How very different Ricky Nelson’s 1972 message is from that touted by Bob Dylan during his born-again christian period in his 1979 hit Gotta Serve Somebody.

At the end of Cary Goldstein’s The Art Of Fiction interview of Charles Johnson, he concludes with this exchange:

GOLDSTEIN: [Dr. Martin Luther] King, in Dreamer, feels that he’s failed. He has a wish to live a simpler life. Is that something you have felt in some way?

CHARLES JOHNSON: I can easily relate to the need for a simpler, less cluttered life. That’s how Dreamer opens—with King dreaming about going to Kerala, India. By the time Dreamer came out in 1998, I had been making a promise to myself for about ten, fifteen years that by the age of fifty all my duties, obligations, and responsibilities to everybody in my life from childhood forward would ­finally be discharged. Every bloody one. Period. I worked to serve others—family, colleagues, friends, students, the book world—as completely as possible. To stay “at my post,” as Emerson put it. Then, at age fifty, I promised myself that I would be free to step back or away from these social obligations and allow my commitments to the Buddhadharma to deepen. I’m only just realizing that goal, but now I want to spend my time, this winter season of my life, in spiritual practice, creating, learning—I am a lifelong learner—and just writing about the things I love.

This is perhaps why, very early in my life, I decided that children were not in my future. I’m simply too selfish. That’s a flaw, I admit, but at least I didn’t try to correct the flaw, fail and seriously ruin other lives in the process.

Last month the Cuyahoga County Charter Review Commission voted 8-0 in favor of adding campaign finance language to Article III, Section 3.09 of the Cuyahoga County Charter which enumerates the powers and duties of the council. The proposed language for 3.09(13) (see page 12) reads:

To establish by ordinance campaign related laws governing the election of any County officers and officials including, without limitation, campaign finance regulation, donor disclosure requirements, donor age limits, enforcement or other provisions to avoid violations of the public trust.

Tomorrow, the proposal goes to the next step when the Committee on the Whole will begin consideration of the commission’s report at a 1 p.m. meeting.

Steve Holecko, political director of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, writes:

[Council members] have 60 days to decide whether to pass the amendment unchanged to the voters, to fail the proposed amendment entirely, or to vote down and submit an amended proposal. If passed by Council, the proposal will move to the ballot in November.

This proposed amendment would add a section to the Cuyahoga County Charter that codifies the ability for Cuyahoga County Council to create campaign finance-related legislation by ordinance. It does NOT add specific campaign finance limits into the Charter. Rather, if passed by the Council and approved by the voters, elected officials, experts, advocates, and citizens would work together through the legislative process on what that ordinance could look like. Right now, there is no campaign finance language in the Cuyahoga County Charter. We, the people, can finally change that!

In addition to the Democrats and Republicans on the Charter Review Commission, the proposal has also been endorsed by the Honorable Mayor Bruce Akers (former Chair of the 2012 Charter Review Commission), the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP, Common Cause Ohio, the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland and more!

In advance of tomorrow’s meeting, Holecko has three suggestions for residents:

Step 1: If you are a resident of Cuyahoga County, call your Cuyahoga County Council representative, give them your name and that you are a constituent and ***kindly and respectfully*** ask that they “support passage of the Charter Review Commission Campaign Finance Charter Amendment to the voters.” That’s it!

Step 2: If you are available to attend the meeting on the 4th floor of the Cuyahoga County Headquarters, 2079 East Ninth Street, it would be great to have people there in support of the Amendment.

Step 3: Please share and spread the word! If you have any friends, family or community organization that want to support this, please let me know and encourage them to contact their Councilperson as well.

I have a student at that time, but I called my representative for District 5—Michael Gallagher—to say that I favor the change and Steve can consider this my spreading of the word.

Charles Bramesco, writing in Who is America? Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show aims high but goes low for The Guardian, was not impressed:

Somewhere around the bit in which Sacha Baron Cohen recalls being cuckolded by a dolphin while on vacation with his (human) wife, a viewer is liable to be hit with a wave of nostalgia. Sitting through the largely tiresome pilot of Cohen’s latest program Who Is America? inspires longing for a simpler past, when Cohen’s profile was still low enough that he didn’t have to mask his face with nightmare-inducing prosthetics just to go incognito. He plays four characters in the first episode of this new series – an obese quack doctor, an NPR-listening uberliberal, a limey ex-con, and a gruff Israeli commando – all of whom evoke fonder memories of sweet Borat, the good-natured traveler in thrall of a “very nice” world full of “great success!” As hardliners on the left and right, gun nuts and bleeding-heart activists, confrontation is baked into the very premise of this new quartet.

