I own a copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions and while I wouldn’t call the book life-altering, I did learn a bit of wisdom from what Bach had to share. That was why when I read Oliver Burkeman’s Good advice from bad people this morning I was pleased to read him quote Bach: You teach best what you most need to learn.

That line has always resonated with me because I think that writers, like psychologists, are using their exchanges with others, their processes, to explore their own questions, and we are not candidates for canonization. Burkeman writes:

Many of [Good Advice From Bad People author Zac] Bissonnette’s subjects are criminals, or mentally ill. But he touches briefly on a more fascinating possibility: what if it’s precisely because some people have big problems, in a given domain, that they end up so forcibly telling others what to do about it? In its original Freudian sense, “projection” is a woolly notion, but the contemporary psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests one way it might work. When you’re keen not to think certain thoughts about yourself, you’ll make them “chronically accessible” to your mind, so they’ll be the first things you reach for when analysing what’s wrong with others. Lance Armstrong could have settled for being a cheat; instead, he was a cheat who banged on about integrity.

The irony is that the resulting advice can be great. The best investment strategy, Bernie Madoff once said, is to resist the urge to play the system and put your money in index funds. He was right; it was investing your money with Madoff, the ultimate system-player, that was wrong. “You teach best what you most need to learn,” wrote Richard Bach, though he presumably didn’t have Ponzi schemers in mind.

Leaving aside criminals and charlatans, you could argue we’re better off taking advice from those who’ve struggled with whatever they’re addressing. It’s a cliche that “all therapists are crazy”—and there’s evidence they really do have more direct experience of mental illness than others—but that’s not necessarily bad. It means they’re personally invested.

Perhaps this is why Alcoholic’s Anonymous continues to be popular despite the program’s abysmal success rate: we trust the sinner more than the saint.

*That’s what she said:

It must be so hard to make 24 hours of television without saying the words: cunt, snatch, cooter, silk purse, spicy taco, hoohoo,, trim, vajayjay, bearded clam, front bottom, nether region, sin grotto, red lobster, beaver, fur burger, downstairs retreat, honey pot, inner sanctum, yoni, sugar walls, peach blossom, lady treasure, roast beef curtains, gray garden—Oh! I almost forgot the most important one: box.

Of all the Jon Stewart Daily Show alumni, I think Samantha Bee is, by far, the best.

My first-draft mantra is I’m OK when the writing sucks. No one ever wrote a perfect first draft. Hell, no one ever wrote a perfect 10th, 100th or 1,000th draft. The work gets better with ever pass, but at some point you have allow the editor to pry the manuscript from your fingers. I once had an editor who literally ripped pages from my typewriter when we were on deadline. What I wrote wasn’t pretty, but the words did the job.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in The pessimist’s cure for procrastination for The Guardian get all philosophical on the concept.

There’s nothing new in the observation that perfectionism leads to procrastination, but too often we perfectionists are secretly proud of our affliction: we’re convinced that this time, finally, if we pulled out all the stops, we might get things exactly right. The bracing Gnostic response is: forget it. Creation is imperfect by definition; to bring something into being is unavoidably to screw it up. It’s not a question of “embracing failure”, but of seeing there’s no option but to embrace failure. I’m pretty sure the Gnostics didn’t intend it as motivational advice, but that’s the effect it has on me: it’s far easier to get things done, and to take interesting risks, if you’ve already failed. There’s no point worrying things might go wrong when they already have.

Burkeman goes all Gnostic because of an essay by Costica Bradatan Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination as part of The New York Times’ The Stone series. Bradatan begins:

“The world,” we read in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, “came about through a mistake.” The demiurge who made it “wanted to create it imperishable and immortal,” but eventually he “fell short of attaining his desire, for the world never was imperishable, nor, for that matter, was he who made the world.” The Gnostics believed nonexistence to be a mark of perfection, and coming into being a form of degradation.

Basilides, one of the most intriguing figures of early Gnosticism, believed that the highest attribute of divinity is its inexistence. By his own account, Basilides was a theologian of the “nonexistent God”; he referred to God as “he who is not,” as opposed to the maker of the world, trapped in existence and time.

Gnostic thinking takes us to a privileged ontological realm: the state of perfection that precedes actualization. That which is yet to be born—be it the world, a person, a piece of furniture or a piece of writing like this one—may be nothing, but at this stage it is at its utmost. Its nothingness is fuller and richer than any ordinary existence. To fall into existence is to enter time, and with time comes decay, aging and death.

