By the time of his writing of this essay, George Orwell had published three of his six novels: Burmese Days, 1934; A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936. None did particularly well, which might have led him to write his defense.

Orwell begins his 2,758 word essay, In Defense Of The Novel, written in 1936, this way:

It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels’, which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now always uttered in a tone of conscious pride. It is true that there are still a few contemporary or roughly contemporary novelists whom the intelligentsia considers it permissible to read; but the point is that the ordinary good-bad novel is habitually ignored while the ordinary good-bad books of verse or criticism is still taken seriously. This means that if you write novels you automatically command a less intelligent public than you would command if you had chosen some other form. There are two quite obvious reasons why this must presently make it impossible for good novels to be written. Even now the novel is visibly deteriorating, and it would deteriorate much faster if most novelists had any idea who reads their books. It is, of course, easy to argue (vide for instance Belloc’s queerly rancorous essay) that the novel is a contemptible form of art and that its fate does not matter. I doubt whether that opinion is even worth disputing. At any rate, I am taking it for granted that the novel is worth salvaging and that in order to salvage it you have got to persuade intelligent people to take it seriously. It is there fore worth while to analyze one of the many causes—in my opinion, the main cause—of the novel’s lapse in prestige.

Orwell blames bad press. Really:

The trouble is that the novel is being shouted out of existence. Question any thinking person as to why he ‘never reads novels’, and you will usually find that, at bottom, it is because of the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers. There is no need to multiply examples. Here is just one specimen, from last week’s Sunday Times: ‘If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.’ That or something like it is now being written about every novel published, as you can see by studying the quotes on the blurbs.

I have to wonder how the blurbs for Aspidistra read. What starts out as a defense of novels, quickly becomes a defense of reviewers of novels, a trade that Orwell himself practiced with some regularity. (Volume I, 1920-1940, of Orwell’s collected essays, journalism and letters contains 16 such reviews, including, perhaps most famously, his take on Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer, published in New English Weekly, 14 November 1935. The review would later form the core of Orwell’s Inside The Whale, published in 1940.)

A periodical gets its weekly wad of books and sends off a dozen of them to X, the hack reviewer, who has a wife and family and has got to earn this guinea, not to mention the half-crown per vol. which he gets by selling his review copies. There are two reasons why it is totally impossible for X to tell the truth about the books he gets. To begin with, the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in him the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every case the only truthful review he could write would be: ‘this book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.’ But will anyone pay you to write that kind of thing? Obviously not. As a start, therefore, X is in the false position of having to manufacture, say, three hundred words about a book which means nothing to him whatever. Usually he does it by giving a brief résumé of the plot (incidentally betraying to the author the fact that he hasn’t read the book) and handing out a few compliments which for all their fulsomeness are about as valuable as the smile of a prostitute.

But there is a far worse evil than this. X is expected not only to say what a book is about but to give his opinion as to whether it is good or bad. Since X can hold a pen he is probably not a fool, at any rate not such a fool as to imagine that The Constant Nymph is the most terrific tragedy ever written. Very likely his own favourite novelist, if he cares for novels at all, is Stendhal, or Dickens or Jane Austen, Or D. H. Lawrence, or Dostoyevsky — or at any rare, someone immeasurably better than the ordinary run of contemporary novelist. He has got to start, therefore, by immensely lowering his standards.

That sadly has been the bane of all journalists. A few rise to the place where their reputation is strong enough that they are permitted—as long as the advertisers don’t scream too loudly—to write what they understand to be the truth. They do not get there, however, without spending their time in the trenches writing, as it were, on their knees.

Orwell does offer a scheme that answers:

I believe that in some such way as I have indicated the prestige of the novel could be restored. The essential need is a paper that would keep abreast of current fiction and yet refuse to sink its standards. It would have to be an obscure paper, for the publishers would not advertise in it; on the other hand, once they had discovered that somewhere there was praise that was real praise; they would be ready enough to quote it on their blurbs. Even if it were a very obscure paper it would probably cause the general level of novel reviewing to rise, for the drivel in the Sunday papers only continues because there is nothing with which to contrast it. But even if the blurb reviewers continued exactly as before, it would not matter so long as there also existed decent reviewing to remind a few people that serious brains can still occupy themselves with the novel. For just as the Lord promised that he would not destroy Sodom if ten righteous men could be found there, so the novel will not be utterly despised while it is known that somewhere or other there is even a handful of novel reviewers with no straws in their hair.

