I think we have entered a kind of second phase of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd and every person of color, but especially Black men, murdered by agents of the state. This phase is focused on statues and other emblems of our past.

It’s reasonable to ask where the line is. Do we take down all statues of men connected to slavery? Is George Washington as worthy of condemnation as Robert E. Lee? I have an opinion but for now I want to say I have faith. I believe there is a line though we don’t know collectively what it is. I believe it will be the product of passionate public debate. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, we will know where this ends.

There are those, however, who are lacking faith. They do not trust the public to comprehend the problem or to determine who to tear down from platforms of honor and who to leave in place. For these people, any deviation for the status quo is disorder on the brink of anarchy. For these people, any call for change is a “slippery slope” with no end in sight. The marketplace of ideas isn’t a source of excitement. It’s a source of anxiety and uncertainty, a source of something they fear called “mob rule.” When Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell says protesters are tearing down statues of the founding fathers like they were statues of Saddam Hussein, he’s not criticizing protesters on the merits. What he’s really doing is telling Americans to shut up.

Rudy Giuliani isn’t good for much, but he is good for illustrating this mindset. Last night, on Laura Ingraham’s show, he said Black Lives Matter is the same as antifa is the same as Communism is the same as totalitarianism. “That’s part of a plan,” he said (there is no plan), “and we better wake up to it and we better stop being silly. People who say they are favorable to Black Lives Matter — Black Lives Matter wants to come and take your house away from you. They want to take your property away from you.” (For the sake of the integrity of the public sphere, I must say these are lies, all of it).

I take Giuliani’s remarks as part of a cohort of Americans that is searching very hard for evidence that 2020 is the same as 1968, and that public arguments over who to memorialize and who to condemn have the makings of a counterargument wholly in favor of the president and his bid for reelection. For these people, there is no social upheaval that does not remind them of their teenaged years, and there is no step forward that does not trigger a “conservative” white backlash. (To be fair to Giuliani, which I dislike doing, some liberal pundits have the same political orientation.)

They could be right. Morning Consult, a pollster, found that by a 12-point margin a majority of Americans think Confederate statues should remain standing. The same poll found public opinion evolving, though. While 52 percent in 2017 said Confederate statues should stay, only 44 percent say so today. The difference can be explained by the different between a biracial cosmopolitan chief executive whose tenure ended in 2017 and the cheating, illegitimate, white supremacist we’ve been stuck with since. Lots of white people, as I have noted before, could not quite bring themselves to believe the claims of Black Lives Matter while the country was being run by its first Black president. Under Donald Trump, however, they have less trouble believing BLM’s claims. Most white people are unlikely to see a rightwing counterargument, because tearing down General Lee is for them the same as tearing down President Trump.

Comparisons to 1968 are probably apt but not for reasons some think. That year saw riots, massive antiwar demonstrations and violence in every city that mattered. That year saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. That year saw the crackup of the Democratic Party’s ruling coalition that had prevailed in American politics since the 1930s. This was the context for Richard Nixon’s message of law and order (it was the context for his “silent majority” gambit later). Put another way, Nixon was not seen as part of “the problem” however that was defined. He was seen, indeed, he positioned himself to be seen, as a solution to apparent anarchy.

Even if a rightwing counterargument managed to take off, Trump usually ends up clipping it. That’s precisely what he did when he said he’d outlaw tearing down statues. The focus of attention wasn’t protesters. It was him. Again. The more he tries, the more it seems to backfire. He uses Nixon’s slogans as if they were magic spells. Just speaking the words makes them come true! They won’t, of course. What’s more, I suspect most people have stopped listening. They are busy focusing on the problem of systemic state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans. They are busy debating where to draw the line. Most people keep the faith. Others, sadly, have none at all.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 23 June 2020

Word Count: 849

—————-

In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally — or is it once again? — confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening.

Yet to state the obvious, we’ve been here before. Mass protests in response to racial inequality and discrimination, including police brutality, have been anything but unknown in the United States. Much the same can be said of riots targeting black Americans, fomented and exploited by white racists, often actively or passively abetted by local law enforcement officials. If Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was correct in calling violence “as American as cherry pie,” then race-related urban unrest is the apple-filled equivalent.

The optimists among us believe that “this time is different.” I hope events will prove them right. Yet recalling expectations that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 signaled the dawn of a “post-racial America,” I see no reason to expect it to be so. A yawning gap, I fear, separates hope from reality.

Let me suggest, however, that the nation’s current preoccupation with race, as honorable and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.

MLK defines the problem In April 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King delivered a sermon that offered a profound diagnosis of the illnesses afflicting the nation. His analysis remains as timely today as it was then, perhaps more so.

Americans remember King primarily as a great civil rights leader and indeed he was that. In his Riverside Church address, however, he turned to matters that went far beyond race. In an immediate sense, his focus was the ongoing Vietnam War, which he denounced as “madness” that “must cease.” Yet King also used the occasion to summon the nation to “undergo a radical revolution of values” that would transform the United States “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Only through such a revolution, he declared, would we be able to overcome “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

The challenge confronting Americans was to dismantle what King referred to as the “edifice” that produced and sustained each of those giant triplets. Today’s protesters, crusading journalists, and engaged intellectuals make no bones about their determination to eliminate the first of those giant triplets. Yet they generally treat the other two as, at best, mere afterthoughts, while the edifice itself, resting on a perverse understanding of freedom, goes almost entirely ignored.

I’m not suggesting that members of the grand coalition of Americans today fervently campaigning against racism favor extreme materialism. Many of them merely accept its reality and move on. Nor am I suggesting that they consciously endorse militarism, although in confusing “support” for the troops with genuine patriotism some of them do so implicitly. What I am suggesting is that those calling for fundamental change will go badly astray if they ignore Dr. King’s insistence that each of the giant triplets is intimately tied to the other two.

Defund the Pentagon? The protests triggered by the recent murders of George Floyd and other black Americans have produced widespread demands to “defund the police.” Those demands don’t come out of nowhere. While “reform” programs undertaken in innumerable American cities over the course of many years have demonstrably enhanced police firepower, they have done little, if anything, to repair relations between police departments and communities of color.

As an aging middle-class white male, I don’t fear cops. I respect the fact that theirs is a tough job, which I would not want. Yet I realize that my attitude is one more expression of white privilege, which black men, regardless of their age and economic status, can ill afford to indulge. So I fully accept the need for radical changes in policing — that’s what “defund” appears to imply — if American cities are ever to have law enforcement agencies that are effective, humane, and themselves law-abiding.

What I can’t fathom is why a similar logic doesn’t apply to the armed forces that we employ to police huge chunks of the world beyond our borders. If Americans have reason to question the nation’s increasingly militarized approach to law enforcement, then shouldn’t they have equal reason to question this country’s thoroughly militarized approach to statecraft? 

Consider this: on an annual basis, police officers in the United States kill approximately 1,000 Americans, with blacks two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victimized. Those are appalling figures, indicative of basic policy gone fundamentally awry. So the outpouring of protest over the police and demands for change are understandable and justified.

Still, the question must be asked: Why have the nation’s post-9/11 wars not prompted similar expressions of outrage?  The unjustified killing of black Americans rightly finds thousands upon thousands of protesters flooding the streets of major cities. Yet the loss of thousands of American soldiers and the physical and psychological wounds sustained by tens of thousands more in foolhardy wars elicits, at best, shrugs. Throw in the hundreds of thousands of non-American lives taken in those military campaigns and the trillions of taxpayer dollars they have consumed and you have a catastrophe that easily exceeds in scale the myriad race-related protests and riots that have roiled American cities in the recent past.

With their eyes fixed on elections that are now just months away, politicians of all stripes spare no effort to show that they “get it” on the issue of race and policing. Race may well play a large role in determining who wins the White House this November and which party controls Congress. It should. Yet while the election’s final outcome may be uncertain, this much is not: neither the American propensity for war, nor the bloated size of the Pentagon budget, nor the dubious habit of maintaining a sprawling network of military bases across much of the planet will receive serious scrutiny during the political season now underway. Militarism will escape unscathed.

At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then, except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to “defund” the Pentagon?

King considered the Vietnam War an abomination. At that time, more than a few Americans agreed with him and vigorously demonstrated against the conflict’s continuation. That today’s demonstrators have seemingly chosen to file away our post-9/11 military misadventures under the heading of regrettable but forgettable is itself an abomination. While their sensitivity to racism is admirable, their indifference to war is nothing short of disheartening.

