The Postmodern Dystopic: One Year/Year One of the Trump Presidency

President Donald J. Trump & former FBI
Director James Comey, January 22, 2017
(Photo © NBC News)

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America. His presidency really began, however, on the night of the national election last fall on November 8, 2016, when he defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton, by a 77 vote margin in the Electoral College and despite a loss of nearly 2,868,691 popular votes. Or, one might even argue, it began before he was formally elected, while Barack Obama was still the legal president, when Trump's rise signaled a shift, long underway, in our election process and public discourse that his victory only confirmed. In saying this I am not referring to the now steadily amassing body of evidence that suggests that Russia involved itself extensively in the 2016 election, and had numerous ties of various sorts to the Trump campaign. What I am suggesting is that Trump's ascent, from his declaration of his candidacy in the summer of 2015 forward, marked him out as the emblem not only of the contemporary Republican Party, for which he is the standard bearer, but underlined where our politics and society had begun to head during latter years of Bill Clinton's and all of George W. Bush's presidency, and which has found its true tribune in him.

Before I say anything more, let me note that I have found these last 12 months so exasperating, depressing, maddening, and absurd to the point of outright laughter by turns--though I have also been trying to convey in personal conversations that in some ways they still do not approach the insanities of 2001-2008, a period this country has still not recovered from, which in part has made Trump's rise possible--that I have not registered here, as I once might have, every significant outrage committed by this president or his allies and defenders. First, there are too many and they come in such steady and heavy flurries that they would make a snow-cloud jealous. Second, it really would require someone with the patience of Job--or an army of fact-checkers--to keep up with the daily tide of lies, misstatements, half-truths, and misinformation, let alone the innumerable questionable and potentially actionable violations of rules and laws that this administration seems to engage in. We currently have one major political party, the Republicans, who hold all the reins of federal power, utterly in his thrall, and a second, the opposition Democrats, who still have not reckoned with the opponent they face nor with the shifts in the broader social and public discourse that demand that the the Democrats change how they function in order not just to remain a viable party for the future, but a potential backstop against the complete dismantling of our society.

On October 2016, as I watched the election unfold, I wrote a post entitled "Our Postmodern Election(s)." (Jeet Heer later wrote an article in New Republic that expounded on some of these themes while exploring other ones in relation to this president.) It had its limitations, and on the key point of Trump's electability, I was wrong. One of my dear colleagues recently decried the idea that Republicans, let alone this president, have taken up postmodernism and run with it, though I think it is a foregone conclusion that they have, and as I tried to assert in that earlier blogpost, the postmodern condition (and, in many ways, an essentially neoliberal framework) underpins our entire society, including our politics, so it is not merely the GOP that has adopted and warped a postmodern worldview, but, more broadly, it defines this society itself to an estimable degree. I won't restate that post, but I think it's fair to say that "truth" has no fundamental relationship to how Donald Trump operates, unless one takes the Platonic (in the sense of his The Republic) and, perhaps more correctly, Nietzschean views that truth is what the ruler--or Übermensch--or similar corporate entities declare it to be.

In fact, as Trump has made clear for decades and especially over the last few years, especially with his championing of the Birther conspiracy, verifiable factualness, material evidence, reasoned argumentation, and science-based statistics have no bearing whatsoever on what he believes, let alone how he acts and moves through the world. Yet it is not Trump, but large numbers of Americans who reject verifiable facts, appeals to any authority but that of their feelings and those who agree with them, even what we might call objective reality itself. Additionally, both the mainstream media, by manufacturing consent (as Noam Chomsky brilliant argued years ago) and "normalizing" Trump's actions, and numerous parallel organs of reportage and pseudo-reportage, have served to make a muddle, at least for a sizable number of people, of what "truth" might look like. Figures like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich are quite aware of the tenets of postmodernism, as the latter pointed out in a New Yorker profile earlier this year, and have made great use of them. This is a feature, not a bug, of how they and the Right have come to operate.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson, at his confirmation hearings
(Copyright © NBC News)

In that earlier post, I did not believe that American voters would elect Trump. Or rather, that enough white voters would not be so appalled by his campaign and behavior that they would vote against him. (My predictions about the Senate were closer to how things actually turned out.) As I say above, I was wrong. Despite admitting that he had forcibly kissed women and groped their private parts without their permission, while also pursuing married women "like a bitch," he received 52% of white women's votes. Since taking office, he has lurched from crisis to crisis, now so numerous it's hard to keep track of them. In this regard, he has made Obama's first year, which included addressing inherited national and global financial crises and multiple wars, while also trying to pass a stimulus bill, a comprehensive health insurance bill, and a bill to rein in Wall Street's excesses, look like paint drying. Trump's first year has also transformed the slow-rolling catastrophe of Bush's inaugural year into a series of surprising but nevertheless dull anecdotes, 9/11 notwithstanding. In January I thought about regularly posting on the Trump administrations scandals, which seemed to be accruing as soon as he entered the Oval Office, and then again, after his first 100 days, which seemed to mark yet another low-point in his tenure. But one could pick any point over the last 11 months, or before, to find evidence of the debacle this presidency is turning out to be, and so it might perhaps be best to say that like the classic figure of synecdoche, any point is representative of the whole, and metonymically, the Trump administration is synonymous with corruption, disruption, and a sense of foreboding and rolling disaster.

If, as Aristotle once pointed out in the Nichomachean Ethics that "Man is the rational animal," while also arguing that there also was an irrational component to human existence, Trump has exemplified that this country's most powerful man is the dominating and dominant "emotional animal" whose main goal is to satisfy his own psychological needs and energize those of his core supporters. This would be worrying in any leader, but it should be especially concerning to have such a person at the head of the most powerful government and military on earth. One effect has been to keep not just his government, but the entire national and globe in a state of disquiet, dis-ease, since the demands and effects of his emotional needs and outbursts cannot be contained within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump campaigned like a right-wing racist nationalist and has seeded his government and presided like an ultraconservative white supremacist authoritarian. He appointments to his Cabinet, save one or two, are to the right of the kinds of people George W. Bush placed in office, and his Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, has positioned himself so far to the right that  Antonin Scalia, the justice he replaced, would be envious. Significantly and in Orwellian fashion, many of the people Trump has placed in positions of power actively and openly seek to undermine or destroy the very organizations they are running, and ensure, as his formally dismissed but still potent advisor Bannon championed, the "deconstruction of the administrative state," or rather, the federal government as we have come to know it.

