Journal of the Plague Years

April 27, 2018

In the last forty-eight hours we have seen the ignominious fall of America’s Favorite Dad and Kanye’s full transition from tortured narcissistic genius to  a self-saboteur with contempt for his fans.  Nas has been exposed by Kelis as an abusive spouse and deadbeat dad.  Frankly, none of this should come as a surprise in a country that elected a tacky reality show star as President, but people have seemingly spent hours trying to parse the meaning of Kanye’s disturbing declaration of allegiance to Trump.  Beloved Chance waded into the controversy and noble John Legend tried to intervene privately, only to have Kanye screenshot their text exchange and put it on blast on Twitter.

On the same day that Cosby was convicted and Kanye doubled down on being an imbecilic jackass, Janelle Monae proudly came out, declaring the importance of being a “free a—Black woman” (Source: “Janelle Monae Frees Herself,” by Brittany Spanos, Rolling Stone, May 2018).  While Monáe’s honest vulnerability was a welcome example to young LGBT people everywhere, and a contrast to the flavors of toxic masculinity on display from Cosby, Kanye and Nas, it is hardly groundbreaking to point out that Americans place far too much emphasis on the pronouncements of celebrities, to our obvious detriment.  We foolishly look to them for political leadership and trenchant analysis, all but ignoring experts who have studied history, political economy and sociology or weary activists who have organized and effected change for decades. Continue reading “Kill your darlings”

April 24, 2018

By now, we have all heard story of the carnage and heroism at Waffle House.  On Sunday,  a naked white man walked into an Antioch, Tennessee Waffle House, armed with an automatic rifle, gunned down four Black patrons and wounded two others before James Shaw, Jr. wrestled the weapon from the gunman with his bare hands.  James Shaw, Jr. sustained burns and bullet wounds and saved countless lives in the process, but has rejected the title of “hero,” (Source:  Hero Customer Wrestled rifle away from Waffle House shooter,” by Justin Carissimo, CBSNews.com, 4/23/18).  Meanwhile, the NRA, Trump and others are eerily silent. Continue reading “The gift of legacy”

April 18, 2018

As the walls close in on Trump with the revelation that the Michael Cohen raid may pose an even greater threat to Trump than the Mueller investigation, we cannot forget that Trump has the capacity to inflict enormous damage on wide swaths of people while we wait for due process to play out.

In addition to this administration’s blatant racism, we should take note of the deep-seated misogyny embedded in the administration’s immigration policy as well.  This is playing out in under the radar moves being made by serial perjurer and committed racist, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, as well as in new policies being imposed by little known agencies with the responsibility for the well-being of recently arrived refugees.   Continue reading “Women’s rights are human rights”

April 15, 2018

There has been a cascade of stories this week which demonstrate the myriad ways in which Black people are reviled in this country. First came the truly harrowing story of fourteen year old Brennan Walker, who was shot at by a white man merely for asking directions to his neighborhood school. Thankfully, the white man has been arrested and charged with attempted murder, a welcome instance of law enforcement working as it should. Terrifyingly, the only reason Walker is alive is that, in his haste to try to kill him, the shooter forgot to remove the safety (Source: “A teen missed the bus to school. When he knocked on a door for directions, a man shot at him,” by Eli Rosenberg, The Washington Post, 4/13/18). Next came a stark reminder that respectability politics won’t save us, when two Philadelphia men were arrested for trespassing in a Starbucks after less than fifteen minutes of failing to purchase an overpriced coffee beverage.

There are so many layers of toxic racism to unpack here. In neither case did the black people involved do anything remotely threatening or out of the ordinary. The young boy in Rochester Hills rang the front doorbell to ask a neighbor for directions after missing the schoolbus. The security video shows the wife asking, “Why are you trying to break into my house?” Rather than answer the door or ignore it, she chose to call the police, assuming that they would share her view of the inherent criminality of black people. Her husband, a 53 year old retired firefighter, not content to wait for law enforcement, resorted to vigilante justice and tried to kill this young teenager for the “offense” of ringing his doorbell. Conversely, in Philadelphia, the police proceeded to arrest the black men at Starbucks, despite being aggressively confronted by other customers who asserted that the men had done nothing to warrant it (Source: “Two black men were arrested waiting at a Starbucks. Now the company, police are on the defensive,” by Alex Horton, The Washington Post, 4/15/18).

