alias Bruce.

The meaning of President Trump, in 100 words:

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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 curfew, night two, with notes.

One of the twisted things about the two-days-and-counting Baltimore lockdown is that this city is now probably a safer place to be a black person than it is during a normal day. Reporters are everywhere, every incident brings another question for beleaguered Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and still-in-rehearsal Governor Larry Hogan, and angry citizens are marching, shouting, and issuing demands with the strength of numbers. Contrast that with any normal day, when being poor and black and beaten by Baltimore Police happens in the privacy of any given alley or squad car, and is newsworthy only to those to whom it happens.

The normal Baltimore Police routine of jacking up black folks with impunity and anonymity will have to wait until the media crowds go back home. Right now there is a script to be followed.

With that in mind, here are my margin notes on the first section of a Baltimore Sun story that ran online in the early hours of Thursday. The indented gray text is the Sun. The flush-left blue text is mine.

As masses of mostly peaceful demonstrators marched on City Hall, officials on Wednesday began their own offensive to prevent violence from flaring again Friday, when police are expected to turn their investigation into the death of Freddie Gray over to prosecutors.

This was PR damage control for the mayor's and police commissioner's powerlessness to stem the BPD's long-standing culture of brutality in poor black communities, which is what caused the uprising in the first place, and for the sheer ineptness of the mayor in trying to display both her own caring and the city's progress in the Freddie Gray case.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and others tried to tamp down mistaken expectations that the public will be told Friday how Gray, 25, suffered a severed spinal cord and crushed voicebox while in police custody.

The city succeeded in letting us all know that an investigation would report its findings on Friday -- but not in making people aware that they might remain secret. There are good prosecutorial reasons for keeping such information under wraps. But my guess is that during the explosive onset of the uprising the city talked up the coming report to try to quell rage without thinking much about how secrecy might play out later.

On a relatively subdued day, when the Orioles resumed play but in an empty Camden Yards and police and National Guard troops remained in force on city streets, city officials and lawyers for Gray's family worked to explain what to expect in the coming days.

The absurdity of a major-league baseball contest played out in a completely empty stadium is like something from a dystopian novel about a post-apocalyptic city that has outlawed the word "irony."

They stressed that the police findings would not be released to the public, and State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby would not announce whether she would file criminal charges against the officers involved in the arrest.

Can't blame the State's Attorney for this one.

"People misunderstood [Friday] to mean something else," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said outside New Shiloh Baptist Church, where she met privately with Gray family lawyers and community leaders to discuss how to prepare for what Friday might bring.

"Misunderstood" is one word for it. What is saddest here is that the Gray family is caught in a public drama that goes against their wishes but that has become much bigger than their loved one.

Attorney Hassan Murphy said Gray's relatives are "all terribly concerned" that those expecting a major break in the case could allow their disappointment to explode in anger.

At this point, I doubt that even the family's heartbreak over these events will sway the public here. When the uprising subsides it will not be because the family requested it.

"We don't want a repeat of Monday," Murphy said, when gangs of mostly young people rioted, looted businesses and set fires.

Problem is, some people do, and the accrued community anger goes back decades.

For the rest of the Sun story, including what Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, and tone-deaf Maryland Governor Hogan had to say ("We want things to get back to normal"), go here.

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.

Police race relations turned violent here in Baltimore Saturday, the news says. But

that is not exactly the order in which things happened.

But I need to back up for a moment. What happened at the peaceful Freddie Gray protest in front of City Hall earlier yesterday (my photos below) was that thousands of us who gathered there understood that any one of us could have been Freddie Gray: dragged screaming with a trailing limp leg into a police van, taken on a Baltimore Police Department illegal "rough ride" without a seat belt, spine broken, making three stops in a 40-minute trip to the police station including, incredibly, one to pick up another prisoner, with no medical attention whatsoever, and ultimately dying days later of horrible injuries. All because of his making eye contact with a cop and running.

It could have happened to me the morning I was swarmed by a squad of Baltimore undercover narcs on my way to record a commercial in New York City for my ad agency. It could have happened to the young guy next to me in the crowd at the rally who was trying to keep hold of his toddler son. It could have happened to the heavy-set guy at the protest who climbed the cement base of the City Hall flagpole and yanked the ropes until the fluttering American flag came plummeting downward to throaty cheers. It could have been, and it could yet be, any one of us ending up on the coroner's slab at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department.

Race violence here in Charm City began long before crowds kicked in police cruiser windshields yesterday outside Camden Yards stadium during an Orioles game, and before Zero Tolerance policing targeted poor people of color on the street for harassment and arrest, and before the War on Drugs made militarized policing the norm in low-income communities of color, and even before Jim Crow and lynch law.

In fact, race violence in law enforcement began the first day that the first white lackey was paid a pittance to pursue and capture the first runaway black slave.

So things did not "turn" violent at Camden Yards yesterday after many of us gathered peacefully at City Hall. What happened was that decades of an arrogant, notoriously corrupt, racially-discriminatory occupying-army Baltimore police culture -- with which too many of we non-Caucasian citizens are far more intimate than we would like to be -- is, once again, boomeranging in the form of rebellion. We are talking about a police department and a police union so extreme that they pushed through legislation denying the police chief the authority to discipline officers. This is a city that has paid nearly $6 million in police brutality lawsuits since 2011. The contempt with which many Baltimoreans of color regard law enforcement is well-earned.

