alias Bruce.

Mike Pence Gets Booed at "Hamilton" and...

...Donald Trump takes offense with a tweet demanding an apology.

So, just to make sure we understand: President-Elect Trump believes that he and his surrogates are entitled to call Mexican immigrants "rapists," to call women "pigs" and "dogs" who you can "grab by the pussy," to claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, to advocate banning Muslims from the country, to insult a military Gold Star family and their self-sacrificing son on religious grounds, to mock disabled people, to validate white supremacists, to encourage violence at his rallies, to call the former secretary of state and his presidential opponent a "nasty woman," and to sneer "they don't look like Indians to me" at Native Americans who challenge his casino interests.

But an audience at a smash musical that touts diversity is not entitled to voice its displeasure at such wanton racism, sexism, and hatred.

To paraphrase that paragon of principle Mitt Romney, this is a textbook example of white male bully delusion. It's an affliction of those taught to inherit the 400-year-old self-image of captor and master: they can dish it out but they can't take it.

Ex-slaveholder, ex-master of women, and ex-majority over brown people are all positions with no future. In today's world they are guaranteed dead-end jobs. And I do mean dead: in the sense of an aging and shrinking white male-dominated demographic that can feel itself shriveling nationally and globally. Within decades its majority in America will be gone, replaced by a thriving predominance of brown people and of white people who are comfortable with difference.

One recent example that will jerk your head back is the testimony, on the seminal radio chronicle This American Life, of economically screwed white Americans who bitterly report, with no sense of historical irony whatsoever, their shock at feeling "their" country and communities occupied by differently-colored newcomers from overseas. Uh, has anybody here looked beyond the white experience to see how their feeling of dispossession is neither unique nor accurate?

But that's the problem with defined whiteness: its world starts and ends with itself. Trump is part of its end, its desperate death throes, its final mythology. The only remaining question is whether the rainbow of humanity as a whole can survive this deadly fiction.

I say we can. You?

 

Read “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.”

For soundly grounded perspective in the crazed months ahead, give yourself the benefit of Russian-American dissident-author-activist Masha Gessen’s practical advice on what is happening to we Americans at this moment. She knows what she’s talking about. Below is an excerpt from her November 10, 2016 New York Review of Books piece, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” Read the entire piece, with its analyses of Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s profound misunderstandings of the Trump phenomenon, here.

…Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

Here is who we can thank for President Trump:

- A corporate Republican Party that, since Nixon, has sold itself to any and every narrative that coaxes non-rich white people to attack brown people instead of turning on their own greedy white jailers.

- A corporate Democratic Party that, since losing to Reagan, has lost all will to challenge money and has thereby abandoned the economic populist field to any charlatan willing to yell, "The system is rigged."

- A media corps that made false equivalency (Clinton cites actual proof of a Trump lie = Trump yells that Clinton is a criminal) a long-term habit and now blinks in shock at the victory of an utterly dishonest and unqualified candidate.

- A dying white electorate willing to flush its own humanity down the crapper in order to feel even the most sorry excuse for power.

- Progressive voters and non-voters -- particularly whites insulated from the worst consequences of a Trump victory -- who thought they had the luxury of ignoring what fascism actually means.

 

WHY WE CAN’T DUMP TRUMP: Donald Trump’s horrifying political survival makes perfect sense.

After three debates and a hallucinatory succession of politically unsurvivable outrages, Donald Trump is still standing.

“Impossible” is a marker we blew past long ago. After a year of Trump’s gleefully insulting the economic intelligence of angry whites, spitting in the faces of people of color and women and Muslims, consorting with the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, denying the continual catastrophe of climate change, pandering to the worst in foreign autocrats and domestic brown shirts, and magnifying at dizzying speed the reasons he cannot be trusted with house keys, let alone nuclear weapons, Trump has capped his wickedness with boasts (and 11 allegations so far) of sexual assault, “nasty woman” rasps at Hillary Clinton, and defiance of a popular vote before it even happens.

