Nation

Talk is Cheap

by

“The new Faith in America” survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights that the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person’s political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.”

While there’s absolutely nothing surprising about this, I suspect you’d get a very different result if you asked the question this way.

“Do you believe that the life of Jesus Christ should influence a person’s political values?”

Read more

Late Prince (Black Lives Matter & A Month of Death)

by

Prince’s Welcome 2 America, which was recorded in 2010 but only released in 2021, five years after his death, has a rep for being a politically aware CD that anticipated the BLM summer of 2020.  Prince limned his country as “land of the free, home of the slave.” Triplets on one lyric disclosed a low line of descent – “son of a son of a son of a…slave-master.” Ten years after, it’s still bracing to hear Prince cutting through the fantasy of a post-racial America.

Read more

Brothers in Arms

by

If y’all have time, watch “The Truth,” which is episode five of season one of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. I will only add this. Black people don’t fight for America because we love it. We fight for America because we built it and because it ain’t shit without us.

Read more

Into the Pit

by

A few days ago, I posted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s video message to the Russian people, an example of thoughtful Republican rhetoric and action. Good to be reminded there are Arnold’s and Liz’s and Adam’s in the world. They are far too few. As we see below.

Today we return to the more typical universe of Republican thought. Something we might call Dispatches from Trumpworld.

Read more

The Way We See (and Hear) Now

by

“Westside Story 2021.” A yes for me. We watched it through, surprised and moved by crazy young love brought vividly to life in this cast’s Tony and Maria. I kept thinking, no, they have a chance, they’ll get out of the Shakespeare play they were born in, like the street where you were raised and the language that formed you. Valentina will give them bus fare and Anita will not betray them after she is almost gang raped. Justin Peck’s balletic remastering of the Robbins dances. The screenplay by Tony Kushner. The Spanish spoken throughout without subtitles. Spielberg’s camera adds wings to the play, turning it into a movie that’s a play set in the way we see things now. Every story is about the time it’s told in, not the period depicted, and this one is about something’s coming. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the rapturous, jazzy Bernstein score that doesn’t get old. And never will.

Moses from Harlem

by

Reps. Espaillat, Wilson, and Raskin are leading a push to posthumously honor Bob Moses with a  Congressional Gold Medal. Rep Espaillat hosted a virtual tribute to Moses during Black History Month. Moses’ daughter Maisha spoke briefly about her father, starting with his boyhood in Harlem…

Bob Moses’ Legacy (Call for Donations)

by

Dear Family & Friends,

I need your help.  As you know, Bob Moses, Civil Rights legend and Math Literacy Scholar, passed July 25, 2021.  Since then, I and a team at FIU, have established a Bob Moses Research Center at FIU. From 2004, when Bob first joined FIU as an eminent scholar, he envisioned a space at FIU to inspire those who want to transform K-12 public schools, through research, to produce quality education not just for the few, but also for students who historically have been denied equitable learning structures & opportunities. Bob believed that all students deserve the opportunity to learn the mathematics skills necessary for a full livelihood and citizenship in a 21st century society.

And he believed that FIU, as one of the largest Research 1 Public Universities–which had long supported his research, philosophy and practice concerning math literacy for K-12 public school students–was an ideal institution for this work.

To memorialize and project into the future Bob’s vision & practice, FIU has generously donated a wing of its Biscayne Bay Campus (BBC), as the home of the Bob Moses Research Center —a valued contribution and strong commitment to further Bob’s work. The Center will serve as a space for people, from all over the country, to gather together to explore how to make this demand for excellence in education a reality for all the nation’s children.

Now that we have the bricks and mortar and the offices are open, our next step is to underwrite human resources. This is where I need your support. Please join us as a partner in building Bob’s dream and furthering his legacy.

Read more

Unsentimental Internationalism

by

I

One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm).

Read more

Defund, Abolish, What?

by

The people who call for defunding the police, and the smaller number who want to abolish the police, have a particular focus: they are interested in the cops who patrol the streets on foot or in cars, the cops who direct traffic, the cops who answer calls about domestic violence and robberies or assaults in progress, and the cops who deal with threatening or erratic behavior in public places. And they are also interested in the special forces, the SWAT teams, that invade homes, often without warrants, looking for illegal drugs or other contraband. Focusing this way makes perfect sense; these are the cops who too often escalate the violence they are supposed to control; these are the cops who kill innocent people. But there is a great deal of police activity that is missing here.

