Nicaragua is rising

As I often explain to visiting friends, here in the San Francisco Mission district, Nicaragua and all of Central America feel very close by. "Nicaragua is rising" says the poster that recently appeared in a store window on Mission Street. It refers to the popular struggle which has rocked that country since April and has cost some 200 lives in what was recently the most peaceful nation in its neighborhood.

Nicaragua is close, not only because so many local residents migrated from there, but also because so many San Franciscans participated in the struggle of the 1980s against our own government's determination to crush Nicaraguans' attempt to replace a dictator with democracy and justice. That dream lives on in the hearts of many experienced activists now bent on resistance to the Trump/GOP regime's cruelty and greed.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Nicaragua at the Barricades ... And a Crossroads, Erudite Partner describes both, some of the story of Nicaragua's liberation struggle, as well as some of the history of how North American supporters learned from Nicaraguans. She asks, why should we care that Nicaragua is suffering renewed violence amidst our manifold troubles at home?

...there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being.

This was "heady stuff" in the repressive, GOP/Reagan-afflicted 1980s. North American allies could not always internalize the most important lesson Nicaraguans tried to teach us: that the success of their revolution ultimately would depend on whether we too could remake our country into a place of democracy and justice. E.P. shares that story and more in this new article.

From here, we can have at best little idea where Nicaraguans' contemporary struggles will take them; we can have confidence that our domestic struggles for human decency, for democracy and justice, increase the space for theirs.

Speaking out: for kidnapped children and against our national demons

In anticipation of civil disobedience, Erudite Partner was asked to explain why she was protesting at Otay Mesa immigrant detention jail to a reporter from Bay Area station KQED.

Protesters in San Ysidro are preparing for arrest this afternoon at the border. Rebecca from San Francisco came to this protest and explains what this orange bracelet means for some protesters. pic.twitter.com/aCxzIqFBQa

— 🐝john sepulvado🐝 (@JohnLGC) June 23, 2018

As usual, she was animated and articulate.

Reporter John Sepulvado's report from Otay Mesa is an observant, accurate account of the weekend's actions.

Up close to a toxic system ...

With leadership from PICO California, some 600 or so folks from all over the state descended on Saturday on the Otay Mesa detention center that the US government is renting from a private contractor to hold migrants. We rather thought we'd improved the signage.

While security was distracted by the redecoration project, about 50 of us moved up the fence around the facility.

They then linked arms and chanted some more after tying kids' shoes to the fence. pic.twitter.com/PQNp93H0KK

— Andrew Bowen (@acbowen) June 24, 2018

From there we blocked the main gate during shift change and received the smiles of visiting family members exiting after visiting prisoners.

The best moment was when women locked within responded with cheers to the chants of the massed crowd on the perimeter road. On this day, what we had to offer was encouragement to sister human beings. The long work remains to reform an asylum and migration system that has become poisonous to us all.

This post lacks my usual photos because, for this day, I was on hand to take whatever risks of detention my participation might involve -- so no photographs. Didn't happen today. The condition of our country will likely demand unfamiliar risks from most all of us in this toxic moment.

The people assemble ...

One thousand folks are expected to march and witness tomorrow outside the immigration detention center in San Ysidro. This afternoon belonged to the mechanics of organizing -- buses, sign in sheets, and water bottles.

In early evening, massed clerical persons from many traditions led an interfaith prayer service.

A child participant was fascinated by her candle.

More tomorrow ... or as soon as I am able to post.

A profound moral crisis

Erudite Partner and I are on our way to the border to pray and protest against the Trump/GOPer regime's cruel treatment of migrants. You are more likely to see photos than text here for the next couple of days.

But I thought some might appreciate some thoughtful reflection on this country's history of child snatching from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.

... part of what horrifies Americans is not the novelty of Trump’s policy, but its familiarity. Americans are fighting a part of themselves that they naively thought they had vanquished. From chattel slavery to American Indian schools to convict leasing, child-snatching has been a tradition in America since before there was an America. If one is convinced that the parents are not truly human, then the children cannot truly be children, and what should be unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Few of the Trump administration’s policies better exemplify the Trump campaign’s commitment to restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race, religion, and gender, than family separation. That commitment—and Republicans’ muted opposition to or vigorous support of the administration’s actions —has plunged the United States into a profound moral crisis that will define the nation’s character for decades to come. To harden oneself against the cries of children is no simple task. It requires a coldness to suffering that will not be easily thawed. The scars it inflicts on American civic culture will not heal quickly, and they will never completely fade.

People who would do this to children would do anything to anyone. Before this is over, they will be called to do worse.

Serwer points out that the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin which gets some credit for spreading the anti-slavery gospel in the north in the 1850's revolves around child theft. Once again, when they revel in their villainy, we cannot be silent or passive.

Friday cat blogging

There's nothing to suggest that this animal wanted the human with the camera to come closer.

But although wary, she didn't pull away when I came close. I love how cats can negate your existence when they wish to.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

When evil curdles your gut, you can do something

Children caught up in the Trump/Sessions/Nielsen border dragnet are turning up around the country. Media are investigating the scope and horror of the program. Ordinary citizens are looking for ways to denounce and impede this cruelty.

