Author: Ldavis0260

January 9, 2018

Americans have a  well-deserved reputation for laziness and impatience.  We seek instant gratification and, in our eternal optimism, disdain the work required to ensure our continued prosperity.  Nowhere has our national character been more on display than in the reaction to Oprah’s speech at Sunday’s Golden Globes.

Oprah’s speech was magnificent.  She spoke movingly of the power of representation as she recounted being a little girl watching Sidney Poitier win the Academy Award for “Lilies of the Field,” in 1964.  Oprah said that she hoped little Black girls watching at home on Sunday night find similar inspiration in seeing her be the first Black woman to win the Cecil B. DeMille Award.  Most impactfully, she thundered, “A new day is on the horizon!  And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, ‘Me Too’.”  The camera panned an enraptured crowd in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton, on their feet applauding, many with tears streaming down their faces.  Within minutes, #Oprah2020 was trending on Twitter.  By the next day, Politico had assembled a panel of operatives to assess Oprah’s political odds .  Bill Kristol, (Bill Kristol!!!) was tweeting “I’m with her.” Continue reading “Oprah 2020?”

January 6, 2018

     Like frustrated monkeys in a cage, Congressional Republicans are flinging their excrement in every direction (h/t Mike Schmidt) feverishly working to discredit and destabilize the Mueller investigation, the FBI and the DOJ, as more and more evidence emerges, both that collusion with the Russians to interfere in our elections went to the highest levels of the Trump campaign AND that Trump’s efforts to obstruct that investigation were relentless and widespread. Continue reading “A Three Front War”

January 4, 2018  

 

   The provocative excerpts released from Michael Wolff’s new book detailing the inside of the Trump White House merely confirmed what we already knew and had ample evidence of — this administration is a nest vipers where no one has any loyalty or a shred of interest in actually serving the country.  We didn’t need multiple quotes from administration officials to know that Trump is a semi-literate child.  His Twitter account offers daily proof of that. Continue reading “Fire and Fury?”

January 2, 2018

The start of a new year is customarily a time of renewal. We mark the transition by resolving to leave disappointment and bad habits in the past; using the flip of a calendar page to re-commit ourselves to self improvement.   In 2018, our collective renewal project must be our democracy.  The garbage fire that was 2017 has made it abundantly clear that we are in the midst of an unprecedented emergency.  Our country is in the grip of cruel, corrupt racists and our activism and their incompetence are all that stands between us and fascism. Continue reading “New Year’s Resolutions”

December 29, 2017

 

While pundits everywhere were busy parsing The New York Times’ interview with Donald Trump, stunning for the lies that went unchallenged and chilling for Trump’s statement, “ ‘I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,’ “ (Source: “Trump Says Russia Inquiry Makes U. S. ‘Look Very Bad’” by Michael S. Schmidt and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 12/18/17), we were overlooking the way in which his administration was busily advancing its ongoing project of depriving wide swathes of Americans of their basic civil rights. Continue reading “The perils of ignoring history”

December 27, 2017

    It is customary at the end of the year to take stock of the last twelve months, to mark where we are and where we’re going; to commit to improve in the year ahead; to acknowledge what has been lost or achieved in the year that is ending. For 2017, that is a profoundly overwhelming task. Trump, in all of his vulgar, bigoted, narcissism, looms large, casting a pall over seasonal festivities, disrupting our efforts to be reflective, like a discordant wrong note in our favorite holiday carol.  Yet we must tune out the noise and conduct this annual accounting, if we intend to be more than just hapless victims swept up by forces that we cannot control. Continue reading “2017 Year In Review”

December 23, 2017

While we were watching the Republicans raid 99% of Americans to enrich the .1% in slack-jawed horror, we may have missed ominous signs that an emboldened administration was doubling down on its racist authoritarian impulses. This week, ICE leaked that it was considering a new policy of separating children from their parents in order to discourage illegal immigration (Source: “Trump Administration Considers Separating Families to Combat Illegal Immigration,” by Caitlin Dickerson and Ron Nixon, The New York Times, 12/22/17). What has come into frightening focus this week, though, is that Congressional Republicans have transitioned from Trump’s supine enablers to his enthusiastically sycophantic helpmates.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great American Tax Heist (h/t Charles Blow), we were treated to the sickening spectacle of Cabinet members obsequiously praising the narcissistic fraud for his greatness, followed by dead-eyed Puritan, Mike Pence, leading Senate Republicans in a prayer to their orange deity. As Masha Gessen pointed out, the revolting display is a worrisome sign that we are hurtling headlong into fascism without hitting a speed bump.

Continue reading “The Monster is in the House”

December 20, 2017

Last night, after a “process” that was secretive, slipshod and rushed, Senate Republicans passed their jerry rigged monstrosity of a tax bill.  This bill is nothing less than “legalized” theft from the poor, the sick and people who work for a living, to line the pockets of Congressional Republicans and their billionaire overlords.  This may sound like hysterical hyperbole, but just examine the evidence.

This bill, by repealing the individual mandate, will deal a body blow to the Affordable Care Act.  This will cause 13 million people to lose their insurance and in all probability, trigger cuts to Medicare, severely impacting the elderly and people with disabilities (Source:  “Q&A:  Tax bill impacts on health law coverage and Medicare,” by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, The Chicago Tribune, 12/5/17). Continue reading “Make them pay”

December 17, 2017

 

There has always been a stark contradiction between the soaring rhetoric and universal applicability of our country’s founding documents and the messy reality of our willingness to massacre one group of people and enslave another to achieve our country’s global dominance. We know, all too well, the staying power of the pernicious mythology of Black inferiority required to justify our continued subjugation. At every stage of our country’s history, far too many Americans have been comfortable ignoring the contradiction, treating the status of Black Americans like a footnote that can be overlooked without distorting the meaning of the text. Continue reading “The psychological wages of white supremacy”

December 15, 2017

As Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote, Black women are the “mules of the world,” carrying the burdens that no one else will bear.  In Alabama on Tuesday, 98% of Black women (along with 93% of Black men) made history and elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate for the first time in twenty-five years.  Although Black people are only 25% of Alabama’s eligible voters, they were 29% of Tuesday’s electorate.  Black organizations surmounted formidable voter suppression to organize an incredible GOTV operation.  The state NAACP endeavored to call every Black registered voter in the state that had failed to vote in 2016 and The Ordinary People Society registered 5000 people in the jails in the weeks leading up to the election (Source:  @AlGiordano, Twitter thread, 12/13/17).

In the days since, the hashtags, #ThankyouBlackwomen and #TrustBlackWomen have been trending on social media.  What if, rather than being empty slogans designed to garner “likes,” those statements represented an actual intention to recognize the leadership and the work of Black women?  Let’s conduct a thought experiment and imagine what that might look like in real life. Continue reading “#ThankBlackWomen”