stadium, they’re not moving in and setting up housekeeping; they’re going to be in there for about three hours, eight times a year. They’re okay with it if it is reasonably clean, has seats, lights, a field, plenty of bathrooms, and plenty of readily available beer and hot dogs. And they know that any new stadium, no matter what “tier” it occupies in the eyes of league officials and owners, will also have those same (entirely sufficient) basic requirements – seats, lights, field, bathrooms, beer – and nothing else they really care about. No matter what bells and whistles are added to it to assure its exalted place in tierdom, it will still be just a football stadium. What keeps the paying customers coming is a competitive team. So unless the place where that team plays has dark corners where unidentified things skitter in the shadows, they’re generally okay with it. And so, the great mystery: If the fans don’t care about a new stadium and the owner doesn’t care about a new stadium (more on that later), who does?

And speaking of tiers, who in their right mind enters into a contract calling for top tier status in which the definition of top-tier is not unambiguously spelled out, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph? What exactly, the stadium lessors should have demanded to know, does being in the top 25-percent consist of? The agreement they entered into instead seems to say,“the stadium must be rendered top-tier – we don’t know what that means exactly, but we’ll know it when we see it.” Talk about a moving target.

“Is this it?”

No, that’s not it. Try again.”

There’s a memorable scene in the movie “The Fugitive” where Harrison Ford shouts, “I didn’t kill my wife!” and Tommy Lee Jones, his pursuer, shouts back, “I don’t care!” Jones is trying to get Ford to understand that it’s not about that. Which seems to be what Stan Kroenke is conveying, by deed if not word, to the folks working feverishly to offer him a new stadium for the Rams to play in: He doesn’t care. It’s not about that.

At this point, the stadium undertaking appears to be exactly what its proponents have gone to considerable lengths to deny that it is: A last-second Hail Mary launched in the forlorn hope that it will keep the Rams in St. Louis, even though there is scant indication that it will work that way. I could be wrong about that and I am open to any new information regarding exactly who is going to occupy the thing. But as far as I know, Kroenke has never said that dissatisfaction with the stadium situation in St. Louis is what's pushing him out the door. He isn't saying that he would keep the Rams in St. Louis, or consider doing so, if a new stadium were built or the existing one refurbished to his liking. He isn't saying that where he locates his business is in any way connected to St. Louis stadium facilities. Hasn’t said that in the past…doesn’t seem to be saying it now. What he has said, by his actions if not his words, is that he wants and intends to move the team to Los Angeles.

But maybe the folks pushing for construction of a new stadium have information to the contrary about Kroenke's thinking on the matter. If so, they should tell us what they know. Tell us there is evidence that construction of a new stadium will keep the team here. Because so far, all the evidence we’ve seen points to the Rams leaving, stadium or not. It also seems to be the case that no consideration is being given by the NFL to expanding, and no existing team is considering moving to St. Louis. Here again, if someone knows something that suggests otherwise, say so. If there is solid information out there suggesting that a new stadium would actually be occupied – by the Rams, by a new team, or by an existing team -- let’s hear it. Doesn’t it make sense to have something lined up before you throw $800-million at a stadium project?

In a heartbeat, the stadium discussion has gone from blue-sky speculation to “no new stadium, no team in St. Louis, period.” How and why that happened is a mystery. But it’s important to understand that “if you don’t build a stadium, there won’t be a team” is not the same as “if you do build a stadium there will be a team.” We’ve heard the former, but not the latter.

When you question the need for a big civic project like a new stadium you risk being accused of not understanding the big picture – the way these sorts of enterprises work together in a synergistic way to have and hold world class things, and the quality of life to which those things contribute. They keep the big wheel turning, and the visionaries understand the need to keep it turning, and what it takes to do it. I get that. Civic foresight is about big ideas. I just don’t see a rightful place on the big wheel of commerce and prosperity for a new stadium, and certainly not for one whose occupants, as of now, will be tractor pulls and rock concerts. If you build it, they (the NFL) will come? Right now, that’s the billion-dollar maybe. Again, if there is reliable information regarding an NFL occupant for a new stadium, please let the rest of us in on it. Anyone? Anyone?

