We have something MAGA lacks

Ben Lorber is a writer and researcher at Political Research Associates, a long time observer of hate movements in this USofA. To do his work, he reads online right wing and MAGA chat groups. The resistance and resilience of people in the Twin Cities is giving these keyboard fascists fits. From Facebook:

Yesterday a far-right journalist tweeted out screenshots from a public, unvetted ICE Watch Signal group in Minneapolis. It’s gone viral on the online Right. While thousands took the streets, reactionary keyboard warriors stared wide-eyed and aghast at images from chats showing neighbors organizing street-level mutual aid networks and ICE monitoring shifts.

Over and over I see the same refrain - ‘the Right is nowhere near as organized as this.’ They insist folks are getting paid by China or that it’s all coordinated by the deep state. They’re clearly unable to comprehend, or unwilling to admit the organic strength of grassroots movement-building.

The Right is prone, of course, to strategically amplifying the imagined threat of conspiratorial, all-powerful enemies lurking around every corner. Stuff like this is catnip for a movement eager to catch a forbidden glimpse into the hidden heart of Leftist power, whether it’s from Q Drops, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or in this case a public, easily accessible Signal group.

But here they’re glimpsing something real, and it scares them. They can’t help but admit that their side could never pull this off. It reminds them that they don’t really have people power— the kind that makes neighbors show up for each other in the cold, again and again, over the long haul. And they never will, because their project is genuinely unpopular, and that makes it precarious and fragile.

So they cling as tight as they can to the levers of state and institutional power, and the massive funding streams that they do hold. But they can’t dream of the level of grassroots mobilization on display from just one public Signal chat in one city. It terrifies them- and it should.

It’s also hard to miss the note of envy. It reminds me that there’s always been a not-so-subtle thread of envy running through the history of conservatism. Whether it’s the French Revolution, 1917, the 1960s New Left or Minneapolis today, the Right is often jealous that the forces of human emancipation are more numerous and better organized than they are, and having more fun, with a more compelling vision of the future than they can ever dream of. 

... let us strive on to finish the work we are in ... A. Lincoln

Another murder in Minneapolis -- say a prayer and speak the truth

We gathered at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, memorializing Alex Pretti's murder in Minneapolis -- and finding comradeship with each other. The crowd was large, not so much militant as determined.

There was anger -- yes!

Apparently a good nurse, from the accounts of Pretti's life that are coming out. There were many in the San Francisco crowd who looked to be nurses themselves.

This crowd was determined ...

• • •

The Rev. Angela Denker pastors at an Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the murder site in Minneapolis. She writes:

I write to you so sad - I feel like I cry every few hours - and also so, so mad. At the many who prepared the way for this gratuitous violence and hatred. At the Christians, Christian leaders, and politicians who stubbornly dig in their heels, who refuse to repent, who insist upon more and more bloodshed, sacrifices poured out to the gods of violence, war, and money.

Pray for Minneapolis, for Minnesota. For Alex’s loved ones. For the eyewitnesses. For the press who were teargassed and pepper sprayed. For the children who see it all and wonder, how they can ever possibly become adults in a world like this. For America. For our churches, embattled and exhausted. For neighborhood leaders who again host vigils and light candles. For brave observers. For the VA Hospital, where I served my chaplaincy internship, and where Alex worked in the ICU. For the woman whom Alex tried to help, who was being assaulted by ICE agents, who then turned their attention to Alex. For the ecosystem of lies and those who profit from them. For justice. For truth. For courage. For love.

Amen. 

Amen indeed on this third Sunday in the Christian season of Epiphany -- the season when we repeat stories of the Living God calling forth improbable followers from among the workers of his time and place to witness the Love he spoke.  

• • •

For a more secular reflection, here's the often lucid Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

What Can We Do?

For starters, be grateful to the people of Minneapolis. Bearing witness today in America requires physical courage. Every single person who steps out their front door in Minneapolis to observe, document, and protest the actions of our government is taking their lives in their hands.

These men and women are the kind of patriots you would have seen at Lexington and Concord. I am in awe of their valor. They started this resistance to protect their neighbors, but what is happening in Minneapolis now is bigger than that. They are standing against the might of the Trump regime not just for themselves, but for all of us.

 Second, don’t look away. Don’t forget what is happening. Don’t give in to despair or exhaustion.

Third, do not tolerate false equivalence from responsible quarters. Anyone in public life who cannot call things by their right names here should be shamed, swept aside, and ultimately ignored.

Fourth, understand that this moment requires new structures and new thinking. The resistance in Minneapolis is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history. The political opposition must think anew as well. And any part of the political opposition that continues to act as though these are still ordinary times should be swept aside, too. ...

