Flowers for America
Over the last few years I have blogged and tweeted about shows from HBO Now, Youtube TV, Acorn, Britbox, and briefly the Mhz channel. In response to the pandemic, we dropped all those pay channels and have been streaming free channels like Roku, TUBI, FilmRise, etc. I rewatched UFO, a paranoid 1970 sci-fi series by the team that had produced marionette series like Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds, and later Space 1999. I am rewatching Merlin, too, which presented the Arthurian legend as a mix of adolescent comedy and melodrama.
I had seen parts of the first Hunger Games film, but TUBI had the entire series for nine more days, so we started watching those, and comparisons to the current economic landscape are inescapable. We’ve also been watching the Genius of the Modern World series on Netflix, which my stepson has not dropped. The first two episodes featured Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzche. We watched Nicole Kidman in Bewitched, and last night my wife found a 1990 Cinderella-type flick called, If the Shoe Fits, starring post-sex tape Rob Lowe and post-rhinoplasty Jennifer Grey. That was terrible, but I owed her for sitting through Marx and Nietzche.
One film we enjoyed was Flowers for Algernon, a 2000 TV movie starring Matthew Modine. I saw Charly in theaters when it first came out in 1968, and found it very moving. Cliff Robertson played Charlie Gordon on TV in 1961, and again in the film. I thought Cliff Robertson deserved his Oscar, but there was one scene where he plays the developing Charlie Gordon being “groovy” that was tough to watch. Later I ran across the story in a scifi anthology. I hadn’t initially thought of it as a science fiction tale, but increasing his intelligence got Dr Morbius in all sorts of trouble in Forbidden Planet, and there were the Outer Limits episodes, Expanding Human and The Sixth Finger, where Skip Homeier and David McCallum ran afoul of their experiments in increasing intelligence.
Daniel Keyes was an experienced author and editor of pulp magazine and comic book science fiction, horror and fantasy, but also spent some time teaching English to special needs students. He reportedly developed a synopsis, Brainstorm, at the request of Galaxy Science Fiction into Flowers for Algernon, whose editor then requested a happier ending. Keyes published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction instead, and won a Hugo award for Best Short Story. Keyes later expanded it to a novel, which I have not read, which shared a Nebula Award, and was nominated for a Hugo. Again some publishers requested the happier ending, but Harcourt Brace published as written.
Anyway, we enjoyed Matthew Modine’s performance. There were staging differences from Charly, but the story was essentially the same, and at the end we had to wonder how we would deal with a loss of intelligence. We each have relatives who are dealing with this in a very real way.
As I drifted off to sleep last night, it occurred to me that our nation-state is facing an impending decline of intelligence with far less grace than Charlie Gordon. We’ve witnessed an experiment in which a surfeit of natural resources – taken from around the globe – fueled a massively prosperous middle class, but the experiment is being carefully wound down, and we are being made to forget all the rights and prerogatives we once took for granted.
How long will Black Lives Matter?
A week after our office day of reflection on anti-racism issues, we met again (via Zoom) for a discussion of learning and next steps facilitated by Larry Roper. I had been pondering the question, Why is an anti-racism movement finally gaining some traction now, centuries since what Dr Gerald Horne and others call The Construction of Whiteness? But one of our number raised another excellent question when she recounted that people on what she had watched were quite matter-of-factly discussing how to keep the BLM movement going when the powers-that-be lose interest.
As to the first question, my theory is that BLM is at least partially a useful rallying cry for the resistance against the Trump insurgency, using those terms as defined by John Robb in an interview early in Trump’s presidency:
The concept is that the American political scene is now the battleground between two weaponized social networks that have taken over the political process. It started with the insurgency, which is the rejection of the establishment that voted and put Trump into office. The insurgency is a maneuver base. It disrupts systems, causes chaos and because of that chaos, it disrupts the decision making process of the opposition, the established opposition as well as any network opposition. It’s been fairly effective. It put Trump in office. It’s maintaining his popularity. Trump is a natural in terms of that maneuver based disruptive strategies. He has lots of what’s called a fast transiency. Moves from one topic to the next, one disruption to the next. There’s never really any time for the opposition to build a momentum in terms of opposition on any specific point.
The resistance is the network that’s been most effective at combating the insurgency. It found its purchase in the identity side, very values focused. Its pure tunicle. In many respects doesn’t put up with violations of values. It’s in the process of taking over the democratic party and we’re seeing the compromise mainstream candidates being thrown to the side like Biden and anyone who’s tried to straddle the middle ground. AOC for instance, is the perfect example of the resistance participant. Both of these networks are open source. Meaning there’s not anyone specific person that’s leader. Those people that you see at the front tend to be more like a weaponized version of the network. There’s lots of conflicting ideas within these open source networks but they’re all agreed on a single animating purpose. That’s just the, the core of the idea.
Poli Sci and Econ professor Mark Blyth believes that swing state voters went for Trump to make themselves heard in an economic system that was ignoring and savaging them but the Donald also clearly caters to and is popular with white nationalists in the US. The resistance has searched for a mode of attack, such as MeToo, Russiagate, etc. – none of which gained real traction – but BLM is a pill he cannot swallow without alienating that racist base. Between BLM and his boneheaded lack of response to the pandemic, Trump appears poised to lose to Joe Biden, who is feeble, but far less offensive to Democratic donors than Bernie Sanders.
Certainly many people are honestly appalled by the recorded evidence of official violence against people of color, but I suspect that once Trump is out of office, BLM will no longer enjoy the media focus it does just now. Hopefully I will be proven wrong.
