Click HERE to read “Twenty-Five Years After” at Stay Thirsty Magazine.
Nation
What is the Truth, or…How the Roto Rooter Man Tried to Kill Me
We live in a self-made adobe house and every year the line from the sink to the septic tank backs up and we need to have the Roto Rooter man come out to unclog the pipe. He kneels beneath the kitchen sink with his long electric snake, and unclogs the drain. And that is what happened a few days ago. It took him twenty minutes. Afterward he came outside to figure up the bill, and as the Roto Rooter man stood by his White Roto Rooter Van, I asked him if he had been vaccinated.
Going Back to Jackson: A Mississippi Tribute to Civil Rights Warrior & Algebra Project Founder Robert “Bob” Moses
I often wondered how someone as gentle as Robert “Bob” Moses could be so powerful.
Bob Moses in Mississippi, 1962
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Zoom to the Future with Bob Moses (A Civil Rights Agenda for the 21st Century)
During the last stretch of his life, Bob Moses made time to meet with small groups of strangers who talked through the issue of caste in America—“what it means to you; and how you see it manifest itself in American classrooms.” He wasn’t just musing around. These Zoom raps—informed, no doubt, by the practice of Moses’ mentor Ella Baker who believed major social insurgencies must be rooted in humane face-to-face interplay—were part of campaign to build a national consensus. Moses knew he wouldn’t be around to see the future he envisioned, but he hoped Americans of all kinds and conditions would suss that the country’s school system must be remade in order to break down our caste structure.
Eliminating Caste in America’s Classrooms (A National Consensus Project Working Paper)
I. America’s caste system depends on caste in classrooms
The idea that America’s schools level the playing field for America’s children is a myth. The playing field has always been sharply tilted–or even completely walled off–to make it easier for the children of affluent families to inherit superior caste status. Even after Brown v. Board of Education, schools are where lower caste students–those with darker-skin and those living in poverty–are taught their subordinate place in U.S. society and in the U.S. economy.
Radical Equations
When Bob Moses died last Sunday, Taylor Branch–author of America in the King Years–pointed out on Twitter that Moses was a student of the Constitution.
Towards A Tragic View of Darren Beattie
Few things shock me anymore. And I’m the worse for it. But leave it to an ex-Trump speechwriter to find a way. A think piece from Revolver was making the rounds on Fox News and into the living rooms of a million Americans. In it, one Darren Beattie critically examined court proceedings for some of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists. He noticed some defendants had yet to be charged. From this, he conjectured that these unnamed people are FBI agents, and that the entire day was an inside job.
“It’s All Yours, Lestrade.”
“(T)ruth is just not a matter of discovering objective facts.
Wikipedia. “Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard.”
Restrictions had been off for a week when Goshkin returned to the café. The tables were spaced. The front door and windows were open. Less than a fifth of the chairs were taken. Few customers were masked.
“The Republicans want so’s you can’t discriminate against the unvaccinated.” Murray looked up, worried, from his Times.
“So they’ll die.” Large Victor bit his croissant.
“Guys. Shekit,” Goshkin said from the next table.
Seeing Is Believing
Last month I got a lift when I learned Blue Collar–Paul Schrader’s 1978 movie about working class lifers and union corruption–unsettled a group of middle class city kids who’d never seen the inside of a factory. Their weightier-than-woke response to a screening of the movie in NYC hints it remains a model of popular realist art.
The Fight Against Line 3 (& For Wild Rice)
Since 2014, Tara Houska, Nancy Beaulieu, Dawn Goodwin, Taysha Martineau, Winnona LaDuke and hundreds of others have been fighting against the construction of the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota.
Tipping Point
The other day I sat with a man, his name is Ricardo. Or was. I hope is. He was less than a mile from my home, which is filled with the things I buy with paintings—whole bean coffee, volcanic face masks, limonada, audiophile-approved speakers. I can’t stop thinking how close he was, I keep looking out my kitchen window in the direction of Ricardo.
Party Lines
What It Was (July 20)
One year ago today Trump outdid himself rhetorically, reaching astonishing heights of inspiration during a dark hour of American crisis. It was a stirring challenge to the better angels of our nature. Speaking of the pandemic’s rising death toll, Trump tugged at the heartstrings of America when he declared to Chris Wallace, “It is what it is.”
Are You Ready for the Country?
A conversation between Benj DeMott and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer about her painting of the Capitol riot, America’s politics of culture, Christianity and Country music…
The Great Fear (& Independence Day)
Rummaging through Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, and Forgetting Dolores, I am wondering how to confront or forget Sarah Schulman’s magisterial, if also monumental, heavy-weight, literally door-stopping Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Whew! Who can forget those years of what I once termed (in earlier writing on this crisis and epoch) euphoric fear. Schulman’s novels prophesied it.
Radiation Treatment
So, I am in the tight waiting room sharing space and chairs with half dozen black men in their fifties and sixties — the oldest of them twenty years younger than me. They are all of them thin and dressed in poverty uniform: shabby sweat pants or jeans slipping off slack thighs, loose sweaters and shirts that had once been molded to thicker chests and arms. Tired eyes, mustaches and hair combed, but still unkempt. Worn men, their unprivileged lives on display. They had all of them been driven up by van from black Brooklyn to glossy Mid-town Manhattan for their daily radiation doses.
Known & Unknown
Donald Rumsfeld’s death sent me back to his memoir, Known and Unknown. I wasn’t grabbed by his counterattacks on his critics and colleagues in the Bush Administration. (Years after disasters in Iraq, I doubt anyone would be won over by his case that nation-building-was-not-his-job-and-Bremer-Condi-were-incompetent.) What struck me were his (few) moments of clarity about his own dimness. Such as his reflection on his failure to check in with his wife on 9/11:
“Have you called Mrs. R.?” More than 12 hours after the attack on the Pentagon—I had been so engaged I hadn’t thought of calling her. After 47 years of marriage one takes some things—perhaps too many things—for granted…[A Defense Department official] looked at me with the stare of a woman who was also a wife: “You son of a bitch.” She had a point.
Nuts in May
Last Thursday night, in dueling sound bites, Paul Ryan and the tag team of Gaetz/Greene presented starkly different visions of the future of the Republican party.
First In, Last Out: A Year of Retail Mask Mandates
In mid-May, the CDC revised its guidelines on masks. Vaccinated individuals could go maskless both indoors and out. The news came on the tail end of a long shift at my retail job. We’d strictly enforced the mandate since last May. It felt like, mid-fight, the enemy combatants had called out from their opposing trench that the war was over. Maskless customers filtered in throughout the evening. Without word from On High, the battle was over. And that battle had been about more than just public health.
Notes from the Underground
The author–a columnist at Inside Higher Ed–thought this piece belonged in First in the Month. Your editor was glad to take him up on his proposal to reprint it…
In the sort of coincidence that makes a columnist’s work much easier, the Library of America published Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel on April 20 — the same day, as it turned out, that a jury in Minneapolis convicted a police officer of murdering George Floyd last year.
Driving While Brown: Stories from the Struggle Against Sherriff Joe Arpaio
Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawless approach to immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause embraced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.
What follows is a Q&A with the authors of Driving While Brown.