Journal of the Plague Years

September 30, 2020

     Last night’s “sh-tshow” masquerading as a debate left us demoralized and terrified.  Every loathsome aspect of Trump’s personality was on full display— he was dishonest, hateful and boorish.  Over the course of 95 interminable minutes, his braying voice oozing with contempt, Trump mocked Biden’s intellect, dishonored his dead son, and instructed white supremacists to “stand by.”  The debate, something we endured, rather than watched, left us all exhausted by Trump’s barrage of vitriol.

     Biden spoke for all of us when he called Trump a “clown.”  He could be forgiven for his breach of protocol when he told Trump to “shut up, man!” (Source:  “Trump incessantly interrupts and insults Biden as they spar in acrimonious first debate,” by Anne Gearan, Phillip Rucker and Annie Linskey, The Washington Post, 9/30/20).

      Trump’s performance was hardly surprising, given that it had been merely 48 hours since The New York Times’ bombshell reporting exposed him as a serial tax cheat and terrible businessman, who is in debt to the tune of almost half a billion dollars to who knows who.  Trump knows that remaining in office is the only way to stave off almost certain financial ruin and possible prison time.  Is it any wonder that he spewed venom and insults in an effort to make us all as miserable as he is?

    What is most dispiriting is not Trump’s performance.  After all, cornered animals attack.  What is most dispiriting is knowing that even after this performance, 40% of this country will continue to support him.  40% of our fellow Americans will support a poop flinging baboon if he promises to deport Latinx folks and imprison Black ones.  It is knowing that people considered by their peers  to be “principled, brilliant lawyer[s]” will sprint over the grave of RBG and jettison those “principles” to accept a Supreme Court nomination from a walking national security threat in a cheap suit.

     The awful truth is that the most contemptible elements of our society have coalesced around this man- the bigoted, the greedy, the misogynist, the religious zealots fighting modernity.  Our only hope is to beat Trump so resoundingly that we force these people back to the fringes where they belong.

     We know Biden is not a stellar candidate.  Most of us cringed when he described police brutality as the fault of a “few bad apples,” or at the alacrity with which he said he didn’t support the Green New Deal.  Yet, we also know that Biden has the most progressive policy platform of any Democratic nominee in history; one that seriously addresses climate change, wealth inequality and systemic racism (Source:  “Biden Goes Big Without Sounding Like It,” by Peter Beinart, TheAtlantic.com, 8/3/20). We also know that Biden is a decent, empathetic, honorable man and we know all too well what Trump is.  Last night was a preview of what we can expect if Trump is re-elected.  We have 34 days.  Make them count.

#FairFight

#BidenHarris

#Indivisible

September 21, 2020

      The collective wailing of millions of American women that erupted at 8:00 p.m. Friday night, when we learned that indomitable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, could probably have been heard from space.  We cried, we raged, we screamed, at the unrelenting cruelty of the Annus Horribilis that is 2020.  We sat in blinkered disbelief that the universe would snatch the great and good among us in rapid succession, yet leave evil to bestride the world like a colossus.

       Mitch McConnell leaned into his reputation as The Grim Reaper, announcing within hours of RBG’s death that Trump’s nominee to replace her would get a hearing, disregarding Justice Ginsburg’s “fervent wish that I not be replaced until a new president is installed.”  In so doing, as we knew he would, McConnell jettisoned his own rule that Supreme Court justices could not be replaced in an election year.

       As grief began to congeal into despair, we struggled not to capitulate to the learned helplessness fostered by a society that tells its citizens that our fates are in the hands of a superhuman, preternaturally gifted few, like John Lewis or RBG, who single-handedly shoulder the burden of fighting for equality against evil, omnipotent malefactors backed by white supremacists and bankrolled by the Koch Brothers.

