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.

New York Primary

This week I advocated strongly that everybody I know vote in the primary elections.  For most of my friends in New York, and especially those in their twenties and thirties, that meant a vote for Bernie Sanders.  Many of them did, in fact, vote by going to the polls, not just by clicking "like" on Facebook.  So what were they to think when Hillary Clinton routed Bernie Sanders by twenty-seven percentage points here in New York City?  How are they supposed to retain their enthusiasm when they were defeated so handily in a contest where nobody they knew voted the other way.  I don't have a precise data-based answer but I have some thoughts.

On the New York Times website the editors posted a really interesting interactive map of the voting in NYC, precinct by precinct.  In my election district, for example, I can see that 253 people came out to vote: 172 for Clinton and 81 (including me!) for Bernie Sanders.  That is a higher percentage for Clinton than city-wide (68% here in Spuyten Duyvil versus 63% in NYC)  And that is no particular surprise.  The entire northwest Bronx is reliably club-driven, so much so that our state senator, the execrable Jeff Klein (who began caucusing with the Senate Republicans when the Democrats gained a numerical majority!) has easily won both primaries and general elections since demonstrating this grotesque opportunism.  My neighborhood is dominated by white people over 60 (including me!) and enough of them turn out and do what the club leaders say that they are able to swamp dissenting votes from other parts of the district.  In order to get rid of Jeff Klein and his ilk we will have to mobilize an enthusiastic primary turnout in other parts of the district, and then follow that up in the general election, where NY pols hedge their bets with multiple parties all of whom support the same machine-selected candidates.  

For example, in 2012, Jeff Klein ran unopposed in both the Democratic and Republican primaries! In that general election he won with 94% of the vote. (Does this sound like a two-party system to you?)  In 2014 he actually had to run for re-election.  G. Oliver Koppell, a former NY State Attorney General (and a member of the same Democratic club as Klein!) ran against him in the Democratic primary on the grounds that Klein was caucusing with the Republicans and was, therefore, not a Democrat at all. (Koppell's actual reason had more to do with the fact that term limits were ending his tenure on the NY City Council and he hadn't been out of public life for most of the previous forty years.)  But the club selected Klein, so Klein won, albeit with "only" 65% of the primary vote.  This seemed to embolden the Republicans, because they actually ran a candidate against Klein that year, one who got all of 14% of the general election vote.  

Here is the additional rub, though.  In 2014 the Conservative Party ran still another candidate, who was probably put there to divide the Republican vote.  And in both these recent elections, Klein was also present on the ballot for the "Working Families Party" and the "Independence Party."  For those of you unfamiliar with the New York State ballot, we have all these parties that cross-endorse candidates from the Democrats and Republicans.  They can remain on the ballot as long as they garner sufficient votes and they can hold up elected officials for patronage by providing their endorsement.  Yes, this is just as sleazy as it sounds.  They can also pretend to actually be independent, for people who don't like Democrats or Republicans: allowing "protest votes" without the downside of benefiting your opponents by splitting votes.  Or as in the example of the Conservative Party above, they can intentionally split votes to support the professional politician with whom they have a deal.

Let's look at a district that isn't populated by superannuated white people, though.  I have a lot of close friends in the Longwood area of the South Bronx.  The area is overwhelmingly Latino (75%) and African American (22%) and the median age is 30, compared to 50 in Spuyten Duyvil.  Median income is $25,000, compared to $80,000 in Spuyten Duyvil.  Every single person I know in the 41st and 42nd election districts (from Leggett to Longwood Avenues, between Beck Street and Bruckner Boulevard) voted for Bernie Sanders.  What were the numbers for the neighborhood? Hillary Clinton won 291 of 397 votes cast, or 73%.  That means that in my neighborhood, where I knew people on both sides, Hillary got 68% but in Longwood, where everybody I know voted for Bernie, she got even more!  What is going on there?

