DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

 

I know we like to think our nation was founded by political geniuses armed only with the best of intentions. But the truth is, if the vast majority of our founding fathers were to somehow magically reappear in today's political arena, they would probably be most comfortable as members of the Klu Klux Klan – being by current definition both sexists and white supremacists. 

Under the first constitution for South Carolina (signed in 1778) Catholics were not allowed to vote. Delaware's first constitution denied the vote to Jews, and Maryland did not permit the sons of Abraham to cast a ballot until 1828. And, of course, women and both sexes of African-American descent either were or would shortly be arrested if they tried to cast a ballot anywhere in America. But the most fundamental bigotry in America was and is not racial or religious. It is monetary. The most hated, despised and disenfranchised group in America has always been anyone who was “not rich”.

In ten of the 13 original United States you had to own at least 50 acres of land or $250 in property before you were judged qualified to vote. The official price for uncleared land along the frontier was set at just ten cents an acre, but usually sold in lots no smaller than a section of 640 acres. At the same time the average yearly income for a laborer was about ninety dollars (with the income level in slave states being even lower), meaning a section would cost a middle class worker over 8 months salary. 

Few working people could afford the investment. So the land speculators stepped in. They had the cash, or the credit, to acquire hundreds of sections of land at a time, survey, subdivide and resell the property in plots down to 40 acres each. It was a system rife with legal and illegal fraud. And the speculators' profit margins tripled or quadrupled the price per acre to the yeoman farmers who usually borrowed to buy the land, often then went bankrupt, lost their investment, and were forced to move even further west to try again, still without the right to vote on the legality of such monetary rules.

This explains why, forty years after the American revolution, only half a million out of the ten million Americans could qualify to vote, and why in 1824 less than 360,000 actually cast a ballot. The debacle of 1825, when the “corrupt bargain”,  and the earlier deadlocked election in 1800, led to the realization that the first objective of fair elections must be to keep the professional politicians from screwing the rest of the population and dictating the outcome. That was why, beginning in the new states beyond the Appalachian crest, the wealth restrictions on voting were dropped. And slowly this influenced the politics back in the original 13 colonies. Slowly.

On 7 October 1825, with John Quincy Adams ensconced in the White House for less than 8 months, Senator Andrew Jackson (above) rose in the Senate chamber. Nominally he was to comment on a proposed constitutional amendment to prevent another “corrupt bargain” from ever happening  It was something Jackson should be eager to support. But, “I could not”, Jackson assured his fellow politicians, “consent either to urge or to encourage a change which might wear the appearance of being ...a desire to advance my own views” (He meant unlike Henry Clay, and President Adams, of course.)  And reluctantly,  he said, “I hasten therefore to tender this my resignation.” 

It wasn't that Jackson was clearing his schedule for the upcoming 1828 rematch . Oh, no.  He was resigning so “my friends do not, and my enemies can not, charge me with...degrading the trust reposed in me by intriguing for the Presidential chair.” As he walked out of the Capital that afternoon, it's a wonder his trousers did not burst into flames. The proposed amendment was then quietly allowed to die.

On the same day, on the west fork of the Stones river, meeting in St. Paul's Episcopal Church on East Vine Street in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (where their capital had burned down two years earlier), the state legislature unanimously nominated Andrew Jackson to be the next President of the United States – three years hence. 

What a happy coincidence of timing, with those two events occurring over a thousand miles apart, and on the same day – proof positive that no one could accuse Andrew “Jackass” of “intriguing” to ride the wave of populism about to break over the electoral college. And if any of you reading this are offended by modern pundits theorizing about the next election almost before the last one is completed, welcome to the brave new world of 1825

Of course, if you were looking for more hard evidence of intrigue you might journey to the 9th Congressional District of Virginia, tucked away in the south-western corner of the Old Dominion. The two term representative for this last gasp of the Shenandoah Valley and its encroaching mountains was a transplanted Pennsylvanian, a graduate of William and Mary, and a Crawford-Republican named Andrew Stevenson (above). 