Personal Day
My employer, Credo, consults for colleges and universities, many of whom were spurred by the protest movement in response to George Floyd’s murder to spend some days in mid-June in reflection and discussion of what led to the racism in our world. Credo decided to do much the same, and today is that day. There were, of course, preparations and meetings with lists of readings and podcast resources in the weeks before. Someone suggested “journaling” which to me meant adding another blog post. Beyond that, simply having a day like this on my schedule brought back memories.
My mother used to tell a story that a stranger rang our doorbell when I was very young, and that I ran to tell her that there was a chocolate man at the door. I’ve often wondered if I really made that connection between skin color and food color. We lived in a mostly white Long Island suburb, but I recall there was at least one little dark-skinned girl in kindergarten, Felicia. I remember talking to Felicia, probably teasing her like all the girls, but her quietly responding, “I’m tellin’.” Which was no fun at all.
Later we had a sitter who if we didn’t behave, punished us with a drop of hot tabasco sauce on our tongue. So we behaved. As I recall, she worked for us for quite a while. But then my folks took two of us on a vacation, and we came home to find my younger siblings and about two dozen of Mrs Brown’s family in our swimming pool. I had never seen so many dark bodies. That was the last we saw of her.
I was around ten when we moved to a still-rural (but soon to be suburban) area in Maryland, and a lot of things changed. My teacher went from being Mrs Grant to Mrs Lee, which I thought was enormously funny. At school, we stuck out with the NY accents we didn’t realize we had, and the other kids called us, “city slickers.” At the ES, our classes were perhaps a quarter to a third black students. For some reason many of the black boys sat in the back row. A few of them could barely read aloud, which puzzled me because they could talk like anyone else. Mrs Lee was local and read to the class from Huckleberry Finn, but her pronunciation of the Southern dialect didn’t sound like it had in my head.
Later I had Mr Jackson, my first black teacher. I truly believe he liked me, but I wasn’t particularly observant of rules, and he often punished me and sometimes my unlucky friends with the long, flat Board of Education across my backside. I remember he broke it on one of us once, and wrapped it back together with masking tape. After that broke, too, he taped three yardsticks together. For music we had Mr Thacker, who would play standards on the piano, by ear, while we sang along. He sent Mr Jackson among us to remove those singing off-key, and I got culled. For three decades I was convinced I couldn’t sing.
Junior High was more of the same, except different teachers. We had a black art teacher, Mr Washington, who used to do silk screens while we were sketching or painting. He also let the black girls bring in their record players and play 45s, so I heard a lot of music, like Grazin’ in the Grass, that they never played on middle-of-the-road radio. (Until they played the Hugh Masakela instrumental cover.) One day he came in wearing sunglasses. The talk was that he had been tear-gassed while marching in DC. It was truly amazing to me that such a laid-back man would have been marching in the streets.
My father had attended a private, Jesuit-run school in NY, so my folks sent me to Georgetown Prep, which is now famous for spitting out two conservative Supreme Court Justices but used to have somewhat liberal professors and teachers. Prep’s student body was diverse, but there weren’t that many African-American kids, and there were no girls. We had boarding students from South and Central America, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, and Iran but a lot of the day students already knew each other from Mater Dei School, a Catholic 1-8 boy’s school in Bethesda. One black fellow joined my class in a later year, though. When he played basketball, I heard that one of my ex-roommates responded to his baskets by shouting out, “three-fifths of a point!” Later we elected him the first African-American President of the Yard.
While I was at GP, my brothers and sisters were encountering racial tensions at the Jr and Sr High Schools. I suspect that a lot of city slickers from a lot of ethnic and economic backgrounds had moved to new developments in the area, and the rural strategies of coexistence weren’t working as before.
At Prep, I read Travels with Charley. In his road tour of the US, Steinbeck only hints at racial troubles as talks with an old man he calls, Monsieur Ci Git, who dismisses it as a problem for later generations. I spent a lot of time then trying to figure what Ci Git means in French, but read now that it was used instead of, “Here Lies” on grave markers. Though I believed Steinbeck then, this reviewer convinced the publishers that most of the book was actually fiction. Later we read Black Like Me, and it seemed too simple that a Caucasian man would really be seen as black simply by darkening his skin. Eddie Murphy did a reverse skit on that theme on SNL, right? But thirteen years before that, in 1948, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who had exposed Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s KKK membership, also passed, and wrote Thirty Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story that Exposed the Jim Crow South, which I suppose I’ll have to find and read now. Reason review and podcast here.
I already told some of my coworkers this story, but when my folks began bugging me about what I wanted to do, I told them Architecture. They thought that was great, but my father told me that Yale or Harvard would want me to attain a Bachelors (non-professional) degree, then get a Masters in Architecture. With six siblings behind me, he couldn’t afford to send any of us to college for multiple degrees. So I got this big, fat green book of college statistics from the College Board, and started going through looking for schools that had Architectural programs, had swimming teams, didn’t cost a fortune, didn’t require public-speaking (I was still very much an introvert) and had a reasonably even male-female ratio. After four years of all-male high school, I wanted to meet some women.
As I recall, Dad forbade me from applying to Stanford, probably because it was so far away, but possibly because he had read about their integrated coed dorms. Dad wanted me to look at Catholic University, as a commuter, and he wanted me to get accepted at William and Mary because a guy at work claimed I couldn’t get in there. There were cards in the back of the big green book that you could send to colleges for additional information. Rice University and The Hampton Institute also met my criteria, and Hampton wasn’t that far from DC. When a thick envelope arrived, I started looking through Hampton’s brochure, with pictures of students and buildings and facilities. Even in the 1970s colleges were trying to show some diversity, but it dawned on me that almost everyone in the brochure was black.
