Insurrection to Inauguration: Reflections on Violence & Healing

By Thomas Beller, Kristi Coulter, Benj DeMott, Richard Goldstein, George Held, Bob Ingram, Vida Johnson, Charles Keil, Greil Marcus, Dennis Myers, Zuzu Myers, Nathan Osborne, David Quigley, Budd Shenkin, Laurie Stone, William Svelmoe, & Peter H. Wood.

Shell-Shock

By Kristi Coulter

He was the first killer virus, you know. We all had to breathe his desecration and cruelty. He got into the places in our bodies where we’d partitioned off memories of abuse, and dissolved the cell walls so half the time we barely knew who we were fighting, or when—am I in 2017 today, or 1973? He loved to see us battling multiple infections at once! It was so exciting, and all for him.

At times I felt almost well and yet I knew the definition of the word had changed, that “well” now meant scared, hard, bitter, and mistrustful, yet able to get shit done. I was grateful for the spates of wellness; they reminded me of various times in the past I had felt safe, and the productivity gave me hope that even if he never went away, I could eventually self-launch to a place he couldn’t reach me. Then he got us all locked in with him and I thought maybe this is how he stays alive, by making other people sick. Maybe he developed a tolerance to the old way and now he needs real bodies and here we are: weakened, susceptible, and available in bulk.

This morning Joe Biden cried when he talked about Delaware and suddenly *I* was crying over Delaware too, a place I’m pretty sure I have never been. Later, as I walked on a trail high above Los Angeles, I told myself it might be hard to get used to feeling things again, and then out of nowhere I had a mental image of tortoiseshell where my breastbone used to be.

January 19, 2021 (Voice of Silence) 

By David Quigley

The midwinter late afternoon light lingered, as Wilton Gregory, the first Black American Cardinal, started things off just on the western edge of the Reflecting Pool in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.  The soon-to-be President and Vice President offered brief remarks, a nurse sang “Amazing Grace” and Yolanda Adams closed with “Hallelujah.”  This was meant to be a brief prelude to the official events of the next day.

That moment of remembrance at dusk for the 400,000 who’ve died during the pandemic made masterful use of silence and space.  400 lanterns glowed against the fading afternoon sky.  The barren emptiness of the National Mall evoked forgotten patriots’ graves across the nation and around the world, and all that has been lost of late.  The 46th President, so long defined by his unending and often vacuous pronouncements in the latter decades of the last century, seemed to have found his true voice. 

Silence and the collective act of mourning on that late afternoon drove home just how much awful, deadly noise had filled the air and our minds these last four years.  Let’s pray these next four open up other possibilities. May we have more chances to be still and reflect on what matters most.

The House that Trump Left

By Nathan Osborne

I’ve been caught in the feedback loop for the last four years. Every morning I’d wake up, check my phone, and see some fresh stupidity. I’d get angry, mutter, bury it, head to work.  Politics was a stupid thing I saw on a tiny screen and had stupid opinions about. I was slow dancing with Moloch; and it takes two to tango. Some people say the media, in hyping up hysteria, profited off and perpetuated Trump’s outrages. Some people say the media should have stopped covering him.  I don’t know if that was a realistic option at the start (“Censorship!”). Towards the end, though, they did stop. CNN would refuse to air Trump’s later COVID briefings. But those choices made their own headlines. Other twittering networks would clap back: “CNN Cuts Away from Trump’s Lies; Here’s a fact check of what you missed.” It seems pretty clear to me that Trump had a codependent relationship with the liberal “establishment.” As in daily life, you can waste a lot of energy sussing out who was the “real” narcissist. “Sure, I made things intolerable at times with my bipolar swings. But she had a manipulative streak and a thousand red flags rippling full mast at high-noon.” Most of the time there’s no single villain. You’re both just a couple of assholes.

But Trump’s hunger wasn’t ordinary, corrupt human desire. His maw sucked in the whole world, compressing it into its vacuum. If just to fill up the emptiness for a time. And five people are dead at the Capitol. Two cops I think (A.C.A.B.?)—but the rioters mostly trampled each other and got themselves shot in the face. There were ugly, vicious scenes that day. But it was just as often simply laughable—carnivalesque. I keep thinking of that picture of the dude making off with Pelosi’s (ahem) lectern. The girth of his spoil is angled and contrasted against his own maybe 5’6”. His shit-eating grin radiates contagious, doomed joy. He’s like some scampering leprechaun who personifies white privilege. I vibe with that jouissance, especially the doomed kind (seeing as all the main offenders are probably in black-site re-education camps right now). This wasn’t an explosion of some white working class’s repressed desire. These people flew out to D.C. with disposable time, income, and a plan. (I couldn’t even get off a Friday night pre-Covid to see Nellie McKay in Northern Kentucky…) They’re lumpen middle managers, used car salesmen, and micro-dosing Q bros. They rampaged through the Capitol with an ostensible list of demands. But they’re also (unconsciously) protesting against the meaninglessness of American consumer life. Of which they’re prime contributors and examples.

“1776!!!” read the directives on Gab from several high-profile conservatives on January 6^th. And in our collective, polluted remembering, the day’s events are closer to that primal scene than anything else we’ve seen. (Draw a line to 1619.) Fuck most of the people who flew out there—I’m sure they’re intolerable to be around in-person. But their act was beautiful in a dark, occult way. A truthful sign of the times because of its absurdity and viciousness. Forgive me for taking (critical) delight in such events. But January has given me whiplash in its shift back to the hyper-normal. I’m reminded of interviews with Minneapolis rioters over the summer. A faux-naif Louis Theroux-type interviewer holds a microphone up to a young man’s face. A mini-mart belches flame and ash maybe fifteen feet behind them. The interviewer’s suit and the young man’s dreadlocks threaten to incinerate at any second. “What’s the message you want people watching to take from this?” the alien whiteboy asks. “I feel like this was all supposed to happen, man. THIS IS HOW EVERYBODY FEELS!” And from Minneapolis to dying Ohio shitholes, I think that is how many feel. (NYC and D.C. I suppose are excepted.) Stimulus checks certainly stave off the psychosis. But I don’t know how much bread-and-circuses, a diverse Cabinet, or the admittedly lovely Jen Psaki can do to change that short-term.

