What is a library?

Njamba abbreviated our walk in the woods at Orchard Beach this morning. We ended up hearing most of NPR's "On the Media." It was about libraries, starting with campaigns against libraries and librarians that are fueled by right-wing hysteria about grooming children by queer pedophiles. It got me thinking about the different ways we imagine libraries.

That campaign is mostly about public libraries, both community libraries and school libraries. I guess lots of people have early memories about libraries. I remember going through every child-directed biography in our school and public library. I remember reading about John Paul Jones, Ted Williams, Dwight Eisenhower, and Young Tom Edison. I remember reading history books for kids: We Were There with Jean Lafitte at New Orleans, We Were There with the Lafayette Espadrille, We Were There at the Boston Tea Party.

I also remember an unloved fifth-grade teacher who gave us a regular homework assignment of "study guides" on each of the fifty states. They were worksheets with spaces for us to fill in the area, population, principal industries, principal crops, etc. I found them grueling and sometimes impossible. We had an Information Please almanac at home, which provided some of the information. We also had an encyclopedia from 1938 that my grandpa purchased for my mom and my uncle, but let's just say that whatever information I could locate there was over twenty-five years out of date: Alaska and Hawaii weren't states in that book, there had been no Second World War, the population of California was 6 million instead of 18 million. One night I got permission to go to the public library to do that homework. (After school was not an option; it conflicted with Hebrew School.) It's only about a twenty-minute walk, but going out after dinner was a huge deal in my family. 

Anyway, I was astonished when the librarian directed me to the World Book Encyclopedia. Astonished because opposite every page with an entry about one of the US states was a table containing all the information I had been struggling to find to fill in Mr. Harris's stupid study guide. The exact format! The exact order! I knew that some of my classmates had that encyclopedia sitting in their rooms because I had seen it when I visited their homes. I was astonished because what had been a kind of unpleasant treasure hunt for me was clearly a simple and quick matter of copying some words and numbers for them. Looking back on this after forty years as an educator I am horrified by the lack of any intellectual content in fifty nights of this homework. But I am also horrified by an assignment that casually privileged children whose parents bought those (expensive! roughly $10,000 in 2022 dollars) 20+ volumes. I am not pleading poverty, but that was not something my parents were buying for us.

So this story serves in a way as a bridge between two ideas of the library. First, as a place where people can have access to books and what is in them for free, regardless of how much money they have. Second, as a place that stores and canonizes KNOWLEDGE. Think for a moment about a printed encyclopedia, whose editors decide what subjects deserve inclusion and what subjects do not. Who contract writers to give an authoritative account of those subjects, deciding what is true and what is not. The mere idea that a table including state bird, state tree, state song presents anything that helps us understand a state both flattens and trivializes what we think of as knowledge, turning learning into an accumulation of factoids. Why do we even have "state birds"? Why is the cardinal the state bird of seven different states? Does knowing that my state, New York, shares the Eastern Bluebird with Missouri add to my understanding of anything? 

And there is a conception of the library that shares this idea of complete, canonized knowledge with encyclopedias. The dream of a complete library goes back at least to Pharaoh Ptolemy I in the fourth century BCE. The library at Alexandria collected about half-a-million scrolls by means of purchase, confiscation, and theft in order to achieve the Pharaoh's goal of possessing every book ever. The idea continued in the science fiction of the 20th century and has received new impetus with the existence of an internet. I read a short story once about a PhD candidate of the future whose dissertation work consisted only of trying to come up with a project that nobody else had done already. An original project could be completed instantly by using the all-knowing computer, but an original idea was also vanishingly rare. This idea suggests that all human knowledge is finite. It also suggests that anything worth knowing can, in fact be known. It says that maybe we humans don't yet know everything, and maybe we individuals can't know everything known by humanity, but individuals can at least have access to everything that humanity knows. I think even that is wrong, because it assumes that the things we think we (individuals, experts, humanity as a whole) "know" are in fact true. 

There is a third understanding of library, which bleeds into the word archive. It includes not just every book, but every piece of paper. Today it would include everything that has ever been typed onto a computer: every job application, every snarky Tweet, every photo of lunch, every text message asking "WYD?" A friend's dad once showed me his basement, which was filled end-to-end and floor-to-ceiling with library shelving. On the shelves was every invoice and every bill of sale from his business, every gas and electric bill from his home, his and his children's report cards... I struggled to figure out whether all of this could ever have any value. When he gave up his home for an apartment it was all moved into a rental storage unit. Now, less than a year from his death in his late nineties it will be up to his children to see if they want to keep some of it, and how to dispose of the rest.

But every archive cannot be dismissed as hoarding. When I looked into the ongoing struggle of the Lakota over the Black Hills, (see for instance "The Black Hills Are Not for Sale" and "Still More: Treaty Rights") I was able to obtain a photocopy of the minutes of a 1920 meeting of tribal leaders initiating the lawsuit that remains unresolved today, despite the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 It showed a very different set of conversations than I would have imagined. Those minutes were being held in the library of Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota. Shortly after the librarian generously sent me this document, the library was threatened by unusual spring floods, the result of sudden warm temperatures after an exceptionally snowy winter. I sent a donation of thanks, in part because I imagined the destruction of that archive.