One-out-of-four is not good.

Cohen saves the clear standout segment of the first episode for last, in which, with minimal difficulty, he convinces a handful of congressmen to support a bill arming four-year-olds with firearms. It will go down as one of the more effective works of Trump-era satire, as damning and chilling and disarmingly strange as the latest tweet from the commander-in-chief. The sight of a geriatric man brandishing a semiautomatic rifle outfitted with cute bunny-rabbit ears will not leave the memory of those who gaze upon it any time soon.

To Cohen’s detriment, that only throws the shortcomings of the other segments into sharper relief. In the first three parts, he ribs Bernie Sanders as a yokel with a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “one percent” is, discusses his daughter’s free-bleeding onto an American flag over dinner with small-town staunch conservatives, and pitches his bodily-secretion artworks to a Laguna Beach dealer. While the latter of the three has the distinction of being astonishingly weird (the woman that gladly clips a lock of her pubic hair is, hands down, the most game person Cohen has ever interviewed), they’re all hamstrung by a sense of inconsequentiality.

Maybe our banality is part of the problem?

Reading Charles Johnson’s interview for The Art Of Fiction in The Paris Review is making me think more than I have in sometime about the block I have in my current novel project Absent Son. The block is this: the novel is set in Charleston, South Carolina, during Reconstruction and my first draft had not a single major character who was African-American. I found myself fearful of getting the character wrong.

I had this conversation with my brother Cavana Faithwalker and in his wise way he told me to just write the damn character and not worry about right or wrong; let the character be who he—Xavier Brüt, in this case—wants to be.

In the interview, Johnson offers another perspective on my problem:

I think that black literature has reached a point where it is full of exhausted conventions. The slave narrative and slave stories, for example. You’re always going to have the master, evil or benign. You’re ­going to have the slave who is content, you’re going to have the slave who isn’t content. There are conventions and threadbare tropes that come up again and again and again. And I wonder if that’s a good thing. We have a tendency to exclusively interpret the black experience in terms of victimization—­victimization and oppression. And if that’s not in a story about black characters somewhere, or in a story about the black American experience, some readers will be disappointed, and ask, Where’s the oppression? Where’s the discrimination? It’s an expectation that’s drilled into us in terms of narratives about black Americans. I think it’s racial and political kitsch.

My tendency is to acknowledge oppression but to also call forth ­other profiles of the black experience, because I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen. In my fiction, I have stories where you don’t know what the character’s race is. Or it’s about a character who’s black, but he’s Martin Luther King Jr. and still a grad student finishing up his dissertation, like in Dr. King’s Refrigerator (2005). He’s got a new wife, and that’s what the issue in the story is. He’s spending too much time on his work, away from his wife, and so on. You get to the end of the story, after he’s had a Buddhist epiphany about the interconnectedness of all things based on the food in his fridge, and you know within twelve months Rosa Parks is not going to give up her seat on a bus and he’s going to become a “world-historical” figure, partly prepared for that role by his revelation a year earlier. Those are the human moments important to me—he’s figuring out how to be married and how to deal with all the duties heaped upon a young minister. There doesn’t have to be a big conflict, and there doesn’t have to be a big racial conflict. I don’t believe that’s the totality of our experience.

Twenty years or so ago I made a resolution to read the Torah, the five books of Moses, across the course of a year and I chose the Shabbat class taught by Rabbi Roger Klein as the vehicle to carry through the year. I actually went through three cycles and learned a great deal from one of my greatest teachers. Rabbi Klein liked to extend his teaching beyond the strict text and he would introduce the class to words and authors that many were not strictly speaking intimate with.

That was how I was introduced to Rambam—Moses ben Maimon—and his writings and I remember a particular morning when the word epiphany came up. I don’t recall the context but I remember Rabbi Klein repeating a lesson from his father that if you want to make a word your own, you have to use the word correctly 10 times the day you first lean the meaning. That stuck with me, and reading about Johnson’s description of King’s Buddhist epiphany brought all that back because that’s the way they happen. No one ever went looking for an epiphany and found one. They just happen.

Xavier Brüt isn’t a hero or heroic. He’s a man learning—as is my protagonist Cassius Alexander William FitzRoy—to operate in a world he never expected to experience. Unlike Cassius, however, Xavier lived the transition. He has a memory of what happened and that continuity helps him to cope. Understanding that experience—good fiction is the writer’s attempt to understand what they don’t—is my challenge. How do I write about a life I haven’t lived. Cav’s advice to just write the damn character is spot on, as Johnson elaborates.