The Capitol rioters got their grand orgy of violence. And serving federal time is their reward. But most Trump supporters didn’t fly out there. In flyover states, their desire remains unfulfilled—sold but not paid for. Like in Blake, the worm of Trumpism remains, devouring their dying rose. It’s been interesting to see which of my Trump-y compatriots have shifted back to private life, and which have maintained non-stop “Rigged Election!” shit-posting. White-collar “trad” types can scoff at the incipient woke dystopia from a comfortable distance. But “low-class” folks largely don’t know when to quit. Call me nihilistic, but I admire the thorn-in-the-flesh they pose to bougie conservative comfort. These “deplorables” were part of your coalition—helped you ride to power in 2016. You can’t just go back to Calvinism and The Conscience of a Conservative and leave them out in the cold. They ate the foulest pig-slop, and once again are left in abject spiritual/material misery. I know if I consummated my imaginary dialogues, these true believers would denounce me as a communist at the first mention of higher wages. But I love them in a way. I too know what it feels like only having the embers of burnt bridges to keep you warm. It’s a transitional place—you can move on to somewhere better or worse.

Teenage TikTok communists are currently selling their Trump-y families out to federal agencies. So I hesitate to bring it all back home. But I’ve been surprised how the grieving process hit those closest to me. My slightly ironic, Archie Bunker-style dad got banned off Facebook a while back. I think he questioned the integrity of mail-in ballots one too many times. (“Dad, I voted by absentee ballot.”) The college-educated younger subset of my family has largely sworn off engaging him on politics (and occasionally altogether). But I’ve kept fighting and (screw my presumption) attempting to school him on the dangers and dog-whistles of dangerous-type right wing extremists. (“Don’t you ever get into that QAnon stuff, that stuff fucking ruins lives.”) So I checked in with him throughout December/January because I was worried. Thankfully, he hasn’t gone full deep-state or pro-insurrection. “I’ve lived through 60 years of presidents, and not a one has done a damn thing for me. Trump came in and tried to do something real and they crucified him for it. I’m not losing any sleep. They’re all corrupt—that’s how it was and how it’ll always be.” He bought a Trump 2024 flag he hasn’t flown yet. His texted pic was an image suffused with irony, wistfulness, and sorrow. The flag got put in the closet —it’s still there I think. My dad and I don’t talk much about public affairs. The last time we got political was when he told me that I need to get health insurance. I told him my plan was to just keep voting Democrat until we get that sweet, sweet free government insurance. We both laughed.

On the flipside, I’m worried about my mother. She’s a deeply religious “prayer warrior.” I always felt I had a better chance to convince her that MAGA was a satanic cult. As is common in Evangelical circles, she has an interest in eschatology. That’s the fundamentalist occult of the end-times. She’s joined several “prophetic” bible-study groups. Searching the book of Revelation for mentions of Trump, the future of the Jewish state—that kind of thing. Around November she started Zoom-ing into several conspiracy-adjacent churches—always several states away. In California or one of the autonomous Northwest territories (Washington, Oregon). They were getting her into progressively harder stuff. These pastors told their flocks that Trump is a King David-style savior of America. Trump was uniquely chosen by the Lord to deliver the country from darkness—all the more consecrated for his past profligacy and indiscretions. These sermons feverishly followed the anti-democratic election lawsuits, proclaiming God had revealed Trump’s eventual victory in visions and dreams. These pastors turn the good news of Jesus Christ into idolatry—a Jesus-themed cocktail of conspiracy and right-wing extremism. They’re hurting real people—my people. There’s a thru-line between them and the prosperity preachers of yore. Sometimes they’re the same people in a second act. (Paula White—may an “abundance of rain” sweep you right down to hell.) I’m paraphrasing from a Twitter thread, but the prosperity preacher’s faith in a divinely ordained meritocracy no longer makes sense—especially for down-and-out Christians who are their victims. They promised happiness, then switched to “Rigged Election/Everything” nihilism when reality threatened to tell on them. I asked my mom in November, “If Biden gets inaugurated in January, then that too must be part of God’s plan, right?” “Two months is a long time,” she answered. After Jan. 6^th I asked what the prophetic communities were saying now that Trump’s exit was all but confirmed. “January 18^th may happen, but we have the next four years to watch. All will be revealed; all will be brought to light.” I’ll say it right here, I better never catch one of these snake-oil heretic pastors on the street. Somebody is going to lose their life.

I don’t understand people for whom “relief” is the lasting impression of the last month. Or rather, I never had that sense of peace or comfort to regain. I feel tense—on edge. Yeah, the appendage spewing puss and bile is severed. But we’re still lying on the floor bleeding out. I read a woke Congressman’s tweet the other day: “Supporting the filibuster is white supremacy. College loans are white supremacy.  Calls for unity are white supremacy.” In non-sequiturs like this, any passing fancy gets filtered through maximalist, alienating buzzphrases. Super-Democrats, with their mandate to nothing, ought to be careful of taking a victory lap right back to the antimonies that resulted in 2016’s rightward lurch. It’s just one glib tweet, but it made me sick. These people have learned little about communicating outside their circle. It’s an elite, self-cannibalizing class with a language all its own, and I ain’t a part of it. I understand conflict can’t be repressed and culture wars are here to stay. But race-bound, tone-deaf pronouncements imply we’re not all on the same boat even when it’s rocking to and fro and dangerously near the rocks. I’m not seizing on tone to renounce policy positions I agree with. But the Trump-sickness has seeped into all of us. Don’t come at me pretending like your hands are clean.

We woke up January 7^th to a militarized Capitol. The pictures of that morning were perhaps more astounding than those of the previous day. The Capitol was occupied by masses of huddled, sleeping National Guardsmen. Dropped in as if from the skies into the halls & chambers like huge globs of green and tan marshmallow. So many fresh-faced youth (both men and women)—our country’s future!— arms and legs entwined in a byzantine jungle of limbs. So many tired boys—jarred from their Fortnite and Call of Duty into a weird new morning. There wasn’t anybody there to protect—and nobody to protect anyone from. Even incapacitated by their exhaustion, their physical presence was enough. A wall of prostrate bodies fending off an invisible but immanent threat.  Every moment could bring more boredom, or the final conflagration everyone sensed round the bend.

Mentally, I’m still with those drowsy Guardsmen. January 18^th washed like a cosmic blanket over the again-sleeping Land of Nod. Our sleep is alternately deep & fitful. Pleasant dreams—return to brunch, presidential dogs (the Oval Pawfice!), Netflix Obama docs… But scary things too—returns to the 6^th, skinheads, incels, a retail proletariat crying for relief. But sleep in itself is welcome for the moment.  Trump got in our veins and nervous systems. He pumped poison deep into our minds and bloodstreams. I turn off my phone, lie down, and dream of the day in which all that poison pumps out. But I know recovery is rarely full or complete. Moving on is sometimes the best you can do. There are scars, insanities, verbal tics that linger. Letting someone like Trump into your life will do that. Yet I don’t want those memories hanging around. I want to relearn how to talk to everybody.

