Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Why I’ll be wearing a safety pin when I go out. From now on.
A safe person to sit next to on a bus, walk next to on a street, even have a conversation with.
I quite like the idea of just putting a safety pin, empty of anything else, on your coat. A literal SAFETY pin!
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Darkness has begun to settle on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain takes out the sun at around 4 pm now and at 5 pm, the current time, evening is ready to shift over to night.
The cultural earthquakes from Tuesday’s election results have only registered as tremors so far, but the big one is not far off. When will it come? I don’t know. I suspect after the inauguration. A police shooting here. A gay bashing there. A couple of rapes. Perhaps targeted violence against African-Americans. Maybe the National Guard sweeping aside the protesters at Standing Rock.
Those happenings will crystallize out of the solution of public anger and fear a rock hard resistance. And it will be the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Unfortunately, not a new problem. As Saul Alinsky said, the action is in the reaction. How far the call and response of bigotry will spread, how large will be the congregation that ultimately says amen is not yet known. These times are perilous, more perilous than any I have known.
When Reagan came to power, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with the Minnesota AFL-CIO. We went by bus, playing poker and drinking beer (not me, but everyone else), singing labor songs. When we got to D.C., we marched. Reagan, Reagan he’s no good, send him back to Hollywood. Reagan broke PATCO, the union of air traffic controllers and ushered in an anti-union environment that even after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama remains a national disgrace.
It was a combination of union busting, international trade deals and robots that created the rust belt and the dismal future of non-college educated folks in general and whites in particular. We have just felt the first profound shock of those choices. When people lose faith in the structures of power, they do what they can to create new ones, hopefully, they believe, better than the old one. The abandonment of the former working class by liberals and conservatives alike makes our time bereft of powerful allies for them. They’ve hoped, and voted for that hope, that somehow a billionaire who resides on the Upper East Side of New York City will do for them what others haven’t. From within their world it may have seemed like a bet worth making.
(Someone should make a map of the cultural fault lines in the U.S.)
This fault line within American culture has only begun to shift. It has not yet slipped, not yet allowed its full constrained force loose on our common life. Trump’s election is not that earthquake. It will follow in his wake as he takes pussy-grabbing and race-baiting to the home of the country’s first African-American president. Ironically, his predecessor.
That fault will slip. It may not come when the insults to the poor and people of color and the LGBT community mount, but it will surely come when the left behind in the white working class realize that Trump is not their friend, but an archetype of their oppressor. When that awareness dawns, head for the bunkers.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Time to admit our complicity in this mess. While is there no doubt that crotch grabbing racist xenophobes have had their say, while there is no doubt that know-nothings have seized control of levers they do not understand, while there is no doubt that license has just been given to violent police actions and violent action against whoever is the other, we cannot turn aside from our implication in this disaster.
We? Yes, you, the college educated. Yes, you, the climate change activist. Yes, you, the LGBT champion. Yes, you, the Black Lives Matter protesters. And, yes, even you, the brave folks of Standing Rock.
What? We have allowed identity based politics and the politics of climate change to blind us to the real, often more urgent demands of economic justice. It’s irony so thick it would require an obsidian blade to cut. Oddly enough what we just experienced was class warfare waged from within the very camp of those who have made such a struggle necessary. That is, the party of capitalism, of big business, of Citizen’s United nominated a man for president who claimed the mantle of working class champion. And, due to their own flaws and fears, working class non-college educated white folks followed him.
Trump reminds me of the pied-piper, offering a fun-filled, immigrant-bashing, race-baiting, pussy-grabbing jaunt out of town to a good place, a place with green grass and blue skies, a place filled with winning and winning and lots of guns. Only there is no such place. It’s really more of the same distractions the 1% have used for years, the American political equivalent of 77 virgins. Hear, strap on this Trump pin and help him blow up America. What’s that? A job? Oh, sure. Look, over here! Someone coming to take your guns and the job you might have had if we hadn’t just moved our company overseas.
How are we complicit? First, they came for the unions. And we did nothing. Then, they came for good-paying working class jobs. And we did nothing. Next, they let an antiquated educational system churn out high-school diplomas so worthless they were of no use in hunting for and finding work. And we did nothing. When the banks came for their homes, we stood by and did nothing. When the floods and the hurricanes and the droughts and the wildfires created disproportionate damage to working class folks, we stood by and did nothing. Even the one place where we did do something, Obamacare, it was so flawed that it may well collapse.
