Monday, December 25, 2017

Arf

https://www.nationofchange.org/2017/12/17/arf/
Men are dogs (sorry, dogs!).
Trump refers to his ambitions with canine instincts, e.g., he wants to spend $1.5 trillion on new nuclear weapons to make sure the USA is at the “top of the pack.” We only have a few more than 7,000 of them live, locked, and loaded, prepared to overkill humankind by a factor of seven, so it’s important to add more, right? Arf.
Moving to other phallic symbology, our fake president decided to defend his sexual assaults by impugning anyone who would suggest he was ever in the wrong (textbook God complex pathological narcissism, no matter how utterly unjustified). Implying that a US Senator–who took him to task on his ever-increasing stable of women coming forward to accuse him of illegal, immoral, hurtful, or disgusting sexual behavior—is a whore could be a new low for The Donald. Arf.
From the standpoint of my field, Conflict Transformation, Minnie Driver has it right when she describes how inappropriate it is for men to decide what the spectrum of rotten sexually inappropriate behavior is (perhaps with the exception of the law, and perhaps women should not only be the only ones to vote on such laws but should be the ones to serve as judges and juries in such cases). This is a time for men to simply apologize if they are going to say much at all. This is neither a time for men to declare gradations of what is terrible behavior nor a time to justify or even qualify our past acts and words.
In an interview with The Guardian, Driver says, “I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.”
This quote should go down in the literature of my field as an exemplar of perspective in identity communication. It’s like white male Mississippians telling us that “Calling someone a n__ger isn’t as bad as refusing to hire one.”
No, Mr. White Mississippian (or New Yorker, or wherever), you don’t get to pronounce on that. And similarly, Minnie correctly notes, even men of goodwill should take this opportunity to listen and learn, re-evaluate and rehabilitate, not make determinative rulings on increments of impropriety and certainly not call for tossing a break to powerful men with new image issues.
quote shoul go dow
To model what I think Minnie is after, I’ll acknowledge that, like most men, I have demonstrated plenty of poor behavior in my 67 years on this Earth, no excuses, many apologies, and a promise to listen and learn. You can teach an old dog new ideas. Woof.

Those Tax-and-Spend Republicans

https://www.laprogressive.com/tax-and-spend-republicans/
Okay the Republicans got their tax plunder law. They win, we lose.
Some 83 percent of the $benefits will go to the top 10 percent of wealthy Americans.
last-minute add-in will mostly benefit Trump and other wealthy real estate developers/investors. Buck-naked corruption.
The health care crumbs promised to Senator Susan Collins were mostly absent, breaking the “ironclad” promise to her from Mitch “Haha-gotcha-you-ignorant woman” McConnell.
If you are a middle class or poor person your taxes will rise either immediately or gradually over the next decade.
If you get some small tax break just know that rich people get a much larger one and the national debt will increase astronomically by $1.4-1.7 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In other words, if you are a rich person, congratulations! You snowed us again. Or, as was noted in The New York Times by Andrew Ross Sorkin, ” If you’re a billionaire with your own company and are happy to use your private jet so you can “commute” from a low-tax state, the plan is a godsend.”

What the uber-rich count on is our apathy. Plus they believe that if you toss a bone to a dog that dog will not try to get inside your mansion where you are feasting on the choice meats.

What the uber-rich count on is our apathy. Plus they believe that if you toss a bone to a dog that dog will not try to get inside your mansion where you are feasting on the choice meats. Are they correct? I mean, it’s not like we didn’t know, as noted on CNN: “While Republicans cheer the bill’s passage, however, 55% of Americans oppose the plan, according to a new CNN poll. Just 33% say they favor the GOP’s proposals to reform the nation’s tax code.”
We will see. If we the American people will put up with this we are quite sorry excuses for citizens and are acting more like subservient subjects. I long for the day when we can set aside all other differences and just take back our democracy, which, according to the most robust testing by nonpartisan Freedom House, is not as strong as that of Uruguay, San Marino, Japan, Kiribati, Ireland, Portugal, Malta, Chile, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, all of Scandinavia, Belgium, Barbados, Bahama, Taiwan, Marshall Islands, Iceland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Cape Verde, Canada, Lichtenstein, Australia, Austria, Andorra, St. Lucia, Tuvalu, the UK, Estonia, Dominica, New Zealand, Palau, and Micronesia.
We only get robust democracy by earning it and maintaining it. This tax robbery by the filthy rich is quite a test.