Lest we think that black men alone bear the brunt of toxic racism, Linda Villarosa’s brilliant piece in today’s New York Times Magazine details the crisis of black maternal and infant mortality in heartbreakingly personal terms. Through the poignant tale of the death of Simone Landrum’s baby, Villarosa documents the contempt and disregard that the medical establishment has for black women. Those viewpoints are so ingrained and pervasive, they are literally killing black women and babies. The result is that in 2018, black women have a maternal mortality rate that is worse than it was 25 years ago and worse than it was in 1850 (Source: ibid, Villarosa)! As Villarosa herself experienced, neither education, nor income, insulates black women from the noxious effects of racism, a point made most starkly in the tragic story of Shalon Irving. Irving, a CDC researcher whose specialty was racial disparities in healthcare, nonetheless died three weeks’ postpartum, another victim of a medical profession trained to disregard and devalue black women (Source “Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” by Nina Martin, ProPublica and Renee Montagne, NPR News,ProPublica.org, 12/7/17).

The combined impact of the violence, viciousness, persistence and ubiquity of anti-Black racism can seem insurmountable, threatening to push us into despair. That is why a performance like Beyoncé’s last night at Coachella was a necessary antidote. Last night’s epic performance, which made history as the first Coachella concert headlined by a black woman, was, quite simply the best live concert performance many of us have ever seen. It wasn’t merely the fireworks or the sterling musicianship or the precision choreography, although all of those were present in abundance. Beyoncé’s Coachella performance was also a recruitment film for HBCUs, a pep rally for black people and a sly invitation to white allies, using her prodigious catalogue of hits as the foundation. More than any of this, though, Beyoncé’s masterful Coachella performance elevated the concert performance to a work of fine art, requiring critical exegesis to interpret the musical, cinematic and historical references embedded in it. Last night. Beyonce referenced “School Daze,” quoted Malcolm X and Nina Simone, brought in the African diaspora by sampling Fela Kuti and Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, all while singing and dancing flawlessly (of course) in heels. Beyoncé’s concert was a reminder and a rallying cry —- although this country has never relented in its quest to relegate black people to permanent second class status, still we rise!

#Beychella

#Beyonce

#Blacklivesmatter

#Blackgirlmagic

April 10,2018

Phones around the country simultaneously erupted yesterday with the news alert that the FBI had raided the office, home and hotel room of Trump fixer, lawyer Michael Cohen. Trump exploded predictably, decrying the raid as an “attack on our country” revealing once again, his narcissistic delusion that “L’Etat C’est Moi.”

To the contrary, the raid was evidence that we have remnants of a functioning democracy; and that even Trump appointees to the Justice Department have more fealty to the Rule of Law than to the lizard-brained autocrat that appointed them. Still raging this morning, Trump shrieked on Twitter that the “Attorney/Client Privilege” is dead. While it is true that an FBI raid on an attorney’s office is a drastic move, that is more of an indication of the severity of the evidence against Cohen than of lawlessness within the Justice Department. Continue reading “Wag the dog”

April 8, 2018

 

Week after week, we slog through the ongoing traumatic assault that is life under the Trump administration, dispirited by the continuing evidence that, for Congressional Republicans, no amount of corruption, instability or racism is too much, as long as they get their policy goals of tax cuts and rampant de-regulation.

This week, apparently spurred on by an inflammatory segment on “Fox and Friends” on Puebla Sin Frontera, an annual caravan of migrants fleeing political persecution and gang violence, Trump lashed out with the demonstrably false claim that rapes were occurring at “levels that nobody has ever seen before,” (Source: “Trump claims female migrants are ‘raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before,’” by Veronica Shacqualursi and Elizabeth Landers, CNN.com, 4/5/18). Trump’s scapegoating followed his announcement on Wednesday that he was ordering deployment of National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border, despite the dubious legality of such a move and despite the fact that border crossings by undocumented people are at an all time low (Source: “The Stats on Border Apprehensions,” by Lori Robertson, Factcheck.org, 4/6/18).

As always, the actions of this administration must be viewed through the twin lenses of politics and profit motive. The politics of Trump’s paroxysm of xenophobia are obvious. From Scott Pruitt’s epic, dunderheaded corruption, to the Stormy Daniels drama, to the ongoing news coming out of the Mueller, probe, Trump has been relentlessly battered by weeks of bad headlines. The Republican tax cut message is not resonating with a base that has scarcely seen any economic benefits from it (Source: “Blue Collar Voters are Shrugging at Their Tax Cuts,” by Michael Tackett, The New York Times, 3/7/18). Faced with these headwinds, Trump defaults to his demagogic instincts and seeks to whip up his base with hatred and fear of the “other.” Despite the fact that this has been a losing message, from Ed Gillespie in Virginia to homophobic pederast, Roy Moore, in Alabama, Trump and the Republicans keep pivoting to it again and again because it’s all they have.