We have, as a culture, and as an educated and moneyed elite, ignored fundamental political matters. Each family needs a way to provide for itself, to have a home, food, a decent education, health care. When these key components of life are made difficult or impossible to obtain, a political price will eventually be paid. That note just came due.
Economic justice, an egalitarian distribution of the fruits of our common life, is central to a just and fair politics. It cuts across race, gender, sexual preference, ethnic origin. By allowing the perversions of capitalism to gut whole demographics, we, the moneyed and educated elite, have let our own comfort trump effective policy for the working class.
The good news here is that the way out of this political swamp, Drain the Trumpian Swamp!, is known. All it requires is political will. We need solid unemployment benefits, training in crafts and skills, support for retraining as soon as jobs are lost (see coal mining, for example), real healthcare access, support for unions, affordable housing and higher taxes on the 1% to fund all this. This is the program that can unite people of color with working class whites.
Let’s get to work.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
We have experienced something dark, disturbing and powerful, an election in which the id drove our common choice. Kate said, “Hate has won.” Yes. But not only hate. Fear. And, even worse, hate dominated by fear.
The most prescient article I read, and I read hundreds, cautioned American liberals and leftists not to take the polls too seriously. I tried to find the article, but couldn’t. It was written by a Brit, an opponent of the Brexit decision and a man who awoke to a decision by his countryfolk that defied polls and pundits. He reminded us of the European turn toward nativism, French, Austrian and German movements in particular. And, he said, it could easily happen in the U.S. It has.
As I wrote earlier, I’m not a man given to despair and I don’t feel it this morning, this terrible wakin’ up mornin’ when the American dream has ghosts and rapists and Confederate flag waving, gun toting white men ranging uninhibited in it. This election is, I believe, a result of that dream dissipating like puffy cumulus clouds pounded by hurricane force winds. A dream denied, hopes crushed. What happens to the heart when the future dims?
Of course, you can ask any woman, any African-American or Latino, any member of the LGBT community. Ask any of the native Americans on the ground in North Dakota today. Ask any group that has existed on the fringe of the American experiment. They know what happens to the heart when the future dims.
Today that same disillusion among white working class men and women has pounded on the door of our destiny. Yes, the irony is thick, but the political dilemma of persons shunted to the side of history contains the seeds of revolution.
In part I do not despair because I have read history. The United States is not the first great power to be brought low by economic dislocation of a former privileged class. Paul Kennedy’s, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, proposed a mechanism for great power collapse. Military overreach strains domestic budgets and can create misallocation of economic resources. The resulting economic woes, Kennedy suggested, create the conditions for dissent at home, dissent that can wreck political unity.
It remains to be seen whether the toxic stew cooked up by the Donald’s political base will poison our common life and prove fatal to this long experiment in democracy. I doubt that it will. I believe we are, still, stronger than the darker angels of our nature.
Lincoln, that stalwart of the old GOP, said it best:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
It’s here! It’s here! Election day is finally here! The Forever Campaign will, hopefully, end today. Like watching the Chicxulub meteor arrive in slow motion. We know it’s coming, but we have no idea whether this will be an extinction level event or just a local catastrophe. That is, will it wipe out the entire country or just one party? I have no idea.
After following this campaign with amazement and dismay for nearly 18 months, I want to throw my hands up in the air, real high, take a deep breath, then assume the fetal position. No, not really.
Here’s my takeaway so far. The mud-wrestling over the arc of this campaign has obscured its significant implications. It’s not really about Trump vs. Clinton, or Republican vs Democrat. This election is about owning the distressing realities of late-stage capitalism. Creative destruction has been wrought by structural changes in international markets, robotic workers, an educational system lagging far behind these transitions, the abysmal economic collapse of 2008 and the long overdue bill for institutionalized racism having arrived in the morning mail. Those with the most significant unearned advantage in our culture: white men and women with no college education have suffered severe dislocation as a result.