Read more

Nightmare Scenarios and Beamish Projections

by

Linguistics Professor and author John McWhorter (McW hereafter) is many things.  He is an elegant and effective writer and perhaps an even better talker.  Moreover, he knows his way around an argument and is often on the right side of one.  And not least of all, he can be wickedly funny as anyone who has seen him on cable TV harpooning Donald Trump and others surely knows.

These days though, he is increasingly a man on a mission.  In Woke Racism (2021), his recent crusade (sadly, it is hard to term it anything else) against those who would sound the alarm about the continuing impacts of racism in America, even at his best, he fails to put his points about the excesses of “Anti-Racism”—many of which are spot on—into the broader context of all that ails us today.  At worst, e.g., when branding what he calls “Third Wave Anti-Racists”—like prominent authors Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehesi Coates—as “high ‘priests’ in an ‘ideological reign of terror’” and “gruesomely close to Hitler’s racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood-deep malevolent ‘whiteness’”—he has, I fear, gone off the rails.

Read more

McWhorter’s Rare Dare

by

The second and third volumes of Stoppard’s trilogy on 19th C. Russian revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, is mostly set in exile, but Voyage, the first volume, is set in Russia.  A brilliant speech opens its second act:  Alexander Herzen, appearing for the first time, addresses the audience, explaining both a children’s game and picture book titled ”What is wrong with this picture?” and the situation of Russia under Nicholas I.  Herzen gives some examples of what is horrifically wrong under Nicholas’s autocracy, and concludes “Something is wrong with this picture.  Are you listening?  You are in the picture.”  It is the most theatrically brilliant moment in the trilogy.  Herzen suggests that we do not seem to take in the grotesquerie of what is happening, or are perhaps merely afraid to speak of it.  I think he is also implying that whichever is the case, in not noticing what is supremely visible and in not speaking about what is clearly outrageous we are to a degree complicit in such things, also more vulnerable to them happening to us.

This is pretty much John McWhorter’s strategy in Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Read more

Way Down Yonder

by

On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine of skittish enough character to have defected both to and from the Soviet Union, was arrested for assassinating John F. Kennedy by firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade below. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, killed Oswald. A commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Oswald a solo act. This conclusion launched a thousand books, several films, and not a few careers selling counter-theories as to who the actual perps – CIA, FBI, Mossad, Mafia, a military-industrial consort, pro-and anti-Castro Cubans – had been and what role, if any, Oswald and Ruby played.

Read more

Character of the Assassin

by

The author wrote this right after JFK’s assassination, finishing it on the day Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby. It was published in The New York Review of Books and in the essay collection, You Don’t Say (1966).

Read more

Shadows: John Thompson’s Reckoning with Race

by

“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).

Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.

Read more

Time and Skyline in Scorsese’s Stoic Epic

by

Framing the battle
The long narrative core of Martin Scorsese’s 166-minute epic Gangs of New York (2002) is bracketed by two highly stylized sequences — the first, a dystopian “once upon a time” inside a huge ill-lighted building, and the second, a cinematic dissolution of time in a Brooklyn cemetery.

Read more

The Myth of Joan Didion

by

Joan Didion’s death last week was followed by an outpouring of praise stretching over a week in The New York Times. This raises a critical question. Was Didion really a great writer, or merely the vector of attitudes held by the commenting class? The answer lies not just in her most famous books and essays, but in a piece  she wrote that has been overlooked by those who present her as a seer into the enduring meaning of the past.

Didion has been cast as a prophet of the present who “told the truth about America,” as one Times writer gushed. Well, she did tell a kind of truth, one that many sophisticated readers wanted to hear after the traumas of the 60s. Apparently, they still want to hear it. Her images of crazed violence resonate, for her admirers, with the current threat posed by the violent right. But this selective view of Didion’s work ignores the evidence that her dystopian gaze was usually a reactionary one.

Read more

“Succession’s” Essence

by

There is no unhappiness quite like that of a Legacy Media Family.  Such is the premise of HBO’s Succession.  At the heart of the show is Logan Roy (a very leonine Brian Cox) and his four children, the most viable candidates to take over leadership of the publicly-owned but family-run company called Waystar Royco, a conglomerate of business ranging from cruise lines to motion picture production to cable news.  The Roys are miserable, especially when they are all together, and they are always together—insulting, undermining, and threatening each other with little reserve or discretion.  They find the savage fun in dysfunctional, and many of us could not wait for the show to return after a long Covid-19 hiatus.

Read more