The bloodiest war in our national history—one some believe is ongoing—transformed our national thinking from a belief that These United States are to The United States of America is. That transformation predicted and proceeded a similar transformation in Europe and the rest of the world as nations coalesced from disparate political entities to form the nations we now see on our maps and globes.

Those lesser political entities still exist. We have 50 states as different as Hawaii and Mississippi. Germany still has Hesse and Bavaria. Revolutions disassociated empires, but nations held together. Some political malcontents preach secession—Scotland, California and South Carolina come to mind—but there is little evidence (Brexit notwithstanding, it may yet collapse) that such suicidal actions are likely.

Still, our world seems less stable, plagued with Strongmen (but, as of yet, no Strongwomen) each promising to make their own country great again.

Rana Dasgupta, writing in long-read The demise of the nation state for The Guardian, explains:

The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.

Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society—ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918—has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.

Shortly after our national elections this fall, we will mark the centenary of the signing of the armistice ending the hostilities that came to known as World War I. That war began a transformation that would continue only a score or so years later and culminate in an even greater war that would end with the only—so far—use of atomic weapons. The post-war world war world was very different with nations absorbed and formed and reabsorbed and reformed. This last 100 years brought us to today were national banks are losing out to international bank accounts. Dasgupta continues:

The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.

A 20th-century political system cannot cope with a 21st-century economic system. Full stop. Global economics demand global politics, and this is perhaps the driving force behind the rise of strongmen—very, very wealthy strongmen (Vladimir Putin may be worth $200 billion)—who fear global government as a barrier to their global wealth. Dasgupta goes on to suggest a possible course to restore sanity.

If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.

What would that spectacular political infrastructure look like? The details, well worth consideration, are there in the long-read, and, Dasgupta suggests: The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis. The 1 percent of the 1 percent, the wealthy (almost exclusively) men who owe no allegiance to any other than their wealth will fight any and all of Dasgupta’s suggestions.

We must fight harder.

On Monday I wrote about the appearance—or at least the first time I noticed—sponsored content on National Review’s webpage. (Yes, I read NR so that you don’t have to. You’re welcome.)

Today I saw the first reviews of Chappaquiddick and the light went off in my head. Did NR actually place sponsored content as a movie promotion? Their own review, published on Friday, suggests that they did.

Maybe a more religious reader of NR can answer this question: What was the last movie that got this much attention from the NR staff?

[Update: 7 April—Further sponsored content appeared today.]

I once forced a girlfried to sit through The Godfather—which she hated from the wedding forward—so that she could see Jesus Christ Superstar.

Mano Singham was right in saying that watching the live version with commercial breaks last Sunday evening would have been even more excruciating. I may watch the whole production when the DVD becomes available.

I’m rereading W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction In America and this time I’m taking special note of the poems Du Bois placed at the end of each chapter (an anti-epigraph of sorts). At the end of the first chapter—The Black Worker—I found:

Dark, shackled knights of labor, clinging still
Amidst a universal wreck of faith
To cheerfulness, and foreigners to hate.
These know ye not, these have ye not received,
But these shall speak to you Beatitudes.
Around them surge the tides of all your strife,
Above them rise the august monuments
Of all your outward splendor, but they stand
Unenvious in thought, and bide their time.

—Leslie Pinckney Hill, 1880-1960

According to The National Cyclopedia of The Colored Race, Hill was a graduate of Harvard University and “was for a good many years, in charge of the Department mof Education at Tuskegee Institute. From Tuskegee he went to Manassas where he was principal for several years. Manassas owes its development very largely to Mr. Hill.” At the time of the writing (1919), Hill was principal of Cheney Institute in Cheney, Pa.

Journalists refer to writing sponsored content for a publication as dropping to your knees and sucking an advertiser’s cock, or, in shorthand, giving a blowjob. Sponsored content is the original fake news. So, I had to snigger this morning when I was reading the online edition of the National Review and saw two stories flagged as sponsored content–what old-school publishers used to call advertorial (no such beast exists)–I was curious as to who the sponsoring party was. That proved to be extremely difficult if not impossible. Yet, I went down the rabbit hole.

