Image by Ben Kessler
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The day after Biden won in 2020, Fredric Smoler mused on the nature of the president-elect…
Nation
Some Thoughts on Trump
The author wrote this post last month, before last Thursday’s debate, but his movement of mind is not only not out of time, it chimes with Cong. Jamie Raskin’s bracing clarities in a Q&A yesterday…
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It’s a familiar trope of old horror films. Everyone is aware of the fanged entity creeping up on the heroine, except the femme fatale herself. You might be tempted to point, or even scream “Behind you!” But, of course, you won’t be heard.
There is something strangely analogous to that frustration – not being heard – which might strike a chord with those who have tried to express their misgivings about Trump to those of other persuasions.
Willie Mays R.I.P.
Shoutout to C. Liegh McInnis for steering his readers to this fine, felt rap on Willie Mays’ legacy.
Breathless (Danny Lyon’s “SNCC” & “The Bikeriders”)
Watch “SNCC” (with a quick and dirty review) below. A short film on “The Bikeriders” back story follows…
SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)
Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.
Stormy Weather (Redux)
I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)
Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.
Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?
[Originally posted on April 1, 2023.]
Party Like It’s “1984”
George Orwell in 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Battle Cry of Freedom
Here’s a comprehensive take on Mercedes from Jane McAlevey–someone with way more organizing chops than I’ll ever have.
For my part, I woke up on May 17 thinking, “Brace yourself, they’re probably going to lose.” In my experience, the “Baby, just give me one more chance…” angle is highly effective. Mercedes implemented substantial improvements in the wage structure while still retaining a somewhat reduced version of the “Alabama discount”. Then they fired the plant manager and the new guy asked for some time to set things right. They intimated that, if people were still discontented, they could come back in a year and vote the union in. Of course, Mercedes will spend the next year systematically undermining union support, harassing union leaders, etc. (though they may be somewhat constrained by German and U.S. labor investigations).
Fathers of Our Country (A Truscott Twofer)
This is the “law and order” Donald Trump is running on
May 24, 2024
Donald Trump invited two rappers who are members of the 8 Trey Crips gang onstage with him at his rally in the Bronx yesterday. Tegan “Sleepy Hallow” Chambers did eight months in prison on charges of gun possession and criminal conspiracy. Michael “Sheff G” Williams served two years in prison for criminal possession of a firearm. Both men were arrested last year along with 32 other gang members in a 140-count indictment for gang activity, murder, and conspiracy.
American Prism (Campus Diary)
The morning after the night raid, I woke up and checked my phone to see University security service’s automated message sent at 7:02 A.M.: “Quad cleanup.” I cringed. I texted a friend who had been involved from the start with the Encampment and checked the school’s paper The Maroon. Their live updated coverage had been one way of keeping up with goings on at the Quad. Like most students, I went in, and out, of the Encampment: meeting friends; nodding to acquaintances; hearing about campers’ fears and strategy; attending a Palestine-activist professor’s teach-in (“genocide isn’t complicated”); taking in kids’ play and an inter-faith call to prayer. Only snippets, perhaps, compared to those who stayed for the week and kept up chanting all night against the university police raid, but it was enough to give me a sense of the moment, and place.
Every Picture Tells a Story
“The artist is someone who makes something called art.”
Marcel Duchamp[1]
Not too long ago, I delivered a Zoom talk in which I detailed how I came to find myself frequently writing about transgressive cartoonists. My friend Malcolm, a visual artist of impeccable credentials but sometimes stodgy mien, commented that he found himself enlightened as to my “fascination with the obscene, the perverse, and the tasteless,” adjectives I would not have come to on my own.
At this time, I was also preparing for a podcast on which I would be discussing the Air Pirates, a band of underground cartoonists who, in 1970, took it upon themselves to further the revolution by creating comic books in which Disney characters conducted themselves in an unDisney-like manner, and which, in the ensuing litigation, Disney’s lawyers termed “perverted,” “obscene,” “cancerous,” and “grotesque.” I was struck not only by the similarities of language between Malcolm and Disney’s counsel but how it seemed to say as much about the beholder as the beheld.
In my Zoom talk, I had mentioned a book which I had known about for 50-years but had never had an inclination to acquire. I decided to pick one up.
.
There was a time when pornography pushed as many buttons as uni-sex bathrooms do today.[2]
Goodbye, Bill Walton
I wrote plenty about Bill Walton when he was alive (alive as you and me) but, damn, even more so. I don’t want to let him go. Ever!