Earlier in the essay, Orwell mentions that there are some 5,000 novels published in England each year and that perhaps 100 of them are good. I did a quick check online and found a source that estimates publishing houses released more 12 times that number of adult (as opposed to juvenile, not pornographic) novels last years. That number gives me hope. One more novel won’t break the bank.

Previously…

Coming next week: Spilling The Spanish Beans….

Every morning the second website I check is National Review—the first,as a prophylactic, is The Root—because I believe that a healthy immune system must be challenged to work properly. (Thank you George Carlin.) Journalists have a long history of story immersion stretching back to Nelly Bly forward through George Orwell to John Howard Griffin to Morgan Spurlock to, in the present, Michael Harriot.

Now I expose my sanity to what are arguably rational, thoughtful pieces like: Russians Colluded Massively—with Dems, American Populism: A User’s Guide, America Badly Needs More Psychiatric-Treatment Beds, Excusing Cowardice Is Not the Path to Gun Control, Courage: The Greatest of Virtues and Is ‘Collusion with Russia’ Over? What Harriot did in the name of journalism was bat-shit crazy.

In What I Learned From My Week as a Conservative for The Root, he writes:

Since Sunday, the only news I have watched on television is from Fox News. I have read Breitbart and the Daily Caller every day. While becoming a black conservative seems like an insignificant thing, imagine that the only information you received was from someone who you knew was a liar. It was like living in “the upside down.” It was a 24-hour, never-ending gaslighting.

The only step more extreme that I can think of would have been if Harriot had put on white face and infiltrated The Conservative Political Action Conference. Wait, could he have been the guy heckling Trump?

Harriot came away with I think is the Great Central Truth about Conservatives:

I learned a great deal about myself and the world. Everything I thought about the conservative mindset was upended, and I have actually gained a newfound respect for the people who live in the parallel universe that we call conservatism.

1. They are not liars.

Although Fox News and its derivatives are some of the greatest propagandists in the world, I have come to understand that the mistruths they spread are not necessarily lies. I think they honestly believe in what they are saying, in the same way that some people have faith that their fate is determined by the whims of an invisible man in the sky.

Is it a lie if you repeat what you’ve been told? Of course not. That’s called ignorance, and ignorance—if the subject is willing—can be cured. Harriot came away with four additional lessons:

2. Conservatives are unapologetic,
3. Conservatism is a mental illness,
4. They’re not all racist and
5. Being conservative is easy.

Now, Harriot is having a bit of a laugh—I think he does so to prevent permanent harm from his experience—but there are underlying truths there. What we must consider is that from the perspective of a conservative, the exact same statement can be made—with no sense of irony or duplicity—about liberals and progressives.

For me the question comes down to a choice between Liberty and Community. Do we want to live in a society where we can do our best to fight our way to the top of a pyramid, or, is our ideal a society where the needs of the many must supersede the needs of the few?

That’s the message I’ve heard from a few sources since I declared my support for Dennis Kucinich as the next governor of Ohio. I recognize that Dennis has his own baggage, hell, the man has his own moving van, but—as the members of the Cuyahoga Country Progressive Caucus demonstrated when they voted to endorse Kucinich—his credentials as a progressive are solid. Those of his key Democratic opponent, however, are not. Events on Valentine’s Day created a seismic shift in National and State politics. Zaid Jilani, writing in Ohio Governor’s Race Turns to Gun Control, Assault Weapons Debate for The Intercept, has the story:

The debate about gun control that was reignited by last week’s tragedy at Parkland High School is playing out in Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, where Dennis Kucinich is calling out his opponent Richard Cordray for his track record as a pro-gun advocate.

