Bizarre and hurt-filled: white evangelical culture lived

Louisiana's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments reminded me of an anecdote from NPR reporter Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Raised in an insular mid-American white evangelical home and community, McCammon recounts a visit by a Holocaust survivor to her communications class at her Christian college.

Many of us in Dr. M's [Dr. Mendoza's] class were moved by [Felicia] Brenner's story of the horror her family endured after the Nazis marched into their home town in central Poland, forcing them into a ghetto. Near the end of the war, they were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents would die in the gas chambers. Out of a family of six brothers and sisters, only Brenner would survive the war ...

... Dr. M confided in me one day after class, some of her evangelical students seemed fixated on the fact that Brenner was Jewish and, therefore, according to our theology, not saved. Why invite her to speak to us as all, a student in one of the classes had later asked, if Jews were all going to Hell anyway? ... Dr. M watched in horror as other students chimed in to agree ...

... Brenner spent the last three decades of her life telling her story about the Holocaust and raising alarms about the dangers of antisemitism. In a grainy oral history video recorded in 1985, an interviewer asks her how she reflected on her experiences after many years. She's bitter, she says, not only at the Nazis but at the rest of the world who'd abandoned the Jewish people.

And she points to the Christians who've enabled and participated in those evils.

"We gave them the Ten Commandments. We gave them their Jesus. What do they want from us?" Brenner asks. "[They say], 'You killed Jesus,' which is wrong; we did not. But they crucify us and crucify us and crucify us, over and over again."

As Dr. M told me this story about my peers, I could feel that something had permanently shifted inside me. ...

Maybe force feeding kids the Ten Commandments might have, in a round about way, have taught this young evangelical some deep moral lessons, but this seems a vicious way to get there.

McCammon's Exvangelicals is a very intimate portrait of what it is like to grow up deep within the culture of white American evangelical Christianity. The author emerged to become a respected professional political and social journalist; she combines wide ranging interviews and sociological research with a memoir of her own experience of "unraveling." 

Her story is fascinating, as foreign to me as anthropologists' accounts of "primitive" cultures.

But, of course, the culture from which McCammon sprang is not at all foreign. It is very much a contemporary segment of this nation within which we live and in which we struggle to develop in competing directions.

Another anecdote from one of her interviewees:

Sheila Janca grew up as an "evangelical preacher's daughter" in what she describes as an abusive home in the Midwest in the 1960s and '70s. Any questions that bubbled up to the surface had to be quickly suppressed in favor of "blind faith." ... Janca remembers the humiliation of finally discovering, during a nursing school class, that men weren't actually missing a rib. Taking her cues from the creation story in Genesis, she'd believed that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, men had a different anatomy ...

That's pretty out there -- and still manifests itself all too often when red state legislators try to explain anything about female anatomy while prohibiting reproductive choice.

At once point, contemplating evangelicals' embrace of racism, Trump, and homophobia, McCammon finds herself wondering:

That made me think about my own parents, and [other] parents... How do you weigh someone's "good intentions" against the pain their actions cause? And when is it okay to be furious?

She sees child abuse in the strict parenting enjoined by evangelical leaders. She meets people who've left these faith byways -- the exvangelicals of the title -- who are recovering from religious trauma arising from apocalyptic vistas of Hell and a Last Judgment. Therapists report that an upbringing in this religious culture results in people who can never feel safe. However

... leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life's most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of "answers" -- about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you're sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It's often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve the community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world.

In this "wilderness," she finds new community among other exvangelicals. She reports that many reach a sort of truce with parents and other relatives who think they are going to Hell: they just avoid conversation.

There's a lot my own parents and I don't talk about, that we can't talk about. When we have tried over the years, the conversations inevitably end in misunderstandings, tears, and an everwidening distance. They spent years building a world for me that was intended to protect my spiritual safety and warning me not to leave it, only for me to feel anything but safe inside.

She goes on:

... Like so many exvangelicals I've spent much of my adult life slowly crawling away, trying to hang on to something for dear life, often feeling like a wrecked -- or shipwrecked -- soul, swimming for solid ground. Even now in middle age, nearly two decades out of that world, the nightmares still haunt me, as they do so many others. ...

