U.S. religious landscape 2021: but how can they?

Ever since the Trump election of 2016 was achieved with 81 percent support from white evangelical Christians, I've been trying to understand what motivated these people to affiliate themselves with such a foul human being. I've written up books by Sarah Posner and John Fea. I've dutifully read efforts by establishment conservative oped writers like Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. And I go on wondering.

In the Elizabeth Dias New York Times article I'm taking as conventional wisdom about the religious implications of the Biden transition, she summarizes:

... His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results.

 But looking backward and forward, I wonder if we can't learn more from Christy Thomas, a former evangelical who eventually liberated herself to become an United Methodist minister and a consistent voice for a generous Jesus. She pulls no punches:

Who are they, these decent people who still remain as true believers in Mr. Trump, insisting that he won the election and that the Jan. 6 protestors were really Antifa adherents? What motivates them? What makes them tick?

For the most part, they tend to be avid readers of the Bible. They do so with this much pre-determined: The Bible is without error and therefore trustworthy. The commands therein are to be believed and acted upon. And it was written with the 21st century U.S. in mind and in a direct line with prophetic words in the ancient texts. ...

As a rule, these good people belong to a church with a charismatic male pastor with a gift for teaching and explaining the Bible. God is male, and God’s spokesperson must also be male.

Furthermore, and this is key, these believers operate under the understanding that they should not question or in any way hinder the person who is in leadership, whether it be in the church or in the nation. ...

She goes on to explain the extremely convenient (and authoritarian) reading these people draw from the story in the first book of Samuel, 24th chapter, about ancient Israel's kings: King Saul (a bad dude) and David (an obedient subject and hero). 

Apparently these folks don't read the earlier passage in the same book (1 Samuel 8) in which God warns that the Israelites won't like having a king who will conscript their sons to wars and seize their flocks and fields for the king's own.

Christy Thomas found no remedy for white Christian evangelicalism than to get out. Her conclusion is poignant: 

... when their leaders tell them that God has chosen Mr. Trump for at least another four years, they have one job: make sure that it happens, so God’s will is indeed done on earth as it is in heaven.

... I lived and breathed this world for years. By being so sure God is indeed in charge and busy choosing my leaders, my job became amazingly simple: do everything possible to support those leaders, no matter the personal cost I may need to pay. ...

I spent years and years, twisting my mind into knots, trying to make it work. I also endured significant horrors in my private life before I finally could no longer deal with the discordance. Eventually, I was both kicked out and also walked out voluntarily.

You can read it all here. 

• • •

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study counts 25 percent of the U.S. population as white evangelical. It also shows that most are Boomers or older; the 18-29 cohort isn't buying it. This particular perversion of the religious impulse may be waning in post-Trump time, though such authors as Posner insist we should never underestimate the profitable political infrastructure which the authoritarian Christian right thrives on on.

• • •

U.S. religious landscape 2021:

What is sacred?

Evangelical Christians: but how can they?  

Roman Catholics in sunlight 

White Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers

A coming out for liberal religion

U.S. religious landscape 2021: what is sacred?

So I asked Erudite Partner, "how do you feel when, after the mob invasion of January 6 and President Biden's inauguration, people call the U.S. Capitol sacred?"

"Slightly queasy," she replied.

Me too. I'm more than a little allergic to calling most any building "sacred," though I've been in a few that evoked that awe -- the Umayed Mosque in Damascus comes to mind. I consider the U.S. Capitol a symbol of a secular nation, a place embodying some of the honorable strands of our history, but not sacred.

But the label is popular at the moment.

We just got rid of a president who falsely claimed he'd won an election in a "sacred landslide." Even if he had won, that would be a weird framing.

But less lunatic public figures seem inclined to call the building sacred. Speaker Pelosi, during the debate on what to do with the lunatic president, spoke of the January assault as a "gleeful desecration of the Capitol." Though Texas Republican Congressmember Pat Fallon voted to block certification of Joe Biden's entirely aboveboard election victory, he too protested that "a mob breached our sacred Capitol." Democratic House Rep. Brian Higgins (NY) was all in on the usage: "The US Capitol is a sacred space - a building at the literal center of our capital and central to our democracy. ..."

And news media describing the January 6 mob have gone wild using "sacred" as shorthand to induce revulsion:

“He’s a noted Nazi miscreant,” Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. “It is a disgrace that someone like him was able to invade the sacred Capitol of the United States.” Los Angeles CBS Local

After 52 years of voting, knowing many of these election workers, I have more faith than ever. The faith symbolized by a big, beautiful, sacred Capitol that came under assault today, but the angry people have all left. The Capitol remains, bothered, but not destroyed and still standing. A symbol of American faith. Craig O'Neill Little Rock, AR 11

The resonance of the label "sacred" probably has a lot to do with the increasingly common function of the Capitol as a venue for funeral tributes to distinguish citizens. Since Senator Henry Clay was the first in 1852, deceased officials, judges, and military leaders have lain in state at the Capitol, most recently John McCain, John Lewis, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It would be churlish to feel there was something wrong with that unifying ritual practice, a bridge inclusive of particular faiths and none in a largely secular society.

The change of administrations, including both the Capitol riot and the inauguration, has led to an outpouring of commentary on the U.S. religious landscape. All sociological research says we are becoming less and less religiously observant. Yet faith(s), religious and perhaps also secular, seems so significant and so lively in this turning over, or perhaps turning back, moment.

Elizabeth Dias provided a straightforward reporter's account of what she sees as the arrival of "an ascendant liberal Christianity," a development that reflects the change in the man at the top:

There are myriad changes with the incoming Biden administration. One of the most significant: a president who has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices. Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies. ...

 Well, true, and I'm thankful. But there is so much more to ponder here.

Biden's installation has unleashed a flood of commentary on religion and faith in our politics and culture, too many perspectives to survey in one blog post. I find many fascinating. This week I am going to take up a few, one perspective at a time.

• • •

U.S. religious landscape 2021:

What is sacred?