Clicking on the link led me first to the sponsored-content page below which featured three sponsored-content stories—On Taking the Fifth, Massachusetts Soap Opera and Capital Bulletin: Is Teddy Through?—but still no mention of who was doing the sponsoring.

Searching the page I found the nearly grayed-out notice: recommended by Outbrain. What is Outbrain? Outbrain:

is a premium discovery platform that helps connects marketers to their target audience through personalized recommendations on the world’s leading publishers. We use proprietary interest and behavioral data to capture audience’s attention all the way to inspiring their next action.

In the vernacular, Outbrain is a provider of fake news—I use the term fake news here in the old-school/advertorial sense of advertising disguised as news—which is hilarious because Outbrain’s link notice (shown below) clearly states that Outbrain:

…has a firm policy against fake news which is why we support efforts to educate audiences on how to stay critical and informed.

I had to ask myself, who benefits from the National Review running decades-old stories about a deceased senior senator from Massachusetts under the sponsored-content banner?

We don’t know.

And that is important.

National Review is far from unique in allowing non-editorial entities to purchase space. Recently my favorite newspaper, The Guardian, began the disgusting practice, but the editors do attempt to be transparent:

Guardian News & Media produces a variety of content with funding from outside parties. These sources of revenue allow us to explore topics that we hope are of interest to Guardian and Observer readers. The presentation of the content makes clear how the content has been commissioned and produced, and who has funded it.

One of three labels will appear on this content: ‘Supported by’, ‘Paid content/Paid for by’, or ‘Advertiser content/from our advertisers’.

As a journalist I abhor the practice—and as a subscriber I’ve expressed my displeasure to the editors—but the paper calls a spade a spade.

National Review could learn a thing or two if the editors have any interest in integrity.

During my career as a magazine editor and freelance writer I have supervised a number of young interns. I had several while I was working for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and when I was freelancing in the mid-’90s I offered a trade to Della—no her mother was not a Perry Mason fan—a barista at Phoenix Coffee who saw my business card hanging from my computer bag.

The interns at HBJ were all paid by the company (I have no idea how much, they were simply assigned to me by the vice president of editorial) and they worked for me about 12-weeks each. I treated them like entry-level assistant editor which meant they did scut work. I did the same menial work when I started there in 1984.

Della was different. I wasn’t making a lot of money as a freelancer (in a good week I made $600), but I was keeping the bills paid and I wasn’t looking to hire anyone. In conversation, however, Della, who was an undergraduate communications major at John Carroll University, asked me to talk about the business and we ended up coming to an arrangement. I needed a secretary and she wanted to learn about journalism. We split the day 50/50. She would do filing and such for half the day and I would give her scut work for the other half so that she could learn how being a journalist worked. In the beginning there was no money involved. (She continued working early mornings and evenings at Phoenix.)

That changed when I landed a magazine startup gig with Crain Communications. The work involved a lot of phone calling for research and paid me at a rate that was better than my usual billings. I put Della on the job and paid her $10 an hour for the calls. In 1993 dollars that was a serious bump in her barista pay.

In 2018 dollars that is $17.23, more than four times what Amalia Illgner made in her 21st century internship. Writing in a Guardian Long Read—Why I’m suing over my dream internship—she explains:

My job was to help Monocle 24 prepare for its 7am radio show. Throughout each shift, I wrote detailed research briefings for producers on topics as varied as North Korea, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Finnish literary stars; ferried mail across three floors; fact-checked senior journalists’ raw copy, and transcribed interviews. On any given day, I might greet former diplomats, columnists, artists, designers and the guy who wrote the song Wichita Lineman and usher them into the studio to be interviewed on air. Occasionally, interns would also be called upon to double as human FedEx boxes; one was flown to Milan to hand-deliver a selection of books and magazines to Tyler “I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing purple” Brûlé, Monocle’s jet-setting founder and editor-in-chief, who was visiting the city for fashion week. It was a canny shipping method: for every nine-hour shift, Monocle interns are paid £30.

