alias Bruce.

Reset: Progressive is the new normal.

Sometimes we reach the point where we just have to start hearing and speaking what is real in spite of the insistent stories we are told.

So:

Forget the underlying narrative of nearly every important story you’re told by The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN or NPR or other media that almost never utter the word “capitalism.” The inaudible but invariable message in their avoiding that single word is that capitalism is not a mere option on a varied menu of possible paths for democracy, but a default mandate for modernity and prosperity. It is time for you and me to lose that lie. In a monopolized world where alleged economic meritocracy behaves exactly like monarchy, the myth of productive competition is theirs to sell, not ours to buy.

Forget the Democratic Party’s quadrennial ad jingles, the latest of which was “stronger together.” The Democratic Party and its leading lights lost their ability to speak for American democracy through a long series of heartbreaking cave-ins, most recently when the party sabotaged the full-throated progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party will not lead us. But perhaps, when we and some rebellious progressive Democratic candidates start winning battles in the streets and at the polls, they will follow us.

Forget, of course, President Donald Trump’s addled impersonation of populism to a wickedly conned white base, made possible by the lack of even the sorriest semblance of a believably reality-based Democratic presidential nominee, let alone a Republican one.

Forget the fantasied wish that a blockbuster Hollywood superhero film – say, Black Panther – will carry a message of “revolutionary” or “radical” change. It can’t and it won’t. It is not built to do so. I’ve written about this on Truthout. I wept at this film. Black Panther is a brilliant, gorgeous, and powerful inspiration to African-American kids (and we black adults) who desperately need affirmative and potently imaginative antidotes to the lethal ordeals of life in a 500-year-old white supremacist regime. But the Black Panther film is not and will not be a revolutionary act. Reserve that term for acts and ideas that overturn and replace entire societal ruling systems. Then see and enjoy the film, brought to you by the sponsors of the default capitalist narrative, for what it is.

It is time we hit reset. Reality is not news media messages that refuse to name capitalism, or movies that purport to be about liberation while cementing a cruelly inhuman system of life. Reality is a progressive narrative that speaks aloud the names of prisons – including modern corporate monarchy – and that offers thoughtful ways out and tangible paths into healthy and sustainable systems of kindness, fairness, and freedom.

For a creatively-inspired and reality-based take on one potential human future, try this interview with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.

Trump won with an audaciously fake, racist, and misogynist nod to what most Americans of all backgrounds already know: The system is rigged.

Imagine what we progressives can do with an audaciously passionate and truthful treatment of that reality.

Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi drowns. We watch. For centuries.

400 years ago, West African mothers and fathers cradled dead children in their arms on beaches as slave ships bucked in the surf.

It is 2015. How much longer will you and I and the world stand for this?

Little three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi drowned, his tiny sneakered feet dangling from the arms of a soldier who picked him up out of the sodden Turkish sand, because his own nation’s government did not belong to him, and because governments from the United Kingdom to the United States do not belong to those whom they purport to serve. They belong, instead, to strongmen and CEOs and senators who prosper when international capital makes money from a fragmented and corrupt Africa and  a politically leaderless Middle East and an obese and self-obsessed America.

The power brokers work with available materials. In a Europe now destabilized by plutocratic greed, we see the tip of a resurfacing iceberg of racist xenophobia that we last saw rise in the ascent of the Third Reich. We also see anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States, as a portion of the white electorate, for whom Donald Trump is the present demagogue, clings with venomous desperation to its legacy of privilege.

We know, too, that this worldwide crisis of displaced and suffering people is part of the continual wreckage that began with pre-colonial European conquest of the global South and continues through the havoc wreaked upon entire regions of the world, including the Middle East, by centuries of Western-capitalist-fueled war. From Columbus to G.W. Bush, it’s about destroying local sovereignty and sucking all we can from the resources that are exposed.

Yesterday I sent an email to the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Réka Szemerkényi, registering my disgust with the actions and baldly racist statements of Hungary and its Prime Minister with regard to the Syrian refugees who suffer there:

September 4, 2015

To: [email protected]

Dear Ambassador:

Shame, shame, shame on Hungary for your treatment of Syrian migrants, your disingenuous excuses for your actions, and your Prime Minister's contemptibly racist statement in a radio interview on Friday that "We may one morning wake up and realize that we are in the minority on our own continent." 

