New York State: Champions of Voter Suppression!

Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act we have been witnessing a new wave of voter suppression that closely parallels the Klan terror of the 1870's with its "legal" accompaniment of eight-box laws, poll taxes and literacy tests.  This time we see polling places and registration sites closed amid a ginned-up terror about "voter fraud" for which there is absolutely no substantiation.

But what about the states which were not covered by the Voting Rights Act?  Are they paragons of democracy, encouraging participation?  New York is an example of a state with a long history of arcane maneuvers to keep power in the hands of local clubs by discouraging voting and by controlling the outcome of primaries.  After the New York presidential primary I wrote about the state senate votes in my district and in one in another part of the Bronx and about how the clubs control the vote.  Next week is another primary election, the second of three this year (?!) in New York.  We will be selecting party candidates for Congress and I think this is a good time to revisit the question of club control.

I live in New York's 16th Congressional District as the lines are currently drawn, which includes the North Bronx and southern Westchester.  We are represented by Eliot Engel, a mostly unexceptional Democrat who is known for always managing to appear on TV shaking the hand of the president after the State of the Union address.  He taught at IS 52 from 1969 to 1976.  He declared his Maryland home as his primary residence for tax purposes.  But what about elections?

Engel initially won his seat by beating Mario Biaggi in the 1988 primary.  Biaggi had already been convicted on 15 counts of bribery and obstruction of justice in the Wedtech Scandal.  Engel was seriously challenged only a few times since then.  He beat trombonist Willie Colón 1994 and City Councilman Larry Seabrook in 2000.  Seabrook is currently in federal prison for corruption convictions including a $1.5 million slush fund and no-show jobs for his mistress and siblings.  Otherwise, Engel has faced easy sailing in his elections.

What about the primary election next week?  I can find no evidence that there is any candidate in this election in our district other than Engel.  I don't mean no other Democrat.  I mean no other candidate. Last time around, in 2014, Engel ran unopposed in the general election.  He was the candidate of both Democrats and Republicans.  He nevertheless found a compelling need to raise $1.2 million for his campaign.  In scanning the FEC reports I see lots of postage and office supplies.  There are plenty of meetings at the Blue Bay Diner, Generico's Pizza and Liebman's Deli... all of which are within a couple of blocks of the Benjamin Franklin Democratic Club on 231st Street near Tibbett Avenue.  All of it seems totally above board.

This time around, with no sign of an opponent, and with three months to go before the election, Representative Engel has already raised over a million dollars.  Where is it being spent?  After the postage and the office supplies and the neighborhood restaurants in Kingsbridge some other patterns emerge.  One is the cost of the fundraising itself.  In the 2014 election cycle the FEC reports show regular payments to a DC fundraising firm totaling about $100,000.  So if you want to run a campaign, roughly 10% of the cost of that campaign will be paying people to get the money you need.  Then there are the tickets and journal ads.  Black Democrats of Westchester?  Congressman Engel supported their dinners to the tune of $1000.  Eastchester Irish Americans, again $1000.  Allerton Homeowners? Another $1000.  That pattern repeats itself.

In low-turnout primaries a candidate can rely heavily on the support of certain well-organized groups.    The candidate can get that support by supporting them financially.  This actually explains the cost of a non-existent campaign.  A well-funded war chest makes the cost of challenging the incumbent prohibitively expensive.  The candidate distributes the funds in that war chest to likely primary voters, thereby -- again -- creating a near-insurmountable hurdle to the challenger.  All of this is legal if pedestrian and tawdry.

Where does the million come from, though?  A pro-Israel PAC.  The teachers' union.   A for-profit university in Grenada.  Defense contractors.  Beer wholesalers.  Also cryptic individuals: A housewife in California ($5400).  A hedge fund CEO in Boston ($2700).  A real estate developer in Boca Raton ($2700).  A "home maker" in Texas ($2700).  You get the picture.  Most of this is undoubtedly disguised lobbyist donations, but all legal if (as I said) tawdry.

The practice of returning incumbents is well established all over the United States.  It means you get experienced constituent services.  It means your representative builds up seniority and can leverage that for local funding from federal services.  I am just deeply skeptical that we have been unable to find a more inspiring Congressman from this district for the last 26 years.  And I know that little tricks like suppressing voter turnout by separating primaries are helpful in ensuring that insiders control outcomes.

