GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN

 

I come home in the morning light,
My mother says "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh ,mother, dear, We're not the fortunate ones,
And girls, They wanna have fun.

I am not sure how to describe the Pharaoh's women. They were called a harem, but that conjures up  images of sex starved coquettes waiting impatiently for the a few moments with their sugar daddy -  a male Egyptologist's fantasy if ever there was one. It also seems an inefficient use of resources, what with years of housing, feeding and clothing so many sperm receptacles. Surely these ancient women had to be multi-taskers. For example, we know the Pharaoh's harem had a very nice choir.

But besides harmonizing, the ladies of the harem must have earned their keep between reproductive sessions by cutting ribbons at temple openings, encouraging teenagers to just say no to drugs and reminding stone masons of their vital role in the Pharaohonic economy. Proof of the importance of women in Ancient Egypt can be found in events which occurred some 4,200 years ago, at the end of what is called "The New Kingdom" - which gives you some idea of how old Egyptian civilization really is. In the spring of 1167 B.C.E. Ramses III sat down to talk with his wives, and he almost did not get up again

Usimare (Ramses III's real name) was a good example of the vagaries of picking a Pharaoh. He was tall for the age - about 5.8", smart, competent and dedicated. His reign should have been as successful as his idol's, Ramses II, who during his 67 years of rule (according to tradition) threw those freeloading Israelites out Egypt. But Usimare was also a really unlucky guy.  

Just before Usimare became Pharaoh a large volcano in Iceland blew its top, and the shadow of its ash cloud damaged Egyptian crops for twenty years. The price of wheat skyrocketed, and entire classes of farmers and fishermen became hobos, stealing that they could not buy, be it food or a new place to live.

In the Middle East they were called Philistines, and they spent a couple of hundred years bringing "tsuris" to the upstart Israelites. In Tunisia they established Carthage, and a thousand years later became the Roman Republic's worst enemy. In Egypt they were called the Sea Peoples, and fighting them off left the treasury flat broke. That distant volcanic eruption wasn't Ramses III's fault, but he got the bill. He just wasn't lucky. He wasn't even lucky in his death, in that he did not die fast enough.

The phone rings in the middle of the night,
My father yells "What you gonna do with your life?"
Oh, daddy, dear,
You know you're still number one,
But girls, They wanna have fun

By the spring of 1167 B.C.E., poor, unlucky and broke Ramses III was about 65 years old and had been Pharaoh for thirty-two years. He had dragged his entire court to Thebes for the five day celebration of his Heb-Sed, or Feast of the Tail of the Jackal. There were parades, dinners, banquets and lots of drinking, and on the fourth day the Pharaoh had to "run" a course and shoot arrows to prove he was still fit enough to rule. What they would have done if the old boy had not been up to it, I don't know. But in the Old Kingdom they used to kill him if he was too feeble.

His harem had of course come with him, headed by his new Great Wife Isis and her boy,  22 year old newly crowned Prince Heqamatre, and also Prince Pentaweret, who was  Queen Tey aka Tiy's son.  Now  Penatweret was just a few months younger than Heqamatre. But that slight seniority had moved Heqamatre next in line to be Pharaoh over Pentaweret, and replaced Tey with Isis as the Great Wife..  

Ramses III could have overridden these automatic adjustments in his royal household if he had felt one heir more suited than the other, but for whatever reason he did nothing. And that would prove to be a fatal choice because Tey was the kind of a girl who carried a grudge.

Well, she wasn't a girl, she was a grown woman who had given birth to three sons, and she was at least forty years old by now. Still, Tey must have been an impressive broad, because six of the other wives sided with her in this matter. And they were all the daughters of powerful families.

In addition, Tey had considerable support from the bureaucracy which maintained the harem. Chief of the Chamber, Pebekkamen, and his assistant were down with her plan, as well as Peynok, Overseeer Of The Harem,  and his scribe and seven royal butlers, who were all titled members of the bureaucracy. 

