Tag: Events of the Day

That is all.

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I didn’t watch the debate the other night, but I sure heard about it, and even I had to get in on the meme fun the next day:

Apparently when asked for specifics of his plan for American healthcare once the Affordable Care Act is repealed under his next Presidency, our 45th President said, “I have the concepts of a plan.”

Which, for anyone who has ever paid more than eight seconds of attention to this guy, obviously means, “I have given it zero thought and I have no intention of doing so in the future.” And all the meme-making and joking to mock this obvious bullshit line was fun, but I think it points out another aspect of the news media’s coverage of this campaign that I find incredibly frustrating, even above the fact that they are insisting on treating this campaign and its two candidates as business-as-usual, and ignoring the utter insanity of a party nominating a former President who tried to engineer to a coup to stay in power and who has promised to pretty much follow every authoritarian instinct in his bones. The error here is in treating 45 as if he’s just a mere candidate for the Presidency, instead of treating him as what he is: a former President who served a full term and has a very real record that might just be instructive, if we looked at it once in a while.

Take the healthcare question: “Do you have a plan?” was the question. But that shouldn’t have been the question! He was President already! The question shouldn’t be “What is the plan?” but rather, “You already had four years and no plan was ever proposed. Why should we believe that you have a plan now?” And it would be true. During 45’s first term, at no point did he offer up any proposal or legislative agenda even pointing at a healthcare plan. He never made a single policy suggestion about it. So why on Earth should anybody be giving him any benefit of the doubt here that he’s going to come up with a plan this time?

He has already shown us who he is, so why is our media insisting on treating him as if he’s something totally new?

The best statement about this came, I think, from President Biden, who noted in his speech to the Democratic National Convention that 45 kept promising “Infrastructure Week”, and yet, in Biden’s words, “He never built a damned thing.”

That should be the response every time he says what he wants to do in the second term: “Why didn’t you do that in the first?” When he says we’re not going to have deficits, ask why he exploded them in the first term. When he says we’re going to have great healthcare, ask him why he didn’t touch healthcare in the first term. The man was already President, and his record of terrible policy, horrible court-packing, an economy managed solely for the rich, and eventually a bungled pandemic response and a disastrous economy exists. Let’s stop pretending that those are just things that happened, because the damned guy who made them happen wants another shot.

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Just so I have a place I can point to if anyone asks: I don’t know if he should withdraw or stay in. I do know that whatever happens, there is still a choice to be made between one party that values good governance and one that does not. The idea of choosing the party of Project 2025 over the Democrats because the sitting President has issues strikes me utterly insane, and we do not live in a world where a rational case can be made for voting Republican right now.

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I’m not generally one to get moved about The Discourse, and how people can’t talk to one another anymore and all that stuff…but this clip from The Daily Show, in which John Stewart talks to a former Republican Congressman with whom he has little in common, is certainly a good model for the way The Discourse probably would go more frequently, if we lived in a healthy country.

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Remembering this day those who lost their lives fighting in wars under the American flag. I make no attempt this day to adjudicate the justness of any of those wars; there are other days for that.

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Every year on this date I listen to this song. It’s been done by many artists, so here it is by the Dropkick Murphys. This song is one of the best artistic meditations on the awful futility of war that I know, because those last words are so absolutely true: “It all happened again, and again, and again….” I don’t find a great deal of solace or even solemnity in Memorial Day, just a sadness that we keep coming back to this and that there will never, ever, be a Memorial Day when we can say, “Interesting, there are no new names to remember this time around.”

I’m also reminded of Lee Blessing’s play A Walk in the Woods, which dramatizes an event in the 1980s when two arms negotiators, one American and one Soviet, got frustrated with the lack of progress and wandered off to put together their own proposal, which was soundly rejected by both sides for being too realistic, I suppose. In that play, Blessing puts these words in the mouth of his Soviet negotiator:

“If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us, and only two soldiers.”

I fnd it hard to disagree with that sentiment.

