America MUST Learn From Its Flaws

I've already said my thoughts about the Republican attacks on teaching history - their fear about how racist our past has been and how that racism defines us now - but it helps to hear from another voice like Rude Pundit, who spells things out in a more blunt but effective manner: 

When I was applying for jobs in academia years ago, I figured that, depending where I was applying, my whiteness and maleness would work against me or in my favor. It never occurred to me to resent the idea that I might lose out to an equally qualified non-white person or a woman because I believe that diversity in education is an imperative to maybe, perhaps one day overcoming or at least ameliorating the effects of racism and sexism. On more than one occasion, some other white guy would ask me if I was upset that I might lose out on a dream job because of affirmative action or diversity hiring. 

And my answer was always the same: "I'm not angry at people today for getting jobs. I'm not angry at people today for considering race and sex as factors. I am pissed off as hell at all the stupid, racist, sexist white men in the past who fucked it all up." 

See, what gets me, time and again, is trying to conceive of all the people whose genius, whose talent, whose abilities were never even given a chance because of the actual laws and the unspoken rules of white male domination and oppression. If you really think about it, that loss is overwhelming. It's incalculable. And it is frankly entirely rational, entirely normal, entirely expected that trying to wrap your head around it is going to make a white person feel like shit. 

Frankly, we white people should feel shame. We should feel anger. And rather than deny those feelings, rather than repress them and revolt against them, we should embrace them, learn from them, and grow from them. Otherwise, we'll just keep doing all the things that make future whites ashamed and angry, perpetuating the very system that we're pretending we've defeated... 

History is not some distant memory, some tale to be told over dinner or a campfire like a fable of old. History is living, reaching from the past affecting the actions we take today as we attempt to redefine our futures.

If what you get from that is that white people are bad and that you don't want to feel bad, that's on you. For chrissake, as a white person, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the fact that the country wouldn't exist without the enslavement of one race and the genocide of another, both done by white people? Why wouldn't I feel like shit that the white-run government didn't enforce the very laws that it created to bring about equality between the races? Why in the world wouldn't I feel like shit about lynching and terrorism by whites against Black people? As someone who grew up white in the south, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the Supreme Court-endorsed apartheid that prevented Black people from prospering for a hundred years after slavery? Why wouldn't I feel like shit about policies like red-lining and banking discrimination and environmental ghettoes? We're now talking about things white people have done in my lifetime, not 400 years ago. 

Goddamn, you'd have to be so deep in denial, so delusional, so sociopathic to not think that whiteness has been used as a weapon against non-white people. Don't tell me not to feel like hell. Tell me how you agree that we need to accept it, teach it, learn it, and change it...

The Republicans - driven by their cultural conservativism and their religious puritanism and their greed - dare not confront that past because it exposes the sins they are committing now in their pursuit of permanent political power. They cannot share that power with others they deem inferior by race and by gender and by creed. So they wage war on our nation's own history, to purge it of our sins like Rosewood and Tulsa and Sand Creek and Camp Logan and Port Chicago and the Trail of Tears.

Rather than learn from those horrors, the wingnut Right would have us all forget it... so they can repeat those mistakes in the here and now.

We're seeing the results already of the conservative witch hunt against teachers exposing racism: A Tennessee school board fired a teacher for quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates' works. Say hello to the modern update of Jim Crow, America. You're not reading this in your history books, you're reading this on today's Twitter feed.

Republicans don't want us to learn, Republicans don't want America to reform and refocus and improve. They don't want to do the smart, simple thing that Rude Pundit and I agree our nation needs to do:

A truly great country doesn't have to keep saying it's great. A truly great country can handle more than one idea about itself. A truly great country is one that recognizes its mistakes and treats them as the chance to become, what's the phrase, "a more perfect union," as our flawed, racist, but, yes, wise founders said.

Imposing Silence Against Racism And Our Nation's White Boy Sins (w/ Update)

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment - I know the security is a hassle but I need to filter out the Chinese spammers...)

Saying this up front: The Republicans are doing this out of fear.

It's been an issue simmering for some time but ever since the George Floyd verdict and the ongoing struggle of the Far Right to rail against anything that paints them in a bad light, the Republicans have declared WAR on Critical Race Theory and are banning its teachings in public schools. Especially here in goddamned Florida under the faint-hearted eye of Gov. DeSantis (via Julia Craven at Slate (paywall warning)):

On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted unanimously, at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, to ban lessons that employ critical race theory (CRT) or the New York Times’ 1619 Project from schools. The vote aligns with initiatives in several other states such as Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Iowa. 

Florida’s amendment takes an existing rule saying instruction “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holcaust” and adds “slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country...”

While that reads as though the Board is protecting teachers to teach on those matters, the ruling actually bans them from using any materials from the award-winning 1619 Project, which had studied the impact of racial slavery since the British colonial era.

Even as it bans specific themes and texts, though, Florida’s amendment doesn’t define exactly which historical or factual claims are off-limits.

CRT is a decades-old set of ideas from the legal academy, which began to be a low-grade source of right-wing panic about racism during the Obama administration. Since the anti-racism protests of 2020 and the end of the Trump administration, though, it has rapidly become an all-purpose term to attack any sort of discussion of the history or current conditions of racial inequity in America.

Nothing academically recognizable as critical race theory is currently being taught anywhere in Florida, according to officials who spoke with the Miami Herald. Yet DeSantis has continued his campaign against it anyway, telling reporters last month: “You teach the facts. You teach everything that has happened. But critical race theory is basically race essentialism. It teaches people to view that as the most important characteristic and obviously, if you are of certain races—Caucasian or whatnot—they view that in a negative light.”

It's not even being taught at the public school level - it's primarily discussed in law schools - but DeSantis and other Republicans are still acting terrified that something like it will trickle down into the regular history classes as more studies on racism's impact on our history become commonplace.

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American...

What is REALLY happening here is that DeSantis - by forcing the state to impose these restrictions on our schools - is setting the foundation for ANY parent aggrieved and upset about Whites being labeled "racist" can sue to stop ANY class discussion about racism in our nation's (and Florida's) history. The matter may not directly be Critical Race Theory, but if the parent gets one whiff of "oh my God this makes my White ancestors look bad" they will go ballistic and use this ruling to shut it down.

What DeSantis is doing is literally whitewashing our history to make it look clean and happy and "oh, don't you mind about the decades of lynchings and centuries of abuse" and every other thing Proud White Boys don't want to worry about. The excuse that "making Whites look racist is a Marxist attack on THE GOOD OLE USA" just also happens to be the same damn excuse throughout the 20th Century for racists - from the Dixiecrats of yesteryear to the trumpian GOP of today - to ignore the damage they've done and are still doing. 