And yet, close to half of the electorate remains willing to vote him into the presidency. Pundits are aghast. Mainstream news outlets, for whom quote-without-question false equivalency has become a rote practice in reporting “both sides” of issues like politics and climate change, now dare to use the word “lie” to describe Trump’s fictional claims. Now, just days before the election, one can feel a rising mainstream hysteria on the airwaves, in print, and in overheard conversations: He will not die! How is this possible?

There is a very good reason, and it is one that corporate journalists and corporate-fed politicians continue to deny: America is broken, from the bone outward. And only Trump, an amoral opportunist, and Bernie Sanders, a progressive firebrand who the managers of corporate reason were unwilling to tolerate, have dared to mouth those words.

Let’s take the corporate journalists’ denial first. From The New York Times to CNN to NPR, until these final shell-shocked days the unspoken subtext of news stories has been, If we journalists simply put on display Trump’s daily outrageous claims, which are transparently untrue, citizens must surely see through them and reject them as antithetical to the truth and fairness of the American experiment. But this is a false assumption. Unlike prosperous national journalists who earnestly publish books and who vacation in inspiring places, the millions of white Americans who make up Trump’s base long ago gave up on any pretense of meritocracy in this country. They know that access to political office is bought with money. They know they are behind the eight ball on a slanted plane of play. They expect to be ceaselessly lied to. And they have learned well, at the punishing hands of global conglomerates and purchased politicians, that the only remaining game is a dirty one. Black and brown communities trapped in poverty, poor schools, and a pipeline to for-profit prisons? Too bad for them, and keep them away from us. Refugees fleeing the wreckage of a global post-neocolonial regime of cheap raw resources and wars of control? Wall them out. We have our own hell here. War-zone zealots whose remaining desperate sense of redemption is in wearing a bomb belt? Screw their reasons and don’t apologize for our methods. Bomb and torture them back to carbon. For uneducated white men – the core Trump electorate – the corporate media have been speaking Greek for decades.

Then there is the corporate political denial. As the longtime sole arbiter of what passes for progressivism in nationally “realistic” politics, the modern Democratic Party has – since the rise of Ronald Reagan and the Dems’ defensive descent into increasingly cruel corporatist platforms and policies (welfare reform, NAFTA, draconian sentencing laws, obscenely weakened oversight of banks, polluters, low-wage conglomerates and other public predators) – effectively erased the party’s credibility with suffering whites for whom the crumbs of white privilege have become starvation rations. Republicans have, since Nixon, peddled flavors of the “what’s good for rich people is good for white people” seduction. But today’s Democratic – and increasingly, Republican – Senator Silverhairs have become, to many whites amid the remaining shreds of a middle class, a bitter mockery of representation. Mainstream news correspondents may still dutifully repeat these professional politicians’ vacuous declarations as if they are newsworthy. But many ordinary working white Americans stopped listening years ago. It’s what Cornel West has accurately called the “niggerization” of American working people. We black folks and other people of color have borne it for centuries. Now, increasingly disenfranchised whites, feeling their own (decidedly race-softened but awful) version of the pain, are staging a political riot. (For a deeper understanding of how and why Trump profoundly appeals to white voters who are by far his moral superiors, go to The United States of Anxiety, a devastating podcast produced by The Nation and WNYC.)

That is why Trump can serially lie with impunity to his base about his disproven claims, boast about his evading taxes, contradict his nationalist rhetoric with his anti-American-worker hiring practices, and brag about sexually assaulting women – and still claim roars of approval from the very voters he betrays. This is neither nonsensical nor insane. It is a brutal, wicked consequence of corporate media and mainstream politics having abandoned the clear populist imperatives of our era. The error of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their humanistic side of the corporate establishment is that for the past eight years they have left the defiantly progressive field wide open for any takers. They left it vacant, in fact, until Sanders proved it had clout. (Have you wondered, as I have, what the campaign would now look like if it were Democratic Socialist Bernie bellowing back at fake-rebel Trump in the three presidential debates?) Trump, the consummate opportunist, has filled the white blue-collar populist void with his brutal audacity and dishonesty. It doesn’t take much to swim upstream when the flow is so feeble.