The emergence into the public square of these matters is long overdue. The GOP “values” voter emphasis collected into the big tent a whole constituency of people who, economically speaking, should have been Democrats. While the Republicans cynically deployed the fears and prejudices of poor and working class whites (No gay marriage, no abortion, they’re coming to take away our guns), their elites used the political punch they gained to cut taxes for the wealthy, to give more and more latitude to corporate America (see Citizen’s United, for example) and put us into a Forever War with the Middle East.
What Trump did was strip away the elitist package of policies supported by the wealthy Republicans and lift up the real economic struggles of what is becoming a white underclass. I’m not saying he did that with any intention of rectifying the problems. No, in fact, I believe the opposite; but, as a demagogue, he tuned into the pain of the left behind. Their pain is real; his candidacy as advocacy for solutions to that pain is not. He’s the political equivalent of an opiod, temporary pain relief with no therapeutic effect on the underlying problem
We have a generation, maybe more, of citizens who are failing to find purchase in our economy. Institutional racism explains the ongoing marginalization of people of color while economic disadvantage locks them into its results. What is somewhat new is the marginalization of under and uneducated whites. I say somewhat because white poverty has always surpassed, in strictly numerical terms, all other groups in our country.
What has changed? The myth of upward mobility, so often used to pacify working class white ambitions, especially working class white males, has been unveiled, unmasked. There is no ladder out of a life with a high-school education, not in this economy. And, the largest number of voting age Americans fall in the white, no college demographic.
There is an opening here, though I don’t how to exploit it, for a traditional political approach: increase unemployment benefits, fund job transition education programs, create regulatory advantages for unions, ensure housing and medical care for all persons shut out of jobs with a real living wage. These policies should function as solutions for no college whites, and no college people of color, too.
My fervent hope is that this election forces us as a nation to confront, together, these problems. If it does, it will have been worth the weirdness.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Well. The countdown clock is at 0 days and 18 hours as I write this. No more nattering, punditing, analyzing, fearing or hoping. Now it’s time for the votes. For the breathless ring of “We’re calling this state for…” An article posted on Real Clear Politics has it exactly right: “Half of America is about to get gut punched.” If you want to see how the stakes look from the red side, read this short screed from Nevada: It’s Trump or It’s the End of America.
No, it’s not. Even Trump gets elected it’s not the end of America. But. No matter the victor the anguish driving guys who wear the inflammatory t-shirts at Trump rallies will not disappear. One of those t-shirts I saw read: Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required. This is a level of uncivil discourse I would expect at a KKK rally. Oh, wait.
Read a short line somewhere that said re-examination precedes renewal. My hope is that this election is a re-examination of the American political contract, of what it means to be a nation. I’m far away from my anarchist days when I wished for the Balkanization of the states, the U.S. divided into regional countries. We need each other, red and blue, white and black, brown and yellow. We need each other because ours is a country built on an idea, not a people. We become a people only when that idea ties us together.
That idea, flawed as its execution has often been, is that all peoples can come here and become part of us, can become equal to us, can become the future of our country. That all those people must consent to be governed. That that governance should and can be realized through open and free elections.
“Foreigners come here not out of a love for America, but for a love of the cradle-to-grave welfare state that America has become. Eighty percent of them (or higher) will vote Democrat forever more to keep the welfare checks coming. That’s Hillary’s plan.” It’s Trump or it’s the end of America This quote is a direct denial of the central idea behind our experiment. That this nativist idea or something similar seems to be driving the political push for Trump actually reveals the opposite of Mr. Root’s claim.
Love of America comes from all of us boat people, all those whose ancestors sailed here from Europe, even those brought here against their will, all those who walked across the border in search of a better life, all those who flew here from parts of the world in crisis or in economic disarray. That’s all of us with one notable exception: the native americans.
And look at the news as this election day looms ahead. It’s native americans who stand in defense of water and against another pipeline carrying the drug to which we are well and truly addicted: oil. In other words even the peoples who have suffered the most as this country grew use its political system, its history of protest and the power of individuals when collected together. This is the America I love. The one we need to protect with our votes and our continued alertness over the next four years.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
I imagine, all round the U.S., on all political sides, a fervent Thanksgiving prayer will be, “Thank God, it’s over.” Of course, the finish of this demeaning, dispiriting and dismal campaign will not heal the divisions it has unveiled. Welcome to the new America where less-educated white men and women are newly visible as an underprivileged and problematic slice of the citizenry.