Or, as we might suggest today: Life sucks, then you die.

Yet, even if we do not choose to embrace nothingness, nothingness itself may choose to embrace us. It may not be that we don’t have anything to do, or that we’re bored, or that we would rather do it later, but just that we don’t see the point of it all. In our idleness we intuit a cosmic meaninglessness, which comes along with the realization that, with every action, we get only more entangled in the universal farce.

Perhaps the most intriguing form of idleness is one nearly all of us are intimately familiar with: procrastination.

I think that if some of my students were to read this, particularly the bit about cosmic meaninglessness, there might be a bit of a revolt at the high school. Bradatan continues:

Idleness is difficult to find in a pure state. Indeed, in a certain sense, it eludes us because, at its most radical, idleness tends to devour its devotees. But procrastination is a different business altogether: It is not only more available, but also more dynamic, just as the procrastinator is a more dramatic figure than the idler, who is as ascetic and immobile as a pillar saint.

The drama of procrastination comes from its split nature. Just like the architect from Shiraz, the procrastinator is smitten by the perfect picture of that which is yet to be born; he falls under the spell of all that purity and splendor. What he is beholding is something whole, uncorrupted by time, untainted by the workings of a messed-up world. At the same time, though, the procrastinator is fully aware that all that has to go. No sooner does he get a glimpse of the perfection that precedes actualization than he is doomed to become part of the actualization process himself, to be the one who defaces the ideal and brings into the world a precarious copy, unlike the architect who saves it by burning the plans.

The procrastinator contemplates his deed and realizes all its future imperfection, but — fallen creature, “man of the world,” part of the “infamy of Creation” that he is — he must do it. The procrastinator is both contemplator and man of action, which is the worst thing to be, and which is tearing him apart.

What procrastination betrays is above all an anxiety of creation: It pains us unbearably to realize that, for all our good intentions, we are agents of degradation, that instead of creating something that stays whole and incorruptible, we by our very doing make it “perishable and mortal,” in the words of the Gnostic author of the Gospel of Philip. Procrastination and mourning are tied tightly together: for to procrastinate is to mourn the precariousness of your creation even before you bring it into the world.

The only cure is the work. Horribly, tragically flawed as we know any effort might be, the work is the approach to the perfect and like Achilles we can approach the finish line, but are doomed to never break the tape.

On Wednesday, I wrote about another African American high school football player threatened with murder by lynching for the crime of exercising his free speech rights under our Constitution. The day before Monument Mountain Regional High School principal Marianne Young gathered her charges for a New England tradition, the town community meeting.

Heather Bellow, reporting in In wake of lynching threat, Monument principal, students, say school has racial tension, issues for The Edge, writes:

Monument Mountain Regional High School Principal Marianne Young told students at [Tuesday]’s assembly that, in grappling with a recent racist threat and its aftermath at the school, she’s had to do some deep diving within.

“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” she said, adding that her recent comments to the press about the incident, and “decisions,” may not have “represented the school.”

Young didn’t go into details about an incident — still under investigation by the school, local police, and possibly the FBI — in which a white student threatened to lynch an African-American student because, during the national anthem at an away game, he kneeled to protest national police killings of black men.

Young, however, confirmed what up to now was reported as an allegation. “Somebody did, in fact, say a horrific, indefensible racist comment.”

Students were not passive listeners at the assembly.

Student Senate President Teddy Michaels, a senior, addressed the 500-plus student body.

“There are bigots and racists in the world,” Michaels said. “But Monument doesn’t have to be the way the world is out there…we can influence our community by the way we treat others and ourselves.”

He said he didn’t want his fellow students to grow up and “look back…embarrassed” by what went on at the school. He echoed Young: “This is not about individuals — it’s about us all.”

He quoted Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”

And Michaels spoke to what many in the Monument and general communities have expressed, especially on social media, since the incident came to light.

“There is racial tension at the school; that is undeniable,” he said.

Yes, lately the stories have ripped loose from safe moorings of privilege and the perception that we are a right-thinking Berkshires.

I have to wonder why I haven’t heard of a similar assembly at Brunswick High School.

So, this morning as I was checking traffic I noticed a visitor from the Ohio page of Ron Gunzburger’s Politics 1 where Have Coffee Will Write is included in a list of political blogs in Ohio. Looking at the list I wondered how many were still active.

