Bell Ringing Fear

WOW!  

Dog whistles are cheap… ‘bout seven to seventeen bucks on Amazon. 

Problem is: Fear-feeding, fear-breeding politicians don’t use dog whistles – because they can’t be heard by human beings. 

Like the Russian (isn’t that ironic) physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), rightwing fear merchants use dog-bells – specifically tuned to provoke fear and corresponding votes for demagogues and would-be demagogues. 

Pavlov deliberately starved the dogs he was training and, when they were sufficiently hungry and compliant, he simultaneously exposed them to meat and the clang of a bell. The result: With repetition, the dogs would begin salivating simply at the sound of the bell. Stop the simultaneous bell-meat exposure long enough and the salivating would end; occasionally repeat bell-and-meat exposure and the response would temporarily return.

Pavlov was a precursor to political manipulation.

In the earliest days of the post-World War II Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy stoked Americans’ fear of widespread communist subversion – of the military, of colleges and universities, of the film and entertainment industries, and of the federal government. A self-centered, hard drinking and heavy gambling demagogue, he recklessly threw unsubstantiated accusations – publicly (especially in Congressional hearings) attacking the character and patriotism of anyone who dared confront him. 

In February 1950, McCarthy went so far as to declared that he had a list of “members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” employed in the State Department; he made similar clams about communist infiltration of the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voce of America and the U.S. Army with charges of communism and communist sympathies, disloyalty, sex crimes and homosexuality. McCarthy perfected the political version of Pavlov’s bell experiment – scream “communist” or ‘traitor” or “homosexual” with little or no proof and gain demagogic power, while destroying innocent men and women. 

Significantly, one Congressional investigation labelled McCarthy’s charges a “fraud and a hoax” and accused McCarthyism of trying to “confuse and divide the American people… to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves.” When his witch hunts failed, McCarthy turned against supposed homosexuals in the State Department and throughout the government. 

In the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Stuart Symington exposed McCarthy, whose attorney of choice was the infamous Roy Cohn, an early mentor of Donald Trump, as a bully and told him “Senator, the American people have had a look at you for six weeks; you are not fooling anyone…”

Ultimately, McCarty was “censured”/”condemned” – a semantic difficulty that resonates through history – and served out the remaining two and a half years of his term as a pariah. Freed of McCarty’s political intimidation, President Eisenhower quipped that McCarthyism had become “McCarthywasm.”

Nineteen months after McCarthy’s death in January 1959, purportedly from the effects of his long-term alcohol abuse (and morphine abuse financed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation), Fidel Castro and his camouflage-clad, rifle-toting “revolutionaries” entered Havana and initiated a violent campaign of murder and human rights violations and Russian-backed Communism. Almost immediately, approximately 200,000 Cubans fled to South Florida. Between November 1960 and October 1962 and under the auspices of Operation Peter Pan, Cuban parents sent more than 14,000 sons and daughters to the United States. Between December 1965 and early 1973, 265,297 Cubans fled to the U.S. on “Freedom Flights,” and another 125,000 fled the island for South Florida in five months in 1980. It remains impossible to determine how many “balseros” – “boat people” - died in the Florida Straits.

In 2016, The Miami Herald reported that two-million Cubans lived outside of Cuba and, in the previous ten years, more than 18,000 had been detained as political prisoners. The Herald cited one specialist in “democide,” who placed the number of Cubans killed by their own government between 1959 and 1987 as 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000.

Castro, his brother and their successors were/are murderous dictators. We do not doubt that they and many of their allies experience the fires of Hell. They deserve them. The consequences of their political sins now echo through three generations of Cubans in America – especially South Florida. 

Nonetheless, “communista” and “socialista” are dog bells – the first politician to splash the labels on his/her opponent, the political party that shouts “communista” and “socialista” against the opposition controls the dog bell of elections fears – not unlike Joe McCarthy screaming “communist,” “traitor” and “homosexual” with no other proof than political opportunism and dishonesty. 

Too many Catholic bishops, Knights of Columbus pamphleteers and Priests For Life are dog bell ringers ranting against abortion. Rarely, if at all, do they offer more nuanced declarations that, when needed, we must afford women the highest quality of birth control – consistent with their well-formed consciences, and them and their children the highest quality of perinatal and postnatal care – including nutrition, housing and education from conception into mature adulthood. 

