badinage
Visual Argument makes strong case for January 6 Commission
Vice News compiled a visual timeline of January 6 in a recent video piece they describe this way:
This treatment of the insurrection recreates the attack moment by moment, tracking the protesters mounting agitation and rage, and some rioters breaking into various fronts of the U.S. Capitol, eventually marching the Confederate flag into the building and occupying the halls of Congress.
It also reveals the diverse and competing ideologies that coalesced on Jan. 6: angry Trump voters marched alongside sovereign citizens, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Christian Nationalists. Some rioters demonstrated solidarity with the police as others brutally assaulted officers.
The film highlights moments within the mayhem that add to the complexity of our understanding of the attack. It enables viewers to feel what it was like to be drawn into participating in this event.
In this 45-minute film we see how the false narrative of electoral fraud that was stated and restated by former President Donald Trump led thousands of Americans to attack their own Capitol, and the unprecedented violence that left hundreds injured, five dead, and a shaken democracy.
Read more about the project here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pk… [1]
The piece starts with cellphone video of a plane full of enthusiastic Trump supporters en route to D.C. from Tampa. All of the video is from public broadcasts and footage shot by demonstrators and others on the ground before, and during, the January 6 MAGA riot at the Capitol. When I clicked on it on my phone the other night, YouTube gave me this warning.
Kind of an ambiguous statement, I thought. Confirm that some audiences found this inappropriate or offensive?
“Inappropriate” to “some audiences”– like very soft core child pornography lite, tastefully shot and without nudity, a Ku Klux Klan video purporting to lay out the truth about America’s race problem?
“Offensive” — like a video convincing the credulously angry that America is in the grips of a vast cabal of Satanist Democrat [sic] cannibal pedophiles who drink the adrenalized blood of the children they torture and terrify before slaughtering?
I think YouTube could have better chosen its warning. Perhaps: this video contains upsetting images of explicit violence and instances of very coarse fucking language.
The all-purpose, nonjudgemental YouTube warning was made a tiny bit more explicit today, covering the blacked out video screen on my computer and offering me a reasonable choice to click on:
Less than a half hour later (since I did the screen capture above) YouTube changed the designation and warning. If you verify that you’re over 18 you can click on the video below, which I recommend watching at 1.5 speed (you won’t miss anything), if you have the stomach to proceed beyond the first minute or two.
I’m about 13 minutes in, so far (watching at 1.5 speed), and have no doubt that this documentation is all that’s needed to establish the urgent need for a January 6 Commission.
We don’t even need the additional damning, un-contradicted facts raised at Trump’s second impeachment, the $50,000,000 in ad buys to promote the false and incendiary message that Biden stole the 2020 election, the $3,500,000 in dark money to organize and promote the March for Trump to Stop the Steal that led, inexorably, to the riot. Just watch the video with your eyes and ears open. It’s like watching the slow killing of George Floyd.
Nothing controversial about the need for a January 6 Commission, my fellow cucktards, unless you stand to be prosecuted for your role in it, or your party’s electoral chances could be hurt by a report outlining the vast scope of the GOP’s unified, historically unique (and ongoing) attempt to block the peaceful transition of power in our fragile experiment in democracy, after a fair, historically high participation election their candidate lost by an indisputable margin.
“Indisputable” of course, now being in contentious dispute … by influential lawmakers and right-wing media pundits, men and women of unimpeachable honor and love of country. Check them out:
To speed it up, click the settings wheel, bottom right, and change playback speed. You’ll thank me for it.
[1]
From that article:
This film also reflects the years of groundwork laid by Trump and his staffers that ultimately culminated in the insurrection. In 2015 on the campaign trail, he falsely claimed that elections are rigged and the only way he could lose would be through systemic voter fraud. He said it again in 2016 when he won. He repeated it throughout his presidency. And he claimed fraud again—and again, and again—when he lost.
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing,” Trump said during his January 6 speech.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.”
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Justice, when racist culture warriors run the Department of Justice
I must point out two things — the incredible restraint of the peaceful Black protesters at the scenes of several police killings of unarmed Black citizens SINCE Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in an incident Minneapolis police originally headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
The restraint of the Black community seems superhuman to me, at a time when we have a seemingly decent man as the president and now daily police killings of unarmed civilians, disproportionately Black and brown, that police departments in many cases immediately justify in public relations campaigns and do their best to cover up.
The other thing to note is that the Department of Justice was specifically created to bring justice to the victims of racism. It was established pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment that extended the constitutional freedoms of the Bill of Rights to every person born in America, all citizens.
The DOJ was tasked with supervising the states, particularly the former slave states that had taken up arms against the US government, to ensure that former slaves (soon to be victims of a hundred years of variations on the Black Codes, lynching and deprivation of basic rights under “Separate but Equal”) had the constitutional protections of the federal government.
The Supreme Court stepped in, within a few years, to effectively nullify the Fourteenth Amendment, putting it into a judicially induced coma that lasted for almost a century. A political compromise that settled the close 1876 presidential election resulted in the end of Bayonet Rule (federal enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the return of Home Rule, by white supremacist “Redeemers,” the former Confederate leaders.