The Stars and Bars

            One afternoon a few years ago, several members of my family and I, along with a dozen or so other pods of people, were taking the gulf breezes on a beach in Florida when a group of five or six youngsters, college age or thereabouts, came along and picked out a spot not far from us.  They staked out their territory in the customary way, plopping down their coolers, laying out their blankets, and deploying their beach umbrella.  But then, all of that done, they unfurled a sizable confederate battle flag and planted its staff deep in the sand.

Our reaction to this was visceral and, I believe, normal: We were sort of dumbstruck by the effrontery of it and a little worried about the group’s intentions. Did they mean to make some political statement? Were they unilaterally designating this as a blacks-not-welcome place?  Were they itchin’ for a fight? I don't know.  Nothing happened, and we went our separate ways at the end of the day.   Once again, though, the rebel flag proved itself to be a potent symbol, certain to elicit immediate reactions and strong feelings, most of them negative.

This all comes to mind as the confederate flag once again gets in the news, as it has from time to time over the years when reasonable people have voiced their objections to its being flown in various public places.  Fortunately, in many quarters, public officials are now hearing those objections. Others are not, though, and there are still pockets of people who continue to argue not just in defense of the right to display the flag but also in defense of the appropriateness of displaying it.  This is still predominantly (though not exclusively) a southern thing and my unsolicited advice to those southern folks as to whether they should continue to fight for the right to display the rebel flag:  Sure -- assuming, of course, that they wish to portray themselves -- and reinforce and perpetuate an image of southerners in general -- as slack-jawed, back-woods racist.

Most Southerners, of course, are not that, and, presumably, neither are the self-described Missouri “rednecks” who get in such high dudgeon over criticism of their confederate flag flying.  But they should realize that in associating themselves with this symbol, they’re risking labeling themselves, and by proximity and association, others, in exactly that way.

And let’s not be coy about what the rebel flag stands for.  It stands for racism. It has, at various times, been used as the banner of the KKK.  It was the banner of the Dixiecrat Party whose platform was overtly and unabashedly anti-civil rights. And it is widely if not universally understood, among both blacks and whites, to be associated with sensibilities ranging from intolerance to hate. Ask any black person if he or she, upon seeing a group of whites displaying the flag, would interpret it as a sign of welcome.  And ask the displayers if they consider it to be one.  The insistence by sons of the Confederacy types that the rebel flag is nothing more than a benign memorial to the Confederate movement and its fallen soldiers is, to put it cvharitably, disingenuous.

And as to that Confederate movement, its true believers (and the flags they wave) here in the early part of the twenty-first century represent at the very least an inexplicable fixation on, and homage to, an era now a hundred and fifty years and many generations distant.  No matter how loudly these southern colonels rattle their sabers and eulogize their great-grandfathers, their connection to it all is tenuous.  Still, blood ties to and reverence for their fallen Civil War ancestors of so long ago is a theme we hear much of from Southerners of this particular bent, but not nearly as much from the descendants of Union combatants who fought and died in the same war. The underlying suggestion is that the Confederate cause was in some way more worthy -- that it was one in which the South fought valiantly against overwhelming odds for something it believed in, and that it thus had a nobility that the North’s lacked

To put it not so charitably: Baloney. The South’s action was an insurrection.  Whatever they believed and however they justified it, what they did was attack and attempt to tear apart a country, the United States, that had been formed a hundred or so years earlier at great cost in blood and treasure -- the “noble experiment” which, until the Civil War, had operated not perfectly but pretty successfully in terms of the liberty and prosperity enjoyed by its citizens -- and wage a war in which they killed some 365,000 of their fellow Americans from the North and in which about 165,000 of their own were killed, a war in which many of their cities and farms were ruined, their railroads destroyed, and their industry and trade brought to a standstill.  And the high cause for which all of this was done -- for which the sons of the South spilled so many rivers of blood:  the right to enslave, for their own ease and economic benefit, three and a half million of their fellow human beings.

That many if not most of the southern soldiers were apolitical and maybe only dimly aware if at all of the issues on whose behalf they waged war may be true; and that being the case, it’s certainly appropriate to lament, and memorialize, their suffering. Unfortunately, the rebel flag doesn’t do that.  What it does instead is memorialize the repugnant cause they did the fighting and dying for.

A younger generation with a more clear-eyed view of the South’s role in the civil war appears to be in the majority now  -- people who understand the incendiary nature of the rebel flag and are finally ready to disown it as a public symbol of who they are and what they believe.  It’s good to see that they’re getting on with it.