Franksummers3ba's Blog

The days of August have passed and September promises to be a lot worse while things are pretty bad for me already. But I have not been idle. below is a link to my roundup of things on my mind. Here are some more links to sample chapters of my novel.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ecRvUoMdZhhqZCpB3hrx3TAjD7PRLHOjW4BVfUaxpU4/edit?usp=sharing

Chapter 1:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1okmSNn4bPEDIIxTDnoYos7ZU0k51Vi2ozLW3blIfGpQ/edit?usp=sharing

Chapter 2:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nDPSkTl0LdTXVg1rHPlqvPxzR-EDjpxnaVJhJUVkUwI/edit?usp=sharing

Chapter 3:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDK_MBvJyfk-SM7GN9bWEXbRV69TiGwbIX9gnqDjZuE/edit?usp=sharing

I am writing one of those roundup notes I write from time to time in which I try to cover unrelated themes tied together by their occurring at this time. Like all the others it is a kind of note that makes me aware of things I am not writing about or communicating and why. It is a sort of housekeeping kind of note to keep relevant as for as these online outlets are concerned. Today the main  themes will be:

1. the approaching war with Syria,

2. the effort of working with my novel manuscript,

3. finding magmatic water on the moon

4. the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington,

5. the hearing to set the trial date of Seth Fontenot for the Rivault murder, and

5. some family and personal issues briefly summarized.

With my time spent on finishing up my novel I have not been producing as many notes lately as I sometimes do. I brought out the first paper copy of my novel on the August 15, 2013 National Day of the Acadians and Feast of the Assumption. While I am planning to make a few small changes before I publish it if it comes to that the printing out of words on 838 pieces of paper was still a big event in the process. I also have a few others notes I am trying to get around to just now and I am committed to putting out those notes but they are not as pressing as this set of issues discussed in this roundup are for me right now. It is under such circumstances that I write a roundup type of note. My own efforts to shape events have been of very limited success and yet I still write about them. Let us get into this writing then:

The Approaching War with Syria

The Syrian government very likely has used chemical weapons against its own people. Chemical weapons are unconventional and their use is a violation of specific international laws. America is decidedly in a position to bear a lot of responsibility in maintaining the regime of international laws and institutions. Therefore I CANNOT FAULT THE FACT THAT AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT WANTS TO ACT TO PUT TEETH IN THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS BAN. But that is not the whole story. The Assad family and many in Syria are fighting for survival against many people hostile to all American values if America is at all understood in its best character. On the other hand some in the insurgency have noble and good motives America can relate to as well. But America has not handled the last two years of civil war well which have now led us to a very difficult situation.

Some people are comparing the quality of intelligence in this situation with the quality of intelligence at the start of the Iraq War. The war in which we did not find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction was indeed a war without perfect intelligence and full disclosure. However, it is a certain and known fact that Saddam Hussein’s regime actually did use chemical weapons on several occasions against his own people, probably in both the Marsh Arab populations and then on the Kurds. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations were hesitant to make these acts a red line offense because they knew and understood that the options in Iraq were not great and there were a lot of bad players who would benefit from any efforts we made. In Iraq we had about fifty allies going in and had worn down the regime from decades with many UN resolutions along the way. This is not our situation in this potential war.

Forces are mobilizing to deal with this war in Syria. Our forces, Russian forces, Israeli forces and other regional powers are all bracing for the coming conflict. Things are different now than in the past.   We have a situation where our President inspires a unique set of reactions in the world and says unique things about us to the world. At the same time,  President Barack Hussein Obama has often ruled or exercised his office with little regard for the traditions of the Congress. But now that he has the USA isolated from almost all major powers, clearly distinguished from Britain and involved in planning an open war where unconventional weapons have already been used — now he is eager to have the Congress act in a due and full way to authorize the war.  In a case like this a great deal comes down to whether or not one trusts a particular chief executive. I do not trust Barack Hussein Obama. This President of the United States of America has set a discernible and almost consistent tone throughout the Arab Spring, the Benghazi Consulate  attack and the killing of an ambassador, the changing relations with the USA across the world.  As we possibly go to war with Syria his style and personality will continue to set the tone for much of the American future and its policies for the foreseeable future. We will face the future and our opponents in Syria or elsewhere as best we can in a world where the mere election and reelection of Barack Obama has already shown us as profoundly weak in the eyes of so much of the world which is not run by the US Supreme Court and the media of our fair land. Assad and Obama will create a different contrast in the world than any pairing of leaders we have seen so far in conflicts in the Middle East or the Muslim world. The British educated eye doctor born to a hereditary leadership he never grew up knowing would be inherited by him or even by anyone is a stark contrast to Obama’s journey to power.

While family has played a role in Obama’s politics as well, it is not the combination of noblesse oblige and a dynasty of dark local powers which defines Assad. Obama’s dreams from his father come from one who was not an American. His father was a politician as much as Assad’s  father but his role in Kenya is different from his alienated pose in the USA. Barack Hussein Obama it is to be noted is the descendant of an American mother and has married and had children with an American wife. The mother was white, the wife is black. Obama’s father was an African student and he also had an Indonesian stepfather. Obama is as strong an attack against family tradition in office for America as one could readily dream up. I do not feel America is dying under a vast avalanche of strong family ties and needs Obama to save us. In a society where forty-one percent of children are currently born out of wedlock, Schwarzenegger has been Governor of California, Jindal is currently Governor of Louisiana, Granholme was Governor of Michigan until a few years ago and tens of millions live here without documents or any legal status and many of those with few if any family ties. Obama has a strong basic appeal to our society which is committed to its own utter destruction at this time. Obama is a man with a very impressive resume and a lot of lessons and experiences that have not come together in the same individual before. Obama does not have any desire to compromise with the vast complicated burdens of American History. He is less aware of them than most Presidents have been and is more committed to policies and procedures that will undermine this country than he would be if he did not have the background he actually does have.

President Obama has been the expression of decades of  continuous confusion and staggering forward. What will happen to him and to the country before he leaves the  Oval Office behind is not entirely predictable. Nor is it it clear what he or the Presidency will be like after his administration ends. If he leaves office alive after completing two full terms then the Presidency of the United States will be part of his impressive curriculum vitae which includes editing Harvard Law Review, traveling the world, authoring two very successful books, serving in the United States Senate and giving many famous speeches. If a major constitutional change occurs in the United States of America after his retirement from this office he will be in a powerful position to broker part of this change. However, his own tenure in office has contributed to America’s inevitably worsening troubles unless it does seriously reform.

Besides confronting Assad, Obama may be squaring off against , Vladimir Putin  and the Russia led by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин. This leader is still building his plan and career and we have begun to see the recent conflict over the Snowden case as he draws on his experience as a former leader of the KGB and major player in Soviet intelligence. Unlike the Soviets Putin’s Russia has seen Yeltsin buried as a Christian, Medvedev attending Christmas Mass, arrests of protesters outside a Cathedral and the right of Russian parents to select on of a menu of diverse options for religious education in the public schools. He has never claimed very publicly to be a Christian but his regime will have no trouble using religious energies to discredit the parts of the Syrian insurgency which promote Islamist excesses such as burning churches, organized girl raping, killing priests and fomenting hatred of other religious groups.

The Russian leader was born on October 7, 1952 is a vigorous probably more physically fit than I on almost every measure despite being almost eight years my senior  and several years the senior of Barack Hussein Obama at an age where that really matters in terms of physical prowess beyond mere healthy functioning. Putin served as the post-Soviet Russian Federation’s second President and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus and he is a man of broad appeal among several segments of Russian society. He is still trying to see what he can be in the region and in the world and how a new Russian path forward in world affairs can be worked out.

He may be that kind of person once referred to as a reappearance of Aratos (a Greek politician of long ago)  and because of who he is and his attitudes he will remain Putin while he remains alive. He became acting President as the world celebrated huge numbers of parties and even those disputing the calendric significance on all sort of bases  had gotten into the act of a millennial party this happened on my ex-wife’s thirty-third birthday which was December 31, 1999, when president Boris Yeltsin resigned in a surprising move. This date was overlooked then in much the way that it has been overlooked that Snowden stayed in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong and may have been a Russian agent for some time.