Friday, December 15, 2017

Review: We were eight years in power: An American tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/we-were-eight
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes with a sound mind and a broken heart, with great power and confessed pain, of America’s relationship to African Americans, of African Americans’ struggle to succeed against forceful unfairness and positive feedback loops of negative consequence, of African Americans’ successes in overcoming and outshining everything and all, and of ongoing undercurrents pulling to drag those people and those successes to drowning depth. This is a deeply insightful book—and one with perturbing problems.
Coates quotes W. E. B. DuBois to set the stage for his thesis, which is a continuation, expansion, and updating of what DuBois said at the destruction of the black advances during Reconstruction, commenting on South Carolina in particular, but about the South in general, “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government it was good Negro government.”
From that nugget of truth, Coates gives us eight essays, one written by him and published in The Atlantic during each year of the Obama administration, plus some extended and updated thoughts as introduction to each. In truth he gives us one per year, but not one from each year; there are two from 2009, one from 2011, two from 2012, and one each from 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Coates contends in his first essay that Barack Obama made it look as though all one had to do if one is black in America is to wear a suit, behave well, and expect success at least equal to white Americans. To Coates, that is not merely a problem and false, it ignores the rise of the base that lifted Donald Trump and his ignorant racist rants into the White House, a base that emerged from the identical roots that grew the vicious Jim Crow segregation in the South at the end of the 19th century.
To be sure, even given everything both Coates and Obama knew, Coates reveals in his intro to his final essay that they predicted to each other in conversations—as did most others, but they are not most others—that Donald Trump would not get elected. For two black men steeped in the knowledge of the prevalence of racism and retro thinking in America to miss the signs says that pretty much all of us were taken flat-footed by surprise.
Coates sees and analyzes and, in the end, expresses almost no hope, which is a pity, Trump victory notwithstanding. He is essentially saying—though likely he would evade a categorical inquiry—that the races simply need to live apart, since white people cannot seem to improve to the point of taking black people as equals, that white people fear the rise of the competent black person as much as they fear the presence of the black gangster. Where else does that leave us?
Coates helps whites with little direct experience in the black community understand the separation from standard binary white analysis of left/right politics in his exegesis of the Bill Cosby 2004 campaign to call out black leaders to accountability, to black youth to be accountable and presentable, and to stop blaming white America for their failures.
Coates explains that Cosby attempts to invoke the myth of the independent clean and respectable-to-itself black community, not in order to curry white favor but in order to stand proudly on its own. Coates does these flashbacks throughout his march forward through the eight Obama years.
Is Coates giving us a legitimate book or simply stitching together already published pieces with a bit of 20-20 hindsight? That will be up to each reader to decide. If you read The Atlantic and his pieces all along, the book might feel redundant, a bit like you’ve pretty much been there before.
Still, Coates is rigorous in his self-analysis and prefaces his Cosby piece with his acknowledgement that he paid scant attention to the mounting charges of rape that were being written about then by others. So his previous work is prefaced by self-critique and by circumstances in his own black life at the time.
Pacifists will not greatly agree with Coates, who valorizes Cosby when Cosby tells a packed hall of black men that the better days were when they put the children in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said “By any means necessary.” Indeed, in his Cosby essay, Coates calls MLK’s philosophy “gauzy, all-inclusive.” It is hard for a close reader not to think, Ahem, seems like Cosby is rich with white money and MLK is dead from a white racist bullet. Cosby was talking to his safe audience—black men, while MLK risked and lost his life for his people in the heart of cracker Dixie.
This is not to claim Coates is not a critical thinker; he certainly is. He simply crosscuts his ethical claims in his own way, tries to consider multiple historical trends as their roots affect today’s movements, and is, in the end, an intellectually and emotionally by any means necessary to help black people analyst, commentator, and advocate.
When asked about white people in the wake of Trump’s ascension to power where to look for hope now, Coates completely dodges the question, claiming that it is “not his job” to give white people any hope.
Well, he’s a nationally and internationally known writer who accepts interviews so it actually is his job to at least answer questions as an analyst rather than as a churlish curmudgeon, though it is easy to sympathize with any black person who feels a profound sense of hopelessness in the current social ecology in America, one that is poisoned by far too many parts per million of racism in all it deplorable acts and expressions.
