alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

White supremacists duck in at DC's Lafayette Park. Again.

 

KKK March down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, 1925 (Photo: Getty)

 

Crowd opposing KKK march to Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, 1982 (Photographer unknown)

 

Facing white supremacists at Lafayette Park,  Washington, DC, 2018 (Photo: Bruce A. Jacobs)

 

The August 12, 2018 embarrassment for Jason Kessler and his knucklehead squad was not the first time that white supremacist goons have targeted Washington, DC and the city's Lafayette Park. It follows at least one infamous Ku Klux Klan event in Lafayette Park, and others in historic parts of this city as well. For instance:

- In 1925, at the height of the KKK's popularity (it had 5 million members), 35,000 KKKers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue as if they owned the place. In many ways they did: U.S. lynchings peaked at more than 100 a year between the 1890s and the early 1900s, and legally-codified racial brutality, segregation, and discrimination were considered acceptable by the ruling white mainstream.

- In 1982, two years after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, a far smaller Klan contingent of 12 members faced thousands of enraged counter-protesters, some of whom overturned cars and mixed it up with police. From a New York Times account at the time:

"Eleven police officers were injured, none seriously, in the melee, and 38 demonstrators were arrested. Before order was restored, two cars had been overturned, at least two stores had been looted and windows in several buildings, including the historic home of James Madison, had been smashed.

Klan leaders had predicted that as many as 200 of their members would march from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the rally. Instead, about three dozen Klansmen showed up and, on the advice of the police, changed their plans in order to stay clear of numerous anti-Klan groups demonstrating by the hundreds at points along the route.

The Klansmen canceled the march down the avenue and drove in a police motorcade to Lafayette Park. They left their white robes in shopping bags during the 15-minute gathering, which was more of a question-and-answer session with reporters than a full-fledged rally. When it ended, the police swiftly escorted the Klansmen out of town."

1982's parallels to Sunday's event 36 years later are striking: Racists with blood on their hands call for hundreds of attendees, nearly all of them are scared away, and the handful who show up are baby-sat by police escorts to Lafayette Park, where they pose for the press before police quickly usher them back out of town to safety. It amounts to a police-guarded photo op, at massive public expense, for ninny bullies who for centuries have ducked the concept of meritocracy, let alone a fair fight.

And there is still the dangerous question of the factual meaning of free speech. More on that coming, to be sure, but the above pieces of history, about which I've just learned, come first.

Thanks to Allie. 

#WaitingAtStarbucksWhileBlack.

You may have already heard – see Melissa DePino’s Twitter feed – about two innocent black patrons being forcibly hauled away from a Starbucks by Philadelphia’s finest. Bulldozer-through-the-drywall ambushes like this, day after routine day, decade after lived decade, are what white privilege really, truly looks like

Driving/walking/shopping/dining-while-black are intolerable clichés because of their insane normality: they happen constantly and brutally to people of color who are not believed when we report them, and they never, ever happen to white people to whom these experiences sound like some impossibly dystopian nightmare.

One of the redeeming qualities of cell phones – which have done plenty to deaden us to the immediacy of our surrounding human company – is that they can now instantly and globally deliver video of happenings that non-affected people have previously found easy to dismiss as mere stories. No more. Today, the only remaining people who will defend what happened on April 12 to two black men awaiting a white friend at a Starbucks in Philadelphia are those who would eagerly wait on a hearth on Christmas Eve for a Ku Klux Klan Santa Claus to descend though the chimney bearing personal gifts for white supremacists.

Handwritten note to American white people: Awful things that have never happened to you happen every day to black Americans, and they happen with the authority and approval of official institutions of public safety, including Philadelphia’s police department, led by a black chief.

We black and brown citizens, however, will not tolerate this. Will you, as a white citizen, remain silent? Or will you join us in the imperative to do unto others as you would have done unto you?

The supreme irony is that Starbucks’ notoriously bitter brand of roasted coffee is nowhere near worth getting arrested for in the first place.

How Do We Get Rid of Trump?

Short of some single-minded soul’s borrowing one of Trump’s insinuations and giving him the Second Amendment treatment – which would place the United States at the mercy of the smarter and more efficiently hateful monster Mike Pence – what will it really take to rid ourselves of the lethal Trump regime?