Evangelical Christians: but how can they?  

Roman Catholics in sunlight 

White Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers

A coming out for liberal religion 

Making more peace

Something I found almost unexpected -- and good -- happened last week. And no, I don't just mean the inauguration of Biden and Harris; that we had reason to hope for. I mean that on Thursday the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force. 

What? Yes. This international agreement is a legally binding pact to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination. Passed at the United Nations in 2017 by 122 nations (with all the nations that currently have the bombs abstaining), it now has collected the fifty national signatories to enter into force among them. Thirty-five additional nations are in the process of ratifying.

Pat Hynes describes developments which demonstrate the strong force of world opinion, and even U.S. opinion, that is building against these ultimate weapons of mass destruction: 

■ The General Electric Company stopped production of nuclear weapons in 1993. ...

■ Mitsubishi UFG Financial Group, 1 of the 5 largest banks in the world, has excluded nuclear weapons production from its portfolio, labeling them “inhumane.” ...

■ Our goal must be a world “without nuclear weapons … “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought:” Former Republican Secretary of State George Schultz and former Democrat Secretary of Defense William Perry.

■ Mayors for Peace: 7,675 cities in 163 countries support the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

■ Fifty-six former presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defense ministers from 20 NATO countries and Japan and South Korea recently signed an open letter in support of the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons. “Sooner or later our luck will run out — unless we act. … There is no cure for a nuclear war,” they asserted. “Prevention is our only option.”

■ Pope Francis: “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral. As is the possession of atomic weapons.”

Isn't this all just noise, without effect or meaning? After all, the guys with the bombs still have the bombs and even sensible U.S. presidents still prove their manhood by "modernizing" the nuclear arsenal for great profit to the defense contractor establishment.

Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro's book, The Internationalists, convinced me that the process of developing an international legal framework to replace the rule of "might makes right" is a vital and effectual part of turning our fractious species away from our own destruction. We don't go quietly, but our better angels can be given space by the clamor of the people. Creating this treaty, however aspirational, gives the peoples of the world -- who gain nothing from the continuing nuclear menace -- a place to stand. Bravo!

Today's yanked image is of Australian activists from ICAN/Twitter.

Saturday scenes: Oceanview Public Library

Might we perhaps be entering a season during which I can simply pass along wonderful sights I've encountered, mostly while Walking San Francisco? That is, can we all breathe again?

As is so often the case when I'm out and about walking, I had no idea this was here.

 

This charming public art decorates the Oceanview Public Library on Randolph Street. It's closed because of the pandemic at present.

 

You can't actually see the ocean from Randolph, though it might be visible on a fog-free day on a ridge to the north. The neighborhood was once mostly Black and run down. It's now multi-racial -- Black, Filipino, Chinese, so many ethnicities -- and still down at the heels, where a hard-pressed working class lives.

It's the newest library branch in the city, a present from former mayor Willie Brown, opened during his re-election campaign in 1999. His opponent Frank Jordan claimed Willie stole the credit from him ... How San Francisco!

Brains and drive -- what else?

I read a book about Joe Biden. The least I could do was read the available book about Kamala Harris. So I did.

Author Dan Morain strikes me as bringing a conventional state capitol journalist's perspective to California's current favorite daughter: congratulatory, careful, and slightly cynical. After four decades of urban and state political reporting, his viewpoint is no surprise. Up close, Sacramento and its denizens most likely always looks powerful, compromised, and slightly sleazy.

Simon & Schuster bills Kamala's Way: An American Life as "a revelatory biography." It is not.

The later part of the publisher's blurb does seem more accurate; this is a detailed accounting of Vice President Harris' life, upbringing, some influences, career, some accomplishments:

"... the kind of people she brings into her orbit, the sorts of problems she’s good at solving, and the missteps, risks, and bold moves she’s made on her way to the top."

If the story of Harris's career is unfamiliar, this is a good introduction. As a dabbler in San Francisco and California politics for decades, I appreciate that Morain understands and explains why Northern California contributes so much beyond its population size to the state's politics. It's not just the available political cash; Los Angeles and Hollywood provide plenty of that too. It's also the intimacy of a setting in which committed activists clamor to be heard and give all politicians a rough ride. Those who prevail get tough. Harris learned survivor's moves -- navigating a still white-dominated political environment.

And for all her lofty perch, we still don't know quite what beyond brains and ambition drive Harris. Morain tries -- in his telling her most authentic policy passion, the aspect of her career that stands out, has been defense of children from racist limitations, neglect, and predators. That's not a full agenda, but it's certainly a good base from which to start.

Beyond Morain's scope is the marvelous symbolism which Harris' new position embodies. I'll leave it to Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project to explain:

Harris’ election proves what many of us have always known: We do not need to moderate or shrink from who we are as a party in order to win elections — a winning platform can be rooted in equity and justice. ... With Harris, America will have a vice president who knows what it means to be a Black woman in a country that too often takes our experiences and needs for granted (until it desperately needs us to save itself).

After reading Dan Morain, I looked back at two of my own takes on Harris: when she ended her presidential campaign and when Joe Biden chose her to be Veep. I think they hold up pretty well. 

This incredibly accomplished woman is still unfinished, still becoming. I look forward to seeing what she makes of the next four years and beyond.

Friday cat blogging

I call it a laptop. Janeway would call it an impediment if she could speak.

The canvass work pants have proved valuable while this fur ball with claws matures into a cat.

New time; many recurring tasks ...

So now what? Delight in the relief.

Joe Biden comes with a list:

• COVID-19
• the economy
• systemic racism
• and global warming 

Here's a good explainer on the first step on the toughest of the bunch.

We all did this

Leastways, everyone I know did it, one way or another, in ways great and small, over the last four awful years. And let's not forget that. This is what should be celebrated -- amid pandemic, and rightwing thuggery, and crumbling empire.

This is ours.

Sure, there's plenty more to do. But we did this. For today, that is enough.

