When activism is not optional

Chicana feminist and San Francisco Mission stalwart Yolanda M. Lopez passed in 2021; a free exhibition of her art, Women's Work is Never Done, is currently on display within the library at the University of San Francisco.

Lopez's voluminous body of work touched all the struggles of her time:

Moving from San Diego to San Francisco in the late 1960s, she became active in the cause of Los Siete de la Raza, young Latinos charged with killing a police officer who were eventually acquitted with broad community support.

 

Latino Californians were forced during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by 1994's racist initiative Prop. 187,  to organize themselves to win political power commensurate with their numbers. 

 

Although Lopez eventually won increasing respect for her more sophisticated feminist art, one explanatory panel reminds exhibition visitors that, "at the height of her career she still made ends meet by working at the Macy's gift-wrapping counter." Lopez was a worker.

I found an installation she called "The Nanny" most poignant:

The show will be open daily from noon to six until November 12.

Women report from the wars

From Ukraine:

 

Kateryna Kibarova is a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha.

Recently, I read that the best warrior is the one who has lost everything. There was a story about a man in Odesa who went out for groceries at Easter. A rocket flew into the house and killed both his wife, his two-month-old baby, and, I think, the mother-in-law. He came back home to find his relatives—three generations—gone. And so he went to fight.

There are so many like him. It’s not only patriotism, but also boundless grief. It's like total courage—but it's different from when you are walking next to your mom as a child, and you're not afraid of anything. This is when you have so much pain inside, when you already know what pain—maximum pain—feels like, and you're not afraid of anything any more. This is a mix of anger, pain and aggression, all bubbling up in you.

I don't know of any punishment in the world that would be fitting for the people who are responsible for this. But I very much believe that the Russians will bear the consequences of their atrocities. They will be held accountable before God—and the Hague.

Africa encounters Saudi Arabia: 

Lydia Polgreen came up in journalism by way of years reporting from the civil conflicts of West Africa in the first decade of this century. Now from her perch at the New York Times editorial department, she insists that we not look away from reported Saudi massacres of refugee Ethiopians, desperately seeking to enter by way of war-torn Yemen:

We are living through a brutal new era of realpolitik, where might equals right amid a frenzy of global jockeying. This world has been very good to Saudi Arabia, a very rich and very important country by dint of its geography and natural resources. China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and its archenemy, Iran; and now the Biden administration seeks a grand bargain between the Saudis and the government of Israel. For the West, the dictates of our current moment are clear: Counter China. Contain Russia. Keep unwanted migrants out.

The Biden administration came to power with many promises and good intentions. Two years ago, speaking after the chaos of the necessary and long overdue withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, Biden declared: “I have been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.”

Biden made similar commitments about migrants. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said in his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.”

I am certain that President Biden believed these words when he said them and believes them still. His administration is playing the hand it has been dealt. But as the events in the Saudi desert illustrate, this century is going to be nasty, brutish and long. ...

Photo via Human Rights Watch which made the story accessible in the US.

For Labor Day

On December 3, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln sent what was then known as the president's Annual Message to Congress, summing up the challenges of his first year in office. (These constitutionally mandated presidential communications were delivered in writing until 1913 when Woodrow Wilson began the custom giving a speech and weren't called the "State of the Union" messages until the 1930s during FDR's term.)

This tidbit from that document is often pulled and publicized for Labor Day to express Lincoln's appreciation for workers. I thought it would be interesting to explore the context from which it emerges.

Though the short bit reads as high political theory, the context is not. For example in this document, Lincoln reports to Congress that the Post Office shows:

... an excess of expenditure over the revenue for the last fiscal year of $4,557,462.71

Some things don't change, but they don't usually make it into the report in subsequent years ...

However, Lincoln had much larger problems than minor fiscal shortfalls. The context of the message is that several Southern states have gone to war against the Union, against the federal government. Its conclusion speaks to the great context of that rebellion.

It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government--the rights of the people. Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. ...

The rebellious states were not fighting for popular democracy, were founded in privilege and prejudice. The Confederate vice-president, Alexander Stephens, was not shy about the purpose of the revolt: "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition." 