If you follow my blog, you got to have read Ta-Nehisi Coates at some point. His tenure at The Atlantic covered a lot of ground in researching the impact racism had to our history well into the modern era. His articles on redlining - the push by banks and realtors to undervalue Black housing and overvalue White neighborhoods - and his argument in favor of reparations to redress that damage are must-reads of the last twenty years. This is the kind of thing DeSantis and other Republicans would be terrified of seeing taught or discussed in our schools, because GOD FORBID Coates' work highlighted how racism was actual policy pushed by Whites in political and financial power.

If you grew up in Florida, you may have heard about Rosewood. Most likely you hadn't, because it's not often taught in our schools here. I didn't learn about it in the state history book I read back in third grade: I read about it in the 1982 St. Pete Times articles instead. It was through the newspapers I learned about the white riot that burned an entire Black town down, killed dozens and drove the survivors to flee halfway across the state... all because a White woman lied about getting assaulted by a Black man.

Do you think if a teacher started teaching Rosewood in a Clearwater high school classroom that DeSantis is going to allow that to even be discussed? It could all bring up stuff about RACISM that will offend the overly sensitive Whites...

Note: Yes, I am White myself. I'm just not a goddamn whiny bitch about it. I know racism exists and I've seen the damage being done right now and we ought to be FIXING THESE DAMN PROBLEMS instead of sweeping it all under the goddamn rug like we've done the last 150 years.

If you watch the history of how history is taught in the United States, you will notice a pattern: the Far Right - the ultra-religious, the ultra-patriotic, the ultra-assholes - will insist that history ALWAYS preach to the greatness of our nation and the proud heritage of what being an American should be. You'll notice those same people will quickly ignore, denounce, decry, or embellish any of the dirtier parts of our nation's start and growth - the chattel slavery of Blacks, the Trail of Tears and other forced relocations of Native tribes into harsh reservations, the anti-Chinese riots, the anti-Mexican animosity - because they don't want to be reminded that their cozy wonderful lives were all built on the pain and suffering of others who just happened to be Black/Latino/Asian/Other.

These are the same people who tried to shut down AP History exams in 2014 because they feared those classes would teach kids to be "Un-American" due to all the racism being discussed. 

The Far Right - the ignorant and ill-informed Republican Party from the lowest member to the fearful Governors right up to trump and Mitch and the Fox Not-News propagandists - don't want anyone to really see the warts and bruises of our American History: Because that might compel our nation to seek repairs, resolve old issues, heal old wounds... the same issues and wounds the Far Right twists into self-victimization of themselves in order to fearmonger to their audiences.

The goddamned Far Right would rather preach mythology than cope with the facts. They would impose silence where they cannot convince, and they will enforce their character by the sword of liars instead of the facts of history.

And that plays into that goddamned adage: Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But the Republicans WANT that, they want us to repeat the same mistakes because it keeps them in power. They want us to stay racist and broken, because it profits them to leave our nation that way.

We need to learn from our mistakes, we need to learn how racism hurt our nation, we need to comprehend how that racism keeps us weak not proud. We need to rebuild and become the stronger just nation our history bends toward.

We need to tell DeSantis and his fearmongering kind to go away. They're not protecting America, they're defending the soft weak worries of racists. Go away, you hypocrites and ignorant. We got better work to do.

A Second Chance To Restore the Long Arc Towards Justice

I just want to post a link here to an important, must-read essay by Adam Serwer at The Atlantic, regarding our nation's poor civil rights history, and the chance we face today of making good on the promises of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era:

Trump was elected president on a promise to restore an idealized past in which America’s traditional aristocracy of race was unquestioned. But rather than restore that aristocracy, four years of catastrophe have—at least for the moment—discredited it. Instead of ushering in a golden age of prosperity and a return to the cultural conservatism of the 1950s, Trump’s presidency has radicalized millions of white Americans who were previously inclined to dismiss systemic racism as a myth, the racial wealth gap as a product of Black cultural pathology, and discriminatory policing as a matter of a few bad apples...

The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening—in 1868. The story of that awakening offers a guide, and a warning. In the 1860s, the rise of a racist demagogue to the presidency, the valor of Black soldiers and workers, and the stories of outrages against the emancipated in the South stunned white northerners into writing the equality of man into the Constitution. The triumphs and failures of this anti-racist coalition led America to the present moment. It is now up to their successors to fulfill the promises of democracy, to make a more perfect union, to complete the work of Reconstruction...

You need to read the whole thing. It's arguably one of the most important works on modern racism - and its long deep roots to a failed Reconstruction - since Ta-Nehisi Coates' tenure - especially his brilliant argument "The Case For Reparations" - at that magazine.

Fixing Inequality in 2019 Means Reparations. Deal With It

It's been awhile since I've brought up one of the big influencers in my political worldview, Ta-Nehisi Coates. But he showed up today at a Congressional hearing about reparations - one of his most important essays and probably one of the biggest political calls to action in the last ten years - and he pretty much dropped a bomb on one of the worst men in the universe Mitch McConnell.

It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery. As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of America,” so that by 1836, more than 600 million, or more than half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: 3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined. The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling, nor persuasion, but torture, rape, and child trafficking. Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror. A campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell.

It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement. But the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy respects no such borders. And the God of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs, coup d’etats and convict leasing; vagrancy laws and debt peonage; redlining and racist G.I. bills; poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism. We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama, and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited Civil Rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago, and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the Majority Leader. What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Sen. McConnell’s “something”: it was 150 years ago and it was right now. The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women, and there is of course the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share.

The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism. To say that a nation is both its credits and its debts. That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings. That if D-Day matters, so does black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. Because the question really is, not whether we will be tied to the “somethings” of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them...

We are in 2019 facing major economic problems. Housing is unaffordable for almost half the population, much of them in poverty and many of them minorities. Income inequality is making more people poorer than ever before. When many Americans base their income on their homes - except for the uber-rich, who base it on stock market dividends - we can't ignore the damage being done to ourselves when we can't even afford a decent two-bedroom home to either buy or rent.

A strong argument can be made - HAS BEEN MADE - tying racism to poverty. This nation needs to break the cycle of poverty that has been haunting us for generations, and to do that we need to break the cycle of racism that's been feeding that poverty for the last 250 years.

Reparations matter. We can't avoid the argument anymore. And the United States needs to resolve this. Before we have no more homes, no more neighborhoods, no more communities worth a damn thing.

America's Original Sin, Given Human Form

For all my rage against donald trump as a con artist, a failure, and a horrifying mockery of a human being, I don't have the eloquence or skill to describe him the way Ta-Nehisi Coates does in his latest essay for The Atlantic.