Coates seems to strive to achieve the delicate balance between the expected role of the angry black man with the sensitive critical thinker, leaning as necessary on his oft-mentioned influence from his Black Panther father—and in fact Coates writes the Black Panther comic stories for Marvel comics, not featuring much devotion to nonviolent de-escalation of conflict nor to “gauzy” inclusion.
Coates is monomial in his explanation of the sordid nature of the racially fraught understanding of who Barack Obama is and was to American whites who voted him into office, that is, that they were essentially voting for the white half.
He apparently comes to this conclusion for all or virtually all whites, possibly out of the understandable deep pain of watching the ugly resurgence of overt white supremacist racism that helped propel Trump into office. Of course, reality is far more complex.
There are many white Americans who viewed Obama without parsing out his white half, who supported him for his deliberate, statesmanlike, earnest, talented orator persona.
We can never know that number of such white Americans, though one might assume that some of them might be white parents of children deemed African American by U.S. society, that is, white parents who produced racially mixed children with black partners, lovers, spouses, or chance encounters. Some number of those white parents deeply love their children and are long past Coates’s categorizations. Those numbers are not insignificant; nine million Americans said in the 2010 census they were black and white racially mixed and most who study populations put the actual number far higher, since historically “a drop” of African blood made a person African.
We may be talking about more than 10–15 % of the white voting population. Coates leaves them out of his narrative, preferring the more lugubrious stereotype of the frothing racists. Again, given the hate-shock of the Trump-Dylann Roof-Steve Bannon grotesquerie, Coates is within his rights to be so focused on that aspect.
In his connecting present-day-looking-back narrative, Coates is as focused on memoir as he is on societal analysis. He gives us more of his life story, the quotidian of the many, the struggles of young parents to earn enough to feed and clothe their child and keep a roof overhead, and then the breakthrough writing gig at The Atlantic, suddenly launching them into material success and even notoriety.
Perhaps we are to feel glad at this American success story; certainly, for the millions who have experienced deprivation and desperation as young parents it is a happy surge to prosperity in his sidebar life story.
One of Coates's most important insights is his offering of two views of the success of Barack Obama followed by the success of Trump. In the first instance, he notes the voices who tentatively hoped that Obama's 2008 election augured a change, an evolutionary moment, a harbinger of a new era of improved appreciation for diversity, if not an endgame of post racialism.
But other voices unceremoniously flattened that rosy scenario simply saying that the country must really be in a serious and desperate mess to cause the white majority to vote for a black man.
Coates clearly subscribes to the latter view, drawing parallels to other periods of advancement during crises only to yield to yet more racist retrenchment once the crisis had been somewhat resolved.
For instance, the North allowed no black soldiers--until the bloody costs had them on the ropes, at which point blacks could serve and fight. But after the hopes of Reconstruction the resurgent racist exploitation, disenfranchisement and segregation became the federally unchallenged norm in the South. Other examples make his case quite cogent.
And now we see the overflowing basket of deplorables slashing throats in Portland, Oregon, running over nonviolent protesters at alt-right rallies in Charlottesville, and displaying swastikas and confederate battle flags in many locales. The Trump Effect is pervasive and polarizing, rolling back the rocks which seemed to have covered the most egregious reptilian representations of a brutal, mindless history of racial atrocity.
Coates writes unremittingly in favor of the Civil War and with alternating qualified respect and complete disrespect for those who commit to nonviolence, even those who engaged in the Civil Rights movement, which seems to be a manifestation of his parental influence.
Black Panthers were frequently dismissive of "Negroes" who would lower themselves to the practice of nonviolence, and Coates was raised by parents who shared that philosophy, so his glorification of the Civil War seems a bit zero-sum to the reader who is attempting objectivity and critical thinking.
To effectively wave off the demonstrable gains made by nonviolent action is simply and profoundly ahistorical, especially when, in some passages of his previously published pieces, he ambivalently credits nonviolent resistance with some gains.
Empiricism in the examination of nonviolence has taught us several lessons, all of which Coates ignores. One, nonviolence succeeds about twice as often as does violence. Two, nonviolent struggle is faster, on average. Three, and perhaps most obviously, the costs in blood and treasure are far less when nonviolent methods are used. Fourth, and what requires the deepest historical plumb, is that sustainable metrics of democracy, civil rights, and human rights more routinely follow a nonviolent victory than they do a violent victory. To date, this empiricism has only seriously studied maximal goal struggles--insurgencies meant to overthrow a government, evict an occupying force, or secede. I believe the record of subnational struggle would reveal an even stronger set of advantages for nonviolent v violent struggle. That Coates stains his analysis by ignoring all this is a pity.
