Listening to: Rebirth Brass Band

 

It's kind of embarrassing to admit now, but my first extended exposure to New Orleans-style brass band music came ... via a bunch of white guys from Madison, Wisconsin.

During my early days in Lawrence, I made friends with a guy named Joe -- a little older than I was, a lot more hip, and fun to hang around. One evening after work we went and got dinner, then walked around Massachusetts Street looking for something to do. We walked by the Jazzhaus, saw a group called the "Youngblood Brass Band" was playing, and decided why not? The cover charge was something like $3 -- maybe a little more, but not vastly more.

These were the aforementioned white guys from Madison, Wisconsin. The tuba player was particularly talented, using his giant horn to spin out turntable-style sounds while the snare drummer doubled as the band's MC. And what can I say? I'd heard brass band music before -- I'd gotten to see the Dirty Dozen brass band play maybe three songs a few years before, and I enjoyed it, and I should've appreciated what I was seeing more, but it didn't take then. The night I saw Youngblood, it took. 

A few days later, I was at a record store, chatting with a friend about how much I'd enjoyed the concert when a stranger approached. "If you think you like brass band music," try this out. He shoved a new CD copy of "Rebirth Brass Band: Live at the Maple Leaf" into my hands. Some meetings are serendipitous I guess. I bought the CD.

And then I was amazed. I probably kept the disc in my player for a month. The music was raw and energetic -- the recording was live, made in what sounded like a party. The songs went on forever. It was all new to me. I loved it.

I'm listening to them now, loving the music and feeling regrets. I always meant to get to New Orleans someday -- to hear them at the Maple Leaf, to hear Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn's. Saw Rebirth here in Lawrence a couple of years ago, and they were great, but they played at the Lied Center -- a big stage, the kind of place build like an opera house with balcony seats -- and that wasn't really their milieu. New Orleans is. I thought I'd get around to it sooner or later. But now I'm not sure there's going to be a later, at least as far as travel and live music are concerned. I hope there is. Until then, I have the recordings.

Bag O' Books: MOBY DICK

A spoiler or two follows, but kids: The book is 170 years old. It's not my fault if you get spoiled.

There are some works of art that I am slow to getting to because the weight of their reputation makes them seem -- forgive me, teachers -- like homework. I didn't watch "The Godfather" for years for precisely that reason: It just seemed like too much. Then I watched it and fell in an obsessive kind of love.

"Moby Dick" turns out to be a similar experience. I didn't read it for a long time, because in addition to the weight of the book's reputation, there was the sheer damn size of the actual physical novel. It's not small! But the pandemic slowed my life down a little, and I have resolved to tackle some works of literature I'd skipped before.

Things about "Moby Dick" that I didn't expect:

* That it would be so gay. 

Listening to: An explanation

I'm going to make this an occasional series, I think, about whatever album I happen to be listening to when the mood strikes. I can't really write about music -- it's like dancing about math -- but I can describe how music intersected with my life and made me feel, so that's what I'll do. It's my blog! Would love to hear your own experiences with the artists I mention. 

Listening to: Sharon Jones

 

I never quite made my life match up to getting the full Sharon Jones experience.

My friend Josh Powers told me about her back in the mid-aughts, had been to a couple of her shows in Lawrence, Kansas and said they were amazing. I found my to to one of her albums and could not believe her albums had been made during this century.

When the time came that she visited Lawrence again, my wife and I got tickets. But Jo was pregnant, battling pretty severe morning sickness that lasted all day long. We made an attempt to go to and enjoy the show -- I remember Jones was wearing a skimpy dress, and worked the stage hard, shimmying and shaking all over the stage, and even then I knew I'd never have that much energy again -- but Jo was miserably ill, so we left after a half-dozen songs or so.

I remember being cranky that Amy Winehouse got famous using Jones' backup band.

There was one other opportunity to listen to Sharon Jones for me. It was Philly, 2011, and we were broke and barely employed. But Jones was playing a free show on Broad Street that spring -- it would've been a huge crowd, we probably would've been miserable. But as it happened, we didn't get to go. I was in the hospital, septic with infection and vomiting green bile. The next day I had a surgery that saved my life -- the first of three I would have that year. I've been broken since then. But I lived and got to see my son grow up.

And another opportunity to go see Sharon Jones live -- in what, I gather, was her element -- never presented itself before she died. 

Right now, I'm listening to her album, "Naturally," and ... I still can't believe it was made during this century.

Listening to: Lou Reed

I first really encountered Lou Reed in high school, about the time he released the "New York" album. A friend -- a Spanish exchange student -- lent me the cassette tape, so I took home and listened on my miniature boom box (known at the time, somewhat egregiously, as a "ghetto blaster" because we didn't quite realize how racist that was) and decided the album wasn't really for me. But Reed's use of the term "Statue of Bigotry" in the song "Dirty Boulevard" stuck in my head for years after.

(Actually, I didn't know it at the time, but my FIRST first encounter with Reed was the Honda scooter commercial in 1985 that used "Walk on the Wild Side," which is a really weird song for a commercial.) 

I gave Lou a second chance in the late 1990s, thanks to the BMG music club -- and discovered I really loved his 70s stuff. (For music snobs of a certain age, "best of" compilations are thought of as belonging to the newbs and amateurs. Guilty as charged, I suppose.) I heard songs like "Satellite of Love" and "Perfect Day" for the first time and was blown the hell away.

The CD got lost somewhere along the way. But a couple of years ago I found another "best of" collection featuring a lot of the same songs -- I mean, they really were his best songs -- on vinyl. I am listening to it now and I'm feeling kind of content.

What both sides need to understand about Amy Coney Barrett's quote about faith

 So I keep seeing this quote from possible Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett being bandied about the Twitters:

For my friends on the left: This quote, in and of itself, is not proof that Amy Coney Barrett intends to establish a theocracy. It's pretty standard stuff for many practicing Christians! Even people who do their jobs in completely normal ways will talk about how they try to do their best for the glory of God. The better tactic is to focus on her actual legal philosophy -- she has a track record of rulings you know -- and talk about how that might be at odds with the American common good.

For my friends on the right: People being afraid of this quote doesn't mean they're "bigoted" against faith, per se. They're worried about how that faith will manifest itself in her rulings -- just as, presumably, people like Robert George are hopeful that her faith will manifest itself in her rulings. Clothing yourself in the garments of bigotry victim might feel good, but it's not all that accurate.

I'm no fan of Barrett, precisely because of how I think she will rule as a judge. And it's impossible at this point for everybody not to assume that the other side is acting in bad faith, I realize. But that assumption becomes its own kind of bad faith.

Coronavirus Diary: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

My big regret from the last decade or so of my life is that I've spent too much time living in my head and in cyberspace and not enough in real life with real people, and now that it's better to live in cyberspace than in real places, I find I'm going a bit stir-crazy. I miss tangible experiences.

