So, we have our first Little Free Library in North Royalton, Ohio—and from the looks of the map the only Little Free Library south of I-480—thanks to new Eagle Scout Evan Porter of Troop 526. Porter made the cover of the North Royalton edition of The Post this week. I’ve seen a lot of Eagle projects over the years, but I particularly like Porter’s.

To honor Porter’s work, I added three books to the library—Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers; Hiroshima by John Hersey and The Natural by Bernard Malamud—and plan on stopping by once a week or so to add more as those three selections are collected and read.

I’ve always liked the Little Free Library system and have thought of adding one of my own, but never had an appropriate space. Back in 2007 I toyed with the Book Crossing system, but little came of that endeavor.

That you Mr. Porter.

I’ll keep track of future donations on my Little Free Library page.

[Update at 0716: I’ve selected the three books I’ll donate next week: Finding Fish: A Memoir by Antwone Quenton Fisher with Mim Eichler Rivas; Truman by David McCullough and My American Journey by Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico.]

Bizzaro, whether found in the work of Dan Piraro or Otto Binder and George Papp, is always weird. Our present global madness, however, stretches far beyond those two tame understandings of what is, and is not bizzaro and causes me to wonder: have we seen the likes of this unbalanced, unhinged reality since the end of the 18th century?

Ralph Nader makes a convincing case that normal has gone beyond the event horizon and that we have entered the uncharted country.

Nader, in Society Is In Decay–When the Worst is First and the Best is Last, writes:

Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. [Think Scrooge McDuck with his own stable of congresscritters, JH] Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. While teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions more. Wells Fargo executives are cases in point. The vastly overpaid CEO of General Electric left his teetering company in shambles. In 2019, Boeing’s CEO got a bonus (despite the Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8 crash in 2018). Just days before a second deadly 737 Max 8 crash in Ethiopia.

This disparity is on full display in my profession. Public interest lawyers and public defenders, who fight daily for a more just and lawful society, are paid modest salaries. On the other hand, the most well compensated lawyers are corporate lawyers who regularly aid and abet corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. Many corporate lawyers line their pockets by shielding the powerful violators from accountability under the rule of law.

Physicians who minister to the needy poor and go to the risky regions, where Ebola or other deadly infectious diseases are prevalent, are paid far less than cosmetic surgeons catering to human vanities. Does any rational observer believe that the best movies and books are also the most rewarded? Too often the opposite is true. Continue Reading »

Here we go again. Cuyahoga County–Corruption Center–will let another $40-million in bonds for our real corrupters–our major league sports teams. Your taxes will be the cash register for another robbery.

It’s hard to keep up with how much borrowing Cuyahoga County will do for Gilbert, Haslam and Dolan.

But if you are among the many people looking for a new home outside Cuyahoga County you doing the right thing for your family.

The give-away City and County Councils–and their bosses (Mayor and County Executive)–are taking you to debtor’s prison.

This has been a long, very expensive story.

Much more than a billion dollars has been spent to keep the sports moguls. New bond issues will not only cost the amount of the bond but likely some 50 percent more in interest. It’s only tax money, c’mon don’t be cheap.

The newest $40-million bond issue the County Council is ready to provide will cost another $20-million in interest.

This story has been going on for a long time.

In our look back we can go to 1990 when the Plain Dealer cheer led, as it always does, the parade to start the billion-dollar gift to millionaires.

Just how blatant the PD was can be seen on Page 3 below. It shows emblems the PD used on articles to sell the Gateway issue. The PD essentially used Gateway’s symbols to sell the issue to voters. City voters said NO but County voters said YES in number to pass the issue.

The newspaper also on the final weekend used a distorted poll to suggest the vote was a landslide for Gateway. It was a lie and the final result revealed it. The Pee Dee essentially lied to boost the issue.

Today, the PD will remain editorially silent as another hefty bond issue is pass, all in addition to the original financing–the sin tax.

As the County spirals in a fiscal swoon the city’s newspaper once again avoids responsibility to inform the public.

The truth of the matter is that Cuyahoga County simply cannot afford three grasping major league teams. The burden is too heavy.

When will the Plain Dealer, the voice of the public, tell the TRUTH? Never, I guess.

The newspaper deserves much of the blame for the poor leadership–Jackson, Kelley, Budish & Brady–the city and county are experiencing these days. And we still await the 28,000 jobs promised by Gateway. What a laugh!

The Pee Dee, gorging on propaganda and deceit, as I wrote back in 1990 can be seen in the Vol. 22, No. 17 & Vol. 22, No. 18 issues of April-May, 1990. There has been change–things are worse than ever, as those who can move out in quiet but deathly protest.

Back on 23 May, South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Democratic Party presidential candidate Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg sat down for a one-hour, on camera interview with the Washington Post‘s Robert Costa. Based solely upon his responses to Costa’s questions I would have no concerns voting for Buttigieg if he becomes the Democratic Party nominee.

At this moment I would place him fifth on my list—behind Kamala Harris (and possibly Stacey Abrams), Tulsi Gabbard, Wayne Messam and Bernie Sanders. (In that order.) The key qualities that prompt me to like Buttigieg are: he has executive experience, he’s actually run shit; he is a veteran who understands what going to war means; and he is, in my considered opinion, on the side of right on all the progressive/democratic issues that I think are vital to take back our country from those looking backward instead of forward.

Near the halfway point, Costa gets around to asking the socialism question and Buttigieg blows away the conservative smoke used to obstruct the reality that Democracy and Socialism are not opposites on some spectrum, but rather the intersection of two scales: political and economic on a coordinate plane. Seen in that light—accepting that democracy and socialism are not mutually exclusive—carefully and clearly positions himself as a Democratic Capitalist.

A few minutes later, Costa switches to questions from Twitter and the first (from Mia in Queens, New York) asks how, as a veteran, Buttigieg feels about NFL players taking a knee in protest of police brutality. Buttigieg is absolutely spot on in a way that only a veteran can credibly be: when he responds: I felt that I watching Americans exercise a right that I had put my life on line to defend.

At timemark 36:37, Buttigieg responds to a question from Costa concerning an issue in his past that I was not aware of: the firing of South Bend Police Chief Darryl Boykins in 2012. Clearly there is controversy about this decision—mostly from conservative media—but given that the citizens of South Bend reëlected him three years after that firing and based on his response to Costa, I’m willing to set that aside for now in my evaluation. Here is what Buttigieg said:

Part of being mayor—and again, this is something I learned the hard way—is managing things that you don’t control and controlling things that you don’t own and learning to own things that you don’t actually have any official power over. That’s where you earn your paycheck.

The management stuff, you could hire somebody to do. Where you earn your paycheck is when there is no answer that isn’t damaging in some way, when you’re choosing between one package of right and wrongs and another and there’s no formula and there’s no handbook and there’s no consensus. And you just–that hits your desk and to the best of your judgement, in good conscience you have to figure out what to do. Now did I resent being in that situation? I certainly didn’t appreciate being in that situation. But that’s why we have human beings in elected office.

Two thoughts: first, that’s a lesson you learn from being in a leadership position in the military where no handbook can provide all the answers in the seconds between inaction and the loss of life; second, that is how I want a president to think.

On saber-rattling in the Middle East—particularly toward Iran—veteran Buttigieg is again spot on when he says:

I’m extremely troubled by the saber-rattling around Iran. Right now you’ve got people getting ready to take an oath of enlistment who weren’t even alive on 9/11. And if we learned anything from the last decade and a half of endless war, it’s that you do not casually threaten military involvement. And it is mystifying to me that John Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq War, probably the greatest American policy disaster of my lifetime, is allowed anywhere near the Situation Room, especially by a president who says, falsely, of course, but says that he was against the Iraq War all along. It is unbelievable. And to see the same people taking some of the same steps. I mean, they appear to be prosecuting a case, as though we hadn’t seen this movie before. Possibly and terrifyingly, for domestic political purposes—it makes me think about my time in service and wanting to believe that everybody above me in the chain of command knew what they were doing or at least never came by a decision lightly. It makes me think of the high school students I was just with in South Bend who we celebrated because they’re getting ready to go to the academies or to enlist. And just thinking that for all the political noise here, we are talking about life and death. This is not a show. This is not a game, and this has to stop.

