Rinsing away the
world, from a widow’s
peak above the Batten
Kill, with a cup of rose tips,
everything burned leaves
the fragrance of her dried lips,
like old questions interrupted.
Monthly Archives: November 2018
Is a Biden/Booker Ticket Unbeatable in 2020?
Is a Biden/Booker Ticket Unbeatable in 2020?
I recently came across a survey on Democrats.com, in which users were asked to pick their favorite potential candidate for president in 2020. Here was the breakdown:
Joe Biden: 14.8%
Bernie Sanders: 11.44%
Liz Warren: 12.81%
Cory Booker: 10.16%
Kamala Harris: 9.48%
Kirsten Gillibrand: 6.7%
Andrew Cuomo: 4.57%
Eric Holder: 5.6%
Julian Castro: 4.31%
Amy Klobuchar: 4.41%
Opra Winfrey: 3.54%
John Hickenlooper: 3.26%
Deval Patrick: 3.08%
Eric Garcetti: 2.32%
Donald Trump: 0.88%
Along with 14.8% of the participating online community who took the poll, I voted for Biden. In many ways, Joe Biden is the antithesis of Donald Trump. Biden is strong, steady, seasoned, moral, and a tried and true public servant. Biden is “Uncle Joe” and a friend of women. Biden is working class and the father of a fallen Marine. Biden is the real deal.
For myself, as for 14.8% of the survey takers, the real question…
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After the Flowers
Into the kind of stillness
a mother craves when
she kisses the sculpted
forehead of her infant,
the Dewdrops emerge
again. After the flowers,
on a carpet of acidic peat,
feeding the frogs and snakes,
they emerge. Soon hurtling
toward the hunger of morning.
Another Staged Thanksgiving
Helicoptered away
from another staged
Thanksgiving, God
feels pinned down
and torn to pieces.
Like the last virgin
in Laos, or a platoon
letting go together.
Can Gandhian Nonviolence Work on the Border?
In Ramachandra Guha’s book, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1949 (Knopf), he writes, “Activists fighting for the environment, for refugees’ and immigrants’ rights, and against racial discrimination and violence continue to be inspired by Satyagraha, Gandhi’s neologism meaning nonviolent direct action. The aim of Satyagraha was to arouse the conscience of oppressors and invigorate their victims with a sense of moral agency. Gandhi’s unique mode of defiance, the theologian Niebuhr observed as early as 1932, not only works to “rob the opponent of the moral conceit by which he identifies his interests with the peace and order of society.” It also purges the victim’s resentment of the “egoistic element,” producing a purer “vehicle of justice.”
As I write this reflection, hundreds of desperate migrants have finally attempted to breach the border along Tijuana and San Diego. Unsurprisingly, given Trump’s supercharged anti-immigrant rhetoric and militant stance, they were met with tear gas and driven backwards. It was the first violent incident to take place in this escalating conflict, and it surely will not be the last if things continue to go in the direction they have been.
Here is where I think Gandhi is once again relevant. The tactics of Satyagraha can be used at the border to engender not only tremendous sympathy from the world, they can also force the Trump administration to act from a defensive position rather than the one it has presently taken. If the migrants participate in a massive show of unified self-sacrifice at the border- with the cameras rolling and journalists present- they can force the Trump administration to negotiate. Using Gandhian tactics, their lack of military weaponry becomes irrelevant. Just by engaging in something like a hunger strike, the migrants have the power to generate profound global sympathy and transform the hearts of their most vehement opponents.
Crashing the border and getting hit with tear gas, on the other hand, is a standard reaction. It’s what people expect. It’s what Americans have been watching on TV for the past decade or so when they try to grasp the refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe. Charging the border also allows the president to snidely remark, “I told you so” to his political detractors. It is a losing proposition all around for the migrants.
Fortunately, it does not have to go down this predictable road. If the migrants are able to collectively organize under the banner of Gandhian nonviolent action, they can turn the tables upside down; they can also achieve everything they hoped to seize from this opportunity. They can put such tremendous moral pressure on the governments of Mexico and the United States, that the two countries will have no choice but to take into consideration every single asylum seeker.