During that long century of unpunished terrorism there was no federal protection against racist or otherwise oppressive state action, what became known as civil rights violations. Enforcement of all laws was at the discretion of each of the United States, as though the constitution had never been amended by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nowadays, after a century of blood, activism, organizing and court victories against white supremacist terrorism and racially discriminatory practices across the nation, the Fourteenth Amendment is back. Citizens, since the mid-nineteen sixties, can go to federal court to seek redress of grievances against their state under the constitution, as intended in 1868 when the amendment was added to ensure the rights of citizenship to a new class of citizens..
The Department of Justice, we see, changes, sometimes radically, with every administration. Regard for the spirit and letter of laws enforcing equality of citizens comes and goes with the strong opinions of the Executive.
Trump’s Department of Justice abdicated all federal responsibility for overseeing even overtly racist police departments. Recall the grim determination of Trump’s first Attorney General (followed by his evil second A.G.) to keep American policing strictly in local hands. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Trump’s first senate supporter, a man deemed too racist to be appointed to the federal bench, imagine that) insisted “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” The diminutive racist:
made clear he believed policing should be left to local and state law enforcement bodies, no matter how brutally they treated black and other minority citizens supposedly under their protection.
Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s provocative, partisan culture warrior gunsel, who replaced the “weak” and “disloyal” Sessions as Attorney General, agreed 100% and was even more proactive in his partisan and race-baiting attacks. Antifa and Black Lives Matter, he insisted, are the problem (also mail-in ballots were an “obvious” invitation to massive voter fraud), not heavily armed white militias exercising their protected First and Second Amendment rights to resist the tyranny of pandemic precautions, or local and federal police simply doing their best to keep the peace, doing their difficult, thankless jobs in a nation overrun by savage, vicious, terrorist haters.
It should be noted that the fat, pugnacious fuck resigned before the actual insurrectionist “poop” hit the fan in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Barr may be enraged at disrespectful liberals, atheists, humanists and so on, but he’s not going to prison behind that rage.
Barr consistently did major damage for his master, spun whatever Trump wanted as perfectly legal and proper and justifiable, using legal quibbles like “material lie” to exonerate Trump allies who’d lied under oath to protect their boss. Other times, Barr was right in your face.
Remember his December 3, 2019 speech at the Department of Justice when he pointedly reminded Black people that if they want police protection, (Barr at his deniable best– he never singled out Black communities by name!), they’d better start respecting and obeying [1] the police.
Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
“Nice little family you got there, shame if anything happened to ’em.” [2]
It is encouraging to have a Justice Department that is now looking into what appears to be a pattern and practice of corrupt and selective prosecutions by the Executive branch under America’s Greatest Winner President, Donald J. Trump, and his smugly bullying gunsel Mr. Barr.
We learn from the recent execution of search warrants against another of Trump’s personal lawyers, that Barr kept a lid on the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s mad attempts to make money and keep the far right in power by spreading Russian propaganda leading up to the election and meddling in every other possible way. After all, Barr must have reasoned, what’s really the big deal about helping the president in an arguably shady effort Trump wasn’t even convicted for when a politically motivated impeachment was brought against him? More to the point, investigating an ally of the president was absolutely and completely within Barr’s discretion, as top US law enforcement official.
It’s not like Mueller got the truth out of Manafort or Stone in time to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump campaign had been in an actual criminal conspiracy with Russia. We now know that Manafort gave critical polling data to the Russians so they could help Trump win the Electoral College in 2016. We also know Stone, among other unsung services to his far-right colleagues, worked with Wikileaks on the timing of revelations harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Some of us know it, anyway — there are millions who believe the whole thing is a hoax on top of a lying liberal hoax. And that storming the Capitol to stop these election-stealing murderers is more than justifiable, it was patriotic.
God bless these United Shayssssh.
[1]
I know, I know, Barr said “support” not “obey” but these pricks always dogwhistle in easily translatable code.
[2]
I see in finishing the article I got Barr’s quote from, that Adam Serwer (staff writer for The Atlantic) put it even better, in a tweet (from December, 2019, mind you):
Bill Barr, almost verbatim: “nice community you got there. Shame if something happened to it because you said the police shouldn’t murder innocent people.”
Solving the cellphone animation registration problem for an 8 year-old
Liz Cheney posed the proper constitutional and practical questions to her Trumpist colleagues 3 days before the January 6 MAGA riot
Leading up to, and even immediately after, the Trump-donor funded MAGA rally, and separate subsequent march to and riot at the Capitol on January 6, loyal Trumpists with presidential ambitions, like senators Lyin’ Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and rioter high-fiver Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), were holding up the certification of Biden’s victory and calling for the formation of a commission to investigate why millions of Americans believed allegations of widespread voting fraud that may have, quite possibly, led to Joseph R. Biden being able to steal the election from Donald J. Trump.
