"Don't know what a slide rule is for"

In October 1980 I was a month into my my seventh year of teaching.  I was teaching social studies at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx and the fall presidential campaign -- Jimmy Carter running for re-election against Ronald Reagan -- was an important part of our curriculum.  In those days political cartoons were always on the US History and Government Regents Examination so we introduced them in class from time to time.  It turns out that the visual language of those cartoons is anything but universal and so the tropes and memes have to be taught.

That need for teaching was glaringly apparent on this day.  I cannot find the cartoon, so I will have to describe it.  It showed Carter and Reagan debating.  Carter had a chalkboard covered with complex equations and cryptic symbols, while Reagan's chalkboard simply showed a smiley face.  My students were able to see that the cartoonist believed that Carter was overly complicating things and speaking over the voters' heads, while Reagan was over-simplifying the issues.  What they could not interpret was the device Carter held in his hand: a slide rule.  They had never seen one before; they didn't know what it was.

I graduated high school only ten years earlier, in 1970, when the slide rule was a clear marker of the science student and the engineer.  Not all my classmates knew how to use one.  Hell, I suppose most of them didn't even know what a slide rule was for. (See the great Sam Cooke's song, "What a Wonderful World.")  What I liked about multiplying and dividing with a slide rule was the constant reminder that you were approximating your third digit and that was the best you could measure anyway.  After all, I measure the distance from my home in the Bronx to my daughter's in Brooklyn in miles, not feet or inches.  Anything more than miles is a false precision.

The slide rule was a big deal in my house, too.  My dad was an engineer.  When he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946 and returned to college, his GI benefits didn't help much with tuition, because City College was still free!  But those benefits allowed him to purchase a top-of-the-line Keuffel and Esser slide rule for the equivalent of a week's pay, $25.  It was always near to hand when he was working, so I was happy to learn how to use one and get my one of my own, even if it was inexpensive and made of plastic.

The complete disappearance of the slide rule in just ten years, to the point that teens didn't even recognize it is pretty astonishing.  People today know what CD's are, even though it has been fifteen years since the first iPod came out.  People still go to the movies seventy years after the popularization of home TV.  But a slide rule is an antique, a piece of technical arcana.  It has been erased.

That year, when I was a high school senior, the first "pocket" calculators came out.  One of my classmates, the only child of well-to-do parents, got one.  It was what we later called "four function," meaning it could add, subtract, multiply and divide.  By the time of that Reagan-Carter cartoon in 1980 you could buy such a thing for under $5 and actually fit it in your shirt pocket.  The calculator my classmate had in 1970 sold for about $500, was about the size of a modern tablet (9"x5"), and weighed a lot.  And $500 in 1970?  More than the $2000 cost of a laptop today.  I bought my first used car then for $300.

I couldn't imagine why anybody would want such a thing.  But I have been remarkably blind to the emergence of the calculator all along.  I'll permit you another opportunity to laugh at me.  In 1983 or 1984 I took a year of college physics because I felt like it.  When it came time for the first exam I saw that all my classmates were carrying calculators.  I smiled, because I was absolutely certain the professor would forbid us to use them.  These were programmable devices; you could save all the formulas we were being tested on right inside the calculator.  Why would they be allowed in an exam room.  But I was the idiot: they all got to use their calculators while I was left doing all my computations with a pencil.

When I was an assistant principal for Math and Science at Monroe Campus in 2001 all our ninth graders had to learn how to use a graphing calculator.  They were encouraged to use it on their Regents exams and we had to provide one for each of them in class and during the exam.  But when I say "learn how to use" that is exactly what I mean.  They were not intuitive at all and required the mastery of a particular set of key strokes.  I remember one principal actually scolding parents for buying their children $120 shoes instead of that $100 calculator.  Her position was that if they didn't practice with it nightly, on each homework assignment, then they would be at a profound disadvantage on the day of the test.

Today (and for the last ten years) I have all the functionality of that calculator in my pocket at all times.  It is built into my telephone, along with a high-definition video camera, a GPS app, a music player, a portable TV and all sorts of other things.  It is a much easier calculator to use than that TI-82, but I suppose that the kids still can't bring it into exams because it also allows them to text answers to one another.  In any case, I have seen electronic miniaturization erase the slide rule, replacing it with the pocket calculator, and now -- almost -- erase that calculator, too.

