So, I’ve been under the weather for a few weeks—mostly a bum shoulder that has made typing very difficult—but I’m well on the mend and I’m diving back in to fill in the gaps in Have Coffee Will Write and bring the blog back up to date.

To that end this notice with links to the most recent posts will stay at the top of the blog.

Here is what I posted yesterday, March 25:

1. IS THE 737 MAX BE BOEING’S CHEVY CORVAIR…?
2. SEVEN ARTICLES, 21 SECTIONS & 27 AMENDMENTS…
3. CHASING THE BOY WITH THE NIXON TATTOO…
4. THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT AND PRESIDENT TRUMP…
5. IF YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A HOLE, STOP DIGGING…
6. PRIVATIZATION: JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THEFT…

The time has come to ignore stories about malfeasance in office by President Donald John Trump and his minions. I’m not saying high crimes and misdemeanors weren’t committed, I’m saying that until there are resignations or convictions, the time to speculate is passed. Now is the time to focus on 2020. We all need to take a breath and shut-the-fuck up.

Mary Jo wanted to talk about the Mueller’s report yesterday and I told her I couldn’t because I, like 99.99997 percent of Americans, hadn’t read it. All I know, all any of us know, is that Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election states three key facts:

First: The report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public.

Second: The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

And third: The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Case closed. Done and dusted. Move on to 2020.

The release of Barr’s memo was significant enough to prompt Matt Taibbi to publish one chapter from his forthcoming book: Hate Inc. (You can subscribe to the book for $5 a month or $40 a year. I’ll wait for a library copy.) Taibbi begins:

Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

You should read the whole chapter. Taibbi, as always, does an excellent job of making his case, and I’ll only include this single excerpt:

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing–crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

Spoiler alert. He won’t.

But he might be a single-term president like George Herbert Walker Bush. To achieve that end we all need to let President Trump be President Trump and work like hell to make it so.

[Update @ 0648 on 26 March: Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah each apologize to Trump.]

Bonus No. 1: Media reckoning following the Mueller report.

Bonus No. 2: 16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It.

Bonus No. 3: Trump’s pyrrhic Mueller victory.

Bonus No. 4: How to Blow $700 Billion.

Bonus No. 5: Trump Wants More War Money Than Last Year and Democrats Don’t Seem to Mind.

Bonus No. 6: Turns Out That Trillion-Dollar Bailout Was, in Fact, Real.

In the latest look back I examine private power and its ability to guide the public agenda for private interests. In times of intense stress, the string-pullers are more easily identified. They have to show themselves rather than remain hidden, safely pulling strings. The 1960s were times of great stress. The title of Vol. 1, No. 20 was Many Roads Lead to Jack Reavis.

Reavis was managing partner of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, today just Jones Day, now a massive international law firm known for its representation of the energy industry. This issue, more than 50 years ago, foretells that interest.

Reavis spoke truthfully in a manner that invited my barbs but silence or support from the Plain Dealer or Press of that time.

“The Negroes on this committee have behaved magnificently,” he said of African-Americans on his Businessman’s Inter-racial Committee. Like children, the comment suggests.

Can you imagine? They talked that way in the ’60s and on.

Embarrassingly, Reavis congratulated the newspapers of the day for censorship: He secured a pledge from the editors, he said, “a pledge… that they would give us (Businessman’s Interracial Committee) no publicity except as we asked for it.”

How’s that for service?

This issue also traces a number of Jones Day lawyers of the time playing roles to “guide” the public agenda, including partner Seth Taft, who ran for mayor in 1967.

When I was at the PD in 1967 I had the opportunity to call Reavis for a comment on the possibility of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky’s coming to organize in Cleveland. It would be, he said, a “tragedy.”

I learned in my short time (two stints—1965 & 1967) at the PD that community control by unelected, moneyed interests was the essence of Who Rules. Newspapers colluded.
Reporters often don’t report because they are taught not to see raw power at work. I hope that this single issue tells how that works to those who want to see.

In 1920, Eugene Victor Debs made his fifth and final run for President of the United States. From prison. He lost. I first learned of Debs from one of my writing mentors, Kurt Vonnegut who admired Debs and even named a character after him. I have written about Debs numerous times since and, in his centennial campaign year, I expect I will write much more.

Vonnegut most famously (and often) quoted Debs 18 September 1918 state to the federal court here in Cleveland where he charged and found guilty of sedition. In lieu of calling witness in his defense, Debs delivered a two-hour oration to the court. He began:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs, because of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is very much on the minds of lovers of capitalism everywhere and especially the minds of President Donald John Trump’s minions in Congress like Roger Williams (R-TX) who likes to ask witnesses in congressional hearings: Are you a Socialist or a Capitalist?

Jill Lepore, writing in Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism for The New Yorker does justice to Debs and brings his legacy forward to 2020.

Debs, who wrote a lot about manliness, always said that the best kind of man was a sand man. “ ‘Sand’ means grit,” he wrote in 1882, in Firemen’s Magazine. “It means the power to hold on.” When a train stalled from the steepness of the incline or the weight of the freight, railroad men poured sand on the tracks, to improve the grip of the wheels. Men need sand, too, Debs said: “Men who have plenty of ‘sand’ in their boxes never slip on the path of duty.” Debs had plenty of sand in his box. He had, though, something of a morbid fear of ashes. Maybe that’s a fireman’s phobia, a tending-the-engine man’s idea of doom. In prison—having been sentenced, brutally, to ten years of hard time at the age of sixty-three—he had a nightmare. “I was walking by the house where I was born,” he wrote. “The house was gone and nothing left but ashes… only ashes—ashes!” The question today for socialism in the United States, which appears to be stoking its engines, is whether it’s got enough sand. Or whether it’ll soon be ashes, only ashes, all over again.

Angela Duckworth wrote about grit back in 2017 and, of course, Charles Portis wrote about the amazing grit of Mattie Ross. Debs impressed a budding politician in Vermont with his grit.

Really, [Debs] wasn’t much of a writer. The most delightful way to hear Debs is to listen to a recording made in 1979 by Bernie Sanders, in an audio documentary that he wrote and produced when he was thirty-seven years old and was the director of the American People’s Historical Society, in Burlington, Vermont, two years before he became that city’s mayor. In the documentary—available on YouTube and Spotify—Sanders, the Brooklyn-born son of a Polish Jew, performs parts of Debs’s most famous speeches, sounding, more or less, like Larry David. It is not to be missed.

I first listened to the documentary back in 2015. The recording plays even better in 2019. Debs began his adult life as a Democrat, not a socialist.

For a long time, Debs disavowed socialism. He placed his faith in democracy, the franchise, and the two-party system. “The conflict is not between capital and labor,” he insisted. “It is between the man who holds the office and the man who holds the ballot.” But in the eighteen-eighties, when railroad workers struck time and time again, and as many as two thousand railroad men a year were killed on the job, while another twenty thousand were injured, Debs began to wonder whether the power of benevolence and fraternity was adequate protection from the avarice and ruthlessness of corporations backed up by armed men. “The strike is the weapon of the oppressed,” Debs wrote in 1888. Even then he didn’t talk about socialism. For Debs, this was Americanism, a tradition that had begun with the American Revolution. “The Nation had for its cornerstone a strike,” he said. He also spent some time with a pencil, doing sums. Imagine, he wrote in an editorial, that a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt started out with two million dollars—a million from his grandfather and another million from his father. “If a locomotive fireman could work 4,444 years, 300 days each year, at $1.50 per day,” Debs went on, “he would be in a position to bet Mr. Vanderbilt $2.50 that all men are born equal.”

Lepore continues:

In 1889, Debs argued for an industrial union, a federation of all the brotherhoods of railroad workers, from brakemen to conductors, as equals. Samuel Gompers wanted those men to join his far less radical trade union, the American Federation of Labor, which he’d founded three years earlier, but in 1893 Debs pulled them into the American Railway Union. Soon it had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members, with Debs, at its head, as their Moses. That’s what got him into a battle with George Pullman, in 1894, and landed him, for the first time, in prison, where he read “Das Kapital.”

For most Americans—thanks to 20th century Red Scare and all the associated fear mongering—reading Das Kapital is a deal breaker. I read the work as a high school student at the Washington County library in the early ’70s. I probably understood 5 percent of the book. The book would have a much more profound effect on Debs.

The Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger did bring Debs a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital.” And Debs and his fellow labor organizers dedicated most of their daily schedule to reading. “I had heard but little of Socialism” before the Pullman strike, Debs later claimed, insisting that the reading he did in jail brought about his conversion. But it’s not clear what effect that reading really had on him. “No sir; I do not call myself a socialist,” he told a strike commission that year. While in jail, he turned away overtures from socialists. And when he got out, in 1895, and addressed a crowd of more than a hundred thousand people who met him at the train station in Chicago, he talked about “the spirit of ’76” and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not Marx and Engels.