Dang, the man is good.

Bonus No. 1: Full, Washington Post transcript of The 2020 Candidates: Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: To cultivate mindfulness, we can do the same things we always do—walking, sitting, working, eating and so on—with mindful awareness of what we are doing. When we are eating, we know that we are eating. When we open a door, we know that we are opening a door. Our mind is with our actions. [Emphasis mine, JH]

When you put a piece of fruit into your mouth, all you need is a little bit of mindfulness to be aware: “I am putting a piece of apple in my mouth.” Your mind doesn’t need to be somewhere else. If you’re thinking of work while you chew, that’s not eating mindfully. When you pay attention to the apple, that is mindfulness. Then you can look more deeply and in just a very short time you will see the apple seed, the beautiful orchard and the sky, the farmer, the picker and so on. A lot of work in in that apple.

Bonus No. 1: 16/8 Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner’s Guide.

[Update @ 0200 on 29 May—The Guardian stole my headline…! :)]

To borrow the most famous soliloquy in theater history—and one I horribly mangled (long before video cameras, thankfully) in my high school drama class—an almost existential question faces the double-dozen Democrats who want to be the next president of the United States: do they speak directly to Americans by taking part in a Fox News town hall?

So far, Bernie Sanders, Amy Jean Klobuchar and Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (Mayor Pete) have done so. (Kirsten Elizabeth Gillibrand is scheduled to do a Fox News Town Hall a week from Sunday on 2 June.) Two other candidates—Elizabeth Ann Warren and Kamala Devi Harris—have declined invitations.

I’ve not yet watched Klobuchar’s performance—I’ll correct that deficit over the weekend—but clearly, Bernie and Mayor Pete nailed their appearances and showed that going into the belly of the beast is not only a good thing, but that it can be transformative.

On his reasoning for taking part in the town hall, Buttigieg said:

There’s a reason anybody has to swallow hard and think twice before participating in this media ecosystem. But I also believe that even though some of those hosts are not always there in good faith, I think a lot of people tune into this network who do it in good faith.

And there are a lot of Americans who my party can’t blame if they are ignoring our message, because they will never hear it if we don’t go on and talk about it. So, it is why whether it is going into the viewership of Fox News or whether geographically it is going into places where Democrats haven’t been seen much, I think we have to find people where they are, not change our values, but update our vocabulary so that we’re truly connecting with Americans from coast to coast.

Buttigieg is precisely correct here. Fox News’ viewership includes racists and bigots and the poorly educated, but those people are not the viewership of Fox News, and candidates who see that, embrace that, have a much better chance of winning back the White House, of taking America back from the haters.

Bonus No. 1: First Dog on the Moon lost the election for Bill Shorten! Coward!

Through the years top business, charitable and political figures became targets for reasons that typically involved their pursuit of power and riches.

It helped tell the story of who runs a community–who rules. Newspapers shy from exposing those who need a spotlight.

Our look back this time goes to summer 1969 centers on George Steinbrenner. Then he was a wanna be elite. It was before he tried to buy the Cleveland Indians. And before he was part of a group that in 1973 bought the New York Yankees at the amazing low net price of $8.8 million from CBS.

He was a younger man-on-the-make when I wrote about him.

In this issue of Point Of Viəw called “Steinbrenner: “Man on the Make,” he was playing to the times with his association with Mayor Carl Stokes and heading what was called Group 66–an assemblage of young movers-and-shakers that never lasted.

Steinbrenner boasted he had to be “where the action is.” His business was American Shipbuilding.

He played both Democratic and Republican sides of the street. He got in trouble later when he made illegal political contributions to President Dick Nixon. He also ran into problems with major league baseball when he hired a gambler to dig up dirt on a player. It cost him a suspension of more than a year from baseball by Commissioner Fay Vincent.

A big man—I once labeled as appearing like an “over-stuffed chair”–he kept his hand on Cleveland matters even from New York.

During the Ralph Perk administration, he paid for a poll, labeled in the press as a “Democratic poll.” It said Perk was unbeatable.

And Steinbrenner gave $10,000 to Paul Briggs and the Cleveland schools to hire 10 Plain Dealer and Press reporters and editors at $500 each for two weeks to talk to Cleveland students about journalism during a newspaper strike in the mid=1970s. Only two striking reporters refused the payout: Bob August and Norm Mlachak, both of the Press.

Cavana Faithwalker taught me about urban gardening here in Cleveland and how important these projects can be to not only feeding a community’s stomach but also a community’s soul. Cavana remembers his own family’s experiences with urban gardening: We harvested, cooked and ate, gave food away, and canned. Does anyone know what a Ball jar looks like? I do.

Central to the story Henry Louis Gates tells in Reconstruction: America After The Civil War is land. (All four parts are also available, for now, on YouTube.) If you’re going to reliably feed your family and your community, you need land to grow food and raise animals. In what some consider to be the bible of Reconstruction, Eric Foner’s book on the subject cites the challenge of convincing freed slaves that they should be raising cash crops but they weren’t interested. They wanted to work their land to their own benefit, not for that of northern manufacturing.

In the run-up to the 2020 elections, the subject of reparations for 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal and 35 years of state-sanctioned redlining
is a hot topic thanks to the groundbreaking work of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Marissa Evans, writing in What Reparations Could Mean for Black Farmers for Civil Eats, begins with the story of Keisha and Warren Cameron, owners of High Hog Farm in Gwinnett County, Georgia.

“As a young person, it never occurred to me that you could be a Black farmer, which is sad because my grandmother was a gardener and a homesteader,” said Cameron. Her family moved north and separated from the land during the 70s. When she returned to the South as an adult—moving first to Virginia and then eventually further south around a decade ago—she felt like she was coming home: “It has been very healing.”

Cameron remembers a time when just mentioning reparations would make a person sound radical or militant, but things are changing.

“There have been systems and structures put in place to ensure that Black people are either excluded [from agriculture] or exploited,” she said. “It’s important that the descendants of those who were enslaved receive some acknowledgement—that we say, ‘these are the harms that have been done.’”

When I think of farms, I think of the family farms in Washington County, Ohio, where I grew up and families like the Lees and the Arnolds and the Coffmans whose boys I played and went to school with. High Hog Farm is very much in that mold. While we think our tax dollars are going to help the farmers I knew—and some does trickle down to them—the vast majority goes to factory farms owned by corporations. We need to turn that equation over and reparations would help. Evans continues:

The idea of reparations isn’t new. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and activists like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore have long been on the frontlines of the issue. A series of lawmakers—including Michigan Representative John Conyers, and more recently Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker—have filed bills in Congress in an effort to “to right the economic wrongs of persistent racism, white supremacy, implicit racial bias in our nation.”

Now, reparations have become a cornerstone in the 2020 presidential election, which could hinge on Black voters. Senator Booker as well as California Senator Kamala Harris, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke, Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have all put forward the idea of reparations. But the reparations rhetoric has yet to be framed around a more specific population: Black farmers.

There were just 45,500 Black farmers in 2017, up about 2 percent from five years earlier, according to the agriculture census released in April, but a far cry from the 950,000 Black farmers who worked the land in 1920. But the census also found that Black land ownership dropped 3 percent in the last five years, while white farmers only lost 0.3 percent of their land. The data also showed that most Black farmers made up only 1.3 percent of the overall farming population and owned between 10 and 49 acres of land—much less than today’s average farm size of 441 acres.