Lincoln thought otherwise.

Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people. In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.

For Lincoln, the foundation of American government was that it promised equality of opportunity to the working man. (Yes, he did mean man.)

... It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

That is, for Lincoln, the point of the government and constitutional system which he had been elected to lead, was to ensure opportunity to workers -- all workers -- to make what they could of their economic circumstances. This message came two years before the necessities of Civil War forced Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to begin freeing the enslaved people of the South. Events would force him to see the necessity of broader inclusion.

The idea of freedom for labor was essential to his idea of the country; the time for free labor to include all men regardless of race had not come yet in 1861, but from this platform, Lincoln could move on toward universal free labor.

Hence his famous declaration of the superiority of workers:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Lincoln did not visualize a future in which industrial and finance capital dominated and exploited most workers.

Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. ...

He trusted the democratic future of the country to free workers. They would preserve the Union of the states and government by the people.

... as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. ...

No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.

Although the economic system of the United States of America didn't turn out as Lincoln envisioned, those of us lucky enough to be born here should be grateful that newcomers, from all over the world, still struggle and die to come here -- to what still seems to them to be a land of opportunity for workers. These days, it is often those newcomers who make the country rich and strong. They are much of the backbone of what we call "organized labor," the union movement which fights to constrain capital.

As Lincoln knew, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed when he sought the presidency in 1988, that energy of aspiration for better futures keeps hope alive.

Music in the park

This summer Golden Gate Park has showcased random musicians in random locations, doing their thing for and with random passersby ... like me.

 

It's been a good summer, despite the gray and fog. Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Friday cat blogging

 

Two cats can be a lot of cats. Especially when wishing to write on one's desk.

It's hard to visually convey the size discrepancy between Janeway and Mio. Perhaps this catches it:

He's about 2 and a half the bulk of her. Never fear though -- she's still the Captain of this ship.

A bit of rant: let's be thankful for those small donors

Thomas Edsall's formula in his weekly NY Times opinion columns is worn out. He assembles a collection of "authorities," mostly political and social scientists, writing in obscure academic journals, all to tell us the reality is more complex or less dire than the headlines proclaim.

Edsall's luminaries may even be correct. But he's become a bore.

And sometimes his conclusions are just minimizing and silly. Exhibit A -- "For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties." 

Edsall sets out to indict the legions of small donors who have been funding campaigns during the last decade by asserting that their contributions have undermined political party control of candidates and campaigns. I have no real argument with the realization that political parties have lost control of the process. (I have plenty of argument with oligarchic big political donors, but that's not my subject here.)

Here in California, we saw an earlier iteration of the political party decay Edsall so regrets. In this state, beginning in the '90s and 2000s, the parties were overshadowed by functional ideological actors, like SEIU, the Sierra Club, and even NGO groupings such as San Francisco Rising. And it was in the interests of professional consultant gurus to make every candidate and political player a separate fundraising actor, since consultant income derives from the financial success of the people and causes they work for (plus a rake off for TV ads).

Edsall's column leads off by alluding to a stunning finding which goes completely unexplored. 

In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years....

Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70. ...

If the assertion I have emphasized is correct, there has been an astonishing growth in the sheer number of citizens who think that what happens in our democratic politics matters and who choose to pay into that process. Edsall sees a nightmare because these citizens -- right and left -- are expressing polarizing desires from government. I see participation -- buy-in -- by ordinary people on a novel level. I don't have to like all of them to be heartened.

If democracy is to work, people have to play. We differ a lot, to the verge of violence. That's scary. But that risk is the cost of commitment to people taking a role in the direction of the country. An unprecedented fraction of us are trying to take part via our dollars.

All this small giving naturally leads to attempts to aggregate the money more effectually. This ad was a great example from the last election cycle. With the increase will come ever more of this also. Maybe they could reduce the flood of email?

Maybe the library will reopen some day

It feels as if the monumental Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library has been closed ... forever. Even before the pandemic, plans for closing and renovation were discussed in public meetings. Then came the civic shut down in 2020 and the massive Carnegie building never reopened. SFPL provided a "temporary" branch on Valencia -- but what's with the library?