The first blog I clicked on was Right Angle Blog, because back in the day blogger Matt Naugle was particularly nefarious. I was very pleased to see that Naugle must have allowed the registration to lapse around six years ago and the blog is now an online gambling gateway.

I went to Ohio’s flagship political blog, Plunderbund, next and was pleased to see that the blog is alive and well.

Word Of Mouth, sadly, has also gone the lost registration route, and now sports ads in German (Auf was muss man beim Umzug achten?). Scott Bakalar, Henery Hawk, Kelly Boyer Sagert, Brian Hazelett and the rest of the Secret Squirrels were always some of my favorite bloggers.

Buckeye State Blog is now an advertising site for lighting.

Well, you get the idea. I really need to find a way to keep Have Coffee Will Write and The Writing On The Wal safe until our cephalopod overlords take down the interwebs.

I have railed of late about XBATs—my acronym for Xenophobic Bigoted Anonymous Trolls—and their cowardly attacks on athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Rodney Axson, along with an ever-growing list, for taking a knee in protest at the singing of a national anthem that celebrates a nation where black men and boys can be summarily executed in our streets.

My indifference to sports is infamous and I never heard of Etan Thomas until this morning, he has long been fighting this battle.

Etan Thomas, writing in What Kaepernick Started: A Former NBA Player Reflects for The Progressive tells us:

Today, I take my hat off to Colin Kaepernick for everything he is enduring, especially now in the age of social media. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry can develop what I call “Twitter courage” and type a hateful, evil condemnation of Colin Kaepernick. As Dave Zirin, sports writer and my co-host on the radio show The Collision: Where Sports And Politics Collide, has put it:Twitter is the white hood of the twenty-first century. It’s where bigots revel in their anonymity and rage against the current, where people can be both hateful and cowardly.

Thomas shares Zirin’s observation fairly far down in his piece which opens:

Seeing all of the venom spewed at NFL player Colin Kaepernick takes me back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Today, even Republicans admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no direct connection to 9/11, and no reason to invade Iraq. But back in 2003 it was thought to be anti-American, even treasonous, to speak out against the Iraq invasion. I was playing for the Washington Wizards in the nation’s capital and simply couldn’t keep quiet about what I saw as blatant disrespect to our troops—sending them to die because of deliberate lies perpetuated by then-President George W. Bush. I began reciting my poems at rallies and marches around Washington, D.C. Sometimes thirty or forty people came. At other times, hundreds or even thousands showed up. I delivered each poem with the same tenacity no matter the size of the crowd. Here is an excerpt from one of my poems, titled “Bring Our Heroes Home”:

Out of the ashes of Iraq come soldiers dressed in fatigues of fire
wearing helmets secured in smoke
They’ve choked off the lies spewed out of the mouth of a burning bush
The true warrior’s existing wake
Who’s flames burned them at the stake
Cremated their bodies
And stuffed them in an urn wrapped in red, white, and blue…

Rummaging through a forest set ablaze by one lethal match
With witty catch phrases forever attached to the side of their kingdom
Operation Iraqi Freedom Links to Al Qaeda Eminent Threats
And weapons of mass destruction…

They’ve been skillfully thrown into the lion’s den
Out of the frying pan and into the furnace
Their courage exceeds any measuring stick
But they can hear the footsteps of death creeping around the corner
For they’ve been led into the eye of the storm
Transformed into peacekeepers
Lending a helping hand for the poorly planned post-war strategy…

I attempted to get my message out to the papers, but nobody wanted to cover it. I tried The Washington Post and The Washington Times, since those papers covered our team. But I was met with a resounding no.

Then, at one particular anti-war rally, I performed a poem called “The Field Trip.” I named some ten Republicans I wanted to take on a field trip to see the results of their policies. My piece went viral before going viral was a thing. There was no social media or Twitter back then, but soon the story of the rally was everywhere.

All the criticism being leveled at Kaepernick takes me back to those days and the hate mail delivered to me at the then-MCI Center (now Verizon Center). I played with Michael Jordan and Gilbert Arenas, so I saw guys get stacks and stacks of fan mail delivered to them every day. I would get a few letters here and there, but after that rally I started getting boxes. Some of the letters were supportive, but a lot of them were filled with anger and hate.

Those letters, now replaced by emails, Snapchats and Tweets, are still filled with anger and hate from the XBATs, but brave athletes are not deterred.

