Equality on Earth


James Baldwin

This week’s featured post is “The 2016 Stump Speeches: Rand Paul“.

This week everybody was talking about another police shooting

The initial report was very familiar: Sure, it was only a stop for a busted taillight, but the subject was a bad guy and he went for the policeman’s weapon. The cop had no choice but to shoot him, and he died in spite of everything the cops did to save him.

Then it turned out that somebody had a video. (Huffington Post imagines the news report we’d be reading otherwise: another justified shooting.) The policeman was in no danger, and after calmly gunning down the fleeing Walter Scott (“like he was trying to kill a deer” as Scott’s father put it), he makes no effort to revive him, but drops the taser Scott had supposedly grabbed next to the body.

So this time, it looks like justice is being done: the cop has been charged with murder. But doesn’t it make you wonder about all the other times a white cop killed a black suspect and there wasn’t a video? (In the last five years, police in South Carolina have fired at people 209 times, resulting in a handful of official charges and no convictions.)

ThinkProgress collects what the local police department said before they knew about the video: It’s eerily similar to what the police have said in a lot of other shootings that ultimately were judged to be justified. The Week concludes: Without the video “he probably would have gotten away with it.”

How many other cops have?

and 2016

After Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy on YouTube yesterday, it’s hard to remember that Rand Paul just announced on Tuesday. But Paul is an interesting candidate that some liberals are tempted to support, given his strong positions on civil liberties. However, Paul also carries a lot of baggage. I try to collect the good and the bad as I annotate his announcement speech.

One thing I will point out about Hillary’s video: Notice how deep into it you have to go before a straight white man shows up.

and the 150th anniversary of Appomattox

I’ve been pleased by how many historians have written anniversary articles agreeing with the point I laid out last summer in “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“: the Civil War didn’t end at Appomattox; the planter aristocracy continued fighting a guerrilla war until the North finally withdrew its troops and let white supremacy resume. See, for example, Gregory Downs’ NYT article “The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox“.

Other articles have supported “Not a Tea Party’s” other main point: that the right-wing surge we are seeing today is a continuation of the Confederate worldview. For example: “Why the Confederacy Lives” by Euan Hague in Politico. And WaPo’s Harold Meyerson writes:


In “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” I described the Confederacy as a worldview:

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries. … The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

For a contemporary example of the Confederate mindset at work, listen to a recent interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson:

I really believe if what the Supreme Court is about to do [i.e. legalize same-sex marriage nationwide] is carried through with, and it looks like it will be, then we’re going to see a general collapse in the next decade or two. I just am convinced of that. So we need to do everything we can to try to hold it back and to preserve the institution of marriage.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Massachusetts for nearly a dozen years, and for almost a decade in Canada, with no visible evidence of any ill effects on society. You’ve got to wonder when Dobson and his ilk will start seeing facts and reality rather than their own apocalyptic nightmares. Probably never. If Dobson is still around twenty years from now, I imagine he’ll have rolled his disaster prediction forward to “in the next century or two”.

And what does “do everything we can” mean? Get violent, apparently.


Because accepting social change is impossible. All forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified.

but I was reading two unrelated books

In the past I’ve reviewed the books Merchants of Doubt and Doubt Is Their Product, which describe the tactics by which corporations keep selling a product long after people start dropping dead from it. I found those to be very radicalizing books, but I doubt that many of my readers managed to finish either one. They’re each a slog, and they’re depressing.

Well, sometimes fiction can get ideas across more effectively than factual reporting (i.e., Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Paolo Bacigalupi is a post-apocalyptic young-adult sci-fi writer, known for The Wind-Up Girl, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. (They’re good.) His new novel The Doubt Factory is set in the present and covers a lot of the same ground as the factual doubt books, but does it with action and characters.

The main character of The Doubt Factory is a high-achieving senior at an exclusive prep school who knows her Dad runs a public relations firm, but has never paid much attention to the specifics. Then she is kidnapped by a skilled gang of teens who have been orphaned by products that her Dad helped keep on the market. They release her, believing they have turned her to their side. But have they?

The plot raises issues about how you know what’s true and where your loyalties should lie. In the background are broader issues of privilege: How much should it bother you if your lifestyle depends on a corrupt system?

As a young-adult novel with political content, The Doubt Factory in a class with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Homeland, which center on surveillance and privacy. In order to follow the story, you need to learn some facts about product safety and the ways corporations manipulate science and the media. But the book is a page-turner; like Doctorow, Bacigalupi never sacrifices the integrity of the story for political polemic.

I finally got around to reading Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis. It’s a well-researched month-by-month political history of Dallas from January, 1960 to the day JFK was killed.

Not a Kennedy-assassination book per se, it’s more about the rising tide of anti-Kennedy feeling in Dallas that culminates in the assassination. In some ways it resembles the movie Crash, where a swirl of loosely-connected tension seems fated to result in something bad, even if none of the characters can predict what it will be or who will do it. In the end (unless you buy one of the conspiracy theories) it was a left-winger who killed Kennedy, but afterward “Distraught women from all over Dallas are on the phones lines [to police headquarters]. Each one is sobbing, confessing to police that she is certain that it must have been her husband who shot the president.”

