Like a taco in the sun

Of all the vile stupidity that the Fraudulency Administration has foisted on this nation the latest round of beaner-bashing - the promised elimination of the rule that allows people who were snuck into the United States as minors to remain in the United States - is perhaps the vilest and most stupid.

Vile because, like it or not (and the Trumpkins DON'T like it, which is why they're shrieking and stamping their widdle feet so hard to make this a thing) these people are U.S. nationals. Not citizens, but American in all effective senses of the word. Tossing these poor sonsofbitches into Guatemala City or Sinaloa would be no different than snatching some random gringo out of the nonexistent salad bar a Applebee's, stripping them naked and parachuting them out over San Pedro Sula. This will result in some predictable number of these people, whose "crime" is infinitely less egregious than the shameless grifting indulged in by some greater-than-random-percentage of Orange Foolius' appointees, being raped, murdered, robbed, beaten, and more-or-less enslaved.

Stupid because, frankly, this is more of the same nonsense I fulminated against here, here, and here.

Only worse.

Because the vast, VAST majority of the people targeted by this nasty little piece of xenophobic racism are, as I said, American. They are employed, many in college, many in position to be valuable contributors to any sensible civilization. But because of the gibbering lunacy of the GOP C.H.U.D. base they will be wasted, thrown away to appeal to a group of people who, by and large, appear as useful to the future of the United States as print-shop employees for a glossy skin mag.

One reason I really hate writing about politics these days is how utterly vile are the politics of the current ruling party and its' adherents. There's a point to be had in discussing controlling the entry and exit to the United States. There's no point to discussing that by shrieking demonization of the people trying to evade those controls. They're simply doing what every human being since Olduvai Gorge has done; make their lives and their families' lives better. A sensible polity would be trying to figure out ways to integrate many of them into the life of the nation, and to ameliorate the problems in the native lands of the others so as to wake them from the nightmares that drive many of the immigrants to flee their native lands.

But given the last year's history this nation is, quite obviously, NOT a sensible polity.

Aside from simple sensible policy, the deplorables that are squealing and squeeeeeing because His Fraudulency is punishing these "others" aren't even going to get the woody they anticipate out of this. They're highly unlikely to benefit from the expulsion of these people in any material way. Cletus and Lulabelle aren't going to pick tomatoes in the California sun, or sheetrock Houston in the swampy misery of late summer, or cook frantically in the back of a diner in Sherwood, Oregon. The "jobs" they think these people they hate are taking? They're not good jobs. These DACA people have no legal rights; they cannot afford to take any job that will do a thorough enough background check to expose their legal status.

That will make no difference to the deplorables; for them it's all about just wanting to make "those people" pay.

That's a fucking insane way to run a great industrial nation.

But insanity has never stopped modern Republicans before and it won't now. It's all tribal, all resentment, all whining and bitching all the way down, along with stooging for plutocracy and licking the guns of the ammosexuals and the cross of the God-botherers.

The dark heart of Treason in Defense of Slavery and the decades of segregation and racial oppression that followed was the the people who "counted" - the wealthy white elite that founded the U.S. based on what was good for wealthy white elites - conned the po' white trash into sucking up to them with the bestial promise that, no matter what, no matter how worthless and vile and shitty those white trash people were and would be, they would always be "better" than a nigger.

And a beaner.

And, as we can see, that hasn't changed an iota.

So, despite the obvious fact that, as I said back in February, that

"...the results will be at best underwhelming. The promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee will turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals.

The result of all this huge slug of spending - surely paid for by a tax hike, right? - will be, outside of personal hardship for those involved, a vast expanse of...very little."

his Trumpkins will fight for this like crazed hashashins because nothing, nothing, is more important to them than reminding those dusky little devils that this is still a White Man's Neighborhood.

Cop-killer

So, in quick succession, a couple of different coppers killed some black people, and a black person killed some cops.

As is almost always the case, depending on their outlook, various other people mourned and defended the people killed by the coppers and excoriated the coppers, and various other-other people exalted and mourned the coppers and excoriated black people.

Well, you know my position on the whole business of being so fucking easy to kill people with guns in this country, so I'm not going there

But, if you want, here's Fred Clarke with a good point on the whole business of coppers, badges, and guns:

"This is why our constantly armed law enforcement can be police, but can no longer really be police officers. The office, like the badge, is overshadowed by the gun as an insufficient, subordinate source of authority, meaning and legitimacy."

Is it possible to "enfore the law" in this country without firearms?

