It's a jungle out there

My phone is dying.  I've just bought phones for everyone else in my family, so I'm trying to hold out for my own upgrade. The battery in my phone has about enough life left in it to get me from home to work most days, but I have to plug it in once I get there.  If I use it at all during the day, I have to make sure I charge it before it I leave.  I have a daily reminder to this effect to avoid those days when I'm ready to commute home and discover I have 12% battery left.  Some days, for whatever reason, I don't see the reminder.  I am on the train, reading emails or my book with music playing and then suddenly... nothing.   When this happens I find myself staring at the blackness of the screen in a state of conditioned expectancy for a bit longer than I should be.  I may forget or not bother to take the earbuds out of my ears.  Eventually, I look up and am faced with having to deal with the reality immediately in front of me.  If I weren't sitting on my ass within the confines of a train leaving this segment of my day in the hands of the transportation authority, I don't know what I'd do, but commuting is challenging enough.

When I look up, I realize that nearly everyone else has their eyes down in the direction of their laps.  Their batteries live.  It's comforting to think that in that moment I'm invisible, alone in a realm so removed from connectedness.  This unconnected realm-- there needs to be a word for it.  Meanwhile my fellow commuters are out there in connected reality, lost in their books, or their music or wandering the web. It gives one pause to contemplate it.  What are they all doing?  What fascinates them?  Some of them are using the down time to edify themselves, or "crossing stuff off the list" and "gettin' 'er done."  Most are no doubt frittering their time on a diversion.  Some are engaging with family, friends, colleagues on social media.  Some are trying to improve their lives, or fix the country, or save the planet.

Some-- you can imagine based on what could be interpreted as furtive glances about them between laser focused gazes back on their screens-- are getting into trouble.  Looking for satisfaction, looking for love, looking for fights.  Some are using the downtime to poke around the edges and dark spots, stimulating themselves with forbidden sensations.  This used to be impossible to do by yourself on a train underground.

The other day, my phone died in the middle of a search.  Believe it or not I was looking for a slur for British people to use in a joke I was writing in an email to my brother in the context of discussing the third bad middle brow British movie I'd seen in a month.  I had found a dictionary of pejoratives by ethnicity among the hits of my search, and on clicking on it, had just gotten a warning about the danger of the site I was going to when the screen suddenly went dark and turned my phone into an inert black mirror reflecting my quizzical face back at me.  My first thought was that I had breached some forbidden line and been busted and my rights to the web had been rescinded.  Served me right when I thought about what I was trying to do.  And then when I came back to my senses, I thought what if I had a heart attack at that moment and died, and the next person to access my phone were my wife or daughter.  What would they make of the fact that the last thing I was doing when I died was searching for ethnic slurs?  And why do I not already know a good bad word for British people?

I don’t know if it’s any consolation or if it mitigates things, but everyone using computers these days -- including me-- is a human, i.e., basically an ape.  The internet is horrible in terms of what it does do but it’s also amazing in terms of what it can do, so putting this powerful instrument in the hands of apes is going to result in weird search histories for everyone.   It’s frickin' bizarre when you get down to it.  Every ape is almost guaranteed to have shit on them in their search histories that other apes could take out of context and misconstrue right along with and next to the stuff that they could nail perfectly and perfectly construe.   It’s not just a case of “Nobody’s perfect ^_^”  It’s more like “Everybody is frickin' fucked up! < 8 0 “  Yes modern society contributes to that but I also think it’s part of the ape condition.  Not that anyone’s going to excuse anyone else on that basis—nor should they necessarily-- but I like to remember it from time to time.

Malagueña

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony no 14: 2. Allegretto. Malagueña (words by Federico García Lorca, translated to Russian by Anatoli Geleskul), Anne-Karin Mikonaho, soprano.   It's from García Lorca's first major book of poetry, Poema del cante jondo, written in 1921 but not published until 1931.  Within five years of its publication, García Lorca was dead, killed by an anti-Communist death squad in the Spanish Civil War.  His work was banned under the fascist Franco until 1953.  Shostakovich, who himself had an ambivalent relationship with the Soviet regimes under which he lived and worked, included the poem, now called Malagueña, in his 14th Symphony, a song cycle based on poems of García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and Wilhelm Küchelbecker, featuring a male basso, a female soprano and a chamber orchestra with percussion.  The piece premiered in Leningrad in 1969.  Many recordings of the second movement are far faster than I like, but the below (an excellent recording referencing a Swedish-Finnish soprano who appears to be depicted in the thumbnail, backed by a suspiciously unnamed orchestra-- possibly the Malmö Opera) is just right.