When I looked into resistance to the draft during World War 1, I was able to get digitized records of inmates at Leavenworth Penitentiary. (See "Green Corn Rebellion" and "More On the Green Corn Rebellion.") Looking at the prison records of participants in this armed march against the war, including their friends and family who were authorized to correspond with them by mail, allowed me to see what connections did (and did not) exist among the rebels. This is important to understand given the multiracial nature of the uprising in Oklahoma, including Blacks, whites, and Natives in roughly equal numbers.

The flip side of this is the archives that have vanished in fires and floods. Genealogists all know, for example, that the rolls of the 1890 census are largely gone, damaged by a 1921 fire in the basement of the US Department of Commerce. In fact, that fire is largely responsible for the creation of the National Archives. But when I was looking into property records in so many places around the US, I was surprised to find how many of them had been destroyed. And I cannot help but suspect that much of this was intentional. So much land belonging to African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans somehow ended up in the hands of their white neighbors over the course of time. It is hard for me to imagine that the repeated pattern of disappearing paper records, records that would document the real owners, was all accidental. It is just too convenient.

But let me return to the current campaigns against libraries. They are not particularly new, just accelerating. Efforts to ban books have been an American perennial, documented year after year by the American Library Association. There are those who want the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to be removed from the shelves. I guess these people really don't believe their own rhetoric about the undeniable superiority of capitalism because they are apparently afraid that if somebody reads this 1848 pamphlet our entire economic and social system will be endangered. 

I am a little puzzled by the endless campaign against the Captain Underpants series. For those of you who have no preteens in your life these books are the ongoing saga of resistance by two fourth-grade class clowns against their mean principal. I guess there are people who feel the premise is too disrespectful and antiauthoritarian. Again, is our civilization really so fragile that it is imperiled by a bunch of nine-year-olds chuckling about the pranks of George and Harold?

Catcher in the Rye? Centers a teenage slacker who questions everything. 

Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret? Frank discussion of menstruation. (If we don't say it aloud will it stop?)

The Things They Carried? I don't know; insufficiently worshipful of war and warriors?

To Kill a Mockingbird? You already know. Even this white savior narrative is too explicit about the horrors of racism.

But that is the bridge to the current attacks on libraries. Because a number of state legislators, challenged to say where they saw critical race theory being taught in the public schools, immediately pointed to To Kill a Mockingbird. It is easy to see that "Critical Race Theory" was coded language for the racist right. It is an approach to understanding the way white supremacy is cooked into law, without necessarily being mentioned explicitly. It is offered as an elective in some law schools, not mandated in grade school curricula. But the language that is used to criminalize it is revealing. Parents are urged to report anything taught in school that makes their children "uncomfortable." And you can definitely read that sentence as "white parents" and "white children." All the examples raised by the politicians riding this hysteria are about white children who are learning for the first time about the history of enslavement and Jim Crow and finding it horrifying. None of those examples are about Black or Latino or Native or Asian children who are othered by their teachers and administrators. And the books these parents want removed are by Toni Morrison and Ta-Nahisi Coates and Sherman Alexie. I am prepared to defend the value of that literature as part of a mandatory curriculum. But they are apparently prepared to demand that brilliant literature - literature that is written by people who aren't white and offers a different point-of-view - be banned from library shelves.

It is also definitely worth noticing that these campaigns only pretend to be grassroots phenomena, instigated by parents who are disturbed by their children's reaction to what they have been taught. Take Boundary County, Idaho. Angry citizens there are demanding the recall of the library board and they have presented a list of 300 books that must be removed. The head librarian quit her job after endless death threats and armed protesters parked outside her house night after night. But the library never owned any of those three hundred books!

Most of this list represents a new tack by the enemies of literature. They're not so prudish as to oppose any reference to sexuality, only to the sexuality of LGBTQ people! But their argument is the same as the opposition to the Communist Manifesto and Captain Underpants. It is still the danger of such exposure. They insist that children can "turn gay" by reading about gay people. They accuse the librarians of grooming. 

I will not dismiss the need for parents to safeguard their children against pedophile adults. We have all seen the scandals of pedophile priests and clergy in all denominations. We have seen the Boy Scouts of America file for bankruptcy because of the weight of sex abuse cases. I will remind you that most groomers, like most people, are heterosexual. I will ask why you think heterosexual children can be groomed to become gay by reading stories about gay people, but all these gay people failed to "turn straight" despite reading and viewing endless stories about straight people. I will also remind you that these people believe that their fourth grader is being groomed by Harold because at the end of Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot it is revealed that he will grow up to have a male domestic partner. I will remind you that they also believe that every Hollywood star and Democratic politician is part of a vast conspiracy to cannibalize children. I will remind you that nobody can point to where all these disappeared children came from.