What’s beautiful to see is how Colin Kaepernick’s message is spreading and how it is resonating with so many athletes, from high school football teams to Howard University cheerleaders. [snip]

What’s almost more impressive is how this message is resonating with high school athletes who, as we know, are greatly influenced by professional athletes. They are watching, learning, and taking stances of their own. Not because it’s a new fad as some sports commentators remarked, in a feeble attempt to discredit and demean this movement, but because they have their own experiences with injustice. Some have stood in the face of adversity, hatred, and threats of physical harm.

A Brunswick, Ohio, high school football player named Rodney Axson Jr. was threatened with lynching and called the N-word by his white teammates after he knelt to protest racism on Friday, September 2.

Garfield High School’s football team and coaching staff, along with more than a half-dozen West Seattle High School players, took a knee while the national anthem played before their Friday night game.

They were not intimidated by critics including Trent Dilfer, Dabo Swinney, Kid Rock, Tony La Russa or Kate Upton. Nor did they stand down when Mike Ditka, Jim Harbaugh, Vikings offensive lineman and Kaepernick’s former teammate Alex Boone, Jason Whitlock, Boomer Esiason, Victor Cruz, Tiki Barber, U.S. Representative Lee Zeldin, and Shaquille O’Neal all used their platforms to discredit, condemn, and ridicule Colin Kaepernick and other athletes for having the moral courage to stand up for what they believe in. One would think they would be just as vocal in condemning social injustice and the countless murders at the hands of the police that have gone unpunished. More than two dozen black people were killed during encounters with police in just the first six weeks after Kaepernick began protesting.

Where is their condemnation of that?

Where indeed.

Republicans understand that their worst enemy is high voter participation. Here in Ohio our Secretary of State Jon Husted got smacked down for attempting to prevent pesky voters from, well, voting.

To our immediate west, Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson, is following Husted’s lead by shutting down the local manifestation of Patriot Majority’s successful voter registration organization: the Indiana Voter Registration Project.

Spencer Woodman, writing in Police Raid Indiana’s Largest Voter Registration Office Following Fraud Accusations From GOP for The Intercept, explains:

State police raided the offices of Indiana’s largest voter registration operation Tuesday morning, a dramatic step in a fast-developing investigation that police say is about voter fraud and election activists say amounts to a Republican-backed attack on access to the ballot in the Hoosier state.

According to organizers, nearly a dozen police entered the Indianapolis offices of the Indiana Voter Registration Project with a search warrant and seized multiple computers, the personal cellphones of employees and paperwork relating to the group’s get-out-the-vote operations in the state.

The group alleges that police told a worker she was not allowed to film the raid and attempted to block workers from access to counsel, said Jeff Macey, the attorney representing the IVRP. He called me from his car parked across the street from the voting offices he said he was unable to enter.

With its headquarters stripped of essential equipment, the registration drive’s future is suddenly uncertain.

Remind you of 2008 and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now?

What I found particularly egregious was how the State Police were able to keep anyone from recording the raid on their phones.

[Dave Bursten, the chief public information officer for the Indiana State Police] said that the police had come to collect cellphones and did not want to give targets of the investigation time to delete evidence that might be contained within the devices.

So, if police think that the cell phone you’re recording their bad behavior on is evidence, they can just take your phone away from you?

Expect to see this tactic spread like wildfire in the coming weeks.

On Monday I posted about death threats made to another high school student who took a knee. Yesterday, the principal of the school where the threat was made held an assembly.

Heather Bellow, reporting in Monument Mountain High School to hold assembly over lynching threat; FBI involved for The Edge, writes:

In the wake of a violent threat made to an African-American student last week at Monument Mountain Regional High School, school and Berkshire Hills Regional School District officials will tackle the matter in an all-school assembly in the gymnasium tomorrow, Tuesday [yesterday, JH].

Meanwhile, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were at the school last Friday after being somehow made aware of the incident in which the student reported he was threatened by another student with a “lynching in the woods,” a hanging and a beating. But FBI Boston division spokesperson Kristen Setera said she couldn’t confirm or deny that an investigation is in progress.

The FBI’s involvement would come under the realm of civil rights or hate crimes violations.

Monument Principal Marianne Young said that, at the assembly, school officials would deal with the incident in a general way. “We’re going to talk about what the school has experienced, and about how to address our own shortcomings and remain committed to one another,” she said.

Reader Eoin Higgins let me know yesterday that The Eagle disabled comments a few weeks ago. The Edge has not.

