alias Bruce.

Three quotes that might help.

"It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be." - James Baldwin

"There isn't going to be a turning point...There isn't going to be any next-month-it'll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don't have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say: So this is it. This is really all there is to it... Everybody just needing such little things and they can't get them. Everybody needing just a little...confidence from somebody else... Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back...it seems like such a shame. It's so close to being, like, really right and good and open." - Janis Joplin

"I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe... I wouldn't be surprised if poetry...in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes and designs...is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song." - David Byrne

Why Trump is the death of white men as we know them.

Smart people keep saying this but that’s because reality keeps shouting it: Trump is part of nature’s answer to the temporary global authority of white males who have massive treasuries and armies but tiny appendages of social perception.

There Trump is, braggingly brushing what he calls “dandruff” off the shoulder of French president Emmanuel Macron, a younger white male who thinks he can save the burning clubhouse, or at least inherit membership points. There Trump is, making his pear-shaped golf swing at his Florida swamp playground while he brays the planet into incompatibility with human life. There Trump is, lavishing sick job-starved white men with shamelessly wicked promises about coal mines and winning wars and grabbing women by their privates.

I fear it will get worse before it gets better. America, with its 18th-century patrician presumption of noblesse oblige, hasn’t yet had time to create a working model for addressing bad monarchs.

But make no mistake: Trump is the last titanic white man, the final Caucasian male officiate ranting oaths from the lifeboat, the end of the line for a brand of capitalist maleness that is rotting on the shelf in a rapidly-browning and broader-gendered market of humanity.

Every white male who cuts you off on the highway, or who floors his burp-tuned exhaust all the way to the next red light, or who votes to economically screw himself in order to savor a momentary blow at brownness or femaleness, is screaming, “This world is killing who I thought I was, and I don’t want to die.”

That goes with the territory when any animal stakes out unsustainable turf.

Being unaware of the world will kill you every time.

Racism is Trump’s hole card. Can America deal with that?

I mean, really. Can we please ditch the perplexity about Donald Trump?

There is little mystery here, despite the prolonged “Wha…?” from journalists and politicians who don’t want to believe that American moral authority is this broken.

Look, it started out broken. Okay? This is not a new thing. It was broken from the start by an ethic that needed race as a retroactive explanation for the compulsion to invade the North American continent, slaughter its people, import forced labor to jump-start a profitable economy, and sustain the enterprise for centuries with successive adaptations of trickle-down Jim Crow.

President Donald Trump is the latest hammer banging non-wealthy white Americans upside the head with the expedient lie that their power derives from the subjugation of demonized brown people. Never mind how laughably this ignores what actually happened. For latter-day generations of working white folks in desperate need of a way to feel right and powerful in a position of wrongness and powerlessness, a desperate lie will do.

This is Trump’s gig. Okay? It’s not news. It’s what he does. It’s what he did in playing supporters and subordinates against one another as a real estate operator. It’s what he did in stigmatizing Native Americans who threatened his casino interests. It’s what he did on The Apprentice in putting hungry contestants at one another’s throats. It’s what he did in pitting desperate Mexican immigrants against desperate American low-wage workers. It’s what he did in setting up White House subordinates like Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Jared Kushner to suspect and undercut one another.

It’s what Trump does. He whispers implicit encouragements to underlings and lets them bleed out as they claw at perceived rivals for dominance. Then he shops for new chumps and plays golf.

And so Trump, increasingly cornered by his having screwed so many erstwhile allies, now dog-whistles his last reliable audience of suckers – non-college-educated Caucasian voters who have lost out in the latest American manifestation of whiteness – to lash out against feared and loathed browns. His latest scrap tossed to the angry white base is his publicly telling the non-voting, heavily-brown U.S. territory of Puerto Rico to shut up and suffer after hurricane Maria. Meanwhile, he aims for those who enjoy voting rights in Florida and Texas to point to his disaster response as cause for gratitude.

It’s what he does. He divides and hopes to conquer. So it’s way past time for folks who have access to the relevant information – journalists and politicians, for example – to stop being surprised.

Trump is doing exactly what a defender of post-slavery white supremacy can be expected to do. And he’s doing it the way a slave master – AKA a dictator – learned to do it: brutally, unapologetically, audaciously. The idea is to paralyze via stone-cold fury.

Plenty of we brown Americans have seen this before. We are not shocked. And we wish that our country would listen to us earlier and more often.

America, welcome to the world’s illegitimate states.

For a nation so accustomed to congratulating itself as exceptional, it is bitter poetic justice for we as Americans to officially join the ranks of ridiculed autocracies ruled by cartoon dictators.

We now fit all the criteria: An elite whose exponentially absurd distribution of wealth makes a joke of the pretense of a civilized economy? Check. National media that avoid the actual issues of raw autocracy while dithering over distractive questions such as optics and intent? Check. A plurality electorate sufficiently brutalized to settle for abusing designated others as an acceptable form of solace? Check.