The empire decays; another beginning

Erudite Partner surveys our broken country as Joe Biden assumes office:

How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.

Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk. Beside that edifice stands a wooden cross decorated with a string of white Christmas lights and a red ribbon—a memorial to the woman who built that structure and died inside it earlier this week. We don't know—and probably never will—what killed her: the pandemic raging across California? A heart attack? An overdose of heroin or fentanyl? ...

... Human beings have long built new habitations quite literally from the rubble—the fallen stones and timbers—of earlier ones. Perhaps it's time to think about what kind of a country this place—so rich in natural resources and human resourcefulness—might become if we were to take the stones and timbers of empire and construct a nation dedicated to the genuine security of all its people. Suppose we really chose, in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, “to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Can the aroused people who repudiated the particular corruption of the Trump era build something better? At this new beginning, we certainly want to let go our fears and follow our hopes. Read it all.

Martin Luther King holiday

The Martin Luther King holiday is unsettling. It should be. He tried to change the country at its core, to turn us away from the injustice of race hate and poverty. So we killed him. And we gave him a holiday which calls for "national service." I guess that's better than ignoring the man, but how much better?

My friend Dana has become a racial justice activist late in life. I was reminded of her response to another of our problematic holidays, the one about "bombs bursting in air." Her sentiments seem appropriate to this one too.

... it was the Fourth of July, and we did our usual things — a speaker spoke, we told another horrible story, we said the person’s name. And while I was kneeling, I thought about this song that I loved. A song I loved all my life, but that has never made a whole lot of sense. “America the Beautiful.” 

It was the Fourth of July, we finished saying their name. I walked out into the middle of the road, and I turned and faced everybody, I said, “You all know this song,” and sang “America the Beautiful.” When I was done, I said to them, “I know that I will never be able to, and I don’t think my children will ever be able to, but I can only hope that if they make it to my age, my grandchildren will be able to sing that beautiful song without the same sense of irony with which I just sang it: ‘God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.’” 

I don’t think so. I mean, it’s a wonderful idea, but it is potential that has been unmet. And that for me is really sad.

That's how I feel on the King holiday. But he didn't give up and neither can we.

We've been warned

Someone who uses the Twitter name Alexis in Brexitland (@andevers) has a message for us who live in the disunited States. A slightly edited thread:

So, real talk to American friends. Start wearing your masks outside on the sidewalk if you are not. Start wearing them outside if there are people meters away. Start wearing them inside your house if there are others there. Wear them. The new variant transmits readily.

A great deal of people I know all got the new variant all at once -- at least one handful of people got it outside in a very legit allowed social distance park walk. ...

I am saying this because I can tell from talking to people back home that it hasn't really hit everyone how different it is. It's very different.

And really, I say this to everyone. The new variant is a doozy. ...

For months and months in fall, even as numbers climbed, I didn't know anyone with Covid. Then I knew a dozen all at once. And now I know about a dozen more. Just be careful.
 
I think it becomes very hard to avoid even if you do the right things now, if you interact with others at all. But the masks are definitely something.

If you are in a situation with others outside your home, even if you are in a bubble wear your masks. ...

Truthfully, I am selfish. I want the virus to go slower there than it did here, because all my older family is there, waiting on vaccines or second vaccines. Slow this down for them.

And for the hospitals and the workers. Everyone.

I submit this for your consideration, considering a lot more people don't have to die that will if we don't get better at masks and unnecessary going out. Etc. And that's it! I'm going to bed.

Scary.

It's big, it's bad, and political choices still matter

Until I read Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, the economic upsets of early 21st century global capitalism had mostly registered with me through the Wall Street melt down that confronted Barack Obama on taking office in 2009 and the grinding Great Recession of Main Street America that fed the resentments of his detractors. Somehow the Obama administration never seemed willing or able to turn its economic policies to the needs of ordinary citizens.

Oh, I knew that what seemed to begin with casino-gambling with home mortgages by the sleazier elements of US finance had somehow nearly brought down the whole world economy -- I read books that sought to decode what they had been doing. (Gillian Tett's was a good one.) And I encountered a Spain in 2013 where the economy was still somehow leveled by the backwash of these shenanigans. And I even knew all this somehow fed those pratfalls by English-speaking democracies in 2016: Brexit and electing Donald Trump.

But until I read Tooze -- he's an erudite Brit who has landed teaching history at Columbia -- I lacked a global picture to put all this together. Crashed does that. It's a masterly account of intricate financial systems and above all their dysfunctional politics. If you suspect any discussion of global capitalist economics is no more than a morass of high falutin jargon, you are usually not wrong -- but Tooze draws a path through vast swathes of human activity and suffering, of myopic leadership and occasional brilliance. I found it fascinating,

This is how Tooze introduces the grand scale of his subject matter:

The events of 2003, 2008, and 2017 are all no doubt defining moments  of recent international history. But what is the relationship among them? What is the relationship of the economic crisis of 2008 to the geopolitical disaster of 2003 [Iraq invasion] and to American's political crisis following the election of November 2016? What arc of historical transition do those three points stake out? What does that arc mean for Europe, for Asia? How does it relate to the minor but no less shattering trajectory traced by the United Kingdom from Iraq to the crisis of the City of London in 2008 and Brexit in 2016?

... the idea that was so prevalent in 2008, the idea that this was basically an American crisis, or even an Anglo-Saxon crisis, and as such a key moment in the demise of American unipolar power, is in fact deeply misleading. ... It pleased people around the world to imagine the hyper power was getting its comeuppance. ... Contrary to the narrative popular on on both sides of the Atlantic, the eurozone crisis is not a separate and distinct event, but follows directly from the shock of 2008. ...

Unexpectedly -- to rest of the world and possibly also to elements of the US political elite  -- the Obama administration and most critically the central Federal Reserve Bank, proved quite adept at saving floundering wealth institutions. Their prescription -- a sophisticated application of "print money" and give it away to rich people -- broke with academic economic orthodoxy, and succeeded. Ordinary citizens remained screwed -- but hey, at least the whole capitalist economy didn't grind to a halt.