In 1967, Dr. King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” During the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness.

America’s national signature Given their size and duration, the protests occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have been remarkably peaceful. That said, some of them did, early on, include rioters who resorted to looting. Smashing windows and ransacking stores, they walked off not with milk and bread for the hungry, but with shopping bags filled with high-end swag — designer shoes and sneakers, purses, clothing, and jewelry lifted from stores like Prada and Alexander McQueen. Also stolen were smart phones, handguns, even automobiles. In-store surveillance systems recorded scenes reminiscent of Black Friday doorbuster sales, though without anyone bothering to pass through a checkout counter. Some looters quickly attempted to monetize their hauls by offering to sell purloined items online.

Certain right-wing commentators wasted no time in using the looting to tar the protest movement as little more than an expression of nihilism. Tucker Carlson of Fox News was particularly emphatic on this point. Americans taking to the streets in response to George Floyd’s murder, he said, “reject society itself.”

“Reason and process and precedent mean nothing to them. They use violence to get what they want immediately. People like this don’t bother to work. They don’t volunteer or pay taxes to help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing… On television, hour by hour, we watch these people — criminal mobs — destroy what the rest of us have built…”

To explain such selfish and destructive misconduct, Carlson had an answer readily at hand:

“The ideologues will tell you that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it’s far darker. What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it.

This is vile, hateful stuff, and entirely wrong — except perhaps on one point. In attributing the looting to a deeper cause, Carlson was onto something, even if his effort to pinpoint that cause was wildly off the mark.

I won’t try to unravel the specific motives of those who saw an opportunity in the protests against racism to help themselves to goods that were not theirs. How much was righteous anger turned to rage and how much cynical opportunism is beyond my ability to know.

This much, however, can be said for certain: the grab-all-you-can-get impulse so vividly on display was as all-American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. Those looters, after all, merely wanted more stuff. What could be more American than that? In this country, after all, stuff carries with it the possibility of personal fulfillment, of achieving some version of happiness or status.

The looters that Tucker Carlson targeted with his ire were doing anything but “rejecting society itself.” They were merely helping themselves to what this society today has on offer for those with sufficient cash and credit cards in their wallets. In a sense, they were treating themselves to a tiny sip of what passes these days for the American Dream.

With the exception of cloistered nuns, hippies, and other vanishing breeds, virtually all Americans have been conditioned to buy into the proposition that stuff correlates with the good life. Unconvinced? Check out the videos from last year’s Black Friday and then consider the intense, if unsurprising, interest of economists and journalists in tracking the latest consumer spending trends. At least until Covid-19 came along, consumer spending served as the authoritative measure of the nation’s overall health.

The primary civic obligation of U.S. citizens today is not to vote or pay taxes. And it’s certainly not to defend the country, a task offloaded onto those who can be enticed to enlist (with minorities vastly overrepresented) in the so-called All-Volunteer Military. No, the primary obligation of citizenship is to spend.

Ours is not a nation of mystics, philosophers, poets, artisans, or Thomas Jefferson’s yeomen farmers. We are now a nation of citizen-consumers, held in thrall to the extreme materialism that Dr. King decried. This, not a commitment to liberty or democracy, has become our true national signature and our chief contribution to late modernity.

Tearing down the edifice At Riverside Church, King reminded his listeners that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he had helped to found a decade earlier, had chosen this as its motto: “To save the soul of America.” The soul of a nation corrupted by racism, militarism, and extreme materialism represented King’s ultimate concern. Vietnam, he said, was “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

In a tone-deaf editorial criticizing his Riverside Church sermon, the New York Times chastised King for “fusing two public problems” — racism and the Vietnam War — “that are distinct and separate.” Yet part of King’s genius lay in his ability to recognize the interconnectedness of matters that Times editors, as oblivious to deeper maladies then as they are today, wish to keep separate. King sought to tear down the edifice that sustained all three of those giant triplets. Indeed, it is all but certain that, were he alive now, he would call similar attention to a fourth related factor: climate change denial. The refusal to treat seriously the threat posed by climate change underwrites the persistence of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

During the course of his sermon, King quoted this sentence from the statement of a group that called itself the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Regarding race, it appears that the great majority of Americans have now rejected such silence. This is good. It remains an open question, however, when their silent acceptance of militarism, materialism, and the abuse of Planet Earth will end.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 23 June 2020

Word Count: 2,179

—————-

I’m not one of those journalists who laments the news cycle as if the Washington press corps has no choice but to cover everything this president does as if everything he does were of equal importance. The Trump administration is indeed a dust devil of disaster, but some things are more important than others, and reporters should say so.

This weekend saw wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump’s attempt to reboot his bid for reelection. The setting was Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Covid-19 pandemic is surging, and where civic and business leaders said now’s the wrong time to gather 20-some thousand people in one place. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, crowed about how many people were going to show up only to be humiliated when less than half did.

Empty seats evidently signal “vulnerabilities” heading into the election, according to the AP’s Steve Peoples and Jonathan Lemire. “Trump’s return to the campaign trail was designed to show strength and enthusiasm but instead highlighted growing vulnerabilities. It also crystallized a divisive reelection message that largely ignores broad swaths of voters, who could play a decisive role on Election Day, and the critical and dominant national issue of racial injustice. National unity was not mentioned.”

I get it. I’m as human as the next guy. The president was embarrassed. Cue the Schadenfreude. But if we’re going to talk seriously about Trump’s “vulnerabilities” in a “divisive election” in which he’s pandering to his base of support while ignoring a majority of Americans, let’s remember that that’s what the president did last time around. That’s why he had to cheat. Cheating, for this guy, is a feature, not a bug.

Indeed, cheating was confirmed Friday. The US Department of Justice released unredacted parts of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in 2016. The parts involved Roger Stone, the president’s friend and confidant. (They were redacted while Stone’s federal trial was ongoing.) Thanks to Buzzfeed, which sued for the release of the information, it’s abundantly clear there was a link between Trump and Kremlin operatives attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton. That link was Stone.

During testimony to the US Congress, Robert Mueller said the Russians waged a cyber-offensive against Clinton to benefit Trump. His report explained how hackers under the direction of Vladimir Putin gave stolen documents to WikiLeaks, which timed their release for maximum impact. Unclear, however, was whether the Trump campaign knew about Putin’s efforts and more importantly, whether Trump himself knew about his campaign’s effort to obtain the information. If a link could be established, it would be clear that to win, the president colluded with the enemy.

The link was … already established? The New York Times and the Washington Post, in reporting the results of Buzzfeed’s lawsuit, said there wasn’t anything new to report other than the possibility of the president having lied to Mueller’s team. Apparently, the link between Trump and Russia had already been reported! Apparently, that link was clear after Roger Stone was convicted of lying to federal investigators! I mean, OK, fine, so maybe I should’ve been paying more and better attention, but I do this stuff for a living. If I missed this link, I’m betting lots of normal people missed it, too, and if lots of normal people missed it, too, that’s probably an indicator of some sort of institutional failing, right?

Think about it. If this president, or any president, is shown to have cheated to get to where he is today, that means this president, or any president, is illegitimate. That means this president, or any president, defrauded the American people, violated national sovereignty, and seized the right to rule without the consent of the ruled. That means it doesn’t matter what this president, or any president, has done or will do from now on. The fact that this president, or any president, cheated means he has to go.

He has to, because once a cheater, always a cheater. Trump cheated again when he tried involving two foreign leaders in a scheme to interfere this year, and in doing so either betrayed American values (he’s willing to look away from China cracks down on Hongkongers and Uighur Muslims) or literally committed treason (with Ukraine, in my view). Cheating, in other words, isn’t a bug for this guy. It’s a permanent feature.

The Washington press corps can choose not to cover everything Trump does as if everything he does were of equal importance. When it comes to reporting a campaign rally in which half the people showed up who were supposed to show up, cheating is a news context as valid as any other. It could be the pandemic kept people away. Just as plausible, however — and plausibility is the best that reporters have to work with — is that people are not showing up to give an illegitimate president a second chance.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 22 June 2020

Word Count: 806

—————-

Recently, in this Black Lives Matter protest moment, my five-year-old son looked at me and asked, “Mommy, where did all the brown people go? Did the police here shoot them?”

