Journal of the Plague Years

September 26, 2017

Many people have compared the gallons of ink and hours of air time spent discussing Trump’s ongoing excoriation of the protests of Black athletes, with the below the fold coverage of the massive humanitarian crisis unfolding in Puerto Rico.  3.5 million Americans lack electrical power, cell coverage and fuel and face a rapidly dwindling supply of potable water.  80% of the island’s crops have been destroyed.  Although the federal government has sent three amphibious ships with supplies and personnel, it is notable that it has not sent the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the much larger vessel which was deployed to the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma.  (Source:  “Puerto Rico has become raw and primitive,” by Joel Achenbach, Dan Lamothe & Alex Horton, The Washington Post, 9/25/17).  Trump’s response, which mentioned the debt owed by the territory to “Wall Street,” was one of callous indifference, lacking empathy or any concrete promise of aid.  The reason for the differential treatment of 3.5 million Americans who live in Puerto Rico as compared to Floridians is obvious to anyone who is paying attention, and the reality is, the neglect of Puerto Rico and the attempted silencing of Black protest are two sides of the same coin. Continue reading “Take a knee”

September 21, 2017

In a week in which Mexico City was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, Puerto Rico was slammed and flooded by Hurricane Maria, and the occupant of the Oval Office stood at the podium of the United Nations and threatened to annihilate an entire nation, we are reminded of the prescient words of W.B. Yeats a century ago:

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

(“The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats.)

Continue reading “Things Fall Apart”

September 19, 2017

Many of us watching the Emmys on Sunday night shared Anna Chlumsky’s slack-jawed disbelief when Sean Spicer was wheeled out onto the stage to “joke” about crowd size.  We couldn’t believe how quickly our Hollywood heroes, who have spent countless nights over the last nine months righteously excoriating Trump’s corruption, bigotry and dishonesty, could book a prime slot on the rehabilitation tour of one of his primary enablers.  Of course, Stephen Colbert was hardly alone in this.  Harvard University invited Spicer and Corey Lewandowski to be fellows at their Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics.  The stated mission of the Institute of Politics is to “engage students with academics, politicians and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership.”  How can Harvard square the appointment of a mouthpiece for a racist grifter who demeans the office of the Presidency, trashes our country’s standing in the world and demonstrates utter contempt for the Constitution and the Rule of Law, with that mission?  The disturbing trend, noted by everyone from Teen Vogue to Time Magazine, is that notoriety is now the coin of the realm, with no regard for ethics, standards or values. Continue reading “Hollywood Heroes?”

      It is a struggle to maintain hope that we will emerge from this nightmare in which our beloved country is in the grip of racist kleptocrats, but some weeks are harder than others.  For Black Americans, this week has brought a stark reminder of how little our lives matter.  Just yesterday in St. Louis, Officer Jason Stockley was acquitted of the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, despite audio evidence that Stockley began his pursuit of Smith with the intent to kill him and despite DNA evidence that showed that Stockley had planted a gun in Smith’s car, to make it appear that Smith was armed.  In a depressingly familiar tableau, we witnessed Smith’s mother in the post verdict press conference stating, “My soul is burning.  My heart is broken.”  We saw St Louis police in riot gear confronting peaceful protesters.  We contrasted the response of the St. Louis police last night to the response of Charlottesville police last month when confronting armed white supremacists.  While the Grand Dragon of the KKK could fire a gun at a Black counter-protester and walk away unmolested; an elderly woman who was peacefully protesting was assaulted by the St. Louis police (Source:  Fox 2 News; 9/15/17). Continue reading “No justice, no peace”

September 14, 2017

The news media has been obsessed this week with Hillary Clinton’s new book, “What Happened.”  Half of those commenting decry her for having the temerity to write it at all, stating that she should retreat to the Chappaqua woods.  Others carp that Hillary fails to accord sufficient weight to her own mistakes as a candidate.  That particular criticism is rich coming from a press corps that defensively denies the role its own imbalanced coverage played in Trump’s victory.  As the Shorenstein Center Report detailed, coverage of Hilary Clinton during the 2016 election cycle was light on policy and overwhelmingly negative (62% negative vs. 38% positive).  While Trump’s coverage was also more negative than positive (56%/44%), given the seriousness of the genuine scandals in which Trump was embroiled, his higher positives simply make no sense.  (Source:  “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election:  How the Press Failed the Voters,” by Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and The Press, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at The Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 12/7/16). Continue reading “Silence is violence”

September 12th, 2017

Sunday night we were treated to the spectacle of Charlie Rose interviewing Steve Bannon, the bilious re-animated corpse of Spiro Agnew, on “60 Minutes.”  Bannon, his voice dripping with thinly veiled contempt, uttered ahistorical nonsense that displayed less knowledge of American history than a 5th grader who was paying attention in Social Studies would have had.  Bannon bristled at the notion that The United States was a country of immigrants and said that “economic nationalism” built this country.  Unless economic nationalism is a new synonym for “slavery,” that is the most absurd thing ever uttered in public by a current or former White House staffer.  Continue reading “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”

 

Republicans and Democrats alike were stunned this week when Trump capriciously made a deal to sign a Harvey relief bill that only extended the debt ceiling for three months, as requested by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. The agreement increased the Democrats’ leverage and crushed McConnell and Ryan’s hope of extending the debt ceiling fight past the 2018 mid-term elections. Baffled commentators scrambled to make sense of Trump’s decision, ascribing his motives to everything from a narcissistic need for positive press coverage to boredom at the debate during the Oval Office meeting. Regardless of the reason for this small victory, we would be foolish to take it as a harbinger of moderation or bi-partisanship from this administration. While we were busy crowing at Pelosi and Schumer’s ability to snooker the President, his administration was continuing apace with its destructive policy agenda. Continue reading “Hell or high water”

September 7, 2017

It is difficult, amid the deafening cacophony of our chaotic daily news cycle, to take the time to consider all of the forces that had to align to bring us to this point, or to see a path forward for our nation, beyond resistance to reclamation of our vaunted national values.  We can argue that the combination of decades long coordinated attacks on the Constitutional right to vote, together with the abdication of the duty to check majoritarian abuses of power by co-equal branches of government, has landed us here.  Given the mountain of evidence supporting this view, this will be a multi-part post. Continue reading “How we got here, Part 1”

With Trump as president, our waking nightmare has no end. After months of coy equivocation, pretending to feel compassion for DACA recipients, Trump’s administration has announced that it will end DACA in six months.  Some are alleging that Trump’s hand was forced by the threat of a lawsuit from ten conservative State Attorneys General.  Spare us.  Since when has Trump backed down from a threat?  He is playing a game of nuclear annihilation chicken with North Korea, but we’re supposed to believe that Trump is intimidated by a letter? Continue reading “Dream or nightmare?”