However unprecedented and effective the Fed's actions might have been, even for those politicians whose support for globalization was unfailing, its practical implications were barely speakable. Though it is hardly a secret that we inhabit a world dominated by business oligopolies, during the crisis and its aftermath this reality and its implications for the priorities of government stood nakedly exposed. It is an unpalatable and explosive truth that democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic has choked on. 

... America's crisis fighting exhibited massive inequity. People on welfare scraped by while bankers carried on their well-upholstered lives. But though the distribution of costs and benefits was outrageous, at least America's crisis management worked. Since 2009 the US economy has grown continuously and and least by the standards set by official statistics, it is now [pre-pandemic in 2018] approaching full employment.  

By contrast, the eurozone [the European Union countries that share a currency], through willful policy choices, drove tens of millions of its citizens into the depths of a 1930s-style depression. That tiny Greece, with an economy that amounts to 1-1.5 percent of EU GDP, should have been made the pivot of this disaster twists European history into the image of bitter caricature.

And then there's China, whose burgeoning capitalist command economy might also have been dragged down amid these flailings and which both wavered and grew exponentially. Nobody's financial elites look like geniuses in this telling

Until I read Tooze, I had no idea that Obama's foreign travels were usually more about trying to nudge bankers and global financial elites toward what the US thought was economic stability than about arms control, or recovering from the global opprobrium which George W Bush's wars had seeded, and or even climate change. It's an enlightening perspective.

None of this suggests happy prospects for economic justice, democracy, or even truth as Europe and America have known it.

It was the current president of the European Commission who announced in the the spring of 2011: "When it becomes serious, you have to lie." At least one might say, he knows what he is doing. If we believe Jean-Claude Juncker, a posttruth approach to public discourse is simply what the governance of capitalism currently demands.

In the 19th century, economics was sometimes labelled "the dismal science" because it was the study of why human beings would always lack for our basic needs, for food, clothing, and shelter. Modern global capitalism has proved capable of building the components for those needs beyond the wildest dreams of pre-capitalist economists, though it usually flunks the equitable distribution part of the problem.

The crux of Tooze's argument about the unfolding of the crisis of 2008 is that it turns out that contingency, accidents, and politics still matter despite the enormous scale and complexity of financial systems interwoven with modern states. It's possible that global capital has stamped out the possibility of democracy and we didn't notice. But also it's possible that's wrong.

There are ways of describing the operations of these systems that void the presence of politics. But if a history such as this has any purpose, it is to reveal the poverty of such accounts. Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative ... Success and failure, stability and crisis, can indeed pivot on particular moments of choice. ...

Not a bad thought as we enter a different, hopefully better, US political era ...

Friday cat blogging

Erudite Partner reports that spinning is not made easier by a good ear cleaning from Janeway's rough tongue.

We need a new President's medal -- the Eugene Goodman Medal

It's small potatoes among twice-impeached Donald's crimes, but this is still a little sickening. The old celebrity chasing conman has been handing out Presidential Medals of Freedom to cronies. He especially favors honoring past-their-prime white sports icons like Lou Holtz, Jerry West, and Gary Player. (Still active NFL coach Bill Belicheck had the decency to turn the award down after this month's Capitol attack; he's a smart one, that crafty old survivor.) 

In the last few months, Trump has honored champions of political vitriol and vituperation: Rush Limbaugh, his current Congressional pitbull Rep. Jim Jordan, and that rather stupid fabricator of lies Rep. Devin Nunes. The Nunes medal citation is a masterpiece of the Trumpian bullshit: 

Devin Nunes’ courageous actions helped thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president. Devin’s efforts led to the firing, demotion, or resignation of over a dozen FBI and DOJ employees. He also forced the disclosure of documents that proved that a corrupt senior FBI official pursued a vindictive persecution of General Michael Flynn — even after rank and file FBI agents found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Congressman Nunes pursued the Russia Hoax at great personal risk and never stopped standing up for the truth. He had the fortitude to take on the media, the FBI, the Intelligence Community, the Democrat Party, foreign spies, and the full power of the Deep State....

 After this sort of tripe, the Medal of Freedom has lost much luster.

My friend Ayse Sercan, writing on Facebook, has an idea:

For the last week the video clip of a Black officer being chased by a mob of white men has haunted me. I'm no fan of the cops in general, but in no way does that make the situation of a bunch of violent racists chasing a Black man any better.

Then I found out he had deliberately led them away from chambers to protect the people inside. A Black man *used his Black body* to protect white people who too often forget how they have benefited from systemic racism and the service of Black people, the sacrifice of Black bodies. While some of his white colleagues were participating in the riot and taking selfies with rioters. Now he has to fear for his safety and that of his family because terrorists know who he is.

I think we need a new medal, the Eugene Goodman Medal, which would replace the defiled Presidential Medal of Freedom. [My emphasis]

Here's Goodman's story as told by Rebecca Tan at the Washington Post. Apparently he's not the sort of fellow who would want the attention, but he deserves plenty of thanks for quick thinking and courage. He probably averted many deaths.

The fear will linger ...

What happens to the psyches of members of legislative bodies who have experienced incursions by armed right-wing thugs screaming for their overthrow? Plenty, it seems.

Michigan statehouse in April. Photo by Jeff KowalskyAFP

Matt Shuham of Talking Points Memo interviewed members of the Michigan and Idaho legislatures who have endured gun-toting anti-coronavirus restriction protesters invading their space. 

“Now I’m like, ‘Well gosh, does it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?’” said state Rep. Ilana Rubel, a Democrat and minority leader in the Idaho House of Representatives.

... State Rep. Donna Lasinski (D), minority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, recalled sitting mere feet from the swinging doors that separated the House “and the men who were screaming and armed right outside our chamber” in April. 

She said the rage on display in Washington, D.C. last week recalled what she’d seen at her own workplace — “when you hear someone scream, and you hear the change in their voice that has moved them to a point where you feel like there’s no return, where you feel like violence is imminent.”

