Wednesday, June 27, 2018

A Pep Talk From Cranky Bear

[Editor's Note: I have been quite busy lately, and so I have decided to hand the reins over to my friend Cranky Bear. Warning: he is a lot less civil than I am. Right now, I think we could use that.]

Hello all, Cranky Bear here, drinking coffee and ready to give you all a taste of my mind.

A lot of you are really upset today. After all, the Supreme Court just decided to kneecap public employee unions, and Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Yesterday they affirmed gerrymandering and the ability of crisis pregnancy centers to misrepresent themselves. Shit looks pretty bleak.

This is all coming while the government is still holding immigrant children in cages. Just a couple of weeks before, the dotard despot effectively ripped up the postwar alliance system. He is also waging a trade war that is already costing jobs in this country. We are living in dangerous dark times.

Which is why you fuckers have to get up off of your asses and FIGHT!

Yes this sucks, but translate your fear and concern into action, dammit!

When the other side loses, do they engage in fatalism and hopelessness? No, they go out there and relentlessly keep trying to push their agenda forward. After Obama won the presidency they unleashed the Tea Party. As long as we are chickenshit we will lose because we are up against awful people who will stop at nothing to win. They blocked the Garland nomination, they are suppressing votes, and they are relying on the electoral college to maintain minority rule. They have absolutely no fucking shame about going against the will of the majority because they don't give a shit about democracy.

A lot of this is down to our mistaken belief that history is on our side due to our righteousness. Sorry folks, history doesn't give a shit about morality and nothing is inevitable. The tides of history turn only when people MAKE them turn. And as a student of history, I can assure you that shit has been worse than this before. That's not an invitation to fatalism, that's an invitation to FIGHT!

The lying fuckwits and craven crony capitalists and wacko Christianist theocrats up against us are actually few in number. They derive their power and influence from filthy lucre, and also from a pervasive propaganda machine. The thing is, the level of commitment possessed by your average Limbaugh and Fox devoted chodes is pretty damn limited. They might lose their shit when they see a black athlete daring to protest police violence, but they won't do much about it rather than buy another asinine "blue lives matter sticker."

We are younger than them. We are more devoted than them. We are motived by seizing the future, they are still wedded to maintaining a non-existent past. We can win, but first we have to commit ourselves, we have to organize, and we have to stop fucking around. For liberals this means no more West Wing-inspired insipid bullshit about civility. There's no being civil with people who want to wipe you out. For Leftists this means no more purity test bullshit and especially no more standing on the sidelines and sniping rather than getting your damn hands dirty. For all y'all, remember while you are coming up with excuses to not fight, there are children being held in cages in this country every minute of every day. Your bullshit is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

If we are going to fight to win we need to commit ourselves to being in the streets, to striking, to talking to our neighbors, to voting, to canvasing, to running for office, and above all to ORGANIZING. The Fox/Limbaugh chodes will vote for Trump no matter what. Their support of his human trafficking and hostage-taking is proof of this. Stop trying to convince these people to change their minds. They are lost. They are not to be convinced, they are to be defeated, and in that fight, no quarter should be given.

We need to get out there and tell people why they need to care. And please, no more of this "when they go low, we go high" horseshit. Fight to win or don't even bother to fucking fight at all. Times are hard and getting harder. Things will get worse before they get better, but they will only get better if we get out there and make it happen. To quote the speech in Mrs Miniver: "this is the people's war, our war! Fight it then! And may God defend the right."

I'll be in the streets on Saturday, I hope to see you there.

Cranky out

Monday, June 18, 2018

The Fear And America's Default Setting

I have a dose of the The Fear tonight like none I've ever had since perhaps the day after the 2016 election. I cannot get the knowledge that children are being ripped from their families and jailed for the crime of seeking asylum out of my head. Every single waking breathing moment I have is totally suffused with it.

It was bad enough earlier today, but then I decided to listen to that ProPublica audio and I completely lost it. My two daughters are almost six years old, and the six year old Salvadoran girl who kept repeating her aunt's phone number has a voice very much like one of my daughters. I could imagine her in that moment, confident that she could get out if she could just get the big people to understand her.

As others have pointed out, this kind of thing is not new in American life. Today's carnival of lies by DHS Secretary Nielsen reminded me of a propaganda film the government put out in 1943 to tell everyone that Japanese internment was necessary to protect the nation from saboteurs in their ranks. It also said not to worry, the internees were being treated well, as their smiling faces were supposed to attest.

