alias Bruce.

#WaitingAtStarbucksWhileBlack.

You may have already heard – see Melissa DePino’s Twitter feed – about two innocent black patrons being forcibly hauled away from a Starbucks by Philadelphia’s finest. Bulldozer-through-the-drywall ambushes like this, day after routine day, decade after lived decade, are what white privilege really, truly looks like

Driving/walking/shopping/dining-while-black are intolerable clichés because of their insane normality: they happen constantly and brutally to people of color who are not believed when we report them, and they never, ever happen to white people to whom these experiences sound like some impossibly dystopian nightmare.

One of the redeeming qualities of cell phones – which have done plenty to deaden us to the immediacy of our surrounding human company – is that they can now instantly and globally deliver video of happenings that non-affected people have previously found easy to dismiss as mere stories. No more. Today, the only remaining people who will defend what happened on April 12 to two black men awaiting a white friend at a Starbucks in Philadelphia are those who would eagerly wait on a hearth on Christmas Eve for a Ku Klux Klan Santa Claus to descend though the chimney bearing personal gifts for white supremacists.

Handwritten note to American white people: Awful things that have never happened to you happen every day to black Americans, and they happen with the authority and approval of official institutions of public safety, including Philadelphia’s police department, led by a black chief.

We black and brown citizens, however, will not tolerate this. Will you, as a white citizen, remain silent? Or will you join us in the imperative to do unto others as you would have done unto you?

The supreme irony is that Starbucks’ notoriously bitter brand of roasted coffee is nowhere near worth getting arrested for in the first place.

Red, blue, and rich: game over.

In the United States, as in most other non-democracies, national politics is a moral sport of the wealthy.

The wealthy players fielded by America’s Red Team feel varying amounts of actual heartfelt care, ranging from the frigidly mercenary to the heatedly passionate, but are for the most part selfishly negative in their agenda. The wealthy players who take the field for the Blue Team are generally more empathic and positive. But both teams’ players perform in a steel-shielded arena where winning or losing may be ecstatic or hurt like hell, may earn roars or ridicule, but won’t affect their personal comfort or lifestyle or that of almost anyone they know.

American presidential and congressional politics, like the NFL or NBA or any other corporate-sponsored contest, is a cage match among fiercely-driven elite gladiators who, regardless of who wins or loses, will all leave the ring rich and surrounded by validators.

That is why Hillary Clinton and the Democrats lost in 2016. That is why mainstream media reporters and pundits have become irrelevant to what Americans feel and believe. Insulated by corporate cash, with its gilded chokehold on who gets to compete for national leadership, the Blue Team has confidently hogged the mainstream “progressive” mic while growing ever more more clueless about what its voters have to say and need to hear. And the Red Team has increasingly cornered itself with the clash between its lunch-bucket rhetoric and its robber baron policy.

So, with the official political podium and official media closed off to angry and hungry voters who have known for decades (for people of color, make that centuries) that this nation and its economy have been broken by its masters, where could people go for attention?

To Twitter. And Facebook. Where, unlike the ruling American news operations and political parties, it is still permissible to truthfully say, “The system is rigged.”

Problem is, competent and decent potential Blue Team leaders were either self-silenced on this built-in function of economic inequality (Clinton), or blocked within the party (Sanders). And Red Team leaders were happy to exploit anger but incapable of blaming the rich for anything. So the field was left wide open for a celebrity demagogue named Donald Trump to declare, with veracity, “The system is rigged” – while lying about everything else and steering white rage toward people of color, women, and Muslims. All while he and his henchmen exploited Twitter’s and Facebook’s vulnerability to fake news and false accusations.

So the kinder corporate Blue Team lost this election because it convinced itself that it understood working people while having barred them from the actual field of play since at least the Reagan years. And the meaner corporate Red Team lost its stature and what was left of its self-respect in its cave-in to Trump’s white faux-populist scam, but in so doing it rode the coattails of his audacity.