The next year, Debs endorsed the Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, running on both the Democratic and the People’s Party tickets. Only after Bryan’s loss to William McKinley, whose campaign was funded by businessmen, did Debs abandon his devotion to the two-party system. The people elected Bryan, it was said, but money elected McKinley. On January 1, 1897, writing in the Railway Times, Debs proclaimed himself a socialist. “The result of the November election has convinced every intelligent wageworker that in politics, per se, there is no hope of emancipation from the degrading curse of wage-slavery,” he wrote. “I am for socialism because I am for humanity…. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization.”

In June, 1884, Debs’ American Railway Union held their first annual meeting in Chicago. One of the speakers was:

nineteen-year-old Jennie Curtis, who’d worked in the Pullman sewing department for five years, upholstering and making curtains, addressed the convention. Curtis explained that she was often paid nine or ten dollars for two weeks’ work, out of which she paid Pullman seven dollars for her board and two or three more for rent. “We ask you to come along with us,” she told Debs’s men, because working for Pullman was little better than slavery. After hearing from her, the A.R.U. voted for a boycott, refusing “to handle Pullman cars and equipment.”

We can draw a line from Curtis in 1884 to AOC in 2018. Lepore continues:

That Curtis had a voice at all that day was thanks in part to Debs, who had supported the admission of women to the A.R.U. He also argued for the admission of African-Americans. “I am not here to advocate association with the negro, but I am ready to stand side by side with him,” he told the convention. But, by a vote of 112 to 110, the assembled members decided that the union would be for whites only. If two votes had gone the other way, the history of the labor movement in the United States might have turned out very differently.

Lapore notes that: The A.R.U. vote in 1894 set back the cause of labor for decades. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters achieved recognition from the Pullman Company only in 1937, after years of organizing by A. Philip Randolph.

(Mary Jo’s grandfather George Hanlon Sr. took part in a sit-in protest in Columbus, Ohio, protesting unequal treatment of the union’s negro members. The Pittsburgh Press published a wire story on the event in the 17 March 1947 edition that lede:

A CIO official today promised legal action against the Nell House Hotel for the discrimination by waitresses against a union’s Negro convention delegates. Refusal to serve the Negroes caused a six-hour sit-in strike in the coffee shop by all delegates.

More than 50 years after that first ARU meeting, the fight continued.)

In 1901, Debs would join The Socialist Party of America. Lepore continues:

For Debs, socialism meant public ownership of the means of production. “Arouse from your slavery, join the Social Democratic Party and vote with us to take possession of the mines of the country and operate them in the interest of the people,” he urged miners in Illinois and Kansas in 1899. But Debs’s socialism, which was so starry-eyed that his critics called it “impossibilism,” was decidedly American, and had less to do with Karl Marx and Communism than with Walt Whitman and Protestantism. “What is Socialism?” he asked. “Merely Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality in men.”

That last sentence ought to be repeated to every American who touts their Christianity while shilling for President Trump. A dozen years later—in a year that might be seen as the seed of 2018—Debs would again run for president.

“This is our year,” Debs said in 1912, and it was, in the sense that nearly a million Americans voted for him for President. But 1912 was also socialism’s year in the sense that both the Democratic and the Republican parties embraced progressive reforms long advocated by socialists (and, for that matter, populists): women’s suffrage, trust-busting, economic reform, maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws, the abolition of child labor, and the direct election of U.S. senators. As Debs could likely perceive a couple of years later, when the Great War broke out in Europe, 1912 was to be socialism’s high-water mark in the United States. “You may hasten Socialism,” he said, “you may retard it, but you cannot stop it.” Except that socialism had already done most of what it would do in the United States in those decades: it had reformed the two major parties.

Debs fourth run came in 1916 when the United States was embroiled in our first global war.

Debs spoke out against the war as soon as it began. “I am opposed to every war but one,” he said. “I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” Bernie Sanders recorded this speech for his 1979 documentary. And, as a member of the Senate, Sanders said it again. “There is a war going on in this country,” he declared on the floor of the Senate in 2010, in a speech of protest that lasted more than eight hours. “I am not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.”

Sanders 2010 speech, perhaps set up his run for the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. We all know how well that went. Lapore writes:Socialism has been carried into the twenty-first century by way of Sanders, a Debs disciple, and by way of the utter failure of the two-party system. Last summer, a Gallup poll found that more Democrats view socialism favorably than view capitalism favorably. This brand of socialism has its own obsession with manliness, with its “Bernie bros” and allegations by women who worked on Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign of widespread sexual harassment and violence. Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently addressed some of these charges: “Was it too male? Yes. Was it too white? Yes.” Hence the movement’s new face, and new voice: the former Sanders campaign worker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Debs wrote its manifesto, but there’s a certain timidity to the new socialism. It lacks sand. In 1894, one Pullman worker stated the nature of the problem: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” We live in Amazon houses and eat Amazon groceries and read Amazon newspapers and when we die we shall go to an Amazon Hell. In the meantime, you can buy your Bernie 2020 hats and A.O.C. T-shirts on… Amazon.

Just as no Democrat would allow their literature to be printed by a non-union shop, so too, ought all Democrats just say no to Amazon.

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where he became Convict No. 9653. Lapore concludes:

Convict No. 9653 refused to ask for a pardon, even as he grew sicker, and leaner, and weaker. His reputation as a twentieth-century Christ grew. (Kurt Vonnegut’s much beset narrator in “Hocus Pocus” says, “I am so powerless and despised now that the man I am named after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat fond of me.”) His supporters began holding Free Debs rallies. President Woodrow Wilson refused to answer calls for amnesty. Warren Harding finally released him, on Christmas Day, 1921. Debs never recovered. He lived much of what remained of his life in a sanatorium. In 1925, he said that the Socialist Party was “as near a corpse as a thing can be.” He died the next year.

Debs understood capitalism best on a train, socialism best in prison. One of the last letters he wrote was to the judge who had sentenced him in 1918, asking whether his conviction had left him disenfranchised or whether he still had the right to vote.

Debs would have smiled broadly last year when Floridians passed Florida Amendment 4.

Our work is far from over.

Bonus No. 1: The face of American socialism before Bernie Sanders? Eugene Debs.

Bonus No. 2: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows yesterday’s radicalism can become tomorrow’s common sense.

Bonus No. 3: Only snobs care about apostrophes: some correct and popular opinions.

So, the report is in and America’s long nightmare is finally over. Special Counsel Robert, after 23 months and approximately $25 million (the investigation turned a profit thanks to fines levied) sent the report to his boss United States Attorney General William Pelham Barr and we now know exactly what happened. Sort of.

Not even Congress has seen the full, unredacted report and we can expect a long, nasty political fight in the coming months. The New Yorker Editor David Remnick, writing in It’s Mueller Time for The New Yorker, steps back and looks at a bigger picture. He ledes:

Late last year, Vintage Books reissued Night of Camp David, a political thriller from 1965 that seemed to rhyme with the strangeness of our era. The novel centers on a Commander-in-Chief named Mark Hollenbach, who is gradually coming unwound. President Hollenbach is in the habit of summoning confidants to his cabin in the Maryland woods, where, at night, he turns off the lights and rants until dawn about the conspirators encircling him. He rails against pernicious legislators, disloyal appointees, and craven reporters. For no coherent reason, he intends to distance the United States from Western European allies and make common cause with a Kremlin leader named Zuchek. He also wants to tap every telephone in the country, declaring, “No respectable citizen would have a thing to fear. It’s the hoodlums, the punks, the syndicate killers, and the dope peddlers we’re after.” Lacking Twitter, he writes deranged letters. One key character is a Supreme Court Justice by the name of Cavanaugh. The marketers at Vintage shrewdly wrapped the reissue in a black-and-white cover emblazoned with a question intended to play upon the country’s collective jitters: “What Would Happen if the President of the U.S.A. Went Stark-Raving Mad?”

Of course, we think we know the answer to that question, or at least we did before Donald John Trump was sworn into office as our 44th president. Mueller may yet change all of this, but for now, Remnick concludes:

The emergency that the Trump Presidency represents leaves the Democratic Party’s cast of candidates with a singular responsibility—to win the election—and two colossal reclamation projects. The first involves the environment. Presidential debates in past elections have largely ignored the costs of climate change. But public opinion on the topic is moving, and there is cause for at least some political optimism in the fact that many Democrats have gotten behind the idea of a New Deal-scale effort to address the issue. Candidates who can best give shape to that impulse and find a plausible way to make it a legislative reality deserve the most urgent attention.

