Life in the "Post-Truth" Era

Yes, the OED just listed post-truth as its word of the year, beating out alt-right and woke. I don't have the strength to list the many ways journalism failed us in 2016, but Christiane Amanpour gave a pretty good speech the other day on how threatened our media should feel in Trump Nation.

I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.

Yeah, me too.

Privatizing Washington

The Trump transition just looks like chaos. There is clearly an underlying theme: privatization. You have a Secretary of Education who wants to privatize education. You have a VA Secretary who wants to privatize VA hospitals. You have potential choices for Secretary of the Interior who are all for developing public lands and a Health and Human Services Secretary who wrote the bill to overturn ACA. You have a guy in the running for Transportation whose specialty is private-public partnerships.

Oh, and you have the serious mention of David Petraeus for Secretary of State—although maybe he's just a red herring? Because when you just won an election by threatening to jail a former Secretary of State for failing to secure possibly classified materials, why not give the job to a guy who was convicted of doing just that (and is still on probation, btw)?

Meanwhile, back home, people are coming out of the woodwork to join the Democratic committees. Safety in numbers? Doing something is better than doing nothing? Motivation doesn't matter; it's a slight stirring of rebellion, and we'll take it.

Mired in Ire

I seem to have taken a left turn from Depression and landed back in Anger, which I'm taking out on family, friends, and random tire salesmen. Chief on my irklist, in no particular order:

• Trump trolls
• mansplaining misogynists
• Bernie canonizers who believe without evidence that he could have won
• Cornell Review and most alumni commenters on the Cornell Daily Sun
• people who won't admit that the GOP has no answer for the white working class, either
• professor watchlists
• apologists who apply Good Nazi language to Trump supporters
• anyone who thinks Giuliani would make a fine Secretary of State
• people who are cool with the Great Migration but can't imagine uprooting coal miners or small city white folks
• people who say, "the Party's elitist, but I'm not" or "Trump's racist, but his followers aren't"
• emboldened racists and antiSemites
• many of the hideous families described in Pantsuit Nation
• everyone mentioned as a possible Trump cabinet member

Civics Engineering

There's been a lot of blather about Party hegemony this election season, and while I don't entirely discount it, I also know that it's a lot harder to be elitist on the local level. Every newly registered voter in our county is invited to join the local committee. What we haven't been good at is educating people about what that means. And of course, it's hard to get past the fact that upper-class, educated elites are society's joiners, which perpetuates that kind of hegemony. I carried baby Olivia in a car seat to committee meetings, but not every parent can do that.

I just took the opportunity to do some of that initial, critical educating in my first column for Tompkins Weekly. They reached out to me post-election, probably feeling sorry for us, but offering me 800 words monthly, which I happily accepted. It gives me a chance to do the kind of outreach and education (what's a caucus? how do I run for office? when do I need to re-register to vote?) that we as a committee have not been able to do because local media have been generally loath to help us do it. (When I've advertised for potential candidates, the response of the Ithaca Journal has typically been: "That's your job, not ours.")

We'll make the effort, but again, it comes down to how many people take the time to read 800 words on civics in a local paper with modest readership. Many other steps will be necessary to reach the people who should be included but currently are not.

Most people have no clue how the electoral process works; that was evidenced by how many otherwise educated people were flummoxed by the primary system in NYS (which is stupid and exclusive but really very simple). Paul thinks it's because we no longer teach civics (we do, but not terribly well).  I think it's because people don't much care how the sausage is made until it makes someone sick.

Required Reading

Matt Taibbi may have been as wrong as anyone else, but he was worth reading every step of the way. Two days post-election, he railed at himself and his elite media colleagues for their failures.

We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.

Dear Rest of the World, Sorry

I heard from two people today about the joys of explaining Trump Nation to foreigners. One mentioned the difficulty of predicting what will happen next to people who are genuinely afraid of the possible effects on their U.S.-allied nations. One said that in the countries he deals with, people recognize that governments are f*cked up and don't represent the populace, and only idiot Americans would imagine that the system should work.