The recording ends abruptly, on purpose.  In performance it leads directly into the third movement (Allegro molto, Loreley, based on a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire).

Russian and Spanish lyrics are from http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=33305,

English translation and Russian transliteration are from
https://www.naxos.com/sungtext/pdf/8.573132_sungtext.pdf

Malagueña / Малагэнья
Federico García Lorca / Anatoli Geleskul

Смерть
вошла и ушла
из таверны.
Черные кони
и темные души
В ущельях

гитары бродят.

Запахли солью
и жаркой кровью
Соцветья зыби нервной.
А смерть
все выходит и входит
И все не уйдот
из таверны.

Translation:

Death walks in and out of the tavern.
Death walks in and out of the tavern.
Black horses and sinister people
wander the deep paths of the guitar.
And there’s a smell of salt and women’s blood
on the febrile spikenards* along the coast.
Death walks in and out,
out of and into the tavern walks death.

The original:

La muerte
entra y sale
de la taberna.

Pasan caballos negros
y gente siniestra
por los hondos caminos
de la guitarra.

Y hay un olor a sal
y a sangre de hembra,
en los nardos febriles
de la marina.

La muerte
entra y sale,
y sale y entra
la muerte
de la taberna.

For non-Russian readers who would like to sing along or compare the Russian to the Spanish:

Smert’ voshla i ushla iz tavernï.
Smert’ voshla i ushla iz tavernï.
Chyornïye koni i tyomnïye dushi
V ushchel’yakh gitarï, brodyat.
Zapakhli sol’yu i zharkoy krov’yu
Sotsvet’ya zïbi nervnoy.
A smert’ vsyo ukhodit
I vsyo ne uydyot iz tavernï.

~~~~~~~~
* "Febrile spikenards" is not only my new favorite insult, it's a direct translation of the Spanish "nardos febriles" in García Lorca's original.  "Соцветья зыби нервной," the Russian counterpart to this phrase in Geleskul's translation, translates less specifically but equally poetically as "nervously swollen blossoms."

Gag Reflex

When HBO aired a documentary version of Lawrence Wright's damning Scientology expose Going Clear a few years ago, the Hollywood Reporter published a 5-page response to the documentary from the Church.

Here’s a sample of the caliber of the response (links and footnotes mine):

Lastly, Lawrence Wright is obviously suffering from an acute case of jealousy of Mr. Hubbard and thus has tried to slander him out of spite. ... Mr. Hubbard was a writer—one of the giants of the Golden Age of pulp fiction, during the Great Depression. He was also the author of 13 New York Times bestsellers in the 1980s. Indeed, his works are published to this day in 50 languages and have sold hundreds of millions of copies, something Wright could only wish to accomplish. ... Mr. Hubbard was also a man who traveled the world and into the Far East, in the 1920s, studying and learning Eastern religions. And this at a time when most young men had never ventured beyond the boundaries of their own town. He was also a member of the famed Explorers Club and was awarded three expedition flags. He was also the youngest Eagle Scout in America at the age of 13, a licensed pilot at the advent of aviation, and a master mariner, licensed to captain any vessel on any ocean. In addition to all this, his greatest contributions to Mankind are his discoveries on the mind and spirit that form the Scientology religion. Millions of people around the world consider him their greatest friend for the help he has provided. ... He was recently named one of the most influential Americans* of all times in the Smithsonian Spring 2015 edition. 

One thing you have to give the Scientologists is that when they feel an official response from the Church is called for they are utterly guileless in their attacks.  They could put on a face of reasoned and measured but basically mild disagreement with their critics and confuse the hell out of everybody, but instead they come out in full lunatic mode. Are they so blind that they have no clue how this comes off?  Yes they are!

I was reminded of this by the response of AIPAC and establishment politicians and journalists to comments and tweets about the lobby's influence made recently by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.  For background (or a refresher) on what prompted Rep. Omar's comments go here.  For a reminder of why it is important to condemn Benjamin Netanyahu's right wing government and its deadly policy toward Palestinians in Israel go here.   As to the relevance of money to this topic, New York Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman (himself no Islamic Militant) has made much the same point as Rep. Omar about AIPAC's undue influence in American politics.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement arose largely on college campuses in protest of the injustice and deadly enforcement of apartheid policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right Likud party.  It was only in the context of Omar's tweets about it that I learned that 26 US states have already passed or decreed anti-BDS laws making support of BDS grounds for dismissal or termination of government contracts, a move which has already had consequences for dissenting individuals, notably in Texas  where it includes those receiving aid for the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.  In the United States of America!   Who let this happen?   This account of the successful stealth passage of legislation in California gives a flavor (apologies for the length, but it's instructive):

“We’re now at the point where, sad to say, the BDS movement has saturated the country to the extent that it is no longer so predictable—you can no longer focus on a discrete number of campuses,” LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus said at the StandWithUs conference.

Part of the idea behind moving the battleground to state legislatures is to find more favorable turf for the anti-BDS message, said pro-Israel activist Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, who has supported the nationwide legislative effort.

“You don’t want to fight on your enemy’s terrain,” Pollak said, speaking alongside Assemblyman Allen at the conference. The “enemy,” he said, “picked out campuses for a reason.”

Victories in state legislatures could subsequently spread to college campuses, said Pollak.

According to Pollak, legislating against BDS tells its proponents, “While you were doing your campus antics, the grown-ups were in the state legislatures passing laws that make your cause improbable.” The laws are meant to dent the morale of BDS advocates, who enjoy a number of advantages on campus, he said.

Among those advantages, the Palestinian narrative of Israeli “oppression” and “racism” holds a certain intrinsic pull for some minority communities, allowing groups like Students for Justice in Palestine to build diverse coalitions around their cause.

Roz Rothstein, the CEO of StandWithUs, admitted that when it comes to building diverse coalitions, “we’re very bad at that.”

“The other side is doing it to a fault—that’s all they do,” she said.

In essence, recognizing that anti-BDS laws are things that only an AIPAC funded legislator could love, organizations such as the Emergency Committee for Israel have worked aggressively with legislatures, lawmakers and governors to get these laws on the books, in essence giving cover to fundees for putting the screws to contractors and individuals doing business (or, apparently, needing assistance from the government!) who either support BDS or would balk at waiving their right to support it.  What would formerly be widely condemned to failure as a clear violation of first amendment rights, is now all but assured thanks to years of  stealth appropriation of legislatures and courts by anti-democratic libertarian forces funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers, the NRA and AIPAC among others, whose common cause is purchasing victories for their singular causes that  would be defeated if they were voted on in democratic elections.

In light of their massive success without public support or consultation, it no longer behooves the victors of these sorts of battles to put a pleasant face on their accomplishments.  But with the recent return of the House to Democrats in November, in the wave that brought Ilhan Omar, Alexandia Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and others to Washington, there is change in the air and dissension in the ranks.  Hence both the novelty of a Congresswoman bluntly critiquing the anti-BDS movement and the lobby that made it possible and the reflexive over-reaction from the predictable quarters.  When Rep Omar lampoons the motivation of politicians in doing the bidding of AIPAC in exchange for political contributions, or questions aloud the ethics of requiring lawmakers such as herself to place the interests of Benjamin Netanyahu's government over those of her constituents as anti-BDS legislation explicitly does, it's important to listen to her words and not be lulled by the comfortably reflexive charges of anti-semitism that are blatantly obvious attempts to shut down conversation.

While anti-Semitism must be called out wherever it appears (as in neo-Nazi marches with Tiki torches, defacements of and mass shootings in synagogues, the expression of prejudice, hatred, discrimination and slander against the Jewish people), as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, good faith criticism of the government of Israel is not anti-Semitic and should be protected.  When the pro-Netanyahu lobby goes behind closed doors to take freedom of speech away from Americans without their knowledge or consent, rather than reflexively hurl disingenuous slurs against its critics to stifle the ensuing outrage, it should brace itself for what happens when those coalitions that the opposition have been building to a fault (an opposition that includes and is led in part by Jews) mobilize.  What happens is not anti-Semitism.  It's democracy.