Those numbers required generations of manipulation to bring about. They are not the failures of individuals but the success of a system that needed to destroy the 40-acres-and-a-mule narrative and bury the gains made immediately after the Civil War. Not much has improved since 1920 either.

In 1920, Black Americans owned an estimated 16-18 million acres of land. Now that number is down to 1 million. Black farmers’ land loss and the debate on reparations is intertwined because “who owns the land controls what the political change and shifts will be in localities,” said Savi Horne, director of the Land Loss Prevention Project, which focuses on helping Black farmers in North Carolina keep their property.

“You’re not seeing the more graphic abuse of power by local agents of the USDA … but you’re still losing land,” said Horne. “There needs to be a national dialogue and call for reparations that includes front and center the land question, because even where there’s been some stability the fact that you’re still losing land speaks volumes.”

Evans concludes with a roadmap candidates might consider to get family farming in the African American community back on track.

Part of the problem with the way presidential candidates have framed the reparations conversation is no one has offered a real structure to how it might work, said Jillian Hishaw, an attorney and founder and director of F.A.R.M.S., a legal and education non-profit that provides services to small farmers and rural youth in the Southeast. She supports the idea of reparations, but adds that there needs to be a reimagining of what it could look like, such as providing stock options and dividend payments that go into a fund that grows over time. She pointed out that part of the reason Black farmers lose their land is because they don’t always have legal documents such as wills, deeds, and trusts in place to keep it in the family.

“[Reparations would] need to be based on a wealth-building model,” Hishaw said. “Handing out a check is not sustainable,” she adds, pointing to the fact that most recipients probably didn’t use the Pigford settlements to acquire new land.

Giving Black farmers agency is what Soul Fire Farm’s Penniman hopes to do. Her reparations mapping tool aims to help guide foundations and individual funders looking to invest in Black farmers. But, as she told Civil Eats last year, “it’s not just about money. It’s about power and control. It should be the people who are directly affected who have that power and that control.”

Indeed.

Bonus No. 1: A Reparations Map for Farmers of Color May Help Right Historical Wrongs.

…And we can take him back out again. No one with the franchise in the United States has clean hands when we’re talking the rise to power of President Donald John Trump. We all—wittingly or unwittingly—played a role in creating our national disaster and we are obligated to set our mistake right. We The People can’t sit back and hope Congress gets the job done.

No, we must get back up on our hind legs and do the work; precinct by precinct, community by community, county by county and state by state. Understanding how we actually got here is vital and Ralph Nader has some thoughts on that topic.

Nader, in What and Who Gave Us Trump?, writes:

Donald J. Trump’s presidential ambition has simmered for decades. He was and is a regular TV watcher and saw the changing political landscape. One by one, previous presidents diminished the integrity of the presidency and violated the rule of law, paving the way for Trump’s candidacy.

Bill Clinton was exposed for serial adulteries and abuses of women and lied under oath. This perjury led to him being impeached in the House (though he was acquitted in the Senate). “Hmm,” thought Donald, a serial abuser of women, “Clinton got away with it and was elected twice.” One potentially career-ending violation no longer had the weight it once did.

Then came George W. Bush–selected by the Electoral College and a Republican Supreme Court. “Hmm,” thought Donald to himself, “Even though Gore won the popular vote, Bush won because of Electors in swing states.” Despite Gore’s crushing loss, the Democratic Party refused to support ongoing Electoral College reform. Once in Continue Reading »

Previously: Part I, Part II and The Art Of Fiction No. 11 in The Paris Review. I’m fighting very hard to resist the urge to order everything that Algren wrote, but I’m 323 pages into the book and on the chapter that covers the period of 3 October 1953 through September 1955 (the month I was born) and able to hold my ground, for the moment.

Perhaps because the McCarthyism of the ’50s reminded Algren too much of the the Red Scare of ’20s, Algren was particularly hard on himself for not doing enough.

Everyone in my generation has fallen short of their ideals, [Nelson] told his friend Max Geismar in April [1953], and I’m no better. “I think that the writers of the twenties were sounder of heart; they took scars but they stayed.” The writers who got their start in the thirties are a different sort, though, Nelson said. The “came in on themselves: gave up, quit cold, snitched, reneged, begged off, sold out and copped out, denied all and ran.” Jack Conroy, Millen Brand, Leonard Ehrlich, Richard Wright and Meridel Le Sueur all wrote good books, Nelson said, “But when the thirties were done, they were done.

It was a harsh assessment, and it ignored how the Red Scare had sidelined his generation of writers, but there was much truth in it. …

Kenneth Fearing, Nelson continued, was “the truest poet, for my money, of the decade,” but he’s been repeating himself. “Now he’s hacking, Ben Appel is hacking. I’m hacking too. Nobody stayed.” p. 326

Algren would have been been only 44 years old in 1953, middle aged but far from over the hill. Jack Conroy and Ernest Hemingway would have been 54; Meridel Le Sueur, 53; Millen Brand, 52; Leonard Ehrlich, 48; and Richard Wright, 45 years old. Algren was the youngster seeing his future in the faces and careers of the writers he admired. Then he got this epitaph hung over his typewriter:

[Reviewing A Walk On The Wild Side] [i]n The Reporter, Leslie Fiedler declared that Algren was “a museum piece—the last of the proletarian writers.” [Emphasis mine, JH] p. 356

The term proletarian writer fascinates me. Asher cites The Proletarian Literature Movement nine times on pages 83-85, 92, 100-101, 118, 133, 142, 289 and 356. He introduces the concept this way:

Nelson wrote to [the editor of The Anvil: Stories For Workers, Jack] Conroy looking for a publisher, but he found a mentor instead. Conroy didn’t accept any of Nelson’s stories, but through their correspondence, and the material he published in The Anvil, he introduced Nelson to the proletarian literature movement—the mileau that defined the beginning of Nelson’s career. …

There wasn’t much connecting the motivations of the proletarian writers, but they had a unifying goal: they wrote to broaden the scope of American literature so that working-class characters could assume prominent role, and most understood that effort as part of a larger struggle. They believed their writing had the potential to change the world, and the Communist Party USA—the proletarian literature movement’s greatest benefactor—encouraged them to embrace that possibility. p. 83-84

As an undergraduate at Ohio University, one of my favorite classes was Dr. David Williams’ Soviet Literature class where we read the works of authors led by Maxim Gorky. (I went looking for my notes but they don’t seem to be with the rest of college papers. Bummer.) [Update on 9 August @ 0911: Found the notebook! See my comment below for details, JH] The Proletarian Literature movement in the United States would be the equivalent in English to the Russian writers we studied in Dr. Williams class.

In June of 1970, Scanlon’s Monthly published The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson. While I discovered Thompson—and became a devotee—after reading his 1966 masterpiece: Hell’s Angels (one of The Nineteen Books That Have Shaped My World) I an intimately familiar with the narrative of the Scanlon piece.

So when I read “For months at a stretch, Nelson [said goodbye], and wrote very little, but then seemingly out of nowhere, Sports Illustrated asked him to cover the 1958 Kentucky Derby.” I pegged the needle on my attention meter. Asher writes:

The text Nelson submitted that day was distinct from everything he had written before. The story, though putatively nonfiction, features a protagonist named Nelson Algren who is more sarcastic, droll and bumbling that the real Nelson Algren. Much of what happened in the story is either fictitious or greatly exaggerated, and the subject—the Derby—is less important than the narrator’s character and impressions p. 373-4

Sound familiar? Asher thought so. Three paragraphs later he continues:

Prose like that would become familiar to readers a decade later when authors began writing in a style eventually called New Journalism.