Fifth, as we identify ways to give material support to the Minneapolis resistance, be ready to offer whatever you can.

... They want us confused. They want us too exhausted to fight back. You don’t have to go into the streets of Minnesota to fight back. You can simply state plainly that our government is lying to us. Say it somewhere. Online. To a friend or family member. But do not let their lies go unanswered by truth.

Solidarity amid horror

 

Yesterday evening northern Californians marched in downtown San Francisco in support of the besieged people of Minnesota. We're fortunate -- it was more hot than cold!

We know which side we are on.

This was a union crowd with participants from SEIU, organized teachers and nurses, even retirees.

And some who are just forming their union.

 

These folks know which side they are on and it ain't ICE.

 

It was also a civic activist crowd. I saw lots of old friends from Bay Resistance, Indivisible, Swing Left and more. 

 

Like the people of Minnesota, we won't give up our immigrant friends without an organized struggle. 

Friday cat blogging

I won't be the only one who misses the football season when it is finally over. Mio finds the little men below his perch intriguing.

Maybe he can swat them? Apparently not.

Actually, I won't miss football this year. Every team I was interested in was eliminated over the last weekend. The season is so long it breaks the best of them. Will I even watch the finale?

A fascist with a brain bleed

Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist, the pillar of the news site Public Notice. He also happens to live in Minneapolis. 

He writes that yesterday he had other plans for his newsletter, but, as so often is the case, our blubbering bully of a pseudo-president managed to command his attention for his antics. This brief commentary is worth reading in full but here are some summarizing tidbits. 

American embarrassment. Global pariah.

... Donald Trump sounded like a fascist dictator suffering from a brain bleed during his speech yesterday at Davos. It was a national embarrassment even by the lowly standards of modern American politics.

... Put it all together and what we have here is of an out of control wannabe autocrat who’s cognitively impaired, openly racist, and more eager than ever to use force against his perceived foes both at home and abroad. It’s complete madness that this guy has the nuke codes and yet, with the exception of people like [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney, too few leaders are willing to grapple with it.

... At campaign rallies throughout his political career, Trump has regularly read “The Snake,” a poem about people being taken advantage of because of their credulity.

“‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin, ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,” it goes.

America knew — or should have known — that Trump was a snake before voters committed the world historical blunder of letting him into the White House for a second time. But that’s water under the bridge. Now we have to hope we’re able to survive the venom and endure the unending global humiliation.

... That Trump backed down hours after his Davos speech is a promising sign that financial markets and diplomatic pressure (not to mention the grassroots organizing that’s taking place in the occupied Twin Cities) can still provide something of a check on his desire to carve up the world between strongmen like himself, Putin, and President Xi. But make no mistake — one year in, he and his regime are getting worse.

That’s evident in the streets of Minneapolis, the oil fields of Venezuela, and yesterday on that stage in Davos, which will go down as the site of one of if not the most pathetic presidential speech in history — so far. 

• • •

A friend in the Twin Cities writes from within the occupation:

It’s really impossible to explain to people outside the Cities how dense and aggressive the ICE presence is, in comparison to the metro population. The scale of the violence.

There’s no denying that the cruelty is the point, and that how you feel about what’s happening depends utterly on how you respond to bullying and intimidation. The reason it’s not working here is because Minnesotans really REALLY fucking hate bullies. There is a cultural unity around that, and it may lay dormant most of the time but it sure as hell has been activated now.

We are resisting and obstructing, but it’s awful and scary and heartbreaking and infuriating, and they are targeting our most vulnerable people on purpose. Please make sure that everyone you know knows that.

I should add that I suspect the people of Maine are made of just as tough stuff as the Minnesotans. 

Here's what I know about how the rest of us can help occupied Minnesotans, though there are certainly many other ways. On mutual aid for the people of Minnesota 

There's no point in denying reality. And much harm.

With Donald Trump blustering about at Davos today, my thoughts return to the real international substance of our moment as described by Phillips P. O'Brien, historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The United States has changed sides in the long struggle for decency and democracy against exploitation and tyranny. We may not have been the pillar of righteousness we liked to think ourselves, but we were once not the declared enemies of humane flourishing for the peoples either.

Says O'Brien:  

The importance of the US changing sides stretches far beyond the Russo-Ukraine War. It is a challenge to the survival of liberal democracy and the rule of law itself around the world. It has left other democratic states leaderless and divided. It has emboldened Russia and China and it has made working with them far more attractive a prospect for others. It has upended the world order more than anything else since 1945, with the possible exception of the collapse of the USSR.

