Plessner Chronicle Blog

Is that what American marriage and marital bliss have come to? Why has our society created a world in which marrying age adults don’t know how to cultivate and maintain love and passion, who care more about their favorite television show than they do about their mates?

Are American young people being raised in homes where they never learn from the example of parents who love each other and show it in front of their children, either through touching, kissing hello or goodby or by acts of caring and concern?

No wonder our divorce rates are so high!

If you are in the same kind of marriage as those two couples, I have some advice for you. I’m a 73-year old man who recently lost his wife of 48 years. Carole and I were deeply in love as soon as our second date and we remained in love until her last day. And I remain in love with Carole even now.

But our love didn’t remain vibrant, and I mean really vibrant, without conscious work by both of us to keep our partner in love with us.

We never parted without a kiss and we never greeted each other without kissing and holding. (Carole’s smile upon seeing me remains my most treasured memory.)

Nobody believes it but we never had an argument, although she probably won almost all of our “discussions”. And we never, never showed anger or resentment at one another in front of our three children. Never!

You have to work at being in love. Romance doesn’t just happen and it won’t survive on its own energy. If you want to avoid having to force yourselves to “have sex” you need to decide together to “make love” eagerly and often.

Human sexuality is a profoundly wonderful gift, either from God as you may believe or as a result of evolution as others might understand. In either case it is a gift bestowed in such abundance and complexity only in the human specie. Those who deny it or soil it or work to make it seem sinful are fools.

And contrary to what you may think, true love that lasts for years requires attention, response, dedication, tolerance and compromise. Only with an abundance of those will lifelong love and romance survive.

But you still have to work at it.

If you don’t take her hand when she is sitting next to you in the car, in church, in a movie or at home, you are not working at it. And if you don’t return his gesture by squeezing his hand when he takes yours, you’re not working at it.

If you don’t grab or pat some part of her when she brushes by, you are not working at it.

If when in bed reading or watching television and you don’t reach over and touch each other in those special places, then you are not working at it.

If you don’t show your pride in your lover’s achievements and brag about them to others in front of your lover, then you are not working at it.

If you don’t kiss at least once a week with unexpected passion, perhaps ending up behind a closed door, then you are not working at it.

And perhaps finally if you are making love and your partner’s satisfaction isn’t your first concern, then you certainly are not working at it!

If you are reading my commentary for the first time and want to be added to our email list forward this article to gerald@geraldplessner.com .

And if you believe that a McCane presidency will be able to reduce our military commitments around the world or significantly improve our relations with friendly nations you may be in for a whole bunch of disappointments.

A new McCane presidency will be confronted with dozens of neo-conservative war hawks planted in the White House, the Defense and State Departments. They are avid in seeing America increase and extend its imperial footprint around the globe and especially in the oil rich Middle East.

A new administration — McCane or Obama — will not be able to replace those operatives fast enough to completely stop them from advancing the disastrous initiative they created in the Bush administration.

And some of those people, because they are vital to daily operations or because they have powerful benefactors, will inevitably be allowed to stay on to “insure a smooth transition”. Its how the system works.

Then there are the American oil companies and their partners in the Arab world; Dick Cheney and his buddies who want to secure control over Iraq’s oil exports.

The Bush administration’s negotiations to secure 50 permanent American bases in Iraq is intended to secure that source of supply and profits for American companies.

If George W. Bush is able to create a document that our Congress might approve, then he will have established generations-long American imperialism and the neo-conservatives will have achieved their original goal. Then the United States will be burdened with running an imperial empire to support international corporations, and American military men and women will continue to die unnecessarily for generations.

But there’s more. The oil industry will be followed by other corporations eager to keep the war machine alive. John McCane can talk about being a maverick but he is going to need money — lots of money — to finance his campaign. And he will take it gladly from all sorts of corporations that have an interest in providing military supplies, hardware, security services in war zones, along our borders and elsewhere.

There are also the research and development companies at work on new military hardware, much of it untested and outdated even before it is finally designed.

Although many of those programs have bloated budgets, questionable value and poor management, you can be sure that lobbyists and Members of Congress who want Federal money spent in their districts will pressure a McCane administration to show its gratitude to the people who helped finance his campaign.

And when it comes to reducing our troop strength in Iraq or withdrawing entirely, which will never happen in a Republican administration, a President John McCane would be acting against everything his party and he, through his entire adult life, has stood for.