How the fuck did I not read about Algren until this year? When I was a magazine journalism student at Ohio University in the early ’80s I studied Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others, but Algren’s name never came up in any of my classes. Asher continues:

Then [Nelson] arranged to to have someone bypass the gas and electric meters so he could avoid the cost of utilities, and hung pictures—one of Gerson changing a tire, and other of Beauvoir, Paula Bays, his high school basketball team, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway and Joan Baez.. p. 380

This last brought me up short. Baez was born on 9 January 1941 and moved with her family to Boston, Massachusetts in 1958, the year Algren moved into his apartment at 1958 West Evergreen. She would have been 17 that year. How (and why) the feck did Algren have her picture?

Her picture was important enough that Asher mentioned it one other time in his book: on the first page, in the second paragraph. He writes:

Nelson’s apartment was a canvas—an unmediated expression of his psyche. The air smelled of smoke, and blues records spun on the turntable. There were pictures of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens and Joan Baez on display in the living room…

Now there’s a troika if I ever knew one. Finally:

“Once I used to live in America,” [Nelson] said. “Now I live on American occupied territory.” My country has become the status-obsessed, conformist place I feared it would become after the war, and “I’ve been eaten alive, made a sucker of, betrayed.” p. 387

We can only be thankful that Algren was spared the presidency of Donald John Trump.

The National Rifle Association is a state-sponsored global terrorist organization fueling mass emigration of citizens from central America by promoting and facilitating the sale of weapons of war to drug gangs and cartels all in the interest of corporate profits for American gun manufacturers. And, not only is our president OK with that, he’s ecstatic.

I watched the latest episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix this morning—the show is not yet posted to YouTube (the video posted at 1800)—and I think Minhaj’s takedown of the National Rifle Association is brilliant. This is far from his first pass at the NRA, but the public airing of the not-for-profit shill for corporate death merchants skid-marked skivvies has opened a window that a bad guy with a gun could chain-migrate his whole village through.

Full disclosure, from my teens into my early 20s I was a member of the NRA but dropped my membership when the organization ceased to be about hunting and became the front for Automatic Weapons Are Us. I’m also a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment and am constantly telling people that there’s a reason that the first and second amendments to our constitution appear in the order that they do: the first is a melange of our most basic human rights and the second guarantees that a tyrannical dictator does not pull a 21st on the 1st.

The minions (i.e. the NRA) of the military-industrial complex hate the 2nd amendment, but they understand that an outright repeal doesn’t serve their purposes. Instead, they come at strengthening tyranny by ignoring the four most important words in the 2nd amendment: A well regulated Militia… No dictator is going to give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about bunches of overweight, undertrained gun collectors because they pose no threat to an actual Army.

Even a well-led rabble—see American Civil War—couldn’t defeat the United States Army and that isn’t going to change. I don’t care if you’re compound has hundreds of rifles and pistol and you’ve stockpiled hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, just how long do you think you’re going to hold out against an M2 Bradly platoon or a squadron of Warthogs?

Now a well regulated militia, equipped and maintained by individual states and carefully kept independent of the federal Army, might stand a chance or at least threaten sufficient casualties, especially if a few dozen states act as one. That’s what the founders had in mind.

There is no greater threat to our freedom than the bullshit slung by the likes of Wayne Robert LaPierre, Jr. and his corporate overlords.

Bonus No. 1: Scott Morrison had a government defined by five years of chaos and he still beat Labor, BY HIMSELF.

Bonus No. 2: Digital Civil War review: a stark call to save American democracy.

Bonus No. 3: Naomi Wolf: ‘We’re in a fight for our lives and for democracy.’

Some may believe that today’s NEW Plain Dealer with its big headlines and larger photos is about as bad as you might see a daily newspaper sink.

But in the past, it hasn’t been very pretty either.

In 1971 one of the PD’s best reporters, Terry Sheridan, wrote a piece for me. He had quit the paper the year before when editors tried to send him to a suburban slot. No thanks, he said with his feet.

Terry served us, as only he can, a smorgasbord of Plain Dealer absurdities. You’ll find some unbelievable.

He also tells of the ceaseless desire by then publisher Thomas Vail for a Pulitzer Prize. He, however, was unwilling to pay the price necessary. Meaning the cost was always too high, as Sheridan records.

Priceless among the misdeeds of those past years was the assignment of two very good reporters to travel to Okinawa in search of racism. Better than upsetting people with deeds down the street at home.

Here is Vol. 3, No. 19, April 1971:

Buster, the best dog anyone could ever hope to have left my life Thursday following a brief illness. He was 17. Seventeen for a dog his size—90 pounds—was nearly miraculous. One vet told me that for a dog that large any years past 12 were gravy years. We were gifted with five gravy years together and for that I Mary Jo and I will ever be grateful.

(Special thanks here to doctors—Hart, Annie, Oscar, Jerry and Erin—and their great staff who took such wonderful care of Buster over the years, diagnosing difficult conditions and helping us to have those bonus years.)

Buster was a stray and his birthday was only a best guess by the first vet that Mary Jo took him to. He found Mary Jo on the streets of Akron while she was walking her other two dogs—Bailey, female yellow lab and Max, a male golden retriever. He paralleled their walk, staying on the opposite side of the street until she got home and then followed them into the house where he took a drink of water and then pissed in Max’s food dish.

Buster earned his name by busting through the back porch screens. He refused to be confined, crated or caged. We attempted, once, to send him to dog training school but the resident Cecil the dog whisperer called us in less that 24 hours because Buster had escaped his cage once and Cecil was afraid that he was going to break his teeth attempting a second attempt to gnaw through the metal fencing. We never attempted to board him after that and we arranged our own travels so that one of us was always home. When that was not possible to schedule we hired a number of dog sitters to come to the house as needed.

While Buster exerted his dominance from the first moment in the house—remember Max’s food dish?—Mary Jo said that changed when Buster met me. Buster was a mutt. His lineage (according to a DNA cheek swab) was 40 percent Shar-Pei, 30 percent German Shepherd and 30 percent mixed terrier. In reading about the Shar-Pei breed, Mary Jo discovered that they are known to pick their master, their alpha, and bond only to that individual. That turned out to be me.

Buster and I walked together every chance we had. I estimate that we walked more than 2,700 mile—greater than the width of the United States—over the years. Until a couple of years ago we walked in every weather and temperature. Buster didn’t mind either rain or snow, but I became more careful, restricting our walks to when the temperature was above freezing.

Dogs outside the family—we once had four other dogs, Yuba in addition to Bailey, Max and Gillighan—were always a problem. Buster did not play well with strangers and we had to restrict our walks to the very early morning hours, often leaving the house before the sun was up, and I could not allow him off leash because he loved his freedom and playing “the chase game.” The chase game was me chasing Buster. I quickly learned the power of being his Alpha, however.

He slipped his collar one morning—I switched to a harness after that—and ran off exploring. But he wouldn’t run far and we always stopping to look back to make sure that I was following. That went on for a bit but when we got close to an intersection and I feared he might stray into traffic, I turned around for home, thinking that I have to get my own car to get him under control. I hadn’t walked 50 steps before I heard the sounds of running dog feet. I turned around and saw Buster coming toward me at a dead run. I sat down in the grass and he came up to me with a look of Where the fuck were you going? I was just playing. on his face.

Buster was ever the hunter and over the years he had favorite spots and trees—like this one—that he loved to sniff and attempt to fell.

There is more to come, I’m sure, but I can only write so much right now. I’m also in the process of curating my photos of Buster and you’ll be able to view them on his memorial page.

Bonus No. 1: As we struggle to save the planet from climate collapse, let’s dance (dramatic glockenspiel).

In his 1999 book House, Tracy Kidder wrote about contractors who took short cuts because a house owner power bargained a few hundred dollars off the cost of a new house. Every time they shaved a bit of quality in someplace that the home owner would never see, the craftsmen would say to themselves, there’s your $660.