CARY GOLDSTEIN: Are there proprietary subjects in American literature? Are there topics or perspectives that are off-limits for exploration by someone who hasn’t had that experience himself?

JOHNSON: It’s tricky. The question is, Can you write outside of the cage of your race, class, gender, or cultural position? We’re talking about it in terms of writing, but these are larger questions about America right now, and they’re reflected in what we say about literature. Who has the right to write about, say, a black woman’s experience? It’s very complicated, and I don’t quite know what to say. And as I said, I will write stories in which the race of the character is not important, a reader will not get any designations of that character’s race, because race isn’t important for the story. Or put it this way—we must, as writers, be able to empathize with the racial, class, gender, and cultural other. We must use our best research and imagination, as I try to do in a few stories in my new collection Night Hawks, to write stories about Muslim American soldiers, Japanese Zen abbots, black people, Plato and the Buddha, and ­stories that have no racial signatures at all.

That’s tough. When are race, class, gender or cultural heritage not important? Are there universal, human experiences that where we as writers can emphasize with that other? That’s very tough. Goldstein continues:

GOLDSTEIN: And yet, if you weren’t black, you wouldn’t have written the novels and stories you did.

JOHNSON: No, I wouldn’t be writing novels about the things I’m writing about. I am not blind to the illusion of race, I am not blind to American history and the history of race. But I’m not bound by these matters either.

Now, could I write about a white character? Yes, I could, and I have. Remember, I’m trained as a philosopher and a journalist—I had to learn how to take on any assignment. The reason you can’t do this sometimes is because you don’t know people. I’ve read that, overwhelmingly, white Americans live in neighborhoods or communities that are all white, so they don’t have much personal contact with black Americans. They don’t know us. They don’t know how we talk. They don’t know where we came from. They don’t know our individual histories. They don’t know our hearts. They have to project ideas on us that may have nothing to do with us whatsoever. [Emphasis mine, JH] This is the agony we’re facing in America right now, so it’s got to show up in our literature.

My task is to honor Johnson’s vision.

I only this were true. I made E5 (Petty Officer 2nd Class/Sergeant) when I was 22 and my prefrontal cortex was still forming.

David French is a conservative who thinks, instead of reacting and startling at every noise. What he has to say in his piece, Mueller’s Latest Indictments Show That ‘Witches’ Are Very Real for The Nation, will not make the rabid right happy—just take a look at the comments on French’s piece—but then, nothing that doesn’t neatly fit their tropes could.

French lays out four points regarding the latest revelation from the most recent indictment in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation:

1. This indictment demonstrates why it’s important that Mueller be permitted to finish his work. Our nation needs to know what happened in 2016, and Mueller — through both the social-media indictment and the hacking indictment — has provided a clearer picture of the precise details of alleged Russian election meddling than any other source. This is a valuable public service, and to the extent that he can hold the actual conspirators accountable, it’s also an act of necessary justice.

2. It’s now becoming increasingly clear why intelligence agencies believe that Russians were trying to help Trump and hurt Clinton — the scale of the attack on the Clinton campaign, the DCCC, and the DNC was troubling. And while there are past reports that the Russians attempted to hack Republicans, this indictment outlines a comprehensive and sustained effort against the Democrats and is silent about a similar conspiracy aimed at Republicans. Perhaps more information will emerge, but the available public evidence at this point bolsters the intelligence agencies’ unanimous conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump.

3. The indictment practically screams, “More information is coming!” — including additional information about Russian communication with American citizens. For example, paragraph 43a of the indictment contains the first evidence of possible Russian collusion with an American candidate for public office — not President Trump, but an unnamed candidate for Congress.

4. This indictment makes it even more troubling that Trump mocks, denigrates, and undermines the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” We now know that there was real wrongdoing; we just don’t yet know its extent. [Emphasis mine, JH]

As French notes in his third paragraph:

The hacking scandal was different. The hacking scandal mattered. [Emphasis in original, JH]

French follows that declaration with:

There’s no way to know if it moved enough votes in key states to swing the election, but the leaks of hacked emails dominated multiple news cycles, embarrassed key Democrats, and sowed a degree of discord within the Democratic party. Republicans, including Donald Trump, exulted in the revelations and sometimes explicitly called for more. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said publicly on July 27, 2016, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Interestingly, it appears the Russians may indeed have been listening. “After hours” on July 27, the conspirators “for the first time” targeted “email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office,” according to Friday’s indictment.

I imagine that Trump thought of his call for Russian intervention as a dog whistle for the trumpies. I don’t think he knew who would answer.

