When Our Heroes Fail Us

The New York Times story detailing the sexual abuses attributed to the late United Farm Workers union founder Cesar Chavez has shocked all of us. One of the victims, union co-founder Dolores Huerta, has confirmed what Chavez did to her 50 years ago. She kept silent about it, she said, because she was worried about damaging the farmworker movement Chavez launched.

Many have already decided to remove his name from schools and streets, hide his statues, and cancel celebrations in his honor, even changing the name of the holiday created for him.

But can these revelations diminish Cesar Chavez's accomplishment? In the civil rights field, he did for Latino farmworkers what Martin Luther King Jr. did for blacks: made them and their plight visible. The creation of the United Farm Workers union liberated many from exploitation and put the issue on the map for the whole country, not just California. Should his crimes constitute grounds for erasing him from consciousness?

This Jekyll and Hyde dynamic is not new. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most revered Founding Fathers, is also known for fathering children with a female slave. But it doesn't change the foundations of our country. Remember Christopher Columbus? He may have "sailed the ocean blue in 14-hundred-and-92," but most states have renamed his holiday because he oppressed indigenous people when he got here. We admire the work of artists and performers until we learn about their bad habits, extreme political views, or even criminal activity. But it doesn't change one stroke of their painting nor one frame of film in the movie that won them an Oscar.

I've often said that when you put a statue of someone up in the town square, it had better come with interchangeable parts so that when your hero falls out of favor, you can easily replace them on the pedestal with someone else.

I'm not calling for anyone to forgive Cesar Chavez. What he did, as reported, to women and young girls is unforgivable. But we can't erase history, and many of our leaders have already been trying to do just that for other reasons, long before these New York Times revelations came out.

The other message here, though, is that as a civil rights issue, the women's liberation movement is far from over. If the Epstein story hasn't made that point, maybe the Chavez story will.

As for March 31st, Cesar Chavez's birthday and still officially a holiday here in California, it may be renamed Farmworkers Day. I prefer Campesinos Day, using the Spanish word for farmworkers, which at least preserves the spirit of what this man did for tem.

 

Rolling the Dice

 

President Trump and Israel’s leadership have taken the bold step of launching a full-scale attack on Iran with the apparent goal of regime change. There’s no question that the current regime has been a “bad actor” in the Middle East, and the US seems to have longstanding grounds for this move in response to the hostage-taking of Americans back in 1979 and the subsequent spread of terrorism. But will it work, and what constitutes “working?”

 

It would be lovely if this turns into a Persian Spring, with the Iranian military laying down its arms, democratic leaders quickly assuming power, and Iran becoming a nation of 92 million happy campers with minimal casualties among them. But this is the Middle East.

The current war, or whatever you call it, is not our first regime-change play in Iran. In the 1950s, the country briefly tried democracy, but the US and Britain found the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh too lefty, especially after Iran’s nationalization of oil. The CIA and MI6 engineered a coup and restored the Shah’s monarchy. Many Iranians resented the intervention for a long time, and the revolution of 1979 installed the current theocratic regime and resulted in the taking of US hostages. It’s my own theory that if President Jimmy Carter’s helicopter hostage-rescue effort had succeeded, he would easily have been re-elected. But it didn’t, and his administration was forced to negotiate the unfreezing of Iranian assets. The hostages were freed, but only when President Reagan took office.

When did war actually “work?” World War II. All the bases were touched. Congress formally declared war against the Axis powers when the President asked for it, and after years of hard fighting, with not just bombing but troops on the ground, and a huge loss of life, the conflict ended with the formal surrender of Germany in May of 1945, then Japan in September. Democracy followed, but with the US and other countries running former enemy nations for a while to fix what had been broken. Their populations were mostly compliant.

But that was then. If the Trump-Netanyahu gambit were in the plot of a TV series, it might have a nice neat ending. But we are only a little way into the first episode, and it seems a sure bet that this series is not going to be a short one, and there could be much pain added to the script before it’s over.

