Monday, August 31, 2020

Addressing Law & Order

If the Left is going to survive Trump's Law and Order assault, and elect Joe Biden to the presidency, I believe we will have to make an adjustment in how we address that visceral and sensitive issue.

The right - and Trump in particular - has ramped up tension by supporting police crack-downs and encouraging armed militias. They contrast violence on the left as 'mob violence' and as 'destructive', while upholding the violence of the right as 'patriotic' and 'defensive'.

The right is focusing on this issue because it’s one on which they feel they can win. And they may well be right. By stoking the fears of ‘middle America’ as they did so persistently during their convention, they’ve managed to divert attention away from the issues of police violence, institutional racism and the needs for reform.

The right is equating Biden and democrats with lawlessness, just as in the past it has succeeded in equating liberals with weakness, blackness with welfare and crime, and republicans with patriotism and the constitution.

Too often, the Left has been afraid of fighting back, of actively engaging in the war over definitions, over what things mean. This is a case in point.

It's become a white, republican conservative thing to say that you want your streets to be safe. That you want dangerous people to be watched, contained. But liberal democrats of color want these things too. We too want an end to violence in the streets, and want active criminals to be dealt with, at least constrained.

One of the problems is, the social systems of control that make safe streets happen are largely under the control of the right, and they are highly suspect in many communities of the left. Which is why the left has always protested against the agents of the law, as far back as there has been Black protest in America, since the days when slave-catchers had legal authority to kidnap free human beings and re-claim them as some man's property. 

The right keeps wanting to say that the problems of police have disappeared, except for the odd, bad apple. The right wants to deny any responsibility for the state of distrust and for the demands for social justice, reform and defunding the police.

They pretend that legitimate protests have not been happening, because there's nothing to protest in Trump's America. The only legitimate action by citizens is the armed defense of the nation against vandals, looters and those who hate America. It's right out of Rynd's "Atlas Shrugged", a brilliant fantasy novel about godlike heros who overcome the hoards of the weak and servile socialists who want to sap the wealth and vitality of real humans.

The Left can't afford to make the mistake of leaving the definitions to the other side. And we can't win the war - which is already underway; no use arguing about whether anyone wants a war or not - if we won't even engage. We can't afford to focus so insistently on the social injustice issues that we hold ourselves indifferent to the vandalism, looting and attacks on police. That's even if we want the repudiation and defunding of the police. We - and not just the right - have to be willing to recognize personal responsibility. Not just that of a police officer who stands by while a fellow squeezes the life out of a citizen with his knee, but also that of a demonstrator who torches a store, or who doesn't, but who afterwards decides to help himself to the goodies that were made available.

These are issues that cannot be ignored without alienating a large segment of the American voting public. And without eroding the integrity of what the protests and demonstrations are about.


It’s hard for the Left to call attention to the 'disruptors', anarchists and looters whom so many are doing their best to make the symbols of what the Left stands for. I understand the reluctance, because the size and importance of this segment of the left is already exaggerated. And because attention to them has consistently been used to ignore the underlying causes of unrest and protest. And also because we understand the anger about a capitalist system that has consistently 'looted' the poor in favor of the rich, and then uses the law to both maintain inequalities and to punish those who oppose them. And, because much of the violence taking place is caused by policing forces, and by the vigilantes that come out to support them, with the backing of the president and republicans.

But we lose the effectiveness of protest, and ultimately will reinforce the crushing of dissent, if we lose the upcoming election because voters have been too frightened by the prospects of lawlessness and disorder to pay attention to anything else. And if Democrats become identified with an indifference to Law & Order, because our attention is so focused on Justice and constitutional law that we are seen as willing to overlook - or outright forgive - street-level crime and destruction of property, we may truly be inviting a new American fascism that goes beyond our worst nightmares.

I'm not sure how the message "You will not be safe under Biden" will be successfully corrected, but it has to be addressed directly. I think the democrats missed an opportunity during their convention, by not addressing these issues preemptively. I have to agree, as the republicans charged over and over during their convention, that the democrats hardly mentioned the disorder that has occurred - however minimally - alongside peaceful protests. And, by not naming it where it does occur, democrats can be more effectively charged with ignoring or tolerating it..