And now, with fascism in the wings, the callow wealthy Reds and the outraged wealthy Blues regroup on the field, with as little to lose in their actual lives as before.

But for those who stand to lose everything, the Red and Blue game is over.

The meaning of President Trump, in 100 words:

This (President Donald Trump, with an administrative roster of goons and clowns like Steve Bannon, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, et. al.) is what a country gets after corporate-run decades of making public-interest government a bitter joke, after serving up Hillary Clinton as its best offer, after proving that corporate journalism is useless to actual people, and after suckering white working people into believing that niggerizing others is their only relief from being repeatedly kicked in the head by white bosses.

This is what the U.S.A. gets when it creates an evil mythology for non-rich white people and then breaks it.

The Obama and Trump Show.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

How does it make you feel to watch video of the elegant, informed, erudite President Barack Obama sitting beside, and making welcoming conversation with, President-Elect Donald Trump as Obama dutifully hands over the reins to the Western world to an openly racist, sexually assaultive, Muslim-persecuting, defiantly know-nothing, brazenly lying sociopath?

To me, watching that video footage feels like the final collapse of whatever lingering legitimacy the American presidency still had after decades of corporate money and advertising-driven media made the race for the highest office a sponsored pageant: a mega-moneyed Mr. or Ms. Universe contest. A cage fight with attack commercials.

After the shattering Obama-Trump footage of presidential baton-passing, there is little left to the nation’s most exalted position but a palmed shiv and a tiara. If such a creature as Trump can pass the casting call for the world's most powerful political role, then the show is over. At least for now. It’s just another hack creation that a crew of mercenary smarties heaved into our lives because they got paid. 

Except that this show will savage the future of at least a generation and, potentially, all humans in the searing times to come. Think climate change and the nuclear red button -- for starters.

Trump's rise is proof positive that most voting Americans believe that the state is a crude, sarcastic joke. The punch line, of course, is that they’re right: it is. As any person or family who has suffered through recent decades of the wealthy's bottomless buffet can tell you. 

The resulting empty societal space, where the richest nation in history might have cultivated mutual care and trust but didn't, is what enabled an amoral billionaire megalomaniac to lie his way into the hearts of millions of hard-suffering white folks who embraced an ideal of privileged whiteness as a last-stand currency of lost power and dignity. 

So Obama and Trump smile on camera as the former flushes the slurry remains of presidential substance and morality into the little pink-cupped palms of the latter. 

Offscreen, the world screams. 

Springsteen cancels concert; bigoted LGBT law continues to cost North Carolina.

From the Guardian:

Bruce Springsteen on Friday cancelled an upcoming concert in North Carolina because of a controversial anti-LGBT law that critics say legalizes discrimination.
Springsteen was scheduled to perform on Sunday in Greensboro, but said he was cancelling the show because he and the E Street Band “want to show solidarity for those freedom fighters” protesting the law.
“To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress,” Springsteen said in a statement.

Take Springsteen's dead-on statement -- "it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress" -- and you can apply it to the mobs that ran amok after the  emancipation of slaves, after the winning of suffrage for women, and after the legal end to racial desegregation. As well as those that still run amok over legalized (and perpetually threatened) abortion rights.

Now it's the anti-LGBT mob's turn to revolt against the reality of an advance in civilization -- and to prolong the everyday pummeling of LGBT people for as long as possible. The good news, such as it is in states like North Carolina, is that it appears neither industry nor fair-minded people of all sexual and gender orientations nor Springsteen fans will long tolerate the cost of bigots' temporary unconstitutional maneuverings. Nor can any breathing federal court judge before whom the law will soon appear.       

 

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

We talk Trump on the radio.

This week I had a radio conversation about Trump, white fear, and fascism with psychologist and host Dr. Pamela Brewer on her MyNDTALK program. You can hear or download our one-hour conversation, "The Direction of This Election," at MyNDTALK, at WPFW-FM (as the April 4 MyNDTALK show), at PRX, on iTunes, and at SoundCloud.