The second reclamation concerns Trumpism. Somehow, sometime, Trump will leave the political stage; but the moral and material corruption he has inflicted will be with us for a long while. Who has the vision and the language to confront xenophobia and white-supremacist ideology? Who has the dexterity and the pragmatism to enact reforms on voting rights, health care, immigration, mass incarceration, and campaign finance, and so strengthen a stressed democracy? Who has the political acumen to argue for policies adequate to resolve our crises and, at the same time, to win back the millions of voters who cast a ballot for Barack Obama and then shifted to Trump?

Trump will be dropping loaded hooks in the water every day, but Democratic candidates ought not take his bait. He’ll use “socialism,” “Jexodus,” or whatever comes to mind as a means of distraction and division. It is perfectly legitimate to test the candidates and their potential weaknesses: Are Biden and Warren and Sanders too old? Is Beto O’Rourke the second coming of Robert Kennedy, or does he just look like him when you squint? And so on. But the kind of serious campaigns and debates that are never found in political novels are precisely what’s now required.

I’m certain the Remnick will be watching the first presidential debates closely.

We all should do the same.

I finish Eric Levitz’s piece on the optimism of Ta-Nehisi Coates (see Part I and Part II) with the final two exchanges jumping off from a line in The Case for Reparations: What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

In setting up his question, Levitz points to already evident changes growing out of the Black Lives Matter movement and growing support for a congressional investigation, if not the implementation of, reparations for our history of slavery. It seems to me that the case can be made that all Americans are, to varying degrees, co-conspirators in a criminal enterprise that has as its roots in events of 1619 Jamestown, Virginia.

LEVITZ: To your previous point: I want to drill down on your theory of change. It seems that a central premise of a lot of advocacy for reparations, including your own, is that squarely facing hard truths makes them easier to overcome. … As a writer myself, I find this theory of change—that forcing a confrontation with truth can spur progress and liberation — very attractive. So much so, I get a little suspicious of it. But is that a fair description of the theory you subscribe to?

COATES: Yes. And I don’t think it’s just us writers. I don’t want to overlook the power of journalists. But it’s also the activists who take down Confederate monuments, it’s … I think we as political writers—and this is one of the reasons why I’ve been making comic books and other things—we can argue with people up one side, and down the other. You confront them with facts, and they’ll just look away. They’ll completely look away.

Because our politics occurs within the imagination of the citizen. If I don’t believe that black people are human, it really doesn’t matter what you say to me about policy. So the question is: How do we decide who gets to be human and who doesn’t? How do we decide who our heroes are, and who our heroes aren’t? All of that is tied together in the stories we tell ourselves. There’s a direct relationship between the legacy of Birth of a Nation and the fact that folks don’t support reparations.

Our mass entertainment culture has, over the course of a century, spent most of its time reinforcing the idea of black people as undeserving, as lazy, as any number of stereotypes. Remember, for black people that’s always in the background.

Willie Horton, the welfare queen. These things are dangerous because of their impact on policy. But they’re also dangerous because of how they make black people look in the white American imagination. And in some cases, in their own imaginations. Because it’s the imagination that sets the terms for what’s possible in terms of policy. And so popular culture matters. It’s a part of it too.

LEVITZ: It seems to me that what might set you apart—from both moderate and Marxist critics of reparations—is actually your optimism. Optimism about what’s possible in a democracy, or about what storytelling can make possible.

COATES: I just don’t have another choice. I just don’t have another choice. I don’t know how I go and look my mom in the face, I don’t know how I go and look my son in the face, and say, “Well, I’ve been fighting, mom and dad, as you brought me up to fight. I’ve been fighting. And I’ve told you to fight, and the best I can see in my vision, from my imagination, is the permanent second-class citizenship of black people.” And just, I wouldn’t ask anybody to accept that. And forget being black, I wouldn’t ask the women of this country to accept permanent second-class citizenship.

It’s not enough for me to see an America where the wealth gap is reduced from 20-to-1 to 10-to-1. That’s not enough to me. Five-to-one. It’s still not enough to me. Two-to-one is bad. That’s not as bad as 20-to-1, but it’s still a species of bad. And so, as a writer—I’m not a politician; I’m not trying to denigrate politicians—but I’m really talking to writers right now. If we circumscribe ourselves, and write as though we are Senate aides, or House aides—if the way we write about policy’s completely circumscribed by this notion of what we can see as possible right now, we’re in a bad place. We’ll always be fighting between these lines. And one of the things I thought that was so exciting about 2016, when Bernie ran, was like, “Yo, okay, the imagination’s expanded now. There’s shit on the table that I never thought was going to be on the table. We’ll fight for it.”

But if we’re going to do it, then let’s do it. Let’s put it all out there. Let’s tell folks how we imagine this new America being. And a vision of that without an explicit and direct confrontation with one of this country’s oldest evils—with an evil that is actually foundational to the country? If you’re confronting that strictly through the lens of poll numbers? I don’t know, man, as a black person, I just got difficulty with that. I don’t know how I explain that to my family. I don’t know how I explain that to the community that I come from.

Neither can I, but, as one of the writers Coates speaks to, I am obligated to try.

Not since the ill-fated, early ’50s era de Havilland Comet has a commercial airliner recieved such intense scrutiny as Boeing’s 737 MAX series. The Comet was the world’s first commercial jet airliner and flaws, while tragic, were understandable. Boeing’s 737, however, is the result of more than 60 years of manufacturing history. There’s no excuse this time.

Ralph Nader, how has made his bones on corporate malfeasance endangering the public’s lives, isn’t having it. Nader, in Greedy Boeing’s Avoidable Design and Software Time Bombs, writes:

As internal and external pressures mount to hold Boeing responsible for its criminal negligence, the giant company is exerting its immense influence to limit both its past and future accountability. Boeing whistleblowers and outside aviation safety experts are coming forward to reveal the serial, criminal negligence of Boeing’s handling of its dangerous Boeing 737 Max airplanes, grounded in the aftermath of two deadly crashes that took 346 lives. Boeing, is used to having its way in Washington, D.C. For decades, Boeing and some of its airline allies have greased the wheels for chronic inaction related to the additional protection and comfort of airline passengers and airline workers.

Most notoriously, the airlines, after the hijacks to Cuba in the late Sixties and early Seventies, made sure that Congress and the FAA did not require hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches on all aircraft, costing a modest $3000 per Continue Reading »

Yesterday I began reading Eric Levitz’s Ta-Nehisi Coates Is an Optimist Now A conversation about race and 2020.. One of the aspects of Coates that I greatly admire is that he is authentic in his word choice. You can tell by the way he speaks that he understands that his words have a gravitas that he must own and be responsible for.

This morning I want to pickup with the paragraph immediately after the one I finished on yesterday. Coates said:

I do think the implicit point you made about there being a separation between African-American voters and African-American activists is a real thing. I was very concerned about how Obama addressed black audiences during his time as president. [Emphasis mine, JH] I’m not sure that that was ever a mainstream position among black people. I don’t think it ever hurt him in any sort of demonstrable way. And I think there’s a similar thing with Kamala. I don’t want to hear about how she didn’t lock anybody up. The idea of threatening mothers—and in most cases, because of how the families were set up, it was gonna be mothers, minority black and brown mothers—with jail, under the notion that you ultimately want to help them? I find that chilling. That’s really really chilling.

I had to think long and hard about that and came around to the thought that what Coates is saying here is that there is gulf, a crossable gulf certainly, but a gulf all the same that exists between authority and compassion. Prosecutors, if they wish to survive in their profession, lean heavily toward the former. In the rest Coates’ answer to this question, he ponder whether, given Harris’ credentials, Black voters will care.

Next, in a long and rambling question, Levitz gets to what most readers are concerned about Coates and reparations and Coates’ response is spot-on. He said:

When I say I am for reparations, I’m saying that I am for the idea that this country and its major institutions has had an extractive relationship with black people for much of our history; that this fact explains basically all of the socioeconomic gap between black and white America, and thus, the way to close that gap is to pay it back. In terms of political candidates, and how this should be talked about, and how this should be dealt with, it seems like it would be a very easy solution. It’s actually the policy recommendation that I gave in the piece, and that is to support HR 40. That’s the bill that says you form a commission. You study what damage was done from slavery, and the legacy of slavery, and then you try to figure out the best ways to remedy it. It’s pretty simple.

Every one wants to jump to the conclusion. People want answers to questions like: How are going to pay for all this? Who will be eligible? Those questions are, of course, bullshit. They’re designed to quash any discussion because the people asking the questions are afraid of what any commission might find, let alone decide.