Like many converts, the dapper Stevenson was heavily financially and emotionally invested in the peculiar institution of slavery, and savvy about the politics of his adopted state. He had been the Speaker of the House of Burgess, where he was considered a member of the “Richmond Junta” which ran Virginia politics. So why would a member of the Richmond Junta decide to join forces with a Yankee from the Albany Regency, to support Andrew Jackson from Nashville, Tennessee, for President?

First, the south had something that New Yorker Martin Van Buren (above) wanted – electoral votes. The institution of slavery was indeed peculiar because although those humans treated as property had no rights, each slave did count as 3/5ths of a person for determining congressional districts which meant electoral votes. And the census of 1820 gave the south 22 additional congressional districts – and 22 additional electoral votes – which their white population alone did not entitle them too. This was the deal with Satan the founding fathers from New England had been forced to make in order to form a “more perfect union.” Those 22 electoral votes were more than enough to throw a close election in whatever direction Van Buren from New York, wanted.

What Stevenson and other Southerners wanted was a guarantee that the economy of the south would be protected from the growing wealth of the North.  Practically, this meant low tariffs. The slave states produced few of the machines that were increasingly vital to modern life,  largely because slaves were never allowed to share in their master's profits, and thus had no incentive to invent or invest of themselves any more sweat than was required. 

A little over two weeks after Jackson's resignation from the Senate, the Erie Canal (above) officially opened, connecting the produce of  Ohio to the markets of New York City. It was visible evidence of the economic giant the workers and consumers of the "Free States" were becoming.  But in a nation without an income or a sales tax, a tax levied on imported goods, or a tariff, was the only way to support projects like the canal, or the national highway..

The Bank of the United States was a vital part of the infrastructure which John Quincy Adams was advocating. He believed projects such as the National Road and canals connecting the great lakes with the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, would unite the nation both physically and economically. What Adams saw was government preforming the unprofitable investment in infrastructure so that business could use it as a base for their future profits. But Stevenson and his ilk saw “Big Government”, supported by tariffs, as a multi-head snake (above) designed primarily to choke off the South -  and thus a threat to slavery. And they were both right.

In 1831 (six years hence) a young French official, Alexis de Tocqueville, journeyed to America to observe the young nation's institutions and people. And in perhaps his most famous passage he touched upon this central issue. “The State of Ohio”, wrote de Tocquville,”is separated from Kentucky just by one river; on either side of it the soil is equally fertile, and the situation equally favorable, and yet everything is different...(In Ohio the population is) devoured by feverish activity, trying every means to make its fortune...There (in Kentucky) are people who make others work for them...a people without energy, mettle or the spirit of enterprise...These differences cannot be attributed to any other cause but slavery. It degrades the black population and... (saps the energy of) the white.”

This was a hundred years before the Republican Party adopted its infamous “Southern strategy” to convert segregationist “boil weevel” "Dixie-crats into a southern Republican block. But Northern Democrats, at very the moment of their party's birth, made a much more disgusting bargain – agreeing to protect real slavery in all its foul existence,  in exchange for gaining national power for themselves and their masters, the money classes.

Jackson was a slave owner, and his natural inclination would be to support slavery. He was opposed to the national bank, and Adam's program of “big government” investments. But was that because he saw them as a threat to the South, or because he saw Adams as cheating him out of the White House?, Whatever his priorities it is clear Jackson had no interest in the details of forming a political party. His only interest was in winning over those who “cheated” him. Forming the party that would carry him to victory could be left to his loyal followers, men like Van Buren and Stevenson, who were binding Northern bankers to the Southern slave owning ruling elite. And ensuring the bankers would own them. That accommodation would be the foundation of the Jackson Democratic Party.  And, in the twentieth century, in it's turn. the Republican party

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MUD IN YOUR EYE

 

I keep reading that the election of 1884 was one of the “dirtiest” in American history, which strikes me as saying that a sewer is dirtier than a septic tank. Still I have to admit that there was a lot of mud flung around by James Blaine and Grover Cleveland. And as usual, he who flung the most, won. Blaine got in the first shot.