Putin’s rise to office slipped under this New Year’s fireworks as worldwide camouflage in a way that would be worthy of a former intelligence officer. He then began consolidating his power in a way that combined traditional Russian, Soviet, progressive democratic elements into a new decisive style. won the 2000 presidential election and in 2004 he was reelected for a second term lasting until 7 May 2008. Then he served as Prime Minister and helped develop Medvedev and his supporters as part of anew and more constitutional Russian politics in which he also would be a player in that other emerging stream of the party he had long led one way or another. He seeks slowly evolving opportunities and this Syrian crisis is one of those.

He has many hopes he still cannot really do anything to achieve but he keeps chipping away at the obstacles. He does have more empathy for authoritarian leaders like Assad than Obama can openly claim to have. That lack of condemnation of the basic structure is shared by many and is true although Putin has made no moves that indicate wanting to destroy the participatory elections, emerging federalism or development of a more mature Russian political process.  Putin did not demonize Yeltsin and the recent regime nor set about abolishing its forms and reforms in a systematic and aggressive way. He remember Soviet ideology more fondly than Americans do but he sees more of a duty to the national good than an ideology in home and domestic policy. Thge Assad regime was not so good for Syria but the Civil War was largely brought into being by America and is worse in his view. He can face world scrutiny better than his Soviet predecessor could. He may change but for now he passes the smell test few of them ever could.

Most of his harshest critics would acknowledge his role in creating or restoring political orderly process and Securing the rule of law. His presidency included gains such as  the fact that Russia’s economy avoided a terrible  and developing  crisis, the increase by over 70% in the GDP ,  and probably lifting half the Russian poor out of poverty as well as securing the fragile middle class and working class segments of the new Russia by seeing average monthly salaries increase from less than $100 to  well over $500. While high oil prices were part of this miracle his management of the oil boom was among the better responses to such mineral driven influxes of wealth in a crisis which the world has seen. He likes healing and building better but could become a figure of destruction fomenting hate — it just depends on too many factors to sort out here. His conduct in office has not always earned the respect of independent evaluators  and  its faults have been shown forth by domestic political opposition. Mostly  he can be criticized his record of  both real and perceived restoration of some Soviet  abuses which have violated  human rights and freedoms; this has included improper conduct toward vocal opponents acts towards the former Soviet Republics both aggressive and of questionable legitimacy. He has shown a talent for balance, both in becoming Prime Minister and waiting to be able to run again and in his UN behavior with former Soviet Republics he seems to play a very hard game of politics rather than the great communist fault of abolishing civilized politics until the need becomes to great to avoid restoring them. He is a legitimate president whose critics have had chances to flex their muscles against him and yet he is a dangerous man whom one must think twice in opposing. Leaders in the region who have seen Saddam hanged, Mubarak possibly dying in prison, Khadaffi killed by a mob and the families of most of these men also killed or badly harmed may feel they have a chance in dealing with Putin and that dealing with the USA is only suicide. Of course one could also argue that the US has punished effectively those who would not deal with them.

As Egypt  struggles simply not to descend into chaos and Tunisia seems to feel little affinity for the USA some will see Putin as a man who can negotiate transitions for nations.  He helped save what he could of Russia’s socialist safety nets, bureaucratic expertise and tradition while securing emerging capitalism, free markets and private property. President Putin passed into law essential reforms such as a flat  13% income tax , a reduced profits tax, was well as credible and juridically workable land and legal codes . Based on his achievements, Putin is a man about whom pop songs have been written and performed. He is, as written above, still exceptionally vigorous. There is little that can be done to contain his personal networks or his base of popular support within and around Russia.  He also has many foes, but it may well be that America has no leader with as much overall popular support. Putin sees himself as a man with whom a new future could be negotiated for the world  and he is not eager to give away gains to an America he sees as confused. In dealing with the Syrian crisis, Putin is very much a part of the total situation that must be addressed.

The Effort of Working with My Novel Manuscript

I have read again of the recent discoveries of water coming forth from the interior of the Moon at various time in the past. This featured discovery of the mineralogy mapping project and mission coincides with the discovery of evidence that more or less cannot be refuted which has been intensely studied in the scientific spotlight which is embodied and effected in the function of the Curiosity mission on Mars. These things are among many others which support the things I wrote and said when founding the Crater Cap Colony Concept Group. As I dive into the jungle and wonder if I will stay in it with little more than Writer’s Digest as I guide I hope to find a literary agent who will help bring my important work and all that it stands for into the best possible publication. One of many things that the novel is about is the development of the crater cap colonies and it is set in a time when they are up and running. One of the longest bits of speech by a minor character in the novel occurs in the first chapter and it is different from the proposals written for how to activate the Moon’s water resources right now. But these are related  processes and described in related writing. A crater cap engineer is describing the process of building a colony to the novel’s protagonist:

“Pleased to meet you you can read my name on my badge of course”. There was an awkward sort of gesture here that was neither a bow nor a handshake and yet was more than an inclination of the head, both men stumbled through it in the way that men not used to stumbling socially can when they must — the seats were not spacious for one thing.The engineer continued speaking relatively seamlessly now.  “About the caps they are simple enough: First they keep out cosmic and solar radiation but you can put solar panels up on top to gather the power. Second, you start channeling that power into heat and light it starts to warm up or if it is a blazing hot place to cool but is illuminated as you block the sun. On the moon many craters are below 45 degrees Kelvin on the floor — that is super cold. You put a cap on the place and nowadays we send out coldbots to scoop up methane and hydrogen and burn it. These little engines speed things up and that adds to the build-up from solar powered heaters and lights. Third, in most spots we choose, water ice starts to melt and gathers in ponds and streams. You see Pilot Culkathadreil, even though we pump or mine for more later on that is magmatic or subterranean ice we already have water on the Moon and on Mars at that stage. Fourth. we start with all airlocks and pressure suits but we put in a base of miners and start planting domed gardens and keep burning the methane and heating the mines, spoils and floor. Then we get to the real progress in the fifth stage when the miners wear masks but atmospheric pressure is fine and the climate is chilly but not brutal on the floor. Sixth, the miners have always been crapping and continuously urinate and sometimes die and we recycle all their waste properly into compost or bury them to decay into the soil  and by the sixth stage we have a good amount of soil and with chemical fertilizer additives and water the place is not what it was. Seventh, we can bring in a few real farmers. When this goes on the right way long enough you can get a place like Lunapolis”.

Of course those words are a small part of the 638 or so pages of the novel and the novel is not in print. While I have seen my work in print many times I exist these days as a writer almost exclusively as a web presence. My life is in countless ways derailed and this adds difficulty when one has to compete for the time and support of someone who has an inbox  already full (mine is too sometimes) and offer to make them even busier now with a novel which does not come from someone generating an income in literature and coming to them recommended by other people who have read and enjoyed the novel as a financial project or at least as paying book buyers. There is a cost to anyone in doing real and substantial work and after that work one needs a reward roughly commensurate to survive. That is one reason so many artists and writers of talent die young and not very well, it is simply a basic human reality that one has just completed a work and would like to do something other than see if perhaps one can now succeed in another uncertain and difficult task while judging from one’s own inner resources that this is a more unlikely time than most to seek to establish a literary community connection. One writes to a complete stranger a line like “I see that you mention leaning to science fiction and fantasy and also mention the Crucible and both of those notes are somewhat relevant to my novel Culkathadreil: A Tale from the Life and Times of the Prophet King.”  In addition one regards the work one has done as having been done at a particular time and for timely reasons. one may hope it will endure but many novelists and poets like myself have worked in the world of journalism and periodicals and perhaps in blogs and expect to have work appear shortly after it is finished. That is a sort of hard-wired expectation that cannot be entirely overcome by rationalizing the reasons it will not happen.

My query letters will be followed both by my link to Google Drive and by the pasting of  the first  chapter which is  just half a page under the first ten pages of your manuscript.  My novel is a science fiction novel for adults. I believe the rest of the information any serious reader would need will be included in any query I send out but it is not as though I value the query as a genre all that much. I am not a published novelist but I am not a babe in the woods and for any relationship with a publisher or agency to work out I have to feel that I am not just contributing to a false concept of the literary business but am in a real dialog about a real book with a real person. If my particular correspondents are not interested obviously they risk nothing (or little) by ignoring that fact but I try to mention this to them along with other things. If the mechanics of marketing outweigh the work and value involved in the novel then a given correspondent is not the place for me to place my work anyway.