Of course not all is lost. Democratic forces have a chance to fight back. As I wrote in this Foreign Affairs piece published in September, the remaining democratic forces that do not want to go down the dark road that the US is now on, can act now to preserve themselves. They still have important reservoirs of strengths. However, before they can use this strength, they must acknowledge the reality of the new world. 

The US has changed sides, is not their friend and in many ways is out to subvert their futures as the US becomes an ally of authoritarians and dictators.

Acknowledging the reality of the new world is the only way to fight it. For this reason there really is only one story that defines 2025. The USA has changed sides. How the rest of the world reacts to that will define the future.  

Let the Europeans do better than we do. Greenland from the Greenlanders!

Marching on the MLK holiday

 

I found it notable that among the several thousand marchers in downtown San Francisco were so many children. Standing up of justice, for freedom, for the possibility of diverse community is too often a dangerous activity in Trump's dystopian America. But not this day. Today families could be together. Today parents could safely share with their children the values they hold.

 

Many marchers arrived from the Peninsula at the Caltrain station and made their way from up 3rd Street.

One of the larger labor contingents consisted of workers from the airport.

Young men finding their way in a tough world marched proudly.

  

This young woman was part of a Glide Church contingent. There were quite a few church groups and visible clergy. The short trek ended in Yerba Buena Gardens with music and festivities. I followed my usual course, attending either the march or the rally -- but not both, so this account stops here.

King's freedom struggle goes on

  

Some years ago, when I was walking all the streets of San Francisco, I encountered this window full of small nods to the life and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Click to enlarge.) Some are familiar: at far left, a small photo of the pastor and leader exhorting attendees at the 1963 March on Washington; in the center, a head shot of King labeled "Dream." 

But others, all words from Dr. King harder to make out, are less familiar and more challenging: 

• Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.
• Life's most persistent and urgent question is "What are you doing for others?"
• The time is always right to do what is right.
• A riot is the language of the unheard. 

Dr. King was not a comforting prophet. Few prophets are.

Dr. King, his words but even more the freedom movement of which he was the public face, was a presence in my late childhood and early adulthood. I realized this year how few of us still remember Dr. King as a living figure in the landscape of our lives rather than an icon of some vague, possibly better, historical America. 

That time didn't seem so good as lived; after all, its leader was murdered as a consequence of his struggle for justice. As were a lot of other people killed working for a different America.

Looking back, King is enveloped in a warm haze. That's bullshit. To the powers that were, he was a dangerous rebellious terrorist. 

Yesterday, in honor of the MLK holiday, my little parish sang the freedom lyric "We shall overcome ..." Do we believe that? It was probably even harder to believe in that in King's day than it is today. 

As singers did in the heyday of that song, we adapted the lyrics to our own moment:

"We shall melt the ICE someday ... "

In honor of Dr. King, let's get to work. 

Not to be missed

This is what Donald Trump will find he's up against if he insists on invading Greenland. The land of rock and ice has its defenders. In addition to Denmark and NATO.

Thanks to Paul Krugman from whom I grabbed this.

On mutual aid for the people of Minnesota

If you, like me, cannot look away from accounts and videos of Donald Trump's assault on the people of Minneapolis/St Paul and beyond, there are several actions you can do:

1. You can let your federal officials -- senators and congresscritters, especially if you have Republican ones -- know that the behavior of the federal government, your government, is unacceptable and should end NOW. Yeah -- calling Congress is a drag, but many live in a Fox News media bubble and need to be jarred by their constituents.
2. If you have friends in Minnesota who have put out appeals for help for people and institutions they know, send money if you can. This is not a time for someone to be starting a full fledged non-profit. Under invasion, mutual aid between humans is the name of the game. 
3. If you don't have more personal connections, people I trust say Stand with Minnesota is the real thing. They offer options to get help directly to threatened immigrants and also to the lawyers who have to fight the good fight in the courts.

When the structures of a complex society break down, we are forced to recall that we are dependent on each other. 

Donald and the MAGAts want to return us to a 19th century society when government was solely a force of occasional repression and people were on their own to try to navigate a harsh and chaotic world. They think their imagined big white men will be fine and all the other scum will live under the thumb of the big men.

Such a world actually generated Mutual Aid as a deeply theorized response to the cruelty of the emerging capitalist society. DJT and Stephen Miller are trying to take us back to such a society. Are we going to let 'em?  

Friday cat blogging

I think they are glad we are back in town. Not that they don't love A. who cares for them in our absence. But besides opening cans, we also let them sleep on the bed with us. They do actually sleep.