... the evangelical impulse -- the idea that "people need the Lord," that we have been given a unique understanding of the Truth about the most complex questions about reality, and which we must impose through persuasion or coercion -- has never made much sense to me when I survey the complexities of the world, and the diversity of experiences and points of view. Even worse, that way of thinking seems to be at the root of so many evils that have been perpetuated throughout human history by religious fundamentalists and other extremist ideologues. I fear the same impulse is currently laying the groundwork for irreparable harm in our country and the world, and I fear that some of the people I have known and loved, and who've loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil.

... what mission can I subscribe to in good conscience, as an exvangelical? ... Grandpa noted that the purpose of life was something Jesus had also worried about. His advice was simple, even biblical: help others.

I'll give a plot point away here: it helps to have a gay non-believing grandfather.

This is a complicated, horrifying, and impressive book; highly recommended.

Humans might be smarter than we often seem

We have, I think, gotten to where we don't have to be told that the climate is changing -- warming and also becoming more unpredictably wild.

But perhaps more than we recognize, the human species -- subset United State-ians -- is finally doing something about reducing fossil fuel use by adding renewable energy sources.

Click on images to see more

Renewables are taking off -- the curve is escalating fast.

 

Solar and wind, enhanced by batteries, are beating the costs of old-fashioned oil and coal energy. As the graph highlights, we may have unthinkingly unbalanced the climate with older fuels, but human science is coming to our undeserved rescue.

 

That particularly means solar energy installations; the number just goes up and up.

 

The energy transition is hard and disruptive, but we seem capable of achieving it. And the transition in China, which matters even more than we do in the US of A, seems on a strong path.

 

All graphs snagged from the economist/curmudgeon Noah Smith.

Recognition where recognition is due

From the Washington Post:

Vice President Harris on Friday credited hospitality workers who mobilized supporters in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona with helping Democrats win the White House in 2020.

“It is because of your work and your support that Joe Biden is president of the United States and I am the first woman elected vice president,” Harris told members of Unite Here, which represents hospitality workers. “I’m really clear about how we got here.”

Harris made the remarks during a speech at Unite Here gathering in New York. The union recently elected Gwen Mills as their new president, the first woman to hold that position in the organization’s 130-year history.

Harris told the group that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and his allies work from a playbook to “make people feel alone, to make people feel small.

“But in the face of these attacks,” Harris said, “we here know the power of the collective.”

Truth! Four years later, the union will be there ditching Donnie again.

Friday cat blogging

This is where Janeway and Mio landed after a vigorous bout of chasing. He could get up to the lookout, but given his girth, he's more likely to hide underneath. If he emerges unwarily, she might yet jump him.

Might as well also show their favorite activity which gives a good sense of the sizes.

Dykes to watch out for -- Ukraine style

The Washington Post published a sweet feature [gift link] centering young Ukrainians, one of whom has been defending her country from Russian invaders in the army for nine years now.

Ukraine does not recognize these women's relationship. But in a country struggling for national freedom, they can at least take a role in agitation for LGBT+ freedoms. 

Mariia Volia, 31, a radio specialist now serving in the 47th Brigade in the Donetsk region near the eastern front, has spent nine years fighting for her country. She believes so strongly in Ukraine’s survival that she legally changed her last name to the Ukrainian word for liberty.

But as a lesbian, she — and other LGBTQ+ soldiers — doesn’t qualify for the same rights and benefits as heterosexual troops. ...

Russia’s war has propelled Ukraine ever closer to Europe. Ukraine’s survival depends on its ties to the West — and its image as a bastion of democracy at total odds with Russia’s authoritarianism and conservative social values. But for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, the reality is more complicated.

LGBTQ+ individuals can serve openly in Ukraine’s armed forces. But several laws that would advance LGBTQ+ rights in Ukraine, including one that would expand hate crimes definitions to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and another that would allow same-sex civil partnerships, have stalled in parliament. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on the unequal treatment of soldiers, saying it was an issue for parliament. A spokeswoman for the ministry said that the ministry created an office for protection of servicemen’s rights to manage alleged cases of human rights violations in the armed forces. ...