"I don't see race": Living in a bubble of whiteness

 I've been thinking about this, from Roger Marshall, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas:

"I don't see race" is a line that has become a punch line, but it occurred to me that for Kansans, it is literally true: They think they don't see race because so often they don't actually see Black people: 13.4 percent of the U.S. population is Black, according to the U.S. Census, but just 6.1 percent of the Kansas population is. In Great Bend, where Marshall lives, the number is less than 2 percent.

I went to a central Kansas high school where (reputedly) one Black person had ever graduated in the entire history, and that was before my era. For many rural or rural-ish Kansans who live outside the cities of Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, it is pretty easy to go about your life -- work, education, church, everything -- and only occasionally, if ever, encounter a Black person.* That means your primary source of understanding comes from media sources instead of anything remotely resembling real life. 

*There's a related but also separate discussion to be had about the state's Latino population, but Marshall's quote comes in the context of Black Lives Matter.

Which is how you can start a sentence saying that you don't see race and finish it by talking about "the ghetto."

As a political matter, it's pretty easy to vote for somebody like Marshall, then, because -- even though he's going to go and caucus with a party that do esso much, for example, to gut the Voting Rights Act, and which supports a president who is plainly racist -- you don't see the ramifications of that party's acts in your real life. The color line is a theory, and not one that bears much thinking about in one's politics. A lot of us in Kansas "don't see race" because -- all to often -- we don't have to see Black people. I suspect that makes a difference. 

These folks are in a bubble of whiteness, and it's no less pernicious than any other bubble we've talked about in recent years. Maybe even more so: As Nate Silver notes, America's rural areas get 2.5 times the representation in the U.S. Senate than do urban areas. It probably goes without saying that those rural areas are considerably whiter than America as a whole. Some of the folks who live in those areas are surely racist. But a lot of people are probably comfortable with the racially disparate impact of their votes because they think they don't see race -- and in a very real sense, they don't.

Updated with some copyedits.

Bag O' Books: FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM

This has been, for many white Americans, the summer of anti-racism reading. I guess that my dive into David Blight's FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM counts in that category. I can't tell other people how to try and figure out how to do their own thinking about race -- but I don't have much patience for "how to" books like "White Fragility." I'd rather read histories and current books by and about people who have lived the struggle. I've re-read James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" this summer, as well as Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Next up on my reading list is Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste." In between all of these books, I'm getting in a chapter or two of "Moby Dick" now and again.

Among the lessons to be learned from Blight's book is that discerning the One True Way to battle the evil of racism may not be so easy, or even possible. Douglass evolved over time from a "moral suasionist" form of abolition to a fiery advocate of righteous, cleansing violence. He moved from being a radical outsider to a Republican "party man." He struggled with human foibles. 

The two through-lines in his life, though, are this: He always fought for the advancement of his race. And he often did so by telling his own story -- a biography in which he escaped slavery and rose to become a preeminent orator, writer and (three times!) autobiographer.

The other through line, perhaps, is that the struggle never ends. Douglass started his fight against slavery and ended it an enemy of lynching. Evil never subsides. It just takes on new-- and, sometimes, not-so-new -- forms to be opposed.

Bill Barr, civil liberties, and sedition

 It's interesting that this news:

Attorney General William Barr drew criticism after calling lockdown measures aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19 the worst infringement on civil liberties other than slavery.

Came down at the same time as this news:

William Barr told prosecutors to explore aggressive charges against people arrested at recent demonstrations across the US, even suggesting bringing a rarely used sedition charge, reserved for those who have plotted a threat that posed imminent danger to government authority, according to multiple reports on Wednesday.

Barr's interest in civil liberties is ... situational, shall we say.

There is no right to commit vandalism of and destruction to government property, of course, but there's a reason sedition charges are rarely used: They've often been used in American history to tamp down legitimate dissent.

This was notoriously the case under President John Adams. Jill Lepore, in her book THESE TRUTHS, wrote about his use of a sedition law to punish political opponents:

Sedition laws were also used abusively around World War I.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

After delivering an anti-war speech in June 1918 in Canton, Ohio, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled Debs had acted with the intention of obstructing the war effort and upheld his conviction. In the decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the earlier landmark case of Schenck v. United States (1919), when Charles Schenck, also a Socialist, had been found guilty under the Espionage Act after distributing a flyer urging recently drafted men to oppose the U.S. conscription policy.

I don't envy the politicians who have tried -- not always successfully -- to balance the requirements of public health with the obligations of protecting civil liberties. But they have been working (despite criticisms) to protect public health, not to punish their enemies. Sedition laws are generally used to punish acts committed in the name of some sort of wrongthink. To me, at least, that's a more dangerous kind of civil liberties violation. It also happens to be the kind that Attorney General Bill Barr endorses.

Does this count against Donald Trump breaking America's "39-year streak" of new wars?

We refuse to spend enough money to make sure that unemployed people can eat and pay rent, but we can talk about spending tens of billions of dollars to create a fleet of deadly robot submarines. President Trump doesn't get to claim to be the peace president when he's spending so much money trying to make the United States a more lethal nation. We're already pretty lethal!

Anyway, POTUS and his cronies have been speaking lately that he stopped America's 39-year streak of starting new wars. To my way of thinking, this counts against that:

The U.S. military’s Africa Command is pressing for new authorities to carry out armed drone strikes targeting Qaeda-linked Shabab fighters in portions of eastern Kenya, potentially expanding the war zone across the border from their sanctuaries in Somalia, according to four American officials.

The new authorities, which must still be approved by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and then President Trump, do not necessarily mean the United States will start carrying out drone attacks in Kenya. Nevertheless, they would give Africa Command permission under certain circumstances to expand the counterterrorism drone war into another country.

Arguably, this is an old war expanding to a new arena. If Trump gets to keep his streak-breaking claim, though, it won't be because he's not expanding the United States' wars.

Coronavirus Diary: There's only so many times you can binge-watch "Parks & Recreation"

I am at the stage of pandemic isolation where there isn't much left for me to re-watch on TV that brings comfort -- or, at least, I can't do it without diminishing returns. "Parks & Rec" is great, but you can only go to that well so many times.

I've been allowing myself some socially distanced socialization lately -- mostly, standing out in front of the coffee shop with a small group of men (it's usually all men, most of them a bit older than I am) -- and chatting for a few minutes. Is it distanced enough? I don't know. I'm terrified it's not. But I've also been going stir-crazy in isolation, so I've decided I will allow myself that little bit. If the crowd gets too large, I leave.

I hope I don't regret it.

I hope my family doesn't regret it.

