My mother’s maiden name was Claudette Winfield. Her twin brother was named Claude Winfield. She left home for college to attend Jackson State University and met a young man named Claude McInnis who was named after his uncle Claude Brown. That’s a whole lotta damn Claudes, which is why my Pops never intended for me to be a junior. My mother’s twin was her best friend until the day she died. As siblings, they argued and disagreed often. As siblings, no one else could say anything bad about the other one. So, when I learned Wednesday that my mother’s twin, my Uncle Claude, had passed, I realized that is the end of the Claudes. But, more importantly, that is the end of one of the most important people in my life.
Nation
Before the War [& After Friday’s Murderous Assault on Rushdie]
In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.
Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.
The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead
Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Spiked (Brad “Pitbull” Pigott and Mississippi’s Real Welfare Queens)
Former US Attorney Brad Pigott, who was leading the Mississippi Department of Human Services’ attempt to investigate parties that had misappropriated funds earmarked for Mississippi’s most vulnerable citizens, was fired by Governor Tater Tot Reeves because Attorney Pigott had set his sights on bringing to justice some of the most powerful figures in the state, including former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre.
G.O.P. Hot Takes (and the Dead)
Once again, I am astonished that I can be astonished at the level of gun violence in this nation. It is so routine. And yet so astonishing.
And once again, I am astonished that I can be astonished at the level of Republican callousness. It is so routine. And yet so astonishing.
Silver Linings
“Supreme Court further erodes separation between church and state in case of praying football coach.”
Of course they did. And they did so with the supreme confidence that comes with knowing they’re on God’s side in the matter.
Mother Cheney and The Mob
Liz Cheney speaking yesterday at the Ronald Reagan library.
The whole thing is well worth hearing, but start at 8:45 for the meat. Listen to at least 17:35, although you might not want to miss the raucous applause at 23:30 when she says, “We must not elect people who are more loyal to themselves or to power than to our Constitution.”
But then why not listen to the end, for the applause for the mention of Cassidy Hutchinson, and then Cheney’s challenge to the “girls” of the nation to become leaders because “the world is run by men, and the world ain’t doin’ so well.”
Indeed listening to the repeated applause for Liz Cheney gives me a tiny sliver of hope. Hope that there just might be enough Republicans out there who have not sold their souls to Trump to turn this thing around.
But then I watch the Jordan Klepper piece,…and my hope starts to feel very quicksand-like. And I think of the two audiences, the Reagan Library and a pro-Trump rally, and I realize that if we are to be saved, it’s conservative elites who will have to stand against what Hamilton so often referred to as “the mob.”
A Black Woman Remembers Elvis
News of the new biopic about Elvis, which focuses attention on the nexus of black cultural creativity that fed his talent, moved Marsha Music to suggest your editor repost her remembrance…
Elvis was my first love. I was 5 years old in the 1950s, and I sat in the sun on the living room floor with my legs criss-crossed, album cover on my lap, in a pool of light from the leaded-glass window near the fireplace. Motes of dust bounced and drifted in the beam of sun, fairy-like. The sun shined on Elvis Presley too, on that cover; guitar strapped across his stripe-shirted shoulder, as he gazed upward into a faraway sun, or maybe into the light of Heaven itself.
Human Comedy
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece on black stand-up comedy, “Unlikely Heirs: The Comedic Children of Cosby,” that places contemporary comics in relation to Bill Cosby, including ones who are not easily seen as being in his tradition. In the course of limning the Cosby aesthetic, McInnis highlights two little miracles performed by Ali Siddiq.
I discovered Siddiq after he was already a sixteen-year vet of comedy on two episodes of Comedy Central’s This Is not Happening, “Mitchell” and “Prison Riot.”
In both episodes, Siddiq tells horrifying stories about prison life, but I was unable to stop listening or laughing. Y’all know that I don’t do blood or gore. I don’t like violence in reality or art. Thus, I don’t watch horror films or films with graphic killings. Yet, I was captivated by Siddiq and couldn’t figure out why.
Wali Ali (Ghetto Existentialist)
It’s all in Siddiq’s big eyes which signal his gift for noticing. His most expressive feature enables him to enact felt surprises that define his art.
Getting Your Gun Off
They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing. Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage. They are armed with the latest in assault weapons. They carry knives. Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.
Insurrection Day
Turn the bigot magnet on unleash the storm
“That Strange, Mysterious and Indescribable”: The Fugitive Legacy of Frederic Douglass’s Political Thought
Nick Bromell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass rests on a tour de force reading of Douglass’s own account of his childhood. Bromell grasps how Douglass’s infancy gave him a foundational sense of dignity that fueled his resistance to slavery in America and injustice everywhere. What follows is the final summative chapter of Bromell’s book which underscores how “Douglass was always a political thinker not a ‘bare’ theorist. He did not seek the truth for its own sake; he sought it because it carried him closer to justice.”
As I have underscored many times throughout this book, Douglass’s thought remains elusive today because the philosophical lexicon at his disposal to articulate it was inadequate to the task.
Do Good Things
I’ve been thinking about writing and activism—which one is “better” for a person to do, a person with limited time and energy, a person in a pandemic, a person living in a country where basic voting rights are not at all secure. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it like this—as in one or the other. Except for the obvious fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, even a strange pandemic day, and everyone I know is exhausted and demoralized. What “should” people do? I’ve been thinking about that.
Yesterday at the NRA Convention
When Beto invokes Alithia Ramirez above, his repetition of the phrase “gifted and talented” seems slightly class-bound, yet his attentiveness to the murdered girl’s picture-making and the familial scene where he took in her images is deeply humane. As is his readiness to talk to those on the other side of the debate about gun laws. Quash noise from ideologues who lack Beto’s feel for the American people’s fluidity. Don’t conflate his democratic temper with a sell-out’s disposition. Beto aims to work with and for us. His purer-than-thou critics are dancing with the Donald…
Again
The Ten Dead Adults In The Supermarket
Are Pushed Aside By Nineteen Children
who smile naively from photographs –
Her proudly-raised Honor Roll certificate,
his “Change Maker” t-shirt.
For Christmas cards, politicians
pose their families with guns.
The guns shine. The guns are bleeding
the children again. Again
and yet again, rounds spent in endless repetition.
That church or concert hall. This classroom
with floors bleached, swept clean
of hair and bone. What needs to be done
not done. “The school had too many doors.”
Holes blown through their hearts, the parents
buy wood boxes, carved stone.
It’s Coming for Us All
“Don’t talk to me about mental illness! Anyone who does something like that is just a coward!” I was at the park, walking my dog. Excepting my dog, I was the lone solitary walker. Huddled groups of twos and threes trampled the blacktop. The mostly geriatric crews traded thoughts on yesterday’s slaughter in Uvalde, Texas. Some comforted each other, Most traded justifications or vows of revenge. The air was bad; bloodlust hacked from many wrinkled throats. I feared going to work. On days like these in retail, with all the displaced anger, the rituals of hierarchical debasement get worse. I felt horror at the unspeakable, mundane child murders in Texas. But I couldn’t understand the crack about cowardice. It seemed like there were two competing braveries – the world-destroying violence of the shooter, almost certainly consigning himself to death. And the teachers acting as human shields – the parents who literally broke the hold of the cops to run in and rescue their babies.