The way forward is hard and will be bumpy, but you never know where folks might end up once a vista of freedom, however distant, comes into view.

Juneteenth: what we need to know

 The History Channel offers an accessible story:

"An attack on liberty for the sake of power ..."

For those of us unmoved by the supposed attractions of the MAGA movement and its felonious leader, it's all too easy to keep coming back to the question: what's wrong with these people? Why do they recoil from the possibility of a more humane, more just, more diverse country for all of us in order to latch on to a con man?

As in most broad movements, there are certainly multiple individual answers. Greed is not the only one. I think conservative New York Times pundit David French, who has been ejected from that set for rejecting MAGA, sees an additional explanation all too clearly:

... So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty. Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights. Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power. An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) — of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control. It’s not just that Catholics and Protestants have equal rights (a relatively recent development), it’s that Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

That last seems a fine, uncomfortable, contribution from a right wing Christian to Pride month! 

It's all too easy for me to see in French's description all too many local mid-American elites (like the kind I grew up around) who find MAGA so attractive.

Looking for their strong man

There has always been a cohort of highbrow Americans who were certain they are too smart, too important, too well educated to have to accommodate themselves to a messy, noisy, sometimes smelly democratic and popular system of government. Jacob Heilbrunn offers a survey of the type in America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Yes, Donald Trump's admiring Putin apologists and intellectual sycophants are nothing new.

In fact, autocrats and fascists have long been attractive to some Americans. As we lurched toward engaging in the Great War (World War I, 1917-18) on the side of the Brits and French, plenty of intellectuals thought we'd do better siding with the German Kaiser.

... intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad. In the 1920s and 1930s, this set of beliefs or habit of mind, became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American devotees, including the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the aviator Charles Lindbergh ... Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet ... Today, a Hungarian strongman who is peddling volkisch ethnonational thought as a replacement pan-European ideology ... is the latest object of the Right's dictator worship ...

... they denounce "cancel culture," but are busily canceling anything that nettles them, from books to beer. They define freedom as the ability to suppress the views and beliefs, ranging from transgender rights to an independent media, that they revile. At bottom, they are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.

As Heilbronn points out, it has usually been the Left which has been charged in this country with admiring foreign authoritarian autocracies -- and sometimes we have. But we did so in the belief and hope that a different, anti-capitalist, organization of society would more completely promote the general welfare, in the words of the preamble to our country's Constitution. Sometimes we've been quite wrong in the foreign movements in which we located hope. But unlike these sad and despicable Right figures that Heilbrunn chronicles, we mostly didn't err out of snobbery, bigotry, racism, and injured self-importance. We wanted the greatest good for the greatest number. The Right wingers seem to me to have just wanted more goods and unearned respect for themselves.

America Last is not a book for everyone, but it sure captures a slice of our intellectual and political history that a lot of conservatives would prefer to see swept under a rug. This is one bit of a necessary history of the U.S. in the twentieth century.

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

Father's Day

When my father retired -- semi-voluntarily because the little company that had employed him for decades was sold -- my mother convinced him to join her on a trip to Ireland. She had done most of her traveling as an adult without him. He liked to stay home. But now he had no excuse; he would have to go along to the country of some of his ancestors.

This was his passport photo from the early 1970s..

He didn't much like Ireland: "They should put a roof over that country."

He was glad enough to stay home thereafter when she wandered. He was somewhat prickly, but funny. I  loved him very much.

Travel was not his thing; I fortunately inherited my mother's yen to see the world.

Happy Flag Day

Never was much for this pseudo-holiday, perhaps in part because it didn't get me a day off in grade school. But some people are into flags. We were already released for the season ... Via: @Out5p0ken

Friday cat blogging

I have an overseer. Yes, I do worry that all 20 pounds of Mio might arrive precipitously. But fortunately he's a pretty cautious boy.

Info-graphic palooza

An occasional  post featuring visual presentations of data that I found interesting. Sorry -- all too much of this about MAGA and its Orange-headed cult leader, but that is our fate.