Janeway settled on my lap this morning. Friendly, if a little wary.

 

Meanwhile Mio keeps watch on the street. 

 

We're back in town, still a little unsettled by cross-country flights, but grateful for feline and human welcome.

Not a time to be quiet

It's hard to stop feeling shattered amid both fear and fury watching what is happening in Minneapolis right now. Americans are finding out what it is like to be occupied by an invading army of unconstrained goons -- sent by our own government. All over social media, you can see the thugs in their pretend military garb, roughing up people who question their authority. They sure seem to like being the Big Guys with Guns.

And you can see your fellow citizens rejecting the invaders, at known risk.

A sociologist who studies sexual violence, Nicole Bedera, has some thoughts about resisting if this invasion comes to your neighborhood.

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence.

Among perpetrators of violence, there is a very small share who are independently motivated to violence. But the vast majority of perpetrators commit violence to seek approval and status from others. This is particularly true among men who use violence to affirm their masculinity.

The goal of ICE watch is to surround that second type of perpetrator with people who *disapprove* of their actions. It will make them less likely to be violent and we’ve seen that, in some cases, that includes rethinking their original plan to tear a family apart too.

The success of ICE watch interfering with ICE’s mission is almost certainly why DHS keeps sending more agents to Minneapolis. They used to execute their raids with just a few agents. Now they need 6-12 to even begin to disrupt the social pressure to be nonviolent. 

I’m just echoing others who have already said this, but it’s a good thing that it takes so many ICE agents to make a single arrest. It makes the whole operation slower and more resource-intensive.

It can be hard to see the success of prevention efforts because we can’t see inside the minds of the people who changed their behavior because of those efforts. But there are a lot of reasons to believe ICE watch is working. And it’s also part of why ICE watch is generally safer than it sounds. 

Let's hope she's right. My city is full of people who are determined to protect our neighbors when/if the goons arrive. 

Everybody go get those whistles! 

Promise keepers

Nobody loves the electric company. We usually only notice it when we pay the bill or, more acutely, when something goes wrong. The power is just supposed to flow.

Here on Martha's Vineyard, we get our electric from a company called Eversource. Some of our experiences with them have not been so good -- like the time they were upgrading the lines on a nearby road and blew out our power. Fortunately we only lost a bunch of surge protectors. Remember to use those surge protectors!

These days, Eversource is completing a much anticipated project to bring a high capacity cable from the Cape to the Island, ending use of diesel for electric generation. It's a big deal. 

After Donald Trump's attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, a lot of big companies swore off contributing to members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 vote for Biden. Most of them have gone back on their promises.

But a few have held out. Judd Legum assembled an honor role of promise keepers that stuck to their word.  And Eversource was among them: 

On January 13, 2021, Eversource Energy, a large electricity provider in the Northeast, announced that it would not donate to any of the members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. In a statement, Eversource’s Chief Communications Officer Jim Hunt said, “at Eversource, we were deeply disturbed by the intentional disruption of our democratic process and the violence that occurred at the Capitol last week.”

Eversource has kept its promise not to donate to any election deniers and has made few political contributions in general. NRG Energy, a competing electricity provider serving some of the same states as Eversource, also promised not to donate to any election deniers, but has since reneged.

Other promise keepers include AirBnB, Expedia, Nike, and Lyft.  Read all about the good guys!

Not going back!

Erudite Partner's latest essay for TomDispatch looks back on "a low dishonest decade." It's her 99th piece for this lively opinion site which brings experts to attempt “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” She first came on as someone equipped to write engagingly and informatively about torture and abuse by the American government. What a vocation!

Her title comes from a phrase in the poem by W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939. Given that analogy, her reflections on the last 20 years of American hubris are pretty dire.

But she's still kicking. 

... A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle. ...

You can read it all here. 

Calling out the crimes

Nice to see Northern Californians doing something we do well: taking to a cold Ocean Beach yesterday to assert our opinions.

Brad Newsham deserves credit for pioneering this local artform. 

The San Francisco Chronicle has surprisingly good coverage of protests around the Bay. Coverage always becomes better when the local powers know they are up against the sentiment of the people.

Stay angry. It's good for your mental health.

The last week has been bad. ICE murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Donald Trump raided Venezuela on shifting pretexts and apparently has no coherent plan for the aftermath. Oh yeah, and he's threatening more mischief in Greenland.

We're ruled by a dangerous sociopath. Of course that's depressing and disorienting. It's a lot worse than simply being ruled by bad politicians who start stupid wars and funnel the product of our land and labor to rich people.