White Woman Calls Cops on California Man Chilling in His Car Listening to Yoga CD

Apartment Complex Manager Suspended After Black Resident Kicked Out of Pool

Judge of Characters: Meet the Racist Caucasian Crusaders

Black Man Denied Entry To Bus in Martha’s Vineyard ‘Because You’re Black’

Georgia Cops Flip a Coin to Decide Whether to Arrest Driver Who Was Allegedly Speeding

Two White Women Attack Their Latinx Neighbors, Call the Police on Them, and End Up Going to Jail Themselves;

Watch: New Details Emerge in Case of Minnesota Cops Pulling Guns on Black Kids After Fake 911 Call

Man Screaming Racial Slurs at Black Teenage Girl Arrested For Threatening to Kill Me, You, Your Mama and Your Cousins Too…

Cop Fired For Calling Black People ‘Alabama Porch Monkeys’… Then Re-Hired

Woman Goes on Hate-Filled Anti-Muslim Rant on New York City Bus: ‘ICE is Here For You’

Officer Who Stood by as Man Harassed Woman in Puerto Rico Shirt Resigns

And then there’s 4ProfitPatty.

Previously…

Previously…

[Update at 0428 on 21 May 2020:

Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising, The by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

Kimchi Chronicles: Korean Cooking for an American Kitchen: A Cookbook, The by Marja and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

ConBody: The Revolutionary Bodyweight Prison Boot Camp, Born from an Extraordinary Story of Hope by Coss Marte.

Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, The by Bhaskar Sunkara. p. 139

New York Times Magazine for 18 August 2019: The 1619 Project.]

#neveragain: A New Generation Draws the Line by David and Lauren Hogg.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink, page 131.

The New Rules of Lifting for Life: An All-New Muscle-Building, Fat-Blasting Plan for Men and Women Who Want to Ace Their Midlife Exams by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove.

Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour Hersh.

Modern Macrame: 33 Stylish Projects for Your Handmade Home by Emily Katz.

Deskbound: Standing up in a sitting world by Kelly Starrett and…

The Kingdom Of Speech by Thomas Wolfe, page 74.

In addition to returning these library books, I’ve canceled a hold on The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I have, however, kept holds on several books of light fiction for my bedtime reading:

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly, John Woman by Walter Mosley, The Reckoning by John Grisham, Eight Million Ways to Die a graphic novel adaptation by John Snyder of Lawrence Block’s classic and Little Scarlet another by Walter Mosley.

There are also one audio book—Calypso by David Sedaris for drive-time listening and three movies—The Death of Stalin; the fourth season of The Brokenwood Mysteries, Series 4; andYankee Doodle Dandy—on my hold list at the library.

The Founders formed the federal government as three separate, but equal, entities to ensure a separation of powers. That has deteriorated, I argue, since the end of WW II. I base that argument principally on Congress’s abdication of one its vital constitutional duties set forth in Section I, Article 8, Clause 11: the Congress shall have Power To… To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

The last time the members of our Congress issued a declaration of war was on 8 December 1941. Since the end of WW II some 90,000 Americans have died in combat and thousands more have died in non-combat incidents related to undeclared wars.

That is not what the Founders intended.

David French, writing in How the Kavanaugh Nomination Reveals a Deep Challenge to Our Democracy for National Review, makes the conservative case:

Yesterday I wrote a piece rejecting the absurd alarmism surrounding Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. No one will “die” if Kavanaugh is confirmed. His judicial philosophy doesn’t represent an “emergency” for the “safety” or “freedom” of the American people. If anything, his jurisprudence will largely lead to greater protections for individual liberty against state power.

But today? Today, I’m going to reverse course just a bit. I do think that Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination does help reveal a terrible challenge to American democracy, but it’s not a crisis of personal safety or individual liberty. The various versions of the “Bork’s America” speech for 2018 that are circulating online are overblown and ridiculous. No, the challenge is structural, and a structural challenge can be just as dangerous to the health of a constitutional republic as cultural or political division over any given set of issues or values.

Kavanaugh’s nomination — indeed, every modern Supreme Court nomination — reminds us that the most powerful branches of the federal government are the most removed from the democratic process. The vision of the Founders has been subverted. Your vote matters less every year.

