Journal of the Plague Years

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”

December 12, 2017

Today’s special election in Alabama presents the starkest choice imaginable of what kind of country we’re going to be.  The question is whether voters will choose an exemplar of America’s id, a walking cauldron of seething hatreds, backwards lawlessness and predatory behavior, or an upstanding public servant with a reputation for integrity with whom voters have some policy disagreements.  Today will determine how many of us will choose white supremacy over everything else.

That may seem like a sweeping statement.  We’d like to think that this is just about those “backwards” people in Alabama and doesn’t implicate the rest of us.  The truth is that every article that pre-emptively lays the blame for a Democratic electoral loss at the feet of Black people, citing our lack of “enthusiasm,” while studiously ignoring the multi-faceted campaign of targeted voter suppression being waged nationwide, is blaming the victims of that disenfranchisement.  We need to understand that it is white supremacy that renders Black people invisible and overlooks the devastatingly consistent efforts to disempower us. Continue reading “White supremacy over everything?”

December 9, 2017

 

This past week members of Congress have been falling like dominoes, due to transgressions large and small. While Democrats were imposing a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment, Roy Moore’s fervent supporters in Alabama were saying that many parents would have been “proud” for their teenage daughters to date him (Source: Vice News, HBO, 12/9/17).   The difference is that preying on women is a feature, not a bug, of patriarchal white supremacy. While we were transfixed by the bizarre tableau of Congressional misdeeds, we may have overlooked ominous signs that we are on the brink of sliding into a full-fledged autocracy.

 

First, evidencing the consequences of Merrick Garland’s stolen seat, the Supreme Court began the week by ruling, by a 7-2 margin, that Trump’s “revised” travel ban could go forward while the two court challenges made their way through the Ninth and the Fourth Circuits. Next, during Tuesday’s oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, the nature of the questions led several observers to predict a 5-4 decision in favor of the bakery’s right to discriminate against LGBT people. Although cases interpreting the Bill of Rights frequently require a balancing act between competing interests, if the court holds that the free exercise of religion renders unlawful discrimination permissible, it has the potential to erase all of the hard won civil rights gained by people of color and LGBT people over the last sixty years. Then, on Thursday, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court granted a stay of the lower court order directing the Executive Branch to turn over internal documents and legal analyses related to the decision to rescind DACA (Source: “Supreme Court lifts order to disclose DACA cancellation records,” by Josh Gersten, Politico.com, 12/8/17). Continue reading “Be a patriot”