Hampton had been founded after the Civil War to teach freed slaves. They later included Native Americans, but were criticized for racial-mixing. Native Americans found that they couldn’t get jobs with a degree from a black college, so that enrollment dried up. I frankly don’t recall if I even showed the brochure to my folks. I couldn’t imagine going to a mostly black college, and I couldn’t imagine them paying for it. Based on my SATs, Carnegie-Mellon sent me a small brochure and also fit all my criteria, and that is where I went. I have thought back over the years on what it would have been like to be in the minority on a campus.
Fast forward to Baltimore in 2018. I moved from the Mt Washington suburb to an apartment downtown, and began walking past The Real News Network (TRNN) offices on my way to the farmer’s market. TRNN featured a live talk by Dr Gerald Horne, so I dropped by to watch, Why Black Lives Don’t Matter. Horne recounted many of the points from his book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. I bought this book for my stepson, who is widely-read in American history. You can sing Molasses to Rum all you want, but Horne claims that the Revolutionary War was an attempt to preserve the cash cow that slavery represented to wealthy people in the American colonies.
Last week I was telling a friend about this day of reflection, and he told me that he had recently watched a talk by several speakers, the best of whom was a black woman. A questioner noted that a review called her, “articulate,” and asked if she was offended. She replied something about enduring microaggressions (PDF). My friend, and his partner, couldn’t get their minds around interpreting a compliment as an insult, but as described in this legal reference site, they are very real to minorities.
Anyway, coworkers suggested many pieces for us to watch or read. I got a jump last night and watched 13th on Netflix, which explains how the prison-industrial complex has evolved to replace slavery. I also watched the first of a series of NY Times podcasts called 1619, which asserted that Lincoln, after freeing the slaves, hoped to return them to Africa, and indeed had a Commissioner of Emigration for that purpose. But it is clear that this subject cannot be dealt with in just one day or several. I will have to keep reading and watching for probably the rest of my life.
Symptoms
Almost four year ago, I wrote Clinton vs Trump, in which I considered both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to be very weak candidates for President in an open field. I wrote then, “After a spirited primary season, it comes down to an establishment neoliberal candidate and a populist moderate candidate, both of whom are widely disliked and distrusted outside of their loyal core.” Clinton carried the popular vote, but failed to win the electoral college, failing to inspire rural voters in supposedly “blue wall” states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Some pundits claim she hadn’t even campaigned in Wisconsin because she took it for granted.
Once again, Bernie Sanders ran an inspiring campaign but currently trails an uninspiring establishment neoliberal candidate, in this case his “good friend” Joe Biden. Sanders devotees are again stunned, again feel cheated (denial) and accuse Bernie of being too nice to rivals Biden and Elizabeth Warren and lacking a killer instinct (anger). Now some are claiming that Sanders has pushed the party left just by running (bargaining). Left-leaning sites claim that Sanders was actually out-maneuvered by former President Barack Obama, who orchestrated the withdrawal of other establishment candidates to allow a Super Tuesday surge for Biden. Centrists claim that Sanders’ call for a political revolution frightened moderates. Funky Academic, Irami Osei-Frimpong opined on Rising that,”black people look(ed) at Bernie Sanders the way most of America looks at Marianne Williamson.” – meaning I suppose, someone with good intentions, but who could cause serious turmoil if elected.
Though he was never as disliked as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden is also a vulnerable candidate. One subplot of the failed impeachment effort was a cushy board position given to Joe’s troubled son, Hunter. Photographs of Joe Biden invading the personal space of various young women have been buttressed by a formal charge of rape by Tara Reade, a former staffer. The #MeToo movement has essentially disgraced itself as establishment Democrats refuse to take Reade’s accusations as seriously as those of Christine Blasey Ford.
Biden was once a snappy debater but now has to be led through interviews by his wife, Dr Jill. Though he is being touted as some sort of progressive, his record is conservative. After serving as VP in an Obama presidency that failed to deliver on the change part of “hope and change,” Biden has been widely quoted as assuring wealthy donors that, “Nothing will fundamentally change.”
As with Clinton, Biden’s only strength is that Trump is generally worse. But the smartest comment to come out of the hectic stage debates was Andrew Yang’s, “Donald Trump is not the cause of all of our problems. We’re making a mistake when we act like he is.” In contrast to the dominant theme of the DNC primary, Yang felt that Trump is, “a symptom of a disease that has been building up in our communities for years and decades.” Yang eventually dropped out and endorsed Biden, reportedly in exchange for the promise of a cabinet position, so now Yang seems to be a symptom as well.
In the runup to the last election, the press could not stop covering what certainly seemed to be a reality show masquerading as a presidential run. Trump got the nomination, Trump won the presidency, and even the media couldn’t deny that all the free coverage handed to the Donald had played a part in his victory. But they’ve obviously learned nothing. Trump has wildly mismanaged the US response to the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu and the establishment press has rewarded him with hours of airtime to drone on about how well he and his people are handling the situation. Reporters try to criticize him without realizing that the public trusts them even less than they trust politicians.
Some pundits who have seen it all remind us that defeating a sitting president is always a tough task. Since Jefferson in 1804 incumbents have won 60% of the time, and the only incumbent loss in the 20th century was Ronald Reagan defeating Jimmy Carter, who was a very good man, but a very unpopular and weak president. But Biden is not at the head of a strong movement like Reagan, and Trump, though incompetent at many things, is not as obviously ineffectual as Carter.