Most importantly, if Gandhian tactics are employed, no one will die from an armed conflict, and the cause of the migrants will be made even more dignified than it was before they set out on foot so many months ago.
Whether the tactic is a mass sit in, a collective act of silence, an art project, a singing marathon, or something I could never dream of, doesn’t matter in the least. The main point is it needs to be highly organized, fully committed, and waged in the same spirit that drove Gandhi to successfully confront the British Empire without guns or tanks.
Rochester’s Racist Marijuana Policies Must End
Whether readers make the personal choice to smoke pot or not, the decades long war against marijuana in Rochester has been an unmitigated disaster. A series of recent studies have revealed just how devastating this war has been for people of color in our community.
According to the Division of Criminal Justice Services, in Monroe County, from 2012-2016, there were 1,811 total marijuana offenses. 373 were white. 1,241 were black. That’s 68% of all arrests weighted against people of color. In Rochester, the total number of pot related arrests was 1,483. 157 of those were white people. 1,164 were black. That’s 78% of all arrests weighted against African- Americans. Put in another way, African- Americans make up 8 in 10 city pot arrests. This is a travesty of justice that is both unacceptable and untenable.
Perhaps the Partnership for Public Good in Buffalo and Erie County has encapsulated the social justice aspect of this crisis the best. They have stated: “For communities of color, marijuana prohibition has justified an invasive police presence that damages citizen’s relationships with law enforcement. And it brings a violent, underground economy into their neighborhood, that cannot be governed by rule of law or regulated as an industry. For immigrant communities, arrests for marijuana possession can lead to deportation. This has happened on a large scale; simple marijuana possession was the fourth most common cause of deportation for any offense in 2013. For young people, the stakes of a marijuana arrest are particularly high, due to the long term costs of early involvement in the criminal justice system.”
What makes this such a blatant act of social injustice, is that study after study has shown blacks and whites to purchase, consume, and sell pot at the same rate. Why are blacks arrested at such disproportional rates? The only explanation seems to be prejudicial and racial profiling. In the words of author/activist Michelle Alexander, “We arrest these kids at young ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them into a parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their lives…They can be discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing, access to education, public benefits. They’re locked into a permanent second-class status for life. And we’ve done this in precisely the communities that were most in need of our support.”
Added to the grotesque fact that African- Americans are nearly four times more likely than white individuals to be arrested for marijuana possession, as Alexander alludes to, the amount of money to be made from legal pot sales can be reinvested in the communities hardest hit by the failed War on Drugs. A recent study conducted by the New York Department of Health found that if marijuana was sold between $297 to $374 per ounce, it could generate between $248 million and $678 million in tax revenue for the state. A different study released by the New York City comptroller’s office pegged the state’s marijuana market at $3.1 billion, with tax revenues yielding about $1.3 billion annual at the state and city levels. That’s a lot of money that can be redirected towards underfunded schools, after school programs, job training, public health, and neighborhood revitalization.
Mayor Warren, with all of that being said, what else do you need to know? The time to push for statewide legalization is now. Decriminalization alone won’t stop the illegal drug trade. And we all know that black and brown people in Rochester are being decimated by the status quo. Something needs to change. When it comes to the social justice imperative of marijuana legalization, whose side are you on?
Trump is not a Phenomenon
Henry Kissinger once said, “Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries have not seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office.”
Kissinger’s remarks are indicative of a perspective that both Democrats and Republicans share towards the president. Despite their radically different appraisals of his effectiveness, one party sees him as a newfangled incarnation of wickedness and incompetence and the other sees him as a political virtuoso of world-shattering stature, both regard him as unprecedented political figure in American politics.
But there is nothing singular or extraordinary about Trump. The truth is he is just another politician who has chosen to take sides in the long battle over human rights in this country. This battle goes back to the founding of our nation.
For example, some European colonists protested the xenophobic and militaristic stance their families maintained towards Native Americans. However, other colonists feared Native Americans and did everything in their power to subjugate them. Which side do Trump’s policies reflect more?