This is why White Supremacy is so wrapped up with any discussion of reparations. Reparations threaten the very existence of White Supremacy and Coates gets there when Levitz asks him about the Democratic presidential candidate field—specifically Bernie Sanders–talks about reparations. He told Levitz:

You know, I am not shocked, or even disappointed, when those moderates basically use “rising tide, lift all boats” rhetoric to address race. But part of why I always considered myself a product of the left was because that was the place where you could try to reimagine society. And in 2016, we had the most serious left-leaning presidential candidate I’d seen since I was a kid and Jesse ran. But I have to say, unlike in Jesse’s campaign — which supported reparations — there isn’t the same level of consciousness of that history in Bernie’s.

And you see that when Bernie rails against the identity politics of, say, a young Latina, when only weeks earlier he’s rooting himself in the white working class to launch a critique. You see that when Bernie goes on Chris Hayes and claims that “political correctness” helped explain Trump’s victory. That shit baffled me. Or downplaying the racism that Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum faced.

And to see a candidate like Senator Sanders just hand wave reparations away like it’s nothing — who says, “I think there are better ways of dealing with this than writing a check.” When writing checks is a basic part of how … there’s nothing wrong with writing people checks! Especially to those who have had their checks taken from them. Let’s start there. So it’s hard to have a left-wing candidate who is pushing the boundaries on almost everything else, but when it comes to race, whose policies I have a hard time distinguishing from Obama.

Now, none of this makes Bernie a racist. And none of it makes any of his competitors a more obvious choice. This is not an endorsement of the unspecific, vague reparations talk I’ve heard from Kamala Harris. But I think it’s fair to question whether Bernie, and more importantly the people around him, even understand the illness which they think they can treat through class-exclusive solutions.

Coates continues in the vein, but I want to get to the question of White Supremacy. In wrapping up this section of Levitz’s questions they engaged in this exchange:

LEVITZ: It is hard to imagine a morally acceptable answer to the climate crisis that doesn’t involve a majority of Americans agreeing to transfer resources to groups they don’t belong to.

COATES: That’s right. That’s right. And I will say, there are left-wing critiques of reparations that I appreciate. Folks rightly get skittish about a straight-up exchange of private property, period, without any sort of reform to the larger economic project, right?

LEVITZ: Right.

COATES: Because the point of reparations is to destroy white supremacy, not displace its emphasis. [Emphasis mine, JH] Not integrate black people into its most acquisitive functions. It’s to question and assault the entire paradigm. But that is why it makes me really nervous when I see leftists saying, “We should abandon the whole project altogether.” Because I feel like the way to counter that is to get into the debate. Okay, so you don’t like reparations being talked about strictly in terms of capitalism and market. Well, let’s think about it in another way. Let’s think about cooperatives. Let’s think about something more transformative. Let’s ask, you know, should I be in line in the same way that somebody that has been living in the projects for generations should be in line? You understand what I’m saying? Let’s ask how we deal with class within the African-American community. But we can’t have a debate if people leave the room.

Coates here is not talking about destroying the White Supremacist’s movement, or the Ku Klux Klan, or American Nazi’s; he is talking here about destroying the entire system of white privilege, about achieving the promise of Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence that we are all created equal.

That scares the shit out of people, conservative and progressive, with something to lose.

I’ll wrap this up tomorrow morning.

I do distinctly remember the moment when, in being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, on national television, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that if you were looking for a positive message, for hope, he was not the guy to talk to. Rewatching the exchange now still has tremendous power, particularly when Coates talks about the malleability of who counts as White.

What took me back to that day in 2017, was the headline on Eric Levitz’s piece in New York Magazine which proclaims: Ta-Nehisi Coates Is an Optimist Now A conversation about race and 2020.

Wow, just fucking wow. So, what changed for Coates? Perhaps time, age—can he be an elder at 43?—and the unexpected power of the opposition. Levitz ledes:

In recent days, as Democrats debated the definition of “reparations,” Joe Biden rationalized his opposition to integration, and socialist congresswomen started demanding the rebirth of a nation, inquiring minds wanted to know: What would Ta-Nehisi say?

I imagine that that question must simultaneously piss off and scare the fuck out of Coates. In the case of the former, the idea that he is somehow everyone’s go-to Black friend who can explain what Black people think is ludicrous. Levitz continues:

Throughout the Obama years, Ta-Nehisi Coates provided politics-watchers with a regular source of historically grounded, bracingly well-written punditry and reporting. But since 2016, the writer’s ambitions have led him off of Twitter and out of the news cycle, leaving us to navigate the Trump era’s dark waters without the aid of his insight.

That’s some heavy shit. I’ve followed Coates since his blogger days and both respect and admire his work. He is smart, well read and articulate, but no one elected him Ambassador to White People or the Second Coming of Malcolm X and those are not titles he sought. (I wonder how Justin Simien might write Coates if he were to visit the fictional Winchester University as a guest speaker?) In the case of the latter, knowing that somehow people endow what you write and say—just watch the Reparations hearings and see how all the other witnesses are somehow treated less than Coates—with intense gravity is scary. Saying the wrong shit can harm or even ruin people’s lives.

When Levitz asked:

What do you know about American politics today that you didn’t know on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated? Or, put differently, what, if anything, about the politics of Trump’s America (whether in terms of developments within the two major parties, or between them) have you found particularly edifying or surprising?

Coates responded:

I think I underestimated the left’s response to Trump. I definitely underestimated the Democratic Party’s response. Listen, I was in college during the Clinton era, in high school and college. That whole “super predator” thing that came up during Clinton’s campaign, that wasn’t—and is not—abstract to me. That was literally the folks I went to school with. It was well within the mainstream to say things like that. We’re gonna see, but the kind of pressure that our activist groups, and the left wing of the Democratic Party has been able to exert … I get this rap for being pessimistic, but it’s inspiring to see. It’s really inspiring to see.

And I think it proves something that I try to talk about from time to time, that is there is a whole range of politics that happens outside of the voting booth. I think you’re seeing the effect of that. Obviously with the fact of Bernie’s campaign in 2016, and the effects of that, but I think you’re also seeing what I would describe as this sort of long war—or a continuation of the long war—with Black Lives Matter. I think those guys got a lot of flak at the time for this notion that they were too abstract, that they weren’t doing anything, they weren’t doing this, they weren’t doing that, but I actually think you can very much see the impact right now on the Democratic race.

When Levitz asked, do:

you believe that it is possible for Biden or Harris to earn the votes of those who value racial justice, and if so, what they would have to do to earn them? And finally, whether you are concerned that they might win such votes without earning them; which is to say, that their offenses might matter more to African-American activists then to the black electorate, writ large?

Coates pushes back a bit:

Let me start by stipulating that I’m always gonna be the guy that did not think we would have a black president in my lifetime. You need to take that in consideration when you hear any sort of prognostication from me. I wouldn’t have predicted that we’d even be talking about reparations, right now. I wouldn’t have thought that.

That said, you would think looking at Biden and Kamala that they have some of that baggage, particularly around criminal justice. Biden and Kamala are different. Biden is really popular right now among black voters. But it’s worth remembering that in ’08, Hillary Clinton was really popular among black voters early too. I think Biden has more than just criminal-justice baggage when it comes to race. I think that it’s not just that. Biden said, “My goal is to lock Willie Horton up.” He’s literally on the record making the case for why his crime bill is tough. He wasn’t trying to compromise with the Republicans. This was actually an attempt to get to the right of Republicans. On top of that, you have this piece in the Post where he talks about his own rhetoric in the ’70s and ’80s, in terms of busing. I don’t know if the criminal-justice bit is going to be enough. But you start pulling all of it together, I think you start to get something that might actually be problematic.

Biden, for me, is far more than just problematic—Coates can be too diplomatic at times—Bill Clinton 3.0 is flat out toxic.

More tomorrow.

I never read the front-of-the-book reviews in The New Yorker because I’m not in New York; and I seldom read the reviews in the back-of-the-book because I most a homebody in my dotage. But occasionally a phrase or word will suck me in and that is what happened in Anthony Lane’s review of the Christian Petzold film Transit.

What caught my attention was Lane’s description of how is how Petzold took events from a 1944 novel—he both adapted the novel for the screenplay and directed the movie—and snatched them into the present. Lane, reviewing Transit as the second feature in The Grim Rapacity of “The Iron Orchard” for The New Yorker,

When is a period movie not a period movie? The question is raised, if not answered, by “Transit,” which is based on Anna Seghers’s celebrated novel of 1944. Seghers was a German Jew and a devout Communist, who was arrested after Hitler came to power; later, she fled from wartime Paris to Marseilles, and from there, in 1941, to Mexico. (She and her children landed briefly in New York, but were denied entry.) Georg, her fictional hero, plans to take the same route, though fate confounds him, and so it is with the film. Most of it is spent in Marseilles, and I’ve little doubt that Seghers would recognize the sun-warmed purgatory, both frantic and interminable, in which the characters dwell—the nervous quest for visas, the nocturnal knock on the door, the police raids on crummy hotels. One detail alone, I suspect, would startle her. The movie is set now.