 

Making the World Safe By Regulating Hate

By Richard Goldstein

It was shocking. Scary. Surreal. A revelation that democracy is fragile. We look back on the tolerance of extremist views with the regret of a smoker who has just received a diagnosis of lung cancer. How can we cut out the malignancy before it spreads even further?

The cancer metaphor is tempting, but this situation is not a disease. It’s the murderous manifestation of a political tendency that has material as well as symbolic roots. It is a racist backlash, but not only that. It is truly threatening, but so is the prospect of a crackdown that unleashes its own metastasis, until the range of political discourse is shaped by group consensus, and public expression becomes a privilege rather then a right. I worry about that, but I also worry about the Proud Boys and the boogaloo. I would be their victim several times over. I’m not sure where the boundary between dissent and hatred lies. For now, I have more qualms than declarations. The New York Times, says we should focus on the right because it’s more dangerous than the left. But is danger the only basis on which we distinguish justifiable violence from the indefensible sort? Aren’t we also influenced in our judgement by the principles that inspire the destruction? Is political violence always wrong, or is there such a thing as righteous mayhem? And who gets to decide what that concept means?

Question: Should we organize a movement to throw Fox News off the TV dial? A growing chorus of liberals—from Kristof to several commentators on MSNBC—think we should. The First Amendment, they point out, doesn’t prohibit boycotts of advertisers or cable operators who host an offensive channel. The rationale here is that Fox spreads falsehoods rather than news, and this steady diet of fraudulent info incites the far right. But the audience for Fox is much broader than violent extremists. Aren’t these viewers entitled to a media sounding box, one that doesn’t pass a litmus test for responsibility administered by liberals? Should a progressive movement that takes free speech seriously suppress these outlets because they aren’t always truthful? The answer may affect much more than how we respond to right-wing violence. Zoom recently censored an NYU meeting featuring a Palestinian activist who advocates “all means of struggle,” after objections from a pro-Israeli group. An artist, whose mural of Bernie Sanders was defaced by someone who turned him into Pepe the Frog, has demanded that the vandal be prosecuted for a hate crime. A musician who attended the Trump rally in Washington, but did not invade the Capitol, was dropped by his record label after photos of him circulated on social media. Imagine a world where intense political disputes are regulated by lawsuits and consumer pressure. Is the current rush to repress extremist views the stalking horse for a much broader spirit of censorship?

Question: Should we reach out to Trump supporters or drive them to the margins of political life? A lot of wind has been expelled by both the right and the left against the spirit of kumbaya. The word has come to mean a naive or phony attempt at reconciliation (although I’d venture that plenty of liberals who mock the K-word once sang the song from where it comes). This raises a more fundamental question: are bad people redeemable? If someone apologizes for a racist or sexist comment, should that gesture be accepted, or should the penitent be banished nonetheless? What if dealing with the economic grievances that animate the right convinces some of them to part ways with Trumpism? In a close election, wouldn’t that be significant, or is it more important to struggle against a backlash that nearly stole our future? Can we ever forgive a bigot who claims that he or she has changed? Does amazing grace actually exist?

Question: If we succeeded in banishing extremist right-wing ideology from from the media, would it go away? Or would it morph, sustained by new venues and codes (much as rock did), generating an enduring mystique for the alienated? Are we setting up a game of whack-a-mole, in which armed men in Viking horns spring up from the depths of forbidden discourse? Do these bizarros represent a subterranean culture that actually flourishes in a climate of repression? Is a consensus enforced by suppression ever effective in an open society? Is a truly open society even possible in such a censorious climate?

If I were faithful to my past, I would answer these questions with a defense of free speech. My life as a radical journalist has depended on the distinction between offensive ideas and violent acts. But the events of the past weeks make it clear that this this a very tricky line to draw. So my final question is: What does it cost to be protected by repressing dissent? The answer demands that we look not just to the present, but to the unsavory history of punishing radical activism in America—to the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, in which thousands of leftists (including Emma Goldman) were deported; to that precursor of doxing, the blacklists of the 1950s, legal because they were created by pressure groups, not the government; to the seizing of gay writing by the postal service, reflecting a consensus so certain that homosexuality posed a danger to young people that listings with the word gay were banned from the Yellow Pages of the phone book. Those were the unintended consequences of suppressing freedom in the name of safety as it was conceived of back in the day. Times have changed—or have they?

Playing At Insurrection

By Budd Shenkin

Crowds do matter; the French Revolution was at first a crowd phenomenon, I think, but it was like taking the cork out of a bottle.  There was a reservoir.  And small numbers can do large things.  The Bolsheviks proved that.

But that’s not us.  Yes, there is resentment aplenty, all over the place.  Certainly the cell phone camera revolution of George Floyd and other atrocities on Blacks reveal truth that goes further than what we happen to see, and it just ain’t right.  There is a bias toward fairness in our minds – the chimpanzee fairness experiments show that clearly.  And while the resentments of whites are real enough – look at our lack of a safety net and lack of social mobility – they also rest on the loss of social status for those who can say “at least I’m white.”  The visuals of the Trump cabinet vs. the Biden cabinet are pretty clear.  (We Jews can be pretty happy that at those upper rungs, anti-Semitism doesn’t seem much in play, amazingly enough.  It’s just that the Trump administration had the wrong Jews.)  In other words, yes, things need to be fixed up for whites who are left behind, but the social insulation of racism?  No, that’s gotta be fixed guys, you’ll have to make your self-worth rest on something else, not that.

But, given all that, should we be afraid of the January 6 Pseudo-Insurrection?  No, not really.  It was bring on the clowns, not bring out the tanks.  Trump plays to the reality show episode of the day, and so did the malicious throng.  There was some malevolence by authorities in the lack of preparation and appreciation of the danger, and for sure those who said blacks or Muslims would have been killed by the 10’s are 100% correct, there is infiltration of white nationalism everywhere and it showed along with some incompetence, but you could all but hear, hey, Mom, look at me, I’m on TV!  (The fact that it was their own private cell phone channel didn’t seem to matter.)  It’s mostly show and no go with that crowd.