And that ain’t gonna happen!

(You can comment on Gerald Plessner’s comments at his BLOG at geraldplessner.com.)

Of course it helped that I went through college in the same dorm with some of them — veterans of the Korean War, mostly — and a rowdy and randy bunch of characters they were! I was just a kid out of high school and they were men of the world who told great stories and raised a little good-natured Hell!

But as I grew older and formed the political outlook I have today, I realized how profoundly wise the G. I. Bill really was.

Not only did it give deserving ordinary Americans a chance to climb up the ladder to economic success and a better life. It also gave our country a burst of knowledge, intellect, creativity and initiative that led to things like computers, Silicon Valley, the Space Age, today’s quality of life, great new literature and art and just about everything good(and some of it questionable), that the United States has given to the world over the last 50 years!

And it did all that by helping every kind of American, male or female, black, white or brown, urban or rural, rich or poor.

Some of that money was wasted and there was fraud in some education that wasn’t delivered, but overall I still believe that the G. I. Bill was the best social legislation in history!

And that’s probably why George W. Bush(and John McCain) are opposed to it.

They say they are concerned that making a free college education so attractive will cause young people in our military to not re-enlist and that’s probably right.

But that’s like admitting it will discourage young people in the military from aspiring to a better life and that’s wrong!

(If you think I’m being racist or classist just look at the next list of Americans lost in Iraq and count how many come from small towns or count how many Senators or Congressional Representatives have children in the military.)

We must begin to understand one truth about our current national policy and how it impacts upon other issues.

The war on Iraq, and many other military activities are acts of imperialism and imperialistic states need professional rather than citizen militaries. A professional military will, of necessity, require large numbers of younger, less educated, lower class recruits.

Giving those recruits the chance to secure advanced education and move back to civilian life will make it much more difficult to maintain a professional military.

And that’s why you shouldn’t be surprised by the president’s position. I won’t be surprised by conservatives who will agree with him.

But you think they should just get over it? Should my fellow Jewish Americans just get over what Hitler and his German followers did to our people in the Holocaust?

Should Armenian-Americans just get over what the Turks did to their ancestors a century ago?

Should we just not care about the hatred spewed by religious zealots against our young people who might have a life style those bigots detest but that their God or heredity or evolution made our young people who they are?

Isn’t it time to begin to understand and appreciate the histories, cultures and concerns of all American ethnic groups? This country, like no other in human history, has taken in the persecuted, the hated and the dispossessed from around the world and we did this while limiting the horizons of our own African American underclass. Shouldn’t we be concerned about that after more than 225 years of history?

And finally (I hope) should we be angry about the thinly-veiled hate speech spread across the land by people like Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity or Dennis Prager against African Americans, liberals and others as they attack Barack Obama?

Now that most talk show loud-mouths are again comfortable attacking and ridiculing African-Americans, not even bothering to screen their bigotry, should we be angry because they make big money keeping your uncle Henry angry by spreading fear and hatred?

Think about the words of Barak Obama’s pastor, saying “God damned America” for sins he believes we committed against African Americans. Then pause for a moment and reflect on the words of the white Evangelical Pat Robertson, who said that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were caused by God’s anger at America for abortion and our disrespect for Him. Wasn’t Pat Robertson saying that God damned America?  At lleast he seemed to be spreading the idea that God should do so.

Did the radio talking heads or any respected Republican condemn Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell who said much the same thing?  Or is there a double standard when it comes to bigotry too?

    John McCain is a nice guy — the sort of fellow you would want to travel with on a long vacation trip. He has an inspiring life story and a great personality but he has a long history of working with lobbyists who serve the interests of major corporations.

    McCane will not come to the White House with the clout or the flexibility needed to purge the building and the government of the neo-conservative Cheney machine or the lobbyists installed by president Bush. Those people now hold important regulatory and decision-making positions which are at the root of every failure and embarrassment of the Bush administration.

    The vice president’s staff is twice a large as the president’s and it has much greater influence on Bush administration policy than the president’s other advisors, according to an excellent series published by the Washington Post. That staff either writes, rewrites of scuttles every White House initiative that does or does not fit into Cheney’s neo-conservative, imperial presidency, corporate-interests-first mentality.

    The vice president has been the force behind our so-called war on terrorism. Through his staff he has guided the development of the policies on torture and the denial of civil rights, the illegal surveillance of Americans, the use of signing statements to void the legitimate actions of the Congress and the selection of Supreme Court justices. The concept of the imperial presidency is Dick Cheney’s guiding principle.