The cost of taking back our politics is on-the-ground organization that counters that of the clubs.  For every Mt. Vernon and New Rochelle synagogue, a tenants's council.  For every precinct clergy coalition, a coalition against violence.  And more: instead of soliciting funds from unions, providing support to rank-and-file workers' organizations.  I do not know how these disparate groups unite around a single candidate.  I suspect it gets done at the City Council and State Assembly level before attempting a Congressional campaign.  I am certain, though, that we begin with these goals before wee attempt to unite around one presidential candidate

I found reading through Eliot Engel's FEC filings profoundly depressing.  I would like to see a very different politics.

Fort Apache, the Bronx

San Carlos artist Douglas Miles was here in the Bronx for the last few weeks doing workshops on mural painting in skateboard deck designs at The Point on Garrison Avenue.  He created a large piece on the front of the building, begun with the observation that he is Apache and that neighborhood had the appellation "Fort Apache."  It is a gorgeous work, exploring a theme and vernacular that he has been mining for a while.
But putting it here, in our borough, is a radical act of seizing and redefining what was, after all, a racist name.

Fort Apache, the geographical location, is an old US Army outpost on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona.  It is the scene for my story "The Giant Believed Her" in the collection Stones from the Creek.  The artist lives a hundred miles away on another Apache reservation.  He mentioned when we spoke, though, that his girlfriend lives near Fort Apache.  This represents both tribal and personal history.  Locations have meanings to the people who visit them regularly.  Certain places, though, have resonances far away, for people who have never set eyes on them.  The Bronx is a good example.  When we visited a village in Bavaria, in the Upper Palatinate, we attended a backyard barbecue with an extended family who had all heard of "the Bronx," including those who spoke no English.  They had very clear ideas of what this meant. They had seen the TV shows and movies.  (How "vérité" are any of them?  Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" had mountains in the background.)

The "Fort Apache" of the imagination, like the imagined "Bronx," inhabits a different geography.  The 1948 film "Fort Apache" starred John Wayne and Henry Fonda.  It is a complex story of race, class and conquest.  The plot takes the story of the "last stand" and moves it: the Indians are Apache instead of Lakota, the Colonel's name is Thursday instead of Custer.  In contrast to Errol Flynn's heroic 1941 colonel in "They Died With Their Boots On," Fonda's character is glory hungry and a bad listener.  But his needless sacrifice becomes legendary and his subordinate and antagonist, John Wayne, sadly and pragmatically endorses the legend.  This is just one of the things that makes this story more nuanced and less "rah-rah soldiers".

Certain things about the movie are much less complex.  The Apache leader Cochise is played by Mexican actor Miguel Inclán.  No other Apaches in the movie are listed in the cast.  There are 300 of them, all played by Navajos and the film was shot in Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation.  The entire drama is played out among the cavalry unit and its family members, which makes the film's "Apaches" a symbol of chaos and savagery outside the "civilized" confines of the fort.  So except for the fact that Cochise is "honorable" we get a view of culture and civilization that is entirely racist and without nuance.

This is the meaning that certain NYPD officers were applying in the 1960's when they began referring to the 41st Precinct on Simpson Street as "Fort Apache."  They were telling themselves and the world that their house was a solitary bulwark of civilization in a hostile landscape of savagery and chaos... the South Bronx.  This notion -- this meme -- of white men in Indian country goes back through Buffalo Bill's Wild West to James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.  It is present in the dramas and melodramas of British imperialism.  It denies the humanity of those outside the "fort."  It is an extremely pervasive idea and it underlies the walled-and-gated communities of contemporary suburbia, along with the religious cult of "Second-Amendment Rights" in our political culture.  I don't think it is possible to exaggerate the fear of the racial "other" it implies.

When the movie "Fort Apache -- the Bronx" was made in 1980 with Paul Newman and Ed Asner it conveyed that same theme.  The cops aren't all good but they are there to create order.  A title card informs us that there are hard-working people, but we never meet them.  We see gang members and prostitutes and Pam Grier as a crazed, drug-addicted cop-killer who doesn't speak.  It was a much worse movie than John Ford's "Fort Apache" and it is barely remembered even here in the Bronx.  But the title?  That conveyed what it was intended to.  People everywhere got the idea that the cops in the Bronx are embattled defenders of civilization against the barbaric hordes.

That is why Douglas Miles's mural is so subversive.  It says that the people of the neighborhood are Apaches: we have been authorized by an actual Apache.  It says we are resisting the encroachments of people who want to take our homes from us.  It says (literally, the words are in the mural!) that "the Bronx is not for sale."  It is anti-gentrification.  It is anti-racist.