~~~~~

*  Technically he was on the Smithsonian's listicle of the top 10 most significant Religious leaders in American History-- a list that also included  Ellen G. White.  (I know, who?) The list was one of 10 counterpart lists of ten names in ten arbitrarily chosen areas compiled to be sold at supermarket checkout stands, and to give an indication of the scholarly rigor with which the lists were compiled, it also included Mary Pickford (Pop Icons), George W. Bush (Presidents), William M. "Boss" Tweed (Outlaws), Sarah Palin (Women), and Hulk Hogan (Athletes).

Four Remains

Speaking of poetry ...

{insert palate cleanser}

The day after my father retired from his job as an itinerant business machine salesman, he and my mother divorced.  It was a friendly divorce that my father had agreed to though it was not what he would have preferred. The next day, having already sold the house where they raised their four now adult children they moved into new homes, in new towns north of where they'd been and twenty miles apart from each other; my mother in a quaint cosy village close to her neighbors and close to town, my dad in a rustic cabin surrounded by a thick wood that kept the house obscured from the road and situated at a comfortable remove from neighbors.  My parents continued to see each other regularly but developed lives apart.

Always a bit of the odd man out in my house growing up with his love of both country music and opera, a flirtation with a wacky, conservative brand of politics and a fondness for talk radio, my father seemed to thrive in his new life.  He got a part time job working a counter at a dry cleaner's, and learned he had a knack for dealing with the public.  Never outgoing, but always a bit of a character and an eccentric, he found himself welcome in the rather artsy town closest to him.

He had been an only child, the only son of immigrants, a child also of his times: the great depression, World War II, the post-war boom that never quite boomed for him the way it had for others.  He grew up in the suburbs of New York but after struggling with a floor sanding business, he took the family on a vacation to Maine, fell in love with it, bought an old farmhouse to fix up and there we stayed.  He was a homebody, who spoke fluent Swedish and devoured facts about the world but never traveled.  But after 7 years of retirement, my mother talked him into taking a trip to Sweden that summer by himself to meet his relatives.  Reluctantly, overcoming deep insecurities and a heavy kind of Lutheran guilt at the indulgence, he finally agreed to go.  He had an amazing time.

When my mother picked him up at the airport in Boston on his return, he was pale and appeared to have lost weight.  He didn't recover after several days, and she made him see a doctor, where he learned he had advanced myeloma and not long to live.  When he asked how long, the doctor told him he didn't need to make any big purchases of firewood.  Winter was four months away.

He started transfusions, and began to finish things up and to say goodbye. I saw him over the summer and had planned to come up and see him again for what I assumed would be the last time over Labor Day.  I would take off from work the Friday before the holiday, drive up from the mid-Atlantic, pick up my brother in New York City and we'd be in Maine by evening.  Two days before, we got the news that he didn't make it.  My mother was with him, in his cabin in the woods, when he died.  The call came late Wednesday night. Knowing I had a scheduled vacation day on Friday, I foolishly went to work as usual on Thursday, telling no one about my news to avoid having to chat about it.  I wasn't particularly close to my father.  We all had difficult relationships with him though he mellowed in his final years. While he was sentimental about some things and had a good heart toward strangers and those in need, toward us he had a temper, and was critical and impossible to please.  He had no self-esteem, and had a way of making us feel we were in the way of other people when we were in public.  We grew up feeling that we were a source of great shame for him, a failing.  But Thursday was a sea of pain.

On Friday, I left early in the morning as scheduled,  stopped in New York for my brother and we got to Maine early enough to watch the waves roll onto the beach at York as twilight descended.  We continued up the coast to my mother's.  The next day we were at my father's.  Seeing his car in the driveway, his groceries in the fridge and the cupboards,  his dishes in the dish-rack, his mail in a stack, the little temporary messes he'd left here and there from whatever activities were in progress when the disease finally stilled him that if he were still around, he'd have cleaned up immediately, the only thing missing to animate the scene was him.  The interrupted quality of it brought home for me that death is really just the absence of life.

As we went through his stuff, there were his bird books and nature journals, his radios and pipe collections, his tools and sanding equipment from his life before business machine sales.  Every book had his name in thick black marker on an endpaper along with the date he'd come into it and who had given it to him, and was crammed with little newspaper clippings and hand-written notes.  He didn't talk to himself; he wrote to himself.  An inveterate law-giver, here everywhere were his little signs: LOW OVERHANG - WATCH YOUR HEAD!  TURN OUT LIGHT WHEN DONE - Thx!  DOUSE THAT BUTT!!  NO TRESPASSING - THIS MEANS YOU!!! 