We’d just moved to the outskirts of a more affluent rural town from a city where my son and three-and-a-half-year-old daughter mixed daily with black, Latino, and Asian American kids and were among a minority of whites at their preschool. Now, it was whites to the horizon: the white UPS guy, the white neighbors nearly a mile away on either side of us, the white motorcycle gangs zooming down the road in front of our house, sometimes sporting confederate flags on their seatbacks.

As I fumbled to explain racism, the general mistreatment of people of color, income inequality, and redlining in the simplest terms I could imagine, my son tried to clarify things: “So white people steal? Is that what they use the guns for?”

In his young life he’s already absorbed way too much talk of guns, bombs, weapons, and war thanks to the news he catches in passing, as well as discussions of my husband’s work on nuclear and ballistic-missile submarines and now as a Pentagon official, not to speak of my own work as a therapist in military communities, a human rights activist, and the co-founder of the Costs of War Project. I think, by now, he assumes that things in this country happen mainly thanks to the brute force of white guys with guns.

At his young age, he already struggles regularly with thoughts about how it feels to be treated badly because of the way you look. Late the other night, when he should have been asleep, he called me in and asked, “Mommy, what does it feel like when someone kneels on your neck?” And when, while riding in our car with the radio news on, he heard about the pepper spraying of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House, he asked, “Was that coronavirus they were spraying? Does that make you not breathe, too? Is the world bad?”

Later, he wondered aloud: “Does daddy have a gun? Is he scared?”

I guess it’s logical enough for the child of a man who has served on three subs and an aircraft carrier during his 17-year naval career to assume that the people with power and the mandate to kill are white men. Certainly, whenever we’ve attended a Navy gathering, we invariably face a sea of white officers and their white, J.Crew-clad wives.

And — not to cast aspersions — the four of us look as if we belong on the cover of a Muesli box with our pale skin, fair hair, and long, well-nourished limbs. The rare people of color we’ve come to know among the officer class in the Navy have had their own stories to tell about the commonplace nature of the racial slurs like “raghead” they’ve heard in the service and of being threatened with racially motivated violence by peers and higher-ups alike, sometimes under the guise of “training” exercises.

To report such threatened or actual violence is usually futile in the submarine force, as to do so you have to identify your rank and so open yourself up to further retribution. In other words, my son is already experiencing a system in which 43% of the men and women on active duty are people of color and yet, in practice, one that has regularly culled its officer class down to white men, as Helene Cooper’s recent striking investigative piece in the New York Times made all too clear.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that my son and other children like him tend to assume that the bad things that happen in this country do so through violence, armed and otherwise. Like more or less everyone in the U.S. now, he knows that George Floyd died on a street corner in Minneapolis because a police officer knelt on his neck. In my son’s short life, he’s also experienced a military world in which old missiles are painted bright colors and repurposed as street lamps and benches at military bases, not to speak of seeing whiskey bottles in our own dining room shaped like ballistic missile submarines.

At three, I remember him standing beside me as I anxiously watched the nightly news during one of his father’s sea deployments to an unknown location, as Donald Trump threatened to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on the Korean peninsula. I’ve found him looking over my shoulder as I sifted through photographs of burnt and bloody Iraqi and Afghan children in my work for the Costs of War Project. Relatives have snuck G.I. Joe figurines into some of the toy trucks they’ve given him as gifts — in their quest to one day make him “like his daddy.” And let’s not forget the active-shooter drills that were a regular part of preschool until Covid-19 struck, making the threat of weaponry an aspect of any child’s life away from home (and dodging them a kind of game).

Even at his young age, my son has been interested indeed in finding out what violence feels like to those who experience it and to its perpetrators as well. He zoned out during Sesame Street’s town-hall style program that attempted to explain American racism by having Big Bird teased for his size and color (a show that, by the way, didn’t explain slavery). Yet he was riveted when Nickelodeon stopped its programming for eight minutes and 46 seconds.

Most white parents assume that their children need to be sheltered from truths central to how our country is run and how it feels to so many. In the world of military families I’ve lived in for so long, however, as (to a far greater degree) in civilian communities of color, reckoning every day with what violations of your body will feel like is part of life itself.

One veteran’s story The threat of armed violence shapes the major life decisions of so many people of color today. I recently interviewed retired Marine enlistee Affraz Mohammed. He has written eloquently of his path as a Trinidadian-Muslim immigrant of Indian descent, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1980s and 1990s, into the U.S. Marines. There, before 9/11, he became well enough respected to be assigned as an escort to high-ranking diplomats at President George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, but the road to that moment (and thereafter) would be hell indeed.

Affraz Mohammed decided to join the military on the assumption that he would die young anyway if he stayed where he lived. “In the community I grew up in,” as he put it, “there wasn’t much opportunity. We had a crack epidemic. If I died in my neighborhood, the government wasn’t going to pay for my funeral.”

After all, his neighbor, the cousin of his best friend, shot his two cousins in an act of violence Mohammed still doesn’t understand. “There were guns lying on the ground there because drug dealers stashed them in abandoned buildings. It was like stepping on candy, because that was your self-protection.” To him, joining the military seemed to offer more hope of a future than staying in his neighborhood. At least in the Marines there would be “rules of engagement” when it came to using a rifle.

His journey through boot camp, however, would prove anything but easy. Drill instructors placed sandbags around his bunk (“to make me feel more at home”), called him a “towel head,” and punched him. “My meanest boot camp drill sergeant told me that one day I would understand why I was treated this way.”

After 9/11, he would indeed find out. He would be arrested in a sting operation for purchasing a then-illegal automatic rifle from another Marine. He had only wanted a pistol, but the seller arrived with what he claimed was a legal semi-automatic rifle, and offered him a good price for it. As soon as the deal was completed, he was, as he wrote in a piece for the New York Times, “swarmed and arrested by government agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Held in a prison in Alexandria, Virginia, he was not informed of the charges against him (which would fall apart at his future trial, the jury concluding that he was lied to and entrapped). He was, he says, raped there before being sent back to pretrial detention at Marine Corps Base Quantico. During that time, fellow Marines watching over him treated him as a “terrorist,” threatened his life, forced him to do menial tasks like picking up pubic hairs in the public bathroom using tweezers, and continued to sling racial slurs at him. “They called me Taliban Marine, Sand Nigger, Taliban Faggot, and more.”

Despite such treatment, Mohammed told me, “the military was hard, but growing up in the United States was harder. Even fellow Muslims at my local mosque treated me like an outsider because I was not Arab. Now, the FBI officials watching me want to know all about my connections with local mosques where I was never really accepted anyway.” Calls and in-person check-ins from the FBI have continued both for him and the Veterans Administration therapist treating him for the post-traumatic stress disorder he got from his time in the military.

“I learned to keep going even though it’s tough.” Other service members of color regularly suffer, even if not as severely as Mohammed did. Research by the Costs of War Project has, for instance, documented the way people of Arab and South Asian descent were profiled en masse and mistreated after the 9/11 attacks.

Of one thing there can be no question: the U.S. military like the rest of American society is infused with racism and yet service members of color like Mohammed often enough join anyway to steel themselves against the more unpredictable racist horrors of American life. In one military community where my family and I once lived, for example, I met a Mexican-American veteran who had served in a wartime Air Force unit in Vietnam. I still remember him telling me that he felt more affinity for the people he was shooting at than for members of his own command, most of whom were white. He spoke in anguished terms of then-candidate Trump’s warning that there would be “taco trucks on every corner” if this country didn’t severely restrict immigration. His parents, he told me, owned a Mexican restaurant and that was how the family survived. Through his military service, he added, “I learned I mattered even if it wasn’t recognized outside. I learned to keep going even though it’s tough.”

By all accounts, it is tough. And the boot camp of life for people of color begins early in this country. Once, when I mentioned to a black friend that my kids didn’t seem to notice differences in race at their preschool, she responded, “Well, I bet that the black kids notice differences.”

Not long after, while dropping my kids off one day, I noticed an African-American staff member yelling at two black girls struggling over a doll. “Sit down, right now!” she insisted. Her tone was harsher than commands I’ve seen given in the military. Unnoticed, I’ve watched the same woman discipline my white child in a similar dispute by commenting on how great the toy was that he and the other child were fighting over before counseling them both on how to take turns. In that way, I feel I saw a tiny example in the lives of those preschool children of the boot camp of black life in America.