Tey also managed to draw the army into the conspiracy. The sister of an officer in the Nubian Archers, who was one of the "harem six", urged her brother to "Incite the people to hostility! And come thou to begin hostility against thy lord." Well, I suppose, she could have been more circumspect. 

In any case, Tey even had conspirators working inside the Thebian police force. She was also attempting to seduce the head of the Egyptian Treasury, which was called The White House. And Tey even managed to enlist Iroi, Ramses III's personal priest-physician. But it appears he was the only priest who joined the conspiracy.

Some boys take a beautiful girl,
And hide her away from the rest of the world.
I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.
Oh, girls, They wanna have fun.

See, ancient Egypt was peppered with temples, large and small, and each had their priests and their grain fields to support them, and slaves to work those fields. By the best estimates, 14 % of the irrigated land and 2% of the population were owned by the temple priests. The temples also owned 500,000 head of cattle, 88 large ships and some 53 workshops and shipyards. And in 1167 B.C. all of this was tax exempt, which shifted more of the tax burden onto the lesser nobles and peasants. Does any of this sound familiar?

Ramses III tried to reduce his expenses by replacing his bureaucrats and parts of the army with slaves, supplied by royal families acting as independent contractors.  But Ramses III also contributed to this power shift to the priesthood by continuing to donate large sums to the temples. Gold and silver went straight out of the government coffers and into the collection plates. Ramses III boasted on a temple wall, "I did mighty deeds and benefactions...for the gods and goddesses of South and North." Those benefactions hastened the bankruptcy of the national treasury. Familiar again, right?

Just three years before this original "Year of the Woman" the artisans working in the royal tombs had stopped work because their pay had stopped. Ramses crushed this first worker's revolt in history as if he were the Governor of Florida   But that wildcat strike indicated that Tey was not just trying to make her son Pharaoh, she was trying to reverse the decline of the power of The Pharaohs.  The whole thing came to a head, say the ancient accounts, when Ramses III  decided to spend a night with the girls.

Since Ramses III's mummy was discovered in 1886 we know that the Pharaoh received no knife or spear wounds. And his skeleton reveals no broken bones. I'll bet that Usimare was poisoned, not killed but weakened enough that within a few days after setting down to spend some time with the girls, he died, perhaps of heart failure or dehydration. A hint is that in later centuries, Egyptians invoked Ramses III's name when seeking divine assistance in the case of snake bite. And like a snake, Ramses III lashed out from his death bed against those who had stepped upon him.

In three scandalized trials conducted after Ramses III's death, twenty-seven men and six women were convicted of treason, including her boy, Pentaweret.  Pentaweret was forced to drink poison. Every one else, including Tey herself  was slowly simmered to death on a barbecue, cooked until the flesh was just falling off their bones. And then their bones were ground up and their ashes were scattered to the four winds, condemning the immortal souls of these original resurectionists to wander the after-life without a body.  Tough, I know. But if you are going to shoot at the Pharaoh, you had better not miss.

And it is a shame Tey did miss. In his will, Ramses III donated 86,400 slaves to the estates of the god Amon's temples. His son and heir, Heqamatre, became Ramses IV, but he ruled for just six years. Ramses now followed Ramses with such rapidity that the High Priest of el-Kab who had helped Ramses III celebrate his Heb Sed, was still in office when Ramses IX died in 1111 B.C.E. By then the priest were  the power in Egypt, and the country was run for their benefit, sort of like the bankers run America today, and Egypt slipped into a centuries long dark age.  

When the working day is done,
Oh, girls, They wanna have fun.

Ah, if only Tey aka Tiy had been quicker, then the New Kingdom might have lasted a few hundred years longer, and women might have played a bigger part in history. After all, the girl just wanted to have fun.

- 30 -

POLITICAL PHOBIA

 

I think of this guy as just another one of those self-made right-wing technocrats, who used his fortune to finance an ultra-conservative agenda - a 19th century Elon Musk.  In this case the technology was the telegraph, Samuel Finley Breese Morse (above) did not even invent the name "telegraph", he stitched together other people's inventions after his painting career fizzled. But before he learned about electricity he learned to fear the 'Bavarian Illuminati' from his father's Sunday sermons.