These senators, and their indignant counterparts in the House, kept insisting “we’ll never know who the real president is, unless there’s a commission to revisit every faulty or corrupt bipartisan state recount and each of the dozens of unfair court decisions from judges prejudiced against Trump … unless we form a commission to study this, America will never know who our real president is!”
We know who the real president is. But tens of millions of Americans, for some reason, believed (and still believe) the Big Lie (which 2/3 of Republicans polled spontaneously appear to regard as the Big Truth) about widespread voter fraud that led to the theft of an election, and so seven Trump supporters in the Senate, and 140 in the House (including ‘March for Trump’ speakers Madison Cawthorn and Mo Brooks, both of whom gave stirring speeches right before the riot), contested the awarding of Electoral Votes to Biden and called for a commission to figure out exactly how the Democrat [sic] party pulled off this slick, massive, historically unprecedented voter fraud. In service of Trump’s lie about a rigged, stolen election, they called for the formation of a commission, before any Electoral College votes were made official.
To which uber-conservative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) responded, on the first page of her long January 3 memo to her anti-reason caucus:
The recent proposal for a new “Commission” is even more problematic [than Congress overruling state determinations about Electors]. It is not reasonable to anticipate that any commission so formed could wrap up its work in 10 days; indeed, the subsequent debate at both the state and federal level would likely require months. Did those proposing a new commission realize that they were in essence proposing to delay the inaugural? Did they mean to set up a new future precedent where the inaugural is delayed and we have an “Acting President?” For how long? Who decides when that process is over? Will that require another Act of Congress? Could the Acting President veto any such future Congressional action? If Congress has authority to create such a commission now, are state elections, recounts and state law legal challenges just “make-work” until Congress gets around to investigating and deciding who should be President? Members who support the new commission proposal may need to answer each of these questions. And in particular, Members should be prepared to answer how such a commission would be justified by the actual text of our founding documents.
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No wonder the Wyoming Republican Party censured Cheney! Many want more fitting, more consequential, punishment than censure — she should be primaried, tarred, feathered and drummed out of the Grand Old Party! What kind of goddamned stupid, counterproductive questions are those, at a time when a rigged election has been brazenly stolen, when Black Lives Matter rioters — and antifa terrorists — are burning down the country in a reign of terror as power-mad pedophile cannibals drink our children’s blood and laugh at us while patriotic white militias do their best to hold off the violent non-white hoards?!!!!
Is there a single coherent answer to ANY of the questions Liz Cheney raised in her memo three days before the widely supported MAGA riot? I address this question to the 147 Trumpist Congress members who voted to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election on the grounds of massive fraud Trump claimed, without proof (and advertised to the tune of $50,000,000), had happened everywhere he “lost”. Their answer, of course, is a united “fuck you, Democrat [sic] party! Fuck you, Liz Cheney!”
Somaticizing your people’s trauma
I heard a very insightful discussion (between therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem and Kritsta Tippett) of the deep bodily harm racism inflicts, on a cellular level. Menakem describes how the subjects of racist attention are born inheriting, in their bodies, the stress their mothers felt while carrying them in their wombs. It made a lot of sense to me, the innate vigilant tension that must be carried in the body by those who society marks, solely by their external appearance, as inferior and threatening.
Menakem makes this profound point:
Not just that they lived through trauma, but that the angst and the anguish was decontextualized. And so for my Black body to be born into a society by which the white body is the standard is, in and of itself, traumatizing. If my mom is born as a Black woman, into a society that predicates her body as deviant, the amount of cortisol that is in her nervous system when I’m being born is teaching my nervous system something. Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.
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I immediately knew the truth of this. I thought of my advantage, as a white person raised in safety by white middle class parents [1], when an off-duty cop tried to punch my face in for a disrespectful remark I’d made to him. (In my defense, I had no idea the violent piece of shit was an off-duty cop.) When three of his colleagues finally pulled us apart, two pinned my arms. I immediately relaxed my body, signaling to them I was not resisting, that I was calm, that they could safely let me go, which I quietly asked them to do.
Had my body been programmed to tense up and resist, knowing in my ancestral memory that the next likely thing was for all four of them to start beating me, or worse, I’d never have been able to relax and free myself so easily. I’d never have had the chance to reasonably ask the guy who’d tried to punch me in the face over and over what was stopping me from doing the same to him, then doing it, in front of three witnesses, and making my exit without having the shit beaten out of me afterwards.
The trauma of growing up in a despised, feared group is somaticized, it becomes part of the body’s response system (making the body more susceptible to disease and early death, among other things [2]). Not surprising at all, once it’s put out there, but fascinating and important to consider. The inherited, instinctive fight or flight mobilization in traumatized bodies can also be described by epigenetics, which Krista Tippett also did a great show about.
The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.
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These biological expressions of stress and trauma can be worked through by survivors who receive help and support, once the traumatic events are far enough in the past. But what of those whose stress and trauma are ongoing, systemic, unending, in the news every single day?