You REALLY need to follow this link and read the whole thing.

Coates gives precise historical context how trump came to rise atop the Republican hill as a fearmongering white supremacist, giving form to 250-plus years of racial politics:

...To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible...

...Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic...

Here's the bit that should force every White trump voter to hang their heads in guilt (and to the non-White trump voters, what the hell were you thinking???):

The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.

You should really read the whole thing. The whole history of the United States brokering on slavery and racial divisions, the stuff that the Lost Causers would rather ignore while defending their Confederate statues, is what you need to read to understand just how fucked up our political system is: so desperate for White Power to stand above all others that it would risk the worst human being on the planet in our White House, destroying every institutional norm with his greed and stupidity, with his equally greedy and ill-informed lackeys adding to the inferno.

We should be better than this, America. That enough of you sided with trump is a horrifying reality that needs fixing.

So Who Really Makes Up the Voting Base For Trump? (w/ Update)

So Hillary got the Far Right in a snit this weekend by calling out "half" the Trump supporters for their racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and sexism:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables'. Right?” Clinton said to applause and laughter from the crowd of supporters at an LGBT for Hillary fundraiser where Barbra Streisand performed. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”

“And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,” she added.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it:

...One way of reporting on Clinton’s statement is to weigh its political cost, ask what it means for her campaign, or attempt to predict how it might affect her performance among certain groups. This path is in line with the current imperatives of political reporting and, at least for the moment, seems to be the direction of coverage. But there is another line of reporting that could be pursued—Was Hillary Clinton being truthful or not?

Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supporters hold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it.

When Hillary Clinton claims that half of Trump’s supporters qualify as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” data is on her side...

If I had to break it down, the Republican voting base - the biggest part of Trump's support - goes like this:

You have the traditional Republican voter, the ones who were raised since birth - or at least since their mid-life crisis - to vote habitually for the GOP regardless of who the candidate on the ticket is. These are the voters that Rude Pundit noted before would vote Republican even when it was their best interest to vote Democrat based on the issues. These are the ones who aren't really fully racist, they're merely prejudiced (there is a distinction, at least among themselves) and are genuinely nice to other ethnicities and would probably vote for reasonable social aid programs and keep public schools funded and stuff, they'd just rather everyone stay on their sides of the lines and not make a fuss about it. These are the ones who can't vote for Hillary Clinton even if Hillary guaranteed full-time jobs at $90,000 minimum across the board and non-fattening ice cream for life. I'd have to say these were the ones who didn't vote for Trump in the primaries but likely for the "Establishment" type candidates like Jeb, Kasich, or Rubio. That would be about 25 percent of the primary voter turnout (and a good number of business leaders who financially support the party).

You have the hardcore Far Right voter who obsess fully over the dogmatic positions for cutting taxes, slashing government regulations, shutting down Planned Parenthood, bringing back the standard neocon foreign policy stances but not exactly anything that would alienate our allies. These are the Republicans who have no problem with government shutdowns, or blocking anything to the Left of Barry Goldwater. They're relatively racist and sexist but are more subtle about how they sell themselves to the public knowing full well there are some lines you can't cross. At least not until they've got solid control of all three branches of government. These are the types who voted for the more radical candidates like Santorum, Huckabee, and the second place guy Cruz. I'd put them about 27 percent of the primary voter turnout (and with the other business leaders who are more wingnut, such as the Koch brothers).

And then you have the Real Trump supporters. The ones who... well...

The ones who display open rage at Latinos. Who can't wait for that Trump Wall to go up between the US and Mexico. Who can't wait for another Operation Wetback to drive out 11 million people. Who fully buy into Trump's accusations of Mexicans being rapists and thugs.

The ones who attack Muslims in public. Who buy into the fear-mongering that EVERY Muslim is a knife-wielding bomb-wearing killer driven by a hateful religion to kill "true" Christians.

The ones who express utter disdain - and violence - towards women. Who tend to be the ones on social media using it as an outlet for some pretty vulgar stuff. And who threaten to get worse.

These are the ones who went all in for Trump during the primaries around 45 percent.

Granted, these are just based on uneven - actually minor - primary turnout results, that do not cover the Independent voters who couldn't participate in any of the closed primaries. This is just a rough guess estimate, but it has the virtue of filling the polling numbers and support that the Far Right and Right-leaning voters are giving Trump right about now.

The scary thing is how the hater faction backing Trump is so large compared to the other Republican factions still struggling to stay afloat this election cycle.

Hillary may have apologized for saying "deplorable" stuff about Trump supporters but I'm with Coates on this. Hillary didn't lie.

And Hillary was more polite about it that I would have been. I've had called those half of Trump supporters - the neo-Nazis, the Klan, the Islamophobes, the Roger Aileses of their tribe - a bunch of assholes. And then I'd ask the saner members of the Republican Party forced to back Trump something along the lines of "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT YOUR OWN PARTY TURNING INTO A BUNCH OF MONSTERS?"

Update: PM Carpenter has less sympathy for the enablers of the "Deplorable", especially Ron Fouriner. To wit:

It is shocking, at long last it is still shocking, that Fournier (& Co.) could be so blind as to not see that only populist baskets of virtually undifferentiated deplorables could have elevated Mussolini and Hitler to the ultimate authority they sought. The latter deliberately distorted the origins of the national ills they addressed, while the latter of the latter pursued assorted scapegoats with unprecedented verve. And this — all of it — would have gone nowhere had it not been for the authoritarians' popular support; less than a majority, but popular enough. The lazy, the easily beguiled, the human detritus of pluralistic societies grabbed at the quick, brutal fixes of fascist appeals — and the indifferent or less enthusiastic supporters were really no better than the vigorously enthusiastic. They — all of them — were essentially one of a kind: deplorable...

...One may support an unbigoted, non-sexist, intellectually deep and quite curious if rather conventional pol, or one may support her point-by-point opposite with no blanket deplorability attached. Just how in God's name is that possible? Hillary's "gross" generalization was, is, incontestable: Roughly half (probably more) of Trumpeteers are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it." At least those are principles, of sorts. They may be contemptible principles, but they're principles as "philosophically" rooted as was National Socialism's anti-Semitism. Far less principled are the other half who support a megalomaniacal thug merely because he plays into the extravagances of Hillary-hatred. And Trump "has lifted them up" — all of 'em.

We can only hope the result of this election cycle is a decisive Trump and Republican loss across the board. And then the entire GOP - the party elected, their media pundit allies, their deep-pocket funders, their voters - needs to sit down in a room and figure out just how WRONG they all got this cycle.

A Tale Of Two Books (2015)

I need to get this review done before the year does.