• A flight attendant explains in the Houston Chronicle: "I will not be complicit." She's not alone. Airline workers protest being made part of this atrocity.

• The Detroit Free Press reports "8-month-old baby lands in Michigan." Another of the children shipped in with that group was 11 months old.

• The New York Daily News has looked into which entities and individuals in New York are making a good business out of child detentions.

  Housing the migrant children who arrive in America unaccompanied and those who have been separated from their parents at the border is a big business -- one that now costs taxpayers more than $1 billion a year.
  
  ...The charities and church groups whose duties include running the Unaccompanied Alien Child Program in New York State have seen their revenue double, from $73.9 million in fiscal 2015 to $154.2 million this year.
  
  Some of the executives at these charities take home hefty six-figure salaries, a review of tax records shows.
  
  For instance, Jeremy Cohomban, CEO of Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County, received $568,999 in salary and other compensation, according the group’s 2016 tax forms. The group’s contracts under the Unaccompanied Alien Child Program rose from $16.6 million in fiscal 2015 to $19.4 million this fiscal year. ...

• Meanwhile, 600 alumni of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's Tampa prep school have organized to express their outrage about the policies she has made herself responsible for. Better yet, like thousands of citizens across the country, they are raising money for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).

Most of us can find something to do to demonstrate where we stand on ripping children from parents already so desperate they sought asylum in this unwelcoming country. Your blogger along with E.P. is off to the border this weekend with our friends from Faith in Action.

You can find protests planned around the country for June 30 at this link.

Our improbable "internal political resource"

As the Trump regime builds out its baby jails for children under five, and we, the resisting majority, scream our protests, some repeat over and over "This is not who we are. We aren't like this!"

And those of us who have never been confident that the USofA was very good through much of our history sigh -- and contemplate the terrible job of gentle (and not so gentle) instruction we owe to our fellow citizens. What a horror show this country has been for so many: there was the attempted extermination of the native people of the continent; the use of African human captives as trafficable, disposal machines for cotton profits; the wars of empire in which torture and murder have been justified by religious and race hatred. And it goes on and on.

But there have also been also those other themes of our history: "inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; "government of, by, and for the people." The gradual expansion of "the people" to encompass more and more of us ...

Mark Kleiman at Reality-Based Community took up how we live among these uncomfortable contradictions a few days ago. We need to learn a more complicated, more truthful, history, of course. But also --

Aspirational history and political rhetoric
... “critical” history isn’t the only kind. National myths are, themselves, potent realities. A country where the belief that horrible actions Aren’t Like Us is widespread has an internal political resource that helps political actors within that country oppose such horrible actions.  A country where that belief isn’t widespread – where criminality is an accepted part of the political culture – lacks that resource, which of course is a benefit to criminal political actors within that country. The accuracy of the underlying belief is an independent question.

This post was a rare exception to the rule on the internet; comments expanded the discussion. Here's one from someone who calls himself "johnarkansaslawyer".

As a leftist, I'm in broad agreement ... that the United States has no particular claim to virtue. Also as a leftist, I'm also able to tell the difference between bad and worse. What we have right now is worse cubed. ...

Hating your own country is the internationalism of fools. That much I do know.

Becoming revolted by your own culture's flaws is a useful phase in development of a broader worldview, assuming you get past it. Getting stuck in that revulsion leaves you just as foolish, just in the opposite direction.

As we resist cruel barbarism, we can't pretend this country is flawless. But neither can we succumb to nihilism. That's throwing away any chance to fight another day.

Of such small victories, a different world is made

The Rev. Marlyn Bussey  of St. James A.M.E. Church, San Mateo

Community residents of San Mateo County made it abundantly clear to their Board of Supervisors this morning that it is time for lawmakers to to do the right thing. Every other Bay Area country has funded legal defense for immigrants threatened by our nativist government's program of ethnic cleansing. Faith leaders and supporters testified for an hour within the meeting; afterward, flanked by brave immigrant neighbors, they spoke to the press outside.

Organized by Faith in Action Bay Area, folks made it clear they'll be back. All five supervisors seemed intent on getting with their constituents' program.

the Rev. Penny Nixon, Congregational Church of San Mateo

Their cries echo to the heavens ...

The investigative reporting group ProPublica provides this audio from within a Border Patrol detention facility. Whoever made and smuggled out the recording passed it to civil rights attorney Jennifer Harbury -- a name long familiar to many North Americans concerned with human rights in Central America. Harbury's Guatemalan husband was tortured to death in his home country in the 1980s by paid CIA informants.

Those of us in the US who worked for justice and peace in the Americas have always feared the misdeeds of the United States would come home. They have -- and are visited on the children.

A call to reunite children with parents

Laura Bush (you know, George W.'s wife) calls out border cruelty.

Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.

Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.

Read it all -- and then find a Families Belong Together demonstration for human decency near you.

Pure evil

Jesuit Father James Martin calls the Trump border policy what it is. (I've transcribed a series of tweets here.)

Like many, I've resisted using this word but it's time: the deliberate and unnecessary separation of innocent children from their parents is pure evil.

It does not come from God or from any genuinely moral impulse. It is wantonly cruel and targets the most vulnerable.