Garrett Graff offers a cogent description of what it does to us: 

... unfortunately some communities and populations have long had reasons to fear government in various forms or question the “protection” of the police, but never have Americans collectively experienced anything like the accumulation of mental weight we have in this last year.

All that weight is piled upon all that we also accumulated in 2020, from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th — the last, also disastrous year of another Trump presidency — and all that other mental weight we’ve accumulated that comes from the rising fear and collective understanding that because of GOP policies, far-right culture and media, and a nation that has lost its collective mind, you cannot count on being safe in the places where we should feel safest — synagogues, churches, schools, universities, offices, and more — and that when you kiss your children and send them to school, you can’t guarantee that they will come home at the end of the day.

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday, is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism....

But, dammit, let's remember who we are. We're the descendants and successors of a gritty, fractious bunch of migrants who defied a king, overthrew an enslaving oligarchy, fought 19th and 20th century capitalists, fought Nazis, and inspired colonized people all over the world to dump their overlords. (Even to dump us, sometimes.) The Trumpian crew are greedy second-raters who want to steal for themselves what a great people built together.

Resistance to tyranny is what people in this country have done, over and over. And don't forget it.

These women and the flag waver at the top of the post came out today even though the main local demonstration of disgust, defiance and determination happened on Thursday here. The population is small in January; the Indivisible lead volunteer organizer had already put on one good sized rally in Vineyard Haven this week. 

But she exhorted any who wished to get in sync with so many taking a stand this Saturday across the country: "Old School - Just Show Up!"

Some folks did. 

Friday cat blogging

 

Gremlin came to visit.

It was not long before she spread herself out to accept homage. But she's a playful creature, curious and even affectionate. We miss her.

Standing up against our aspiring king

At Five Corners intersection on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts:

 

It was cold, but not that cold, and the sun shone a bit as year-round islanders stood in witness to a woman killed and a regime which steals from us all and murders because it thinks it may.

The island has had its own invasion by ICE.

The masked thugs were not popular. There are plenty of people here who've come from other countries to work. Many have made a life in this place -- legally or otherwise.

New Englanders know BS when a would-be tyrant tries to feed it to them. ICE shot that woman in Minnesota because they thought they could.

These folks have a proud tradition to uphold. 

This is about deep story

I was disinclined to give Elaine Pagels' Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus a fair shake. I was wrong. I encountered a book that intrigued, broadened, and even fed delight. 

Pagels is a Princeton University historian of religion, an authority on the numerous texts in the Mediterranean world from the decades just before and at the beginning of the Christian era that didn't make it into the official (canonical) version of the Bible. 

Pagels' subject matter is what made me suspicious of her scholarship. This derives from a quirk of my history. When the Dead Sea Scrolls, 3rd century BCE texts uncovered by archeologists in the Judean desert turned up in the 1950s and early '60s, my intellectually curious, historically inclined, mother was for awhile gripped by a sort of fever for the discoveries. Though just an annoying child, I remember feeling there was something a little too credulous in her enthusiasm. Something didn't feel right. The whole accumulated history of the ancient world couldn't be overturned by some bits of clay covered with scratches. That's not how history works; there are no secrets, just complicated, crooked byways to explore. 

It seemed many mid-20th century popular religious writers, encountering the new historical tidbits, lost their bearings. As I studied history more, I wasn't going there. (Mother eventually got over her enthusiasm as well.) 

And I long pigeonholed Pagels as one of those enmeshed in the glamour of poorly grounded novelties. In Miracles and Wonder she's not, at least not much. Instead she muses with restraint on what modern historical interpretation of the times means to thinking about Bible narratives.

... given the opportunity to draw upon a far wider range of sources than those available to many historians in the past, I am excited to return to the questions with which we began: Was Jesus actually a historical person? If so, what kind of person? The answers are not obvious, since our earliest sources are brief, and often contradictory. There are more questions than answers -- many gaps in what can be known. But the evidence confirms that he was, indeed, an actual person; everyone among his contemporaries who mentions him agrees on that, whether they speak of him with reverence or contempt. 

I began this book with other questions too. What was the social and political context of Jesus' life in Judea? How is it that Jesus, who lived thousands of years ago, has not gone the way of other beings, gods and humans, like Zeus or Julius Caesar, who populate our culture's remote past?

The result is a little uneven, but interesting. 

She particularly chases down the notion, found in multiple more or less contemporary sources, that Jesus had a known male parent, one Pantera, a Roman legionnaire, who presumably raped his mother Mary.

