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.

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.