     It is hard to overstate the daunting  impact of RBG’s legacy on the lives of American women.  As a lawyer, in a strategically chosen series of cases, RBG secured the coverage of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause for women, (Reed v. Reed); and pushed the Supreme Court to invoke heightened “intermediate scrutiny” in cases involving distinctions “on the basis of sex,” (Craig v. Boren).  As a Supreme Court justice, in 1996 Justice Ginsburg authored the landmark decision in United States v. Virginia which eradicated the male only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute, paving the way for opportunities for women in the military.  In her later years as a Justice, as the Court lurched rightward, RBG became known for her stinging dissents, most notably in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case which kneecapped the Voting Rights Act.  In the face of such a record, it is easy to think that we can’t possibly measure up. 

      Yet, as those who criticized RBG for failing to retire in 2009, or more substantively, for a deeply flawed decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of New York, 544 U.S.197(2005), which held that a repurchase of tribal lands did not restore tribal sovereignty, RBG was not infallible.  Of course not, she was human.  Flattening her legacy to erase her mistakes, or discarding it to focus on the rare times she disappointed us, lets us all off the hook and surrenders our own agency.  As she said herself, “the spirit of liberty must live in the hearts of the women and men of this country,” and that while it would be easy “to appoint Platonic guardians who would rule wisely for us … then we wouldn’t live in a democracy.”  We must take that spirit of liberty and the power that RBG gained for us and FIGHT for this democracy, for her and for us.

Rest In Power, Notorious RBG.

September 15, 2020

     As Bob Woodward continues the media blitz for his new book, “Rage,” each day brings the release of a new Trump recording, confirming what we’ve long known to be true.  On each tape, we hear Trump, in his own words, practically crowing that he is a racist who makes common cause with murderous dictators.  Most chillingly, we hear him calmly admit that he downplayed the lethality of the coronavirus in order to protect the stock market, his sole measure of a healthy economy. 

    What is more disturbing, though, is what it reveals about us.  It is a profound commentary on our national,character that, not only did a majority of white Americans vote for a corrupt sociopath whose only concern was money, they  voted for one too stupid to understand the nexus between public health and the economy.  We have watched nearly 200,000 of our fellow Americans die preventable deaths that by and large, were not marked or mourned in any meaningful way.  Worse still, a majority of Republicans found the number of COVID-19 deaths “acceptable” presumably because Black, Latinx and Indigenous people were disproportionately those who died, (Source:  “More than 176,000 in US have died of COVID-19; 57% of Republicans polled say that is acceptable,” by William Cummings, USAToday.com, 8/24/20). Continue reading “We charge genocide”

September 10, 2020

     After four years, we thought we had lost the capacity to be shocked.  We thought we had become inured to the daily onslaught of policies motivated by cruelty and greed; the barrage of grade school insults by tweet; the daily briefings full of the dangerously ignorant musings of a profoundly stupid man. We thought we understood what it meant to say that, with Trump, there is no bottom.  It turns out, we were wrong.

     Yesterday, Bob Woodward released excerpts from his new Trump book, “Rage.” The recording of his taped interview with Trump was released in which Trump said this on February 7th:  “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.  And so that’s a very tricky one.  That’s a very delicate one.  It’s also more deadly than even your serious flu,” (Source:  “Trump intentionally misled Americans on coronavirus,” by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, The Washington Post, 9/9/20).

      Despite knowing this, for months, Trump publicly downplayed the seriousness of the virus, telling Americans that it would “go away on its own” and that it was all going to be fine, (Source:  “ ‘It will go away’:  A timeline of Trump playing down the coronavirus threat,” by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, 9/1/20).  Worse still, Trump politicized the response to the virus, undermining public health. Trump’s campaign defied socially distanced seating arrangements and mask requirements at his June Tulsa rally.  A few weeks later, prominent Black Trump supporter and former presidential candidate, Herman Cain, who attended the rally, died from COVID-19.

    It is shocking to imagine that the person occupying the office of the presidency would actively lie to the American people in a manner certain to lead to more Americans dying, until you think about which Americans were dying.  Although the initial sentiment about the coronavirus was “we’re all in this together,” by April, the picture began to emerge that Black people were disproportionately contracting COVID-19, and dying from it, (Source:  “Early Data Shows African-Americans Have Contracted And Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate,” by Akilah Johnson and Talia Buford, ProPublica.org, 4/3/20).