Kucinich, considered the most progressive candidate in the race, is calling for Ohio to ban assault weapons. “We are going to change the politics of the state on this single issue,” he said at a press conference in mid-February.

The former Cleveland mayor and member of Congress and his running mate, Akron City Council member Tara Samples, plan to enlist volunteers to pressure local city councils to pass resolutions urging the state to ban weapons similar to the AR-15 used in the Parkland shooting. The campaign announced that in the first 24 hours after it issued this call, 1,500 Ohioans signed up to volunteer.

Meanwhile, a pair of Democratic Ohio senators this week introduced legislation that would make it a fifth-degree felony to possess or acquire assault weapons.

However, Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief, has thus far not joined the push to ban assault weapons. Cordray, the frontrunner in the Democratic race, went only as far as saying, “We also need to rethink our approach to military-style weapons that are used to perpetrate mass shootings.” He is instead supporting expanding universal background checks and other more modest reforms.

Cordray is no reluctant, rule-of-law, gun advocate. The key evidence against him is his zealous advocacy against Ohio municipalities taking charge of their own fates as regards weapons used to slaughter their residents. In Cleveland v. State Of Ohio, Cordray successfully defended a state law making it impossible for local governments to ban or restrict gun ownership. Jilani continues:

As the state’s attorney general, Cordray helped author a merit brief before the state’s Supreme Court in 2010. That year, the court upheld the 2006 law in a 5-2 decision. “Law-abiding gun owners would face a confusing patchwork of licensing requirements, possession restrictions and criminal penalties as they travel from one jurisdiction to another,” Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton wrote.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer offered an opposing view, writing that the law “infringes upon municipalities’ constitutional home-rule rights by preventing them from tailoring ordinances concerning the regulation of guns to local conditions.”

“This is an important victory for every gun owner in Ohio,” Cordray said in a statement following the court case. “Before 2006, Ohioans faced a confusing patchwork of local ordinances with different restrictions on gun ownership and possession.”

The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, noted that Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, “echoed Cordray’s comments” in his own statement on the case. “If Cleveland, or any other city, wants to crack down on violence, city leaders there should focus on prosecuting criminals, not enacting new gun laws that only serve to restrict law-abiding citizens,” Cox said at the time.

Cordray is, as are all the Republican candidates, on the wrong side of history here.

To be frank, when I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, I did so knowing that Clinton would represent more of the same, but that if Donald John Trump were elected he would be a lightening rod for left-of-center Democrats in general and progressives specifically to take to the streets.

That is precisely what has happened. The president’s base continues to cheer and chant, but the rest of America isn’t very happy. This year will be pivotal and what happens here in Ohio will send shock waves across the country.

We are in for one hell of a ride.

For years I have relied on Consumer Reports for factual information—remember facts, those irritating bits of data that don’t care how you feel?—before I’ve made any major (cars, mattresses, appliances, &c.) purchase. I’ve also used Consumer Reports to cut through the bullshit on purchases as mundane as toothpaste.

Corporations depend upon people being tired and uninformed. That’s how we get played. Ralph Nader has long been an advocate for being informed and his go-to organization is Consumers Union and its chief publication: Consumer Reports.

Nader, in Absorbing the Irresistible Consumer Reports Magazine, writes:

On my weekly radio show, I recently interviewed Liam McCormack, the head of testing for Consumer Reports—a resource and monthly magazine with seven million print and online subscribers. It has always been a wonder to me why seventy million people don’t take advantage of this honest, non-profit testing organization that gives you the lowdown on just about every kind of consumer product—and some services—that you buy regularly.

Year after year, month after month, Consumer Reports proves its worth to consumers through money saved, aggravation avoided and safety advanced. Founded in 1936, this venerable organization takes no advertising and is as incorruptible as any organization can possibly be.

Here are just a few examples of naming names and suggesting better purchases:

—“AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon cost an average of $960 a year. We’ll tell you about the carrier that provides better voice quality and costs $360 a year. You can save $600 a year.”