So is this really about grooming? Or is somebody using parents' fears of predatory pedophiles for some other agenda? And is white supremacy the only reason for attacks on libraries that actually stock antiracist literature? Or is it also a helpful fear that provides racist cover for another agenda entirely, one that many of these racists wouldn't support if it traveled under its own name?

Let's go back to that episode of "On the Media" that we heard because Njamba didn't really feel like walking in the woods this morning. The host interviewed Emily Drabinski, who is the interim chief librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center and the president-elect of the American Library Association. Drabinski apparently made herself a lightning rod for all this anti-librarian venom by posting a celebratory tweet about her election as a Marxist lesbian. But she argues, and I agree, that underlying the opposition to libraries is an opposition to public institutions. Remember that World Book Encyclopedia that I eventually accessed at the library? Without libraries the only children who could use that encyclopedia would be those whose parents paid for it. The history of public libraries in this country, like the history of public schools, goes back to the earliest trade union movement. Both were demands that learning be made available to people who could afford to pay for it. There were no public schools at all in most of the states controlled by enslavers before the Civil War. Public schools in the former Confederacy were begun by the Reconstruction legislatures, the program of formerly-enslaved people. Segregated schools weren't a means of separating Black children from white children; they were a means of denying education to Black children. 

In 1959 the white librarian in Lake City, South Carolina called the police on nine-year-old Ronald McNair because he wanted to borrow books. Yes, that Ronald McNair. The one who earned a PhD from MIT. The one who served as an astronaut on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984. The one who died in 1986 when the Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean. That library is now named after Ronald McNair. But the campaign to defund libraries will prevent another Ronald McNair from reading the books about space that he wants.

Privatization as an ideology argues that the profit motive ensures better services for us all, an argument without evidence that amounts to a quasi-religious faith. Privatization as a practice allows profiteers to step in and provide (or pretend to) services while exploiting every shortcut imaginable to maximize their returns. But privatization as a political strategy is a way for the wealthy to shed any public responsibility at all. Why pay for schools that my child won't attend? Why pay for airline inspection when I'm hiring my own pilot to fly my own plane? Why pay to keep libraries open when I buy the books I want and profit more when you all have to buy your own, too?

There are exceptions. The fire service used to be private. If you paid a subscription in advance, the firefighters would come to put water on your house. But it turns out that fire doesn't discriminate between subscribers and non-subscribers and if your neighbor's home was fully engulfed in flames, yours was going up, too. So the fire department became a public service, paid for by all our taxes. Policing is a different kind of public service. Yes, the rich still maintain their own private security, but they can also tax us to provide a police force that protects them from the rest of us.

But they have very little interest in our education, beyond training us to work for them and produce their profits. When you see some hack demanding to know why we teach science instead of how to fill out credit card applications, remember that they want us to be climate skeptics so that they can keep profiting on both the destruction of our planet and our need to pay usurious interest to them. When you see them mocking the study of history, remember that they really don't want us to know any. In the days of Jim Crow, white exploiters didn't want their Black workers able to read contracts or calculate rent and debt. How different do you think the capitalists of today are? The entire charter school scam is the latest trick to defund and dismantle public education. And the idea that librarians are grooming our children to be gay?

Wake up.

Satan?

 Florida Governor Rick DeSantis is not Satan. He is a human man.

When he was a Member of the US House of Representatives in 2013, he did try to deny federal disaster relief to victims of Superstorm Sandy here in New York and New Jersey. Because he wanted to pretend he’s a fiscal conservative? Because we tend to vote for Democrats? Because he believes there is no “we, the people” so everyone is responsible for their own hardships?

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian he is insisting that it was a “500-year storm.” Why? It is definitely the strongest to hit Florida in the last four years, since Michael in 2018, which came with 160 mph winds and killed 50. Does he want us to think it’s a statistical freak instead of the utterly predictable result of human-caused global warming? Does he want to justify his request for federal relief for Florida, but not for New Jersey and New York? Does he want to pretend that there won’t be another, maybe even during this hurricane season?

He is also defending the decision of officials in Lee County, the hardest-hit area, not to evacuate before the storm. Does he really think this should be an individual decision, placing the lives and safety of first responders at the whim of the folks they will be forced to rescue (or recover)? Is he so dependent on the political support of county officials who made a bad call that he can’t antagonize them? Does he simply not care about the people who lost their lives?

And then there are the Venezuelan refugees he kidnapped from Texas and flew to Massachusetts as a political stunt. The original plan was apparently to fly migrants from Florida but there were political costs to that idea. So he sent agents 700 miles and four states away, with false promises of jobs and homes, to lure desperate people out from under the eye of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott is DeSantis’s rival to be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2024, and he has been stunting with migrants, too... although with buses, not airplanes; and with major Northern cities, not resort islands. I don’t even have to speculate about motives: DeSantis clearly believes that his political ambitions outweigh both the humanity of the people he kidnapped and the Florida law that set aside funds for him to transport migrants out of Florida, not random other states. He clearly resented Greg Abbott’s access to people whose humanity neither of them recognize.

So, back to Satan. No, Rick DeSantis is not him. But Rick DeSantis willingly volunteers - again and again and again - to do his work. 