In general, Coates does a remarkable job of contextualizing the black experience, contending African American viewpoints, and comes down on some perspective but carefully enumerates his own evolution, including serious adjustments in his perspective as events unfold.
While Coates critiques Barack Obama for his use of drone warfare, it is somewhat shocking that he adds, "particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints." Really? The Yemeni child, the Somali girl, the Syrian baby—they don't rise to the level of an American who is online recruiting jihadis? Why would Coates gratuitously add that?
Is the African American who slaughters other brown people excusable? Perhaps, but at the very least it needs a mention by one who is increasingly seen as the premier black public intellectual. Coates deserves his fame and fortune, but with that comes a vulnerability to critique when he hesitates to place blame where it belongs--or perhaps unknowingly presents something of a double standard himself, after rightly accusing white America of holding profoundly double standards.
At the same time, some of Coates's best work, most thought provoking and heart-rending is his examination of the results of the growing, nasty, lying, dirty-tricks racist opposition to a Barack Obama presidency, the winding terrible tale of which is the core value of his book.
For example, Coates interviews Shirley Sherrod, a civil rights leader and faithful practitioner of both nonviolence and community service, and one appointed to Obama's USDA, but who fell victim to lies about her attitudes, disinformation concocted by the racists who began to surface in response to—white bearded, sallow complexioned, patriarchal God in the sky-forbid—a black President.
That shameful story, in which a film clip was edited to make Sherrod say exactly the opposite of what the full film later revealed, had the Obama administration scramble to fire her fast rather than risk the racialization that the racists wanted. Sherrod was thrown under the bus to protect the presidency and that, to this reader, was white America's shame, not President Obama's. Coates does an amazingly sensitive treatment of her.
At the same time, Coates has reserved a large slice of the sensitive pie for himself quite personally, first about aspects of his life that were hard in poverty—understandable—but then about his life in success.
He complains, nearly whines, about what he regards as the unreasonable expectations imposed on him as a black public intellectual, expectations that he moves beyond kvetching and toward proposing some ideas for improvement. Perhaps his editors in his successful publishing world relate to such privileged protests, but it's hard for this reader to relate. Isn't that precisely his job, to make suggestions, even demands, for better ways to be?
For him to label activists as "public scolds" and then for him to reserve that right unto himself when he now earns his very handsome living almost forcibly convincing us of the problems and resenting it when we apparently hope for his notions of better alternatives—this is not so acceptable to some.
The reprinted essay “The Case for Reparations” (2014) is a magisterial work, a litany of egregious treatment of African Americans from colonial-era slavery through 20th century legal theft—really robbery, since the bad laws were ultimately backed by the armed agents of the state if it came to that. He makes the case, period.
What America owes to African Americans is morally overwhelming, only awaiting the law to overtake ethics—so we know not to hold our breath in this case. The evidence Coates summons in this piece is towering, enraging, and depressing, and reading it is a serious challenge to the pacifist.
As a white reader, I need to be uncompromisingly frank in my ignorance of what I would think or do if I were black. As an analyst from the field of social struggle, I know that nonviolent struggle is more likely to succeed and yet the violent, long-committed and long-permitted ghastly injustices prompt a familiar realization; I can analyze professionally but I cannot prescribe or advise until explicitly sought.
Coates may bridle at being regarded as an intellectual identified as focusing on the black experience but that, in this book, is exactly what he does, and little else. He piles on the evidence, makes many conclusions and assertions, and is a powerful intellect indeed, literally and figuratively colored by his experience, his upbringing, and his research.
Black people cannot know what misfortune is specifically due to racism and what is due to a background rate of bad luck experienced by anyone, unless empirical credible research testing is done, but the systematic theft, punctuated in Coates's essays by his interviews with those who have been in fact targeted and ripped off as part of a racist pattern, can begin to at least produce understanding among white readers of the tsunamic power of racist exploitation at virtually all fronts in U.S. history.
Coates cites The Autobiography of Malcolm X as influential and a source of his education. Young readers of all races can cite Coates in their futures.
He asserts, correctly, that only by at least engaging in a serious national discourse about reparations can America at last evolve and mature from its childish mythos to a nation embracing difficult discussions and potentially healing but hurtful truth and reconciliation.
And facing our history can be the bulwark against a vile repetition because we see it played out in new and more cunning ways even as we attempt in our lurching and desultory fashion to eliminate the worst of the old ways.
An example is the Wells Fargo proven targeting of black populations for subprime loans in the early 21st century that resulted in record home losses and evictions when unqualified black home buyers desperately signed on to loans that were unpayable with the slightest financial setback. With the 2008 recession that is exactly what happened, and the racism and outcomes were documented so dispositively that Wells Fargo had to settle for some $315 million.