From the point of view of the thugs, intimidation is the point. And unless this kind of terrorism can be curbed, very few people are going to be willing to sign on to contest and hold elected office. And that means the terrorists win.

Watching this has reminded me that our Constitutional structure of government was not designed to be operated by professional politicians whose career path consisted of winning and holding elective office. The founding generation expected Congresscritters and their state analogues to be short-termers, white gentlemen taking a break from their plantations (South) or perhaps their law practices (North). 

Though political parties formed within a decade and professionalization rapidly followed (all that patronage for office holders to distribute!), it's worth remembering that eighty years after the founding, our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, had been merely a one-term Congressman who had retreated after a loss to a country law practice. He enjoyed continued prominence only thanks to the accident that the national party structure was reformulating itself to generate a new, anti-slavery, free labor party (the early Republicans). His equivalent of Twitter was a national lecture tour reinforcing the drive toward free-soil expansion of the nation to the west. And, having won the Presidency in 1860, he had to slink into Washington under threat of assassination in Baltimore before even taking office. In Lincoln, we lucked into a politician who believe in something beyond a career and paid the price.

People whose ambitions are simply to hold a cushy job and perhaps graduate to a lucrative lobbying career aren't going play in the political arena if it is perceived as more dangerous than prestigious. We have to make elective office safe enough to attract people who want to engage in public service without fear. Ideologues will come to the fore when temperatures remain as hot as they are today. 

Biden wasn't my guy by a long shot. But nothing is served by so breaking the structures of government that only ambitious monsters and monomaniacal zealots will take part. Let's hope he can calm the roiling seas.

We need to hunker down

That huge black bubble over California representing current hospitalizations is properly alarming in this depiction from the COVID Tracking Project. The coronavirus is thriving among us.

Mission Local passed along a video exploring why new COVID cases took off after mid-October in San Francisco as authorities relaxed precautions.

According to Phoenix Data Project:

This data reveals that although San Francisco was doing relatively well controlling the pandemic, when indoor dining opened and cases numbers increased, SF made its big mistake. By not reversing reopening plans, ICU and case numbers increased, and SF experienced a large holiday surge.

Stay safe out there ...

America's mayor or America's next governor?

The headline reads "Bowser tells Americans to stay home for the inauguration." Good for District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser. If enough potential visitors listen, as seems likely, it will make it easier to separate the white supremacist militia boys planning another riot from the rest.

Locals may differ; they almost always do. (Don't expect me to applaud my mayor's coronavirus response, despite her national rep.) But from afar,  it seems Bowser's a done decent job in an impossible position and year, both in affirming Black Lives Matter and trying to bring order to a city abandoned by Donald Trump's federal government which controls most of the levers of power.

Certainly she supplants for the title that delusional conman from New York who had one good afternoon 20 years ago and now awaits a much needed pardon from his criminal client and overlord.

Bowser's legal inability to extract assistance from the feds and to command her own National Guard add to the case for DC statehood. I don't know if the Dems have enough votes to deliver; all it would take is a majority vote and presidential signature. But one or two lawmakers and the President himself could gum up the works, again.

Some facts about DC statehood: the new jurisdiction would immediately become the most Black state with currently something like a 46 percent Black population. Though that's a high proportion, it's nothing like the "chocolate" Washington that Erudite Partner grew up in during the 1960s -- truly an overwhelmingly Black city. 

DC's population is larger than that of Vermont and Wyoming.

Because DC is entirely an urban city center, the new state's GDP would be 1st per capita in the nation, and 1st by median household income. That doesn't mean everyone is Washington is rich. Poor residents (essential workers, perhaps?) have been pushed east across the Anacostia River where, in 2016, the poverty rate was 33 percent.

Residents of the District are U.S. citizens; they have long deserved their own state government.

How to crush the Rebellion

That's what my Unionist ancestors would have called the white nationalist incursion at the Capitol last Wednesday. They were by no means "woke" or anti-racist, but they helped found the anti-slavery force that became the party of Lincoln. They didn't intend to be ruled forever by what they called "the Slave Power." When the southern states chose to break the country because Lincoln had affirmed that "government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," those ancestors worked loyally for the Union war effort until the Confederacy was broken. They knew where the moral right lay.

I can bloviate long and vigorously about what I think ought to happen to our contemporary insurrectionists. But I think I'll hand that job off to San Francisco civil rights lawyer John Crew, writing on Facebook. I particulary appreciate the comprehensive scope of the sanctions he says we ought to bring to bear against the instigators as well as the perps. Here's Crew:

More attempted acts of insurrection may be imminent -- especially if the reaction to what has already taken place is not immediate, very strong and sustained. 

And, that reaction must be comprehensive. 

It must be political -- impeachment of the leader and inciter of the insurrection and, at minimum, official censure of the congressional enablers. 

It must be prosecutorial -- the punishments must fit the crimes and be more severe for those who do not turn themselves in. 

It must be professional -- disbarment, firings, expulsions from professional associations. 

It must be economic -- threatened boycotts and other pressure on business interests who remain complicit. (Hell, if the National Association of Manufacturers can break with Trump and the democracy-destroying lies that define Trumpism, anyone can.) 

It must be journalistic -- not just with relentless investigations and accountability pieces that name the insurrectionists and expose their roles but also with newly direct, no-bullshit, clarity and bluntness in how these events and those involved are described. 

It must be social -- people who openly seek to destroy democracy, who cannot or will not accept the core requirement of democratic citizenship that one MUST accept the equal legitimacy of all legally cast votes, and [must] peacefully accept legitimate electoral defeats, and/or who cannot accept the demographic certainty that this country's democratic power will continue to become ever more multi-cultural and less white must be shunned.

I would add that it must include the readiness of people to take to the streets and confront right wing hate groups who will surely be feeling a sugar high after their murderous stunt.