No, we are not all in the same boat

 Judith is not the only Black woman I know who finally couldn't keep watching "A Handmaid's Tale" on TV. The reminders of their great-grandmothers' experiences, the notion that this all becomes a horror because it's happening to white women, the belief that this is speculative fiction instead of fact... it was all too much. The use of the red, hooded cloaks as a public trope made it more than just a show to stop watching. Protests against Trump's inauguration, against misogynist Supreme Court nominees, and finally against the Court's long-prepared blow against women's bodily autonomy in Dobbs v. Mississippi all featured demonstrators in those cloaks. The implication that this represents a frightening future instead of a horrifying past is a kind of color blindness that erases the historical memory of Black and Native women and presents white experience as universal instead of particular.

There are parallels all over the landscape of political issues in the US. Every time a white person responds to the latest horror with an indignant "This is not who we are!" Black people roll their eyes and say "This is who you always were." An attempted insurrection and coup at the US Capitol in 2021? A successful murderous insurrection and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Separating parents from their children at the border? The entire history of Native boarding schools and the present practices of child welfare agencies with Black families. Mass shootings of Mexican and Mexican Americans in El Paso and African Americans in Buffalo? Do I even need to say anything?

I was caught off guard by discussions of a post-apocalyptic novel by Rebecca Roanhorse. She made the point that Native people are already living in post-apocalyptic times, something that I had failed up until that moment to fully register. Similarly, Black, Native, and other colonized American peoples have already experienced fascism. Way back in 1946, when most people in the US were still freshly horrified by the full exposure of the extremes of the Nazi holocaust, WEB DuBois wrote in The World and Africa:

There was no Nazi atrocity - concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women and ghastly blasphemy of childhood - which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.

This is actually the meaning of the descriptor "racial capitalism." It isn't a "flavor" of capitalism, like mercantile or monopoly. It is essential to exploitation to target a group that the exploiter can dismiss as somehow lesser, somehow less deserving to be treated as kin or even as human. But the dirty secret is that whatever a capitalist tries against another color or nationality or religion will - sooner than later - be extended against people whose only real difference is less money.

White people often object to discussion of difference. They may say that it weakens unity. But imagine how hard it must be to find unity with people who refuse even to acknowledge your lived experience.

Child Welfare?

 Only a few pages into Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts I was so horrified by contemporary stories of stolen children that I had to set it down to gather my thoughts. Those thoughts turned to history and to the history of stealing children in the United States.

Richard and Chauncey Yellow
Robe with Henry Standing Bear
in 1883

The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at government and church boarding schools for Indigenous children in the US and Canada has returned attention to the trauma of the survivors of those schools. (It has been noted that the use of the word "survivor" instead of "alumnus" reveals a lot.) Native children were taken from their parents, moved far away, and given new names, clothes, and haircuts at the boarding schools. They were beaten for speaking their own languages. But a feature that has received less attention is the "Outing System." 

In its original form the outing system sent students from Carlisle Indian School to spend the summer with local farmers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The idea was that they would lose all their progress in acculturation if they went home to their families for summer vacation, and that they would progress much more by being embedded in the lives of white families, for both relationship and the ethic of work.

It should be abundantly clear that this idea is genocidal in its conception, despite its

Richard and Chauncey Yellow
Robe with Henry Standing Bear
in 1884

philanthropic facade. Its intent is to wrest every vestige of indigeneity from the students: to isolate them from one another, to prolong the separation from their loved ones, to substitute new, white "families" for their own actual families, to enforce the English language, and to make white values seem unarguable. Carlisle's founder, Richard Henry Pratt was fond of saying that the goal of education was to "Kill the Indian; save the man.  

A moments thought should also suggest that extending this system through a large number of schools around the country would inevitably shift the emphasis from education and relationship to exploitation. Students at most schools were simply put to work in cotton and beet fields, orchards, railroad lines, and domestic service without any pretense of including them in anyone's family. In some schools, any local demand for labor put a stop to classroom work for the duration of whatever harvest came up. In others, few "students" were ever assigned to classrooms at all. Even General Pratt, the founder of Carlisle, turned against the outing system he had invented once he realized what it had devolved into.

Racial capitalism is forever finding ways to assert control over children, especially children it characterizes as "non-white", and to seize them for its own purposes. In the period immediately after the Civil War, white landowners accused freedpeople of being indigent - which was hard to argue since they were emancipated without property or back wages - and then stole their children and declared them "apprentices" on the grounds of parental neglect. The archives of the federal Freedmen's Bureau are absolutely filled with thousands of petitions by parents and other relatives to get their children back from illegal and unwanted so-called apprenticeships. Consider this appeal to General Lew Wallace in Maryland by Henrietta Clayton whose children were kidnapped by her onetime owner:

I went to my master after my children and he ordered me away; he told me if I did not go he was going to shoot me; he say before I shall have my children he will blow my brains out; he says I must not step my foot on his farm again. There is three boys with my sister's child; my tow boys and my sister's child, Perry, Henry, Tom. Mr. Jimmy Giles is my master, Eastern Shore Maryland.