What, Coates wonders, will America settle at for centuries of oppression and direct theft?
As Coates preps us in a few short pages for his seventh essay, some 62 pages on black America incarcerated, the reader is beginning to sense that reparations are in progress for Coates at least, paid to write the piece for The Atlantic and paid again to reprint it in a bestselling book made fat by the reprints, as his new writing is minimal by comparison. It happens in the arts, but primarily for musicians, not so much for writers.
Indeed, this feels at moments like a self-referential reissue of Ta-nehisi Coates’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1, with new liner notes. He is seriously double-dipping, perhaps relying on some combination of white guilt and unconditional black support to make it unremarkable, all observable factors in America, and justly so.
Coates is in some ways exploiting the exploiters. Fair enough. It just needs to be noted. And in that brief intro to his essay on incarcerated black America, he pines to write like James Baldwin, then tells us he intends to write like James Baldwin, and finally nearly begs us to compare him to James Baldwin. He fixates too much. I leave judgment on the outcome of this ambition to subjectively smarter minds. Coates is a great writer but he does not ascend to Baldwin’s stature by invoking him ad nauseam. Let the critics, the readers, figure it out sans redundant prompts, Mr. Coates.
If this reads ambivalent you are discerning my vacillating response to a book of churlish genius, adamantine sparkle set in an unremitting justifiable jeremiad of injury and suffering individually and collectively, presently and historically. Coates is weary of the costs of racism and the reader may be forgiven if s/he is in turn experiencing Complaint Fatigue and Injustice Overdose at this litany long before page 367.
In this book and in many interviews Coates seems to take some pleasure in underscoring his lack of hope. It is how he frames his summations of his life, his research into his essays, and his synoptic and predictive conclusions about America. One wonders if his relentless repetition of this is a cry for help or simply an African American version of a Ginsbergian howl.
The lamentations are righteous, and the reprinted essays focus, for the most part, on them. His seventh, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” was from 2015 and is a scorching damnation of the (oxymoron alert!) American criminal justice system.
Coates mustered the facts in the essay and I can validate them anecdotally from direct personal experience as a prisoner of conscience (anti-nuclear weapons nonviolent actions). In city jails in which I spent time the overwhelming majority of inmates are black and in the state system I was incarcerated in, Wisconsin’s, it seemed to me in the three prisons in which I served time, that the authorities may as well have just gone into African American neighborhoods in Milwaukee and elsewhere and rounded up vast numbers of black males between the ages of 18 and 35 and simply figured out what they might be doing that was convictable.
Literally, it seemed to me that in a state with an approximately six percent African American population that three-quarters of my fellow inmates were black. Many, perhaps most, were not convicted of a single violent act. This is bone-deep “of course” knowledge in the black community but revelatory to others—certainly much of The Atlantic readership.
Though Coates was raised radical by Black Panther parents he writes almost like a white guy about prison since he has been one clean hardworking guy, a family man not about to risk time behind the walls. So, for instance, he refers to “tickets” in prison, issued for inmate behavioral infractions, though inmates and guards would almost universally refer to these as “shots.” And I never heard anyone refer to a “bunkie,” just a “cellie.” Just sayin’. It’s not summer camp, Ta-Nehisi.
In the mid-1980s came directives vacating the judge’s discretionary evaluation of each case and replacing that custom with draconian and Procrustean mandatory sentence ranges that dramatically lengthened many terms in the fed Bureau of Prisons. This, coupled with the Reagan war on drugs was significant.
Coates devotes a paragraph to the mandatory minimum sentencing but chooses to blame Ted Kennedy and omit mention of the majority of rightwing members of Congress who colluded en masse with Reagan to make this policy lurch, an irritating convention of some black radicals who prefer to attack those they regard as tepid allies far more virulently than the overt enemies.
This shows an understandable yet unfortunate lack of rigor. Calling out poor votes is important but failure to note overwhelming rightwing racist consensus is seeing a few trees and missing the forest.
As a result of the mandatory minimums the BOP was soon quite crowded and many states followed suit. Missing in his piece was the role in many states of the correctional unions, frequently the largest collective bargaining and lobbying organizations in many states, all in favor of more incarceration, more inmates, longer sentences.
Coates does dwell on the infamies of slavery though in his root contextuals of black incarceration and rampant injustice, dramatic and yet at a significant remove. Quoting from the blatant racists of the 19th and early 20th century is helpful to a historical placement but seems like fish in a barrel since most of it is so well hashed and thrashed to all who have worried about these problems for years.