I have written a novel and so it is on my mind and I will discuss it here. The first printed out copy was just made and was it is about 638 pages long in 8 books of 8 chapters each — 64 in all. The first chapter is 4389 words in ten pages and Google Drive has word counts for every chapter but I would say that something less than 4389 times 64. Thus the book is less than but roughly near 280,896 words. My guess is that it is nearer to 275,000 words. I am pleased with it. This book is deeply tied to my own roots as it is steeped in the lore of Louisiana and the South and has a great deal of book culture and more references to the titles of Louisiana books than probably any novel ever written but it is not a pastoral or historical novel but a piece of science fiction.   The first book or section of  the eight that carry the narrative is called “The Moon” and is set on the Moon in a somewhat optimistic 23rd century.  The protagonist Joseph Culkathadreil wins a prize to be a pilot on the mothball cruise of the Neil Armstrong a mile long ship retiring to the Mars colonies. While on the Moon he falls more or less in love with Roberta Dupuis who is a newscaster who cover his prize win. There is already a great deal of complexity in their lives and early on themes are suggested which blow up into very large plot segments. The book deals with adventures far beyond a trip to mores and more deadly enemies than two assassins he meets while still with Roberta Dupuis on the Moon. This is also a love story which involves two people with significant past love lives, Joseph has one living and one deceased child by two different mothers when the story starts and he and Roberta have differing kinds of present entanglements. A lot of the plot involves other lovers but the Joseph and Roberta retain a serious connection for the plot. This is also hard science fiction so there is an effort to explain how somethings work and what they mean in the context of a novel.

If I were going to make hyperbolic claims for the book I could write that lots of things of arguable truth such as:

1. That it is very entertaining and commercial with fights and whiz bang gadgetry and sex as well as true love (very little sarcasm, some ommission).

2. It is also an education in itself. People could read my book and have access to all sorts of insight and be tempted to save money by shutting down a lot of the best grad schools and just saying “I read Culkathadreil: A Tale from the Life and Times of the Prophet-King” (lots of sarcasm but despite keeping schools open it does have a lot in it — I think).

3. It does fascinating things with perspective and time (pretty objective).

4. It has real mainstream literary merit tied to its relationship with me as a source and historical (long dead) character (hard to explain what that means outside a stream of reviewers of a certain type but pretty true anyway).

However, a literary agent is better suited to make such claims (more rightly made) than an author. Those who read me in my blog and on Facebook have ways available to get to know me as a writer.

Finding Magmatic Water on the Moon

This is one of the really big topics that is likely not to get noticed. Life is a complex thing.

I have written a great deal more than most people on the subject of water on the moon. More than all but a relative handful of people and yet I cannot say it is the dominant theme of my writing or thought. It is a very important theme and was vital to the Crater Cap Colony Concept — whether capitalized or not — which has been an important part of my life and work. It is vital among other things to the plot of the novel I have discussed earlier in this note. Thus I discussed the water on the Moon in the novel section of this round up at more length than I will here. One cannot much mine ice on Earth as water is warmed above freezing by the geological activity on Earth. I think it may turn out that by lowering the definition of geologically to an extremely low level with very good observation by many instruments we may find that the moon is not entirely dead to geology. The powerful tidal forces of the Earth acting on  soft metals, water ice and faults probably create some slow and lazy cycles of rock which receive new energy from impacts of varied objects. But to a degree nearly unimaginable to most of those who move earth, mine, dig or study rocks on Earth and have no interest in the Moon — the Moon is dead inside and there will be deposits of water ice along with tiny rivers of water lasting a few years or less from time to time. Those resources could be and must be mined by colonists from Earth. Ice mining would be a new adventure for humanity, without even getting to the many aspects of mining on the moon which include good things like multiplying lift by six compared to the same muscles and motors on Earth as well as many challenges.

I hope we will soon regain a path to Moon colonization. The risks of not doing so are enormous and need to be discussed in another note. Only Lunar colonies will make it feasible to maintain the level of activity in space we need to defend a planet whose greatest disasters have always come from space. Nor is that the only reason to do this vital waork.

The Fiftieth Anniversary of the March on Washington

During August of this year we observed the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. The Democratic party president and former Presidents of the United States of AMerica who are living attended and the Presidents Bush did not. The crowd is estimated by some to have been twelve percent of what it was in 1963.

I have a lot of empathy for what Doctor Martin Luther King Junior was trying to do and some respect for what he did. Given the constitutional framework of his life his efforts were better than America had reason to expect in many ways.  Many crimes by the Black organizations are covered up and distorted. The actions of some Southern and other white resisters are unduly distorted and made more criminal than is accurate or fair. The results have been falsely interpreted and yet he was often a decent man seeking justice. The US Supreme Court and other players in the struggle are more to blame for what did not not work out well.

As for the directions I think that things should go, my Model Constitutions are my proposal and answer. We must not fall prey to the brief comments I would be forced to make in a small section of a roundup post.

The Hearing to Set the Trial Date of Seth Fontenot for the Rivault Murder

A young man who was in college and is often well-groomed and has quite a few friends was at home and in what he may have believed was defense of his car or truck he shot into a car with three teenage boys in it. He killed Austin Rivault. Austin had been a Faith Camper and was a winning young kid with family and friends who loved him. He had a special kind of energy and potential and I took some pictures of him at a Faith Camp reunion which show a haunting depth with his friends.

He lived nearby and was out late because it was our Mardi Gras Season of Carnival. He attended a Catholic High School where I used to teach and where three of my sisters were at one time enrolled and my eldest sister graduated — St. Thomas More High School.

The whole story is not known to me but the depth of the tragedy is real enough to me. I imagine it may get more tragic and I do not wish to pretend I knew Austin better than I did but our country is less without him.

Some Family and Personal Issues Briefly Summarized

My niece Sophie Clare Summers was born. My sister Mary, brother John Paul, nephews James, Michael and Anthony, niece Anika, sister-in-law Brooke, cousin Rebecca and some others celebrated Birthdays in August. I observed each event to varying degrees. My sister Susanna and her husband Mike celebrate a dozen years of marriage this first day of September 2013.

I have been aware of all these and other things while I have also been busy with my novel and several other projects which have presented challenges and demands on my time.  Sarah my sister and her husband Kevin meanwhile moved their house out to Big Woods and the family will follow soon.

At a purely personal level I am not feeling nor sensing that I am particularly well in very many senses of the word. But I get up and live the day as most of us do.

This is a long status update with two points:
1.The novel that I just wrote has a lot of horror elements in it although they are not the predominant elements, But my sense of horror is based on my experiences in life and reporting more than anything from literature. I read little in the horror genre and my fiction is more influenced by mainstream and Sci-fi lit, But horror is everywhere.
2.My parents and I have very few choices on television and ABC is the only big reliable network after years of many channels. We have been watching the Bachelorette and Desiree has a brother she does not want to ruin everything by meeting the guys, guys have been freaking out and leaving the show without a rose ceremony, Desiree also acts oddly and looks odd in some angles. We know ABC had a transsexual on DWTS. On the basis of all these things and at the risk of insulting publicly a real woman. I think there is an almost fifty percent chance Desiree is a transsexual. If the men did not know this then I would count this show as real life horror and also horror for the audience. I have known some pretty convincing trannies and think it is a wrong thing to have done to anyone but this would be a new low in the ever accelerating rush to perdition in my world . . . .

I congratulate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the House of Windsor, the British peoples and peoples of the Commonwealth Nations birth in a safe delivery for mother and child of a Son and Heir — Third in Line to the Throne.

This is one of those posts that comes at a time when I would rather be paying tribute to a local and personal connection in an uncomplicated with one of this year’s National Medal of Arts recipients: A man who has had his work put into successful television formats, who has a center named after him in my undergraduate alma mater, who has had his work and career recognized in many ways as this native of Louisiana and former Stanford University Stegner Fellow Ernest Gaines has at eighty years old received an award from the hands of President Barack Hussein Obama. Gaines is the only novelist on the National Medal of Arts list this year – he already received the National Medal for the Humanities in 2000 and a similar honor from France and his work has been translated into Chinese and most large European languages.  Poets and novelists have been awarded regularly the National Medal in both categories but I am not sure how many have received both awards.  The language of the citation includes the following statement that Gaines is “recognized for his contributions as an author and teacher. Drawing deeply from his childhood in the rural South, his works have shed new light on the African-American experience and given voice to those who have endured injustice.”

Gaines was born 80 years ago on the River Lake Plantation near the small town of Oscar, in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. His ancestors had lived on the same plantation, River Lake, since slavery, remaining after emancipation to work the land as sharecroppers for five generations. Gaines and his family lived in the houses, much expanded, that had once served as slave quarters. His parents separated when he was eight; the strongest adult influence in his childhood was a great aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, crippled from birth, who crawled from kitchen to the family’s garden patch, growing and preparing food, and caring for him and for six of his brothers and sisters.

