Truth has never mattered despots, fascists and thugs. George Orwell devoted an entire book to an obscure worker in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. Having said that, I also recognize that well-meaning people accept objectively false information as truth because they need to do so to justify their actions. (I wasn’t speeding officer, I was keeping pace with traffic.)

We’ve got bigger problems, however, than speeding tickets or how a pair of jeans fits our spouse. We have an entire executive branch not only lying to the us from day one, but a leader and his staff that double down on lies when they’re caught.

Jonah Goldberg, writing in his weekly G-File piece, Who Cares about Truth Anymore, Anyway? for the National Review, has barbs for both the left and the right, but he begins close to home, with the eight Republican members of the House of Representatives who (led by Ohio’s own Jim Jordan) filed articles of impeachment against President Donald John Trump appointee Deputy Attorney General Rod Jay Rosenstein. Goldberg writes:

Consider the articles of impeachment filed against Rod Rosenstein this week. I am not disputing that there are serious people with serious complaints about Rosenstein. But this was not the work of serious people. I would think that reasonable people could agree that impeaching any government official is a serious thing. Impeaching this official in particular, given the stakes and the controversies associated with him, is a particularly serious affair.

And yet, the authors of this document dashed it off like a college kid trying to write a term paper at the last minute and striving to hit the required page length by submitting it in 18-point font.

My favorite charge is that “Under Mr. Rosenstein’s supervision, Christopher Steele’s political opposition research was neither vetted before it was used in October 2016 nor fully revealed to the FISC.”

In October of 2016, Rosenstein was a U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland. What was he supposed to do? Barge into the Justice Department offices and demand that a document he didn’t know existed be vetted more thoroughly? Rosenstein wasn’t appointed to his current position until 2017. And you know who appointed him? Donald Trump.

Which points to the real farce here.

The bulk of the complaint is that Rosenstein has not given Congress the documents it wants. In the abstract, this is a legitimate disagreement. And, as a general proposition, I’m all in favor of Congress reasserting its oversight power vis-à-vis the executive branch. But that isn’t what’s going on here. Congressional oversight of the Trump administration has at best been minimal,and some committees have acted like broom-pushers behind the elephants when the circus comes to town.

But Rosenstein is not a branch of government. The president is. And Rosenstein works for the president. Trump could order Rosenstein to hand over any documents he sees fit. He hasn’t done that. As Jack Goldsmith, hardly a left-wing loon, writes:

Impeachment, moreover, is not an appropriate remedy for Rosenstein’s alleged transgression of insufficient transparency. He, after all, works for the president, who is ultimately responsible for the information the Justice Department gives to Congress and who can order Rosenstein to disclose more on threat of removal. Congress is overstepping its authority in micromanaging the executive branch by seeking to impeach an official for refusing to turn over information that the president has not ordered him to turn over. Congress appears to have only once used the impeachment tool against an executive-branch official other than the president— n 1876, when it impeached Secretary of War William Belknap after he resigned for accepting bribes and kickbacks in office.

If the impeachers were seriously outraged—truly, seriously, outraged — by the executive branch’s behavior, they might be moving to impeach the executive.Or, at the very least, they would be imploring the president to order Rosenstein to hand over these materials or to fire Rosenstein for refusing to do so.

They’re not doing that. Why? Because they’re putting on a show. This impeachment effort is a prop in the passion play, a talking point for Hannity’s opening monologues and the president’s Twitter feed.

Goldberg has more, much more, including his view on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Gini Coefficient. (Ocasio-Cortez is a 2011 graduate of Boston University with degrees in economics and international relations.) You can argue with her understanding of economics—and many on the right do—but she does have the chops. Despite that, Goldberg writes:

There’s no better example in the moment [of how charismatic personalities have replaced… traditional institutions as sources of information, morality, and politics.] than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who strikes me as a kind of lame reimagining of a young Barack Obama with a woman in the lead. Cortez doesn’t know a lot about economics, [see above Jonah, JH] beyond some handy buzz-phrases and shibboleths. She likes to brag about how she knows what the Gini coefficient is but thinks unemployment is low because people are working two jobs.

See, this is how Truth becomes truth.

Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people of color have been murdered in the United States of America since 6 December 1865 for the crime of not being white. The murder of Trayvon Martin was not special, yet, coming in the third year in office of a president who would say: If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon, his death was the seismic shift that put the lie to myth of a post-racial America.

Writing in How Jay-Z’s new docuseries on Trayvon Martin exposes America for The Guardian, Steve Rose drills down to the gusher:

[Trayvon] Martin’s killing was the moment the whole country realised the system wasn’t working. In particular, the case brought attention to the controversial “stand your ground” law [See also Danielle Young’s piece yesterday, JH], backed by the National Rifle Association, justifying the use of deadly force in self-defence–which has heavily favoured white shooters of black people. In the broader sense, Martin’s case presaged America’s current racial and political divisions. For a brief, wishful moment after the election of Barack Obama, the country imagined itself a post-racial society, but as the final episode of Rest in Power lays out, it was really just a few short steps away from riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the NFL kneeling protests, and the far-right marching through Charlottesville chanting white nationalist slogans with the tacit endorsement of Donald Trump.

George Zimmerman is our Gavrilo Princip.

We ought not to be surprised that progressive—dare I say socialist?—Democrats are in the news in Kansas. This is the state where the chant Cut That Tax! Cut That Tax! Cut That Tax! drove the state into a ditch. Working-class Kansans are feeling the pain and they’re not happy about that. Chuck in President Donald John Trump’s pissing contest trade war with China and the plummeting prices of beef, wheat, corn and soybeans driven by tariffs and you get a lot of unhappy people who voted for Trump in 2016.

All of this has come together to open the door Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sander to stump for James Thompson in Kansas and Cory Bush in Missouri.

Sarah Smarsh, reporting inThey thought this was Trump country. Hell no for The Guardian, writes:

Through the thick cement walls of this downtown Wichita convention hall, we heard the roar of 4,000 Kansans awaiting speeches by Sanders, Thompson and progressive rocket ship Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in support of Thompson’s run for Congress. It was Ocasio-Cortez’s first political appearance outside New York after her remarkable primary win in June, when the 28-year-old democratic socialist defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats in Washington. Here in the midwest, Thompson–who also has never held office–has tapped into similar yearning for a representative who has more old friends at the local pub than in DC.

The choice of location for Ocasio-Cortez’s debut outside New York is poetic: like Sanders, she and Thompson have refused corporate donations, and this district is home to perhaps the greatest conservative influencers in US history – the Koch brothers, whose political network pledged to spend $400m on conservative candidates before the midterms.

What makes Thompson’s run particularly important is that he has chosen to beard the lion in his den. Smarsh explains:

It’s one thing to push the Democratic party left in New York City. It is quite another to rabble-rouse for universal healthcare, wind energy and a livable wage in Charles Koch’s backyard. Doing so takes, my friends in the north-east might say, “hutzpah”.

Or, as my Kansas farmer grandpa might have said: “That Jim is full of piss and vinegar.”

No congressional candidate has ever done what Thompson is doing in this era of unrestricted corporate campaign donations: hold a progressive sword at the precise geographic heart of the dark-money beast. When I asked whether anyone has, say, tried to break his kneecaps, Thompson let out a big laugh.

“I’d like to see them try,” he said. “That’s one good thing about being 6ft 2.”

Such humor–joking in a manner that polite society might view as unseemly–is the necessary roughness that millions of Americans develop to survive on job sites, in barrooms, in their own homes while the air conditioning window unit drips water on to the carpet.

It only makes sense that a progressive movement unifying the working class across lines of race, gender, age, religion and location would contain candidates like Thompson, who is both a civil rights attorney who represented detained immigrants and victims of police brutality and a former bouncer at a Wichita country-western nightclub called InCahoots.

Thompson is my kind of Democrat. If he were running in Ohio’s 16th I’d be busting my hump, and maybe my bank account, for him. Why? Smarsh hits all the buttons:

Thompson told me he was first encouraged to run for office by Republican friends who felt out of sync with a party morphing into an “insanely right caricature”. A pro-choice, gun-owning military veteran who supports legal weed and social security expansion, Thompson can kick dirt with farmers at rural events, walk in Wichita’s recent pride and Juneteenth parades, and post a photo of himself smiling with two guys wearing “bearded deplorable” shirts after a long conversation about the issues.