You bring shame upon your citizens and your nation. I shall surely not travel as a tourist to Hungary as your website so cynically assures readers that we can. And I have lost all respect for your moral stature. 

With disappointment and disgust,

Bruce A. Jacobs

Baltimore, MD USA 

Please email the ambassador yourself at [email protected] .

But what will it take for we Americans, fat within our padding of Big Gulps and Big Macs and Big Savings, to walk out of our front doors and actually do what citizens do when our government is not ours, and when Syrians’ government is not Syrians’, and Hungary’s government is not Hungarians’?

THIS is what the future of American community-building looks like.

Cover of Baltimore City Paper, May 6, 2015

Baltimore Freddie Gray rally May 2, 2015: photos and videos.

I will say only three things before I turn this post over to the faces and voices of the Baltimore rally I attended Saturday in front of City Hall, one day after State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced bringing criminal charges, including murder, against the six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray.

1.) Black Lawyers for Justice president Malik Shabazz, the rally's keynote speaker, was not only overshadowed by speeches by young people and mothers of those killed by Baltimore police, he was roundly heckled by audience members for his transparent egoism and microphone-hogging. He is just good enough a demagogue to shove himself into the limelight and just clumsy enough to be obvious about it. At one point, after he bragged about his family lineage and his having contributed $5,000 toward the day's event, audience members shouted back, "It's not about you!" I will have video up of him as soon as I can; it has gotten hung up at YouTube, thanks perhaps to unseen protocol or the ghost in the machine.

2.) I will follow up soon with audio recordings I made of Tawanda Jones (whose brother, Tyrone West, was killed by Baltimore Police Officers and who with her family has mounted a weekly protest for nearly two years), mothers of young people slain by police, longtime justice advocate Carl Dix, and others. Sadly, I missed recording the afternoon's most moving oration -- by young Tanara Collins, who looked to be in her teens and electrified the audience with her fierce run-down of the history of white policing from slavery to now -- when my phone ran out of data space. That'll teach me to squander precious recording time on the headliner. If I find her speech online I will pass it on to you.

3.) For the record, it appears, from photographs, that three of the six officers charged in Freddie Gray's death are black. As many of us have written for years, cops of color are not exempt from the racist militarized police culture that has dominated American policing from the War on Drugs forward.

Now have a look and listen:

 

 

 

Above: Crops and Bloods together onstage

 

 

Baltimore before and during curfew: It must be nice to be a white guy who

is sitting in a booth in a suburban Baltimore restaurant holding forth to his white buddy about what the police should have done to nip the misbehavior of enraged Baltimore black folk in the bud on Monday.

It was about an hour before Tuesday's 10pm curfew was set to fall on the city. It was before the helmeted and shielded riot police, waddling like plastic-swathed insects, began firing smoke bombs and pepper bullets at the line of defiant protestors who refused to leave the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, a corner a few blocks away from where I lived some years ago.

For about an hour there in the curfew-less suburbs, in the booth next to mine, the two 40-ish white guys, chilling out in business suits with their jackets off, chatted expertly about what black kids need: fathers at home to lay down the law, cops who will dare to stand up to them, a lesson in consequences.

It is hilarious, in a wrecking-ball sort of way, to listen to some white people declare what they know about black people. White people who have never been jacked up by cops for being white, who have never been followed by store security guards for being white, who have never been denied an apartment or a decent mortgage for being white, who have never stood a higher chance of conviction in court for being white, and who don't even need to think much about the fact that they are white unless they are around a bunch of people who are not.

The ironic thing is that alongside their cluelessness about the Baltimore Police Department's record with black people, these two shirtsleeve cocktail-hour experts hit on some obvious truths: black male kids in poor prison-siphoned neighborhoods do need male, as well as female, examples of power and self-love, and they need as much guidance and discipline as any kids do.

But what poor black kids need more than anything, which privilege-bubbled white guys are so well-shielded from seeing, is simply to not be treated as niggers.

I don't mean niggas in the cocky black (and in the white-playing-black) sense. I mean niggers. In the perennial Mississippi whipping-post sense. In the face-jammed-onto-a-cop-car-hood sense. In the move-your-black-ass-along-or-else sense. In the okay-fuck-it-I'll-be-the-fearsome-creature-who-you-expect-me-to-be sense.

White guys don't get served that dish in the cafeteria.