Several Cabinet departments, among them the most important like State, appear to be in disarray and withering on the vine, at a time when world affairs, made so precarious in part through prior US attempts at creating a "New World Order" and "nation building," are approaching a precipice. To take one example, the chief means by which the United States has kept North Korea's nuclear ambitions and aggression in check has been through diplomacy and partnership with allies and, in some cases, hostile countries that have a vested in interest in containing the North Korean government. Under Trump, however, we keep inching nearer and nearer to outright war with the North Korean government, a turn of events that would most certainly lead to cataclysm, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of people in South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, the United States, and countless other countries if nuclear weapons were involved. Yet Trump at times appears to be undermining his Secretary of State, former oilman Rex Tillerson, who, for his own part, appears to undermining the State Department itself, through a bungled reorganization that has led to numerous empty bureaus and widespread understaffing. One major lever of power the US yields, through its wealth and influence, for good or bad, is soft power via diplomacy, yet even in a crisis zone like Korea, under Trump and Tillerson, we lack an ambassador to South Korea since Trump, in one of may steps against precedent, summarily canned all of Obama's ambassadors shortly after taking office.

Rather than detailing the numerous crises, scandals, failures, and so forth that have occurred under Trump's watch, though a number of sites do have lists, cheat sheets and more notating the Trump administration's mis-actions through this month. It should suffice to note that beyond appointing Gorsuch to the court; striking down many of Obama's executive actions; succeeding in most of his appointments to his administration; and presiding over the growing economy bequeathed by his predecessor, Trump had no major successes in the legislative arena until the recent monstrous tax cutting bill, a massive giveaway to billionaires and corporations, which still requires reconciliation between the House and Senate and could yet end up another of his failures. In his account, by contrast, he has been the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln, though unlike each of the various men to hold the office before him, he is the least popular president at this point in his term, with a majority, upwards of 50% in many polls, disapproving of his governance.

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley
(Copyright © CBS News)

Among the low lights thus far of Trump's tenure, and this is hardly an exhaustive list, once could mention:

• his constant attacks, deflections and projections on and mis-representations of the free press, his opponents, his former campaign opponent Hillary Clinton, his predecessor Barack Obama, the US intelligence services (including the CIA and FBI), and even fellow members of his party;
• the repeatedly attempted Muslim ban (which, after revision, was finally allowed to take effect); 
• firing the FBI director, James Comey, initially for one set of reasons proposed by his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, only to contradict them on television and later to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador, in the Oval Office (more about this below);
• his dismissal of Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who had warned him about General Flynn;
• the resignation of his now convicted National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, after 24 days, for allegedly lying to the Vice President about his contacts with Russia (more about this below); 
• the repeated failure in his attempts to legislatively repeal the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare (though he continues to shred it by other means); 
• his equivocation on the white supremacist Unite the Right tiki-torchlight march and subsequent murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville;
• his failed response to Hurricane Maria's battering of Puerto Rico, which remains in dire condition;
• his flipflops on the DACA policy, leaving countless young undocumented Americans in legal jeopardy, and his rescission of the refugee policies for Haitians and Salvadorans;
• his illiberal pardoning of Arizona prison chief and avowed racist Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted on a misdemeanor charge for contempt of court, because he was disobeying a judge's order to stop racial profiling.

Also:

• his attacks on Black football players and other athletes protesting state and police violence on and racism against African Americans and other people of color;
• his establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, admirably bi-partisan, but headed by a man, Kris Kobach, known for racist views and who has actively worked against expanding democracy and voting rights;
• abandoning the Paris Climate Accords, leaving the US only one of 2 nations not to sign on;
• losing two Communications Directors, Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, within the span of six months, while also forcing out his chief of staff, former RNC head Reince Priebus;
• his advocacy for the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline (which actually burst not long ago, leaking 210,000 gallons of oil);
• his appointment of new commissioners who are vowing to repeal net neutrality;
• his use of a slur against Native Americans during a ceremony to honor Native American military heroes, the famous "Code Talkers," while standing before a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, whose record of extensive anti-indigenous policy and violence is well-documented;
• his promotion of anti-Muslim videos, including one considered to be fake, posted by a fringe, extremist white nationalist British political group;
• his constant tweeting, through which he has advanced conspiracy theories, false information, and unilateral policy without alerting his administration (such as banning transgender troops in the military without first discussing this or consulting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff)

To conclude the list, Trump is now campaigning for and recording robocalls for a man, Roy Moore, who has been credibly accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl and assaulting another teenager, was twice removed from the bench, and whose ideas are so far out of any mainstream that he repeatedly lost out in prior attempts at runs for statewide positions in a state dominated by his party. And the above list does not even touch upon the administration's possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution; the Hatch Act; the Logan Act; and other ethical or legal landmines. Nor does it include the debacle of the Al Hathla Raid in Yemen, which faces a humanitarian crisis in part because of US-supported actions by the Saudi Arabian military, or the Tongo Tongo ambush, in Niger, which still remains unexplained to the wider public.

Amidst all of this, as a backdrop, Congressional panels in the House and Senate, as well as a Special Counsel, lifelong Republican and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, continue to investigate the Trump administration for obstruction of justice in the firing of James Comey and its ties to Russia before and after the 2016 election. The investigation includes the various revelations in MI5 agent Christopher Steele's "dossier"; alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's server and the accounts of other DNC and Democratic officials, as well attempts on state and local voting systems; the Trump campaign's ties to various Russian officials, oligarchs, and emissaries, as well as Russian, Russian-allied and foreign banks and institutions; the Trump campaign's links to Wikileaks; other alleged Russian forms of and attempts at meddling in the US election process; and the Trump campaign and administration officials' financial ties to other foreign entities like Turkey, Ukraine, and so on. (And there may be even more that I have not listed under investigation.) The bizarre scene earlier in the year, involving the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Minister, in which the US press were effectively barred, is just one of many strange moments in this administration's shadowplay with Russian.

(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Gary R. Herbert
swears in Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. as U.S. Ambassador
to Russia during an Ambassadorial Swearing-in
Ceremony at the Utah Capitol Saturday, October 7, 2017.
Mary Kaye Huntsman is in the middle.

Among Mueller's actions so far have been to indict former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort and his adjutant Rick Gates on felony charges; to secure a felony guilty plea from former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos; and to gain a felony guilty plea for lying to the FBI from Michael Flynn. Attorney General Sessions, special advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., and many other Trump campaign and administration officials, including the President himself, may find themselves caught up in the FBI's net as well, as a fundamental line propagated by Trump from the very beginning of his campaign, that he had no ties to Russia, now looks increasingly like a falsehood, and the President's actions since taking office have not advanced the perception that he views Russia as a hostile foreign power, as his predecessors and most of the US's allies, all have.