If you will allow me a little metaphor mix here, these two leaders have deployed a powerful drug to destroy what they consider a cancer, and they may succeed at that. But the after-effects remain mostly unknown. The dice are still rolling, and who knows when they will stop?

Layers of Complicity

 Now that the information in the Epstein files is slowly coming out, many of us are still waiting to hear the names of more wealthy and powerful men believed to have had sex with underage girls.

But there is a whole layer underneath of people connected to Jeffrey Epstein who did not commit such crimes, or those related to them. First, there are individuals who knew very well what was going on with Epstein, even appearing to joke about it with him in emails or texts.

Then there were those who knew but continued their association with Epstein while saying nothing. After that, there were those in the circle who found out about Epstein’s activities, were genuinely shocked, and cut him off in disgust, but still said little or nothing, except in some cases, to authorities. All of these can be exposed to some level of shame as the files come out, but it’s really a question of what they knew and when they knew it.

 “Well, of course, I would have spoken up!” you might say. Really? Suppose you were a corporate CEO, a legislator, or a college president? To be honest, I can understand why some of those who cut Epstein off simply wanted to put as much space as possible between themselves and him without getting further involved. As this story unfolds, however, should everyone with ANY revealed connection to Epstein, be required to resign their positions and go directly to shame hell?

As for the names of all the possible sexual offenders in the Epstein case, we may not get them from the Justice Department directly, but instead from some members of Congress who see the unredacted files or even a few very courageous and fed-up survivors who, in spite of the potential consequences, come forward to publicly say, “When I was 14, I had sex with X and Y while Z watched.” In the post-MeToo era, who is not going to believe them?

But the Epstein saga is much bigger than a few wealthy, dirty old men. Epstein appears to have been at the center of an international sex trafficking operation, suspected to have involved co-conspirators supplying young women from around the world. But he also did things like helping prestigious universities connect to wealthy potential donors.

To me, it’s the biggest thing since the Catholic Church sex-abuse story, unveiled more than two decades ago -- maybe even bigger, since it has involved a wider variety of people. These scandals don’t say much for the human race, but we can take a little comfort in the fact that they still involve only a minority of us.

 

Rules of the Road

 

There’s absolutely no need for the federal government to “take over” the election system, certainly not the way President Trump wants to do it. Election fraud has been consistently shown not to be much of a problem. The Constitution leaves elections up to the states. All of that said, there are many bewildering differences among the states about how they administer them.

Just take the party primary system. It starts in January in Presidential election years with the counting of the first votes in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. I don’t have a problem with this quaint tradition. But the primary season goes on for half the year. Iowa doesn’t even have primary elections, it has caucuses. Some states have ranked choice voting, but it is not widespread. Super Tuesday pressures candidates to choose which states they will focus their campaigns on. I believe it was President Ford who suggested creating four regional primary dates to shorten the season.

Then there are the internal election rules. Voter registration requirements vary, and while some states allow early voting, the length of time can also vary. Access to polling places is easier in some states than others -- remember the controversy over bringing water to voters standing in line on a hot day? Voting-by-mail regulations also differ.

When it comes to the election itself, even when counting the votes, some states don’t allow it until the polls close, while others do, which makes for the faster release of results.  In my own state, it used to be that your mailed ballot had to reach the election department by Election Day, but that was changed to postmark by Election Day, which means votes are still being tabulated well afterward.

TV election nights are not what they used to be. We need the Steve Kornacki types to explain what’s goibng on, and there’s a much better chance we will not see anything resembling a final result in one night. It’s the 21st century, this should all be faster, right?

We haven’t even discussed gerrymandering, almost as old as the republic itself. When it comes to setting Congressional and other election district boundaries, most states do this through their legislatures, while others use independent commissions.

I could go on, but it’s my feeling that election rules should be more like the rules of the road. We can drive across the country without having to do exhaustive research on traffic laws before crossing a state line. There are state-by-state differences, but they are minor.

While the states have the responsibility of running elections, Congress does have the authority to set some rules. The system could benefit from some tweaking. More uniformity would make elections more efficient, and, in my opinion, fairer too.