Its use has been cloaked in lies, another clear sign that it does not proceed in any way from God or from a genuinely moral impulse. And the results--misery, anguish, physical suffering, division and despair--are also unmistakable signs that this is an evil.

As St. Paul wrote, "You will know them by their fruits....every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit." (Mt 7:17). That is, the results enable us to clearly recognize evil. As such, we have a moral obligation to name it and fight against it.

Anyone who participates in this kind of wanton cruelty is also guilty of this evil. "I was just following orders" went out at Nuremberg. The decision-makers and all who cooperate in these actions will be judged.

"I was a stranger and you did not welcome me." (Mt 25)

Enough.

Father's Day

Here's my father, alongside his father, on a Buffalo winter day, just over 100 years ago in 1919. Both of them lost that ramrod posture as they aged.

San Francisco: a little bit of alright

Before the June 5 election completely slips down the memory hole, it's worth noting that 69 percent of city residents voted to ban flavored tobacco products. That's impressive, considering that the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company spend $12 million on defeating Prop. E. In the days before the election, we were all deluged in No on E mailers claiming that barring sale of bubble gum flavored vaping products was the new prohibition. Just about every corner market displayed a No on E sign.

The tobacco companies are working hard to expand their market.

“To Juul (the brand has become a verb) is to inhale nicotine free from the seductively disgusting accoutrements of a cigarette: the tar, the carbon monoxide, the garbage mouth, the smell,” writes the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino, of the San Francisco-based product Juul, a sleek vaporizer that looks like a flash drive. They come in eight flavors, like Fruit Medley and Crème Brûlée, cost about $16 for a pack of four pods, and, as such, have become increasingly popular among teens.

One in six high school students currently use e-cigarettes, according to one estimate from the Department of Health and Human Services. As of March, Juul represented more than half of the e-cigarette retail market, a lucrative market expected to reach $48 billion by 2023.

Their elders, so many of whom struggled to get over tobacco addition in their time, said "no way" in our city.

Whatever Big Tobacco claimed, this was a vote against child endangerment for profit.

What the rules do for us

Josh Marshall is actually reading and absorbing this new Justice Department Inspector General's report that condemns former FBI director James Comey's self-referential and consequential misbehavior in reference to the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails. (No surprise that Comey screwed up there.) Marshall pulls a long quote from career DOJ Prosecutor, George Toscas:

One of the things that I tell people all the time, after having been in the Department for almost 24 years now, is I stress to people and people who work at all levels, the institution has principles and there’s always an urge when something important or different pops up to say, we should do it differently or those principles or those protocols you know we should—we might want to deviate because this is so different. But the comfort that we get as people, as lawyers, as representatives, as employees and as an institution, the comfort we get from those institutional policies, protocols, has, is an unbelievable thing through whatever storm, you know whatever storm hits us, when you are within the norm of the way the institution behaves, you can weather any of it because you stand on the principle.

And once you deviate, even in a minor way, and you’re always going to want to deviate. It’s always going to be something important and some big deal that makes you think, oh let’s do this a little differently. But once you do that, you have removed yourself from the comfort of saying this institution has a way of doing things and then every decision is another ad hoc decision that may be informed by our policy and our protocol and principles, but it’s never going to be squarely within them.

This is the same lesson that Trump administration abuses remind us of. Decent institutions require rules. Those rules may feel as if they constrain unnecessarily; they may seem inadequate to some emergency. But in longstanding institutions that have survived and improved over time (like, say, our imperfect democracy), rules should constrain us.

That's true, even if a President doesn't think he needs or must abide by any rules or laws. Bulldozing through norms may work for awhile, but that kind of success doesn't endure. The norm breaker may not personally pay the price, but those around him and his enablers will. And so will the country he is betraying.

Friday cat blogging

I'm getting to be an older gent. Can I really do it? Can I?
It's so tempting. I'll just throw myself up there ...
Morty treats the insulated attic crawl space as his private playground. I sure hope he never gets in trouble up there, because I sure can't follow to rescue him.

Dear Leader lords it over his captives

This image is from within a Border Patrol concentration camp for migrant children in a Walmart in Brownsville Texas. A former employee in the privatized children's prison system along our southern border described what he could no longer do:

Colleagues at a government-contracted shelter in Arizona had a specific request for Antar Davidson when three Brazilian migrant children arrived: “Tell them they can’t hug.”

Davidson, 32, is of Brazilian descent and speaks Portuguese. He said the siblings — ages 16, 10 and 6 — were distraught after being separated from their parents at the border. The children were “huddled together, tears streaming down their faces,” he said.

Officials had told them their parents were “lost,” which they interpreted to mean dead. Davidson said he told the children he didn’t know where their parents were, but that they had to be strong.

“The 16-year-old, he looks at me and says, ‘How?’” Davidson said. As he watched the youth cry, he thought, “This is not healthy.”

No, it is not healthy. The authors of this abuse, the Sessions and Nielsens and Homans, are the criminals.

What some South Koreans think ...

After all, Koreans are the ones in the immediate line of fire. They are the ones who have been separated from kinfolk for nearly 70 years.