So it's a matter of perspective. Nevertheless, the grotesquerie of the Romney v. Giuliani feud should probably make all nations on earth duck and cover. Romney "looks the part." Giuliani is a raving lunatic with dubious international connections. The whole transition employment plan
seems like a casting call for a horror film.

DeVos in de Henhouse

If you want to rid yourself of a pesky Department of Education, put someone in charge who never attended public schools, whose children never attended public schools, who basically doesn't approve of public schools, whose public work has all been about moving money out of public schools and into charters and private (especially religious) schools, whose husband made his billions on a pyramid scam and whose brother founded America's most successful mercenary group.

Choose someone who has sat on the board of a group that advocates bringing back child labor.

You can talk about the dangers of coal mining or selling newspapers on the street. But let’s not pretend that danger is something that every young teen wants to avoid.

Choose someone whose husband almost single-handedly made Michigan a right-to-work state.

This is a pretty good compilation of articles on the DeVos family's work to eradicate public education and destroy public unions.

Thankful

As we plunge into the Thanksgiving holiday, starting with tonight's traditional lobster-fest via Marblehead, MA, I am truly thankful that we don't have to ban politics from the table, because we're all more or less on the same page.

Yes, there's the millennial who scoffs at the likelihood of public protest affecting change, and the occasional hopeful bleat that maybe things won't be so terribly bad... but at least we don't have to contend with family members who are gleeful and giddy as all of us sit in that big old melting pot waiting for the water to boil.

Impeach Pence First

Click here to see...

Mike Pence never met an unborn child he didn't want to protect. He served 12 years in the House and 4 as governor of Indiana, so he, unlike Trump, has a long voting record. When he took the Political Courage Test as a Congressman in 2008, he wanted to greatly increase spending on intelligence operations and national missile defense and greatly decrease UN expenses. He wanted to slightly decrease all taxes but greatly decrease inheritance and capital gains taxes. He supported no principles regarding campaign finance and government reform. He wanted mandatory sentences for drug sellers and supported the death penalty. He wanted to increase development of fossil fuel energy sources, eliminate federal education standards, and let individuals carry concealed weapons. He wanted English as the official national language. He opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and rejected same-sex marriage, but he was fine with privatizing Social Security.

And then he became governor, and lots of bills passed his desk that met his standards. He signed bills authorizing the possession of sawed-off shotguns and bills prohibiting the government from "burdening the exercise of religion." He authorized concealed weapons on school property, repealed the Common Core Standards, and signed that famous bill requiring women to determine the final disposal method of their aborted fetuses.

In short, Mike Pence is exactly who you might expect him to be: a super conservative, minimal-government guy, except when he's in your bedroom or womb.

Be careful what you wish for, those who are hoping for an early Trump impeachment based on violation of the emoluments clause. Pence is a theocrat and a super-scary guy. Just ask the few surviving Indiana Democrats.

I'm Not an Anti-Semite; I Love Israel!

There are plenty of reasons for an alt-right anti-Semite to be a Zionist, as Steve Bannon purports to be.

1. It keeps 'em all in one place.
2. At present, Israel leans far right.
3. Israel is a U.S. ally against other Middle Eastern powers.
4. Israel is good at building physical barriers to prevent ethnic mixing.

But would you want your daughter to marry one? Or go to school with a bunch of them?

To quote peace activist Uri Avnery:

Can a person be an anti-Semite and a Zionist? Indeed, yes. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, already tried to enlist the support of notorious Russian anti-Semites, promising them to take the Jews off their hands. Before World War II, the Zionist underground organization IZL established military training camps in Poland under the auspices of the anti-Semitic generals, who also wanted to get rid of the Jews. Nowadays, the Zionist extreme Right receives and welcomes massive support from the American fundamentalist evangelists, whom the majority of American Jews, according to a poll published this week, consider profoundly anti-Semitic. Their theology prophesies that on the eve of the second coming of Christ, all Jews must convert to Christianity or be exterminated.

Bannon's not evangelical; he's Catholic. But let's be clear: He is also a white supremacist who happens to be mounting a PR campaign claiming that he's not. Far worse than his protestations or those of his PR folks are those of the multitudes of Trump supporters who are doing that job for free.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

In a world gone mad, who is the true madman? 