I obviously don’t know Thompson or Ocasio-Cortez beyond their media faces, but what I’m seeing, hearing and reading so far tells me that they have the No. 1 attribute that America needs in 2018: Authenticity.

No, not that Norm, this Norm. Norm is a frequent contributor to one of my local newsweeklies in both the guest and the letters-to-the-editor columns.

Today I left this comment to his most recent Guest Column, Democrats forgot to tell us:

Good morning Norm,

I’d like to buy you a beer. While our politics are very different, we do have points of commonality.

Like you, I’m a Navy veteran (I was a gunner’s mate on board the USS Bainbridge, CGN 25 from 1 January 1976 though 6 December 1979) and I’m a resident of southwestern Cuyahoga County (I live in North Royalton).

I also suspect that we are of an age (I’ll turn 63 this year) and from reading your columns and letters-to-the-editor, you’re clearly articulate and an impassioned writer (I’m a journalist and educator by profession).

You can reach me at hessAThavecoffeewillwriteDOTcom if you agree that sharing a beer isn’t crazy.

I’m following this thread, so feel free to reply here as well.

Cheers,

Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write

We’ll see how this goes.

And the hits just keep rolling in…

#SayHerName: Celebrities Draw Attention to the Death of Nia Wilson in the Week Following her Fatal Stabbing

White people—including me, including you—must take into the marrow of our privileged bones the truth that ALL black people fear for their lives DAILY in America and have done so for GENERATIONS. White people DO NOT have equivalence for this fear of violence.

Given those givens, we must ask our (white)selves- how “decent” are we really? Not in our intent, but in our actions? In our lack of action? —Anne Hathaway.

Florida Cop Says His Chief Instructed Him to Frame 2 Black Men for Crimes They Didn’t Commit

Mississippi Cop Caught on Video Using Stun Gun on Handcuffed Shoplifting Suspect

Mother Says Medics Denied Her Daughter an Ambulance Ride Because They Assumed She Couldn’t Afford It. Her Daughter Died Days Later

A Small Arizona Town Is Saying It’s Not as Racist as It Appeared on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Show.

White Driver Follows Black Man to His House, Calls Him the N-Word in Road Rage Incident.

Wells Fargo Employees Call Cops on 78-Year-Old Black Woman After Refusing to Cash Her Check.

#CouponingWhileBlack (Again): Dollar General Employee Calls Cops on Black Woman Using Digital Coupons.

Protestors Shut Down Convenience Store After Video Shows Owner Kicking Black Woman.

Previously…

I don’t remember the last time I disagreed with Ralph Nader on a topic, but this is one of the rare ones. Every single time I go into my bank—something I only do maybe once every four or six weeks—the teller gives me a sales pitch for a certificate of deposit or a new credit card. I always politely turn them down because even the really good CDs are paying less than the current rate of inflation so you’re losing money.

Now, I think this is part of the plan because the only way to beat inflation with your saving is either to own property or, and this is really what the big boys want us to do, play the stock market.

Yes, Nader is right, 2.25 percent doesn’t suck nearly as bad as 0.2 percent. My problem is that it still sucks, /rant.

Nader, in Savers Alert: Tens of Billions of Higher Interest Dollars are Yours for the Asking, writes:

American bank customers are losing billions of dollars in higher interest payments because they’re not being “frugal shoppers” and making a telephone call or sending an email to compare interest rates. If they did, they would find out that the Federal Reserve’s three years of gradual interest rate increases have finally pushed the banks—traditional and online—to make ten times more in interest payments to savers than millions of bank customers are now receiving.

There are over ten trillion dollars in bank savings deposits and money market accounts at places like Fidelity or State Street. In the past four years, such institutions have been reluctant to pass on the benefits of higher interest rates to their trusting savers. However, about a year ago when the interest spread between what the interest banks charge borrowers and the interest banks pay savers became Continue Reading »

I have to believe that the vast majority of people in general—and politicians in particular—know only six words from Bruce Bruce Springsteen’s classic (released as the title song on his seventh album in June 1984; just in time for my graduation from Ohio University): I was born in the USA. The song isn’t about what they think—that the USA is the greatest country on Earth and the best place to be born—but when you read the lyrics you come away with a different view. I’ve said before that through no merit of my own, I’m part of the world’s one-percent: I’m European-American, Male and I was born in the USA.