In the context of now daily police killings of unarmed Black people, this dynamic is very important to consider. The day after Derek Chauvin was convicted, unarmed, unresisting Andrew Brown was, shot to death in a rural county in eastern North Carolina. The warrant for his arrest called him a dangerous drug dealer and the unidentified sheriff’s deputies who went to serve the warrant on him wound up killing him. According to the officers who shot him, the proof that he was resisting arrest is that once they began shooting into his car, and four shots are confirmed to have hit him, he tried to drive away, attempting to back down his driveway, which seems to have been when the fatal fifth shot was fired into the back of his head.
Ask yourself how a Black man, even if he is not a “dangerous drug dealer”, does not try to flee from police bullets coming into his car, particularly after he has complied and kept both hands on the steering wheel.
Recall the original police account of the murder of George Floyd: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” We know now, thanks to the video shot by a courageous seventeen year-old, the testimony of several witnesses, police officials and medical experts, and the guilty verdict by a jury of twelve of Derek Chauvin’s peers, that the original police account, while strictly true (there was a “medical incident” but it was Floyd’s murder) was a grossly misleading oversimplification of what happened during those fatal final nine and a half minutes of the “police interaction” that ended George Floyd’s life.
Makes me want to holler, it really does.
I’ve been reminded that most people who become police officers, the vast majority of them “white,” grow up with a conservative mindset, conforming to the norms of our society and believing in a basic code of right and wrong based on enforcing the law, whatever it is, against lawbreakers. I believe many, if not most, are motivated to become police officers by a real desire to protect and serve. The burning, killing question is who and what, exactly, you have vowed to protect and serve.
[1]
Leaving aside my own epigenetic trauma to be the child of parents who lost all but a few family members, every single family member left in Europe, to an outbreak of murderous group madness in Ukraine and Belarus in 1942 and 1943. Every one of them murdered and disappeared without a trace, just thirteen years before I was born. Try as I might, it is something I can never get out of my head, or my body, I suppose, though my own experience never included anything like the killing crews that were the last thing my grandparents’ family members ever saw.
[2]
For a very short description, see also, HERE.
Radical Republican Apostasy 2021-style
Here’s a dramatic illustration of why Joe Manchin’s present fetish for bipartisan consensus, highly desirable though such consensus is, is so misguided in the age of the cult of Trump that the GOP has become. By simply stating true facts about the 2020 election and Trump’s attempts to overturn it, arch conservative Liz Cheney has become a pariah in her party.
After the former president and his closest allies, in the two months after the election, spent $50,000,000 on ads falsely declaring the “rigged” 2020 Election had been stolen from America’s Greatest Sore Loser (he made the same claim in 2016, when he won), and at least $3,500,000 to organize and stage the January 6 rally at the Ellipse and the march-permitted march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” and speaker after speaker (including newly elected Congressman Madison Fucking Cawthorn) urged the rally attendees to fight like hell or democracy would be stolen from them, there was little but silence from Trump’s party in Congress after the deadly riot of January 6th.
Only one top Republican member of Congress immediately spoke out, without equivocation, against the president’s attempt to overturn a US election by force. Liz Cheney (daughter of evil incarnate, the aptly named Dick Cheney), stated “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” She voted for his impeachment, along with nine other House Republicans. Cheney was almost immediately censured by her state’s Republican Committee (as were virtually all of the others who concluded Trump deserved to be impeached) for disloyalty to the former president and his party. Cheney is poised to become the leader of a post-Trump GOP, if there is such a thing, but for the moment, she’s a Republican villain to most Republicans.
To defend [Liz] Cheney is to invite the wrath of Trump and his base, while for those members who remain Trump loyalists, interaction of any sort with “fake news media” is increasingly to be avoided. But I [writing for the NY Times] was able to listen in on Cheney’s remarks at a virtual fund-raiser for her on Feb. 8, hosted by more than 50 veteran lobbyists who had each contributed to her political action committee.
At the event, Cheney lamented the party’s drift away from reality, the extent to which it had become wedded to conspiracy theories. The party’s core voters, she said, “were misled into believing the election was stolen and were betrayed.”
Alongside a legitimate concern over a Biden administration’s priorities was “the idea that the election somehow wasn’t over, and that somehow Jan. 6 would change things. People really believed it.”
When one lobbyist raised the specter of Trump re-emerging as the G.O.P.’s dominant force, Cheney responded that the party would have to resist this. Citing the Capitol riot, she said, “In my view, we can’t go down the path of embracing the person who did this or excuse what happened.”
She added: “We really can’t become the party of a cult of personality. It’s a really scary phenomenon we haven’t seen in this country before. Our oath and our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual — particularly after what happened on Jan. 6.”
This month, she told Fox News that she would not endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024.
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Too bad she’s not in the Senate (though she holds mostly repellant views [1] and, for all of our sakes, is better off arguing them in the House) — because the plain speaking Joe Manchin might find common ground with the staunch Wyoming opponent of Obamacare, environmental regulation, gun control, gay marriage and apologizing for our use of overwhelming military force to protect American interests around the world.