The two white fellows finished their meal and their talk and collected their suit jackets and left. Someone changed the channel on the TV up on the wall. A TV reporter was counting down the minutes to curfew while the camera held on the line of demonstrators at North and Pennsylvania. The protestors did not move. A young guy rode a bicycle in a repeating circle. A politician in a baseball cap said inaudible things to an interviewer. Then the countdown hit curfew. Then it was 10 minutes past curfew. Then 20.

Then, suddenly, smoke erupted from canisters fired by the line of police at the line of unyielding protestors. "Police enforce curfew," read bold letters on the screen. A reporter talked about pepper bullets. The smoke billowed, enveloped people and storefronts. Some civilians emerged from the white clouds clutching scarves and handkerchiefs and others seemed to just disappear without a trace.

In the suburban restaurant it fell quiet. The occasional hushed "Oh, my God" replaced the jocular small talk and the confident declarations about perps and fault. We all watched the screen as the first of what will be a solid week's curfews fell on our city -- if you are on the street after 10pm and not en route to work or an emergency room you are subject to arrest -- and we held our mouths quietly open, we handful of strangers whose looks have landed us on one side or another of the smoky divide..

Miles south of us at the corner of North and Pennsylvania, people were going to jail, were being sick in the smoke, were running, were not running, were going home, were going somewhere else. Soldiers and police were claiming stewardship of an entire city on our alleged behalf. Our technocrat mayor, corporate-smart but street-inept, was mouthing robotic instructions, trying to read from the manual, to hoots and jeers from all sides. Our state's new amateur governor, who won in November because he played a better fake populist Republican than his opponent's version of a fake passionate Democrat, was shrugging and blaming the inept technocrat mayor. The head of the Maryland National Guard assured reporters that what Baltimore is undergoing is not martial law because, she helpfully explained, the military is not officially in control.   President Obama issued some of his trademark oral vapor, telling us, amid the militarized occupation of our city, that we as a nation need to do some "soul-searching." Well, thanks for that, Commander-in-Chief.

Tomorrow morning it will get light again, and as we walk or drive or bus through or past the police-and-soldier-patrolled city where as yet unspoken things will have happened entering Lockdown Day Two, a lot of us -- including any of us who pretend to know -- will be trying to figure out where we live.

Baltimore: the riot will not be televised.

Drive up normally-jammed Charles Street in downtown Baltimore on this first night of what will be called the 2015 Baltimore Riots, and there are a thousand open places to park and two shiny black police cars with flashing lights pulled beside each other in the middle of the street comparing notes.

"They live for this," a guy said to me tonight about Baltimore cops and mayhem. "This is what they want."

Some, no doubt. Their record in this city bears it out. And how many jobs are there in America where a high school graduate can lord it over a thousand people a day?

But whether Baltimore cops like it or loathe it, tonight they were on the receiving end of mayhem aplenty in the opposite of its routine direction. More than a dozen police injured, with broken bones of various kinds and least one cop "unresponsive," according to the Baltimore Sun. Lines of kids lofting every heavy object they could find at phalanxes of cops while the police, looking more vulnerable than I have ever seen them, scrambled backward ducking the fusillade. It gives the briefest glimpse of what the power of sheer human numbers might look like on some unknown day when, say, tens of millions of Americans decide that they have simply had enough.

So begins Curfew Week here in Charm City. Seven days, declares our city's mayor, of 5Am to 10PM allowed public movement. Along with, our governor reports, the activation of the National Guard.

This is now a national story. A shared trauma, a city's public disgrace, a spectacle of failure. It's hot. It's news. It's what matters this week.

But where was the national story, the shared trauma, the spectacular attention-grabbing disgrace, when we needed dedicated reporters rather than cell phone cameras to show a nation how one black kid at a time was trained to write himself off, to hunt for his daddy in a gang of kids strutting guns and streetcorner product, to hate the guts of the police, and to spitefully cooperate in marching off to the new mass plantation of for-profit prison to live out the assigned role of kamikaze outlaw? Where were the cameras over the years as tens of thousands of black boys and men, including me and countless others, got merely mistreated by cops if we were lucky and deposited six feet under if we weren't?

I am writing this to you, tonight, from a relatively safe place.

But for countless kids, some of whom you watched on television tonight daring riot-equipped cops to kill them, there is no such place. Not tonight or ever.