On all of these, click for a larger image.

There's apparently a direct correlation between consuming newspapers and traditional TV news and supporting Joe Biden. If you get your news via social media or cable, you might like Mr. Trump. If you get no news at all, Trump's your guy. 

Yes -- winning in November is going to require a lot of unwilling conversations ...

The Daily Mail created a word cloud out of Trump's ravings.

 

If you are wondering what MAGA is so unhappy about, this might be it.

I don't see the media much reporting this, but evidently favorable opinions of Kamala Harris are increasing. 

 

What else is on the rise? Child labor in red states which have relaxed prohibitions on employing young people. Now there's a good capitalist response to a labor market where it is hard to hire ...

 

Belonging to a union sure makes a difference in your well-being. States which hinder labor organizing (RTW States) lag behind states where unionization is more common.

Is a president really the supreme chieftain?

Timothy Snyder is a very fine historian of the eastern reaches of Europe, at least insofar as I can discern.  I've audited online his Yale course on the history of Ukraine and written about many of his many books. I'm no credentialed expert, but I can often sniff out when an historian is weakly grounded; Snyder is the real thing.

Snyder does something else which is uncommon, and considered suspicious, among professional historians. He seeks to reach into and describe the underlying mythic structure of the realities and events he chronicles. Respectable historians are supposed to stick just the facts.

But I think Snyder enlightens by going deep, reaching insights beyond the surface. Here he describes of our current American democratic (small "d") predicament:

The political theory of Trump's [January 6] coup attempt is that all that matters is the chieftain.  He does not have to win an election, because the chieftain has the right to rule simply because he is the chieftain.  Requiring Trump to win an election is thus a provocation.  The claim that he should leave office when he loses an election justifies revenge.  And of course retribution is Trump's platform.

The legal theory of Trump's coup attempt, made explicit in argument before the Supreme Court, is that the chieftain is immune to law.  There is magic around the chieftain's person, such that he need respond only to himself.  The words "presidential immunity" are an incantation directed to people in black robes, summoning them to act as the chieftain's shamans and confirm his magical status.

Some of the people in black robes, Supreme Court justices, like being shamans. Our shamans are allowed to take bribes from those who support the chieftain, and also allowed to claim that as magicians, people unlike others, they are unaffected by them. If there is any doubt, our shamans tell us, they can be trusted to be judges in their own case.

Shamans thus installed will protect their chieftain, and surround him with their magical aura. Unlike other courts, the Supreme Court can make things up as it goes along, and there has been a good deal of that lately, especially on the part of Mr. Alito. Its members can claim fidelity to the words of the Constitution, then cast all that aside when the chieftain is threatened.

To contemplate "presidential immunity," as the shamans are now doing, is to cast aside the rule of law and summon up the ghost of revenge culture.  It is constitutionally ridiculous to say that the person whose responsibility is to execute the laws is above them.

But the problem is deeper than that.  If any individual is untouched by law, that individual can be expected to shift the entire society back towards revenge.  Trump openly affirms this. His entire platform is retribution — retribution against others for the crime that he himself committed. Once we replace law with revenge, there will be no way to hold him back. ...

This June, we await the decision of the Supreme Court on whether the former president is legally immune from prosecution for inciting and encouraging insurrection against election results and against the Constitution. Lower courts say "no way!" We are about to find out how far our black robed shamans have strayed from the American promise. 

 

Or perhaps they are best represented by some other animal ...

We just need to pay attention

What do we know and when did we know it?

In 1973, Senator Howard Baker asked that question about a criminal president (Richard Nixon). Erudite Partner asks that question today about criminal wars and climate failure. She suspects, we're all living within the painful trajectory of the ancient Greek seer Cassandra.

This capacity to predict the future is beginning to feel a bit déjà-vu-ish. ...

Read all about it at the LA Progressive.

Republicans believe the darndest things

Aaron Blake compiles a rather extraordinary catalogue of falsehoods that have taken root among the GOP base.