Sadly, no. But it's a hell of a brilliant thought.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

First of all, and kind of beside my point, if the joker who sniped five coppers in Dallas wanted to discredit everybody who's pissed off because American coppers have killed about an infantry battalion's worth of people in 2016 already (and it's not even halfway through July...) he couldn't have done a better job. Every right-wing ding-dong who throws up a little in their mouth when they see the words "Black Lives Matter" will now have enough rocks to throw at their non-wingnut "BLM" fellow citizens from now until Christmas. Good job, sniper. You done fucked your own cause like a football bat. Asshole.

Second, the cop-shootings allowed every talking head from here to Fox and Friends to trot out the nauseating little trope of "hero coppers".

That nursery rhyme may be my second-most hated thing in the entire world after "hero soldiers". I practically grind my teeth down to nubs when I hear it.

I mean...I realize this may be a difficult concept to convey in the "news", or to people in general and the public-is-an-ass people in particular, but...just being a copper doesn't make you a hero...or, possibly anything...other than, possibly, a total asshole.

Yes. It's entirely possible to do a stressful, demanding, occasionally-dangerous-but-usually-just-boring-and-aggravating, difficult job and yet still be a complete scumbag.

Or not.

But - just putting on a damn badge doesn't make you a better human being, any more than putting on a tree-colored suit makes you a hero.

So I posted this to my FB feed and got an immediate reply from a very nice but fairly simple and politically conservative person:

"...seriously john... would you do that job? those guys are doing a job most of us would not want to do and they deserve our prayers and i know that you will shoot back and put me down for my thoughts. But that is how i feel. May God have mercy on us all."

To which I, in turn, replied and, in so doing, realized what irks the shit out of me about this stuff:

"I've DONE that job, (person's name). I've worked riot control. I've been a "cop" in foreign lands where the residents really DID want to kill us. And I still managed not to kill anybody.

I'm not "putting you down" for your thoughts. I'm putting you down because your thoughts are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And like I said; putting on a uniform - whether it's colored blue or colored green or colored like a tree - doesn't make you a good person. It makes you...a person in a uniform. Some good. Some bad. Mostly in between.

And that's just the truth. Some cops are terrific. Some are assholes who use their authority to make other people's lives miserable. Most of them just try and get through their day as best they can, not doing great, not doing evil, just bumbling through.

So using the actions of some murderous a-hole to try and turn cops into saints and martyrs (and "heroes") is stupid, counterproductive, and wrong. It doesn't help the good ones, and it lets the bad ones (and the "enh"-ones who let the bad ones slide, which a lot of them do because, people...) cover their bad deeds with the mantle of heroism.

So. Cops. Some are great. Some are total scumbags. Most are just regular jamokes.

Killing some of them doesn't make the scumbags any better.

And, more importantly, making heroes out of dead coppers doesn't solve our single big problem with coppers - that we've let our coppers, a hell of a LOT of our coppers, begin to think of themselves as soldiers in an occupying army, to think of their fellow citizens as "civilians" whom they are ordered to rule by force and fear, and whose task it is to suppress any hesitation to accept, or any attempt to question, their authority.

And that authority is to be ruthlessly applied with deadly force - often not as a last resort but as a first.

(And, as an aside, I note that the usual suspects who were all there about the Bundy clan and the Malheur Moron Mulisha's armed sedition and threats to fire on federal law officers are suddenly and curiously silent about the black man shooting down law officers. Hmmm...I wonder if race has...nah. Unpossible.)

But we cannot exist if our law officers become unquestioned figures of authority, and that authority comes, predominantly, from the barrel of a gun.

As Clarke says: "(The point) at which we must arrive if we are to be a free people under the rule of law in a community where badges and offices and law are to mean anything more than who has the biggest gun."

White Man's Neighborhood

My friend Kimi reminded me that today was the seventy-second anniversary of FDR signing the now-infamous Executive Order 9066 that sent more than 100,000 people, most of them American citizens, to prison without charge or trial.

Call it what you want; internment, protective custody. If you send me to a place where barbed wire keeps me in and I will be shot if I try and escape?

That's a fucking prison.

I just talked about the total fuckupitude of other places; today is a reminder that the price of our own liberty and our political freedom is eternal vigilance, and, especially, vigilance that we don't allow ourselves the freedom of our worst ideas and our most ignorant convictions.

We know now that the U.S. government knew then that the Japanese-Americans it imprisoned were not a threat to national security. The imprisonment was driven by racism, pure and simple.