Actually, what's going on in the South Bronx is very similar to what's going on in Riverdale.  Longwood, Hunt's Point, Soundview and Clason Point are represented in the State Assembly by Marcus Crespo, a protege of State Senator Rubén Díaz, Sr.  And, yes, Díaz, Sr. is another Senate "Democrat" who allied himself with the Republicans in order to prevent the Democrats from running the Senate when they won a majority.  The last time Díaz, Sr. faced a significant primary challenge (2010) his opponent's poll watchers were expelled from the polling sites and there were multiple reports of voter intimidation.  In 2014 Díaz, Sr. ran for State Senate on the Democratic and Republican tickets and won with 89% of the vote.  In 2012 he was unopposed in both Democratic and Republican primaries (!) and won the general election with 97% of the vote.  Assemblyman Crespo won those two elections equally easily: 96% in 2012 and 94% in 2014.  

We are thus looking at the same phenomenon in both sections of the Bronx.  It is prohibitively difficult to mount an opposition to these incumbents, whether from within the Democratic or Republican parties, because the Democratic clubs can count on sufficient regular voters to swamp the low-turn-out primaries and drown any insurgency in any given year.  That, and the threat of violence when necessary.  People remember how little their votes mattered and they are less likely to try again the next time.  They shake their heads at the naïveté of the new generation of voters and stay home.  Is it any wonder that the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly are each awaiting sentencing for their federal corruption convictions at this very minute?

The outside world saw this week how our election board purged 126,000 names from the voter rolls in Brooklyn.  We saw tweets and comment posts in all corners about people who vote in every election, and who have lived at the same address for years, arrived at Brooklyn polling sites to discover they "weren't registered" or "weren't Democrats."  This was a clumsy way the party bosses found to suppress the vote, not only in this primary, but in future elections when people will be discouraged by this bad experience.

But it is the year-in year-out boss control that we should be fighting.

I am not a Bernie fan.  I have opposed his brand of "socialism" -- the kind that argues that "economic justice" will solve all the problems of racism and imperialism -- for my entire adult life.  A few months ago I asked in this space whether anybody seriously thinks that Bernie Sanders (who has scrupulously avoided civil rights issues for decades by moving to one of the whitest states in the country) is a champion of African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans?  In January, when Ta-Nehisi Coates critiqued Senator Sanders for his failure to support reparations to African Americans,  I observed on Facebook that Sanders's supporters denounced Coates for a "probably-paid hatchet job in support of Hillary."  Because why -- they apparently wondered -- would anybody criticize Bernie except in service of his opponent?  I added:

It seems not to have occurred to them to see it as a critique of their OWN views, a critique of the idea that "economic justice" will automatically erase racism. The New Deal didn't do that. European social democracy doesn't do that.

We speak of the late forties and early fifties as a time of progressive taxes, strong regulatory agencies, good Social Security, GI housing and education benefits.  How exactly did any of this benefit racial minorities in this country?  

None of this makes me a supporter of Hillary Clinton.  She was an outspoken supporter of the policies that led to this era of mass incarceration in which the US outstrips every country in per capita imprisonment rate.  As Secretary of State she forcefully advocated for a coup in Honduras, which led immediately to the current lawlessness, and then argued against our admitting the children who come here fleeing that violence!  She was largely responsible for our supporting armed groups in Libya, leading to the present absence of any government there.  And every word out of her mouth is carefully vetted to position herself near some theoretical center relative to both Bernie Sanders and her imagined opponents in the fall.

All of which is to say, I think we need to start thinking outside the Democratic Party.  I think we need to select neighborhoods where we think we can make a difference and start working to send our own representatives to the City Council and to Albany.  And I think we have to find a way to support the enthusiasm we saw for this year's primary in New York City instead of allowing it to be a memory of disappointment.  

Perpendicular Axes?

The primary election is three days away in New York and we have long since passed the time when every piece of news has become relevant to partisans of the candidates only in so far as it shines light on their favorites or shade on the others.  Bernie Sanders makes a reference to subway tokens? (Obsolete 13 years this past Wednesday.)  Hillary fans guffaw at him as a faux native son, hopelessly out of touch.  Hillary Clinton chuckles at a Bill diBlasio "joke" about "CPT"?  Bernie Bros who have never heard that term are consumed with righteous outrage.