But--and this is a major point, beside this backdrop, as I have labeled it, Trump's power to disrupt remains. To give but one very contentious example, he could fire Mueller, it seems, creating a constitutional crisis if the GOP were unwilling to stand up to him, and whereas even some very conservative Senators expressed faith in the investigation months ago, they now appear to be wavering. The conservative head of one Congressional committee, California Republican Devin Nunes (temporarily?) recused himself after troubling contacts with the White House. Although several Democrats, led by Congressman Al Green of Texas, have introduced Articles of Impeachment, nothing can happen unless either the Republican majority decides to act upon them, which is not assured even if the Congressional committees and Mueller identify possible material evidence of collusion, coordination, and financial crimes, or the Democrats win an airtight House majority and a significant enough one in the Senate in 2018. The former is not inconceivable; the latter is much more of a stretch.

In our postmodern political and social climate, there is no guarantee that even in the face of proof of obvious crimes the GOP in Congress, let alone Republicans across the US, would sanction impeachment of Trump, nor agree with attempts by Bob Mueller to indict him or his family members, if it came to that. Nor is it a lock that the Congressional Democrats, unlike those of the 1970s or 1980s, would have to have the will and fearlessness to take Trump and his administration on either. Thus far they have done a mostly lackluster job challenging him publicly or creating a compelling counternarrative to energize voters to oust the GOP. For the Republicans' part, they very well might argue, as some seem to be doing and, as one, a "anonymous source linked to the Bush administration" told journalist Ron Suskind in the October 17, 2004 issue of The New York Times Magazine:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That empire under Bush was a putative failure, but Trump's has quickly taken shape and continues to emerge. Truth may have an implicit "liberal bias," as some wags like to say, but nearly one year of Trump has shown us that the liberal imagination, and liberal, democratic and republican structures remain imperiled when a leader decides, with the support of millions, to create and enact his own reality. At the rate things have occurred this year, we should all, whatever our perspective, be very concerned about what will await us at this point one year from now. 

Congress's Speech, or They Don't Write Like They Used To

Yesterday, via Digby, I came across Lee Drutman's Sunlight Foundation's article on the "changing complexity of Congressional speech." According to the article, which Drutman and Dan Drinkard based on statistical analysis, using the Flesch-Kincaid test (which uses a "reads at a n-th grade level" standard), of the Capitol Words site's word cull of speeches given by members of Congress, the linguistic grade level among Congressional speakers on the floor of both houses has has fallen by nearly a grade level compared to 7 years ago, falling from a "10.6 grade level" to a "11.5 in 2005."

Drutman writes: "Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record." Moreover, it turns out that the speech complexity of Republicans' official statements used to exceed that of Democrats, but that has flipped, and that members of Congress on the more moderate ends of both parties give more complex speeches than those on the less moderate ends, with conservative Republicans allegedly utilizing the lowest grade level.

Before you leap with delight at having your appraisal of Congress and of the GOP confirmed or start cursing and dismissing the study out of hand, I'd suggest one way of looking at this is that Congresspeople have begun to deliver speeches closer to that of average US voters who, according to Drutman, average out at an 8th grade reading level. Rather than talking down to constituents, they are talking, well, at them (though we all know the only people they're really talking to are the ones who bri...do various things for them involving sums of money).  In other words, I'm cutting them some slack.

I haven't watched C-SPAN in years, but I must admit that when I used to do so, in the late 1990s, I was often appalled at the simplistic level of the speeches Congresspeople on both sides gave, and it was a rare moment when the level of oratory (or wit, or knowledge, or anything) rose even to the standard that was expected of me and my coworkers, or that I had to achieve when speaking in high school. Former President Bill Clinton, however, like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, then First Lady, was often very good at speaking off the cuff at a level and with a complexity that nevertheless did not exceed the grasp of listeners; in my opinion, both rarely failed to impress.

One of the things I've sometimes worried about with this blog and my writing in general is that my tendency is towards language that's too syntactically complex, ungainly, serpentine. I think in compound-complex terms, often opening a thought with a qualifying conjunction--it's just how my mind works.  I went through a period in which I strove to write simply and directly, and still try to do this when I have to deliver an introduction or talk, but since this blog is more of a sketchpad than anything else, I restrain myself less here. (Note that the preceding sentence stretches for five lines, and is compound in its syntax.) I can, however, write simply. Like now.

At any rate, I decided to try a different test to see at what level my writing averaged out, and used writingtester.com to assess the readability and grade level of my prose. I then scoured the web for snippets of work I could easily drop into writing tester's box. Most copyrighted work is difficult to copy and drop, but I also wanted to see how different prose texts over the last hundred or so years ranked. Our first two presidents, an Enlightenment philosopher, and Henry James land on the more difficult to grasp side; our most recent presidents, Toni Morrison, and Abe Lincoln write such that most people can understand them. I turn out to be rather close to Henry James. I'll take that as I shall.

One note: the hyper-enthusiastic, exclamation point-tipped guide for understanding the scores comes straight from the writing test site. I can be exuberant, but the lack of restraint below is not mine.

J'S THEATER'S PROSE

My Brooke-Rose commentary on this blog:

Readable Score: 32 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 10

My recent Drunken Boat book review:

Readable Score: 19 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 12

Opening section of my published short story, "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution"

Readable Score: 34 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 10

Second section of my published short story, "On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueiras"

Readable Score: 33 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 10

SOME OTHER RANDOM WORKS:

Opening paragraph of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (translated by J. H. Bernard, 1892, corrected for the tester):

Readable Score: -21 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 20

Declaration of Independence:

Readable Score: 20 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 13

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Readable Score: 48 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8

Opening paragraphs of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written By Himself:

Readable Score: 51 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 7

Opening paragraphs of Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

Readable Score: 45 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8 

Opening excerpt (beginning "The fact of his having married a rich woman") from Henry James's Washington Square (from Google Books)

Readable Score: 31 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 11

Opening excerpt (beginning "Jewel and I come up from the field") from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying:

Readable Score: 47 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8

Opening excerpt (beginning "124 was spiteful") from Toni Morrison's Beloved:


Readable Score: 61 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 6

Opening paragraphs of Zadie Smith's essay, "Generation Why?", New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010:

Readable Score: 45 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8

Entire article "$tuck in a f’book bind: Wall St. leaves savvy invest kid in dark," by Mark DeCambre, New York Post, May 22, 2012

Readable Score: 44 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8

Entire article, "Rutgers Webcam-Spying Defendant Is Sentenced to 30-Day Jail Term", by Kate Zernike, New York Times, May 22, 2012

Readable Score: 45 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 8

Entire article, "US-Pakistan tensions deepen as Obama snubs Zardari at Nato summit", by Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian Online, 21 May 2012:

Readable Score: 29 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 11

Entire article, "Man in his 40s becomes third person to fall down Niagara Falls and SURVIVE after failed 'suicide' plunge," by Daily Mail Reporter, Daily Mail UK Online, 21 May 2012:

Readable Score: 37 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 9

Entire article, "Dancing with the Stars Sizzles in Spectacular Finals," by Dahvi Shira and Mike Fleeman, People Magazine, May 21, 2012:

Readable Score: 37 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 9

Opening paragraphs of George Washington's "First State of the Union Speech," January 8, 1790:

Readable Score: 13 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 13

Opening paragraphs of John Adams's "First State of the Union Speech," November 27, 1797:

Readable Score: 3 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 15

Opening paragraphs of George W. Bush's "First State of the Speech," January 22, 2002:

Readable Score: 47 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 7

Opening paragraphs of Barack H. Obama's "First State of the Union Speech," January 27, 2010:

Readable Score: 49 (The higher the score the easier the article is to read!)
Grade Level: 7

DADT Finally DOA + OccupyWall Street Protests

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the failed "compromise" policy restricting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender service people to serve openly, which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993 after the Republican-controlled Congress passed it, is now officially no longer on the books.  As of today, LGBTQ people, who have been members of the US military since its establishment, can now serve without fear of prosecution simply because of their sexual or gender orientation, whether they announce it publicly or not. The policy also should end the costly witchhunts to root out queer servicepeople, and automatically halts all investigations currently underway.

( Matthew Cavanaugh / European Pressphoto Agency )
Retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, who lost a leg in Iraq, testified to Congress in 2008 that he told his fellow troops he was gay and that it didn't erode "unit cohesion" -- an argument used by opponents of gays serving openly in the military

The change occurred not because of the military's or politicians' benevolence, but because of intensive and sustained efforts, including militancy, to shift public attitudes on LGBTQ people, and to repeal an overtly discriminatory policy that never should have been enacted in the first place. A strong congratulations goes to all the LGBTQ and straight people, especially those in the service and veterans, who fought to end the policy, and a hearty thanks to all who have supported repealing the policy, especially the members of Congress who voted to end it; President Barack Obama, who, after some dillydallying, finally signed it into law; and the military leaders and officers who have taken steps to implement it.  All branches of the military are now taking applications for anyone who qualifies, and this includes LGBTQ people.

Now, if only we could end all the wars the US currently is engaged in and bring the majority of our troops, whatever their sexual orientation, home!

+++

As I type this entry, thousands of people of all ages are participating in a public protest, Occupy Wall Street, down at Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan, against the past, current and likely future economic crises caused by Wall Street other other American and global financial firms. From 2007-2009, the United States and numerous other countries suffered the worst economic catastrophe since the Global Economic Crisis, also known as the Great Depression, which stretched from 1929 through the 1940s. The most recent crisis resulted from a number of factors, among the bursting housing bubble, the effects of deregulatory policies that loosened longstanding financial controls, overleveraging among consumers and banks, poor to non-existent government oversight, and a sense that our public tax dollars and private savings existed to be played as in a casino. We know the aftermath; we also know that Wall Street and foreign banks have received billions of dollars of taxpayer support, and continue to. In addition to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), banks have benefitted from trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve-backed swaps, loans, and monetary policies. They contine to benefit, and yet despite destroying the lives of millions of Americans and people across the globe, there have been almost no prosecutions, let alone serious, sustained investigations, of the people involved.  Wall Street bankers continue to influence and shape policies in Washington, DC and in other government capitals, while also strongly shaping non-governmental, global banking policies.

This then is part of the background to the protests, which Adbusters and the online group Anonymous organized. Related are the ongoing trials of organized labor; public labor unions have suffered repeated legislative assaults to match the longstanding rhetorical ones in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, Maine, and Ohio, and private ones are battling corporations like Verizon, Boeing, and Albertsons, to name just three. (The strikers and Albertsons have settled their issues for now, while the communication workers unions ended the Verizon strike without an agreement, and the legal issues involving Boeing's attempted job shift to South Carolina also continue.) The protests began on Saturday, and will continue for the foreseeable future.  The Occupy Wall Street site features live forums, chat rooms, phone conferencing bridges, photos, live streaming, and user maps for participants.  A number of protesters have been arrested (I can't verify the numbers so I don't want to post incorrect ones), some based on an obscure law preventing masks during protests. Others have been brutally roughed up (as the photos below show), including one who allegedly had police pile onto him as he was having an asthma attack. I've also posted below a video of the Verizon workers who on strike to keep their tenuous hold on the middle class.

A photo photos from @Hatofhornigold (with permission; thank you! If you Twitter, do follow this real-life mariner!)

http://twitgoo.com/4jawpe @OccupyWallStreet

http://twitgoo.com/4jm83t. @occupywallstreetnyc

http://twitgoo.com/4jaype @OccupyWallStreet

http://twitgoo.com/4jmgwp Crowd raises hands to show they approve civil rights lawyer Sam Cohen's offer to represent us #OccupyWallStreet

Debt-Limit Ceiling Blues (Or Obama the Moderate Republican, Revisited)

Though the looming disaster of the US Congress's failure raise the debt-limit ceiling, a procedural vote that has been fairly routine in the past, has been a topic I've debated writing about for weeks now, what provoked today's post was seeing yet again in a New York City MTA station--23rd St., at 6th Avenue to be exact--a young mother, with children (this young woman had both a 5-6 year old and an infant who could have been no more than half a year old) begging for cash to feed herself and her children. That, and thinking about the ongoing US 9-16% unemployment/underemployment rate, and reading in yesterday's New York Times about the extremely disturbing racial and ethnic wealth gap, caused to a huge degree by the 2008 economic collapse, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent explosion of joblessness and underemployment, guided me to today's entry. Seeing yet another young woman, with a child in tow, begging for money to feed herself and her child, on top of reading about the grim economic statistics particularly facing Black and Latino Americans, during this ongoing Great Recession (though it's allegedly "over") and then watching this sickening Grand Guignol play out in Washington, DC over the debt-limit ceiling vote, the deficit and the debt, is enough to make me want to go Robespierre.

