Steve Russell : Unfriendly Fire at Fort Hood

Police car outside judicial hearing at Fort Hood, Texas, July 9, 2013. Photo by Tony Gutierrez / AP.

Workplace violence:
Unfriendly fire at Fort Hood, Texas

I am gobsmacked by a particular elevation of form over substance being practiced before our eyes by the Army.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2013

The Rag Blog's Steve Russell -- a Texas trial judge by assignment and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma -- will hold a book signing event at Austin's Black Star Co-op Brewpub, Thursday, July 18, 2013, from 4:30-7:30 p.m. He will sign his three books -- Sequoyah Rising: Problems in Post-Colonial Tribal Governance, Wicked Dew, and Ceremonies of Innocence: Essays from the Indian Wars -- and all three books will be available for purchase. The Black Star Co-op is located at 7020 Easy Wind Drive, Austin, Texas.

Meanings vary when people repeat that things can be done “the right way, the wrong way, or the Army way.” “The Army way” may represent teamwork so instinctive that orders are not necessary. For most GIs, “the Army way” is elevation of form over substance.

I am gobsmacked by a particular elevation of form over substance being practiced before our eyes by the Army. The substance began on November 5, 2009. My son was due back from his second tour in Iraq any day and the question in the family was whether he would be home for the holidays.

Ft. Hood is covered by local media in Austin, so when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and opened fire, I was probably paying attention before the firing stopped. Where was Paul? Iraq? Kuwait? Or was he in SRP, though which every soldier passes being deployed or coming home?

My son was not in SRP, but of those who were, 13 died. The victims were soldiers ranging in age from 21 to 56 and in rank from PFC to Lt. Colonel, as well as one civilian, 62 year old Michael Cahill, who died trying to stop the shooter. The youngest soldier killed, PFC Francheska Velez, was pregnant, and the fetus also died. Another 31 soldiers were wounded by gunfire, along with civilian police Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who was wounded while exchanging gunfire with the shooter.

The shooter was seriously wounded in the gunfight with civilian police. While waiting for him to recover so he could be put on trial for mass murder, we learned that Maj. Hasan admired the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico born imam who had presided at his father’s funeral. Hasan and al-Awlaki had substantial email communication before the killings at Ft. Hood.

In March 2010, al-Awlaki released a statement complaining that the Obama administration was failing to credit him properly, saying in part:

Until this moment the administration is refusing to release the e-mails exchanged between myself and Nidal. And after the operation of our brother Umar Farouk the initial comments coming from the administration were looking the same -- another attempt at covering up the truth. But Al Qaeda cut off Obama from deceiving the world again by issuing their statement claiming responsibility for the operation.

The “brother” referred to was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab AKA “the underwear bomber” because he was inspired by al-Awlaki to attempt blowing up an airliner but succeeded only in lighting up his tidy whities.

A month later, to a chorus of criticism, Obama placed al-Awaki on the CIA “kill list.” His father filed a lawsuit to get him removed from the “kill list” on due process grounds, but the case was thrown out because the father lacked standing. al-Awaki himself would, of course, have had standing, but if he came to court, the reason he was on the list would disappear.

When al-Awaki was not directly counseling on how to kill Americans, he was overseeing the editing of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English language organ where the Boston Marathon bombers allegedly read, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” The criticism of Obama fired up again when a CIA drone strike nailed al-Awaki in September of 2011.

At the time of the drone strike, al-Awaki was hiding in the lawless areas of Yemen and a Yemeni court had issued a warrant for his arrest on terrorism charges. Obama is supposed to have violated his rights by putting him on the “kill list,” but the way I read the law, a violent felon who poses a continuing danger and cannot be arrested can be killed.

This is the case without regard to citizenship and across national borders in the sense that a violation of state sovereignty is a beef between governments, not between the U.S. government and the individual targeted. Further, the standard for deciding the fact of the matter -- that he’s a continuing danger and can’t be taken into custody -- is not “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It’s “probable cause,” or what a reasonable person would believe about the facts as they sit. If the target wants more facts developed and the reasonable doubt standard met, then he can come to court, where more process is due.

Therefore, the only reason there’s any more legal or moral problem with the drone strikes than with the cops shooting a fleeing robber or rapist is the secrecy. You can’t turn yourself in if you don’t know you are wanted. But secrecy was not an issue in al-Awaki’s case. I’m sure he considered himself a soldier who died on an active battlefield, which is highly ironic given that the whole argument about the unlawfulness of drone strikes turns on claiming there was no active battlefield where he was killed and therefore he was simply assassinated.

But I digress.

After Hasan became physically able to come to court, the first military judge assigned to the case elevated form over function by engaging in a six-month battle with a dead man over shaving his full fundamentalist Muslim beard.

Nidal Hasan is a dead man rolling, since he can no longer walk as a result of his gunshot wounds. Apparently proud of his “accomplishment, “ he wished to plead guilty, but the Army won’t allow a guilty plea in a capital case and the prosecutors won’t waive the death penalty.

Those of us who oppose the death penalty can’t make an exception for Hasan like most of us did for Osama bin Laden, because Hasan would not be a hostage magnet if allowed to live in custody. But the posture of the case is what it is, and if you want to attack the death penalty, Nidal Hasan is not your poster child.

Since there is no question that Hasan did the shooting, the lawyers tasked with defending him must bring forward evidence of his mental state -- a complete defense if he’s legally insane or a mitigating circumstance if he’s sane. Understandably, Hasan does not wish to litigate his mental state, so he fired his lawyers.

Hasan informed the new and more goal-directed judge that he wishes to argue that his conduct was justified as “defense of third parties.” What third parties? Mullah Omar and the rest of the Taliban.

This will not fly because the soldiers murdered were not about to harm Mullah Omar, among many other reasons. One of the more interesting reasons is that a defender of a third party can have no more right to use deadly force than the third party would have had. Nidal Hasan is stretching for some way to put the Afghanistan war on trial, since the force he was allegedly defending against would have to be “unlawful.”

U.S. soldiers are taught that they must refuse unlawful orders, and I remember no war in my lifetime when somebody did not refuse deployment for the purpose of making a court rule on the legality. They lost, but they got to make the argument. I don’t think you can raise that argument as a justification for shooting fellow soldiers.

I understand why we generally don’t let people plead guilty in a death penalty case. We want to see the evidence. We don’t want innocent persons executed even if they volunteer to save guilty persons. In the Hasan case, that can’t happen.

Not accepting his guilty plea turns the “trial” into a slow motion guilty plea and a political circus. I’m OK with the political circus part, having been the ringmaster of several. It’s the nature of our system that trials are political, even though many of us try to pretend otherwise. But I am offended by a slow motion guilty plea.

Meanwhile, the Army has categorized the shootings as “workplace violence” rather than terrorism. There are substantial benefits for the families of soldiers killed or wounded in combat. These benefits are not available to the soldiers who signed up to fight the “war on terror” and then got shot by a turncoat whose stated purpose was to protect the enemy from his fellow soldiers on the instructions of a radical imam who repeatedly called killing Americans a religious duty.

Had my son been in the SRP that day, I would have to sue the Army for the good of my daughter in law and my grandchildren. Because he wasn’t, I’m just another opinion from the cheap seats when I say that respect for the law is the right way, but denying benefits to the victims’ families is the wrong way, and this entire process is making a mockery of the Army way.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Big Brother in the Data Mines

Cover of the first Signet Classics edition of George Orwell's 1984. Image from Vintage Paperback Archive.

We're talking yottabytes here:  
Big Brother in the data mines

We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

One of the television talking heads really hurt my feelings in a report the other night on Edward Snowden, the traitorous hero or heroic traitor who leaked the existence of PRISM, wholesale collection of data from the servers of various major players on the Internet. Not once but twice, he demanded to know how a 29-year-old high school dropout could become a computer jock for the National Security Agency with a top-secret clearance?

I was once an 18-year-old high school dropout who was a computer jock for the NSA (USAF branch) with a top-secret clearance. In the three years I worked up to my elbows in top secret intelligence, I can remember two items the leaking of which would have landed the news on the front pages along with the leaker in the pokey.

We were all told regularly and often what the consequences of revealing classified information would be. Would I have done that? I like to think I would if the public interest in the information clearly outweighed my own safety, but that circumstance never came up, so I can’t know. Before you spit your coffee on the keyboard, remember that the very oath every military person takes involves putting the interests of the country above your own.

Spying on the retail level has been part of war on this continent at least since the pueblos pulled off a sneak attack that sent the Spanish colonists all the way back to El Paso del Norte, licking their wounds.

Spying on the wholesale level awaited technology, not intent. Governments had always tried to gin up networks of informers, some of which became famous in history and did the job for a period of time. Scholars estimate that one in seven East Germans informed for the Stasi on some level. People, over time, seem to revert to their own values over those imposed by government, and so become less reliable as informers. People lack the discipline of computers.

During WWII, Bletchley Park began to move warfare into the digital age. Communication had for some time been by wire and by broadcast, and so intelligence became a contest between code makers and code breakers in, as the computer geeks say, real time.

One obvious method of code breaking is to archive and collate vast numbers of messages and look for patterns. This became possible by entrusting analysis to Alan Turing’s mathematics, which became the Allies’ ACE (“Automatic Computing Engine") in the hole.

Once the algorithms were written, the issue became how to capture and store mountains of communication data. We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By the time the calendar turned over the date that gives the title to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the technology was possible for Big Brother to be watching us. When the date whizzed by with no more notice than Y2K, some of us wondered whether the American people, like Winston Smith, had learned to love Big Brother?

Image from The Matrix.

Apparently, not all people share amorous attachment to the government, since the sales of Orwell’s novel have spiked with the revelations about PRISM.

Back to the Okie teenager who got his top-secret clearance in 1965. We learned our trade on computers that stored data in kilobytes. When we moved to intelligence, we were dealing with megabytes. There were rumors about gigabytes, like the computer in my home on which I compose this column. Today’s NSA is storing data in yottabytes. That is, a septillion bytes.

We are told PRISM collects “metadata,” not identifiable to individuals or even organizations. Numbers called to and from, length of call. Not content. Not even who made the call.

Excuse me, but how would it help catch terrorists if it could not be focused on individuals or organizations? Back when I did this, just about everything we had in the computer was from communications intercepts and aircraft sorties. Collating that told us all kinds of useful things about our adversaries.

The question how many data points it takes to focus on an individual is not one of opinion but one of mathematics, and the number of data points is directly related to the level of certainty we demand. In the case of cell phone metadata, there’s some evidence that a mere four hits on the same number can identify 95% of individuals.

Because published studies in scientific journals are limited, that could be wrong, but the fact remains that the question is not one of opinion, but of mathematics.

By cross-referencing telephone and Internet metadata with bank records, which are already in electronic form and do not require a search warrant to access, the NSA can discover things about you that your parents may not know.

We are told that the metadata can be accessed from the desktop computer of any analyst who has the proper clearance. You know, like the one I had at age 18? Let’s not give Big Brother too much credit for having his attention focused on us, but let’s not pretend that it’s impossible or that the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing when thousands of people have access to yottabytes of data.

Big Brother does not care about you, but he cared enough about Martin Luther King, Jr., to bug his motel room, a laughably primitive method. He cared enough about the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement to insert double agents, which is also kind of labor intensive and old fashioned.

If the United States is data mining on this level, what do you think China and Russia are doing? China in particular has pulled off some hacks into corporate databases that left me scratching my head.

This is not an argument to shut down PRISM, assuming that would be possible given the resources already invested in storage. Consider these words like a weather report, since, after all, the databases being mined were already in corporate hands before the government touched them. I’m unclear that maximizing shareholder value is a less dangerous imperative than maintaining a government in power.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : The Unlikely Story of Dr. Wahoo, Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

Chief Illiniwok, the long-embattled mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was retired in 2007. Illiniwok was opposed by American Indian groups and others for perpetuating cultural stereotypes. Native American caricatures live on as mascots in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Image from The Society Pages.
The unlikely story of Dr. Wahoo,
Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / February 15, 2013

Lots of things have followed me into my second retirement. Some, like continuing work with Indian graduate students, are a source of delight. Others less so. I am reminded that I failed to change the world.

The National Science Foundation just sent me the 2011 report on earned PhDs. I immediately headed for the graph that breaks down the numbers by race/ethnicity.

Like all credentials, the PhD can represent more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration is worthy by any measure. The objective of a doctoral dissertation is to add to the total store of human knowledge in a measurable way.

It’s true that some PhD granting schools are more rigorous than others, the same as undergraduate schools.

My claim is not that the credential is infallible evidence of the accomplishment it is supposed to represent. We all know better than that. But it’s also more than just the union card for the professoring trade, and the more tribal citizens with advanced degrees -- PhD, MD, JD, or others -- the more 21st century possibilities are open to the tribe, not just the individuals who get the degrees. So, yes, if my academic career has involved advancing Indians on the micro level, one student at a time, I remain highly interested in the macro level.

I remember a discussion about the minimum number of Indian lawyers it would take to form a section of the American Bar Association and realizing it would require us to literally sign up every known Indian with a law degree (at the time) to what is a voluntary and quite expensive organization (to which I currently do not belong). I remember talking with a non-Indian MD who was working off his school debts with the Indian Health Service and coming to the realization that he did not think much of Indians. I don’t like the view at the bottom of the barrel.

In the 2011 numbers, I noted that Hispanics, at 2,006 new PhDs, surpassed African-Americans, at 1,953. This has been a continuing trend because Hispanics (16.7% of the population) outnumber blacks (13.1%). American Indians, even by the expansive new definition that doubled the numbers, and even adding Native Hawaiians, are only 1.4% of the population. Number of new PhDs? 136.

Let’s review.

African-Americans are about 13.1% of the population and produced about 6.14% of the new PhDs.

Hispanics are about 16.7% of the population and produced 6.31%.

Indigenous persons are, on paper, 1.4% of the population, a number that is greatly overstated by self-reporting from the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. We produced .43% of the new PhDs.

I watched similar numbers for years involving the JD degree. We are growing in absolute numbers, and we’ll continue to get better because education is as hereditary as lack of education. I am a first generation college student and all four of my kids went to college. So, are we satisfied?

I’m not satisfied, and every time I hear a bright Indian kid accused of “thinking white” for the sin of thinking, I want to revert to savage stereotype.

When Indians do something positive, we are quick to offer cultural explanations for our superiority. It’s about time culture took some of the rap for our academic underperformance.

You want more evidence? Asians are about 5% of the population and snagged over 9% of the new PhDs. I’ve never heard of an Asian kid being accused of “thinking white” or of trying to elevate herself above her peers.

Speaking of savage stereotypes, some people would say that the problem of our lack of success in education is a problem way bigger than, say, Indian mascots.

With that painful sight of Robert Griffin III going down on his knee the wrong way, I was reminded that I care about him as an exciting rookie player from my neck of the woods while I root for the Washington team to lose, always.

RGIII played his high school ball at Copperas Cove and his college ball at Baylor. He’s one of those new wave running quarterbacks. You never know if he is going to hand it to the running back, throw it, or take off. More to the point, neither does the defense.

So why, oh why, did he have to get drafted by the Washington team?

In 2008, a refereed article appeared in the journal Basic and Applied Psychology, “Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots.” Like most science, it contains more mathematics than opinions, but I’ll skip the math and go to the money shot in the abstract:

We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

The public Indian comes in two versions, primitive relic or romantic warrior, both doomed. Historical figures, feared in the past, pitied in the present, irrelevant to the future.

When I was a professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they still had an affirmative action plan. It did not call for the recruitment of Indians, citing the lack of Indian PhDs in the talent pool. There was a hiring goal for Asian males, but none for Indians of any gender.

There were two Indians on the faculty. The other guy did not get tenured. I did, but I took an offer at a Research I school... where I was one of two Indians. Again, I was the only one of the two of us to get tenured, but they hired three more and we discovered another who had never before made himself known. Two of the three hires left by the time I did.

If Indian students did not get mentored by non-Indians, they would never get mentored. Not that the lack of mentors is the major problem. The major problem is that most research universities contain more dead Indians as “scientific data” than live Indians as students.

I was born in a small town in Oklahoma where the most numerous minority was Indians. Only one in my age cohort finished high school. I myself made it only to the ninth grade. We expected no more of ourselves than the public schools expected of us, and we had no educated role models.

That has not changed, and we’ve had about all the “honoring” by turning us into mascots that we can stand.

I wish RGIII all the best for a quick recovery, and for the day he plays for a team that does not disadvantage Indian children.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Hiding Behind a Girl

We are all Malala. Photo from Reuters.
I am Malala:
Hiding behind a girl

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2013

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

-- Kishwar Naheed (Urdu-to-English translation by Ruksana Ahmed)

In the time suck that is Facebook, I changed my profile picture to one of Malala Yousafzai. Besides improving the visual appeal of the page, what was I trying to accomplish?

Malala is a 15-year-old student from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, an area formerly ruled by the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists who believe that educating girls is sinful. This policy, coming from God, is not negotiable. Enforcement of the policy is up to any devout Muslim, as the God the Taliban follow is apparently too puny to enforce its own rules.

Enforcement in areas infested by the Taliban has included burning of schools and throwing acid on girls seeking to study.

At age 11, Malala began a blog published in English and Urdu by the BBC called “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl” under the nom de plume Gul Makai (Corn Flower). When the Taliban fled, Malala’s identity became common knowledge. Fluent in English, the girl appeared on British and American television advocating that Islam does not ban education of women.

What does this have to do with us?

In Afghanistan, American troops have been dying in the longest war in the history of this nation. It began in 2001 when the Taliban refused to surrender the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.

Our troops ran the Taliban out of the cities and into the Pashtun tribal area along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. The Taliban had the support of the Pakistani government until we started shooting at the Taliban and demanded that the Pakistanis choose a side.

While Pakistan ostensibly chose our side, the Taliban are still a potent political force. We’ve seen this movie before. Only the Pashtun people can root out the Taliban insanity. Not the Pakistani army, and certainly not the U.S. army.

On October 9, a Taliban gunman attacked a school bus and shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. Two other girls were critically injured, but Malala was the target. “Malala was using her tongue and pen against Islam and Muslims,” the Taliban said, “so she was punished for her crime by the blessing of the Almighty Allah.”

So far, it appears that this crime has not received the blessing of the Pashtun people. Within the week, street demonstrations in Pakistani cities were displaying pictures of Malala.

Many years ago, world opinion was outraged when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statutes. The banning of television, sports, and music upset even local opinion. But by attempting to kill a young girl for the crime of wanting to go to school, the Taliban may finally have put themselves in a place where no decent person will shelter them.

What does this have to do with me, other than the fact that my son is a GI?

I would hope that no man with daughters would ask that question. Both of my daughters are well educated, and I’m proud of them. Two of my granddaughters are in college right now. One granddaughter is a toddler with a twin brother. While I know I will not live to see what they become, I have dreams for them both, no greater for the boy than for the girl. And there is another granddaughter who is Malala’s age.

I hate to trouble children with the existence of evil, but I hope my grandchildren will identify with Malala, with her courage and her ambition. They are Malala; all of our daughters are Malala. And so I am Malala.

Malala’s pen name, Gul Makai, comes from the heroine of a Pakistani folk tale, a Romeo and Juliet story, where the lovers meet at school. The romance between Gul Makai and her lover, Musa Khan, creates a war between their tribes.

Gul Makai goes to the religious leaders and persuades them, by reference to the Holy Quran, that the grounds for the war are “frivolous.” Inspired by the teachings of a girl, the leaders place themselves between the warring parties, holding the Quran over their heads, and persuade the two sides as Gul Makai has persuaded them. To seal the peace, the lovers are united in marriage.

According to the English translation by Masud-Ul-Hasan, “Most of the love stories generally have tragic ends; in the case of... Musa Khan and Gul Makai... events took a different turn. The credit for this goes to Gul Makai. She did not rest content to love, and die. She was a woman of action; she loved, won, and lived.”

Until Gul Makai, Malala Yousafzai, the lover of knowledge, is out of the hospital, this old retired teacher will hide behind the face of a brave young girl. I am Malala.

UPDATE ON January 4, 2013. I’m happy to report that people happening on my Facebook page will once more have to endure my mugshot, as Malala was released from the hospital today.

In the meantime, the Pakistani government has been moved by the international reaction to Malala’s shooting to publicly commit to girls’ education. Of course, like any other government, what the commitment means will depend on who is watching and who the players in government are from time to time, but saying as a matter of public policy girls can expect to be educated is a colossal step in the opposite direction from the one the Taliban were demanding when they tried to kill her.

Finally, Malala Yousafzai has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She would be the first child to win that honor. I hope all of us with daughters are rooting for her.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

A chapbook review:
Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

[Wicked Dew, by Steve Russell. (2012: Dog Iron Press, Georgetown, TX.); Paperback; 88 pp; $7.75.]

I've known Steve Russell since sometime in 1968 when he started showing up at The Rag office, a tall, gangly, very young Vietnam-era vet going to UT Austin on the GI Bill. Although Steve is incredibly bright and witty, and I've always enjoyed his prose contributions to The Rag and now The Rag Blog, I was nervous about reviewing his first book of poetry, Wicked Dew.

Steve is a Native American writer, and all of the previously published works in this collection have appeared in the Native press, where he is a regular contributor of weighty essays as well as occasional poetry. The book in fact won the 2008 Poetry First Book Award of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas (NWCA), and would have been published as part of the award; unfortunately, NWCA lost publication funding and the book is only now seeing the light of day.

I worried I might not be the right person to review poems that would obviously, just from these facts, be deeply rooted in Steve's experience as a Native American. My mostly Scotch-Irish parentage undeniably has Native ancestors as well, but in my generation, and even in my folks', as Russell writes in "Blood Quantum," the "thin red line" of Native genes became gray oblivion.

My unfamiliarity with contemporary Native American literature (these days, honestly, with literature in general!) added to my concern. Would this blue-eyed daughter of "the flood of European blood" really get it?

I needn't have worried, and neither should other poetry lovers. While a deeper knowledge of Native American literature would no doubt add to the grasp and enjoyment of these 37 poems, most transcend ethnic or tribal viewpoints, offering windows into the transformation of a poor "halfbreed" Oklahoma dropout into a multifaceted human rights activist and whole human being, rooted in and proud of his heritage.

"Heritage" for Steve is, I think, not just who someone's ancestors were or what they did, but what a person makes of it. He writes his own history, and defines his own family, too.

Steve Russell

Here are no paeans to Native purity or essential nobility. Only the lovely "Haiku for Walela" hearkens back before the European flood hit the Western hemisphere. One rather cynical poem, "Teach Me," begins, "Teach me, White Father, so I may understand. I understand slavery..." Slavery -- although not of the lifelong variety -- was commonly practiced among Native tribes long before there was any European contact. Of these critical looks at Native political correctness, the most powerful is "How to Succeed as an Indian Poet":

Don't say 'hunger.'
Write of the plump red strawberries
grown by Cherokees
in the Cookson Hills,
rather than rodents fried in lard,
garnished with herbs from the bar ditch,
government commodities on the side...
In "Probably Wolf Clan," "Indistinguishable Color," "Blood Quantum," and other poems, Russell mourns the ongoing loss of Native identity and weighs his own. The question of who is "red" enough to be a "real Indian" has parallels in other discussions: is Barack Obama a "real black man?" What does it mean to be "Hispanic" or "Latino?" And for goodness sake, what in the world is "white?" "When I'm Old" begins:

And when I am very old
will the drums outrun my feet?
Will the sweetgrass be just another smoke, and the sage a burning weed?
Does White Buffalo Calf Woman return for the civilized Indians?
A few selections distill the "wicked dew" of the title and cover illustration, inking the perfidy of European America in its true colors of bitterness and gall. "Bison Bones" excoriates oblivious conquerors who do not even know what they desecrate:

Were Dallas Texans born with neckties on
to be served in deep carpet
by smiling brown faces
where dishes disappear silently
and condiments come in tiny sealed jars
to dine on bison bones?
In other poems, Russell celebrates Native cultural values. "Disruption, Spring 1997," based on news accounts of an Albuquerque school girl not allowed to graduate wearing a traditional shawl by her grandmother, tells of family pride in the girl's achievement. Poems for two of Steve's (non-simultaneous) wives and one titled "Lust" are lit from within by wise acceptance of what-it-is. Another, "Cherokee Love," begins:

There is no love in Cherokee.
No falling in or falling out,
no marry now or live in doubt,
no changing weather love in Cherokee...
Some selections are rooted in Steve's activism as part of Austin's late 1960s-early 1970s anti-war movement. "Jailpoem 2," from 1970, was clearly written following angry protests of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and massacres of students at Kent State and Jackson State. Steve became a leader in the Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Steve Russell, front with VVAW flag, participates in a demonstration by Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the University of Texas Campus at Austin in the late Sixties. Photo from Mariann Wizard's files.
"At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" alternates flashbacks of a Southeast Asian village, a horse cavalry massacre in an Arapaho village, and tears for the fallen soldiers memorialized on the Wall. "Seeing Off the Troop Train" contrasts his youthful desire for heroic action with his grandmother's wisdom and his own fears as a father:

Twenty-eight years later, my son is a volunteer soldier.
Nobody elected Bush or his crew of 20th century retreads.
Granma is not here to say 'We got no business over there!'
But I hear her anyway.
Not everything is equally successful. "Not Juan Valdez," a clever idea, is marred by Spanish spelling errors and the misplacement of Colombia's iconic coffee grower to the Mexican state of Chiapas. Not Juan Valdez, indeed; this one confuses the reader and thus loses points.

A few poems with long, complex lines push against the borders of the printed page, seeming to demand spoken performance and perhaps hand drum punctuation, but add to the depth of the collection overall.

Wicked Dew charts a vision of optimism, traditional values, and endurance in selections such as "Indian Lawyer's Creed" and "A Matter of Faith." "To My Grandfather," the initial poem in the collection, is perhaps the most revealing of these:

I told him I wanted to be like Mickey Mantle,
who escaped the poverty of rural Oklahoma,
and appeared to own New York,
a grand place located near Oz...

I left Oklahoma
and as the years accumulate
Oklahoma almost leaves me.
The road home is distant and dusty and even more unlikely
than the road here...

I have seen New York.
And Oz.
And College...
And although I still cannot tie a necktie, Grampa,
I have taken your name...

and I want you to know
I am still playing batter.
Retired from a first career as an Austin and then Travis County, Texas, trial judge, and a second as a professor of criminal justice in San Antonio and later at Indiana University, and with a book of essays also just out (Ceremonies of Innocence: Essays from the Indian Wars, 2012, Dog Iron Press), Steve Russell bats close to a thousand with this collection of verse.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Will Rogers and the Jokes of Partisan Politics

Will Rogers. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The jokes of partisan politics:
Will Rogers 'chews to run'

'I’m not a member of any organized political party,' he famously confessed, 'I’m a Democrat.'

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

Will Rogers, the Paint Clan Cherokee cowboy turned entertainer turned political pundit, used to say he did not make jokes. “I just watch the government and report the facts.” Like any intelligent man, he could be viewed as a bundle of contradictions, but most of his contradictions came from wearing his heart on his sleeve.

From at least 1916, when he faced the reputedly dour and humorless President Woodrow Wilson, nobody was safe from his barbs. Before that performance, his political comments had been topical humor pulled out of the latest newspapers. Having the President in the audience, for Will, took topical comedy to another level bordering on what he never intended, personal attack.

Characteristically, he started with the truth: “I am kinder nervous here tonight.” Writing years later, he admitted, “that is not an especially bright remark, ...but it was so apparent to the audience that I was speaking the truth that they laughed heartily at it.”

Encouraged, Rogers let fly with his usual routine, and the President wound up laughing at himself. According to Rogers biographer Ben Yagoda, Will was invited into the presidential box after the show. Still a bit nervous, he parked his omnipresent wad of chewing gum in his hat, forgot he had done so, and suffered the consequences when he put the hat back on later. (His chewing gum habit would come up again in his choice of slogans for his Anti-Bunk Party, “He chews to run!” This was a gentle parody of Calvin Coolidge, who did not “choose” to run.)

Wilson, a Democrat, was the first President to be roasted face to face by Will Rogers, but hardly the last. There was plenty to go around for both parties. Will never hid his biases. He was more worried about the welfare of farmers than that of city folks, and working stiffs more than bankers. “I’m not a member of any organized political party,” he famously confessed, “I’m a Democrat.”

Of course, in our time we can laugh at that remark as ancient history... unless we think about the 1968 Democratic Convention, when the delegates pledged to the anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene McCarthy were physically ejected, adding to the chaos in the streets of Chicago that year. Or the 1972 Democratic Convention, when the anti-war outsiders became insiders and spent so much time wrangling among themselves that George McGovern gave the speech that was supposed to end the war at a time when the television audience had gone to bed.

Having admitted to identifying with the disorganized party of the workingman, he still seldom bestirred himself to vote. It’s not clear that he ever voted. It’s safe to say, though, that he would be disgusted with the wave of voter suppression laws and would have had plenty to say about the Republican Party pushing them.

Rogers himself would not be allowed to vote under many of these laws. He wrote of his difficulties getting a passport for lack of a birth certificate:

In the early days of Indian Territory, where I was born there was no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough. We generally took it for granted that if you were there, you must have at some time been born... Having a certificate of being born was like wearing a raincoat in the water over a bathing suit.

Informed in the passport office that they knew him, but still needed proof he was an American citizen, Rogers was still puzzled:

That was the first time I had ever been called on to prove that. Here my Father and Mother were both ….Cherokee Indians and I have been on the Cherokee rolls since I was named, and my family had lived on one ranch for 75 years.

The argument that you have to have a picture identification to get on an airplane would not have impressed this early and enthusiastic endorser of civil aviation, because the voter suppression laws are not aimed at people who normally get on airplanes.

Rogers was plain about his working class bias, but in the world of electoral politics, he practiced equal opportunity ridicule. “Both parties have their good and bad times,” he observed, “only they have them at different times. They are each good when they are out, and each bad when they are in.”

His personal friendships, like his jokes, were bipartisan. Among presidents, he was probably closest to the Roosevelts, the Republican Teddy and the Democrat Franklin D. “America,” he claimed, “has the best politicians money can buy.”

It’s not hard to picture what he might have said about the tradition of presidential candidates releasing multiple years of tax returns begun by the Republican George Romney and ended by the Republican Mitt Romney. We would be hearing a lot about Swiss bank accounts, in between wisecracks about President Obama’s adventures with the Chicago political machines.

Will Rogers reported for both parties’ nominating conventions starting in 1920 and ending in 1932. Like most of Rogers’ career moves, his convention coverage started out slow, because he did not in fact attend the 1920 conventions. His reportage was disrupted by the tragic death of his son Freddie in June of 1920, the very month both conventions were scheduled. Characteristically, the grieving Rogers honored his contract, taking newspapers as his information, the same information his readers had.

The Democratic Convention was held in San Francisco, where Rogers was when he heard that his children’s “sore throats” were in fact diphtheria. He drove all night to get home, but Freddie died at 4 a.m. on June 17. His first comment on the convention was dated the same day.

“Our National Conventions,” Rogers observed, “are nothing but glorified Mickey Mouse cartoons, and are solely for amusement purposes.” Will was writing about the tendency for the real business of the conventions to be settled in back room horse-trading rather than in public.

In fact, the “cartoons” were not as scripted in advance as they are in our times. The last time a candidate was “drafted” at a convention was the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The last “floor fight” for a major party nomination was in 1976, between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nod. It was not that long ago that the political parties did real business at their conventions, although Rogers was correct to be skeptical how much of it happened in public.

Will Rogers practiced "equal opportunity ridicule." Image from New Hampshire Commentary.

1920 Democratic Convention, San Francisco 

In the 1920 Democratic Convention, for example, there were 1,092 delegates and only 336 of them were “pledged,” meaning that they had promised their vote to a candidate on the first ballot. Of those 336, most were pledged to “favorite sons,” a mechanism for party bosses in a state to capture the delegation after the first ballot, since a “favorite son” was not going to win the first ballot.

There were, of course, no “favorite daughters,” since women only got the vote nationwide with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August of 1920, although they had the franchise in most western states much earlier.

The wide-open nature of the race for the Democratic nomination was a result of the country in general being ignorant of President Woodrow Wilson’s health problems, and as a result uncertain whether he would stand for re-election. In fact, Wilson had been incapacitated beginning in 1919 -- the government effectively run by his wife and the cabinet -- because there was no 25th Amendment providing for disability of the president until 1967.

The only candidate in 1920 who had dared to enter primaries while his party held the White House was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose legacy in history is primarily the “Palmer raids,” roundups of immigrants thought to harbor radical ideas. Neither the Palmer raids nor his run for the Democratic nomination produced any lasting results, although Palmer’s name comes to mind more easily than that of the man actually nominated, Gov. James Cox of Ohio.


1920 Republican Convention, Chicago

The 1920 Republican Convention was held in Chicago, which, Rogers reported, “holds the record for murders and robberies and Republican conventions.” He alleged, “California’s 26 delegates to the Chicago convention were accompanied by 60 bootleggers.”

Will Rogers, bylined as “Famous Oklahoma Cowboy Wit and Goldwyn Motion Picture Star,” did his best from a distance to report the convention that launched the ill-fated presidency of Warren G. Harding. It was Harding’s selection by party bosses behind closed doors in the Blackstone Hotel that contributed the phrase “smoke-filled room” to our political lexicon.

Rogers “reported” an imagined dialogue between himself and one of the party bosses, Pennsylvania Sen. Boies Penrose, who, in spite of serious illness, kept his hand in from Philadelphia with both telephone and telegraph wires in his sick room. Rogers asked “Penrose":

“What makes the delegates change? Don’t they stay with their man?”

“The delegates vote the way their people told them the first ballot. But after that they sell to the highest bidder.”

“But that’s not honest, is it?”

“No, just politics.”

While Harding went on to be elected, his administration was quickly engulfed by the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Secretary of the Interior (and political Indian fighter) Albert Fall went to prison for bribery and against which all other political scandals were measured before the Watergate scandal.

Harding was saved from further humiliation by his death in 1923, but since the incumbent President Calvin Coolidge was untainted by Teapot Dome, all the drama was gone from the 1924 Republican Convention. The slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” said it all.

This time, Rogers reported the conventions on the scenes. By 1924, Rogers was better known than most of the people who were the subjects of his dispatches. His byline had become, simply, “Will Rogers.”


1924 Republican Convention, Cleveland

Admitting to the cut and dry nature of the Coolidge nomination, Rogers reported, “This is the first Vice Presidential convention ever held in the history of politics.”

“The city is opening up the churches now... so the delegates and visitors can go and hear... excitement of some kind.”

“Now I want this distinctly understood, that I have nothing against Cleveland. I love Cleveland because I knew them before this catastrophe struck them. She will arise... and some day be greater than ever.”


1924 Democratic Convention, New York City

The Democrats had a more exciting show at Madison Square Garden. Rogers had progressed from the one-liners that dominated his reportage in 1920. It was a measure of the relative excitement that he produced five articles on the Republicans keeping cool with Coolidge and 18 on the Democratic Party’s circus. By the end of the Democratic Convention, he was reporting as “Will Rogers, Jr.,” because it had lasted so long that his son had supposedly taken over the task.

I suggested to them that if I was them I would adjourn before they nominated somebody and spoiled it all.

We heard nothing from 10 o’clock in the morning until six at night but "The man I am going to name." Then they talk for another thirty minutes and then, "The man I am going to name." There have been guys going to name men all day, and all we ever got named were about six out of a possible 200.

They all kept the names until the last word. It was safer.

Safety was indeed an issue at this convention, where the Democratic Party split wide open over the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the number of cross-burnings and hooded marches outside the proceedings led some wags to refer to 1924 as the “Klanbake.”

Inside Madison Square Garden, the main issue became a choice in the platform between a vague call for religious toleration and racial harmony versus a full-throated denunciation of lynchings in general and the KKK in particular.

“They have been five days working on a plank on the Ku Klux and finally brought in the same one the Republicans used,” observed Rogers.

Some guy from Maine offered an amendment naming the Klan... There were 12,000 civilians and at least a hundred thousand cops in and around the building. There were 10 policemen standing in the aisle by the side of each Texas delegate.

Will’s description was comic hyperbole, but the debate did rend the party.

When North Carolina announced to the Chairman that three and eighty-five one-hundredths of a delegate were in favor of the Klan amendment, and that twenty and fifteen one-hundredths of a delegate were against it, why, there was a round of laughter that broke up what was the most tense moment ever witnessed in a convention hall.

Rogers went on at length about the anatomical improbability of fractional delegates. “If a delegate is three-seventeenths of one vote, what would that make an alternate?” The silliness subsided but the KKK prevailed in the floor fight.

Today they start balloting, and I suppose some man will win the nomination by the narrow margin of a left forearm of a North Carolinian.

After a record 103 ballots, the Democrats finally settled on John W. Davis for president. Davis comes down to us in history as the lawyer who argued the segregationist and losing side of Brown v. Board of Education.


1928 Republican Convention, Kansas City

One of the things Will Rogers’ biographers cannot agree upon is how many airplane crashes he survived before the one that took his life. Because of his devotion to the cause of civil aviation (and military aviation before that), Will always minimized mishaps and covered them up when he could.

Flying from his home in California to the Republican Convention in Kansas City, Rogers survived two of what he called “incidents, not accidents.” The first was a wheel breaking on landing in Las Vegas, which ended with the plane on its back. Just a few hours later, in a different plane, Rogers survived a hard emergency landing in Cherokee, Wyoming. He complained that he had lost his overcoat in the confusion around the “incidents,” but vowed to keep his bloodstained shirt for a souvenir.

Once more in 1928, the Republicans put up no serious fights. Herbert Hoover, in a workmanlike march toward nomination, had done enough advance work to be nominated on the first ballot. “The whole show,” Will complained, “has degenerated into nothing but a dog fight for Vice President.”

Rogers did note one thing that has changed in our time, when no Democrat holds statewide office in Texas:

They had a time seating the Texas delegation, as there was no law in Texas to apply to a Republican primary. Texas never thought they would come to a point where there would ever be any Republicans there. They also have no laws against the shooting out of season of reindeers or musk ox.

There was a rare hint of foreign policy debate when one of the speakers alluded to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, where the U.S. had sent Marines in 1926. The U.S. had pressured the Nicaraguan congress to elect Adolfo Diaz president, something that Will commented on at the time:

We say that Diaz is the properly elected president of Nicaragua, but Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay -- all those say that the other fellow is the properly elected president. It’s funny how we are the only ones that get everything right. I’d rather be right than Republican.

Two years later, Will had not changed his mind:

[The speaker] brought up Nicaragua, but he left the marines down there. He said that he would protect American lives down there, even if we had to send some there to protect.

This was vintage Will Rogers, who never hid his opinion that other countries in general, and Latin American countries in particular, ought to be allowed to govern themselves without U.S. meddling.

Rogers could not let the convention pass without ribbing the first American Indian to appear on a presidential ticket, Charles Curtis. While he was also Osage and Potawatomi by blood, Curtis was enrolled Kaw and grew up on the Kaw Reservation in Kansas Territory. Curtis was, like Will Rogers, a pre-statehood Indian who had watched Indian governments get shoved aside.

Rogers said of Curtis getting the nod for Vice President:

The Republican Party owed him something, but I didn’t think they would be so low down as to pay him that way.

1928 Democratic Convention, Houston

From Houston, Rogers anticipated the major issue of the Convention:

Since prohibition was unearthed nine years ago, there has only been one argument invented that a politician when he is cornered can duck behind... "I am for law enforcement." It don’t mean anything, never meant anything, and never will mean anything.

It would take practically a lunatic to announce: "I am against law enforcement."

Now the Republicans held their convention first, and naturally they grabbed this lone tree to hide behind. Now that leaves the Democrats out in the open.

Days later, he continued:

The whole talk down here is wet and dry; the delegates just can’t wait till the next bottle is opened to discuss it. Prohibition is running about a quart to the argument here now.

It was plain that the Democrats would “straddle,” as Will put it, with a “balanced ticket,” which in the context of the times meant a wet and a dry. When the convention settled on a wet, and the first Catholic, Alfred E. Smith, to lead the ticket, the way was open to put the first Southerner on a major party ticket since the Civil War.

This was critical because Smith (and Catholics generally) had been subject to almost as much animosity from the Ku Klux Klan as African-Americans and Jews. This was the very next convention after the one that splintered over the KKK.

The second spot on the ticket went to Arkansas Sen. Joseph Robinson, about whom Will Rogers opined:

They got a great fellow in Joe. He is a real, two-fisted he-candidate. He comes from the wilds of Arkansaw, where they are hard to tame. I have had one in my house for 20 years and there is just no managing ‘em.

Will was referring to his wife, Betty Blake, whom he had courted across the Arkansas line from Indian Territory.

The Smith-Robinson ticket was decisively defeated by Hoover-Curtis, but within a year the “Roaring Twenties” would quit roaring.

Will Rogers: "Never a slave to objectivity." Image from MovieFanFare.

1932 Republican and Democratic Conventions, Chicago

In retrospect, it’s fitting that both parties convened in the same city in the depths of the Great Depression, since neither party had done much to prevent it. The Progressive reforms championed by Will Rogers’ friend Theodore Roosevelt were a distant memory, and the anti-trust laws Roosevelt pioneered were honored in the breech.

Wall Street speculation was rampant at a time when the margin requirement was only 10%. That is, to buy $1,000 worth of stock, a trader only needed $100 in his account. The common belief was that the stock market would always rise, and a rising tide would lift all boats. Politicians were either unaware of or ignored a degree of income inequality in the U.S. that would not be seen again until current times, when we once more choose to assume that the key to prosperity is that the rich do well.

The conventional wisdom came crashing down on Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929. A stock market that had been volatile for some time took a dive. Thirty billion dollars in paper wealth disappeared in two days.

When a similar crash began in September of 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank responded with major liquidity injections, “loose money.” This could not happen in 1929, when the Federal Reserve was bound by the gold standard and private gold hoarding was common.

Speculation in a perpetually rising stock market was not anything that appeared to need regulating in 1929, so when investment banking collapsed, so did commercial banking. Crop loans and inventory loans dried up. When banks failed in those times, the depositors simply lost their money. A rumor became enough to set off a “run” on a bank.

President Hoover’s major policy response was the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Will Rogers was opposed to tariffs in general and that bill in particular, because he felt that it hurt farmers and helped bankers, a view that may have sounded simplistic but was vindicated by events.

Rogers steadfastly refused to kick Hoover while he was down or encourage those who did. When asked by Hoover to write something to discourage hoarding, Will complied by claiming that

A Jewish farmer at Claremore named Morris Haas hid $500 in bills in a barrel of bran and a cow ate it up. He has just been able to get $18 of it back, up to now.

This hoarding don’t pay.

In a speech titled “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines,” Will cut though the rhetorical smoke about the need to balance the budget and the transgressions of other countries:

There’s not really but one problem before the whole country at this time. It’s not the balancing of Mr. Mellon’s budget. That’s his worry. That ain’t ours. And it’s not the League of Nations that we read so much about. It’s not the silver question. The only problem that confronts this country today is at least 7,000,000 people are out of work. That’s our only problem. There is no other one before us at all. It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work, and also to arrange some way of getting more equal distribution of the wealth in the country.

In those dark days, the two major parties met in Chicago to debate how to get out of the hole and who would be put forward to lead the country out.

The Republicans met first, and started a little slow, according to Will:

I couldn’t find out a thing about politics, and I guess that’s just about the way the whole country looks at it. Nobody here knows they are holding a convention. There is lots of flags out, but Tuesday is Al Capone’s birthday, so who knows?

The next day, Rogers found a political story he cared about:

Well, got some scandal for you today, for it wouldn’t be a Republican convention without some sort of undercover "finagling." They are out now to throw poor old Injun Charley Curtis off and get another Vice President... Their alibi is that he is too old... Well, they knew a few months ago how old he would be about now.

Will went on to suggest that the people out for Curtis’ head say it this way:

We are in the hole and we got to try and dig up somebody that will help us swing some votes. It’s not your age, Charley... You got to be the goat, not us. So any one we can think of that can carry the most votes we are going to nominate ‘em, be it Charley Chaplin or Amelia Earhart. You been a good Injun, but its votes not sentiment we are after this year. So long, Charley, take care of yourself.

Two days later, Will complained again “Poor Charley is to be tomahawked in the back... just like they took the country from the Indians...” When the movement to dump Curtis failed, Rogers claimed credit, probably correctly:

I saved my "Injun" Charley Curtis for vice presidency. The rascals was just ready to stab him when we caught ‘em.

So it’s the same old vaudeville team of Hoover and Curtis.

When the Democrats came to town, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to replicate Hoover’s first nomination battle. He had entered and won every primary where he would not offend a local “favorite son.” This being the Democratic Party, it was not that simple.

Al Smith was nominated again, as was the Speaker of the House, John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. There was even a boomlet for Oklahoma Gov. William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray. Will Rogers was friendly with all the contenders. Never a slave to objectivity, Will actually addressed the crowd during a recess:

Now, you rascals, I want you to promise me one thing. No matter who is nominated, and of course some of you are going home disappointed that it was not your man, no matter who is nominated, don’t go home and act like Democrats. Go home and act like he was the man you came to see nominated. Don’t say he is the weakest man you could have nominated; don’t say he can’t win. You don’t know what he can do, or how weak he is until next November. I don’t see how he could ever be weak enough not to win. If he lives until November he’s in.

This time, the Democratic platform managed to advocate repeal of Prohibition, to Will’s delight:

Did the Democrats go wet? No, they just layed right down and wallowed in it. They left all their clothes on the bank and dived in without even a bathing suit. They are wetter than an organdie dress at a rainy day picnic.

Will went on to lament that the Democratic platform had no plan “to get some bread with the beer.” The truth was nobody in either party had a clue. The economist John Maynard Keynes was an academic in Great Britain and Roosevelt would find the magic of the aggregate demand curve by trial and error.

When Alfalfa Bill Murray’s candidacy did not catch fire, Oklahoma’s favorite son votes went to Will Rogers, a development Will took in good humor.

Roosevelt broke though by offering the vice presidency to Cactus Jack Garner, who accepted for reasons unclear in light of his later comment that the office was not worth “a bucket of warm piss."

The Great Depression had, as Rogers predicted, set the stage for a rout of the Hoover administration. It’s hard now, even in economic times challenging by the standards we know, to picture the situation President Roosevelt would face. Unemployment was over twice what it is now, without unemployment insurance or Social Security or Medicaid. Armies of unemployed lived in shantytowns, dubbed “Hoovervilles” by the Democrats.

Will Rogers wrote from Claremore, Oklahoma, on July 4, 1932, looking back on what would be his last convention coverage and, characteristically, forward:

Heard a mule braying a while ago at the farm and for a minute I couldn’t tell who he was nominating.

Steve Russell gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Steve Gragert, Director of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. A shorter version of this article appeared in Indian Country Today. 

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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ELECTION 2012 / Steve Russell : The Election Night Rhythm and Blues

The Obama Four celebrate victory in Chicago on election night. Photo by Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images.
From the POTUS to Sharon Keller:
The election night rhythm and blues

What got me off my leftist disgust with Obama high horse was the cold realization that we were about to lose victories won by our parents. We were in danger of dropping the baton.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2012

AUSTIN -- I offer some reflections on the Silly Season now ending.

Waking up the next day, I was pleased to learn I did not dream that the POTUS was reelected and that Gov. Romney actually made a gracious concession speech. This was looking unlikely when I went to bed with Romney refusing to concede Ohio in the face of overwhelming evidence that the counties still out would not help him.

It was difficult not to chuckle at a tweet let fly by The Donald Trump calling the election a sham and advocating, I kid you not, “revolution!”

Pampered wealthy people, arise! You have nothing to lose but your tax shelters!

GMO labeling failed in California, which was rendered a probable outcome not by the merits but by the sums of corporate money that went into defeating it.

Recreational weed won in Colorado and in Washington. It’s only a matter of time until we can get high without being terminal cancer patients or chronic pain sufferers needing a prescription. Bad news for the liquor business.

Marriage equality scored three popular vote wins, becoming law in Maryland and Maine and beating back a ban in Minnesota! I saw this coming from being a university teacher. The younger generation, liberal or conservative, simply does not care who somebody else marries.

The Congress is improved by Alan Grayson returning and Allen West and Joe Walsh leaving. On the downside, Michelle Bachmann won by the drag of a knuckle.

Tammy Baldwin becomes the first out lesbian in the U.S. Senate, in a Senate with the most women to serve in that body ever.

The Tea Party remains the gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats, having now denied the Republicans slam-dunk victories sufficient to have taken control of the Senate.

The latest Tea Party fiasco was led by the two guys who wanted to be kinder and gentler about rape in order to crack down on abortion. That turned over Indiana and saved a seat in Missouri. This adds to Tea Party debacles in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska.

In Alaska, the mainstream Republican defeated in the primary won election as a write-in and as a result readily departs party discipline with no fear of the Tea Party.

Linda McMahon has now burned almost $100 million in her own money trying to buy a Connecticut Senate seat. McMahon has beaten the record for cost-ineffectiveness held by Texan John Connally, who spent $11 million in the 1980 Republican primaries to buy one delegate. (Another Texan, Phil Gramm, made a spirited run at the record in 1996, when he spent $8 million to get run out of the race by Pat Buchanan.)

Texas is, to blend a metaphor, still sipping on the Tea Party Kool-Aid. Hell, they’re sucking on the ice. So Texas goes until the demographics catch up.

So, now, whither the national GOP?

Will they decide that they lost for excessive crazy or insufficient crazy?

So far, the crazy has cost them control of the Senate. Taking out Dick Lugar in Indiana was particularly stupid. They gave up slam-dunk wins to embrace the crazy.

On the downside, over 40% of the country is crazy.

To the extent the crazy is driven by racism -- and it's hard to ignore the margins in the Old South and the continual bitch slaps on Hispanics -- that kind of crazy is doomed to demographics.

To the extent that crazy is driven my misogyny, the female body has a way to shut that thing down. The female body acquired that by the means shown in the pic that went around the web in the last week allegedly showing Susan B. Anthony being beaten down in the street for trying to vote. While the photo was of a different suffragist, the essential message is true.

Women vote. Get used to it. They are not going back.

The money for the crazy came from the 1%, but this election teaches they are going to have to fund a sellout from among the hoi polloi, because electing one of their own is not likely.

My favorite quote of this season is the metaphor mixed by San Antonio’s Julian Castro, when he said the American Dream “is not a sprint or a marathon -- it’s a RELAY.”

What got me off my leftist disgust with Obama high horse was the cold realization that we were about to lose victories won by our parents. We were in danger of dropping the baton.

The Donald speaks. Screen grab off Twitter.
The worst realization of 2012 is the degree to which we’ve allowed voter suppression in the name of stamping out virtually nonexistent retail voter fraud while ignoring computer-driven wholesale voter fraud. This is going to bite unless we stop it.

The outcomes were the usual mixed bag in a divided country, but I generally like them in the high profile races.

The worst outcome is the justice system in Texas, still roiled by party sweeps. Austin’s Third Court of Appeals, which used to be my judicial career goal, has lurched to the right. A guy I once put in jail for obstructing access to an abortion clinic is now on the Texas Supreme Court, having defeated a more mainstream Republican who committed the sin of birth with an Hispanic surname.

But the very, very worst of the lot is the easy reelection of Sharon Keller as Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Let me explain, so you can discount, if you choose, the views of a judge who was elected by the crazed voters of the People’s Republic of Austin, Babylon on the Colorado.

Suppose you have an ugly rape and murder of a teenage girl.

The only evidence is a statement by the defendant that required considerable bending to fit the facts: he bragged that he had consensual sex with a female hitchhiker, who was apparently an adult.

But the “scientific evidence” of a blood test “could not exclude” him.

The government was not proud enough of this case to seek the death penalty, which was probably a good thing for the defendant, as he was quickly convicted.

Many years of durance vile later, DNA testing becomes possible that DOES exclude the defendant and points to some unknown male as the perpetrator.

When these facts arrive in the Court of Criminal Appeals, Judge Keller deems them insufficient to require a new trial because of the possible presence of an unidentified co-ejaculator or prior consensual intercourse.

Never mind that the jury never heard this theory.

Never mind that the prior consensual intercourse theory required inventing a sexual history for a young girl that by all credible accounts did not exist.

In the service of what? The finality of judgments, the same argument against the DNA testing that kept Michael Morton in prison for an extra three years while the government fought the testing. Testing which in the Morton case not only exonerated an innocent man but also led to the arrest of another man, who had DNA in the system.

Now, if you believe the finality of judgments is not a value, you are an incompetent lawyer who ought not be put on the Bench.

But how heavily you weigh the value of finality is a matter of judicial philosophy. My own view is that finality is a much more weighty consideration in a civil case then in a criminal case, because in the latter case there might be a felon running loose, freed by the error.

That’s philosophy. If you agree, vote for me. If you don’t, vote against me. That’s fair and square if we choose to elect judges.

But that was not the main issue in Sharon Keller’s race.

She got a phone call from the defenders of a convicted murderer, pleading that they had a computer crash and were going to be later than five o’clock filing a petition for a stay of his execution scheduled for THAT NIGHT.

She would pretty much have to stay the execution, because the ground was that the U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to hear another case containing the identical issue.

Her response? The courthouse closes at five. Be there or be square... or, more to the point, you have a dead client. Which is exactly what happened.

The "Honorable" Sharon Keller. Photo by Eric Gay / AP.
Now, let me expose my biases.

Go back to when I was a baby lawyer, newly licensed and just defeated in my run for Justice of the Peace. Persons in the system either did not know me or knew me as having just been rejected by the voters.

After 4 p.m. on a Friday, a woman came into my office with one eye swollen shut, busted lip, bruises all over her. She was afraid her husband would finish the job.

This was in the days before family violence protective orders, so the only remedy in court was a temporary restraining order in a divorce case.

This was also before computers, so I took a divorce petition and filled in her information and handed out pieces of it to both of our clerical persons and two other lawyers. They typed while I worked the phones.

I called the District Clerk’s office, because by this time it was past 4:30. I explained myself.

The clerk who answered the phone, who I assume did not know me from Adam, agreed to keep the office open until I could get the papers there and even went down the hall to count heads in the district judges’ offices. The clerk got back to me with the information that there were still three district judges working.

Within 45 minutes, I got the petition done and sworn to and filed. It was after six when a judge signed it and I hand carried it down to the Sheriff’s office, where the civil process unit was closed. The dispatcher called somebody in from dinner, and he promised me an attempt would be made that night.

I guess I was spoiled by learning my trade in Travis County.

After I lost that election, I had a couple of occasions to present bond applications to the man who defeated me at his home after hours.

Years later, after he had quit the Bench, he tracked me down where I was spending the night at my girlfriend’s house to present a bond. I signed it, but that’s not the point. The point is that I heard him speak for his client, regardless of the time on the clock.

I leaned my trade where there were district judges like Jim Meyers and Harley Clark and Jim Dear who you could roust out of their homes or away from the dinner table in the restaurant or out of the stands at a ball game.

There was no guarantee they would give you what you wanted, but the point was that they would hear you. At any time.

When I ran for judicial office again, because of the way I learned my trade, I knew both that I would make less money than most lawyers and that I would not get to work only eight to five, five days a week, and I would be giving up a certain amount of privacy.

Police need search or arrest warrants at all hours. Defense lawyers need consideration for bonds at all hours. Civil lawyers need temporary restraining orders at all hours. I believed, and still believe, that this is what a lawyer takes on by putting on the black nightgown and taking the oath.

You don’t promise any particular ruling, but you do promise to hear people who need to be heard.

Therefore, I’ve many times kept my office doors open past five for reasons a lot less weighty than considering whether the government will be allowed to kill a man that evening.

But maybe that’s just me, and maybe it’s just an artifact of where I learned my trade.

I hope it’s not just me, but I’m retired, and Sharon Keller cakewalked to reelection over a candidate with better paper qualifications who won the Bar poll and virtually every endorsement from all ends of the political spectrum.

I hope I’m not the only person who finds this outcome to be a very sad and even tragic counterweight to some generally good national election results.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Citizens United and 'Scandalgate'

Richard Nixon: "I am not a crook!"
Scandalgate

The Citizens United case has put us in a situation where Watergate is such small potatoes that it's almost quaint.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / November 2, 2012

Luke Russert, son of the late and much admired journalist Tim Russert, recently referred to Watergate as "the mother of all political scandals." He’s right, given our predilection to add “-gate” when we describe any serious scandal. That rhetorical flourish is of a piece with “mother of...” -- a superlative lifted from our late and unlamented adversary, Saddam Hussein.

Russert’s Watergate remark reminded me of the night at The Daily Texan, my undergraduate student newspaper, when I led an editorial "We take no pleasure in the resignation of President Nixon..."

My conservative critics attacked that as rank hypocrisy, given my role in longstanding and public criticism of Nixon on grounds related and unrelated to Watergate.

What they did not understand is that no serious person could find joy in a situation where the President of the United States could announce "I am not a crook!" and a majority of the country would be thinking "Oh yes, he is!"

The Citizens United case, where limitations on corporate spending in elections were held to violate the free speech rights of corporate persons, has now put us in a situation where Watergate is such small potatoes that it's almost quaint.

In Watergate, Nixon had to beat the bushes to come up with a million bucks in his slush fund for the burglars, since it contained a mere $700,000. We say "slush fund" because it came from wealthy donors who were buying the kind of access donations always buy in politics without identifying themselves.

In the post-Citizens United world, a million dollars won't get it. We have billions pouring into our politics with no fingerprints on the billions.

George Soros, the boogeyman of big political money from the right's point of view, is so down on President Obama that he actually threatened to fund a primary challenge from the left. This nicely demonstrates the great irony of this election: much of the left is holding its collective nose very hard to vote for Obama and that's "vote for" as distinguished from "support."

I personally had decided to merely "vote for" rather than "support" based on my disgust with Obama's negotiation style, where he seems to throw the best ideas under the bus at the front end. Then I read Obama's book and discovered he really did believe that most Republicans want the best for the country. I presume that illusion has been shattered by these years of autopilot veto.

I sat down and made a list of Obama's first term accomplishments against overwhelming odds. I watched the GOP scream "socialism!" over mainstream Keynesian economics, the normal method of handling fiscal policy since FDR gave us a clinic in the role of aggregate demand in a capitalist economy.

I listened to the GOP critique of the very idea of government responsibility for everyone's access to health care. I remembered that this party that never met a war it didn’t like tried mightily to prevent Sen. Jim Webb’s update of the greatest engine of social mobility in American history, the GI Bill.

That finally brought me to the fact of the matter. As much as I find this flabbergasting, as much as it turns my knees to jelly and my brain to mush... we are refighting the election between FDR and Herbert Hoover! We are in a time warp.

Keynes is no longer conventional wisdom.

The National Labor Relations Act, Social Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut (access to birth control)... everything we worked for but, more importantly, everything our parents worked for, is now once again controversial.

Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of WWII, chose to run as a Republican and led the nation to essentially ratify the New Deal. The worst pullback of the Eisenhower years, Landrum-Griffin, was a tinkering at the margins that did not challenge the fundamental right to independent unions.

Keynesian economics was taken for granted because it had worked, and you could follow the aggregate demand curve when FDR briefly succumbed to attacks on temporary deficits and the recovery started to falter, only to be revived by the unbridled demand of WWII.

I remember when the John Birch Society got written out of the Republican establishment for calling Eisenhower a Communist.

Now Obama does things Eisenhower would have approved and gets attacked as un-American.

An incumbent President is about to be substantially outspent by a challenger with invisible money. Contrary to the criticism mouthed by Justice Samuel Alito during the State of the Union, the money could damn well come from foreign corporations because Citizens United has given us a world where we don't know where the money comes from.

I'm not so concerned about money from overseas. In our times, national borders have become technicalities unrecognized by corporate power.

I'm concerned about the kind of money that turned public opinion for to against Hillarycare with the Harry and Louise ads. I'm concerned with the kind of money that has rendered the obvious fact of global warming controversial. The kind of money telling us that Obama has increased taxes and government regulation in the face of hard facts to the contrary.

Watergate may have been the mother of all political scandals, but what is happening in our time puts Watergate in the shade. And the most scandalous thing is that it's all perfectly legal.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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