Killing the fathers

 

Adrian Carrasquillo covers the Trump tribe's war on immigrants for The Bulwark. Sometimes I wonder how even such a professional journalist can bear the anguish that is his subject.

ICE's new permanent family separation

... In the first Trump administration, opposition to the president’s immigration agenda was galvanized by the horrors of family separation. As Adam Serwer memorably noted back in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”

 

Today, the opposition is different, and the stakes seem far higher. It’s not separation that drives the fear; it’s disruption and death. There is deep mourning, but there is also a growing fury at these ICE killings all over Latino social media. It’s become clear that mass deportation comes with this type of violence—and maybe that’s by design.

 

Under images of Araujo and Guerrero as departed angels, the page Latino and Muslim Unity wrote,  “Our fathers deserve to come home to their families. We demand accountability.”
 

Carlos Espina, a social media influencer with 23 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, posted videos at turns angry and heartbroken.
 

“The Colombian immigrant that was assassinated in a hail of bullets by ICE in Maine was in the car with his three-year-old baby,” Espina said in one. “It shows this agency has no type of respect for human life, much less the lives of our people. They see us as dogs, animals or worse.”
 

JC Frias, a Mexican-American activist with nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, shared the final words of both men: “Me estan matando” and “I tried to stop.”
 

“They were fathers. They were providers. They were loved. And they were HUNTED because of the color of their skin,” he wrote. In another post, Frias echoed a sentiment I’ve seen repeated often, including in private messages to me from Latinos and Mexican-Americans who saw their own father in Lorenzo Araujo.
 

“Lorenzo’s memorial says more than words ever could,” Frias wrote, describing the candles, Mexican flags, soccer jerseys, and families stopping to pray. “One message echoed over and over,” he said. “Lorenzo could have been any of our dads.” ...

Follow Carrasquillo at Huddled Masses.

Are the AI tech bros conning us? And also themselves?

Last month, I bought a new Apple iPad to use for travel. Since I bought the last one in the mid-2010s, I thought the $450 price pretty cheap for a very powerful tool. But I was also aware that the Erudite Partner had two weeks before bought the same iPad for notably less. What led to the price increase?

Alex Reisner, a staff writer at The Atlantic, blames the AI boom [giftlink]. He's provocative.

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster: A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

... The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.

The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them. ...

He thinks the tech moguls who are building the AI future have blithely launched themselves into a morass.

... The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. ...

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). 

The large in large language model [LLM] should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. 

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. ... By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed. 

But, Reisner concludes, the tech barons are enthralled by their messianic delusions.

Chatbot companies are aware that their products are inefficient. ... we seem stuck with LLMs, perhaps because they have been so aggressively marketed. They are now being added to everything, whether you want them or not. In 2024 and 2025, they were integrated into both Windows and MacOS, which means that more computing power is now needed to run a basic personal computer. Smartphones are also being sold with upgraded hardware as companies anticipate new AI features. Inefficient AI is also being added to common programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word, meaning that computers need to be more powerful to run this software.

This is all especially bad because computers are no longer improving at the rate they used to. Since the 1950s, manufacturers have learned to make microchips steadily faster, smaller, and cheaper, a trend known colloquially as Moore’s Law. But in the past few years, components have gotten so small that manufacturers have run into molecular-level limitations on shrinking them any further, which has slowed progress significantly.

Ultimately, inefficiency may be of little concern to the people within the tech industry who believe that they are replicating intelligence itself. There is an almost-religious conviction among many in Silicon Valley that something mindlike could arise from LLMs, which are ultimately just statistical language-generating software—this, despite the software’s inability to recall basic facts, its lack of common sense, and its complete dissimilarity to a biological brain. ... But the mythological lure of AI is so strong that many engineers believe that nothing should stand in their way. Not even the basic task of writing efficient software. 

Is Reisner correct that AI is powering toward a messy, expensive, debilitating dead end? I'm certainly not qualified to evaluate, but I'm glad to have read his case. You can do that yourself at this gift link.

What makes Reisner's case highly plausible to me is where it touches on an area in which I do think I have the capacity for discernment. (And you, the reader, likely do too.) In the US political arena, these tech boys act like intoxicated teenagers with unmerited riches to throw around. Nobody can directly gainsay them; with their kind of money, they are surrounded by supplicants, flatterers, and, of course, politicians eager for a piece. An experienced con man like the Orange Toddler may seem to them a mark, but he's the true professional swindler. 

Scientific and business "geniuses" have lent themselves to fascist regimes in the past. The results were not to their liking; the Trial of the Industrialists at Nuremberg exposed cooperation with Nazi war crimes and mass murders. (Yes -- many escaped justice become "the West" decided they were useful to the Cold War... but that's another story.) Some of these guys are making themselves targets for a future fall.

They are good at standing around and being seen

 

To a bemused observer, one of the weirdest things about the regime in Washington is that most of its appointees in significant executive roles seem to spend so much time being props at various performative events. Don't these people have jobs to do? 

On the other had, when they do attend to the agencies and offices they've been dropped into, they mostly serve only as wreckers. So maybe we should be glad that they view their roles primarily as extras on a stage set.