If honest, hardworking Americans can be disturbed by haggling over $660 out of $150,000, then imagine how businesses operating in other countries, not subject to our inspections and safety standards, might cut corners, might look the other way, when there is profit to be hoarded. Ralph Nader, the consummate consumer advocate, reading a piece in the New York Times ponders how that dynamic affects the very medicines we depend upon for life and health.

Nader, in Trump: Importing Dangerous Medicines and Food and Keeping Consumers in the Dark, writes:

Conservatives favor consumer choice. Consumer information is vital to make that choice meaningful. Corporatists, masquerading as conservatives, do not care about informed consumer choice. Donald Trump is a corporatist, as are the vast majority of Republicans in his Cabinet and in Congress. Corporatists do not even want you to know where products are made. Today, producers and retail sellers do not have to tell you the “country of origin” for meat and pork products. Before 2015, when Congress bowed to the dictates of the World Trade Organization, Congress had enacted a law that required country of origin labels on meat products.

People wanted to know whether the beef and pork sold in their local stores was from the U.S., or Canada, Brazil, China, Mexico, or South Africa, among other importers. But after the WTO judges in Geneva, Switzerland decided, bizarrely, that “country of origin” labeling was an impermissible non-tariff trade barrier, Congress meekly passed a bill that repealed the labeling law and President Obama signed this legislation into law.

While Donald Trump claims to reject “free trade” treaties, he has been silent on country of origin regulations. State Cattlemen’s Associations want laws mandating country of origin labels, believing that consumers are more trusting of the U.S. meat industry than the meat industries in most other countries. These associations know that the U.S.D.A. Food Safety and Inspection Service has a much less rigorous inspection process Continue Reading »

As promised, I continue reading, annotating and writing about Nelson Algren as told in Never A Lovely So Real by Colin Asher. As I’ve moved into the second half of Asher’s biography of Algren, I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by Algren process as a writer, particularly his way of immersing himself to fully in the subject.

Asher allows Algren to describe his method this way:

That’s how I wrote my novel, he said later. I put myself in the middle of scenes “in which human beings were involved in conflict.” Then I simply “recorded my own reactions and tried to to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and the terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people had been forced into.”

Days were for writing. Nelson worked at a desk that he had placed in his bedroom, by a window overlooking the Lucky Star saloon. He kept his phone in a drawer with a blanket wrapped around it, drank whiskey and soda and ignored his friends. p.236

This is the extreme that I think I, and many other neophyte writers, imagined that a prototypical, two-fisted, hard-boiled writer writer wrote. This was the image that I first fastened on when I read Ernest Miller Hemingway’s A Movable Feast.

As an aside, I don’t know if this a factor of my getting better at proofreading or just older, but I came across an error in the text. I’m unclear if the fault is Algren’s or Asher’s, but about mid-book I read the sentence below that brought me up short. In describing a plot point in Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, Asher writes:

On the night America dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Frankie got blind drunk and drove into a billboard on Ashland Avenue. p. 272-3

If the error was Algren’s I would have expected Asher to say so and corrected the problem in a footnote. If, the error is Asher’s, I would have expected a copy editor to make the fix.

The bombs were not dropped on a night but nights—9 August and 6 August respectively. Perhaps Asher meant to write something like: “The night that the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was publicly announced….” President Truman, however, announced the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb on 6 August and the Nagasaki bomb on another day. (I can’t determine from online sources exactly when that was, but it was likely on 9 August.)

I can’t tell and an online search does not find any other mentions. Oh well.

The next bit that drew me in was Asher’s look at Algren’s 1956 prose poem: One man’s Chicago—later published as Chicago: City On The Make. Asher wrote:

[One Man’s Chicago] reads like an indictment, but when the narrative shifts and Nelson begins to argue that the conflict between the grand ambition of Chicago’s residents and their sinful natures is the thing that defines the city. The frisson created when those impulses clash, he says, is the thing that drives the city—its imperfections are its greatest virtue, not a flaw.

“You can spend your entire life in a single neighborhood here and still be forgotten the week after you leave,” he writes. “Yet once you’ve come to be part of a particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

The tension in the essay feels resolved, but then Nelson brings the timeline to the present day and advances the argument further. Some of the finest poets, singers and painters the country ever produced came from Chicago, he wrote, but that won’t be the case for much longer because everything that made this city great is being denied. Our history is being whitewashed, and everyone is under pressure to conform.

“[W]e stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara,” he wrote.

“You can live in a natural home,” he warned, “with pictures on the walls, or you can live in a fort; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch you can’t live in both. You can’t make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its great cities to produce artists. It’s the nature of the overbraided brass to build walls about the minds of men—as it is in the nature of the arts to tear those dark walls down. Today, under the name of ‘security,’ the dark shades are being drawn.” p. 299-300

I could see the beauty of Algren’s work here in sentences like:

Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

and

It’s the nature of the overbraided brass to build walls about the minds of men—as it is in the nature of the arts to tear those dark walls down. Today, under the name of ‘security,’ the dark shades are being drawn.

It is no wonder that Ernest Hemingway wrote of Algren:

This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.

(From page 210 of Bettina Drew’s 1989 biography of Algren: Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side)

Finally, Asher caught me with this:

The speech [at a writer’s workshop at the University of Missouri during the third week of June 1952] sounded like a call to arms as it neared it conclusion, but Nelson ended with a sober thought befitting 1952’s ethos of noble defeat. Chekhov said it best, Nelson told the audience. He understood that writers owe their allegiance to the truth, and that truth serves no political faction. “‘We paint life as it is,’ he wrote, ‘and beyond that, even if you lashed us with whips, we would not go. We have no God and we do not believe in ghosts. And personally I have no fear of death or blindness.'” p. 307

That, to steal a phrase from another great writer, is a writer in full.

What does it take to get Bill Nye, The Science Guy, to start dropping F-bombs? Well, asking him to explain Carbon Taxes—oh grow up, we use taxes all the time for good—would be one example. John Oliver devotes the balance of his show this week to House Resolution 109—The Green New Deal—introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last February.

The resolution, a broad statement of Congressional intent, suggests many challenges and calls for concerted action to literally save humanity, but specifically does not threaten to pry hamburgers, cars and airplanes from our cold, dead hands. How do I know? Because I fucking read the document, motherfuckers.

Now get to work.

116th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 109

Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

February 7, 2019

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (for herself, Mr. Hastings, Ms. Tlaib, Mr. Serrano, Mrs. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, Mr. Vargas, Mr. Espaillat, Mr. Lynch, Ms. Velázquez, Mr. Blumenauer, Mr. Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania, Mr. Castro of Texas, Ms. Clarke of New York, Ms. Jayapal, Mr. Khanna, Mr. Ted Lieu of California, Ms. Pressley, Mr. Welch, Mr. Engel, Mr. Neguse, Mr. Nadler, Mr. McGovern, Mr. Pocan, Mr. Takano, Ms. Norton, Mr. Raskin, Mr. Connolly, Mr. Lowenthal, Ms. Matsui, Mr. Thompson of California, Mr. Levin of California, Ms. Pingree, Mr. Quigley, Mr. Huffman, Mrs. Watson Coleman, Mr. García of Illinois, Mr. Higgins of New York, Ms. Haaland, Ms. Meng, Mr. Carbajal, Mr. Cicilline, Mr. Cohen, Ms. Clark of Massachusetts, Ms. Judy Chu of California, Ms. Mucarsel-Powell, Mr. Moulton, Mr. Grijalva, Mr. Meeks, Mr. Sablan, Ms. Lee of California, Ms. Bonamici, Mr. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, Ms. Schakowsky, Ms. DeLauro, Mr. Levin of Michigan, Ms. McCollum, Mr. DeSaulnier, Mr. Courtney, Mr. Larson of Connecticut, Ms. Escobar, Mr. Schiff, Mr. Keating, Mr. DeFazio, Ms. Eshoo, Mrs. Trahan, Mr. Gomez, Mr. Kennedy, and Ms. Waters) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, the Judiciary, Ways and Means, and Oversight and Reform, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.