There isn't a lot bringing me joy these days. The other morning, walking my daily two miles in the rain, I felt a sense of well-being I haven't felt in awhile. But it passed. Most days I'm stuck on "dread" and "despair" as my dominant emotions. All I can do is the bit of work that I have, and try not to let my son see what I'm feeling, lest I discourage him. School seems to be going well for the most part. There is that, at least. I wonder if he is learning anything that will help him survive the terrible times I suspect are coming.

A few years back, I read that depressed people are actually ... just more realistic than optimists. I am feeling very realistic lately.

Forgiveness

David Blight, writing about Frederick Douglass meeting his former enslaver: “In much of Christian tradition—in which Douglass had learned to think and write—the forgiver often forgives for his own sake, not to excuse the oppressor.”

I’m not firmly a Christian these days, by but I think about these concepts a lot. I’m not sure why I still aspire to this kind of moral attitude. I certainly cannot expect it of others, least of all somebody as badly wronged as Douglass has been. I barely practice this level of grace myself. And yet I suspect it is what my goal should be. 

Movie Night: THE SECRET GARDEN (1949)

 You can find the synopsis of THE SECRET GARDEN right here.

No movie is the same as the book that inspired it, of course. I like some of what this movie does that's different than the book -- it leans into a haunted house vibe more heavily (it feels a bit like Alfred Hitchcock's REBECCA), which is aided by the appearance of Elsa Manchester (THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN) laughing endlessly just a little too much. But: It makes villains out of characters who were anything but villainous in the book, and it more strongly hints at a love connection between Dickon and Mary. (Given that the actor playing Dickon was nearly 20 when the movie was made, it's good they didn't take it further.)

There is some first-rate child tantruming in this movie. But the real star is, of course, Margaret O'Brien as Mary. She has a charismatic presence, and it's easy to see how she became a (child) star during this era. Overall this movie is a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but it's not essential.

THE SECRET GARDEN is currently streaming at Criterion Channel.

Movie Night: LENNY

 

This is a story about an artist who comes up in the industry starting out at strip clubs, is abusive to women, and does a lot of drugs. Bob Fosse went on to make ALL THAT JAZZ, which is considered his autobiographical film, but if he hadn't made that, LENNY would probably suffice. Yeah, it's about Lenny Bruce. But if you're familiar with Fosse's biography, you know that this movie isn't just about Lenny Bruce.

Valerie Perrine won an award at Cannes for her role here, and I've got to say that this is a great performance from her as Bruce's stripper wife, Honey. Dustin Hoffman buries himself in the role. But something feels like it's missing from this movie -- a sense, perhaps, of why Bruce might've been compelling beyond mere shock value. Or maybe that's all there was.

LENNY is playing now on the Criterion Channel.

9/11

I've probably said enough about 9/11 over the years. Long story short: My first-ever visit to New York City was a few weeks after the attacks. There was still smoke rising from the bowels of the World Trade Center. The makeshift memorials -- on fences around the perimeter, in subway stations -- were still fresh and full of living pain. 

Also: The city was still, unmistakably alive and vibrant.

I drove across country to get to New York that week, stopping in Shanksville along the way. It was the first time I'd driven so far by myself. I realized how big this country is. And how much New York differed from the world I'd grown up in. And I loved it. 

9/11 made me back away from the pacifism I'd grown up with, and in retrospect I think I was wrong to make that choice. The wars that grew out of the attacks have not created much safety, but they have increased the total amount of misery in the world. What a shame.

Time passes faster than you think. I was still young when 9/11 happened. I'm not now. That day is history. Before too long, it'll be ancient history. But it still feels like current events to me. Except for this part: Between 9/11, the Great Recession and now, this is the third time in my adult life where I've wondered if the world is coming to an end.

One of these days, I might be right.

How Trump's lies make us less safe, vaccine edition

We already know that Donald Trump lied to Americans about the dangerousness of the pandemic. Trump's lies are designed to be self-serving, but they have a real affect on our safety.

There is a lot of skepticism out there, for example, about the possibility of a vaccine arriving just in time for election day. There is good reason for that skepticism -- even crash vaccine efforts usually take years to come to fruition. Doing on a timeline of months is pretty much unheard of. But the other reason people are skeptical of the vaccine is because Donald Trump is promising us it is on the way and will make everything alright. And because we Americans know Donald Trump is such a huge liar, this makes us understandably skittish that such a vaccine, if and when it arrives, will provide us with as much protection as a broken condom. Which means, inevitably, that fewer people will line up to take the vaccine when it becomes available -- which, if it is effective, means that a number of people will forgo the protection, and that they in turn will deny us collective immunity.

Health and drug company officials understand the problem, which is why you've seen them out in public the last few days, telling us they would never, ever put out an ineffective or unsafe vaccine for political reasons. But Trump's lies, and his willingness to bend the bureaucracy to his will for political reasons, means we can't really trust those promises. It's possible that we're going to have a snake oil salesman whose snake oil really works, but whose reputation for cons and selling quack cures means many of us pass on the good stuff. That would be tragic. But we're talking about Trump here. It's just as likely the snake oil salesman's product won't actually work, and we'll be stuck with the consequences of his selfishness.

Perhaps we can replace the State of Liberty's torch with an extended middle finger

Vox:

The Trump administration is reportedly considering allowing even fewer refugees — or even none at all — into the US next year, another potential blow to the US’s already decimated refugee program.

Reuters reported Thursday, citing a senior administration official, that officials are weighing several options: delaying some or all refugee admissions until a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order curbing refugee resettlement is resolved, deepening cuts to refugee admissions, or both.

@TheWeek: "Lol nothing matters"

I found myself moved by Damon Linker's column this morning about these awful times: "Maybe we can love the world, mourn our losses, and recognize the awfulness of so much of what swirls around us while also striving to place it in a perspective that makes some space for wry smiles. In dark times, a little irony can go a long way — transforming a tragedy not so much into a comedy as into a chapter with a mixture of darkness and light and an indeterminate end that leaves a little room for hope."

“Woke”

One of my big pet peeves these days is right-wing sneering at Black people not wanting to get shot or unfairly policed as “woke.” Like the survival instinct, or wanting to be left alone, is merely a form of radical chic. 

Yes, Trump is a warmonger

American Conservative: "President Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, thanks to his role in brokering a historic peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and for breaking a 39-year streak of U.S. presidents leading the U.S. into a new war."

This "broken streak" idea is specious. Trump's early presidency included dropping "the Mother of All Bombs" on Afghanistan. He vetoed a measure to end U.S. involvement in Yemen's war. He had a top Iranian general assassinated. The list goes on, but you get the idea: No American president gets out of office without some blood on his hands. and Trump is not an exception.

Maybe the first step to peace is not starting new wars. Great! But the United States armed forces are still involved in conflicts around the world. And Trump bears a great deal of responsibility for that. Don't let the lack of *new* wars fool you.

