What Kind of Mother#)A$(*#?#?!!ckery is This?

To borrow from the inimitable Amy Winehouse.

It's 60 days and counting and I am still in a state of simmering apoplexy.  What kind of nation have we become that this ignorant, lying philistine with his concubine faux-wife represents our collective American selves?  What does that make us?

What kind of Democrats have we become that white liberals believe reading J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is revelatory?  (Or for that matter that the existence of a Barack Obama was chimerical.)  I and the rest of my siblings grew up among these north-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line crackers and have listened aplenty to them, and as far as I'm concerned they are my fellow Americans worthy of civility and entitled to their dignity, but I sure don't owe them any apologies.  Now solid research shows that working class white folks are dying of despair and I'm supposed to have enough magnimony left in me to care?

It's always been abundantly clear to me that the USA cuts way too much slack (an informal way of saying "privilege," which has now become too weaponized a word) to white people.  Period.  That only when a phenomena significantly harms white people is it recognized as mass suffering as opposed to moral defect or criminality. (1980's crack epidemic vs. 2010's opioid epidemic, anyone?)  But frankly, judging from some of Congress' rationale for gutting the ACA I'm not sure the "significant harm to white people" bar is holding either.

And yes, when I'm not as inflamed as I am in the Age of Trump, I am well aware that class and other variables determine collective and individual fates.  But, I am tired and the harm in communities of color (and yes, it's another fashionably weaponized word, but sometimes you need shorthand) continues as a crisis and I am nowhere near the mediation stage.

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya, Part II

From an e-mail reply I sent a friend who, like many others, is passing on much of the ink that's been spilled as she tries to figure out what to do:

It was undeniably grief that I felt by late Tuesday evening, like millions of others.  I have urged friends that I talk to submit to it for the time being, and resist the urge to get into frenzied action.  By yesterday I was able to pick the scab and read blogs (including the excerpt from Rorty’s work) and online news accounts of What Happened, but soon tired.  I don’t know if it’s my age, or my temperament, or the fact that I grew up in an environment where my family and I were a tolerated novelty so have always been an outsider, but for whatever reasons I am not despairing.  Angry, yes.  Disgusted, yes, but not despairing.  In what age and in what nation-state have people not suffered and died unjustly as one regime ends and a new one begins?

I disagree vehemently with Masha Gessen – outrage on the level of what is happening in the streets of our cities cannot and will not be sustained.  White-hot anger is a force that eventually gets spent because it can kill the host.  Unless we are willing to elect radical politicians to the Statehouse and Congress; and unless we as a liberal polity learn to tolerate that our elected leadership will become comfortable, and more conservative, and eventually accede to legislative decisions that stink of betrayal, then we are fooling ourselves.   By the time someone is elected to office they have to be willing to “do the nasty” of politics or they will be ineffective.  And who is willing to be the next Lyndon Baines Johnson, who by all accounts was a son of a bitch’s son of a bitch?

What Do You Think I've Been Doing?

Watching clips from the RNC convention,
Reading blogs and online zines about El Trump,
Observing conservatives of conscience (and some without) squirm and all I can say is that it's like watching someone trying to thread a rock-salted pretzel through a needle.  Good luck with that, y'all, and
Gardening in the hot hot sun.  (Insert it's-in-her-DNA joke along with a stained-glass window.  I slipped in an inside New Haven reference.  Don't bother to figure it out; my eyes haven't stopped rolling about what passes for political outrage these days in this joint.)

I took a mini-vacation last week, rented an apartment south of Prospect Park, and did speed dating with friends, some of whom I haven't seen for years.  (Shortly after moving here I realized that I like very much to sleep in my own bed, and when I did go to New York for business I persisted in coming home no matter how late it was.  I kept making vague promises to friends about getting together and never keeping them in my rush to get to Grand Central.)  The time I spent there last week was fun, and I'd do it again but perhaps in the fall when it's not so likely I'll be boiled alive.  I don't miss New York, of that I'm certain.  I'm like Goldilocks here -- this is just right.  But Gawd do I miss the street theater.  An example (to which I can't do justice):