Some Puritans believed religious fanaticism curtailed liberty. For them, that is why they risked everything to cross the mighty Atlantic to settle in a new world. But others believed that God ordained them to colonize these lands in order to make them amendable to Christianity. Which worldview is more aligned with Trump’s?
During World War II, some citizens believed interning Japanese- Americans was inhumane. Others believed citizens of Japanese descent could not be trusted. When the bomb dropped, some believed that we committed a terrible sin against the human race, while others believed it was the only way to end a horrific war. It’s not hard to imagine what side Trump would take if put in the same position today.
Moreover, throughout the Civil Rights Movement, there were those who stood on the side of freedom seeking minorities and those who believed in the necessity of segregation. Whereas some citizens spoke out against the horrendous atrocities of Vietnam, others felt that the war was the only way to combat the menace of Communism. Whereas some viewed President Nixon as embodying law and order, others saw him as a crook in the White House.
What side is Trump on when it comes to matters of racial justice, freedom of speech, uniting people of differences, and reigning in executive powers?
No, Trump is not special. Trump is not unique. Trump is not an anomaly. On the contrary, Trump is just another politician who has chosen sides. Despite the hyperbole and dizzying self-promotion, the man was born in this country; he was educated in this country; and he was shaped politically by this country. By treating him as a “phenomenon,” we actually shirk responsibility for his actions; for if he is so extraordinary, his actions no longer exist within the sphere of our understanding or control. By turning the president into a larger than life personality who is acting in a way that we have never seen before, both Democrats and Republicans have diminished their capacity to judge his policies in light of not only historical events but the real life challenges we currently face as a nation.
Nationalism and its Contradictions
Allow me to begin by stating an anthropological and genetic fact. Any conversation about so called “American” nationalism must begin with the story of human migration itself, which is a story that started in Africa: the one place where all humanity can affirm a shared genesis story. Beyond religion. Beyond politics. Beyond culture. Beyond current affairs. We are all from Africa. That’s a fact.
From Africa, humankind dispersed in several directions. It is believed my most scholars that the first human populations of South America either arrived from Asia into North America via the Bering Land Bridge, or migrated southwards or alternatively from Polynesia across the Pacific. Jared Diamond has conceded that the earliest generally accepted evidence for human habitation in South America dates to around 14,000 years ago. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Diamond concluded: “Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion’s layers is fascinating, challenging—and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past’s lessons for our future.”
With Diamond’s words in mind, the first important acknowledgement that must be made is that the notion of “American” is much more complex, fascinating, and challenging than just the United States. In fact, perhaps 10-90 million Native Americans inhabited America at the time of the European arrivals. Therefore, there is no such thing as American nationalism. If we are going to challenge those who talk about nationalism from this perspective, we must point out that there are only Americas, and to make one of them more important than the others is itself a form of naïve ethnocentrism.
But narrowing our focus for the purpose of this critique, it is obvious to me that the United States cannot claim — not absolutely — one single cultural invention that has come to be emblematic of its self-identity today.
Take for example the game of baseball. Although it may sound feloniously unpatriotic, the modern version of the game derives from England; it would not exist without previous games in early Britain and Continental Europe such as cricket and especially rounders. Most scholars agree that these precursors date back to at least the 16th century.
Not even basketball counts. Interestingly, some sports scholars argue that the concept of basketball derives in part from Gaelic football; and the inventor of the game, James Naismith, was a Canadian physical education instructor.
Politically, our system of government cannot be exclusively claimed by the United States. The Greeks developed the basic tenets of democracy; Aristotle wrote expertly about constitutionalism in his Nicomachean Ethics; and the notion of individual liberty was discussed in depth by philosophers such as Socrates and Plato. In fact, the Japanese had a formal constitution in 604 called the Seventeen-articles constitution. And in 1100, Henry I adhered to the Charter of Liberties, which ultimately led to the Magna Carta in 1215.
Nor are human rights unique to the United States. The Golden Rule may be over 10,000 years old, dating back to the ancient Chinese sages. The very Judeo-Christian tradition that provides the scaffolding for the U.S. educational and legal framework predates the founding of our country by at least 8,000 years.
