Beggars Banquet (More Post-Election Reflections)

By Stacey Abrams, Michael Brod, Nick Bromell, Robert Chametzky, Kristi Coulter, Leslie Epstein, Bruce Jackson, Bob Levin, C. Liegh McIness, Zuzu Myers, Asha Sanaker, Aram Saroyan, Budd Shenkin, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, Alison Stone, Laurie Stone, Bill Svelmoe, and this walker in the city…

New York Minute

Click the link to watch Michael Rapaport (it may take a few seconds to access the video): IMG_0755 (10)

Newt Gingritch Claims 150,000 Dead People Voted

I want to believe him,
to imagine the dead marking ovals
or pulling levers with transparent hands.
Where did they go after, their “I Voted” stickers
stuck to whatever they were buried in.
Lots of suits and fancy dresses
heading to the polls. Were they allowed back
for this one act, or could they stay,
pick up plastics from the beach or push
a child from the path of a car? Were they confined
to the state they died in, or could they cross lines?
Thanks, Newt, for giving me the image
of my mother helping choose the first female V.P.
Perhaps she’s on her way to my house now.
I’ll put the kettle on, make sure her favorite cup is clean.

–Alison Stone

Go Team

By Kristi Coulter

When we FINALLY decided a woman could have one of the top two jobs in the US government, we went ahead and chose one who’s black and the daughter of immigrants too. How about that.

(And a Democrat! I genuinely did not think the first woman in this job would be a Democrat. I assumed she’d be some Amy Coney Barrett type.)

Coming

By Aram Saroyan

An exhilarating sense that our democracy, imperfect as it is, endured and triumphed over a wildcat attack. That the institutions that facilitate and protect succession didn’t allow our own dictator to disable the process. Biden rose to the occasion and his tone now seems to me perfect. He is, by nature I think, a healer, which may be what Obama first saw in him. Now we will have the energies and ingenuities of our republic and the larger world’s coming to our table. Democracy won.

French Letters

By Bob Levin

When I arrived at the café to pick up my double espresso, Leonard said. “You know our expression ‘WHEW!’?

Indeed, I did. In fact, I had been thinking that all morning.

“In France,” he said, “the expression is ‘OUF !’, which, when written, has a space between the ‘F’ and the ‘!'”

You never know what you may learn at the café, I thought.

“I have been getting e-mails from Paris for 24 hours: ‘OUF !'” he said.

That sums it up for North Berkeley.

p.s. And let’s not overlook: “First Jewish Second Spouse!”

Stacey Abrams And That Says What?

By C. Liegh McInnes

The author began his post-election reflection musing that “the election of Cindy Hyde-Smith over Mike Espy proves that the vast majority of white Mississippians would have never voted to ‘retire’ the Confederate Flag as they resoundingly voted for Hyde-Smith who was one of the loudest critics of changing the state flag.” He then went on to the general election noting he’d never expected a “liberal landslide”:”Maybe I’ve…accepted Mississippi and America for what they are…”