To vote exclusively according to American bishops’ “pro-birth” – but most assuredly not “prolife” - statements is to be ruled by the dog bell. 

In a “Fact Sheet” – “Respect for Unborn Life: The Church’s Constant Teaching” - America’s Catholic bishops, through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, acknowledged: “In 1827, with the discovery of the human ovum, the mistaken biology of Aristotle was discredited. Scientists increasingly understood that the union of sperm and egg at conception produces a new living being that is distinct from both mother and father. Modern genetics demonstrated that this individual is, at the outset, distinctively human, with the inherent and active potential to mature into a human fetus, infant, child and adult.  From 1869 onward the obsolete distinction between the ‘ensouled’ and ‘unensouled’ fetus was permanently removed from canon law on abortion.”

In essence, the bishops were admitting that their teaching on the beginnings of human life and the “ensouling” that occurs at conception had been evolving philosophically/ theologically since St. Augustine began theorizing based on the Fourth Century BC writings of Aristotle but still took forty-two years to catch-up with science. 

Perhaps they will take less than forty-two years to recognize that homosexuality and transsexuality are not “inclinations.” They simply are! When men and women – tens of thousands of times, perhaps millions of times worldwide - describe having “those feelings” and “identities” at four and five and nine and fifteen years old, they are not speaking of an “inclination.” They are describing a sense of self, a personal reality, who they are and will forever be on this Earth.

Catholic – Christian – voters, indeed all voters must approach the November elections with an ear to the dog bells. 

The bell ringers who scream “Brown, Black and people who are ‘not like you’ might one day go to your children’s schools and move into your neighborhoods; they will lower your local property values, or marry your children or grandchildren” must be rejected.

Intelligent voters – of all religions and no religions, of all faiths and no faith – must hear and reject the “communista” and ”socialista” bell ringers whose only objective is to inflict fear and garner votes. The bell ringers of fear will make their cafecito-drinking and pastelito-eating stops in Little Havana and Venezuelan and Nicaraguan neighborhoods and enthusiastically shout “libertad” and “democracy” – in exchange for votes. And forget those promises on January 20, 2021 as blithely as they did on January 20, 2017.

Conscientious, thinking voters must dismiss the bell ringers of fear who shout so adamantly about absentee and mail-in ballots - used by soldiers in every war since the Civil War, used by members of the Trump family and the Trump administration, used almost universally in some states for a decade – and recognize they are a healthy response to a pandemic that has claimed 200,000 American lives. 

We must recognize the bell ringing prevaricators and pseudologues who declare: “We have it totally under control… It’s going to be just fine.” (January 22), “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA…” (February 24), “As far as what we’re doing with the new virus, I think that we are doing a great job.” (February 25), “… within a couple of days [it] is going to be down close to zero.” (February 24), “Just stay calm. It will go away.” (March 10), “It will go down to zero, ultimately.” (April 28)

Faithful and Faith-filled voters will reject the bell ringer fear mongering of those who shout “George Soros” and “Jewish plots,” “introducing Sharia law” and “burning down our cities.” (Portland and New York and Minneapolis are still there and functioning

Responsible citizenship means forming a conscience free of the fear generated by bell ringing would-be demagogues. 

And, of course, there’s the bell ringers threatening “They’re coming for your guns!.” After the Valentine’s Day massacre of seventeen students and faculty members by a semi-automatic rifle-wielding 19-year-old, classmates and their parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School responded to the vacuous promises of new gun laws with the inspired phrase “We call BS!”

The truth is that it is still legal to purchase and own armor-piercing bullets; the majority of states do not limit the magazine capacity of firearms; most Americans eighteen and older can still own an unlimited number of firearms; restrictions on gun ownership apply almost exclusively to dishonorably discharged members of the military, persons who have denounced their American citizenship, individuals with documented mental illness issues – including addictions, and ex-felons. 

The appropriate response to the “They’re gonna take your guns!” bell ringers: “We call BS!”

Finally, only individuals who deny gravity or think the sun rises in the West will believe the political bell ringer who declares Global Warming and Climate Change are an “expensive hoax” (DJT tweet 1/29/2014) and “b..s…t” (DJT 1/1/2014 ) or “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (DJT 11/6/2012), and the infamous response to the Western U.S. wildfires - “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” (DJT 9/14/2020

Responsible citizenship means forming a conscience and voting free of the fear generated by bell ringing would-be demagogues.