In an NPR interview, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker described an all-American “tradition” of elderly black men teaching their kids “how to protect their black bodies from racism manifested in the most evil of ways, which is murder.”

The end goal of such a boot camp: keeping such kids safe from white peers, coaches, the police, future bosses, or anyone likely to find them “out of place” and capable of hurting them in response.

Home front or war zone As a military spouse and therapist, it’s clear to me that, these days, whether people of color or not, active-duty servicemen and women, as well as veterans, generally face a host of difficulties in this country. They range from problems accessing much needed responsive healthcare services to social isolation from a civilian population that understands little about their experiences, to chronic illnesses and injuries they suffer, to repeated deployments in America’s forever wars.

Now, add to all that the current showdown between highly militarized police and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the president’s deployment of the National Guard and his threats to deploy federal troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C. (and elsewhere). As one Washington therapist who works with military service members and their families told me, many veterans find that memories of combat are triggered by the sight of police in military-style equipment facing down crowds of civilians and, in response, they socially isolate themselves more.

For some veterans, when the home front starts to look like a war zone and fears rise that the Trump administration will use force against peaceful citizens, it feels like a new red line has been crossed. As Affraz Mohammed told me, “When the veterans of these wars come home, they won’t understand what’s going on. They are not used to a hostile environment at home. They want to come home. They turn the light switch off when they go home. What’s going to happen when they’ve got to turn it on again?”

As illustrated by an NPR interview with that rarest of figures, black retired Major General Dana Pittard, Mohammed is not the only person of color who worries that the very civil liberties he’s fought to protect are at risk in the United States as our endless wars in distant lands continue to come home. (“I was very concerned with even the threat of using active duty military to quell the protests.”) After all, those heavily white police forces, now facing off against Black Lives Matter demonstrators in cities and towns across the country, are equipped at this point with about $1.8 billion dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied military gear, including mine-resistant vehicles and grenade launchers. (Since that Pentagon program began in 1997, $7.4 billion worth of such stuff has been handed out.) A 2017 study found that cities where the police had received such military gear had more civilian deaths than those that hadn’t.

In the present context, my own family members, unlike General Pittard and some of the parents of my child clients, aren’t afraid for our lives or those of our children, not here in the U.S.A. That’s what racism means at the deepest level in a still white-dominated military in a still white-dominated country. Yet, as the United States comes ever more to resemble a war zone in a pandemic moment, in a country run by a president with autocratic inclinations, amid a surge of protest over racism, the home front could indeed become a war front. Then, among military families at least, the experiences of so many people of color and their children could come to seem more familiar. If those in uniform continue to be the aggressors against black, brown, and white protesters, including children, where will any of us find a safe haven?

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 22 June 2020

Word Count: 2,582

—————-

The president came close to inciting violence today. Regarding his upcoming rally in Tulsa, Donald Trump tweeted that “any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma, please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!”

This is evidence, I would argue, of the president being the nominal head of a loose network of vigilantes inside and outside law enforcement prepared to use violence when normal democratic politics fails to yield the right results. This is an expression of confederate (i.e., fascist) elements always already at work in this country ready to burn down the status quo if the status quo gets in the way. This is a reality that isn’t even conceivable when we continue calling rightwing illiberalism by its wrong name.

The wrong name is “conservative.”

My friend Seth Cotlar teaches American political history at Oregon’s Willamette University. He asked recently if it might be better to rethink conservatism, especially what we are told it means. He located his question in the 1964 presidential election, which is generally considered the starting point of so-called movement conservatism in which Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory arose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat. (Reagan launched the “conservative” regime that we are living in today.)

“What if we think of 1964 as the moment when the Republican Party committed to being a party of the illiberal far right,” Seth said, “and then it took 20 or 30 years for them to push out the remaining (classical) liberal conservatives in their coalition?” Seth then turned to the Democrats. 1968 is generally considered the year in which the ruling coalition the Democrats had enjoyed since the 1930s fell apart in the wake of the civil rights movement, specifically the white backlash to it, and the Vietnam War.

Seth asked if we should “think of the post-1968 Democrats (and their moderate GOP allies) as the true conservatives, as the folks devoted primarily to conserving the democratic and egalitarian elements of the New Deal order that the illiberal elements in the GOP sought to destroy?” Seth then asked us to “conceptualize ‘the American left’ as the portions of the Democratic party that sought not just to preserve the New Deal order, but expand upon it,” and that it was the American left that had “to battle the illiberals in the GOP as well as the conservatives” in both parties (my italics).

After this, Seth said, we might have different view of “conservatism.” He said: “I think it’s done much damage to our political culture that we’ve used the term ‘conservative’ to refer to a radical movement that sought to dismantle huge swaths of the American state and fight against social movements for equality and democracy.” Additionally, we have a different view of “liberal” and “leftist.” Amid the current “conservative” political regime that started with Reagan, the liberals have been conservative while the leftists have been pushing the franchise’s boundaries to include people who had not been included previously, for instance, transgender people. As the left keeps trying to open the door wider, rightwing illiberals keep trying to push it shut. Liberals and leftists believe everyone is American no matter who they are. The “conservatives,” however, define “American” according to a set of ancient hatreds and bigotries.

The conventional wisdom is that conservatives don’t like change but will go along if and when a majority of the people believe it’s time. According to this widely accepted definition of conservatism, conservatives will yield in time to popular sovereignty. But, as Seth hinted, “conservatives” since 1964 haven’t done that. Liberals and leftists have used the tools of democracy — free speech, grassroots organizing, legal advocacy, and science, to name just a few — to include more people. The “conservatives,” meanwhile, increasingly find themselves losing ground. Instead of adapting, as true conservatives like George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller did in the 1960s and 1970s, rightwing illiberals have increasingly found ways to sabotage the tools of democracy themselves. The next step, as the president intimated today, is an embrace of political violence.

Many people think the Republicans turned their backs on democracy when Senate Republicans nullified Barack Obama’s right to name a new Supreme Court justice. But I think there’s another moment that gets little attention, because it’s about mass death and gun violence, not democratic norms. That moment was the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in which 20 six-year-old children were shot to pieces. That was when true conservatives in the Republican Party, seeking to preserve life and liberty — the very essence of that which must be conserved — would have acted. They did no such thing.

Sandy Hook proved there are no conservatives left in national politics. Indeed, the GOP went the other way. While Republicans at the Capitol held the line on “gun rights,” Republicans at the state level loosened or abolished gun laws, allowing them in cafes, churches, libraries, playgrounds and other areas where guns do not belong. The energy that pushed guns deeper and deeper into public affairs is the same energy now threatening state lawmakers acting in interest of public health and ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional right to protest a fascist president in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

True conservatives do not give up on democracy. Rightwing illiberals do. They must. I don’t think it’s possible to understand our current politics if we don’t understand that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 19 June 2020

Word Count: 903

—————-

I don’t like John Bolton any more than you do. He’s a crank. He’s a snob. He’s a warmonger. One thing you can’t question, though, is his loyalty. No matter how wrongheaded, how dangerous, how much he prefers airstrikes to diplomacy, you can’t doubt (I don’t doubt) his dedication to the United States. Indeed, he’s loyal to a fault.

This is important to point out, because disagreeing with someone, even to the point of fighting like hell to wall him off from power, is not grounds for questioning his love of country. The Democrats usually understand the difference between partisanship and patriotism. They usually get the difference, ultimately. The Republicans, since Barack Obama’s election, have usually demurred. If you are not a Republican, you’re not quite American; if you’re not quite American, you are tantamount to the enemy.

This, I have argued, is the result of a double consciousness among Republicans. Starting in 2008, when the country elected its first African-American president, members of the GOP began splitting their loyalty between the real nation that is the United States and a wholly imagined nation inside the United States, where “real Americans” live and where white Protestant men are chosen by God to rule the United States in His name. Since 2008, you have probably noticed the GOP looking and sounding more Southern. Well, there’s a reason for that. For some people, the Civil War never ended. It just went underground. The result has been that for some Republicans patriotism is optional. They didn’t exercise that option fully until the country was governed by a black man.

Bear this in mind as we consider John Bolton’s new book, parts of which were leaked Wednesday to the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The former director of the White House National Security Council was present during Donald Trump’s talks with foreign leaders. He paints a familiar picture. From the Times: “It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.”