We also cannot ignore the perverse profit motive behind the administration’s efforts to ensnare as many people as possible in ICE’s dragnet and funnel them into the for-profit detention centers. Never forget that, thanks to 2010 federal legislation, for-profit prisons have a federal contract that guarantees them 34,000 beds per night at a cost to the federal government of $125 per detainee/day. These for-profit prisons ratchet up their profit margin by forcing detainees to do all of the work maintaining the facility, for as little as $1/day (Source: “When Migrants Are Treated Like Slaves,” by Jacqueline Stevens, The New York Times, 4/4/18). These for-profit prisons earned new lucrative contracts from the Trump administration after donating generously to Trump’s campaign and Inaugural Committee (Source: “Private Prison giant, resurgent in Trump era, gathers at president’s resort,” by Amy Brittain and Drew Harwell, The Washington Post, 10/25/17).

The good news is that, for now, the majority of the country rejects the noxious mix of naked racism and corruption that this administration represents, as evidenced by progressive candidate Rebecca Dallet’s 12-point victory in Tuesday’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Dallet’s win continued the Democrats’ streak of wins in unlikely special elections (Source: “Rebecca Dallet’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election latest victory for women,” by Scott Bauer (Associated Press), Wisconsin State Journal, 4/6/18).  Although these wins are encouraging, we can’t afford to take anything for granted. Never forget that the people we seek to defeat are actively trying to establish slave labor and contempt for human rights as the official policy of the United States. If they succeed with undocumented immigrants, who do you think will be next?

 

#Immigrationreformnow

#Noprivateprisons

#Bluewave2018

April 5, 2018

 

   Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   There were sober reflections, book-length re-appraisals, op-eds in the “paper of record,” and appropriate commemorations.  The assessment of both the magnitude of Dr. King’s achievements and of how relentlessly those achievements have been attacked from the moment of his death is necessary, but not sufficient.

    It is insufficient because no mere recitation of facts and figures showing how little progress we have made towards Dr. King’s anodyne dream that Black people be judged by “the content of their character,” let alone his more radical call that we confront militarism and capitalism, along with racism, gets to the root of our persistent problem.  We know that the laws mandating desegregation and equal opportunity were met with instantaneous and steadfast opposition. We know that as a result, schools are more segregated now than they were prior to Brown v. Board of Education (S.Ct. 1954).  We know that employment discrimination is stubbornly persistent, despite the passage of Title VII and that the wealth gap between white and black Americans has exploded.  What we don’t spend enough time confronting is why? Continue reading “What we fear most”

April 3, 2018

The stench of corruption coming from this administration rivals a garbage barge on the Hudson.  It is worse than the smell of a broken, urine-soaked project elevator.  The profligacy and venality of these people knows no bounds.  In the past several days, we have learned that EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt approved the pipeline expansion request of Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, while simultaneously enjoying a sweetheart deal provided by Enbridge’s lobbying firm, Williams & Jensen.  While this decision was under review, Pruitt  was renting a room in the condo owned by the wife of Williams & Jensen’s chief at the absurdly below market rate of $50 per night  (Source: “A Lobbyist, A Condo Deal, A Green Light,” by Eric Lipton, The New York Times, 4/3/18).  This goes beyond the appearance of impropriety into an evident quid pro quo. Continue reading “The stench of corruption”

April 1, 2018

Resurrection Sunday is a celebration of renewal, a holiday that rewards faith and hope with a victory over suffering and death. One lesson from Jesus’ life, that we seem compelled to learn again and again, is that messengers of love who seek to uplift the least among us, will be demonized and murdered by corrupt and greedy regimes. Those in power are continually threatened by the message that it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” (Matthew 19:23). Given the doctrinal roots of Christianity, consider how much the message of Jesus has been perverted by those who preach these-called Prosperity Gospel and distorted to the point that 81% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump and still offer him unwavering support (Source: “The Last Temptation,” by Michael Gerson, TheAtlantic.com, April 2018). To whom are these purported Christians actually demonstrating allegiance? Continue reading “Easter Sermon”