Steve Bannon runs the asylum

Cabinet is one of those French words, like bureau, that refers not only to a physical space but to people who occupy a physical space. It used to confuse me when I was a child; I would read about the President's cabinet and picture a wooden cupboard.

In Robert Wiene's 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the cabinet is a coffinlike box where a sleepwalker spends much of his time, when he isn't called upon by Dr. Caligari to answer questions from fairgoers and kill at the doctor's orders. In From Caligari to Hitler, theorist Siegfried Kracauer connected themes in the film to the rise of tyranny in the Third Reich, with the sleepwalking Cesare a stand-in for the German people, unable to resist their manipulative puppet-master.

Of course, the twist in the film is that all of the characters are shown to be residents of an asylum, with Dr. Caligari its director.

Which brings me to the Trump transition and the proposed cabinet appointments. Is Bannon Caligari? Is Trump the somnambulist? Or, as Kracauer suggested, are we all sleepwalking through our own destiny, content to be hypnotized and lulled into an acceptance of evil?

All I know is that we have Jefferson Beauregard Sessions from Alabama proposed as Attorney General. As befits a man named after two Confederate leaders, Jeff stands firm against even legal immigration and could not hate the Voting Rights Act more.

National Security Adviser will be Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who does not distinguish terrorism from Islam and calls both "sick."  And Tea Party member Mike Pompeo, a supporter of Guantanamo and more, not less, domestic surveillance, will be CIA chief. The two Mikeys don't even require Senate confirmation, but any cabinet member looks likely to skate through, thanks to the so-called nuclear option.

"Darkness is good," says Dr. Caligari.

Buy Nothing

November 25, 2016

Last year I went to a lovely workshop by Barry Derfel at TST BOCES on MLK and the process of nonviolent protest. It was for teachers, really, getting them ready to handle the new Social Studies standards, but it was a great review for me on the three prongs of successful protest: education, politics, and money.

You start with educational acts of witness, narratives designed to change people's beliefs. Sit-ins, demonstrations, teach-ins, marches—all are designed to show that a given system is oppressive and violent. Acts of witness require discipline on the part of the participants and willingness to suffer (for example, to be arrested or beaten up). Media play a big role in documenting this suffering.

This leads to the second prong, politics. King's theory required that enough people be arrested for performing legal acts of protest that the jails would become full, causing tension between police and politicians. Police then pressured politicians to change the laws so that they no longer had to arrest protestors at the expense of doing their regular jobs arresting actual criminals.

But neither step works without the third, money. Without the boycotts of bus companies, Woolworth's, Newberry's, and other businesses that acted in hurtful ways, MLK's protests would never have worked. Withholding dollars had to lead to companies' making less money, paying fewer taxes, and laying off workers. As citizens saw services dwindling, they pressured companies to change policies and politicians to change laws.

Buy Nothing Day, established on the traditional Black Friday after Thanksgiving, is a global day of protest against consumerism. What better way this year to protest, from the comfort of your home, the ascension of Trump? For the man who exemplifies conspicuous consumption, a day of no consumption at all must be unimaginable. For the rest of us, it is a reminder that without monetary pressure on the system, all the marching, writing, protesting, and FB posting we do will have zero likelihood of effecting substantial, lasting change.

Segregation by Political Class

Clinton's America, NYT 11/16 

It's pretty easy to tell when you look at NYS that people settle where they are comfortable with the values of the people around them. Ithaca is an enclave of liberalism. The big cities. Most of NYC with the exception of Staten Island. When I consider moving to Madison County to be closer to Paul's job, I think Cazenovia and Hamilton, not Oneida and Chittenango. I even fudge the reasoning for that—Cazenovia is charming, Hamilton is a college town—when what I mean is "My kind of people."

Liberals are beating themselves up over the results of this election and blaming themselves for neglecting the working class that got them Democratic majorities in earlier decades. There's a lot of thoughtful contemplation of what a non-elitist left might look like, as in this piece by failed state senate candidate Sara Niccoli. Sara is an island unto herself in the Town of Palatine, population 3,240, halfway between the seen-better-days cities of Utica and Schenectady. She got 24% of the vote in her own county, despite being a known town supervisor. Against Trump, Clinton got 34%.