That the U.S. in 1942 was racist as all hell isn't exactly news. But what I want to remember today is what a hell of a racist place Portland, Oregon was.

Remember, this was the home of the "Coon Chicken Inn", a place where it was illegal to be black and Oregonian. So it shouldn't be a shock that many of the Good People of Stumptown had rather low opinions of their Japanese neighbors.

Yeah. Just like that.

Here in Portland we even came up with a real special bit of nastiness; we shipped all our Japanese Oregonians to an "assembly center" located...in the North Portland stockyards.

That's right. We shoved our neighbors and fellow citizens into fucking cattle pens. It was, by all accounts, as utterly miserable as you'd expect:

"Dysentery broke out and there was a desperate rush to use the limited toilets. One can imagine the agony and desperation suffered by those afflicted. One day, a Military Police cook came through the gate to borrow food items from the center's kitchen. A Military Police guard shot him in broad daylight-a sobering sight for the internees. The incident that everyone remembered later occurred on a hot day in the spring of 1942, when the Center resembled an oven. The fire department came up with a solution. They would hose down the hallways and, as the water evaporated, the surfaces would cool down. It was a good idea, but they forgot one variable. As the halls were doused, water seeped through the plank floors and moistened the dirt and manure mixture underneath. The result was stench and hordes of flies. For days, thousands of flypaper rolls hung throughout the Center."

Finally the Oregonians were shipped off to the camps in the California desert. While they were gone many of them had their land stolen and their property looted.

Then there's this; Korematsu v United States.

Pretty straightforward. Fred Korematsu was the Rosa Parks of internment. He refused to move out of his home and was arrested. His case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a 6-3 majority upheld the government's right to imprison you without charge or trial in the cases of national security. Justice Black wrote the majority opinion, stating:

"...the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this."

This decision has never been overturned.

In 2011 the U.S. Department of Justice issued a "Confession of Error", which concluded that the decision rested, in part, on a conviction that the U.S. government had valid reasons for interning American citizens which was not only incorrect but known to be incorrect at the time.

Regardless of this, Korematsu remains law.

There is no legal basis at this time for opposing a similar incarceration of Americans based on suspicion. Regardless of grounds or, as has been shown, no grounds at all other than fear seasoned with racial hatred.

I love my home.

But in many ways, both gross and subtle, Portland and Oregon remain very much a White Man's Neighborhood.

Sherman's March

I watched the Seattle-San Francisco football game this past Sunday. I watched the whole thing through the final whistle so I got to see Sherman, the Seattle right corner, make a hell of a play to send his team to the championship game, and also enjoy his hyperkinetic rant after time ran out and some sideline reporter was stupid enough to jam a microphone in his face.

I didn't have the same reaction my friend Labrys had or, frankly, that Charles-whose-wordprocessor-I-am-not-worthy-to-reboot-Pierce had.

Because I used to play soccer goalkeeper.

Because of that I completely understand exactly where Rich Sherman was that night, and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with brutality (and, yes, it is a pretty goddamn brutal sport) and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with racism or being an uppity Negro (and, yes, he was rude and loud and obnoxious, and in this country if you're black that will earn you a pantsload of ignorant racist bullshit).

It had to do with playing on the side that doesn't have the ball.

Attackers, whether they're soccer strikers or football receivers, get to do one particular thing that we football cornerbacks and soccer goalies don't and usually can't do; they get to score points.

In most sports let's face it; that's the fun shit.

That's the glory noise, the big news that makes the headlines and gets you on cereal boxes and into lucious television contracts. How many cornerbacks can you think of sitting in the ESPN booth right now? Kasey Kellar is the only keeper I know of that works the booth and that's largely because soccer in the U.S. is frankly weird and keepers are often the only player most Americans outside soccer fanatics actually know.

But playing offense is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Any sports nut can tell you how many points so-and-so scored, how many assists, how many yards he ran for or threw for, how many goals he scored. Any casual fan remembers the quarterbacks and the receivers, the strikers and the wingers, the goal-scoring centers and the point guards.

Who the hell remembers whose tackle saved a sure goal? The stick save, the deflected pass, the steal? Who recalls who batted the possible winning touchdown pass away for the interception that saved the game and the conference championship?

I'll tell you this; they'll damn well remember who did that for Seattle in 2014.

But it's more than that.

Defending is about plain and simple defiance.

It's about raging and hating to lose. It's about pure anger.

It's personal. It's about wanting to ruin the other person's day.