[Please note, there is not a single, motherfucking name on the above list from the State of Ohio. Not a single one of the four Democrats representing Ohio in the House—Joyce Beatty (3rd), Marcy Kaptur (9th), Marcia Fudge (11th) or Tim Ryan (13th)—signed on to co-sponsor the resolution. Shame, shame, shame.]

RESOLUTION

Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.
Mar
Whereas the October 2018 report entitled “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment report found that—

(1) human activity is the dominant cause of observed climate change over the past century;

(2) a changing climate is causing sea levels to rise and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life, healthy communities, and critical infrastructure;

(3) global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause—

(A) mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change;

(B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100;

(C) wildfires that, by 2050, will annually burn at least twice as much forest area in the western United States than was typically burned by wildfires in the years preceding 2019;

(D) a loss of more than 99 percent of all coral reefs on Earth;

(E) more than 350,000,000 more people to be exposed globally to deadly heat stress by 2050; and

(F) a risk of damage to $1,000,000,000,000 of public infrastructure and coastal real estate in the United States; and

(4) global temperatures must be kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrialized levels to avoid the most severe impacts of a changing climate, which will require—

(A) global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030; and

(B) net-zero global emissions by 2050;

Whereas, because the United States has historically been responsible for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions, having emitted 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions through 2014, and has a high technological capacity, the United States must take a leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation;

Whereas the United States is currently experiencing several related crises, with—

(1) life expectancy declining while basic needs, such as clean air, clean water, healthy food, and adequate health care, housing, transportation, and education, are inaccessible to a significant portion of the United States population;

(2) a 4-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and antilabor policies that has led to—

(A) hourly wages overall stagnating since the 1970s despite increased worker productivity;

(B) the third-worst level of socioeconomic mobility in the developed world before the Great Recession;

(C) the erosion of the earning and bargaining power of workers in the United States; and

(D) inadequate resources for public sector workers to confront the challenges of climate change at local, State, and Federal levels; and

(3) the greatest income inequality since the 1920s, with—

(A) the top 1 percent of earners accruing 91 percent of gains in the first few years of economic recovery after the Great Recession;

(B) a large racial wealth divide amounting to a difference of 20 times more wealth between the average white family and the average black family; and

(C) a gender earnings gap that results in women earning approximately 80 percent as much as men, at the median;

Whereas climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices (referred to in this preamble as “systemic injustices”) by disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this preamble as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);

Whereas, climate change constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the United States—

(1) by impacting the economic, environmental, and social stability of countries and communities around the world; and

(2) by acting as a threat multiplier;

Whereas the Federal Government-led mobilizations during World War II and the New Deal created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen, but many members of frontline and vulnerable communities were excluded from many of the economic and societal benefits of those mobilizations; and

Whereas the House of Representatives recognizes that a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era is a historic opportunity—

(1) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs in the United States;

(2) to provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States; and

(3) to counteract systemic injustices: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—

(1) it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal—

(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;

(B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;

(C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;

(D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come—

(i) clean air and water;

(ii) climate and community resiliency;

(iii) healthy food;

(iv) access to nature; and

(v) a sustainable environment; and

(E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);

(2) the goals described in subparagraphs (A) through (E) of paragraph (1) (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal goals”) should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following goals and projects—

(A) building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies;

(B) repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including—

(i) by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible;

(ii) by guaranteeing universal access to clean water;

(iii) by reducing the risks posed by climate impacts; and

(iv) by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change;

(C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including—

(i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and

(ii) by deploying new capacity;

(D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity;

(E) upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification;

(F) spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible, including by expanding renewable energy manufacturing and investing in existing manufacturing and industry;

(G) working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including—

(i) by supporting family farming;

(ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and

(iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food;

(H) overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in—

(i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing;

(ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and

(iii) high-speed rail;

(I) mitigating and managing the long-term adverse health, economic, and other effects of pollution and climate change, including by providing funding for community-defined projects and strategies;

(J) removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution by restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as land preservation and afforestation;

(K) restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency;

(L) cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites;

(M) identifying other emission and pollution sources and creating solutions to remove them; and

(N) promoting the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services, with the aim of making the United States the international leader on climate action, and to help other countries achieve a Green New Deal;

(3) a Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses; and

(4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects—

(A) providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization;

(B) ensuring that the Federal Government takes into account the complete environmental and social costs and impacts of emissions through—

(i) existing laws;

(ii) new policies and programs; and

(iii) ensuring that frontline and vulnerable communities shall not be adversely affected;

(C) providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so that all people of the United States may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization;

(D) making public investments in the research and development of new clean and renewable energy technologies and industries;

(E) directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry and business in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation and economic, social, and environmental benefits in frontline and vulnerable communities, and deindustrialized communities, that may otherwise struggle with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive industries;

(F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level;

(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition;

(H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;

(I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;

(J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors;

(K) enacting and enforcing trade rules, procurement standards, and border adjustments with strong labor and environmental protections—

(i) to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas; and

(ii) to grow domestic manufacturing in the United States;

(L) ensuring that public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and that eminent domain is not abused;

(M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples;

(N) ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies; and

(O) providing all people of the United States with—

(i) high-quality health care;

(ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;

(iii) economic security; and

(iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.

Now, I’ll be long dead before, as Bill Nye said: the planet is on fucking fire, but there are people living now that may be here at the end of the century. To them, we’ll either be global heroes or motherfuckers so evil that Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito will look grandfatherly in comparison.

But like I said, I’ll be dead so maybe you don’t give a fuck.

Bonus No. 1: The Real Deal Press, Vol. 4, Issue 29.

Bonus No. 2: Just in case the whole show hasn’t been taken down yet, here it is.

Bonus No. 3: To the white people at South: we need to work against our white privilege.

Bonus No. 4: Brazil And The Amazon.

Bonus No. 5: The Guardian view on a Green New Deal: we need it now.

So, Glenn Greenwald sat down with U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (HI-2) talk about her 2020 presidential run. As a woman of color (she’s Samoan-American ) Gabbard fits in to my second tier of potential presidential candidates—my top tier is reserved for African-American women—and she’s a veteran with tours of duty in both Iraq and Kuwait.

As I would expect, Greenwald delivers a far better interview than what I’ve come to expect from journalists. In Interview With Democratic Congresswoman and 2020 Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard for The Intercept, Greenwald writes:

I sat down with Gabbard in Washington late last week to discuss a wide range of issues, including the reasons she is running for president, her views on President Donald Trump’s electoral appeal and what is necessary to defeat it, the rise of right-wing populism internationally, the Trump-Russia investigation, criticisms she has received regarding her views of Islam and certain repressive leaders, and her unique foreign policy viewpoints.

This interview is intended to be the first in a series [emphasis mine, JH] of in-depth interviews with influential and interesting U.S. political figures, including but not limited to 2020 presidential candidates, designed to enable deeper examinations than the standard cable or network news format permits (designed to be 45 minutes to an hour, though a last-minute call requiring Gabbard to leave for National Guard duty meant we had 30 minutes for the discussion, which nonetheless ended up quite wide-ranging and substantive).

Gabbard is impressive and comes from a political family. She’s also a ranker. Gabbard signed up with Hawaii’s Army National Guard as an enlisted member in 2003 and graduated from the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy four years later. Over the next eight years Gabbard rose from 2nd Lieutenant to Major.

After listening to Gabbard I have to say that she is definitely at the top of my second tier of candidates.

Bonus No. 1: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard On America’s Role In The World.

Bonus No. 2: Has News Corp gone too far? It looks like it hahahaha HOORAY!