That is the real riot, the real carnage. And until it stops, the amply-televised loop of what we are seeing tonight will not.

Gil Scott-Heron told us about what gets televised and what doesn't. And it's still true.

Why a two-year-old shot his mother dead with her loaded gun in a Wal-Mart.

The very idea of our having a policy conversation about an Idaho concealed-carry law that allows a parent to carry a hidden loaded pistol into a department store with her two-year-old is ludicrous.

Here, in these two reader comments accompanying a Guardian story on the tragedy, is the entire catastrophe in a nutshell:

gettinggolder
33m ago
Well more than half on the people in the US want something done. There is a failure of action related to allowing corporations, in this case gun manufacturers, to buy legislators with campaign money, or just to threaten to fund opponents. The same problems arose with health care, lots of money from health care insurance and drug companies to defeat a one payor system.

LostintheUS
11m ago
It's not that we don't care, we care desperately This is about corporate ownership of our government and only that. The NRA owns Congress AND most of the state legislatures. I have personally seen them in action in the Wisconsin capital. They get whatever insane legislation they want. Citizens have worked and worked for protective legislation from this death lobby to no avail.

NRA money buys the legislators who pass the laws that enable these killings of children, women, and men. Campaign finance reform will cut off the money and bring policy into the realm of sanity. That's all there is. There is no more need for a societal "discussion" about this than there is a need to have a discussion with a runaway dump truck or with a two-year-old wielding a loaded pistol.

We will see an end to this nightmare when, and only when, we as citizens are ready to jointly do what it takes to stand up to big money. Until then, we will get what we've got.

Quote of the day from Ferguson, MO.

“How can I prepare kids for the world if I’m not preparing the world for the kids?”

-Tory Russell, youth worker and co-founder of resistance group Hands Up United, Ferguson, MO, from his interview today on NPR’s Here and Now.

The George Zimmerman Trayvon Martin acquittal takes the anger of we black men

to a whole new level.

Me, I am so angry right now that I barely know how to write how angry I am. I am so goddamned angry I could spit hot nails and then take a boiling bath to cool off. I am so angry I could make a movie about 10 million black men going out and buying handguns and starting target practice collectives. And it would be a documentary.

That's what happens when six people on a Florida jury conclude that a white man can seek out, pursue, antagonize and then shoot to death an unarmed black boy but not be guilty of murder or manslaughter. While 200 million white Americans, whether they are outraged at the verdict or not, still feel entitled to walk around in public with a feeling of relative safety.

Whether George Zimmerman had been acquitted Saturday or not, most white people would and do still expect to be able to go to the store on any given night and walk down the street with their Skittles and iced tea without being hunted and/or shot, whether by the police or by a wanna-be cop. And most black and brown people, especially black and brown males, do not.

And now that Trayvon is the latest of us to be waylaid with impunity while white people – including those with sympathetic or even passionately empathic intentions – will still get to drop by the convenience store without thought of being racially stalked, I as a black man feel a plume of rage that gives me empathy for your average volcano. Multiply that by millions and you can do the emotional math on what churns in the innards of black males nationwide.

I am angry that any white person anywhere in the United States of America can wake up in their bed this morning and believe that anything about their life as a white person, anything at all, is normal: the way whites can hurry down the highway without fearing that their mere whiteness will get them "accidentally" shot in a car search by a race-conditioned state trooper instead of simply being fined for speeding; the way whites can innocently and thoughtlessly walk through a department store without thinking about how their mere whiteness might get them followed by a race-trained store detective; the way whites can wait for friends in a hotel lobby without any thought of how a race-trained guest might take their mere whiteness as a cue to approach them and ask for help with his bags; the way whites fail to suffer consequences for their whiteness in airport security lines and on planes and hailing taxis and waiting to be seated in restaurants and walking the thin roads of the suburbs and ex-urbs and ex-ex-urbs of an America that has made an industry of perpetual flight from brown faces and brown bodies. I am angry beyond belief at the casual, bloodless manner with which so many white Americans can, with no intent or awareness, stroll through a landscape of brown blood.

And more than anything, I am angry about being angry.