The patriarch Samuel Morse proselytized that the Roman Catholic Church was flooding America with Irish and German Catholic immigrants, intent on establishing a new Vatican City in the Mississippi valley. Wrote papa Morse, “Surely American Protestants...(will) discover...the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is...a political as well as a religious system; that... differs totally...from all other forms of religion in the country.”  And like his 21st century progeny the poison he was peddling (and funding) fed on fear and ignorance, and grew strong.

It sprouted into full flower in the congressional elections of 1854, catching on “like measles”, according to one Democrat. The organization was officially known as “The American Party”, but commonly refereed to as the Know Nothings, because its members were coached to respond to all questions by admitting only, “I don't know”, and because, frankly, in the eyes of their critics, the majority just seemed to be not very bright.  Membership was limited to white males of proven English heritage, and usually self described evangelical Protestants.

 And although most of the new candidates had never been active in politics or held public office before,  they won 61 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that year. They elected a governor and all the other posts open that year in Massachusetts and Maine.

They controlled the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and most of New England. They gained advantage in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Tennessee by taking no position on slavery.  This hurt them in the deep south,  as did being linked to violence and even murders in Chicago, Philadelphia,  Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Columbus, Cincinnati and New Orleans. Still, the Know Nothings looked certain to capture the White House in 1856. And then came Bloody Monday in Louisville, Kentucky.

They held three elections in Louisville in 1855. On 7 April voters threw out the incumbent mayor, who had converted to Catholicism when he married, and elected a Know Nothing replacement and a Know Nothing majority on the city council.

They followed this a month later by electing a Know Nothing majority of county court judges. Then the school board fired every Catholic teacher, save one. The Know Nothings were feeling both confident and paranoid - it was the nature of the party and the movement.  Now another Know Nothing, Charles Morehead, was favored to win the governorship of Kentucky on yet another election, Monday 6 May. On the night before, 1,500 Know Nothings staged a torch light march through Catholic neighborhoods, warning them “to keep their elbows in” come election morning.

Maybe no one other than Reuben Thomas Durrett (above) could have made the nation face the truth about the Know Nothings. Others wrote about it, but they lacked his resume. R.T., as he preferred to be known, was a defense attorney, and familiar with arguing unpopular causes. He was “intellectually and physically...a magnificent man.” More than that he was a poet, and a lover of truth and history. He had a 50,000 volume personal library. And 300 years earlier, his French Protestant ancestors had barely escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France when Catholic bigots had cleaned house. So when the political spin machine smothered every other honest voice in Louisville, it was R.T. who validated the reality when some tried to put the blame "on both sides".  “To my mind,” he wrote, “the whole secret of the success of this disgraceful affair was...that the Know Nothing sympathizers were prepared and armed for the conflict...”

According to R.T., the thugs, hired as “special police”, formed a gauntlet in front of the polls. If a would-be voter were an immigrant from Germany or Ireland he was presumed to be Catholic, and was “... ordered by one of the bullies to leave...” And if he refused, “...he was attacked by the whole mob, severely beaten and driven away.  If the man showed fight, his life was in great danger." 

Recently ousted Mayor James Speed watched the beatings on the courthouse front lawn from eight in the morning until six. “It was not fighting man to man," he recorded,  "but as many as could fall upon a single Irishman or German and beat him with sticks or short clubs...”  The clubs had been specially made with lead weights in their tips, and mass produced.  In the afternoon Speed was told 200 shotgun wielding “Germans” had captured a polling place. Speed knew this to be a fantasy and said so. But his informant, a judge, “replied with warmth showing that he believed it to be true.” About four in the afternoon, things went from bad to worse.

Two Louisville Catholic activists, Theodore Rhodes and David Doughtery were warning everyone in their east side neighborhood to stay off Main street. They stopped at Micheal O'Connor's grocery store, at the corner of 10^th street and Main and warned him to close. As they came out a Know Nothing ran up to them.   Basil Rhodes, Theodore's father, standing in front of his home a block away, watched the man shoot his son dead. The gun shot drew Know Nothings from all directions, and it quickly became accepted that a Catholic had killed a Know Nothing.  The exact opposite of what had really happened. What followed was mass murder.