Like a primordial predator that can kill with its eyes closed, Donald Trump is idiotically expert at destruction. His arsenal of continual chaos is, so far, keeping an entire society’s alleged defenses of due process at bay. Any one of them – the Mueller investigation is a good possibility – could bring him down. But, like any great con man, Trump is a deadly master of distraction and deflection.

So what will it take to rid ourselves of Trump and his terrible reign of supremacist rage?

• Trump voters, even the most demure, will need to own responsibility for having empowered wickedness that they claim to not embrace. It makes no difference that you’re “not a racist” or that you “don’t like the sonofabitch but liked some of his policies” or that you “just wanted somebody to shake things up.” As Charles Blow has said, in effect, if you voted for Trump after hearing the things he said he would do, you are now responsible for his having done them. This is on you, bamboozled white avengers. Own it.

• Liberal-leaning voters need to ditch, once and for all, the corporate incrementalist lie that we can’t risk a flat-out audacious, in-your-face progressive economic and political campaign in the next presidential election. If Trump’s success with a thoroughly phony but blisteringly audacious “the system is rigged” pitch – laced with virulent racism, no less – could win an election but lose the popular vote, a truthfully in-your-face progressive call to jettison what is broken and to champion what is fair in America can only do better. Progressives need to own that. We need to swat away the alleged leadership of the money-wedded Democratic Party. Through our own voicing of what most Americans continually say they need and want – universal health care, an end to big money in politics, higher wages for the non-rich and higher taxes for the rich – we need to rise, in the streets and online and in candidacies, and exert national leadership that the Democratic Party, if it is smart, might then follow.

• I’ll keep saying it: Americans need to redefine normal. “Normal” is not the silence that reporters and money-backed politicians subject us to about the constant atrocities of corporate control over public policy on health and education and policing and war. Normal should be, instead, a very public reckoning on those devastating realities. Trump cashed in on that trauma. Progressives can do far better than that for this country.

Fascism happens one agonized personal concession at a time.

This is the mistake we make: We think that the troops and the tanks and the ovens appear all at once, a firestorm of evil that we can track from a distance and wall out of our towns and our jobs and our decisions.

But these are the ways it actually happens:

• Your boss tells you to do what is ordered or lose the paycheck that keeps your kid out of jail or keeps your sick loved one out of the morgue.

• As an employee, you simply know, you are certain beyond all doubt, that a national leader this horrific cannot possibly last in a society like ours. So you keep your head down and you do what you are told. And you wait for it to end. And you wait. And wait.

• The incredible days of incredulous journalists reporting impossible things begin to blur together until it feels less and less unusual for the president to talk not just like a cynic or a crook, but like a madman.

• Police officers and soldiers, who swear to an oath that assumes that obedience to official authority in our society is a just cause, follow their oaths. For some uniformed recruits, the jackboots and shields of a bullying posse are irresistible perks.

• Politicians, who assume that the public deserves what it submits to, hold their noses and stow their valuables and follow their fortunes. Or they quit politics.

• Teachers teach what they are told to teach or, in growing numbers, they quit teaching.

• Health practitioners, including mental health specialists, make choices: they condemn and fight against the mad leadership and the physical and mental torture embraced by their freshly unleashed nation, or they calculate to aid and abet it, or they shut up about it.

• Reporters make choices, too: they defiantly report reality in the face of blacklisting by a regime of “alternative facts,” or they quit and denounce the amoral enterprise of filtered storytelling, or they smile and cooperate with the authorities.

We are all making these choices. Right now. So I am talking to myself as well as to you: Please. Do not confuse what is expedient with what is true.

How the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad happened.

You know about the already-infamous much-ridiculed Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial, in which a Caucasian-stock-photo beautiful young woman joins a lefty protest line, strikes the iconic pose of young black demonstrator Ieshia Evans face-to-face with a row of militarized police officers, and then releases a fount of peace and love by offering an officer a Pepsi.

You also know everything that is tragically and stupidly and absurdly wrong with that commercial.

But now, a former advertising agency VP – me – will tell you exactly how that unforgivable commercial got made. I should know. I’ve been in scores of those meetings and I’ve seen precisely how this jaw-dropping outcome unfolds a step at a time.