The feeling to me is that nothing matters now except in relation to this election.  I will be voting for Sanders on Tuesday, despite my profound reservations about his understanding of the issues of race, nationality and gender.  But I am apparently supposed to shut up about those things and go into full-throated denunciations when I hear anybody else raise them, too.  In geometric terms, it is as if everything in the universe exists on a single line, with Bernie on one end and Hillary on the other.  (Forget Republicans.)  Our job is simply to run as fast as we can in the direction we choose, while heaving opprobium on those we pass traveling the other way.

I have been thinking a lot about other axes, perpendicular to the political "left" and "right" and our confident failure to look at them at all.  Religious faith, for example, has very little to do with politics.  But you would never know that if you listen to so many people.  I think, for that matter, that religion has very little to do with morality, either.

There are people (religious people) who wonder how anybody can ever learn morality if it isn't taught in a house of worship and backed up with threats of eternal punishment or promises of an afterlife reward.  There are also people (mostly irreligious) who point to clerical abuse scandals, wars, and  the current spate of so-called "religious freedom" laws (justifying discrimination with "closely-held belief") who argue that formal religious faith is inversely proportional to morality.  They see institutional defense of pedophiles, denunciations of other traditions and anti-gay bias.  They do not see love and spirit.  When a Pope Francis comes along they prefer to place him somewhere on the left-right political axis rather than to understand him in terms of his own language of the Gospel.

Yesterday Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox Church traveled together with Archbishop Ieronymos of Greece to visit the refugees on the island of Lesbos.  Implicit in their call for support for the people fleeing war across the Mediterranean is a prophetic critique of those who would close the door to them.  It is a religious critique, rooted in the Gospel and they quoted Matthew to make that explicit: "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me."

I do not understand our obligation to care for the victims of war as a religious one.  But I don't see it as political, either.  I would much rather align myself with people of a faith that I do not share in order to care for the Honduran children at our gates, than to support people I agree with politically who make excuses for imprisoning those children and sending them back to die in San Pedro Sula.  I am not interested in covering up the errors (or crimes) of people on my "side."  I will not make excuses for Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza or the West Bank just because some anti-semite is using those crimes to attack Judaism or Jewish people.

But we are in primary season.  So while there has been some modest coverage of the Pope's visit to the refugees (mostly failing to mention the Orthodox leaders), the big Vatican news in New York was Bernie Sanders's visit.  Some questions were eagerly debated: Was he invited by the Pope? Did he meet with the Pope?  Hillary supporters mocked him when the Church announced there was no formal invitation.  Bernie supporters fired back when the two men chatted informally in the Papal residence.  Because -- for both sides -- the only thing that matters is fodder for their respective wars of words against one another.

I believe that the Papal news that matters is his demand that we show hospitality for other people.  That news is not on the political axis.  It may be on the religious axis.  It is certainly on the human axis.

The Misogyny of Donald Trump

It has become a commonplace of the analysis of the Trump phenomenon to say that he throws away the dog whistles of previous Republican campaigns with his direct racism and xenophobia.  The pundits say that GOP leaders frightened by the rise of Trump have nobody to blame but themselves.  I think this is unarguably true.  Politicians of both parties have raised the specter of "terrorism" to distract the voters' attention from real threats to our safety, like gun violence.  Trump just says he will bar an entire religion from this country!  Politicians of both parties use the coded phrase "border security."  Trump just says that Mexicans are rapists.

Besides his open white supremacy and hatred of foreigners, Trump's other vulgar verbal habit is the disgusting misogyny that his fans applaud as "telling it like it is."  He called candidate Carly Florina ugly: "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that face? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?"

He refused to participate in a debate because of the presence of FOX-TV anchor Megan Kelly and argued that she questioned him sharply because she was menstruating: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever!"

He has a long history of calling women "fat slobs" and "pigs", accusing them of gold-digging and manipulation, and bragging about his sexual conquests.  In short, his conversation about women is characteristic of a junior high school boy who is scared stiff of the girls, who are taller and more mature than he.  Trump has never matured emotionally.  If his rally attendees who applaud his oafish comments on race are closeted (or open) Klansmen, then those who love his attacks on women are Gamer-gate boys bringing their fears into the national political arena.

