Monthly Archives: April 2016

04.20.16
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Voter Suppression In New York! Or, The Revolution Has Gone Mad

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Remember 2008? As it became clear that Barack Obama was going to win the nomination, Hillary Clinton and her supporters become more fervent that not only would he not, but that he was a weak candidate who couldn’t possibly beat the Republicans (Hillary less so than her supporters and surrogates, honestly). To me, the culmination of this nonsense was when she won West Virginia in mid-May. It was a rout, and the Clinton camp used that to argue that they were better positioned to win in November, because, as the candidates said “I’m winning Catholic voters and Hispanic voters and blue-collar workers and seniors, the kind of people that Sen. McCain will be fighting for in the general election.”

Those of us in the Obama camp were obviously incredulous. There was no way that she was going to win West Virginia in November. Winning the Democratic primary there was about as valuable as in Idaho or Wyoming, places that wouldn’t go blue if a Democrat promised to make potatoes our new currency. She was losing the popular vote, states won, and total voters. There was no case that she should be the nominee.

So basically, this is kind of weird mirror year, no?

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04.20.16
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In which we concede to germs…

Breaking! 

“You’ve been cleaning your hands all wrong. The World Health Organization recommends a 6-step, 42.5 second technique for applying hand sanitizer.” 

You know what, double that. Better yet, make it five minutes. Quit your job if you have to.

Congrats, germs! You win. No one has this kind of time. Even Howard Hughes would find it a distraction from his routine of growing his nails and murmuring. Hope you do a better job with the planet than we did.

04.19.16
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A Death in Cameroon: Samantha Power And The Terrible Contradictions of US Power

The child was only seven, rushing to see the excitement. A US convoy was rolling through a Cameroonian village, led by Samantha Power, who was bravely going to meet with victims of the rapacious cruelty of Boko Haram. She was showing the soft face of US power. But the convoy was rushing, as convoys have to do when there are enemies all around, and the child was distracted, or over-excited, and the drivers sure had their eyes peeled for attacks, not for children. There was a collision, and a 7-yr-old was dead.

This was not intentional. This was not because the child was mistaken for a terrorist. There was grief and pain throughout the convoy, especially for Samantha Power, who had to balance the knowledge that the child would be alive if it weren’t for her visit; but then, who knows if her visit could make things better, including the life of that child, if it only weren’t for that hideous moment, that instant where fate forced the action, that terrible collision of plated steel and fragile flesh. Maybe if they were a little further to the side of the road, or someone had grabbed the child, or if the convoy wasn’t forced to rush through dangerous territory, the child would have remembered that day as the one where life started to get better, because America finally lifted itself to help the fight against violent militants. Maybe this would have been a day she talked about for generations.

That’s the horrible contradiction of American power in a changing world. The conflicts that we try to solve can’t be solved merely with the military, even if that is our default. But even when showing the soft face, we have to always be on the lookout for danger, and have to act as both the powerful and the persued, the rifle-toting hunstman and the quivering prey. We stumble with some good intentions, and some ill, into conflicts we barely understand, and leave pain as well as medicine and food and hope.

The problem is, that might be the inevitable outcome of being the last real traditional power in a changing world. Conflicts are both local and international, driven by internal ideologies and transnational ideas. They are old ideas being revived by new technologies, and mostly are a product of a global system that is slowly being replaced. The nation-state is no longer the primary actor. What we’re seeing is the final stages of collapse by the old empires, who created transnational conglomerations that broke up into nation states, and now are chafing under that. We see that in the Caucuses, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Canada and Latin America, and even in the American southwest. Some areas, like Western Europe, have been trying to go the other way, but even that is showing strain.

This isn’t to say we live in uniquely perilous times. Everyone wants to think they are in the most dangerous and interesting and hopefully end times (it lessens the agony of death if you think everyone is going with you). But we are in a very long period of transition, and it is doubtful that an old-school power like the US, especially one that has such a messy and possibly unworkable democracy, can handle it. Certainly not the way we are now. We’re too big, and too unwieldly. We carry too much baggage, and we don’t know which has clothes and which one has the bomb.

Samantha Power is a good person trying to make sense out of a dangerous world. She doesn’t deserve the guilt she must feel over this tragic death. But that is also the price we pay. When trying to impose and old order on a world where that order is decaying, there will be collateral damage. It’s the inveitable price of empire, but, as always, the cost is never borne by the empire itself. Whether or not we can sustain being one is a question that our leaders have to ask. It’s unfortunate very few have the courage to do so. Until that happens, we’re a blind convoy, hurtling through unknown jungles, and praying we get out without trampling over those we propose to save.

04.19.16
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Why Losing New York Won’t Bother Ted Cruz

The brutal and terrifying interrogation scenes in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon are, in some ways, a generational clash. Rubashov, the old revolutionary, is interrogated primarily by two men, Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov is a contemporary, a former running mate, and has some sympathy for Rubashov, if not for his apostasy. This sympathy and inability (or unwillingness) to get a confession by any means necessary leads to Ivanov’s own execution. Gletkin has no such hangups, and not out of fear. He’s a child of the Revolution, essentially born into it, and has had his moral compass shaped entirely by the revolutionary rhetoric. He doesn’t just force Rubashov to confess. As Hitchens put it, “Orwell’s more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don’t just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them.”