Yesterday the powers-that-be, headlined by local city supervisor Hillary Ronen, announced that construction would begin on the massive empty hulk. She's a library user too.

 

Mission artist Juana Alicia spoke for our neighborhood's endurance. Her mural, which has been commissioned for the restored main stairwell, will feature images of the nopal, the Mexican cactcus. This prickly fruit serves as an "emblem of resilience and national identity."

The library project was then blessed by the neighborhood Aztec dancers.

At each stage of the renovation project, we've been assured that construction will take 2 years. Will the remodeling be completed by mid-decade? This is San Francisco. I expect delays ...

Strange sight in the 'hood

 

Just another Mission District walker out for stroll. Until you zoom in a little ...

 

What's former President Reagan doing on that guy's leg?

I spend a good deal of time reading/listening to Never Trump (mostly ex-) Republicans these days. They are some of the most insightful folks around on the sad topic of the anti-democratic degeneracy of so much of the GOPer party. In this emergency, the anti-fascist coalition needs everyone. But hey ...

This bunch all seem to have an absolute blind spot when it comes to Reagan. They revere him as a kind of saint. Here was a guy who launched his campaign from the Mississippi locale made famous by the racist murder of three voting rights workers, made war on workers by firing striking air traffic controllers, and spent a term refusing to mention the AIDS epidemic because speaking up might indicate sympathy with dying gay men.

Not a saint to me.

Cretinous and disgraceful

Kevin Drum's shtick is tamping down excessive anxiety among his comrades on the loosely liberal side of the political spectrum. But not on this topic; he's disgusted by the stupidity and cruelty of too many of his credulous fellow citizens. The damage to young humans must take precedence.

Click to enlarge.

Moral panics like this one generally produce nothing but misery and oppression, and the campaign against gender-affirming care is headed down the same road. It's one thing to display some caution toward procedures that haven't been heavily studied and still have unknown consequences—this is happening in some European countries—but it's quite another to ban them altogether out of bigotry and ignorance. That's what the militant zealots in Alabama are doing, along with their militant zealots in two dozen other states.

In the absence of strong evidence in either direction, decisions like these should generally be left up to the patient, their doctor, and their parents. They're the ones best able to make case-by-case judgments. At most, given the current state of our knowledge, states might be justified in mandating a few guardrails (counseling, time restrictions, etc.). But that's it. Banning gender affirming care entirely for minors—the only age at which certain procedures can be done—is nothing more than jumping on the bandwagon of never-ending ugliness that has broken out in the Republican Party in the age of Trump. It's cretinous and disgraceful.

Witch hunts seem to be a recurrent theme of U.S. life. The 1980s saw the great Satanic Panic which inspired terrified parents to dig under daycare centers searching for hidden tunnels where ritual abuse was practiced. Eventually, after childcare workers were put on trial and many cases collapsed, that alluring madness faded. A few people spent many years in prison for "crimes" that have been understood never to have happened. Might the attractiveness of the theory have had something to do with the enormous increase during that decade in the proportion of women with children working outside the home and so the increase in daycare facilities?

Today we live amid a gender-fluidity panic. Beating up on trans kids, trans-curious kids, and their parents is in vogue. How many victims will be left in the wake of ignorant fears, weaponized by Republican political gain?

Marching on in faith

Monday, August 28, is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remembered today for Dr. King's "I have a dream ..." proclamation. There will be commemorations, congratulations, and calls for renewed energy in the incomplete struggle for the freedom of all.

Inevitably looking back 60 years, we telescope events and markers of the Civil Rights movement era which actually spread from the late 1940s through at least 1968. The great march was not an end point, but perhaps a pivot point; what had been many localized eruptions became unequivocally national afterwards. A broad movement coalition was formed for the day; this won the grudging attention of the ruling Democratic Party powers-that-be ... and change followed.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph of UT-Austin describes the context. 

No major civil rights legislation passed in 1963, but it was the most important year in the decade that transformed America.... The forces that fueled segregation and racial hierarchy in America — and the forces that galvanized the political resistance to both — sped up that year. 