Members of the House of Representatives—and, while less so, members of the Senate—have rendered themselves increasingly irrelevant because they’re more interested in re&?euml;lection (and holding onto the wealth and power their office provides them) than they are in governing as the Founders intended them to. French agrees:

This is exactly and precisely wrong. This is not what the Founders intended. And it’s inherently destabilizing and polarizing. Consider this: Both the executive and the judicial branches operate under essentially a winner-takes-all format. Once the president wins his election, he doesn’t need the consent of Congress to craft regulations, and his authority to craft regulations is immense. He effectively doesn’t need the consent of Congress to launch a war.

Similarly, at the end of a Supreme Court case—whether the vote is 9–0 or 5–4—jthere is a winner and a loser. The courts are where litigants go when compromise has failed. There is, by design, little democratic recourse for reversing a Supreme Court decision, and losers often lose for a generation or more — even when their cause is just (think of Dred Scott, Plessy, or Roe).

To put it plainly, this means you — the American citizen — get one vote every four years (one out of 130 million) to decisively influence both of the most powerful branches of government. Your congressional vote, the one you cast every two years — the one that matters most to the outcome of an election — has become a vote for a glorified pundit. He or she will issue press releases, argue with other members on cable news, and pledge to do the bidding of (or oppose) the man with the true power.

French goes on to argue, correctly, that the Founders intended our weakest branch, the one voters have the most contact with to be the strongest.

The Founders didn’t intend to create executive or judicial supremacy. They didn’t even intend to create “co-equal” branches of government. They intended legislative supremacy. The legislature can remove the executive. The legislature can pass laws over the president’s objection. The legislature can remove any federal judge or justice from the Supreme Court. It can sharply limit the jurisdiction of the courts. Its latent constitutional authority is breathtaking in its scope.

But it can attain its intended dominance only through bipartisan compromise. The supermajorities necessary to trump the executive, for example, can’t exist without either extraordinary emergencies, extraordinary foresight, or a necessary deescalation in our political rhetoric and a transformation of political incentives.

That’s one reason, for example, that “people will die” or “Flight 93” arguments are ultimately so destructive to our body politic. What rational person would compromise with an opposing legislative force that wants to kill you or end America?

Legislative supremacy depends on debate and compromise. It depends on forging actual relationships. And it puts legislators up for a vote every two years—making public accountability an omnipresent force in a House member’s life. Executive and judicial supremacy, by contrast, incentivize mass tribal mobilization followed by the exercise of raw power to deliver on the promises that brought tens of millions to the polls. The challenge to American democracy—even to American unity—is obvious.

To me, and perhaps to you. To the Trumpies? Not so much: Our Founding Fathers wanted Legislative supremacy? Tribalism is bad?? Compromise is good?!? You RINO you!!! Aargh! —jgbrownhornet, in the comments.

I’m continuing to read Charles Johnson’s interview in The Paris Review and stopped this afternoon at this passage:

When I was younger I was drawn to [Hermann] Hesse, who was popular on college campuses in the sixties. I read his short stories and novels, and literary scholar­ship on his work, like that by Theodore Ziolkowski, who examined themes and structure in Hesse’s fiction. I wanted to learn his method of composition, the way he thought. Hesse is interesting to me precisely because he works with different forms in his novels. He also has a spiritual dimension—he has us looking toward the East. A friend of mine gave me Demian when we were undergraduates. I wasn’t really impressed. But it led me to Siddhartha. And then I thought, Here’s a German in the 1920s writing about the Buddha and getting a good deal of it right. Man, that book so affected me. I really wanted to respond to it. And that response is, of course, Oxherding Tale. But what I did was respond from a black American perspective.

I came to Hesse a little earlier than Johnson; I read him during my high-school years. I was so taken with him that for a time I added the extra ‘e’ to my name and drove my teachers a bit nuts. The book I struggled the hardest with was Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse’s final novel and the one cited as occupying a special position in his 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.

When I first started reading the book—I have my copy still—I was 16, but I couldn’t finish (although I started almost yearly) the text until I was in my late 30s. Some books are just that way. If the author had been anyone buy Hesse I would not have tried even a second time.

Oxherding is on order and reading Johnson talk about Hesse has made me all the more anxious to read his book.

Oh happy serendipity! While looking up a few items for this post, I discovered that in 2010 BBC Radio 4 produced and recorded a dramatization of Das Glasperlenspiel in two parts, presented below.

I began reading The Root back when Jimi Izrael was a regular. My favorite reporter there currently is Michael Harriot. This morning he has two stories in the Dumb-Racist-Shit category. I won’t detail them here, go read the originals. What I do want to do is list the unbelievable number of similar stories published in just 2018.