According to E. Tammy Kim, writing from Seoul for the New Yorker:

Koreans see the Singapore summit not just as another sensational episode in the story of Donald Trump but as a step away from a sixty-eight-year-old unfinished war. In South Korea, in all but the most reactionary circles, there is a sense of ethnic solidarity with the North and some longing for unity. Support for President Moon, who is seen widely as the catalyst for this sudden thaw of relations between North Korea and the world, remains high. (Local elections, though overshadowed by the summit, take place on Wednesday in South Korea. Support for Moon’s party, generally, has also remained high, and voters will have a chance to express their confidence at the ballot box.) I’ve yet to meet a single Korean who isn’t willing to express optimism, in some form, about the prospects for peace and reunification. ...

... Lee Soo-jung, an anthropologist at Duksung Women’s University, acknowledged the painful “historical irony” of benefitting from Trump. In a fairer world, she tells me, “The citizens of the world would be able to vote for the U.S. President.” ...

... After the summit, [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] issued a short statement congratulating the U.S. and North Korea on a “successful” and “historic” meeting, praising Trump for his initiative and promising to work toward inter-Korean peace. South Koreans do not trust Kim or Trump, or believe in the possibility of a quick reunification. They are simply aware of the toll that seventy years of national division have taken, and are eager for an alternative future.

How many people around the world must have felt that they, too, deserved to have the chance to vote on U.S. presidents -- since the North American elephant might crush the life out of them with an accidental or unconsidered misstep?

Trump's video trailer for his nothingburger summit

Much of the media finds this weird video apparently gifted from Trump to Kim simply dumbfounding. I don't.

A story: years ago, when I was doing some consulting on organizational effectiveness for the ACLU, I had the sad duty of researching and explaining one of the facts of life to the civil liberties groups' brilliant director. According the best opinion studies, about 16 percent of citizens thought TV cop dramas were documentaries, literally true. (Obviously these folks had no personal experience of police or courts.) This phony film is for these same people. I doubt if it will occur to polling and marketing companies to inquire, but it is aimed at the segment of the population who will believe it. They exist.

What if democracy and individual freedom seem incompatible?

How to begin describing political scientist Yascha Mounk's The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It? On the one hand, many US readers will have to work to adjust to unfamiliar uses of familiar words which are at the core of Mounk's argument. On the other hand, once we get the definitions down, this is a very clearly written and highly accessible survey of trends all over the world that certainly seem hostile to polities that value human freedom. So -- here are Mounk's core definitions:

• a democracy is a set of binding electoral institutions that effectively translate popular views into public policy

• Liberal institutions effectively protect the rule of law and individual rights such as freedom of speech, etc ...

• a liberal democracy is simply a political system that is both liberal and democratic -- one that both protects individual rights and translates popular views into public policy

One additional definition is necessary to understand Mounk's book: by populism he means movements that see legitimacy and power as emanating solely from majorities of the people. These movements have no respect for the technocratic, legal, and institutionalist organizational forms that elites (and majorities in less fraught times) uphold. Populism can refer to movements either loosely of the left or vaguely of the right. In US history (not much discussed by Mounk who is a newly naturalized US citizen, formerly German) western farmers rebelling against the banks and gold standard in the 1890s were lefty populists -- as were the followers of demagogic Louisiana governor Huey Long during the Depression of the 1930s. Donald Trump is a right populist in our familiar categories.

In this book, the author demonstrates that liberal democracy loses legitimacy all over the world because, for many people, the democratic part of the equation -- voting, parties and candidates -- don't seem to deliver what they promise: much impact on outcomes people want in their daily lives. What populists -- like Donald Trump -- do is weaponize people's frustration with the failures of the system against the very institutions that make democracy liberal: higher education, regulatory bodies, science, courts, lawyers, etc.. Populist pols substitute the One True Leader for all those complex social mechanisms and claim "I alone can fix it."Hence

"an honest leader -- one who shares the pure outlook of the people and is willing to fight on their behalf -- needs to win high office ... once this honest leader is charge, he needs to abolish the institutional roadblocks that might stop him from carrying out the will of the people."

For the populist, the institutional roadblocks are the political system of law and justice itself. I find this description of what US democracy is up against in the Trump regime clear, compelling, and chilling. Mounk provides readable documentation from survey research and electoral examples all over the world.

So what would be necessary for liberal democracy to satisfy the people, thereby defanging the populist menace? Mounk suggests three areas where he sees contemporary democratic failure. Unconstrained economic elites are seizing for themselves more and more of the wealth of the nation and mature economies offer very little in the way of "trickle down." Increasing racial and national diversity among the people is easily blamed for the specter of scarcity. Promoting the notion of racial, cultural, or even gender "enemies" serves to divide minorities from the "real" citizens. And modern communication media lend themselves to obfuscation, conspiracy theories, and lies.

"Once upon a time, liberal democracies could assure their citizens of a very rapid increase in their living standards. Now, they no longer can. Once upon a time, political elites controlled the most important means of a communication, and could effectively exclude radical views from the public sphere. Now, political outsiders can spread lies and hatred with abandon. And once upon a time, the homogeneity of their citizens -- or at least a steep racial hierarchy -- was a big part of what held liberal democracies together. Now, citizens have to learn to live in a much more equal and diverse democracy.