America isn't going to change overnight - as we should all know by now, especially after witnessing the strong, reactionary lurch backward that began immediately following Obama's election. I too felt a kind of jubilation at the overwhelming reactions, nationwide and worldwide, to George Floyd's murder, and the calls for justice. But I'm not deluded that the celebrity activism of the NBA is representative of the 'likely voters' who will mail in their ballots or stream to the polls on November 3.

Some of those likely voters are already tiring of all the attention on systemic racism - which a great many of them still do not grasp. They may be much more concerned about the rising numbers of assaults and the threat of street violence. And Biden and Harris damned sure better have a lot to say about that. At the very least, Democrats need to point out, again and again, that the violence occurring in America TODAY, is occurring in Trump's America, out of the discord HE has generated.


Thursday, August 27, 2020

Can an Entire Nation go Insane? Can an Entire People lose its Soul?

Yet another shooting that defies understanding. But even without understanding, the story will be scripted in scars across a paralysed body, and in the minds of children.

I once saw a young man lose his mind.

One day, he was lucid and clear as water, sharp and smart, cynical and blaming, counting up all the pricks and pokes that daily life sent his way, sure that he was better than all the distained realities that oppressed him, and that he would transcend them.

And the next time I saw him, he was no longer tethered. He’d begun to be prodded by what he couldn’t see, but which he could hear, voices telling him things, scaring him, daring him. His cynicism was now free-floating, detached from the realities I knew, and from those of his girlfriend and community, the world he’d known.

Our communication, which had always been strained by tensions between what was and what ought to be, between the offered and the demanded, it now devolved into desperate lunges at meaning that eluded and shape-shifted us to exhaustion. Until we could only make exchanges of raw emotion, of wanting, or dismissing, of coming or going, yes and no, on and off.

This was a white young man, by the way. This isn’t that kind of oppression tale.

I hadn’t known that sanity could be lost so suddenly.

I watch the news, and the political conventions in the self-proclaimed ‘greatest nation in the history of the world’. And I wonder if an entire people can lose its collective mind, become insane. Does a nation, a community even have a mind? And if so, can it become severely disordered?

A young woman, slippers on her feet, as though she just left her living room. Maybe she plunged through her television screen to enter the drama unfolding blocks away. She is excited, as though she’s just been called up from the audience by a game show host, and now gets the chance to spin the Big Wheel. But she stands in a store, looters smashing display cases all around her, grabbing up plastic baubles and cardboard boxes. Exultant. Exuberant. Not wanting to miss this moment.

A young man, dressed like the citizen-soldier of a Marvel comics universe, transported by duty and super-hero fantasy, for God and Country, protecting property that isn’t his. Filled with fervor and carrying an automatic weapon which will soon leave two people dead.

Two of thousands or millions, talking back in their souls to the talking heads that don’t hear us or each other. Language that will not translate anymore, because there are no rules for translating passion and propaganda into lived, shared truth.

I didn’t know that sanity could be lost so suddenly. When a body cannot reconcile its visions of right and wrong with the world in which it finds itself. When it will not turn down the volume of its own fantasy, to accept why it can never be reality – these puffed-up, animated, choreographed and sound-tracked dreams.

Maybe a nation raised on Batman, Skywalker and Superfly cannot grasp the need to do its laundry. Vigilantes, revolutionaries and citizen tricksters, made into familiar storybook figures, devoid of responsibility or conscience, or the need to step backwards, and to sleep.


Saturday, August 8, 2020

Journeying Through My Journals

              Awhile ago, I began generating a list of books I’ve read, and to help me along, I cycled through my journals. I started to journal when I dropped out of college for a year, just before turning twenty, and have kept at it in a very irregular way for almost fifty years now. I knew that here and there were lists of my reading. And even before I started the lists, I’d gotten into the habit of underlining titles of books, so they stood out from the texts. I wasn’t intending to actually read the journals, but I guess it was inevitable that as mentions of people and places and events caught my eye, I would be drawn in, which I was.

              My thirty or so journals were mostly still boxed, from our last move. I used art sketchbooks all those years, the ones with the black hardcovers, and thick, acid-free, unlined paper, so except for the difference in the two sizes I alternated between, they are almost identical. They can hardly be distinguished by wear and tear either, because in later years I began to carry my journals with me instead of writing all my entries at home, making them appear much like the older ones. In any case, in my search for book titles, I picked up the journals randomly, so that I bounced backward and forward through my life, which made for an odd effect. It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s character from Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time” and bounding randomly through his past and future.