A good walk just might save my life

 

Yesterday, I was so angry at the state of the world -- justifiably, I think -- that I actually thought for a few minutes I was giving myself a heart attack. I wasn't. But the rage I was feeling about everything manifested itself as, well, physical pain.

Since the beginning of August, I have been getting out every day to walk a couple of miles. Before that, I'd gotten very pandemic sedentary: My Apple Health app tells me I averaged 365 steps a day in July. That's bad. So I made a goal of 5,000 steps a day, and I've mostly stuck with it. It is the most consistent exercise I've gotten since 2002. (My body and I don't always have a great relationship. I'm kind of a "stuck in my head" guy.

Anyway, it was raining this morning. I walked anyway. Through the downtown of my suburbanish college town and back, through the park. And I felt something I hadn't felt in months, maybe years: Maybe it was joy? I don't know. It felt good, though.

The state of the world is cause for rage. And sometimes I have to live with that anger. But I am not capable of living with it so acutely. The walk let me listen to music -- I've gotten very deeply into comfort music of late (more on that later) -- but otherwise I wasn't staring at a screen, obsessing about things. I let my mind get to other places. Getting physical activity every day is good in its own right. But the mental health aspect is pretty important too. A good walk just might save my life.

The narcissism of small differences: Pew Research edition

Seems like a better way to put this would be: Large majorities of U.S. adults -- in both parties -- believe that social media is a distraction. Emphasizing that one party believes it slightly more than the other, when lots of people in both parties believe it, does more to emphasize our differences than our commonalities.

With his SCOTUS list, President Trump says the quiet part a little louder

When President Trump announced his shortlist for the Supreme Court during the 2016 campaign, it was a clear signal to conservatives to get on his bandwagon, filled as it was with Federalist Society-approved names. Now that his re-election prospects are sketchy, Trump has released a new shortlist. It worked the first time, after all.

The interesting thing about the 2016 list is that it still had the quality of being -- for Trump -- subtle. Unless you pay enough attention to the endless ideological maneuverings to control the courts, the names on the list (and its FedSoc provenance) might not've meant much to you. But if you were aware of those things, invested in those fights, and conservative, the list was a good reason to think Trump might not be a squish on issues important to you.

This time around, though, Trump is taking no chances with subtlety when it comes to motivating the base. It's one reason he's even more plainly appealing to white racism during this campaign. But the boldface names on his new SCOTUS list -- Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley -- are meant to get the attention of the most casual conservative. They're known culture warriors who appear regularly on cable news, not the coy legal eggheads known to insiders. Trump is fairly screaming that he'll appoint anti-abortion judges this time around. The man is known for saying the quiet parts out loud. The closer the election gets, it seems, it's saying the out loud parts even louder than he once did.

@TheWeek: "The most destructive single decision ever made by an American president"

My colleague David Faris:

It struck me anew how unfathomable it is, or should be, that the person entrusted with the presidency, whose actions and inactions can have terrible and unforeseen consequences for millions of people, purposefully concealed his own knowledge about the coming of one of the worst crises to afflict humanity in close to a century. The selfishness and the bad faith are staggering. While Trump couldn't have stopped COVID-19 from getting here, his lies and inexcusable inaction sent a lot of people to their graves and caused millions of others to this day not to take this virus seriously.

How all the latest news makes me feel

I think I'd help myself professionally, as a part-time pundit, if I weren't so publicly emo. The model for column- and opinion-writing is generally to have a take and to be confident in it, to be prepared to argue and generally look strong and authoritative. At least, if you're a man. None of that is my strong suit, and I'm fairly sure I invite some contempt for it. (Then again, maybe that's all in my head.)

So. Let me tell you how all the news today -- 

...about the fires in California...

...about the president's lying to Americans about COVID...

...about the White House ordering security officials to downplay threats from Russia and white supremacists...

...and so much more...

-- makes me feel.

It makes me feel helpless. 

I don't have a smart or analytical reaction. Mostly, I just feel (in the case of the fires) that we're reaping what we've sowed, climate-wise, or that too many of my fellow citizens like what our president is doing. Mostly I know that what is happening is bad and that there's almost nothing I can do to stop it or make it better.

And that feeling is even worse because I have a son who is going to have to live with the consequences of what happens now. We're giving him a terrible, terrible world, and I cannot protect him from it.

God help us.

Starting to sense a pattern among Republican presidents

 Remember this?

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

The dirty secret of the Bob Woodward book is...

 ...roughly 40 percent of the country does not care how terrible a president Donald Trump is. They buy what he is selling, for whatever reason, and even taped conversations in which he admits he was lying to the country aren't going to make a difference.

That, as much as anything, is why I feel despair about the country. 

Does Donald Trump discredit the doves?

 Jeet Heer with an excellent observation:

My worry is that: Because of his attempts to portray himself as something of a dove -- even though that's arguable at best -- Trump will make it more difficult in mainstream politics to challenge Washington's hawkish consensus. The president's foreign policy incompetence and general terribleness will mean that if there is another leader who legitimately shrinks from using the hammer of the U.S. military to treat all challenges as a nail, they'll be tarred by association with Trump's rhetoric.

Maybe that's too hopeful, actually. It's difficult to position yourself for president in this country without buying into that hawkish consensus. The peaceniks are forever at a disadvantage.

Rod Dreher* is opposed to "woke college football"

 There's never a right way to protest racism, is there? Dreher is warning that Southern football fans won't take well to LSU football players demonstrating for Black Lives Matter. 

It just seems to me that if you are a football player trying to build interest in and sympathy for Black Lives Matter, this is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s the way to energize opponents of BLM. And I have a sense that this is going to have some effect, perhaps not measurable, on the fall election — and beyond.

The end result of this logic is that Black people would never, ever protest racism because it would rile up whites. It's the logic of abuse. But I'm sure the "Camp of the Saints" guy is legitimately concerned with helping Black people effectively fight racism.

* Oh, hell. Maybe this IS a Rod Dreher shitposting blog. Please forgive me my minor obsessions.

Parenting in 2020: Using Donald Trump as a moral object lesson

Before bedtime, discussion with my son turned to talk of morals and ethics. I want him to aspire to both justice and compassion -- and sometimes (according to my Mennonite understanding of how the world should work) that means having compassion for people who act unjustly.*

*I don't expect other people, especially victims of injustice, to do this. It's how I roll.

Talk turned to Donald Trump, of course.

How do you have compassion for Donald Trump?

My usual approach -- when I am the person I want to be -- is to look for redeeming qualities in the person I find frustrating. Most people are a mix! Even many genuinely terrible people have some redeeming quality.

I cannot discern a redeeming quality in Donald Trump. Not as a public man. Not as a private person, at least from what I know of him that way. (Which is too much.)