How I, and the rest of us got here, however, isn’t all that glorious and not what you learned in American History. I suspect that Springsteen’s anthem speaks to a great number of the supporters of our president. If you, like me, are not a fan, then following the lyrics to Born In USA can be instructive as to how we arrived in 2018. AbBetter course, however, would be to read Michael Harriot’s essay: Donald Trump Is America’s Greatest President.

Harriot begins with a 1920 quote from H.L. Mencken (Harriot ledes with the bold text below but provides the full quote in the comments.):

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Harriot explains:

In their attempt to convince the world of his lack of qualifications, [European-American liberals] conveniently forget that this misogynist, this lie-spewing, racism-filled narcissist, is the perfect person to represent America.

Never before has one person so perfectly embodied the qualities of this nation.

If one was to create a sentient being out of America’s past and present, it would look like Donald Trump. It would hate anyone who is not white. It would believe itself to be an infallible “stable genius.” It would hide secrets. It would whitewash its past. It would lie incessantly. It would rip brown babies from their mothers’ arms. It would criminalize Muslims. It would mirror the intellect and sentiment of the vast majority of people who fill the country from sea to shining sea.

Donald Trump is America.

Harriot concludes:

Like this country, Donald Trump is a mirage. His greatness is a figment of a collective white imagination that envisions a bright, shining star where there is only a dumpster fire.

He is a first-rate con artist. He is a counterfeit, autocratic dullard impersonating a commander in chief. He is every white foot that has ever been placed on a black neck. He is hate personified and incompetence exemplified. He is the imbecilic farce of a white man convinced of his own supremacy.

Yet, he remains.

Like “racial resentment.” Like the electoral college. Like the two-party system. Like the 53 percent. Like white supremacy and black oppression. Like hate. Like injustice. Like apathy. Like rage. Like us.

Like the masses’ unrelenting adoration for this beloved, blessed, once-great thing called America.

There is greatness in the unrealized aspirations of our best citizens, but aspirations and $2 will get you a cup of coffee.

Making the dream reality takes a lot more hard work.

And oh, here’re are the outtakes…

Local journalism isn’t dead, yet, but the signs are all there. That’s why I think reminding us that corporate money doesn’t have to own journalism or journalists is important; that the idea that the story is more important than the access is vital.

For 50 years Roldo Bartimole was one of the exceptions that proved the rule.

Erick Trickey, writing in Roldo Bartimole, Cleveland’s original alt-journalist for the Columbia Journalism Review, ledes:

The day Roldo Bartimole turned 35—April 5, 1968—a crisis of conscience struck him. Martin Luther King had been assassinated the night before, and riots had broken out in major US cities. Bartimole, a Cleveland journalist who’d gone to the 1963 March on Washington, attended a meeting between George Wiley, a civil-rights activist, and several Ohio college professors. He was appalled when the white professors asked Wiley when riots, not injustice, would end.

“It felt to me like things were as bad as they could be,” Bartimole recalls.

By day, Bartimole worked in The Wall Street Journal’s Cleveland bureau. He moonlighted as an anonymous writer for a Cleveland Council of Churches newsletter. At the nation’s moment of despair, he felt the need to do more.

So Bartimole actually made the move that countless reporters have fantasized about. He quit his newsroom job and started his own publication, a newsletter he named Point Of Viəw.

[The inverted ‘e’ on the masthead was suggestive of the publication’s POV. JH]

“I tried to tell the story that I saw as a reporter,” recalls Bartimole, “but knew would never be published in a traditional newspaper. So I had to invent something.” Typed after hours on a church’s IBM Selectric, printed on heavy-stock 11-by-14-inch paper, Point Of Viəw became the underground samizdat of Cleveland’s political, business, and journalistic circles.

Trickey goes onto to chronicle Roldo’s storied career and of course the CJR couldn’t resist topping Trickey’s piece with what Roldo call the photo that wouldn’t die. (Scene also used the photo for Sam Allard’s Happy 85th Birthday, Roldo! cover story in April.)