Most important, perhaps, was the unveiling of what was plain enough for most to see before, but now is hard for even Republican loyalists to deny.  They are reduced to asking people to ignore their lying eyes.  We choose power by whichever way, and we’ll lie and cheat and steal to keep it and get more – that’s what the eyes see.  Fuck democracy, it was always a lie.  It’s all out there.  So, the new clarity is really a gift, the gift of plain sight.

Was it more dangerous than I’m saying?  Could there have been a major massacre with dead bodies, hostages, and Mike Pence swinging freely?  I guess so.  I guess there could have been.  Hindsight can be deceptive of possibilities.

But to my mind, democracy did hold, and it held with local officials and state officials acting honestly and truly, and some national officials as well.  Institutions do not hold by themselves, it’s the people in the institutions to whom acting bravely and righteously is left, they are the bulwarks, and they came through.  And the military.  Who’d a thunk it, the military.  God bless them.  Turns out that that was what the post-election Department of Defense replacements were all about – if you can’t turn the military, at least try to neutralize them.  The coming investigation will see just how instrumental those replacements were in leaving the Capitol police on their own, and almost hanging in the wind.

The January 6 Insurrection does reveal again, however, that while many officials have acted bravely and saved democracy, as I think we will find in the coming weeks, there is an infiltration of white supremacy throughout our institutions as well.  Look at ICE, CBP, many police departments and especially police unions.  The seeds are there.  The gift of January 6 is that if we look at this properly, maybe by a new Kerner Commission, we should find out where they are, how extensive they are, and we need to do our own homegrown deNazification right here in River City.  Find’em and do what we can to ostracize, reeducate, indict, or just label and fire their asses.  Deconstruct the institutions that can’t be reeducated – reconstruct institutions that have rotted.  Don’t defund police, but spend the money necessary to change them – my prosecutor stepson tells me it all starts in the training academies.  There’s a big job to be done.

And of course, we need to go back to fairness, to righting the distribution of goods and services and security and safety and employment and possibilities.  That’s the bedrock.  But first you have to attack the pollution, or no new growth of righteousness will be possible.

“Thank You but Fuck You…”

The Rage and The Word Sedition

By Thomas Beller

The word sedition echoes the word seduction. Looking up the latter, I was surprised to see the Oxford English Dictionary has, as its first entry, a definition concerned so directly with the issues raised by the former: “To persuade (a vassal, servant, soldier, etc.) to desert his allegiance or service.” Among the examples cited is this catchy riff from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Suttle he needs must be, who could seduce Angels.”

To paraphrase Greg Allman, the insurgents at the capitol were no angels. Was the Inciter in Chief subtle in his admonishments?

I guess I will have to listen to arguments about this in the coming weeks, assuming the matter is discussed in the Senate. I had a thrill of righteousness when the word “sedition,” was being thrown around during and immediately after the attack on the capitol, like a spectator at a boxing match whose guy—or girl—was landing blows and drawing blood. A person in this posture of rooting for blood is rabid, slavering.

I still recall the words of one such fan at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum, during a fight that I attended on assignment in 1988. Art Jimmerson vs. Lenny “The Rage” Lapaglia. The whole experience made a strong impression, the brutality, the immediacy, the defiance on the part of LaPaglia, who slotted into the Rocky role opposite Art Jimmerson’s Apollo Creed. Except LaPaglia didn’t have any of Rocky’s mensch vibe at all. The nickname, “the Rage,” set up the impression. But the glowering charisma of the guy at the start of the fight added to it. The violence of his blows in the early rounds. Then the tide turned and Jimmerson had the upper hand. I wrote about it back then, reported on the spectacle of LaPaglia’s strategy of lowering his hands and absorbing blows. He let himself be pummeled.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that what begins as a rumination on acts of sedition should circle around to the spectacle of a fighter who, in his defiance and contempt for his opponent, lowers his hands and lets himself get punched in the face, in the ribs, in the head, over and over. From that experience, and the piece I wrote in 1988, one line has come back to me somewhat regularly, yelled by a spectator rooting for LaPaglia in the early rounds. It rings in my memory for the evil music of both its sentiment and syntax amidst the shouting and blood-lust of the crowd in the way that certain phrases and images from life and literature randomly lodge in one’s memory. I went and found that old piece, looked it over. Here is the passage:

“Tattoo his face, ‘Rage’,” a man yelled above the din. “Make things come out!” It wasn’t until the fifth round, however, that the fight went from ugly to the bizarre. Jimmerson was gaining in momentum, landing combinations while blocking a number of LaPaglia’s shots. LaPaglia, for his part, was looking completely unfazed by the head shots that Jimmerson was landing, and seemed to be mainly battling his own fatigue.

Finally fatigue won and what followed was one of the more macabre moments in recent boxing. LaPaglia dropped his gloves. Jimmerson proceeded to go off on LaPaglia like he was the heavy bag in the gym. LaPaglia impassively took several wide-open shots to the head and the body before getting down on one knee with the urgency of a man about to tie his shoelaces. While taking an eight count, however, he winked to the press corps. “I was trying to sucker him,” he later said.

In my middle age I have been trying to get myself to embrace bitterness more, especially in my writing, and yet it’s difficult, I find, to lower one’s guardrail of bemusement without tipping over into the rabid, shouting bloodlust of political theater, yelling, internally, “Sedition! Sedition!” Like the guy yelling, “Make things come out!”

I’ve been mulling over a long ago shard that has stuck with me, in me, about a newspaper columnist (for the Daily News, I thought), who, sometime in the post-Iraq Invasion Bush years, exclaimed in rage at the lies on television, a statement from the Bush White House—literally bellowed, ‘that is a lie!’ at the TV—and then keeled over, dead on the floor of a heart attack. I’d aimed to end this riff with a reference to that mad journalist’s exit. But it turns out the above clues alone—newspaper columnist/Daily News/ Bush/ Heart Attack—will produce, however they are rearranged on Google, a great deal of information about newspaper columnists who have died of a heart attack, but not the name I am looking for. To what end do I need that name and that specificity, anyway? Do I really want to make this epic event in modern political history, this grotesque circus, all about my delicate sensibilities?

To my utter amazement, that fight at the Felt Forum in 1988 is regarded as something of a classic. At least that is what a long article about it suggests, written in the wake of LaPaglia death at age 53 in 2013. It includes video of the fight. I watched the first minutes. The blows come early and often. I have enjoyed reading about boxing—Liebling, Mailer, Oates—more than I have enjoyed boxing, but the sport, now a shadow, seemed vital and part of life, back then, part of the present that connected to the past. It was a shock to see images that exist in the murky, distant, retinal burn of memory suddenly present in the flat, two dimensions of video in 2021.