Samuel Elbert in Baltimore petitioned for a child whose mother had been sold South ten years earlier. He, too, was threatened with death:

I worked for him at the time this child was born and for some time afterwards, and it is on this account that I am interested in the little girls, as she has no one to intercede for her. He said I could not take her unless I could prove that she is my child and that I was married to her mother. That I could not do as it was not so.

I struggle to imagine that this white man who sold the mother away was genuinely concerned with the child's welfare, or with protecting her from Mr. Elbert. In fact, General Wallace's reports include an account of a white man, Mr. Sewell Hepburn, who indentured twelve Black children from a single family, insisting that it was "an act of humanity" because those children grew up with his and were their playmates. But in another letter to Wallace he complained that all the grown men he previously enslaved had enlisted in the US Army during the war. And he wrote:

I am left with no body to black my boots or catch a horse. I am now an old man, and in my younger days labored to raised these blacks. [lower case in the original.]

(For more like this, see Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. These few examples come from pages 406 and 408.) 

This also got me thinking about Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, a story that has haunted me since I first read the book twenty-one years ago and through multiple re-readings. In 1904 an orphan train arrived in Clifton, Arizona carrying children from the New York Foundling Hospital along with three nuns to supervise them, members of the order Sisters of Charity. A couple of things in that sentence require unpacking. First, the word "orphan" is a misnomer by our standards, because most of those kids were the children of single moms. But grinding poverty was characterized as parental neglect (as it still is today!) and so they were taken from their families. Second, these were literal trains that took children wholesale from the city and placed them with families in the country. They had been started by the Children's Aid Society in the 1850's on the theory that the country was a much healthier place to raise children than the city, even if they weren't with kin. CAS founder Charles Edward Brace offered a rationale that is close to General Pratt's thinking: 

A child's place at the table of the farmer is always open; his food and cost to the family are of little accoun... The chances, too, of ill treatment in a new country, where children are petted and favored, and every man's affairs are known to all his neighbors, are far less than in an old. The very constitution, too, of an agricultural and democratic community favors the probability of a poor child's succeeding. When placed in a farmer's family, he grows up as one of their number... The peculiar temptations to which he has been subject - such, for instance, as stealing and vagrancy - are reduced to a minimum; his self-respect is raised, and the chances of success held out to a laborer in this country... soon raise him far above the class from which he sprang.

Third, the Children's Aid Society was a Protestant charity, but most of the "orphans" they were transporting and placing were Catholic. The Sisters of Charity founded the Foundling Hospital specifically to ensure that those children would receive a Catholic upbringing. The placements made from the Foundling's orphan trains, unlike those of the Children's Aid Society, were with Catholic families.

Clifton in 1903

Clifton, Arizona may have been far from any city (in 1904 Tucson - 175 miles away - was the closest place with a population near 10,000) but it wasn't "country" as we imagine that word. It was a copper mining and smelting camp. Moreover, it was widely known as a "Mexican camp," meaning that the majority of workers in town were Mexican or Mexican-American. Foremen and management were Anglo. And that is significant to the story. Because when the Sisters asked the local priest for Catholic families to adopt the children on the train, those Catholic families were Mexican. Within hours of those families welcoming the children to their homes, armed Anglo vigilantes were going door to door to prevent white children being raised by Mexicans.

The matter didn't end there. Perhaps the impoverished miners of Clifton had no ability to take racist vigilantes to court, but the Sisters of Charity did. The New York Foundling Hospital did. They were joined by the Ancient Order of Hibernians and by New York City Mayor George McClellan, Jr. But the Arizona court agreed with the vigilantes that Mexican homes were unsuitable and Mexican parents were unfit. The US Supreme Court agreed.

My odyssey today began with reading about a mom whose child was taken because she was deemed unfit. She was asked to demonstrate a year sober, a good attitude by way of taking and passing various classes in parenting, a job, and a home. She did all those things and the social workers said it was insufficient and refused to return her child. I was so unsettled by this that I had to put the book down. Did I go for a walk? Play with the dog? Find some rational way of strengthening myself to continue reading? I did not do any of those things. I chose to continue in the horror by looking at its history instead. Child welfare is just another apparatus of the colonial state, another police agency.

 

Jackson still has no water

Jackson, Mississippi is entering its third day without water. The city's water supply system has been failing for years, but the flooding Pearl River simply overwhelmed it. Jackson may be the capital of Mississippi, but white flight has made it a 79% Black city and the white supremacist legislature just doesn't give a shit about the people they pass every day commuting from elsewhere to their meetings in the capitol. Mayor Lumumba told them two years ago that the water system needed $40 million to make it functional. They allocated $3 million. By comparison, I managed a larger annual budget when I was principal of a 400-student high school. 