Once elected, Trump very adroitly abandoned his promise of being a populist bringing change. Once he fired Steve Bannon and stacked his cabinet with military-types, Trump was essentially absorbed by the establishment, and even though he makes a lot of populist and anti-immigrant noise, he essentially has done the establishment’s bidding where it counts: tax cuts and corporate largesse. Joe Biden has never not been a tool of the establishment, and would certainly also do their bidding, if he can get elected, and would stop the harassment of the mainstream media. But he has to hope that Trump’s popularity really suffers from the enormous economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. By November, though, Trump could be taking credit for a world and nation returning to normal, or could be burnishing his image as commander-in-chief by managing a small war somewhere. Or simpler yet, as many left-leaning pundits have noted, Trump could simply use the pandemic crisis to appear to adopt some of Bernie Sanders’ proposals, beating the Democrats to the punch.
Biden can’t beat Trump; Trump has to beat himself.
US Open Finals & Climate Crisis Town Hall
I’ve been watching tennis for a long time. The US Open has come down to two compelling finals. In one, Serena Williams faces Bianca Andreescu. By winning, Serena could tie Margaret Smith Court’s record of 24 wins in majors. Eleven of Court’s titles were Australian Opens during an age when not all the players chose to take the long flight down under – but she did win them. But Court’s homophobic religious views have become extremely unpopular inside and outside the locker room, so a lot of tennis people want Serena to consign her to the history books.
Andreescu, though, is a solid player. Just a teenager, she moves well, hits hard off both sides, and competes well, having mowed down every top ten player she’s faced in the last several months. She’ll be tough to beat.
On the men’s side, Rafael Nadal seeks to move to only one win behind Roger Federer’s twenty major titles, with the realistic prospect of winning another Roland Garros next year. After a tired-looking loss to Grigor Dimitrov, Federer’s chances of extending his lead seem about as compelling as his spaghetti commercials. Opposing finalist Daniil Medvedev is fast, powerful and a strong competitor, but has a history of behaving poorly on court, so the wealthy crowd will likely be rooting for Rafa.
Who will win? One strategy is to minimize errors, another is to go for winners, but tennis seems to come down to a balance of consistency and aggression. You can’t just get the ball back in play, but you also can’t give the opponent lots of free points by going for winners on every shot. And, you have to deal with the increasingly intense summer heat.
A few days ago, CNN hosted a Climate Crisis Town Hall for all the major Democratic presidential candidates except Tulsi Gabbard, who is on military duty. Climate activists wanted there to be a climate change-themed debate, but the always timid Democratic National Committee wouldn’t allow it. So instead – over seven hours – each candidate was interviewed in a town hall format by CNN anchors and concerned citizens with prepared questions. In past town halls, these “ordinary citizens” have turned out to have industry connections or concealed agendas, but this batch seemed mostly on point. In fact one flummoxed Joe Biden by asking about him attending a fossil fuel-sponsored event directly after the Town Hall. I’m still amazed CNN let that happen.
Who won the Town Hall? Well, as in the debates, the tone was essentially set by the progressives. Naomi Klein considered it a victory to simply have the words Climate Crisis in large red letters on television. With category 3 Superstorm Sandy shocking NorthEast elites and category 5 hurricanes like Matthew, Irma, Maria, Michael and now Dorian becoming yearly events, even conservative people are realizing that severe weather events are occurring much more frequently than ever before.
How do you win a town hall? Most of the candidates tried to minimize errors, reciting the green talking points they learned from Governor Jay Inslee, who recently ended his candidacy. Some candidates assured us we could still eat hamburgers and use plastic straws – business as usual – while they pursued some incarnation of a Green New Deal.
Several candidates pledged to eliminate waste, or increase efficiency in this or that, which sounds good on the surface. But there will always be a certain level of inefficiency in human endeavors. After hearing decade upon decade of such pledges, I now take them as a veiled promise to not structurally change the status quo.
“Whether they need it or not, government always spends the money it is allotted,” is a standard issue talking point, one I’ve heard since I worked a summer job for county government. Accordingly, Julian Castro recounted an anecdote about Air Force pilots dumping their fuel in the ocean to maintain a yearly allotment of fuel.
Only Bernie Sanders actually went for his shots. Unfortunately for his candidacy, Sanders is proposing to revamp several of our major industries – government/lobbyists, banking, military, pharmaceuticals, insurance, automobiles, prisons – and while he assures us that the workers in those industries are not his enemies, management of those industries will certainly see Sanders as their enemy, as does management of the major media. It remains to be seen whether the Sanders plain-spoken populist agenda constitutes an error or a winner.
My Old School
“And I’m never going back … to my old school.”
One day when I was about fourteen, my parents gave me a brochure from the Georgetown Preparatory School, in Garrett Park, Maryland. This was before Tom Brown’s School Days was on television, and I had no notions about private schools. All the kids I knew and all the kids on TV attended public school. But my father had gone to a Jesuit school in New York City, and thought that I would do well under the same sort of tutelage.
To be accepted I had to take the Secondary School Aptitude Test, the SSAT, and be interviewed. I always loved taking standardized tests; to me it was like a day off school. At the interview they asked what sports I played. I knew almost nothing about team sports other than baseball, which I had played badly, but my Mom offered that I loved to swim. They let me in.