Bonus No. 3: A two-for from reader Ryan: Joe Rogan Experience #1170—Tulsi Gabbard and Jimmy Dore and Tulsi Gabbard all 4 segments compiled just for YOU!

Under the doctrine of Marxist-Leninism—as formulated by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov AKA Lenin—the reason that the German workers did not rise up as predicted by Karl Marx, was International Capitalism. Exploited workers in The Third World allowed German capitalists to support a high standard of living for German workers. Today we call that Globalism.

American workers here in the Post-World War II United States enjoyed a similar Golden Age through the 1960s until wages stagnated and began to shrink in real terms in the early ’70s. Still, American Capitalists continued to mollify American workers by maintaining a facade o prosperity dependent upon cheapish consumer—or cheap plastic crap from China as I like to refer to them—goods supplied by, again, low-paid workers in other countries.

So far, the tactic has kept the pitchforks and torches at a minimum, but increasingly the exploited workers are inside, not outside, our borders and Ralph Nader thinks that’s a big problem for what he calls The Contented Class.

Nader, in The Contented Classes–When Will They Rebel?, writes:

For all the rhetoric and all the charities regarding America’s children, the U.S. stands at the very bottom of western nations and some other countries as well, in terms of youth well-being. The U.S.’s exceptionalism is clearest in its cruelty to children. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate of comparable [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. Not only that, but 2.5 million American children are homeless and 16.2 million children “lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis.”

The shamelessness continues as the youngsters increase in age. The Trump regime is cutting the SNAP food program for poor kids. In 2018, fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP than in 2017. To see just how bad Trump’s war on poor American children is getting, go to the web sites of the Children’s Defense Fund and the Children’s Advocacy Center.

Trump brags about a robust economy—still, however, rooted in exploitation of the poor and reckless Wall Street speculation with people’s savings.

Trump’s pompous promises during his presidential campaign have proved to be a cowardly distraction. He claimed he would take on the drug companies and their price gouging. The hyper-profiteering pharmaceutical goliaths are quietly laughing at Continue Reading »

My hardback copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima is the 1986 Bantam New Edition, minus the dust jacket. Hersey added a fifth chapter—The Aftermath—that, at 62 pages, is two-thirds the length of the original text. Hersey returned to Hiroshima 40 years after the original was published to revisit and better understand what we had wrought.

Yes, the head on this post is gross, cruel, insensitive beyond understanding, but I decided to use those words because they reflect the dark humor sometimes associated with those of us—like my father and myself—who played a role in our nation’s nuclear weapons program. My father, Charles Benjamin Hess was a member of what was then called the Army Special Weapon’s Platoon and he assembled nuclear bombs in in the early ’50s. During his tour, he drew an illustration for a special patch for the platoon that consisted of the Earth, split apart with a mushroom cloud rising from the crack. The patch was never made.

While in the Navy I was responsible for the care and feeding of four surface-to-air Terrier missiles in the aft missile house on board the USS Bainbridge CGN 25. The headline comes from one phrase we considered considered for the G Division t-shirts. Thankfully, we rejected the idea—not because we didn’t like it, but because we didn’t others would understand.

I visited the memorial in Hiroshima while I was in the Navy. No one who had made that pilgrimage could ever consider either my father’s patch or my division’s slogan as humor. I bought a copy of Hersey’s book while I was there and passed it around to the other sailors in my division. That copy is lost, but I acquired my present copy as a used book in the ’90s. I had no idea of the association of Hersey and his book with The New Yorker.

Nicholas Lemann, writing in John Hersey and the Art of Fact for The New Yorker, enlightened me.

[Hersey’s] decades-long association with The New Yorker began when he and [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy, out for the evening at a night club called Café Society, encountered William Shawn, then the magazine’s managing editor, and had a conversation about the PT-109 episode.

“Hiroshima” is still probably the best-known piece The New Yorker has ever published. When it appeared, in August, 1946, it took up an entire issue, a signal the magazine has chosen to send only that once. Its publication marked the end of the magazine’s founding era and the beginning of its maturity. Before the war, The New Yorker was, as Treglown puts it, “generally associated with light entertainment.” Its psychic home was the kind of night club where Hersey had encountered Shawn. During the war, Shawn began to function as the magazine’s de-facto editor; it was Shawn—not The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, who died in 1951—who commissioned Hersey to go to Hiroshima, and who edited the article. By the end of the war, the magazine had become far broader in its concerns, trading in its characteristic urbane-bleeding-into-sneering tone for a journalistic core of moral engagement.

Hiroshima was a journalistic breakthrough on many levels and the publication of Hersey’s novella-length (some 43,000 words) piece was a major shift for the magazine. Lemann continues:

“Hiroshima” was a marvel of journalistic engineering. Someone had given Hersey a copy of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” to read on the destroyer that took him to East Asia, and he adopted the novel’s technique of braiding the stories of an ensemble of characters. From the dozens of people he interviewed, he chose six, alternating among them so that each character appeared in every major phase of the chronology. Hersey’s writing voice is calmly recitative, bordering on affectless—“deliberately quiet,” as he later put it. The opening words of “Hiroshima” convey the effectiveness of Hersey’s tone and narrative approach:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors.

Hersey didn’t have to sell the story, or make an argument. There’s nothing in the account about whether Truman was right to drop the bomb rather than to stage a more conventional invasion of Japan. “Hiroshima” is told entirely in an unadorned, omniscient third-person voice, which is why it’s often called the first nonfiction novel. [Emphasis mine, JH] A brief editor’s note in The New Yorker, likely written by Shawn, said, “Few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon. . . . Everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.” That falls on contemporary ears as gently stated, but the method Hersey used relieved him of ever having to say explicitly what he took the message of his story to be.

Even now, nearly 80 years later, I can’t imagine another event in human history as momentous as Thomas Ferebee’s toggling of Little Boy from the belly of the Enola Gay on 6 August 1945. Incredibly, Ferebee did not know exactly what he was unleashing on the people of Hiroshima. To tell the story Hersey needed transitional tools. He, its seems like Nelson Algren, was bent on reshaping journalism in ways that help to launch the New Journalists like Gay Telese, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe in the ’60s, and he, writes Lemann, reached back to the works of Stephen Crane and William Faulkner for inspiration. Hersey was not pleased, however, with what happened after Hiroshima was published. Lemann continues:

Hersey taught writing at Yale from 1965 to 1984, and in 1980 he wrote an uncharacteristically ill-tempered article for The Yale Review titled “The Legend on the License.” Then sixty-five, he declared himself to be “one worried grandpa” of the nonfiction novel. His major gripe was that nonfiction writers had begun blurring the line between fact and fiction. “There is one sacred rule of journalism,” he wrote. “The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”

Hersey had three specific targets, books recently published to great attention: “The Executioner’s Song,” by Norman Mailer; “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe; and “Handcarved Coffins,” by Truman Capote. It’s an odd essay, partly because the examples don’t really fit the argument. Mailer subtitled his book “A True Life Novel,” and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, not nonfiction. Capote described “Handcarved Coffins” as “a short novel.” “The Right Stuff” does present itself as straight-up nonfiction, but Hersey, despite what appear to have been strenuous efforts, was unable to find clear evidence that Wolfe had fictionalized anything. Hersey went to the trouble of interviewing two former astronauts, and finally admitted, “The Right Stuff has been accepted as fairly accurate by people in the know.”

What had so nettled Hersey? In those days, the nonfiction novel was an exciting cultural form, not unlike certain ambitious television series in the post-“Sopranos” era. (David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” was in fact a nonfiction novelist before he was a TV auteur.) Hersey’s three foils were all New Yorkers who adored publicity and made loud claims for their work, a writerly stance that he—by that time living quietly on Martha’s Vineyard and in Key West—found repellent. A number of Capote’s reported works were methodologically in the line of descent from “Hiroshima,” culminating with “In Cold Blood,” which The New Yorker excerpted at great length in 1965. Hersey may have been the inventor of the nonfiction novel, but Capote, in describing “In Cold Blood,” invented the term itself.