The United States of America has arrived. Welcome.

Videos and photos from Dulles Airport anti-Trump protest in support of immigrants and refugees 1-29-2017

I shot these videos and photos of the Dulles Airport protest today. You can also view the videos on my YouTube channel.

People chant "No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here":

 

 People chant, "No hate, no wall, America welcomes all":

 

People cheer arriving passengers:

 

People chant "Immigrants make America great":

 

People chant "Shame on you" at two Trump supporters":

 Photos:

 

Start drawing your Trump battle lines. Now.

For those of us in America who have the cushion of assuming a daily life free of being physically kicked in the ass, jailed, blacklisted or fired from our jobs for political reasons, or threatened or worse by goons who do whatever the state pays them to do, it is now time to let go of the illusion.

That kind of normalcy has long been a First World problem. Not anymore.

Our personal American bubbles, within which our opinions don’t endanger our uneventfully going to the store or having company over or exercising our right to free speech, are bursting. Fast. Entire swaths of our population – people who work for entire governmental departments that are suddenly forbidden to talk to the public or to the press(!!), law enforcement officers who are ordered to round up newly targeted populations, journalists who are put on brutal notice for what they can and cannot ask or say, citizens who are forced to accept the possibility of being disappeared into unaccountable “black sites” according to the whims of a regime that makes and enforces its own rules in secret – are being herded, under threat of injury, into a new way of life.

This is me, and you, that I’m talking about. Every day this week in the United States, more corporate supervisors and religious leaders and mayors and teachers and police and janitors and hospital administrators and writers and child care workers and musicians and congresspersons and government administrative workers are treading more carefully, self-editing, yielding ground, backing off, facing an awful and humiliating choice between what is right and what is safe.

If you’re not scared, and if you’re not pissed off beyond belief at having to confront being scared, you’re in denial.

So let go of what you thought the ground rules were for America in 2017. Adjust to what they are.

And choose: in the face of half our population’s being drunk on an intoxicating autocracy, who are you going to be? Right now?

This is how stupid Trump thinks his followers are:

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe the easily-disproved “alternative fact” that Trump's inauguration crowd in DC was not dwarfed by Obama's in 2008 or by the Women's March in 2017.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that giving brown people less will give struggling white people more – while the rich boldly suck up even more of virtually everything.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that going back to giving more power to for-profit health insurance companies will somehow, for the first time ever, give people more generous choices at lower prices.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that you can gut government (e.g., freeze federal hiring) and wildly expand it (e.g., build a wall, prosecute women for abortion, enforce a ban on Muslims) at the same time.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that suicide bombers and shooters are a greater danger to each of us than more poisonous air, water, and food.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that virtually all of the reputable climate scientists in the world are scammers and that the handful of climate denial scammers are telling the truth.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that a white serial bankrupter who stiffed contractors and ran a phony college is a better ally than a black president who lowered unemployment and favored a higher minimum wage.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to trust a notoriously greedy billionaire because he repeats the obvious truth that “the system is rigged,” even after he fills his cabinet with greedy billionaires and brazenly pursues policies that favor CEOs over everyone else.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to continue to cheer on the Trump regime’s increasingly brutal scapegoating (e.g., of women, Muslims, blacks, brown immigrants, and LGBT people) while Trump’s billionaire policies lay waste to the lives of working white people.

None of this is new. Dictators thrive on telling bald-faced lies to desperate people.

But what we don't know is: How many Trump followers will see through the con? How many of we Americans as a whole will actively risk being targeted, fired, jailed, or worse to protect our futures and that of our kids? And how many journalists will actually fight – and by that I mean put their careers and possibly their physical safety at risk – for what is provably true and morally non-negotiable?

The Guardian’s Lindy West: Why say alt-right when you mean Nazi?

This from columnist Lindy West on why we stop at “alt-right” when we’re talking about ethnic-cleanser racial supremacists:

What does it take to call a Nazi a Nazi? In the interminable fortnight since the election of Donald Trump, the US press has been floundering in a gyre of panic over the internal taxonomy of racists.

For months, many (myself included) indulged Trump’s base in their euphemism of choice, the “alt-right”, an attempt to rebrand warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and harmless!) internet fad. Despite the fact that Breitbart News (described by former honcho turned Trump adviser Stephen Bannon as “the platform for the alt-right”) had, at one point, a news tag labeled “black crime”, and was a driver of the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim, the press contorted itself into labyrinthine knots to avoid applying the word “racist” to Bannon or Trump in any committed way. (In our post-meaning world, being called a racist is nearly as grievous as being a racist.

Public outcry has prompted some hemming and hawing over the finer distinctions between “white nationalists” and “white supremacists”, the mainstream media not allowing either term to get too close to Trump himself, even as antisemitic, anti-black, anti-gay and Islamophobic hate crimes (not to mention KKK victory parades) continued to proliferate in his name. The website Boing Boing published a “White Supremacy Euphemism Generator for journalists”, explaining: “even when people pander to the idea Western culture’s wellbeing is inseparable from European ethnicity, they somehow avoid being called white nationalists or supremacists by journalists”. One hang-up seemed to be a lack of self-identification. If a person doesn’t consider himself a white supremacist, can he still be one? (Answer: OF COURSE.)