Stopping his best shot. Tackling him when he's got a clear run at goal and stripping the ball off his feet. It's about getting out to full stretch and palming his sure game-winner around the outside of the post. Pushing his slam-dunk back in his face. Sending him to the ice with the puck skipping away.

Sure, you saved your team the points, or the game. But other than that what's the reward for this hard work?

I'll tell you.

It's looking at the striker's face, seeing in that quarterback's eyes, the knowledge that you bested him. That he gave you his best shot and you were better. That he came straight at you with all his skill and strength and you slapped it down like it was a little baby's patty-cake pat. It's watching his sad little face get all puffy and red, watching him watch you with cautious hatred, and loving the feeling that you crushed his hopes and blighted his dream.



We all feel that way.

Sherman just said it.

I know, because of the night the striker on the team sandbagging down to our sad, low co-ed Division 4 level ran in on me as I collected the ball on the ground and kicked it straight back into my face and broke my nose.

(Then had the gall to complain to the referee that I was bleeding on the field.)

So after I stonewalled the sonofabitch the rest of the match - making save after save to deny him the win he so badly wanted - I walked up to him with the bloody twists of paper sticking out of both nostrils and got right in his face and smiled.

He shoved me and I cocked a fist and both teams jumped on us and hauled us away.

And, broken nose and all, I was a happy man.

Because I owned his sorry ass, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and that knowledge filled me with joy.

That's a very low human emotion, I'll admit, but that's the sort of thing that builds good defenses.

And empires.

And to make this about race or civility or something like that is just silly. If you did, or do, you really need to borrow my gloves and go get between the posts and I'll hammer some shots at you and dare you to stop me and we'll see how you feel about that.

Some Random Thoughts on Race and Society.

The Supreme Court held today that crucial parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional.

I could go on at length why this is not a good idea for the United States as a nation or Americans as a people except that Lemieux does all that already at the link.

If you're paying attention you understand that in many parts of the United States "conservative" outfits like True the Vote (as well as the usual suspects involved in gerrymandering electoral districts) are doing everything they can to ensure that anyone they suspect of voting to the Left of Lester Maddox is ghettoized into their own crowded districts when they can't disenfranchise them altogether.

I want to think about this for a moment, though, as part of a larger part of American life, a part us white folks really hate to think and talk about.

That's the part where we have to take one in the seat of the pants if we want to change the way "race matters" in the United States.

And the part where we haven't, and it hasn't, and race still matters in the United States.

Less than it used to, but matters.

Let's start with this: us white folks fucked over them colored folks - them folks being mostly colored dark brownish-black tho we didn't mind giving the redskins and brownskins and yellowskins a kick in the ass, too, whenever we could - for pretty much most of the first 150 years of this country or so.

Women didn't get such a great deal, either, but we've already talked about that a little.

Let's not kid ourselves.

This wasn't some sort of little gentle corrective slap from time to time.

Being black in the United States from 1776 to about 1969 was about as much fun as being the littlest guy in the yard at Salem Correctional Institution for Men.

If you were lucky you had to sit in the back of the bus and work for peanuts while taking crap from the scrawniest little bastard flying KKK colors. You lived in the shittiest parts of town and your kids went to the shittiest schools and got the shittiest educations. You worked at shitty jobs for shitty wages - less than the white boys doing the same shitty jobs - and shopped at shitty rundown stores for shitty products the white folks didn't want.

If you were lucky.

If you weren't you got beaten up, or raped, or killed. You got run out of town with nothing but the clothes on your back. If you were foolish enough to be accused of anything - or even just being nearby when someone else was accused of anything - you ran a real good chance of getting murdered out of hand.

Speaking for my home town, it was against the law to be black in Oregon from 1844 to 1926. The law wasn't much used, mind you, but it was there, and the knowledge of it probably had a lot to do with how few African-Americans ended up here.

Since the end of WW2 life in the United States has gotten better for those citizens-who-aren't-white-people. Lynching has been stopped. Overt, legal discrimination is dead as the dodo. Social, political, and economic opportunities that did not exist for blacks (and hispanics and asians) fifty years ago are now mandated by law and enforced by social pressure.

Let's not kid ourselves here, either.

If you're poor in the United States (and poor trumps white, by the way, in my experience...) things are pretty nasty for you.

If you're poor and you're NOT white, well, chances are that you STILL live in the shittiest parts of town and your kids still go to the shittiest schools. You still get shitty jobs and you still get shitty pay. The likelihood that you're out of work and unable to find work is higher than if you were white and always has been.