Now I read about Georgetown Prep as an elite school. There were some guys from wealthy families, and some diplomat kids, but a lot of the guys were from striving middle class backgrounds like me. Some had to work in the dining hall to help pay their tuition. It wasn’t Eton, or even Choate. I somehow knew we were better off than Cardozo, but I never felt that we were very different than the other schools we swam against: St Albans, Sidwell Friends, Good Counsel, Bullis, Bishop Ireton, Gonzaga.
I certainly got that classical education at Prep: we took Latin, Calculus, read books by DWMs, and dreaded Speech class. There were no dummies in my form, and I think that not wanting to look bad in class spurred me to try harder than I would have at public school. We were also made to sit down and do three hours of homework every evening, whereas at home I probably would have watched a lot more TV. We were also encouraged to do team sports, which led me to the swim team. All of that was good.
But Prep was all-male, so public school would have offered far more interaction with girls. A few young ladies from Stone Ridge attended our science classes. They were the source of many fantasies, but I never spoke to them. A lot of private school girls attended our mixers, but I was too terrified to talk to them. In four years I think I met two girls through Prep. I was staying overnight with a classmate, and his mother’s friend brought her daughter, who I now remember as looking like Martha Plimpton, sort of awkward/pretty. She played her guitar and sang Joni Mitchell’s Clouds for us. We were not on each other’s wavelength, but I wish I had tried harder. Later I was at a school play, and sat next to the sister of a classmate. She was pretty. We talked quite a bit, and she was very nice, but I had no idea what my next move might be. The next day her brother teased me about my great romantic encounter. And that was the end of that.
So I read that current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of trying to molest a 15 year-old girl from Holton-Arms, at a party. I didn’t go to parties at day student’s houses, but I heard some bits about them. We had a minor sensation after one of my classmates punched one of my swim teammates over a girl, which I believe happened at a party.
Kavanaugh and Gorsuch attended about a decade after my time. GP seems to appreciate the notoriety of alums in the highest court in the land, but people on twitter now refer to it as that, “creepy little all-boys school.” Democracy Now! quotes journalist Sarah Posner:
“It is becoming abundantly clear, even by the account of Kavanaugh himself and Mark Judge, that there was an environment [at Georgetown Prep] that was out of control, quite frankly. And lets be very clear and fair here. We are not saying that every student at Georgetown Prep acted this way. But according to this article in The Washington Post this morning, which I again urge everyone to read, this was a very prevalent atmosphere there—the drinking, the drugs, the abuse of girls from neighboring high schools.”
Did anyone else ever watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High? I’m not defending it, but I have to believe that drinking, drugs and abuse of women could probably have been observed at almost any high school, public or private.
I was not in favor of appointing Gorsuch (or Garland) and I think Kavanaugh is an even more troublesome candidate. I just hope people realize that many of us at Prep were not smug rich kids, or heavy drinkers, or would-be sexual predators.
The American Prison Experiment
Last year, when I read that TYT fired reporter Jordan Chariton, I had a visceral reaction. I dropped my subscription to The Young Turks and subscribed to The Real News Network. I thought Chariton had used poor judgment in sleeping with one of his interns (who was young, married and ambitious), but I also realized that I had become increasingly dissatisfied with TYT’s “shtick” if you will. I liked Jimmy Dore on Aggressive Progressives, and thought Emma Vigeland and Michael Tracy were promising, but except for Chariton, the show seemed like a rehash of other peoples’ reporting, regurgitated for hip, young viewers. TRNN was about as sober as Democracy Now! and even featured Aaron Maté, whose name I remembered from Amy Goodman quickly reciting the DN credits. TRNN also seemed devoted to local reporting in Baltimore.
A few months ago, TRNN brought on liberal radio stalwart Marc Steiner and his first interview was with Chelsea Manning. I had heard a lot about Bradley Manning alerting us to military abuses in Iraq, languishing in prison, changing his gender to become Chelsea, surprisingly being pardoned by President Obama, and now running for the Senate here in Maryland. Before watching that interview, she was a cipher in a uniform, but afterwards she seemed credible as a candidate.
I ran across a notice that Manning was going to be in town at a place called The Impact Hub, and was thinking it would be interesting to attend. I got an email from Penny, who runs Light Street Cycles, where I go for all my bike needs, and sometimes just to chat. I was already a customer when Penny and I ran into each other at an Occupy Baltimore event, and realized we were on the same political wavelength. Manning is one of her heroes, and she had signed me up for the Circles of Voices discussion of Mass Incarceration that featured Manning. Cool.
So I took light rail to North Avenue Station and walked over the Hub, which is part of the renovated Centre Theatre, in what was once a prewar car dealership near the intersection of North Avenue and Charles Street. The door was supposed to be locked, but they opened for a fellow delivering pizza so I came in, too. The Hub appears casual inside with lots of techie design flourishes contrasted with rough concrete, rusted steel and sliding fire doors. I was half an hour early and happened to ask JC Faulk, who runs the sessions, if I was in the right room, and he had me sign in and fill out a name tag. I poked around and noticed very small signs for wayfinding to restrooms, which after several turns, corridors and doors turned out to be inside the Centre Theatre. On my way back, I found Manning looking a bit confused and led her back to the Hub. I tried introducing myself but she didn’t respond.