Yes, I know the contemporary Republican Party is far to right even of its most recent White House incarnation, George W. Bush, let alone its icon, Ronald Reagan, and includes a raft of fantasists, nihilists and anarchists who would make William Godwin or Mikhail Bakunin jealous. Yes, I grasp that even with a near filibuster-proof majority, the Democrats in the Senate were too fractious to pass much of the legislation that their counterparts in the House, under Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), pushed through over and over. And yes, I know that almost immediately upon taking office President Barack Obama cast himself as a "centrist," hovering above the fray and rejecting what liberal, progressive and even some conservative economists argued were policies to address the employment crisis and rebuild the country after the bursting of the housing bubble and the gross dereliction of the Federal Reserve, ratings agencies, and Wall Street. His approach initially was more of the neoliberal same. Yes, I know that we have an establishment, mainstream media consisting of millionaires and millionaire wannabes, the children and heirs of millionaires or friends thereof, who are insulated from the problems millions of Americans face, and are more eager for "centrism" and "consensus" and splitting the difference and never calling the GOP out, even if these same media types vote for Democrats or call themselves "liberals" in secret.

But even taking all of these things into account, I find myself coming back to a basic question, and it centers on the president: was there any need whatsoever for Barack Obama to yoke the necessary, usually "clean" debt-ceiling limit vote to a crazy attempt to ram through "Shock Doctrine" style deficit cuts, including to vital social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, when before and since the 2008 economic collapse two basic economic facts have always been apparent: 1) creating JOBS would have the effect of lowering the deficit and government spending, because more jobs mean more tax revenues AND in the absence of jobs, people necessarily draw more on the invaluable social safety net, thus increasing the deficit and requiring more borrowing; and 2) by allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire--ALL OF THEM--resetting them to the marginal tax rates under Bill Clinton and with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in place, the country would plug a $4 TRILLION deficit hole over 10 years.  At almost no point since he took office, and certainly at no point whatsoever since the Republicans won the House in 2010 in part by terrifying seniors over claims that Obama had cut Medicare (!) through implementation of Obamacare, has the president made either of these facts clear. The first is so self-evident that it would likely have only needed to take root with a little nurturing, while the second definitely needed to be restated by every liberal in Washington, though it's increasingly clear that neither will get much airing, because the endgame of the current and future circuses involving Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans is to permanently lower taxes on the rich, gut social safety net programs, and transfer more of society's burdens onto the middle-class, working class and poor. Ancien régime, c'est nous!

Back in January 2010, after a year of exasperation at our then-new president, whom I not only enthusiastically voted for but helped to elect (both to the presidency and to his prior seat, as the junior US Senator from Illinois), I posted a blog entry, "Is Barack Obama Really Colin Powell," asking whether in effect we had elected a moderate Republican--Colin Powell--rather than a liberal Democrat to the nation's highest office. As is often the case with these blog posts, it merited little response, but that did not surprise me.  Since Barack Obama's election, I have often felt loath in criticizing the president, and family members and most of my friends have not wanted to hear any criticism from me or anyone else of the president, certainly not from his diehard opponents on the right, nor from those who, appealing from the left and having supported him, have felt great disappointment what portended to be a transformational presidency rapidly slips away.  Despite some early positive signs, such as his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court, which remains, I think, one of the most important achievements of his presidency; his signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009; and decision to bail out of General Motors and Chrysler, again and again whenever Obama has tended to choose neoliberal or sometimes even conservative options over liberal or progressive ones, and the former tendency has grown stronger over the last year, particularly after the Republican assumption of the House in 2010.

Even when I wrote my earlier post, was still willing to give Obama an opportunity to show that in fact he was not what I feared, someone seeking not only to extend Bill Clinton's neoliberal economic approaches (i.e., Rubinomics, which was exactly the route he took, appointing as Treasury Secretary Wall Street agent Timothy Geithner and as his chief economic advisor former Harvard University president and notorious bully and deregulatory guru Larry Summers), but many of the worst supply-side economic theories of Ronald Reagan and the neoconservative geopolitical and military approaches of George W. Bush. Well, one year later, I think it's clear that my worst fears have not only been confirmed but exceeded. In that earlier post, I even mentioned that Obama had thus far avoided Herbert Hoover's approach, in 1929, of tepid governmental approaches coupled with austerity, volunteerism, and market-based boosterism, and that a president Powell might very well have taken the earlier Republican president's model as his own, but as of July 27, 2011, it's fair to say, as The New Republic's John Judis argues, that President Obama has doubled down on Hooverism, not only adopting his predecessor's rhetoric, but intensifying the failed economic policies such that he has called for greater spending cuts and inadequate tax increases that exceed even the expectations of the average Republican voter! Obama's Deficit Commission, also known as Simpson-Bowles, was unable to agree on a recommendation because several of its clearheaded Democratic members and more obstinate Republican ones refused to be railroaded into buying into the economically problematic approaches that have long been pushed by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Foundation, and similar right-wing and libertarian propaganda outfits, whose endgame is, as I suggested above, lower personal and corporate federal marginal tax rates  (Peterson is a billionaire so he benefits handsomely, as would his heirs), privatization or gutting of social safety net programs (privatized Social Security would benefit Peterson, a hedge funder, and also flood Wall Street with cash), and increased economic burdens on middle-class, working-class and poor people (because in the absence of a safety net, we're on our own).

President Obama & House Speaker
John Boehner, R-OH, on the
first green as they golf
at Andrews AFB, MD
Saturday, June 18, 2011.
Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Now, I read enough blogs and websites (via fastnewsReader and other apps!) to grasp that I was not alone in my appraisal of Obama back in January 2010.  Since then, though, I have read more and more folks coming to a similar conclusion and level of dismay. One of my favorite bloggers (and public intellectuals), who has been repeatedly proved right in his assessments and predictions, is Nobel laureate and Princeton University professor Paul Krugman, who, I should note, was critical of Obama's centrist stances during the primary season. (Krugman has, at the same time, praised Obama when praise is due.) Today, Krugman simply posted on his New York Times Conscience of a Liberal blog, "Obama, the Moderate Conservative." Krugman linked to a Fiscal Times piece by former Reagan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett asking, "Barack Obama: The Democrats' Richard Nixon." There is Salon writer Michael Lind's persuasive "Why the GOP Should Nominate Barack Obama in 2012," which walks through some of the same points I made back in 2010, though we all know that would never happen. Another online writer I regularly read, the brilliant gadfly lawyer Glenn Greenwald, posted months back that in fact Obama was not being forced to push such extreme plans--let's note again, to the right of even average Republican voters--but that he wanted to: "Obama's 'bad' negotiating is actually shrewd negotiating." And, to be fair, as Greenwald notes, some commentators, like Digby of Hullabaloo, warned even before Obama took office that he was pushing for that hideous "Grand Bargain" establishment Washington and New York's elite want so badly: cutting Social Security and Medicare, and lowering personal and corporate taxes to ensure the social safety net can never be adequately funded again. I could go on, but I'll stop here because it's numbing to continue.