Trump and the new Brown Shirts.

Photo: Guardian

We need to keep repeating this because we cannot afford the cost of being blindsided by it: This is what happens when a culture of white supremacy, perpetually promised the fat that American consumerism skims off the globe, learns it is fucked for good.

For months now, while gatekeeper pundits have gamely tried to shush worries about the Trump phenomenon, others of us have kept saying that we oughtn't underestimate the beast he has loosed. Millions of white Americans, raised to believe they will inherit whiteness as it has been traditionally understood -- if we work hard and stay out of jail, people like us will do all right no matter what happens to those frigging other people -- are feeling today's corporate boot in the teeth. The one where whiteness isn't worth squat if you can't buy yourself up out of of the hole. American plutocracy has gone feral, wild with power bereft of a sense of planning beyond even the next decade, and a certain swath of beached white Americans are losing their minds.

These are Donald Trump's people. The traditional corporate politics aimed at their demographic, with rehearsed phalanxes of Senator Silverhairs mouthing coded tag lines about farms and good solid white people, is worse than useless. It spits in their faces. They don't run the economy and they know it; they are no longer in charge of the culture in an increasingly brown country in a brown world and they know it; they are nobody's boss in a pecking order of predator bosses and they know it. 

Adolf Hitler worked this mob when Germany hit the skids and a proudly privileged nation suddenly saw a loser when it looked at itself in the mirror. That is how privilege works: If you are no longer in charge, you are a loser. Demagogues bank on it. Trump is cashing in.

Stop being afraid to talk about this. This is early-stage fascism. A significant number of under-powered, under-employed white Americans will trade in their illusion of democracy for a return to a feeling that they are a part of the ruling force.

It is time to face it and fight it.

The most senseless word about the Baltimore uprising is "senseless."

As in Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's remark that “What happened with the rioting and destruction of CVS [drugstore in West Baltimore] is senseless. It is destroying neighborhoods."

"Senseless" is the word of choice for many authorities and leaders and residents when they speak of fiery days of rage such as these, when people torch their own neighborhoods. It has been the chosen word for decades for riots and insurrections in Baltimore and Rochester and Los Angeles and Newark and anyplace else where poor people explode on the very streets on which they live -- and then must live with the rubble, the smoldering ruins, the loss, and the brokenness of the ensuing days and years.

But that is where the word "senseless" becomes code for a taboo: the rule that one must not speak of the unchanging realities that make an uprising such as that in Baltimore perfectly sensible. Because in fact the city's leadership has for decades presided over "destroying neighborhoods."

What the mayor and the police commissioner and the business leaders who lead the city's broken economy and broken politics refuse to face is that it is completely sensible for people in perpetually-ignored war-zone communities to finally act out their rage in the one way that will gain attention: burning houses and cars, trashing and emptying stores, and upending the city's oblivious sense of order. It is a perfectly logical response. True, it has not succeeded in the long run in lifting entire communities out of generations of poverty and violence, but then nothing else has, either, and that is a structural problem having to do with who pays for political policy and who is present (and who isn't) in the economic conversations that shape the city. Fact is, tragically, the one thing that will at least draw global media attention to a disastrously depressed black community, and that will push politicians and police to make at least a symbolic try at facing endemic poverty and abusive policing, is a horrific hellfire uprising that makes the long-running war between militarized police and poor communities of color officially visible along its battle lines. Complete with riot gear, tear gas, and the National Guard.

There is nothing "senseless" about people doing the one thing proven to work as a way to draw national notice to the particular form of economic and racial apartheid that has become routine in cities like Baltimore. It in fact makes tragically good sense. And when our society has the courage, if ever, to replace class/race apartheid with approaches that create fairness in education and job creation and law enforcement, the uprisings will cease.