There are many conclusions we can draw from available parts of the book. (The Bulwark has a handy rundown of takeaways.) I’m interested in two moments when Bolton was a fly on the wall. One is Trump’s discussion of military aid to Ukraine. The other is Trump’s interactions with China’s leader Xi Jinping. To take the second first, the president offered to reduce tariffs imposed on Chinese imports in exchange for Xi’s buying up US farm-products, which would put him in good stead with farm states. In other words, Trump asked China for help in getting reelected, as he did with Ukraine.

The differences are important. As Jonathan Bernstein wrote this morning, it’s probably not abuse of power for Trump to trade favors with China, even if the favor requires turning a blind eye to Xi’s rounding up Uighur Muslims and “reeducating” them in concentration camps in China’s northeast corner. I agree. That’s probably not abuse of power. If Trump’s interest in getting reelected aligns with farm-state interest in selling more soybeans, so be it. But that’s about all the good we can find in this episode. What Trump did in trading blood for soybeans is a repudiation of our republican values and a forfeiture of our influence overseas. This may not be an abuse of power, but it sure-as-hell is a betrayal of everything we tell ourselves we stand for.

As for Ukraine, Bolton confirms what we already knew. The president was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky, holding up tens of millions to aid his country’s eastern war against the Russians in exchange for an investigation into Joe Biden’s son for the purpose of smearing Trump’s most likely opponent in the 2020 election. Or as Bolton put it: Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything [military aid] until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”

This is usually characterized as Trump not just welcoming foreign interference in our elections (as he did in 2016) but demanding it. That’s bad enough, but we really should call an attempted international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people by its real name. Yes, we are not at war, which is what critics say whenever I introduce the T-word. I’m not interested in legal and constitutional word-parsing. I’m interested in speaking the whole truth plainly, and what this president did was flat-out treason.

More importantly, I think, is what the Republicans in the Senate did. Remember that John Bolton didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. When the Senate Republicans decided against gathering evidence and hearing testimony in Trump’s impeachment trial, they almost certainly knew they were preventing the public from learning more, thus making their decision to acquit that much easier to defend.

Make no mistake, however. The Republicans would have made the same decision. This president isn’t rogue. He’s an outgrowth of a political party that has become increasing dedicated to a wholly imagined nation within a nation, where “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule the United States in God’s name, the result being that “real Americans” are released from the awesome and solemn responsibility to bargain in good faith in pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. Indeed, the greatest good has become the greatest threat, thereby justifying even the highest-order crime.

Let’s be clear: every single Republican senator who voted to acquit Donald Trump knew he was trying to sabotage the sovereignty of the American people. They knew he abused his power. They knew he obstructed justice to cover it up. They acquitted him anyway, the result being a president not only above the law but the law itself. He is a king.

The Civil War never ended. It went underground — until a black man dared be president. The Republican Party died that day, and the Confederacy was reborn. No one dares call it treason, but we should.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 18 June 2020

Word Count: 1,016

—————-

Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which America’s streets were essentially empty, they’ve suddenly filled, day after day, with youthful protesters, bringing back a version of a moment I remember from my youth and that’s a hopeful (if also, given Covid-19, a scary) thing, even if I’m an old man in isolation in this never-ending pandemic moment of ours.

In such isolation, no wonder I have the urge to rant. Our present American world, after all, was both deeply unimaginable — before 2016, no one could have conjured up President Donald Trump as anything but a joke — and yet in some sense, all too imaginable. Think of it this way: the president who launched his candidacy by descending a Trump Tower escalator to denounce Mexican “rapists” and hype the “great, great wall” he would build, the man who, in his election campaign, promised to put a “big, fat, beautiful wall” across our southern border to keep out immigrants (“invaders!”) — my grandpa, by the way, was just such an invader — has, after nearly three and a half years, succeeded only in getting a grotesquely small wall built around the White House; in other words, he’s turned the “people’s house” into a micro-Green Zone in a Washington that, as it filled with National Guard troops and unidentified but militarized police types, was transformed into a Trumpian version of occupied Baghdad. Then he locked himself inside (except for that one block walk to a church through streets forcibly emptied of protesters). All in all, a single redolent phrase from our recent past comes to mind: mission accomplished!

From the second the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to the spread of Covid-19, developments on this planet have been remarkably inconceivable and yet strangely predictable. Can you even remember that distant moment, almost three decades ago, when a stunned Washington political establishment (since its members had never imagined a world without the other Cold War superpower) suddenly found themselves alone on Planet Earth, freed to do their damnedest in a world lacking enemies of any sort? The globe seemed to be there for the taking, lock, stock, and barrel.

Their promised post-Cold War “peace dividend,” however, would involve arming the U.S. military to the teeth, expanding the country’s “intelligence” agencies until there were (count ’em!) 17 of them, bolstering an already vast national security state, and dispatching this country’s generals to fight “forever wars” that would unsettle the planet, while conquering nothing at all. The folly of this in such a moment on such a planet should have been obvious. And in fact, it was. In early 2003, facing only one small terrorist group and a completely concocted three-nation “axis of evil,” President George W. Bush decided to order the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Sensing what was coming, millions of people poured into the streets of cities worldwide to tell him the obvious: don’t do it! (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” a typical protest sign of that moment read.) Of those millions, however, not one dreamed that, 13 years later, as a result of Bush’s decision to ignore them, this country, or at least its Electoral College, would put in the White House a president who would essentially launch the invasion of America.

What else do you need to know about our mad moment than that the president of the land that had, for so long, fought a “war on terror” would call the all-American protesters once again turning out in the streets of hundreds of cities and towns in vast numbers “terrorists”? He would then label a 75-year-old white man shoved over by two cops in Buffalo, New York, and left bleeding on the ground as they walked away an “ANTIFA provocateur.” (He’s still in the hospital.) In this fashion, with the police armed to the teeth with weaponry and equipment off the battlefields of America’s forever wars and George Floyd literally breathless thanks to one of those policemen, the war on terror would come home big time.

Think of it this way: we Americans, the greatest power in history, the ultimate unchallenged victors on this planet as the last century ended, are now living in a disease-ridden parody version of occupied Iraq and my own generation is officially responsible.

A flattened planet Outside that Green Zone in Washington, an age, a system, even a planet as we’ve known it may all be ending and that shouldn’t be taken in without emotion. So many things aren’t obvious when they should be. Still, to give myself a tad of credit, in the years after the invasion of Iraq, I did at least sense that this single superpower world of ours was some kind of sham. In October 2012, for instance, I suggested that

 

one thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet. Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces… Given the lack of enemies — a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers — why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.

I added, however, that “the end of the Cold War, which put an end… to several centuries of imperial or great power competition… left the sole ‘victor,’ it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation.”

Now, those exits are truly in sight and the self-congratulation that once filled Washington has been ceded to the walled-in occupant of the Oval Office in a country visibly in dismay and disarray. With a regime that not only has autocratic tendencies but also a remarkable urge to take the planet down environmentally (and possibly via nuclear arms as well), it’s easier to see just how disastrous the post-1991 “sole superpower’s” decisions really were.

Hopeful as the grit and determination of those Black Lives Matter protesters may be in the face of police violence and repression, not to speak of the nastiest virus in memory, we’re also at what looks increasingly like one of those moments when worlds do end and it didn’t have to be this way.

After all, in a cocoon of seemingly ultimate triumphalism, those who were running the post-1991 American global system did anything — to steal a word from journalist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World Is Flat — but flatten the world they inherited (as in creating a more level playing field of any sort). In fact, the American powers-that-be promptly put their energy into creating the least level playing field imaginable. In it, a single country, the United States, would invest more money in its military than the next 10 powers combined and, by 2017, three Americans would have more wealth than the bottom half of this society. Meanwhile, the wealth of 162 global billionaires would equal that of half of humanity. It was a world in which, once the coronavirus pandemic struck causing almost unspeakable economic disaster, those billionaires would once again make a rather literal killing — another half-trillion dollars-plus.

So Friedman was right, but only if by “flat” he meant the four flat tires on the American Humvee.

Here, in fact, was the strange reality of that moment of ultimate triumph in 1991: the American political ruling class, the people who had seemingly won it all, would prove remarkably brain-dead in a way few grasped then or we wouldn’t be in Donald Trump’s America today. Back then, the one thing they couldn’t imagine in a world without the Soviet Union was an all-American world of flatness, peace, and democracy.