Cop Pulls Gun on Children After 911 Caller Falsely Reports Armed Black Kids Roaming Around in Park;

Kentucky Governor: Black Kids Playing Chess ‘Not Something You Would’ve Thought Of’ in Black Part of Town;

#SummerJobWhileBlack: Child Gets Cops Called on Him for Delivering Newspapers

White Couple Who Called Police on 12-Year-Old Mowing Lawn Called Them Again on the 4th of July Because They Felt ‘Threatened’;

California Prosecutor Called Maxine Waters a ‘Loud Mouthed C-Word in the Ghetto.’ His New Boss Calls it ‘Salty’ Language;

If You Live in One of Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods, Stop Reading This and Go Check on Your Car;

Man Who Drove Through Antwon Rose Protest, Ran Over Demonstrator, Only Charged With Misdemeanor;

#CaucasianCallingTax: White People Need to Be Taxed for Wasting Police Officers’ Time;

Can We Live While Black?;

Paul Blart, Pool Cop Fired After Calling Police on Woman For Swimming in Her Own Pool;

Black Man Forced to Crawl at Gunpoint After Police Thwart Imaginary Robbery;

#EatingOutWhileBlack: Subway Employee Calls 911 on Black Family Because She Thought They Would Rob Her;

Priest Who Called Cops on Black Funeral-Goers Placed on Leave ;

#CampaigningWhileBlack: Someone Called the Cops on an Oregon Legislator Who Was Out Canvassing;

Gang of White Thugs Hurl Slurs at Black Mom, Smash Her Car Window, Yet Somehow No One Went to Jail or Even Had a Damn Mugshot Taken;

When Caucasity Costs You Your Coin: #PoolPatrolPaula Fired After Harassing Black Teens at Public Pool;

#PermitPatty Said She Only ‘Pretended’ to Call the Police. The 911 Recording Says … That Was a Lie; and for today, I’ll finish with:

Them vs. Us: How Black Cops View Policing in America

This shit should have stopped with Trayvon Martin, but DRS continues to happen.

The first tools is any writer’s toolbox are words. Even if you subscribe—as I do—to the admonitions of Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White and George Orwell—the greater your vocabulary the greater will be the clarity of your writing.

The editors at Merriam-Webster get that. That’s why they publish Words At Play and this week’s: Wonderful Words That You’re Not Using (Yet).

All of the words are wonderful, but I was particularly drawn to No. 6: Nauseant because of our current political reality.

Nauseant: an agent that induces nausea. In the event that you ever find yourself feeling nauseated (or nauseous; either one is fine), say, perhaps by a meldrop clinging tenaciously to the nose of the person with whom you are speaking, it may prove useful to distract yourself with the knowledge that there is a word for the thing that makes you feel that way. Before you use the word loosely, you should know that nauseant is generally used in a medical sense, referring to a specific agent that causes nausea (and often is an expectorant, rather than just anything which turns your stomach).

Having thus, as we conceived, exhausted all the material medica, we turned to the second class, which is called atonics, and which we found to consist of blood-letting, issues and setons, nauseants, cathartics, gases, and abstinence. —Monthly Review (London, UK), Nov. 1810

What are your top three nauseants?

The tell-all books just keep coming and coming. The latest is from President Donald John Trump’s former White House Press Secretary—and arguably Melissa McCarthy’s greatest mock—Sean Michael Spicer: The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President.

The book won’t be published until 24 July, but early reports indicate that President Trump will not be happy.

Tom McCarthy, writing in Sean Spicer contradicts Trump’s Manafort claims in new book for The Guardian, ledes:

Dreamily envisioning Donald Trump as “a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow”, former press secretary Sean Spicer has filled a new book with breathless memories of his role in recent American history—while admitting that Paul Manafort, suspected of being a tool of Moscow, played a central role in the Trump campaign.

In The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President, which will be released on 24 July and a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, Spicer dramatically compares the work of a press secretary to that of fighter jet pilot, champion boxer and tightrope artist.

At impressive length, the book purports to set the record straight on an extensive string of micro-episodes and mini-scandals from the Trump campaign and early presidency.

But Spicer’s description in the book of Manafort’s campaign role belies Trump’s characterization of former campaign chairman Manafort as a minor campaign figure.

While I have no doubt that what Spicer wrote is true, I won’t waste a cent or a second on his book. What his former employer has to say however, could be priceless.

I do wonder what he said to Robert Mueller, however.

Voter fraud, at least at the level of the voter, is not a problem in the United States. Voter fraud is in our country a conservative boogie man to suppress voting by likely liberal/progressive voters. (Coincidentally—perhaps?—boogie is also a racial pejorative.) The voter fraud narrative, like the ginned-up brouhaha over immigration is a political fun-house mirror that makes the conservative vote look much bigger than it is.