—Comparing price, selection and service of more than 20 chain Continue Reading »

Back on Monday, in WELL, WE ASK, IS DONALD TRUMP A TRAITOR…? I posted my thoughts on James Risen’s story of the nearly identical title for The Intercept. This evening, partly in response to what I can only believe is an online shit storm, Glen Greenwald and Risen sat down, with Jeremy Scahill in the role of ineffectual moderator, to talk out some very real differences on their respective views on President Donald John Trump and the Russia Investigation.

The Intercept characterized the hour-long debate this way:

James Risen and Glenn Greenwald have both won Pulitzer Prizes. They both have found themselves in the crosshairs of the U.S. government for their journalism. And they both write for The Intercept. But Jim and Glenn have taken very different approaches to covering the Trump/Russia story. In this one-hour special video edition of Intercepted, they go head-to-head in a debate. Glenn is one of the most high-profile critics of the official story bolstered by the U.S. intelligence community, the Democrats, and many media outlets, including some of this country’s most powerful papers and news channels. Jim battled both the Bush and Obama administrations—under threat of imprisonment—for refusing to name his sources in some of the most sensitive national security reporting of the modern era. Jim recently broke a key story on a secret NSA channel to Russia and his first column for The Intercept, about the Trump/Russia investigation, posed the question: Is Donald Trump a traitor?

The short answer is No. Trump is a whole slew of exceedingly vile and repugnant nouns (and more than a few verbs) but our current president is not a traitor. Do your best to the debate. There is a tremendous amount of sense and reason therein.

Is Dennis Kucinich tilting at windmills?

Perhaps, but I don’t care. In a world where children are setting the example and shaming adults into action, where our man-child and chief pouts in bed with his Diet Coke and McDonald’s cheeseburgers, where our congressional representatives scurry for cover like cockroaches when the lights come on in the kitchen at 2:12 a.m., where a Russian president does what a long line of first secretaries could not, where a few fossil-fuel-loving billionaires are allowed to roast our planet, fuck it has become a sonnet.

Less than two weeks ago I said that I would be backing Richard Cordray. I was wrong. I was stupid.

Events in Parkland, Florida, and the reactions of students there, have convinced me that the safe Democrat is no longer safe.

Dennis Kucinich is not safe, but he is right.

Two pieces, one local and the other national, tell the story.

First, Sam Allard, reporting in Dennis Kucinich Wants to Ban Assault Weapons Across Ohio for Scene, writes:

Dozens of rain-soaked rallyers gathered in a meeting room at the downtown DoubleTree Hotel Monday afternoon as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich and his running mate, Akron City Councilwoman Tara Samples, alongside a roster of speakers and sign-wielding supporters, promoted a grassroots effort to ban assault weapons in Ohio.

The massacre that left 17 people dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last week prompted the rally. The school shooting has riled Republicans as well as Democrats. Student survivors have called out their elected representatives on social media for failing to create gun sensible gun laws.

Even Ohio Governor John Kasich has changed his tune. He deleted a pro-gun portion of his website, and on a CNN appearance this weekend, he called for gun regulations and pressure on city and state legislatures. If local entities enact gun control legislation, Kasich suggested, Washington would follow.

“If you’re a strong Second Amendment person you need to slow down and take a look at reasonable things that can be done to answer these young people [from Parkland],” Kasich said. [Too little, too late, John. JH

That position is something of an about-face for Kasich, who has been a dear friend to Second Amendment enthusiasts and who has passed six pieces of pro-gun legislation since his tenure began in 2011. Among other things, those laws have allowed guns in Ohio bars and restaurants and reduced the hours of training required for a concealed handgun license.

But his stated position, to pressure local governments, is precisely what Kucinich’s #BanAssaultWeapons rally was all about. Kucinich called the current national moment a “tipping point” and characterized the effort, which has already garnered nearly 2,000 signatures on his website, not as a political campaign but as a social movement.

Second, Zaid Jilani, reporting in Dennis Kucinich Vows to End All Oil and Gas Drilling in Ohio If Elected Governor and Then Take the Industry to Court for The Intercept, writes:

In a press conference in late January, [Kucinich] unveiled one of the most cutting-edge environmental platforms of any candidate in the country. Kucinich called for a total end to oil and gas extraction in the state of Ohio.