... The March for Jobs and Freedom, announced July 2, forged a new consensus across partisan divides by linking American traditions of freedom and democracy with the Black movement’s aspirational notions of dignity and citizenship.... Bayard Rustin — a Black, gay and radical social democrat who spent time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II — led the organizing of the March On Washington at the behest of A. Philip Randolph, the legendary founder and labor leader who served as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin endured vicious homophobia within and outside of the movement. ...

Yet Rustin endured, making a final unstoppable comeback within movement circles through his ingenuous organizing skills that helped ensure the eclectic coalition of religious, labor, student, civil rights, business and civic groups were all there in Washington, equipped with buses, portable toilets, sandwiches, water fountains, chairs for dignitaries and more....

That's how a social movement gets things done: broad coalitions enabled by competent logistics. Or so I believe.

The minister of my Buffalo, NY, Episcopal parish attended; his daughter and I were envious. But supportive white northerners didn't think this was anything to take kids to -- sixteen years old was less mature in 1963 than it is today. In a distanced sense, far away parents knew the freedom struggle was no picnic, that violent pushback was always a possibility. As it was. As it is.

Ten years ago, in 2013, another commemoration of the great march took place in Washington. Via Religious News Service, comes this affirmation of the faith from those participants.

Edith Lee-Payne explains: "... it means to me - as a person of faith - a re-dedication that with God all things are possible. ... we knew that sometimes God takes us through some things ... [God] takes us through them to get us where God wants us to be."

He left a large swath ...

Thomas Cromwell served as English King Henry VIII's councilor -- a sort of chief of staff. He lost his head, literally, in 1540. So did an awful lot of notables of the volatile monarch's court, as a consequence of the deadly mix of greed, jealousy, state formation, wealth accumulation, international enmity, and religious Reformation in which they swam. 

Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of the most successful and lastingly influential of these men (and a few women including Henry's six wives) is delicious fun, worth 21 hours of listening.

The historian credits Thomas Cromwell's machinations and his convictions with preparing the ground from what became the Anglican Church. Henry's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I built on Cromwell's foundation, avoiding trumpeting its source. MacCulloch identifies the woman who became head of the Church of England, like Cromwell himself, as what reforming Protestants called a "Nicodemite" -- someone who dissembled about their religious convictions for political reasons.

Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe's leading Protestant monarch ... Cromwell's evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s; it was hidden in plain sight. It's permanent results became apparent only after this death ... These later developments of the English Reformations ... [included] destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a sacramental theology which the old king had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell's religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. 

Thomas Cromwell most likely could not recognize the belief structure of contemporary Anglican Christianity, but he would certainly recognize its unwieldy polity and shape, as well as its internal conflicts. Churches -- living human expressions a human yearning toward God -- take the shape of their time and place. We're human, bounded in time, after all.

Friday cat blogging

 

This shot gives a pretty realistic sense of the size of Mio. At 18 pounds and about 30 inches long at his full extension, he's a lot of cat. Bits of body often hang off surfaces.

He's also sweet and patient which is a good thing as Janeway the Tiny Terrorist jumps him several times a day and they race about until he plops down panting. She's wonderfully fit thanks to all the exercise. He seems a lot more fit than you'd think from the size of him. Maybe he's a kind of NFL-lineman cat, more muscle than blubber?

Ukrainian independence day

On August 24, 1991, the country now fighting for its life came into being. 

Today, Ukrainians marked the day with a raid on occupied Crimea.

Whatever else Ukrainians may lack, they sure aren't short on grit, style, and bravery.

It's not a pretty picture

 

I guess you'd have to predict this guy couldn't just fade away. More than half a century of imperial promotion, torture, and war-making doesn't lead to a graceful exit.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner reminds us of centenarian Henry Kissinger's many contributions to the last eight decades of U.S. efforts to seize and hold onto global hegemony. 

It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.

... Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

... If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.  ...

Read it all.

The Republican Party has thrown down on hating women and freedom

No watching the Republican debate for me ... I don't feel the need to see the also-rans posture and squabble. Barring an act of God, we'll have forgotten most of them by next spring.

