On the eve of the British general election

Now that looks familiar, doesn't it. Young people are evidently pulling one way, the elders another (as of May 30). Nothing strange to us in the U.S. in that.

People who actually know anything about the approaching British vote (not me) seem agreed that Theresa May and the Conservatives (Tories) will win enough of a majority to stay in government, but probably not much enlarge their margin. This wasn't supposed to be how this worked; May called the election expecting to be greatly strengthened, but on the eve of the vote, it doesn't look as if she'd get the wipe out against the opposition Labour Party she hoped for.

In addition to the generation gap, there are familiar elements. Zrinka Bralo, a Bosnian who found refuge in Britain from war, has described how he and other immigrants are struggling for democracy in their new home.

... we often neglect to mention that refugees and migrants are also political, and possessing the same agency to democratically determine their future. This agency is exercised despite migrants often being denied their rights, forced to endure prejudice and degrading treatment and being formally excluded from the democratic process.

We have been citizens somewhere and many are soon to be citizens here. In fact, many refugees ended up fleeing their countries because they risked their lives being citizens in pursuit of justice and democracy. For many refugees and migrants, politics, democracy, voting and civic participation is an essential part of our identity and, without exaggeration, a matter of life and death. Just before the war in Bosnia, I checked myself out of hospital in order to vote in the independence referendum. Not voting was just not an option for 24 year old me.

... When the snap election was announced by the Prime Minister, migrant and refugee communities responded in the best way they knew – through a nationwide mobilisation. Communities seized the opportunity to make this election different by organising everybody to speak out, register to vote and ensure that their voice in heard. Even those who cannot vote were able to work together to ensure that their communities and their interests are not lost in this election. In a clear voice, migrants said that decisions about us should not be taken without us. ... Since April 18, more than 2 million people registered to vote. Many of these will be migrants looking to choose a Government that stands up for them and their communities.

As is so often the case, it looks as if what happens in Britain will be decided by who gets out and votes. Historically, young people and newcomers may have opinions, but they just don't bother to actually cast a ballot. The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been drawing enthusiastic crowds on a platform of free tuition and re-orienting the state toward support for public welfare. Theresa May clearly is uninspiring to many. But pollsters wonder whether all this noise can translate into a Labour win -- or even hold down a Tory majority. Parties depending on young voters seldom reach their turnout goals. Can Britain be different?

Labour has been airing slick ads that make the case to young Brits. Stephen Bush at the New Statesman opines that this vote could be a repeat of Brexit (and resemble Hillary Clinton's fruitless popular vote victory).

Most of Britain’s great cities – London, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle – all voted to Remain. Its smaller cities and towns opted, in the main, to Leave.

Labour’s surge may be similarly geographically limited.

Labour gains where globalization fuels diversity and prosperity, but this may not be enough to overcome the drag among people for whom globalization is not benefit but painful disruption.

We'll see. Pollsters in Britain have a far poorer track record than ours. Their system is harder to model. I'm following @GoodwinMJ and the British edition of The Guardian.

Local immigrant workers targeted for deportation

Having recently knocked failures of solidarity by national union leaders, it was nice to see local labor unions taking the lead at a small rally today outside federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE - Trump's deportation force) in support of Hugo Mejía and Rodrigo Núñez.

The two long time residents were drywall workers. When they reported to a jobsite at Travis Air Force base in early May, a military official turned them over to ICE; despite having lived and worked in the U.S. for over a decade without any criminal records, they have been placed in an expedited deportation process. The Mercury News reported their detention in mid-May.

President Donald Trump, who made enforcing immigration law a centerpiece of his campaign, has suggested the administration’s focus would be targeting illegal immigrants with criminal records. But critics say his executive order changing deportation priorities — which essentially made almost every undocumented immigrant a deportation priority — makes it easier to deport people with long ties to the U.S. like Mejia and Nunez.

“When the federal government indicates a desire to really go after people who are not citizens, then other parts of the government feel emboldened to target those groups,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, a Stanford law school professor and founder of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “There’s a ripple effect. The government sets a tone for what is acceptable and what is not.”

It’s unclear if employees or officials at military bases across the U.S. are required to report undocumented immigrants who visit the bases to ICE. A spokeswoman for Travis did not say if there are any such policies in place or if the individual who reported Mejia and Nuñez to ICE used his own discretion.

The two men have attracted broad community support.

Mejia and his family live in San Rafael; Rabbi Stacy Friedman brought a message of support for her congregation's neighbor.

Support rallies have been held in several Bay Area locations.