I bought these two books at the same time.

This was back in July, when they were released to the public at roughly the same time.

Harper Lee's book was the more promoted and anticipated work. If you lived through high school American Lit, you read To Kill A Mockingbird. It was unavoidable: Lee's magnum opus about growing up in 1930s Deep South, a searing indictment of racism and cultural violence. It'd been rumored for decades that Lee wrote a follow-up book - it was in fact her original work, but her publisher talked her into re-writing with a focus on her main character's childhood and on father Atticus Finch - that had disappeared. It had actually been misplaced, and when it popped up there had been a bit of a legal and public scuffle over whether or not to publish Go Set a Watchman at all. Once the crying and the thou-shall-nots subsided, it went to market and broke several sales records... and quickly stirred up a whole new hornet's nest of trouble, which I shall discuss in short order.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' book had received some fanfare before release, due to Coates' growing reputation in the political punditry circles from his years of writing for The Atlantic and other publications, but his fame was nowhere near Lee's and his book Between the World and Me was a modest success compared to Watchman. But it received near-universal acclaim, won awards, and became the most-talked-about political essay - with people praising it or debunking it - of the year.

I bought both, and wanted to read both, and want to discuss both at the same time because both works deal with perhaps the key issue of the American idea of itself: the issue of racism, observed from differing points of view. From Lee's perspective as a liberal southern White of the then-Civil Rights struggle of the Fifties, and from Coates' perspective as an urban Black of the post-Civil Rights / Reagan era enduring the realities of a still-racist socio-political system.

Go Set A Watchman opens on the return of an adult Scout (aka Jean Louise) to the backwoods home town of Maycomb, Alabama. On a visit to see her aging father Atticus, Jean Louise confronts some of the still-standing cultural norms - the Jim Crow segregation - of the Deep South in the mid-1950s.

Watchman turns on a pivotal moment - Chapter 8 in fact - where Jean Louise discovers a shocking truth about her own father, someone she had viewed as a paragon among lesser mortals. Page 100 (of the hardcover) in fact, and Lee even gives us the time of hour when all illusions are shattered:

...Jean Louise was snatched from her quiet realm and left alone to protect her sensitive epidermis as best she could, on a humid Sunday afternoon at precisely 2:28 PM...

She discovers a pamphlet hidden among Atticus' reading materials. It's titled the Black Plague, and she takes some time to read it:

When she had finished, she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail, and walked into the kitchen. She held the pamphlet in front of her aunt.
"What is this thing?" she said.
Alexandra looked over her glasses at it. "Something of your father's."
Jean Louise stepped on the garbage can trigger and threw the pamphlet in.
"Don't do that," said Alexandra, "They're hard to come by these days."
(p.102)

That sound you heard when 500,000 readers got to those pages were a lot of hearts and souls getting broken all at the same time finding out that Atticus, dear old Atticus of To Kill A Mockingbird who stood up against the injustice of racism, was really racist all along.

It gets worse for Jean Louise as she hurries off to sneak into the meeting Atticus and his law partner Henry - and would-be suitor for Jean Louise - had scheduled that afternoon. She discovers it's a Citizen's Council meeting, and they're listening to a racist preacher espouse hatred to a nodding crowd. Confronting both Atticus and Henry about it, her outrage grows to the point where she plans on leaving the small town - and her family - forever.

Watchman has its flaws as a novel. You'd expect that from a publication that went to print without any editorial controls - we're essentially reading a rough draft because Lee's legal guardians were likely wary of having anyone "tweak" the novel and face accusations it wasn't really Lee's work - and with little realization how Watchman has continuity errors with Mockingbird. For starters, the centerpiece of Mockingbird - the rape trial involving Tom Robinson - turned out differently in Watchman where Atticus won the case - in 1930s Alabama?!?! - by arguing the "rape" was consensual. Someone with an eye towards making both novels fit their same histories would have fixed that to fit the more tragic ending in Mockingbird.

Where Watchman has a strength is its frank revelation of how pervasive racism was - still is - in the American Deep South.

One of the darker parts of the book is the final confrontation Jean Louise has, this time with her uncle - a doctor no less - who physically slaps her and then chews HER out for being prejudiced and narrow-minded judging her father. Domestic violence issue aside, a modern reader would notice the practice of "blaming the victim" here as Dr. Finch points out how Jean Louise has her own biases blinding her to how everyone has their own watchman, their own conscience, and that despite her realizations that Atticus is racist he still raised her to "set her own watchman" (hence the book title). The book ends with that tone, with Jean Louise reaching some kind of rapprochement with her father - Atticus expressing that's proud of her for standing her ground, Jean Louise admitting that Atticus has a point about the civil rights movement "moving too fast" and that she still loves him - although the events of the weekend have changed warmth to wariness.

It's a weak ending, but it's one that fits within the context of the 1950s when it was written. Racism was so ingrained into the cultural norms not only of the Deep South but across much of the nation. And it's not the blatant racism - the burning crosses, the hanging nooses - that Harper Lee is focusing on in this novel, it's the unthinking and reflexive kind that she brings up: the sharing of racist literature among the community, the public meetings of "councils" to discuss how to keep "outside" agitators like the NAACP from disrupting their segregated towns, the small-town mindset to "keep it in the community" and do things the way they've always been done.

To the modern reader, one who's lived through - been born after in a lot of cases - the civil rights movement of the 1960s and into the post-Jim Crow world of the late 20th Century, Watchman has a nostalgic aura but one that shines a light on the hypocrisy of that era. But it's also a light that shines on the hypocrisy of our own modern decade of the 21st Century... because Ta-Nehisi Coates' book highlights how all those sins Harper Lee wrote about back in the 1950s are still with us.

Between the World and Me is slightly misleading in that while the book is written in the style of letters from a father to his young son, BtWaM it's really Coates writing to the rest of us about how it was - how it still is - for a young Black child to grow up a Black man (or woman) in a United States where nearly every institution - the schools, the police, the law, the government, the businesses, the communities - viewed Black Americans as "property"... and how that property can be destroyed by the whims and needs of those institutions:

The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies... But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal, America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist... I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American Exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much... (p. 8)

Coates' work is coming at a pivotal time in modern America, as awareness to how Black lives are suffering at this very moment:

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help; that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store.  And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone's grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction... Resent the body trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed... And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. (p. 9)

Coates details for his teen son his own horrors of growing up, his own childhood fears, fully aware of the psychological breakdown that haunted his black community then and since. One incident in particular haunts Coates and appears often in BtWaM: the death of fellow Howard student Prince Jones, whose only crime was to drive through an affluent neighborhood in the DC metro and ended up shot to death by a county policeman (and outside of his jurisdiction). Angered by the injustice, Coates then had to come to terms with the facts that the cop who shot Jones was black, worked for a county government and chain of command with black leadership, and yet it all still marginalized and destroyed black lives. To this Coates sees a nation and a world of rules designed to take rather than liberate or restore:

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence... So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason... this is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile... It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered... (p.90-91)

Where Lee's two books provided the view of America from the White perspective - where the American Dream of quiet neighborhoods with picket fences and happy singing birds, no matter how benign the intentions are to make this so - Coates' book provides the view from the Black perspective where the American Dream was founded, funded and built upon the destruction of black neighborhoods where intent does not matter, only the destruction does.