£30, this morning, works out to $42.18 or $4.69 an hour. Internships in England, and the United States, are the high-concept version of the poverty jobs in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

Working for Monocle was prestigious. You did get to work with brilliant people. I don’t know that I wouldn’t have jumped—scratch that, I know that I would have jumped at—the opportunity. But at some point the work gets dark. Illgner continues:

Halfway through my internship, I landed my first front-page piece for Monocle’s Summer Weekly newspaper. It was a personal coup, but after 20 hours of research and writing – done in my own time – the thrill of a byline paled against the glaring fact that I was not being paid for the story. The privilege of working for almost nothing no longer seemed like a viable way to get ahead. A few months later, I would start proceedings against Monocle for unpaid wages.

If you have an MP, watch films, read magazines, wear clothes or enjoy anything vaguely cultural, chances are you have enjoyed the fruits of an unpaid intern’s labour. Britain is addicted to internships. The most recent figures suggest there are at least 70,000 interns, around a third of whom are unpaid. Most work in politics, journalism, fashion and other creative fields. Eight-hour working days, paid at the £7.05 minimum wage, for 23,000-odd graduate-age interns, comes to more than £1.3m a day. Unpaid interns – or those, like me, paid well below the minimum wage, often on an “expenses only” basis – present a tidy saving for British industry.

Since the financial crash, the number of internships in the UK has exploded, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research. As the economy stumbled around 2007, free labour became an attractive way to cut budgets while keeping the coffee percolating, the mail circulating and the website copy uploading. At the same time, culturally elite industries were flooded with young talent, who had little option but to work for free: although more and more people have been going to university in the past decade or more, the contraction in the economy meant that there were fewer and fewer jobs for them to take up once they graduated. IPPR calls these out-of-college, out-of-work graduates “the inbetweeners”.

At one point in history, unseen and exploited workers in third-world nations began supporting the economies in industrial nations. This allowed for the illusion of prosperity and a healthy economy in the industrialized world. Workers there enjoyed a standard of living several times better than the workers in the non-industrial nations. Then we began running out of exploited workers overseas and found that we could—via companies like Walmart—better exploit our own workers. That worked so well for blue-collar jobs that white-collar employers wanted in on the largess. Enter the world of interns and unpaid Internet Content Providers. Slaving is addictive:

At the beginning, most internships only lasted “about two weeks”, I was told by Tanya De Grunwald of Graduate Fog, a website dedicated to the fair treatment of graduates. But by 2010, internships were thoroughly entrenched in the creative industries, politics and the media, and De Grunwald started hearing about “eternal interns” who were working for a year for no money. That same year, Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, found that 467 unpaid interns were working in 34 organisations funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Even as the state of the economy began to improve, companies found they couldn’t shake their reliance on free labour; it was too easy to skimp by relying on a steady stream of unpaid drudges. A phrasebook of euphemisms for such work soon appeared in job ads: “placements”, “work shadowing opportunities” and “voluntary positions”.

Today, firms have access to even sometimes highly skilled workers for low or no pay, while insecure positions and interns have come to replace a whole strata of entry-level paid jobs. The National Union of Journalists reports that 82% of new entrants into journalism undertake internships, which average at seven weeks, and nearly all of these—92%—are unpaid.

My ex once worked as a volunteer for a major non-profit here in Cleveland. When my magazine folded in 1992, I told her that we could no longer support her volunteer work and that she need to tell her supervisor that the non-profit needed to hire her full-time at a good salary or she was going to have to go elsewhere. Of course, they hired her at a very nice salary.