... Recognizing the political context of first-century Galilee is necessary, though to understand the gospel stories. What they tell is what the writers knew well: that everyday life in occupied Judea often included violence. Roman writers picture their empire as a civilizing force, but Josephus [a contemporary Jewish historian] depicts first-century Judea as a land in turmoil.  

What has lent credence to the stories of Pantera is what local people knew: that Roman soldiers brutally suppressed any hint of revolt, exploited subject people, and targeted local women with sexual violence. ... 

... As for what actually happened -- divine miracle, human dilemma, or both -- who can say? As I see it, however these various writers interpret Jesus's origin, [gospel authors, canonical or not] all agree on the spiritual truth: that Jesus is "Son of God," and embodies God's presence on earth. 

That is, this is an historian who gets around sticky, messy questions of "what is truth; what really happened?" by defaulting to "does this story inspire?" This is no way to write academic history, but it may be the only way to chronicle actually existing, longstanding religious faiths whose content morphs and grows within history. This is Pagels' method.

My own experience as a historian has made me cautious. We do not know which episodes were made up, and which might be based on actual or visionary experiences. Furthermore I have shown that some scenes that sound like invention are written as metaphor. ... 

... what fascinates me is not only the historical mysteries my book seeks to unravel but the spiritual power that shines through these stories. ... every one of these gospels -- not only those in the New Testament but also the "secret gospels" [non-canonical fragments] -- ends in the most astonishing reversal of all. After Jesus suffers the worst imaginable fate, betrayed by a trusted friend, abandoned by everyone, falsely accused, tortured, and cruelly executed in public, he is raised to glorious new life, reunited with those who love him, and elevated to receive the highest praise in heaven, to reign over a world renewed in justice and peace. 

Hebrew Scriptures set the pattern for such shifts: people enslaved are set free; a shepherd boy named David fells a hostile giant with a slingshot; hungry lions spare Daniel's life; and Jonah emerges alive from the belly of a whale. The point is as clear as a lightening flash: "God can make a way out of no way," transforming what we suffer into joy. I love this about the gospel stories. Is that what keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history? As I see it, they give us what we often need most; an out burst of hope.

This is a generous book. We live in a time that needs a lot more generosity. I recommend it less for the truth it reveals than for its spirit. But that ain't nothing.

Five years on from Trump's coup attempt ...

... we should be clear about what is happening. American fascism is on the march, and anyone who balks at saying that clearly, who makes excuses and pretends that Trump and the people he brought in aren’t monsters, is deeply unpatriotic. If we are to have a chance at saving democracy, our first duty must be clarity. No sanewashing, no bothsidesing. Only facing the horrible truth can set us free. -- Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman

That's Krugman's substack reflection on the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021 and the current Trump regime. I have no beef with this formulation. I do have a beef with fancy pundits who haven't dared or won't see so as to speak so plainly.

But I am interested also in this from the comments on Krugman's post; a reader writes:

American voters voted for this [in 2024]. 77 million of them looked at Donald Trump and decided they wanted someone who was a convicted felon, greedy narcissist, sex pest, insurrectionist, profoundly stupid, massively ignorant, racist imbecile, and dedicated to destroying the United States government. 77 million Americans voted for this.

And now the country is getting what it deserves. 

It's easy to be disgusted by our fellow/sister citizens. 

The reflexive, easy response is to think: No -- that's not what they voted for. They wanted cheaper eggs. Or, to be more respectful, lower costs for higher ed or to buy a house. Less respectfully -- Yes, they wanted the old white guy, even a criminal old white guy, in preference to any accomplished Black/South Asian-origin woman. 

The commenter has a point; the dimwits who casually put Trump in office do perhaps deserve what they are getting. 

Much of it will fall on other people, who didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all. The Trump/Musk tantrum at USAID is estimated to have already killed 600,000 people, mostly children in Africa.

But Trump voters will catch some of it when they can't afford increases in the price of health insurance or when there's nobody answering calls for rescue when flood waters rise. 

But then I reflect: none of us really get what we deserve in life -- for ill of course, but also even more for good. What we think of as our desserts is not how it works. 

We just have to forge on, trying to fix what we can and passing on something at least as good and perhaps something a little better to the humans who come after us. As I usually say to people who ask why I do what I do -- my activism -- "Nothing else to do..."

• • • 

Historian Diana Butler Bass offered a thoughtful reflection on January 6 in 2022 and reposted it today. 

...Some of my earliest memories are political ones — mostly of John F. Kennedy and of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the two, I learned that democracy was a hope-filled possibility and that it wasn’t perfect. Indeed, it wasn’t complete. It was a project. There were people who couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. There were people who didn’t have certain rights because they weren’t men. There were people who couldn’t publicly proclaim who they loved because others considered them deviant. There were those with no access to democracy because they were poor or marginalized or went unnoticed.