This is where racism becomes and remains the great original sin of the United States. Willing to divide ourselves, by those who profit and achieve power by those institutions that enforce such divisions, the United States cannot claim the purity of exceptionalism the nation claims as its identity.

Halfway through Watchman, Atticus takes on a case for a young black man charged with vehicular manslaughter who turns out to be Calpurnia's - the housekeeper for the Finches in Mockingbird - great-grandson. However, Jean Louise finds out he's only doing so to stop the NAACP from coming in and taking over the defense. Dismayed, she visits Calpurnia's family on her own to offer some form of condolences and try to put a positive spin on her father's taking the case, but the meeting becomes strained because Calpurnia knows why Atticus is doing what he's doing:

She looked into the old woman's face and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia was watching her, and in Calpurnia's eyes was no hint of compassion.
Jean Louise rose to go. "Tell me one thing, Cal," she said, "just one thing before I go -- please, I've got to know. Did you hate us?"
The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.
Finally, Calpurnia shook her head. (p.160)

Calpurnia has to think it over before giving her answer. SHE HAS TO THINK ABOUT IT.

That's what racism does to this nation. It makes people like Jean Louise have to ask if she and fellow whites were/are hated, it makes Calpurnia have to sit there and think through the slights and wounds she had endured because of it, it's left Prince Jones and Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin dead before their times, it's put a warning sign on Ta-Nehisi's son that all of this will happen to him.

This is a tale of two books. It is a tale of one nation divided into pieces over our nation's deadly sin.
 

The War On Saturnalia 2015: A Call To Defend (w/ Update)

Rise up, my fellow Unitarians and high school Latin students! There is a WAR ON SATURNALIA AND I CAN PROVE IT.

You never see Bill O'Reilly get mulsum as a holiday present, do you?! SHAME! Shame, America! WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS.

Confronted with this proof, we should file a protest with the Civil Rights office in DC and get Obama himself to sign off having Saturnalia listed as a national holiday. I'm sure the Republican Party won't object.

On personal notes:

This is the 197th blog post this year, the most so far. I can make it an easy 200 to round it out, so I don't want to over-blog if I want to top the year off there. Thing is, I shouldn't be that OCD about it.

My latest ebook Body Armor Blues was ranked 140th on the Amazon sales list for the Superheroes category... for about 23 minutes. I checked on the sales report for that day. I had two buyers. So if I can get five more by this weekend, I might rocket up to Top Ten.

On political notes:

Dear media elites: Stop trying to make Rubio happen. He's not going to happen.

If I had to, given a particular parlor game, make a choice between Trump, Cruz or Carson for the Presidency, I would choose the parachute for jumping out that particular airplane, Bob.

Ranking the candidates for the Republican nomination is a horrifying prospect: I'd personally put too many of them tied for 16th... out of a race that's been whittled down to 14 12 11 maybe. I kind of agree with how John Scalzi has his list of "terrible to troubling," but I just can't consider even the possibility of having to choose a Republican in 2016.

On comics notes:

Ta-Nehisi Coates is getting totally pumped over his Black Panther series starting up next year. Dude, he's getting Alex Ross to do alternate covers! Dude! I envy him.

And for Saturnalia, here I pray to the Lord of Saturning for my annual wish list of hope, and love, and presents. Ohmmmmmm... Ohhhhhmmmmmmm...

(Update) Well, there's one Saturnalia wish that's come true so far:

The FBI arrested the douchenozzle Pharma CEO who keeps raising the prices of life-saving HIV and cancer medications on security fraud charges. Granted, these are charges stemming from Martin Shkreli's previous hedge fund company: Considering how unrepentant and greedy Shkreli keeps acting in public, he deserves every karmic punishment that the universe can deliver unto him.

IO SATURNALIA.

For the Horde! TNC Is Gonna Be a Comic Book Writer

And the fandom rejoiced.

Local hero Ta-Nehisi Coates has been tapped by Marvel Comics to write a year-long (12 issue) story for the Black Panther superhero series.

From io9:

The news was unveiled by the New York Times in a new interview with the writer, who’s known for his two nonfiction books The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood and Between the World and Me, as well as a vast number of contributions as a journalist for The Atlantic, Time and many other outlets. Coates is widely held to be one of the most respected commentators on cultural and social issues regarding the plight of African American citizens in the U.S. today, and paired with an amazing artist like Brian Stelfreeze, it’s hard not to be excited about what the author will do with T’Challa—especially as its his first foray into writing comics.

There's a good number of comic book fans among the Open Thread Horde - AKA the Lost Battalion - so they were pretty much geeking out on Facebook all afternoon.

This is huge (per Vulture):

...A bit of background on Black Panther: He’s a king from a fictional, extremely technologically advanced African nation called Wakanda. He has some slightly mystical powers but mostly relies on his blinding intellect and high-end weaponry. He was co-created in 1966 by comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — oddly enough, before the founding of the Black Panther party just a few months later. He’s remained a staple in Marvel stories ever since, and will be first appearing in cinematic form in next year’s Captain America: Civil War, with a solo movie in 2018.

And a bit of background on Coates: He's a giant superhero geek. I spoke with him about caped crusaders for more than two hours earlier this year, and I’ve never encountered an ostensible comics-industry outsider who was so intelligent and insightful about the subject. As of then, he’d never written a comic (though he vaguely alluded to overtures from people within the industry about such a project)...

...Which leads us to today’s news about the Coates-penned Black Panther. We don’t know how long the series was in development, but it’s certainly a major reversal for Marvel’s optics. Indeed, although other leading publishers like DC and Image have their own laudable pushes on diversity, none of them have the kind of momentousness and crossover potential of this hiring. This isn’t just bringing a writer of color onto a book about a character of color — it’s bringing the leading voice on race in America onto a book about one of the most important characters of color to ever appear in comics. There have been politically charged and progressive stories about the character in the past (most notably, the incredible turn-of-the-millennium run from African-American writer and outspoken anti-racist activist Christopher Priest), but this is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans. Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.