My journals are a wonderful thing. For several reasons. They remind me of things I’ve forgotten, including how I felt at the time of an experience, rather than how I feel about it years later, looking back. And, they provide evidence of what a lousy memory I have. Actually, not lousy at all. Just that it does its thing with the aid of some super, creative editing.

I’ve begun to think about what to do with this shelf of books, how to dispose of them. I don’t have children to leave them to, and there’s so much explicit and personal material in them, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave them behind if I did. A dear friend once told me about stopping journaling and burning the evidence in a bonfire, and I couldn’t imagine doing likewise. But it increasingly seems possible that I could follow that example.

But here are just a few of the precious memories I came across in my journal scan. Some were all but forgotten, and feel almost like the experiences of an alternate me in an alternate life; others got a detailing from the re-reading that brought them back to vivid life, and carry me back to their time. They make me grateful for the long years, for the experiences that pile up and continue to shape me, for good or bad. They reaffirm for me that I’ve lived a life.

Repeated mentions of a friend, Theo, who called me over and over again during a long period of struggle and sadness, just to see how I was doing, and that she was thinking of me.

A couple, in their fifties, who picked me up on a bitter cold night, as I hitch-hiked north through Cleveland one January. They couldn’t take me very far, but as they dropped me off, with best wishes, they gave me ten dollars, a bible and the remains of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On a long Greyhound bus trip, returning from a cross-country visit with my 91-year old grandmother. I wrote about a young child, Marcus, who crossed the aisle to sit with me and look out the window at I can’t remember what. He shyly accepted my invitation to sit on my lap so that he could see better, his smiling mother looking on. Could that even happen these days?

Getting the beauty of a desert for the first time, as I drove through the Yakima valley at daybreak. Then, decades later, experiencing the Negev and understanding how such a place could give rise to visions.

I bounded from the volume where I went for a 3-day holiday in San Francisco, backward, to the volume of fifteen years earlier, when I lived there for six months. Everything had changed in those intervening years. Especially me.

There was an invitation to a party I gave, with a hand-drawn map of how to get there, because I lived on a hillside, on a crooked, dead-end street. On the back is a list of all the people who came.

I awoke from a dream sobbing, my face and pillow damp from tears. I was awash in sadness from a dream I couldn’t remember. But the feeling that was predominate was relief. I hadn’t cried in years, had felt bottled up. The experience came as blessed release.

Getting off of an Amtrak train on an impulse, a couple of hours before my destination, Raleigh, North Carolina, because I recognized the name of a town as my grandfather’s birthplace. I called a distant relative whose number I happened to have. We visited, and as I left her home, she pointed to the cultivated field next to it. “Have you ever seen cotton?” she asked. I hadn’t. I picked a handful of it, and tried to connect to the spirits of un-named ancestors.

A sudden and surprising one night, sexual indulgence with a young woman I’d had fantasies about. But all the pages before and after are about another woman I was emotionally obsessed with and longing for.

Hitchhiking from Atlanta to San Francisco in four and a half days and eighteen rides. Why was I in such a hurry? My one visit along the way was disappointing. My first girlfriend. Never saw her again.

I was surprised to discover that one period of time, when I was in great personal distress over a relationship breaking down, and another period of time when I was soaring with energy and enthusiasm around my professional and volunteer work with youth, were in fact the same period of time. I never remember them that way.

Taking my Dad with me to my jazz deejay sets at the Dominion on Queen on Wednesday nights during his visit with us. Six weeks in a row. He was in his eighties at the time, and still a charmer and a flirt. For years after that, whenever I ran into regulars from those days, they asked about him and told me what a kick he was.

When I was just starting to write, and was frustrated at my inability to imagine strong plots, I was given a story in a dream. It was complete, beginning to end, and I immediately wrote it down, marveling at the ways of creativity.

Being laid over in Chicago's O'Hare airport for about three hours in the early, early morning. I hopped on the subway heading downtown and was soon on the elevated track going through a working-class neighborhood waking to the day. I got off and had breakfast at the counter of a greasy-spoon, thinking: “These people have no idea that I’m an alien, briefly touching down.”