Back in the Hub more people were showing up. I’m tall so I always sit towards the back in flat spaces. I started speaking to a young teacher named Erin about Lies My Teacher Told Me, and a former teacher named Jason joined in. Eventually Penny showed up. I introduced her as the mother of a teacher, so they all chatted away while I people-watched. JC was fine with us hobnobbing, but asked us to find a person we didn’t know and tell them something that wasn’t obvious about ourselves. Birte turned around and told me she was German, but had lived in the Netherlands for several years. She was a few weeks from obtaining her PhD in the US, and returning to the Netherlands. I said, “dankuwel,” and she smiled, which reminded me of Angelique Kerber’s toothy head shot on the WTA site. I told her I used to sing and act on stage. She had been brought along by her friend, a tall, blonde girl named Rachel. My hound dog days are long past, but there were a lot of pretty young women in that room.
JC settled the crowd of about sixty and laid out the ground rules, such as Attack the ideas, not the person. One would think that rule was fairly obvious but last week a firefighter throttled a city planner during a public discussion of whether separated bike lanes were crowding out fire lanes. Right here in Baltimore. Another rule was Immunity. Another was Don’t Interrupt. Another was Know When to Step Up and Step Back. Another was No Recording or Filming, but JC pointed out that CoV staff was filming this event. He also told us that the door was locked to keep out a white supremacist that was trying to use the available office facilities.
JC told us that he started this effort after seeing his community in turmoil after the death of Freddie Gray. He introduced Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West who was killed during a struggle with police some months before the Freddie Gray riots.
JC said he wasn’t interested in promoting candidates and hadn’t much use for the sly talk of most politicians but felt that Manning had been honest and forthright in her campaign. Manning said she was running for Senate, but wanted to set that aside for the evening’s discussion. She told us some of the ins and outs of being incarcerated, and it occurred to me that being alone in a corridor with a large stranger like me would probably be intimidating for a rather small person like her who had been in prison for seven years.
Manning talked about the guards “losing” the request forms that prisoners had to submit for toiletries, and prisoners looking out for one another by stockpiling those items for anyone that got screwed over. My mind turned to the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a researcher named Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned nine male students each as guards and inmates, dressed them accordingly, and let them loose against each other in a few basement rooms on campus. Despite the crude simulation, all parties seemed to conform to their roles with utmost seriousness:
There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were “good guys” who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners.
The two-week experiment ended after only six days at the urging of Zimbardo’s girlfriend, a psychologist named Christina Maslach, who was appalled by what she saw. One “prisoner” had been in solitary confinement for several hours, and was interviewed two months later:
I began to feel that I was losing my identity, that the person that I called Clay, the person who put me in this place, the person who volunteered to go into this prison – because it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me – was remote until finally I wasn’t that, I was 416. I was really my number.
Manning was under Prevention of Injury isolation, essentially solitary, for about ten months. BTW, Zimbardo and Maslach later married, and each has had a successful career in psychology.
Manning said that after three years in prison she had accepted, like most prisoners, that she would be serving her full 35 year term. (Though she would have been eligible for parole after about a third of the sentence.) She was initially in denial that all but four months of her remaining sentence had been commuted by President Obama – a charitable act for which I forgive many of his neoliberal transgressions – except drone strikes on innocent civilians.
After she had finished, JC broke us into circles. After some negotiation we settled on three groups: those who had been incarcerated, those who knew someone incarcerated, and my group, those who had not been and did not know anyone who had been incarcerated. A big fellow named Mike began to collect our group, describing himself as a natural extravert who was trying to step back. I told him I was a reformed introvert. IIRC there were only about eleven of us. Mike, Peter, me, Asia, a woman without a tag, A woman with very short hair, another woman, a man, Maria, an older woman, and Magda. I said I was surprised we had even one person of color, and then hoped I wasn’t offending her. She seemed OK.
JC told us to begin, so I brought up the Stanford Prison Experiment, which most had heard about. I suggested that it was very easy to fall into the assigned roles in prison and in society. As if to verify that, someone suggested that prison was a necessary evil. Others objected and felt the entire prison system should be dismantled. I pointed out that many outlets credited the increase in incarceration with a corresponding decrease in crime. I recounted surveying Mecklenburg Correctional Center, a medium security facility in Southern Virginia in the late 1970s, which seemed like a relatively civilized place.
I asked if anyone felt that American prison was restorative rather than punitive. They all laughed and said punitive. Someone brought up the Nordic prison system as much less abusive to prisoners, but someone else observed that it worked well but in a very homogenous society. JC had told us that the US had 25% of the world’s prisoners but only 5% of its population. The US has 655 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, depending on how it is calculated. Seychelles has 735, but their total population is only 92,000. I thought Russia was next, but Cuba has 510, while Russia has 450 and Thailand has 445. Norway has 70, Denmark has 61 and Sweden has 53. CoV staff were roaming with boom mikes and cameras.
Several people pointed out that increasing prison population was a result of the War on Drugs, which was intended as an extension of slavery and Jim Crow oppression. Hence we had non-violent offenders thrown in with serious criminals. Maria talked about being from an immigrant family and always being afraid of dealing with the police. Someone asked if being in jail counted. We realized that while we had not been incarcerated in prison, several of us had been arrested and held for some short period of time. I asked if anyone expected that they would be able to stay away from incarceration the way things were going. The older woman foresaw having to be arrested for protesting.
JC asked the different groups to sum up. The incarcerated groups had been extremely in favor of dismantling the prison system, and had covered many of the same issues we discussed. Penny added that while our group self-selected and were against mass incarceration, she knew lots of people that considered it a sensible response to crime.
JC closed by asking us to speak one-on-one with someone answering the question, What happens if I ignore someone in pain? Peter and I paired up, and we each had to speak to the other for three minutes while the other listened intently. He talked about trying to be more empathetic as a mental health professional, and I spoke about what had happened in personal relationships.