This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the oldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Gaines’ first years of school took place in the plantation church. When the children were not picking cotton in the fields, a visiting teacher came for five to six months of the year to provide basic education. Gaines then spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads, Louisiana. Pointe Coupée Parish, “Negro schooling” in the Parish did not progress beyond the eighth grade at that time.

At the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to California to join his mother and stepfather. He wrote his first novel was written at age 17, while babysitting his youngest brother, Michael. In 1956, Gaines published a short story, The Turtles, in a college magazine at San Francisco State (SFSU). He graduated in literature in 1957 from SFSU. After spending two years in the Army, he won the Stegner, a writing fellowship to Stanford. In most years since 1984, Gaines has spent the first half of each year in San Francisco and the second half at the university in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he has taught a workshop every autumn. But in 1996, Gaines did spend a full semester as a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in France where he taught the first Creative Writing class ever offered in the French University system  Gaine  remains deeply rooted and he and his wife a home on part of the River Lake Plantation where he grew up.[ He has also had the church he grew up with moved to his property.

He has been open about what he most treasures from those days, “I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me,” he wrote. “She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don’t think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.””

Ernest Gaines has at least two ways in which he has walked the path of a man of letters, a race man and a son of Louisiana.  One part of his legacy is his work and life as a writer in residence, commercial success and regional celebrity. That must be taken into account in any assessment of his work and its impact on racial identity and politics. In that area he has been about the advance of his racial group as well as himself.  When I was at enrolled the university where Gaines taught I was never enrolled in one of his classes, I did however attend lectures he gave, two of which were hosted by Dr. Patricia Rickels, now deceased,  whom both of us knew very well and who was both in the English Department and head of the Honors Program to which I belonged.  I spoke to her and students who knew him well about him much more often than I spoke to him and I read his books and bought several although at a time when I often got books signed I never had his books signed nor asked him for anything that I recall except once for his plans for classes in the coming semester which I recall he did not much appreciate.  Gaines was a well dressed, disciplined man who was an intimidating physical specimen and more often in the national spotlight than anyone else in the Department when I was there. A strong academic, a strong son of Louisiana and a strong Black man – he was all those things.

The other side of Gaines is his writing itself. He preserved characters and scenes of White Creoles, Cajuns, Anglos and other people along with the African-American characters often described in ten different ways by use of the same “N word” now left out of some versions of Huckleberry Finn. The black people are humans with hopes, dreams, consciousness and aspiration. In A Gathering of Old Men, there is cowardice, backwardness, ignorance and folly portrayed with realism in the African-American Community. There is also courage, cleverness, hope and community as old men with shotguns having fired a shot face down the white supremacist Cajun establishment.  In the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman there is failure and lack of achievement but also perseverance, a struggle for decency and a triumph of continuity.  In A Lesson Before Dying there is a bit of heavy-handed moralizing, racial philosophizing, and more Black assertiveness than anywhere else but there is real pathos, tender regard for life and law and compromise as people of all colors find them.  These are likely his most important works but not as revealing or upsetting to mainstream America as some of his lesser pieces.  I have always liked reading Gaines and found him fulfilling to read as well.  I once gave a copy of a Gaines novel, I believe it was Of Love and Dust to a friend and relative of mine, now deceased, who was a self-identified White Racist and asked the person to read it and get back to me. The response as best I recall it was, “That N***** can write. I really could hardly put the book down because it is story you feel. He knows and sees everything I do about N****** and he writes in a fully N*****ish fashion but he makes you think about what is right and how people should relate to each other because you know he is not afraid of the truth.”  Gaines has a unique voice, I doubt that friend would have read an entire book by many other Black writers and maybe none at all who wrote about Blacks chiefly.    Marcia Gaudet of the University of Louisiana’s Ernest Gaines center was quoted by a West Coast interviewer associate with the Stanford University where Gaines has long had ties and she said: “His literature is based on memory of the past, and it’s somewhat different from that of many African-American writers of the mid-20th century, who based their work on erasure of that past and moving their characters to Northern urban settings. Gaines was one of the first to go back and look at what the hardships were.” I pay tribute to Ernest Gaines here but that is not the main point of this Blog Post and Facebook Note.

This is another one of my rambling blog posts and Facebook Notes. I am splitting the difference as I almost always do in these notes between a theme and a combination of recent events from my own life and current events in society. I really am trying to write a bit about Race, Sex and ethnicity in America.  I am hoping to do a note or blog post about Sex soon. But in the interest of space and coherence I decided to limit myself to race and ethnicity here. However, whenever it comes out the piece on sex will be a companion to this piece. I will not discuss relations between racial and sexual identity here but I hope to do so soon.  However, I also am writing about my own life in ways not so much related to this. There was a time when I hoped for good things in my own life but it was never really a realistic hope. I don’t think highly of very many people, of the state of the world or of society as a whole.  I look back on a world of unbelievable evil and I have the sense I always behaved much better than was reasonable to expect. My empathy with and for those with power is shrinking every day. Given the years of ever diminishing resources those experiences and sensibilities track with a route to prison or some kind of institution which is a deeper and clearer hell within hell.  But in all these times of hell and evil and righteous suffering I have had a chance to observe what is sometimes the giant sewer in which I and many of us find we live. My varied life experiences have let me see the greatness of America, the modern world, several other countries as well as smaller institutions and groups and that same varied life has enabled me to see the utter wretchedness  of many modern conditions as few can. The worst and most evil people in America and most of the world are as likely to wield power as to have it wielded against them. The less empowered and more left alone segments tend to avoid the real extremes of depravity.  While there are some very fine people in power and some I see as more or less my moral equals maybe those quotas were full and perhaps I was just never evil and worthless enough to really survive and prosper since I was not born to blend in well. Things are not working out fine it seems to me.  I think race, sex and ethnicity are three areas where I feel the tensions in society not being worked out and resolving themselves.  I am aware of those tensions the way I am aware of most of the world’s ill. I perceive them through the lens and filter of my own experiences as well as readings and viewing.

I think today of  Danielle Wright who may be (and likely is) deceased but may still be at sea in a life raft after the yacht on which she and others were sailing from New Zealand to Australia  disappeared. I crossed from New Zealand to Australia in an airplane.  But I lived near a beach in New Zealand and toured the coast of Australia and I knew a good number of mariners from New Zealand and Australia whom I met when my family lived near a marina in Tonga. Those experiences join with my reading and television viewing and my sailing and ocean-crossing memories to make it easy for me to visualize the terrors of the sea which that young woman has experienced by now regardless of her condition. I remember being in several storms at sea, seeing whales playing near small ships and large boats I was on and watching big ships pass my boat in a fog. I have been in boats which had engines that failed. I have also read stories of sea survival. These mental images make her experience closer for me than for some.  Which is how a great deal of America’s trouble is for me, it is made real by near experience. In following the economic collapse and now financial bankruptcy of Detroit I remember my ex-wife’s trips to Troy and our entertaining one of her supervisors when she came to Louisiana. I also remember my numerous trips to Michigan. I remember troubled neighborhoods and cities I have visited or lived in around the world.  The school shootings remind me of my many experiences in schools. The soaring prison population reminds me of my many visits to and interactions with prisoners. One of the pastors of the church parish to which I belong and which I have regularly attended most of the last fifteen years has been to prison. Governors Edwards and Leche, Attorney General Jack Gremillion, Commissioners Brown and Roemer (Roemer was the father of Governor Roemer) all went to prison.  One of the more successful members of my father’s law school class who was also one of his good friends went to prison. Several of my first cousins have gone to jail and a sizable number of my friends and classmates over the years have done time.  Those numbers are not an abstraction for me. Lots of prisoners are black and a lot of others are ins ome way tied up with the results of our attempt at a misguided racial revolution.

I can empathize with black kids protesting over the Trayvon Martin shooting who are afraid of getting shot and the many whites and Asians not protesting who are afraid or disturbed by the racist Black masses of vengeful, ignorant people who harbor those calling for blood, making death threats and collecting money for bounties. This is a real tension and crisis.