Who knows, they might even reach a principled compromise on a national $10/hr minimum wage.
[1] Her position on the first Trump impeachment, for example:
“It’s a system and a process like we’ve never seen before, and it’s really disgraceful,” Cheney said during one TV appearance. Voting to impeach Trump under such circumstances “may permanently damage our republic,” she warned on the House floor.
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Even her principled positions are laced with partisan accusations against Democrats, as she wrote in the opening section of an otherwise praiseworthy long memo to her colleagues three days before Trump’s riot at the Capitol:
The following summary begins by addressing the Constitutional issues, then provides excerpts from and a description of the principal judicial decisions in each of the states. As you will see, there is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts.
Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.
Democrats have long attempted, unconstitutionally, to federalize every element of our nation—including elections. Republicans should not embrace Democrats’ unconstitutional position on these issues.
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States’ Rights, y’all, as sacred as the Second Amendment itself. Can’t be a good conservative without attacking the fucking unscrupulous, partisan Democrats, not in 2021.
Joe Manchin’s view
I watch Democratic Senator Joe Manchin interviewed and often feel an impulse to slap that complacent reasonableness off his face, particularly when he smiles amiably after the interviewer asks no follow up to his prepared bipartisan-sounding answers. Yes, Joe, we all agree it would be a better country if the two parties worked together, if we did not live in a zero-sum moment where one party, making no concessions, can simply tell any lie to justify their unconscionable actions to their angry base. We’d also be a better, more decent country if millions of our countrymen stopped being violent racists and misogynists, agreed Joe.
I’ve got two words for Joe Manchin and his idealism about bipartisanship: Mitch McConnell.
Do you think, for a second, that Scorched Earth Mitch would hesitate to nuke the filibuster once he regained the majority? He already did it for Supreme Court nominees, after blocking Obama’s nominee because it was only ten months from an election. You recall Mitch blamed it on the Democrats, who’d eliminated the filibuster for presidential nominees after a record shattering number of the president’s nominations were filibustered by Mitch and his colleagues and never reached a hearing.
Our government was not always gridlocked this way. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3. Radical right-wing activist Boof Kavanaugh did not enjoy quite as much bipartisan support, he prevailed 50-48, after Mitch got rid of the filibuster.
Tell us more about this principled bipartisanship of yours, Mr. Manchin, and how it will melt the heart of a power-crazed troll like McConnell. Or how it will enlighten even a handful in a united Republican Congress that continues to block a commission to get all the facts about the riot at the Capitol, a party that will not denounce its 147 members who voted, without evidence of any kind but the former president’s lies, to contest the counting of Electoral College votes, even after #Stop the Steal rioters, infuriated by the exhortations of the president and other rabble rousers, stormed their workplace, put many police in the hospital and interrupted the ceremonial counting as members of Congress scrambled for their lives and rioters looked for Pence and Pelosi, to string them up. This is Trump’s party, a party in which even “moderates” refuse, as a block, to vote with the radical Democrat left embodied in Biden and Harris (no vote for Covid relief, Mitt?)
On the other hand, Manchin, former governor of West Virginia, was elected to the Senate in a state that voted this way in 2020:
A decisive ass-whupping from a state where Trump had promised crowds of cheering West Virginians he’d send them back into the coal mines. Thousands of mining jobs were lost under Trump, a man with a spotty record on telling the truth, but MAGA man is apparently still beloved in West Virginia, at least among the 63% who turned out to vote in 2020. It’s clear, in light of the heavy Republican tilt of the great state of West Virginia, that Joe Manchin has to be mindful of the likelihood of being lynched if he calls too loudly for helping an illegitimate Democrat [sic] president by making it harder for obstructionists to filibuster every one of his proposed laws.
Yes, white people do get lynched too, once in a while, “race traitors” in particular, when it’s extremely necessary for a mob to make an example out of one who violates sacred norms and folkways.
So, while I don’t like it, I can understand Manchin’s tap dance. In a hopeful part of my brain it reminds me of the recent statements Biden has been making about fighting the climate emergency and job creation. Fighting climate catastrophe will create millions of good, clean jobs, he says (not unreasonably) and transform our economy from an extractive system that is destroying the world into a sustainable one that will allow our children’s grandchildren to live on healthy planet. As he talks I keep hearing the term he refuses to say, the plan he vowed to veto if it ever reached his desk: The Green New Deal. That’s politics, you can’t always say what you actually mean, for fear of stoking partisan rage that will sink a good idea before it can get political traction.
If Manchin says, before it is absolutely the last moment to do so, “fuck the filibuster, I’m with Joe and Kamala” he’s done, as he knows. Could he do a better job by making a less moronic argument for why he’s against changing a frequently abused parliamentary rule that is not part of the original design of our government? Possibly, even though all arguments in support of the filibuster require overlooking its mostly racist history. But people who are dying deaths of despair in large numbers, as they pine for good jobs they once had in the coal mines, in a state that American prosperity has left behind, likely would not cotton to even the most otherwise reasonable arguments for making the filibuster harder than merely sending an email to the proper authority. They like Joe because he fights for West Virginia and is basically an older-style Republican conservative who ain’t gonna do anything we don’t want him to do.