Sara ran on issues that one would think everyone in her county could get behind—better funding for schools, fighting the effects of globalization on farmers. But in addition to being a farmer, she runs a nonprofit and has a Master's from NYU. She isn't just a churchgoer, she's on the executive committee of the NYS Council of Churches. Neither fish nor fowl, she managed to be both homegrown and elitist—in lifestyle if not in her heart—and it did not help her cause.

I had a productive talk with our Chair yesterday about the flaws in our committee and how we might address them, and I was happy to find that we were on the same page. More about that as we move forward. It's easier to do locally, even when you live in a place that's 10 square miles surrounded by reality. But look at that map! Clearly secession isn't an option. We can't all pack up and move to Red States. How do we reintegrate?
  

What About Russia, or No Time Like the President

I like the thought of Melania as a Russian spy, if only because it's a far better role for her than the one she's currently assuming. Certainly her accent is reminiscent of Natasha Fatale's in "Rocky and Bullwinkle," and she has the slinky wardrobe for it, as well as the unruffled demeanor.

And little else explains the ease with which Russia hijacked the U.S. election and flew it into Trump Tower. I just can't buy the argument that "Putin said great things about me, so I'll say great things about him."

One of my greatest fears about our having an all-Republican government is that we might never get to the bottom of the Russian intervention. But only Republicans of a certain age seem to recognize the danger. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are not my favorite senators, but at least they are stepping up.

I was a child of the Duck-and-Cover years. Mark and I had a fourth-grade teacher who held the Russians (then the Soviets) responsible for all that was wrong with the world. We were lucky not to live in Russia, we'd be told, because if we behaved the way we were behaving, we'd be lined up along the wall and shot. (This is not an exaggeration. Imagine a teacher saying that today! The president-elect, on the other hand, would admire the un-PCness, not to mention the implied defense of the Second Amendment.)

Putin was a KGB agent. He wants to Make Russia Great Again. His foreign policy is increasingly arrogant and aggressive. It seems as though manipulating Americans is part of his master plan.

Others may be pointing at China and the likelihood that, absent an agreement with the U.S., it will take over all Asian markets without anyone to berate it about human rights. But I was raised to worry about Russia, and worry I shall.

Everything's for Sale

When you see Ivanka flexing her wrist on "60 Minutes," it turns out that she's advertising a $10,800 bracelet. When you hear surrogates rehabbing Steve Bannon's career ("That antisemitic piece was written by a Jew!"), you can bet that they are paid staffers of Breitbart. U.S. Government? QVC? It's all the same in Trump Nation.

Of course, the selling of the White House is nothing new. Ask any major donor to a winning political campaign. State dinner? Check. Night in the Lincoln Bedroom? Check. It was only a matter of time before the First Lady stood in the lobby hawking tshirts and signed photos.

A quick aside: I love this graphic in the NYTimes today; it's both beautiful and terrifying. And Ithaca and environs are specially called out.

Meanwhile, this whole Glenn Beck vs. Breitbart feud starts to look like a ratings war. Which is some consolation for those of us who really did not want to see Glenn Beck as a good guy.

Everything's for sale! Tweeters have mansplained to me for the past several days about how paid protests work: Someone gets hired, and then the other people follow him or her, even though they get nothing out of it. Sort of like the presidency, I guess.

Manning the Barricades, Checkbook in Hand

There are members of our town and county Democratic committees who do the work of writing, organizing, leafletting, walking, and calling. Then there are members who fund the work. Occasionally, but rarely, do those groups overlap. Clearly, both are needed.

One fascinating outcome of the election has been the enormous outflow of donations to groups that are either in trouble under a Trump regime, figure to counter Trump policies, or both. My favorite, of course, is donating to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence's name, so that he gets the notifications and thank-yous. Jezebel has a vast and useful list.

We once thought that conservatives gave more to charity than liberals did. Luckily, MIT came along and debunked that. Conservatives give bucketloads to their churches, but beyond that, donations are not greater than those of liberals. I do wonder whether Obama's election in 2008 led to a flurry of contributions to conservative causes or if this is a peculiarly liberal trait. Gotta do something, so let's give money!