      Two weeks later, Trump was urging an end to the lockdown orders, tweeting “Liberate Michigan,” in support of the legion of heavily armed white men who had descended on that state’s capitol, demanding that Governor Gretchen Whitmer open bars and bowling alleys, in the midst of a raging pandemic, (Source: “Trump tweets “liberate” Michigan and two other states with Democratic governors,” by Craig Mauger and Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News, 4/17/20).

      As the months wore on, it became clear that Black, Latinx and Indigenous people, who were over-represented among frontline workers and plagued by pre-existing conditions that were the result of healthcare disparities, were bearing the brunt of the burden of the pandemic, (Source:  “The Fullest Look Yet At The Racial Inequity of the Coronavirus,” by Richard A. Oppel, Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright and Mitch Smith, The New York Times, 7/5/20).

      Divorcing Trump’s actions from these facts would require us to ignore everything we know about him.  He is a virulent racist who began his career in real estate discriminating against Black people and began his presidential campaign viciously maligning Mexican immigrants.  He excoriated Woodward for suggesting that they examine their white privilege, dismissively saying that Woodward “drank the kool-aid,” (Costa, Rucker, The Washington Post, 9/9/20).

       If you think I’m being hyperbolic, consider the other major news that broke Wednesday— that the Director of National Intelligence ordered intelligence doctored to downplay not only Russian election interference, but the threat posed by violent white supremacists, (Source:  “D.H.S. Downplayed Threats From Russia and White Supremacists,” by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times, 9/9/20).  Consider the fact that Trump has refused to condemn the 17 year old vigilante who murdered two protestors in Kenosha.

       Trump, and those who support him, are distressingly comfortable with Black Death, to put it mildly.  Commentators from Eddie Glaude to Anand Giridharadas have said we’re in the midst of a cold Civil War.  I’m afraid they’re mistaken.  It isn’t a cold one.

#VOTELIKEYOURLIFEDEPENDSONIT

 

September 2, 2020

 

      We are all gripped by fear.  Fear that snatches us up by the collar and hisses, unmasked, in our faces, “We hate you…and we will kill you!”  We are not afraid of the things that Trump and the RNC told us to be afraid of. We’re not afraid of Black people moving to the suburbs— we’re already here. We’re not afraid of antifa and anarchist protesters— those are mostly peaceful, woke white kids whose parents raised them right.  We are not afraid that “socialism” will run amok in Joe Biden’s America.  Socialism? Joe Biden? Have you met Joe Biden?

      No, we are afraid of what a mentally impaired, stochastic terrorist is unleashing on this country. Trump has nothing left—  no platform, no plan for rescuing a shattered economy, and a plan to rely on “herd immunity” to curb the soaring COVID-19 infection rates, that will result in 2.13 million dead Americans.  So, as Trump always does, he pivots to fear and racism.  As commentators from Charles Blow to Joy Reid have pointed out, Trump is hardly original in this regard, (Source:  “Trump, Vicar of Fear and Violence,” by Charles M. Blow, The New York Times, 8/30/20).  “Fear of a Black Planet” was not just a classic Public Enemy album, but a pithy descriptor of the subconscious dread that drives far too many white people to vote for plutocrats who shred the safety net to line their own pockets and to shrug at abuses of power and the incineration of the Rule of Law, (Source:  “The past year of research has made it very clear:  Trump won because of racial resentment,” by German Lopez, Vox.com, 12/15/17). Continue reading “American Dream or American Nightmare”

August 25, 2020

     The specter of Black death haunts us, a dispiriting backdrop that persists in our daily life, regardless of whether the President is an urbane Black liberal or a corrupt, frothing-at-the-mouth racist.  By now, we have all heard the story of Jacob Blake, the 29 year old father of three who was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha, Wisconsin cops in front of his three young children.