And, this is where the plot is twisted by the magnificent work of Stacey Abrams who, interestingly, is an award-winning author of several romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. Abrams’ work as a Georgia Representative, her 2019 gubernatorial campaign, and her founding Fair Fight Action is the reason that Georgia just voted for a Democrat presidential candidate since 1992. Yes, one can argue that Atlanta and its surrounding areas are booming with black folks and other minorities.  But, the sad truth is that the majority of black folks don’t vote as they should for various reasons. However, Abrams was able to develop an infrastructure to inspire and mobilize black folks, which is why President-Elect Joe Biden was clear in acknowledging that black folks “showed up” at the polls for him. The history of America is the history of black folks like Abrams who believe in the beauty, intellect, and power of black folks enough to force this country to overcome its hypocrisy and achieve its fantasy ideals about itself as a democracy rooted in the land of the free and the home of the brave As such, Abrams’ work must be a lesson to African Americans from one end of this country to the other.  Do African Americans continue to cry and beg white folks to see, hear, and help them? Or, do African Americans recognize the resources and power that they have and do for themselves? To be clear, Attorney and former State Representative Abrams is not a Black Nationalist as I am. Yet, her work proves that one does not have to be a Black Nationalist to understand and work for black folks becoming self-determining.  I don’t care how black folks get there. I just want us to get there.  And, in the true fashion of Mavis Staples and the great Staples Singers song, “I’ll Take You There,” it was a black woman leading the country on a spiritual journey to redeem its soul. I don’t think that it is an overstatement to proclaim Abrams a political Harriet Tubman, leading black Southerners on a path to freedom. Abrams got the South so shook that Mississippi Governor “Tater Tot” Reeves tweeted that “I will do everything in my power to make sure universal mail-in voting and no-excuse early voting are not allowed in Mississippi – not while I’m governor. Too much chaos.”  Talk about the plantation owner being worried about what the slaves are doing on his neighbor’s plantation. Reeves and the other Southern governors are worried that their black folks might become inspired by the work of Abrams and finally get organized enough to poke more holes in the Red Southern Wall. And while Mississippi’s black population is still not large enough to elect someone to a statewide office on its own, Abrams’ work shows that there are many more battles that they can win if they simply recognize and utilize their own resources.  Mississippi has long had more black elected officials than most other states. But, Mississippi has lacked the type of consistent black leadership that could inspire and lead black folks to control their day and destiny.  Afro-Mississippians constitute thirty-nine percent of the State, which makes it the largest percent of African Americans of any state in the country. While we can complain that white Mississippians are fifty-nine percent of the state and that ninety-five percent of them vote as a solid white block, the truth is that Afro-Mississippians don’t vote their numbers and don’t believe in themselves enough to create a unity that enables them to control their day and destiny. Thus, I’m hoping that Abrams’ work inspires Afro-Mississippians in the same manner that it has scared and infuriated Governor Tater Tot and his Confederate Army.  So, how black folks get to a place where their day and destiny are in their hands is not the issue for me.  That we do this and that more of us follow the lead of Abrams is most important to me.  Other than that, a lot of folks must do some soul searching to decide what is the best way forward for themselves, their immediate community, and the country. To recap, ninety-five percent of white Mississippians voted for a woman who admitted that she would attend a public lynching, and close to fifty percent of Americans voted for Trump; yet, a black woman raised in Gulfport, Mississippi, who relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, when her parents pursued graduate degrees, became the bulldozer to blast a hole in the Southern Red Wall, and that says what?

What Abides

By Tom Smucker

Phonebanks, texting, letters, postcards, zoom meets, donations, folks worked their pandemic asses off to get this victory. And now what? More. Georgia Senate run offs, Covid spikes, cabinet compromises, down ballot battlegrounds. Back to the phone banks.

Maybe Trump is going away or maybe he’ll be back, but Trumpism is alive and mutating, a worldwide pre-fascist, post-neoliberal mix of social media, politics, and religion, with national tweaking. Surging Pentecostals in Brazil, Catholic originalist intellectuals in the USA, only some of it audible in normal talking head critiques. Is AOC the only one who can cross Twitter swords with Trump in our American subconscious? Are centrists still astonished by the breaks with mainstream etiquette only dealing with the rational ice berg tips?

Politics and policy since Jimmy Carter cracked open a fissure filled here by Trump, and around the world by the Bolsonaros and Borises. If Trump goes away that emptiness gets filled with something. Before a refurbished Trumpist gathers strength and jumps back in, I’m for closing the gap with one eye on global finance and the other on the internet, while privileging unions and elevating class back into all our discussions.

Gone Country?

By Scott Spencer

Here in bucolic Dutchess County, many Trump supporters live near me, nearly all of them well armed. The good news about the slow count to 270 is that it’s given them plenty of time to adjust to the Democrats winning and that the man they adore going down to a humiliating defeat.  I have never put up a lawn sign during a Presidential election but this year, irritated by all of the Trump signs and particularly the one near me that said Cold Beer Matters, I stuck a Biden-Harris sign on what’s left of my lawn.  Several times it was mysteriously removed and several times I stuck it back, and that’s as close as I got this year to discussing with my neighbors their choice of candidate or even engaging with them about what they thought they needed to make their lives better.  In the exhilaration of this day, people are wondering what Joe Biden can possibly do to govern a country in which 70 million people think that Donald Trump is a decent person, and I am wondering when the chasm between me and my neighbors became so wide that I gave up trying to convince them of anything. Our country is going to play the next few hands with a fresh deck, and now I am wondering if I have it in me to once again believe in rational discourse, and if it even makes sense to apply myself to the arduous, frustrating project of winning hearts and minds.