Further, the 147 Republicans in Congress who, after the attack on their citadel and persons, voted to throw out the clear verdict of the people in favor of Joe Biden, must be driven from office. If they had any decency, they would resign, but the votes Wednesday night gave them a a chance to repudiate sedition and they flunked it.

The people will have to do the job on most of these Congresscritters, rejecting them at their next election. That will be hard, but midterm elections are always tough for the party in power. With a Rebellion underway, lives depend on keeping Democrats in power in both houses of Congress. 

This cycle's success at turning Georgia blue shows that hard work by local organizers, with adequate financial support from outside, can increase participation and change outcomes. Georgia also showed that the work has to be ongoing; you can't just put up a campaign in the last six weeks and expect to swing elections.

Fortunately, the Cook Report has given democracy activists whose arena of struggle is elections what amounts to a target list of Republican offenders who voted to overthrow the election. Here's a small section of it, highlighting California's top target:

Mike Garcia's Congressional district is in Orange County. Anybody know who is doing the work of expanding and engaging the electorate in those parts?

Weasel words

This is not the most important vexation in this moment, but this New York Times headline provoked me.

Either the Native American population dependent on the hospital were abandoned by the overlords of the U.S. Indian Health Service or that population is in the grip of a delusion. Which is it, Times? 

If you don't have an answer, you don't have a story. I wouldn't ask this of some amateur blog -- but the "newspaper of record" ...

Poverty kills

Our unhoused neighbor who had settled in across the street has died. There is no reason to suspect human foul play, just deprivation and possibly her own demons.

She made it as long as she did by projecting a fierce independence; don't mess with me, her whole bearing screamed. So we left her alone. She died alone in her tent.

Mission Local found neighbors who shared memories of Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Rieber.

Friday cat blogging

How many cats does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Cats can see in the dark. But they like ladders.

Capitol Police blew an easy call

Somebody let the crazy out ... and we know who.

 

I'm beginning to formulate some political thoughts about yesterday's Trumpist assault on the Capitol, but I want to let them marinate a little.

Meanwhile, I'm much frustrated by this from an otherwise unremarkable Washington Post oped by David van Drehle: 

There will be a lot of second-guessing of the Capitol Police and of public safety officials generally in the District of Columbia. How could they let this happen? Let’s be clear: Such questions are completely off-base. No official should be blamed for failing to anticipate that the president of the United States would incite a mob to overwhelm the Capitol. We cannot accommodate ourselves to the idea that this should be foreseeable; that we should plan against it; that law enforcement in Washington must go to battle stations in anticipation of an attack by one branch of government against another.

Bullshit! Second guessing is entirely proper. Trump has been attacking parts of the government he pretended to lead since long before the national democratic shipwreck of November 2016. Anyone remember Judge Curiel? He's attacked his own Secretary of State, two of his own Attorneys General, Senators who didn't bow before him, multiple Congresswomen whose gender, religion, skin color and national origin offend his thin sensibilities ... pretty much all he has done in public life is incite mob violence.

More to the point, F.B.I. director Christopher Wray, whose job is to know, has been calling out the danger of domestic terrorism from white supremacists and right wing conspiracy nuts. You'll never convince me that the F.B.I. didn't know these dangerous thugs were on their way; unless the federal agency has badly fallen down on its game, probably many of the "members" of these Trump-supporting right wing groups are actually infiltrators. 

Law enforcement knew what was coming unless heads were willfully buried in sand. And some cop heads should roll in the aftermath.

Black people save the country -- again

The Senate elections in Georgia -- the two new Democrats that the Peach State is sending to DC to break the Republican legislative strangehold -- mean, once again, we can hope for sane governance from the Feds. Congrats to "Rev. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff" as I've been naming them to voters on phones for a month.

It was a tremendous privilege to work with UniteHERE on this campaign, while knowing that every progressive force and person in the country was pulling hard for a Democratic and small "d" democratic result. And the people of Georgia have delivered, even if it isn't quite official at the moment of this writing.

The insightful reporter Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out a meaning of this result during a FiveThirtyEight live blog of the election. He wrote:

Democrats spent a lot of time the last four years obsessing about states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and wooing white voters without college degrees in particular. And while it’s not clear that Biden did that much better than Hillary Clinton with white voters without college degrees, he did win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Georgia is a different ball game, in part because of its big Black population. And notably, the Democrats ran a campaign for these Senate seats that reflected the large Black electorate in the state:

1. They embraced the approach of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, of really trying to boost turnout among voters of color, younger voters and those in the Atlanta area.
2. They embraced two candidates with lots of ties to Atlanta’s Black community. In Warnock, the pastor of the church MLK and his father ran, but also in Ossoff, who worked for two Atlanta Black congressmen, the late John Lewis and Hank Johnson.
3.  And lastly, they embraced a kind of social justice message. Ossoff and Warnock talked a lot about voting rights and other “Black” issues on the campaign trail.

If Democrats win one or both of these races, I would expect them to run similar campaigns to this in other states in the South with large Black populations.

Southerners have been telling the rest of us for years that there's a hopeful promise in their region arising from the Black history of pain, of enslavement, and of struggle. If we're to preserve and extend freedom, Black southerners will be among our leaders. Let us continue ...

The stakes in Georgia

Today Georgians vote in the two U.S. Senate elections which will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control that legislative body. If the Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff prevail, our new President will have a chance of getting something done. If the GOPer incumbents win, expect stonewalling of everything, including funds to vaccinate against the coronavirus and to assist economic recovery.

Those are the national implications of this election. But this election also has huge stakes for democracy within Georgia. The New Georgia Project's Nsé Ufot explained what the election means for Georgians in the Atlanta Voice:

For too many years, Georgia’s conservative leaders have gotten used to cherry picking their voters. Instead of trying to appeal to a wider swath of voters, they have worked to deny voting rights to those Georgians whom they don’t care to represent, especially Black people. Thanks to extensive voter suppression tactics — from purging voters from the rolls, to withholding voter registrations under an “exact match” law, to shutting down precincts – these officials have worked, too often successfully, to suppress our votes.