The striking thing about Dallas during the Kennedy years is how closely it parallels America as a whole during the Obama years: Instead of Obama, there’s Kennedy. He’s not a “real American” because he’s Catholic rather than black. Where Obama is supposed to be a secret Muslim who’s betraying America with his Iranian nuclear deal, Kennedy is supposedly a secret Communist who is betraying America to the Soviet Union in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Instead of the billionaire Koch Brothers, 1963 has billionaire H. L. Hunt. Instead of ObamaCare, there’s Medicare, which a Hunt-funded radio program says “would literally make the President of the United States a medical czar with potential life-or-death power over every man, woman, and child in the country.” (It fails in the Senate by two votes; LBJ passes it after Kennedy’s death.)

Rather than Louis Gohmert, Texas of 1963 has Congressman Bruce Alger, who says more-or-less the same things: “Kennedy is operating as chief executive without regard to the rule of law and is, indeed, substituting his own judgment and will for the exercise of the constitutional powers by the Congress and the people.” And right-wing author Dan Smoot echoes: “Kennedy, by Executive Orders which bypass Congress, has already created a body of ‘laws’ to transform our Republic into a dictatorship.”

There’s even an imaginary secret-in-Kennedy’s-past parallel to the Birther theory: a failed secret marriage before Jackie.

I come away with the impression that today’s political controversies really have more to do with right-wing pathologies than with anything President Obama has done. The Right has projected its hate and fear onto Obama the same way it projected onto JFK half a century ago.

Let’s hope Obama lives to tell the tale.

You’ll never catch up: The Oyster Review has its list of the 100 best books of the decade so far. How many books do these people read? I’ve read just six of the 100; at this rate there are 16 more every year.

and you also might be interested in …

Michael Brown’s legacy: Voter turnout in Ferguson’s municipal elections more than doubled, from 12% to 30%. The City Council is now half black.

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas says President Obama is exaggerating when he says that scrapping the nuclear deal with Iran risks another Iraq War (only worse, because Iran is three times bigger). An attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be simple.

It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox: several days’ air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior.

And then Iran will do what? This is the kind of logic we often hear from fans of military action: We’ll hit them, and then that will be the end of it. Cotton is like the guy who has no intention of starting a bar fight, he just wants to punch that other guy in the nose.

Imagine instead that Iran surveys the world, picks out an American vulnerability somewhere, and hits back hard. Won’t Cotton be the first to say that we can’t let this stand and have to hit back harder yet? How many rounds of attack-and-retaliation will have to happen before he decides that only boots-on-the-ground regime change will end this threat?

A tangential thought about the CNN reporter who interviewed rural Georgia florists about whether they’d sell flowers for a same-sex wedding: There’s a class issue the reporter doesn’t see. When you ask professional-class people an abstract question, they usually picture themselves being nicer than they actually are. But working-class people generally imagine they’d be more rule-abiding.

So the florists say they’d have nothing to do with a same-sex wedding, because that’s the set of rules they were brought up with. If an actual same-sex couple came through the door, though, things might turn out differently. “Normally I’m against this kind of thing, but you seem like nice folks.”

Thursday, a Unitarian Universalist woman led a pagan prayer to open a session of the Iowa legislature. Some Christian legislators boycotted, while others turned their back on her.

The invocation is given in full at the Progressive Secular Humanist blog; it’s pretty benign other than calling on “god, goddess, universe, that which is greater than ourselves” rather than just the Christian God.


If you’ve been curious about the Apple Watch, The Verge has it covered.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank collects a number of recent red-state efforts “to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor”. Kansas, for example, has specifically banned the poor from using their benefits on cruise ships. Because, I guess, that was a common problem, and it wasn’t already covered by bans against using benefits out of state.

and let’s close with Mary Poppins

or at least, with Kristen Bell’s version of Mary campaigning for a higher minimum wage.

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  • SandPen  On April 13, 2015 at 3:04 pm

    Ickee Mushta is a short novel relating to your theme in Not a Tea Party, particularly in Chapter 19 and 27-29. Exploding the Tea Party myth before 2016 is crucial to elect a saner government. I applaud your effort at exposing the truth.

  • rmkorama  On April 13, 2015 at 3:42 pm

    I find the coverage of Deborah’s invocation troubling because all we ever hear about are the folks who boycotted, the one who turned his back, and those who prayed for her salvation. But the other side of the coin is, one of our legislators invited her to speak, and many of our legislators stayed to listen. Making it all about the haters just gives them that much more power over the narrative.

  • lauraleeauthor  On April 14, 2015 at 1:07 pm

    I’m interested in the blurb about the Georgia florists. You say “When you ask professional-class people an abstract question, they usually picture themselves being nicer than they actually are. But working-class people generally imagine they’d be more rule-abiding.” Is this a study? Is there a source on it? I’d be interested to read more on this.

  • Anonymous  On April 14, 2015 at 4:49 pm

    Hi there. I’ve been reading your stuff for a long time now and I am almost always impressed with your thoughtfulness. I’m wondering if you have been following the recent news about the 2015 Hugo awards being “hijacked”. I first heard about in here:

    I think you once wrote something about a (conservative?) willingness to break the spirit, if not the law, of long standing processes or organizations in order to get what one wants/deserves. Filibustering, refusing to allow appointments, creating doubt, redefining common words, setting up shop in an Economic Freedom Zone in order to pollute… This seems like an example of this phenomenon.

    Anyway, I though you might find it interesting if you aren’t already following it. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.


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