Some of this is because there are some real fucking bad habits that have worked their way deep into African-American communities and African-American culture.

(Mind you, when you're the punk of the prison yard you end up learning some pretty degrading tricks to earn your smokes. Doesn't mean it's not your problem. But it means that you need a little more than just the warden telling you that he's told the Aryan Nations gangsters to stop bending you over the weight bench four times between dinner and lights-out for everything to be peachy-keen from there on.)

But a hell of a lot of it is because the rest of us have run like sonsofbitches any time there was a danger that we might wind up living and working alongside African-Americans.

We - largely the "conservative" and white "we" - have fought "affirmative action" that would have forced us to take on black people as peers in our schools and jobs whether we liked it or not. We've white-flighted every time black people have moved in next to us. We've worked very hard to avoid doing anything that would have seriously inconvenienced us as a means of trying to rub out the long-lasting effect of all that lynching and slaving and general 150-some years of fucking-over.

Well, it's worked. Many black Americans still have some problems here in America - and some black Americans still have some very big problems in America - and today the U.S. Supreme Court said that despite that history of fuckery it's fine with the fuckers fucking with other people's voting because "taking race into account" was okay as a reason for the fucking for 150 years but not when you're trying to unfuck the fucking for the past 50 or so.

The public in its infinite wisdom is now solidly against anything that can be described as "affirmative action" or "reverse racism" as if somehow trying to erase the legacy of all that racist shit was in itself racist. Because we're all "post-racial", right? If you walk into a bank to get a loan, or into a traffic stop, or into a polling place it doesn't matter if you're black or white, right?

Let's not kid ourselves.

We can keep going along just fine the way things are. Lots of black people (and hispanic and asian and other not-white people) are way better off today than they were. Nobody is going to Bastille the Capitol building because they can't be CEO of Goldman Sachs or because every so often they get stopped for driving while black; the U.S. 2013 ain't the slums of Paris 1788.

It's just that us white folks should be willing to look at ourselves and admit that we're okay that some people who don't look like us are a little more troubled and a little poorer and a little less part of the life of our nation so long as "we" don't have to make any sacrifices to change that.

That seems a little small and a little mean and a little miserable to me.

Hey, I don't like the idea of sacrificing something to make some anonymous black guy more likely to have what I've got any more than Lester Fucking Maddox did.

But I like to think that I'm a better man than Lester Fucking Maddox, and that my country is, too.

Over the Mountains

Sorry for the light posting - I was out of town all last week working in Walla Walla, WA (a place I am told by a native drysider should always be referred to as "the town so nice they named it twice") and was off the net. I have a crazy busy day tomorrow than then should be back on schedule.

I did want to make a brief observation on the latest news-time obsession; the murder of young Trayvon Martin.

Y'know what the really messed up part was?

That the shooter wasn't immediately escorted to the Crossbar Hotel.

Because I'll give you all the rest of the "backstory" here. You know what I'm talking about, right? All the things this is supposed to "tell" us about the U.S. circa 2012?

The perception of young urban black guys as dangerous and scary. The possobility that young urban black guys ARE dangerous and scary. The degree to which this makes it dangerous to be a young black guy. The throwaway quality of life as a young black guy.

Race. RacISM. Class. Bad Laws. Inequal Justine Under Bad Laws. Republicans vs. Democrats.

The fucked-up-ness of writing a law that makes it possible for a knucklehead with a weapon to, in effect, go looking for a fight. The overarching place that race and class plays in American life. The sociology of race, class, weapons, and American urban life. The propensity for places like Florida, where being an ignernt goober is no disqualification for public life, to make fucked-up laws that enable knuckleheads with a 'tude to pull a hogleg whenever they feel disrespected, or spooked, or like scaring somebody, or for no goddamn reason at all.

Let's just take all those as a given, K?

But even given all this, the fucked up part of this story, for me, doesn't come until the local constable doesn't even attempt to take the shooter downtown and book him for manslaughter.

At least.

Because, as we discussed earlier about the Afghan shooter, when you don't do that, you make it obvious to everyone that the dead guy (or women, or kids) doesn't really matter to you.

And when you do that you prove that you've forgotten that the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

Let's thing about what the law is for; what it's "supposed to be for, and what it really IS for.

We all like to cling to the ideal that the law is ground rules for our society; the lines on the playing field. And how we're supposed to be all "equality of opportunity", liberty, and justice for all. But, look, we already know that there are two laws in this country, or, rather, one law that, in its impartial majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges.