What was most striking about this video artifact, to me, was the chorus of voices that ring out every time there is a crest of brutality. 1988 in New York. Howard Beach on one side (1986), the Central Park jogger case on the other (1989). The Crown Heights riot just around the corner. This is the New York of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Danny Aiello’s character could have been in that crowd, yelling, but Do The Right Thing is a fiction and that character is a kind of Saint. The voices I heard in the video, the one minute I watched, suddenly re-animated at the Felt Forum, calling for blood, were harsh and familiar. Lapaglia, from Chicago, had relocated to Levittown, but the local support wasn’t about geography. The black vs white optics of Jimmerson and LaPaglia were immediately apparent. When LaPaglia lands his early blows the crowd roars with pleasure. I really hated those voices. I was as afraid of them—the boroughs’ whites–as I was of black people in Harlem while growing up in New York in the 1970’s. The apotheosis and pure distillation of those voices yelling to “make things come out,” became, astonishingly and mortifyingly, the President of the United States.

Looking for something to orient me to the discussion of racism in New York in 1988, I came across a letter published in the New York Review of Books in December of that year. A German academic named Hanz Spiess, responding to an Andrew Hacker article titled, “Black Crime, White Racism,” described his experience as a resident of Oakland, California, from the late 1960’s through 1981, when he moved back to Munich (of all places). About Oakland, which was supposed to be a progressive, integrated city, he writes, “Yes, your service sector is integrated—your life is not. Your life is split—black and white in public, all white private. Black and white integration at work, in your public life, your service sector, yet total segregation, apartheid, in your private life…

It is a miracle to me that this paradox living situation does not cause more emotional confusion with blacks—and whites. A psychiatrist would expect to find a split personality in a split living situation.

This adds one more question to Andrew Hacker’s article: How will white Americans fare in their country when they fully realize it’s not their own any more? Will white frustration replace white domination—or is there a chance to reduce alienation for both black and white Americans?

To be honest: Our experience in Oakland did not leave us overly optimistic.

Postcard from last week

By Laurie Stone

We have become stupider over the past four years, living inside I want to be sedated and How can I move when I can’t see an over there? Let’s talk about the crimes of the thing and forms of penalty (I hope) for its actions. If we omit saying its name, more and more the categories of what was done to us and our country will be clearer, and the individual person—who was never an individual person but a collection site for hate and rage—will assume its actual, pimple-sized dimension.

1.

Is this dream or nightmare
from which we awaken?

Do we live still in the age of Frost
or T***p? The answer is debatable,

But our destiny is unknown: do we have
the strength to preserve our ever-

challenged democracy, the republic
for which “Old Glory” stands?

2.

The old, glorious words Hemingway
declared dead in The Great War

need renewal or replacement,
but how replace “honor,” “integrity,”

“truth”—just uttering that word
in the Senate after the Insurrection

earned Romney applause— when “disgrace,”
“fake,” and “disaster” still ring in our ears

and lesser poets fill Inauguration Day
with shibboleth and cliché?

3.

“The Gift Outright,” while not the poet’s best,
still provides us food for thought—

“The land was ours before we were the land’s…”—

as we waken from the four-year dream
or nightmare.

[Originally posted at New Verse News]

The Modern Presidency (post WWII Election

By Dennis Myers

…Truman…Eisenhower…Eisenhower…Kennedy…Johnson…Nixon…Nixon…Carter…Regan…Regan…Bush…Clinton…Clinton…(Bush)*…Bush…Obama…Obama…( )*…Biden

*–lost the popular vote

 

Pax Vobiscum

By Charles Keil

Dear Liz, Nina, Rep Johana Hayes, the squad and all representatives from the fifty states and Samoa, et all

IF we could get Pelosi to agree to a CONSTITUTIONAL COMPREHENSIVE IMPEACHMENT as a parting gift to the emerging Global Organization Of Democracies and people everywhere trying to stop the rising fascisms on all continents . . . .

IF we could halt ALL ‘economic’ immigration from everywhere for a decade and have a minimal Incomes Policy to equalize personal self-determination for ALL we might be able to put out the fearfire of Xenophobia that is every tyrant’s primary tool and can easily bring the Patriot Party storming back in just 2 years . . . . .

IF a miserable excuse for a human being and complete misfit & utter failure like Drumpf can inspire loyalty in the hearts of more than 75 million Americans we must understand what the forces of Participatory Consciousness really and truly are and how to harness them for culture-building on “local peace economy” foundations. . .

IF we could shift John Kerry’s job description from Czar or Commisar to Dept. Secretary of ______________________or of Peace & Ecoequilibrio

IF we could have Tulsi G, Marianne Williamson and Hillary’s daughter as a troika for the new Dept. of Children’s Full Development complete with Rights to Grooving in all performing arts . .. . . .

IF we can get a few Senators (e.g. Ben Sasse and Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Shelly Capito of W. Virginia, and/OR Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska, AND/or Toomey of PA and Romney of Utah to go INDEPENDENT and caucus with Bernie once in a while or start a CCGP — Conservationist Conservative Green Party . . . . . . There might be a small but precious chance to save the world for Greta’s generation and the sustainable future that is aching to arrive on time.

Treason and Denial

By Peter H. Wood

Over Saturday morning coffee, I read the newspaper reports that a lawyer in the Department of Justice, Jeffrey Clark, had accepted the plan of then-President Donald Trump to oust the acting US attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen, and replace him with Clark, who would then work to stop Congress from counting and confirming the certified Electoral College votes on January 6. Only the threat of high-level resignations at the DOJ prevented the plot. I immediately recalled Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in the throes of Watergate.

This new development seems to be the white-collar version of the mob insurrection at the Capitol Building, also spurred by the sitting president. I am no reporter, just a retired American historian and a concerned citizen. But when I typed a search for “Who is Jeffrey Clark?” into my computer, it yielded plenty of easily accessible and verifiable results. Jeffrey Bossert Clark was born in Philadelphia in 1967. He attended Catholic schools there before entering Harvard College in 1985, where he majored in Economics and History.

Ironically, Clark later earned an M.A. from the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy & Administration at the University of Delaware before earning a Georgetown law degree. He then clerked for Danny J. Boggs of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Senator Mitch McConnell has praised Judge Boggs as “a Kentuckian who is one of the finest legal scholars of his generation.” Others who have clerked for this respected conservative judge include recent White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, and the new Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines.