To accomplish this, he would deploy a battery of radical policies. He would, for instance, utilize eminent domain to seize control of oil and gas wells throughout the state and then shutter them. He would block all new drilling permits and order a total ban on injection wells.

Kucinich would also deploy the Ohio State Highway Patrol to stop and turn away vehicles that possess fracking waste. Under a Kucinich administration, Ohio would give subsidized health screens to residents living near fracking sites; that data would then be used to file a class-action lawsuit against fracking companies similar to how states took Big Tobacco to court in the ’90s.

The minions of the fossil-fuel billionaires are not happy.

A spokesperson for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which represents a number of oil and gas companies, derided the plan in an interview with The Intercept. “Misguided policies such as these threaten Ohio’s future and would destroy billions of dollars invested in our communities,” the spokesperson said. The organization has promoted an analysis that argues Ohio could lose 400,000 jobs by 2022 if the state enacts a ban on fracking.

Mike Chadsey, a spokesperson for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, was even harsher in an interview with the local media.

“For being the person who touts himself as the candidate for the average guy, he sure is anti-worker and anti-union,” Chadsey said. “These bold and unrealistic statements show how desperate his hopeless campaign is.”

While the short version of Kucinich’s reply echoes Emily Gonzalez’s refrain, his response to the billionaires’ minions was direct to the issue: “No one has taken the time to monetize the value of fresh water, but ask the people in Flint about that.”

With these two vital issues—gun control and environmental protection—Kucinich has set himself from the pack of other democrats. Jilani continues:

Kucinich is competing against four other Democrats, including former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray, for the nomination. In interviews conducted with the local press, none of the others joined his call to eliminate fracking and oil drilling.

Our choice in May is clear and our choice in November will be even clearer.

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine—four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit… my insurance had already been canceled and my driver’s license was hanging by a thread.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head… but in a matter of minutes I’d be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz… not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.

There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out… thirty-five, forty-five… then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these… and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything… then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly—zaaapppp—going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-slick… instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway 1.”

Indeed… but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there’s no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right… and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it… howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica… letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge… The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

This passage, the conclusion to Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, more than any other, got me out of Marietta, Ohio, because I wanted to find The Edge, to be a writer.

I never found The Edge, though I came close a few times. I did become a writer of some small skill, But I never approached the sheer majesty of this passage.

In his most recent novel—Robicheaux—James Lee Burke’s police officer protagonist, Dave Robicheaux sets himself free.

His gaze lifted to my face; he looked like a man who realized a sea change had just taken place in his life, in full view of others, and he would never be able to erase the moment.

I splashed the gun into his bowl of potato salad and walked back to my truck. I drove back down the highway and passed a trailer slum and crossed the Teche on a drawbridge and continued past another oak-shaded plantation within one hundred yards of the slum property by the bridge. The juxtaposition of the two images could have been extrapolated from a Marxist propaganda film. I felt strange driving through the twilight by myself, as though I had deliberately severed my connection with the rational world and given up all pretense of normalcy and in so doing, set myself free. p. 358

In the movie, Janis would be singing the soundtrack as Dave drives away.

Back at the end of 2002 Michael Moore explored the cult of guns in the United States in his documentary Bowling For Columbine. My greatest takeaway from the movie was that despite having a lower gun-ownership rate per capita than our neighbor to the north, The United States’ rate of gun violence was greater by several orders of magnitude. (The data was later fact checked and found accurate by Deanna Grant.)

That’s why when Mary Jo passed Max Fisher and Josh Keller’s What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer in The New York Times along to me, I was skeptical.

Take a look at the chart above. Canada appears to have about 32 guns per 100 citizens. The United States about 89 per 100.

Did the numbers change so drastically between 2002 and 2015?

Fisher and Keller begin:

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.

But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

Read that again slowly. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

Not mental health. Not video games. Not racial diversity. Not immigration. Not societal violence. Not any other factor.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.