Wow. From my 1950’s childhood in eastern central Indiana that sentence would have seemed like a fever dream, a nightmare, a unicorn in the possible futures branching off from the Atomic Age. Yet here we are: much more demographically diverse, decimated unions, manufacturing both fled on the one hand and roboticized on the other, birthrates among the white population long in decline, even the familiar protestant and catholic profile of white, high school educated America, slumping toward secularism. Family farms have become vestigial to the onrush of corporate agriculture. The home states of blue collar workers are either now the rust belt or the Confederate flag waving south or the unhappy west of Sage Brush rebellion militants.
None of these trends, decades now in the making, will be easily turned around, especially since the common good will to solve them seems absent. This means the next decade, perhaps, literally, the rest of my life, will be spent attempting to negotiate the political terms of a new U.S. This is necessary and it is the chief reason politics exists in the first place, to barter out differences among groups. But it will not be easy and it may be violent. The politics of frustration often bends in that direction.
On the other hand we have no choice. These are divisions, like Jim Crow (and its contemporary manifestations), the plight of the undocumented, the integration of refugees from the Middle East that have no simple answers. In fact, even addressing them creates political resistance. Again, it doesn’t matter. Our public square has potholes and fissures deep enough to swallow our future unless we figure out how to live together.
Gotta say, the notion of this struggle energizes me. Let’s get ready. Let’s do this.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
He sits, early in the morning, while it is still dark outside, with his head in his hands. Orion, his longtime friend hangs in the sky visible to the southwest, Scorpio and Cassiopeia and the Drinking Gourd out there, too. A crescent Thanksgiving Moon, waxing toward its Super Moon event on November 25th, was visible last night.
If only the world could be quiet, serene, beautiful like the 5 am dark sky here on Shadow Mountain. No pussy grabbing. No complaints about raping 13 year old girls. No encouragement of political violence. No cynical comments about the validity of our electoral process.
Perhaps he could just slip away, go to some Trump Island in the the general area of Antarctica or maybe a luxury masted sailing ship forever circling the diminishing sea ice of the North Pole. Like Frankenstein’s creation. I would make a comparison between Trump and Frankenstein’s monster, but the monster was Frankenstein.
In this case Trumpism is the monster, a living candidacy patched together from a body of populist resentment, the brain of a nativist bigot, the nervous system of fearful white males and the legs of second-amendment worshipping other-phobic citizens. The arms, though, the arms are Trump’s, dangling like the tentacles of a squid, ready to grab, squeeze, embrace. Force. Trump is Frankenstein to this political moment in the Republican Party. The GOP provided the lightning that brought this monster to life and has paraded it with pride through this mockery of a campaign.
These are the most perilous political times in which I have lived. There are milita’s preparing an armed response to a potential Hillary gun-grabbing presidency. Our to this point normative peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election is under threat. This is a core feature of our democracy. The stakes on one issue, strangely absent from the campaign, are ultimate, the very survival of the human race may hang in the balance: climate change. The timer counting down the years in which we can still soften the blow of advancing global warming nears its alarm.
Race relations are in a visibly violent phase. Police kill black folks with so steady a drumbeat that it has become like Trump’s long string of insults to America, dulling our capacity for outrage. Misogyny is at its peak in the Donald, powerful at the same time as our first serious female candidate.
The Forever War has captured our youth, our money, our tolerance. We bomb and shoot and strike with drones, again dulling our capacity for outrage by desensitization.
I am not a man given to despair. Hamlet, that most existential of Shakespeare’s plays, offers a choice in the often quoted to be or not to be soliloquy. Do we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? I know my answer.
Rabbi Tarfon is credited with this quote: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it” (Avot 2:21). wiki This is a wonderful thought because it drives directly against despair, relieving us of the expectation of finishing our political work, yet not letting us set it aside either.
So, when confronted with the potential momentary success of hate-filled, other-despising politics, those of us committed to a diverse, egalitarian world must not pull back, must not flee to Canada, must not despair. We are not, as Rabbi Tarfon said, at liberty to desist.
miss pommery 1926