Which means I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. 

It's not a matter of him deserving it. It's a matter of me practicing an ethic that I aspire to. And he defies my understanding of how to implement my ethic.

So my answer to my son is: This is where I fall short of my values. I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. All I can tell you is to aspire to justice, and try not to let your anger at injustice -- however justified that anger may be -- warp your soul.

Mostly, I would like not to have to have Donald Trump be an object lesson in my parenting.

If in Trump's America, "l'état, c'est moi," l'état might allegedly be a rapist

 AP:

The U.S. Justice Department is seeking to take over President Donald Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit from a writer who accused him of rape, and federal lawyers asked a court Tuesday to allow a move that could put the American people on the hook for any money she might be awarded.

After New York state courts turned down Trump’s request to delay E. Jean Carroll’s suit, Justice Department lawyers filed court papers Tuesday aiming to shift the case into federal court and to substitute the U.S. for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded.

Again: Trump is putting the US government on the hook to defend him from allegations about activities that allegedly occurred long before his presidency. Perhaps there's some bizarre legal theory that can justify this. But most people will justifiably understand this as further confirmation that Trump sees no distinction between is personal interest and that of the country. 

Racists going to do what racists do

 In his biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight relays the following story about racist conspiracymongering as the Civil War came to an end.

What's the saying? History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

You should read the new Adam Serwer piece in The Atlantic

Right here. 

There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, but America has never seen a coalition quite like this.

This is the most hopeful thing I've read by Serwer -- which is to say, it's hopeful but very cautious about what is possible -- and it is frankly a relief to read somebody aiming for what's possible instead of what is coming undone. Even better, Serwer roots that hope (and the caution) in a deep reading of history. I do a lot of lamenting. And not without reason. But maybe we can make things better for people who need it to be better?

My son just came to me, teary-eyed, because the link he needs to get into his afternoon class wasn't working

 It might be a long school year.

A different first day of school

My son started the seventh grade today. He got up, ate breakfast, puttered around a little -- and then, at 8 am, went to his room, turned on his school-issued iPad, and settled into a video chat with his science teacher.

I'm not enamored of distance learning, but that's still kind of an extraordinary thing, isn't it? And then I remember: He's 12. He doesn't remember a world without iPads, or without live video calling.

My own seventh grade experience was somewhat different. My family wasn't poor, exactly, but we weren't comfortable, either. I didn't have a Trapper Keeper. Instead, I had to carry a cheaper, more industrial three-ring binder. (I wonder who invented that locking mechanism those binders have.) It made me feel like I looked poor, and I felt the humiliation keenly. I have to remember that when you're 12, the smallest slights feel huge.

"At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror"

Good lord, the damage we do in the name of our own safety:

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts.

Vine says that while having these numbers is helpful, it does not offer any insight into what kinds of lives displaced people are living. “Every day you live in a refugee camp is a day it’s been degraded compared to what it once was,” he said. “It’s another day you’re separated from your home and your home land.”

I will always believe that the War on Terror has created a lot of enemies the United States might not otherwise have had. In the name of national security, we have made ourselves less safe. Dumb.

Rod Dreher endorses the notion that 'code switching' is lying

Rod Dreher* has a lot of anonymous correspondents. But I think this is one super-misguided part of his recent blog post.

My correspondent — let’s call him Henry — argued with the CRT person over power and identity within corporations. Henry has decades of experience with corporate life. His view is that men and women who have reached the top in most corporations have been thoroughly assimilated into corporate culture — and that defines who they are and what they believe. His interlocutor disagreed, and said blacks in corporations retain their black identity and just engage in lots of “code switching.” They tell white people what the white people want to hear. They tell the truth to their black friends.

Henry said that this woman’s view, when understood through communications theory, means that her actual argument is this: that black people lie to white people all the time. Conclusion: the white racists have been right all along. Black people cannot be trusted when they talk to whites.

Understand that we're getting this account of what the corporate trainer said third-hand, so I have some questions about the accuracy of how it's characterized. Nonetheless, Henry's understanding of code switching seems to me to be misinformed.

Code switching, as I understand it -- and hey, I'm not Black, so I've never had to do it -- isn't lying, but rather attempting to communicate in the vernacular of whatever setting you're in. White people don't generally have to code switch because their vernacular tends to be the dominant one. And yes, I suppose it means that the person doing the code switching obscures some part of their "authentic" self to do so, but that doesn't strike me as lying.

Put it this way: If Black people didn't code switch in corporate settings, Dreher would be writing a post complaining about ebonics.

Anyway, here is a good post from last year, "Code-Switching Is Not Trying to Fit in to White Culture, It’s Surviving It."

For African Americans, it is a performative expression that has not only helped some of us thrive in mainstream culture—it has helped many of us simply survive.

Dr. Dione Mahaffey, an Atlanta-based business psychologist and coach, says the very notion of code-switching is draining, but asserts that the practice has been most beneficial as she progressed in her career.

“It’s exhausting, but I wouldn’t go as far to call it inauthentic, because it’s an authentic part of the Black American experience,” Mahaffey says. “Code-switching does not employ an inauthentic version of self, rather, it calls upon certain aspects of our identity in place of others, depending on the space or circumstance. It’s exhausting because we can actually feel the difference.”

Anyway: It's frustrating to see Dreher take a common practice and interpret in the worst possible way for the Black people who practice it. (Typical, though.) For all his smarts, Dreher shows little evidence of considering what the world must look like through the eyes of Black people, or even having read much. He's incurious, which makes him stupid. He could do better. He chooses not to.

* The man gets my goat for some reason. I'll try not to make this a Rod Dreher shitposting blog.

3,000 words

 It took me four days of hard writing, but I just completed a 3,000 word draft of a reported piece.

I know the work isn't over. It never is at this point of the magazine article writing process! But it feels good to have hit this milestone.

Trump is a racist. And....

Here is my column from this morning about how Donald Trump is criticizing Critical Race Theory and "The 1619 Project":

It is unlikely Trump has read or personally tried to understand much about CRT or "The 1619 Project," or possesses the capacity to engage with either meaningfully. But he probably understands one important thing. What both those efforts have in common is an effort to understand and address the experience of being Black in America — where slavery and Jim Crow have been the law of the land for all but a few decades — and to do so from a Black perspective.

That is what Trump is against.

After nearly four years of this guy's presidency, it feels insufficient to say "Trump is a racist" over and over again. I mean: It is one of his defining characteristics. But the people who are going to listen to you say it already agree with you. Also, it's easy. But it also seems worth pointing out how that actually works from time to time.