The Democratic convention in Buffalo, New York ended on 11 July 1884, after having nominated hometown hero, “Honest” Grover “The Good” Cleveland. Just ten days later the “Buffalo Evening Telegraph” reported “A Terrible Tale”; that in 1874 Cleveland had an affair with a young widow from New Jersey named Maria Helpin. That September Mrs. Helpin had given birth to a son she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland (Folsom was the name of Cleveland’s law partner). According to the “Telegraph”, Maria ended up in an asylum and the poor innocent boy had ended up in an orphanage. The Republican faithful began the chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.” 

It was a great story, and parts of it were true. But Cleveland (above) refused to panic and instructed his followers to “Just tell the truth”, which is easy to say at those rare times when the truth actually helps you. The truth was that Mrs. Helpin had affairs with several men (something that probably happened a lot more often than anyone in 1884 was willing to publicly admit), and there were several men who might have been the father. Cleveland never admitted parentage. But he had supported the infant after Maria started drinking.  Later, when it became clear Maria was not going to get sober anytime soon, Cleveland had paid her $500 to give up Oscar, and the boy was adopted by a friend of Cleveland’s, and eventually ended up graduating from medical school. So, after all of those details came out, the initial Blaine attack had resulted in Cleveland sounding more honest than before. The second Blaine attack backfired even worse.

There were two “third parties” in 1884; the Greenback Party and the Prohibition Party. The Greenback Party seemed likely to hurt the Democrats most, so Blaine’s Republican supporters actually gave them money. “The Dry’s” had nominated for President John St. John (above), three time governor of Kansas. Blaine’s people were worried that St. John would siphon off Republican votes in upstate New York. They urged St. John to drop out of the race, and when he refused they spread the story that St. John had abandoned a battered wife and child in California. Again, the smear was true, sort of. After his parents had died (when St. John was 15) he had joined the ‘49ers, looking for his fortune in the gold fields. He didn’t find gold but at the age of 19 he had found a wife and fathered a child. And at his wife’s request he had “granted” her, to use the old phrase, a divorce, before returning, broke, back to to Illinois.

Like most smears this one hurt St. John the most among his most fervent supporters. Prohibitionists were always a priggish bunch of humorless unforgiving bores, and they abandoned St. John as if they had just discovered the sacramental wine was actual wine. But St. John had that other trait you often find in prohibitionists; he considered revenge a matter of principle. Knowing he now stood no chance of even winning Kansas, St. John concentrated his efforts in upstate New York, just the place the Republicans were the most worried about.

Meanwhile, James Blaine, the Republican candidate, had his own problems, with the “Mugwumps”. This was yet another group of holier than thou Victorian prigs, but these prigs were Republicans, and they had a hard time deciding whether or not to support Blaine because he was so…well, crooked. 

They took their name from a supposed Algonquin word for “big leader”, but it was "New York Sun" columnist Charles Dana who defined them as Republicans who had their “mugs” on one side of the fence and their “wumps” on the other. 

And they could not decide which side of the fence they wanted to be on,  In addition, traditional  Republican commentators went so far as to imply that the Mugwumps were “effete”, or to use the 1884 vernacular, “Man millners”, or the 2018 vernacular, homosexuals.

Meanwhile the Democrats were throwing everything they could think of at "James Blaine, the Continental Liar From the State of Maine", such as calling him "Slippery Jim". They even dragged up the old charge of “Burn this letter after reading”. 

And the Indianapolis Sentinel even discovered that Blaine had married his wife only after her father had threatened him with a shotgun. Blaine sued for liable, but the paper then produced the certificates showing the couple had been married in March, 1851 and their first child had been born less than three months later. Unheard of! A young couple had engaged in sex before they were married! Shocking! Blaine came up with a story about two ceremonies, one private in 1850, and a public wedding a year later, but by the time he finished explaining it all, the audience had turned to the comic pages. 

But the final nail in Blaine’s coffin was perhaps driven in by the Reverend Samuel Burchard, who at a New York City Republican rally, with Blaine sitting at the dais, charged that the Democrats stood for “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”.  The press had a field day, calling the phrase anti-southern and anti-Catholic, (which it was) and that by his silence Blaine had approved of it.  

It was absurd. Blaine’s mother was a practicing Catholic. His sister was a nun. The Republicans had even been hoping to attract some Catholic votes away from the Democrats. But all those attacks weighed Blaine down, especially after the Democrats publicly organized Catholic Democratic lawyers in case they had to contest the official election results from New York. And they almost did.

