Ta-Nehisi Coates (once again) Knocks It Out of the Park

If I had been able to, this is what I wished I could write to explain my bitterness, my sense of betrayal and wariness and living behind enemy lines that I've felt since the election.  Somewhere in an earlier post I told the story of my blurting out to a co-worker after hearing another co-worker insist that we all read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, "I don't owe those crackers shit," and how tired -- so very tired -- I am of the assumption that the working class that the press writes about and opines about is the white working class, as if American blacks in particular are only jobless ghetto-dwellers or former presidents of the United States.  Coates dissects the edifice upon which much analysis and understanding of Trump, who he defines as "The First White President," is based.

Gone Quilting ...

A few random thoughts:

Wayne Barrett died yesterday,

Please, a certain strand of liberals, take off the hairshirts.  You don't owe those crackers an apology.

My head will explode if I hear or read one more superficial pundit talk about "the working class" as if it is only white guys who drive F-350s.

Read the history of the conservative movement's long march to power after Goldwater got crushed in 1964; and the Tea Party's ascendance to power.  If you are on your way to a state or national capital to protest in the streets, don't leave town without dropping by a politician's office.

My white husband never believes it's about race; it's always about race in these United States of America.

I can't go on.  We go on.

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?

Two Self-Dealing Inveterate Dissemblers Walk Into A Presidential Election ....

.... and ask to be our President.  A caretaker incrementalist who is an archetypal example of what becomes of a socially liberal idealist when they gain entrée to the Establishment's sausage-making machine vs. a colossally ignorant, boorish, ADHD-afflicted case study in greed and arrested development.  Those are the choices, folks.

Fuck them.
Fuck Gary Johnson.
Fuck Jill Stein.

I'm voting for Clinton.  It solves nothing but buys time to do the work that needs doing.

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.

Peter Coyote's The Progressive Case for Obama

Bing.  Go.

Read.