Another Instance of Newspeak

California taxpayers subsidize abortion tourism.

— Brietbart headline

GOP crazies are accusing Democrats of a weird form of political point-scoring.

They're calling it "abortion tourism."

Republican Senator Steve Daines used the term only yesterday to decry a Democratic bill meant to protect a woman's right to travel across state lines for an abortion.

He claims that state-funded "abortion tourism" appeals to "greedy woke corporations," because it lowers the cost of paid maternity leave.

Some left-wing columnists begrudgingly agree with him.

Give me a break.

"Abortion tourism" isn't a thing.

It's no more a thing than "colostomy farming."

Abortion is a medical procedure. Tourism is a facet of the leisure industry.

Plastering the two terms together does not make them a thing.

It's only another Orwellian coinage.

The GOP loves Orwellian Newspeak, the language of 1984 that the ruling party in the novel created "to diminish the range of thought."

Newspeak comprised a "verbal shorthand," Orwell said, that "consisted of words deliberately constructed for political purposes."

These words packed "whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables." 

Their purpose was "not so much to express meanings as to destroy them."

When you destroy meaning, Orwell showed us, you destroy thought.

Right-wingers like Daines would no doubt deny they're using Orwellian Newspeak.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" is merely a linguistic cousin of "medical tourism," the term we commonly use to describe international travel for medical care.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" carries no particular judgment.

But that defense is disingenuous.

They know the term is a wry distortion which implies that the woman who seeks an abortion is frivolous—a tourist; and the abortion clinic that serves her is a leisure-industry profiteer—a Disneyland with stirrups.

When nothing could be farther from the truth.

"Words, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "how innocent and powerless in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

Dock Boggs

In the bright sunny south in peace and content,
The days of my boyhood, I scarcely have spent, 

From the deep flowing springs to the broad flowing stream, 

Ever dear to my memory and sweet is my dream.

— Dock Boggs

I first learned of Dock Boggs from Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, the rock critic's look into the "old, weird America."

New York Magazine called Marcus' landscape the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, and anonymous poets of all stripes."

Boggs was one of the latter—a morose, hard drinking Appalachian poet who sang like his blacksmith daddy and picked a blues-style banjo in the fashion of the Black banjoists he heard in the railroad camps surrounding his home.

Boggs was born in 1898 in Southeastern Virginia and, as a young man, made a living working in the coal mines and peddling moonshine.

For three years in the late 1920s, he tried desperately to earn a living as a professional musician, entertaining at parties in the mining camps and recording 12 songs (eight for Brunswick Records in New York and four for Lonesome Ace Records in Chicago). 

But he quit music in 1929 when the stock market collapsed the parties and recording deals came to a sudden halt.

Boggs stayed out of the music business for over 30 years, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by the leaders of the folk revival.

In 1963, one of them coaxed the 65-year old Boggs out of Norton to play at large festivals. 

Boggs also recorded an album that year for Folkways Records in New York, and became a strong influence on Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and even the 15-year old Bruce Springsteen.

Say what you will of it, Boggs' music is raw. 

"I put so much of myself into some pieces that I very nearly broke down," he once told folklorist Charles Wolfe. 

Greil Marcus claimed in Invisible Republic that Boggs sounds when he sings "as if his bones were coming through his skin."

"If God ever requires that rocks cry out," singer-songwriter Lesley Miller wrote, "they may sound as old and earthy as Dock Boggs. 

"His banjo rings like the end of time, and his voice cries out from the deeply submerged recesses of the American heart and mind."

Boggs' old-time music is the polar opposite of today's Country, where the emotions and rural references are formulaic and trite and about as "country" as the corn pone at Popeye's. 

Boggs' characters, in contrast, are real: they're dirt farmers, hillbillies, convicts, wastrels, and murderers, all deeply afflicted by the fates they must suffer. 

Not one drives a Ram, supports our troops, or wears tight blue jeans. 

And they usually wind up vanquished, humiliated, or dead, not home on the couch with the hot wife and the football game.

"Dock deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed God expected of him," English professor Barry O'Connell wrote.

"Never a conventional life, his was also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.

"Through his music, he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and startling and acute than we are usually able to feel."

Above: Dock Boggs by R. Crumb.

Postscript: Listen to this lovely instrumental by Nora Brown. It's Dock Boggs' "Coke Oven March." 

Trump's Defense

They who rule unjustly and incompetently have been raised up by God to punish the wickedness of the people.