Apparently Douglas Miles said at one discussion of the work in progress: "I can go from ironic to iconic in ten seconds."  The irony of an Apache in the neighborhood of "Fort Apache" may have initiated the idea for the work.  But the imagery grants iconic status to the resistance of the people of the Bronx.  People from the neighborhood are going to see it.  My friends who live and work nearby are bringing their kids.  I haven't yet heard what meaning they are constructing, but it is resonating strongly with something within.

Thanks, Douglas Miles.  This is what real art does.

Zombies!

A trending topic today is a tweet by comic actor Bruce Campbell.  I hadn't seen the photos of the woman beaten by Sanders supporters at a Trump rally, probably because the online world is even more divided than the real world and I don't have any Facebook friends who support Donald Trump.  But Trump Universe was circulating this picture with great outrage and avidity.  The captions usually mocked liberals for their supposed non-violence: Look what these monsters did to this pretty blonde woman!

Bruce Campbell recognized the photo as being a test shot for makeup for his current TV show, Ash vs. Living Dead.  He called people on it, tweeting, "Check your facts, folks. This is an actress named Samara Weaving from #AshVsEvilDead. This is a makeup test. Sad."  I like how he got the hashtag plug for his show in there!  And then you look at the photo again and, wow, great lighting.  Great makeup, and not just the "injury."  This has got to be a better photo than an amateur could get on the spot to document some street horror.

The thing that really bothers me about it is that this is not a species of lie that is unique to Trump Bros or to the Right.  We are all so susceptible to believing a story that fits our desires and preconceptions that this kind of bullshit is propagated by social media regularly.

A year and a half ago, when the story of the abducted schoolgirls from Chibok was still relatively fresh in people's mind, this picture of armed African women circulated widely.  In the face of frustration with the Nigerian military's ongoing failure to save the girls from Boko Haram, this photo purportedly showed local women taking that fight into their own hands.  People, including me, were really excited to see this and to share it.

Unfortunately, that is not what it showed at all.  As I wrote at the time, the photo originally accompanied a two-year-old article on militias fighting Tuareg rebels in Mali, 1600 road miles, and a 36-hour drive from Chibok.  Even at the time I wasn't entirely sure what made me suspicious of the story.  And even when I reverse-searched the image through Google it took me a long time to find its original source, because -- of course -- the overwhelming majority of hits were from the popular current version of the story, which placed it in Borno State, Nigeria instead of two countries away.

I assume that all of us have had the experience of clicking on a link to a news aggregator to see some outrageous story (that confirms our worst suspicions) only to find that the actual details don't quite match the headline and that they are only relying on some other outlet that actually reported the story anyway.  This really is one definition of the term "clickbait" so it shouldn't surprise us much.  We bit on their gambit, they reported our hit to their advertisers, they made some money.

I see more to it, though.  First, pictures are very powerful and they don't speak for themselves.  So when we take a well-crafted photo and give it a totally new meaning the lie we have created is much more powerful.  Second -- clickbait aside -- we don't always even look at the story before sharing.  It is the image and the caption that are the "meme."  Finally, when the lie is political, it has consequences that last forever.

In September 1971 NY State Police retook Attica Correctional Facility from rebelling inmates.  The police killed 29 inmates and 9 corrections officers while they fired blindly into tear gas and smoke.  Governor Rockefeller and the newspapers reported that those corrections officers were murdered by inmates and that their throats were slit.  This was before the 24-hour news cycle and it wasn't until the next day that the truth began to slip out.  It was only later that surviving corrections officers were able to tell how their lives had been saved by inmates who covered them with their bodies.  It is now forty-five years since those terrible murders and there are still people who will insist that they saw those throats slit, despite the autopsy results!

It has been said that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.  That quote has been variously attributed to Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson and a bunch of guys you never heard of.  I could, of course, make a PowerPoint slide with a picture of one of them and a text box with the quote.  I will try to restrain myself from adding to the flood of misinformation.

While you were watching the xxxxx...

From summer 2011 until late May 2012 the Democratic National Committee was able to keep its base agitated with what I later came to think of as the Lunatic of the Month Club.  Remember?  As the corporate news media declared one Republican presidential candidate after another to have “momentum”, Democratic voters were agitated with the possibility of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich becoming President.  (The last three actually won some primaries.)  We were prodded with the latest outrageous quotes from one after the other.  It is – after all – a pretty effective tactic for keeping us thinking that a Republican victory would be a calamity for the Republic.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t fall for this a second time.  To my surprise, though, the very first Lunatic of the Month, from June 2015, has retained that proud position for the last twelve months.  He is now the presumptive candidate of the Republican Party and has earned the support of most GOP leaders.  And I have not come close to ignoring his scandalous statements.  I pay close attention, and I publicize them to my limited ability so that my Facebook friends will not forget just how scary the prospect of a Trump Presidency is. 