I'm not sure I have the best handle on how to do it. Here is what I wrote this morning:

Black Americans are definite underdogs in the telling of this country's story. So theories and histories that center their perspective get crosswise with the old axiom that "History is written by the winners." Trump, we know, has a rather narrow idea of who constitutes America's winners — and contempt for everybody else as "suckers" and "losers." So it is to be expected that he defines such Black-centric ideas as "un-American," and attempts to put them outside the bounds of debate.

And here is a more straightforward way of saying what I was getting at.

“To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. 

How to address the problems of this era in a true and meaningful way -- rather than just heaping more kindling on the fire -- remains a challenge for me. I'm trying to get there.

My mother's birthday

 She would have been 69 today. She was 61 when she passed. I still miss and love her.

Alan Jacobs on Frederick Douglass

I've been thinking about this piece all day.

Decades ago, I read an essay by a feminist literary critic named Patrocinio Schweickart about how feminists should read misogynistic texts from the past. She counseled them to face the misogyny but also to look for what she called the “utopian moment” in such texts, an “authentic kernel” of human experience that can be shared and celebrated. I think that’s what Douglass does. He has every reason, given what their sins and follies cost him and his Black sisters and brothers, to dismiss the Founders wholly, but he does not. “They were great in their day and generation.”

It would be utterly unfair to demand of anyone wounded as Douglass was wounded the charity he exhibits here. I would not ever dare to ask it. That he speaks as warmly of the Founders as he does strikes me as little less than a miracle.

Please read the whole thing.

And now the earthquakes

 

If I were possessed of a certain theological bent -- or if I was a huckster televangelist trying to scare people -- I would be out in the streets suggesting that wildfires, plagues, earthquakes and all the rest are God's judgment on humanity.

I feel sad about Rod Dreher

 I used to enjoy reading Rod Dreher.

Dreher blogs these days at The American Conservative, but I first started paying attention to him back when he wrote regularly at Beliefnet. His social conservatism was never going to be my own, but I admired what appeared to be an independent cast of mind: He was a conservative who opposed the Iraq War, who questioned capitalism's corrosive effects on our souls, who sought out community, who righteously bore witness to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and left that church because of it. There were alarming moments in his writing -- a seeming hatred of Muslims, a disregard for immigrants that seemed un-Christian. But for the most part, he seemed thoughtful and generous of spirit. He modeled a kind of conservative thinking that these days I find best representative in writers like Alan Jacobs and David French. I don't always agree with their viewpoints either, but I sometimes learn from them.

Over the last few years, Dreher's writing has curdled into something mean and hard. I don't want to play armchair psychologist, but the shift seems to date from his book, "The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming," and a realization of how completely his small-town family hated and rejected him for his cosmopolitcan ways. I hate that he experienced that -- the end of "Lemming" was shattering to me, frankly.

But where Dreher once seemed curious and generous-spirited, he transformed into one of the most-shrill writers around. A lot of this was focused on sex -- his disdain and hatred for gay and transgender people defines most of his writing these days. Even when it seemingly makes no sense: He went out of his way this week to point out that the author of "In Defense of Looting" is transgender. (In the comments, he said he thought the author's "disordered" mind explained the defense of looting.) 

Dreher roots much of his writing in a Christian morality. But he applies his standards -- and his compassion -- differently to different kinds of people. This is what he wrote* about Kyle Rittenhouse, who stands accused of killing two people in Kenosha:

I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t see Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero or a villain. I see him as a tragic figure, a kid who inserted himself into a situation where he didn’t belong, and that was way, way over his head. He meant well, but he shouldn’t have been there.

He also wrote about Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her bed by police, but who "had been involved romantically with Jamarcus Glover, a drug-dealing thug."

What happened to George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Breonna Taylor would not have surprised a man like my father. Floyd was a career criminal and a drughead. Blake was a violent man too. Taylor’s extended romantic relationship with a career criminal brought her to ruin. All of these cases, regardless of how they are adjudicated in a court of law, would have been seen by my father as examples of what happens to people who refuse to live by the Tao (I mean this in the C.S. Lewis sense of “natural law”), or who entangle themselves with those who refuse to live by the Tao. 

So. Dreher is sympathetic of Rittenhouse, a young man who armed himself with a gun, went looking for trouble and found it. But he stands in judgment of Taylor, who found herself caught in a crossfire because of police mistakes.

We all have our rooting interests, I suppose. But Dreher applies a harsher moral standard to a woman who has been killed than the young man who killed. His morality -- the thing that defines him -- makes excuses for some and blame for others. It is ugly. I used to enjoy reading Dreher, and admired his independence of mind. Now, he just looks like a cautionary tale to me.

*I don't feel like linking him. His articles are easy enough to find if you want.

If it's too loud...

Old and busted: If it's too loud, you're too old.

New hotness: If it's too loud, you're my son.

"I can't hear myself think!" he shouted at me in the kitchen just now, while the radio was playing some energetic songs from my youth.

Two possibilities: He does not possess a rock n' roll soul.

Or I'm getting old and have all my electronics turned up to high volume because ... that's what I did when I was young and now my hearing is ruined.

It's possible both are true.

Personal note about the writing process

After 25-plus years in journalism, I can pretty easily write 700-1,000 words in one sitting -- sometimes, depending on the topic and how much reporting and research have been done ahead of time, I can hit 1,000 words in about an hour. And they're usually coherent! It's one skill I know I have.

The last few years, though, I've done a few more reported magazine-style pieces. Not terribly lengthy -- usually in the 2,500-word range -- and, hoo boy. It's a whole different process. It's not just longer. I have to think my way through the structure of a piece more. And I have to be willing not to do it in one setting -- the attempt can nearly destroy me. 

Instead, I have to break the work up -- writing for an hour here, an hour there, until I get my draft. I'm accustomed to a "see the assignment, write the assignment" kind of process, so slowing down and taking chunks is unfamiliar to me. It requires me to stretch my skills and even learn new ones. It is not in my comfort zone. But it seems worth doing. Not just because I get paid for it (though that's important) but because it helps me stay fresh. This is hard stuff. Which, in this case, means it's worth doing.

The frustrating silence of John Kelly

 I am sorry that the death of John Kelly's son has become a political issue, but I am not sympathetic to this: 

But Mr. Kelly, who served for more than 40 years in the Marines, has told associates that a retired four-star general should not come out against a sitting president in the heat of a political campaign, even though former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general, publicly criticized Mr. Trump in June for lacking “mature leadership” and trying to divide rather than unite the country.

“He wants to avoid taking a position that might be perceived as political,” said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star Marine Corps general and a close friend of Mr. Kelly, who had not spoken to him since the publication of the Atlantic article. “I also think he takes to heart the commitment to confidentiality in matters related to their interaction with the president.”

I don't buy it.