I am envious.  The man is gonna get a series published for a comic book due to have a movie release for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  He's gonna get all the attention, some of the love, some of the nit-picking (sad but true, geek fans are obsessive with this), and it's gonna be one of the crowning moments of his whole geek life.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here banging my head against the keyboard trying to get two more sections of my own superhero novella to make more sense in the overall narrative, wondering if DC Comics is ever gonna call me back on getting a one-shot of Brother Power the Geek scripted (I kid, I don't think they're bringing Brother Power back for anything).  Sigh... le sigh.

Some Notes About The Never-Ending Horse Race to 2016: It's ONLY July 2015 Edition

It doesn't finish, because I guarantee you on the Wednesday after 2016 Election Night someone is going to rev up a 2020 campaign.  /headdesk

But in the meanwhile, just these thoughts to consider before I delve into more dedicated writing:

• You-Know-Who had an interesting weekend where his polling numbers jumped higher than all the other GOP reindeer, just as he was laying waste to the personal biography of one of his intra-party critics.  When The Donald insulted McCain by mocking his five years as a Vietnam War POW, the outrage among the Republican elite and their media allies went to Eleven on the hypocrisy dial. The polling may yet dip on Trump, going after McCain may be a bridge too far, but one of Trump's early campaigning strengths has been stoking the outrage among a party base that doesn't trust their party leadership in the first place: for every veteran voter Trump may lose he may well get two wingnut voters in return.  Additional polling may have to play it out.  Either way, Trump has not apologized and probably never will: he is playing a blunt style that may violate a lot of Machiavellian rules but it's working for him.  There *is* a point of no return, but for now nobody can yet tell what that will be...
• I can't joke anymore about Scott Walker's John Doe investigation.  Wisconsin's Supreme Court voted to pretty much kill off the search into Walker's campaign violations, meaning he can now campaign just as illegally at the national level.  It's interesting to note that Walker is currently Number Two behind Trump.  It's also interesting to note that Walker's shaking the War Flag crying out to attack Iran on Day One if he makes the White House.  This is how extreme the primaries are going to get.
• John Kasich, current governor of Ohio, is announcing for reals today, making it officially a Round of 16 for the GOP primrary roster.  More on him later when I can do a quick Character review.
• I just started reading Between the World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, having paused in my reading of Go Set a Watchman, as the current discussions over Coates' work has priority.  I still plan on tag-teaming the reviews for both as I feel they are thematically appropriate.

Also, pro football season is warming up and they're already mocking my team the Bucs without mercy or care.  Ah well.

While I Was Away

So, to the seven readers who keep track of this blog, you may have noted I was off on vacation with limited access to updating the site.  For what I've kept up with during my trip to the DC/Baltimore area (hello, Gettysburg National Park!  Remember me?  Yeah, the fat guy in the UF sports cap), this is what I'm noting on my return here:

• Donald Trump doubled down on being a douche.
• Jim Webb announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination and pretty much nobody noticed.
• Chris Christie announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination and pretty much everyone mocked him.
• Greece voted in a referendum to turn down the EU's offer to fix their debt crisis, mostly because the EU's offer was an austerity program that would have made the 2001 Argentinian deal look like the Marshall Plan (if you know your history, you will understand how bad a deal the EU offer was).  This link to Interfluidity's article goes into a long and complex explanation of what led to the vote and why Greece was fighting the bad deal, but it's worth the read:

• It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis... Regulatory mistakes and agency issues within banks encouraged poor credit decisions. Spanish banks lent into overpriced real estate, and German banks lent to a state they knew to be weak. Current account imbalances within the Eurozone — persistent and unlikely to reverse without policy attention — implied as a matter of arithmetic that there would be loan flows on a scale that might encourage a certain indifference to credit quality. These were European problems, not national problems. But they were European problems that festered while the continent’s leaders gloated and took credit for a phantom prosperity. When the levee broke, instead of acknowledging errors and working to address them as a community, Europe’s elites — its politicians and civil servants, its bankers and financiers — deflected the blame in the worst possible way. They turned a systemic problem of financial architecture into a dispute between European nations. They brought back the very ghosts their predecessors spent half a century trying to dispel. Shame...

• Ta-Nehisi Coates is releasing a new book Between the World and Me.  He's already got a rave review from Toni Morrison.  Toni NOBEL LAUREATE Morrison.  Try to imagine the amount of squee-ing Coates must have went through.  Lemme just say if I ever got a review from Neil Gaiman saying "eh, his Hero Cleanup Protocol estory doesn't have that many grammar errors in it, so..." I'd be stuck in a fanboy coma for weeks.
• Oh, and the Women's Soccer Team won the World Cup in Canada. USA USA USA USA USA!

The Problems We All Live With, Because of Racism, Because of Guns

Charleston South Carolina, last night.

In one of the worst mass shootings in the state's history, a gunman opened fire during Wednesday night services at Emanuel AME Church, one of Charleston's oldest black churches in downtown Charleston.

Eight people died at the church, and a ninth person died later at MUSC hospital, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said during a news conference just before 1 a.m. Thursday. The number of injured people and their conditions were not known.

Charleston police chief Gregory Mullen said he will investigate the shooting as a hate crime...

Turns out it is a hate crime.  The shooter - whom I shall not name - intentionally walked into the historic Black church (he hails from Columbia, which is a good distance from Charleston, so he went out of his way here), intentionally sat in on a prayer session, intentionally pulled out a gun, intentionally shot most of the people present, intentionally reloaded, intentionally told the surviving witnesses "I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go," and intentionally fled so he could get safely captured by police in another state.

The shooter - no, the terrorist - chose a church with vast history: formed by one of the earliest anti-slavery leaders, Denmark Vesey.  A free Black who formed the first Black church south of the Mason-Dixon, he was accused in 1822 of fomenting a slave revolt and executed on secret evidence, and after his hanging his church was destroyed.  His sons eventually rebuilt the church after the Civil War, where it became the center of African-American culture and politics in the shadow of Jim Crow and in the light of the Civil Rights movement.  The terrorist just happened to select out of the hundreds of churches in South Carolina to target, and he targeted the one with the deepest racial meaning.

This is just another day in America, isn't it?

It's just another day where Blacks get shot at, just like all the other days from Sanford and Cleveland and Ferguson and Baltimore and a hundred other cities.  It doesn't matter if I or anybody else rail about this over the years - this I wrote last year for God's sake - nobody's gonna do a goddamn thing about it, are they?

It's just another day where we have a gun massacre in our communities, regardless of it being a school or a church or a movie theater or a college campus.  It's just another day where the rights of the gun-fetishists under the Second Amendment to open-carry weapons that can kill anybody they don't like take priority over the rights of the vast majority of Americans who don't own guns yet try to peaceably assemble as due their rights under the First Amendment.