Land of the Free and Fearful

Michael Brod & Nicholas Bromell

Scott Spencer’s comments struck a chord with Michael Brod…

I also live in Dutchess County, land of the free and the fearful. The image behind the question Scott poses, that common ground where we have civil discourse, feels like a chimera, like some land of make-believe. But maybe therein lies some possible solution. If there is no common ground then a common ground needs to be created. We know now that it isn’t the internet. Perhaps it is the opposite of the internet, the town square. An actual physical space in every community where divergent realities can meet and stitch together a community fabric that protects and nurtures criticism within a civil society.

Fear in all its forms, drives politics. The real and present fear that African Americans experience daily and the fear that militiamen and women have about being constrained by forces beyond their control; and the existential fear of climate change and nuclear war. Local fears are hard to dislodge but existential fears have the possibility of being drawn down to actual fear and in such a draw-down the possibility of a common ground comes into focus. Planning for the long-term allows for some degree of abstraction. Hmmm. The emergence of Abstract art came into being as the Belle Epoch came to a bloody close. Common ground was dug up, blown up, poisoned. Abstract art took the visual elements that comprise an image: line, color, shape, form, texture, space, and created a new language. We surely need a new way of imaging and talking to each other.

Nick Bromell responded to Brod’s comment…

I agree that fear is something we need to look at. I strongly recommend Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited for its deep wisdom in general and its insights into fear in particular. (It’s available in a nice paperback edition from Beacon.)

Thurman writes at some length about the effects of the pervasive fear of violence that has injured Black Americans for centuries. He occasionally takes a turn and shows how the same dynamic can operate elsewhere and among differently positioned people.

I want to quote these sentences of his: “The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of the churning fear. He senses confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing. All leaders of men have recognized the significance of this need for a sense of belonging among those who feel themselves disadvantaged.”

What is the threat that strikes such fear into Trump supporters that  they want to immunize themselves against it by finding “belonging” under the mantle of a leader like Trump?

I do not think it is fear of violence. It is probably fear of loss of belonging. This fear arises from the diminishing value of whiteness culturally and economically.  It is caused also by the deskilling and disappearance of so much blue collar work. And I’m sure there are other injuries and causes.

But we have to listen to hear them.

As Thurman writes: “It ill behooves a man who [does not experience a certain fear] to tell those who must how to transcend its limitations.”

Home Training

By Zuzu Myers

Three thousand miles and a pandemic away from my father, my mother, and my brother, my thoughts are often about family. When we watched Joe Biden taunted and teased mercilessly about his son during the first debate, my heart filled even further with grief over the way family is used as political gambit in this country. Later, as I watched Joe Biden on stage Friday night, naming one family member after another, I found myself taking in an email from Cosecha, the grassroots, New Jersey based, immigrant rights coalition. The email was written by Norma Morales, whose son was deported–not under Trump–but under the Obama-Biden deportation machine, the one that deported more U.S. residents and tore apart more families than any other administration prior. I do believe that this election was won not by the DNC, but by grassroots, BIPOC led organizing–organizing done by the likes of DRUM and the South Bronx Mutual Aid in New York City, East Point Peace Academy in the Bay Area, Mijente, United We Dream, and Black Lives Matter nationwide, and the infrastructure laid down by the Stacey Abrams campaign. Organizing that has at its heart the kind of kindred care evoked by President and Vice-President elect’s family names–organizing that does the hard work of expanding that care community-wide. My hope for the administration is that it takes these lessons to heart. In a nation so deeply wounded, so deeply scared, and so deeply beloved, the elect must listen to these rooted leaderships. The new administration must bring the same kind of careful love that uplifts the names of their family members to all our fellow country-people and to our world.

After

By Laurie Stone

Before
Election night, when it looked like Biden might lose, I could not think of a reason to leave the couch. Or remain on it. I was living in the moment, and it was empty. I was a fly in amber in the age of spoiled endings and uninteresting violence. I stayed up until 3:30. How could I be so awake and empty? I slept a few hours and the next morning a woman texted to say she was coming to pick up chairs we were selling. I could not recall the feeling of being absent from myself. It wasn’t just slipping into my old steps like footprints in the sand. I awoke a different person with a different set of capacities, and I wondered if there would always be a door I hadn’t previously known about.