Nielsen proclaimed that the kids were being treated kindly, and that this whole thing was necessary to uphold the law and to stop MS-13 and terrorists, instead of "saboteurs."

I am also reminded of many narratives by former slaves who discussed the practice of children being sold away from their mothers. Solomon Northrup's description of a boy being taken from his mother at the slave market in New Orleans brings tears to my eyes:
 This scene, of a mother crying as her child is taken away from her, is being replayed many times a day on the border as we live and breathe.

In many respects, we are seeing America return to its default setting. This nation has its origins in settler colonialism, which gave birth to a form of Herrenvolk nationalism. Until 1965, citizenship in this country was still by law dependent on race. The Voting Rights Act and Immigration Act helped change that, but that was not so long ago. Deep down, most white people (including white liberals) do not care enough about the fate of brown-skinned immigrant children to do something on their behalf. I have pledged to fight, but I am not confident that there will be victory.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

A Shameful Father's Day

An appropriately dark song for this Father's Day

Tomorrow is Father's Day, which is falling at an eerily appropriate moment. The nation is abuzz with the news that thousands of children have been taken from their parents at the border. On this father's day there are thousands of fathers who are living a parent's worst nightmare: to have their children stolen from them.

As a father, I can't even bear to think about this happening to me. Knowing that in my country, that this is currently being done to thousands of other fathers, is a thought that weighs on me every moment of every day. On top of that there are fathers who have been in the country for years being ripped from their families and deported.

And what exactly is happening in response? I am trying to do my part, but I am losing heart. I went to a protest last weekend, I have been calling elected officials. That's clearly not enough, but what else is to be done by someone like me?

Those of us who care are trying to fight, but the whole reason we are in this mess is that not enough people actually care. Just look at our pathetic excuse of a news media. In one of his ridiculous lies, Trump has tried to blame all this on Democrats. And the stenographers with Ivy League journalism degrees give themselves lobotomies and dutifully tell us "Trump says this, but this is what others say" as if they can't actually see the reality smacking them in the face. That kind of bothsidesism reduces the kidnapping of children to just another policy decision. I remember the run-up to the Iraq War, so this game is quite familiar to me. I am just shocked that it is still being played.

What about others? So few people have responded to the current crisis by changing their counterproductive ways. There are still the leftists sniping from the sidelines, saying "stupid liberals!" when said liberals use naive the rhetoric of "this isn't who we are" but don't bother to actually go out and do something productive. There are the nice liberals, their brains damaged by The West Wing and thinking that the system actually works and that Mueller will come on his white steed and save the day. Of course, there are the full-fledged Trump supporters who actually cheer this because they are just flat out bigoted. A less talked about group, however, are the Republicans and right-leaning independents who did not necessarily love Trump but voted for him, and who have refused to change their allegiance even after thousands of children have been kidnapped by our government. Politics has become like sports, and most people will never be able to root for the other team, even when their own is engaged in atrocities.

And the dirty little secret beneath all of this, of course, is that the vast majority of white people in this country simply do not care what happens to brown children, especially immigrant children. This goes for liberals and conservatives. Most white liberals do not approve of this policy, but neither are they willing to stick their neck out on it. Truth be told, it just doesn't matter that much to them.

As I have said many, many, times before, America is in its Brezhnev Years. Just as the Soviet Union limped on once belief in Marxism and Soviet ideology had faded before it collapsed, the United States still maintains the facade of democracy, even though a sizable number of Americans (perhaps a majority) do not really believe in it beyond lip-service. Our president certainly does not believe in it. He adores despots and attacks democratic rulers who dare to criticize him.

The only way forward that we have is to achieve what Lincoln proclaimed in the Gettysburg Address: a new birth of freedom. For this nation to survive as a democracy we need to make it truly democratic, and not simply aim to restore the status quo ante, since that's what got us here in the first place. The only way that is going to happen is that those of us who want it put our shoulders to the wheel.

If you are upset by the current situation but are not doing anything about it, I urge you, being the agnostic preacher that I am, to mend your ways and repent. On this Father's Day think of the families being ripped apart. Think of the children being jailed away from their parents. Think of the parents living with the anguish that they may never see their children ever again. Don't just tweet about it. Go out there and do something. Future generations will be judging you.