Steal a car, steal a stereo, and you'll probably end up in jail.

Steal an entire pension fund, steal a family's house, steal a company and run it into the ground and put thousands of people out of work?

You'll probably get a job on the Securities and Exchange Commission and never lose a night's sleep.

So we've pretty much admitted by our actions that we don't really CARE about that part of our laws.

But the other part of what the law is for is to keep everyone inside society's fences. To maintain just enough public order that we don't get convinced we're in some sort of Hobbsean war of all against all and then start acting like that. To maintain "public order" in the same way that the rules of engagement of an Army of Occupation are there to convince the occupied that doing what the foreigner tells them to is healthier than planting mines in the roads at night.

So, sure, I'd like my country to actually have one law for rich and poor, powerful and powerless. I'd like to believe that the magnificent words over the courthouse door "Equal Justice Under Law" were true. I'd like for there to be good work, decent work, living-wage work for everyone who wants it. I'd like for my country to be the best it can for the most people it can.

But I'll settle for just enough equality to keep the village quiet.

Because unlike a lot of people - unlike nearly all of our wealthy white folks, the people who are benefiting from the kind of nation where people like Trayvon Martin are, and are shown to be, disposable - I remember what happened the LAST time this country was so open an oligarchy that even the dimmest prole could figure out that both ends of the stick he or she was going to get were dirty.Yeah, that.

We forget that the Gilded Age and the Ragtime Era had a scary edge to them, because the people on the Outside knew they had no way in and many of them decided to kick the thing to pieces rather than put up with that. We had a president assassinated, the first one outside wartime. Anarchists and Reds were under every patrician's bed, and armies of Pinkertons and goons - and the real Army - was employed to "fight them". This damn situation lasted until the Depression, when the New Dealers forced some of the oligarchs to bend a little to stave off what happened to Italy in 1922 and Russia in 1917.

And I'm on the wrong side, here: the kind of people I was then were the ones shot down by troops breaking strikes, beaten by company goons, lynched by American Legion thugs, and railroaded by corrupt judges. They were shot by people very like this Zimmerman who shot the kid Martin; because they didn't like the way my sort of people; poor people, union people, working-class people, looked.

Like I've said here before; the United States was founded as a sort of oligarchy and can work perfectly well as one.

But it's not much fun unless you're an oligarch and, can you tell me, sitting there reading this, that you feel lucky?

I didn't think so.

So while I'm sorry for Martin, his family, nice black guys everywhere, and my country in that we've made it possible for jackholes like Zimmerman to exist, because of who I am and where I am I have a vested interest in keeping the lid on enough to keep my society from flying apart.

So, for me, the important thing here, now, is that this shooter goes to jail. Goes to trial. Gets convicted - assuming the evidence shows that he did what he seems to have done, pursued an unarmed man into a fight and then killed him - and spends a long, long time in prison. Hell, we all have an interest in seeing that the people who use bloody-handed methods to emphasize the fucked up things we believe swiftly take the long step to the end of the short rope that German soldier took in Pont-avec-Crap back in 1878.

Because if we don't; if we convince enough people that the law is for you and not for me, that they might as well be hung for what they did do rather than what they didn't and some ignernt asshole thinks they did...well...

...then the village becomes unquiet and we've taken the first steps up the pass over the mountains of madness.

A Poor Black Child

OK, here's an oddity. Maybe you can help me figure this one out.My little girl doesn't like talking about her pre-adoption life. She does the three-year-old version of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "la-la-la-la-la!" when you bring the subject up. She violently objected when I tried to talk about her birth mommy in China, pointing at Mojo and declaring "That's my mommy!".

So the other night, we were coming home from the Nickel Arcade after giving Mojo Mommy's Night Off and talking about what the Peeper is learning about Dr. King. The conversation turned to how people who come from different places look different, and upon being informed that she was Asian, Missy said:"I was born a poor black child am NOT Asian!"

Her brother - cartoon Scotsman as he is all red hair and freckles - insisted that she IS. Is NOT! Is!

I had to shut down the Peep before the tears arrived.The thing I can't figure out about this is:

Is Missy saying this because she hears "Asian" as "not like my mommy and daddy and brother" and is saying this just to insist that she is - i.e., she doesn't understand the entire concept of race and is just demanding her place in the family?

Or does she understand, and is she doing a Steve Martin and insisting she is TOO Caucasian like mommy and daddy and brother?I want Little Girl to like herself and be happy with who she is. And if what she's saying means the first expression then it's just a question of development and understanding. But the second argues a degree of dissatisfaction with her own appearance and ethnicity, which makes me a little saddened and a little worried, and I'm not quite sure which it is...