... Even as more than 10,000 Georgians have lost their lives to COVID-19, Georgia Republicans are already working to walk back the measures taken to make voting safer in the face of the pandemic, recently unveiling a plan to restrict vote-by-mail and roll back the election laws that facilitated record-high turnout in the state in November. This move comes on the heels of a decision made by election officials in Cobb County to cut early voting locations by half ahead of the Georgia runoffs, which will disproportionately affect voters of color. 

... These suppression efforts are a response to the shifting power dynamics in Georgia: our representatives are afraid of our power and want to curtail it. Because of a multiracial coalition of Black, Brown, Gold, and progressive white voters, Georgia went blue in November. You see it in the numbers: our state had more than 6.6 million registered voters in 2016; this year, it reached an all-time high of 7.6 million, with registrations among Black, Latino, and Asian voters booming. 

... The defenders of the status quo have seen what Georgians can do when we all turn out to vote, and that’s why they’re scared.

Over the last month, it's been an education and sometimes a pleasure to phone Georgians about their election. UniteHERE callers have been thanked and blessed -- a lot.  Let's hope Georgians who have already voted, and those who turn out today, succeed in building a new, more inclusive future, for everyone, in their state. Just as in Washington, democracy itself is on the ballot in Georgia.

Why are Jenkins and other UniteHERE members working so hard in Georgia?

Let him tell you himself. Jenkins Kolongbo is knocking on doors in Georgia for U.S. Senate candidates Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Offoff. UniteHERE members expect to hit 1,000,000 doors before the polls close tomorrow.

Hundreds of us are backing up Jenkins and the Georgia team on the phones from all over the country. You still have one more day to join us. Sign up for a shift and join us on Tuesday, January 5.

A civil rights hero for public transit

When I came upon this banner celebrating Mary Ellen Pleasant (lived 1814(?) – January 4, 1904) on one of the most obscure public bus barns in the city, I'd never heard of her.

In case that's true of you too, here are some glimpses of the life of this amazing San Franciscan. The New York Times featured her in one of their obituaries for people they know the publication had "Overlooked."

Pleasant lived her life between the lines of legitimacy and infamy, servitude and self-invention. She became known throughout San Francisco as Mammy Pleasant, because of the years she spent as a domestic servant. Yet she was also, incredibly, a former slave who became a millionaire. Add to that improbable pairing, a dedicated abolitionist, credited with being an important conductor of the Underground Railroad.

What we know of her life history is murky, apparently including fables she encouraged herself and inventions in 19th century tabloid newspapers which found her an attractive subject. It seems mostly agreed she was born in Georgia or Louisiana sometime in the second decade of the 19th century and spent her youth as a domestic servant for a wealthy white Nantucket household, probably abolitionists. In the 1830s, she married a James Henry Smith, a white or perhaps mixed race Virginia planter. During their marriage, she led groups of enslaved men and women to freedom via the Underground Railroad to Canada. When Smith died in 1840s he left her a significant inheritance. She claimed to have helped fund John Brown's attack on the federal garrison at Harpers Ferry.

She remarried to John Pleasant and went looking for new opportunities, again according to her delayed obit:

In 1848, the California Gold Rush began and word soon spread that even blacks were free to seek their fortune on the West Coast. Pleasant heeded the call. She moved to San Francisco and found work as a cook, invisible and unimportant once again. She shrewdly eavesdropped on the wealthy people she served, and using the information, invested bits of her inheritance. “It’s quite possible that the jobs she had as a domestic were a cover that she was using because she clearly made her money from investments,” [Lynn] Hudson, [her] biographer, said in an interview.

Her portfolio grew to include shares in businesses that ranged from dairies and laundries to Wells Fargo Bank. She owned restaurants and boardinghouses, which locals whispered were actually brothels. In the 1890 census, she stated that she was a “capitalist” by profession. 

... She formed a decades-long business partnership, possibly romantic, with a white man named Thomas Bell. After his death, it turned out that much of Pleasant’s portfolio, including the mansion she designed and had built, were held in Bell’s name. Historians believe that the pair used his name in many of the business dealings to facilitate what surely would have been more difficult for a woman, and especially for a black woman. Bell’s widow sued Pleasant and won control of the Bell estate. In an instant, Pleasant’s fortune was diminished. She died in 1904.

Yet that spectacular rise and fall in wealth is not what caused Mary Ellen Pleasant to be heralded by our bus service. According to an ACLU Northern California history website, along the way this indomitable woman won a major victory for civil rights in her new state.

In 1866, a street car conductor in San Francisco refused to let her board because she was black. Outraged, Pleasant sued. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In a historic decision, the court ruled that segregation on streetcars was illegal in California.

In keeping with so many episodes in her life, she didn't receive the money damages a lower court had ordered. But she landed on her feet, with an implausible victory.

San Francisco has always been a boom and bust town attracting determined, unconventional characters. Against the odds, Mary Ellen Pleasant found a right place for her talents and made it a better one.

End the federal killing spree

Joe Biden, once in office, will have the power to put a quick halt to one facet of the Trump/Barr drive to further embed cruelty and retribution in our political fabric. Such a move would stir up howls from the vengeance caucus, but it would make us a better country.

Countdown in a San Francisco window. Accurate as of January 1.

According to Andrew Cohen of the Marshall Project, writing at the Brennan Center for Justice, a president can halt activations of the federal death penalty which before Trump had sat unused for 16 years.

The Trump administration’s decision to execute five condemned federal prisoners during the presidential transition — an unprecedented killing spree — stems from the same blunt theory of governance that saw Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuse to hold a Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland in 2016 while rushing to confirm Amy Coney Barrett earlier this year.

In each instance, those with power eschewed cherished norms and political comity and used it. Their right to do these things gave them the might to do it, you could say, regardless of what the rest of us thought about it all.