But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

Fisher and Keller conclude with this 2015 tweet from British journalist Dan Hodges:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

Looking back now I have to wonder if, as a nation, we bore that anguish because we had a Black president and we couldn’t conceive of giving up our precious guns when the race war was going to start any day? Is this the difference in 2018?

Or is the difference that we now have a president who is so tone-death that he has actually tried to make the mass murder in Parkland, Florida, all about himself and his struggle to stay in office?

Or has a generation that didn’t even exist when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked havoc in Columbine become old enough, savvy enough, articulate enough and flat out pissed off enough to open the windows and have their collective Howard Beale moment?

Gas up the van, Jeremy…

Beware of headlines with question marks.

That caveat aside, I can think of few other headlines in today’s political climate more guaranteed to draw readers—regardless of where you stand on President Donald John Trump—in to read, especially when the headline is qualified with the tag: Part I.

The story, written by James Risen, a newcomer to The Intercept staff, but little else is the first of four parts. Risen begins:

I find it hard to write about Donald Trump.

It is not that he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is that everything about him is so painfully obvious. He is a low-rent racist, a shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an unrelenting liar and a two-bit white identity demagogue. Lest anyone forget these things, he goes out of his way each day to remind us of them.

At the end of the day, he is certain to be left in the dustbin of history, alongside Father Coughlin and Gen. Edwin Walker. (Exactly – you don’t remember them, either.)

What more can I add?

Unfortunately, another word also describes him: president. The fact that such an unstable egomaniac occupies the White House is the greatest threat to the national security of the United States in modern history.

Which brings me to the only question about Donald Trump that I find really interesting: Is he a traitor?

Nothing else really matters, does it?

Here is how Risen intends to answer his question:

There are four important tracks to follow in the Trump-Russia story. First, we must determine whether there is credible evidence for the underlying premise that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win. Second, we must figure out whether Trump or people around him worked with the Russians to try to win the election. Next, we must scrutinize the evidence to understand whether Trump and his associates have sought to obstruct justice by impeding a federal investigation into whether Trump and Russia colluded. A fourth track concerns whether Republican leaders are now engaged in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice through their intense and ongoing efforts to discredit Mueller’s probe.

This, my first column for The Intercept, will focus on the first track of the Trump-Russia narrative. I will devote separate columns to each of the other tracks in turn.

The evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win is already compelling, and it grows stronger by the day.

Make yourself a strong cup of coffee and prepare to spend an hour or so immersed in the real world that Fleming, le Carré and Deighton only touched upon.

The more-than-3,000 members of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus have voted in a bottom-up initiative to endorse candidates in the 8-May primary.

According to the organization:

The Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus is proud to announce its candidate endorsements for the May, 8 2018 Primary Election.

CCPC is a bottom up grassroots activist organization. All of our candidate endorsements have been determined by a vote of our membership which concluded Thursday, February 15. If only one candidate applies for an endorsement membership still votes to approve or disapprove the endorsement.

Many of CCPC’s endorsements are different than the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party endorsements which were selected nearly a month ago, weeks before the filing deadline, by an elite group of party insiders known as the Executive Committee. Half of this Executive Committee is actually appointed by the Party Chair. The differences between CCPC’s endorsed candidates and the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party’s endorsed candidates in certain races can perhaps be attributed to the difference between an open bottom up process and a closed top down process.

The CCPC’s picks are:

U.S. Senate: Sherrod Brown

U.S. Congressional District 14: Betsy Rader

U.S. Congressional District 16: Aaron Godfrey

Ohio Governor: Dennis Kucinich

Ohio Senate District 21: Jeff Johnson

Ohio Senate District 23: Nickie Antonio

Ohio Senate District 25: Kenny Yuko

Ohio House District 8: Kent Smith

Ohio House District 10: Kyle Earley

Ohio House District 12: Yvonka Hall

Ohio House District 13: Mike Skindell

Ohio House District 14: Steve Holecko

Ohio House District 16: Cassimir Svigelj

I’ve highlighted two races on the list. The first, Aaron Godfrey, because he’s my guy to replace the used car salesman who now represents me in the 16th. The second, Dennis Kucinich, because I changed my mind in the past week. I like Dennis, a lot, but I didn’t think he had a polar bear’s chance in the Arctic of getting elected. I had planned on backing Richard Cordray, a man I’ve admired and one who I thought could stomp all over whomever the Republicans decide to run. What changed? Quite frankly, I had forgotten about this.