• A new CBS News/YouGov poll gets at a question I’ve been hoping someone would ask for a while. It gauged just how many Americans buy into the still-baseless idea that Biden had something to do with the successful charges against Trump in Manhattan. Turns out, it’s 43 percent — and 80 percent of Republicans.
• Just as a mere 20 percent of Republicans reject the Manhattan conspiracy theory, previous YouGov polling has shown only about 1 in 5 Republicans even acknowledge that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. (He most certainly did.)
• A majority of Republicans have labeled the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” (This is false.)
• Half of Republicans have denied Trump even had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. And about half have said they were at least “probably” planted. (Trump has acknowledged having the documents; there is no evidence they were planted.)
• About 4 in 10 Americans and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans have said Biden didn’t legitimately win enough votes in 2020, even though Trump’s theories about this repeatedly fall apart under even modest scrutiny. (Trump backers have at least come to largely acknowledge there is no hard evidence for their belief.) 

Belief in Trump is overriding all evidence and common sense among an astonishing number of our fellow citizens.

Over a year ago, elections commentator Ronald Brownstein explained why this works for Trump. He has convinced

... most Republican voters to view his four criminal indictments as a politicized “witch hunt” aimed not only at him, but them....  the inclination of so many Republican voters to dismiss all of the charges accumulating against Trump ... reflects something much more fundamental: the hardening tendency of conservatives to believe that they are the real victims of bias in a society irreversibly growing more racially and culturally diverse.

The good news is that about 57 percent of us don't believe any of these fables. We are the majority.

If we don't want to live in a terrifying cloud-cockooland, we have to get that majority out to defend reality in November.

Justice catches a break

Ya gotta have hope!
Mustn't sit around and mope ...
[From the musical "Damn Yankees"]

Author Jemar Tisby audaciously offers "the tools and knowledge necessary for you to move from follower to leader on the journey of racial justice" on his Substack Footnotes. I share his reaction to Donald Trump's conviction for 34 crimes last week.

... as people concerned about justice we need to learn to be as concerned about what is a win as what is right.

There’s a sense in which Trump’s conviction is both a win and it is right. But it’s not an unequivocal win. He can still, very likely, become president.

Yet is there any relief in the right being done (a conviction in this case)? Do we allow ourselves the space to be glad that a system works, even occasionally?

I get it. I study racism and justice all day, every day. We face a lot of setbacks, heartbreak, and resistance.

What is also true is that we occasionally catch a break. Sometimes light pierces the darkness of our political atmosphere. And we have every right to appreciate those moments.

There is no virtue in suppressing our feelings. Feelings are a compass that point to our most authentic thoughts.

Allowing yourself to feel a glimmer of joy and hope is not foolish. It is inward, the spark of the Creator, that reminds you of your humanity and that you can still imagine a better future. ...

In a long career of working for more justice and more compassion, I too have found it hard to note and savor the moments when justice momentarily prevails. But they do happen. The New York State convictions are one such. Let's be glad -- and defeat the Orange Crybaby and his MAGA hordes in November.

Trials of techno-medicine

Provision of medical services has become more and more sliced and diced to provide maximum profit for corporate providers, or so it appears to me.

Last week I accompanied an older friend to an appointment for a prescribed blood draw. The office was in a nondescript strip mall building. The entrance issued on a waiting room with rows of chairs -- and no human attendant. Just chairs and a large wall screen that flashed a series of messages.

A printed sign pointed to another small screen on a podium at waist level and called upon patients to "check in here." This screen asked for an appointment number -- a number which appeared nowhere on the paper notice provided by my friend's doctor. Dauntlessly, my friend ventured down a hall way and around a partition to find a human. That worker offered, resignedly, "just enter your phone number." Seemed she might have been interrupted by this question before.

After a bit of poking around on several confusingly designed screens, we found a place to enter that number and my friend managed to call up a notice of her appointment, offer her ID to be scanned, and also enter some of her insurance information. She never quite finished that part of the process, but eventually her name appeared in the left hand white column on the big wall screen, indicating that the office understood she was there for her appointment.

So we sat in one of the rows of chairs, all of which faced the big wall screen. And there was nothing to fix on except that screen, which flashed a series of messages promoting this for-profit facility. We especially appreciated the one above. So helpful to patients ...