And his signal cases in which he attempts to elicit outrage against the criminal justice system do not sit well with many; how are readers supposed to work up a big sympathy for a fellow who shot a taxi driver point blank in the head, killing a working man? Stories of those imprisoned for nonviolent crimes would have gone much further. They are out there—or rather in there. Coates would have written a stronger piece by sleuthing out who they are, on the one hand, and examining the rare but real restorative justice programs that can turn around much of this dynamic.
Describing the riots that took place at the end of the 1955—1965 civil rights movement, Coates correctly names some of the sparks and some of the flammable social conditions but misses the larger narrative entirely; black people in the U.S. earned steady gains in that decade of nonviolence and all such advances screeched to a halt with the riots and the emergence of armed self-defense organizations, primarily the Black Panthers. Instead he praises the violence and waves off all admiration for the nonviolent resistance. Regardless of philosophy, this is not crack journalism.
Where Coates does show robust analysis is in his synthesis of many sources that can help him buttress his case, though his original knowledge-gathering is limited for the most part to his occasional interviews.
He is not an actual researcher too often, but rather a searcher for knowledge gathered by others that relates to the argument he makes—that is decent journalism. Little is original; Coates’s gift is in reassembling what others have done and reorganizing the findings as a part of his case.
At times Coates whips up a slippery slope and presents his extrapolative assumption as fact we should swallow whole. When, for instance, he excoriates Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a sexist in favor of domestic violence including rape, one’s jaw drops. Seriously?
That Moynihan was a sexist in his 1960s writing, in a profoundly sexist system, in a country that then regarded the ideal family as a breadwinning father and a stay-at-home nurturing mother, is undeniable. That he thus excused a husband raping his wife is an outrageous piece of calumny that somehow escaped the editors at The Atlantic.
This is a nonfiction book and really needed an index to enhance its utility. That is missing, and that is a pity. Yes, it’s popular literature, but it pretends to be a resource, which militates for such tools. Coates uses footnotes; the expectation of a good index is a legitimate concomitant. And the publisher needed a bit more proofreading; those of us in the resistance are not “resistors,” for instance. But these are obviously minor irritants only noted for the record.
Yes, it’s a book that seems mired in yesteryear, but some of the past is so recent and the gulf which yawns out to it is so vast, that I will offer one extended quote to show the urgency of it:
“Last spring, I went to the White House to meet the president for lunch. I arrived slightly early and sat in the waiting area. I was introduced to a deaf woman who worked as the president’s receptionist, a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who work on the National Security Council, and Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president. This receiving party represented a healthy cross section of the people Donald Trump had been mocking.”  
That eyewitness report from the old White House should acutely clutch the sensibilities of any decent American. Coates imparts a yearning through this simple observation that is more fiercely piercing than any of his standard-issue moaning, the power of the witness. He was there then and tells us what the reality was, a masterstroke of journalism.
In his final essay he brings the most mature, complex, attuned analysis of race and gender, particularized and universalized self-knowledge, and authorship of one’s own specific identity that I have read in five decades of reading germinal works on these topics in America. Coates does so by his own inquisitiveness informed by Obama’s, a remarkable psychological feat.
This is a sharply probing, at times poetic, problematic volume. It made this reader think hard, give thanks, and get angry at many moments, mostly at what Coates correctly calls the plunder of racism—and occasionally at Coates himself.
As I read his final essay that included his account of Obama’s final October 2016 gathering of the African American illuminati—replete with Obama’s inimitable MC patter—my throat closed and my eyes stung; what have we lost?
My copy is certainly marked up, and I’ve already given away another copy to a dear young African American friend and budding scholar. Coates, a noveau member of the black intellectual peerage, deserves all his success; I hope he is able to handle it with the élan he shows us in many passages and not so much with annoying caviling that careens at the reader from time to time.
I hope I’ve noted his drawbacks for this particular reader in balance with my admiration for his devotion to lifting his own capacities, his family’s happiness and wellbeing, the future of black America, and the education of white America. Like my favorite politicians, I see the blemishes but I’d still vote for him.
Coates brings all circles and spirals into resolution and clarity in his epilog, an exegesis of candidate and White House-dweller Trump, and here is his most universally forceful work, drawing together disparate themes to give us an explanation and refutation worth the price of a new book.
The evolution and maturation of Coates as an analyst and journalist reaches its peak in this culmination, both nuanced and battering in its power and accuracy. Coates has arrived; it is an American duty and pleasure to let him carry us with him.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Leave it on The Table Again?