Graduation season

My friends' son graduated from high school this weekend. (Picture used by parental permission.) He sure looks happy and handsome, as do his friends. Congratulations to them all -- one milestone down and worlds to conquer!

Like the young man pictured above, I attended a private school which put on a grand graduation ceremony. But, oh, the differences! This is my high school class of 1965, Buffalo NY. (Back row, five from the right, for the curious.) The world has become better since then in so many ways.

• The school went to great trouble to get us all lined up neatly on bleachers for a professional photographer. That's what it took to get a proper photo in those distant times. Much effort was expended on getting the legs of the girls in the front arranged properly. How stiff we look!

• Everyone in the picture is white. The school had one black girl in a lower class in the year we graduated. I can't imagine what her life was like. (Nowadays it looks to be a far more diverse place, I learn from their unanswered fund appeals.)

• No pseudo-academic robes for us. We all had to wear white "lawn party" dresses. These were not something that even these privileged young women owned. Some, the most affluent or fashion-conscious, bought "frocks" for the occasion. I was fortunate to be in a long lineage of the more thrifty who passed the dresses down from year to year. I got the item I had on from the recently graduated daughter of one of the women who taught at the school when my mother had taught there before I was born. I remember it being ill-fitting and scratchy.

• And see those bouquets! You might think we were a bevy of bridesmaids -- and in fact the form of the event did point where much of our upbringing was meant to lead. The building in the background was one of the city's society churches. The school made polite noises about the important roles we might play in our future lives. It actually offered a solid introduction to scholarly learning. But there was no question that we were being launched toward heterosexual marriage and bearing 1.5 respectable children who might attend the institution in their turn (if female).

As you can perhaps tell, I hated my high school graduation. In fact, I hated my high school.

Certainly many high school grads still hate their high schools (though not, evidently, the young man pictured above). That's okay. It's a hard time of life. But there is so much more ahead. Enjoy.

Dude has his priorities

People fleeing #LondonBridge but the bloke on the right isn't spilling a drop. God Bless the Brits! pic.twitter.com/ceeaH0XxeX

— Howard Mannella (@hmannella) June 3, 2017

Grace under pressure.

Will media ever learn to stop chasing shiny baubles?

A Sunday AP report reads:

President Donald Trump is leaning against invoking executive privilege to try to block fired FBI Director James Comey from testifying about their private conversations regarding an investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser, two administration officials said Sunday.

There’s been no final decision, and the matter remains under discussion, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Trump’s known to change his mind on major issues.

That's nice. Are you going to allow the Cheato to whiplash you around about whether he'll make one or another decision that probably won't amount to anything consequential anyway? Just stop it.

If consumers of news stop clicking on stories like this, maybe the dimwits who write them will get the message.

The Cheato will decide what he decides, when he decides. I'm quite willing to wait for the news of that decision when it happens. That's news. This is junk reporting.

Facing down fear of collapse

It's not hard to understand why Donald Trump had to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement: he reveled in a chance to strike out at all the stuck-up, pointy-headed, leftist intellectuals who will never give him any respect and who are making his presidency an embattled morass. No one seems to take seriously that he has any formed opinions on the threat to climate stability which humans have initiated. But he does know that he can bond with a segment of his supporters who've been taught by fossil fuel myth-spinners that their jobs, and their white pride, and their manhood, have been done in by the tree-huggers.

Most of the more informed deniers, skeptics, and angry rejecters of climate science are actually terrified Collapsarians. Many of them know in the deeper recesses of shrouded minds that something is happening with climate. These people -- some brighter Republican officeholders, pundits, and business leaders -- resist engaging with climate science because to do so would force them to accept that their preferred economic system has set disasters in motion -- and very possibly there is nothing [that they are willing] to do about it. Staring at what humans have done to our own future is just too unbearable. The natural reaction is terror. Climate collapse looks inescapable; they must look away ...

In parts of Trump's base Collapsarianism is a perfect fit with day to day experience in their communities. There are too many places in this country which have indeed collapsed -- not yet because of climate instability, but because of technological and economic changes, accompanied by a perception of racial and social change, if not next door, somewhere too near by. Anyone who needs another dose of evidence of this should read Margaret Talbot's remarkable New Yorker profile, The Addicts Next Door. A Collapsarian response to intimations of climate change is simply a glove that easily fits for many of these folks.

But neither Donald Trump, nor GOPer leaders, nor suffering white people in places modernity has bypassed are the Collapsarians whose willed escape from ugly reality most disturb me. I worry about Collapsarians of the left. Oh, these folks excoriate those other Yahoos, the climate change denier tribe. But, especially in liberal enclaves like the one I live in, too many good people are haunted by the terror that collapse is what's ahead -- and develop strategies that enable them to look away. The unvarnished reality -- of climate change, of racial and economic injustice, of not seeing a way forward -- is just too awful.