Here’s an interesting article about the challenges West Virginia faces. It provides several ideas for how the federal government could help states like West Virginia and win voters away from the idea that all federal programs are part of a coercive system that must be resisted as strongly as the deprivation of States’ Rights once was by states that took up arms against such tyranny.
The article points out:
The economics of redevelopment in the state are particularly tricky given that the state government has limited resources, local governments have meager tax revenue, and philanthropic dollars are scarce (those out-of-state coal companies didn’t leave behind a lot of local family foundations).
The solution, of course, collect taxes from giant corporate “persons” that currently pay none and let the federal government invest the money to help actual human persons in places where the entire economy in some small towns, in recent years, has been based on obtaining and selling millions of doses of the prescription drugs people with no other options use to dull their pain, and 238 times a day, end their pain once and for all.
That kind of large-scale economic development program, directly benefiting a wide swath of his constituency, is the only thing that will allow a Joe Manchin to take less maddening positions on things like actually allowing debate on bills in the Senate.
I have no insight into what motivates the first openly “bisexual” member of the Senate, Arizona’s anti-filibuster reform, anti-minimum wage hike Kyrsten Sinema (elected in 2019 to fill John McCain’s seat), but I have no reason to suspect it is high ideals about democracy. Arizona and West Virginia Democrats have to keep the pressure on these two “centrists” to do the right things. It’s unlikely they’ll listen to anyone else.
Hope v. Despair
If you believe that you can help make change for the better, you have reason for hope. Starting therapy, which is based on the idea that understanding leads to personal growth, change and less pain in life, is an expression of hope. Marching in protests is an expression of hope. Supporting friends who have made even small changes for the better, an affirmation of hope. Hope is a precondition for creative action of all kinds. Despair, a firm belief that no positive fundamental change can ever be accomplished, that we are as we were born, the world is what it is and nobody can change any of that, results in a hardened certainty about the grimness of life that nobody can influence.
Raised by two frustrated, anger-prone parents, broken by their own strong-willed mothers, I was never taught that it’s possible (and smart) to take a breath, remain silent for a moment, think a bit more, consider the effect of my reaction. You could say I was trained to have a handicap — when something aggravates you, get mad and vent loudly. The reflex to get angry is still strong in me, when a computer has its way with me I can be heard to snarl and yell like I’m in a barehanded fight to the death with a young, energetic Mr. Hitler, armed with a Bowie knife. Seeing the terrible impact getting angry all the time had on my life, I set out to become milder in my reactions. Over many years, I’ve made some progress.
My father snarled when I brought this progress up twenty years ago or so. No, he insisted, you changed only your superficial reactions, not your reflex to fly into a rage. I pointed out that changing my reactions meant I am more often able to control my reflex to fly into a rage.
“I’ve seen big a change in you,” my mother said, as she passed through the room, on her way to the bedroom to read a murder mystery. It is hard to express how much her passing comment moved me, fortified my efforts to change even more. Particularly since it was spoken early into my attempt to become a less angry person.
That change may not fix everything that’s broken is often cited, by Positive Change Skeptics, as proof that real, fundamental change is impossible. To me, if I get angry 40% less than I used to, am more consistently able to not hurt those around me by taking anger out on them, I consider that change very valuable. To those who insist we are what we are, and foolish hope of change is a game for chumps, a paltry 40% less anger is the same as telling everybody to fuck themselves. I hope I will not infuriate anyone by admitting I have no idea by what percentage I’ve lessened my angry reactions, I pull the 40% stat out of my ass by way of random illustration.
Without hope, without faith in our power to choose more wisely than we did when we were children, the only alternative is a pessimistic acceptance of every bit of negativity we encounter as the natural order. Remove hope and you have only a grim acceptance of a bitter world, run by evil people, a brutish place where you get as much as you can before some other syphilitic rat bastard tries to steal it from you.
We are living in a moment of mass despair, millions worldwide taking desperate action out of their sense of hopelessness. There are many reasons for despair. Humans are destroying the planet we live on, quickly, irrevocably, much faster than even the most pessimistic climate scientists predicted. The economic system that prevails on our dying planet is unashamedly extractive, not sustainable and it exploits most people who work for it.
The powerful could give a shit what happens after they’re gone, if piping toxic tar sand thousands of miles to toxically extract more gasoline from it will increase their vast wealth, fuck “water protecters” and “tree huggers” and “climate alarmists” and “climate scientists” and everyone else who has a concern about unsustainable, deadly levels of toxins released into our air and water. You fund influential “think tanks”, hire lobbyists, judges, goons to beat protesters up, sic dogs on ’em, strip search ’em. Have legislatures pass laws labeling every demonstrator an eco-terrorist, put ’em all in jail. People can’t change, we are an irredeemably evil bunch, fuck it — set it all on fire, let God sort through the ashes.