Meanwhile, bloodcurdling screams issued from the back offices -- we'd seen a mother lead a reluctant child down the hall. This was not so much pain, we hoped, but terror. But it was completely unsettling. When they exited, the mother -- in the midst of reassuring the child -- looked around the waiting room shamefacedly. I tried to offer her some comfort.

Finally a human appeared to call my friend to come behind for her needle stick. She was taken to the same room from which the child-patient had been leaving. She reported she still felt the swirl of psychic fear in this antiseptic place. The tech was business-like; her blood draw was quickly accomplished. And then he pushed on to the next waiting patient.

There's no health in a setting like this; we're just profit points for someone. Would hiring a receptionist really hurt the bottom line so much?

Friday cat blogging

The cats are glad to have their humans back in town, I think. They certainly don't improve productivity at the key boards.

Tell it loud ...

 

NEW BILLBOARDS are live in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin featuring Republican Voters Against Trump:

“I’m a former Trump voter. I won’t vote for a convicted felon.” pic.twitter.com/T0sCr9CiLl

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) June 4, 2024

He's just a rich crook and the Republican Party is a cult

I shouldn't, but I retain the ability to be amazed by my fellow citizens.

Click to enlarge.

Aaron Blake reports:

In April, [a You-Gov poll] showed 58 percent of Republicans said that a convicted felon should not be allowed to become president. But after Trump’s conviction in Manhattan last week, that number plummeted to just 23 percent.

Republicans in April said by a 41-point margin that a conviction would be disqualifying; they now say by a 35-point margin that it’s not disqualifying.

The same poll in April showed 37 percent of Republicans said they would not be willing to vote for a convicted felon “under any circumstances.” That number has now dropped to 14 percent.

... Trump’s party is certainly a reflection of his own situational approach to principles.

We're back to "what the hell is wrong with these people?" I'm sure the answer is multi-faceted and some facets may be forgivable. But too many are not. The only recourse is to outnumber them in a free and fair election in November.

He's just a rich crook

Some Democratic political consultants tell us we must use weasel words about the former president, but I don't see it. A jury got a close look at how he illegally schemed to rob voters of information that might have influenced the 2016 election -- the jury heard it all, and said no, he's obviously guilty. And that's the new fact.

Jess Piper, who organizes and campaigns for Dems in rural Missouri, is having no caution. 

... I have had several Missouri candidates, and those from outside of the state, reach out and say that the Democratic Party has decided it’s best for state level candidates to not speak on Donald Trump’s guilty verdict.

Wait, what?

... Speak on the Trump guilty verdict. Say it loud. Knock doors and tell the folks about it.

I don’t think we should rub Republican noses in a guilty verdict, but my god, to remain silent on it makes us look complicit. Or like Biden had something to do with the verdict. Or like it was truly “rigged.”

If we don’t speak on it, we seem guilty as well, and that gives the purveyors of right-wing propaganda the inch they need to run a mile with absolute lies. We have to get out there with our message of truth, or we have folks thinking the Dems had something to do with the guilty verdict or the case being brought in the first place.

...  Here is a message that even rural Republicans will agree with…rich folks tend to get away with everything. They walk out of a courthouse free on charges that would land the rest of us not only in custody, but probably in jail. They can pay for lawyers the rest of us would have no access to, and they can even buy politicians to plead their cases to the public. That’s not how the justice system works for any of us…why do rich people not have to play by the same rules?

... Trump is guilty of paying hush money and didn’t want voters to find out. He was elected telling us lies. He conned every single one of us by not telling the truth and hiding what he did by paying off folks to remain silent. 

Go get him, Jess!

South African democracy still being born

Democracy is not only elections. Voting only one way, though important, that we, often poorly but also often earnestly, try to turn our hopes and desires into government by the people.

This month, the number of countries conducting electoral contests is staggering. I focus on the domestic antics, Mr Trump the unstable criminal v. President Biden the wounded healer. But India, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the European Union are also up in the current moment.

I have no expertise on any of these but our own, but I'm fascinated by developments in South Africa.