“You can’t fight City Hall.”
Well…turns out City Hall is a minor obstacle these days. Trump and his autocratic buds loom far larger. If you can’t fight City Hall you surely are foolish to try Trump.
Indeed, we routinely tell ourselves some version of the Reinhold Niebuhr axiomatic Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
We cannot possibly affect serenity these days without occupying a state of deep denial. This is an emergency on all fronts:
· Trump groped many women, a dozen of them came forward to describe it, and yet he keeps his job while the other power players topple.
· Trump praises foreign dictators—Putin, Erdogan, Duterte—and insults the leader of Europe’s strongest, prosperous, generous, peaceful democracy—Merkel.
· Trump is doing everything possible to put industry in charge of dismantling environmental regulations.
· Trump is appointing Supreme Court “Justices” who are shifting the decisions toward jingoism, xenophobia, and unconstitutional, anti-democratic nationalistic insularity.
· Trump is targeting Muslims, Mexicans, and others with his racist tweets, presidential orders, and auto-cannibalistic appointments.
· Trump and Kim Jong Un are doing the most demonic death dance ever, like little sociopaths who simply do not care about the annihilation of millions.
· Trump’s encouragement to the most brutal police has created a new level of racial fear felt first and familiarly in the African American communities but now in a toxic spreading reciprocity.
· Trump lies pretty much every time he discusses and denies the Russian roles in getting him elected and is now squirming to avoid the law as embodied in Mueller’s investigation.
And this is only the short list. We are losing public lands, gaining the ridicule and revulsion of citizens from around the world, and watching the shreds and loose threads of a social safety net for our most vulnerable blowing in this gale of bad policy.
What can we do?
Well, what did women do to finally get the vote? What did blacks do to finally end segregation? What did migrant workers do to form a union? What did Native Americans do to finally reaffirm long-abrogated treaty rights? What did British Gold Coast Africans do to end colonial rule? What did Filipinas and Filipinos do to depose Ferdinand Marcos? What did Serbs do to knock Slobodan Milosevic out of office? What did Tunisians do to overthrow dictator Ben Ali?
In all these cases and many more, people finally decided to take that latent power that is always there—nonviolent people power—organize it, recruit mass numbers to their movement, and use it strategically to earn victory. Yes, they worked at it. Yes, they sacrificed. And they won, with far far far fewer costs than if they would have either shrunk from engagement or engaged in violence.
Our power is in our hands if we take it off the table—and if we don’t, the greedy elite will take it all again. Our power, our choice.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