All this begs a question.  What, then, were the dog whistles that Republicans used to disguise their hatred of women before Orange Hitler came along?

I think the answer is the so-called "right to life."  The Trump phenomenon has made it utterly transparent that the self-described "religious right" is not religious in any way, not even Christian according to their own definitions.  Donald Trump has repeatedly revealed himself to be profoundly ignorant of Christian belief and practice.  These "religious" folk are now supporting a candidate who freely and casually uses obscenity, vulgarity and blasphemy in his own speech, who brags relentlessly about his sexual adventures, who has divorced twice, and whose current wife poses nude for publication.  The double standard of people who speak of a "right to life" while opposing gun control and supporting capital punishment has long been obvious.  But Trump doesn't even oppose abortion!

So why did those "Christians" (now exposed as worshippers of a very different sort of God) oppose abortion?  Again, their opponents understood this all along.  It was always all about controlling women, especially controlling their frightening sexuality.  When off-message elected officials claim that women can't get pregnant from rape they show that same magical terror of women's bodies, along with the patriarchal need to get them under control.

We have generously allowed them their religious conservatism, arguing that they shouldn't impose it on others, but trusting that they themselves were authentic in their beliefs.  It should be clear to everyone now that there was never any political conservatism in the Republican "base", there was just white supremacy and opposition to the rights of people of color.  There was never any economic conservatism.  A social safety net was a good thing as long as it wasn't extended beyond white people.  The support of Donald Trump by people who laughably call themselves "evangelical" should show once and for all that they are not religious conservatives:  they are just terrified of women.

Who is the real "pharma bro"?

The Martin Shkreli story was a good one for the Twitter age.  It is both easy to understand and outrageous when a "pharma bro" purchases the rights to an essential anti-AIDS medicine (one whose patent expired sixty years ago!) and then raises its price from $13.50 to $750 a tablet.  Those numbers are still astonishing, even now, six months after the scandal broke.  The optics were good, too.  Shkreli has a cartoon villain's smirk that would go well in a low-budget Batman feature.

From the beginning observers who are knowledgeable about the pharmaceutical industry raised storm flags about personalizing this story about one greedy hedge-fund capitalist.  They argued that all of Big Pharma was doing even worse.  Now, the collapse of Valeant Pharmaceutical stock prices is offering a different window into that world.  In August, right when Shkreli bought the rights to pyrethamine, Valeant was trading at $263.70 a share.  At the moment I write these words, the price is $27.13 a share, and falling.

One question might be, "How does a company lose 90% of its value in seven months?"  An equally interesting one, though, is "What was the source of Valeant's value in the first place?"  After all, it was trading under $70 a share only three years ago.  Five years ago its price was close to what it is right now.  Valeant's business model was not dissimilar to Shkreli's: Obtain the rights to drugs and then jack up the prices. They had a few additional components, though.  Instead of buying drugs that they considered undervalued, Valeant was buying the entire companies that owned those rights and then firing all their scientists!  Valeant was a drug company with no interest in developing new drugs unless they could do it on the cheap.  For decades Big Pharma has been justifying their outsized prices as the cost of developing new cures.  Valeant simply declared their indifference.

Then they stopped paying taxes.  Buying a whole drug company instead of just its rights gave Valeant the ability to shift their corporate headquarters to the home of the company they purchased.  If it was a place with lower taxes they could -- and did! -- claim that as their home and pay their taxes there.  Like overpricing its products, like refusing to invest in research and development, reducing the corporate tax bill helped boost profit rates.

Finally, there were the secret mail order divisions.  Ordinarily when a customer goes to the local drug store (or even to a legitimate mail order pharmacy like Express Scripts) the pharmacist will look at a brand-name prescription and recommend a lower-priced generic substitute if one exists.  By refusing to sell through the normal outlets and making their drugs available only through their own mail-order subsidiaries, Valeant was able to leave pharmacists completely out of the loop and keep patients from getting that advice.  This is how a company makes super-profits on a medication which is no longer protected by a patent.