Now, as in 2018 with Brexit and the immigrant crisis in Europe and the caging of small children, some in diapers, in our own country, Petzold uses Seghers’ novel as a mirror to show us what we are doing in our present.

The director is Christian Petzold, whose storytelling, in films like “Yella” (2007) and “Barbara” (2012), has tautened to an unsettling pitch. Rarely, however, has he been so implacable in his mission to freak us out, and “Transit” is all the more alarming because he refuses to labor the historical parallels. At the heart of our current crisis are refugees who, beset by danger or deprivation, need to get into Europe (or, indeed, the United States), whereas Georg (Franz Rogowski) is one of thousands who seek a way out, as occupying forces—whom we never witness en masse, but whose power grab is taken for granted—advance through the continent and head south. What concerns Petzold is not the direction of traffic, as it were, so much as the moral damage that piles up in the traffic’s wake. Paranoia and resentment are rife, as is the petty bending of rules, and readers of Kafka will feel horribly at home. “So, I can only stay here if I can prove that I don’t want to stay?” Georg says to his landlady, in Marseilles. She smiles. In voice-over, we hear the following comment: “He knew the woman would betray him, tomorrow, if not today.”

In his concluding paragraph, Lane ties Transit to another period film that most of us have seen at least once: Casablanca.. He writes:

Sitting through “Transit” is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg. Haunted and hunted, he has a slight speech impediment, the darkly despairing gaze of an insomniac, and the wariness of a fox. In his face, you read the dilemma that any displaced person, past and present, must confront: Should I run or hide?

Imagine living that way 24/7…

A long time ago in an America far, far away, Edward William Proxmire, the senior United States senator from Wisconsin, regularly presented his Golden Fleece to federal government agencies for wasting taxpayer money. Most famously there was the Pentagon’s $600 hammer and the $640 toilet seat. In 2019, both seem quaint.

As we talk about a Green New Deal, Single-Payer Healthcare, Universal College Tuition and a living wage, Conservatives ask the perennial question: how are you going to pay for the program? Matt Taibbi, examining the accounting nightmare that is the Pentagon’s budget, offers insight into wher

Matt Taibbi, writing in The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit for Rolling Stone, explains why and lays out the real nightmare that is military spending in the 21st century. He ledes:

A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, in which the dollar value of the error was discussed.

Wanted to keep you all informed of the massive inventory adjustment processed at [Ogden] on Wednesday of this week. It isn’t as bad as we first thought ($8.5 trillion). The hit…?$3.9 trillion instead of the $8.5 trillion as we first thought.

The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. Nobody lost money. It was just a paper error, one that was caught.

“Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.”

OK, let the laughter out. Take a breath. A billion dollars isn’t real money to the Pentagon. Shit, they probably spend that on shit paper each year. And then the story goes downhill. Seriously. No. That’s the good news. Taibbi continues:

The Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

What Andy, and Matt, describe here, aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features of what President Dwight David Eisenhower famously warned us against: The Military-Industrial Complex.

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment—more than $700 [or about 225.8 trumps, JH] billion a year—the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

At the tail end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

All of this is overwhelming. The numbers are mind numbing. Taibbi, in his usual manner, however, uses the perfect metaphor to help us understand the colossal fraud that is the Pentagon: Enron.

If and when the defense review is ever completed, we’re likely to find a pile of Enrons, with the military’s losses and liabilities hidden in Enron-like special-purpose vehicles, assets systematically overvalued, monies Congress approved for X feloniously diverted to Program Y, contractors paid twice, parts bought twice, repairs done unnecessarily and at great expense, and so on.

Enron at its core was an accounting maze that systematically hid losses and overstated gains in order to keep investor money flowing in. The Pentagon is an exponentially larger financial bureaucracy whose mark is the taxpayer. Of course, less overtly a criminal scheme, the military still churns out Enron-size losses regularly, and this is only possible because its accounting is a long-tolerated fraud.

We’ve seen glimpses already. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike fighter program is now projected to cost the taxpayers $1.5 trillion, roughly what we spent on the entire Iraq War. Overruns and fraud from that program alone are currently expected to cost taxpayers about 100 times what was spent on Obama’s much-ballyhooed Solyndra solar-energy deal.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

Read the first sentence of that last paragraph again:

Meanwhile, the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste…

The Defense Department admitted to $125 billion in administrative waste. How much such waste does anyone think is actually there? For comparison’s sake, the Veterans Administration’s annual budget is only $83 billion.

Taibbi goes on and on and on, documenting consistent, systemic fraud, malfeasance and incompetence in spending my tax dollars.

In my own, very small, way, I was once part of that system. For a year back in the late ’70s I was the Supply Petty Officer for G Division onboard the USS Bainbridge, CGN-25. My job was to ensure that the armory, forward missile house, after missile house and the two dozen men assigned to those spaces had all they needed—from ballpoint pens and safety boots to hydraulic fluid and repair parts—to do their job. I don’t recall what my quarterly budget was, but I know that I had to keep track of every penny and submit my accounting up the chain of command every three months.

If what Taibbi and Andy are telling us 40 years latter (and I have no reason to doubt their honesty) is true, I have to wonder at what point did my numbers get sucked down the rabbit hole?

Bonus No. 1: Welcome to the latest edition of It’s Never Ever White People’s Fault.

Bonus No. 2: Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations.

What appeared to be a positive sign of racial harmony-the election of Carl Stokes as the first black mayor of a major U.S. city in 1967, became ugly racism. In two January 1970 issues of Point Of Viəw—(Cleveland Cops White-Hot Racism) and (Silence: Crime Of Moral Elites)—I revealed how Cleveland police and others used race as a bludgeon on Stokes.

Stokes decided he would not run for a third term in 1971. It was a short interval and then a return to white ethnic mayors with Ralph Perk and Dennis Kucinich after 1971.

I wasn’t that easy with Stokes myself as I read the 1970 piece.

“… the man who thought the dream could be his ‘program’-Mayor Stokes-now finds himself tossed and buffeted so that he has become a sorry figure.”

“His main leadership gap, of course, is with the police-a battle the black community cannot afford to lose.”

Cleveland cops went as far as to station themselves at the voting booths to intimidate black voters: “Armed cops openly placed themselves in black polling places for a single purpose-to intimidate black voters.”

I noted that police were doing very little but picking up their paychecks, which were highest in Ohio by statue, later removed.

The police never forgave Stokes for his ruling that had all white police officers removed from Glenville during the 1968 battles.

In the accompanying issue I went into detail on the police treatment of Julius Boros, an NBC cameraman here from New York during the Glenville troubles.

His testimony of his brutal treatment was intense.

“I was afraid to die from the beating. You know, and I know if I go down they will jump on me and kill me right there. And they dragged me and pulled me… He grabbed and dragged me behind a squad car and that’s when I really got it; it was the third time… I bet it was a dozen policemen on me – and hitting me and I went down… All policemen,” he adds, “I should emphasize all white policemen.”

It is very disturbing.

There was an saying in the Soviet Union regarding the two, most common, daily newspapers: Pravda and Izvestia that plays on the meaning of their two names: There is no Pravda (Truth) in Izvestia (News) and no Izvestia in Pravda. After reading Adam Gopnik’s piece in The New Yorker on Denis Diderot, I feel a bit that way about The Enlightenment.

Gopnik concludes his initial paragraph in How the Man of Reason Got Radicalized this way:

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a “scientific” hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. “Reason” became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

Ouch! Gopnik continues:

It has been said that there were two Enlightenments, one high and one low. The high Enlightenment was the Enlightenment that produced the weighty works and domineering ideas; the low, or popular, Enlightenment was—in ways that scholars as unlike as Jürgen Habermas and Robert Darnton have been illuminating for the past half century—the Enlightenment of the cafés and conversation, or, at times, of pamphleteering and pornography.

Until the moment, in the late seventeen-forties, when he was asked to undertake the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was mainly a figure of the low Enlightenment.

Pamphleteering and pornography. Now there a career I could get behind.Diderot, whom I was not acquainted with previously, had a storied life and one, at least in the little I learn here, I admire. Gopnik writes:

From an early age, he loved women and women loved him back. (His marriage to, of all people, an oddly wellborn working laundress named Toinette was not a success; she would have street brawls with his mistresses.) He had what we call charm, the ability to present intelligence as though it were identical with amiability: he knew that we are sooner seduced by someone who is smart enough to enlist our sympathy than by someone who tries to enlist our sympathy by being smart. Almost alone among his peers, he was presciently aware that chattering could be a way of mattering. “What we write influences only a certain class of citizen,” he once wrote about his circle of confrères, “while our conversation influences everyone.” He understood that civil society, radiating out from the small circles of the cafés to a larger civilization, could change public opinion, noting “the effect of a small number of men who speak after having thought,” and whose “reasoned truths and errors spread from person to person until they reach the confines of the city, where they become established as articles of faith.” Minds made talk; talk made minds.