Conservatives have size issues and we must not allow them to make their vote look bigger by making the votes of their opponents disappear.

Ralph Nader, writing in Universal Voting Dissolves the Obstacles Facing Voters, offers a solution:

When will the authoritarians and their political henchmen stop harassing American voters and let all citizens vote? No other Western country comes close to imposing so many obstructions for certain categories of people to keep them from the voting booth. In Canada, England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, it is very easy to vote.

Voter suppression is real and getting worse. Voter fraud is virtually non-existent, but this spurious claim is used as the excuse for unnecessary restrictions. Voter turnout, not surprisingly, is lower than in any other Western country.

According to the New York Times, here are seven ways the state of Alabama is obstructing voters. This former plantation/slavery state doesn’t overtly keep people of color, especially black people, from voting. That would clearly violate the federal civil rights laws. No, instead of race, Alabama electoral tyrants use class Continue Reading »

Especially in light of Michael Sainato piece two days ago Exploited Amazon workers need a union. When will they get one? for The Guardian this week and another piece by Clevelander Mac McClelland that I’ve cited several times, we all need to read Sam Allard’s column, An Essay on the Failed Amazon Bid and the Defective Philosophy Undermining Cleveland’s Progress for Scene. Allard begins:

Like others in the ramshackle local press corps, I assumed that Cleveland’s heavily redacted Amazon bid, released last month after no shortage of fuss, wouldn’t have much journalistic value.

I almost didn’t bother reading it. On a recent episode of WCPN’s Reporters’ Roundtable, host Rick Jackson remarked offhandedly that there was more redacted material in the bid than there was available to the public. Cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn dismissed it as well, suggesting that the unredacted content explained nothing that we didn’t already know. At the time, I nodded along. I had my own views about the city’s shortcomings, but only the bid’s incentive package (still under lock and key) would definitively tell the story, I thought.

Because the story, surely, was how and why Cleveland failed to make the list of 20 cities that Amazon named as finalists for its second headquarters back in January. This seemed cut and dry.

Now, I’m not so sure.

You shouldn’t be either. Go read. Engage in the conversation and let Allard know what you think.

I didn’t vote for Hillary. I didn’t vote for Hillary because I thought we’d be in a worse place right now with a solidly Republican Congress and a solid majority of Republicans in in our state capitals. Hillary represented a repeat of the past 18 years of crumbs instead of real subsistence on our nation’s plates.

As dark as America seems right now, I can see more light in the rising of a revolutionary left, driven by democratic socialism the likes of which we have not seen since the ’30s, than I have seen in my lifetime.

People are getting pissed/scared/frustrated enough to get up off their asses and take action.

Perhaps we’re all grasping at straws, but when straw is all that you can grasp, go with that.

George Monbiot, writing in America’s new revolutionaries show how the left can win for The Guardian, suggests that the strategy could be working. He ledes:

Even at first sight it is exhilarating. The overthrow of one of the most mainstream and senior Democrats in Congress by a 28-year-old Democratic socialist with a radical programme and one tenth of his funding is, you might think, interesting enough.

But since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th district (meaning she will almost certainly enter Congress in November), I’ve been interviewing some of the people who lit the fuse that caused this detonation. What has emerged is just how marginal and improbable their movement was when it began, and how quickly it is now gaining momentum. A revolution has begun in America, and it is time we understood what it means.

In 2016 I thought that either Clinton would destroy the Democratic Party or Trump would kill the Republican Party. Both it seems now, are now true. What will replace them, however, is still a mystery and what happens in November and will tell us much. On the left, Monbiot points to Brand New Congress and an apparent successor, Justice Democrats, as one possibility. He continues:

In a way, this tiny group, Brand New Congress, which evolved into the Justice Democrats, marginalised itself. It wanted nothing to do with a traditional left it saw as being obsessed with positioning. It wanted to escape the shadow of people who seemed stuck in the 1980s, who didn’t take environmental issues seriously or understand the need to challenge structural racism and gender inequality, or to reach millennials trapped in terrible housing and miserable non-jobs. They were mocked, ignored and dismissed as well-intentioned but hopeless idealists. One of them told me how he was literally patted on the head by an older Democrat.

At first, it was chaotic. Most of the volunteers they recruited had little or no experience. Some turned out to be wonderful, others less so. Their original aim was to find 400 candidates to challenge both Democratic and Republican incumbents. They sought bartenders, factory workers, small-business people, community organisers, teachers, nurses—ideally people who had never held public office before. While Democratic candidates are usually chosen on the grounds of how much money they can raise, the Justice Democrats looked for people who could not be seduced by big funders. They reasoned that if the people they met had served their communities instead of themselves, they were unlikely to sell out once they were elected.