It's just another day for comment from blogger Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

We have a problem with guns.  It isn’t going away.  You can dig through the twitter streams and comment threads as I have, but you already know what you’ll find.  For too many Americans, the solution to our gun problem is obvious:  the answer to a bad shooter in church are good ones.  If only those at prayer had been packing, Dylann Roof wouldn’t have been able to kill more than three or four before taking a couple of hundred grains of lead to the throat in return fire. If only…

The ammosexual defense of their kink is predictable and almost certainly incorrigible.  Driven (and heavily armed) that’s a view that’s managed to hold political sway over the mushy majority for whom the notion the the liberty of the gun-sniffing few outweighs the freedom of the rest of us to assemble, travel, speak without fear of suppressing fire.  What drives that is, at least in part, the normalization of gun fetishization.  Which is what you see above.  And is what must be shamed out of the public square...

It's just another day for Charles Pierce at Esquire to rage with absolute truth:

We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition...

It's just another day, isn't it, out of the 200-plus years of our nation's history where racism and violence are part of the pride and arrogance of the haters who insist on flying a flag of treason and war over our state capitols.  In South Carolina, they've lowered the official state flag to half-mast, they've lowered the national flag - our Stars and Stripes - to half-mast, and they're still flying that goddamn Stars and Bars battle flag at full-mast.

I am with Ta-Nehisi Coates: That damned Confederate Battle Flag must come down, NOW, from every Southern state flying it.

The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it...

...Surely the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves. “Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation...

Moral cowardice requires choice and action. It demands that its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. Here is another choice.

Take down the flag. Take it down now.

Goddamn us, as a nation.  We are led by cowards and fear-mongers who would profit from racism by making the rest of us suffer for their rage and greed and pride.

To the leaders of Florida, if that Confederate Battleflag of Treason and Race Hatred is flying over our buildings in Tallahassee or anywhere, TAKE THOSE DAMN FLAGS DOWN NOW.  To the southern states from Texas to Virginia, if any of you are flying that damn flag, SHAME ON YOU AND TAKE IT DOWN.

Back to Pierce for his closing (but not final, because Goddamn us this is going to keep happening until we face these demons of fear and wrath) thoughts:

...There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.

American Income, American Injustice

This is, by the by, the 700th post here on this blog (under different names).  Big Hello to all the Crooks and Liars people following Mike's Blog Round-Up link!  Thank you for stopping by, and please check out the rest of this blog.  Also, I have a separate blog at WittyLibrarian And The Book With the Blue Cover, at which I have a current memorial for Sir Terry Pratchett.)

The federal investigation into the dealings of the Ferguson Police Force, not just in the Michael Brown shooting but a litany of complaints against an out-of-control agency, brought up some horrifying revelations.  Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly titled his article about it "The Gangsters of Ferguson," and for good reason:

(from the DOJ report) Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue...

There's a word for this: Extortion.

Extortion... is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense...

Thing is, Organized Crime never had it so good or easy as corrupt cops and city employees, who extort through excessive fines and asset seizures using the threat of jail and the threat of police brutality to get their money.  The Mafia ain't got sh-t on a police force that basically fines the hell out of its own citizenry.

And why is this happening?  Why are the police and city governments so eager to shakedown their own communities like a bunch of street thug enforcers and their capos?

Let's ask Chad Stanton over at the Washington Monthly:

...What exacerbated such practices is the maniacal hold of anti-tax fervor that has trickled down from the federal level to the state and local level. With conservative domination of many statehouses, its clear to any ambitious politician that wants to advance in the Republican Party that their fealty to the ideal of “no new taxes” has to be iron-clad.

This lock-step discipline on taxes has become a principle unto itself. From the beginning, its support has come as a result of racializing social safety net programs. What we see is a feedback loop occurring post “formal” Jim Crow. Black people are seen as “stealing” the hard earned taxes of white people, who then support politicians pledging to never raise taxes. Revenue is still needed to run the government, however, so we see budgets for programs that benefit everyone slashed. At the municipal level, cities target black communities to make up the gap.

This targeting is then justified by the same logic that was used to rail against taxes in the first place, as we see in the report. Several officials cite African Americans’ lack of “personal responsibility” as justification for targeting them for revenue.

As long as America is under the grip of this circular logic, there will be many cities operating the way Ferguson did...

It's a wonderful cycle, isn't it?  The anti-tax crowd pushes hard to cut income and corporate taxes at the federal and state level that could otherwise fund our cities and counties and states.  The county and city governments, forced to find other sources of revenue yet unable to even consider raising their own taxes lest the anti-tax forces throw them out of office, have to rely on fees and fines to cover the costs of running their low-level government services.  As most cities are home to large groups of ethnic minorities, these cities view the minorities not as people but as statistics.  And meanwhile, those same anti-tax agitators (yes, I'm pointing a finger at you, Fox Not-News crowd) rail their base against those ethnic minorities as an ongoing social and economic threat, making it easier to ignore their suffering.

There's another word, phrase actually, that can be used here: Indentured Servitude.  Ferguson PD and other departments like them across the nation use violence and the threat of ruin to force a persecuted group - a poor minority like Blacks or Hispanics - to fork over money.  In order to recoup those losses, those minorities are forced to work harder or place themselves further into debt, only to have the PD show up and take more money.

I wrote awhile back about the police department in Waldo, FL shutting down.  It's a small, dot-on-the-map town in the northeast corner of Alachua County.  If you lived in Gainesville (GO GATORS) and had to drive to Jacksonville, you'd know about this place... because Waldo was one of the most infamous speed traps in American history.  Waldo was so small and so poor a community that the police force couldn't rely on the locals for shakedowns fines, so they went with a ludicrous speed trap instead that netted the unwary drivers from out-of-state or from parts of Florida that hadn't heard of them.  My dad got nailed driving through there once, he even knew about it and even he couldn't avoid getting caught in the speed trap.

I was caught once in a speed trap on I-4 one weekend morning, with a group of co-workers leaving a night shift job.  Our driver was accused of being 20 MPH over the speed limit, but she was driving off an expressway ramp onto the interstate having just left the toll booth and there was no way she had accelerated that quickly to the spot the cops pulled us over.  The Orange County deputy claimed an overhead plane was using some form of radar to track us, which was hard to believe because there were no planes overhead (it was a clear morning sky).  As he issued the ticket he bragged that he "always showed up in court to enforce the ticket" and essentially tried intimidating the entire minivan.  Meanwhile a small division of cop cars were swerving backwards on the interstate to reset themselves to catch more "speedsters," driving more recklessly than any civilians they were hoping to ticket.