     Blake was in the midst of trying to defuse an argument between two women when the police arrived.  Video shows officers shooting him in the back as he tried to enter his S.U.V.  Although Blake has survived thus far, Kenosha erupted in justifiable anger, with some protestors setting fire to buildings and vehicles, (Source:  “Fires in Kenosha Reflect Anger After Police Shooting of Jacob Blake,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, 8/25/20).

     Although Democratic Governor Tony Evers condemned the shooting and called for a special legislative session to work on measures to address “use of force by law enforcement,” he also called out the National Guard and imposed an 8:00 p.m. curfew.  These moves led to the depressingly familiar tableau of soldiers in full riot gear facing off against citizens; deploying tear gas and rubber bullets against people principally armed with incandescent, righteous rage.  Rage at knowing how hollow the black squares and yellow murals were.  Rage at the emptiness of belatedly acknowledging Juneteenth, itself a holiday that commemorates enslaved people finally being freed two and one half years after the Emancipation Proclamation (h/t Michael Harriott).  Rage  from recognizing that resistance to de-funding the police comes, not only from gun-toting racists policing their gated community, but from self-described liberals quick to call the police on a Black person who doesn’t “belong” in their leafy suburb or tony high rise, (Source:  “As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change,” by Betsy Hodges, The New York Times, 7/9/20).

       It’s time to face the brutal fact that an organization with roots in slave patrols cannot be reformed to believe that Black Lives Matter, no matter how many Black officers join the force.  It is long past time to take some of the billions given to police forces nationwide and invest in housing, education and social services in the Black and Brown communities suffering from a century of disinvestment, (Source:  “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein, Liveright Publishing, 2017).  And for God’s sake, don’t respond to Black rage by decrying damage to property.  It just reminds us of the sickening truth— our lives don’t matter to you because we no longer are.

August 23, 2020

     After four years of a Trump presidency, our country has been rendered unrecognizable.  We are a failed state, with an economy in tatters, brought low by a pathogen that we refuse to muster the discipline to manage, despite possessing the knowledge and the resources to do so.  Our children can’t go to school safely and those adults lucky enough to still have jobs, can’t go to work safely either.  Rather than reckon with the enduring structural racism that is the legacy of slavery, Trump and most in his party would rather deny the facts of history and brutalize those who point out the truth.

      After four years of seeing children ripped from their parents and put in cages; an entire religion banned from entering the United States; Nazis praised; and environmental regulations shredded, Americans are exhausted and traumatized.  Four years ago, Black women warned this country what a Trump presidency would bring, and nearly 63 million Americans voted for him anyway.  Perhaps some of those 63 million genuinely believed that Trump would shake things up and shift policy to benefit working people (who are Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous and white, btw) who have received short shrift from both parties.  Perhaps some were just too misogynist to vote for a woman, regardless of her peerless qualifications for the job and Trump’s embarrassing lack of them.  We know that more of them than we’d like to admit voted for Trump because of his racism, because of his assurance that in Trump’s America, white people would always be on top and would be the only ones able to claim the mantle of “legitimate” Americans, the Constitution and the law be damned. Continue reading “To catch a predator”

August 16, 2020

     We barely had the time to celebrate the historic selection of Senator Kamala Harris as the first Black and first Asian-American woman Vice Presidential nominee on a major party ticket before we were confronted by a threat to democracy so grave and so immediate that there was no time for Black women to bask in being seen for the first time as leaders, rather than mere workhorses tasked with getting out the vote with $20 and a Kinko’s credit card from the DNC.  There was no time to refute the racists and insecure Hoteps who questioned Kamala’s blackness.  There was no time to pen a painstaking refutation of those who found Harris’s past as a prosecutor disqualifying per se, or to answer critics who distorted her record to depict it as uniformly bad, rather than a mix of positive and disappointing decisions that are almost inevitable in that job.  Jamelle Bouie defended her blackness here.  Public defender, Niki Solis, ably defended her prosecutorial record here and Jacob Rosenberg cautioned us about the risk inherent in pinning our hopes for change even on  those widely acknowledged as progressive prosecutors. Continue reading “The choice is ours”

August 9, 2020

     As the pandemic rages on during the dog days of summer, we are increasingly gripped by a sense of hopelessness.  Spurred by the twin accelerants of Trump’s criminal indifference to American deaths and the toxic selfishness of Americans who refuse to endure the minimal discomfort of wearing masks to save lives, the case count and the death toll keep climbing.