Anyway, long story short, I think Ted Cruz is actually pretty happy he’s going to lose New York today.

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04.18.16
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Dick Lugar Explains, At Length, Why He Can No Longer Win Elections In A Republican Primary

Well no, not really. But he did write an op-ed in The Times arguing that of course President Obama has the power to enact executive orders that deal with immigration resources, even saying that  the”nature of immigration enforcement and the resources (or lack thereof) appropriated by Congress necessitate exactly the type of choices that the president has made,” which is the same thing.

This isn’t counter-intuitive, or even good ol’-fashioned common sense: it’s just a basic understanding of how our country works, and the underlying assumption that since Barack Obama won elections, he should be able to govern as the President, which is the kind of apostasy that makes you lose primary election to lunatics.

That Lugar is writing this as an ex-Senator really tells you all you need to know.

04.18.16
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Hillary Clinton Is Not The Enemy

And neither, for that matter, is George Clooney. He is someone who wants a Democrat to win against either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Paul Ryan)!

Come on… 

Money plays a damningly huge role in our elections. It has transformed American democracy into a weak and flickering simulation, corrupting everything it touches. There clearly needs to be a change, but that won’t come without winning elections. It certainly won’t come if a Republican wins and they solidify their grip on the House and Senate.

Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, and for all the moneyish grasping that marked Bill’s tenure and her political career, is not the enemy of the progressive movement. She’s another side of it: less radical, more cautious, not a true soldier, but not a summer one, either. Vote for Bernie (I did!) and agitate for him. Drag Hillary even further to the left. Make her work for votes. But she shouldn’t be treatead her as an alien, as someone to unload upon. She shouldn’t be equated with the desperate venal clowns in the GOP.

It is great that people are fighting for Bernie, and in any election there are going to be hard feelings. But the #bernieorbust movement is an absurdity, a privileged expression of pique. Does it suck to vote for the “lesser of two evils”? Of course it does. But the alternative is the greater of two evils, so come on.

Protesting George Clooney because he is raising money for Hillary Clinton is just as bizarre as anything on the other side. It’s a weird moment in our politics.

 

04.18.16
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Chicago in a Turbulent Spring

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NBC Chicago: The first shooting of the weekend happened at 4:45 p.m. Friday, when a 1-year-old girl was shot in the neck while riding in the backseat of a car with her family. Her aunt and cousin were in the car in the 5400 block of W. Le Moyne in the West Side Austin neighborhood when someone fired shots at the car from a silver vehicle, police said. A bullet went through the trunk and back seat, striking the baby in the neck, though authorities originally said she was hit in the head.

On Friday evening, a still chilly night that blithely foreshortened a pleasant lakeside walk, my wife and I went to a get dinner at a restaurant we had never been, on the far north side, where Chicago begins to blend into Evanston and Skokie. It was a neighborhood joint, a burger and pizza place, with a bar area but also filled with families. During dinner, Allison started to talk about the damning report on Chicago police, the endemic racism that course through it, and the casual brutality employed by far too many of its members. It’s a report whose outline comes as a surprise to few, but whose depth has shocked many. What was blithely assumed can no longer be ignored, and the Mayor, the venal Rahm Emmanual, is racing to appoint the finest blue-ribbon task forces to study the problem. I looked around the bar, and a few policemen, and realized that this was a cop bar. Not a grim and hard one, but for police and their families. There was the motherly camaraderie of dealing with tough jobs, that faint hardness mixed with the middle-class comfort of one of the few strong unions left. We decided not to talk about the report, for fear of hurting someone’s feelings, or making a scene, and just being seen as outsiders. We sat back and watched the Hawks win, exchanging high-fives and jokes, with new friends, and never gave it another moment’s thought.

“C.P.D.’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” the task force wrote. “Stopped without justification, verbally and physically abused, and in some instances arrested, and then detained without counsel — that is what we heard about over and over again.”

Saturday dawned beautiful, and taking the 7:00 train into the city to meet friends for a softball tournament, you could feel the city stretching out, coming alive. At the beautiful park, with its old clock tower outlined against the endless lake, hundreds of people jogged and rode bikes, played tennis, and relaxed in the morning beauty of a city freed from winter. The human form, long since hidden in winter fastness, re-emerged, unstretching lithely across the long lakeside track that hugs Chicago from north to south. We won a game, lost a game, but mostly just enjoyed being out, drinking some beers and busting chops. It was illegal to drink at the park, of course, but so what? No cop would ever give you trouble unless you were being obnoxious about it. There wasn’t even a reason to hide our cans or shade the minor scofflawing. Our thoughts were as untroubled as the infinite blue sky.

 

  • At about 8:15 a.m., a 28-year-old woman got into a fight with another woman in the 6400 block of S Langley in the city’s West Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side. The woman pulled out a gun and fired shots, striking the victim in the right knee before fleeing. The victim was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center where her condition was stabilized.

