alias Bruce.

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.

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.

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

Cover of Baltimore City Paper, May 6, 2015

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."

 

Baltimore Freddie Gray rally May 2, 2015: Malik Shabazz speaking and being heckled.

Eloquence can be like romance: in honest and loving hands it can ecstatically liberate, and in dishonest and selfish hands it can be the worst kind of betrayal. And you know what they say about believers scorned.

Malik Shabazz appears to be neither eloquent nor abominable enough to qualify for either extreme. As president of the Black Lawyers for Justice, he works and speaks for some causes that direly need and deserve support, including resistance toward racist policing. But as a man with an ego that seems the size of Nebraska and with an apparent tone-deafness to how repugnant it is to use events like the brutal deaths of black ctizens for his own self-promotion, he cannot help but tip his hand as someone whose leadership is suspect.

That is why, at Saturday's Baltimore rally following the filing of criminal charges against six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray, Shabazz, the keynote speaker, was roundly heckled by spectators. Some hecklers were organized, with agendas of their own, but many were clearly spontaneous: strangers in the crowd rolling their eyes at one another and yelling annoyed comments at this shameless guy who just couldn't seem to get enough of using the word "I." At one point after Shabazz bragged about how much of his own money he had spent to sponsor the event, scattered audience members began yelling at him, "It's not about you."

This matters. Not just because manipulative attention-hoggers are obnoxious, but, more importantly, because they are destructive. They give ammunition to the stale old rulers' story of how "outside agitators" are the source of trouble in cities afire, a tale that has been used for ages to try to dissuade well-behaved black folk from aligning with a man named King who led a bus boycott in Montgomery, or a woman named Tubman who led slaves through the woods to freedom.

To paraphrase what Lloyd Bentsen said to hopeless veep candidate Dan Quayle, Shabazz is no King and no Tubman. But the tepidly mixed reception Shabazz received at Saturday's rally with his blend of fiery advocacy and clichéd preening, while parent and advocate Erica Marks brought the crowd to a righteous frenzy when she took the stage and declared that she would spend no more of her afternoon listening to male patriarchy, said plenty. (I missed getting it on my video of her speech, but trust me, she said it and the crowd got it.) Powerfully received as well were the remarks by veteran national organizer Carl Dix, who drew his loudest cheers when he called for women to be treated as full human beings instead of as "sexual objects and punching bags" in the fight for a just society. I will post audio of Dix and others in the coming days.

Meanwhile, here are two videos from Saturday of keynote speaker Malik Shabazz revealing the limits of sheer sloganizing.

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

"Supreme adventure" for LGBT rights

Here are photos from a friend's sister who drove from Upstate New York to Washington, D.C. and back IN ONE DAY to stand in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in support of gay marriage, which the Court is now considering. She calls it her "Supreme Adventure."

As demonstrators 40 miles north in Baltimore stand up for the right to not be summarily beaten and killed by police, it all fits together.

 

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.

What the Charlie Hebdo Paris murders may bring next

will depend on how people and powers choose to respond. And that leaves open a fearful range of possibilities.

As the worst terrorist attack on France since World War Two, at a moment when France and Europe are already torn between racist nationalism and more moderate forces, the shock of a massacre such as this could push things in any number of directions.

Like a tsunami that has yet to hit the shore, the massive crowds filling the streets in a "Je suis Charlie" outpouring of grief and outrage carry all of the clashing currents of current French political momentum: pent-up anti-immigrant fury, proud libertarianism, proto-fascist nationalism, progressive inclusionism, cynical racist populism, plain old dizzy fear. As with America's current battle between an entrenched and entitled police culture and the fight against police brutality, all kinds of things could happen.

What we must know, though, is that there is a huge amount at stake on either side of the Atlantic. Weimar Germany pivoted on traumatic national identity crises such as this. In France, the anti-immigrant National Front is already the third largest political party on the strength of widespread fear and anxiety about the economy, North African immigrants, and Muslims. Millions of scared voters in France – just as in the U.S. – are stumbling along the slippery edge of whatever-it-takes-to-protect-the-Homeland. These are times when armed soldiers on street corners can begin to feel ordinary, and when increasingly restricted rights for certain groups of people can start to feel okay. Or not. Time, and events, will tell.