Let’s be frank. Not one single technology, either — from the radio to the worldwide web — belongs to the United States in its design, production, and distribution. This is true of the research/mechanical processing of technologies in a global marketplace, as well as the scientific discoveries which made these technologies possible; for it is not the invention itself that matters; it’s the ideas which paved the way for the inventions to occur.
For example, Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, predicted the existence of radio waves in the 1860s. Without this work no one in the United States would be able to watch TV or use cell phones. (In the 1880s, Italian inventor, Guglie Marconi, sent and received his first radio signal in Italy.) Likewise, the conceptual framework for the internet had its roots in the research of countless scientists and engineers from all over the planet. Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Nikola Tesla toyed with the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s. Paul Otlet, the Belgian author and visionary entrepreneur, was the first to conceive of a way to collect index cards meant to catalog facts. Otlet’s Universal Bibliographic Repertory in 1895 is an idea that would grow into Google a century later.
How about Pizza? It could be as old as the Chinese baking techniques of the 1100s: certainly, it is Italian. Hot dogs? Try German. Beer? That’s prehistoric. Cars? Motorized transportation has been a dream of rational bipedal creatures since the dawn of the wheel. Movies? They are just plays, recorded and edited for reproduction; and theatrical plays have been performed for at least 2,500 years.
Not even the Blues and Jazz can be considered inventions of the United States. Both are byproducts of an African experience that can only be understood in the context of slavery. These musical genres would not exist at all if it wasn’t for a very particular and sinister form of nationalism which justified the capture, enslavement, sale, and torture of human beings for financial gain.
Not even iconic corporations such as McDonald’s and Walmart make the cut. Agriculture and cattle raising was birthed in the Fertile Crescent, in what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria, possibly more than 12,000 years ago. And the first long-distance trading occurred between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in Pakistan around 3000 BC.
When one stops to really think about this picture, it appears that what makes the United States unique is how all of these disparate cultural ingredients come together to produce something novel. What comes out of cricket and rounders is a new creation called baseball. What comes out of percussive based shamanistic rituals associated with redemptive suffering is a new form of musical and religious expression called the Blues. What comes out of generations of bloody contests for human liberty on the battlefields of Ancient Greece, Asia, South America, and Europe, is a new experience of freedom enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. What comes out of painstaking scientific progress from all parts of the globe, is a new use of rocket propulsion technology that enables astronauts to reach the moon and computers to dominate communication. If the United States can lay claim to being exceptional, it is because of this globalized cultural amalgamation.
That being said, here is the main point. To be a nationalist who believes that the United States is exalted above and beyond the cultural achievements of other societies (and ancient civilizations) is not just ahistorical but nonsensical. The fact remains that U.S. citizens exist because they are Egyptian, Syrian, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Russian, African, Chinese, European, and so on. If for no other reason, that’s why this nation is something new in the course of human history. Everything from the philosophy of statecraft to the battle for civil rights has been an advancement for the species. But these advancements have been made because the U.S. stands on the shoulders of giants from somewhere else.
The United States is not just part of the world. The United States is also of the world and because of the world. It’s a hard to hear message for some, but this nation is a nation because of those who have been callously denigrated or outright forgotten as foreigners, aliens, outsiders, migrants, immigrants, etc. This is a great shame because at the end of the day there is only internationalism. There is only a United States of the World.
Trump is not a Phenomenon
There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. To view him as distinctive and exceptional is to give him more credit than he deserves. Yet both Democrats and Republicans do it all of the time. The Democrats talk about him as if he is a newfangled incarnation of wickedness and incompetence. The Right talks about him as if he is, love him or hate him personally, a political virtuoso of world-shattering stature. Take for example the words of Henry Kissinger, who has said, “Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries have not seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office.”
But both parties are wrong about him. Trump may be a character, but he is not a singular character. Trump may have a big personality, but it is not a personality so extraordinary that it has not been weathered before. Trump may be fantastically wealthy, but that is not a novelty in the White House either. By the comparative standards of the 18th century, how rich were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? And although Trump may fancy himself a once in a life time defender of “traditional American values,” he is hardly the first president to use the coded rhetoric of white nationalism to incite the passions of nervous and vulnerable citizens. Andrew Jackson did it. James Polk did it. Calvin Coolidge did it. Woodrow Wilson did it. So did Nixon and Reagan.