I'm standing on the Manhattan-bound platform at the aboveground Parkside station.  Across the way on the Coney Island bound platform is a flock of city kids, summer day campers all wearing the same bright t-shirts, shorts and sneakers.  On my side are 3 young men.  Something about them says tourist, Eastern European variety at that.  (Don't ask me how I know.  If El Trump can recognize Mexican rapists from the Upper East Side, I can spot European tourists five feet to the right of me.)  They are weaving as if, at 11 in the morning in the godforsaken heat, they've been drinking.  The oldest of the 3 is brandishing a camera and wants to take a picture of the middle school blackbirds.  He has the kids' attention, they are happy to pose.  After all he is several train tracks away, waving his camera, not giving them the finger.  So they oblige him, posing as kids do, and he takes the shot.  Then he points one of his younger partners.  "Dis is Justin Timberlake brudder.  Jus-tin Timber-lake brudder!"  Am I the only one on the platform besides Tae Three Stooges who finds this hilariously funny?  The kids don't.  Thankfully our train comes and the kids are spared even more inanity and I get on grateful grateful grateful for the cool air and a seat.  But don't you know 1/3 of this stand-up act sidles over and leans into the young man next to me and asks:  Vat is the name of the building that King Kong climb?  And he is serious, standing there waiting for the answer.  Jeopardy for 100 points!  What is the Empire State Building?  Boy, I really miss all the gratuitous craziness that New York serves on a platter.

And speaking of gratuitous craziness how about the Republican nominee for President of these United States, eh?  I have spent more time than I care to admit scouring the web for stories about all of it.  (It's avoidance I realize, and I know exactly what I'm avoiding -- death and taxes -- but it's been fun.)  I found this comment in response to a post, "Kirchick's Coup Fantasies"  in The American Conservative by Noah Millman,and it comes as close as anything I've read as a rebuke to those who persist in promulgating false equivalencies when comparing Trump and Clinton -- and yes I mean you, intransient Berners -- and those who rationalize that a vainglorious and vulgar id-iot with narrow executive, and no political experience can govern the world's most powerful nation-state is qualified enough:

demz taters says:

July 22, 2016 at 9:48 pm

The idea that Hillary doesn’t adhere to political norms is a fallacy. She is the consummate American political animal – hawkish, cozy with the monied class, requisite fealty to Israel, and well acquainted with the art of the back room deal – just like EVERY OTHER politician who’s occupied the Oval Office for the past 50 years (including the Bush admin, which did most of its work on RNC servers). She is, in other words, the truly conservative choice. You may not like her policies but she is not a destroyer of institutions or a dangerous rabble-rouser. Life under Hillary will continue pretty much as it has, stable, more or less predictable – and a little more generous for the have-nots. Trump, on the other hand, is a dangerous radical who seeks to destabilize American institutions and replace them with … what? He is short on details other than promising to punish whole classes of people who have been deemed insufficiently “American” in the rightwing media universe; to rewrite treaties, agreements and alliances that have contributed to an unprecedented, sustained era of relative global peace; and to make the world stop “laughing at us” which is a truly an unhinged and paranoid point of view. If you can’t recognize which is a greater threat to American stability, I feel for you because to people who understand both history and human nature, there aren’t enough facepalms in the world to adequately respond to those who think Trump is going to save the Republic.

Egypt: Cairo, Alexandria & Elsewhere

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Sphinx Rising

Three years ago Husband No. 1 and I went to Egypt.  I'm not an African-American Egyptianist, i.e., someone who spends time arguing who invented mathematics first -- the Greeks or the Egyptians.  (For the record, nor am I descended from great kings and queens of Africa.)  Fred had gone and recommended we go, so we did.  I now realize that my brain and many other Americans' brains need to be scrubbed because more than once when, after telling someone I travelled to Egypt, they'd ask, "Didya ever go to Africa?"

"Well, yes.  I travelled to Egypt."  Check a map if you don't believe me.

I love that country and hope to, need to go back.  We went to Alexandria one day and toured the modern Library of Alexandria where, I kid you not, I was treated like a movie star.  One moment I'm looking at a lithograph from the the days of Napoleon's sojourn in Egypt and the next minute I'm shaking hands with children asking me who I am, where I'm from and so on.  As stunned and flattered as I was, that's not why I love Egypt.  It's the people I met (some of whom may be out in the streets today).  We were very aware that as Americans we were undoubtedly safer in Cairo than in New York.  You figured out right away that Mubarak's regime would never ever let a Western tourist come to harm.  Husband No. 1 and I used to count the different uniforms we saw  representing different police and/or military forces.  We stopped at five and then wondered how many plain-clothes were around, too.

 When I read or hear of people here complaining about the US being a police state I roll my eyes, because, frankly, they don't know what they're talking about.  Egypt is the real thing.  It is what a dictatorship looks like smells like acts like.  Here's an example of what an authoritarian regime does to its people: The man who drove us to Alexandria spoke excellent English.  He explained that he worked in the States for several years as King Faisal's driver (when the King was in California).  At one point he was offered permanent residence (imagine that happening now) and he turned it down to return home.  Now, he said, if Islam didn't forbid it, he (and all other Egyptians) would commit suicide.

Egyptians are risking their lives in ways most of us Americans never have and can't imagine.  I am in awe of their courage.  I recommend visiting Mona Eltahawy's blog to find out more.