So Hillary Clinton – who embraced energetic progressive rhetoric only after Sanders proved it might win – is now our last barrier between a bad political landscape with footholds for progress and an abyss plunging into unknown depths of depravity, repression, and potential nuclear and ecological ruin. She was far from my first choice. But I am one of many who will vote for her with fierce resolve.

For those who have failed to call out betrayal of progressivism over its decades-long cooptation by corporate expediency, the old adage still applies: you break it, you buy it. That shattered mess on the floor is what is left of the myth of white meritocracy preached since World War Two. White people left behind by the corporate version of white privilege need somewhere else to go. Trump is a temporary refuge. He may or may not lose the election. But either way, the tide of betrayed collective white ego he has loosed is not retreating. That dam is busted, and the flood plain will extend far beyond Election Day.

We can blame Trump, an amateur fascist, for cashing in on this with his come-on to a beached white electorate. Or we can ask, What happens when the enraged hungers of disenfranchised white people start to merge with the centuries-old hungers of black and brown ex-slaves and the desperation of those who now flee global poverty and slaughter?

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.

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’?

How long should black people keep forgiving white people?

Seeing Nadine Collier sobbing as she forgave 21-year-old racial terrorist Dylann Roof for slaughtering her mother, Ethel Lance, was devastatingly moving. Her having done so speaks to the moral superiority of the very people who small-minded tormentors and murderers would try to paint as humanly inferior. It destroys any claim of white civilizational superiority. It denies slavering white attackers the reasons they seek for feeling okay about hating and hurting black people.

It also raises, once again, the centuries-old question of how tolerant and how forgiving black people should continue to be toward a society that persists in treating us as ex-slaves who are subject to selective state brutality and imprisonment, wildly disproportionate joblessness, routine discrimination, contemptuous abuse in everyday media and political speech, and public and personal violence.

Under these circumstances, just how nice are black people supposed to be? How many times are we supposed to get up off the ground, put our kicked-out teeth back in our mouths, and calmly and lovingly remind the kickers to seek and find their better selves?

This is not to personally judge Collier's moral and faith-based proclamations to her mother's killer. That is a matter between her and Roof. Her words to him went viral because they were recorded and shared as part of his court hearing. I, and most of us, cannot pretend to know what we would feel moved to do or say to the perpetrator if our personal world were to be savaged in such a horrific and spectacular way.

So this is not about Nadine Collier. It is bigger than her or any one of us. There is a bigger perpetrator and a bigger crime here, and there are bigger questions at hand. 

At what point, say, if any, is it healthy and fair for an abused spouse to forgive a partner who has made an intimate career of beating, raping, belittling, humiliating, stalking or isolating them? After the spouse goes to jail for a long time? Has been otherwise safely eliminated from one's life? Seeks and perseveres in therapy? Finds the roots of their own rage? 

Forgiveness and forbearance, as tenets of the black church in America, have both soothed more souls and preempted more rebellions than we will ever know. Who knows how many millions of times, in the centuries since slave ships first brought sick and tortured Africans to the Americas, that our taking it to Jesus has prevented our taking it to the streets? Marx called religion an opiate for a reason. Gandhi and King labeled violence as surrender for a reason. Where do we choose between peace and righteousness? When does being peaceful and forgiving serve to enable vice instead of virtue?