In our country’s battle to preserve what soul it had, there was no greater weapon and stronger voice than that of antic Bill Walton. He rarely dribbled, and never shut up. He truly mattered.
Mayday 2024
Sure, Trump could get elected or installed, and further shrink the NLRB, and impose a national right-to-work law. The Supreme Court majority could invent an interpretation of the Constitution that eliminates Social Security and Medicare, maybe even labor unions. Congress could find more ways to top load our already finance-heavy economic pyramid and push more people from the bottom out onto the streets.
But this May Day, I’m feeling this is not the time to feel discouraged. The labor movement is on the move.
It’s not just the UAW big win at The Big Three, or the follow-up victory at VW in Chattanooga, or now the contract victory at Daimler Truck. It’s the fact that all this is part of a plan to organize the auto plants across the south, along with the Amazon warehouses, schools, auto parts plants, and whatever other dominos begin to fall.
Weberian at the Gates (with “Haaretz” Interlude & Post-Bust Postscript)
“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.
The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.
I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind.
Good News from Chattanooga: Paul Baicich & Tom Smucker on Operation Dixie (21. C.)
The UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is not simply impressive; it is HUGE. With 3,613 ballots counted, some 73% of the workers voted in favor of union representation. (The final total was 2,628 votes in favor of joining the UAW, and 985 votes against.)
Clearly, the union gained the confidence of the VW workers after impressive UAW strikes and contract victories last year at “The Big Three.” This election in Tennessee has been closely watched because the union has struggled for years to organize foreign-owned auto operations in the South.
Will Mercedes-Benz in Alabama be next? Could be: Those workers vote next month. — Paul Baicich
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It’s even better than you think.
I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left-wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years past, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster’s Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.
As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south.
Christers’ Quandary: Which Side Are the Demons On?
I rise to sing the praises of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson!
Emotionally Yours
Jordan Poole got his comeuppance all over again this year — as he slumped for months and became the butt of a thousand jokes and memes — but he came through (as his bosses affirmed in their exit interviews)…
[Poole talk ends at 30:00.[
I’m glad to find out Winger felt JP’s comeback, though I’m ambivalent about nice white managers of black genius. (Hi, Bob Myers.) It was on Poole to find his game once the Wizards’ other less talented point guard, Tyus Jones, went down with an injury, enabling JP to play his natural position. Haters aren’t done with Poole. He brings out the mean in recessives shamed by his fluency — “I’m an expressive person” — and physical gifts that enable him to show out like so…
And so…
JP heated up pretty often in games after the All Star break in late February, but what really counted were moments that led to a (rare) Wizards winning streak — an end of game strip of Giannis and this beautiful assist to Cory Kispert…
Thinking Ahead
Hate to be a Gloomy Gus, but it seems fair to say, Trump will not be tried on federal charges before the election.
Bur let’s say he gets convicted in New York or Georgia for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or screwing with the electorate.
Driving in Circles
Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.
Being and Somethingness
Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we have entered that time of the year when yellow blossoms are coming to life on the forsythia and daffodils, and the dead limbs of trees are falling to the ground on the wind. It is one of the rites of spring that the flowers catch your eye, and the dead branches catch your feet.
Quarantine Me: I’m Old
The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land. At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war. At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer. Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.
Or, at least it used to be that way.
The famous line is that you can’t go home again. That’s a lie, of course. You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps. If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives. It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone: someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.
Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.
Fly Me To You
…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.
Some Principles of the Commons
Linebaugh’s principles made your editor rethink my attachment to “public happiness” — a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that I’ve leaned on to evoke the excitement of (small d) democratic politics with its imperfectly human meld of egotism and solidarity. Linebaugh isn’t an Arendt man and he’s never been charmed by her hymns for the American Revolution. Aware our first Founding slipped slavery and the “Social Question” — all the challenges arising from mass poverty and de-skilled labor due to the Industrial Revolution — he’s unenthralled by America’s standard versions of democratic practice. Per Peter, public life/happiness in this country seems a straightened thing…
We distinguish “the common” from “the public.” We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism.
While it’s probably wrongheaded to yearn for demos with no ego, Linebaugh’s distinction is coming through to me this morning. In my inbox today, there’s an announcement of the latest seminar aimed at (what one pale academic muckety-muck terms) “intellectual publics.” Like Linebaugh, I prefer more common things…