So what about that young woman and her two children, seeking money just to eat, or the others I've written about on here, or the millions I haven't mentioned, all around us, barely hanging on? Well, they're nowhere in mind among those participating in the Washington carnival as it's unfolding. All the "fiscal austerity" we're being subjected to means things will get even worse for her--and everyone else, except the billionaires, bondholders, corporate execs, etc.--before they get better.  We may have a something akin to a budget default if the President cannot persuade the two houses of Congress to pass one of the two competing horrid bills they've submitted, or, in the absence of such, refuses to invoke the 14th Amendment to honor the nation's debts. (We should never forget that the Treasury very well could print money until forever if it wanted to.) We may or may not get some of the severe cuts-coupled-with-inadequate revenues that the President/Republicans/Washington establishment/Wall Street are jonesing for, but it's unlikely we're going to see him or any other major Democratic politician (Bernie Sanders, I-VT, is an independent) not only call for a major jobs program but vocally defend the social safety net at the very moment when its existence is proving invaluable. It's unlikely Barack Obama will face a third-party primary challenger from the left or even a viable left-leaning third-party candidate in the general election, since the various third-party organizations now being touted are just more center-right establishmentarianism seeking tax cuts and a gutted safety net, i.e., failed GOP policies. Would I vote for someone primarying Barack Obama? I don't know. Would I vote for a 3rd party candidate like Ralph Nader? I didn't in 2000 and I'm not sure I would in 2012. Would I just not vote at all? On top of this, and I gather the people in the White House just don't care, are clueless or have some hidden strategy I just can't grasp, the possible GOP nominee may run on an economically populist program given the president's intransigence on addressing the unemployment problem, she or he will very likely be even worse, since current GOP plans would do even more severe damage to the fragile US economy, as conservative policies are demonstrating in the UK right now.  In terms of Obama's GOP challenger, I still think John McCain would have been worse on every issue, but then again, other than Justice Sotomayor, can I be sure of that?

Right now, we're stuck, and liberals and progressives might want to think very carefully about how to proceed, given the lack of any channels to anyone running anything in Washington these days. I hate to end on such a down note, but we're in a very ugly place right now, and that young woman and her two children, and millions more like them, will be hanging on by a wing and a prayer and the beneficence of others, while the people in Washington, including the President himself, fight their damnedest to give even more of what's left of this country to those who already have almost all of it.

Dems Proceed on HCR09 + US in Shambles + Blade Closes + Partió Blas Jiménez

I'm glad that the last two holdouts in the Democratic caucus, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D-AR), have decided to vote with the rest of their caucus and allow the debate on the combined health care bill Harry Reid (D-NV) debuted earlier this week to proceed. Recalcitrants like these two, as well as Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have repeatedly dispelled the illusion of party cohesion that the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senate Campaign Committee love to sell; while the Senate Democrats have helped to pass some important, mostly small-bore legislation since taking power in 2006, they continue to slog along as if the GOP were still in control, failing again and again to show real leadership on any of the major issues that face the country. Instead, what the public sees is a glacially moving body, full of right-wing ranters and moderate milquetoasts, taking a scattered and often seemingly ineffective approach to everything. Above all, the needs of Congress's corporate masters come first.

Perhaps it has often, if not always, been this way, but the close-but-unfinished health care reform effort, the ongoing wars and related national security issues, and the economic crisis all throw into high relief how ineffective the United States' upper house continues to be. That said, it increasingly looks like the Democrats will pass a health care reform bill that, while not perfect, will be better than earlier indications suggested. Though the single-payer option is going, the final bill probably will have a public insurance plan; it probably will allow people to opt out of terrible current plans instead of being locked into them; it probably will provide adequate subsidies for a sizable portion of working- and lower-middle families; and it will stop insurance companies from some of their worst practices, such as dropping people because of "pre-existing" conditions, jacking up rates when people get sick, and turning the entire process of dealing with the health care system into a free-for-all lottery. The Senate bill, like the House bills, also includes horrendous anti-immigrant and anti-reproductive rights provisions, and it does not adequately address the for-profit nature of the system, which means that US consumers spend anywhere from twice to three times as much per capita per year as our industrialized peers, and it doesn't have enough in it to drive down insurance costs or drug prices, another baleful aspect of the current American healthcare landscape.

As the bill undergoes continual weakening and diminishment, it makes me wonder whether the Democrats, despite getting so far, will be able to pass it, either by majority with or without a single Republican vote, or by reconciliation, thereby taking a page from the GOP, and if they do so and President Obama in the end signs it, whether it will anything more than a mostly hollow victory. Continual public pressure on the Congress seems to be the only way ensure even minimal fidelity to the people's business, so you know what we all must do:

Call/write/fax your Representative
Call/write/fax your Senators

Urge everyone you know to do so to. Now is a very perilous period for the health care reform bill, and anything progressive.

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Things are really grim economically across the US and much of the world; this isn't news. I see and feel it in varying ways, and often have to force myself not to dwell on how it's affecting so many people I know well, as well as those I don't. Then I read an article like the ones below and I start to feel more than a little worried; things are much, much worse than they seem, and yet the people running the government, corporate heads, the mainstream media all seem so blasé, indifferent, or incapable to getting their acts together.

Alternet.org: 15 Signs the Country Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Longer piece: Amped Status: The Critical Unraveling of US Society

Despite all the grim indicators--including the 123 banks that have failed so far this year--believe the country will turn around, but given the approach of those leading the government and many corporate leaders, it's going to be a painful process, and there's no guarantee that we won't be even worse off if the main perpetrators--their enablers remain in power--behind the mess we're in somehow inveigle their way back to full power using false-populism, lies, propaganda, and anything else that works.

One issue I've thought about a lot is the Congress's inability to reform the financial industries or sector. One key issue is the "too-big-too-fail" problem. As I've mentioned before on this blog, my first post-undergrad job was in banking, when commercial and investment banks were forbidden by law from merging or sharing certain key functions, when banks could not operate across state lines, and when certain other regulatory controls dating from the period of the New Deal were still strongly in place. Even with those safeguards, in October 1987, one month after I began my very brief banking career, stock markets across the world witnessed their biggest crashes in decades. This was also during a period when the US dollar was comparatively weak, and the country was struggling with the deficits that had built up during the previous 8 years of massive tax cuts, defense spending binges, rising deregulation, and gross underinvestment in public and private infrastructure. The US had seen two recessions under Reagan, I believe, and would see an even worse one in a few years under HW Bush. And yet a little over a decade later, in the late 1990s, after the economic upswing, financial policymakers led by Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would do everything they could to gut what remained of the New Deal safeguards, working hand-in-glove with people like Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) to repeal the Glass-Steagall Acts of 1932 and 1933, which had maintained one of the last walls prevent a return to 1920s-style laissez-faire capitalism. Many of these policymakers and their adepts are in place today; we have a libertarian Republican as Fed Chair. We have a neoliberal centrist from the Rubin school, who made disastrous bets at his previous job, coordinating economic policy for the administration. We have a lackey for longtime financial megagambler Goldman Sachs as Treasury Secretary. The already big banks are considerably bigger, and several will be handing out more in bonuses--record bonuses--this year than some states' budget deficits. How it all will shake out, I don't know. But as the Alternet piece suggests, things are pretty grave and could get ugly. Very, very ugly. I hope and pray they won't.

