“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.
Nation
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.
Members, Don’t Get Weary
I’m with the OG Tonight‼️ @DoloresHuerta @amazonlabor✊🏽
Jolene
I once worked in a factory with a girl named Jolene. We were 17 and I had lied to get hired; we couldn’t legally work in the plant for another year.
She was white, from somewhere around “Taylor-tucky”, a name that mocked the southern roots of working class whites of the suburb of Taylor, Michigan. I lived in Detroit (still do). I was black, and I still am, as a matter of fact. Without the factory we’d never have met.
BTC (Better Than Champagne and/or Beat the Clock!)
The moment Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse declared victory in their vote to form the first Amazon union in the United States pic.twitter.com/Fr92Wz1LIN
— Kei Pritsker (@KeiPritsker) April 1, 2022
Bad Actors
Hunter Harris notes there’s something “sexy” about not having a take on the Oscars’ slap heard round the world. (Though she goes into the gory in her gossip column.) FWIW, C. Liegh McInnes, who’s often posted in these pages, had the best analysis of what went down: “Public buffoonery is embarrassing, especially when the buffoon makes a mess at a place where, just a few years ago, folks were begging to be invited.” He was firmly in Camp Rock, pointing out how Smith’s act will make him a “respected person, a real n-word” among the benighted in black communities.
Smith wasn’t the only bad actor on parade that night in L.A. per this report from In These Times:
A Year in Legal Limbo
In Lollipop, Bob Levin has written a totally honest “memoir” of his year as a VISTA lawyer in Chicago from September in 1967 to September in 1968.
It is totally honest because, as he says in his introduction, “I have made up up (almost) all names of individuals and organizations. I have manufactured dialogue. I have composited some characters and omitted significant others. I have altered time sequences and appropriated events which occurred to others as my own. Some of what I believed happened did not. Some of what I thought I’d made up, I learned from my journal, occurred.”
This is all in legitimate service to telling a story that needs to be told of one young lawyer’s experiences in sixties’ Chicago, that city of Sandburg’s broad shoulders and the Daley administration’s narrow and dangerous mind.
Lollipop might seem a flippant title for a book that at its core is a serious consideration of mid-twentieth America in all its shabby glory. It comes from the following statement by the Black civil rights leader and scholar Roger Wilkins: “What we are talking about is changing the way people live. Everything else is band-aids and lollipops.”
Licks from “Lollipop”: An Essential Memoir of the Sixties
The Sixties didn’t spark all that much good writing. Back then, the charm of making it new on the page seemed diminished by other urgencies. And time does its hack work, removing would-be authors from their moment of the Moment. Lucky for us, though, Bob Levin not only felt those Sixties’ urgencies in his nerve ends, he’s managed (fifty years on) to put down in writing what happened as he stretched himself in a year when the country seemed bound for implosion. Check the review above for more context and perspective on Levin’s Lollipop, A Vista Lawyer in Chicago, Sept. 1967 – Sept. 1968. What follows are excerpts from his memoir, starting with the back story of the youth gang he worked with while he was in Chicago.