The only thing they could imagine was another version of the militarized style of dominance that had long characterized the American Century, to use the famous phrase Life and Time publisher Henry Luce first put into the language in 1941. Those managing the imperial system that had dotted the planet with military garrisons in a historically unprecedented fashion, while creating a global economy centered on the accumulation of staggering wealth and power, had no idea that the United States would prove to be the second superpower victim of the end of the Cold War.

Saying goodbye to the American Century Now, let me truly launch that rant of mine — and note that there will be no more section breaks or breathing room. After all, that’s the nature of a rant in an era in which the man in the Oval Office is quite capable of running the country (into the ground) while tweeting or retweeting 200 times in a single day. Hey, what the hell else is there to do as the president of these disunited states, except tweet, watch Fox News, and disunite them further?

So take my word for it, more or less 75 years after it began, the American Century is over. So long! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Zaijian!

Having been born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler (and not much else in history), I’ve lived through just about all of that “century” and I’m still here. And yet think of this as an autopsy because the body (of my hopes and those of my generation) now lies in the morgue and a skilled medical examiner should be able to discover just what it died of.

Who knew what I really hoped for back then? I mean, you’re talking to a guy who can still remember reading quite a range of books, but not what was in many of them. So who knows, half a century or so ago, what exactly was in me? After all, I was then the equivalent of a book that I carried around endlessly but never stopped to fully read.

We’re talking about the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years when, for the first time in my life, however briefly, I suddenly felt strangely at home (and also movingly out of place) in this American world of ours. In the late 1960s, the radical politics of that moment blew me out of graduate school where, of all things, I was studying to be a China scholar at Harvard University. Yes, the Ming and Ching dynasties (rather than the Trump dynasty) then had my attention… until, of course, they didn’t. Those were the years when I suddenly became deeply aware that the American world I’d been brought up to admire (even if, in my childhood, my parents seemed to be having an awfully tough time in it) was deeply awry. And it tells you something about this white boy that it wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement that truly brought that home to me (though it should have been, of course) but an all-American conflict and slaughter taking place thousands of miles away.

Called the Vietnam War, it was a brutal American folly in the divided Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in which millions would die and it would unsettle my mind, my life, my being. Somehow, in those years, as I’ve also written elsewhere, it came to seem as if Vietnamese were being killed right outside my window in peaceful Cambridge, Massachusetts. While I would never end up in the U.S. military — my draft files were destroyed at the time by an activist group that called itself Women Against Daddy Warbucks — I would be mobilized into an anti-military, antiwar movement filled in a fashion unimaginable today with dissenting soldiers, many of whom had fought in Vietnam.

I was swept up by the idea of a better world that I began to imagine might actually come to pass. How naïve I was!

Had you told me at that moment that everything we then dreamt of beyond the ending of that terrible set of American wars would essentially go down in flames; that the U.S. would, in the ensuing nearly half-century, fight two endless conflicts in another Asian land, Afghanistan — one in a kind of open secrecy, the second (now nearly two decades old) in plain sight even as it turns into a pandemic war; that, in this century, my country would invade not only Afghanistan but Iraq and fight a war on “terror” across much of what once would have been known as the Third World; and that all of this would happen without — except for one brief moment — anyone out in the streets protesting or paying much attention at all (except to eternally “thank” the non-conscripted soldiers fighting in those wars), I would have thought you were nuts.

If you had told me that the president of the United States, a man of my generation, would be a narcissistic, autocratic-leaning, utterly self-obsessed version of whatever anyone who mattered to him wanted him to be, a man ready, even eager, to call troops from those distant wars onto American streets to put down a sudden surge of protest amid a viral pandemic and an economic collapse similar to the Great Depression, only to find himself opposed by the very generals, each whiter than the next, who fought the disastrous forever wars that paved his way to power (and that they would be greeted as saviors in the liberal media), I would have thought you mad as a hatter.

And here’s the saddest thing of all from my perspective: if those young people now in the streets can’t perform genuine miracles — and not just when it comes to racism — if they can’t sooner or later turn their mobilized attention to the planet-destroying side of the American ruling class, then forget about it. This world will be heading into a heat hell.

That my generation, whether in the form of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, would be responsible for turning imperial America into an autocratic-leaning, collapsing semi-democracy, and a first-class world annihilator, I would have found hard to imagine. If you had told me that, half a century into the future, the world’s fate would rest on a presidential election between a genuine madman and something close to a dead man (that, for all we know, may not prove to be an election at all), I would have dismissed you out of hand.

And yet that, it seems, is the pandemic legacy of my generation for which we should all be ashamed, even as we watch the young, driven by the insanity and inanity of it all, turning out in our diseased streets to protest a country coming apart at the seams.

Think of Donald Trump as the American imperial establishment’s ultimate gift to humanity. Yes, they were as shocked and horrified as so many of the rest of us when he won the 2016 election, but they created the perfect America for him to do so. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t both built a world that was desperately unflat and been so destructive in the process of unflattening it. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t launched almost 20 years of disastrous, never-ending wars across parts of Asia, the Greater Middle East, and much of Africa under the heading of the war on terror, conflicts that did indeed bring terror to vast populations and spawn a sea of uprooted refugees who helped spark a new right-wing “populism” across Europe and here. (Remember Donald Trump’s Muslim ban!)

It should have been obvious that, in some fashion, those wars and their failed generals would all come home.

Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if the Republicans, once the party of the environment, hadn’t become the party of billionaires and oil magnates. Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if George W. Bush hadn’t insisted on invading Iraq. Donald Trump couldn’t have happened if Barack Obama, a president who understood climate change as well as anyone imaginable, hadn’t been willing to look the other way while the fracking revolution took place and this country briefly became Saudi America. The oceans are now heating in an unprecedented fashion, storms intensifying, sea levels rising, floods increasing in intensity, the Arctic burning in an unprecedented fashion, wildfires growing wilder, and a genuine pyromaniac is in the White House.

The American century is ending decisively with a first-class declinist inside Washington’s Green Zone. My small suggestion: don’t hold your breath for the Chinese century either. I doubt it’s coming.

Whatever happens tomorrow or next week, or next month, or next year, despite the rare gleam of hope those young protesters offer, we are deep in the age of disappointment on (as Donald Trump has only accentuated) an increasingly disposable planet.

So here’s something I wonder about: thirty or forty years from now, when I’m long gone, will there be a modern Edward Gibbon around to write a multi-volume classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire? And will she emerge from that movement of young people now in the streets denouncing racism? And will that movement be transformed somehow into a planetary one of people of every age determined to trump the Trumps of our world and save a planet worth saving by forever burying all those fossil fuels and the criminal companies that produce them, or will the dreams of my generation have turned into the nightmare of all times? Will this not just be the end of that foreshortened American century, but — in the deepest sense of the word — the age of disappointment?

And now, for that rant of mine…

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 18 June 2020

Word Count: 2,952

—————-

I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, but the president’s political instincts are rather stale. The price of gas, the ups and downs of the Dow, the unemployment rate, and the US economy generally — these are the indicators Donald Trump turns to in order to determine how he’s doing politically and gauge the likelihood of getting reelected.

Indeed, the economy is so important that he was willing to do pretty much anything to prevent the markets and the electorate from knowing more than he wanted them to know about Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, which will have killed by week’s end 120,000 people and has unemployed more than 44 million others. By the time the markets and the electorate fully understood the danger, but before the pandemic had even peaked, the president had already begun chomping for a return to normal, as if normal were possible in the absence of a vaccine, as if an economy based on consumer demand can recover when consumer demand has all but collapsed.

Most Republican governors went along. Florida’s Rick DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott, for instance, hesitated to implement guidelines designed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the infection (some Republican governors didn’t bother doing anything). Then, after the president gave them some political cover, they were quick to reopen. States that rushed reopening, however, are now seeing a resurgence in rates of the disease. That doesn’t amount to a second wave, according to the Washington Post, so much as a continuation of a first wave that never crested.

The GOP altogether appears to have decided that saving the economy is worth sacrificing scores of thousands of lives. That calculation seems to rest on an accepted truth: that what’s good economically is good politically. The Republicans figure a recovering economy will carry them through. While that logic might be sound, and cold-blooded, what’s good economically is good politically is more assertion than fact.