Here are the Dropkick Murphys.

oh how do you do, young willy mcbride
do you mind if i sit here down by your graveside
and rest for a while in the warm summer sun
i’ve been walking all day, and im nearly done
and i see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
when you joined the great fallen in 1916
well i hope you died quick
and i hope you died clean
oh willy mcbride, was is it slow and obscene

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

and did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
in some loyal heart is your memory enshrined
and though you died back in 1916
to that loyal heart you’re forever nineteen
or are you a stranger without even a name
forever enshrined behind some old glass pane
in an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained
and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

the sun shining down on these green fields of france
the warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance
the trenches have vanished long under the plow
no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing down
but here in this graveyard that’s still no mans land
the countless white crosses in mute witness stand
till’ man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
and a whole generation were butchered and damned

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

and i can’t help but wonder oh willy mcbride
do all those who lie here know why they died
did you really believe them when they told you the cause
did you really believe that this war would end wars
well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
the killing and dying it was all done in vain
oh willy mcbride it all happened again
and again, and again, and again, and again

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

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Let’s see what the bookbanners are up to, shall we? I know, it’s depressing work, but these people are relentless and they are finding more and more creative ways to tighten the noose around books, free expression, and those of us who value those things.

::  I saw this GoFundMe campaign to support a library whose board fired four employees who defied orders to remove books from the library. And that’s bad enough, but what caught my eye here was this sign:

The sign, in front of what is clearly the children’s section of the library, reads:

As a safety precaution, children under the age of 12 may not be unattended. The library cannot be held responsible for your child. Thank you for your cooperation.

And look, maybe that’s simply about the safety of children being left unsupervised; it may even be an advisable and wise policy. But I have to admit to being saddened by the loss to young people of a safe space that I enjoyed in my childhood. I spent many of my childhood hours hanging around in libraries, reading and looking through books, while my parents were off running this or that errand. We continue to send the ever more insidious message to our kids that the world is an inherently dangerous place and that they are not to be allowed to explore it at all until such time as they are, what? Of legal age to drive, or serve in the military? Both of which you can do years before you can vote, or drink alcohol.

Also, I can’t help thinking that this sign isn’t just about that. I can’t help thinking it’s a prophylactic measure. This way, it’s not the evil librarians’ fault if Little Johnny is (gasp!) exploring the shelves on his own and happens upon a copy of something dangerous! something that will warp and pervert him! I can’t help wondering if this “No unattended kids under 12” policy isn’t so much aimed at protecting kids but protecting the librarians from some busybody Mom-For-Liberty type who spends her toilet time watching LibsOfTIktok videos who is livid that her precious Little Johnny somehow managed to get his hands on a copy of Gender Queer and maybe actually read a few pages of it. To the fainting couch, Helen!

::  The library in the item above is in Alabama. Not to be outdone is Louisiana, whose state legislature is considering making it a literally jailable offense for any state employee to do business with the American Library Association. I won’t quote all the nauseating details here, but I will note the ongoing creativity our country’s right-wing has in finding ways to tighten the screws on whatever the hell it is they don’t want other people doing. They’re not going to violate any specific rights, you see; they’re simply making it harder and harder and harder to actually exercise those rights, or they’re making it easier and easier and easier for people who don’t want you exercising your rights to stop you from doing so. It’s Stealth Fascism, but it’s still Fascism.

Be aware, folks–especially if you’re at all inclined to dip your toes into the “Third Party” waters this November for whatever reason.

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This is a re-post that generally reflects my frustration with the American approach to teaching and thinking about its own history. It’s not specifically about Martin Luther King Jr., but I think it applies, particularly when MLK Jr. is treated by many on the right as a source of exactly one quote. For content specifically about Rev. King, see Roger’s post.

No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.

This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.

What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.

The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:

Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.

I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.

What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.

(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)

(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)

A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:

“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”

Or:

“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”

Or:

“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”

And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!

When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.

These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.

“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”

Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:

If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.

If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.

And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.

But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.

Maybe.

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