Back home on Day 7, it appears that every woman I know here is at least contemplating going to the Million Women March on January 21. Extrapolating out from that, I end up with a figure vastly larger than a million. I've scored a place for DZ and Olivia and me to stay. And I'm starting to envision a new role for myself if I stay with the local Party. More about that after I meet with our Chair on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Giuliani as Secretary of State? The man who, when asked about using nukes against Iran, said, "You shouldn't take any option off the table"? The one who supported Bush in Iraq and loves waterboarding and domestic surveillance? That guy?

Anxiety/Depression

Berlin Artists Turn Swastikas Into Lovable Figures

I read once that if insomnia involves being unable to fall asleep, that's anxiety. If it involves waking in the middle of the night and being unable to fall asleep again, that's depression. Apparently I have both. It culminated in a Twitter war with Trump trolls late last night. It turns out that all these protests are fomented by paid agitators. I used Carrie's sister's great line—"I was there, where should I send my timecard?" It was not well received. My phone blew up! Apparently I'm a naive idiot; there are videos proving this! (By the man who brought you the ACORN scandal.) Oh, and if I believe all that stuff about Bannon, I'm not really a Jew. Couldn't figure that one out, but it was late, and I was tired.

Olivia informs me that she has a fake Twitter account for just such purposes. She can get her anger out without fear of direct reprisal. Probably a good idea, though I don't intend to go there again.

So let's talk about Steve Bannon, former Breitbart ruler, who will be chief strategist in Trump Nation. Media Matters (AKA "leftist porn site," according to my new Twitter friends) says it best: This is a white nationalist who hates Jews.

For most of his campaign, Trump quoted Breitbart conspiracy theories. Indeed, the whole birther nonsense may have arisen on that site, although they've denied it vigorously.

Okay, Nazis in the West Wing. What else we got?

Well, there's Rudy Giuliani for Attorney General (or Sec of State, though I doubt that). Never met a black guy he didn't want to lock up. Proponent of stop-and-frisk. Sure to impose federal law over all those naughty states who legalized pot. Plus, freakin' nuts.

Secretary of the Interior? An oil executive, or Sarah Palin (because she hunts, I guess?) Secretary of Energy? An oil executive. Health and Human Services? Sleepy Ben Carson. Homeland Security? Self-important, recently defeated Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Agriculture? Texas ag commissioner Sid Miller, famous most recently for calling Hillary Clinton a cunt. (He also founded a church for cowboys, so that little slip of the thumb was surely an aberration.) Secretary of Commerce? Maybe NYS's own homegrown sleazebag, Carl Paladino, he of the X-rated emails. At least that would take him off Buffalo's school board. State? How about John Bolton, who hopes to stop Iran's bomb by bombing Iran? Seems like a good way to launch a new foreign policy agenda.

That's not even all of it. I would say it was cartoonish if it were at all funny.

Voting for Your Degrader

Day 5: Lesson learned. It is 100 percent sexist to assume that women, or even white women, are some kind of homogeneous voting bloc. That being said, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump? Really?

FDR was a known anti Semite, a fact that certainly led directly to the death of would-be Jewish immigrants from Europe in the late 1930s-early 1940s. Yet Jews in America voted for Roosevelt again and again, in numbers unprecedented and not repeated until Johnson ran against Goldwater.

During the primary season, we saw the appeal of Trump to aspirational Latinos, even when Trump was pitted against actual Cuban-American candidates. Lesson learned: Latinos aren't a homogeneous voting bloc.

It is reminiscent of a story I like to tell about my volunteer history at Harlem Hospital, where I worked for a while with gunshot children. One day I offered to bring a book for a 13-year-old artist kid I liked, thinking he might choose something about an African-American hero or an important artist. His choice: The Art of the Deal. "I love that Trump guy," he told me. "He's SO RICH." The girls on the ward wanted Sweet Valley High books, those super-saccharine romance/mysteries set in the whitest of suburban towns.

"They don't hate Trump; they want to be Trump."

