Journal of the Plague Years

June 22, 2017

The question is,”What are you willing to sacrifice?” Although the results are barely 24 hours old in the Georgia 6th, the recriminations have already begun. Are you willing to stop treating politics like a bonus season of “House of Cards” and ignore the pundits who assert that our problem was that Ossoff was too progressive, or those who assert that he was not progressive enough? Can you tune out those who claim that the Democrats’ defeat is proof that we have no chance of taking Congress in 2018 and who suggest that we get rid of Nancy Pelosi, simply because Republicans can effectively invoke her in their attack ads? We can’t afford to get scorched by the hot takes. Continue reading “What are you willing to sacrifice?”

Our country is awash in senseless violence.  We have retreated from our pluralistic ideals at warp speed, rendering us a vulnerable collection of “discrete and insular minorities” endangered by the tyranny of the majority at every turn (Footnote 4, United States v. Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938)).

In the 72 hours since Philando Castile’s murderer was exonerated, another Black person was killed at the hands of the police.  In Seattle, 30 year old Charleena Lyles was shot and killed in front of her children by the police that she had called to report a burglary.  Although the police say that she was brandishing a knife, the truth is that the police repeatedly demonstrate their ability to de-escalate situations when a white man brandishing an automatic weapon is involved.  We remember all too well how terrorist Dylan Roof, who murdered nine black people in a church was captured alive and treated to a meal from Burger King after his arrest.  Yet, when Black people call for help, we’re the ones who end up dead. Continue reading “Fighting back: our only option”

June 17, 2017

It does not matter how friendly we are, how much we might individually be beloved by our family, our co-workers, or schoolchildren whose days we brighten, in any given encounter with the police, we are seen as nothing more than a dangerous Black body, engendering mortal fear by our very existence, justifying deadly force by just being. We are penalized for venturing outside of the designated, circumscribed, crumbling spaces carved out for us in undesirable corners of inner cities, until they become desirable again and we are chased out by “stop and frisk,” or priced out by “redevelopment.” Continue reading ““They’re coming for you.””

The quotidian ordinariness of our morning commute was shattered yesterday by news of the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, a Congressional lobbyist, a Congressional aide and two members of the Capitol Police Force, Crystal Griner and David Bailey.  Before we knew the identity of the shooter, we all retreated to the ideological corners of our imagination.  Some of us imagined a scary, Muslim terrorist.  Others assumed that the shooter would be, like so many other perpetrators of mass gun violence, a white, radical right wing Christian man.  When the shooter was revealed to be James Hodgkinson, an MSNBC watching, Sanders supporter from Illinois, it scrambled our smug expectations across the political spectrum. Continue reading “This way lies madness”

Yesterday we witnessed the hideous tableau of Trump’s first full cabinet meeting.  Five months into his tenure, Trump invited television cameras to capture the revolting spectacle of sycophancy on display.  Although the sight of everyone from Rex Tillerson to Reince Preibus debasing themselves to flatter this manifestly unqualified buffoon was seen as comedy, it was anything but.

As cognitive linguist and Berkeley professor George Lakoff has repeatedly pointed out, he who sets the frame controls the narrative and Trump is a master at framing.  By his tweets and photo ops, Trump has been able to dictate the day’s coverage and distract us from the momentous policy decisions being made.  While we were busy laughing at embarrassing obsequiousness, Trump was using the press as a megaphone to amplify his lies.  Low information voters will take the repeated untrue statements from that Cabinet meeting at face value, not bothering to read the fact checks in print media.  The press has to stop allowing itself to be used this way and call out the lies in real time. Continue reading “No laughing matter”

June 10, 2017

We have all long taken for granted that we are a nation of laws, not men. We have never stopped to consider how governance by people with utter contempt and disregard for that basic principle would impact the smooth functioning of our republic. Five months into the Trump administration, we are beginning to have the answer. The consequences were vividly on display with the testimony this week of James Comey. What was striking about Comey’s testimony was not simply his refreshing willingness to call a lie a lie, but his candor in describing his paralysis in the face of a President whose demand for personal loyalty revealed that he fundamentally did not subscribe to the view that no person is above the law. It is understandable that all 6’8″ of James Comey was flummoxed when faced with the combination of betrayal of baseline Constitutional values and the enormous power of the presidency. Continue reading “The fish rots from the head”

 

What we have learned in the last twenty four hours is that the Republican Party’s bloodlust for the power to enact their noxious agenda that virtually no one, other than their wealthy donors, supports, far outweighs any fealty to the Constitution or duty to our 244 year old democratic institutions.

Consider the evidence.  Yesterday, Dan Coats, Mike Rogers and Ron Rosenstein testified before Congress and repeatedly refused to answer the straightforward question of whether Trump had requested that they intervene in the FBI’s investigation of Mike Flynn or his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.  They refused to answer the question, whether asked by Democrats or Republicans.  They did not offer any legally cognizable rationale for their refusal, admitting that the information was neither classified nor covered by a claim of executive privilege.  When pressed, they responded like Melville’s ”Bartleby the Scrivener,” saying, in effect, “I prefer not to.” Continue reading ““A republic, if you can keep it.””

In the past forty-eight hours, Trump has demonstrated that not only is he a narcissistic, incurious bully, but that he is dangerously out of control.  On Sunday, Trump callously derided Sadiq Khan, the Muslim Mayor of London, in the immediate aftermath of a horrific terrorist attack.  In a move right out of the Fox News playbook, Trump quoted a sentence fragment out of context to make it appear that Khan was minimizing the seriousness of the attack.  In a moment when any sane world leader, let alone the leader of Britain’s closest ally, would have responded with solidarity and compassion, Trump chose instead to stoke Islamophobia and score cheap points for his fearmongering policies.  Trump repeatedly demonstrates that he has a boundless capacity for boorishness. Continue reading “Vote as if your freedom depends on it”

June 3, 2017

It is an article of faith that humans are complicated beings, capable of both great good and devastating evil. We are taught that no one is all good or all bad and that even the most flawed human beings have redeeming qualities. Trump and his administration contradict that benign view on an almost hourly basis. The vindictiveness, dishonesty and cruelty behind every decision, large and small, are confounding. We vainly search for a shred of human decency or morality, only to come up empty, time and time again. Continue reading “Power – Use it or Lose It”

If we had any doubt that the election of Donald Trump has unleashed a hateful, destructive force in this country, we need look no further than the news of the last week. Hot on the heels of the murder of two Good Samaritans who were courageous enough to stop an assault on two sixteen year old African American girls, we have seen a noose hung inside of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the “N” word spray painted on the Brentwood home of NBA great, LeBron James.  Princeton Professor Keeanga-Yahmaata Taylor canceled two West Coast speaking engagements after receiving a torrent of violent, racist, sexist and homophobic threats in response to the Fox News broadcast of a clip of Taylor calling Trump a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.”  The escalating violence against and intimidation of African Americans is not confined to the stereotyped states of the Old Confederacy.  White Supremacists have waged violent attacks in the mid-Atlantic and the Pacific Northwest, in New York and California.  This is a national contagion. Continue reading “Destruction by design”