The school shootings and other mass killings are also both real and significant. It is hard to see how the Rolling Stone cover of Dzokhar Tsarnaev helps the problem. However, it does remind us of how real our social problems are today.  This is a society in crisis. I have a different perception of the Tsarnaev’s to add to the big picture of who they are which includes them being Muslim, Chechen, young, living in Boston and a dozen other realities that defined who these brothers were and who Dzokhar still is. But I want to think about their sense of ethnicity and identity and heritage in a society without very strong moorings in that regard.

I have written a great deal in my blog and elsewhere about the Acadian heritage and its ties to France, Greece, the United States and the Confederacy. I cannot exhaustively cover those issues in this note which is largely about other things anyway. I cannot even really define ethnicity or what constitutes a proper  sense of a diverse national heritage in the space and number of words I am going to use here, nor will I really attempt to do so this essay comes without footnotes and a direct bibliography and is therefore more of a personal reflection than an analytical dissection and its tone is not mostly scholarly. The truth is that I greatly support seeking to understand the American heritage, the Acadian heritage and the Confederate heritage and support finding the right way to pass these on but in the world we actually live in that is far from being too much, it is not enough. In fact there is an example of how heritage not central to our past can matter when one looks at the Boston Massacre bombings and the reporting about this incident.

While Rolling Stone has a cover dedicated to the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber, while we celebrate Mandela in almost purist terms despite the horrors many whites experience because ANC related activity in Africa we have seen the Confederate Battle Flags come under increased opposition and attack. We celebrated the election of Barack Obama in a way that bears little witness to the idea that Slavs and slaves sound alike because Muslim Turks enslaved so many Russians and other white slavs that is has shaped our language.  The movie Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer was watched as a truthful parable by at least some of the largely black audience I saw it with but it is really less true than almost any fiction in so very many ways.  I am proud of my Confederate ancestors and when  we who are proud talk or write about Confederate Heritage we ought to also remember the overwhelming evidence that the Confederacy was a society which recognized the concept of heritage. It was a society in which people were at least somewhat sensitive to the heritage of others. Although its name was changed to honor a Confederate Hero after the war who deserved to be honored Congo Square gave white Southrons a place to go where they could be educated about the diversity and reality of black African heritages more in a few minutes than many Americans are today in a lifetime.  Yet I do not deny nor wish to imply that they were not a white supremacist society.

I have written about Acadian heritage in its American, Canadian, French and Greek Dimensions. The Greek or Hellenic dimension is what we see throughout early American history and it brings us beyond the recent years before the founding of our Union or the later War Between the States. In the past there were other stories too and they matter less to America as a whole than either Western European or Greek history matters.   Hellenic Heritage was a heritage many in the Confederate States of America knew something about. I am a fairly long-suffering man who perhaps bears too much with insult but if America ceases to know about heritage and therefore says thing which are stupid and insulting continuously about how things have happened I will probably usually forgive. My inaction and our cultural ignorance do not prove that the rest of humanity will either forget or forgive. Many people do care about being known for who they came from and what they are attached to and our children will be at a disadvantage if they do not have any idea of people not all being recently cranked out of nowhere as the same.

Perhaps if, as is conjectured, he was the instigator of the Boston bombing attack and drew his younger brother into the plan they are accused of carrying out his sense of isolation increased every time this fighting man’s name was not recognized and understood as a reference. I do not know he knew this but I presume he knew he was named after Tamerlaine .  Tamerlaine is is the equivalent name to Tamerlan in our histories but probably did not appear in the history classes he took and is an Anglicization of what some have rendered Timur i-lenk, or Timur the Lame. Chechen’s would probably be reminded that while I grieve over how little of our own history student’s know they know far less of central Asia’s history.

Tamerlan’s namesake was a Tatar tribesman who entered history when he successfully rebelled against the dynasties and cultures of Mongol overlords in the 14th-century social order created by the almost unimaginable violence and military skill the great Mongol warlord Genghiz Khan who had conquered much of the known world. Tamerlaine established his seat of government in they exotic inland city of Samarkand, There he both took advantage of controlling existing dominating significant trade routes and he helped to forge other routes which knitted together a vast part of the world. While we study little of these people and their heritage the cultures around Tamerlaine suffered a similar cultural narrowness of their own. Vikings, Europeans Aztecs, Tongans and other groups had leaders who ruled large regions, traveled far and commanded armies but Tameralaine’s people and neighbors probably regarded only seven rulers or small groups of rulers in the world as significant. These significant powers were the Mongol overlords Tamerlaine conquered in his first rebellion, the Lord of Tatars which may have been his own chief title, the Caliph in Baghdad, and rulers in Turkey, Egypt, India, and China. Tamerlaine conquered all the others except China. Here he fell short of the greatness of Ghengis Khan. While he had little more than tribute from Egypt and only an occupation of Turkey he was still a ruler of enormous influence in world history. His lasting legacies were the Mogul dynasty in India, and some cultural influence over a wide area from India into Russia. What did it mean to the older Tsarnaev to meet so many to whom his name meant nothing at all? A country must have a cultural coherence and not merely laws.

If it is dangerous not to know one‘s self and it is dangerous not to know the world it is also more dangerous than some would think not to know the elements of one’s history as played by one’s neighbors. I am an Anglo-Acadian. I will not be discussing that heritage here as it relates to the Confederate heritage or American heritage but I have written of such things elsewhere .  The word Christian was first used in Syria. It makes all Christians weak that there are few Christians left there and a priest was beheaded and it was scarcely reported here.   We are living in a deadly blindness and are seeking a solution in trying to wipe out our own white supremacy for no particularly good reason – rather than trying to make it better. The Trayvon Martin movement is full of racist and violent blacks who want to control the country but not themselves. We are running out of time for a good plan.

Besides the Trayvon Martin protests, the bankruptcy of the City of Detroit and the collapse of al sense of a real legal system I have learned other things. Such as the fact that cowardice, corruption and cruelty are normal in governance and yet fatal as well and those who live in such modes of what might be called evil often applaud themselves most loudly for doing their best. I know hard times loom large and am aware of the fact that life is without apparent justice in countless cases, but I am trying to be part of creating a plan for a better future. My model constitutions have already spelled out the answers I would propose. What I am asserting here is mostly that the course we have been on will not work and will not be survivable if continued.  Race and ethnicity must be faced and understood differently and that must happen soon. Doing it right will matter a lot.
I have decided to write most of everything I write from now on in preparation for the future which has stretched out so bleakly and horribly ahead of me for so long to be vastly worse than it has long been. I think that the time will be coming soon enough when I will sign off my web presence entirely but I will at least have written the things I will have wanted to say as the years of living hell extend into a limitless misery at least until death. I need to set a frame of reference I suppose, the person I respect the most among the living in the world today is me. That does not make me happy but it is the truth.

I have done things I regret, been exposed to things where I chose to do what was both right and legal at great cost but probably was in a situation so muddy that some mud will permanently follow me around. I look back on a life in which I feel so infinitely cheated already that it defies expression and yet I feel an ever-growing confidence that the worst is yet to come. Life has been horrible but will become infinitely worse in time. Because that is what this world is about. Yet I have resisted not out of compulsion but out of a real desire to make a difference and sense of moral obligation to try.    I really do not think that there is any hope for things to be or feel OK but they can feel less than completely horrible for a moment now and then.

The truth of much policy and political philosophy is that it exists framed and living in a dialectic between that which must be done in a crisis and that which can be reasoned and properly debated in relative leisure during times not defined by a particularly urgent crisis.  The struggle of every society to formulate policy and then to put it into effect is one of the great themes of history although it may less often make its way into the titles of books or even their chapter headings. The truth is that most good historians telling most good and important histories have at least some interest in how the people of a given period discussed and intellectually prepared for a great historical crisis when it was incipient, developing and the then escalating. The activity during the time when the crisis is acute is not likely to produce original theoretical frameworks or innovative discussion which is really excellent. Instead those acting in the acute stage are often doing more than can be expected if they can reach for and apply the best theories and remedies which have been reasoned out and proposed in advance.