One couldn’t just drink coffee and talk and still make a living, [Mores the pity, JH] though—especially after Diderot was disinherited for his bohemianism by his bourgeois dad. He became a miscellaneous essayist and translator, scuffling to make a living by writing political pamphlets, philosophical dialogues, and pornographic books—all the while carrying on vigorous romantic liaisons with a variety of partners, from the local washerwoman to aristocratic readers. His fortunes were boosted by his first popular hit, the 1748 novel Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or “The Indiscreet Jewels,” which was a sort of “Dangerous Liaisons” of lingerie.

Gopnik continues at length before circling back to the genesis of his piece, two new books about Diderot: Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew Curran and Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment by Robert Zaretsky. If my reading time wasn’t solidly booked into next year (and maybe beyond) I would definitely pick up the book invovling Diderot and Catherine. Gopnik sets up that tale this way:

It was Diderot’s reputation as the Encyclopédie man, though, that produced the strangest and most colorful episode in his life, when he accepted an invitation to go to Russia, in 1773, to act as tutor, mentor, and enlightened lawgiver to Catherine the Great. This five-month-long episode is the sole ostensible subject of Zaretsky’s book—ostensible because Zaretsky joyously uses the occasion to write a wonderfully opinionated and erudite evaluation of the whole of Diderot’s career, of the Enlightenment, and of Russian culture. It is an irresistible topic, having already been the subject of several other investigations, as well as of a delightfully Stoppardian novel by the British writer Malcolm Bradbury.

It was a bizarre intersection. An Enlightenment foe of despotism becomes the boy toy of a despot.

Who wouldn’t want to curl up and read THAT at the beach?

The Premonitions Bureau sounds like a steampunk companion to Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Unlike Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Hawley Griffin, however, John Charles Barker is very much a real person who was, in fact, responsible for founding The Premonitions Bureau in 1967.

Sam Knight, chronicles Barker’s journey in The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future for The New Yorker. Barker was, of course, wrong—see The Randi Challenge—but Knight’s telling of the story is fascinating nonetheless.

I was most taken by a discussion towards the end of the piece where Knight explores the nocebo effect: He writes:

In Scared to Death, which was published in 1968, Barker considered the question of who is most likely to be affected by an ominous warning. “It is necessary to consider the seed and the soil,” he wrote, ascribing the potency of a prediction to its “sense of inevitability,” the personality of the person who receives it, and the way it interacts with our deepest beliefs about illness and death.

The influence of negative expectation—of fear—on our health is known as the nocebo effect. Walter Kennedy, a British doctor and drug expert, first used the term in 1961, to describe the opposite of the better-known, more benign “placebo.” (“Placebo” means “I will please,” in Latin; “nocebo” means “I will harm.”) Most researchers agree that the way we react to spurious worrying information is not dissimilar to how we respond to a sugar pill.

The nocebo effect is most often observed in connection with the side effects of drugs, cases in which self-fulfilling prophecies are common. During a 2003 trial of beta-blockers, one group of male patients was told that a drug could cause erectile dysfunction, while another group was not. After three months, thirty-two per cent of those in the first group complained of erectile problems, compared with three per cent in the second. In 2007, the maker of Eltroxin, a thyroid-replacement drug distributed in New Zealand, moved its manufacture from Canada to Germany. The active ingredients in the drug remained the same, but the new pills were larger and a different color. After the media reported that the new drug was cheaper to make, reports of side effects rose by a factor of two thousand.

Whether a nocebo can kill is an open question. In the seventies, oncologists in Australia and the U.S. reported cases of patients dying before their cancers were sufficiently advanced to end their lives. “The realization of impending death is a blow so terrible that they are quite unable to adjust to it,” Gerald Milton, the founder of the Sydney Melanoma Unit, wrote.

Between 1977 and 1982, more than fifty Hmong refugees, primarily from Laos, died in the U.S. from sudden-nocturnal-death syndrome, which the community generally interpreted as lethal nightmares, known as dab tsog. Postmortems revealed that some of the victims suffered from abnormal heart rhythms, which could have been exacerbated by the stress of immigration and the fear of an evil spirit crushing their chest in the night. “You can’t help but behave in a way that is the result of having been immersed since birth in a certain set of attitudes and thoughts,” Shelley Adler, the director of the Osher Center at the University of California, San Francisco, who interviewed hundreds of Hmong people about the deaths, told me. During a placebo trial described in 2006, a twenty-six-year-old man swallowed twenty-nine inert capsules, thinking they were antidepressants, in an apparent suicide attempt. His blood pressure collapsed and he was taken to the hospital, where the symptoms abated when he was told what he had taken.

I was not aware of the nocebo effect, but I’m not surprised that it exists. Our state of mind causes the brain to release certain chemicals in response to perceived threats and, in quantity, I have no problem believing that those chemicals, in sufficiently large quantities, can end our lives.

Yes, we can be scared to death.

Anytime profit in injected into a service, no matter how innocuous, sooner or later that profit with necessarily queer the service to the benefit of the provider and to the detriment of the customer. In most cases poor service is annoying but not catastrophic. In medicine, national defense and criminal justice, for instance, a for-profit mentality, intentional or not, costs lives.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this can be found in our jails and prisons. That a growing number of inmates in jails are there, not because they have been judged guilty of any crime but because they cannot afford bail, makes quality health care for the incarcerated literally vital; and the opioid epidemic is compounding the problems. American citizens are dying in our care.

Steve Coll, reporting in The Jail Health-Care Crisis for The New Yorker, writes:

On August 18, 2016, Sally Yates, then the Deputy Attorney General in the Obama Administration, released a memorandum directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to begin “the process of reducing—and ultimately ending—our use of privately operated prisons.” The memorandum did not address for-profit correctional-health-care companies directly, but it was the boldest turn away from the country’s partially privatized incarceration system in decades. The Presidential election was less than three months away, and Hillary Clinton, who was then leading Donald Trump comfortably in most polls, tweeted her support, suggesting that the order would stand if she won the White House. The share prices of the country’s two largest private-prison builders and operators, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (since renamed CoreCivic), fell by nearly forty per cent in a single day. After Trump was inaugurated, one of the first acts of his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was to rescind the Yates order. (After the election, according to the Washington Post, GEO hired two people who had worked in Sessions’s Senate office to lobby for the company’s interests.)

Opponents of privatized detention have argued, on philosophical and constitutional grounds, that certain governmental powers—such as those to wage war, to use lethal force in the name of the law, and to hold people in detention—should not be hired out to profit-seekers. Yates’s decision was made on a more pragmatic basis: drawing on the findings of a study produced earlier that August by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, she asserted that the government is better at running prisons than corporations are. Private companies, she wrote, “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources; they do not save substantially on costs,” and “they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.”

The concurrent rise of for-profit health care in jails and prisons has not been accompanied by the kind of public debate, congressional scrutiny, or scholarly research that has informed other fields of health policy. Yet there are notable public and nonprofit alternatives. In some European Union countries, where universal access to health care is fully established, prison and jail health care is often administered by state health services. In the Netherlands, for example, a specialized public service treats prisoners on the basis of an “equivalence principle,” meaning that the care provided should be the same as if they were free citizens.

Yes it should. Imprisonment is punishment. There is no need to additionally impose Draconian measures and make prison worse just to make the point that it is prison. Still, most people in society simply want the monsters, the super-predators, locked up so that they don’t have to worry at night and they’re all for paying the least of money possible to accomplish that goal. (Unless, of course you family name happens to be Cohen, Flynn, Gates, Manafort or Papadopoulos.)

We have models already in place that could accomplish that task. Coll cites the case of Newton Kendig and the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Coll writes:

I met Kendig last summer in his office at George Washington’s medical school, where he is currently leading an initiative to draw on academic medical expertise to improve health care for inmates. Now in his early sixties, he told me that he had chosen to practice in correctional health because he “wanted to care for at-risk populations.” He served as the director of medicine for Maryland’s correctional facilities, and then, in 1996, he joined the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which is overseen by the Surgeon General. After twenty years of service, he retired as a rear admiral and an Assistant Surgeon General.

The Commissioned Corps is another public model that might be adapted to provide an alternative to privatization. It is a uniformed medical civil service of more than six thousand physicians, public-health specialists, and other professionals. Among other duties, members design and manage medical and mental-health programs for federal prisoners. They also work for the C.D.C., to monitor and respond to epidemics, and provide medical expertise during emergencies, such as hurricanes.