No, Trump is not special. He is not especially stupid or evil, as most Democrats contend. The truth is he is just another politician who has chosen to take sides in the timeless pursuit of individual liberty and human rights all over the world.
Here is what I mean by that. There were some European colonists who wanted to learn about the native population. And there were some who even protested the xenophobic and militaristic stance their families maintained towards them. There were also colonists who feared Native Americans and did everything in their power to keep them at bay. Massacres and other atrocities on both sides resulted.
There were even some immigrants who believed religious fanaticism curtailed liberty. For them, that is why they risked everything to cross the mighty Atlantic to settle in a new world. Yet there were others who believed that God ordained them to take foreign lands by force in order to make them inhabitable for Christians.
During World War II, there were some citizens who believed interning Japanese Americans was irrational, inhumane, and ironic. To them, an American concentration camp made liberating Nazi camps absurd. But on the other side were those who believed Japanese Americans could not be fully trusted. And when the bomb was dropped, many believed that our leaders had committed a terrible sin against the human race, while others believed it was the only way to end a horrific war.
Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, some Americans were willing to stand on the side of blacks, Latinos, and other freedom seeking minorities; while others were all too willing to enforce segregation.
Likewise, some whereas some citizens were willing to speak out against the horrendous tragedies in Vietnam, others were willing to stand by every word Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon uttered in front of a camera. Whereas some protested the war on the streets, others passed out recruiting brochures for the Army. Some knew that killing innocent children and infants in Vietnam constituted a war crime, while others saw these actions as a necessary way to combat the menace of Communism.
No, Trump is not special. Trump is not unique. Trump is not an anomaly. On the contrary, Trump is just another politician who has chosen his sides. Far too often it appears that he has chosen to embrace fear rather than curiosity; zealotry rather than prudence; violence rather than nonviolence; lies and deceit rather than truth and transparency; and nationalism rather than patriotism. Nothing new there.
Let me take this point one step further. It should be painfully obvious that Trump is not special in any historical sense of the term. But people forget. In the fog of his own blustering self-aggrandizement, it gets lost that he is completely rooted in the traditions of this country, as well as the basic laws of biology and anthropology. He was born on June 14, 1946 in Queens, New York. His parents were Fred Trump and Maryanne Macleod. He graduated with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School at Penn. He has been married 3 times. He has a net worth of 3.1 billion. He was a Democrat up until 1987, after which he became a Republican from 1987 to 1999, then a Democrat again from 2001-2009, and finally a registered Republican once more in 2009.
Trump was born in this country; he was educated in this country; he was given a set of values from his parents and teachers in this country; and he was shaped politically by the ideas of this country. Some of those ideas gave birth to the genocides of colonization, the peculiar institution of slavery, Jim Crow and Segregation, unconstitutional wars, Watergate, and more.
To treat Trump as being outside of this nation’s history is to turn him into a useful but cheaply devised scapegoat. In effect, by treating him as abnormal or Kissinger’s “phenomenon,” we permit ourselves to shirk personal responsibility. If he is such a rare and unprecedented leader, then we no longer feel obligated to see his actions as existing within our sphere of control.
As a result, Democrats forfeit their power when they think of Trump as being so over the top that he can’t even be grasped. They tell themselves that he just needs to be survived, as if he is not a by-product of an incredibly pervasive disease in our society. Republicans, on the other hand, do themselves a disservice by making Trump into a once in a lifetime political figure who has come to rescue them from the relentless tide of liberalism and globalization. Not only do they lose out by embracing an autocratic in the making-thus betraying every value of Conservatism-they hamper their ability to engage with these massive social forces in ways that adequately prepare their rank and file to live in the 21st century.
But both parties are guilty of making Trump into something that he is not. In doing so, they both relinquish their own answerability and self-sufficiency, opting instead for scapegoating, blind obedience, and hero worship.
The Broken Spear Vision 