Finally, though, at Richard B Spencer’s closing speech at Saturday’s alt-right conference just a few blocks from the White House, it became undeniable what we’re dealing with here (at least among this particular sect of Trump’s true believers): it’s a bunch of straight-up neo-Nazis.

According to the New York Times, Spencer – who claims to have coined the term “alt-right” – “railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people … As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute.” The crowd joined Spencer in a cry of “Heil victory!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard Spencer: ‘railed against Jews and quoted Nazi propaganda.’ Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

And yet, still, headlines were tentative. The New York Times gesticulated wildly toward Nazism without actually using the word (“Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’”), and a CNN panel managed to avoid saying “Nazi” entirely, despite discussing a chyron that read, “Alt-right founder questions if Jews are people.”

But if declaring the superiority of the white race, quoting Nazi propaganda, calling for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”, and provoking Nazi salutes from his audience isn’t enough to qualify one as a neo-Nazi, then where on earth is the bar? What is the hesitation? And, given the close ties between the “alt-right” and Trump’s cabinet, how is the top story on every front page not some version of “NEO-NAZIS ATTEMPTING TO SEIZE CONTROL OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT”?

Read her entire column here.

Keith Schlegel on Trump, words, and language as a bomb at a bus stop.

My colleague and friend Keith Schlegel, a retired university English chair and owner of a baritone voice most guys would go to jail for, wrote and recorded a video reading of the following (I'll share a link when I have it [Update 12/8: video is here]):

 

"Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: "Words, words, words."

 

Well, yes, when we read or speak or listen, that is all we encounter, mere words, which, unlike sticks and stones, can never hurt us, or so we teach children. Hamlet's answer to Polonius is that it doesn't matter what Hamlet reads, that whatever it is is meaningless, that words are meaningless. Yet this play, itself made of words only, shows the meaning, purposes, and effects of words, which include cruelty, since words can hurt very much and not just our feelings about ourselves.

 

Words are in fact a species of action and the result of choice. Words are more than mere words to those who depend upon them to represent something like truth, to inspire us, to console, to teach us. Alas, words can also anger, harm, and, most dangerous of all, deceive.

 

Notwithstanding his claims that he has "great" words, President-elect Trump is pitifully lacking in good words, in accurate words. Is Pakistan really a "fantastic" nation full of "fantastic" people and led by a "fantastic" leader, as Donald Trump has recently said? When he said he "saw" hundreds of Muslims in America celebrate the horror of 9/11, his words were fully as perilous as a bomb thrown into a crowd. More recently, he exchanged words with the president of Taiwan, violating established diplomacy. Examples of irresponsible talk abound from the 2016 campaign, but now that it's over, Americans can and should assert a higher standard of active citizenship that listens, reads, judges, and most of all uses words critically and accurately. No excuses remain.

 

I doubt we can quickly or thoroughly change Mr. Trump's bad habits of careless speech, regardless of who is advising him. Those of us who worry most about the degradation of truth can, however, focus our resistance to the debasing of language. Accordingly, as we make ourselves the loyal opposition, we commit to name every misrepresentation, every unfounded assertion, every flattery of tyrants, every overly-general or unfair accusation. We plan to speak truth to power.

 

Over my decades teaching writing, I never let pass without comment any vague use of the word great. "Do you mean famous? large? powerful? important? good?" I'd comment. To make something "great again" surely first requires understanding what the word great means now and what it meant in the past, and much of the divide we now endure stems from people's not sharing the same meanings for words: in that way, the rise of Trumpism has made clear what before was hidden.

 

I'd be happy to agree that American citizens should try to make America great again if that means to return to the clear humanity of Abraham Lincoln or the hopefulness of a young President Kennedy or to the heroism of the civil rights workers or the sacrifices of American soldiers or indeed the promise of justice that lives in the Constitution, which our Presidents swear to defend in the words of their oath of office. I suspect these are not the values defining "great" of those who even now yell for the President-elect to throw Hillary Clinton in jail, albeit I seriously doubt one in a thousand could even name the supposed crime or explain how any President could exercise such unconstitutional powers. The Presidency is the most powerful office in our nation, but it is also limited in ways that would irritate any despot.

 

Much of the power of the American Presidency lies not in the exercise of force but in the authority and stature of the office such that Presidential words must be attended to. The Presidency is a pulpit (a "bully" one) to do good. This is a truth that President Obama knows well, as his soaring rhetoric has shown. Mr. Trump also gets the point, at least in part: when he tweeted this week attacking Boeing, the stock shares fell precipitously: now that’s power.

 

We do no disservice to our country when we demand high standards in Presidential speech: we show thereby that we honor the office.

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.