  • Less than 15 minutes later at 8:28 a.m., two men were in the 6100 block of S Bishop in West Englewood when a white SUV pulled up and a person inside the car fired shots before fleeing. A 23-year-old man was shot in the right ankle and a 27-year-old man was shot in the left thigh, according to police. Both were taken to Stroger Hospital where they were in stable condition.

  • A 30-year-old man was in the 2000 block of E 71st St in the South Shore neighborhood at 11:20 a.m. when someone fired shots from inside a passing white SUV, police said. He sustained a gunshot wound to the ankle and was taken to Christ Medical Center, according to police.

Sunday broke with more of the same; a cloudless brunch and a picnic along the lake at the Northwestern campus, where college students, who could sense the end of the year with every degree the day got warmer, ran around in various stages of frisbee-flinging undress. Our wine still illegal, but the understated assumption is that we are invulnerable, protected by the brightly-lillied day and our unremarkable skin. There was a brief and friendly argument about upcoming CTU strikes, and whether they are agitating for real progressive change, some of the last real defenders of the public sector, or if they were pushing for unsustainable benefits. It was a lively and friendly back and forth, until it died down, with nothing agreed upon, and no reason for there to be.

The sun is not the luxury of the comfortable; it shines on everyone. The whole of the city unfurled in its glory, after a dull winter and a spring that feinted in frustrating fits and starts. Jackson and Washington Parks, on the south side, were as full as anywhere. But there is a trap, a grim pallor that conspires to occlude. The sun is the same; life is not. There is always the awareness, one that I can’t even comprehend, that life can change so quickly, whether from a stray bullet or a badge. It’s privilege to be unconcerned by either, except in extreme situations, privilege that is far more valuable than any that are merely monetary. Being able to take cloudlessness for granted is a Chicago- is an America- that is alien to so many people.

The wine eventually ran out, and with it, the weekend. Walking home I reflected that throughout the days spent, I had never seen nor heard a wave. There was a windlessness that belied the rough power of the lake, the endless storms caught inside it, ready to roar. There was a dishonest calm, made truthful only by its impermanence. The waves will come back.

 

 

04.13.16
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Time And the Endangered River; Or, The Public Good Is For Chumps, And You’re Not a Chump, Are You?

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Image courtesy of americanriver.org. Support it!

Yesterday, the good people at American Rivers released their annual “Endangered Rivers” report, ranging from the Green-Duwamish in Washington to the highly-contested Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint basin in the southeast, where Atlanta gets most of its supply, and which is the darkhorse candidate for “first actual US water war”.  Rivers on it include major ones like the St. Lawrence, the Susquehanna, and the San Joaquin.

The culprits are what you’d expect: outdated dam systems, the paving over of floodplains which leads to excessive runoff, over-tapping, poor upstream management, and pollution. Often, these work in concert to dry up rivers and posion what is left. A lot of this was done in good faith, or ignorance. Dams were needed, and land had to be built on. The effects of this took years to see, but now the bill is coming due, exacerbated by the multiplying impact of climate change.

Rivers are our heritage. They are how we traveled the nation in its early days. The original West, just beyond the mountains, were based around river cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Chicago is Chicago because the convergence of the Lakes, the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi connected the bulk of America with the Atlantic. But decades of expansion, development, and pollution, and overuse have threatened many of our main waterways. Vast ecosystems are being destroyed, and we’re undercutting our own water supplies. There have been people banging on heroically about this for decades, with some great successes. But the vastness of the problem needs bigger solutions.

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04.13.16
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Counterpoint: Come On, Paul Ryan Will Totally Accept The Nomination

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Still not as fit as Trump, you handsome dork.

Writing at Slate, Jim Newell ably lays out the reasons why it would be stupid for Paul Ryan, who is not stupid, to seek or accept the nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland this year (which already has a perfect theme song). Basically, as follows:

It’s a compelling argument! And it’s based in reality. After all, between them, Cruz and Trump are pulling some 80% of the votes, and there would be an open revolt in the base. Who would vote for him? Democrats hate him because, well, he’s a Randian superman wants to starve the poor, despite dewy protests to the contrary. And because he’s taken the role of Speaker of the House, he’s seen as a betraying Chamberlain by the far right (i.e. most of the Republican Party). The Ryan Bubble, as Newell points out, is driven by the same media who has heaped lavish praise on his non-existent wonkitude. That’s all true. My counterpoint though, is thus:

  • Come on…

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04.12.16
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AQAP Still Has Eyes On The Future

On Friday, Yara Bayoumy, Noah Browning and Mohammed Ghobari filed an amazing Reuters investigative report about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and how they were erecting a true mini-state in the south of Yemen: keeping the peace, collecting taxes, doing the roadwork, punishing the rich for stealing from generations of the poor, and so forth. They were levying tributes from ships, much like a real country. It’s a tremendous read, and a powerful look at how smart terrorist organizations work

AQAP has flown under the radar since the terrifying rise of ISIS, and have even been relegated to the back of Yemeni news thanks to the Huthi rise and the Saudi invasion. But they have never stopped organizing, and most importantly, have never stopped learning lessons.

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Image from Reuters.

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