Nation

“It’s All Yours, Lestrade.”

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“(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.

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Seeing Is Believing

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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.

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Tipping Point

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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.

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Party Lines

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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.”

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The Great Fear (& Independence Day)

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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.

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Radiation Treatment

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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.

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Known & Unknown

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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.

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Nuts in May

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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.

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First In, Last Out: A Year of Retail Mask Mandates

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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.

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Notes from the Underground

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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.

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Driving While Brown: Stories from the Struggle Against Sherriff Joe Arpaio

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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.  

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Act Locally!

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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…

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Real Talk in ATL

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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.