Deaths of despair in this country last year, all other forms of suicides excluded, included a U.S. record 87,000 drug overdose deaths, an average of 238 a day. Nothing can change, China stole all the jobs, the radical left stole the rigged election from the only man who can protect us from a cabal of powerful Satanist cannibal pedophiles, what is the point, what is the fucking point? Doctor, I need more Oxycontin!
Despair is understandable. It’s also deadly. If the news is too depressing to watch (which it is, by design), if it fills you with despair that there is not a moment when hope can simply be allowed to breathe, you learn to tune it out. This exhausted disengagement works to the advantage of despair and grievance mongers.
When the Georgia run-off resulted in a narrow Senate majority for new president Biden, the forces of reaction immediately sent an angry lynch mob to storm the Capitol, their violence erasing all celebrations of a resurgence of democracy in Georgia. Almost at the moment Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd (after a short trial during which there were dozens more police killings across the country), a sheriff in North Carolina refused to release videos of someone killed by police. It fills you with a sense of dread, of despair for even the hope of anything getting better.
Watch the affable Joe Manchin insist, with every appearance of measured reasonableness, that the only way out of this viciously deadlocked and divisive partisan political hellscape is by working together, reaching across the aisle to those who support the unfounded claim that Biden stole a rigged election from their party leader, and compromising on changes to proposals that are already compromises. What’s wrong with $11 an hour minimum wage, y’all? Not as much as what generous Amazon pays, but, heck, a lot better than the $7.25 the Fair Labor Standards Act requires all American employers to pay certain workers not exempt from the law because they make tip money as well [1]. Hard not to feel a bit of the old despair, a flash of the old anger.
That’s when it is important to remember things like this. Manchin takes this conservative position because he represents one of the poorest, Reddest states in the nation. Created in 1863, West Virginian’s primary industry has long been coal mining. Trump promised to send West Virginians back to work in the coal mines, and they apparently loved him for it. West Virginia voted for Trump in 2020 by an 40% margin. Now– tell me, if Biden crafted a law to spend billions in recovered corporate tax dollars to revitalize the devastated economy of places like West Virginia, investing money for massive job retraining, new sustainable industries, health care for all, funding internal infrastructure projects hiring thousands, giving West Virginians new hope for the future, would Manchin still not be able to take a reasonable position on weakening or eliminating the filibuster? Would it not give someone like Manchin political cover to insist that the minority filibustering should at least be required to hold the floor and actually argue the merits of why they are blocking debate on the bill they’re obstructing?
It is easy and natural to give in to despair, particularly when every reasonable hope you can muster is continually and deliberately pissed on by unscrupulous powerful people who do not care about justice in any form, except to hoard more of its prerogative to selectively withhold justice for themselves.
The words of Trump’s new internet sensation Frederick Douglass are worth considering here:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
Given the choice between hope and despair, I’ll choose hope every time. It’s not really that much of a contest.
[1]
Manchin’s state already has a more generous $8.75 hourly minimum wage (a state could hardly be less generous than the $7.25 minimum wage 19 U.S. states still have). Ironically, DC is the only US jurisdiction that currently has a $15 minimum wage, $3.25 more than surrounding state Maryland. Kyrsten Sinema’s (of the parody of McCain’s famous thumbs down on Trump’s attempt to abolish the Affordable Care Act, in opposing a $15 national minimum wage) state of Arizona already has an $11 minimum wage, so, you know, enough is enough…
Right-wing culture of cruelty
In 2013 Bill Moyers had a guest, Henry Giroux, who made an excellent and depressing case for America’s Culture of Cruelty [1]. In a materialistic society that monetizes everything and reduces every encounter to a transaction over monetary value, where the super-wealthy consolidate ever greater say in our laws, most of us are expendable, worth only as much as our net worth. Cruelty may be carried out with impunity against people without economic or political power, that’s what “winners” and “losers” is all about. That’s just the sad reality, for losers — winners get rewarded, losers lose, no mystery there.
America, with our divisive, concession-free, attack ad-based politics, is no less cruel as a culture in 2021, despite the growing humane impulse of many of us in the face of cascading evidence of brutal inequality, and outright state brutality, during a deadly pandemic that calls on each of us to summon our higher natures, to consider others, to finally end these ongoing plagues.
Instead, we have unified, irrational, bare knuckled political calculation in the GOP’s uncompromising resistance to voting for even a long overdue Covid-19 relief bill. The GOP is united in refusing to endorse vaccines and basic safety precautions, on the depraved theory that if there is less misery in the country and less Americans die of the pandemic it will make Biden and his Democrat [sic] party look good and hurt Republican chances at the polls in 2022.
People rightfully fear cruelty, particularly when it has the power to harm behind it, hence the vindictive Trump’s continued hold on the party he took over after humiliating and exhausting all opponents to win the nomination and the Electoral College in 2016. He has demonstrated over and over his zeal to punish, to make examples of, to humiliate, to pardon friends and attack and vilify enemies.