No more "consequence free world" -- thanks Donnie!

What's the Orange Toddler going to say in his national broadcast tonight? Looks like he wants to whine on about the 2020 election he lost -- and threaten the 2026 midterms which he is going to lose. I won't be watching; I've got something better to do.

But I know at least one purpose that inspires this unwanted intrusion in our evening: he's managed to start a war against Iran which he is losing. He is desperate for some distraction. He/we are being humiliated by a second rate theocracy with a lot more brains and a lot more guts than exist in the US government these days.

Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien provides an apt and accurate description of what's going on:

The US-Iran War is a war of superlatives, because it is so absurd. It has already been the most “corrupt” war in US history (easily), the most “strategy-free” war in US history, and the most pointless war in US history. It might also be the stupidest. Another thing it is, without a doubt, is Donald Trump’s War (indeed that might be its name in history). This makes it a war with the stability of Donald Trump’s personality (i.e., very little). This week, for instance, the ceasefire between Iran and the USA completely broke down (yes, four days of constant bombardment means it has broken down) but if it instantly reasserted itself today, no one could be surprised because that is how Trump operates. ....

... The most recent polls are pretty consistent—somewhere between 60-66% of Americans do not support the war and consider it a failure. Only the GOP/MAGA base still supports this unending war (ironically enough). Also, the Iranian regime has consolidated its hold on power and seems to have rebuilt some of its military assets. However that is an irrelevance in Donald Trump’s War. He will do anything not to accept defeat for now.

... Look, Khamenei was a terrible guy, but the USA had pursued and legitimized a policy of leader assassination. Now it complains about this policy that has made Trump himself a legitimate target for Iran. What did he think? Did Trump believe he could assassinate whomever he wanted in Iran and Iran would not contemplate retaliating in kind?

The US believed for too long that it was living in a consequence free world, where it could do what it wanted and was so powerful that other states would simply bow to its magnificence, accept all insults, and grovel for its friendship. Well guess what? Actions have consequences, and the US has deliberately chosen policies with pretty terrible ones.

Wake up and smell the roses America. You planted these ones.

Actually, I am not sure Donald Trump's War on Iran is the stupidest war in our history. I could make a case for what we call the "War of 1812" and what Europe, if it remembers it at all, thinks of as minor skirmish adjacent to the Napoleonic wars which shaped the modern era. The USofA got lucky in that one; the world powers were distracted by their own quarrels and couldn't follow up on the blows they'd dealt the Americans. (I'm an interested student of that one; one of its failures laid the basis for my family's subsequent well-being.) 

ICE out of the Bay

Enil has friends. And so, when he had to report in to immigration court on Sansome Street in downtown San Francisco today, his posse showed up.

According to Bay Resistance: 

Enil is a loving father of three and longtime community member who was brought to the U.S. as a baby and has lived most of his life here.

He is an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has strengthened our community through his leadership and care. ICE is trying to detain him again and rip him away from his family.

A long line of other migrants waited outside the doors. Every day dozens of anxious people show up for their various ICE check-ins, never quite knowing if this will be the day the regime arbitrarily decides to take them into custody. The occasional larger protest against ICE, like this one, they sometimes find confusing and a little scary, according to one of the Faith in Action regulars.

So far San Francisco has been spared one of the Trump regime's murderous immigration enforcement surges, but we never know -- and try to be ready.

The local legal community has done a valiant job of decoding and stymieing the multiple illegalities in the process. Immigration law is a snarled nightmare even in benign circumstances. The San Francisco Chronicle has produced a detailed, easy to understand account of how the San Francisco bar is working to protect migrants. Read it! [gift link]

Socially useful residue of great wealth ...

Around the corner from where I live, there's a public library building which has been under renovation since 2020. (I looked up how long construction had been going on ... there was the pandemic and some kind of beef with PG&E. ...) The City powers-that-be claim this is nearly complete; I sure hope so. I use libraries.

Carnegie libraries were built with the ill-gotten gains of late 19th century industrialist/self-made robber baron Andrew Carnegie. He spent the last 20 years of his life on good works, funding 1,679 public libraries in the US, and more in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. San Francisco has several, including a fine specimen in Chinatown.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson included Carnegie's story in her 250 to 250 project for the recent anniversary. It is read by Corey O’Connor, mayor of Carnegie's town, Pittsburgh, PA.

None of the current crop of billionaires seem to do anything so socially useful. Maybe if Elon succeeds with his rockets, we can shoot him off to Mars.

Misery in the Mission

When I see my neighbors who live on the street, I feel moved to repurpose these words of the great moral orator, Frederick Douglass: 

… At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

Nobody should be "living" like this.

These folks are gathered to score from the dealer, I assume. If you don't yet know, the bent-over posture is common among fentanyl users.

Hell of a place to sleep, but still breathing ... all these folks survive (mostly) within a half-block radius of our home.

As the city tries (and largely fails) to "clean up" other neighborhoods, people migrate. I'm not saying it's easy to intervene when we've allowed the creation of a whole class of under- or un-housed outcasts, but a decent society and polity would find a way.

Credit where due

I try to know as much history as I can study, but Kevin M. Levin has just taught me there's a lot I've missed about how the Union won the Civil War. 