Stuart Miller, reporting in Do Not Resist: new film shows how US police have become an occupying army for The Guardian, writes:

Craig Atkinson’s documentary about police militarization, Do Not Resist, is filled with unsettling scenes like the one where a Swat team destroys a family’s home during a drug raid that nets small amounts of loose marijuana. But the most disturbing scene transpires during the relative placidity of a seminar when a hugely successful lecturer tells a room full of police officers: “We are at war and you are the frontline.

“What do you fight violence with? Superior violence. Righteous violence. Violence is your tool … You are men and women of violence.”

The speaker, Dave Grossman, is a retired army lieutenant colonel with a packed national speaking schedule. In the film, Grossman also promulgates the notion that one perk of violent encounters is that police often say that afterwards they have the best sex of their lives, which Atkinson, in an interview, sees as parallel to promising virgins to a suicide bomber.

“I wanted to show how ubiquitous his philosophy is and how it has been adopted throughout law enforcement,” says Atkinson, whose movie won best documentary feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. It opens in New York on Friday and then gradually rolls out. (Grossman refused to be interviewed for this story.) “I don’t think they should be incentivizing law enforcement to commit violence. This is a rape and pillage philosophy versus a protect and serve philosophy.”

Justin Hansford, an assistant professor at St Louis University school of law, says this mentality has long existed but that the 9/11 attacks created a new level of fear among citizens and police and timidity among the politicians who should be preventing this escalation. “It’s a jambalaya of all the wrong ingredients,” he says.

The seemingly endless police killings—from Ferguson to Tulsa and Charlotte—are directly linked to this issue, Hansford and Atkinson say.

Militarization is a huge problem, but there is a deeper sickness present that makes the danger far, far worse.

I cannot say this enough times. As a nation we must immediately take these two steps:

First, no police involved shooting should be handled by internal affairs or a local district attorney with a pet grand jury. Only an independent prosecutor should be allowed to investigate and, if found appropriate, prosecute those involved. So far this year, The Guardian’s The Counted project has listed the names of 814 people killed by police in our nation.

Second, every county ought to have a police review board with the power to fire police chiefs. The panel should consist of elected volunteers representing the diverse communities in the county. I would recommend no more than five members on such a board. The board must have subpoena power to compel testimony at open meetings. The board must not be allowed to meet in private in any sense. The volunteers would be elected annually and serve for no more than two years.

These two steps are not the solution, but they’re one hell of a good beginning.

We cannot afford to sink another well, dig another mine nor build another pipeline. Full stop.

This summer we set yet another temperature record for Earth. Sadly, the record is not likely to stand for more than a year. Oliver Milman, writing in Planet at its hottest in 115,000 years thanks to climate change, experts say for The Guardian, explains:

The global temperature has increased to a level not seen for 115,000 years, requiring daunting technological advances that will cost the coming generations hundreds of trillions of dollars, according to the scientist widely credited with bringing climate change to the public’s attention.

A new paper submitted by James Hansen, a former senior Nasa climate scientist, and 11 other experts states that the 2016 temperature is likely to be 1.25C above pre-industrial times, following a warming trend where the world has heated up at a rate of 0.18C per decade over the past 45 years.

This rate of warming is bringing Earth in line with temperatures last seen in the Eemian period, an interglacial era ending 115,000 years ago when there was much less ice and the sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30ft) higher than today.

As Oil Change International wisely encourages: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Traditional climate policy has largely focused on regulating at the point of emissions, while leaving the supply of fossil fuels to the market. If it ever was, that approach is no longer supportable. Increased extraction leads directly to higher emissions, through
lower prices, infrastructure lock-in, and perverse political incentives. Our analysis
indicates a hard limit to how much fossil fuel can be extracted, which can be implemented only by governments: No new fossil fuel extraction or transportation infrastructure should be built, and governments should grant no new permits for them [emphasis mine, JH].

Continued construction would either commit the world to exceeding 2°C of warming, and/or require an abrupt end to fossil fuel production and use at a later date (with increasing severity depending on the delay). Yet right now, projected investment in new fields, mines, and transportation infrastructure over the next twenty years is $14 trillion – either a vast waste of money or a lethal capital injection. The logic is simple: whether through climate change or stranded assets, a failure to begin a managed decline now would inevitably entail major economic and social costs

We need to be the Earth’s keepers lest the Holls Doyles of the world will leave us no Earth to keep.