Bartimole became Cleveland’s first alternative journalist—a role he continued for 50 years, until he called it quits this February, just before he turned 85. For 32 years, Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw, funded via subscriptions, combined media criticism with inside information and radical critiques of the local power elite. His solo reporting career inspired comparisons to I.F. Stone’s national weekly of the 1950s and 1960s. After retiring the newsletter in 2000, Bartimole continued as a columnist for the alt-weekly Cleveland Free Times and various local websites—always living on a very low income, the self-imposed price of independence.

Tricky’s entire piece is well worth your time, but the ending, when Trickey gets to Roldo’s legacy should be closely read in our era of 21st century fake news and the expulsion, banning and murder of journalists.

What legacy is Bartimole leaving, in Cleveland or beyond? His own answer is modest. “One person doesn’t make that much of a difference,” he says. “It takes movements.”

But Sam Allard, a staff writer for the alt-weekly Cleveland Scene, disagrees. Allard, 30, wrote about Bartimole’s influence on Cleveland journalism for Scene this winter. “He took a real interest in mentoring and fostering younger journalists in Cleveland, myself included,” says Allard. “He was actively calling, emailing and setting up coffee dates.” Allard says Bartimole advised him on his 2017 coverage of an issue dear to the elder journalist: an activist group’s aborted battle against new public funding for Quicken Loans Arena. “One of the things he saw his role as was helping shape media discourse in town. He thinks it’s important to reach out to people who are crafting the narrative.”

In local journalism, calling out unelected power can make reporters uncomfortable and power brokers hostile. “One of the things that’s inspired me the most about Roldo,” says Allard, “is that he spent his entire career writing and reporting critically about people he interacted with regularly. It’s a lot more courageous to report critically about people in your town or community.”

Bartimole’s advice for young journalists trying to cover power in their city is simple. “Look at records, and look at who benefits and who pays,” he says. “Pick out, what are the institutions making decisions? How do certain things get before the public officials to ratify? Look at the organizations that are considered quote-unquote ‘good.’ What are they doing with their money? How are they collecting it?”

Unelected power brokers “come out when there’s certain crises and things have to be quote-unquote ‘handled,’” Bartimole says. “If you watch, you can see that happen. Who pulls certain strings at certain times?”

At a time when we’re asking the question: Who suffers when local news disappears? the answer certainly isn’t the rich and powerful that Roldo afflicted for 50 years.

.

And the hits just keep rolling in…

#CouponingWhileBlack (Again): Dollar General Employee Calls Cops on Black Woman Using Digital Coupons

Protestors Shut Down Convenience Store After Video Shows Owner Kicking Black Woman

Utah Man Impersonated Officer, Threatened to Kill 2 Men Believed to be in the Country Illegally: Report

Cop Kept His Job After Calling Teenage Black Girl a ‘Wild Animal That Needs To Be Put Down’

Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report

#PermitPatty Reported a 13-Year-Old Selling Hot Dogs, Instead of Shutting Him Down, the City Helped Him Get His Permit

The Stand Your Ground Law Protects Shooter Who Killed Black Man Over Parking Space, Sheriff Says

Previously…

I’ve only flown Southwest Airlines once or twice and that was a couple of decades ago. I’ve only flown twice—a round-trip to New York 15 years ago—in the 21st century. Not because of any fear, but simply because I don’t like the hassle and I’ve been all the places I every wanted to really go.

Southwest’s iconic peanuts—and the cattle-car boarding procedure—are what I remember about the airline. The former seems to be on the outs and Ralph Nader is not pleased.

Gary Kelly, CEO
Southwest Airlines
2702 Love Field Dr.
Dallas, TX 75235

Dear Mr. Kelly:

Why would an airline company, which is so sensitive to its consumers that it does NOT charge for reservation changes or baggage fees etc. (as other airlines such as Delta, United, and American do), announce that it will no longer serve peanuts to airline passengers after August 1, 2018?

Peanuts are a part of Southwest’s brand from back when the stalwart Herb Kelleher started this upstart airline in Texas. He said its fares are peanuts and gave away peanuts to symbolize that marketing advantage.

Why give up such a history? Could your critics say that is because your fares are no longer so comparatively lower? You wouldn’t want that to hit the Continue Reading »

While the official record of America’s battle for civil rights in the ’50s and ’60s focuses almost exclusively on the former states in rebellion, prejudice, racism and systematic oppression was actually more prevalent, although better hidden, in the states that fought on the winning side of the War of Northern Aggression.