By Committee of Ladies of Philadelphia via Wikipedia

Roughly 75 percent of free born African American men of military age in the North volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. No other demographic group in American history has mobilized for war at anything close to that rate.

These men enlisted knowing they would receive unequal pay until Congress relented in 1864, that they would serve under white officers and be denied commissions, and that capture might mean enslavement or execution rather than a prison camp. Finally, they served not knowing whether that service would translate into citizenship.

Roughly 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Colored Troops, nearly a tenth of the Union army by the war’s end. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women who fled to Union lines and forced emancipation onto the war’s agenda before Washington had decided what the war was about.

Frederick Douglass understood precisely what this service meant, which is why he threw himself into recruitment. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” he declared in 1863, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” 

Apparently civilians in Union cities knew who was defending them. I feel pretty certain that Donald Trump and his merry band of vandals who are busily trying to cover up what we should learn in US history doesn't know this. And they'd only work harder to push lies if they were taught it. But we can do better.

Memories of delight

There are so many ways to reflect on America 250. I loved this one. 

The Center for Asian American Media writes: 

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we’re looking through our Memories to Light archives of home movies from our community and are moved by how Asian Americans have long been an integral part of our nation. 

Memories to Light is CAAM’s archive of Asian American home footage from across the country, spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s). These images embody shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America and demonstrate the importance of collective storytelling as a path toward greater understanding of the Asian American experience. 

What a gift! 

Friday cat blogging -- sleepy time

Unlike most of the country, summer in San Francisco is cool and gray. Our cats, after being fed and loved by their human servants, take the mist to signal they should take naps.

What a life!

Showing up counts

Andrea Pitzer, author of a serious popular book on the history of concentration camps, surveys the literature on authoritarian governments and movements and comes up with a deceptively simple prescription for those of us who aren't agreeable to American fascism. 

... If support for authoritarian rule can be influenced by something as simple as knowing that others support authoritarian rule, then it’s incumbent upon all of us who can to publicly reject strongmen and their tactics. This study shows that in communities with a free flow of information (as should be the case), the malleability of public opinion will remain a real risk. And this kind of peer influence on people supporting strongmen—when they realize others do—means that norms can shift radically for the worse in a short period, just as we’ve seen in the U.S. in recent decades.

This runs deeper than Trumpism. And one way that each of us can push back is to let our peers know, though word and deed, that these abuses of power are against our values, and that the authoritarian response is a shameful one based in fear and weakness.

There are a million ways you can take on that challenge, publicly embracing freedom and openness to everyone in the community—through art, through writing, through community cleanup, through calls for accountability, through social get-togethers. The main thing is to do something to stake your claim and turn those who support authoritarian rule into the definite minority where you live and around the world. 

My emphasis. We have neighbors and friends. They see what we care about and what we do. A pebble tossed in a lake or stream changes the movement of the water, even if imperceptibly at first. Keep tossing; there is no humane alternative.

Trump is a crook, any way you think about it

It's hard to avoid thinking about "corruption" these days. Every pundit who isn't a MAGA stooge agrees that Donald Trump is the most corrupt leader/office holder the nation has ever empowered. Some might wonder whether Andrew Jackson, or Ulysses Grant, or even Warren G. Harding might give Trump a run for the title. But even a little digging says no. The barons of the Jim Crow system like Huey Long might give Trump competition, but their state level corruption is a different league. In the corruption games, Trump is a legitimate winner.

And yet discussions of Trump -- and his sons' and MAGA acolytes' -- corruption often bemuse me. Let me try to pick this apart ...

For about ten years back in the '70s and '80's I was a small scale construction contractor. That meant that jobs that I worked on were sometimes subject to inspection by the San Francisco Building Department. In that era, the inspectors were mostly old Irish guys who had worked the trades when younger; I think it is possible that my boss passed along a bottle of Irish whiskey to the inspector when we passed the final, but this was closer to solidarity than bribery. I don't think anyone thought you paid the inspector to get a sign off. These inspectors liked good work when they saw it: one of my happy memories of that era was having a white haired, retired, inspector, a Glen Park neighbor of the job, come over to where I was building an entry staircase and announce that I'd engineered the thing as well as any boy he'd trained. He cared that no one would stumble because of my errors. That was the ethos, at least most of the time. 

In subsequent years, the San Francisco Building Department became a sinkhole of corruption facilitated by payoffs to "expediters" and sometimes allowing complete neglect of inspections, all for a price. It took a federal investigation to clean up some of this.  I was glad I was out of the business.

That's what first comes to mind when I hear "corruption" -- bribes and payoffs to authorities for favors. And there certainly is plenty of that in Trump's various pay-to-play schemes.

But a great deal of commentary on Trump and the Supreme Court describes what we're seeing as "corrupt" -- and these writers don't just mean that Thomas and Alioto seem to float happily along on gifts from their rich benefactors, some of whom have cases on the docket.

What we are up against isn't just run-of-the-mill bribery, quid pro quos.  It's rot that lives and grows embedded in the system: the "moth and rust [that] doth corrupt," to be exploited by the thieves.