I found Mounk utterly convincing on the economic aspects of the democratic predicament. He is not steeped in the history of workers' movements; but he is a European social democrat and he knows economic theft when he sees it.

On "fake news" I resist thinking this is a technological problem; every communication advance (think printing Bibles in the vernacular for example!) has eventually been absorbed by its culture without overthrowing all access to truth -- though the process can be long, violent, and fraught.

And I found Mounk a little shallow on race, immigration, and culture; on this, a perspective grounded in consciousness of white supremacy as the US national original sin needs to be front and center to combat Trump's xenophobic nationalism. Like so many academics, his appreciation of this feels a little less heartfelt than his economic analysis.

So what does Mounk propose to people who want to defeat contemporary populism? He's got quite a catalogue. First and foremost, and somewhat unexpectedly for an academic, he says we have to be ready to go out in the streets. He cites the example of South Korea whose current government is one that was elected because the people demanded the ouster of a corrupt predecessor. Resistance can work.

... while the work of resistance is undoubtedly cumbersome, most political scientists do believe it can make life difficult for populist governments: the painstaking work of opposition can call attention to unpopular policies; slow the progress of pending legislation; embolden judges to strike down unconstitutional laws; provide support to embattled media outlets; change the calculus for moderates within the regime; and force international governments and organizations to put pressure on a would-be dictator.

He urges as much unity as possible in opposition; when facing a populist demagogue, we can't afford nonessential divisions. Of course discriminating among unlikely allies is not easy. He points to currents in contemporary civic education that he says we can't afford right now:

... an exclusive focus on today's injustices is no more intellectually honest than an unthinking exhortation of the greatness of western civilization.

He thinks we have to make peace with some kind of patriotism; the ugly sort of nationalism might be softened with more respect for the value of attachments to history and place. He applauds Obama's address at the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march as an example.

I hope I have not made this book seem dry or academic. Though thoroughly documented and impressively broad ranging, it is well written and easy to read. I don't agree entirely with a lot in it, but I found it even more useful for thinking about our democratic predicament than I had hoped.

Mounk's work against demagogic populism is readily available at two other venues. He writes a regular column at Slate, The Good Fight. The article I've linked to describes growing populism in Canada. And he produces a podcast of the same name, some episodes of which are better than others.

On impeding monsters

Here's a rather well done video on what smart resistance looks like when a man mistakes himself for a king.

When nonviolent resistance reaches a critical mass of 3.5% of the population, authoritarian rulers fall.

Nonviolent resistance is hard, because your side is volunteering to take the casualties. But there is good evidence that it works better, especially in the aftermath, than any other tactic.

Echoes of mid-20th century Europe

Read Liz Goodwin's full story of what our racist president's men are doing at the border. The goons executing Trump-Kelly-Nielsen-Sessions "orders" belong in jail, as do the thugs giving the orders. How low we sink!

Take it from a sports writer

This is resistance. Sally Jenkins, who covers sports for the Washington Post, explains how to resist President Trump.

The Philadelphia Eagles beat President Trump. They slipped the punch, and he wound up swinging so hard at the air that he fell on his face. It’s a useful lesson, a timeless one even.

When you’re up against a crotch-kicker and an eye-gouger, what do you do? NFL owners confronted that question and decided the best strategy was to try to placate, and they got leg-whipped for it. It was entirely their own fault for deciding that a president who called their players sons of bitches somehow would play by their rules. The Eagles were smarter. They understood that an eye-gouger counts on an adversary who will come in close.

A crotch-kicker needs an opponent. Without one, what is he? Without a race to bait, without someone to accuse, without a target to lash out at, what can he do? When there is no one to scapegoat or to scream spittle at, then what? He has to stand there and try to look and be presidential. That’s what the Eagles understood when most decided not to go to the White House and shake his hand ...

... most people aren’t Steph[Curry] or LeBron [James] or [Muhammed] Ali. So when confronted with someone who practices startling, uncalled-for aggression, they don’t know what to do. When someone comes at you harder than they should, the critical thing is not to break the rules yourself because you will break the game. It’s among the most immortal and true principles of any contest: Overreacting will cost only yourself, and all will be lost.

True excellence is not just about the vicious deployment of force, but the control and parrying of it without losing yourself, your honor, your conception of what’s most important and who you want to be in this contest and this world. Don’t let someone else’s breaking of the rules break you down. Don’t let them turn something ugly that shouldn’t be and that you don’t want to be. Step out of the way. And wait.

[As Muhammad Ali demonstrated while fighting George Foreman,] ... the rope will take the strain.

The G-7 leaders might learn from this. If Trump wants to trash the system that brings them together, politely meet without him. He needs a time out. He won't like that.

Read and enjoy the entire Jenkins column.

Sidewalks speak in the Mission

Here we have dueling messages:

QUEERS HATE/HEART TECHIES

Several days later, one side has painted out all ambiguity.

This does not make me happy. The newcomers in tech employment are here. They are now part of us, of San Francisco as it is today. Yes, they are frequently oblivious to who and what their infusion of cash and commerce has displaced. Sometimes that unconsciousness can be rude, racist, hateful. And more often it is just dumb insensitivity. But they are here. They are us. We, oldtimers who remain, need to interact with the new us and as much as possible come to see each other as neighbors.