Many thanks to Penny for including me, and for giving me a ride home.
Update 20180528: AP reports that Chelsea Manning was literally on the ledge.
[Friend and Campaign Communications Director Kelly] Wright said that Manning’s adjustment to life outside prison has been “extremely difficult.”
“I have seen firsthand and up close the violence inflicted on her by years of imprisonment, solitary confinement and torture,” Wright said. “This is made worse by the impossibly high expectations our society sets for public figures, especially on social media.”
Tennys Court
As a fan, I have been following the Australian Open (AO) tennis championships, which feature both women and men players. That seems to mean I’m old.
According to a 2016 study of sports leagues, the average age of the ATP’s television audience is 61, fourth highest of all major sports. The WTA fares better; its average viewer age was 55, and the age of its audience decreased between 2006 and 2016.
I actually prefer watching the WTA, but I’m still older than the demographic they want.
After some lean decades, the AO moved from the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club to Flinders Park (now called Melbourne Park) and has blossomed into equal standing with Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open. Its main stadiums are named Rod Laver Arena, Hisense Arena and Margaret Court Arena.
In the weeks leading up to the AO, there was a lot of media chatter about players boycotting, or even renaming Court Arena. Though a fantastic player, with 24 major titles to her name, Margaret Smith Court was a traditional woman, who only toured when she wasn’t being a dutiful wife and mother. Though she had played and lost badly to Bobby Riggs in the Mother’s Day Massacre – the precursor to the Battle of the Sexes – Court was reportedly lukewarm towards Billie Jean King’s efforts to start a more egalitarian women’s tour. After her tennis career, she converted from Catholicism to evangelical Pentecostalism, eventually becoming pastor of her own ministry, where she espoused conservative Christian values … and attacked gay rights, as she told the West Australian in Perth:
“Politically correct education has masterfully escorted homosexuality out from behind closed doors, into the community openly and now is aggressively demanding marriage rights that are not theirs to take,”
“The fact that the homosexual cry is, ‘We can’t help it, as we were born this way,’ as the cause behind their own personal choice is cause for concern,”
I believe that Court is entitled to her beliefs, and as an evangelical, to preach them, but I also believe that she had to expect a great deal of criticism in return from a sport with outspoken lesbian heroes like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, to name only two.
But as the tournament progressed, the controversy over Court Arena faded. LGBT supporters wore rainbow colors on their clothing while playing, but no one refused to play their scheduled matches on Court. Upsets and scintillating matches took over the headlines. Two lower-ranked male players, Hyeon Chung and Tennys Sandgren made unexpected runs into the quarterfinals. Chung is a talented South Korean who recently won the ATP Next Generation exhibition in Milan. Nextgen featured eight young players who are only starting to make a mark in the tour. Tennys Sandgren wasn’t one of them, but his name had garnered occasional attention among writers looking for easy headlines, and he seemed to be an affable fellow, and he was an American from Tennessee.
At the AO, Sandgren vaulted from near-obscurity in defeating journeyman Jeremy Chardy, 2014 champ Stan Wawrinka, fellow newbie Maximilian Marterer and world #5 and genuine contender Dominic Thiem. These were his first four wins in the main draw of any major tournament. But he found himself under the scrutiny of the media, and twitterverse callouts of his tweets that had been ignored before suddenly became worth a second look.
Sandgren, it turned out, had been following the tweets of Tommy Robinson, Nicholas Fuentes and had retweeted articles by Jordan Peterson. Tommy Robinson is a pseudonym for Stephen Christopher Yaxley, a political activist who led the English Defence League, founded the European Defence League, worked in the British Freedom Party, a think tank called Quilliam and a UK offshoot of the German anti-Islamist group Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). Robinson had been moving away from the more violent groups, but remained opposed to the introduction of Islamic culture. Nicholas Fuentes is not the Peruvian footballer, he is a white supremacist student from Boston University who has been quoted saying, “Multiculturalism is cancer.” He left BU after receiving threats due to his participation in the Charlottesville white supremacy rally.
I can hardly fault Sandgren for retweeting Jordan Peterson. Around the middle of last year, my browsing habits led Google to suggest videos of Petersen speaking with Camille Paglia and other intellectuals, and he sounded fairly reasonable. I looked for more information, and found that he was a psychologist interested in religion and ideology, and had become famous, or infamous, for refusing to use transgender pronouns at his school, the University of Toronto. Many reasonable people reject the more extreme political rhetoric, but it seems that Peterson also espouses a strictly binary view of sexuality in which men are men and women are women. Not unlike Margaret Court. Still he’s a lot more palatable than, say, Ben Shapiro, who recites alt-light talking points as fast as possible and calls it debate.
But Sandgren had also retweeted so-called Pizzagate conspiracy rants, and some insults directed towards black folk in general and Serena Williams in particular. He responded to social media attacks by deleting his tweets, which only made him look guilty of something. After defeating Thiem, Sandgren botched the post-match interview by reading a prepared statement attacking the media’s right to question anything he had done on social media, and proclaiming: “It’s my job to continue on this journey with the goal of becoming the best me I can and to embody the love Christ has for me, for I answer to Him and Him alone.” Yeah, that was going to work.
As his match with Chung began, Serena tweeted simply, “Turns channel.”
Soon after losing to Chung, Sandgren tweeted a sincere-sounding statement rejecting alt-right beliefs. Some folk bought it, but I found his statement politically-correct and unconvincing. I suspect that Sandgren still leans alt-light, but is now afraid to express what he really feels – which is a shame. Even though I disagree, I would rather hear what people really think than hear carefully-constructed pablum. In a similar vein, Glenn Greenwald tweeted that while he in no way endorsed Sandgren’s tweets, he did regret that a young person had no space to make mistakes.