For centuries now, black Americans have as a whole been nicer to white Americans than white people have been to us -- albeit under threat of lynching, arrest, social estrangement, or being fired from our jobs. There is not a black Ku Klux Klan. There are not cliques of black people telling white jokes around the water cooler. There is not a black Jim Crow (black tables at school cafeterias notwithstanding) except to the extent that it has been created by decades of white exclusion. Black families (including my own extended family) have for centuries been relatively more accepting of white intermarriage into the clan than white families have been of the equivalent. Most of this disparity in cross-racial meanness is due more to institutional coercion than to any natural inclination. It is easy to be mean to a group of people when they wield little power. It is harder to do so when they wield a lot.

Consider: what are the chances that members of a white church, just days after a dogmatically race-hating black man infiltrated their worship group and slaughtered its participants, would publicly declare forgiveness for him? Face it: America's history has trained we black folks to suck it up.

Again, the church has served as a major anesthetic for black suffering. This can be helpful: whether the Freedom Riders or current protestors against police killings, people of conscience have always needed a place of solace and rejuvenation. It can also be harmful: when we can vent just enough of the pain on Sunday to be able to report peacefully to the subpoverty-wage workplace on Monday, we are less likely to change anything.

For me, the imperative goes deeper than the safe question of forgiveness versus unforgiveness. Fundamental societal change is not about vengeance. It is about justice. It is not about vendettas. It is about visions and transformations that charge ahead in spite of fear and resistance.

My litmus test for forgiveness? When it spurs actual action to challenge and change what is wrong, I not only welcome it but call for it. But when it serves as a long-standing addiction to pacified inaction, I say it's time for rehab.

 

 

How do we treat police as people?

 

Two stories:

 - A friend told me yesterday about a guy she knows who is a Baltimore City Police Officer. She sees him around in ordinary civilian life, she says, and he's a nice guy, peaceful, friendly, kind, open-minded, funny. Then she saw him again after he had been called to riot duty, lining up in formation to face off against angry city citizens in his shield and armor during the Freddie Gray uprising, and she saw a different guy. He talked with a slightly wild gleam in his eye about the adrenaline rush of being in battle, and how a protester kid had taunted him to his face, and how he had fantasized killing the kid on the spot, and what a fucking amazing rush it all was. My friend felt herself physically backpedal away from him, this genial guy she had thought she had begun to know.

 - Another friend of mine is a communist and a member of a self-described revolutionary organization that sometimes refers to police officers as "pigs." She and I have a running argument about this, among other things. I argue to her that police officers, even in service of repressive and racist state power, are human beings and wage slaves like most of us who at some level have a vested interest in not being under the thumb of a plutocracy that purchases American politics, and that even as we fight the role so many cops accept, it will not advance our agenda to pronounce them all "pigs." She argues to me that police officers, particularly in the nation's most poor and vulnerable communities, have made a Faustian bargain to park their humanity on demand in exchange for the rush of personal and institutional power, and that their chosen dehumanizing role deserves a dehumanized label. I am not sure how she feels all of this reflects on the character of actual porcine animals. I need to ask her about that. 

Where the two stories come together is in how we choose to deal with fellow human beings when they occupy more and more starkly opposing roles in an effective state of war. War makes living a life of humanity harder in every way, and American policing in large cities and in majority-white control of black and brown communities has for most of its history been a war. That includes the years since the Reagan 80s, when the full-throated War on Drugs, with its hypocritical approach to urban versus suburban drug use, flooded urban police departments with military hardware, military attitudes, and federal money. In a state of war, it is hard if not impossible to enjoy ordinary human experience with someone who gets a professional hard-on about pummeling people who look like you. It is hard to roll down the street on militarized patrol and not see a potential assassin on every street corner. It is hard to evade the crushing pressure -- or some would say the raw necessity -- to treat others as enemies. 

War. It is what assassinations by police look like. It is what assassinations of police look like. It is what mass imprisonment looks like. It is what armed white convergences on mosques look like. It is what a rush of half-brained presidential candidates shouting "kill them" sounds like. It is what Brown Shirts look like.

We're about there.