There is a sexist, but true nonetheless, adage that asks: Why would you buy a cow when you can get the milk for free? Why would any employer pay a living wage unless they have no other choice. What Illgner is saying is that interns must stop accepting that they have no other choice. The solution, of course, is a union. Unionizing, however, is dangerous.

Tanya De Grunwald believes that interns speaking up and making an example of businesses is a necessary step towards ending this practice. “Publicly ‘squaring up’ to employers, in real time, is one of the most effective tactics we have in the fight for fairly paid internships,” she said. “But, for obvious reasons, very few interns feel brave enough to do this.” This might also have something to do with a chilling piece of evidence that Siebert and Wilson uncovered: people working for free who complained about lack of pay “quickly became unemployable”. This creates a culture where the fear of victimisation in the labour market normalises the expectation of unpaid work.

De Grunwald said that, as a result of continued pressure from Graduate Fog and others, such as Intern Aware, many sectors have shifted their “relaxed” views about unpaid work. Many of the bigger, more high-profile companies, she said, such as the “big four consultancies” have largely stopped the practice. Unpaid internships in journalism, politics and the arts, however, persist.

As long as the applications roll in and the participants remain keen and competent, it is in neither the employers’ or many of the interns’ interests to make a fuss—if you’re desperate enough to accept payment in experience and contacts, you’re perhaps unlikely to voice concern.

When you aspire to break the class barrier, to rise to the level of the 1 Percent—regardless of the insane border walls erected to stop you—realizing that you need to organize so that you can all rise together seems, somehow, wrong. It’s not.

A.O. Scott, writing in ‘Mudbound’ Is a Racial Epic Tuned to Black Lives, and White Guilt for The New York Times, had this to say:

Mudbound is a movie about how things change — slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film, directed by Dee Rees, tests and complicates William Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past. It’s a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force.

The particular corner of the past that Ms. Rees investigates is not entirely unfamiliar. The source of the screenplay for “Mudbound” (which the director wrote with Virgil Williams) is a novel by Hillary Jordan that counts Faulkner and Toni Morrison among its evident literary influences. On film, the racial history of the American South tends to be flattened into reassuring morality tales in which black lives matter less than white consciences. Ms. Jordan’s book occasionally wanders in the direction of this kind of soothing, redemptive storytelling—the white characters are split a bit too neatly into the righteous and the wicked, their black counterparts confined to salt-of-the-earth nobility—but the movie resists this tendency. Its people, members of two families knotted together by fate, hate and economics, are complicated. The wounds are raw.

Coming only two days after I posted about a scene in Walter Mosley’s Fear Of The Dark, watching Dee Rees talk about Mudbound with Trevor Noah resonated with me. Last year my brother Cavana Faithwalker and I were breaking bread and the conversation turned to police shootings of Black men, Black Lives Matter, the Black Panthers and the Second Amendment. At one point in the conversation I, advisedly, said to Cav, They’re ain’t nothin’ scarier than a nigger with a gun. He cracked up at the comment, but we both knew the truth there.

Having watched the trailer, I have to say that that fear, is palpable. I’m reminded of an earlier movie: A Soldier’s Story, starring Howard E. Rollins Jr. and Adolph Caesar. That movie also dealt with how Americans—Black and White—reacted to Black men returning from killing White men in World War II.

This is a story that has been told and retold in our history beginning with Crispus Attucks. This is also a story that resonates with me because this is part of what I’m wrestling with in my current novel project: Absent Son.

I’ve said before that we write to understand what we don’t understand. Clearly, Hillary Jordan, Dee Rees (and myself) are strong evidence for that view.

To be fair, I decided that Scott Adams had gone off the rails sometime around December 2016. That would have been four months earlier if I had known that Adams had become a contributor to Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

I wonder if Adams and Laura Ingrams are sharing their vacation time together?

Michael Harriot, writing in Report: Trump, GOP Seriously Considering Reparations to Attract Black Voters for The Root, delivers my favorite April Fool’s prank of 2018

What made this April Fool’s so good was that Harriot wrote very close to the edge, delivering a message that, given the past 15 months, stretched, but did not break credulity.