I started seeing the usual complaints yesterday, blaming this on the imagined generosity the US shows the world in contrast with its own people: so many billions for Ukraine, so many billions for Israel, so many billions for Taiwan, "Boil your water" for Mississippi. But what this view always obscures is the fact that our generosity abroad always encompasses weapons. It's not a gift to others; it's a gift to McDonnell-Douglass, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and the other profiteers of death in the half-trillion dollar a year US arms industry. We say that greedy people are thirsty. These death merchants are thirsty for blood. Desperate after the end of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they celebrate the horrors in Ukraine.

What is $40 million to upgrade Jackson's water system? The troubled F-35 fighter jet program looks to cost $1.7 trillion.  A single carrier-based F-35 is estimated to cost $337 million. We could fix almost nine Jacksons for the price of one fighter plane. And - again - don't be fooled into thinking this is about our defense. The F-35 program is corporate welfare. 

People like to pretend that WIC and housing subsidies support the people who receive them. In reality they allow employers to pay less than a living wage. So-called "welfare" is actually putting money into the treasuries of the corporations who underpay their workers. But they are happy to have you angry with those workers, even when you're one of them yourself.

In the same way, the big arms manufacturers are happy to have you believe that they are protecting you. They're happy to let you thing that we're supporting the lifestyles of people in other countries who are getting their weapons. You can blame anybody as long as their profits keep rolling in.

None of this helps the people of Jackson. I considered tweeting this morning that it is too bad for the people of Jackson that they need a new water system instead of an F-35. But what they really don't need is my snark. They need drinking water. And they need a representative state government to meet in their own city.

Yellow Cab Medallions: It's A Wonderful Life

The people of Bedford Falls save George

 Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life" is a Christmas holiday classic, widely considered to be one of the greatest films of the 20th century. In the well-known plot, community credit union manager George Bailey is facing bankruptcy and ruin. He is preparing to commit suicide because his absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaced an $8000 payment (roughly $132,000 today) to the local banker, Henry Potter. We, the audience know that Potter actually found and took the money, but is not crediting it to George Bailey's Building and Loan. In the climactic scene, the entire community rallies to George Bailey's aid, bringing whatever money they can spare to save him.

People's warm memories of this film are - in part - constructed. It did not receive great reviews when it came out and it lost the studio a lot of money. Worse, the FBI issued a memo suggesting that the entire plot was a Communist trick to discredit capitalism by portraying bankers as greedy and larcenous. It wasn't until three decades later that "It's A Wonderful Life" became a popular staple of Christmas television.

I disagree with J. Edgar Hoover assessment. I think that a real communist movie wouldn't have ended with Potter getting away with theft. It wouldn't have ended with working people scraping together their meagre cash to pay him a second time. I think it would have ended with George Bailey's neighbors enacting justice on vampire capitalist Henry Potter. I am not the only person to imagine a happy ending

Stomping Potter on SNL

for "It's A Wonderful Life." In 1986, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch they called "The Lost Ending." In this imagined version, Uncle Billy remembers where he left the money and the people of Bedford Falls storm Potter's home and give him the stomping he deserves. That is People's Justice.

So what does this have to do with yellow cab medallions? Yesterday the City of New York and the yellow cab drivers announced a deal - backstopped by the City - that will reduce the debt of drivers who own medallions. The necessary background is that those medallions, which are necessary to operate a yellow cab, were being bought up by private capital firms between 2004 and 2014. That artificial demand resulted in increasing their price from $200,000 to $1 million in the same period. The kicker was convincing drivers that this was not a bubble, that the value could only increase, and that a loan (at predatory terms, of course) was their ticket to being their own employer and the American Dream. Private capital bailed quickly as so-called "ride sharing" services (Uber and Lyft) seized the market from the yellow cabs.

Shall I spell out the parallel? The banks who got into this scam were taking money at predatory rates from drivers, mostly newcomers to the country, many with limited English, when they knew they were selling medallions at prices that they themselves had artificially inflated. Over the course of the next few years drivers realized they owed many times more money than the medallions were actually worth, and that they were working 72-hour weeks and still making less money than before to pay back these loans. Many committed suicide. No angel named Clarence appeared to save those despondent drivers.

And now? Just like the people of Bedford Falls the people of New York are (in this case belatedly) arriving to save those drivers instead of holding the vampires accountable.

There are a couple of changed circumstances since 1946. One new twist is the debate about the (very partial) student loan forgiveness President Biden offered last week. We have been watching the spectacle of politicians and business people who have recently received trillions in COVID loan forgiveness bitching up a storm about people receiving $20,000 in loan forgiveness. And - again, a parallel - those original loans were meant to cover the payrolls of the businesses that were losing money, but were given to the owners instead of the employees, many of whom just pocketed the funds for themselves, saying a big fuck you to their workers.

And what do these thieves say to the student loan recipients? You should never have borrowed money you couldn't afford to return, exactly what the predatory lenders have been saying to the cab drivers whose homes they were seizing, exactly what Potter said to George Bailey.

The opponents of student loan forgiveness aren't just vampires or hypocrites, though. Their thievery borders on a religion. Because their Great Orange God filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy six times! It should be clear to everyone that the only debt they think should be honored is ours, what we owe them.