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I recently participated in some heavy backchannel lamenting about the collapse of the Washington Blade, one of the nation's premier LGBTQ newspapers which had just celebrated its 40th birthday; its sibling newspaper, The Southern Voice in Atlanta, and of its parent company, Window Media, the owner of several other LGBTQ-focused newspapers and periodicials in the country.

The culprit, from what I can tell, is the current dismal economic environment. Several publications in New York and other cities have also fallen by the wayside over the last year. I agree with the argument that with the ongoing development of the Internet and new online media have come a range of new means for disseminating news, conducting investigations, and fostering advocacy and knowledge production around LGBTQ issues, but I also think we shouldn't underestimate the value and necessity of traditional news organizations, including the much smaller but once vital issues and identity-oriented ones, like the Blade. It and newspapers like it have played and continue to play an important role especially during a period when some certainties about how far the society has shifted on LGBTQ and other issues are being called into question. At her David R. Kessler lecture several weeks ago, Sarah Schulman noted, among her many wise points, that "we are dismantling" many of our longstanding institutions--or we are allowing them to be dismantled--at the very moment that we may need them more than ever. Perhaps these vivid manifestations of ongoing struggles remind us that we aren't yet in the post-everything (post-gay, post-race, etc.) worlds that have been proclaimed for quite some time.

Some articles suggest that the Blade may resume publication under different auspices, perhaps as an employee-owned paper or as a not-for-profit, the latter being a model I'm surprised isn't discussed even more as journalism in general takes hit after hit.

===

A friend, translator, scholar and librarian Herbert R., recently sent word of the passing of one of the Dominican Republic's important poets, Blas Jiménez (at left), on November 13. One of the most stalwart expositors and champions of the DR's African heritage--90% of Dominicans have African ancestry, a higher percentage than almost every other country in the Americas except Haiti, Jamaica, and the predominantly Black Caribbean islands--Jiménez had a rich and varied career, as an award-winning journalist; essayist; professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra; TV producer and host of Página Abierta, radio producer and host of La Mañana en Antena; as Secretary General of the DR's national commission for the United Nations Organization for Education, Culture and Communication (UNESCO). For over a decade he worked at the International Education Resource Center, where he developed courses on Afro-Dominican and Caribbean culture and literature.

Amidst all of this great work, he was also and perhaps best known as a poet, and especially as a "poeta de negritud." His works include the volumes Aqui... Otro Español (Here...Another Spanish), Caribe Africano en Despertar (African Caribbean Waking Up), Exigencias de un Cimarrón (Exigiences of a Maroon), and El Nativo (The Native). With highly regarded scholars Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández, he co-edited the book Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (From the Edge: Towards a Nationality Without Evictions). His death, as this very brief note makes clear, is a major loss for Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diasporic literature and culture.

Belichick's Cheating

I figured Arlen Specter might be good for something. Pennsylvania's armadillo of a Senator finally got the NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, to reveal something some people have long suspected: that New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick (photo at right, Newsdayblogs.com) has been taping opposing teams' defenses since 2000, when he took over as head coach.

Specter says this is illegal. Goodell disagrees with Belichick's actions and suggests they're not okay (i.e., illegal?), but took no action, at least none that the public knows about, until the Patriots were blatantly caught spying on the sad-sack New York Jets before the first game of this past season, the very season that the Patriots were waltzing through, undefeated, until they ran smack into the New York Giants for a second time, in the Super Bowl. It turns out that the NFL had looked into Belichick's cheating going back to 2002, but said zero about it until this revelation. To Specter.

Belichick, who has more than once demonstrated a lack of class, claims he wasn't doing anything wrong. Since 2000. At any rate, Goodell levied a slap on the wrist and then, unaccountably, destroyed all the evidence from the investigation. The tapes, everything else. He claims it could have gotten into the wrong hands. Like a prosecutors? Specter, who rarely if ever raises a voice of protest about the Bush administration's destruction of evidence (cf. White House emails, etc.) or the Constitution for that matter, did seem to be vexed by these strange and possibly illegal goings on. I doubt anything will come of this, and the sports media, which adore Belichick as one of the greatest coaches ever, have, from what I can tell, mostly been silent.

Most of the articles on this huge revelation I first came across were AP stories, or versions thereof. Or foreign media accounts. The people who've invested so much of their reputations in pumping up Belichick are silent. My questions: Who on the Patriots knew about this, and did anyone on any other teams know about this? Did Patriots owner Robert Kraft know that Belichick was engaging in this activity? How long has the NFL known what Belichick was up to? Will the "genius" and his team be stripped of their Super Bowl championships? Will he be officially sanctioned, if not by the NFL, which appears to have participated in a cover-up, by Specter and Congress? Will the NFL suffer any penalties, such as the loss of its anti-trust exemption? Should I even been wasting energy on this issue, given the 1,000 other pressing issues out there, but also give how our culture has utterly normalized cheating, spying, and unfair advantages?

I think of well-known athletes decried as cheaters, such as Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, etc., and I wonder, will this high profile but incredibly sleazy coach receive relentlessly hellish treatment anywhere near what they've endured? (Cf. Roger Clemens.) I have my doubts.

Classes + Myanmyar + Strike Over + Kehinde Wiley Busts

CLASSES BEGIN
It's the first day of classes, and so far, so good! Such smart students, all of them are avid readers, and among the writers they listed as their favorites were Dostoyevsky, Ellison, Hemingway, Kerouac, Flaubert, Melville, Vonnegut, Murakami, and Salinger. Who teaching writing wouldn't want to start with such a baseline!

(That's me at right, in my office, in front of the Luis Luma painting and Ella Turenne's Neg Maron print.)

MACARTHUR AWARDS
Congratulations to the 24 recent recipients of MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowships! One is my colleague at the university, the rightly esteemed and remarkable fiction writer and poet Stuart Dybek; another is the New York-based artist Whitfield Lovell, who follows his partner Fred Wilson in receiving this honor (thanks for the h/t, Bernie); another is the blues musician Corey Harris; the playwright Lynn Nottage, whose Intimate Apparel received excellent reviews when it debuted several years ago; and vocalist Dawn Upshaw, best known for her work in opera and contemporary art song. Congratulations to them and to all the other recipients!