There has probably always been some kind of link between economics and politics, but the link was of acute interest during the 1992 presidential election. Like this year, that year saw a recession (a small one compared to today’s), and like the current incumbent, George H.W. Bush had, not quite fairly, a reputation for being out-of-touch with the ordinary worries of ordinary Americans. Over time, the link between economics and politics came to be seen as the cause for Bill Clinton’s victory, and the link was later preserved in amber when a campaign advisor quipped, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

No one knows why anyone wins the presidency. If there is indeed a reason, it’s the most obvious one. Ross Perot, that year’s independent candidate, split the Republican vote, giving Clinton a win by plurality. That, however, didn’t prevent James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” from being received as gospel truth by which every first-termer seeks a second. The thinking goes that incumbents can withstand pretty much anything, even something as damaging as an impeachment trial, as long as the economy is performing well. George H.W. Bush’s one-term presidency (and Jimmy Carter’s too) are like ghosts. They haunt the White House and have for 40 years.

Economics might (might!) have determined 1992, but it likely won’t determine 2020, because polarization — the rightwing purification of the Republican Party — will almost certainly prevent self-identified Republican voters from leaving Trump’s side. Yes, his policies, especially his senseless trade war with China, has hurt Republican voters in places like Kansas and Nebraska, but, honestly, they are used to it. The GOP has conditioned its members to endure all kinds of misery. If they could live without expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, they can live with a potentially deadly virus.

If I’m right in saying that economics is not going have much or any bearing on the results of 2020, I have to ask: What’s the point? What’s the point of Republican governors rushing to reopen their states, sacrificing scores of thousands of lives in the process? It could be they think politics — total resistance to the Democratic Party — will win the day. That, however, presumes voters won’t die before they vote, especially elderly voters who tend, as a class, to favor Republicans. The conclusion I come to is honestly the worst conclusion I can come to. If they win, politics will have paid off in the form of power. If they lose, politics will have paid off in the form of profits.

Regardless of what they say about themselves, the Republicans are, first and last, the party of business. Big business, small business, all business, and the pandemic has been the biggest threat to business since no one remembers when. So it should be no surprise that the GOP appears to have taken a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook.

They know their product (politics) is killing people, but they are going to sell as much as they can for as long as they can until people get wise to what they’re doing, and even then they are going to double down in order to squeeze out every last buck. It’s greedy. It’s cynical. It’s defies comprehension utterly. In the end, however, it might work.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 17 June 2020

Word Count: 868

—————-

When it comes to the president’s support among white evangelical Christians, my first instinct is skepticism. Always. These people are not subject to political factors normal people are subject to, such as a pandemic that has killed more than 118,000 people. There’s precious little Donald Trump can do to alienate them, because the point in supporting him isn’t protecting “religious freedom” or outlawing abortion. The point is seeing people punished who deserve to be punished — and enjoying it.

This is why recent discussion over the alleged loss of support among white evangelical Christians was pretty meaningless. True, Trump had sky-high approval in March, and true, that approval dropped around 10 points a month later. But that didn’t indicate a serious shift. His approval was sky-high across all demographics due to the “rally around the flag” effect. That was gone by April, and Trump’s approval went back to normal. The president still has white evangelical Christians in his back pocket.

Still, it’s worth asking what would alienate them. There are probably a few who disapprove of the way he staged a “Bible photo op” in Lafayette Square in front of a Episcopalian Church near the White House. There are probably a few who disagree with the president’s decision to gas peaceful protesters out of the way in order to stage it. And, as I said Monday, there are probably a few who dislike Trump’s little wink to the Washington press corps, saying “it’s a Bible,” God forbid not my Bible, the result being a heightened and painful awareness of his pandering displays of empty piety.

However, white evangelical Christians disgusted by this behavior have probably been disgusted for some time. The photo op didn’t drive them away. It was just one more reason for leaving. White evangelicals taking the teachings of Jesus to heart are not who we should be talking about when asking what Trump could possibly do to alienate white evangelical Christians. A vast majority of that cohort is willing to eat virtually any insult as long as Trump sees to it that the right people are punished and, more importantly, that they can do the punishing. This is why Monday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court, which expanded anti-discrimination workplace protections to LGBTQ people, is a bigger setback than white evangelical leaders are willing to let on.

You have to understand something about ultra-orthodox twice-born Christianity when its comes to sex and gender in public and private life. You’re either a man or you’re a woman; male or female; masculine or feminine. Men married women. Women married men. There is no in-between. There is no gray area. There is no plus/and. You are not born LGBTQ, because birth is the most natural thing of all. Being LGBTQ, however, is unnatural. It’s a choice, a sinful “lifestyle” choice. You didn’t choose anything, of course, but that might not have stopped you from feeling you were born a crime.

This is not just a matter of culture or tradition. This is a matter of the natural order — God’s law — and things outside the natural order are a perversion of God’s law, an abomination that can’t be left alone, because leaving it alone would mean complicity in the perpetration of sin against God. To be LGBTQ is to be a “crime,” which requires punishment. Only through punishment can the human soul be redeemed. Yet the Supreme Court now says such punishment is illegal. The high court has given white evangelical business owners a kind of “Sophie’s Choice”: disobey the state and obey God, or obey the state and disobey God. There is no area of gray. This is either/or.

So it’s strange, to say the least, to see white evangelical Christian leaders like Ralph Reed searching for areas of gray. This isn’t a big deal, Reed told the Washington Post. What matters most is religious freedom and abortion. “They rise far higher in the hierarchy of concerns of faith-based voters. Ultimately seeing a reckoning on Roe vs. Wade looms so much larger in the psyche of the right that I don’t know that this is a de-motivator.”

Projection is the coin of the white evangelical realm, so it’s safe to say that Reed means the opposite of what he’s saying. Senate Republicans nullified Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court justice with the full backing of white evangelicals appalled by the court’s extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples. They voted for Donald Trump in order to get an Antonin Scalia lookalike. They thought they got one with Judge Neil Gorsuch. Yet here’s Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the high court’s majority opinion, saying that white evangelical business owners can obey the law or obey God but not both. If that’s not a “de-motivator,” as Reed calls it, nothing is.

Ralph Reed is a political animal, as many white evangelicals are. They are not Trump’s biggest problem, though. His biggest problem is the truly orthodox, people identifying as Christian first, American second. The ruling is for them a major setback. Many may even feel betrayed by the denial of their “right” to punish those deserving punishment; by having gone all-in for Trump and gotten in return a slap in the face. They are not going to vote for Joe Biden, let’s be real, but they don’t have to vote for the incumbent. They don’t have to vote at all if they feel “de-motivated.” The president has his work cut out for him. To win reelection, Trump can’t lose a single white evangelical vote.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 923

—————-

In 1964, an 18-year-old New York Military Academy first baseman named Don Trump slammed a game-winning home run against Cornwall High School that perked the interest of scouts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox. No question about it — the big kid was a professional prospect!

That same year, a 25-year-old New York Yankees pitcher named Jim Bouton, an All-Star the previous season, won two World Series games against the St. Louis Cardinals. Hall of Fame, here we come!

Neither of those hotshots fulfilled their baseball promise. Unpacking why not might just help us survive another day without baseball at a time when — thanks to that now grownup first-baseman — we really need the diversion. And it may remind us of what we’re missing.

As you may already have guessed, Don Trump was never really a pro prospect. That home run, in fact, would prove just a foretaste of his talent for hyping himself. It never happened. He made it up. In fact, his team didn’t even play Cornwall that year. Trump, who actually was his school’s team captain, has long claimed that he was the best athlete there, a boast rarely challenged because coaches and classmates tended to praise him once it became in their best interests to do so.

And what about that Yankee phenom, nicknamed “Bulldog” by his teammates (including legendary superstar Mickey Mantle) for his ferocious tenacity on the mound? Only six years after his World Series heroics, sportswriters would be furiously writing him off as a “journeyman” ballplayer, a “social leper” who had betrayed the game to produce a “tell-all” book written for him by a lefty journalist.

This year, Jim Bouton, who died in 2019 at age 80, will get more of the acclaim owed him as a revolutionary sports figure thanks to the publication of an excellent new biography and a forthcoming 50th anniversary Kindle edition of his memoir, Ball Four, arguably the best sports book of all time. In 1999, Ball Four was, in fact, selected by the New York Public Library as one of the “Books of the Century.”