Thanks to President Richard Milhous Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Republicans came out as racist as fuck. This has allowed the Democratic Party to take anyone not racist or wishing to stay under the sheets, for granted. Michael Harriot is not happy about that.

Harriot, writing in 5 Things Black Voters Should Demand From the Democratic Party for The Root, calls the Democratic Party out.

As the 2018 midterms approach, prepare to see a string of smiling Caucasians kissing black babies and struggling to clap on beat in black churches before they run back to their campaign buses and dip themselves in a vat of Purel to wash the negro off their palms and mouths before returning back to their melanin-deficient communities to ignore black voices and continue white supremacy.

And, like always, black people will carry them across the finish line and wait for them to take our votes for granted. But this time, we should demand a few things for our votes.

To address the deficiency, Harriot suggests:

1. Rewrite section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act. This should be the first thing on the agenda of a Democratic-controlled House and/or Senate…

2. Establish A U.S. Commission on Law Enforcement. In 1957, Congress created the United States Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan, independent division of the federal government to investigate and report civil rights violations…

3. Eliminate state and federal funding for private prisons. Democratic lawmakers on both the state and federal level should pledge to not vote for private prisons that contribute to mass incarceration while profiting off crime…

4. Enact Gun control legislation. Again, this should be a demand for any lawmaker on the local or federal level…

5. Ensure access to health care for all citizens. America is one of the few developed countries on the planet without universal health care to its citizens… Whether it be incremental or all-at-once, Dems should fight for health care for all citizens…

I have no doubt that we’ll hear all five points discussed in campaigns, but New Democrats—post Clinton/Gore—are great at lip service but way light on action. Our hope is that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes running in the fall push the old guard out, or at least get them off their dead asses.

In Ohio history the Kent State shootings of 4 May 1970 loom large, but before there were four dead in Ohio, there were as many as 400 dead in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City.

In this exchange between Stephen Kurtz and Elena Poniatowska in The Paris Review’s Art Of Fiction No. 238, Poniatowska speaks to how the events of 2 October 1968 radicalized her:

STEPHEN KURTZ: You have said that, in some sense, you were radicalized by the events of Tlatelolco—by the government’s reaction to the quake and its ­responsibility for the structural weaknesses of the buildings that collapsed. What did it mean to you to be “radicalized,” and what were you trying to achieve in the books you wrote about these events?

ELENA PONIATOWSKA: To respond to your last remark first, I don’t think I have ever tried to “achieve” anything in my writing except to produce a good book. Which is to say, to follow Buffon’s prescription of thinking, feeling, and expressing well, with clarity of mind, soul, and taste. I never followed a plan, I follow my instinct. There are times in the history of literature—I think of the England of Elizabeth or of eighteenth-century France—when, for some reason that has to do with the development of the language or .?.?. I don’t know what, it would have been difficult to write badly. That is less true now. So I work to pare down passages that are unnecessarily long and to eliminate sentences that I love but that call too much attention to themselves. These things are well known to all writers.

As for being radicalized, I may be guilty myself of having used that word. More accurately, nothing new was revealed to me by these events. One saw the evidence of corruption daily, but here it was, as Americans say, in your face—soldiers shooting and killing innocent people, mothers and children and unarmed students conducting a peaceful demonstration in an open space with no means of escape since the streets leading to it had been barred.

Beyond that, the events of Tlatelolco happened soon after the death of my younger brother, at the age of twenty-one. His death had nothing to do with those events, but, of course, had the effect of enabling me to grieve with the survivors and to feel, in a personal way, the terrible loss of young lives, full of promise. At the same time, if my own grief had entered too directly into the book, it would have weakened it. The events themselves and the voices of the people who experience them are more than enough.

We don not know the true number of deaths in Tiananmen Square after the lights went out on 4 June 1998, but estimates run as high as 10,454. The difference, of course, is that while China is a Communist dictatorship, Mexico in 1968 was ostensibly a Western Democracy and Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz a democratically elected official. The deaths of four students here shocked our nation and in many ways was the turning point for the anti-war movement.

How might we have reacted to 400 or even 4,000 deaths?