The sidewalk wars seem pretty historically oblivious themselves. I've been here since 1972. For at least my first 20 years in the neighborhood, we queers were the rude, gentrifying, interlopers in the view of some of the community. Somehow, often by fighting alongside each other against police abuses and housing rip-offs, we learned to acknowledge and tolerate each other even if we remained culturally apart.

Not all the current residents are going to be driven out. Not all the techies are Mark Zuckerberg. Not all the techies are white. Neither are all the queers. We have to figure out what we can do together to make San Francisco a place where we can all live. We're stuck with each other.

Been there, done that, don't need to do it again

One of the frustrations of the Trump regime is that very few East Coast-based political commentators seem aware that California has already lived through its season of extreme white fragility in response to demographic change. We went through this in the 1990s when an overwhelmingly white electorate tried every imaginative stratagem panicked white people could come up with to try to stem the rising black/brown/Asian-origin tide. We tried by initiative to deny public services to immigrants, to keep the emerging majority out of state-funded higher education, and to lock away offending adults and even juveniles as long as possible.

And then, finally, people of color got active and many white people calmed down, and we became a state that looks forward, not backward. We have our problems, but they are new ones, not the same old same old.

One of the good features of political scientist Yascha Mounk's The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It is that he does notice that California has made itself different.

... Once areas grow accustomed to the reality of a multiethnic society, they may find their fears do not materialize -- and they become less anxious about a continuing process of change.

The experience of California seems to suggest that this ... optimistic interpretation holds true in some places. From 1980 to 1990, the overall share of the foreign-born population rose from 15 perecent to 22 percent. A great wave of anxiety washed over the state. Many native-born Californians were disoriented by the rapid pace of change, and grew furious that politicians were willing to accommodate the cultures and languages of immigrants. ...

... At the time, observers were understandably worried about the future of race relations in California. But in the 2000s and 2010s, the fever somehow broke. Most Californians grew comfortable with the fact that high levels of immigration were a part of the local experience, and the state had become "majority minority." As a result, the state is now known as one of the most tolerant in the country. Over the past years, Californians have reversed many of the draconian laws they had passed by referendum two decades earlier with strong support from white voters. ...

Hence #Notmypresident and #Resistance. We don't want to go back over that terrain. We're done with allowing white fears to define the possible. Can the California pattern be replicated nationwide? Not exactly, but it shouldn't be ignored either.

I'll be writing a more comprehensive post about Mounk's book when I get through some other tasks, but wanted to highlight what is a rare insight in the literature of Trump-time and democratic decline.

Friday cat blogging

Sometimes Morty is a ghostly presence.

San Francisco murders

The Washington Post published an interesting, if slightly overdone, graphic investigation yesterday examining cities where more than half of murders go unsolved. I've pulled out their map of our city here. In areas outlined in blue, two of three murders were followed by arrests of suspects; in the orange blocks, less than one in three killings led to an arrest. It will surprise no one that Bay View, Visitation Valley and Inner Mission/SOMA are decidedly orange. It surprised me that the Tenderloin seems to receive more effective policing. (Maybe it's a Twitter effect?) Over 11 years, 51% of San Francisco's murders never led to an arrest.

The article does not report interviews with the SFPD, but I suspect what reporters learned elsewhere is not so different from conditions here.

Homicide arrest rates vary widely when examined by the race of the victim: An arrest was made in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, compared with 48 percent of killings of Latino victims and 46 percent of the killings of black victims. Almost all of the low-arrest zones are home primarily to low-income black residents.

... “It’s one of the best indicators of how well a police department and a community work together,” said Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer. “If a police department can’t solve the greatest crime, the most egregious crime affecting society, what faith would you have in that police department?”

[Many police officials] blamed the low arrest rates ... on frayed relationships with residents and on witnesses who are unwilling to cooperate. ... Retaliation is a real fear.

... [In Indianapolis] “I think there’s an expectation that their police department, or those public servants, look like a representative of the people that they serve,” Police Chief Bryan Roach said. “So right off the bat, we don’t look like the community that we serve in that area.”

Detective Marcus Kennedy, 58, who is retiring next year after more than three decades with the department, said he thinks cases go unsolved because some of his colleagues spend too much time at their desks instead of working the streets.

Kennedy, who is black, said his peers also have failed at times to treat people in the community with respect. “Some detectives, you know, not to call them out, but I mean they’ll piss people off real quick. Just with an attitude,” he said.

From Managua, Nicaragua: El Porvenir is staying and working

A letter from Rob Bell, Executive Director

There are an increasing number of news articles about the crisis in Nicaragua. We want to let you know how El Porvenir staff and communities are being impacted. Because of safety concerns, the Peace Corps and other foreign volunteer groups have left Nicaragua, but El Porvenir is staying for many reasons:

• We are committed to our mission: Partnering with Nicaraguan communities on life-changing and life-saving water and sanitation projects is what we do.