I am angry that I need to write this to you. I am angry that I am driven to take time away from the infinite beauty of being alive – and the preciously finite moments of my life – to respond to a nation that will not leave me alone, a country that forces me into hand-to-hand and eye-to-eye combat for the mere ability to be who I already am. As if being myself is a privilege granted by white consent and not a right. As if entrusting my blood pressure and risk of heart attack and stroke and premature death to the pre-set dials of America's racial machinery is something I should expect and accept. As if my entirely natural rage at this lifelong bloody gear-mashing is the thing that's abnormal.

I am angry that time after time, day after day, year after year, I am called away from the simple and peaceful act of being the person I am by large and small acts of war. "Hey!" says the landcape of white presumption. "Look up from where you're standing in that perfectly burbling trout stream so I can call you 'nigger' from a passing car. Hey! Look away from the sweetness of your dinner date while I march you past nice empty tables and seat the two of you next to the kitchen and force you, once again, to think about race when it is the last thing you want to think about. Hey! Quit feeling unwatched as you wait for the 'walk' sign and I lock my car door at you. Hey! Let me interrupt your casual and comfortable speaking of proper English by letting you know how bizarre it is for me to hear a black man talking that way. Hey! Stop composing that piece of music in your head for a second so I can re-inflame your awareness of how afraid I am that you'll rob me here in this hallway. Hey! Drop those Skittles and stop that conversation on your cell phone so I can chase and kill you because of who I think you are."

I am angry that I have to walk around with a particular and situationally-triggered kind of anger that white people are spared. Take it from one who knows: I wish such anger upon no one. But I am furious as hell at its selectivity, at the way a certain kind of anger can break into my house late at night or suddenly turn a relational traffic light red or bring a scream into any song I write at any given time, while in a certain skin-filtered way a white person can roll over unawakened in bed or drive on through the intersection or continue on with their music uninterrupted.

The very same is true of the anger of a woman to whose experience I as a man am blind. Or a gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered person. Or a Palestinian person. Or a person who is in the United States illegally.

And if you deny the realities behind this anger, too bad for you. Because if you yourself are not angry on this day, you are the one with the problem.

President Obama crying over 20 dead children will change nothing.

I hate to put it that way. I'm absolutely certain that the President felt every tear he shed.

But the problem underlying this tragedy and the dozens of mass shootings that have preceded it goes deeper than an ocean of tears. And a clear eye will tell you that Obama is of as little use in the fight for gun control as he is in most fights. Everything you need to know about the futility of asking him for more can be found in his coded words about guns in his response to the Newtown, Connecticut shootings: "We're going to have to come together to meaningful action on this, regardless of the politics."

I don't want to dwell on this, because Obama will never be part of a real solution to the American gun murder epidemic -- which, by the way, claims a far greater number of little-noticed people of color than it does mediagenic suburban whites. But let's quickly dissect Obama's veiled reference to gun control and see what's really there.

Obama's words: "We're going to have to come together to meaningful action on this, regardless of the politics." Truth: America's gun-crazy policies are all about politics (as well as economics), and "coming together" is a guarantee of inaction. Gun proliferation and its resulting climate of fear are essential to the monied interests of big gun manufacturers, and are central to the political interests of corporate-owned demagogic congresspersons and senators who sell fear of the other to scared white people. (Let's tell it like it is: citizens of color are, by and large, not clamoring for easy access to guns.) Any challenge to this gun hegemony must by its nature be political. And "coming together" will never, ever win such a victory. All sides "coming together" to defeat the rule of guns is as absurd as all sides "coming together" to defeat slavery in the 19th century. Or Jim Crow in the 20th century. Or the denial of women's reproductive rights right up through today. In each case, what has won the day has not been all sides "coming together," but, instead, those committed to justice proving themselves unstoppable in the face of brutal opposition. The same is true of the gun war.

Which is why Obama will never be part of the solution.

What is and always will be the solution is when enough Americans generate enough of an understanding of the root of the problem and accrue enough rage about its bloody consequences to demand – through strategically-organized protest, civil disobedience, and economic and legislative outcry – that guns not be sold like candy.

To get an idea of just how cowardly Obama is on gun control, read yesterday's remarks by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the guy who did his best to crush the Occupy movement and who presides over NYC's infamous stop-and-frisk policy – in which Bloomberg tried to prod Obama beyond tears and into action on reining in guns.

And to hear someone who has actually experienced a mass shooting talk back to Obama about the Newtown massacre, watch this video of Steve Barton, who survived being shot in the face and neck in the recent Aurora, Colorado theater shooting that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.