This land is your land

I spent the last few days traveling across the country to North Dakota to join others in supporting a gentle man who tried to help everyone. For that he was convicted of several crimes and will be heading to a North Dakota prison.

Michael Foster was born and raised in Texas, in an oil family. His crime in North Dakota was turning off the Keystone pipeline in a symbolic but real call to all of us to do what we can to stop global climate chaos.

That North Dakota valve turn was one of five similar actions last October--two women, three men, five valves on lines in Washington state, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, all done in resonance with the Break Free from Fossil Fuels campaign.
We see the buck-naked consequences of paying no attention to our oil consumption; Harvey drowns Houston, fires rip through the West, every hurricane is more intense than it otherwise would be, droughts last longer, lakes are drying up, the seas are rising and surging, and with fracking even earthquakes are no longer a pure act of God. Most previously natural disasters are now unnatural disasters, made worse by our hand more than the hand of God or Mother Nature.

The Trump regime is doing worse than nothing; they are exacerbating the problem by rolling back the tepid regulations the Obama administration brought to bear. Trump yanks the US out of a world agreement to fix this, the Paris Accords. He gets Rick "Never-met-an-oil-well-I-didn't-like" Perry as his Secretary of Energy and Scott "That-pollution-smells-like-money-to-me" Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency--into the ground. Trump promises to bring back dirty coal. It is Satanic, frankly, with zero regard for the children of the world, for the generations. He's old without any discernible conscience. Who will confront him?

Michael Foster, Leonard Higgins, Ken Ward, Emily Johnston, and Annette Klapstein will. They have.

I attended Michael's trial as much as possible, although I couldn't be in the room in the beginning because I was scheduled as an expert witness and we were sequestered until we testified--or until the judge disallowed us...which she did.

Michael was facing 23 years in prison on four charges. Three of us were there to provide expert testimony in three topic areas to help the judge and jury understand why Michael should be acquitted. Two of us were there to speak to different aspects of nonviolence and one was on hand to speak about the urgency of a rapid change in our general habits but a specific exam of the dirty tar sands oil that flows through the Keystone pipeline. Climatologist James Hansen is 76 years old and is the one who announced that "global warming has arrived" in 1988 when he worked as a scientist at the Goddard Space Center. Every single prediction he made then has come to pass. He is arguably the world's top scientist in that area--certainly the most famous. He’s Trump’s age, only with a long-view conscience and integrity.

The court could not be bothered to listen to this eminent scientist, someone who could have helped the judge and jury become at least familiar with the emergency that we see unfolding all over nowadays, made much worse by the dirtiest sort of fossil fuel--tar sands oil.

The contempt for anyone coming to North Dakota to "tell us how to live" (the prosecutor's attack on Michael, who is now from Seattle) was palpable. The judge allowed the prosecution's expert witness, demonstrating some spectacular inconsistency and hypocrisy. As one who woke up a few times this summer to unbreathable air and everything in my town covered in forest fire ash, I say to North Dakotans, you need to fix this. We will do our part but you need to do yours. Most of us know at least one or two people in Houston, or in the Santa Rosa area, or in Miami or Puerto Rico. Are we Americans who value all other Americans or are we not?

But the prosecutors were dismissive. Hell, Foster only faces 23 years, why give him a chance to reason with jury members? Let's not confuse them with the facts.

The trial in tiny Cavalier, North Dakota, in remote Pembina County, was heartbreaking.