 If you watch the news you will have seen the pictures of the vanishing Colorado River. It is especially evident in both aerial and ground photos of the low water levels behind the big dams. Long boat ramps are completely cut off from the water. Human remains are appearing. The hydroelectric plants that were supposed to provide sustainable, non-polluting electric power are approaching dead pool, meaning not enough water above them to turn their turbines. But almost scarier is the news that accompanies these pictures. The governors of the states that depend on the Colorado to irrigate their crops have failed to arrive at a new agreement on how to divide up the diminishing supply of water.

There is other news about low water levels. The Rhine and the Danube are so low that shipping has ground to a halt. Some media outlets are reporting on how this is affecting the auto, steel, and coal industries, but I have seen more stories about inconvenienced American tourists being bused around by their cruise companies and about the appearance of sunken Nazi warships and medieval rock inscriptions. I have not seen stories connecting the European drought with the American drought.

Some outlets have reported historic low levels in the Yangtze and Mekong Rivers, but it seems that the farther the drought is from New York and Los Angeles, and the fewer white people are affected, the less coverage the catastrophe gets. The stories that do get publicized tend to question the dam-building practices of the People's Republic of China. I have seen nothing that compares them with the questionable legacy of our own Bureau of Reclamation's dams. And, again, I guess there are stories connecting the drought in east Asia with the drought in the American southwest, but I haven't seen them.

Worse is the invisible loss of water. This drought has been going on for years. How have the western states continued farming, golf courses, and water parks? By drawing on underground aquifers, which don't get recharged by a snowy winter or a rainy summer. They are a treasure that won't be replaced. Deep wells are going dry all over the west already.

Then, this morning, public radio had a story about Republican governors opposing land conservation efforts. The Nebraska governor had language about excluding humans from our land. And he claimed that voluntary programs interfere with property rights. For most of the last hundred years, conservation has been an uncontroversial goal of both parties. Maybe "piety" is a better word than "goal" because of the ratio of lip service to actual action, but at least it was non-partisan and uncontroversial. Now? No more.

In the early 20th century, conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt understood our relationship to water, land, and forests as a business proposition: imagine nature as capital and then manage it so that it keeps on yielding profit in the form of lumber and crops. For the last few decades, though, actual businesses have stopped managing actual capital for long-term yield and begun looting their own properties for immediate gain. Like vampire Aesops they ask: "Why not cut up and kill the goose? Those golden eggs are coming from somewhere!"

Apply that logic to the natural world and you get:

• unrestricted burning of fossil fuels (and note that word "fossil" meaning produced in another geological era
• failure to manage our dwindling water supplies
• genetically-modified seed crops that allow (actually require) the massive application of herbicides and insecticides
• clear cutting our surviving forests

The results are not hard to predict and we see them all around. They include soil erosion, vanishing fresh water from both reservoirs and aquifers, massive die-offs of bees and other insect pollinators of our foods, killer heat waves, rising sea levels that poison farmland, and annual "500-year" and "1000-year" storms. Put this together with politicians who insist that it is God's will that "Man" (by which they mean capitalism) should use the bounty of creation and the situation becomes apocalyptic. Literally.

Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ

COVID 19 cases reached their peak six weeks ago with almost a million new cases in the United States on January 14. Since then they have plummeted a full 93%! The still-vocal pandemic deniers add that to the fact that the omicron variant was apparently less deadly and demand an immediate end to masking and vaccinations. Let’s look more closely at those figures, though.

In the two years since the novel coronavirus arrived in the United States, we have lost 946,000 family, friends, and neighbors. Why those deaths are an acceptable price for our “freedom” not to mask and not to vaccinate is mystifying to me. But it also understates the costs. The data is still preliminary, but somewhere between 30 and 40% of people who tested positive for COVID (that is a positive test, not a hospitalization, or even a sickness) suffered lingering symptoms for at least three months! So even that staggering figure of nearly a million deaths doesn’t fully describe the cost.

Then there is the difference between us and other countries. Yesterday, after a month and a half of rapid decline in new cases, the 14-day average of new deaths in the US was 1872. The 14-day average of new deaths in the whole world was 8833. That means that 21% of worldwide deaths was in the United States alone, which has only 4% of global population. Yet people are still yelling about infringements on their freedom.

Freedom has been a cornerstone of the United States since its founding. One way of understanding that is that it is that freedom is the opposite of slavery, and that the white Founders defined themselves in opposition to the Black people they enslaved. But the persistent and bizarre suggestion by pandemic deniers that mask and vaccine mandates are slavery suggests another way to define freedom by an opposite. Wearing masks and receiving vaccines are practices that benefit our neighbors as well as ourselves. So perhaps we should understand American freedom as the opposite of relationship.

Every time I hear someone say that the “only” people who are vulnerable to COVID are those with “pre-existing conditions” I cringe. Not only is it untrue, but it also implies that somehow these other conditions are their fault and therefore not our responsibility. One of those “pre-existing conditions” is age and the claim that children should be at school, in person, and unmasked, regardless of the danger to their own grandparents is just demonic.