They found plenty of brilliant potential recruits, but without mainstream support they didn’t have the credibility required to convince hundreds of people to give up their lives for an improbable cause.

Justice Democrats, like the fledgling Republicans in 1854, are playing the long game.

extraordinary local campaigners combined traditional fieldwork with the big organising tactics developed during the Sanders campaign: using proliferating networks of volunteers to fill the jobs usually reserved for staffers.

Remarkable as [Ocasio-Cortez] is, there are others like her. Cori Bush in Missouri, Jess King in Pennsylvania and Kerri Evelyn Harris in Delaware are just a few of those now fighting for Democratic nominations or seats while renouncing big money, relying instead on the enthusiasm of the communities they hope to serve.

The Justice Democrats are not expecting all these candidates to win, but hope for a few spectacular victories at the congressional elections in 2018 and 2020, not only replacing corporate, money-tainted Democrats, but flipping a couple of Republican districts as well (look out, for example, for the campaigns by Brent Welder and James Thompson in Kansas). As soon as such people take their seats in Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti, one of the core organisers, tells me the aim is to “legislate the hell out of everything, like the Republicans do … proposing the boldest, biggest ideas on day one”. By 2022, using the momentum gained from a few strategic victories, they hope to run a full slate of new or re-energised candidates. The aim is to create a genuinely populist Democratic party, which neutralises Trump’s brutal demagoguery and speaks to people across the political spectrum who have been alienated by the corruption and drift of mainstream politics.

Monbiot concludes:

By understanding how the great reversal in New York happened, we can begin to understand what this movement of outsiders might achieve. It could yet change the world.

To which I would add: Thank you Bernie, the kids have this…

George Saunders, writing in Little St. Don: A reading from the Book of St. Don for The New Yorker, instructs:

A sparrow fell from a tree. Little St. Don ran over it with his bike, on purpose. A white-haired lady from down the block came and unfairly accused Little St. Don of knocking the sparrow out of the tree with a rock, then running it over with his bike on purpose. Her old coot of a husband doddered over to see what the trouble was. Little St. Don quickly hid the rock with which he had killed the sparrow. Then he hired a spokesperson. That girl Traci, from homeroom.

And Little St. Don thoughteth to himself, Man, was that a good throw. One of the best throws ever.

Quoth now the old lady to Traci, “This young man hit that sparrow with a rock and then ran over it on purpose, with his bike.”

“Truly,” answered Traci, “it is sad that all animals must, in time, die.”

“No, he killed it,” the old lady said. “With the rock. Then the bike.”

“Which one was it, the rock or the bike?” answered Traci. “Can’t be both. If you’re going to make a serious accusation like this against a sitting saint, you should get your story straight. Otherwise, you seem a little, you know . . .”

Then Traci did that thing of circling a finger around the ear area, suggesting: “Senile? I’m not saying that. But some people are discussing that.”

“But I saw it,” the old woman replied. “Saw it with my own—”

“Ma’am, I think you need to calm down,” sayethed Traci to the old sinner. “Accusing a saint of murder—that’s a big deal. Also, I’m not sure it’s ‘murder’ if it’s just a bird. Kind of disrespectful to all those actual human beings who’ve been murdered. And their families. Especially in combat.”

•••

After the old sinner and her old, weak sinner husband left that place in confusion, Little St. Don went unto the place he was staying, and thought upon many things, while playing Legos. He built a factory and a farm and did skillfully arrangeth the people therein so that it seemed that they were looking up at him. Being Lego people, they had movable arms, and he raised one arm on each, so it seemed that they were waving up at him. Or taking some kind of pledge.

Then Little St. Don noticed that a few of the little Lego people’s arms had slowly begun to drop. Stupid failing Lego company—couldn’t even make an arm that stayed up. And now it seemed that the little Lego people, or at least a few of them, were looking up at him skeptically. Doubt dawning on their tiny noseless faces. What? What, you stupid hicks? thought Little St. Don. Get those little arms up, pronto. You think anybody else is interested in you at all? Where are those little coal miners?

•••

Then St. Don left that place and went unto the living room. And turning on the TV he heard, from some preacher, the words of Jesus, as follows: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” And he took these words to heart, and would recall them, and abide by them, wisely, years later, when there were some issues at the border, but only a few of the words, like the first four.

This is the word of the Lord.