What happened to my pledge not to be distracted by shiny, frightening things?

There is a recurrent meme in the popular culture about distraction.  (And by “meme” I mean an idea that keeps circulating and renewing itself, not a photo with a quote.)  The essence of this meme is that “they” (politicians, corporate media, Illuminati, whoever) want you to pay attention to “this” (Beyonce, the Kardashians, Cecil the Lion, Harambee the Gorilla) so that you won’t notice “that” (whatever the writer thinks is important.)  The subtext of this meme is that none of us are capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time, ie, I can’t mourn Muhammad Ali, remember D-Day, castigate Congress for failing to fund Zika preparation and care about Puerto Rico’s impending bankruptcy on the same day.

This “can’t-walk-and-chew-gum” notion has been a popular idea in this year’s Democratic primary campaign.  For many months, supporters of Hillary Clinton have been demanding that Bernie Sanders walk away from his campaign on the grounds that we must defeat Donald Trump.  And I have seen people on the Sanders side walk away from their criticisms of Senator Sanders’s one-note economism, which avoids potentially divisive discussions by pretending that race is not an issue in today’s America.  Apparently they want to keep their friends and supporters excited about Bernie and criticism won’t do that.

I voted for Senator Sanders in the NY primary.  I was disappointed with his poor showing.  I have written about that elsewhere.  But what interests me is how people on the Left relate to Presidential contests.  Do we announce a boycott of bourgeois elections?  Do we run our own candidates, knowing that in the current climate they won’t even get enough votes to affect the outcome one way or another?  Do we declare that “this” year is singularly important and that therefore “we” have to support one monopoly-capitalist candidate over another in order to prevent fascism?

I will leave aside for a moment the question of whether Donald Trump and his violent, racist, misogynist, xenophobic supporters represent a fascist moment.  The question that interests me right now is: Can we hold two ideas at one time?  Or, put another way, can we vote for a candidate (and even suggest that vote to our friends) without arguing that he or she is the People’s Red Hero?

I am continually appalled by Hillary Clinton.  It is hard for me to fathom what she gains by publicly praising a mass murderer and war criminal of forty years ago, Henry Kissinger.  She has advocated some spectacularly bone-headed military interventions in Libya and Syria and seems not to be familiar with the phrase “unintended consequence.”  She supported the mass-incarceration and neoliberal policies of her husband in the nineties and I have heard no indication that she disagrees with them now.  Would I campaign for her?  Please!  But I am really going to have to consider voting for her in November.  That potential Trump Presidency does scare me.  Nothing will stop me from criticizing and opposing her and her policies.  But I am old enough to remember people who thought Richard Nixon was an antiwar candidate in 1968.  Anybody who thinks Donald Trump is an anti-establishment candidate because the Republican establishment doesn’t like him is equally deluded.

As I said above, I voted for Bernie.  I don’t like him and I don’t think he represents good ideas.  But I was also not going to sit home on primary day.  I was also happy to see how many of my friends, especially those who don’t often pay attention to politics, were excited about his candidacy.  There is plenty of time on other days for me to advocate for the things I believe.  

I don’t think voting for one candidate (or against another!) on Election Day represents an abandonment of principle.  Donald Trump has given form to an ugly current in American life.  People who think they know him because they watched “The Apprentice,” people who think he’s a “tough guy” because he blusters “You’re fired!” people who think he’s a billionaire because he says so and puts his name on other people’s exclusive golf clubs… these people have been given license to publicly parade their bigotry and their petty fears and their hatred of women.  They have been given license to sucker punch strangers.  I am not the first to suggest that it is like an internet comments section come to life, keyboard warriors freed to embrace one another, howling at their phantoms, while Orange Hitler free associates about his personal brilliance and denounces his critics with the worst word he can summon: “Loser.”

I will be happy to usher him off the stage with that epithet trailing him.  That is the choice we will have in November.  I will continue to call attention to his egregious ideas and behavior.  In the days before and after the election, we can also fight the neoliberalism, mass incarceration, institutional racism and imperialist terror of the current administration.  We can even watch puppy videos.  Because we are capable of thinking about more than one thing.