Kendig told me that the corps’s public-service mission, the opportunity it provides to work for diverse federal agencies, and its generous government pensions have helped it to recruit and retain talented personnel devoted to prison health care, which is, as he put it, a “highly structured and paramilitary environment” that requires a “special person” to embrace it for a career. “The advantage of the public model is that public service gives you stability,” he continued. “The turnover in the private sector is very high.” However, the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress have proved hostile to expansions of publicly funded medical services. Last year, the Administration, as part of its drive to reduce nonmilitary federal spending, proposed cutting the corps’s budget by forty per cent.

Well, no one would be surprised by that.

[Updates: 21 March: Congressional Airline Survey.]

On Tuesday, 12 March, Ralph Nader sent the letter below to the executives of Boeing concerning the fatal crash of the company’s 737 MAX 8 on 10 March. (I’ve checked and can’t find what the acronym MAX stands for.) The Federal Aviation Administration ordered all of the planes be grounded until further notice the next day. (Correlation, is not causation, of course.)

This action came after some 42 other countries—valuing people over corporations—banned the flights of the planes. Nader writes:

I called Boeing’s office in Washington, D.C. about the new Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, with over 300 fatalities, to give them some advice. They were too busy to call back, so I’m conveying some measures they should take fast in this open letter.

Dear Boeing Executives:

You don’t seem to see the writing on the Wall. Your Boeing 737 MAX 8 is being grounded by more and more countries and foreign airlines. Airline passengers in the U.S. are switching away their reservations on this plane and there are signs of an organized boycott of this aircraft which is used by the major U.S. airlines.

It is only a matter of time before the bereaved families organize, before members of Congress start forcefully speaking out, as Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal just did. Both Senators are on the Senate’s Aviation Subcommittee.

Soon the technical dissenters in the reported “heated discussions” with FAA, the airline industry, the pilot unions and your company will see some internal e-mails, memos, and whistleblowers go public. Technical dissent cannot be repressed Continue Reading »

Yesterday, in WHO WILL SPEAK WHEN THEY COME FOR YO?U…? I looked at the roots of our very real fears concerning our machines. This morning I want to continue by following writer Jill Lepore’s exploration of where we’re headed, continuing with the rise of not the machines, but rather with Louis Hyman and the rise of temporary workers.

Lepore, writes:

Gradually, Hyman says, “the key features of the postwar corporation—stable workforce, retained earnings, and minimized risk—became liabilities rather than assets.” Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter introduced the logic underlying outsourcing. By the nineteen-eighties, corporations had to get “lean.” (I worked for Porter in those days, as a Manpower temp.) By the nineteen-nineties, they needed to “downsize.” If businesses exist not to make things and employ people but instead to maximize profits for investors, labor can be done by temps, by poorly paid workers in other countries, or by robots, whichever is cheapest.

The robots, though, were mainly for show.

That downsizing has continued as more machines replace skilled and semi-skilled workers at much lower costs. Lepore continues:

In a downward compression of the labor market, these jobs have been taken not so much by robots as by college graduates: as much as forty per cent of college graduates are currently working at jobs that do not require a college degree, Ellen Ruppel Shell reports, in The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change Four out of every five children born in the United States in 1950 went on to earn more than their parents. For children born in 1980, that ratio had fallen to one in two. Lately, it’s down to one in three. Estimates range from the cautious to the entirely hysterical, but one reasonable study predicts that, by 2050, one in four working-age American men will be unemployed, having been replaced by some form of automation. Most imminently threatened are the millions of people who work as drivers of cars and trucks, scheduled to be replaced by fleets of self-driving vehicles beginning as early as next year.

Economic inequality produces political instability and partisan death matches. Everyone worries about jobs, but people who worry about robots and people who worry about immigrants propose very different solutions. Either way, much writing in this field is, essentially, fantasy.

Much of our current political dysfunction is driven by the difference in solutions, particularly those coming out of the mind of President Donald John Trump. Lepore continues:

Donald Trump ran for President on a promise to create twenty-five million new jobs during the next decade. “My economic plan rejects the cynicism that says our labor force will keep declining, that our jobs will keep leaving, and that our economy can never grow as it did once before,” he said in September, 2016. Many economists mocked his plan, which included protecting American jobs by imposing tariffs on imports. The Economist announced a new political fault line, not between left and right but between open and closed: “Welcome immigrants or keep them out? Open up to foreign trade or protect domestic industries? Embrace cultural change, or resist it?” Barack Obama was an opener. Openers tend to talk about robots. “The next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas,” Obama said in his farewell address, in January, 2017, days before Trump’s Inauguration. “It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes many good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”

Trump is a closer. Closers tend to talk about immigrants. Trump has tweeted the word “jobs” nearly six hundred times, but not once has he tweeted the words “robot,” “robots,” or “automation.” “We’re going to fight for every last American job,” he promised from the floor of a Boeing plant in South Carolina, weeks after taking office. “I don’t want companies leaving our country,” the new President said. “There will be a very substantial penalty to be paid when they fire their people and move to another country, make the products, and think that they are going to sell it back over what will soon be a very, very strong border.” That June, Boeing laid off nearly two hundred employees from the South Carolina plant, as part of a forty-per-cent reduction in its production of 777s. In 2017, the company laid off nearly six thousand workers.

Trump’s Administration mocks fears of a robot invasion. Closers usually do. “I’m not worried at all,” Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin said two years ago. Nevertheless, some think tankers suggested that Trump’s election was “secretly about automation.” And a study published last summer in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy—whose lead author, Carl Frey, is the same guy who made the list of the seven hundred and two most computerizable jobs—argues that the robot caravan got Trump elected. Measuring the density of robots and comparing them with election returns, Frey and his colleagues found that “electoral districts that became more exposed to automation during the years running up to the election were more likely to vote for Trump.” Indulging in a counterfactual, they suggest that a less steeply rising increase in exposure to robots would have tipped both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin toward voting for Hillary Clinton.

The robots aren’t so much taking our jobs, yet, as they are taking our country. For me, that is much scarier.

You know the quote that begins: First they came for the socialists… That was from 73 years ago. If I were to echo that thought today, I might begin: First they came for the stevedores. They, of course, in 2019 are the machines, the very real descendants of Karel Čapek’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti.

We are all replaceable, more or less, mostly more, by algorithms. No job is safe and when he get to the point that that machines start creating machines—think of Deep Thought (not this one, this one) and Earth—then we all become obsolete. Yeah, you can point to gawds and spirituality and all that nonsense, but the machines won’t give a toss about any of that. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll be dead before any of that happens.

Jill Lepore, reporting in Are Robots Competing for Your Job? for The New Yorker, writes:

How can you know if you’re about to get replaced by an invading algorithm or an augmented immigrant? “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated,” Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tells Oppenheimer. “If it can’t, it won’t.” (Rotten luck for people whose job description is “Predict the future.”) Baldwin offers three-part advice: (1) avoid competing with A.I. and R.I.; (2) build skills in things that only humans can do, in person; and (3) “realize that humanity is an edge not a handicap.” What all this means is hard to say, especially if you’ve never before considered being human to be a handicap. As for the future of humanity, Oppenheimer offers another cockamamie rule of three: “Society will be divided into three general groups. The first will be members of the elites, who will be able to adapt to the ever-changing technological landscape and who will earn the most money, followed by a second group made up primarily of those who provide personalized services to the elite, including personal trainers, Zumba class instructors, meditation gurus, piano teachers, and personal chefs, and finally a third group of those who will be mostly unemployed and may be receiving a universal basic income as compensation for being the victims of technological unemployment.”

I got a smile when Lepore also referenced Douglass Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy She added:

Readers of Douglas Adams will recognize this sort of hooey from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Long ago, in a galaxy not at all far away, the people of the planet Golgafrincham were divided into three groups: A, “all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers”; B, “hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants” (the group that everyone else considers to be “a bunch of useless idiots”); and, C, “all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things.” The B people, told they must lead an expedition to colonize another planet, rocket away in a starship, having been led to believe that their planet is doomed. “Apparently it was going to crash into the sun or something,” the B ship’s captain tells Arthur Dent, vaguely wondering why the other ships never followed. “Or maybe it was that the moon was going to crash into us. Something of the kind. Absolutely terrifying prospect whatever it was.” Dent inquires, “And they made sure they sent you lot off first, did they?”