Sometimes the signs were so ridiculous you could only roll your eyes:

PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  

The first time we saw it, in the side porch, it was just one of those absurd Dad enigmas that were familiar because they had played such a part in the background of our youth.  But in the basement workshop, a second appeared.  PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  What the hell?  Was he writing signs for his dog now?  It must have had a meaning for him.  In the garage, there it was again:  PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  One more was found over a workbench in the shed. As we made our way through his things, it became a refrain, a mysterious message from beyond, a presence.

When I returned home from Maine, the odd words echoed around in my brain for days, and then I wrote this: 

Four Remains

PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS
- Thanx Alot!

--The wording of four signs handwritten on cardboard and posted by my father at various times, in four different locations on his estate 

Please do not walk on all fours.
Your ass is getting fat.
To those you contort to let pass you
Do not give too much to look at.
Better to lean tall and thin--
Less seen--
As a shadow on a wall. Obscure,
But not dark.  Less contrast please!
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Are you a baby or a man?
Please don't drool and stop that blubbering;
Don't need need need;
Don't shit in your pants.
The world does not exist to please you.
No one else is going to feed you.
You alone made your circumstance.
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Do not squat, gnawing on a bone.
If you do not belong it's because your race is new.
Therefore, look up, rise up, climb, arise,
Move up from where you came.
Your hands are needed.  They effect change.
They help, they rake, they write, they make.
Stand up.  Evolve.
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Do not walk facing the grave--

Thanx alot!

Farm Implements and Rutabagas

Sea Hag by Elzie Segar

And now for something completely different, a poem:  Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape by John Ashbery.  (Please follow the link for the full text).  It's a sestina, a complex form in which six selected words are repeated six times each at the end of a line in a prescribed rotating order in six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three line envoi using all six words.  The repeated words in Ashbery's poem are thunder, apartment, country, pleasant, scratch and spinach.  Don't miss the poet's reading of it here.

The dumbed down Popeye of the 1950s as spokes-sailor for the humanities-industrial complex

Enter Stage Left

2016 Democratic Primary Results by Primary and by Convention Roll Call (source: Wikipedia)

Last week, Bernie Sanders of Vermont declared his candidacy for the 2020 US presidential election.  As in 2016, rather than bypass the primary process and run as an independent (as Starbucks billionaire and political dilettante Howard Schultz says he will do),  Sanders, who has caucused with the Democrats for as long as he has held national office, has again entered the Democratic race.  As in 2016, the candidacy of this unapologetic Democratic Socialist is a thrill for many, a muddle for some, and a threat to an influential group of others.  What the muddled and the threatened have in common (other than perhaps unfinished business with regard to events of 2016) is an argument that perhaps the Democratic race should be confined to actual Democrats.

An example of this is this brief commentary by John Stoehr at Washington Monthly.  The title of the piece is the first sentence:

Bernie Sanders is still not a Democrat. Now that the independent senator has made his run for president official, that fact bears repeating. When you want the nomination of a political party, your commitment to that party matters, especially to its members who are going to select their nominee.

Because Sanders is not a Democrat, he must find a coalition outside the party that is of two minds: those who are attached to the Democratic Party for arbitrary reasons, and those who are hostile to it. I’m not talking about Democrats who want the party to go in new directions. I’m talking about voters with weak ties to the party, who may have a history of supporting its nominees, but who are generally hostile to the very idea of political parties.

The kernel of Stoehr's argument is in this paragraph:

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there are enough voters outside the party who want what Sanders is selling. If there are, I don’t think they are as mobilized as Democratic partisans in the current anti-Donald Trump climate. Partisan commitments are categorical. I suspect there aren’t enough voters inside the party to lift Sanders to the nomination, because, really, why vote for him when you can vote for [Elizabeth] Warren? 

Shouldn't we welcome the opportunity to give primary voters the chance to answer that question for themselves?

I'm not a political scientist, but it seems counterintuitive to me to say that there is not a constituency for Bernie Sanders' message either inside or outside the Democratic party, presumably drawing voters in.  Using data from Wikipedia on the 2016 Primary, I created the table below.  Recalling that there was a concerted effort against Sanders on the part of party officials in the primary to such a degree that when it was outed by Wikileaks in the heat of the Democratic National Convention in July it forced the resignation of the head of the DNC following Clinton's nomination, Sanders' performance was extraordinary.