If Kelly wanted to preserve his neutrality as a former four-star general he shouldn't have taken on the political roles of Secretary of Homeland Security and chief of staff to this president. He chose to enter the realm of politics. His asserting of military neutrality is a bit late, then, and only works to obscure the deficiencies of the president. It's an excuse -- one that serves Trump, not the American people.

So...

 ...I am honestly trying to figure out what value I can create at this blog, rather than give an opinion that other people also have expressed.

Performative patriotism

A follow-up thought on the controversy over whether Donald Trump disrespected troops: It is clear that some people genuinely love their country and admire military service as a result. But it is also obvious that a lot of people are more interested in using patriotism (and a related respect for the military) as a means to their own empowerment. 

Trump's also likes feeling like a tough guy: That's why he loves military parades and pardoning war criminals. But the key thing to note about him is that he is almost entirely transactional. From that Atlantic piece:

“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.”

We should view Trump's displays of militiaphilia in the same terms we do his relationship with evangelicals: He'd probably toss them under the bus in a second if doing so were to his advantage. Patriotism isn't always the refugee of the scoundrel -- sometimes it's the cudgel used by power-hungry grifters.

About that Trump disrespecting military service and John McCain story...

This is very simple. Somebody needs to ask John Kelly, on the record, if it happened or not. Or Kelly can step forward to deny it of his own volition. If he does so, we move on and The Atlantic loses its credibility. But I feel confident the reporting will hold up -- it's certainly in keeping with what Trump has said and done publicly and on the record.

That said, I can't help but feel somebody like Tucker Carlson is watching and taking notes for 2024. You can get away with mishandling the pandemic, racist policies, undermining America's democratic norms and generally being unpleasant and bad for the country -- and that might be Carlson's agenda, too. But he'll be too smart to ever badmouth the military. Trumpism with a little bit of self-restraint and self-discipline will be a terrible and terrifying thing for the country. The original is bad enough.

I don't think THE GODFATHER PART III is so terrible

Vulture says G3 is getting a rerelease in theaters: " In honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, this edit of The Godfather Part III will feature some exciting new punctuation and will be called Mario Puzo’s THE GODFATHER, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, according to a press release from Paramount Pictures."

I love the Godfather pictures -- I'm a middle-aged white guy, and I've only recently come to realize how much that makes me a cliche -- and my dirty secret is I don't think Part III is actually that bad.

Don't get me wrong: Pacino is way over the top in this movie. I would love to know how the silent Michael Corleone of the 1950s became the shouty guy of the late 1970s, but I suspect that's more a Pacino thing than a story thing.

That said, it has all the elements of a potentially great Part III:

* A young up-and-comer who wants to carry on the family legacy, even though...

* The king, who turned to a life of crime to protect his family, wants to get out of crime...

* ...and ends up sacrificing his family, the people he loves, because of the choices he made throughout his life.

It's a tragedy, man. And the end -- Corleone's death, set to Cavlleria Rusticana -- is wonderful. No assassination. Just death, coming for the king as it comes for us all:

It's beautiful. And imperfect. The new edit probably can't salvage Pacino's performance -- but maybe it can find the better movie I know is lurking within.

What we're talking about when we talk about Trump

He's a liar. He lies to get his way. He lies to get stuff. He lies to make himself look good. He lies for the sheer hell of it.

Which makes a story like this about how Trump "sows distrust" while saying things "with no evidence" a bit aggravating. It's circling the thing without saying the thing. And I'm tired of White House quotes like this.

“The American people know they never have to wonder what the president is thinking or how he feels about a particular topic, which is one of the many reasons why they chose to elect him over the same old recycled politicians who just use the poll-tested talking points,’’ Mr. Deere said.

Which is, of course, bullshit. The question isn't whether we know how Donald Trump feels. He won't ever let us get away with not knowing. The question is whether there is truth to what he says. And there isn't.

What if it is too late to save America?

Farhad Manjoo admits he's feeling jumpy: "To me, the signs on the American horizon are flashing blood red. Armed political skirmishes are erupting on the streets, and scholars are tracking a rise in violence and instability as the election draws near. Gun sales keep shattering records. Mercifully, I suppose, there’s a nationwide shortage of ammo. Then there is the pandemic, mass unemployment, natural disasters on every coast, intense racial and partisan polarization, and not a little bit of lockdown-induced collective stir craziness."

I admit to finding this way of thinking persuasive. Democracy depends on agreement that it's ok for the other party to win elections, even if we want our party to win. I'm pretty sure that agreement is no longer operable in the United States, and I don't quite know how to get it back. That's the short version of my argument.

And it pains me, greatly, to think about. I'm terrified of living out the last third or so of my life in an unstable, poor country. (Especially one that possesses an endless supply of nuclear weapons -- it is terrifying to think how instability in the United States could quite literally bring about the end of the world.) Even worse, I feel miserable when I think about my son having to navigate such a world, if it survives.

Manjoo's column this morning reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker piece, almost exactly a year ago, in which he contemplated the likelihood of a "climate apocalypse." It made a lot of people angry, but his case then -- that we're far down the road, and there is insufficient political will to do what is necessary to fix the problem -- seems to have grown in strength now that we see how much of a mess America has made of the pandemic.

But I didn't think the piece was totally hopeless. Here's what he said toward the end of the piece:

It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.

This makes sense to me. Franzen was talking about climate change, but I wonder if it might not be best to take this approach to everything. I may not be able to save America. I may not be able to save Kansas, or Lawrence, but maybe I can do some things to make my corner of this community a little better. It may be all I can do, in fact. And if enough people do it in enough places, maybe we can make enough of our places better that this thing we call America won't slide into total failure.

That's not much hope. But it's the best I can do.

“Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

NYT: “I want people to understand, the face of the needy is different now,” said Ms. Cazimero, who has joined a new class of Americans who never imagined they would have to take a spot in a modern-day bread line. “Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

I don't have much to say about this, except the need for a more robust safety net seems both obvious and unreachable for America, and it's aggravating. And I'm old enough to remember stories like this.

One in eight Americans receives food stamps One in four American children now depends on food stamps. Among all Americans, one in eight is receiving food stamps, and as unemployment drops middle-class people into poverty, 20,000 additional people are signing up each day.

That's from 2009. Seems we should have learned a lesson during the Great Recession that we didn't.

The president wants to cut funding to "anarchist" cities

NYPost: President Trump is ordering the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City and three other cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime, The Post can exclusively reveal. “My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo, which twice mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name.

Of course, depriving these cities of federal funds will almost certainly exacerbate whatever problems they currently have -- but it seems pretty obvious that Trump isn't interested in solving problems as he is in posturing before his base and punishing his perceived enemies. This is an old observation, but: This is a president who has little interest in governing the entire United States for the entire United States. And we see this isn't just a rhetorical ploy on his part -- he wants to deliver real pain to the places that don't vote for him. (And if that pain suppresses voter turnout in November, I'm sure that's just a coincidence.)