Baseball anthropology Parts of Ball Four may now seem quaint. (Who would be shocked today to discover that ballplayers of that era actually cursed, popped amphetamines, or tried to peek at women through hotel windows?) In 1970, however, that book turned the national pastime on its head. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to have it banned or at least force Bouton to declare it “fiction.” Players who didn’t bother to read it nonetheless felt violated by it or were convinced that they should feel that way. Traditional sportswriters, whose status depended on the idea that they were the only conduit fans had to the true life of the locker-room, were infuriated. They had been exposed as faux insiders.

As former Wall Street Journal reporter (and sportswriter) Stefan Fatsis said, in retrospect, “I think you can argue that Ball Four completely reshaped journalism.”

No one who’s written about Bouton’s book, however, has caught its deeper spirit better than his widow, the psychologist Paula Kurman, in an introduction to that 50th anniversary edition. “Ball Four,” she wrote, “was an extraordinary study of a strange, isolated tribe — from inside the tribe — which any anthropologist would be proud to have authored. It was a universal fable, in which our hero sets out to seek his fortune, or the Holy Grail, and must do battle with those who try to stop him. It was a man from a macho world — openly talking about his feelings and insecurities. It was a kid calling out that the Emperor had no clothes on.”

For starters, it reshaped the perceptions that many sports fans then had of their heroes. It humanized them. Not surprisingly, the book spent months on the bestseller list, less for its mildly bawdy anecdotes than for the way it reinforced the passion of baseball fans for their game. Rigorously edited (but not written) by Leonard Shecter, a progressive, uncompromising veteran of the pre-Murdoch-era New York Post, Ball Four was a strange and unexpected valentine to what was still the national pastime then. (Today, it’s undoubtedly football, a tribute to American brutality.)

Bouton’s book proved to be the sweet revelation of a True Believer’s longing to get a tighter hold on a game that had entranced him as a young man, a hold as tight as the game had on him. Even now, it feels like a warm hug and helps explain why baseball is still America’s best game, a contest without a time limit or strategic violence, a sport that adds up to a true guild of disparate talents only capable of succeeding by working collectively (no matter the mix of workingmen, thugs, and poets on the field). Think of it as a sort of dream version of America.

As it happened, however, it was a glimpse into Mickey Mantle’s alcoholism that especially upset the establishment. As Bouton told Neal Conan of NPR’s Talk of the Nation in 2012, Mantle showed up so hung over one day that the Yankee manager excused him from the game, telling him to sleep it off in the trainer’s room.

“Anyway, the game goes extra innings,” recalled Bouton. “We need a pinch-hitter in the 10th. Somebody went to wake up the Mick. He comes out, put a bat in his hands. He walks up to home plate, takes one practice swing and hits the first pitch into the left field bleachers, a tremendous blast.

“Guys are going nuts. He comes over, crosses home plate. Actually, he missed home plate. We have to send him back for that. He comes over to the dugout, and he looks up in the stands, and he says, those people don’t know how tough that really was. Then after the game, the sportswriter said, ‘Mick, how did you do that?’… And he said, ‘Well, it was very simple. I hit the middle ball.'”

For Bouton, that anecdote was his almost fanboy way of showcasing the greatness of Mantle. But for the sports establishment, media and otherwise, it represented a loss of control, a peek into the deeper reality of the game and of the human beings that made it what it was. They were particularly upset at how Bouton exposed their greed, at how many now knew how little the owners paid all but a few of their players compared to their profits. The largest salary Bouton ever earned from the Yankees was $30,000 in 1965, the year after his World Series wins, and he had to refuse to sign his contract and hold out to get it. All of this would, of course, seem far less shocking in the world of 2020 with the billionaire first-baseman who specialized in bankruptcies in the White House and a country that, in the midst of a pandemic and the equivalent of the second Great Depression, managed to make its collective crew of billionaires $565 billion richer.

Most important, Bouton’s book laid bare the unfairness of baseball’s reserve clause, which bound players to their owners in something like perpetuity. As Kevin Baxter pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, “Ball Four, fortuitously for the players union, came out the same year that St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause by refusing to accept a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a legal battle that eventually led to free agency. Bouton played a part in that, too, when he was called to read passages from his book in front of arbitrator Peter Seitz, who eventually ruled in the player’s favor.”

He would also prove to be a rare sports activist outside the game. He marched for civil rights at a time when most athletes kept their political heads down. He participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations against South Africa’s white regime when most ballplayers didn’t know what the word meant. He was even a George McGovern delegate from New Jersey, his home state, at the 1972 Democratic convention.

The knuckleballer As a player, Bouton was an unusually friendly and accessible locker-room interviewee, even for sportswriters whose hostility to him was guaranteed to find its way into print. The most affronted and belligerent of these was the controversial, right-wing New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, who claimed that Bouton had violated the sanctity of the locker room (a transgression for which he gave only himself a pass). He was the one who described Bouton as a “social leper.” When the pitcher greeted him amiably afterward, Young blurted out, “I’m glad you didn’t take it personally” (though it couldn’t have been more personally meant). That became the title of Bouton’s sequel to Ball Four.

Overused by the Yankees, he would injure his arm in his fourth season and never regain the dominance of his early Bulldog days. In a major league career that lasted 10 seasons, he would play for three more teams, trying to develop and perfect a knuckleball, a difficult pitch to deliver, without notable success. He would then go on to a successful career as a TV sportscaster and then an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. He would jokingly describe himself as a “medium celebrity,” at about the time in the 1980s when Donald Trump first made it onto the B list of anyone who was anybody in New York City. It was a wonder they never met. His wife would later tell me that he “loathed Trump from the get-go,” but by the time he was angry enough to go on the attack, his verbal and literary skills had been dimmed by cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease.

As for me, while working at the New York Times and elsewhere, I interviewed and covered Trump for more than 35 years and Bouton for almost 60 — we eventually became friends — and I can’t tell you how creepy it seems to me to put both of them in the same sentence, no less compare them. Yet they did have something in common. They were both creatures, if not creations, of the media, highly accessible and always eminently quotable. They were both suffered by journalists who didn’t like them because they were guaranteed to draw attention and provide instant colorful copy (as the president still does daily). And both were misinterpreted early.

Trump’s ponderous, dour personal style made him seem serious, almost thoughtful, when being interviewed. While it was clear enough that he had no ideology beyond making money and making his own will prevail, he was regularly characterized as a cunning man and so it was easy enough to assume that he had a master plan of some sort. In those years (as now), he schemed endlessly to attract attention, going so far then as to pretend to be a publicist, peddling his employer, one Donald Trump, while on the phone with reporters.

Bouton, on the other hand, rarely fished for publicity. He did, however, have a bubbly personality and a willingness to talk to anyone about anything, a manner that obscured the very thing he had and Donald Trump lacked: a methodical, rational mind with a highly developed sense of justice. Looking back, Paula Kurman thinks that a media tendency to characterize him as a classic tilter at windmills was a way of diminishing the passionate pragmatism of his activism. His last major quest was an attempt to save an old ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which he saw as a way to preserve history, be a gift to a city — he lived near neighboring Great Barrington — and make money. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the American world of inequality and greed we now inhabit, he struck out.

As he revealed in Ball Four, Bouton was an acute social observer (even if he also had a certain sense of elitism), mocking the dress of various ballplayers, their sloppy chewing-tobacco habits, even the way some feigned brave limps. That he could be seen as a flake was the clearest proof of how conservative, insular, and blinkered most ballplayers and reporters who covered them were, and how hidebound baseball still is.

Dueling balls Otherwise occupied, Trump has been quiet on baseball since he called for the opening of the new season in mid-April at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of his drive to restart the economy at any human cost. Even though he once played the sport, it may be too intricate, humane, slow moving, and collective for a man with as little patience as he has. It’s unlikely he’s up to speed either on the current strained negotiations between the sport’s Trumpian owners and the players for some kind of a truncated version of a 2020 season.

Whether baseball has a season or not this year, chalk up a victory for The Donald in this time of death, destruction, and protest, one that would have amused the former Yankees pitcher. The last time I checked, a signed Jim Bouton baseball cost $64.99, while one with Trump’s signature was going for $5,565.79 — only slightly less than the price for a document signed by the captain of the Titanic.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 2,181

—————-