Monday, June 11, 2018

What I Saw At the "Free Pablo" Protest

You may have heard now of Pablo Villavicencio, an undocumented Ecuadoran immigrant from Long Island working in New York City for a pizzeria. While making a delivery to a military base in Brooklyn, which he had done several times, he had his papers checked and was reported to ICE and detained, then told he was to be deported. He was married with two children, all American citizens, and he himself had been applying for citizenship. Like the vast majority of people in his situation, he was working and raising a family without causing any trouble.

There have been protests in the area around this. I went to one on Saturday here in New Jersey at the Hudson County Correctional Facility, where he was being held. I got the tip from a friend of mine who is a member of the local chapter of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and decided to go.

Just going to the location was an eye-opening experience. It is located in one of those famously ugly stretches of swamp, warehouses, and factories amid a tangle of highways one finds in the parts of New Jersey right across from New York City. Getting there meant having to avoid accidentally taking the New Jersey Turnpike or going through the Holland Tunnel. It was located off of old Highway 1, jammed between industrial parks and truck stops, a place that no one would take a second look at.

In fact, I arrived late to the protest because I had taken a wrong turn in the confusing highway maze and had to drive to other side of Highway 1 to find parking in a lot of a run-down truck stop diner that also advertised packaged liquor. At the protest itself there were maybe thirty people, a great many of them wearing DSA gear. Although they were not the only organization involved, almost everyone there seemed to be DSA.

A middle aged woman in a "I am an immigrant" t-shirt asked if I was a part of that group, and I said no, I was there merely to protest Pablo's detention. She seemed a little put off by the speeches I missed, which I can guess were full of the fire and brimstone of the old Marxist religion. I mostly talked to her and another woman there who was not part of the organization. While standing in the blazing early summer sun in a sea of asphalt, we were joined by a woman there with her mother and two children. She was trying to gain entrance to the facility to see her husband, who was detained there. She wasn't sure if she was going to be able too. One of her children was a two year old, the other a baby. One of the protestors held the baby so that the mother could talk about her situation to a couple of reporters on the scene.

I had made a sign on thick posterboard for the occasion, and I used it to shade the woman and baby from the sun, which in the late afternoon was beating into us. I stood there for several minutes looking at the little sleeping baby, remembering when my daughters were that small. It was almost too much to take, this tiny person having its father ripped away so soon after coming into the world. Having my children taken away from me is my absolute worst nightmare, nothing really compares to it. I kept thinking about that as the baby's mother talked to the reporters, I hope they did something with her story and that it gets heard.

Standing there in a space very much not intended for people to stand in, all I kept thinking was that there were many other places like this in America. At that moment and every other there are nondescript buildings in quiet industrial parks in this country where families are being ripped apart and American dreams are being shredded. These places may be in your town or close by, and their machinery operates right under your nose, every single day in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Ever since the day of the protest that thought has not left my mind. I woke up this morning with horrible vertigo and nausea, and ended up violently puking and having to take a sick day. I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't psychosomatic.

Friday, June 8, 2018

King Trump's Pardon Power

The "deeply stupid" Edward VIII might be the model for America's newest monarch

The outrages and violations seem to come too fast for us to keep up with them. Our wannabe despot president gives us a new scandal each and every day, too much for us to resist. Some of them get lost in the shuffle, and one that has been too overlooked is Trump's use of the pardon power.

Yes, there was hue and cry after he pardoned conservative bottom-feeder Dinesh D'Souza, but that was one episode in a larger story that ought to be concerning for us. There was also Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby before him, establishing a pattern whereby conservative political figures who commit crimes get clemency. It should greatly concern us that the president would so brazenly use his powers to allow criminals to get away with it.

Even when he uses his pardon power for good, he uses it not as a carefully considered instrument of justice, but as a PERSONAL power. For instance, Kim Kardashian came to him to beg clemency for an inmate, and he granted it. Now he is asking protesting NFL players to give him names of people who ought to be pardoned. This is of course completely tone-deaf to what those players are saying, but he obviously sees his pardon power as a "deal making" opportunity. In his typically crass fashion, Trump is offering a quid pro quo.

Our institutions are not meant to be wielded in this fashion. I've said it before and smarter people than me have said time and again, Donald Trump does not know or care about the Constitution or democratic governance. He cares about nothing or no one but himself, with the possible exception of Ivanka, who he sees as an extension of himself. This is why he appears to get along better with despots like Putin and Duterte than with democratic leaders. He is one of them. He would have gone farther by now if not for institutional controls, but those are being worn down.

