Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”
Nation
Notes on the State of Whiteness
Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.
On this and every Memorial Day, my family and I remember Grandpa
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
My Father’s War
Originally published here in 2011.
Entering War & Coming Home (Viet Nam, Fifty Years on)
Originally published here in 2020.
Most Army Soldiers came to and from Viet Nam aboard a 707 commercial airliner. Two years ago, I was seated next to a retired flight attendant. Somehow we started a conversation about Viet Nam. She told me she was a stewardess who flew the flights bringing soldiers to and from Viet Nam. I told her how, as we flew to and from the war, the stewardesses looked like angels, especially on the way home after my tour. She told me about the heartbreak she felt flying, “….so many boys to Viet Nam… how young they were… how depressing the flights to Viet Nam were. It was a different experience flying them home.”
Disney Time With Conner O’Malley
Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date. O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.
I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!] But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.
O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”
How to Cope
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.
I wish they would show the pictures of the dead
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
Wound Up Wrong
“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
January 6, 2021
Someone told me you were seen
running behind that beast you’d bred,
Its hide bristling in flashes ahead,
and you, in the wake of stench,
didn’t mind the slaps of slaver.
Then you saw steps, the police.
He Could Sing, But He Couldn’t Fly
We heard about the memo: Legal Aid lawyers had to ask for papers,
a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they
had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,
sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.
This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.
A Woman of No Rank (Casey Hayden’s Legacy)
The late Casey Hayden, who died last month, would roll her eyes if she was remembered as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement or an initiator of Second Wave feminism, but truth is truth. Here’s something Casey wrote for First a few years ago. It seems timeless now. No surprise given who wrote it…
Dr. Hrabowski’s Higher Ed
Freeman Hrabowski III grew up in Birmingham when it was known as the most segregated city in America, but he realized early he was born free to learn. (“Heaven for me was eating my grandmother’s blueberry pie and doing math problems.”) Hrabowski’s parents and grandparents passed down the idea that education might be an end-in-itself even if black people in the South didn’t have the luxury to conceive of “pure” learning at odds with economism. Hrabowski remains a realist when it comes to schooling. He knows culture don’t butter no bread. So, he’s become the foremost proponent of STEM education for black college students by building a scholarly vehicle for upward mobility—a research university that feels homey to kids in black communities who love learning math as much he did.
Hrabowski retired in 2022 after thirty years as president of the University of Maryland of Baltimore Country (UMBC)—a school with a less than toney pedigree that under his aegis has been the “baccalaureate-origin” institution for hundreds of black Ph.D.’s in natural sciences, math, and engineering. Scores more than have been formed by Ivies—or any other elite, predominantly white institution—in recent decades.
Keeping Faith with Moses: Freeman Hrabowski’s Letter to Congress on Behalf of The National Alliance, “We the People–Math Literacy for All”
Freeman Hrabowski sent the following open letter to Congressman Bobbie Scott the day after Bob Moses died.
Action Painting (Redux)
Originally posted here in 2016.
Micro-aggressions have been on my mind lately. Easy for us white guys to dismiss, but when a cab doesn’t pick us up or someone confuses us with some other white guy they once met at a party, it doesn’t trigger an identification with the victims of 500 years of violence and oppression. We rarely take it personally. The key is identification, not identity, though it arises from identity.