• Our staff is primarily Nicaraguan who are known in the areas they work in; so far, they are less impeded by the road blocks than others. Our staff live in Nicaragua, and this work is their livelihood. They aren’t going anywhere, and El Porvenir isn’t either.

• Our work is more important than ever as government funds once earmarked for water and sanitation are being diverted into dealing with the crisis.

Despite the continued effectiveness of El Porvenir and its staff to provide life changing improvements to rural Nicaraguan communities, there have been impacts and procedural modifications resulting from the crisis:

• There are gas shortages in Camoapa and Waslala. Cement in San Lorenzo recently ran out. With the road blocks, we expect the shortages to continue. That might slow us down with project completions, but it won’t stop us.

• Our Managua staff are required to leave early most days because buses don't run after 3 PM. Outside of Managua, there aren’t many buses anymore. If you’ve ever traveled to Nicaragua, you know that buses are a main form of transportation.

• Once a month, one staff member from each of our field offices comes to Managua for a meeting. This month, one couldn’t come because he would have had to cross through 5 of the 38 road blocks set up across Nicaragua. Our staff usually pay C$20-30 (C$ Cordoba, Nicaraguan currency: Approximately C$20 = US$1) to take the bus; in one instance, a staff member had to pay C$200 to get through just one of the road blocks. So far, our staff have been able to get through local road blocks without issues.

• To protect our staff during the crisis, we have implemented increased security procedures to include no travel at night, avoiding areas without cell phone coverage, keeping phones charged at all times, informing co-workers of where staff are going and their projected return time, as well as many other procedures. We are doing everything possible to keep our staff safe.

We are fortunate to continue our important work during this crisis and are truly appreciative of the support we have received from all of you. If you’d like to make a special gift to keep projects moving forward and give hope for a brighter future, please do so at El Porvenir.

What's the point?

This plea is scratched on a bench in immigration court where I sat in during a deportation hearing yesterday. The message is nowhere near as dramatic as Senator Jeff Merkley's videoed effort to investigate an immigration detention center for undocumented children in Brownsville. But both images bear witness to the Trump regime's cruel effort to Make America White Again.

Jose, whose hearing I attended, is the very type of the sort of immigrant caught up in the ICE dragnet. He came to the US from Mexico 24 years ago at age 15, driven by family poverty. He has worked here without papers ever since in the sort of unstable pick-up jobs that undergird the economy: yard cleaning, landscaping, laying down asphalt paving, tile hauling. He described his work history, exhaustively and proudly. I felt as if I was in the presence of a living instance of Marx's "reserve army of labor" -- a man used as hands and a back that can be summoned when the job is too painful or too dirty to attract people who have any other option, and then can be cast aside when his utility to employers has passed.

Jose formed a relationship, fathered a daughter, broke up with his child's mother -- but faithfully provided $200 a week in child support for nine years. He just kept working. He fell into the traps that are poverty. A broken taillight in 2001 led to a ticket for driving without a license (he was undocumented after all) -- but he never found out he had a ticket hanging over him because the notice was mailed to an address he'd left for another job ... He just kept working. In the superheated Bay Area housing market he decided the rent was just too high to allow him to continue to support his daughter, so he started sleeping in his car... He just kept working. Somebody complained, he was arrested in September 2017, and has been in immigration detention ever since, fighting to stay in this country with his child.

Another bit of unfinished legal business hangs over his case. He was found guilty of a DUI in 2014 and funneled into "diversion." Somehow he came up with the money to pay $2400 to the owner of a car he had sideswiped and partially completed a nine-month alcohol education program for which he was charged $200 a month. He claims to have given up drinking. But the program charges were more than he could earn and continue to support his daughter, so after four months he gave up the program. ... He just kept working. In detention, he's still proudly working; he told the court all about his voluntary work in the jail kitchens.

There are certainly legal justifications for Jose's deportation. But do we really want to deport someone who has lived, gainfully and usefully, among us for a quarter of a century and who is the loving responsible father of a US citizen child? Jose is collateral damage of several decades of Congressional inaction on the realities of immigration in the southwest US. Should his life be crushed because successive people with power never got around to creating equitable systems and rules?

What's the point, except to Make America White Again?

Yesterday's hearing was inconclusive, continued until a Stanford child specialist recruited by Jose's non-profit lawyers can evaluate the impact on Jose's daughter.

Aspiring governor in the 'hood

Awakened early by an over-friendly cat on my face, I looked out the front window at dawn to see this: Antonio Villaraigosa amidst a film crew, warming up for a quick take. He looked small and a little lonely amidst the techs and handlers (all white as far as I could see).

Tomorrow's election could well be the end of a flame out for Villaraigosa. The once promising Los Angeles mayor has to manage to come in a weak second to Gavin Newsom in order to be on the ballot in November. He's got a couple of Republicans on his tail; some polling says the voters will send him home.

Failing campaigns are brutal on candidates and their entourage.

Villaraigosa performed his riff and within an hour the little assemblage had disappeared. Maybe you'll see the product on TV?

Why doesn't the US get anything done anymore?

It's easy to lament apparent stasis in this country. We used to be able to build the interstate system and go to the moon. Nowadays, in my own 'hood, it took us 24 years to replace a bridge (the Bay one) proved unsound by an earthquake in 1989. We seem to have lost our get-up-and-go.

Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University libertarian economist and all-round public intellectual, has explanations, outlined in The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. Since the guy knows something about everything and offers -- highly selective -- facts to buttress his assertions, the book is good mental exercise.

Essentially his thesis is that our society is too comfortable, averse to change, unwilling to experiment, stuck. Well maybe. There is data to show that people don't move as much as they did in earlier epochs, that many measures of economic growth and perhaps living standards have been flat for decades (except for the one percent), that government has a hard time accomplishing much.

But I remain unconvinced that Cowen has been willing to look at all the implications of the trends which distress him. I'll just throw some shade at a few points.

• Perhaps students out of high school and college don't leave their parents' households these days because we've made college debt unaffordable. That could be solved with free college if we really believed that young people and the country would benefit from college. That's how we got free public primary school education -- at one time we decided we needed it and made it happen.

• Maybe it is time to develop an economic framework that does not assume unlimited growth? In our bodies, unlimited cell growth is called cancer. It kills. Might Cowen's precious free market economy not be the eschaton, but rather a primitive way of organizing human societies that is ecologically unsustainable and which our successors will overcome? We don't now know how to better produce and allocate resources, but neoliberal capitalism is a human invention, not a social framework imposed by a Creator. We might just figure out how to do better.

• Cowen convincingly reports that only 10 percent of government spending is really subject to Congressional allocation. The rest goes either to benefits we've decided make for a decent community -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc. -- or what we call Defense which means war fighting capacity. Horrors -- if we try to do anything that challenges "complacent" fiddling at the margins, we'll create an unsustainable national debt. That's just bullshit. He never once points out that government income is elastic: we decide its size by deciding how much to tax. There's money in this country, lots of it in the possession of people who already have enough for a good life. Taxes can redistribute considerable amounts without serious harms. In fact, whenever even the center left, the Democratic Party, has political power, we do redistribute wealth moderately and the debt is lowered. Thinking about the country's budget situation without taking the power to tax into account is intellectual malpractice.

Cowen is a smart, glib, guy who has a way with disparate information, but I can't call him wise. This is a not a book to take on faith, but I did find it good intellectual exercise, as, I suspect, did Cowen.

Changing times

As regular readers here know, although I am decidedly not an Evangelical Christian (I'm of the Episcopalian flavor of believer), I try to track how political and social trends are roiling my frequently estranged co-religionists.

There's a rather nice survey article in the New York Times today about how matters of sex and gender are vexing Evangelical educational institutions. If interested, it's here.

But just as I got into reading it, this almost throwaway sentence grabbed my attention:

Moody [Bible Institute], like many evangelical and fundamentalist schools, adheres to a “complementarian” theology of gender — meaning that God created men and women for separate, complementary roles in family and church life.

Yikes! -- we apparently now live in a world in which a particular, by implication contestable, definition of "gender" has to be spelled out to ensure the reader knows just what is being discussed. Twenty, or certainly forty, years ago what is spelled out here would have been simply the nature of "reality." But no longer.

That makes me glad. Our broad social understanding of "gender" is becoming inexorably enlarged, even among people who are neither much thinking about the matter and/or who feel no personal need for changes. That's how change works.

A love scribble for the times from a San Francisco store window

Recently a friend wrote:

I have no idea what to do with the sheer volume of lies ... I feel overwhelmed to the point of despondency...

So are we all. Yet we go on in this time of trial, go on with the daily doing of what needs to be done -- resisting where we can, reminding ourselves that cruelty and injustice are never alright, protecting if we are able, and building toward a more beloved community, always.

The writer of this window note knows. Here's the text, transcribed.

We have mourned enough these past months. We have shed tears for the country we love and the values we hold dear. We have lived in the hollow of what is left behind.

We can not surrender to more tears because of this. We are leaping into grief as if we have embraced it as a form of recreation.

WE ARE NOT WHAT WE HAVE LOST. WE ARE NOT WHAT HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM US.

If we do not cherish what remains, we will all become as nothing.

WE ARE NOT BROKEN. WE ARE ALL AS WHOLE AS WE WILL EVER BE AGAIN. ... and in the end, when we cease to be, we will all become memories.

For now, we were born for these times, and we are TOGETHER IN THIS.

That election next Tuesday ...

I'm no fan of the "ranked choice voting" system we use in local San Francisco contests. Like many well meaning "reforms" to elections, I think it is a gimmick, promising a technocratic solution to discontent with politics. We often don't like the available candidates or feel that none of them deliver what we thought we voted for, so we look for mechanical solutions to what are really problems caused by our disengagement from community problems.

But if you want to explore how our voting system works, this video from San Francisco Elections is not bad.

I learned something else while looking into this. Often San Francisco results don't come out for several days after Election Day. I thought this had something to do with the difficult mechanics of counting in this system -- but no, apparently not. Election officials are waiting to be sure all the legally postmarked ballots are in. Then, according to the Chron,

... once all votes have been submitted, computing the results usually takes about an hour, according to John Arntz, director of the city’s Department of Elections.

Friday cat blogging

Some animal's job is simply to be beautiful. The humans, on the other hand, are falling down on their job of washing the windows.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.