In the end it is difficult to say precisely why Cleveland won and Blaine lost. The popular vote cast on Election Day, Tuesday, 4 November 1884, was four million eight hundred seventy-four thousand for Cleveland (48.5%) and four million eight hundred forty-eight thousand (48.2%) for Blaine. But as we all know the popular vote is meaningless. What counted was the Electoral College, and there Cleveland won two hundred nineteen votes to one hundred eighty-two for Blaine, giving Cleveland a 37 electoral vote victory. 

The difference was New York State’s 36 votes which Cleveland won by a mere 1,047 votes out of one million one hundred twenty-five thousand and forty-eight votes cast in the Empire state. I think what made those 1,047 votes so powerful were the twenty-four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine votes cast in up[state New York for Prohibitionist Party candidate John St, John. It may have been the last time a prohibitionist could proudly say, “Here’s mud in your eye” - to James Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine. 

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SPEED OF LIGHT

 

I was doing 70 miles per hour, speeding north out of Los Angeles on the 5 freeway on a typical Southern California morning during the 1990's. Suddenly, a flash of silver in the cloudless sky caught my attention. Then, there was nothing but the pale California blue. Then it flashed again, and again. And just as I started to ponder what it might be, the flashing stopped. Three hours later, when I got home, the first thing I told my my wife,  Samantha, was that I had seen a UFO. 

Now, any object you see in the sky which you cannot identify is by definition, an Unidentified Flying Object. And I had seen one.  But what I had not seen was a flying saucer, as in something built by aliens to visit our world.  

While watching the ten o'clock news my UFO was identified as a small home-built experimental “light” aircraft, flying out of Whiteman Airport, in Pacoma (above).  Right after take off the engine had suddenly quit, and the plane had spiraled into the ground, sadly, killing the pilot. And with this knowledge, I realized every time the spinning plane's wings reflected the sunlight toward me I saw the object. Otherwise the plane was too small and too far away for me to have seen it. 

But what were the odds that I would have been in the exact position and looking in the exact direction to see that flash during the 20 seconds it took to fall three thousand feet? My sighting of that UFO was an extremely unlikely event, but far more likely than an alien spaceship visiting the earth. 

Twenty percent of Americans expect aliens to first land in Washington, D.C., which means that 20% of Americans are, in my opinion, too stupid to find their own feet in the dark. About one in three Americans believe flying saucers are alien visitors.  Barely two in ten are brave enough to assert unequivocally that UFO's are not alien spacecraft. I say all of this not because I believe I am right, but because I know I am. 

Just to leave the earth you have to be going 25,000 miles an hour, which is a very expensive and complicated thing to do.  And if you should see a rocket from an odd angle or at an odd time of day (above), it may look nothing like a televised launch. Being humans, with brains designed to make "sense" of what we see, connecting what we see with what we expect to see, with what we have seen before, it becomes easy to see something that is not what we think it is.

In one of the first UFO sightings, in 1947, over Seattle Washington, an experienced military pilot reported a formation of UFOs that raced away from him,  climbing and diving in defiance of gravity, while maintaining perfect formation. Since no one else saw the "aliens" the report can never be absolutely confirmed or absolutely denied. But a recreation by the PBS program NOVA showed the UFO's could have simply been sunlight reflections on the airplane's canopy.  I can't prove that is was reflections. But ask yourself,  what is more likely - aliens or a simple mistaken assumption when the pilot saw something he did not expect to see when and where he did not expect to see it?  Do you want to panic? Then it was aliens. If you prefer not to panic, then it probably wasn't, and life goes on. It's your choice

Also, consider this;   as difficult as it is to go 7 miles a minute just to get off this rock, in terms of space travel, escape velocity  is like backing out of your driveway. 

From the earth to the sun (called an Astronomical Unit) (above)  is 93 million miles. It would take 176 years to drive to the sun in a Chevette at 70 miles an hour, and you would need special glasses. Call them sun glasses. 