And that is a very scary reality.

I confess that I didn’t slam the breaks on until the fifth paragraph when Harriot wrote:

Ben Carson, after pretending to browse the Ikea website for office furniture, announced the conversation made him uncomfortable as a puddle of urine-smelling liquid appeared to drip down the leg of his JC Penny suit. When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) warned that reparations could send the US into a deeper deficit, Trump reminded Ryan that people also said the same thing about the border wall.

I’m sorry, Ben Carson is a former surgeon. There’s no way he’s not wearing Depends when he’s in the White House.

I voted for President James Earl Carter twice, the first time in 1976 and again in 1980. I have never cast a repeat vote since. I am proud of both votes and I don’t think that America has seen the equal of President Carter since.

Carter was also interviewed by Joshua Johnson on National Public Radio’s 1A in A Former President, A Person Of Faith

His bibliography alone, puts him above any other president in my lifetime and I would place him in close company to presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, not for his accomplishments in office, but for his intellectual prowess. Since leaving office in 1981, he has—to date—written authored or co-authored 33 books:

Faith: A Journey for All, 2018;
A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, 2015;
A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, 2014;
NIV Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter, 2012;
Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President, 2010;
White House Diary, 2010;
We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, 2009;
A Remarkable Mother, 2008;
Beyond the White House, 2007;
Measuring Our Success: Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bible Study with Jimmy Carter, 2007;
Leading a Worthy Life: Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bible Study with Jimmy Carter 2007;
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, 2006;
Faith & Freedom: The Christian Challenge for the World, 2006;
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, 2005;
Sharing Good Times, 2004;
The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War, 2003*;
The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: Delivered in Oslo on the 10th of December, 2002, 2002;
Christmas in Plains: Memories, 2001;
An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, 2001;
The Virtues of Aging, 1998;
Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith, 1997;
Living Faith, 1996;
The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, 1995;
Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, 1995;
Talking Peace: A Vision for the Next Generation: Revised Edition, 1995;
An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections, 1994;
Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age, 1992;
Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, 1987;
The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East, 1985;
Negotiation: The Alternative to Hostility, 1984;
Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, 1982;
A Government as Good as Its People, 1977; and
Why Not the Best? 1975.**

*I confess that this was not a very good book.
**I believe that this is the only presidential campaign book actually written by the candidate.

I’m a mid-era boomer and I began reading Doonesbury around 1971. For my money Garry Trudeau has best chronicled our experience and in a single panel this morning captures what many boomers have been feeling here in the early days of 2018. I’ve paired the penultimate panel with a piece by another chronicler—pre-boomer in her case—Barbara Ehrenreich. In Why are the poor blamed and shamed for their deaths? for The Guardian, she writes:

I watched in dismay as most of my educated, middle-class friends began, at the onset of middle age, to obsess about their health and likely longevity. Even those who were at one point determined to change the world refocused on changing their bodies. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure.

Mostly they understood the task of ageing to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mindset that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious”, while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free”. Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures such as hours-long cardio sessions, fasts, purges or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.

We have the luxury of shopping at health food stores—we’re able to pay people to do the shopping at deliver the food to our door, often precooked—but we’re not the norm. We’re not even close. I constantly remind myself that as a white male born in the United States, I’m among the most privileged of individuals on the planet. That privilege holds true for a great number of my cohort.

Ehrenreich runs down a list of health-conscious advocates who, despite their proselytizing and self-denial, died at early ages. In reflecting on her litany, she quotes a physician who said, “Clearly we can’t all be held responsible for our health.” Ehrenreich is not, however, preaching the gospel of hedonism. No. In line with her journalistic history of writing about the poor, she pivots to the reality of their lives.