David Kurtz, via Henry Farrell, makes the point that we are up against this systemic meaning of "corruption."

"To understand corruption properly, we shouldn’t think of it as an individual level phenomenon. Classical thinkers, like Machiavelli, understood corruption as a condition that could afflict governments and indeed societies. But if we value democracy as the best way to order our affairs, we should understand corruption as not a moral phenomenon but a political one, which involves the corruption of democratic processes."

… and applies it to the Roberts Court:

"Across an apparently unrelated range of issues – campaign finance, executive immunity, political corruption and gerrymandering – the Roberts Court’s decisions have persistently corrupted the workings of democracy, so as to undermine equality in decision making and voice in favor of processes that are both duplicitous and exclusive." 

Our Constitutional state has rotted from within at the encouragement and for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Such rot overrides citizen democracy. Yet citizen resistance remains and in our history has again and again overcome robber barons, against both sorts of corruption. 

Note that this broader meaning of "corruption" was well understood in Shakespeare's English: Hamlet's friend, contemplating the drunken revels of the usurpers, summarizes: "there's something rotten" here. 

We are forced to reclaim this usage. 

A season complete ...

Many thanks for all the kind birthday greetings yesterday. We celebrated by watching the lackluster performance by the US men's soccer team. Congrats to Belgium and all the worthy teams in the World Cup.

Of course the Orange Toddler had to do all he could to pollute the occasion. Heather Cox Richardson sums up his intervention in favor of a suspended US star player:

But a world in which playing fields are level is not the world Trump wants. He wants one in which people in power can ignore the rule of law for their own ends. 

Most of us prefer just law, equal opportunity, and a "decent respect for the opinions of [human]kind." 

This year I've come to delight in the idea of spending the couple of weeks stretching from Juneteenth through Independence Day as a season for reflection on the country, its history, its incomplete aspirations. I think that's a worthy practice.

Now back to the grind of freedom's constant struggle ... 

Flowers for a quiet Sunday

San Francisco is surprisingly verdant. It's the dry season, yet the season of thick fog. Observed on neighborhood walks:

 Proving once again, sun and sweat are not the only way to do summer.

How to live in a nation that hates you?

I'm not unusual in being moved by this 250th US anniversary to think about the present through the lens of Centennials Past.  Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. has offered his reflections in America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries.  A scholar of James Baldwin, he is not into pretty pictures of the past; this is not that kind of nation. 

And so Glaude begins:

I do not love America, and never have, especially now.

From there, he's more than ready to tell us why that is:

... Desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to themselves, most white Americans have been led by that fear, and continue to be led, into a kind of delirium that erupts, repeatedly, in unimaginable violence and draconian policies. They lash out. They destroy or render entire populations invisible, lock them away in prisons, push them to the edges of our communities, or deport them in order to keep the country, or their idea of the country, from being torn asunder.

... Trump’s reelection in 2024 signaled that a large swath of white America was unwilling to struggle any longer over race matters. Instead, he reasserted the fantasy of a white Republic. ... 

The burden of white America is a lot to carry. But here Glaude is -- and here we all are.

Glaude takes up various bits of our history and white America's shame in the light of the five great commemorative anniversaries. Particular horrors bubble to the top of this stew for deeper examination. 

For example, launching off the fact that Frederick Douglass's home place was western New York state in the years before the Civil War, Glaude dissects the Tops Market hate massacre in Buffalo in 2021. This one got to me, because Buffalo also was my home place, and I do not want to forget...

... Well over a century after Douglass delivered his speech in Corinthian Hall and Garnet announced in Buffalo that pharaohs were on both sides of the Red Sea, Payton Gendron, an eighteen-year-old white male from Conklin, New York, drove over two hundred miles to east Buffalo, exited his car with a semiautomatic rifle with the word Nigger scrawled on its barrel, and opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market. He was dressed in tactical gear and live-streamed his killing spree on Twitch. [Ten shoppers died.]

Gendron purposefully chose this area because of its high concentration of Black residents. Buffalo is the sixth most segregated city in the country and the third poorest city in the nation. Thirty-five percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Black children in Buffalo live below the poverty line. In 2021, African American unemployment in the city stood at 11 percent. Masten Park on the East Side, where the Tops grocery store is located, is like most Black neighborhoods in poor cities teeming with Black people trying to make ends meet. Severe residential segregation has drawn a hard line between Black and white residents in the city. One reporter likened Main Street to the Berlin Wall, a divide, like railroad tracks in small Southern towns, that separates Black and white neighborhoods. 

Before the horror on May 14, Black people lived in a city that fundamentally devalued and disregarded them, no matter which political party governed. They lived and died by a thousand daily cuts in “the city of good neighbors. ...

Glaude goes on to recount the testimony of the survivors and the relatives of the murdered. These are people who do not have the option of ignoring the reality that too much of their own country discounts their humanity. 

How to live in a nation that hates you? Glaude takes this as his problem and his text:

... We are forced to live with the idea that, because of the color of our skin and because of the color of yours, somehow that says something about our value, our worth. ... 

... There is this palpable sense throughout the country that everything is collapsing around us—that hatred has overrun basic values and that greed has trumped decency. Hope for a racially just society seems like a fool’s desire, because so many white folks—those who can’t imagine themselves as anything but white—have lost their damn minds. 