2016 Democratic Primary Results

		Clinton		Sanders
Primary Results	Primaries won (Convention roll call-- NH declared a tie)	34  (40)	59.65% (70.17%)	23  (14)	40.35% (28.07%)
	Votes Cast (excluding results of closed caucuses and non-binding primaries)	16,847,084	55.20%	13,168,222	43.14%
Votes Cast in Primaries by Primary Type* (percentages are of votes cast for either Clinton or Sanders) *excludes caucuses	Semi-open	696,681	56.55%	535,395	43.45%
	Open	6,363,700	57.13%	4,776,063	42.87%
	Semi-closed	4,942,794	53.42%	4,310,674	46.58%
	Closed	5,177,733	58.70%	3,643,322	41.30%
	Totals	17,180,908	56.43%	13,265,454	43.57%
Delegates	Delegates needed to win nomination	2,382
	Pledged Delegates (from Primary Votes)	2,271	55.51%	1,820	44.49%
	Unpledged (Super-)Delegates (Party VIPs)	571	92.69%	45	7.31%

In spite of Clinton's inevitability* going into the race, Sanders acquitted himself repeatedly.  He performed equally well in open and in closed primaries (i.e., those in which registered voters of any party are able to vote for their choice of Democrat versus those in which only  registered Democrats may vote for the nominee.)  Tellingly, the map of wins by state reveal a North South polarity with Sanders making almost a clean sweep across the open primary states of the north including what turned out to be the all-important Wisconsin and Michigan, compared to the familiar coastal-landlocked polarity of the general election. Sanders, who takes no corporate money, did worst among the unpledged Super delegates-- the party apparatchiks and VIPs beholden to the moneyed interests that donate heavily to Democratic war chests to keep its agenda in the center.  His performance in general voting belies the notion that voters ostensibly selecting their preferred Democratic nominee rejected Sanders' strictly on the basis of his Independent affiliation.  Sanders' presence on the Democratic ballot was considered a novelty at the time, but it provided a bookend to the hiatus from politics as usual that Donald Trump's steamroller represented on the hyper crowded Republican end of the spectrum.  Something was in the water.

Sanders is going into the 2020 race with a great deal of momentum carried over from his 2016 effort as his record breaking fundraising on the day of his announcement demonstrated.  By many accounts if Joe Biden enters the race, the very wide field will narrow quickly to essentially just the two.  Setting aside my own violent intestinal reaction to the idea of Joe Biden (busing opponent, plagiarist, mandatory drug sentencing proponent, Clarence Thomas enabler, Thurmond and McCain acolyte, constituent glommer) as nominee let alone president, if he insists on running why shouldn't he, too, be given a run for his money in the rigorous trial by primary and caucus that Sanders is volunteering himself for.

This is the delicate dance that must happen in primary season.  The perpetual tension between the party old guard and challenges to the status quo from the upstart avant-garde seem always to favor those whose "time has come", whose "dues have been paid"-- the hand-picked, the inevitable-- over fresh blood, new ideas and threats of actual change that matters, but primary season is a waste of time if it doesn't infuse each campaign with the dreams of its constituents.  The American political system is a two party system-- all other voices are shut out after Labor Day when all that are left are the two major party nominees from whom only one will be chosen by voters in November and the spoilers for the one who will lose.  The system is resistant to change and yields almost no opportunity for coalitions to be forged.  This hardly mattered when business as usual was good enough.  Now the stakes are too high for partisan politics to trump (pardon  the expression) voting for the future of the planet.  Partisan politics is nothing more than an obstacle to the task at hand, and sadly it's all that we have to work with.

Perhaps Bernie Sanders has found a way around this. The party lost me for 20 years starting in the Bill Clinton years due to a steady course of triangulation, stagnation, corruption and retreat from progressive action.  Bernie Sanders brought me back.