In 1996, Clark joined Kirkland & Ellis (the largest law firm in the world by revenue). There, he represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in lawsuits challenging the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions, including from autos and industrial sources. His paying clients included General Motors, Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, Volkswagen Group America, and the oil giant BP. Clark successfully defended BP after the nation’s worst oil spill, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. One of his legal briefs has been called “such a comprehensive compendium of thoroughly debunked denial of the scientific consensus” on climate change “that it stands as a classic of the genre.”

Clark also opposed the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gasses, posting an article (April 28, 2010) on the news platform PJ Media. “When did America risk coming to be ruled by foreign scientists and apparatchiks at the United Nations?” he asked. “The answer,” Clark replied rhetorically, is ever since the EPA under Obama issued a ruling “that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare.” The powerful Federalist Society in Washington, DC, appointed Clark to chair of its Environment and Property Rights Practice Group. He was elected to serve from 2012-2015 as a Member of the Governing Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law.

In 2017, President Trump nominated this outspoken opponent of environmental science to be the U.S. Justice Department’s top environmental lawyer. Clark was confirmed as Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in October 2018. In September 2020, he was also appointed to be the acting head of the Civil Division at the DOJ. In that capacity, without informing his DOJ superiors, he met secretly with the US president early in January 2021. Mr. Trump reportedly floated a plan to remove the acting Attorney General and replace him with Clark, who would then be expected to reverse the decisions of previous Attorneys General, open an investigation, and pressure state election officials to void Biden’s thrice-confirmed victory in Georgia.

Disheartening as it may be, the domestic terrorists pictured in the treasonous attack on the Capitol must be brought to justice. Likewise, the president who invited them to Washington and clearly incited their murderous violence should be impeached. Also, Republican members of Congress who lied for months about the election results and spoke out to subvert the peaceful transfer of power should be removed according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress,” that amendment states, “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress,…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Meanwhile, the American Bar Association may wish to review the standing of Jeffrey Clark to practice law.

By Vida Johnson

The apparent participation of off-duty officers in the rally that morphed into a siege on the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6 has revived fears about white supremacists within police departments.

As someone who has researched and written about the chilling problem of white supremacists in law enforcement, I believe the failure to confront the problem has had deadly consequences.

Racism and white supremacy are problems in society, not just the police. Just after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, 9% of Americans responding to an ABC News/Washington News poll said that it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views.

Meanwhile, a Reuters poll after the insurrection at the Capitol found that 12% of Americans supported the actions of those who took part in the attack.

But the percentage of police officers who hold views in support of white identity extremism may be at least as high or higher – white people are overrepresented on police forces cross the country. And surveys have found that police officers – especially white ones – diverge from the wider public on issues of race. A 2017 Pew pollfound that 92% of white officers believe that the U.S. had made the reforms necessary for equal rights for Black Americans. This compared with just 29% of Black officers and 48% of the general public, including 57% of white Americans. This leads some to wonder whether police are more sympathetic to the rhetoric of Trump and others.

With their enormous power, department-issued weapons and access to sensitive information, police departments must be rid of officers with racist views for America’s security. But for the same reasons, police departments have become attractive recruiting grounds for white supremacist groups.

The FBI warned of the problem in 2006, noting: “Having personnel within law enforcement agencies has historically been and will continue to be a desired asset for white supremacist groups.”

Misplaced Sympathies

When it comes to the events of Jan. 6, there appear to be three main areas of concern about the action – or inaction – of police. First, there appears little doubt that Capitol Police did not prepare in a way to protect the Capitol for the threat lawmakers and the vice president faced. The U.S. Capitol Police Department is one of the best-funded police forces in the country; with a budget of more than $500 million and approximately 2,000 police officers, it is larger than the police force of the city of San Diego, yet the Capitol Police’s mission is to guard a few buildings and the members of Congress.

The rally and plan to attack the Capitol were discussed on public social media platforms such as Twitter, Parler, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook for law enforcement who cared to be prepared. Enrique Tarrio, a member of the far-right Proud Boys, was arrested a few days before the attack for the destruction of a Black Lives Matter flag belonging to a Black church in Washington, D.C. Tarrio had traveled to the District of Columbia for the Jan. 6 rally and was allegedly in possession of high-capacity magazines. This should have been an indication that the protesters planned violence.

Both the NYPD and FBI warned the Capitol police of the threats they were seeing online, with an FBI office in Virginia telling Capitol police that extremists were planning violence and “war” just one day before the attack.

Yet there were no phalanxes of heavily armed police officers as had been the case in protests in the capital against racism, in which many more Black Americans were involved.

As such, many are legitimately asking: Was the threat posed by the rioters on Jan. 6 underestimated by police because of their race?

There are also questions to be asked over whether Capitol police officers were more sympathetic to Trump supporters during the attack itself. One officer tasked with protecting the Capitol put on a red Make America Great Again cap during the attack, according to the Tim Ryan, the Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees funding for Capitol police. Another Capitol police officer was seen being friendly and taking photographs with rioters. Two Capitol police officers have been suspended and at least 10 others are under investigation for their behavior in the uprising.

Off Duty, In Crowd

Finally, there is concern that off-duty officers holding extreme views traveled from across the country to be part of the day’s events. Reports from Capitol police officers describe cops flashing their badges while attempting to enter the Capitol.

At least 28 sworn law enforcement officers attended the Jan. 6 rally, according to a tally kept by the publication The Appeal. They represent police departments from at least 12 different states. This number could grow.

Obviously there is a difference between merely attending the rally and taking part in the siege.

But domestic terrorism from far-right groups is a significant threat to America’s safety and security. And the actions of police on Jan. 6 – both as individuals and as a force – raise concerns. For all Americans to be truly safe, it is important to weed out far-right extremism, especially in the institution sworn to protect us all.

By Anonymous

A Hill Well Climbed

By Bob Ingram

Amanda Gorman preaches in fervid poetry and a brilliant yellow coat and in her voice and words and rhythms are the echoes of stump preachers and MLK and Charlie Parker and rappers and Walt Whitman and Billie Holiday and the sainted Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X but finally it is the clear bell of her young and vital poetry that rings in the ears of a nation in need.