But love breaks through. Not some sentimentalized love of country that can easily slip into a kind of idolatry that makes one monstrous, but the love of people close to the ground, who give this place meaning and purpose. The love that motivated slaves to imagine a future as a free people when nothing about their experience suggested that such a future could be possible; the love that announces hatred must never have the last word. ...

... Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us. 

The reality is what it is. The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with this madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the “intolerable bitterness of spirit,” because these people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues.

Glaude would never deny he's a kind of preacher. 

Centennials past ...

My family has been bumping about the United States for a long time, since well before this was a nation, since Europeans started expropriating New England from its inhabitants. I am fortunate to have come into considerable family archives; I find it interesting to catalogue ancestral markers of these observances

At the time of the first (1875-6) centennial, a great-great grandfather, E. G. Spaulding, was a prosperous civic grandee, a banker and former mayor of Buffalo. He erected his personal monument to the country which had been so good to him. He was full of energy and pride.

 

The ostensible purpose of this massive pseudo-classical stone horror was to mark 50 years since the passing of his ancestor, Levi Spaulding, who fought in the American revolutionary army from Bunker Hill through Yorktown. But one panel was also an affirmation of the struggle of this own lifetime; old E.G. was in Congress during Lincoln's fraught Civil War term. He knew where he stood on the battles of his day.

   

Click to enlarge images. 

 • • •

Come the 150th anniversary of the country in 1926, the city of Buffalo was in its commercial heyday. Most of the great civic monuments were in construction or planning in that decade, including Shea's Performing Arts Center, the Peace Bridge to Canada and the art deco City Hall. In addition to industry, Buffalo profited greatly being the gateway to booze smuggled in from Canada, defying Prohibition. I remember asking my mother about that year's sesquicentennial. She was unusually vague in her memories. She was 18 that year, graduating from high school, about to go off with her family on a summer cruise around the Mediterranean, then off to college. She remembered she took her flask with her. Under Prohibition, you had to be sure you didn't drink something that turned out to be paint thinner.

• • •

By the time of the Bicentennial of 1976, I can bring my own memories. I was 29 that year. While the tall ships sailed into New York harbor and the fire works lofted over Philadelphia, I was painting my parents' living room, the furniture swathed in tarps and the painter covered in roller spray. I don't think we wore masks when painting in those days. My chief memory is sweltering, with occasional breaks for the TV.

 

My generation, people who came of age in late 1960s, were often America skeptics. We had grown up inspired by the Civil Rights revolution, then watched the cities burn when hope for racial and economic justice was unfilled, while the boys were sent to Vietnam to die for what we knew was nothing good. Then a president turned out to be just a common crook and drunk -- and by 1976 we were left with Gerald Ford who seemed an interim stand-in for a national leader. 

 

By 1976 I was on board with Dorothy Day's one word reaction to the Bicentennial as printed in the National Catholic Reporter:

 

Dorothy summed up my feelings of the time. This still seems one appropriate response to the national festivites.

• • • 

So what's to make of America 250? 

 

I have to admit, I'm sort of enjoying the show. Donald Trump's ignorant, tacky effort to hijack the national celebration seems largely to inspire ridicule. This ia not a respectful country and never has been. This is also not really a backward looking country; we can wallow in MAGA's swamp of gloomy nostalgia for a season, but our history is that hope revives. Against all odds, we can still make that happen. Let's keep up the work.

On the eve of the July 4 holiday

When I was a child, the preeminent patriotic song was not "The Star Spangled Banner" ... Too formal and too hard to sing. For some, the song might have been "God Bless America" belted out on vinyl by Kate Smith. But mostly, the patriotic anthem was "My country 'tis of thee ..." Perhaps this had something to do with our proximity Canada where, incongruously to American ears, the same tune served as a national anthem pledging allegiance to British monarchy. Obviously an adaptable tune.

With this in mind, I was delighted to stumble upon this wonderful iteration contributed by W.E.B.Dubois:

... Of course you have faced the dilemma: it is announced, they all smirk and rise. If they are ultra, they remove their hats and look ecstatic; then they look at you. What shall you do? Noblesse oblige; you cannot be boorish, or ungracious; and too, after all it is your country and you do love its ideals if not all of its realities. Now, then, I have thought of a way out: Arise, gracefully remove your hat, and tilt your head. Then sing as follows, powerfully and with deep unction. They’ll hardly note the little changes and their feelings and your conscience will thus be saved:

My country tis of thee,
Late land of slavery,
         Of thee I sing.
Land where my father’s pride
Slept where my mother died,
From every mountain side
         Let freedom ring!

My native country thee
Land of the slave set free,
         Thy fame I love.
I love thy rocks and rills
And o’er thy hate which chills,
My heart with purpose thrills,
         To rise above. ... 

There are two additional verses.  

Takes one to know too many

Panic about newcomers to the United States seems to be a hardy perennial in the American experience. 