While the affluent struggled dutifully to conform to the latest prescriptions for healthy living – adding whole grains and gym time to their daily plans—the less affluent remained mired in the old comfortable, unhealthy ways of the past – smoking cigarettes and eating foods they found tasty and affordable. There are some obvious reasons why the poor and the working class resisted the health craze: gym memberships can be expensive; “health foods” usually cost more than “junk food”. But as the classes diverged, the new stereotype of the lower classes as wilfully unhealthy quickly fused with their old stereotype as semi-literate louts. I confront this in my work as an advocate for a higher minimum wage. Affluent audiences may cluck sympathetically over the miserably low wages offered to blue-collar workers, but they often want to know “why these people don’t take better care of themselves”. Why do they smoke or eat fast food? Concern for the poor usually comes tinged with pity. And contempt.

In the 00s, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver took it on himself to reform the eating habits of the masses, starting with school lunches. Pizza and burgers were replaced with menu items one might expect to find in a restaurant – fresh greens, for example, and roast chicken. But the experiment was a failure. In the US and UK, schoolchildren dumped out their healthy new lunches or stamped them underfoot. Mothers passed burgers to their children through school fences. Administrators complained that the new meals were vastly over-budget; nutritionists noted that they were cruelly deficient in calories. In Oliver’s defence, it should be observed that ordinary “junk food” is chemically engineered to provide an addictive combination of salt, sugar and fat. But it probably matters, too, that he didn’t study local eating habits in sufficient depth before challenging them, nor seems to have given enough thought to creatively modifying them. In West Virginia, he alienated parents by bringing a local mother to tears when he publicly announced the food she gave her four children was “killing” them.

I remember (and commented on) Oliver’s efforts, and the aftereffects were eye-opening. While Ehrenreich’s concerns are not as immediate or vital as those who traveled to Washington for The March For Our Lives and who continue to speak truth to power, what she has to say is important and may hatch an epiphany or two.

Here, as Andrew Sullivan was want to say, is the money shot:

In late 2015, the British economist Angus Deaton won the Nobel prize for work he had done with Anne Case, showing that the mortality gap between wealthy white men and poor ones was widening at a rate of one year a year, and slightly less for women. Smoking could account for only one fifth to one third of the excess working-class deaths. The rest were apparently attributable to alcoholism, opioid addiction and actual suicide – as opposed to metaphorically “killing” oneself through unwise lifestyle choices.

Why the excess mortality among poor white Americans? In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working-class people of any colour. I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back – and a strong union – could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. By 2015, those jobs were long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of colour available in areas such as retail, landscaping and delivery truck driving. This means those in the bottom 20% of the white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender reassurance is shrinking.

You should keep reading.

Becoming Kareem…

So, I’ve been on a bit of Walter Mosley binge of late and on Thursday, I came across a Felice León interview with Mosley on The Root. In a comment, I called Mosley the greatest, living American writer. I made that claim based not only on his opus—54 books and counting—or on his far-ranging topics in both fiction and nonfiction—noir detective fiction, philosophy, science fiction, politics, historical fiction—but on his ability to enable a white man to glimpse what being a black man entails. When I left the comment I was reading the second Fearless Jones book (Fear Itself). This afternoon, while reading the third Fearless book (Fear Of The Dark) I came across the scene, found on page 215, that I reproduce below.

The scene is a conversation between Fearless Jones and Paris Minton after two white Los Angeles police officers attempted to roust Fearless and Paris in a public park while they were in conversation with Martin Friar, a white businessman. The conversation begins once Fearless and Paris are alone.

“You see the way them cops bowed down to him” Fearless asked after some time had passed.

“Yeah,” I said. “White people.”

“Uh-uh, Paris,” Fearless said. “No, man. It ain’t just that. It’s the way he thinks too. Mr. Friar know he in charge. He know it. He know it so well that them cops know it too. An’ he so sure about who he is that here he brings us up in here an’ he ain’t even scared of nuthin’.”

“Why he wanna be scared of two Negro men, anyway?” I asked.

“You see that, man?” Fearless said. “You see? You think them cops stopped us ‘cause they don’t like colored people.”