All this is why Valeant was the darling of the investor class and why its stock price was bid up so very high.  And that is how other pharmaceutical companies could be pressured to imitate their disgusting practices.  If investment is flooding into a scam artist that means it is leaving elsewhere and if those CEO's want to keep their companies capitalized, well then the market is telling them what to do!  And this means that those other companies have been imitating some of those practices -- especially avoiding taxes and reducing research -- for several years.

Valeant's initial fall began back in September when their deceptive practices regarding mail order sales came to light.  Just because hedge fund managers want to profit from robbing sick people doesn't mean they want to pay for lawsuits related to fleecing the public.  So they start unloading their shares and the price falls.  But what interests me even more is the drop three days ago when Valeant opened at $69 a share and closed at $33 a share.  What happened that day to this company to make the fund managers lose so much trust over the course of a single trading day?

They promised to stop their deceptive mail order tactics.

That is the beauty of the market.  The only thing worse than being caught robbing the people is deciding to stop robbing the people.  The pharmaceutical industry spends millions lobbying our representatives to reduce regulation.  So does the finance industry.  We cannot possibly match their influence.  But we can never forget why they are willing to forego all those millions of dollars spent on lobbyists: it is because their returns on that investment are in the billions.

A Carnival of Ignorance

Louis CK once described the strangeness of relying on online forums to research products.  He read a review of a Blu-ray player and wondered what particular expertise this total stranger brought to the task, imagining that the critic was about to “murder-suicide his entire family” but first stopped to comment on the unit’s “counterintuitive controls.”

This almost captures my view of the horror that is comments sections.  When I was a principal I once had to fire a new teacher only weeks into his first semester.  Minutes after a meeting in which I warned him about a pattern of abusive language toward students he returned to the classroom and told the kids that his mother hadn’t sent him to Harvard to be a zoo keeper for a bunch of animals like them.  The story actually made the NY Post, with me cast as the villain.  Most of the comments vilified me as a pencil-pushing bureaucrat empowering thuggish minority teens to threaten an idealistic, young, white Ivy graduate (while also mocking his unfortunate liberalism.)  The teacher in question was actually an African American man in his late forties who was still living with his mom, but that didn’t fit their imaginative rendering of the facts reported by the paper.

What interested me about this (and other similarly personal cases) was not the torrent of hatred I elicited from people who don’t even know me.  It was the highly-racialized narratives that people had about the Bronx, about the children I taught, and about their parents.  It mirrored what I saw in the responses to all kinds of news stories that had nothing to do with me.  People could not deal with what they read without first mentally re-writing it to fit their prejudices.  More than just seeing through the filter of a worldview, they actively rejected every fact that might challenge what they “know” to be true.

A little over a year ago I wrote in this space about reader responses to a New York Times op-ed on the US’s ugly history of lynching Mexican Americans.  One commenter complained that white people always have to “take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt.”  Several raised the time-worn defense that social norms were “different” in the past, as if somehow the Biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” had not yet been written in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  And one even wondered what the point of this piece of “historical victimhood” might be, apparently rejecting history – the need to understand our past – itself.

The level of venom in so many online discussions suggests to me that there is a special class of lonely, damaged folk who sit home on their computers heaving poisonous grenades into cyberspace… usually anonymously.  It is a carnival of ignorance.  I try as a rule not to read it because it undermines my faith in humanity.

Or that is what I thought until yesterday.  Because it suddenly occurred to me that they aren’t sitting at home anymore.  The whole crowd of misogynists and racists and xenophobes now have arenas to fill to cheer each other and to cheer their avatar, the phony real estate developer and reality TV star, Donald Trump.  I cannot pretend that they are isolated, because they have found a way to break out of cyberspace and into the real world.  They have found a way to call women “cunts” to their faces instead of in online forums.  They have found a way to sucker-punch Black men from within the comfort of a jeering crowd of similarly minded criminals instead of just threatening to do so under the cloak of a computer pseudonym.  And instead of complaining about the “liberal” media (“liberal” because it publishes facts they don’t want to know) they can physically assault reporters who come to cover their hate fests.

People of color have been observing for many weeks now that white folks have no right to be “shocked” by the Trump phenomenon.  Orange Hitler has simply given all these vicious folks a nucleus around which to coalesce.  My realization yesterday, though, was that these Trump rallies are an online comments section brought to life.  And I started to compose this post.