For example, in a recent political study group, an earnest participant explained she was having a difficult time engaging with the arguments among historical political actors we were reading about. After all, she explained, "I don't believe in the system."

Our facilitator laughed kindly and replied wisely and warmly: "That's okay -- but you know it's like gravity. It's still there, pulling on you, whether you believe in it or not."

In her day, black voting rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer engaged with this same thought when she took on not only the Ku Klux Klan, but also the Democratic Party and a sitting Democratic president in 1964. She was asked “Do you have faith that the system will ever work properly?” She had an answer:

We have to make it work. Ain’t nothing going to be handed to you on a silver platter. That’s not just black people, that’s people in general, masses. See, I’m with the masses… You’ve got to fight. Every step of the way you’ve got to fight.

In the face of collapse, there is no other answer. Looming collapse is real, but giving up is not an option. Too many good people have struggled too long for current generations to give up. We who are active now owe both our ancestors and our posterity our fiercest resistance to the terror that there may be no way forward.

"You’ve got to fight. Every step of the way you’ve got to fight."

How about a little solidarity with the future?

Friday's Daily Action was to call various CEO's who are participating in some of President Trump's advisory (decorative window dressing) boards, asking them to follow the example of Bob Iger of Disney and get the hell out of there in protest of his climate destroying choices. I was happy to afflict a confused PepsiCo customer service rep about Chairwoman Indra Nooyi's cozing up to the Cheato.

But random activists with phones shouldn't be the ones putting heat to these two. (Click to enlarge. Via NYT.)
Whose side is labor on? And who does organized labor want to be there with it when push comes to shove?

A pathetically insecure man fights phantoms. Ruin abounds.

... China is doing its part, dramatically winding down a coal boom that could have doomed the planet, frenetically investing in zero-carbon energy. And it will probably continue to do its part even though the president of the United States is volunteering for the role of climate pariah.

It’s quite likely that the United States will continue to do its part as well, because no matter what climate policies he thinks will make America great again, Trump can’t make renewables expensive again or coal economical again or electric vehicles nonexistent again. California just set a target of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, and many U.S. cities and corporations have set even more ambitious goals for shrinking their carbon footprints. Trump can’t do much about that, either.

What Trump can do is remind his supporters—and everyone else on the planet—which side he’s on, and, more to the point, which side he’s fighting. He’s taking a shirts-and-skins stand against liberals, against goo-goos, against condescending scolds in Birkenstocks who don’t like Styrofoam or hulking SUVs or real Americans, against naive globalists who want the U.S. to suck up to the French and the Chinese and the United Nations. Climate change will affect the entire earth, from drought-ravaged farm villages in Africa to flood-prone condo towers in Miami, but for Trump it’s just a symbol of the stuff that people who don’t like Trump care about.

...Whatever damage Trump’s climate policies cause to the planet will be collateral damage, shrapnel from his political war on elites and the left and Obama.

But that won’t make the damage any less real. The United States happens to be located on that planet, and it’s the only known planet with pizza, whether the president wants to protect it or not. The United States is also part of the community of nations, and it’s a community with many common interests, whether the president wants to lead it or not.

Michael Grunwald, Politico

Urban scenes: the dogs must be walked

When are you going to pick up the leash?

Sometimes walking the pooch seems a pleasant interlude, appreciated by both parties.

But often enough, it looks a bit more of a chore.

Street markings indicate where leashed walking is encouraged.

This crew has taken that suggestion to heart.

Yes, sometimes everyone looks a bit alike.

Dog walking is a profession for some.

It is celebrated on murals.

And subject to mockery by feline fanciers.

Still, these urban dogs must get their walks.

Many encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Blog interruptus

These machines are wonderful, indispensable, we spend our lives with them -- until they stop working. Back when I get old faithful sorted out again ...

Friday cat blogging

After exposing the boy looking silly the last two weeks, here's Morty looking his intelligent best.

In honor of the Cheato's latest rumored atrocity

He doesn't like civilization. We've suspected as much.

... slowing down climate change isn't about saving the planet; it is about us, about our vulnerability to a level of disruption that human civilization simply has not seen before ...

And that's if you don't even think about all the critters that evolved in the same time period we did. All must be put at further risk for the profits of a few coal and oil company executives and shareholders. Guess we didn't evolve to be very wise.

But we did evolve to fight for our lives. Resist and protect much.