In What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank tells about the way certain politicians and special interests used cultural issues to compel wage-earning Americans to vote against their own self-interest. Do we believe that millionaires Bush, Romney, or now Trump want to share a beer with working-class citizens from the hinterlands? Hardly. But they're happy to get their votes. And thanks to issues of gay rights, abortion, and "religious freedom," those hinterlanders happily vote for slates of candidates whose tax cuts benefit their bosses and whose trade policies eliminate their jobs.

Not all women want to work for a living—especially when the kind of work they might attain is low-wage drudgery. Not all women are offended by wolf whistles. At the same time, women seem just as likely as men to fall for Trump's dog whistles: taking your guns, rigged election, terrorism threatening our way of life. And those dog whistles managed to drown out pussy-grabbing and name-calling. I even heard women talk about "family values" when referring to a man who has five children by three women and is famous for his playboy wannabe ways.

Last night, DZ and family marched with 25,000 others in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the president-elect started to put together the worst-looking cabinet since I don't know when. More about those choices tomorrow.

Blame Game

Racism, sexism, arrogance, assumptions about women, assumptions about Latinos, globalization, Islamophobia, stupidity, ignorance, meanness to Bernie, lack of transparency, DNC, Russia, Wikileaks, the media, bad polls, FBI, hubris, complacency, white working class, elitism, TV, millennial women, lack of a message, populism, machine politics, boredom, Weiner, inertia.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Day 4, Olivia's on the Ivy League Snap Story comforting U Penn freshmen who were targeted with a "lynching calendar" out of somewhere in Oklahoma (or to be honest, anywhere on earth—we watch enough TV to know that you can hack or send messages and bounce them around the globe). And in Trumansburg, the Facebook Event page for a new group of Ithacans Against Trump was trolled by someone threatening gun violence, leading to police patrols for a little organizational workshop at someone's house.

What to Do?

BLM Rally, Ithaca

Day 3. My mom wrote to ask about political volunteer opportunities near the retirement community she's moving to next month. Like me, she had heard Elizabeth Warren tell us all to "Volunteer and stay connected."

Everyone is wondering what to do. Yesterday I tried (unsuccessfully, for now) to step down from the Democratic Committee, because that kind of top-down, exclusive organization seems inauthentic right now, plus I'm so very mad at the national committee. (The state committee is barely functional—it's an arm of the governor's office and completely irrelevant.) The BLM Anti-Trumpism rally, on the other hand, felt organic and authentic, yet lacking in purpose. So I guess I'm looking for something authentic and goal-oriented, because marching around or listening to badly-miked speeches is not going to do it for me.

I am willing to go to the Million Women March, though, because I understand the comfort that kind of solidarity can bring.

At this very moment in my world, people are posting about a parade of trucks with Confederate flags driving down the main drag in Watkins Glen. And Cornell students have left their classrooms and gathered on the Arts Quad to protest the election results. The comments on the live Cornell Sun video include "How many of you didn't vote?" to "Grow up!" to "Poor snowflakes."

I think there will be a lot of milling around for a while.

Like a Death in the Family

We got to sleep around 4 AM Wednesday morning. Up at 5:30 as usual. In that hour and a half, I managed to have an extensive nightmare involving pieces of my body falling off. "I need you to take me to the hospital!" I encouraged some shadowy figure. No help for me. Maybe my Obamacare had been repealed.

Those first moments after waking are easy; the edges of the room take shape, dog bodies are imposing on parts of my body or leaping ecstatically at the thought of breakfast. And then comes the realization, like a slap in the face, and it's Election Night all over again.

I am the biggest pessimist in the world, but the worst I anticipated was our losing the Senate. That we would lose everything didn't enter my mind. Here are the losses that could immediately impact the people in my little world:

• Money for environmental work in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• That coveted internship at the Department of Education
• Retirement investments and Social Security
• Affordable health care and decreased pharmaceutical costs
• Access to birth control and women's health care
• Some kind of a fair tax code
• Incentives for solar and geothermal energy

Not to mention international accords and, oh, the planet. And the work we've been doing around the state on developing a plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act seems to have been a genuine waste of everyone's time.

Sleep, wake, slap! Sleep, wake, slap! Day 2 of Life in Trump Nation.