Hung on a Cape Town lamp post, 1990

Way back, in 1990, together with Erudite Partner, I had the privilege of working to provide technical assistance to tiny South African newspapers which were promoting the African National Congress (ANC) message of post-apartheid non-racial justice and freedom. 

This was a strange in-between time; a month before we arrived, ANC leader Nelson Mandela had been released from 27 years imprisonment by the whites-only government, signaling that its system for repression of the non-white majority could not last. Cape Town was alive with excitement, hope, and more than a little trepidation.

But nobody yet knew what would come next. Could a democratic system for all South Africans be made out of the aspirations of the freedom struggle? That vision would have to overcome not only racial categories but also rural poverty and yawning educational and economic inequality if South Africans were to forge a multiracial democracy. And very obviously, this wasn't going to be a smooth process. Pure energy couldn't substitute for learning to work together in new ways.

One anecdote: a member of the staff of a newspaper in Cape Town came to us with a personal request. In this moment of liberation, the ANC was forming local branch committees around town; mass organization that had -- of necessity -- worked hidden and underground was going to come out in the open. She was excited; she needed a flyer to post inviting her neighbors to a meeting. Her radical headline was "Come Elect Your Leaders!"

Of course, we helped her. And then a few days later, she brought the flyer back. There must be a different headline: "Come Meet Your Leaders!" We helped with that too. Evidently the local ANC didn't feel entirely ready for an entirely open process.

That small episode came to capture for me the thousands of such difficult transitions that very ordinary people were attempting while moving toward majority rule. Good people who had suffered horrible oppression were trying to build something altogether new and brave -- this would not be smooth and simple.

And it still isn't.

The first universal, free, and non-racial election in South Africa took place in 1994. Nelson Mandela and the ANC completely dominated the new democracy. And until this week, the ANC remained the overwhelmingly dominant party in free South Africa. Sometimes it governed well; sometimes its leaders succumbed to national and world capitalism, grabbed for personal wealth, and became high-handed, forgetting the masses who put them there.

Lynsey Chutel reports on the election last week:

For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the party once led by Nelson Mandela failed to win an outright majority of the votes in a national election. ...

While the African National Congress, or A.N.C., remains the leading party in the May 29 election, the latest tally is widely viewed as a political defeat and a rebuke from voters ... who have become exasperated with the only party they have known since the end of apartheid. In the last election, in 2019, the A.N.C. took nearly 58 percent of the vote. The drop to about 40 percent in this election has cost the party its majority in Parliament, which elects the country’s president.

Voting-aged South Africans born after apartheid, in 1994, have some of the lowest registration numbers, while those who endured the worst of the apartheid regime are aging. Instead, a generation who experienced the euphoria and economic growth of post-apartheid South Africa, and then the decline and despondency that followed, have soured on the A.N.C.

“Maybe they had a plan to fight apartheid, but not a plan for the economy,” Ms. Mathivha [in northern Johannesburg] said.

... “More than anything,” she said, “the A.N.C. has been humbled.”

The humbled ANC will have to try to form a coalition government with other parties. The Guardian has a very clear discussion of the parties involved and how this might work.

Lydia Polgreen, who served as the New York Times Southern Africa reporter in the last decade, muses reflectively from the Cape Town region:

That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere “politicians,” hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome. The A.N.C. could be forced for the first time into an unwieldy coalition government with smaller parties that might not make for ideal allies.

... there are no miracles here, and that is a good thing. Because miracles cannot be repeated. But what can be repeated is the hard, sometimes ugly, always unglamorous work of compromise and negotiation, and the working through of the inevitable consequences of those compromises. It is only through this process of improvisation and invention that true self-determination comes.

The business of ending apartheid as a form of government in South Africa is over. It is never coming back. But if this election tells us anything, it is that the work of building a true multiracial democracy has really just begun.

South Africa is a beautiful place full of brave people. If, under the constraints of a terrible history, a grossly unequal world economic order, and escalating climate emergencies, any nation can construct something new, democratic, and more humane, this land still has a good a chance.