So, Xenophobic Bigoted Anonymous Trolls exist in what some would consider a bastion of liberalism: The Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, vacation spot for Boston’s elite and mecca for lovers of fall foliage. Then there’s Monument Mountain Regional High School home of the Spartans.

Eoin Higgins, in FBI “aware” of reported racial threat at Monument Mountain for The Berkshire Eagle writes:

The Great Barrington Police Department is investigating a hate speech threat in Great Barrington’s Monument Mountain Regional High School and the FBI is aware of the case.

“The FBI heard about the incident and also called us to inquire and offer any assistance,” Police Chief William Walsh said in a statement. “We are keeping them advised of the investigation.”

The investigation concerns an incident from last week around a school football player’s protest. On September 23, at a game in Athol, a player “took a knee” during the nation anthem. The following Monday, September 26, another student in the high school said he would “lynch” the player and “use his body for target practice.”

The student reported the incident to school authorities. Superintendent Peter Dillon confirmed to The Eagle that the school’s administration is looking into the matter.

As of this report no internal action has been taken at the school, pending the results of a school investigation. Requests for comment from Principal Maryann Young on Friday were not returned.

“Taking a knee” has become a popular form of protest in the months since backup San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for The Star Spangled Banner during a practice game in August. The protest has spread across the National Football League and to high schools across the country.

Reactions like the one at Monument have been isolated but have occurred in other high schools. In Brunswick, Ohio, senior Rodney Axson received death threats, including lynching threats, after he took a knee in early September.

FBI Boston office spokeswoman Kristen Sereta confirmed to The Eagle that the department knows about the situation.

“We are aware of the incident,” Sereta said in a statement.

Sereta could not confirm or deny the existence of any FBI investigation of the matter, citing Department of Justice policies.

There are no comments yet on the story, but perhaps The Eagle has a policy of banning local XBATs.

I’ve offered this suggestion before and I’ll continue to make the offer. We need to take two immediate steps to purge the barrel of all the bad apples.

First, no police involved shooting should be handled by internal affairs or a local district attorney with a pet grand jury. Only an independent prosecutor should be allowed to investigate and, if found appropriate, prosecute those involved. So far this year, The Guardian’s The Counted project has listed the names of 814 people killed by police in our nation.

Second, every county ought to have a police review board with the power to fire police chiefs. The panel should consist of elected volunteers representing the diverse communities in the county. I would recommend no more than five members on such a board. The board must have subpoena power to compel testimony at open meetings. The board must not be allowed to meet in private in any sense. The volunteers would be elected annually and serve for no more than two years.

These two suggestions are not the solution, but they’re one hell of a good beginning.

Finally, while he is speaking about business, Tom Peters offers this bit of advice to anyone dealing with a loss or absence of respect.

Steve Holecko emails:

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Peace at the Pub—Lessons from Vietnam. Tuesday, October 11 7 pm, Market Garden Brewery 1947 W.25th St. Cleveland 44113. Frank Joyce, Vietnam Continue Reading »

Earlier this year, Dan Baum, writing in Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs for Harper’s Magazine revealed that:

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results?

What did Ehrlichman unlock? This:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This revelation was, of course two years into the first term of President Bill Clinton. On 13 September of that year, Clinton signed a bill, titled An Act to Control and Prevent Crime authored by then Senator, now Vice President, Joe Biden, that went further to creating our present incarceration state than Nixon ever dreamed possible.

Film maker Ava DuVernay has just released a film documenting the rise of the incarceration state so powerful that for the first time a non-fiction film will open the New York Film Festival. I wrote about DuVernay’s film, 13th last week and I look forward to watching 13th this Friday on Netflix.

This morning I’m reading Jamiles Lartey’s Ava DuVernay: ‘The black body is being used for profit and politics’ in The Guardian. Lartey writes:

DuVernay’s 100-minute voyage through the legacy of the criminalization of black Americans does more than rattle off statistics. Weaving a historical narrative from slavery through the present, the film and its contributors trace in stark relief, the various transmutations that the oppression of the black body in America has taken, and the ways that criminal justice has been recruited to that end.

Michelle Alexander, author of the bestselling book The New Jim Crow, explains in the film how in the post-civil war south, petty offenses were used to recapture newly freed blacks and force them into free labor under convict lend-lease programs that functionally reconstituted chattel enslavement. Indeed the film’s title is drawn from the caveat in the 13th amendment […except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted… JH], presumed to guarantee freedom for enslaved blacks, but also legalizes the slavery and involuntary servitude of convicted criminals.