…The historian and sometime futurist Yuval Noah Harari has a name for the C people: he calls them the “useless class.” Some futurists suggest that, in our Asimov-y future, these sort of people might wind up spending their empty days playing video games. Otherwise, they’ll wage a revolution, an eventuality that the self-proclaimed “cognitive elite”—the A people, who believe themselves to be cleverer than the cleverest robots—intend to wait out in fortified lairs. (Peter Thiel owns nearly five hundred acres of land in New Zealand, complete with its own water supply.) More popular is the proposal to pay the C people for doing nothing, in order to avert the revolution. “It’s going to be necessary,” [Elon] Musk said during a summit in Dubai two years ago, joining a small herd of other billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, and Stewart Butterfield, of Slack, who endorse universal basic income. It’s either that or build a wall.

All of this has been long coming. Early in the 20th century, Capitalism began to prepare for the replacement of human workers by making human workers more replaceable. Lepore cites Louis Hyman’s Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. [Side note: one of my nieces was married this past weekend at a rustic resort in Dover, Ohio, owned, I was told, by Mancan founder Jonathan Mason.] Lepore writes:

Hyman argues that in the course of the past century management consultants, taking the wheel, reinvented work by making employers more like machines, turning work into the kind of thing that robots could do long before there were any robots able to do it. His story begins in the nineteen-twenties, with the rise of management consulting, and takes a turn in the fifties, with the first major wave of automation, a word coined in 1948. “Machines should be used instead of people whenever possible,” a staffer for the National Office Managers Association advised in 1952. To compete, workers had to become as flexible as machines: able to work on a task basis; ineligible for unions; free at night; willing to work any shift; requiring no health care or other benefits, not so much as a day off at Christmas; easy to hire; and easier to fire.

Remember, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was released in 1927.

Back on 5 April 2012 I passed a weight goal and got my weight under 200 pounds for the first time in a couple of decades. As a reward I invested in a four-bowl ōryōki set. (The link in the original post no longer works, but you can see lots of similar sets here. In the last couple of years my weight went back up again, pushing, briefly, above 230 pounds.

I’ve been working since the beginning of the year to get back to my target weight and this week I’m back under 220 pounds again.

Key to this effort, for me, is the concept of ŌryŌki.

John Kain, in ŌryŌki and Eating Just The Right Amount for Tricycle, writes:

ŌryŌki, often translated as “just the right amount,” is a highly choreographed ritual of serving and eating food—a ceremonial dance of giving, receiving, and appreciation. It is a practice that was codified in China during the T’ang dynasty and was the model for the sweeping grace of the tea ceremony. Practiced, with a few variations, throughout the Zen schools, it was also adopted—in America—by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan founder of the Shambhala lineage. Practically speaking, it is perhaps the most efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and least wasteful way to feed a large group of people sitting in a meditation hall, or a single person at home for that matter. Yet more specifically—and arising from Zen’s insistence on blending the sacred and the mundane—ōryōki unifies daily life and “spiritual practice.” It is essentially a state of mind, a way of being.

When I first got the bowls I just enjoyed the apportionment and I took lots of photos that today would end up on Instagram. I also spent a great deal of time reading some really great books like: Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food by Jan Chozen Bays (my favorite. The book is out-of-print but well wroth the effort to track down a used copy); 3 Bowls: Vegetarian Recipes from an American Zen Buddhist Monastery by Nancy O’Hara; Cosmos In A Carrot: A Zen Guide To Eating Well by Carmen Yuen; and my most recent edition—not vegetarian, but still really good—Buddha Bowls: 100 Nourishing One-Bowl Meals by Kelli Foster.

So, I got pretty good at the preparation and eating parts, but the last aspect, cleaning up didn’t—partially because I was living in an apartment—didn’t click. But for the last several years I’ve enjoyed living in semi-rural southwestern Cuyahoga County where I have lots and lots of nature around me. As I wrote this this morning I realized that the time had come to take the next step. Kain explains:

Participants sit in a meditation posture and wait to offer their empty bowls as the servers bring food and, in a series of hand gestures (beyond the chants of dedication and appreciation, ōryōki is practiced in silence), fill the bowls to the requested level. The ecology of ōryōki is complete: there is no waste. Participants are urged to take just the right amount of food—not a crumb should remain. The cleaning liquid, after it is used to wash each bowl, is partially drunk and the remainder collected and distributed in the garden. Each movement of ōryōki is compact, subtle, and designed to unfold in harmony, demanding meticulous awareness to what is happening in the moment.

This washing up aspect fascinates me and now, that I have a garden to water, I can close the circle. Kain continues:

Oryoki is not about living some altered state of sustained “perfection,” nor is it about performance, or even detail—it is simply our lives. Oryoki subtly and steadfastly exposes the patterns and sticking points of our minds and our behaviors. As Zoketsu Norman Fischer, senior dharma teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center and founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation, says, “The intensity of ōryōki practice is such that you get to see your own tendencies in relation to eating and serving a meal. Someone eating can ask for too much food, and a server can give too little—greed and stinginess arise. Oryoki practice develops kindness and clarity and the sense of not overdoing or under-doing anything. It teaches smoothness and efficiency and the sense of acting with a good heart.”

The second half of Kain’s article focuses more on the spiritual aspects of ōryōki, and that’s fine, but for now, just focusing on focusing and finding the right amount is more important for me.

In a companion article to Kain’s John Loori concluded:

Oryoki is a liturgy in a sense, but it’s a liturgy that doesn’t require formal bowls and a zendo setting. You can do ōryōki at McDonald’s. It has to do with a state of consciousness, with the way you use your mind. It has to do with the way you receive food, the gratitude that is felt when you receive food. The Meal Gatha reminds us why we take this food, what the whole point of it is: it is for all sentient beings. Ōryōki is about the fact that we consume life, not rocks; we live on life, and we do so consciously and with gratitude.

Works for me.

I remember being 15 and learning about the environment. My thinking extended to college and pursing a degree in Ecology or some such and getting a job doing something about the environment when I was in my 20s. Greta Thunberg didn’t have that luxury of dreaming about some distant future when she could make a difference.

Ten years from now, when she’s in her mid-20s, may be too late. Greta need to take action now, and she did. Jonathan Watts, writing in Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t’ for The Guardian, ledes:

Greta Thunberg cut a frail and lonely figure when she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament building last August. Her parents tried to dissuade her. Classmates declined to join. Passersby expressed pity and bemusement at the sight of the then unknown 15-year-old sitting on the cobblestones with a hand-painted banner.

Eight months on, the picture could not be more different. The pigtailed teenager is feted across the world as a model of determination, inspiration and positive action. National presidents and corporate executives line up to be criticised by her, face to face. Her skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for climate) banner has been translated into dozens of languages. And, most striking of all, the loner is now anything but alone.

On 15 March, when she returns to the cobblestones (as she has done almost every Friday in rain, sun, ice and snow), it will be as a figurehead for a vast and growing movement. The global climate strike this Friday is gearing up to be one of the biggest environmental protests the world has ever seen. As it approaches, Thunberg is clearly excited.

“It’s amazing,” she says. “It’s more than 71 countries and more than 700 places, and counting. It’s increasing very much now, and that’s very, very fun.”

Greta reminded me of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, whom she credits for her own decision to protest.

The climate strike was inspired by students from the Parkland school in Florida, who walked out of classes in protest against the US gun laws that enabled the massacre on their campus. Greta was part of a group that wanted to do something similar to raise awareness about climate change, but they couldn’t agree what. Last summer, after a record heatwave in northern Europe and forest fires that ravaged swathes of Swedish land up to the Arctic, Thunberg decided to go it alone. Day one was 20 August 2018.

“I painted the sign on a piece of wood and, for the flyers, wrote down some facts I thought everyone should know. And then I took my bike to the parliament and just sat there,” she recalls. “The first day, I sat alone from about 8.30am to 3pm – the regular schoolday. And then on the second day, people started joining me. After that, there were people there all the time.”

She kept her promise to strike every day until the Swedish national elections. Afterwards, she agreed to make a speech in front of thousands of people at a People’s Climate March rally. Her parents were reluctant. Knowing Thunberg had been so reticent that she had previously been diagnosed with selective mutism, they tried to talk her out of it. But the teenager was determined. “In some cases where I am really passionate, I will not change my mind,” she says. Despite her family’s concerns, she delivered the address in nearly flawless English, and invited the crowd to film her on their mobile phones and spread the message through social media. “I cried,” says her proud dad.

One of the reasons for our 26th Amendment was that we were sending young men old enough to fight but not old enough to vote off to a war that a growing number of Americans disapproved of. I agree with Cody Zuckerman and the other children at Future Leaders for Democracy, we should lower the voting age even further. Greta and David and Emma and Cameron and every other unable-to-vote citizen who is standing up deserves our support because, just like those young men fighting in Vietnam, they will bear the burden of of our perverse handiwork. They, not us, will reap what we have sown.

Bonus No. 1: Briahna Gray interviews Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at SXSW 2019.