Because my parents were unusually old when they reproduced, closer to 40 than 25 when they had a child, I carry a memory of coming up with people who had come of age during the immigration restriction panic of the 1920s. Even in the 1950s, they saw nothing amiss in reflexive "soft" prejudice against people who came from what they saw as "shithole" countries; in their world, that would be people of Italian or, even worse, Polish ancestry. The great patriotic coalition of World War II had sanded some ugly edges off this for them and this disdain didn't extend either to European Jews or American-born Blacks. But during the restricted phase of legal immigration that extended to 1965, they were just normies with normie attitudes. 

My generation were more open to new experiences and newcomers; we call that the Sixties. We were beyond shocking and very controversial to previous generations.

And then, like many Americans, my parents became more and more open to the different sort of Americans who came among us when we opened legal immigration doors a crack. 

The dwindling white base of the current Republican Party desperately wants the past and their entitled bigotry back. The Supreme Court's too small majority affirming birthright citizenship does not mean the end of the fight; it merely signals a new phase in the never finished struggle over who is a real American.

Air Force vet and former Republican Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger speaks to this moment; he knows the worst of his former constituents.  

Why Trump Won't Stop Until He Ends Birthright Citizenship 

Who is an American isn’t a difficult question. Despite what four politicians in black robes tried to tell us ..., the 14th Amendment is incredibly clear, written in language anybody can read and comprehend: “Any persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s simple: If you’re born here, you’re an American, and entitled to all our country’s blessings. And it used to be pretty widely agreed upon that this was an asset that this set our country above other nations as a beacon of freedom.

When I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, I knew this was part of the deal. And I served in uniform alongside people that would have proudly given their life for their country, even if their parents were born somewhere else.

... Let’s be very clear about this: Trump and his allies are not going to stop trying to end Birthright Citizenship, and whoever succeeds him will pick up that mantle. Deciding “who is an American” is central to the MAGA project; it is among the very first steps in their playbook. 

If you think this is an overstatement, just look at one response yesterday from a prominent MAGA stooge—the CEO of the right-wing magazine The Federalist: 

click to enlarge

I'm reproducing this deranged screed here because most of us don't see the stuff our right wingers stew in. "Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners." "Deny entry to all female foreigners." "Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." These people are scared stupid!

Kinzinger goes on: 

What makes America exceptional is the idea that citizenship isn’t about bloodlines or tribal membership—it’s about our shared commitment to a set of principles. It is a big, sprawling, living and breathing Democracy. This is what sets us apart from nations that define citizenship by ethnicity or religion. A Shining City on a Hill isn’t meant to be admired in the distance, it is an actual place with people, industry, traditions and faith.

And that gets us to the core of MAGA. The movement to end birthright citizenship isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America smaller, more fearful, more divided. It’s trying to turn the Constitution into a weapon against the very people it was designed to protect. Ultimately, Trump wants a smaller citizenry, a smaller democracy and a smaller America—in every sense of the word.

This is an existential fight for [Stephen Miller], for Trump and for the sociopaths they’ve got running the government right now. It is the skeleton key to the fascist takeover so many of them pray for each night. So the fight continues because they will never stop. 

America, as they know it, cannot exist with birthright citizenship in place because they believe it diminishes them. And, to me, that’s what makes the MAGA movement so weak and pathetic. They want to make being born here a curse, when the rest of us know it is an immense privilege. ...

What happened at the Supreme Court is not just another move in an ongoing MAGA v. Dems chess match. This is our existential fight.

Really, it's not so bad -- I think.

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark published one of his acerbic essays recently accompanied by this graphic:

Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark

As nearly daily, Last is thought provoking. Yet I question where he goes in this piece.

I think we can take it that the image captures Last's disgust with the small town Americans whose views are described in the ethnographic study from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University which serves as his text. Based in deep interviews in small town Wyoming, Michigan and South Carolina, the study documents that many adults in these communities don't much like democracy -- in fact, they hate majority rule because they know their white nationalist moral understanding of the true and good is simply not shared by the national popular majority. Most of us live in cities, suburbs and along the coasts; we encounter a mix of people and thoughts; we are not from this sad white tribe.

.. Our participants believe the American republic was always conditional on a particular moral order that has now been lost, and a people who held enough in common to uphold this order together. ... Our participants' fear of "too much democracy" is, at its root, a fear that popular will or procedural legitimacy have become misaligned with and elevated above the moral order that should orient both. They believe popular will and procedural legitimacy are important, but can become illegitimate when they stray too far from or threaten the moral foundation. ...

... The conservatives we met share a moral framework that precedes and judges all other aspects of life, including democracy itself. It is organized around four pillars: Faith, Family, Freedom, and Place. The relative importance of these pillars varies across participants, with Faith often being particularly dominant. In our participants' view, these pillars constitute the core of a good and moral life. Democratic institutions, processes, and norms are evaluated against this moral foundation rather than abstract theories of how democracy should work. 

This is not how most contemporary Americans think and believe; nor, approaching the 250th anniversary of the nation, are we willing to be confined in a moral framework from a self-consciously conservative rural minority. Most of us are not open to conversion to a cramped, ungenerous, orthodoxy of fear and decline. The people studied here respond to the majority's refusal to adopt their views by being down on our democracy; they know they are a dwindling minority faction.