I find myself beginning this essay or Facebook Note or Blog Post with a quote from dissenting Justices in a recent Supreme Court decision. It is not so easy to say why the Supreme Court ‘s actions matter so much to one looking at America from my position and situation. The words below are about raw power. They are not from a case arising from the FISA court which allegedly has rubber stamped any sort of spying on the American people which the government wants to do. They are not words from a case arising from a case brought in one of America’s most rotten school districts in the court-overseen South. No they do not come from one of the never brought “effects of forced racial integration” cases in which countless poor white children and Asian kids are shuffled into misery and white middle class kids are driven from systems which have become laboratories for entitlement and racial abuse by African-Americans and others while still not advancing the majority of the members of those groups in those rotten districts. They certainly do not come from a case involving the countless injustices and abuses I have suffered but am not crazy enough to try to bring to trial. No, this is a case involving homosexual (Lesbian here) marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court has long been the real governing power in the United States presiding over the judiciary that has run a society I have always found amazingly unjust.
JUSTICE SCALIA, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins,and with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE joins as to Part I, dissenting. This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today’s opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.
I (A)
The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives. They gave judges, in Article III, only the “judicial Power,” a power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete (ones) .
I may well end up in jail one day but perhaps I make a less credible complaining party because I have not been. In my life I have often sought justice and realized that the justice system was in my view not interested in the justice I was seeking. I think it is possible that one day I will go to jail for something I think not only unjust, contrived and horrible but truly absurd. Of course jail is not absurd and one is likely to plea, negotiate or confess to avoid it and that act strengthens the legitimacy of one’s persecutors. But this is not a simple Facebook Note or Blog Post about corrupt federal and other judicial powers. It is not about my sometimes expressed sentiment that I am living in hell which has been echoed by countless other Americans.

This is one of those Facebook Notes and also Blog Posts which gets too long and a bit too complex and rambles. It has something to do with the U.S. Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage. It has something to do with the trial of George Zimmerman for second degree murder the killing of Trayvon Martin. It has something to do with the proceedings following the killing of Martin Rivault and the coming of Faith Camp which is how the young Martin Rivault entered my life to some small degree in years past. It has something to do with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action. These things would at least have a theme in that they are proceedings of the U.S. courts. But they would still make for a scattered and rambling and long essay. But somehow, into this mix come elements that eliminate any chance of an essay being constructed in traditional form from the topics about which I am writing. Not quite in the vein of court decisions but still in the context of the American legal system is the case of Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks. It has been compelling television to watch this situation play out as a legal drama along with other legal dramas. All these things seem to shape my experience of what America is and where it is heading in this moment in which I live.
I am of the opinion that our understanding of governance here needs to be revisited. The shift to a better view of federalism would be part of it and that view seems to be promised in the majority opinion which Justice Scalia criticizes in the dissenting paragraph above. Here is some good federal language from the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy:

a) By history and tradition the definition and regulation of marriage has been treated as being within the authority and realm of the separate States. Congress has enacted discrete statutes to regulate
the meaning of marriage in order to further federal policy, but DOMA, with a directive applicable to over 1,000 federal statutes and Cite as: 570 U. S. ____ (2013) 3
Syllabus
The whole realm of federal regulations, has a far greater reach. Its operation is also directed to a class of persons that the laws of NewYork, and of 11 other States, have sought to protect. Assessing the
validity of that intervention requires discussing the historical andtraditional extent of state power and authority over marriage. Subject to certain constitutional guarantees, see, e.g., Loving v.
Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, “regulation of domestic relations” is “an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States,” Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U. S. 393, 404. The significance of state
responsibilities for the definition and regulation of marriage dates tothe Nation’s beginning; for “when the Constitution was adopted the common understanding was that the domestic relations of husband
and wife and parent and child were matters reserved to the States,” Ohio ex rel. Popovici v. Agler, 280 U. S. 379, 383–384. Marriage laws may vary from State to State, but they are consistent within each
State. DOMA rejects this long-established precept. The State’s decision to give this class of persons the right to marry conferred upon them a dignity and status of immense import. But the Federal Government
uses the state-defined class for the opposite purpose—to impose restrictions and disabilities. The question is whether the resulting injury and indignity is a deprivation of an essential part of the liberty
protected by the Fifth Amendment, since what New York treats as alike the federal law deems unlike by a law designed to injure the same class the State seeks to protect. New York’s actions were a
proper exercise of its sovereign authority. They reflect both the community’s considered perspective on the historical roots of the institution of marriage and its evolving understanding of the meaning
of equality. Pp. 13–20.

However, it is pretty good evidence that this is not a case championing the federal principle when it has already inspired at least one state official in Pennsylvania to refuse to support Pennsylvania’s own Defense Of marriage Act. What we have is surely federal judicial tyranny and not a reigning in of intrusion. That is because the language above is only part of the total majority opinion published in the case. I empathize with those who see same sex marriage as a terribly destructive social development threatening their children but I agree with the US Supreme Court that DOMA should have been struck down because it is a state matter. In practice that would mean the Feds would have to say that we will a lot some percentage of the benefits due to married persons to the states in the name of those same sex couple Sates recognize as married for them to distribute along with of the persons to the extent we see it as in the states purview. We do not accept them as married here (that part of DOMA stands) and we will pay more for those we endorse as married but we recognize the stae defines marriage and helps collect taxes and in this case enforce laws and so some percentage of the funds involved pertain to such authorities of the states and that percentage will be refunded or allowed to the states to redistribute to those they have earmarked. The same sex marriages may be immoral and destructive of good order but they are a domestic regime. Those domestic regimes are in the authority of the States.

However this is not just a blog post or Facebook Note about the Rights of States or about US domestic policies. For me this country exists in a context. In that context a lot of things are going on while we reinvent marriage. On top and around these marital and racial and social matters there is the world. I am writing about those matters as affected by the beheading of the Roman Catholic priest in Syria. Beyond that I am seeing all these topics through the lens of ever more diverse and interesting astronomical news. The galaxy awash in planets, or dotted with them and full of interest and mystery as regards planets affect my view of what is happening on this planet right now. Also in that space related vein I am fascinated with how little data is being publicized from the Mars Curiosity mission as well as being aware of what has been publicized. The last unrelated component of international news is the wait for Princess Catherine Duchess of Cambridge to deliver a child under the new succession laws in the United Kingdom. Also at this same time the largest building in the world opened to public use. It is a shopping mall in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province. The building is not only large but utilizes innovative and classical design elements and is filled with modern trinketry, luxury and the signs of a rich and diverse economy. Whatever else America is it is a society sharing the world with other societies and I am always aware of that. These things all affect the view I have in this moment of the world in which America does and must function and in which I live. All these varied pressures and influences burble, bubble and boil into the gumbo which is this Facebook Note and Blog Post. This brings me to the next passage from the majority opinion in the case which struck down DOMA:
DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment. Pp. 13–26. (
(b) By seeking to injure the very class New York seeks to protect,
DOMA violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government. The Constitution’s guarantee of equality “must at the very least mean that a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot” justify disparate treatment of that group. Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S. 528, 534–535. DOMA cannot survive under these principles.
Its unusual deviation from the tradition of recognizing and accepting state definitions of marriage operates to deprive same-sex couples of the benefits and responsibilities that come with federal recognition of their marriages. This is strong evidence of a law having the purpose and effect of disapproval of a class recognized and protected by state law. DOMA’s avowed purpose and practical effect are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter
into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.
4 UNITED STATES v. WINDSOR
Syllabus
DOMA’s history of enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than
an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence. BLAG’s arguments are just as candid about the congressional purpose. DOMA’s operation in practice confirms this purpose. It frustrates
New York’s objective of eliminating inequality by writing inequality into the entire United States Code.
DOMA’s principal effect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages. It contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not others, of both rights
and responsibilities, creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State. It also forces same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of
federal law, thus diminishing the stability and predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it proper to acknowledge and protect. Pp. 20–26. 699 F. 3d 169, affirmed

This is why this case will be used to finally destroy all semblance of law and justice in the United States. Because it sees the US Supreme Court as able to say that the Federal constitution finds in a condition unknown to human history a right guaranteed to all in the US Constitution. Life has been hell here but it just got a little hotter.