The Razor

I usually try to take some time to just stop and think about the events of the week to develop an idea for Friday's post. This week has been more difficult than usual, what with Peeper being ill yesterday and myself the day before that, the weather (brutally hot today and threatening more for tomorrow) and the usual distractions of work and worry.

What has helped me has been two discussions: one with an on-line acquaintance and fellow adoptive parent about race and power and the twisted legacies of the imperial and colonial pasts that still tangle both the old colonial powers such as England, France and the U.S.

The other was over breakfast this morning with another debating partner, this one about U.S. politics and power, the way we've been led, the choices we've made and the choices we have soon to make.

And it occurred to me that this autumn we are going to be - bar a freak of man or nature - presented with perhaps the most stark and divisive choice the electorate of this country has had to make since the election of 1860.

The past eight years have been a watershed. All the contradictions that have been splitting our nation from itself have been sharpened by the conservative ideologues that have run the nation so badly for nearly a decade.

What began as a rebellion against taxation has become a mindless refusal to pay the price of civil government no matter the need. What was once a longing for the comforting pablum of Sunday School religion has become an aggressive demand for hierophantic supremacy. The one-time desire for economic liberality has become acephalic deregulation, fiduciary recklessness, unleashed – and unpunished - criminal greed and peculation. Disgust with the protests against American misdeeds had become a fierce desire for others, mostly poorer than ourselves, to fight enemies in part created by those deeds and wrath and hatred toward those who dissent with these policies.

It’s almost as though in the space of eight years the GOP has become a freakish example of the parodistic effects of age, as ideas often become stiff and shrill exaggerations of the richer beliefs formed in our maturity.

So the Republicans will offer us Senator McCain. Ignoring the eyewash about this man as some sort of “maverick”, he brings us more of what his faction has provided for the past eight years: red war, crony capitalism, fiscal recklessness, religious rhetoric, the old, hard, iron ways of the rule of the strong, the rich, the well-born and the able.

The Democrats reply with Senator Obama. To my eyes he summarizes everything wrong with the present opposition party in this country. Given the multifarious misdeeds, lies, deceptions and evasions of the preceding eight years it should be possible to stand up for a handful of simple truths; freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from hate. Rejection of the sneaking, the torturing, the greed and the foolishness that have stamped the previous administration as perhaps the worst since Buchanan’s. Instead we were forced to choose between two candidates with many flaws and weaknesses, whose most prominent characteristic was their savaging of each other rather than the ability to remain focused on the Republican enemy of both.

But now we have the choice. It would seem that a nation of honorable and decent people would have little to decide: on the one hand, decency, on the other, deceit. One the one hand, promised judgment, on the other, moronic wrath. One the one hand, the future, on the other, the past.

BUT…hand in hand with the deceit and the wrath is the past in the form we are most comfortable with: a pink and white Caucasian grandpa, rosily well fed and sleek with inherited wealth.

Decency and judgment and the future takes the form of the despised slave, the wretched freedman, the mocked minstrel and the frightening underclass, who represents all the things that so many of our ancestors taught us to hate and fear.

I love my country. And because I love my country I am not blind to her faults. And one of her greatest has been her heritage of race hatred and racial oppression. The very Founder who wrote the immortal words that in this land "all Men are created equal" was at the very time he wrote those words the owner of human souls for no better reason than the color of their skin. The legacy of race hate and fear is a powerful force right this very minute. And to break with the past eight years of mendacity and hidden brutality by rejecting the candidate that stands for them - as I believe we must do - we as Americans will have to fight and defeat the force of racism in the most difficult terrain of all: our own hearts.

I still believe that our system is badly broken, perhaps irretrievably so. But this isn't about the long view. This is about today. About the weight of so much proven wrong against an untried but hopeful right. But a right that will demand that we, those of us who have been raised in the America where (if we were white) we never needed to think about or fear the consequence our race, will need to place a man with a dark skin above ourselves, in the rostrum of our Capitol, and say: "There. There is my choice. There is my representative, and the Chief Executive of my nation."

Now the razor's sharp edge of the last eight years’ contradictions has been laid against our throats.

I believe – I truly believe – that here we are offered the choice of Satan on the mountaintop: on the one hand the past, with all it’s comfort and wealth, if only we but embrace the man whose ideas speak to the social, racial and political smallness in each of us, if we but choose to make our nation a meaner place founded on the principal of “I’ve got mine, fuck you, Jack!”