Lemann most closely ties Hersey to Tom Wolfe—whose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was one of the reasons I became a writer—perhaps because Wolfe sealed his own connection with New Journalism by formally naming it as such:

What Hersey and Wolfe had in common was a preoccupation with what they took to be fiction’s superiority to journalism as a form of writing, or at least its superior prestige. Back in 1973, Wolfe had written an essay called “The New Journalism,” which presented competition between the two forms as a kind of populist fable. In his telling, novelists in the late twentieth century had abandoned realism, the method that gave fiction its power, and this had left the gate open for an especially humble cohort of journalists—newspaper-feature writers—to adapt the techniques of realism and so to “wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.” Wolfe’s argument now seems quaint. It depended on defining the successful novel in an extremely narrow way (it had to be a Balzac-style “social tableau” about status-striving in a big city); on characterizing contemporary fiction even more narrowly, so that he could dismiss it entirely; and on insisting that nonfiction writers could achieve greatness only by adopting a set of techniques taken from nineteenth-century fiction.

Lemann imagines that Hersey was flummoxed by the use of the tools he selected for Hiroshima to tell far more mundane stories about Frank Sinatra’s cold, the Kentucky Derby and public relations. He continues:

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless. In crafting “Hiroshima,” Hersey left out most of his interview material so that he could focus on a limited number of characters whom his readers would remember; he built suspense by cutting away from each character, as he notes in the Paris Review interview, at “the verge of some kind of crisis”; and he carefully calibrated the pace at which the events he was describing unfolded. Wolfe, in his “New Journalism” essay, enumerated his own set of techniques, which overlapped somewhat with Hersey’s: scene-by-scene construction, use of an omniscient narrator’s voice, use of dialogue, close observation of “status details.” All of these, like Hersey’s methods, have their roots in fiction writing—without, of course, representing the entirety of the fiction writers’ craft.

Reading about the Journalism of Nelson Algren and now John Hersey makes me wish that I could somehow return to school again and learn all of this before I left academia to earn my living as a magazine writer and editor. I think I might have done a much better job of it.

Nelson Algren. Before I read his interview for The Paris Review, I had never heard the name. Then last month I read Jonathan Dee’s Nelson Algren’s Street Cred, a review of Colin Asher’s biography of the author: Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren. Discovering a new writer is exhilarating.

I’m fighting very hard to resist the urge to order everything that Algren wrote, but I’m 323 pages into the book and on the chapter that covers the period of 3 October 1953 through September 1955 (the month I was born) and able to resist, for the moment. Dee hooked me with the final line of his lede:

Twenty-six years ago in these pages, Harold Brodkey took brutal stock of the work of the late John O’Hara, whose reputation, over which O’Hara had obsessed, was already in decline. “Literary immortality is a curious notion,” Brodkey wrote, in a tone of detached sagacity that surely surprised those who knew him, for if any writer could give O’Hara a run for his money in the ego department it was Brodkey. With a coroner’s acumen, he catalogued the ways in which O’Hara’s work, once touted (most insistently by O’Hara himself) for the Nobel Prize, had grown dated and flat, before concluding, rather menacingly, with this one-sentence paragraph: “I think anyone who spends his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool.”

The reason I never heard of Algren before has much to do with the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of two left-handed slaps at literary rats—Louis Budenz and Howard Rushmore. Dee writes:

It is certain that Algren fell afoul of the repressive social and professional culture of the McCarthy era. The F.B.I. kept its investigation of him open for twenty-nine years, enlisting as informers everyone from his publishers to his landlady to (however unwittingly) his mother. Its activities weren’t always a matter of simple information-gathering, either. For many years, the Bureau refused to grant Algren a passport, and the reason for that is a reminder of what a vindictive, resource-wasting cause of shame the Hoover-era F.B.I. could be: it denied him the passport because it wanted him to appeal that denial, a process that would necessitate his signing a form saying he’d never been a member of the Communist Party, which—since agents held evidence to the contrary—would allow the Bureau to file perjury charges against him and put him in jail. [Emphasis mine, JH]

And all this comes to light now because Asher had the gumption and good fortune to obtain, for the first time, Algren’s entire F.B.I. file. (Two previous biographers had to make do with a much more heavily censored version.) So he has a story to tell. The question is whether Algren’s fate was really down to these two stoolies—Louis Budenz and Howard Rushmore, may their names live in infamy—or whether the forces that pushed him and his work out of the mainstream were broader in scope than that.

But the politics comes much later, as Asher, with that whole FBI file—and far more—on this desk, tells the story of how Algren became the writer—describe by Dee as one of a few:

American writers who seemed as well positioned for that sort of “immortality” as O’Hara back in the nineteen-forties and fifties, but one of them was certainly Nelson Algren, the author of “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “A Walk on the Wild Side,” and half a dozen other works of fiction and nonfiction. Algren, like O’Hara, lived long enough to see posterity begin to claw back his reputation; his response, interestingly, was to try to beat posterity to the punch. Around 1960, unwilling to give the literary culture that had turned against him the satisfaction of seeing him wounded, he stopped writing novels, or even referring to himself as a novelist at all (preferring the term “journalist,” or “loser”). He showed up at various literary events dressed more or less in rags, and acted the clown there, as he did for journalists and other interviewers, lying about the facts of his own life and work in ways that made them seem less colorful rather than more. His efforts, sadly, were not unsuccessful. In the last years of his life, the work that Ernest Hemingway once said “beat Dostoyevsky” was so undervalued that much of it was out of print.

Wow, just fucking wow. Back to Asher. The first bit of the novel that I read, re-read and re-read again comes on page 188. Asher writes:

Nelson had been asking himself what purpose literature serves ever since Boots failed and proletarian writing faded. Why do people write? he asked. Why should they? Trying to answer those questions was one of the more enduring projects of his life, and for the next three decades he circled back to them periodically and updated his response—reiterating some points, adapting his ideas, and shifting the emphasis of his arguments. The essay he submitted to The Writer was the first draft of his answer. He called the piece Do It The Hard Way, and in it he argues that literature is a social institution, not an academic or artistic one.

No tool at a writer’s disposal—not symbolism, allusion or motif—has any value outside the context of the broader world, Nelson said, and when authors use them in service of inconsequential ideas, their work is destined for irrelevance. “Their books—and we see them on the best seller list every day—are artful dodges,” he wrote, “tours de force which say nothing gracefully, or nothing lyrically, or nothing nostalgically, or—best of all—nothing mystically. But still: nothing. Like eating cotton candy—a mouthful of the stuff and wisp—nothing left but a sweetish taste and a clinging coat on the tongue.”

Work that lasts grows out of experience, Nelson argued—but not necessarily the writer’s own. He rejected the idea of writing in service of a political movement, and counseled authors to describe the world without making concession for the way they would like things to be. “Feel your way into the story,” he wrote; don’t “regard it from the sidelines by some formal outline.” The trick is simply to be in touch with the world, Nelson said. “All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first hand.

The literary vision Nelson describes in his essay is transgressive, but also profoundly democratic and optimistic. Writers are obliged to confront society with evidence of its shortcomings, he argues, but they can do so and still find a wide audience. “There isn’t a solid publisher going who won’t take a book dealing with any strata of any society so long as it is a true book,” he says. “The truth still holds that great rewards do, at last, come to the boldest; to those who permit neither avarice nor shame to modify what they truly feel and truly know.”

Fatefully, Nelson believed it was possible for a writer to be famous, well paid, and uncompromising all at once.

That’s a vision that I can get behind.

More to come on Tuesday.

Bonus No. 1: Evangelicals breaking up with Jesus.