How to fix these things, make the project work?

Democratic shortcomings were addressed by better democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century, people fought to widen democracy’s reach, to establish the dignified participation of everyone in voting, and to guarantee equity under the law. The federal government must stand as a protector of democracy for all citizens, no matter an individual’s political party, class, or creed. Indeed, many Americans shared a sense of democratic responsibility for people across the globe who were seeking a fairer, more just, and humane existence. Democracy was a worthy project, and it was a bright birthright, our political North Star.

... Democracy, the rule of the people, is a political system based on us. The rule of the people can be as inspiring as the greatest human impulses, as fickle as human nature, and as devious and deluded as human beings can be. In this way, “democracy” isn’t an ideology. You can’t put an “ism” on the end of democracy. Indeed, it is a practice of being a person in community, a polity based more on faith in the commons than a systematized doctrine. You can’t really believe in democracy. Instead, democracy asks us to trust that we belong to one another — all of us — and that together we can behave more justly and learn that liberty and happiness are possible.

... The cruel facts of history came home when armed Americans, deceived by an American president, destroyed a proud tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup to overturn the results of an election — all in a corrupted notion of actually saving democracy.

... January 6 was backlash on steroids. Backlash to a Black president. Backlash to marriage equality. Backlash to women’s rights. Backlash to the widening of democracy over most of our lifetimes — a widening that saw democracy reaching to include all sorts of people who had been excluded, a democratic correction of the flaws and misuses and mistakes of democracy past. January 6 wasn’t just about Donald Trump or the Big Lie. It was backlash to four decades of democratic progress that had been, by any historical account, extraordinary. 

... We can neither diminish nor deny January 6 — its memory — and how we remember it — is foundational for whatever happens next. So, don’t give up on the truth. Let’s practice the future of democracy. Starting from today. Starting wherever and however we can start. We’ve got work to do repairing and saving this messy, ironic, and imperfect project of government by all the people and for all the people.

Diana's consciousness of long-expanding democracy is common in my generation, most especially among comfortable-class white women. Look at all those white heads at No Kings. But we're not alone in this; it's the core American myth and it still has some life.

Will we allow second rate, greedy mobsters to kill it?

It's not solely about the oil

As a parenting advice column points out, unconstrained little boys like to blow things up.

Boys love explosions ...  I'm not sure about girls and explosions. I suspect they're less enthusiastic. 

Boys seem to have an inborn, visceral affection for explosions. As they mature, they gain the additional motivation of staging explosions to impress girls. I doubt girls are really impressed by this. But some of them might act impressed because they want to please boys. This only leads to more explosions. I'm guessing that the entire fireworks industry, and possibly war, has been built on this dynamic. ...

We've given the keys to our military to an uninhibited toddler and his enablers. So we get murder on the high seas and in Caracas.

Noah Berlatsky reflects:  

“The speed, the violence”

Trump’s refusal to try to get anyone on board [with his Venezuela adventure] is obviously an expression of contempt towards all people who are not his cronies. But it’s also an indication of Trump’s own fecklessness and confusion. He has not explained himself in part because he is not willing to do the work of understanding his or his country’s own motivations or interests. He’s going on impulse. And his impulses are for blowing things up.

Trump has long been praised by fools and opportunists as a non-interventionist, largely because he has long claimed, falsely, to have opposed the Iraq War. But even in his first term, it was clear he believes that war is a fun and exciting expression of power and masculinity (at least when it is waged against relatively weak foes). In his first 100 days in office, he used an enormous non-nuclear device — the “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) — in Afghanistan, then reacted with the same sort of gushing enthusiasm he showed after the Venezuela attack.

“We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and thatʼs what theyʼre doing, and frankly, thatʼs why theyʼve been so successful lately.”

In his second term, Trump has launched a constant series of military interventions. In addition to the murders in Venezuelan waters, he authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer and threatened more intervention this week if Iran killed protestors. He’s also bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

These actions have all been framed — especially by [Trump's Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth — as triumphal expressions of American awesomeness and virility. Addressing military officers in September, Hegseth boasted that “we don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He denounced “politically correct” approaches to war and advocated instead “maximum lethality.”

... In short, Hegseth framed murdering people in defiance of the law as a moral and partisan goal. 

Trump’s praise of “speed and violence” and Hegseth’s nattering about “maximum lethality” are of a piece with [19th century futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's] fascist embrace of war as “the world’s only hygiene” and with Hitler’s assertion that “mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.” Fascists don’t need a reason for this war or that war because they believe that war is a good in itself. Force is exciting and fun; using bombs and guns shows you’re strong. Trump’s a bully; he likes bullying.