In the wake of the mass murders in Parkland, Florida, I just can’t get behind any politician who even sniffs around our nations gun fetish. I recognize that Cordray may still win in the primary and in the general this fall, but he’ll do so without my support.

OK, so the chilren’s crusade was really, really stupid and tragic, but this could work.

Angela Helm, reporting in Surviving Teens of Parkland Massacre Tell NRA to Shove Its ‘Thoughts and Prayers,’ and Plan March on Washington for The Root, writes:

Out the mouth of babes, they say.

And these babes will not be silenced.

Since the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Tuesday, many survivors from that day have used social and traditional media to renounce the typical Republican response. You know, “more mental health regulations,” “Guns don’t kill people …” “Maybe if the school personnel were armed …” “Stop making it political …” “It’s the FBI’s fault …” and perhaps the most offensive, “Sending thoughts and prayers.”

Yeah. These kids were having none of it.

These are babes no more.

“People keep asking us, what about the Stoneman Douglas shooting is going to be different because this has happened before and change hasn’t come?” Cameron Kasky, an 11th-grader told ABC News. “This is it.”

In addition to the march on the capital, the organizers also plan protests in other cities around the country and brought fire to the National Rifle Association and its complicit minions.

“Any politician on either side who is taking money from the NRA is responsible for events like this,” said Kasky. “At the end of the day, the NRA is fostering and promoting this gun culture.”

Kasky said the point now is to “create a new normal where there’s a badge of shame on any politician who’s accepting money from the NRA.”

Gonzalez added that the student activists from Parkland want to have conversations about guns with President Trump, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Gov. Rick Scott, and all Republicans

“We want to give them the opportunity to be on the right side of this,” she said.

We have a feeling that this is the beginning of the end. These children have been traumatized, yes, but also politicized, and say they will be out in these streets. And I’m so proud of them, but so saddened that it took this heartbreak to make it so.

Only when angry mothers said enough is enough did our nation’s attitude toward drunk driving change. These teens can do the same for our culture of gun worship and fear.

Every school in the country should be shutting down on 24 March and sending busloads of students to Washington. I expect a lot of Republicans are going to be running for cover in their districts that day.

Don’t let them.

As I mentioned last week, I first read The Road To Wigan Pier a little more than seven years ago after reading Christopher Hitchens rightly praise the writings of George Orwell. The 4,289-word essay, North And South, written in 1937, is also an excerpt from Wigan.

Orwell begins:

As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism—an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

What Orwell describes here reminds me of my own travels in West Virginia and Kentucky when I was growing up along the Ohio River. He continues:

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly frozen; ‘the flock mattress’, it is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be distinguishable from an aeroplane.

Lest we think that such hideous visions are in the past, consider this aerial views of the Alberta tar sands from which Americans will suck energy to power our fantasy visits to Disney theme parks. (Such views are the reason that Ohio Republican legislators want to ban the flying of drones over fracking operations.) Or, closer to home, how about this view of fracking operations in Ohio? For the vast majority of Americans, out of sight is out of mind. However, Orwell continues:

When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?

In asking these two questions, Orwell takes a surprising turn:

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about industrialism. [All emphasis mine, JH] A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the architectural tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it.

Orwell continues:

But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

When I read that I thought I knew where Orwell was going. Damn, I was wrong.

But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of certain real differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and lazy–that at any rate is the theory.

As I read this I was reminded of the industrialist father in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times lecturing his children on the importance of such real work.