(Source: Wikipedia)

~~~~~

* There is undoubtedly lingering (misplaced) resentment directed at Bernie Sanders and his supporters for what happened after Clinton won the nomination.  For a vivid analysis of why democrats would do well to learn from what Clinton herself could have done to tighten the screws on her own campaign (regardless of any and every force-- real or imagined-- beyond her control you could name that was against it) and why failure to do so is asking for a repeat of history in 2020, this lengthy piece by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs rewards the read. 

Who's afraid of Virginia?

Mark Herring, Ralph Northam and Justin Fairfax

It may be hard to believe but unspeakable (as heck) holds almost no sway over political outcomes in Virginia, a state we do not reside in.  Nevertheless, we feel compelled to speak about recent developments in the commonwealth in an effort to attempt to shine some light on the significance and implications of an absurdly chaotic series of unfortunate events in recent days.  At this writing, we don't know how we feel about it, but we hope to correct that through the application of our patented method of reasoning and crafting of pleasing sounding sentences in the service, we hope, of getting at truth in some measure, however ugly or inconvenient.

As a refresher, Ralph Northam won a surprisingly decisive victory over republican Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial election, in what many saw as a referendum on Trump a year into his presidency.  Northam had openly made a case for himself as an anti-Trump in political ads throughout the campaign (in one of which he famously referred to the president as a "narcissistic maniac"), and in response, Trump had heavily endorsed longtime Republican operative Gillespie in typical fashion, on Twitter.   Gillespie himself had not so subtly taken the side of the Charlottesville white-supremacists (and the dog-whistler-in-chief) on the question of preserving confederate statues in Virginia.  In an election that had the highest voter turnout in 20 years, Northam defeated Gillespie by nearly 9 percentage points, 53.9% to 45.0%.   More than 33% in exit polls said their vote was in protest of Trump, versus less than 20% who reported their vote to be cast in support of the new president.  Northam received more than 80% of the African American vote-- an increase from the prior gubernatorial election. 

A year later, it's clear that Northam has made good on his promise with several initiatives: most notably expansion of Medicaid and raising of the minimum threshold for grand larceny in the state from $200 to $500 (a small move with big positive consequences for the state's most desperate citizens).  In keeping with the theme of decriminalizing poverty, initiatives for 2019 include relaxing of marijuana laws, and strengthening and expanding arenas in which women can exercise choice in family planning.  In December Northam released a budget increasing financial aid and tuition grants and requiring schools in Virginia to adhere to standards ensuring predictability in raising tuition.  Also included was increased expenditure on affordable housing and funds earmarked for legal and rent assistance to reduce Virginia's eviction rate, one of the highest in the nation.  In essence, his administration has been vigilant in keeping the needs of Virginia's poorest on the agenda-- vindicating the hopes of those who elected him. This is in the state that gave us the confederacy, George Mason University and the cruelly ironically named "public choice economics."  This is in the state that rather than integrate schools as mandated by the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board decision in the 1950's closed public schools where that could happen for up to five years.

For this reason, the stealth reveal of racist content on Northam's 1984 Medical School yearbook page (discovered by the Breitbart affiliated pro-Trump Republican propaganda outlet out of North Carolina, Big League Politics-- conveniently and probably not coincidentally in the heat of debate on a bill to roll back invasive requirements for women seeking abortions in Virginia behind which Northam was throwing his support and his nuanced medical expertise) produced the expected reaction: public outrage, shock and dismay, and rapidly escalating calls for Northam's resignation most notably from nearly every major democratic figure in Virginia including Virginia's first and so far only African American governor, democrat Douglas Wilder as well as Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, the African American democratic leader who first recruited Northam to run for office.  And so it should have-- the photo appearing directly under his name was of someone (was it Northam?) dressed as an outrageously racist stereotype in blackface glad-handing with someone (Northam?) in Ku Klux Klan robes, drinks in hand.  Northam apologized within hours for his poor judgment in appearing in the photo although he did not say which figure was him.  His backpedaling on appearing in the photograph the next day did not help his case which was further murked up by his admission that while not in the photo on his yearbook page he had worn blackface to impersonate Michael Jackson on another occasion later that year in order to enter a dance contest performing a moonwalk.  Northam was 24 when his medical school yearbook was issued and 25 at the time of the dance contest.  By all accounts, whether he was in the yearbook photo or not, the photo was likely submitted for inclusion on his page, under his name by Northam himself.  If true, who can fathom the reason?