So why write this at all? I surely do not know in advance who will read it. I know some people do read these Notes but the exercise is not all that compelling really. Yet I do write, I feel myself thinking about and relating to the writing of Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone With the Wind. I had read the book when I was young and I think I skipped parts and tried to bridge gaps with memories of the movie and even an article folded in the copy I got from a family library. In other words, I read the book at an age when I left few books unfinished and usually read very intently in discomfort and distraction. I am now at a stage in life where I often am distracted when I read and leave many books three-fourths read but I have read Gone With the Wind again with real interest. I nearly hold the whole story in my head the way I did the novels I loved best in my youth. The facet of the book that strikes me this time is Mitchell’s own sincerity, genuine personal insight into the conditions and earnest desire to state her case. I relate to her inner state in writing the book. I have turmoil of my own to write about. I am influenced by current trends and events as I have tried to describe so far but I am also influenced a great deal by the materials and texts I read. In the last few days I have been replacing a list of books I read which was deleted in the past on Facebook. The Mitchell novel I am writing about today is one of the well over 800 books already on that list. There were 1000 books on the list that was deleted. But some books do not enter properly for whatever reason. In my own struggle to make sense of the rest of my life reading has always played a big part.
I am writing this post, not about a war in the time of a previous generation, but about judicial proceedings and governance in my own time. Not entirely but in large part I am writing about recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Margaret Mitchell was a journalist who wrote a long novel which is a classic and was her only really complete novel where as this is just a post. But she wrote about Scarlett O’Hara as a woman who grew up where the fictional Scarlett grew up. Mitchell was full of complexities and contradictions of mind as regards her sexual life as was Scarlett. Mitchell’s family made money in the lumber business as Atlanta rebuilt after the war and that is what Scarlett doe. Mitchell was trying in a very grand way to tell the truth about her life and conditions around her. This writing is part of my attempt to tell the story of my times and life. I also share some interests and values with Margaret Mitchell. Homosexuality is not an issue of importance in Gone With the Wind but other social issues she faced and wrote about are of interest to me as well. I however, grew up in a world very much influenced not only by the problems Mitchell wrote about but by the writings of Mitchell as well. Her book had to do with people excusing behaviors that have troubled my life. Allowing themselves to see the Wilkes family as useless and archaic and the times as requiring them to be like Scarlett I believe really added to the total of my life’s woes. Yet, compared to the evils she opposed in making the record available to a large readership that cost was small. Without Mitchell only a few would have understood the terrible suffering of the South. Because of her it is a national frame of reference. Today we are in a new social revolution. The U.S. Supreme Court is at the focus of this change.
It has been interesting for me to look at all of the ways in which the country is governed by this least visible branch of the Federal government. That has long been an interest of mine. Although I am not a lawyer I enrolled at Tulane Law School twice and did not die either time and from that point of view my time there was a splendid success. I also was very close to my grandfather who was once Chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. In addition, I have known worked for and am related to many more lawyers. Some might say I am the poor relation in what is in many ways a very large legal family.
In recent years I have written and posted online a Model Constitution of the United States and a Model Constitution of Louisiana. I have been driven to this in response to a number of changes which I see as related to the Obama presidency. However, most of the issues addressed in these documents are issues which have been of interest to me for a long time. This kind of bursting into activity is a pattern which repeats and occurs over and over again in my life. I recently attacked a lawn which I thought had gotten completely out of control. I do not own the lawn and it would not have seemed worthwhile to me to deal with it and the negotiations needed to care for it if it was going to be dealt with by others. Waiting made the task much harder but also made me feel sure I could justify however much trouble might arise because the situation I was addressing was clearly intolerable. My current involvement in opposing the status quo is the same kind of bursting out and deciding whatever the consequences it is worth the risk to try to make a change. Clearly having a legal system and courts of law is and must be very important. Nor do I wish to ignore, nor baselessly undermine the courts. And yet, I am the opposition. I represent something other than the consensus under which American courts operate. Margaret Mitchell represented a point of view which had not much been articulated in her masterful novel and I in my blog and on Facebook represent a particular point of view. What is that point of view as I discuss the state of law in our society?
Marriage itself is only part of the sphere of family. Many family institutions such as differential filiation and inheritance laws, levirate marriage, licensed and placed concubinage and polygamy are already and will remain unlawful in the United States in most places and most times and no court will bring those hurt by these laws any relief. In my Model Constitution of Louisiana I write:
Section One: The Family’s Roots and Nature
Provision One: The Family is an institution shaped and formed by the laws, customs and authorities of human societies in varied ways. However it is not a fictional arrangement, nor one produced by force of law alone. It is rather a vast and vital natural web of meanings associations and possibilities which like a language, game or mathematical system will allow for infinite variations and yet will allow only for one infinite set of variations and will prohibit another infinite set of variations. The Kingdom of the State of Louisiana seeks to keep its legal regimes largely within the infinite set of variations allowed by natural family and does not pretend to authorize or even permit all natural variants which are possible.
This is just a proposal but it makes two points about the law which not everyone agrees with. First, here at least our system of laws should recognize the truth of the natural order although not being its abject slave. Secondly, no system is entirely unchangeable, perfect and comprehensive of all that could be just. It seems to many eyes to split the difference between adhering to the law because it is the law and the citizen’s right to appeal to justice itself.
I am not looking back to some perfect past but writing for many people struggling today. I know many people on this list and who are friends with people on this list are very happy about the Windsor decision which struck down DOMA. I know that many other people on this list and friends with people on this list are either very sad or angry about the same Supreme Court decision. My feelings are a little different in that I am not doing much that will be directly affected and I found the state of things close to unendurable before and I still do find that I have little sense of being able to rationalize much engagement in society. For me the result is mostly that I think law is getting worse as a discourse which shapes my own life.
One of my now reasonably long time correspondents, Lord Norton of Louth who disagrees with me about homosexual marriage and advocates the legalization of marriage between persons of the same sex in the United Kingdom has recently delivered a speech in the House of Lords discussing the relatively poor quality of much legislation passed by the British parliament. Here is an excerpt of some of his speech:
“The problem is not just quantitative but also qualitative. There is not just more law, but more complex law, especially where one is dealing with regulation. This creates problems for Parliament. There is more complex legislation, but there is no commensurate increase in the time and resources available to deal with it. There is a finite number of Members available to sit on committees. There is only so much time available for the different stages of Bills.”
This is both relevant to the legal regimes and court decisions I am discussing here and also a contrast in some ways to what I perceive as our apparent problems. America is I think very much in an intense crisis but it is not so much in a crisis which is acute as regards time and deadlines. I am noy a very free man here and never have been nor am I entirely devoid of freedom. Nor do I enjoy reducing every argument to one about freedom and equality even when the real issues are something else entirely. The Windsor case will simply create more tyrannical nonsense shoved into every cranny and nook of American life while the world rushes on to many other challenges besides forcing us all to approve of the super sameness the courts say we need in our heads and cannot have in any groups of choice.
In contrast to this national judicial dictatorship I wrote in my Model Constitution of Louisiana:
Provision Two: The Family is expressed an embodied in the Domestic Regimes of Marriage, Maitressage and Concubinage as well as in the Association of the Family Association and, in a derivative way, the Kindred and further in the legal recognition of relations between persons who are family members in many aspects of law. The most important of these relations which is recognized in the Kingdom of the State of Louisiana is that relation between mother and child which are so important to all aspects of what is human and to society. Louisiana is a polity that seeks to recognize and improve the inner life of its constituents. It is not content merely to deal with military survival and economic prosperity of a purely material nature. Family is the institution most responsible for developing the inner life of the Citizen-Subjects.
Provision Three: All Citizen-Subjects by force of law belong to a Family in the Kingdom of the State of Louisiana. All Citizen-Subjects also belong to a Family Association by Force of law.
While it may seem as though this is from an alien civilization in another galaxy when contrasted with the Supreme Court it actually is much more rooted in our history than there ideas are or are ever likely to be. The fact that I find myself required , by what I might sometimes call conscience, to resist the direction in which many social trends are moving is simply to say thing are as they have always been. I am simply wearing out and wearing down, the basic framework of my life has not changed. In the course of my life I have pretty much always known that my life would end up on one of three trajectories. First, I might defy extremely long odds and end up at a place in life where I was not likely to end up and be visibly seen to be prospered and happier than was reasonable to expect. Secondly, undertaking many risks in pursuit of long odds I might die young. Thirdly, I might reach middle age in a bad and enduring situation. I have tried fairly hard and long for a life comfortably quiet and decent life, but I always knew I was least likely to achieve that goal. So now, like the vinegar drinkers of Taoism I am in the place where most days seem more like a penalty to be paid than an opportunity to be entered into in life. In that context what do I want to do in terms of writing and commenting on events and trends of this time in which I live. I write in words unusually emotional in a model Constitution in the next passage from the part dealing with family:
Section Two: The Lex Sanguinis, The Domestic Regimes and the Institution of the Family Association