    Along with the vice president’s office, the State, Justice and Defense departments are now managed by neo-conservatives and other rightwing zealots largely chosen by Cheney and his cohorts.

    Every new president has the privilege of keeping or replacing hundreds of appointees who fill critical roles and it will be impossible for a president McCain to reduce the influence of the neo-conservatives now placed in so many critical positions. And there is no indication that he would want to.

    Even a Democratic president will need months to complete that task, giving the Cheney gang plenty of time to continue harming America and trashing our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

    And even if John McCain wanted to reduce their influence — which is doubtful given his admitted willingness to keep American troops in Iraq for as long as 50 years — he would have to replace them with other rightwing individuals and the same kind of lobbyists which the Bush administration has used to advance their corporate supporter’s interests. McCain is just as beholden to corporate special interests as Bush and Cheney.

    Tthat would mean that a McCain presidency would probably be more of the same — a Bush-like administration that cares little for the needs and concerns of average Americans or the world at large.

    In our lifetime we have seen a number of elections described as historic and world-changing. Some of them were. But given the harm that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their Republican sycophants in Congress have done to America and the world, the coming change in Washington must bring profound change, initiated by a president and a Democratic party committed to bringing the people back into the governance of their own democracy.

    We cannot suffer another four years of Cheneyism.

While the vast majority of politicians are certainly loyal to their spouses, too many Republican elected officials seem to live deceitful lives, running on family values while cheating on their wives.

But the Republican predilection to marital infidelity is not limited to conservative politicians. I believe that it is much more prevalent in the general Republican and conservative community. And that is because of unrealistic and unnatural religious beliefs and rules about sex which dominate Republican and conservative culture.

In the larger conservative religious community which dominates Republican politics, religious doctrine taints sex as something other than a God-given gift to humans, which I believe it is.

It should be no surprise that something which is condemned becomes something to be stifled and avoided. Such prudishness has its own reward and that reward if too often infidelity.

If religion teaches its children that sex is dirty or unnatural, then many youngsters, and especially females, will shun or fear it, being subjected to a limited sexual life and ending up with partners who are also sexual cripples. (The exposure some years ago of Christian television preacher Jimmy Swaggart’s visits to New Orleans prostitutes comes to mind.)

Clearly, the condemnation of natural sex by conservative religions, especially in the American South, has contributed to the continuing rash of infidelity among Southern conservative Republican politicians.

On the other hand, predominately liberal Democrats are more open and realistic about sex. No one denies that some violate their marital obligations but the frequency among Democratic politicians is but a fraction of Republican infidelity.

That is because Democrats and liberals probably have healthier sex lives than Republicans and conservatives. Unlike conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats probably just love sex, and especially with their wives! So they are more likely to remain loyal to their wives. And those wives probably have healthier attitudes about sex themselves.

And that is probably why Republicans in Congress are a lot more likely to be philanders.

In the case of Louisiana Republican David Vitter, who campaigned as a saint and then sought funding for abstinence training that advocated limiting sex partners, and who condemned gay marriage as an assault on the institution of marriage, the story is more about political dishonesty, lies and corruption that are endemic to the modern Republican party.

According to Bill Minor, political columnist for the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, Vitter’s political history included the following:

In the 1990s Vitter won elections “with his holier-than-thou public posture while harshly demeaning other pols.”

“A New Orleans woman charged with running the ‘Canal Street’ brothel ring identified Vitter as a client in the 1990s.”

Vitter’s name appeared five times on the list of the accused D.C. Madam.

Contrast that to Vitter’s attacks on President Clinton and his support of impeachment while serving in the House of Representatives, and you have a true measure of the man and the hypocrisy rampant in the Republican-controlled Congress of the 1990s.

Perhaps political hypocrisy is born in the bed of sexual hypocrisy.

America has made great strides since then by providing integrated education, despite the failures of many innovations and the resistance of conservative, racist and frightened opposition. In doing so we have encouraged an open society, enabling all kinds of American youngsters — white, black and otherwise — to learn more, learn about each other, to have better jobs and live better lives.

Now an ultra-conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has advanced a process to disassemble all of that and their first, most blatant attack on our efforts to enable ALL children to get the best education possible has shown them for what they are. Read the rest of this entry »