— John Calvin

As the inculpatory evidence mounts every day, it's reasonable to ask what defense Trump's lawyers will use in the upcoming trial, The People v. Donald J. Trump.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that his best defense is the one known as vis major (a tort law defense, not a criminal law defense; but what the hell).

God did it.

Arguing vis major, Trump can escape all liability for the damages to democracy that occurred on his watch, simply by blaming God.

He can put forward in his defense the writings of John Calvin, who argued in Institutes of the Christian Religion that God, not voters, appoints our leaders—both the good and the wicked ones.

Good leaders reflect God's grace; wicked leaders, His wrath; but "all equally have been endowed with that holy majesty with which He has invested lawful power."

Trump may have been a wicked leader, but God was responsible; so Trump should not be punished for his treasonous deeds.

Instead, he should be revered.

"In a very wicked man, utterly unworthy of all honor," Calvin writes, "provided he has the public power in his hands, that noble and divine power resides which the Lord has by His word given to the ministers of his justice and judgment.

"Accordingly, he should be held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects, in so far as public obedience is concerned, in which they would hold the best of leaders if he were given to them."

Stay tuned.

A hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Above: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin (1852). Oil on canvas. 54 x 84 inches.

For Such a Time as This

Yet who knows whether you have come to 

the kingdom for such a time as this?

— Esther 4

Old Testament readers know well the story of Esther, the ambivalent queen who shirked her duty to save the Jews from annihilation.

Faced with the decision to stand up to the Persians, Esther's cousin asked, "Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Alas, evangelical Christian women have coopted the Biblical phrase "for such a time as this," calling it their "Esther moment" as they push and push the GOP to criminalize abortion nationwide.

But who says the other side—the pro-choice majority—can't take back the phrase and, come November, grab for themselves the "Esther moment?"

I believe, as pollsters do, that women voters will flock to the polls in November to hand the GOP its worst midterm defeat since 2006 (when George W. Bush was punished for his murderous Iraq War).

Don't discount angry women.

Assuming they still have the right to vote in November—with this court, you can't count on it—pro-choice women will have their "Esther moment" in the voting booth.

They will use their votes to assert their right to make their own reproductive decisions.

You heard it here.

Earwash

Now wash out your ears with this.

— Paul Harvey

Were its apostles—Hannity, Levin, Ingraham, et al.—not so flagrantly gangsterish, conservatism might have more adherents.

As things are, "conservative" is an aspersion and only 36% of Americans own up to the label, according to Gallup.

That percentage that hasn't changed in three decades.

To increase conservatism's base would take a thorough cleansing of the outhouse that is "conservative talk radio" today.

And it would take the reincarnation of Paul Harvey.

A staple of ABC News Radio, Harvey was carried on 1,200 stations throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, reaching nearly 15% of the US adult population.

Famed for his tagline, "Now you know the rest of the story," Harvey had a quirky, affected delivery, a kind of velvety staccato that he stole from "old-time" announcers and which he made his own by introducing frequent—and senseless—pauses.

Cherry-picking the day's news and adding backstories, Harvey used his daily broadcasts as a platform for an obvious, but unstated, Midwestern conservatism.

Through his copy, he loved to picture instances of self-reliance, honesty, modesty, and diligence. 

He loved Horatio Alger stories and the gospel of hard work. 

He loved tales of sacrifice and heroism in war.

And he loved to berate big government for any effort to bring about economic justice.

"I was never one who sought to make the small man tall by cutting off the legs of a giant," he said of the Great Society. "I wanted to drag no man down to my size, but only to preserve a way of life which might make it possible for me, one day, to elevate myself until I at least partly matched his size."

Harvey's partisanship, veiled by his Puritan-cum-Pollyanna attitude, set him apart as a broadcaster.

So did his commercialism.

Like today's podcasters, Harvey would commingle sponsors' messages with his copy, so that editorial and advertising content flowed seamlessly from his lips.

The practice—we now call it "native advertising"—earned him the label "the finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves."

"I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is," Harvey once said.

A testament to his gentle conservatism, Harvey received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005.

It's the highest honor a civilian can receive.

"Americans like the sound of his voice," Bush said at the ceremony.

"Over the decades we have come to recognize in that voice some of the finest qualities of our country: patriotism, good humor, kindness, and common sense."

You sure won't find anything remotely like those qualities on conservative talk radio today, where venom and lies are the stock in trade.

Now you know the rest of the story.