On historical lessons

History does not repeat, but it does instruct. ... History can familiarize, and it can warn.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century consists of 20 admonitions which can inform resistance in this scary time, enveloped between a prologue and an epilogue that asserts the necessity of appreciating rigorous historical knowledge.

No one who reads here will be surprised when I rejoice -- this is my kind of book. It's accessible and even concrete. In all likelihood, I'll be drawing on the 20 lessons in future posts about discrete current events and circumstances.

But here I want to reflect on what Snyder writes about our society's relationship to history. He indicts us for embracing two opposite fallacies. The first he calls inevitability:

... Until recently, we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.

... To be sure, the politics of inevitability seem at first glance to be a kind of history. Inevitability politicians do not deny that there is a past, a present, and a future. They even allow for the colorful variety of the distant past. Yet they portray the present simply as a step toward a future that we already know, one of expanding globalization, deepening reason, and growing prosperity. This is what is called a teleology: a narration of time that leads toward a certain, usually desirable, goal.

... The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So long as there was a contest between communist and capitalist systems, and so long as the memory of fascism and Nazism was alive, Americans had to pay some attention to history and preserve the concepts that allowed them to imagine alternative futures. Yet once we accepted the politics of inevitability, we assumed that history was no longer relevant. If everything in the past is governed by a known tendency, then there is no need to learn the details.

I read this and I can identify with it. Often enough, meditating on some past or present atrocity, I've called to mind Theodore Parker's eloquent formulation made famous by Dr. King: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I've labeled Steven Pinker an "arrogant twit" but conceded that I've learned something from his insistence that, on the whole, the world is becoming kinder and gentler. It's probably true that I'm a determined optimist about the positive potential in human societies.

But that only makes me more determined to "learn the details." It is in the details that the hints of hope are hidden. I don't think that dooms me to an "intellectual coma."

Snyder's second fallacy is what he calls eternity.

The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. ... In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. ... politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. National populists are eternity politicians.

I wish Snyder had been more specific about where eternity politics is located in U.S. society. That is, about this I crave details. Does he mean the white supremacist politics of the Confederate Lost Cause, the impulse that led to Alabama's new law outlawing removal of statutes of slavery's defenders? Okay, point taken, this is a remarkably durable thread in our history. But where else? In nostalgia for a romanticized 1950s when (white) men were men and women stayed in our place? Perhaps, but do even the nostalgists really believe anymore this existed? I doubt it. He says the reference decade for eternity politics is the 1930s, but aside from a few right wing crackpots, I think we'd be hard put to find anyone who lives within any picture of that decade.

But though I'm unsure about Snyder's two sided polarity, I resonate with his plea for the necessity of knowing some history if we are to find a way forward.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the co-creator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. ... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

... One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.

Let us resist and protect much.***Two previous blog posts about Snyder's histories:
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
Thinking the Twentieth Century

Caption contest

He stared at me so fixedly, I just snapped his picture -- while Walking San Francisco.

He's alright!

Micah David-Cole Fletcher, who survived his attempt to intervene in the hate crime on a train in Portland, is a 21-year old pizza server and poet.

I am alive
I spat in the eye of hate and lived
This is what we must do for one another
We must live for one another
We must fight for one Mother
We must die in the name of freedom if we have to.
Luckily it’s not my turn today.

African-Americans invented Memorial Day

The graves on the racecourse

When I was a child, my mother would take me to the cemetery on what she called "Decoration Day" to check the placement of the memorial flowers which the management was paid to place on the graves of family veterans, including ones who fought in the Union army during the Civil War. They pretty much always located them wrong; we'd move the vases ... I remember feeling bemused by the ritual.

Yale historian David Blight has made it his business to correct the national memory of Memorial Day as a part of the project of correcting the wider historical understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In Race and Reunion, he documents how the white Southern side won the history after losing the battles and tries to retrieve a more truthful story.

As part of a Yale Online Course he told the story of the first Memorial Day.

[In April 1865, shortly after the South surrendered to the Union army] ... the black folks of Charleston had planned one more ceremony. That ceremony was a burial ceremony. It turns out that during the last months of the war the Confederate Army turned the planter's horse track, a racecourse — it was called the Washington Racecourse — into an open air cemetery — excuse me, prison. And in that open air prison, in the infield of the horse track — about 260-odd Union soldiers had died of disease and exposure — and they were buried in unmarked graves in a mass gravesite out behind the grandstand of the racetrack. And by the way, there was no more important and symbolic site in low country planter/slaveholding life then their racetrack.