What comes next is a long paragraph that I thought speaks directly to the present day and my fellow citizens in the United States.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. ‘Better is it for us’, writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, ‘to be condemned to labour for our country’s good than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.’ ‘Olives, vines, and vices’ sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Garlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner (‘Teutonic’, later ‘Nordic’) is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has so deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money versus feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the South and East for the Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and there grew up a new type of man, the self-made Northern business man–the Mr Rouncewell and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. [I confess that I smiled when I saw that I had anticipated Orwell here, JH.] The Northern business man, with his hateful ‘get on or get out’ philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century, and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by Arnold Bennett–the type who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an even greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis his sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to admire him because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping, and uncouth, he had ‘grit’, he ‘got on’; in other words, he knew how to make money.

And making money, of course—at least in Orwell’s North—is all that matters.

At the end of the essay, Orwell touches on an aspect of education that I found telling in the second decade of the 21st century: our insistance on making every student into a knowledge worker. He writes:

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

Of a far future, Orwell predicts:

Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

Previously…

Coming next week: In Defense Of The Novel….

In the minds of most Americans, the insanity of school shootings began on 20 April 1999, before the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were even born. Since then we have endured nearly 20 years of worthless thoughts and prayers while gun manufacturers, with the help of their professional lobbying arm the National Rifle Association, have reaped billions of dollars in profits with the explicit aid of Republicans in Congress scared shitless of losing their cushy jobs if they do the right thing.

Thoughts and prayers haven’t worked.

Good guys with guns hasn’t worked.

Underfunded and intentionally crippled background checks haven’t worked.

Every excuse muttered by a Republican in the past 20 years hasn’t worked.

Many Americans thought that the 20 children, and six adults, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary would be a turning point. It wasn’t.

This time can be different.

Listen to Sadie Chadwick addressing her president: I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot.

Listen to Emma Gonzalez speaking to crowd in Parkland: We call bullshit!

Listen to the people: Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out.

We seem to have tried every other proffered solution. Let’s give vote them out a go.

The students are pissed and they want President Donald John Trump to know how pissed they are. Emily Witt, reporting in Calling [Bullshit] in Parkland, Florida for The New Yorker, writes:

Instead, the people here had gathered for a different kind of national ritual. In Parkland, Florida, after the fatal shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this Valentine’s Day, the aftermath had at first a familiar pattern: the initial news alerts; then the psychological profiles of the killer; the repetition of “thought and prayers,” the news scrum, this vigil. The funerals would begin the next day, but the long-term prospect was of another lull in the debate until the next act of spectacular violence—a routine so predictable that a couple of days later I saw that someone in Fort Lauderdale had drawn it in imitation of the Krebs Cycle and printed it on a T-shirt. The first hint that something might be different this time came the morning after the shootings, from a Douglas High School sophomore named Sarah Chadwick, who informed the President of the United States, via his favorite medium, in words that quickly went viral, “I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot.” In the hours that followed, others joined Chadwick in rejecting the platitudes. On social media, and on live television, the victims were not playing their parts. They were not asking for privacy in their time of grief. They did not think it was “too soon” to bring up the issue of gun control—in fact, several students would start shouting “gun control” within the very sanctum of the candlelight vigil. What was already becoming clear that night, less than thirty-six hours after the shootings, was that the students were going to shame us, all of us, with so much articulacy and moral righteousness that you willed the news anchors to hang their heads in national solidarity. It was a bad week for a lot of reasons, but at least we had evidence of one incorruptible value: the American teenager’s disdain for hypocrisy.

I have to wonder if Dan McLaughlin feels a little differently about his praise of hypocrisy this evening.

Chadwick has since taken down her tweet and apologized for her language, but I think she has nothing to apologize for. I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit conveys a nation’s message quite well.

Witt concludes with the words of Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas (and future politician) whose refrain, I predict, will become a rallying cry.

The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.

Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.

Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.

They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.

They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun: we call B.S.

They say guns are just tools, like knives, and are as dangerous as cars: we call B.S.

They say that no laws would have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that occur: we call B.S.

That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call B.S.

In response to Gonzalez’s words, writes Witt, the crowd, in a frenzy, responded with a chant: Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out.

We call Bullshit! In this spring’s primaries and in the fall’s general election: Vote. Them. Out!