In a little over four weeks, Joe Biden will have that same power to write his own history with capital punishment in America. The central question is whether he has the political will and moral strength to exercise the power. He can empty federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, by commuting to life-without-parole terms the death sentences of the 50 or so people left on it. He can direct the Justice Department to instruct each and every U.S. attorney around the country not to pursue capital charges for federal crimes. He can order the completion of a death penalty study disappointingly left unfinished during the Obama administration.

Very gradually, this country has been learning that demanding the government kill terrible offenders for us neither creates moral satisfaction nor justice. Our legal processes are riddled with inequities that ensure that poor and dark defendants never get the kind of fairness that rich and white people can buy. The requirement that juries in death penalty cases be made of people who state a willingness to apply the ultimate sanction undermines any potential for understanding and mercy. The tangle of legal safeguards that we've added to a bad system to try to minimize its racism and class bias merely drag out an inherently inequitable, over-complex, expensive, and drearily lengthy process.

Before the Trump/Barr killing spree, we were backing away from capital punishment. According to the AP:

Colorado in 2020 became the 22nd state to strike death-penalty laws from its books. Currently, 34 states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out executions in a decade or more even though their laws permit them, the report said. This year, Louisiana and Utah passed the 10-year mark of no executions.

Historically, it has been mostly the states, not the feds, that executed. The death penalty degrades us all. Joe Biden can walk the federal government back from this misbegotten relic.

Saturday scenes: San Francisco holiday season 2020

As everyone knows, this is the one of the least religious cities in the country. So it's no surprise that Walking San Francisco at this season, I encounter very few creche scenes in yards and on porches. By and large, San Franciscans go in for reminders of the winter we don't have here: snowmen and reindeer. We also favor consumer Christmas: lots of Santas weighed down with packages.

But I have noticed a new theme this year, turning up in widely separated areas of the city.

Guess this is the Year of the Grinch.

The local variant often seems more unhinged than malevolent.

Sometimes the tableau is just a mixed metaphor. It's been a crazy year.

New Years reflections: not quite arrived and aging in place

Though the calendar has turned and we're finally out of 2020, I'm not quite into a new year -- yet. And I won't get there until after the voting ends in the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5; I'm still phoning for Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. 

Perhaps I'll feel the arrival of a new year when Congress votes to accept the results of the election on January 6. Or perhaps the feeling will wait until Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20. I've lived four long years in a hyper-vigilant state, struggling for the survival of the better possibilities of this deeply flawed country -- that doesn't just disappear with the flip of the calendar.

I'll write plenty here during this new year about what I learned in that struggle -- and the struggles going forward -- but not yet.

Today I want write a little about what I learned in 2020 of my own experience of aging, of growing into getting older.

Going into the year, I knew what I thought was ahead. In the first half of the year, Erudite Partner would teach and I'd run, and continue Walking San Francisco, and writing this blog. In the second half of the year, we'd work in some way, somewhere, on a campaign to elect whatever Democrat emerged to contest Trump and the GOPers.

And then came the pandemic -- and we were locked down at home in a constrained world. This wasn't much of a hardship. Though I missed seeing people in person, I could still walk about, and read, and write. We could afford Costco deliveries and cooked more regularly. Pandemic isolation was comfortable for us.

But little nicks and aches interrupted my running. By July I was largely immobilized with a bad back which morphed into medicine-induced digestive problems. And we understood, incompletely but not inaccurately, that the coronavirus was a respiratory threat I had to take seriously. Over the last decade I've had several bouts of pneumonia and I just don't recover rapidly or cleanly. So I chose to reduce risk of infection drastically. I didn't even go out to participate in the racial reckoning protests triggered, this time around, by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

And I certainly couldn't join an on-the-ground political campaign during a pandemic. For me, working a political campaign is the equivalent of going to war; I have always required absolute and unstinting focus from myself when on campaign. I couldn't deliver that in my condition or in the situation the disease had created.

Erudite Partner is a little younger and healthier, so she could go, and in August she departed for 3 months in Nevada. I had to content myself with working on the hotel workers union (UniteHERE) phone bank. This got off to a slow start but built up into a significant effort in Florida, Nevada and Philadelphia -- and continues now in support of canvassers in Georgia.

But stuck at home, I became aware that the pandemic and my own aches were slamming me with a reality that I, like most of us, prefer to push aside. As we age, how we physically and psychically participate in the world around us changes. My mentor in aging Ronni Bennett taught me to experience these changes with curiosity and humor. In her honor, I hope to write here occasionally about what I learn from my aging.

Here are some snippets from this plague year:

• I can't use ladders to change light bulbs anymore unless I've got someone around to hand me needed tools, etc. Found that out the hard way; nothing broke in the tumble except the lamp cover.
• Best have a wall or bed nearby to lean on when pulling on pants. I no longer can do this comfortably standing on one foot.
• I don't know whether this change comes from aging, or the pandemic, or both: mundane tasks that just need to get done like an oil change for the car or calling in the roofer to clean gutters seem more challenging.
• Interests changed. Don't know whether this is a consequence of the pandemic or increasing maturity, but I find I am no longer interested in football, professional or college. Football is a less violent alternative to war. Maybe I don't need that jolt anymore?
• I no longer can intelligently write in the evening; I'm too tired. So it's a good thing I don't now have, and expect never to have, a day job. When would I blog? I can listen to books during evenings, and that's a delight. I hope the San Francisco Public Library reopens soon, as I like to borrow a hard copy of any book I write about here to check quotes. There's quite a blog backlog of booktalk coming once they open.
• You can't go home again (thanks Thomas Wolfe) but old passions recur -- and it's possible to take them up again. I spent much of my early adulthood working to ensure that people in need of food had some. In the pandemic, I find that just about the only useful service I can perform outside the home is contact-free deliveries of food to homebound households one day a week for the Mission Food Hub. 
  

We'll see what the New Year brings ... May yours be happy and peaceful.

Friday cat blogging

Janeway is not interested in any New Years activities. Just give her a warm lap. She did perk up and stare at the screen when I watched the Pixar short Kitbull.