Well, the black folks at Charleston got organized, they knew about all this. They went to the site. They re-interred all the graves, the men. They couldn't mark them with names, they didn't have any names. Then they made them proper graves and they built a fence all the way around this cemetery, about 100 yards long and fifty, sixty yards deep, and they whitewashed the fence and over an archway they painted the inscription "Martyrs of the Racecourse."

And then on May 1 they held a parade of 10,000 people, on the racetrack, led by 3000 black children carrying armloads of roses and singing John Brown's Body, followed then by black women, then by black men — it was regimented this way — then by contingents of Union infantry. Everybody marched all the way around the racetrack; as many as could fit got into the gravesite. Five black preachers read from scripture. A children's choir sang the national anthem, America the Beautiful, and several spirituals, and then they broke from that and went back into the infield of the racetrack and did essentially what you and I do on Memorial Day, they ran races, they listened to sixteen speeches, by one count, and the troops marched back and forth and they held picnics.

In one marker that the South Carolina white planter class has so far won the battle for historical memory, the site of the racecourse is now "Hampton Park," named for Wade Hampton, a Confederate general later turned politician who is remembered for violently suppressing the Black vote.

Too much violence ...

Last Friday night, the motley community of people who have invested themselves in seeking some sanction for the San Francisco police officers who killed young Guatemalan immigrant Amilcar Perez Lopez with six shots to the back gathered on Folsom Street near where he was shot. Perez Lopez died on the 26th of February 2015; we plan to return to the site every 26th of the month for the foreseeable future. If we achieve nothing else, we will remember that, despite the thumb in their favor on the law's scale, cops should not be empowered to kill just because they get heated or maybe feel afraid. Police impunity is simply wrong and shouldn't require commissions, and investigatory bodies, and debates about procedures, and all the paraphernalia of bureaucracy for our city leaders to take a stand against police killings. And it's obvious the color of who continues to die by police bullets; the Mission has seen three police shootings of Latinos in the last three years.

Saturday morning I woke to the news that an angry white man spouting hate on a Portland commuter train had killed two men and injured another who had interrupted his threats to two young women of color, one of whom was wearing a hijab. Presumably the killer was somehow nuts -- he apparently tried to commit suicide by cop by taunting police who surrounded him after the crime. But the killer lives and is in jail facing charges and psych eval today. Apparently he was known to Portland police as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi enthusiast who had threatened violence at demonstrations.

To my surprise, I was heartened by seeing this video of the Portland police spokesperson explaining the little they knew last night about the crime on the train. Unlike our cops, he's not some defensive, awkward commander decked out with medals and weapons who speaks only stilted legalese. I don't know if Portland police have practiced acting like humans when confronted by trauma, but I do know that our cops could take some lessons in communicating. Watch a few minutes if intrigued.
The Portland horror felt close to home. Not long after the election, one of EP's students reported that she'd been riding on BART when a man started harassing a woman wearing a hijab. That student sat down next to the victim and then got off the train with her, even though neither was at their intended stop. It feels as if the violence is all around, as if demons had been loosed.

And then there's the Republican congressman from Montana who responded to a question about the effects of the GOP Trumpcare bill by body-slamming a reporter ...

Meanwhile, sage military reporter Thomas Ricks is book touring Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. (Will write about this soon enough.) He told the Foreign Policy podcast that these times remind him of the 1850s when this country, unable to resolve its conflict over slavery within the Constitutional governing structure, drifted from violent outbreak to greater violent episode as prelude to civil war. I've explored this parallel before. Ricks went on to point out that police are killing nearly 1000 people each year; this statistic was collected by the Washington Post. Though numerically most of the dead are white, Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police, considering Blacks 13 percent share of the whole population.

For a country ostensibly at "peace," there's a lot of violent death happening here ...

Saturday scenes: here's Jerry!

The deceased Grateful Dead lyricist, guitarist, and all-round musical genius is a very present figure in the city of his birth. He grew up in the Excelsior neighborhood, attended Balboa (public) High School, and never really left this playground by the bay.

His boyhood home rates a plaque.

In Civic Center, his image is embedded in the sidewalk in front of Bill Graham Auditorium.

In the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, he overlooks the street scene benignly from a mural covering an entire exterior.

All encountered while Walking San Francisco.

On memory fatigue and other falsehoods

Erudite Partner is at it again at The Nation magazine:

... If the age of Trump doesn’t end relatively soon, the daily effort to sort out what happened from what didn’t may eventually become too much for many of us. Memory fatigue may set in, and the whole project of keeping the past in focus shelved. ...

Read it all at the link. She reminds us what keeps us human.

Friday cat blogging

I wouldn't call the "full Morty" position dignified -- but this is what he looks like when he's had a few minutes with his catnip-filled banana.