Neptune, the 8th and farthest planet in our solar system  is 30.5 AU's from the sun, so just to get out of our neighborhood you would have to drive that Chevette (above) at 70 miles and hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for 5,369 years to get to Neptune.  And that would just get you to the edge of our property line, speaking universally. 

The nearest star to our own sun, in other words the house next door, is Proxima Centuri (above, in the red triangle), which is 15, 300 AU from our sun. That means it would take you, at 70 miles an hour,  two million, six hundred ninety-two thousand, eight hundred years to drive there. And at 30 miles to the gallon, that would be a very expensive trip for a Chevette.

Of course, the assumption is that aliens have warp-drive, or hyperdrive or star-drive or maybe  "fold space", which allows then to travel faster than the speed of light. I guess, on a Saturday night future human teenagers will just zip down to the McDonald's on Proxima Centuri to hang out.

 And I wish that were true, I really do. I am a big Star Strek/Star Wars fan. (Dr. Crusher was the MLF. of my 30's ) But it ain't gonna happen, folks.

Let's say you wanted to build an interetellar Chevette. I would suggest a few style changes, just because. But even if you kept the classic hatch-back earth size, that car weighs about 2,000 pounds. So, just to get that hatchback into orbit would take 57,000 pounds of thrust, or a 28.5 to one ratio of thrust to weight. Now that ratio drops quickly the further you get from the center of the earth. But as you go faster the ratio starts to go back up, and quickly, because - and hold on to your hat here – ...

Fueling up your 2,000 pound Chevette to reach the speed of light would require 69 billion, 192 million pounds of thrust... except, as you go faster, the Chevette gets heavier. Which means you need more thrust, leading to more mass, requiring more thrust, making more weight, requiring more thrust, etc. ad nauseum. 

That's because the amount of additional thrust required to go even one millionth of a mile per hour faster is always squared, (E=mc2) until the additional thrust required to go even one millionth of one mile an hour faster is infinite. That means that the last little bit of energy required to go from 175, 999 and 9/10ths miles per second to 176,000 miles per second - aka 300,000,000 meters per second - the speed of light - would require you to convert all matter in the universe into energy - including your Chevette.  Relatively speaking,  you can not get to the speed of light unless you start out as light. 

Of course, science fiction writers envision ways of changing the rules of the game, by warping space, or using a convenient worm hole. Except you might as well say going down the worm hole with Alice will get you to Proxima Centuri in five minutes flat. It might. But nobody has ever actually seen a worm hole up close or figured how to get into one. Or designed a workable a warp drive.

Let me, as a male, explain it this way. The speed of light is like a gentleman's club where friendly beautiful naked woman gyrate on your lap. But just to get in the club requires you to hand over all your credit cards. And without a credit card, the beautiful women will no longer gyrate within  a hundred feet of you. 

Just getting into a worm hole requires you to get squished flat in a gravity field, after you have been  bombarded with enough radiation to make you transparent - for the fraction of second before you are disassembled into your individual atoms.  Can I prove that? Aha!. I don't need to. I'm not the one claiming there is a magical way of getting something for nothing out of the universe. You might was well ask a Republican for a affordable health insurance.

Is there life on other planets? Of course there is. On this planet there is life crowded around 700 degree thermal vents, in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean -  bacteria, tubeworms (above), clams, mussels, and shrimp - and even in the space between rocks thousands of miles beneath the surface, These creatures never see sunlight, and find oxygen poisonous and thrive in crushing gravity and melting temperatures.  They actually eat hydrogen and sulfur. There are even bacteria that eat acid and petroleum. On this planet. Why wouldn't there be life on other planets in similar unlikely conditions?

 With an estimated 6 sextillion planets in the universe (that's a 6 followed by 21 zeros), it becomes certain that there is life out there, probably everywhere. But is also certain, they have not and will not visit us because they cannot travel at the speed of light. Let alone faster. Nobody can. It's not unlikely.  It is impossible.

 Sorry, but that's just the way it is.  Grow up and get used to it. UFO's ain't alien space ships. They are just stuff we haven't identified yet, mostly because of the way we are looking at them. But we will. Eventually. Be patient. Some day, Gates McFadden may even ask me for a date. It's possible. It just ain't likely.

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