The most telling anecdote in the study for me was this:  

...Participants argue the left has captured the institutions that shape what Americans believe before they ever cast a vote: institutions such as K-12 schools, universities, media, and public health, have all become vectors for pushing progressive values. Clint (70s, MI) and his wife call it the "raging river," a cultural current so powerful it has pulled their own children from faith and conservative values into an amoral progressive agenda, fracturing their family in the process. ...

This ethnographic study describes a set of America's losers. 

And the subjects of this study are all too aware and resentful of their loser identity. They wish they were not a minority, but they know they are.

Obviously, this hurts and makes such people fodder for charlatans promising impossibilities -- for Donald Trump. 

JVL worries that this recalcitrant minority, though it's huckster champion, is sinking the Constitutional ship. 

... I’m not sure how Democrats win over a voter who’s motivated not by unemployment, or the the Iranian nuclear program, or the price of eggs—but is rather lashing out because they’re angry that their children rejected their political views.

We are firmly out of the realm of policy here. Or reality, even. So long as there is a trans activist in San Francisco posting on BlueSky, these people will be aggrieved. Even if their preferred political party holds the presidency, controls Congress, and has an openly corrupt majority in the Supreme Court. Domination of the political system is not enough; they want the people who disgust them to disappear.

And—this is the key—the moral revulsion the participants in the study exhibit overrides their commitments to democratic processes and the liberal order. If “democracy” produces anything they dislike, then they are ready to be done with democracy. 

... This is not a new motivating force in American politics. And I don’t know what the cure for it might be. ...

I respond to that -- nothing in our history suggests that there is any easy cure, but we know what its elements might be: broad prosperity and opportunity available to a majority ... coupled with time. Throughout our history, the children have gone off in their own directions, whether physically to the western frontier or toward the "evil" cities. Trump's base of losers is having a very American experience in this our 250th year. But they remain an unhappy minority of losers ... 

• • •

Is the Agora study or Last's diatribe against the rubes really any different than the much-mocked "mainstream" media's dispatch of correspondents to chat with rural Americans in coffee shops? I have a hard time seeing a difference.

• • •

In the NY Times, David Wallace Wells [gift article] provides a different, and I think more accurate, assessment of this cultural MAGA moment under the Trump regime. In the majority, we're not willing to allow imagination and hope to be suppressed by MAGA's nostalgia for an imagined past.

... It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country. 

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

... Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading. ...

This July 4th, the majority continues to reveal that MAGA is a dwindling fraction, not an enduring "real" America. Most of us reject MAGA's terrified vision. 

I am a little shocked by the optimism that thinking about these several articles has let loose in me. Let's get on with making what democracy can of this country!

A warning by way of Britain: no deathly compromises

It feels as if it were going to be a more than usually unsettled few days, this coming week between the enormous LGBTQ+ freedom marches here in San Francisco and President Toddler's dumb and dopey July 4 appropriation of our national founding in DC over next weekend. 

As I come out of my rhinovirus brain fog, here's a warning from last week that I don't want to miss. 

Erin in the Morning: News and discussion on trans legislation and life provides just what the tagline of the substack says it will. This is news we need to attend to. And with MAGA bigots ascendant, this is news no one should ignore. So I pay attention when Erin issues a warning.

Reflecting on UK politics, where the governing left-leaning Labour Party has succumbed to a rightist-inspired panic attack on trans folk, Erin demands that here in the US, Democrats must find more spine. Deposed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's weaselly accommodation of his country's trans-hating bigots didn't win him any real allies or save his fumbling leadership.

... I often write about Democrats here in the United States, and I often criticize them for taking stances that capitulate to far-right framings on transgender people. In recent months, I lambasted eight House Democrats for voting to hand Trump more power to pull funding from schools that support transgender students. I slammed Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra for their retreat on transgender sports and, in Newsom's case, for floating the idea that trans people should wait until 25 to transition—a position with its roots in UK-based anti-trans activism. I've even criticized progressive icon and Mayor Mamdani for limiting his new clinic to patients 19 and older, using Trump's executive order age cutoff in what amounts to a retreat from his promises to use every tool at his disposal to fight for trans youth. 

Many have wondered why I have just as many sharp words for Democrats who retreat as I do for the Republicans driving the attacks. Starmer's resignation today should help explain why.

One of my biggest fears is not the Republican Party. They are the devil we know—terrible, and they will take every step to target trans people in the worst ways imaginable. 

But in the United States, we have one thing the UK no longer does: our major left-of-center party has not abandoned us. At least here, the harm can still be reversed. Executive orders can be revoked. Rules can be rewritten. Democratic-held states can serve as islands of refuge and support for transgender people, and a future Democratic administration can undo what this one has done. 

That is only true so long as the Democratic Party remains willing to fight for us. What happens if the only alternative party in the United States follows Labour's path and embraces transphobia too? Where does that leave transgender people?

The greatest danger to transgender people in America is not another two years of Republican rule. It is the potential for a cancer to grow inside the Democratic Party—one that whispers to its leaders that the vulnerable and "unpopular" can be thrown to the wolves in exchange for survival. 

But what the pundits pushing this strategy never tell those leaders is that there will never be enough to feed those wolves.  