But our thoughts are rarely original.  And they are often better expressed by others.  Also yesterday a friend shared this tweet on Facebook:  "Donald Trump is like if a comments section ran for office."  Fifty-eight characters instead of 700 words.  Oh, well.  I am posting mine anyway.

Whose Gaze?

This morning I posted two short paragraphs from my sequel to the book Stones from the Creek on a Facebook page I put up to publicize that collection of short stories.  It describes a character’s first day as a convict worker in an Alabama coal mine.  It is a struggle for me to describe the end-of-shift beatings he witnessed… beatings for failure to make weight, to mine sufficient coal for the company.  I want it to convey horror and brutality, not to avert eyes from the inhuman viciousness of the prison industry in 1907.  But I don’t want to create a kind of violence pornography that fails in connecting the reader with the character in a full way.

One way of bringing historical text to life on the internet is the use of actual photographs.  More and more are being scanned and it is a rich resource.  While posting the selection from my work in progress I looked for a long time at a photo of two imprisoned coal miners — convict laborers, slaves — and considered using the picture to illustrate the excerpt.  And then I couldn’t do it.  The photo shows two young Black men sitting on what appears to be a wooden shelf about four feet high.  I suppose it to be a bunk bed in the mine dormitory.  They sit facing the camera, forearms across knees, bare feet pulled up to them.  Their eyes are closed… against the powder flash of the photographer?  Both of them have shackles around their ankles with three elongated links of chain tying those shackles together.  How could the truth of this picture (and the injustice it represents) possibly outweigh the humiliation of the subjects who sat for it?

In the early 20th century, when photography was still the province of professionals, pictures of lynchings were printed and sold as postcards.  James Allen put together a collection of these photos as an exhibition, a book and a website, all titled Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.

Like visual evidence of the Nazi extermination, these pictures remind us of what should never be forgotten.  They demonstrate the horror of white supremacist terror in this country and the fact that it was not a secret or an anomaly.  The photos document large, excited crowds of white people — some with children in tow — cheering the annihilation and mutilation of Black people.

But these images do more.  Remember that they were not kept secret; they were sold as souvenirs to be looked at again and again.  So what does it mean for us to look at them?  What does it mean for ME, a white man, to look at a picture of the destruction and desecration of a Black person that was made for white people to savor and enjoy?

I have posted a photo twice on that Facebook page of soldiers of the 7th Cavalry standing over a mass grave of Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to those soldiers and to others, as well as to tourists.  I have posted three times a photo of Texas Rangers posed on their horses with their ropes around the bodies of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to whites North Americans along the Rio Grande.

I agonize over those photos, which illustrate two American pogroms that I am trying to write about with sensitivity and care for the sequel to Stones from the Creek.  I have been unable to post photos of the Tulsa race riot of 1921.  Those, too, are lynching photos.  Those, too, were sold as souvenirs to the participants in a pogrom that killed hundreds and destroyed the entire African American district of the city of Tulsa, apparently in an effort to turn that city into another sundown town.  There is something too personal about those photos, something that captures the faces of people and glories in their objectification.

I know that Ms. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket for her son Emmet’s funeral.  I know that the photos in Jet magazine brought the savage beating and murder of Emmet Till to that publication’s readership.  I know that the generation who saw those pictures in Jet was moved to oppose and upturn the system of disfranchisement and Jim Crow.  I also know that those photos were Ms. Till’s and that she chose to share her personal loss and horror and to share them with an audience that would view them through her eyes and not through the eyes of the vicious criminals who took her son.  She had the right.

I don’t know that I have the right.  They are not my photos.  I know that I look at the photo of those two men — imprisoned in order to provide the steel companies with a captive work force — and I identify with them and not with their captors.  But who else knows that?  I am a white Jewish man who struggles to look at photographs of the Shoah.  The Nazis were proud to document their murders.  Even as I understand the absolute need never to forget I derive no satisfaction or pride from that memory.  And so, picture by picture and paragraph by paragraph, I struggle to decide how to capture these dark memories of how the United States became what it is today.