The worst of it was Quinn's Row, a block of 12 three story row houses along Main between 11^th and 12^th streets. Around eight that evening a Know Nothing mob set fire to a ground floor corner grocery run by a family named Long. Recorded a Catholic newspaper, “Seeking to escape...the wretched inhabitants reached the street only to meet death in another form. As soon as one appeared at a door he was fired at...” Mr. Long and two of his sons died that night, as did several of the residents of the upper floor apartments.

“A number were taken off badly wounded, and others...returned to the burning houses, preferring rather to be burned than to meet the infuriated mob. One man escaped in woman’s clothes, was detected and shot. Another, who came out covered with a blanket, and, leaning on the arm of his wife, was torn away, and deliberately shot.”

While the first building was still raging, the feed store next door and its apartments went up, followed by a vacant house, then a tobacconist. Noted the newspaper, “How many of these miserable people thus caged in their own houses were burned alive there can be no computation.... Two men were hanged from their banisters of their own homes and also consumed in the flames.” In the last structure on the street, a rooming house, Patrick Quinn, who owned the entire block, was driven outside like the others. Recognized because of his investments around the city (and his brother, who was a priest) , he was singled out, beaten to death, and his corpse was thrown back into the fire.

The official version said that 22 people had been killed in the entire city on Bloody Monday. It is much more likely that the number was at least 100. The death toll would have been even higher but in the German district one of the first buildings looted was Armbruster's brewery. The rioters got so drunk they could only satisfy themselves with torching that building before passing out.

The new Know Nothing Mayor, John Barbee, managed to save two Catholic Churches from the arsonists, but no one was ever prosecuted for the murders, the beatings or the arson. In response the despised immigrants voted with their feet. Ten thousand left Louisville over the next few months, almost 25% of the cities' population. In the city left behind businesses failed, unemployment soared and city coffers dried up. Charles Morehead was easily elected governor in 1855, but it was the classic tale of “be careful what you wish for”.  And the bloodbath destroyed sympathy for the Know Nothings.  There would never be an American President from Samuel B. Morses' American Party.

Most of the Irish moved to Chicago. Typical was ex-Mayor Speed, who became active in Republican Party politics and served in the Lincoln administration.  The Germans mostly moved to St. Louis and Milwaukee, and some to Kansas City, Kansas – ensuring those states would remain in the Union come the Civil War.  It was that war which put the entire Know Nothing movement into perspective.

The Civil War made the Know Nothing agenda obsolete. Immigration was the great enemy in the eyes of Samuel Morse. But the actual enemy of the working class was Wall Street and the bankers who were profiting from low wages  at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The mathematician Alfred Whitehead observed, “The major advances in civilization....all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” And in his book “War and Peace in the Global Village” Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan explains why that is so. “When one has been hurt by a new technology, when the private person or corporate body finds its entire identity endangered...it lashes back in a fury of self-defense...But... the symptom against which we lash out may be caused by something about which we know nothing.”  McLuhan calls that symptom “Phantom Pain”, and compares it to the agony amputees report they feel in missing limbs.

Although America has institutionalized such economic  revolutions, and has won economic advantage from them - such as the current electronic revolution -  that does not make the cultural revolutions that  accompany them any easier to live with.

Politics are never the solution. Politics are only another symptom. The solutions are always within ourselves, trusting ourselves to deal with whatever threats we perceive in our future  And the longer we blame others, Catholics or Muslims, Jews or Blacks, liberals or conservatives the longer and the more our nation suffers. The solution is never who to blame, but how together we can meet the challenges. Because eventually, we always do.  It just seems we waste a lot of time, energy and blood trying to avoid the obvious solutions.

- 30 - 

SENATOR WETBACK

 

I prefer to refer to him as Senator Wetback. His real name was Patrick Anthony McCarran, and this bitter xenophobic, contemptuous narcissistic windbag, represented the very worst in the American character. 