Alien Nation

By Greil Marcus

The last item in the January installment of Marcus’s Real Life Top Ten column posted in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Conor Lamb on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC, January 7). The Democratic congressman from western Pennsylvania after calling out Republican colleagues on the floor of the House as liars: “I really don’t think, you know, you have to be very partisan to look at yesterday and be insulted the way we would be if we’d been invaded by a foreign power. I mean, there were essentially foreign flags, Trump flags, being posted and hung from some of the most sacred square inches of ground in the United States” — and so the Trump project ends as it began, as it was supposed to, leaving the country discredited before the rest of the world, giving Vladimir Putin, collecting the interest on the loans to the Trump company, the free field he paid for. It’s the id surfacing as a person looks for the words to say what he means in a fraught moment, when the everyday unconscious limits on speech don’t work, and what comes out is not an argument, but a realization, the child realizing the emperor has no clothes: “Foreign flags, Trump flags.”

Spanish Bombs

By Benj DeMott

Once it had been deliberate contemplation that had taught Manuel about himself; now it fell to chance to snatch him from the activities of the moment and force his mind upon his past. And, like himself, like all those others, drained of her blood, Spain, too, was growing conscious of herself—as in the hour of death, suddenly, a man takes stock of all his life…

That’s from Man’s Hope—Andre Malraux’s novel of the Spanish civil war. I began paging through it around Christmas after I’d gifted my kid with a hardcover edition. (I’d figured we might share a father-and-son read since he’d dug Hem’s and Orwell’s books on Spain’s ordeal.) Following January 6^th, though, I raced straight through it, stopping only for new videos of the storming of the Capitol or more dope on traitor Trump.

The passage I quoted above nationalizes the imperative of a character who’d replied to a prompt—“How can one make the best use of one’s life?”—with an answer that was probably pretty close to Malraux’s own credo—“By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought, my friend.” Man’s Fate may be out of print but Malraux’s movements of mind seem punctual. Take his interlude on Unamuno—the right-wing litterateur who got canceled by his own side after he scathed pearl-clutching Franco-philes hot to watch executions of P.O.W.’s. The cry of Unamuno’s fascist hecklers now sounds like a slogan made for anti-maskers on the America right: “Death to intelligence, long live death.”

Yet Malraux’s text offers more than long views of Reaction. One of his soulful soldiers recognizes (in the face of a prisoner facing a severe penalty for desertion) “the everlasting visage of the man who pays.” We’ve been seeing such faces lately as cops round up selfie-incriminators who were in that Capitol crowd. When I regard their images of pathos, I’m with Malraux’s character who feels “keenly the necessity of choosing between victory and compassion.” We must choose, but winning doesn’t make us clean. Or, as one of Malraux’s militants has it: “Action…always involves injustice.”

Malraux’s musing contains lessons our new president has heeded. Biden didn’t need the novelist’s warning against drawing conclusions about “a man’s own character from the party he belongs to.” But leftists tempted to write off every Republican should hear this:

Intellectuals are always rather inclined to think that a party means a collection of people rallied round an idea. A party is really much more like a living, acting personality than an abstraction. Take the purely psychological side; a party is surely more than anything else a means of organizing for common action an aggregate of feelings that are often incompatible.

Malraux was thinking through his own ambivalence about members of the Communist Party . (I should allow his record on Stalinism wasn’t great. Unlike Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Man’s Fate took a pass when it came to grasping the irrepressible conflict between CP totalitarianism and Spanish Anarchism.) But his advice to avoid conflating an individual’s nature with that of his/her political party is still on point. It’s not about “there were very fine people on both sides.” The bulk of American Republicans aren’t nazis.

Back in the thirties, Malraux caught an antimony that keeps returning from the repressed (on both sides of our political spectrum): “The desire for fraternity…and the cult of hierarchy are very definitely up against each other in this country—and in some others too.”  Malraux wouldn’t be shocked to find plenty of “progressives” still assume politics is a game that should be won by whoever’s cleverer/purer. (Pace Nathan Osborne.) Malraux was never on their team. He distanced himself from “the impulse to disdain so typical of fools.”

Malraux rarely comes on from above in Man’s Fate, though he interrupts his war stories for discourses on art by fictional scholars and sculptors in the struggle (and on the sidelines). Wonder is his default stance even when his heroes are up in the air. In the following scene, a pair of airmen get lost in the moonlight after a bombing run…

Leclerc picked up the thermos flask beside him, then stopped in amazement, holding the cup in the air, and signed to Attignies; the whole plane was phosphorescent, glowing with a bluish light. Attignies pointed to the sky. Till then they had been looking at the ground, engrossed in their raid, and had not noticed the plane itself; above and behind them the moon, which they could not see, was lighting up the aluminum on the wings. Leclerc put the thermos down; what human gesture would not have seemed trivial and inadequate. Taking them far away from their instrument board—the only visible light in all the waste of the air around them—that sense of well-being which follows on all physical conflict was merging into an almost geological tranquility, incorporating them in the mystic union of moonlight and pale metal gleaming as precious stones have gleamed for countless ages on the extinct stars. The shadow of the plane moved steadily over the cloud beneath them.

Malraux fused an aesthete’s instincts with a warfighter’s nerve but he was no D’Annunzio. He was neither an heir of bloody-minded futurists nor down with anarchists out to martyr themselves. Still, he took in the truth that a just war may become a vector for an uncommon solidarity (and uncheap thrills):

Borne forward on the same tide of hard, fraternal exaltation, he advanced with them, and, as he kept his eyes fixed on the approaching tanks, he seemed to hear the deep-toned song of the Asturias echoing in his heart. Never again as at this moment was he to know all it can mean to be a man.

And once more into a breach……

[O]ne pushes ahead into the barrage; nothing, not even one’s own life, makes the least difference. Hundreds of shells are falling, hundreds of men going forward. You’re just another case of suicide, yet at that moment you’re sharing in all that’s best in all of them. You’re sharing in…in something that’s rather like the ecstasy of the crowd at Carnival. I wonder if you see what I mean…I’ve a pal who calls that the moment when the dead start singing. Yes, for a month now, I’ve known dead men can sing.

“Like hell they do!”

“And there’s something else which even I, the first Marxist officer in the army, never dreamt of. There’s a fraternity which is only to be found—beyond the grave.”

Malraux’s senses are alive on every page of Man’s Hope. Whiffs from his past remain pungent: “An incongruous scent of eau de Cologne was mingling with the reek of smoke and fire that poured into the office through the broken windows. A perfumer’s shop was on fire.” Post-Storm D.C. wasn’t in extremis like Madrid under siege in the ‘30s but as I alternated between Hope, web and the tube, Malraux’s visions of city life during wartime melded with scenes from America’s nightmare. In the aftermath of insurrection, odd set-pieces in the Spanish capital seemed to fill up spaces in my head as the tv showed D.C.’s empty militarized streets.