But we should be very clear on what they ALL agree on:

Advice from history

Willamette University historian Seth Cotlar shared this fascinating artifact of another era when people in the United States had to struggle to combat anti-Semitism. Published in 1943 by the American Jewish Committee,  "What to Do When the Rabble-Rouser Comes to Town" was distributed to Jewish communities to warn people against doing and saying things which stirred up controversy with anti-Semitics [sic]..." 

In today's hyper-polarized world, we might not take the same tack with our homegrown fascists and nativist thugs. We cannot simply deny them a microphone; that's no longer possible. But we can still expose them. And we can sure recognize the type: the crooked fat cat with his lawyers and his army of muscle men.

Let's send him slinking away once again.

Persevering in the good fight

When authoritarians are working to replace established ethical norms with the dictates of the Leader, some of the speed bumps they have to overcome are professional standards. Some people will refuse to play by new rules which violate what they've been taught is responsible -- right and righteous -- behavior. We saw plenty of that during the Trump presidency, notably even from some Trump-appointed judges when the sitting president tried, falsely, to claim he'd been defeated by non-existent election fraud.

Some professionals have been fighting the standards fight for decades. Erudite Partner, in her role as an academic ethicist, worked with professional psychologists during the so-called War on Terror to stigmatize the George W. Bush regime's cooptation of the psychological discipline. Psychologists committed abuses -- torture -- on inmates at our American gulag in Guantanamo. (This admitted torture is why those prisoners, some of them documented "bad guys," have never come to trial; the USofA screwed up, rendering proceedings at law almost impossible.)

Form a 2007 demonstration at an American Psychological Association convention

Psychologist Roy Eidelson reports that the American Psychological Association is still dodging setting effectual ethical standards for members who work with the government. He reports on

... approval of a set of wholly inadequate professional practice guidelines for operational psychology. If this domain is unfamiliar to you, operational psychologists are primarily involved in non-clinical activities linked to national security, national defense, and public safety. Their largest source of employment is the military-intelligence establishment, which includes the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Of particular concern from the standpoint of professional ethics, in some cases these psychologists are called upon to inflict harm, to dispense with informed consent, and to operate in a covert manner such that external oversight by professional boards becomes difficult or impossible. They’re eager to have the APA’s official blessing of this weaponization of the profession because it’s a step toward achieving greater recognition and legitimacy for this kind of work.

In light of the manifest misalignment between key features of operational psychology and the profession’s fundamental ethical principles, I believe the proposed guidelines should have been rejected outright, so as not to lend credence to these practices without sufficient discussion and debate about the profoundly consequential issues involved. 

But it’s worth pointing out that these guidelines deserved a flunking grade simply in comparison to other guidelines recently approved by the APA’s Council for other professional practice areas. For instance, both the guidelines for working with persons with disabilities (2022) and the guidelines for working with sexual minority persons (2021) are each over four-times the length of these vague, abstract, and bare-bones guidelines for operational psychology. Count me among those who find it hard to understand why appropriate guidelines for how to ethically support military-intelligence operations are apparently so much less complicated than guidance for psychologists engaged in other work....

He goes on to remind of past abuses:

What does it actually mean, for instance, to “balance” the government’s urgent demand for actionable intelligence against the human dignity of those suspected of having that information?

Let’s remember too that the military-intelligence establishment has itself engaged in a lot of wordsmithing designed to disguise uncomfortable truths. Most obviously, the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” as a substitute term for a much more familiar one: “torture.” With a similar purpose, the Pentagon reduced the number of reported detainee suicide attempts at Guantanamo by officially reclassifying them as cases of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.” And the number of “juveniles” imprisoned at Guantanamo was decreased by arbitrarily adopting sixteen as the cut-off age—even though a juvenile according to U.S. and international law is someone under eighteen at the time of any alleged crime....

The "War on Terror" taught large elements of the national security state to lie baldly. That lying was the precursor of the recent mendacious Trump presidency. It still matters to call these lies out.

Professional standards aren't enough, unaccompanied by activism, to resist fascism, but they are one sometimes surprising element of the defense of civilization. 