He  preached fear of the future, fear of our enemies,  fear of our friends and even fear of ourselves. It was Pat McCarran who gave the Health Insurance Industry their protected anti-trust status, allowing them to collude in setting drug prices.  It was Pat McCarran who fed America’s vile dead end phobia of Mexican immigration.  

It was Pat McCarran who first used the Senate of the United States to bully and terrorize loyal American citizens. It was Pat McCarran who turned Joe McCarthy’s bungling histrionics into the best weapon the Communists had in the cold war. In short, it was Pat McCarran who planted the seeds of the poisons politics that Donald Trump would harvest.

Pat McCarran was born the same year that George Custer died on the Little Big Horn; 1876. He was raised on an isolated sheep farm outside of Reno, Nevada, 15 miles from his nearest human playmate. He remained an isolationist his entire life. He attended the University of Nevada Law School, but had to drop out when his father was injured. Pat would later pass the bar, studying on his own.

As a new lawyer Pat McCarran made two big mistakes. The first was in 1907 when Nevada Governor John Sparks offered the thirty year old an appointment as a judge. But Pat’s paranoia drove him to reject the appointment. He later admitted ruefully, “That was the first and only appointment that was ever offered to me.”

His second mistake was when he served as counsel in a divorce case, Wingfield v Wingfield. The husband, George Wingfield, was the Democratic political boss who ran Nevada politics. And by representing the wife, Mae Wingfield, Pat McCarran earned the undying enmity of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership. When he tried to run for the U.S. Senate in 1908 he was black balled. One party leader noted, “His reputation as a double-crosser is too well established throughout the state.” Twenty years later the black ball still denied him a nomination for a Senate run.

Pat McCarran was finally allowed to run for the for U.S. Senate in 1932, at the age of 56, primarily because nobody else wanted what seemed like a useless nomination. The Democrats had been the second party in Nevada since the civil war. But in the general election this “ rotund man with a double chin, wavy hair and a high-pitched voice, who often says "My hide yearns for the alkali dust and the desert"— was swept into Washington on Franklin Roosevelt’s coat tails. Pat then proceeded to spit on those coattails.

The new Junior Senator from Nevada (left - second row) opposed every element of the New Deal. “The innovations of executive power, indulged in by Jackson, promoted by Lincoln, expounded by Garfield, declared righteous by Roosevelt and philosophically promulgated by Wilson, appear to have been but forerunners, rivulets, as it were, contributing to a flood that now sweeps on, submerging the Utopian doctrines and theories of Jefferson and conferring unheard of and unfettered expansion to the executive” That kind of rhetoric got him re-elected in 1938 with 73% of the vote.

Now secure in his seat, McCarran made speech's along side fellow Catholic Charles Lindberg, preaching isolationism. “I think one American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all central Europe.”  He condemned Roosevelt’s supposed “secret plan” to push America into WW II. After Pearl Harbor, it was McCarran's desperate attempts to justify his prewar opposition,   which gave birth to the conspiracy myths that FDR had purposefully ignored Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact it was McCarran's stinginess over military budgets that left the Army and Navy short planes and radar to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, however, Senator McCarran was certain that Nevada got it’s share of war spending, including the third largest manufacturing facility built during the war, Basic Magnesim’s $140 million plant, built at full government expense, and the town of Henderson, built again at government expense, to house the plant’s 15,000 workers. Pat won re-election in 1944 with 68% of the vote.

The war and time made Pat McCarran one of the nation’s most powerful senators, by making him one of its most senior Senators. By 1945 he had become the new political boss of Nevada, the new George Wingfield. Pat even filled the U.S. capital building with so many graduates from Nevada Universities that they became known as “McCarran’s Boys”. And after a couple of years working in Washington, many of the “boys” became part of the McCarran Machine, back home in Nevada.

Pat McCarran handed out just as many “black balls” as he had been handed. Federal Marshal Les Kofed explained to the Senator that Federal law prevented political appointees like him from making speeches in support of a local politician. Marshal Kofed explained, “Out of a clear blue sky, shortly thereafter,…I received a call from the chief deputy at Carson City, that a new marshal had been appointed, that I had better come in and turn in my keys.”