Sam Wolfson, reporting in ‘That didn’t go as planned’: Fox News interviews anti-Ice Democrat in mix-up for The Guardian, writes:

It was supposed to be straightforward: early-morning Fox News hosts would interview former Democratic congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick about her support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the controversial agency responsible for enforcing American immigration policy.

Kirkpatrick had been booed at a congressional primary in Arizona the previous day for speaking in support of Ice. The conservative, pro-Trump news network has a long history of interviewing Democrats who share parts of their agenda to give the impression of bipartisanship.

But when the hosts threw her a softball question about her support for Ice, they got a surprising response. “Good morning. I’m actually here to speak directly to Donald Trump,” began the interviewee. “I feel that what’s happening at the border is wrong. I’m a mother of four, and I believe that separating kids from their parents is illegal and inhumane.”

The hosts looked confused, but soon realized what was going on – they had booked the wrong guest.

“I’m actually Barbara L’Italien. I’m a state senator representing a large immigrant community,” the woman they thought was Kirkpatrick said. L’Italien is a Democrat and outspoken critic of Ice who is running for Congress in Massachusetts.

While Fox cut L’Italien’s feed, she later posted a video of what she had hoped to say.

Good on her.

I often remark that the greatest advantage that I gained from my 11 years of military service was the manner that I gained knowledge of people’s with whom I had never met. My first dose of reality came in boot camp when I lived, learned and worked 24/7 with African-Americans for the first time in my life. For an ignorant white boy from rural Southeastern Ohio, the connection was like plunging down a rabbit hole.

Latter, after I joined the 2nd fleet on New Year’s Day, 1996, that experience expanded to include sailors from the Philippines as well as civilians of Asian ancestry. One piece of advice that my father gave me when I joined in 1974 was to take at least one day when I was in foreign land to walk and eat where that country’s citizens did; to get away from the bars. I took that advice seriously and was better for it because I got to see move among and haltingly speak with the peoples of Australia, Japan, Kenya Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Tonga.

I learned perhaps a 10th of what I might—I still hit the bars—but my education was advanced. Reading this exchange between Stephen Kurtz and Elena Poniatowska in The Paris Review’s Art Of Fiction No. 238 makes we realize how much I also benefited from these experiences as a writer:

STEPHEN KURTZ: All writing involves an interplay between style and method and habit. In your work, there is an unmistakably activist element, which is to say, the work itself is an action. Many aspects of your life from childhood on could be considered cosmopolitan. You are equally at home in French, English, and Spanish. You have read widely in European literatures. The people you have written about are often Mexican by choice—Leonora Carrington and Tina Modotti, for ­example. Which is all to say, you might have worked without regard for nationality, but instead nationality is critical to your work. How did that come about?

ELENA PONIATOWSKA: Often people first discover their sense of nationality when they are living in another country. One of the nuns at the Sacred Heart urged us to write a letter of protest to a senator about some issue—I no longer remember what it was. I was surprised, but I did write and was even more surprised when I received an answer. Whether or not he would take action on the issue, he actually answered me, which is something that never happens in Mexico. And as I began writing after my return to Mexico, I wrote out of my own reality—out of what I experienced and saw or was told or read. It is one thing to identify oneself as a citizen of a country and to love its landscape, its people, its arts and culture. It is quite another thing to assess the workings of its social and political structure—the degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by its people, its standard of education and quality of life. A Mexican peasant has virtually no chance of becoming anything else. The standard of education was low fifty years ago and, if anything, is even lower today. European workers, on the other hand, can travel the world—they can go to Egypt or China, wherever they please, certainly when they retire and even before that. They have a relatively big view of the world in this way. Mexican workers cannot travel the world and neither do they read, so their view is very narrow. Our current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, could not name three books he had read and finally was obliged to fall back on the Bible. Too bad he doesn’t read the Mexican Constitution before going to bed. At least it would have something to do with his job!

There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor—and there is scarce concern on the part of those who have for those who do not. The politicians can be numbered among those who have. So my being a Mexican writer and loving my country has come to find its expression in opening up this reality to other Mexicans and to the larger world, expressed through the voices of the least empowered—women, especially, and poor people of both genders.

We don’t need to worry about counting the number of books—other than those he pretends to have written (although I have to doubt he ever got past the cover)—our president has read.