All news is local somewhere

Click to enlarge

The Queens Daily Eagle news story continues:

... The trial was overseen by another man from the World’s Borough, Justice Juan Merchan, who was raised in Jackson Heights.

Despite their shared hometown, Trump had no love for his fellow Queens man following the trial’s conclusion on Thursday.

“This was a disgrace,” Trump said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.” ...

Despite the conviction, Trump was released on his own recognizance Thursday, being spared a trip to Rikers Island, the home of the city’s notorious jail complex which happens to be part of the same borough the former president was raised in.

Good to see that Queens still has its own local rag.

Two old men

In a week when convicted felon Donald Trump is whining loudly about being found guilty by a jury of his fellow citizens of a scheme to hoodwink voters, it may seem beside the point to go back to voters' concerns about the ages of our presidential choices. The jury verdict affirms our assumption that the Orange Man violates any law (or recognized ethical injunction) that gets in his way. That's bad.

But the age discussion is sure to come back, especially if Trump thinks it can distract from his criminal record. 

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the basketball great and supreme exponent of rational thinking, made some observations that seem worth sharing:

I’m younger than both Biden and Trump and I think I’m too old to be president. But what rankles in [one] poll is that Trump is 77 and Biden is 81—a four-year difference—and yet 25% more thought Biden was too old. Given what we’ve been able to observe in both men through their actions and words, how can 62% think Biden doesn’t have the mental fitness needed to do the job but only 48% think that of Trump? 

We’re so focused on worrying about the decline of the brain by aging that we miss this clear evidence of the decline of the use of the brain based on the inability to use facts and logic to form opinions. In the best of all worlds, we’d have younger and more robust candidates. But that, too, was our choice, so all that’s left for those with fully functioning brains is to choose which is best for the country.

I suggest you follow [this gift] link and read the entire article because it offers some scientific insight into the process of aging and its effects on the brain. For example, when older people fumble names and places—as both Trump and Biden (and myself) have done—it’s not necessarily an indication of declining cognizance. It could simply be depression, temporary dehydration, or a deficiency of vitamin B12.

Older people also tend to be more emotionally stable. Aging reduces negative emotions and lets us see with more clarity what’s worth getting worked up about and what isn’t.

What’s concerning about the debate over Trump and Biden’s age is that it spills over into how society perceives seniors in general. Says Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, “The ageism that underlies these discussions is remarkable.”

She also pointed out that “Emotional regulation, emotional caring, appreciation, motivation to be social with others — all of those go up with age.”

Well, we've certainly got one candidate who, if anything, seems to lose emotional regulation and/or emotional stability by the day, if he ever had any. Meanwhile the other guy is doing the most difficult job in the world, creditably if imperfectly.

Kareem's confession that he -- Kareem at 77 -- is "too old to be president" frames his thinking about Joe Biden (who he nonetheless supports). 

I want to suggest that Kareem is not being entirely logical here. 

I too feel myself "too old to be president" -- but I think that conclusion answers the wrong question. The better frame is, does the individual have life experience that helps do the job. We don't often put it that way, but I think that is what we are seeing.

Here's how I've lived an experience which suggests this might be the right frame: when I was a mere 75, I had the chance to fulfill a useful and difficult logistical role for a vital political campaign. I had my doubts about whether I could do it; this sort of work is detail-oriented and completely exhausting. Would I hold up? But I took the chance and plunged in. And, I think, I did just fine. I realized in retrospect that decades of working in campaigns in various roles had thoroughly prepared me for this job. That accumulated experience gave me the intellectual and emotional flexibility to undertake new, but still recognizable. tasks in a fraught campaign setting. I could do it because specific life experiences had prepared me to do it.

I think we are getting to see that Joe Biden's decades of aspiring to be president and of knowing where he wanted to take the role are serving the country well. He's one of the most experienced figures ever to reach the highest office. Presumably no one is fully prepared for that job, but Biden probably comes as close as anyone. I don't like every direction he takes it in, but I recognize that he's indeed "got what it takes" despite advanced age. Sometimes age is actually wisdom. Not every time, but sometimes.

Certainly he's got more of what it takes than the crazy other guy.