There really is nothing new on earth

 

National Portrait Gallery

Did you know that in 1933 a group of financiers and fascists attempted overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and stop the New Deal? The coup leaders thought Mussolini and Hitler offered governments that America should emulate. Militias sprang up in the country—following the example of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts, these groups of conservative veterans called themselves Gray Shirts, Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts, depending on the city of their origin.

Retired US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Darlington Butler was recruited to lead an army of veterans, funded by the American Liberty League, whose membership included such Wall Street figures as JP Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye, and General Foods. Instead, he reported the plan to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who reported it to FDR. Some critics suggested it was a hoax, insisting that there was a great gap between contemplation and execution, but others claimed that if Butler had not been such a loyal patriot, the coup might well have succeeded—and American history would have been dramatically different.

Then of course there was Watergate in 1972, another time when the country was deeply divided, then over Vietnam. President Richard Nixon, anticipating a hard-fought battle for re-election, sanctioned members of his Committee to Re-Elect the President to break into Democratic headquarters in D.C., steal top-secret documents, and bug the phones. After two break-ins (the phone bugs didn’t work at first), Nixon was re-elected, defeating Democrat George McGovern in a landslide. Nixon gave hush money to the burglars and tried to get the CIA to block the FBI investigation of the break-in. Before a grand jury, several of Nixon’s aides testified to his crimes and revealed that Nixon had taped every conversation in the Oval Office. Special investigator Archibold Cox demanded the tapes, and the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release then. He stalled. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up, nd several violations of the Constitution.

Nixon resigned and was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, but his attorney general and several high-power aides went to prison. General Alexander Haig, then White House Chief of Staff, is credited with persuading Nixon to resign and was apparently the one who held the government together in the last chaotic days before Nixon left office.

So Trump wasn’t even making up his own script. He had a playbook to follow with his aborted coup. The country survived two major acts of treachery, which encourages me to think it will survive again as a democracy for all people. And in the Watergate case, some people even went to prison--that could happen again too!

And a sort of unrelated illustration of history repeating itself: our minister, Russ Peterman, is preaching a series he calls “Fierce,” about women of the Bible. This morning he preached on the story of Ruth. Most of us know the Ruth, a Moabite widow, insisted on following her Hebrew mother-in-law, Naomi, back to Bethlehem. It was a time when women had no rights—their lives were determined by men. That resonated with me today when men are trying to take women back to the past instead of forward to the future. But what really struck me was the Naomi feared for Ruth, a Moab, in Bethlehem, because she would be an outsider, and it was a time when prophets in Israel were trying to cleanse the population of outsiders, people who were different. Sound familiar today? Of course it does. That story ends well too—Ruth married again and is considered the great-grandmother of David (perhaps great-great?)

Maybe there are reasons I’m a cock-eyed optimist! History lesson for the day is over.

Mothers’ Day Musings

 

I looked long and hard for the family group photo I wanted but couldn't find it.
This will have to do for to catch the algorithms.

When my mother was young, my grandfather (a man I never met because he died before I was born) told her she took such a poor picture the only place he would hang it was in the barn (she passed this particular trait along to me, along with a lot of much better ones). So I have no picture of her to post—only group pictures, mostly taken with the grands who adored her. But she was a pretty woman, with auburn hair that she pushed into waves—beauty parlors were an anathema fo her. I lost Mom several years before I really lost her—a series of small strikes took away the loving, capable, sometimes silly, always kind woman I knew. It was a period of great grief for me, and one I still look back on with guilt. In the eighties we didn’t know what we do today about caring for dementia patients.

So, today, as I remember Alice Peterman Peckham MacBain, I cling to all the very good memories. Stories she told that made the tears of laughter run down her cheeks, her reassurance that thunderstorms were magnificent (she didn’t live in tornado alley), the time she signed her name Alice P. MacBread because she was watching some toast, the times we cooked together and all she taught me in the kitchen. She was a good cook and a gracious host to many dinner parties. She was also athletic—golf and swimming (she regrated my lack of interest in athletics and once said she wished she’d given me ballet lessons to make me graceful—thanks, Mom).

Mom had a dark side to her life—she lost her first husband to a WWI wound, and four years after I was born, she lost my six-month-old sister. And she lost my dad too soon. So I cling to the good memories of which there are many, and, yes, I still talk to her in my head. I know she’s listening, and most of the time I know she answers somehow.

On this Mother’s Day I want to give a shout-out to my two daughters and my two daughters-in-law, each in her own way doing a terrific job as a mother. The families and their styles are so different, but the end result is that I have seven wonderful grands. As a mother I am so fortunate that my kids and their families like nothing better than an all-Alter get-together. I only wish that my mom had lived long enough to know these families—she would be so proud.

 This day I am particularly thinking about First Lady Jill Biden. I so admire the courage she displayed by going to Ukraine to meet with Olena Zelenska. I read a long article about our First Lady last week in which the writer emphasized Dr. Biden’s ability to compartmentalize, to keep the parts of her life separate and focus on the moment. When she is teaching, her whole being is in the classroom; when she is First Lady, that is her focus; and when she is the president’s wife, she gives that role her all. Someone said recently that she should not have let her husband run for president because of his dementia. The dementia foolishness aside, I don’t think theirs is that kind of relationship, where one person “lets” the other do something. I suspect the run for the presidency was a joint decision, carefully considered and mutually agreed upon. And it is evident today that they are a team, working well together.

A word about Joe Biden’s nonexistent dementia: Russian bots and trolls insidiously injected that line of reasoning leading up to the 2020 election. What alt-right folks label dementia is simply a matter of style and being. Trump is all about drama, waving his arms, pointing at people, yelling, making threats, spewing lies, suggesting irrational solutions to problems, from injecting bleach to shooting civilians and bombing Mexico; Biden is calm, controlled, almost understated—but as he showed at the recent press corps dinner, delivering some zingers. Members of the press who have covered Washington for years say Joe Biden is the same as he has always been—quiet, competent, compassionate. Of the two men—the current and the former guy—it seems obvious to me that our current president is comfortable in his own skin, sure of his decisions. The former guy? Not so much.

A man with dementia could not have handled pandemic and vaccination programs a well as he did, built back the economy at the rapid rate he has, and masterfully united European countries against Russian aggression in Ukraine. He’s accomplished much more but is held back by conservatives. Economists, for instance, say Build Back Better would make an enormous difference in all our lives—instead conservatives are concerned about women’s bodies and their private lives. Ooops, I’ll get off my platform now.

We are fortunate to have both Bidens at the helm of our country today.

God Bless Jill Biden and all the mothers worldwide, women who have borne children, and women who have raised children not their own, women who act as mentors (because that is a form of mentoring), and women who fight for all of us. Fittingly our minister at church this morning began a series of sermons the fierce women of the Bible. May we all have the strength to be fierce.