... As political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “we have the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship” — and the dictator’s personal preference is to watch TV shows in which the US military blows things up at his whim. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we’re about to find out.

I believe we are about to learn that the time is running out in which US enjoys impunity for the consequences of our toddler behavior.

In fact, Trump's enthusiasm for bolstering his waning potency by beating up our western hemisphere neighbors shows a dim apprehension of that fact even in the wily brain of the bully. He wants to cede the rest of the world to other bullies so he can enjoy a free hand closer to home. Bullying in this arena didn't actually work out very well for another Republican imitation cowboy -- that would be Ronald Reagan in his illegal interventions in Central America -- and it is not likely to work even that well for this petulant incompetent. 

As is usual as a consequence of America's wars, we'll end up providing refuge to many of the best (and some of the worst) humans tossed about by our imperial pretensions. That's something to like about this country, I guess.

They broke it; they own it

Our Trump regime's Venezuelan adventure has produced one of the most revealing paragraphs ever in the New York Times: 

Ms. [Delcy] Rodríguez, 56, arrives at the job of Venezuela’s interim leader with credentials of an economic troubleshooter who orchestrated the country’s shift from corrupt socialism to similarly corrupt laissez-faire capitalism. ...

Since corrupt capitalism is Trump's game, he likes that. And he clearly thinks he's won the chance to steal Venezuela's oil. We'll see how it goes.

Good riddance to Maduro. Pity the Venezuelans. Pity us. When legal restraint is swept away, we will all suffer. And pity any country cursed with "black gold" -- except maybe Canada.

They are stark raving bonkers!

When they get through screwing around with Venezuela, there's this. Katie Miller is Stephen Miller's wife, presumably expressing the hopes and fantasies of the cabal of lunatics in charge of the United States.

Somehow I doubt it.

Against forgetting ...

Jack Smith (what a bland Anglo name!) was the very professional prosecutor called upon to consider and if necessary indict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection on January 6 2020 and then stealing classified documents when he left the White House. Smith did his job. Trump escaped the law only when the American people, in our folly, restored him to the presidency.

Smith told his side of that story to a Congressional committee last month. Republicans kept his sworn testimony behind closed doors and only released a written transcript on New Years Eve, counting on the country being distracted. This has worked -- if we let it.

The diligent journalist Parker Malloy had a better fate in mind for Smith's story: 

I spent the holiday reading through the whole thing. Here’s what they didn’t want you to see.

Here are some of the tidbits she extracted from the 255 page transcript:

Trump is a crook:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

Trump didn't care who, including and perhaps especially his Vice President, got hurt in order to keep him in office:  

“Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it. He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it. And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.” 

Smith had built his dismissed case from testimony by Republicans:

“And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies. We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win.’ The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal. Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.” 

Trump's allies had even concluded that people who stood in their way in falsely swinging the vote to Trump in Pennsylvania should be killed.

“And there was a text chain with some of the people who were carrying out this scheme for President Trump basically ended with, ‘These people should be shot,’ because — ‘and that we can’t let this snowball like this; otherwise, we’re going to have to do this in all the other States.’”

Parker Malloy has excerpted the vital parts of Smith's testimony at The Present Age. That testimony is not (ever?) going to be highlighted in the mainstream, but you can read this and great deal more there.

Happy New Year! Around the USofA I go

I'm walking (virtually) a circuitous route that takes me through all the state capitols of the United States. Every day on which I walk for exercise, I record my mileage on the World Walking site. (The blue line shows my progress.) For no particular reason, I chose to walk a ridiculous long route; it's unlikely I'll finish this in my remaining life, but it's fun to see how far I get and collect photos from the site of the obscure roads I'm traveling.

The full route. Click to enlarge.

Starting in Washington State, I've progressed south on the West Coast.

  

Olympia, WA

Through Oregon.

Salem, OR

South along the western slope of the Sierras.

Sacramento, CA

Then north past Lake Tahoe and into the desert.

Carson City, NV

For now, I'm slogging on toward Boise, ID and then Helena, MT. 

 

This year I covered a little over 1000 miles. I won't be surprised if I'm still in Montana or perhaps Wyoming on New Years 2027. Those western distances are long.

Actually, I've done this before. Back when I was a long distance runner, I recorded my virtual progress on The Transamerica Bicycle Trail across the country, bumbling and stumbling 4064 miles between August 4, 2007 and February 11, 2011. That was the short way.