There is no amount of concession on trans rights that will satisfy the other side. The ads will still come. And they will not stop at trans people… immigrants… disabled people… LGB people. 

One by one, each group will become the next "strategic sacrifice," until you are left with a party that has abandoned every community that once believed in it—all in pursuit of a political center that doesn’t even exist. You sell your soul, and all you have left are empty platitudes and a collapsing future. 

My emphasis. We aren't there yet. We have a choice about whether we will allow our panic about Trumpism to undercut our affirmation of human rights for everyone. And we can demand brave choices from our Democratic politicians. We are all in this together. 

• • •

It was nice to read a political journalist writing for a broad audience draw similar lessons in an account of Trump's gladiatorial follies on the White House lawn. Noah Berlatsky publishes at Public Notice. He has no truck with the racist malignant masculinity of the big hunk who celebrated his victory by shouting "Michelle Obama is a man." He sees scam.

... Even if the disgusting smear is not new, it highlights the ways in which the status, dignity, and rights of marginalized people are intertwined. The attack on trans people is not just an attack on trans people; it is also, and deliberately, an attack on Black women, on women of color, and ultimately on all women, on all Black people, and on the political party which the majority of all those groups call their own.

Some Democrats have wavered in their support for trans people during the Trump presidency. But this kind of smear directed at a Democratic party leader at a White House event should make it abundantly clear that throwing trans people under a wheeled conveyance will inevitably mean allowing said conveyance to run down and decimate large parts of the coalition. We need to fight back for everyone if we are going to fight back for anyone, because it is the right thing to do, and because fascists, in their hate, do not distinguish between us. ...

Again, the people may have to lead the pols on this -- but if we insist, we can! 

Still on a brain break ...

I stumbled foggily out to a store yesterday still full of rhinoviruses and found myself among crowds of lovely young women making their way to Dolores Park for the Dyke March. The scene reminded me of this classic lesbian poster by my friend Michele Lloyd.

And that's only a tiny slice of us. Happy Pride to all.

Regular posts will resume tomorrow, I hope. 

Blog hiatus

I'm having what's either ferocious allergies or an atypical head cold. Blogging will resume when I can breathe.

Go ahead, make up a story

I usually don't pause to take pictures while getting in my laps around Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park. But this was too good to leave uncaptured ...

You have to wonder, what was the husband in question doing? ... Or not doing? ...

California elections: I was both wrong and right

California's June primary election taught me some lessons about the numerous vehement opinions I bring to our election system.

For many years, I argued that widespread adoption of "abseentee" or "vote by mail" would detract from voter engagement rather than increase it. I was wrong.

I used to argue that campaigning to enhance Election Day -- marches, parties, the common accompaniments of 19th century elections -- would be the best way to increase turnout. This sort of thing does work in some contexts: homeless advocates have been known to march groups of street-living foks to City Hall to vote with some effect. But there is overwhelming evidence that automatically sending every eligible voter a ballot that can be mailed, dropped in a drop box, or delivered to a polling place is more effective.

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle describes the extraordinary success of mail ballots in our state:

... California had the second-highest voter turnout (40%) of any state that has held a primary so far this year.  The state with the highest turnout: Oregon (41%), which, like California, mails a ballot to every voter. 

Trump doesn't like this, but if you want more civic participation, make convenience voting easy! 

• • • 

However, seeing the "top two" primary voting system in action in picking the candidates who will be on ballot in November was the absurd farce I've always thought it. In loathing the "top two," I was right. 

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton skewers the strange consequences of this systemic gimmick. 

... [Former state Sen. Abel] Maldonado says he crafted the current system 16 years ago believing it would produce “pragmatic and commonsense” officeholders. But that has failed, he acknowledges.

... Voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for any candidate. And the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the general election. ... The idea was that candidates would be forced to appeal to centrist voters — not just party ideologues — and more moderates would be elected.

... Actually, the electorate has become so polarized in recent years — particularly during the Trump era — that very few centrist voters seem to be left.

... Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, favors dumping the top-two.

For one thing, she says, there was too much focus this spring on whether any Democratic gubernatorial candidate would qualify for the November ballot. Fear spread that so many Democrats were running that they’d splinter the party vote and two Republicans would finish first and second.

She wanted to hear less talk about the horse race and more debate over substantive issues.

“People were obsessing about a Democratic shutout,” Gonzalez said. “And people were waiting until the last minute to fill out their ballot because they wanted to vote for the candidate who was ahead to make sure someone made the top two. We didn’t have a policy discussion.” ...

Maybe we can get rid of this abomination? We implanted it by ballot initiative and we would have to vote it away in order to revert to a system in which each party gets a nominee. My instinct is that this would not be an easy campaign to win: voters tend to be protective of any arrangement which they think gives them more choices and presumably that's what defenders of the "top-two" would argue.

• • •

Meanwhile, it would be totally hypocritical of me not to point out that my candidate for US Congress from San Francisco is only still in the running because of the "top-two" system. If we'd had party primaries, Scott Wiener would be a Democratic shoo-in for November. In the current system, Connie Chan, still gives us a chance to elect a progressive, union supportive, Chinese immigrant from this city.  That seems like a good idea ...