Predictably, and depressingly, the 6-3 right-wing Supreme Court that McConnell orchestrated (it would be 5-4 today if Merrick Garland had had a hearing and confirmation vote in 2016), with the three Koch-vetted and dark-money supported extremists appointed by Trump, is marching ahead with quiet, decisive cruelty.
The other day Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh authored a 6-3 decision making the law of the land that teenagers convicted of violent crimes can be imprisoned for life without the possibility of parole, as long as a judge exercises “discretion,” considering the sentence and deciding it’s appropriate.
Ruth Marcus, writing in the Washington Post, in an op-ed called At the Supreme Court, a tale of two Bretts:
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege, the son of a Beltway lobbyist and the product of the Ivy League. Mississippi prisoner Brett Jones has endured a life of misery and abuse, the son of an alcoholic father who brutalized his mother and a stepfather who beat him.
As fate would have it, their lives converged this week: In an opinion released Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh upheld Brett Jones’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing his grandfather just 23 days after his 15th birthday. (And, yes, let us pause here to note a certain irony in the fact that the opinion was written by a justice whose confirmation hearings featured discussion about how people can change after high school.)
The 6-to-3 ruling in Jones v. Mississippi was notable not only for the juxtaposition of the two Bretts. It offered a snapshot of a court transformed by the arrival of Kavanaugh and two other conservative justices named by President Donald Trump. And it demonstrated how a conservative majority bent on reshaping the law can do so without the showy fanfare of explicitly overruling precedents.
According to the punitive right, rehabilitation and personal growth are myths, when applied to poor people. A fifteen year-old with a history of abuse, from a family of limited means, convicted of murder, sentenced to life without parole, just has to continue to be punished, without hope of anything beyond a long prison life, no matter what profound changes he may have undergone while locked up. Fair is fair.
A fifteen year-old from a wealthy family must not be made to unduly suffer, must not have his life “ruined” decades later by being confronted with his unfitness for a Supreme Court seat, for creepy things he was credibly accused of doing at that immature age.
Kavanaugh’s personal unfitness to serve on the Supreme Court was not only his failure to accept responsibility for his youthful bad behavior, it was even more powerfully demonstrated by his angry, tearful, paranoid partisan screed about a cabal of Clinton-assassins and powerful Jews intent on lying about him and spending millions in dark money to keep him off the nation’s highest court, thereby ruining his life [3].
The right is always supremely generous extending mercy and understanding to their own in this game of cruelty. After all, who among us, at a tender age, has not drunkenly fallen on top of a cute much younger girl, in a locked room, started groping her and been too drunk to actually recall it years later? Could happen to anybody at Georgetown Prep! And, besides, it’s totally, totally different from killing someone at fifteen just because you were “abused” by your stepfather.
Makes me think of that study of political orientation that was done a few years ago. Liberals tend to be optimists about human nature, conservatives are pessimists. Liberals skew toward forgiveness and permissiveness, conservatives toward retribution and punishing. Liberals tend to seek to understand the reasons for violence and strategize about how to change conditions that produce it, conservatives prefer to keep things exactly as they are and harshly punish those who deserve it.
Boof Kavanaugh, who deliberately lied several times during his confirmation hearing (including about the definition of “boof” on his elite prep-school yearbook page– everyone knows it’s having a tube inserted into your ass and having vodka poured in — Boof said it was an inside joke about his flatulence, LOL!), and was voted into his lifetime post by a party-line 50-48 vote, the smallest margin since 1881 [2] (and only after McConnell nuked the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations to allow an up or down vote), is a mean son-of-a-bitch, no matter how many millions in public relations dollars from dark money sources went into crafting the image of the gentle, woman and girl protecting junior high school girls’ basketball coach and religious churchgoer during the bitter fight for his nomination. Recall that the Jesuits of America eventually called for the religious Catholic Kavanaugh to withdraw his name from consideration, and that instead he angrily and tearfully cited a vast, evil left-wing conspiracy, in his defense of not having his life ruined by liars.
Here’s what the face of that gentle man, and supremely qualified, unbiased right wing lifetime justice, looked like, when he was challenged by liberal partisans during his confirmation hearings. It is the entitled face of our culture of cruelty.
[1] Giroux writes:
… a growing culture of cruelty brought about by the death of concessions in politics — a politics now governed by the ultra-rich and mega corporations that has no allegiance to local politics and produces a culture infused with a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in the suffering of others. Power is now separated from politics and floats, unchecked and uncaring.
source
[2] The article linked above notes:
Two of the oldest justices on the court — Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both nominated by President Bill Clinton — were confirmed with near-unanimous support that would seem nearly impossible today. Breyer was confirmed in 1994 with an 87-9 vote; one year earlier, the Senate confirmed Ginsburg 96-3.
[3] Part of the remarks that he claimed to have written himself, that should have disqualified him for his Supreme Court position, particularly since millions in right-wing “opposition group” money supported the well-organized (calculated and orchestrated, one might say) campaign to put him onto the court:
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