2007 CAVE CANEM PRIZE TO RONALDO WILSON
Ronaldo Wilson, one of the founders of the Black Took Collective, is the 2007 Cave Canem Prize Winner! Congratulations, Ronaldo! His prose-poetic manuscript, The Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, was selected by judge Claudia Rankine. Serena! F.I.E.R.C.E.ness, and I think it's fair to say that Cave Canem has shown how expansive its aesthetics are with this and last year's selection, of Dawn Lundy Martin's first book of poems! This year's runners up were R. Erica Doyle (!!!) and Nicole Terez Dutton. Congratulations to both of them too, so much fierceness in one year.

PROTESTS IN MYANMAR
The protests in Myanmar, which I highlighted a few days ago, continue to gain international attention, especially now that the government's security forces have started to brutally suppress them. Again, I am impressed and moved by the courage of the Buddhist monks, held in the highest esteem by their society, to put their lives on the line to challenge the horrible, oppressive conditions and the military dictatorship that has imposed them in that country.

The US has propose new sanctions, but I keep hearing that China is the lone country that can put pressure on the ruling junta and its government, and supposedly China may have already done so, but after the defense forces attacked, shot and arrested a number of the monks yesterday, it's clear that China's input may have its limits, though perhaps harsher penalties, such as cutting off arms sales, political support, and other forms of cooperation may do the trick. But does China want to buttress pro-democracy efforts in a neighboring country when its own record is so horrible? Would it, and wouldn't that be telling its own people to try something according to the Tianenmen Square rallies and protests again, despite the country's economic successes? Would the business élite even support such a move, or are they too intimately linked these days to the Chinese government?

So what is to be done to help the people there? What can the rest of the world do? Will US sanctions have any effect at all?

UAW STRIKE OVER
I woke to the NPR news that the United Auto Workers (UAW) had called off its strike against General Motors (GM) because the two sides had reached a compromise during their all-night negotations. Supposedly the agreement hinges on GM creating a retirement health care benefits trust fund, to be administered by the UAW, that will relieve a huge financial burden from the carmaker's books. Hearing this I immediately thought that if we had single-payer, government financed, comprehensive, cradle-to-grave health care, there'd be no need for such a trust fund, and GM, thus relieved of one of its major competitive setbacks, would face having to produce better, more affordable, and more appealing cars. Note to Democrats: this is another gift horse staring you in the face. It also makes me wonder about the old pension system, which many corporations exploited for their own gain and little penalty, at the expense of retirees and US taxpayers. If GM had a real, well-invested, well-managed pension, this turn of events also would not have come to pass. But the world of pensions of old is gone; in fact, as we saw in 2004, we can never relax our vigilance about making sure that Social Security remains viable and properly funded. I'm glad, though, for the GM workers who were about to face a terrible hardship; at least for now they can sleep a little easier.

SCHIP + WAR FUNDING
Yes, this isn't an original argument and it's so obvious it could be in a Bob Herbert column--I enjoy reading him, but you get my drift--but it looks like W will veto the SCHIP bill, which doesn't have a veto-proof majority in the House, because of the GOP, claiming that the $35 billion is too costly and that more American middle-class families will avail themselves of a public, government-funded program, and yet he's sent his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, up to Capital Hill to request $190 billion in additional funding for the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, if SCHIP fails to be funded, poor American children would be the first to suffer.

Gall, shamelessness and arrogance don't come close to describing this man and his government!

Senate Majority Reid vowed the other day not give in to more of Bush's shenanigans. I'll believe it when I see it, but as a Republican Senator suggested about SCHIP, the House should keep reintroducing the bill over and over, and forcing the president to veto it. Eventually enough Republicans will be embarrassed enough that rather than tethering themselves to his sinking ship, they'll join the Democrats to provide enough votes for an override vote. As for the war funding, tell the president absolutely NOT until the information and testimony the Democratic chairs have requested on a range of Iraq-related issues, such as the gross corruption, Blackwater's actions, the faulty equipment (this week brought the news that the infantry must contend with guns that frequently jam, unlike their opponents!), and so forth, are adequately addressed. And don't worry about the American people; we're quite aware of the scare tactics and demagoguery this administration is going to tuse.

KEHINDE WILEY BUSTS AT CEREAL ART
Kehinde Wiley's work, drawing as it does upon current artworld and critical-theoretical trends and discussions around appropriation, the archive, Black and popular cultural studies and performance, and sexuality and gender studies, has fascinated me since I first saw it, but also confounded me somewhat as well.

His paintings (at right, a photo I took of his "Saint Andrew," oil on canvas, 7'x8', 2006 when C and I went to his "Scenic" show at the Rona Hoffman Gallery in River East, in Chicago) are physically breathtaking, especially when viewed up close, and increasingly polished in terms of their technique, while also deeply suffused with an irony-edged eros, but I feel like he's found a socially and commercially viable strategy and keeps, well, exploiting it, a strategy that's meant to appeal, rather obviously, to the powers that be in the artworld, while please the Folks along the way.

His evidently and playfully ironic use of Eurocentric references, both as ground (composition, figuration, etc.) and in the titles--which I think of as falling in a long and broad lineage, but in a specifically queer way to Bob Thompson, for example, though Wiley is very interested in aspects of mimetic realism and expressionism, whereas Thompson, who wasn't gay, was far more grounded in abstraction and the emerging color-field school--underlines this so forcefully for me. Nothing unusual there, and he's well within the mainstream, both of the past and of today. But were he engaged in a more resistent form of détournement, say, or using classical Chinese models, for example, would his work, whose technical achievement is undeniable, be as celebrated? Would it be dismissed as Afro-Chinoiserie, or not discussed at all? (And what would that kind of work, a more complex and provocative anti-Afro-Orientalism, say, look like?) As I said, Wiley's not the only person, in visual arts or any other area of the arts, who's doing this, but I can't stop thinking about it when I consider his work. We all to some extent work with the terms set before us, but where does the limit lie? Is it unfair for me, an admirer of his work, to introduce these questions into the debate?

I'm still very drawn to his work, and so when I received a recent email from Cereal Art in Philadelphia about the availability of a new set of his busts, including his "After La Negresse, 1872," I had to check them out. I've never seen this in person, but they appear to replicate the formal and thematic concerns of the large paintings in this new form, which I think increases the layers of irony (cast marble and resin busts, all white, etc.) and humor--to what end? I don't think I have an answer, but I'm enjoying looking at them.

Cereal Art is selling them as a "special project" at $1400 a pop. What do you think?