For a glimpse of what the perennial prosperous/poor dichotomy of Baltimore looks like, and how the logic of black insurrection actually works outside the bubble of racial and class privilege, watch the following May 7 airing of PBS News Hour. The segment on Baltimore begins at 31:30. It includes this quote from a young black assistant minister at a large black church: "When they are at that boiling point and it comes to them lashing out -- What's the worst that can happen? [Our community] is already falling down around us."

 

The Dems die a little more here in Maryland.

The shocker victory of Republican governor-elect Larry Hogan here in deep blue Maryland is a vivid example of how the Democratic Party is paying the price for having sold its base down the river. Here is WaPo on the physics of Tuesday's gubernatorial Democratic unraveling here in the Free State:

With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, [expected winner Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony] Brown was winning handily in [heterogenous] Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, and he was well ahead in the city of Baltimore. But turnout appeared fairly low in those populous jurisdictions. And Hogan led everywhere else, including in the Baltimore suburbs.

That is the gist of how Brown, the anointed successor to two-term Democratic governor and presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley,  became the latest poster child for his party’s haplessness in the face of an auspiciously divisive Republican Party. Hogan will be only the third Republican Maryland governor since Spiro Agnew. The secret of the Dems’ undoing in this election? Inspire your base to stay at home while the Repubs fire up angry voters to stride into the voting booth and whack away at false enemies.

In Maryland, Republican winner-to-be businessman Hogan’s chosen False Enemy Number One was taxes. In an appealingly homey bootstrapping style, he preached, in effect, to pissed-off voters across Maryland: You’re being taxed to death. Out-of-touch spendthrift Democrats raise your taxes again and again while life gets tougher and tougher for you. They raise corporate taxes that scare away the jobs you need. They’re killing you. Me, I’ll cut taxes. I’ll cut you the break you deserve. I’ll bring in the jobs you need. I’ll make the bureaucrats squirm and I’ll leave you freer to succeed.

It’s virtually all horse shit, of course. Ordinary people are in crisis not because their taxes are high, but because their incomes have been flat for decades while expenses have risen and the incomes of the wealthy have soared. And jobs flee states not because states make outlandish demands but because corporations do: they play states against one another in a divide-and-conquer greed game. Each state trembles at companies’ threats that “if you don’t give me (tax break/subsidy/stadium), I’ll pick up and leave for (another state or country).”

But the anti-tax rhetoric plays on a kernel of truth: for people who are suffering financially and who get no relief from employers and unaffordable health care and a ruthless job marketplace, taxes, like any expense, matter. Giving up money hurts. And while you cannot publicly denounce your employer or vote out the health care industry, you can safely publicly rail against taxes and vote against the people who represent them.

The brilliance of the anti-tax gambit, during hard times in a strong-government state like Maryland, is that it enables  rightfully angry people to vent their economic rage at a passive bystander (a state government that won’t bad-mouth corporations) while sympathizing with the defiant perp (the corporate sector and its righteously indignant preachers, such as governor-elect Hogan).

Democrats such as the defeated Anthony Brown — who strolled around Maryland making vague but pretty declarations about everyone’s right to health care and good schools — fall directly into the clutches of Republican fake populists. Such faint-hearted Democrats personify the accusation that government cannot be trusted. And by zipping their mouths shut on the vital question of who in fact is screwing most Americans, Dems squander their trump card in a nation where any given citizen will tell you bluntly that the rich are the boss.

I’ll wager it didn’t help, either, among many white suburban and rural constituencies here in Maryland, that Anthony Brown is black. His carefully toothless approach to the hidden tensions of race in American electoral politics, like that of President Barack Obama, could not defang this venerable beast.

In effect, the Dems are the paralyzed arm of the corporate party. They are paralyzed by the very body of moneyed contributors they serve. And the Republicans are the arm of the corporate party that remains free to swat, to finger-point, to threaten, to deceptively beckon.

You really couldn’t design a one-party system much better.