Here’s how it happens:

First, the ad agency’s account executive on the Pepsi business calls a meeting with the agency’s creatives. S/he explains that Pepsi’s marketing director wants to associate the brand with today’s younger demographic of social consciousness, but Pepsi also doesn’t want to blunder by coming down on one political side or the other. Trump voters and cops and Black Lives Matter protestors and liberal young people all buy Pepsi. The commercial has to honor the moment without losing any goodwill.

So the creative strategy – that’s the name for it in the industry – is to attach Pepsi to what people on all sides of America’s battle want: peace. Agreement about what’s good. Not having to fight any more. Having a moment where your ostensible enemy comes around to where you are. With a smile.

That’s the charge, declares the account executive. A detailed document spells out the specifics – demographics, media, emotional tone, product personality, budgeted length of message (in seconds), expense limits for production and paid media time – for the agency creatives.

Next, in a sleek, comfortably-outfitted corporate space hospitable to spontaneity, very smart and very clever people bounce ideas around until they land on a concept, which they hone into a rough treatment of a commercial, which makes its way through rounds of survival-of-the-fittest presentations until, climactically, it is shown to the client, Pepsi’s marketing director. The marketing director – maybe with a bellowed “Yes!!” or maybe with days of fretful hedging or maybe with caveats that revise the commercial – approves it. Kendall Jenner’s people are approached. She and they say yes. It’s produced. It goes on the air.

But what is crucial here is that all of the credentialed and talented players who have decisive power in this chain of events are bubbled, highly-paid hot shits who have no personal awareness whatsoever of what drives a young black woman to risk her life in the face of lethally-armed agents of the state.

That is how a stream of politically liberal, fabulously educated, well-intentioned professionals, including a celebrity, labored to make, approve, and air a commercial that defecated on the actual act of racial and political resistance.

It's the business.

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?

Re: being "too angry" about President Donald Trump.

A reader, after seeing my post about Trump’s privileged hypocrisy over Mike Pence’s being booed at Hamilton, observed that she would have re-posted it on Facebook but my message was too angry.

As it happens, I wouldn’t have posted it on Facebook, either, because Facebook, unlike a blog or column, is a chat room intertwined with people’s personal lives. But her comment begs a larger question, which some of we progressives (especially we progressives of color) hear a lot, about our being “too angry” about our nation’s cruelties and injustices, including those of the ascension and incoming regime of Donald Trump.

So, for the record: Not being angry about Trump’s obscenity – and the 400 years of rich white straight male presumption to which it appeals – is a luxury that I do not have. Millions of we black and brown Americans, and disenfranchised white Americans, have been very angry for a long time, with good reason, and it is now long past time for those who have enjoyed a bubble of privileged “normalcy” (by race, gender, orientation, religion, or plain denial) to catch up with the larger reality. The new rich-take-all normal for an increasing swath of suffering white Americans is the old normal for many of the rest of us, and we will not wait to act while those who have been relatively sheltered from these centuries of abuse now fret over how angry they are willing to be.

If now, after all this, is not a time to be angry, what is? America flirts passionately with fascism, in a chilling parallel to the way in which the intelligentsia of 1930s Germany mocked the seemingly ludicrous appeal of the legally-elected Adolf Hitler, but anger would too greatly disturb the daily routines of those who wish it were not so? Imagine how it would sound today to have told fervent anti-fascists during the rise of the Third Reich, “You’re too angry in your opposition to Hitler! Your protests are too inflammatory for me to share them with my friends.”

At a certain point of extremist national change, previous “normal” standards for everyday conversation and political opinion no longer apply, whether those who have been relatively insulated care to acknowledge it or not. Being afraid to be angry about a modern norm of economic and human rights outrages, and clinging instead to mild-mannered Democratic Party business-as-usual prescriptions (Clinton’s “Stronger Together” platform never even came close to addressing the need and desire for deep economic and political change) at a time when many people's lives are falling apart, lost Hillary this election.

Anger – grounded in a righteous love of fairness and of building a better society for one another – is an appropriate and necessary response. Repressing or denying the anger is worse, both for the health of the country and for our personal well-being as people who hunger for better (and who often suffer and die for the privilege, whether through stress-induced illness or selective targeting by police and policy).

Some of us are forced to that recognition sooner than others.

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.