He has now discovered one area where he as president has a tremendous amount of latitude: the pardon. This power is so broad and expansive that many at the time of the Constitution's writing took issue with it. Trump has been wielding that power less like a president, and more like a king. He seeks to rule personally, as Trump, not impersonally, as president.

There is, of course, a remedy within the Constitution for this: impeachment. The men who wrote the Constitution fought a revolution against the abusive power of the English crown and were well aware that such abuses of power could happen in America. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 69 (nice):


Basically, removing a criminal president should be just as easy (or easier!) than removing a criminal governor.

If you read the Declaration of Independence, you'll notice that after the famous preamble, it is a long litany of accusations of abuse of power by the English crown. As flawed and messed up as the American Revolution was, we can still draw strength from its assertion that America is not to be ruled arbitrarily by kings.

Donald Trump is probably the closest thing to a wannabe king we have had in this country's history. He reminds me of so many addled monarchs in history. I think of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, who when told there were not apricot dumplings at dinner because dumplings were out of season screamed "I am emperor and I demand dumplings!"He reminds me as well of George IV, the English king who was famous for his extravagant spending and womanizing. Like Trump, he did not take power until later life, after years of wastrel behavior. Or perhaps Trump is most like Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor. This ill-fated king was famously forced to abdicate the throne, partially because he was a Nazi sympathizer. Gore Vidal once described him as "deeply stupid."

It might be tempting to laugh at this, but our current mad king is possessed of much greater powers and authority than those old monarchs. He also has implements of nuclear destruction at his disposal. Yet again, things are going to get worse before they get better.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Old Dad's Records 26 (Magic)

My podcast isn't dead!  After months of neglect brought on by extreme stress, I've brought it back. The theme is the onset of summer. While I usually get miserable during the dog days of July and August, the early summer of June is one of my favorite times of the year. In this episode I talk about "Magic" by The Cars, a summer song of my youth. From there I go to one of my favorite summer back porch albums, Traffic's The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I finish up by talking about Janelle Monae's most recent, which is my summer album for this summer.

Friday, June 1, 2018

Fight Dirty Or Don't Fight At All

My recent reading has been an education in the political tactics needed to win. I am almost done with Robert Caro's books on LBJ, a man who won by pushing, needling, and taking every advantage he could. I am currently reading Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 about the media campaign behind Richard Nixon's election victory, as well as Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand, about the unsuccessful campaign to pass the ERA.

One theme has emerged from all of this reading: to win at politics you must devoted to winning above all. This is a lesson liberals, who have turned their brains into mush by watching The West Wing, seem to have a hard time understanding. Johnson knew this, and so did Nixon. Nixon's ads in 1968, midwifed by the infamous Roger Ailes, appealed viscerally to fear and hate. They were unlike anything before in their vitriol, and the other side's answers were weak.

In regards to the ERA, the pro side was divided into factions, while the the anti side was united behind Phyllis Schlafly. Her movement incorporated grassroots supporters but was directed from the top, much like the later (and related) Tea Party movement. When there were conventions in the states to elect delegates to the National Women's Conference sponsored by the government, Schlafly and her allies packed them with Bible thumpers from local churches. In many places Birchers got elected into an institution intended to advance the cause of women's rights. (In Mississippi, the Klan did so.)

Today's liberals, so wedded to notions of comity and fair play, are ignoring the fact that they are up against an enemy that is absolutely ruthless in its methods. McConnell scuttled a statement about Russian interference in the election and prevented Obama from nominating a successor to Scalia. His punishment? Getting to be the master of the Senate. Republican Senators used the "blue slip" to stop Obama's nomination, and have now refused to respect the rule when it comes to Trump's nominees.

They think they are playing a game against people who have accepted the same rules, when the only rule Republicans have is to do whatever it takes. I do not like fighting dirty, but when the person fighting you fights dirty, it's time to get down into the mud. If you can't do that it's time to get out of the damn way.

The film clip I attached above is from The Life and Times Of Colonel Blimp, an amazing British film made in 1943, during the heat of World War II. Clive Candy is a devoted British officer, but is friends with Theo, a German officer he dueled before World War I. Theo fled to Britain, disgusted by the Nazis. Candy thinks World War II can still be fought with gentlemanly notions of "fair play." Theo, having lived in Nazi Germany and seen what it was capable of, tells Candy that he must be willing to fight a nastier war if he wants to win. "The enemy is different, you must be different too" Theo counsels. A lot of liberal Candys need to hear this message from us Theos.