The emergency is not over

The Trump trauma is not going away. Here's LA Times columnist Mark Barazak:

Trump’s superpower as a politician has been his remarkable capacity to survive a string of scandals, moral and ethical trespasses and criminal allegations that would have killed off mere mortals.

Part of it is velocity. The mind barely stops reeling from one episode — an outrageous statement, a bald-faced lie, a norm-busting line no president before Trump had ever crossed — when another swiftly follows.

Part of it is volume. In the whole history of the United States, no president or former president has ever faced criminal indictment. Forty-five chief executives: zero criminal charges. Trump: 91 as of Monday’s Fulton County, Ga., indictment. ...

Political scientist Seth Masket provides his understanding of how, what was once simply a political party serving as a catchment for a lot of illiberal fantasies, has become a clear and present danger to the republic.

... there is a populist, nativist faction within the modern Republican Party that has a long, long history in the United States but has rarely controlled a major party. It has championed candidates like George Wallace in 1968, Pat Buchanan in 1992, and others who advocate for strict limits or even the elimination of immigration and have a distinct white conservative Christian worldview they seek for national politics.

Importantly, they have often felt slighted, and they’ve not always been wrong to feel this way. For decades, Republican leaders in DC made modest overtures to them but never really wanted them in charge. Yes, they’d share some of their cultural claims on abortion and guns, but party leaders like Reagan, Bush, Romney, McCain, and others would still favor some sort of immigration and would leave this faction feeling used or ignored. The faction was put down for years by party leaders who told them that some of their views had merit, but only through moderation could they win national office; sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. The populists complained, but they just didn’t have the numbers to take over the party.

And then Trump came along.

Trump was exactly what most party leaders in DC had been trying to keep out of power. He wasn’t committed to the conservative program. He wasn’t respectful of party traditions. He threatened to blow up the fragile coalition they’d crafted. But he also championed the populist faction, and thanks to his own popularity independent from politics, he was able to turn that minority faction into a majority. He was what the populists were told they couldn’t have, because it would cost the party dearly. Instead, he put their faction in charge, and they won the White House ...

He claims he can do it again. And a plurality of Republicans are sticking with the guy who promises to honor their grievances against the contemporary United States. He "will be [their] retribution." Talk about hating your country ...

The emergency is not over.

It's not just weather ... and contraction is happening

Thinking of a friend who lives in Baja, California and of so many others in southern California where a novel hurricane path is being cut as I write, here are some observations from our necessary national Cassandra and conscience, Bill McKibben:

... the number of places humans can safely live is now shrinking. Fast. The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller. ... The story of human civilization has been steady expansion. Out of Africa into the surrounding continents. Out along the river corridors and ocean coasts as trade grew. Into new territory as we cut down forests or filled in swamps. But that steady expansion has now turned into a contraction. There are places it’s getting harder and harder to live, because it burns or floods. Or because the threat of fire and water is enough to drive up the price of insurance past the point where people can afford it.

... For a while we try to fight off this contraction—we have such wonderfully deep roots to the places where we came up. But eventually it’s too hot or too expensive—when you can’t grow food any more, for instance, you have to leave.

So far we’re mostly failing the tests of solidarity or generosity or justice that these migrations produce. The EU, for instance, has this year paid huge sums to the government of Tunisia in exchange for ‘border security,’ i.e., for warehousing Africans fleeing drought

... But the size of this tide will eventually overwhelm any such effort, on that border or ours, or pretty much any other. Job one, of course, is to limit the rise in temperature so that fewer people have to flee: remember, at this point each extra tenth of a degree takes another 140 million humans out of what scientists call prime human habitat.

... along with new solar panels and new batteries, we need new/old ethics of solidarity. We’re going to have to settle the places that still work with creativity and grace; the idea that we can sprawl suburbs across our best remaining land is sillier all the time. Infill, densification, community—these are going to need to be our watchwords. Housing is, by this standard, a key environmental solution. Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.

As usual, it comes down to solidarity -- among humankind and with all life we share the planet with.

A visitor

 

Hard to tell whether this critter is trying to get in the front door -- or perhaps just resting. Fortunately, it's not in the cats' view.

Anyone know the species?