By 1950 Time magazine had begun describing the 73 year old Pat McCarran as “pompous, vindictive and power-grabbing”. According to the magazine he “staged a one-man committee filibuster against an “Emergency Immigration bill” to admit (250,000) D. P’s to the U.S  The D.P.’s were Displaced Persons, who had survived the Nazi death and work camps, but whose identification papers had been lost or destroyed. They were people without homes or a nation willing to accept them. What concerned Pat McCarran was that many of them were Jews. He argued that the “Emergency Immigration Bill” was supported by a particular “pressure group” with “unlimited money” - code words for Jews.

The DP bill had the support of President Eisenhower. But when it was first introduced into a subcommittee in the spring of 1953, Senator McCarran “demanded” a ten day delay while his wife sought medical treatment. When “Senator Wetback” instead surfaced in Los Angles, holding hearings for his own Senate Security and Intelligence Sub Committee, and asked for three more weeks of delay, the immigration bill hearings finally began.

Three weeks into the hearings McCarran managed to snooker the Judiciary Committee (parent committee to the subcommittee) into voting to delay any further action by the subcommittee. When most of the Senators realized they had been tricked, fisticuffs almost broke out. It took a week, but the delay was eventually overturned. Still, in the end, McCarran managed to kill the bill. And tens of thousands of desperate people were turned away from America's shores because of one bigot.

In June of 1952 Pat McCarran co-sponsored a rewriting of immigration law, declaring that “…we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated..." More code words for Jews. "Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.” He could have had the same speech writer as Donald Trump, except McCarran, at least, knew lots of multi-syllable words.

Next came the program which, for me, earned the Senator his nickname, “Operation Wetback.” That  really was its name, and it was launched in 1954 after Senator McCarran’s prodded the bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program contrasted with the ten year old “Bracero” system, in which Mexican recruiters contracted to supply workers for American farmers and railroads.

By 1954 some 300,000 Mexican citizens were legally working in the United States on temporary “Bracero” visas. Few stayed in the United States at the end of their contracts, because their salaries were paid to their families, back in Mexico. However those programs, which protected worker’s rights and wages, were disliked by employers. Racists forces in Texas had prevented that state from participating in the program for five years. 

But in 1954 this successful program was killed, in favor of mass deportations - the same approach promoted by Donald Trump, and producing the same outcome - rising food prices because of a lack of field workers.

The INS would later claim to have expelled 1.3 million Mexicans (not the 13 million claimed in recent mythology) under Operation Wetback.  But a closer examination of the data shows the service could only prove some 80,000 were expelled. The addition half a million were an estimate of those who left the country out of fear, but the number was more hopeful than accurate.

The U.S. Army successfully resisted joining Operation Wetback, and in an internal report written later carried the notation, "Thank goodness"   The program ended abruptly when seven “illegals” being deported by ship, drowned while trying to swim back to the American shore. The crew of the steamer transporting them then mutinied against their captain, and against the entire program.

But Pat McCarran’s most powerful weapon was his anti-communism. In this he was merely echoed by Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarran also supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to the point that he was called “The Senator from Madrid.” 

He was an equally fierce supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek, after Chiang and his supporters were driven out of mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan. So rabid was McCarran's defense that it was not until Richard Nixon visited China in the 1970’s that some sanity and common sense return to American Asian policy.

The McCarran’s Internal Security Act (of September 1950) required members of the communist party to register with the Attorney General. So onerous were the details of the act that between 1965 and 1967 almost all of it was ruled unconstitutional.  Walt Kelly, who drew the popular "Pogo" comic strip, chose to memorialize McCarrain with "Mole J. Macarney", a blind, paranoid mole , who spread tar on everything and everyone he touched.

Pat McCarran died of a heart attack in September of 1954, proving once again that politics is not about being right. It is about being re-elected. To most politicians, nothing else matters.

  - 30 -