It was not difficult to see the day the story broke that perhaps Northam's past had justifiably caught up with him in a way that necessitated his resignation from office.  Northam, a privileged child of the Eastern shore of Virginia (like so many in the south, rich and poor, the great great grandson of a slave owner as he reportedly discovered only recently when his father had the family's genealogy done) graduated as salutatorian from Virginia Military Institute in 1981, and followed that with 3 years at Eastern Virginia Medical School of notorious yearbook fame*.  He served in the army for 8 years afterward, retiring after serving in the Gulf War in 1991, during which he tended to the wounded at Landstuhl Regional Medical Facility in Germany.  On returning to the states he practiced as a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins, specializing in epilepsy.  He describes himself as apolitical throughout this period, by way of explaining votes cast for George W Bush in 2000 and 2004 prior to running for public office for the Virginia State Senate for the first time, as a Democrat in 2007.   Perhaps he accepted the call from the party to run as a  Democrat for strategic reasons since he was unopposed in his first primary, however if so, the strategy paid off in that he defeated his Republican 2-time incumbent opponent by nearly 10% his first time out.  From the start he pursued liberal legislation with a great deal of success.  His ascent through Virginia politics thereafter was rapid, culminating in a term as Lt Governor under his predecessor in the Governor's office Terry McAuliffe before Northam's successful gubernatorial candidacy in 2017.

Calling for Northam to resign when his voluntary resignation was not forthcoming was a no-brainer on Saturday when that meant handing the office to his Lieutenant Governor, Justin Fairfax, who would be Virginia's second African American governor.  But by Monday evening a story had broken, again on Big League Politics that hinted almost unambiguously that Fairfax had forced Vanessa Tyler, now an associate professor of politics at Scripps College in Claremont, California, to perform oral sex on him in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.  Fairfax denied the allegation.  The Washington Post had been given the story in 2018 but been unable to corroborate it.   However on Friday a second woman alleged that Fairfax had raped her when both were students at Duke University in 2000.  Now both Northam and Fairfax looked done for in Virginia politics.  Almost before anyone had a chance to recognize that next in the line of succession was Attorney General Mark Herring, Herring volunteered a confession and an apology that he himself had made a poor decision as 17 year old high school student to wear black face and a wig to impersonate rapper Kurtis Blow at a party.

If it sounds like a Republic dream come true it's because to a large extent it is.  Should Northam, Fairfax and Herring all be forced to resign (or be removed) from their offices, the next in line for Governor would be Kirk Cox, speaker of the Virginia House and a Republican.  While Virginia's constitution stipulates that a governor cannot succeed him or herself, Cox being unelected would most likely be allowed to run for the office 'for real' at the end of his term and if successful would have the longest incumbency of any modern Virginia governor.  (It's interesting to note that Kirk Cox was chosen by chance as speaker when he tied with another Republican in votes for the job and his name was pulled out of a hat to decide the matter as required by House procedures.)

So the question at hand is should Northam resign? As of this writing, the governor appears to have decided for himself that the answer is no, but the matter feels far from settled.  Republicans of course are gleefully rubbing their hands over the possibility of a trifecta-- in essence a coup by attrition-- in Virginia.  On a recent Bill Maher, former Georgia Congressman and current Trump mouthpiece Jack Kingston suggested that there might be hypocrisy in Democrats giving Northam a pass on a racist yearbook photo when Brett Kavanaugh was called on questionable behavior in his past in his nomination process for a Supreme Court seat,  (never mind that his nomination was pushed through in spite of the damning testimony against him). But, Kavanaugh's behavior was not merely offensive.  Kavanaugh's behavior had actual victims.  And while Kavanaugh's judicial behavior demonstrates that his professional attitudes remain stunted at his high school mentality, Northam's legislative accomplishments and goals speak of growth and reform. It isn't up to me, and that is how it should be.  But I'm inclined to agree with Dahleen Glanton of the Chicago Tribune that in this case, the political motives of those outing Northam's past should not be shrugged off as irrelevant.

But let's ask the people of Virginia what they think.  A Washington Post poll tonight indicates that Virginians are evenly split (47% to 47%) on whether he should remain in office.  Tellingly, while whites narrowly favor Northam's departure (48% to 46%), African American Virginians are strongly in favor of Northam remaining in office by 58% to 37%.

Not quite so open and shut to those to whom it matters most.
~~~~~
* Eastern Virginia Medical School's wikipedia page reports a tradition of raucous collegiality among the small student body including a custom of dressing up in costume according to theme on Match Day each spring, when the graduating class receives notification of where they will be spending their residencies.  The tradition was ended by the school in 2016.  Furious searching has failed to turn up the theme for Match Day 1984.