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…
Nation
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.
Act Locally!
First of the Month‘s correspondent Leslie Lopez has another outlet for her reportage from the Pueblo. Here’s a local labor story with national resonance that she published last month in La Cucaracha…
“The Dream of a Burning Child”
Click the link below to get closer to Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s epic painting of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, Don’t You See That I Am Burning.
https://www.miergallery.com/exhibitions/celeste-dupuy-spencer3/videos
The V Bottom of American Politics
It’s what we hoped for.
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most
The author has been keeping up with the Old Right’s angles on our time…
Real Talk in ATL
Rev. Barber is one of the most vital spokesman for The Democracy (to borrow a 19th C. phrase). His down home voice, though, has been slightly diminished lately. His attempt to go big, turning from a politics rooted in his home-state of North Carolina to a national Poor People’s Campaign, hasn’t got much traction. (Though it’s possible that Campaign helped push provisions in the Covid Relief bill that “will cut child poverty in half.”) Barber’s orating and organizing have seemed out of balance. Messages to grassroots may be cheapened by an itineracy that undercuts on the ground prep work and follow-up with “local people” who are the key to serious politics. There’s a danger of becoming a show horse rather than a work horse, to evoke a contrast that once troubled Jesse Jackson. It’s been daunting, on that score, to see Barber sharing platforms with Cornel West. Not that Barber is about to join the blowhards’ club. Nor is he a goodie. His righteousness isn’t rote (yet). He’s still capable of wonder at the undeniable history of human solidarity. Watch (below) how he’s motivated by the fact of Frederick Douglass’s 1871 refusal of anti-Asian bigotry. Once the record speaks, his own tongue lifts the small crowd he’s addressing until he surprises them (and maybe himself) with a final felt gesture that goes beyond words. B.D.
Chinese Workers Turn to US Marijuana Industry as Service Jobs Dry Up
A Chinese immigrant is facing drug charges after two unrelated raids in New Mexico uncovered a marijuana processing operation, a network of purported hemp farms, and dozens of Chinese immigrants who had been laboring amid tons of marijuana.
Letter From Point, Texas
“Do they even know we exist?”
That was the question Sarah asked me as we spoke on her front porch in the small town of Point, Texas earlier this week.
Biden on the Union Drive at Amazon
Click here to hear President Biden speak on the organizing drive at Amazon’s Alabama facility.
The Canadian News Service Elmoudjahweb has provided a useful explainer spelling out why Biden avoided mentioning Amazon in his statement. Per Professor Joseph A. McCartin, the Executive Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor…
True Vines (& a Secret History of Our Time)
Americans aren’t known for their sense of history, but Delegate Stacey Plaskett made the past present during the trial of Trump when she invoked UA Flight 93. Plaskett recalled how she’d been working as a staffer in the Capitol twenty years ago on 9/11 when passengers on UA 93 sacrificed themselves to stop a terrorist attack on the building. Her memory let her roll with those patriots’ “love of country, duty, honor, all the things that America means” as she linked Trump and MAGA mobsters at the Capitol with mass murderers who saw our country as the Great Satan.