Reasons to love
Trump is deeply loved for being a sadistic, murderous fool. No one has been deceived from the moment he opened his sneering, little mouth. The reasons why people love sadistic, murderous fools are manifold, resistant to reductive formulas of cause and effect, and although powerful in their consequences, profoundly uninteresting. The aliens who came to Earth with the monolith in 2001 went to the wrong camp. They should have gone to the bonobos instead of the chimpanzees.

Reasons not to love
I know a lot of people who can’t be happy about this. It can be deeply destabilizing when the worst doesn’t happen.

Happiness
Shouting with joy in Hudson. Can you hear me? Standing on our farm road and waving my Biden sign at trucks going by that want to kill me.

Making room for all Americans is code for saying we have to be nice to all those white guys who are unhappy because sexism and racism are less popular than they used to be. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.

Drinks on the House I Live In

By Bill Svelmoe

I learned something about myself on election night. I’m a happy drinker. Note I did not say happy drunk, although that is likely true as well. No, cocktail making is my hobby. I make cocktails when I’m happy.

Not when there’s a knot in my stomach the size of Trump’s orange head. By midnight Tuesday I was drinking milk.

But now is the time for cocktails. For friends. For celebration. For joy.

There has been much discussion about not celebrating too hard. Don’t offend Trumpers. We need to reach out to them. Etc. Biden is admirably modeling such behavior.

And I agree there will come a time for sober reflection on this issue. Eventually the Confederate states were let back in. Eventually those who voted for a racist sociopath, and voted fully cognizant of who and what he was, will have to be let back in. And we will reach out to those who are reachable. But I suggest we don’t worry too much about such things today.

As I tell my students in my American religion class, we should think about leaders of movements differently than we do followers.

Whatever hypocrisy, even evil, we might see in leaders, many who follow such “prophets” do so without a full understanding of the harm they cause. And we may reach out to such folks at the appropriate time.

But today is a day for celebrating the downfall of the leaders.

We begin with the man at the top. History books will record that Trump was a one-term president. The greatest humiliation a president can endure. We gave you a shot, and then got rid of you. He was also impeached. History will note he was the biggest loser in presidential history, losing the popular vote by large margins twice. His opponent got more votes than any candidate in history. Biden’s eventual electoral college victory will be of landslide proportions.

Trump never for a single day even gestured at doing the job. He watched television, played golf, tweeted, and looted the government to balance the books at his hotels. His monumental laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity was catastrophic to his own promised agenda. Instead the leaders of his own party ran over him to get their tax cuts and continue their assault on the health care so necessary to the welfare of Trump’s own followers.

Trump used the free time we gave him to divide us, assault the racial fault lines in the country, insult anyone who did not kiss his ring, and lie, lie, lie to the point where the term lost its meaning. How do you even call “We’re rounding the turn on the virus” a lie? That’s not a lie. That’s an insult. And people died as a result.

Trump and his family of grifters will pack up and leave the White House in disgrace. That is worthy of our celebration.

But don’t stop there.

Mike Pence, the cold Christian liar, will pack up his office.

Steve Miller, the architect of hate, will pack up his office.

Mike Pompeo, the worst secretary of state in our history, will pack up his office.

Betsy DeVos, the Cruella deVille of our public schools, will pack up her office.

Kaleigh McEnany, the Mouth of Sauron, will pack up her office.

We could go on and on.

In short, the reign of incompetence in our government is over.

We will now install heads of departments who are there to advance the mission of their department, not destroy it. The virus will be attacked by people who actually know how the virus works. Sales of bleach will return to normal levels.

The world will once again look to America for leadership. Our president will no longer be accompanied by a laugh track. Dictators are once again looking over their shoulder. Putin has lost his puppet. Kim Jong Un has lost his lover.

We will reenter the Paris Climate Accords, the WHO, the Iran nuclear deal. Our representatives will once again be welcomed in the capitals of the world.

There will be time to figure out how to engage Trumpers and Trumpism. But today is a day to celebrate the gifts of leadership, maturity, adulthood.

The Father of Lies has welcomed his favorite son back to the Daycare Center. Truth-telling by our leaders will be a requirement going forward.

And that is worthy of celebration!

p.s. We haven’t had much rain in South Bend for some time. Things getting kind of dry.

But now, at the 9:00 o’clock hour, I realize I don’t have to worry.

I can water my lawn with Hannity’s tears…