Subsection One: The Nature of the Polity and Its Conditions
Provision One: Louisiana’s Genius and Liabilities
Louisiana in its lands, people and institutions brings to the creation and maintenance of this Kingdom of the State of Louisiana a great and complex heritage which has been alluded to elsewhere in this Constitutional Charter on many occasions. However, except for a very brief period as the Republic of Louisiana between its first membership in the United States and its membership in the Confederate States of America there has been little in its history when the banner of Louisiana itself has risen over an independent polity in the wide world. In many ways the American experience has been a very trying one indeed for the essence of Louisiana. In many ways its conditions in recent decades have been very averse to its natural genius and have rather fostered its liabilities. I has often been toxic to Louisiana’s culture and social fabric to be a small part of the United States of America which has meanwhile been emerging as an increasingly single republic with its disingenuity and very harsh policy towards many peoples and institutions of Louisiana, it endless lies and distortions regarding history and its endless and almost limitless need for nationalist propaganda. Even in this Third Union Louisiana is still very much conditioned by what is possible within a Union that remains largely formed in an image and basis that exists as hostile to this polity and all that it is.
I obviously feel oppressed but that does not mean I am a separatist nor that I believe this polity is perfect. But I will not contribute to the lie that we have no serious problems.
I am not riding some wave of rebellion. I am simply one face of the real political opposition in this often unfree country. It is tiring and sad as a way of life. Ever since the time several years ago when I went from administering over a dozen groups on Facebook to shutting them all down I have been operating in the realm of not being sure whether I would remain on Facebook. That uncertainty continues as I put up this post. I have somewhat conflicting thoughts and mixed feelings about the matter. There is now almost a decade between me and my time in China. Nine years ago next month I went there and I was there less than a year. Since then my Facebook timeline has been a major outlet of expression and means of communication in my life, it has not been the only one but it has been a very important one. In some ways it has been made singular by the lack positive growth in other areas of my life. Yet all the good events in recent years would make a very long list. Whatever else life has to offer it has offered me some good times with family and friends and some worthwhile projects.

I believe extended family offers many supports and checks on the good and bad of nuclear families and is very important. But that does not mean I get on wonderfully with all my extended family – I do not. This past twelve months has been very far from the sort of year one might see in the plans one makes when first becoming an adult. However, it is also true that it has been a year in which I have had a difficult time holding things on any particular course. It seems impossible to believe that a year in which a great number of personal changes for the better occurred would also be a year in which my own since of endurance is most tested. My paternal grandmother had died just a few months before this time last year and I had just recently moved into her home with my parents for a time. I had been working on a number of projects but was most involved in issues and circumstances related to her death.
The year since then has seen a number of changes in my own life. I have certainly lost weight and improved at least some aspects of my physical health and that has occurred at the time of a great deal of other very negative and bad experiences. There has been no exuberance such as might often occur when one loses over fifty pounds and makes some other adjustments in one’s appearance. In many ways this year has been among the least hopeful in my life. It has been a time to reflect on the total horror of much of my own circumstance. It has not been a time to see new goodness emerge in any significant degree. Some of this is rooted in unhappiness related to extended family issues of long standing. But in my Model Constitution of Louisiana I write:
Subsection Two: The Louisiana Families under Law
( I am leaving out of this Post and Note Provisions One through Four because they are long, technical and even farther out of the mainstream of politics)
Provision Five: Privileges of Members Themselves and related Association Privileges
The Members of Family Associations have the following rights and privileges under the law:
1. They may donate up to a third of their income to the Family Association to reduce taxable income without penalty.
2. They may claim as tax deductible expense reasonable minimal expenses related to doing Association business.
3. They may support association members in general as a valid policy reason strongly presumed to be moral despite laws or regulations seeming to forbid such support in a given circumstance.
The Rights of the Association are as follows:
1. They shall pay no more than ten percent tax on their income and the lowest eighty percent shall pay only five percent income tax.
2. Their income shall come after all deductions for due and reasonable expense in providing pre-natal and birth related support, tutoring, partial state rate scholarships available to all members,a family shrine, a registry of family particulars, a stipend for the Head and Mater Familias and elder care as well as any health care clinic in the Imperial Wellness Community Clinic Network and maintaining a duly chartered guard, managing the Liveried aspects of a liveried domestic service.
In writing this Model Constitution and other things I have written, I really am proposing an agenda that would change the way life works in this particular place and might have an influence everywhere. But it is nothing in all its detail compared to what the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) is actually doing now. Wjile I find life growing ever more hellish I am more convinced than ever of the rightness of the major choices of my life and more convinced than ever of the futility of my life’s course. Nuclear marriage and family alone are recognized in our society and open homosexual are excluded from this and thus from everything that is this one thing. Both conservatives and liberals need to see this as the cause of much of our current conflict, but neither will see it at all. I and those like me are merely voices crying in the wilderness. But I am alive and so must deal with each day as best I can. That is the burden, accepted or not, of all the living.
This time in my life is a time when I am more aware than usual of enduring causes and signs of personal isolation. My writing online about current events is both part of the isolation and an exception to the isolation. Like much in my life and history my online presence is paradoxical. As I see the world continually changing around me I have often asked whether this web outreach is a substitute of the wrong kind for doing more of other things I could or ought to be doing. Instead of writing this Note and blog post should I be attending a political rally or writing letters to the editor? Should I try to do something completely other than these things?
Recently I decided to share a link to Xan’s Fans a page in support of a dying child whose family I know. It seemed like a worthwhile use of network that I have built up and maintained on my page. However, I consider that despite such occasional opportunities it is likely to be getting near the very end of my time on Facebook unless any number of things would change that are not likely to change. While I enjoy staying in touch with people it does not offset the fact that I am not going to continue in what does not sustain me sufficiently and so I want to write a few things before I begin signing off here. This is a time to consider a number of themes from my life in recent years. It is also time to relate those themes to the current condition of society on which I have often commented. I am not likely to ever remarry. However, I was married quite a while and had a good view of what values form American marriage today. In contrast to those I wrote this language in my Model Constitution of Louisiana:
Section Three: Women and Family in the Kingdom of the State of Louisiana
Subsection One: Section Preamble
Women are not the same as men but both are human, capable of being servile residents, Citizen-Subjects, Peer-Electors and Sovereign Monarchs although in every case they are somewhat distinguished from one another. The Policy of the Kingdom of the State of Louisiana regarding women is definitely a policy which discriminates and makes a set of differences. Many of these appear at the level of law which less august than the Constitution and parts of the Constitutional framework appear in other places than this article on Family. However, the enumerated Provisions of this Section form the main body of the transformative policy regarding women and family in the Kingdom of the State of Louisiana.
While it is impossible to tell from these words what exactly I propose it is clear that my values are not those of the Supreme Court. The society I envision and the relationships in it are entirely different than the vision imposed by the heavily armed super spy state in which I live. So I am better off single here in hell.

It is time for me take an inventory of my own life and involvement in those things which do involve me in any way. It is a truth of my life that I have always lived largely in my own mind and judged by my own conscience despite living out among people, seeking advice and studying various systems of morality with preference given to Christian morality. I have not been strongly and directly involved in the same sex marriage debate here in this country. However, I have been directly conversant with those debating the issue abroad. In addition I have been writing model constitutions in recent years which address many of my concerns about the questions of homosexual marriage.
Let me just say that I am not unsympathetic to the rejoicing of homosexual and Lesbian people who have lived in homosexual unions for a long time in this society of isolation and only marriage contracts into which they could not enter. Whatever moral issues there are it is also true they have been support and stay to others in a society that did not sustain them and who have in some cases reared children with a beloved of the same sex. Windsor who brought this action in court did not rear children with her partner. The DOMA case involved benefits and estate taxes. She is just asking for the tax breaks of a married couple. I know that many heterosexual homes are hells on earth. I have seen a great deal of horror and misery in heterosexual homes. Yet, I feel no need to change my mind about the idea that marriage ought to be contracted between a man and a woman only. Although I feel tired and in pain as I write this note I know that not everything in America is unappealing to me and many would say that I have had a pretty good life. So even in that regard I must question whether I have enough to complain about.

So thing will get much worse in many ways in all likelihood and the DOMA case is just a part of the disintegration. That is my view as of here and now.

I have been neglecting this blog for a while. I may make some changes for the better or worse in August. However, for now
this is an usual post related to a guess made on a competition on The Norton View,
.

I am guessing the picture is located just here:

The Peers Tea Room
where painting may be.

I did not win this competition and remain with a total of three LOTB wins equaling a grand prize win and no TNV wins. I do not play very often lately however. I actually thought the winner had it perhaps . . . . She is Lady Tizzy.

This video can be accessed by clicking on the title. It may be a little bit of a stretch even for my readers but has the design of a flying saucer, real or imagined. The title is: