2021 September Blog
Or, how to obstruct and undermine and call it being a Conservative.
–by Chuck Peek
My October birthday will be my last in my seventies. In 2022 I turn the big 80. Tomorrow creeps in its petty pace.
My daughter and son are thinking how to, well, commemorate might be a better word than celebrate, but we’ll go with what we’ve got. One suggestion is an ‘around the world in 80 days’ theme—no travel, just notes from people from their travels to what was most memorable to them or what’s on their bucket list.
Happily, the approaching-80 guy has seen that this suggestion has been scratched. But it did start him thinking about place.
The blank in the title as many will know is Nebraska, from our stadium song. We love the song. For one thing, no one takes a knee during it, which means there is no fuss about reality, just the staged good feeling of tail gate parties, another sell-out crowd, a great band, and… Well, these days we have to stop there, but there is always tomorrow. Or Fordham.
Maybe next year is the only lyric that’s not in the song that maybe should be! I’m not among the naysayers calling for the coach to be fired. I think he’s a good coach and will, given time, produce winning teams. Any beefs I have with him surround other issues than sports and coaching.
I recently heard an up-and-coming Hemingway scholar, one Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, speaking on a panel about how Hemingway “monumentalizes places.” If you’ve read Papa, you can recall place after place that Hemingway’s fiction captured, made large, saw as a “monument” in our landscape of places, a landmark in our sense of values. As Mary did with God—my soul doth magnify the Lord—so Papa did with places, each the more memorable for his having magnified them.
But I’m guessing that what can be monumentalized can also be de-monumentalized. A place with real history, and some real glories, can be trivialized by being seen, being treated through ideological blinders that diminish its integrity and reduce it in the eyes of others.
It’s happening where I live. I enjoy rah-rah as much as any other person squeezed into the sell-out stadium seats, but sadly rah-rah has become the governing culture of our state. I know, you from other parts will be thinking that we must be living in imitation of Florida and Texas. Actually, some of us are living in the hope that their Chief buffoons will manage to swallow up ours. Let them suffer from indigestion for a while.
Our governor, whose only boasts are of facts in our state life over which he had little to do, has ambitions to take his lackluster career to a higher level. It’s refreshing to see a person who still believes that anyone can grow up to be President. And, in fairness, we’ve had some recent examples that probably reinforced that innocence. “If they can, why can’t I? I’m no worse than them.”
Bear in mind that the Presidency historically escaped the grasp of Nebraskans with real credentials: the right-winger Kenneth Wherry, the progressives George Norris, and William Jennings Bryan. The vice-Presidency eluded Frank Morrison, and more recent politicians such as Bob Kerry, Ben Nelson, and Chuck Hagel found the Senate or Cabinet was their glass ceiling. So, maybe Governor Ricketts is right—if real credentials and smarts and some record that suggests a care for the public good won’t get you to the White House, maybe a dearth of any of those things is just the ticket.
Alexander Pope wrote, “Be not the first by whom the new are tried,/ Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” The first people to try to be Donald Trump couldn’t quite get over the hump of some residual human decency. They were the first by whom the new incivility was tried among the followers of Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. The Trump got over the hurdle. But, as the movie Patton reminded us, all glory is fleeting. Donald’s seem to be fleeing faster than most…booed the other day at his own rally. But, on whose shoulders will his mantle fall? Ron DeSantis? Greg Abbott?
Enter Pete Ricketts. Far from laying the old aside, Pete has channeled it into our current carnival. He is the last of a series of governors of our state, each of whom has proved the critics of the previous governor wrong—things in fact could and did get worse, and promise to do so again.
Rickett’s unannounced campaign tactic has become a state-wide, constant nuisance. Pete issues a “proclamation a day” to continue to buck up his crowd. It’s the same crowd that has not minded watching a governor damage our Republican form of government by buying himself a legislature. The conservatives I grew up around must be rolling in their graves. And this same crowd now likes to ride horseback into the village square to uphold yet another proclamation. Never forget the vigilante heritage we share!
I should, then, take one thing back. To get a quiet, peaceful, orderly people to love to demonstrate at the drop of the governor’s hat is something of an accomplishment. Give the guy some credit. He’s actually got lots of folks thinking that know-nothingism and jingoism are “conservative.” I doubt he’s ever read Lincoln on the subject.
Among the things his crowd doesn’t like.
They don’t like the federal land grab. That’s what they read into the Biden 30×30 program—which is nothing more nor less than many set-aside programs before it encouraging conservation and making possible land set asides. These in fact reward farmers and ranchers for the creation of green spaces where there haven’t been any and farmers of both parties, being natural conservators, have made use of them.
Of course, this is much more frightening if it is a “land grab.” Grab you horse, your rifle, surround the courthouse, and get every benighted county commission to sign prefab proclamations against the land grab. They are spurred by one word among many options, the word “permanent”. Bear in mind, they didn’t object to the really permanent land grab that would have taken land out of farms and ranches in perpetuity for the Keystone XL pipeline right-of-ways—Eminent Domain for Private Gain! No, they were silent about that!
But now, when the term “permanent” appears in the draft for consideration where it is meant simply to distinguish between two kinds of conservation: one the one hand, the kind of set-aside a farmer could adopt and, if it later turned out he wanted to change his mind, he could; and, on the other hand, some place like Yellowstone, where public investment would be wasted if it could simply cease to be a national park on some governor’s whimsy.