"Criminals only understand strength!" Trump tweeted on Wednesday. I guess he'd know.

We can use our laws to detain alleged terrorists. They can't use our laws to get undetained.

NYT:

A federal appeals court panel has ruled for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are not entitled to due process, adopting a George W. Bush-era view of detainee rights that could affect the eventual trial of the men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“The Due Process Clause may not be invoked by alien without property or presence in the sovereign territory of the United States,” Judge Rao wrote, a position also taken by Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

The reach of American courts extends throughout the world. The reach of America's rights before a court does not. 

A thought about my simmering rage

 So:

* I extracted myself from social media so that I could stop immersing myself in -- and contributing to -- a culture of Very Online Constant Rage.

* But: There are actually things to be angry about. Leaving Twitter doesn't change that.

* So I am trying to figure out the sweet spot of writing about, and bearing witness to, the injustices of the age while at the same time not exploiting it, unnecessarily or unreasonably exacerbating it, or losing my own soul to constant anger.

I would take some advice on that. 

"Most days it felt like attaching my mouth to an exhaust pipe and then inhaling"

Yeah:

He diagnosed me right away. “Well, so this is a delicate topic, and it's often been difficult to talk about, but there's some kinds of people who particularly get Twitter addictions and they're often journalists—”

I laughed sadly. “And people who are addicted to Twitter are like all addicts—on the one hand miserable, and on the other hand very defensive about it and unwilling to blame Twitter.” (Shortly after this conversation, I quit Twitter for about three weeks. It was soothing. Actually, it was life-changing. As of this writing, for reasons I don't understand—but also do, all too well, because of Lanier—I'm back on the platform. Please kill me.)

@BonnieKristian: "Libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition"

At The Week: "Libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition, if indeed we ever were. There is no libertarianism in the soul of the Trumpian Republican Party, and Republican partisans today are not libertarians. The limited government leg of the stool is broken. If libertarians accede Trump's demand of our permanent loyalty at the polls, the best we can expect is splinters."

I am not a libertarian -- I have too many hopes for what government can do for the people. But I respect a lot of libertarian people and their insights: Bonnie, for one, but also writers (and friends) like Rick Henderson and Steve Greenhut. (Radley Balko is not a friend, but he's another libertarian who was doing the hard work on police militarization long before it was popular.) We don't always agree on stuff (especially when Democrats are running things) but I appreciate their insights that what government can do for the people can also be stuff that government does to the people. They're also better attuned to the law of unintended consequences -- "do something" is not always the right answer when problems arise, though it almost always feels like it is. And beyond that, they aid me in seeing through my own bullshit.

I miss the days of liberaltarian possibility

Anyway, Bonnie's right: The folks in the Trumpist coalition who describe themselves as libertarians either want the big tax cuts that come with Republican governance and maybe don't care about the other stuff (like a willingness to use troops against Americans) that seem to count as unlibertarian. Or they're white folks who subscribe for a "libertarianism for me, but not for thee" approach to, well, everybody else. They see freedom in zero sum terms, and they want theirs.

So no libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition. I doubt they're ever properly part of any party coalition, at least not on a long-term basis. At their best, though, they're like prophets -- in society, yet apart from it, crying out warnings of what we're doing to ourselves.

There *is* a violence problem in Portland

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor. "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west."

It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But.

I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task.

Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did was wrong. I think it's fair, even, to call that terrorism. Certainly, we would have if the building had burned. Maybe we'll found out this was an act of right-wing provocateurs -- and I'm willing to correct and clarify if that's the case -- but at this point that's not what it looks like. 

I'm keeping this in perspective: Right-wing violence is the biggest danger we face at the moment. Listen to Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS official under President Trump:

When Trump finally started using the term "domestic extremism" himself in the summer of 2020, it was in reference to the violence and looting that occurred during the protests across the country against police brutality targeting Black Americans, which the president attributed to "antifa." For Neumann, this was an obvious red herring. She says that the numbers don't bear out the idea that left-wing violence is as much of a problem as right-wing violence, and arrests during the summer's protests demonstrate that.

"If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa." She's unequivocal about this: "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

That's the bigger picture. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. Threatening lives -- especially innocent lives -- is wrong. It's evil.

Foggy morning on the Kansas River

 

I kept expecting to see the Angel of Death emerge from the fog, standing at the prow of a longboat, ready to take me on a journey to Hades. 

Thanks, guys

I knew when I decided to go inactive on my longtime Twitter account and move to cultivating the blog instead, I was going to lose audience and a piece of the conversation. So I'm gratified that in the last day or so, more than 30 of you have decided to follow the Twitter account that is just a feed of this blog. That's roughly 1 percent of the number of followers I have at the old account, but hopefully I'm offering better and slightly more thoughtful content here. At the very least, I think, I am responding to actual stories and not just the headlines -- and I'm less tempted to offer knee-jerk takes when I have to go through the process of creating a blog post. It slows me down a bit. That matters, I think. I hope. 

Anyway, for those of you who have followed me here: Thanks.

The moral burdens of leaving Syria. (And why we should leave anyway.)

 Daniel Larison:

Andrew Bacevich recently commented on our government’s senseless policy in Syria: “So instead of a realistic policy defined by clear national interests, the United States drifts toward a confrontation with Russia in a place that virtually no American believes is worth dying for.” This “drift” is what happens when U.S. foreign policy operates as if on autopilot. Instead of deploying troops somewhere to achieve a specific end to advance an American interest, our policymakers come to see the deployments as ends in themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the deployment serves a clear purpose or whether it is a wise use of resources. It evidently doesn’t matter whether it’s legal. Once the U.S. sends troops somewhere, it usually takes extraordinary effort to extract them later, and that has no effect on subsequent decisions to deploy them in new countries.

Correct. I'd add that deploying to countries like Syria creates a moral element to this flytrap effect: Once our troops are in a country and affecting the political landscape, we become morally responsible both for what happens while we are there -- and what happens as a result of our leaving. I think we should get out of Afghanistan, but I am distressed by what might happen to women in that country as a result. I think the U.S. has no business being in Syria, but it's also true that getting out screws the Kurds over. Those are lives lost and destroyed because we walked away. (I lost a friend, in fact, because I thought it correct to leave Syria -- he felt that doing so was a moral abomination because of the Kurds.)

The answer, as Larison suggests, is not to go to war in countries where American interests aren't all that clear in the first place. And I still think we should get out of Syria and Afghanistan. The advocates of a more humble foreign policy often find themselves having to justify the moral burden of non-interventionism in a way that hawks don't. But drifting toward a confrontation with Russia for no good reason could end up creating a higher moral cost -- in terms of shattered lives -- than leaving. Sometimes, when there are no good answers, the best answer is restraint.