We seriously entertain the notion that our “freedom” to own and walk around with semiautomatic weapons supersedes our responsibility to our children, who regularly practice hiding in their classrooms from deranged killers. We allow this despite the fact that - as a result - we Americans shoot ourselves and one another at twenty-five times the rate of other wealthy nations! Could there be any greater evidence that we value our own freedom to do whatever comes into our minds over our relationships with other people?

Perhaps not greater evidence, but certainly there is more. The pandemic showed just how ludicrous our insistence on tying medical care to employment, or to our ability to pay for it ourselves is. But freedom. The pandemic showed how criminal our insistence on tying housing to our ability to pay for it is. But freedom. 

And then there is this war in Ukraine. Americans of both parties seem to be incapable of seeing death and destruction through any lens other than their political affiliation. Republicans bizarrely insist that Putin would never have dared launch such an invasion in the face of fake tough guy, Donald Trump. Democrats happily scold them with the reminder that Trump was impeached the first time precisely for refusing arms to Ukraine unless they fabricated evidence agains Joe Biden’s son. That latter is true, of course, but how does that help Ukrainians struggling under the bombs. Defenders of the Russians on the hard Right and the hard Left both insist on NATO provocation. The provocation was apparently taking seriously the Ukrainians’ idea that they might want protection from Russia.

And why are we so deeply concerned with the plight of everyday Ukrainians under the Russian rockets? Where was our concern for the everyday Iraqis under our rockets? Where is our concern for Somalis under our rockets? Our concern for Palestinians and Syrians under Israeli rockets? Our concern for Yemenis under US rockets fired by the Saudis? 

Some of this is clearly related to who is doing the bombing. If we, or our allies, attack someone we lose all our empathy for the people whose lives and homes are destroyed.

Some of this is clearly related to who is being bombed. I think it is clear to most people that the Ukrainians receive more sympathy because they are white Europeans. The Bulgarian interior minister explained his willingness to welcome Ukrainian refugees by pointing out that they are not like the “other” refugees Bulgaria is rejecting, Africans and Arabs.

You look at a story or a picture or a video and you have to ask yourself explicitly: “Where am I in this?” In other words, with whom do I identify. There were people who looked at the murder of Ahmad Arbery and identified with his killers: perhaps because they would like to murder a Black man themselves, perhaps because they would have been frightened if they had seen him running down their street. But if you identified yourself with a jogger, stopping because of his curiosity about a construction site, you understood this as a lynching.

In Lakȟótiyapi, the language of the Lakota people, prayers and formal speeches are often closed with the phrase mitákuye oyásʼiŋ, which can be translated as “all my relations” or “we are all related.” This is the opposite of the egocentric freedom that demands the license to serve myself, regardless of how it affects others.

When employers insist on the right to underpay and abuse in order to enrich themselves, will we identify with them or with their employees?

When caterers insist on the right to reject and humiliate customers, will we identify with them and their hateful beliefs, or with their gay customers?

When landlords insist on their right to put people into the street, will we identify with them or with the evicted?

Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ

Update February 28: Reflecting on this in the light of a new day I realized that I had actually understated the toxic egocentrism of the focus on “freedom,” because it doesn’t really center individual rights, it centers my individual rights. Your right to love who you want doesn’t exist if it contradicts my view of… of… of the order of the universe? Really it’s the same for your right to control your own reproductive system. It’s even the same for your right to vote, or be a citizen. When the Tucker Carlson Right insists on their freedom not to be called racist, they are transparently insisting on their freedom to be racist. But it is more: They are insisting on their freedom to impose their racism on everyone else. They insist on their freedom to impose their hatred of women and fear of LGBTQ people on everyone else. They insist on their freedom to deny any legal rights to migrants to this country if those migrants aren’t white. When I say we are all relations, I am not trying to make nice with people who would deny others their humanity. Until people recognize the kinship of all people, they deny their own humanity.

Blue Lives?

There is no correspondence between left and right on the one hand and pro- or anti-law enforcement on the other. We have seen extremely violent assaults on police by pro-Trump mobs seeking a coup d’etat at the US Capitol in 2021… mobs that included off-duty cops. Now we see Canadian rightists plotting to murder the Mounties. They use anti-masking and ant-vaxxing as flags of convenience to cover their attempts at a coup.

The fascists applaud racist murders by police, like the shootings of George Floyd, Amir Locke, and Breonna Taylor. But they also applaud racist murders by civilians, like the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery. It’s not about the police or about the law, it’s about the racism.

Canadian fascists have no problem at all when the RCMP are attacking Wetʼsuwetʼen defenders at the Gidimt'en Checkpoint, but they cry “Nazi!” when they’re asked to safeguard their health and the health of others by getting a vaccination.

Our US fascists have no problem at all when militarized police are attacking a rally for Black Lives or water defenders at Standing Rock, but they cry “Nazi!” when Capitol police conduct a security check on an unlocked Congressional office.

The fascist right (and this includes increasingly large sectors of the official Republican Party) doesn’t support the police or law enforcement at all; they support racist violence.