But fabricating a “land grab” to scare folks isn’t near enough! Rickett’s crowd is also outraged by the proposed health standards for our public schools. The standards aren’t even set yet—they were in a process in which they were supposed to be discussed on the way to a final draft. But they aren’t going to be discussed, they have been shouted down by a well-organized mob, some of them nearly hysterical over the damage they fear the standards will do.
Once again, of course, the standards are, first, the product of input from countless number of sources and people as to the realities about sex, health, and safety today and how and when to educate our children so they can make informed decisions, know the facts, stick to their guns, be protected—and transfer within the state with those safeguards intact. And, get this, there was never any requirement that any school district adopt them! Talk about a tempest in a teapot.
Once, when there was a local push to kill sex education in our local schools, the mob argued their case under a motto on the arch over the stage proclaiming that knowledge is power. Nope. Sorry. We haven’t heard enough about how ignorance is bliss.
And by golly, here’s a surprise: the crowd is also opposed to Critical Race Theory, which not a one of them, even the gubernatorial candidate that proposed the Board of Regents outlaw CRT from the university system, could even begin to define. It is enough that, because it wants true history taught, it is going to teach kids to hate America.
I know, let’s have another proclamation. Right after the proclamation condemning communist governments for suppressing the truth! So far, the only shadow of good news on this front is that the Regent’s voted down the proposal by a handy majority.
Well, good news for lots of the state; bad news for our district whose Regent was one of only two to join the proposer in supporting ignorance. Well, he said, he voted to suppress an entire point of view because he wanted both sides to be heard. May I’ll send him some of the antebellum pro-slavery books that used to abound.
You can readily see the tie that binds the hot-button issues together…the distrust in a reasonable process of discussion and deliberation. They hate government and think that hating it is American, patriotic, conservative. Government is what stands in the way of them imposing their will on everything, so Government is bad. It stands in the way of the juvenile behavior that today is passing as a spirited defense of “my” rights. Best get rid of government—it places limits on stupidity!
Meanwhile, proclamations not being enough to build up the governor’s cachet, not even after they’ve been touted in carefully secured radio call-in hours, we’ve sent state patrol and National Guard to help patrol the Texas border…though we couldn’t seemingly send health care workers to help Texas or Louisiana or Mississippi deal with Covid-19, and certainly weren’t about to spare any of our vital work force to help the Haitians. And besides, we are very much into law enforcement, not into public health. The “dashboard” on the Pandemic has been shut down so we can get verified data only from 10 of our 93 counties or from health districts that leak information.
If God had meant us to wear masks, said the woman wearing glasses, he’d have made us that way. Wearing a mask imperils my sperm count, I was told. In the case of the person who told me, I actually found myself hoping it would. The Vaccine changes our genetics, said another. That’s the crowd…the folks who have never heeded William Clifford’s words: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Clifford was something of an optimist. How about on no evidence whatsoever? Gathering and weighing evidence—that’s the part of the world that is making life difficult for all of us. “Don’t know much gee-og-raphy, don’t know much bi-ol-o-gee, don’t know much about Hiss-tory books!”
All this with such sad results: School Superintendents, already under attack by a strange right-wing alliance against public schools, and their school boards are having to fend off attacks in social media for standing for common sense and good school policy. One County Commission after another has been cajoled into making a meaningless proclamation against land grabs. People who actually show up to hearings on these issues to learn and comment are drowned out by the well-organized voices of misinformation. Seldom is there someone at the hearing who can point out the fake facts and set the record straight the way the NPPD CEO did at the Kearney hearing on lowering our carbon emissions. Carbon, one fellow asserted he’d learned in school, is vital to human life so decarbonization means … “death to the human race.”
It is right out of the Bannon play book to get organized and disrupt and steal the show before voices of sense and moderation know what’s hit them. The studied manipulation of public opinion to subvert the public good!
And most of these people would have just stayed home had the Governor not neglected his real responsibilities, opting instead to whip up support for these inane wastes of time and energy. BUT WAIT! If you order now, you can get two for the price of one! At the same time as he has made public health more difficult to achieve, the Governor wants to lure health workers to the state by noting that they won’t have to be vaccinated or mask up.
No…you read that right! $5,000 bonus to come here and endanger our health!
Fair to say that Nebraska used to be known as a stable and conservative place, hardworking people who weren’t too interested into prying into other people’s business. Our pleasures were mostly simple and wholesome and, when the need arose, we looked out for one another.
Maybe I made that up—it sure seems hard to believe now, now that it seems so far away.
There is no place like Nebraska? Well, we are fast becoming like many other places, sadly, beginning to slip down to that tier of states that each console themselves that they aren’t one of their neighbors. It’s kept Arkansas alive for a long time simply to give thanks they weren’t Mississippi. Move over Rover, Nebraska wants some room in the kennel built by cynicism, anarchy, and no-new-taxes! Imagine a whole state bought and pocketed by Grover Nordquist!
October blog: America’s increasingly amoral culture of unbridled greed, dishonesty, exploitation, and corruption. Or, after this September blog, perhaps October should be: Out of our little frying pan and into the larger blaze!
capeek 