But one of the gravest dangers is amnesia. Beneath the news coverage of the horrific Charlie Hebdo story, which begins with a series of satirical Muslim cartoons and culminates in 12 brutal murders, lies a much longer and unspoken history of rampages and massacres involving France, North Africa, and Muslims. This from a New York Times 2013 obituary containing the memoirs of famed French general Paul Aussaresses during France's 1954-62 attempt to crush rebellion against its colonial rule of Algeria:

He coolly recalled rounding up 1,500 unarmed prisoners — almost all of them Muslims — then selecting “the die-hards” and having them shot. He had the bodies taken to a Muslim cemetery and laid side by side facing Mecca in a 100-meter ditch that a backhoe had dug. Lime was shoveled onto the bodies to hasten decomposition.

He set up death squads, he said, and called them by that name. He ordered the assassinations of Algerian leaders and ordered the killings be disguised as suicides. When he got word Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the independence struggle and later Algeria’s first elected president, was aboard an airplane, he ordered it shot down, then changed his mind when he learned that the crew was French.

That history is just one stream in the current. Add to it the decades-old turmoil in France over the presence and underclass stature of waves of North African immigrants; the global inequities that fuel virulently anti-Western strands of fundamentalist Islam; and the recent French trends toward Islamophobia in dealing with religion.

Believe the dead French general when he suggests to us that this cataclysm is about much more than cartoons and freedom of speech.

This is one of the problems I have with organized religion:

Recently I was sitting in a quiet place at the gym, tired, taking a break after working out, when another guy came and sat down near me to chill out. I nodded hello.

"How you doing?" he said.

"All right. You?" I said.

"Please say a prayer," he said. "My mother is in the hospital." The way he said it sounded mournfully final.

I looked up. "I'm very sorry to hear that. I'll send her all I have. I lost my mother years ago, and I maybe understand."

Quiet for a few beats.

"Your mother. Was she a believer?" he said.

"A believer?"

"Did she believe in our Lord Jesus Christ?"

Oh, Jesus, I thought. "No. She went to church but she wasn't religious. She was very spiritual in her own way."

A beat.

"She went to church?" he asked.

I exhaled. "She wasn't religious. Neither am I."

Another beat.

"Did she accept our Lord Jesus Christ as her personal savior?" he asked.

"Look," I said with a raised voice. "I'm not going to talk to you about my mother this way, and you have no right to ask."

He backpedaled at warp speed. He said he was sorry, he apologized if he'd offended me, he hadn't meant to be rude. I told him to forget it and that I wished his mother well. As I got up to go I again wished his mother my best and he again apologized.

As I walked away, I realized that this is what I loathe about organized religion. Here is a perfectly decent guy, well-intentioned, who instantly becomes a tone-deaf bully in the presence of a stranger because his own dogma has taught him that it is the only truth to be heard. This is exactly how white missionaries told themselves that they were doing divine duty as advance men for the slave trade and for colonial slaughter. It is how men, and some women, tell themselves that girls' clitorises should be cut off. It is how straight couples tell themselves that marriage and legally recognized family life should be denied to everyone but them. It is how people, particularly men, who claim to love human life tell themselves it is all right to be hateful and to do harm to living women who choose abortions, and to turn a blind eye to the hungry, neglected lives of children they would force women to bear in the interest of a fetishistic fetus narrative.

There is plenty that I honor about religious practices I have seen. Further, religion is by no means the only way by which good people learn to do monstrous things. But it is one of the big ones. And that is the irony: an ethic that praises love becomes a blunt instrument of hatred. Or at the very least, an otherwise nice guy at the gym whips around and gives a backhanded whack to a stranger's space in the guise of goodness.

It's like what my old girlfriend once said we should say to any abusive or oppressive zealot who claims to wish us God's forgiveness: Tell them we hope God forgives them.