But this time there is a twist: As someone said to me a couple of months ago, the recent American avalanche of publicized police killings of unarmed black males does not reflect a sudden turn toward brutally violent and racist policing. It reflects, instead, the mere fact that millions of people now walk around carrying cell phones that can globally transmit incidents that have heretofore gone on with little or no public evidence. All of a sudden, police who kill with wanton and racist recklessness are now sometimes forced to do so on worldwide video.

This is a game-changer for the bubble of white privilege. It does not make it impossible for whites who have never actually seen such events before to continue to deny that they happen. But it makes it a lot harder. So we are now seeing a kind of rainbow movement for law enforcement justice that has not existed since the 1960s and 1970s.

And we are also seeing -- as is also true with the progress in LGBT rights -- a wicked backlash among those holdouts for privilege who cannot handle reality.

So what happens now?

The one thing we know for sure is that it is now much harder to avoid taking a position.

 

 

LAPD shoots man with pocket knife. 15-year-old killed in MO hit-and-run hate crime. Deep South goes deeper GOP. It's hard to

not go into brain-freeze or a national seizure at the pace of militarized police killings, racial/religious/you-name-it hatred, and the racialized rightward whirlpool of the GOP's appeal to fearful whites.

In the latest of a spate of fatal shootings, officers of the infamous Los Angeles Police Department raced to touristy Hollywood Boulevard, where they fired 10 rounds to terminate a reportedly homeless man carrying a Swiss army pocket knife. Yes, a pocket knife. Guardian story here. Police pic of the palm-sized weapon here. The victim was white, by the way.

In Kansas City, a 15-year-old Somali Muslim was run down and killed outside a mosque by an SUV driven by a Somali Christian known to have threatened Muslims with violence.

In the much-anticipated runoff U.S. senate election in Louisiana, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu fell to Republican Congressman Bill Cassidy. Like many Dems in this midterm, in her race she fled the causes embraced by her base (at the 11th hour she sang the praises of the Keystone Pipeline and its claimed monetary payoff for Louisiana) only to prove, once again, that a weak-kneed Democrat commands increasingly little electoral appeal against an unapologetic Republican rightie. Much of the American South, thanks to white-powered districts, is now in the hands of a GOP that is laying its last big demographic bet – in an increasingly brown country – on the fears of petrified whites.

In other words, the headlines we read are racing into a blur of brazenly militarized everyday policing, unrelenting hatred and rage, and accelerated racialization of national politics.

What do we do with this?

Blogs are not great for long-view reflection. At this frenzied moment, I can offer only one suggestion for us as progressives: Stay connected. With one another. With the causes that matter for fairness, be it racial, economic, gender, religious, sexual orientation, or physical ability. Stay in the street, literally and figuratively, as an increasingly repressive state and the storm troopers who work for it grow bolder in their audacity. Stay informed, and stay in tune with the movement of people who believe, as you do, in something like a more democratic America.

Yes, back away from the electronic tide when you need to. Hold onto the part of you that would still do and believe what you do and believe if there were no media, no Internet, no Twitter, no 24-hour news cycle.

But also hold onto, or find,  people who want the kind of just, public-interested society you want to live in.

At a nightmarish time in which nihilism and cynical suspension of caring are, once again, tempting to many, our shared sense of what is possible for civilized society is one thing we have that cannot be taken away.

What we've learned so far from the non-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island: 2.

Here is the next in my running list:

2.) So much for body cameras.

It is being tweeted everywhere, and there is truth to it. If the videotaped killing of an unarmed man by a policeman using an illegal chokehold while the victim cries out repeatedly that he can't breathe, in a case subsequently ruled by the coroner as a homicide, can't get an indictment then an on-camera ISIS beheading in Washington, D.C. couldn't get an indictment. President Obama, feeling the heat from enraged voters who the Democrats hope won't boycott the 2016 election, might now be turning over furniture in search of a more satisfying declaration than his recent call for police body cameras. I suspect it wasn't an accident in timing that the administration announced yesterday the critical findings of its Cleveland Police brutality investigation.

Make no mistake: cameras can and do make a life-and-death difference. Had there been video of the Michael Brown altercation, it might have framed the issue in Ferguson, and the reaction to it, in ways we will never know. Having a video of the Rodney King police beating made the Cro-Magnon racism of the Simi Valley and its jury's not-guilty verdict infamous around the world. The Eric Garner video has done the same for Staten Island, where white bigotry and Blue Line police loyalty have been notorious for decades. Like the sometimes-belittled white-privilege-confessional of #CrimingWhileWhite, anything that bears public witness to injustice is a good thing. Cameras are good at that.

But racist bulwarks, like the grand jury pool in Staten Island and the long pattern of overwhelmingly-white Dixie-ish arrogance in Ferguson law enforcement, are very bad at responding appropriately to even irrefutable evidence.

Video won't fix that. Power will. That is why it took streets filled with outraged citizens to put militarized policing of black people into the mainstream of American news and politics. It is up to us to keep it there.