“Well, didn’t they?”

“Naw, man. They stopped us ‘cause they scared. An’ if they ain’t scared, the people who pay ‘em is. That’s the on’y reason they wanna keep you from readin’ yo’ book. That’s the on’y reason they asked the white man were we botherin’ him. They wanna keep on our ass ‘cause if they don’t they worried we might start fightin’ back.”

Fearless did that every once in a while. He’d open his mind to let me see his deft perceptions of the human heart. It’s no wonder that woman and children loved him so much. He was a natural man in a synthetic world. He had to be tough as he was to survive the danger that truth brought.

This is why I call Mosley the greatest, living (for ever, I would have to put Mark Twain at the top) American writer.

This struck me because one of the questions I ask people when they talk about immigrants or Muslims, or African Americans is: What are you so afraid of?

The question almost always elicits a pause or, less often, a bit of braggadocio.

Unlike Martin Friar, most people are not so sure that they’re in charge.

A week after the historic March For Our Lives which attracted more marchers (present and future voters) to Washington, D.C. than any other previous march our discussion continues. One new voice raised in debate is that of former Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who, in his 2014 book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution offered a perspective on the Second Amendment that I have attempted to echo several times. Stevens wrote:

As a result of the rulings in Heller and McDonald, the Second Amendment, which was adopted to protect the states from federal interference with their power to ensure that their militias were “well regulated,” has given federal judges the ultimate power to determine the validity of state regulations of both civilian and militia-related uses of arms. That anomalous result can be avoided by adding five words to the text of the Second Amendment to make it unambiguously conform to the original intent of its draftsmen. As so amended, it would read:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.

Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.

Stevens does not make the suggestion to amend the amendment lightly. The above comes very near the end of his nearly 1,800-word essay. He carefully makes his case, beginning with an appeal to State’s Rights and the need for legislators, not judges, to shape the debate.

The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution placed limits on the powers of the new federal government. Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment, which provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller, decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”

That we outlawed the sawed-off shotgun and severely restricted access to fully automatic weapons with strict licensure and taxation, are strong indicators that, as a society, we recognized what the founders meant. Stevens continues:

When I joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.

Organizations such as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” [Chief Justice Warren] Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

That fraud, perpetrated by the profit-driven gun manufacturers and their paid lobbyists at the National Rifle Association, is killing Americans at a rate so great as to make any terrorist salivate in admiration.

Just whose side is the NRA on? Clearly, not that of We The People.

In John Bolton’s world, the ends always justify the means and relentlessly pursuing your ultimate goal by any means necessary, no matter the damage you wreck around you, is a noble endeavor. America, and the world, must fear and stop Bolton and his ilk.

Ralph Nader reminds us that we have seen all this before in. Nader, in Stopping War Pusher John Bolton, Trump’s Choice for National “Insecurity” Advisor, writes:

John Bolton’s career of pushing for bombing countries like Iran and North Korea, and his having played an active role in the Bush/Cheney regime’s criminal war of aggression that destroyed Iraq, makes him a clear and present danger to our country and world peace. He is about to become Donald Trump’s personal national security advisor with a staff of 400 right next to the White House. He must be stopped!

For Bolton, the Constitution, federal law, the Geneva Conventions, and other international laws are pieces of paper to be thrown away with unctuous contempt. This outlaw—the shame of Yale Law School—should have been cast away as a pariah if not prosecuted and imprisoned. A bully to his subordinates in the government and known as “kiss-ass” to his superiors, Bolton is aggressive, relentless, and consistently wrong Continue Reading »

So, another National Rifle Association/Dana Loesch taking point bites the dust.

School Resource Officer Deputy 1st Class Blaine Gaskill bravely ran toward the sound of gunfire, identified himself as a police officer, ordered the shooter to drop his weapon and then, fearing for the lives of other students, fired his own service weapon and missed.