I posted before about the unfortunate near-riot when Charles Murray attempted to debate professor Allison Stanger at Middlebury College. As predicted, the Resistance and the MeToo movement have brought about an inevitable backlash. In New York Magazine, self-described Oakeshott-conservative Andrew Sullivan claims even the LGBT movement has lost focus:
The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.
While I realize that Sullivan is not entirely wrong here, his POV is very insular. He, a gay conservative, got what he wanted out of the LGBT movement, and that should be good enough for everyone.
The refusal to consider other viewpoints, or to even listen to anyone that disagrees has become a pathology in our culture. It is the key first step in dehumanization of the other. A fellow, Umair Haque posted on Medium that he believes our very culture is severely ill:
American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.
Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.
Bad Boys, Mean Girls and Normies
Despite not knowing what it was for, I joined Twitter a few months ago. I don’t tweet much, but I follow people I respect, and read a wider variety of articles. Aussie progressive gadfly Caitlin Johnstone tweeted that, except as concerns Russia, President Trump seems to be caving to the establishment agenda. I decided to circle back to John Robb at Global Guerillas, and in an article from a few days ago, The OODA loop of Trump’s Insurgency has been Smashed, he agreed. OODA means Observe, Orient, Decide, Act:
… the real uniting goal of Trump’s insurgency was “opposition to a failed establishment.”
That goal held the insurgency that put him in office together, despite gaffes, scandals, leaks, etc that would have ended the political career of any other candidate. It was also a goal that allowed the insurgency to continue after winning the election. In most cases, once the goal has been accomplished (i.e. remove Mubarak), the insurgency evaporates.
The reason it didn’t: the media. …
It was maddeningly clear that the establishment media was in the bag for Hillary Clinton over Sanders, then over Trump. In the world according to Robb, that was enough to keep resentment of Clinton stoked, but it hasn’t been enough to maintain a Presidency aimed at dismantling the Deep State. Steve Bannon, the architect of that goal, was ushered out weeks ago, and now:
… senior military staff running the Trump administration launched a counter-insurgency against the insurgency. …
•Former generals took control of key staff positions.
•They purged staff members that were part of the insurgency and tightly limited access to Trump.
•Finally, and most importantly, they took control of Trump’s information flow.That final step changed everything. General Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet. Further, staff members are now prevented from sneaking him stories from unapproved sources during the day (stories that might get him riled up and off the establishment message). … by controlling Trump’s information flow with social media/networks, the generals smashed the insurgency’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Deprived of this connection, Trump is now weathervaning to cater to the needs of the establishment (as seen with his new stance on DACA and the Wall).
Robb broke down his view of the Trump political climate further back in August in, American Politics: Bad Boys vs. Mean Girls. I’ve quoted but rearranged his descriptions:
The political parties and the media aren’t the primary actors in the US political system anymore. Increasingly, politics is being waged online by networks. A fight between two powerful and very different online social networks:
Robb claims that the ‘Bad Boys’ “(similar to a gang or tribe) network grew in support of Donald Trump,” but I think they’ve been growing as long the middle class has been collapsing and have long flourished on certain corners of the internet. In Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle sets a possible beginning of transgression for it’s own sake in 2003 on 4chan, but I encountered the same sort of misanthropic and misogynistic ‘transgressors’ in usenet in the 1990s. Eventually, as explained by Ta-Nehisi Coates recently, they and Trump were bound to find each other.
[Bad Boys] has one organizing principle: disrupt the status quo. This network fights like an open source insurgency composed of many small groups and individuals acting independently. It disrupts from the shadows. It’s opportunistic, disorganized, and aggressive. It misleads, angers, and intimidates. It scores victories by increasing fear, uncertainty, and distrust.
Robb calls Trump’s opponents the ‘Mean Girls’ “(similar to a social clique or ruling aristocracy) network solidified in response to Trump’s unexpected victory.” Again, I believe that some sort of establishment or Deep State has been around for decades, but found a more compelling common cause in opposing Trump.
[Mean Girls’] cohesion and single mindedness neutered the Trump administration even before he took the oath. … It has one organizing principle: repel the barbarians. This network fights like a ruling clique, albeit vastly larger than we have seen historically due to the scaling effects of social networking. This network openly connects people in authority across every major institution (from education to the media to the government to the tech industry) and leverages it and the politics of identity to establish moral authority. It fights by categorizing, vilifying and shunning enemies. It scores victories by manufacturing consensus.
One only has to read my old haunts TalkingPointsMemo or dagblog, or watch Stephen Colbert or John Oliver or Samantha Bee go after Trump, or one of his staff, or even Bernie Sanders to see this clique in action.
Which leads to my question: Where does the progressive citizen who wants things to get better for everyone fit in? Clearly the Bad Boys want to toss out anyone who isn’t white (or doing a pretty good imitation of white) and start over in a pastoral America that never really existed. There’s no place for the Normies there.
Just as clearly, the Mean Girls profess a world where everyone can be equal and get ahead based strictly on merit. That’s great if you are one of those who can swing a tech job, but not much comfort when those tech firms are transferring the few remaining blue collar jobs to immigrants, foreigners or robots. The Mean Girls become much more pragmatic when asked to support the more progressive reforms proposed by Bernie Sanders.
Are the Bad Boys and Mean Girls just the loudest part of the electorate? Could we create a populist network to rival either of them?
Donal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.