We all openly questioned the validity of what those county cops were doing.  I argued the Waldo example, that the county was making some damn ticket quota to grind money out of the local drivers.  "It's worse than that," one of the ladies in the back seat told me.  "The cops are also looking for any undocumented workers they can pull in for immigration arrests.  If they do that, it's like a bonus."

These are just two examples of abusive, money-obsessed police actions I've been aware of my whole life over decades of having lived here in Florida.  How do you think this is like for a Black woman living in Ferguson having to cope with this sh-t five times a week? Via Coates' article:

...In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn't been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

How fares a society when we look at the institutions sworn to uphold the law and protect the citizenry... and see only bullies and shakedown artists?  Out of all the "good cops" we are repeatedly told are out there doing the hard honest work, why are the bad cops who make the Corleones look like saints the ones representing the entire profession?

And this is part of the problems we've been having with asset forfeiture, a program that's been in violation of the very concept of the Fourth Amendment (and even the Eighth and Fourteenth).

Here's the real problem: our cities and counties are tapped out of revenue sources.  Without many states able or eager to raise revenues through a progressive taxation plan - indeed with many of those states eager to cut taxes even further as part of the Far Right agenda of "kill government, let the free market overcharge us" - these cities and counties are going to raid their own communities through abusive tactics.  If we want to end these tactics, we're going to have to as a nation recognize that taxation exists for a reason and that using taxes to pay for public services is a just and fair practice.

Otherwise, the price we're going to pay for all these tax cuts for the rich and powerful will be our communities falling apart. 

Homework for the Horde: Reading Assignment for September

Just to let the seven people following this blog know, Mr. Coates is asking the Horde to take part in a book discussion.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with it this time.

What we're reading this time is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.  With luck your local library owns a copy, or else is available through your library's Overdrive eBook lender.

Discussions should open up on September 17, so we've all got a few days to get some reading done and take some notes.

At What Point Can The Stupidity of Racism End?

(Update: Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar linked this blog to the 2014 Jon Swift Memorial Roundup.  Hi, everybody!  Please leave comments if you want, and if this is your first visit here, please take a look around.  Io Saturnalia and here's hoping the next year isn't going to be as sh-tty as this one...)

It's easier to express rage during a round of Twitter messages.  It's been more than a week since the shooting death of yet another unarmed black teen by an angry guy with a gun... only this time the angry guy with the gun was a cop.

I don't want to pity Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates.  But every time there's been a shooting involving an unarmed black teen and an armed angry guy (usually white), he's been called to make comment:

...It will not do to point out the rarity of the destruction of your body by the people whom you pay to protect it. As Gene Demby has noted, destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. The body of Michael Brown was left in the middle of the street for four hours. It can not be expected that anyone will be held accountable.

We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their Skittles yelling, "You're gonna die tonight," and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.

And Coates has been called too often the last few years to this role as the Speaker To Unspoken History. It must be tiring.

What's been horrifying in the wake of Michael Brown's murder has been the combination of arrogance out of a police force over-reacting to the protests by the Ferguson community, and the willful eagerness of the racists (there is no other word to describe those people) who were and still are quick to demean, defame, and demonize the victim as well as the mostly black neighborhood in which he lived and died.  As that Salon.com/AlterNet article by Steven Rosenfeld notes, "the victim becomes the suspect."

It came so easy to the haters on Twitter.  I lost count of the number of tweets calling Brown a "thug", and claiming the city and county police were in their rights to break up the street protests using any violent force available.  I saw about fifteen, maybe twenty different tweeters bringing up the argument about how all the "white-on-black" protesters keep ignoring the "black-on-black violence", despite the evidence that, yes, black communities ARE protesting such violence and it's just the haters and the mainstream media are the ones ignoring that issue in the first place.  And I'd like these critics to give some public time and effort decrying "white-on-white" crime please and thank you...

What's at argument here, what's at stake, is the ongoing problem where a powerful governmental agency - responsible towards serving and protecting the public - is abusing such power when dealing with the poor and disenfranchised public they're supposed to serve.  What's at stake here is as much the militarizing of our nation's varied law enforcement offices as much as the dehumanization of entire communities.  Where the police lining up with tear gas and body armor are calling their unarmed civilian targets "fucking animals", less about how those protesters were acting - most of them just walking with their "hands up" calling "don't shoot" - and more about the skin those protesters wore.

The threat of racism among our law enforcement agencies has been and continues to be a serious problem.  The racism in our nation's history, and our nation's current psyche, continues to be a serious problem.

At what point, haters, at what point do you fucking let go of all that hate in your heart?  At what point do you stop the fear, recognize that the problems with our communities come NOT from skin color but because people - white and black and brown - are poor?  At what point do you give up the fucking obsession of some southern conservative pipe dream of returning to an 1850 "utopia" where everyone knew their place by the power of who held the whip?

I am serious.  Dear Ferguson PD: when your fan base is made up of the KKK (!) you are clearly on the wrong side of history.

This entire week has been an exercise in watching the police enforce the unenforceable - the outrage of a community - through violent militarized tactics that even actual military veterans decried as overkill.  (The quote that's stuck with me all week, and needs to be said here, from the Business Insider article: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone.")  At only one point had calmer heads prevailed: when after a violent police-instigated crackdown on Wednesday night during that first week went global on the news, it forced the state governor to order the local police to stand down and sent in state troopers to handle the crowds.  The state law officers went in that Thursday with bullhorns instead of batons, standard patrol uniforms instead of body armor, and hugs instead of tear gas.  That night saw little if any violence.

What the hell happened after that Thursday?  Other than the Ferguson PD coming back with accusations that Brown was wanted for shoplifting cigars at a local store, making another attempt at defaming the victim to justify the shooting.  An accusation that quickly developed holes when the store-owner revealed he never called in a theft, that the police never even showed up for the video until that same Friday, that the timeline and earlier testimony was that the shooting cop Darren Wilson couldn't even have known Brown might have been a suspect, and that a subsequent review of that video showed Brown actually tried paying for those cigars.

In the wake of all that, the Ferguson and county police went back to their heavy-handed body-armor arrest-all-reporters tactics.  Against all evidence that Soft Power efforts - engaging the protesters on an equal level - work, they went back to the violent confrontations.  The only reason why I can figure out is racism: the Ferguson police want this fight, they want to debase and demolish their own citizenry because they can't imagine handling the issue - them vs. the black community - any other way.

Is that racism ever going to go away?  Is that blind stupidity - pushing them to shoot tear gas at kids and families, most of them unable to avoid it all because they live there - ever going to go away?

We should be rolling lighter than this through our own communities.  What the hell is wrong with us?