Simultaneously, the shooter, 17-year-old Austin Wyatt Rollins, fired his own weapon, into his head and took his own life.

I won’t take anything away from deputy Gaskill. He did his job and live fire cannot be compared to accuracy on the range.

The NRA and Loesch, on the other hand, can shut the fuck up with their good guy with a gun bullshit.

Then there is the matter, as this comment illustrates, of Rollins’ intent:

It’s pretty clear Rollins didn’t intend to shoot anyone except Ms Wiley. The fact he “walked through the school” without firing another shot supports this. As far as he was concerned: mission accomplished. He probably also planned to kill himself, maybe at a later time (though his “walk” through the school indicates he didn’t particularly care if he made it out or not). All the officer did was accelerate his timetable.

The school resource officer, therefore, saved exactly no lives. It’s even arguable that the officer placed more lives at risk by forcing Rollins’ hand into firing a second shot within the school.

These are our schools, people, not the streets of Fallujah.

President Donald John Trump wanders the streets of our nation’s capital searching for an attorney willing to assume the thankless and career-ending task of leading his legal team.

“Lawyers, lawyers everywhere but none who jump for Trump.” Those nine words borrowed from Coleridge, echo the headline on Jill Abramson’s piece for the Guardian on President Donald John Trump’s inability to attract a lawyer who doesn’t advertise on bus-stop benches.

Abramson begins:

It matters that Donald Trump can’t find a great lawyer to represent him. Just ask Richard Nixon.

In disgrace following his 1974 White House resignation, Nixon paced and pondered the “what ifs” from exile in San Clemente, California. He placed a call to Washington, DC to the one man he thought could have made a difference and saved him from his ignominious fate and place in American history as the only president to resign from the job.

“I wish you were my lawyer,” he told Edward Bennett Williams, who, at the time, was the most famous litigator since Clarence Darrow. But it was way too late for such regrets. It may be too late for Donald Trump, too.

Lawyers, including John Dowd, have been ousted. Lawyers, most notably Michael Cohen, have been exposed as thugs allegedly paying hush money to a porn star. Lawyers, well-placed Republicans like Ted Olsen, have said no. More recently, other lawyers, like Chicago’s Dan Webb, also declined to come aboard. Lawyers found conflicts to prevent them from representing Trump, like Joe DeGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing.

The tantrums have already started and the McDonald’s wrappers are piling up.

On Sunday, peeved by news reports that he cannot find a willing lawyer, the President tweeted: “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case…don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer…”

Now that was a surefire way of attracting someone who is not an ambulance chaser.

The problem for the white-collar defense bar’s crème de la crème is that Donald Trump is so blatantly the client from hell. He won’t listen. He won’t obey instructions. He is headstrong. He is a bully. Sometimes, he doesn’t pay his bills. Most of all, it’s possible that he isn’t capable of discerning fact from fiction. This last foible could get any lawyer who represents him into very deep legal hot water. No one wants to get disbarred for the fame and fortune of representing President Trump.

Time to get serious Mr. President. The number to call is: 505.164.2255. Francesca is waiting.

I’ll give this to the shills for the gun manufacturers, until Sunday, they represented one of the most organized and effective lobbying groups in Washington. March For Our Lives changed that.

I’m sure that Danae’s dad would bite his tongue over this one.

Michael Ian Black, writing in The Boys Are Not All Right for the New York Times sees Jill’s point:

I used to have this one-liner: “If you want to emasculate a guy friend, when you’re at a restaurant, ask him everything that he’s going to order, and then when the waitress comes … order for him.” It’s funny because it shouldn’t be that easy to rob a man of his masculinity — but it is.

Last week, 17 people, most of them teenagers, were shot dead at a Florida school. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School now joins the ranks of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine and too many other sites of American carnage. What do these shootings have in common? Guns, yes. But also, boys. Girls aren’t pulling the triggers. It’s boys. It’s almost always boys.

America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.

Jordan Klepper interviewed Black post March For Our Lives…