     Those of us in the Northeast who endured months of strict lockdown, only to see it frittered away by corrupt partisan hacks who disdained science, are now facing at least six more months of working remotely, if we’re lucky enough to be able to do so. College students are looking at another entirely virtual semester, evaluating whether sitting in their childhood bedrooms in front of their laptop is worth the thousands of dollars in tuition that schools are still charging.

      Despite the economic devastation caused by this entirely preventable crisis, neither Congressional  Republicans nor The White House has agreed to a recovery package on the scale required to help millions of struggling Americans, (Source:  “As Jobs Report Looms, White House and Congress Say Stark Divisions Remain Over Stimulus Plan,” by Emily Cochrane and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, 8/6/20).  Instead, Trump has pursued a rogue strategy of dubious legality, issuing a raft of executive orders that will do nothing to help small businesses, lower and middle income workers or strapped state governments, (Source:  “Trump’s Go-it-Alone Stimulus Won’t Do Much to Lift the Recovery,” by Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, 8/8/20).

     Our best hope of getting out of this quagmire and setting the country on a path to normalcy is to get rid of Trump and of every Republican elected official, yet, while we are buoyed by polls showing Biden leading Trump nationally and in key battleground states, powerful steps are being taken to thwart the will of the majority and permanently entrench minority rule in this country.  

     On Thursday, the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center confirmed that, as it did in 2016, Russia is engaging in a “range of measures” aimed at helping Trump to be re-elected, (Source:  “Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says,” by Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, 8/8/20).  Yet despite this intelligence and the fact that Trump was impeached over his effort to secure foreign help in his reelection bid, Republicans have repeatedly blocked election security measures introduced by Democrats.

       The machinations of Trump-appointed Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, are sabotaging this vital organ of our democracy at a critical time when scores of Americans will be voting by mail in order to safeguard their health.  DeJoy’s elimination of overtime has led to mail delays and his Friday night massacre which “reassigned or displaced” 23 top Postal Service executives make clear that his mandate, like that of every Trump appointee, is to hollow out and cripple the Postal Service from within, (Source:  “Postal Service overhauls leadership as Democrats press for investigation of mail delays,” by Jacob Bogage, The Washington Post, 8/7/20).

     As with all Trump attacks on democracy, these moves are not hidden and they are not subtle.  We cannot afford to be paralyzed by shock or fear.  Our job is to be clear eyed about the array of obstacles being thrown in our path and steely in our determination to overcome them. If the mail is intentionally being delayed, mobilize to get absentee ballots early.  If we have to face long lines to  vote in person, mobilize armies of lawyers to protect those voters, along with volunteers to provide masks, hand sanitizers and water so that people can be as safe as possible.  A lot of us say that we will crawl through broken glass to vote Trump out.  Be ready, because before this is over we just might have to.

     

#VOTE

#NAACPLDF.org

#LawyersCommitteeforCivilRights

July 28, 2020

      Four years ago, in a slim volume entitled “On Tyranny,” Yale History professor, Timothy Snyder, gave Americans a guide to twenty signs that would mark the transformation of our flawed democracy into a full blown fascist state.  One by one, we’ve watched as Trump’s actions have mirrored each chapter in Snyder’s book, as if “On Tyranny” was a checklist, rather than a warning.

      Still, even after all we’ve endured over the last four years, the scenes emerging from Portland, Oregon, were shocking.  As we all know by now, camo-clad anonymous forces began by snatching people off the street into unmarked vans and detaining them for hours.  These forces refused to identify themselves, to tell people what crime they were being arrested for, or to even admit that people had been arrested, (Source:  “Unpacking DHS’s Troubling Explanation of the Portland Van Video,” by Andrew Crespo, lawfareblog.com, 7/25/20). Continue reading “On Tyranny”