What 13th is, at the core, is a history lesson. A lesson that is woefully absent from America’s history books.

DuVernay said the film was conceived around the idea of telling the story of how privatization and profit drove much of the expansion and development of mass incarceration. “There is a really clean clear line of the black body being used for profit and for politics.

“But as we started working on the film we quickly realized in order for that to really pack a punch you had to understand the historical and cultural context,” DuVernay said.

A number of high-profile criminal justice reform advocates, like New Yorker columnist and UConn professor Jelani Cobb, former Obama adviser Van Jones and civil rights icon Angela Davis lend their voices to the film, along with some seemingly less likely figures.

Republican Newt Gingrich and conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist also make appearances, in part highlighting the bipartisan consensus that has begun to built around issues of criminal justice reform– but also, according to DuVernay, some of the points of disagreement which still exist, and some of the potential land mines.

“I wanted to explore the question of why all this bipartisanship now … and we found a surprising answer that may not necessarily be positive,” DuVernay said.

Lingering on the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), 13th looks hard at how corporate interests have shaped public policy on criminal justice, and adapted to developments in the national consensus on crime and punishment. The film warns that as liberal and conservative opinion coalesces around the need to have less people in jail and prison, what’s likely to follow is a new wave of technology-aided supervision, like GPS-based monitoring of criminals.

“How much progress is it really if communities of color are still under perpetual surveillance and control, but now there’s a private company making money off the GPS monitor, rather than the person being locked in a literal cage?” Alexander asks in the film.

From where I sit, not much progress at all.

So, today I spent some time before the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus forum—The Legacy of Bernie Sanders—at the Parma-Snow branch of Cuyahoga County Libraries reading the Time Magazine cover story on Colin Kaepernick and his Take A Knee protests. The short take on the story is that if you knew nothing about Colin Kaepernick (or Rodney Axson, who isn’t mentioned in the story) then you might have discovered useful information. If you’ve followed the story at all, there was nothing new to read.

I give Time credit for putting the story on the cover, but there could have been more focus on Kaepernick, and the other players, as what they hope to accomplish. I did, however, take away a few bits.

The first place I marked in the story came where writer Sean Gregory noted:

All challenges to the social order provoke strong reactions, but these protest have been particularly divisive. The Star Spangled Banner has been a ritual before American sporting events since World War II, as professional leagues have made a concerted effort to associate their brand with love of country.

This need to associate a brand with patriotism is not new. I am reminded of a movie scene (I think in Yankee Doodle Dandy when a vaudeville performer, losing the audience, grabs the American flag on the side of the stage and strides back and forth, waving the flag, to get the audience cheering. Then there are the business people who make a point of flying the most ginormous flag they can find in front of their business or proclaiming in all their commercials that they are American and proud of it. Here’s a hint, if you have to keep reminding everyone that you’re a proud American, maybe you need to ponder why that is (and don’t get me started on politicians and their lapel pins).

Gregory hits the core of the story in what I saw as three, closely associated, paragraphs on the second page where he wrote:

Spurred by the death of Trayvon Martin and the fatal shootings of unarmed African Americans, players in the NBA and NFL—both leagues made up predominantly by black men, many from underserved backgrounds—have started to speak out in ways that recall an earlier generation of activists-athletes.

Followed a column later by the quote from Colin Kaepernick that started the movement:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Two paragraphs later, Gregory provides a central piece of understanding in all this that many may have missed:

An exchange with Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who briefly played in the NFL, prompted Kaepernick to modify his protest from sitting out to taking a knee as a way of acknowledge the significance of the anthem while still making his point clear.

All of that is good information, but what really piqued my interest were two sidebars and the language the writers chose to use. The first was Kaepernick Had No Choice But To Kneel by John McWhorter. McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Colombia University made the deliberate choice to use: the cops, cops and openly racist cops in his piece 10 times in approximately 700 words.

That may not seem important, but, while the term is widely used by both non-police and police personnel the word is a pejorative harking back to when police uniforms sported copper buttons. The slang term was shortened to cop and joined the derogatory lexicon with flat-foot, fuzz and pig.

Contrast McWhorter’s use with that a page later of Eddie Glaude in There’s No Such Thing As A Selective Patriot. There, Glaude, the Department of African American studies chair at Princeton, chooses to use, the police, police officers and simply officers five times in some 400 words.

Each writer carefully chose their words. Their choices, just as are ours, are important.