On the other, a man who gives us at least the hope of turning to embrace an uncertain future but one which provides an alternative to clanging Roman wars and ratlike scrambling greed. And – to choose this path was must START by crossing the great racial divide that has been with us since before the first African slave set foot in the New World.

For if we cannot bring ourselves to place a man whose skin is darker than our own in a place to lead us; if our fear of the dark "other" is greater than our shame and hate of the things that our current "leaders" have done in our name...

Well, perhaps we have indeed lost our souls.

Do you think we can choose the future by choosing to reject one of the deepest division of our national past? Is that too high a price to ask?

What price the soul of a nation?

Update 5/20: In case anyone questions my characterization of the GOP spear-carriers as racist morons, here is George Packer:

"John Preston, who is the county’s circuit-court judge and also its amateur historian, Harvard-educated, with a flag pin on his lapel, said, “Obama is considered an élitist.” He added, “There’s a racial component, obviously, to it. Thousands of people won’t publicly say it, but they won’t vote for a black man—on both sides, Democrat and Republican. It won’t show up in the polls, because they won’t admit it. The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it. Sad to say it, but it’s true.” Later, I spoke with half a dozen men eating lunch at the Pigeon Roost Dairy Bar outside town, and none of them had any trouble saying it. They announced their refusal to vote for a black man, without hesitation or apology. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.” No speech, on race or élitism or anything else, would move them. Here was one part of the white working class—maybe not representative, but at least significant—and in an Obama-McCain race they would never be the swing vote. It is a brutal fact, and Obama probably shouldn’t even mention it."

These people are planning to vote for the party that promises to shower benefits on the two-yacht family because that party promises them it will keep the niggers down and jail anyone providing someone, somewhere, an abortion. This kind of thinking is the thinking of a moron; I cannot put it any more cleverly than that.

What kind of country is this?

Well, we got the referral p-work filled out and off to our agency. They, in turn, are supposed to translate and send it on to their agent in the PRC for submittal to CCAA. So the next several weeks will be ones of anxious waiting and hoping for the Letter of Acceptance to come back.

Sigh.

So as you can imagine I haven't been following the news as tightly this week. Nothing seemed as important as the little telenovela showing in the little house on Amherst Street where Mojo and Peeper and I talked and organized things to get nearer to little Mei-mei.

So it was a bit of a surprise today when I read about the decision handed down today in the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of two cases involving school desegregation: Parents v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Ed.

I'll let Scott Lemieux over at Lawyers, Guns and Money break down the salient points of these decisions. But the bottom line is that the Court said today that it is not constitutional for local governments to do anything about de facto segregation through school integration.
But I consider it sufficient to reduce the argument against this decision to this: is it in our (yours, mine, our children's, the nation's) best interest to perpetuate the racial concentration of poverty and disenfranchisement that we live with now?

Apparently the Roberts Court thinks so. Apparently the conservative position - since the 5-4 decision was crafted by the "right" side of the Court - is now that the sort of thing pictured on the left is past and forgotten, our dark legacy of slavery and oppression deep in the bosom of the ocean buried .

One of the reasons that this hit home is that suddenly, immediately, I'm thinking about...

...THIS sort of thing.

How do I explain to our little daughter that despite the fact that her ancestors were designing great works of engineering, culture and society when my ancestors were wiping their backsides with leaves and looking for stuff to eat it's still okay in a huge part of our country to publicly brand her a "China Doll" or a coolie or a nerdy little brainiac who can't drive?

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And, especially if you're black, you just need to stay with your own kind. Apparently the intellectual concept of Bush-era-conservatives as typified by the SCOTUS includes the notion that this is OK: that so long as your government isn't doing anything to keep you segregated, it shouldn't try to do anything to keep you integrated, either.

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One of the things that always amazes me about 20th Century "conservatism" is how often the packaging sounds so sensible and attractive but when you look at what the product does the result is often quite loathsome. It's like those flavored lotions that they sell in adult stores. The idea sounds appealing, but you get the lights turned down and the music low it turns out that the stuff tastes like licking a Barbie's ass and feels like WD-40 when you smear it on your skin.

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Eeewww.

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I'm not sure what the right answer for the problem of de-facto concentrating poverty in minority groups in America is. But I'm sure of what it isn't. And the "what it isn't" is what the SCOTUS just told us today is our first and best option.

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I'm sorry, kiddo. Sometimes some of us adults are just plain stone-blind stupid.