Garcia managed to get out his torch and the thin ray rippled along the surface of a fleecy mass scarcely denser than the smoke-clouds overheard. Up to the limit of the light a flock of sheep was surging around. There seemed to be no end to it; they could hear bleat after bleat far into the distance…Fleeing the battlefields, the flocks were passing through Madrid on their way down to Valencia. Somewhere behind, coming down the side-streets parallel to the boulevard, there was doubtless a band of shepherds armed as they all were nowadays. But in the meantime, the nightbound flocks, masters of the Prado as they might be hereafter when men had passed away, were pressing forward between the smouldering houses in a warm, compact mass…

Not that the novel is full of fleecy comforts. A few pages before sheep rule Madrid streets, one of Malraux’s characters checks a reporter’s dispatch from the city…

“A woman was carrying a child, a little girl, scarcely two years old, whose lower jaw was missing. But she was still alive, and the wide-open wonder-struck eyes seemed to ask who had done this to her. Another woman crossed the street; the child in her arms was headless.”

Garcia had seen, time and again, that terrifying gesture of a mother shielding in her arms what remained of her child. How many similar gestures could be seen in the streets today?[1]

Malraux never shies away from particulars of pain even as he reaches for universal truths of suffering, resistance and death.

Magnin had seen death often enough to know the peace it engraves on many faces. When thoughts and cares vanish, wrinkles and crow’s feet are smoothed away. Gazing at that face washed clean of life, but to which the open eyes and leather helmet still gave the illusion of the will to live, Magnin recalled the words he had just overheard, an opinion he had often encountered under many forms in Spain; only an hour after death does a man’s true face show across the mask of life.

Man’s Hope is based in part on Malraux’s stint as an organizer of the Spanish Republic’s outgunned air-force. The need for courage is one constant in the book, but Malraux is practical as well as romantic about the foundational virtue:

Courage is a thing that has to be organized; something that lives and dies; you’ve got to keep it in condition, like a rifle. Personal courage is no more than the raw material of the courage of an army. Only one man in twenty is, through and through, a coward. Two men in twenty are naturally brave. One builds up a regiment by getting rid of number one, using the other two to the best advantage and training the remaining seventeen…

Malraux’s clarity about organized courage is a bracing reminder that the American military’s advantage over right-wing militias and extremists rests on something deeper than superior weaponry and manpower.

Malraux knew that brave recognizes brave, and near the start of his book an anarchist and Spanish police chief—normally natural enemies—come together in defense of the Republic. Each of them are among the two in twenty and the anarchist bows to the chief who he’d just seen limp (“with a curious waddling gait”) through a gauntlet of fire…

“You had luck too when you crossed the plaza.”

Fanatic in his love for Spain, the Colonel was grateful to the anarchist, not for the compliment, but for the form of speech so characteristically Spanish; for speaking as might have spoken one of Charles the Fifth’s captains. For it was obvious that by “luck” he had meant “courage.”

I’ve been hyper-aware lately of those Americans who have had luck. Like that black cop, Eugene Goodman, who steered rioters away from the Senate chambers. Or ex-military guys like Representative Conor Lamb who helped keep members of the House calm during the assault on the Capitol. I’m not sure if we should credit our president with courage, but he’s surely been an incarnation of civic virtue for months now. My favorite of his many anti-Trump gestures was the turn at the end of the short speech he gave before administering Zoom oaths to a thousand new hires. Biden warned these new employees he’d fire them if he heard them talking down to anyone. (The occasion added a fillip to what might have been Biden’s best public moment prior to his run against Trump: his takedown of The Apprentice’s catchphrase during his speech at the 2016 Democratic Convention: “’You’re fired?’ C’mon, America, we want someone who says ‘You’re hired!’”)

One of Malraux’s officers counsels leaders not to suck up to their charges. OTOH: “To make oneself loved without courting popularity is one of the finest careers a man can hope for.” Biden might be on his way there. No doubt he’s learned lots from Obama–a leader who has surely made himself loved without seeming needy. Obama, though, isn’t always up to the moment. He seemed slightly condescending when he averred recently he “couldn’t be prouder” of Joe. I think we all should be grateful to our new pres. I’m not sure any other Democratic candidate could’ve beaten Trump, given the Electoral College’s bias toward the G.O.P.  And since his election, Biden’s own words and tone have been spot on.

America probably isn’t on the verge of Civil War now (and I feel you if you doubt the currency of my book report on a nearly century-old novel about anti-fascist struggles in Europa), yet Trumpism should’ve made us very afraid. Our experiment might’ve been over if he’d had a second term. A nation in mortal peril, as Malraux noted, tends to grow more conscious of itself. And that perception chimes with another of his thoughts on death, which is “so terribly important” (as even atheists concede) because: “After death nothing can be compensated for.” The dead can’t make it up to anyone, just as the living can’t look forward to do-overs with the forever gone.  America, though, has come through and amends seem to be on every Democrats’ agenda. First we need to reunite those children and parents separated at the border in our name. Then there’s the “racial reckoning.” That starts with genuine reform of policing. But reparations for slavery (if not for Jim Crow and redlining) are in our future too even if they’re not just around the corner. Finally, there are imperatives of the multicultural working class that’s been squeezed for fifty years. Now that America’s back, we’ve got to justify their love for this country. Won’t be easy. Per Malraux: “Nothing is harder than to make people think about what to do.”

Note

1 I flashed on the Trumpist at Pelosi’s desk when I read the following passage from the filing of that fictional American reporter:

A Communist bangs the table…A fascist puts his feet on the table…A democrat – be he American, English or French when he addresses an international conference, scratches his head, and asks questions…-We the democratic people of the world believe in everything except ourselves.

That line is redolent of a time when democracies were on the ropes and many wise men assumed the future belonged to communists and/or fascists.  But that invocation of “international conferences” made me focus on the transition from Mike Pompeo to the new Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, who won’t be like Mike. Unafraid to come off as a diffident diplomat, this pro doesn’t seem compelled to swagger.

Last Word

By William Svelmoe

A few thoughts watching Jen Psaki’s first press conference.

There’s a lot to be said for professionalism.

There’s a lot to be said for respect between the press and administration spokeswomen.

For the next four years at least, to find lies and bullshit, we’re going to have to actually go look for it. Turn to FOX for example. But when we watch the real news, we’ll get competent people doing competent things making competent statements. Going to be weird.

My one disappointment is that she didn’t come out and say, “There were more flags on the mall today in one place than ever gathered together in the entire world before. PERIOD!”