But I still think that one think has been lost, and it has to do with the false precision I mentioned above.  I keep on seeing people who mistakenly think that all those decimal places we get, on calculators or phone apps, actually mean something.  In 1996 I saw a student presentation by a tenth-grader on the  epidemiology of sexually-transmitted disease.  For her study she inferred the number of STD's among teens in a particular census tract in the Bronx.  She multiplied the CDC's estimate of teen STD rate by the number of teens in that tract in 1990.  I will ignore now (I did not then) the conceptual flaws in this method.  But my other problem was that she hit on a number of cases with decimal places extending to the limit of her calculator!

Let me clarify.  She confidently announced that in the neighborhood of the school, there were 637.1501792 teens with STD's.  (No, I don't remember the exact number, but you get the idea.)  I questioned her about her precision.  I asked her what .1501792 of a teen looked like.  I asked her what .1501792 of an STD was.  I even asked her why she was certain it was 637.  She grew increasingly angry with my questions and simply redid the computations on her calculator and angrily shoved the display in my face.  She was a bright girl.  And, yes, she was nervous about presenting her work.  She was even more nervous about my challenging it... after all, her teacher had accepted it and had approved it for presentation, so this was hardly her fault.

But the underlying problem remains. I can use a stopwatch (also in my phone!) to time myself walking a measured mile and conclude that my speed was 160.9344 meters/second.  But was that mile measured with that degree of precision?  Was the starting line itself marked off thinner than a micrometer?  Did I accurately start my timer when the leading edge of my finger crossed the plane of that (extremely thin) starting line?  How about when I crossed the (equally thin) finishing line?  Was I a millisecond fast or slow in hitting the start and the stop on the timer?

Three digits.  That's what a slide rule could handle.  I think that's also a reasonable standard for most measurements.  I don't mourn the loss of the slide rule.  I like my phone's calculator.  I like its graphing calculator, too.  But I always think about just how quickly that slide rule disappeared.  And I do miss those three digits.

Speedily Restore the Temple? Um, NO!

Back in the early nineties we traveled to Hawaii, a trip I had been wanting to make for a very long time.  On the overnight flight there, flying west across the Pacific, the sun started to rise behind the plane, lighting both sky and ocean a bright red.  Immediately a couple of Orthodox Jewish men, probably Chabad by their clothing, went to the rear of the cabin.  Each put on his tallit gadol and tefillin and – facing the tail -- began davening Shachrit.  It was a reminder to me that morning is wherever you are and that Jerusalem can always be located by the rising sun.

A few days later we were on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island.  We visited Pu’ukohola Heiau, the temple where Kamehameha sacrificed his rival to gain mana for the conquest of the islands.  The heiau itself is closed to visitors, but Native Hawaiians use it.  We could see pebbles and ti leaves left as prayers, but we also saw people praying while we were there.  In the visitor center a little girl complained that the site was kapu to women as well as haoles.

The juxtaposition of these two events interested me: one located in a place of power on a rocky coast, the other apparently cut loose from all geography and even from the ground itself.  It reminded me that Judaism has been a religion of exile.  How has worship that began in a Temple in Jerusalem been able to survive all this time in the absence of that Temple and far from it? 

2600 years ago, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers stormed into the city, sacked the Temple of Solomon, and took many hundreds of leading families into captivity in Babylon 600 miles away.  They were cut off from their center of worship, which – in any case – no longer existed!  How could their religion survive?  How could they survive as a distinct people?  I cannot express this problem better than they did themselves in Tehillim 137 (Al Naharot Bavel):

By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat,

sat and wept,

as we thought of Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung up our lyres,

for our captors asked us there for songs,

our tormentors, for amusement,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How can we sing a song of the Lord

on someone else’s soil?

Looking back from this distance in time the answer appears to have been… by singing those songs!  That poem is itself a form of worship and a song of the Lord.  The roughly sixty-year exile saw a literary outpouring of new and re-worked material: legends, histories, songs, prophetic literature, poetry.  The very idea of a Torah and of a Bible is a product of those people, in that place, at that time.  And it was that literature that enabled them to continue as a people.  Stories of a captivity in Egypt and a triumphal return enabled them to imagine their own return some day.  The story of the Law of Moses enabled them to reinvent that law for their present circumstances. 

When the Persians allowed the Judeans to return to Jerusalem, they immediately restarted the sacrifices that had been interrupted by the destruction of their Temple.  But they also began the practice of public reading of the Torah (Nehemiah, Chapter 8.)  And that practice of reading and studying and interpreting developed in parallel with the renewed Temple worship once a new Temple was built. 

The texts that we know as the Bible underwent continued creation (the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, most obviously) and editing during this period.  The body of scholars and sages known as Sanhedrin became a parallel institution to the leadership of the Temple priesthood.  By the time of King Herod the party of Pharisees (followers of these scholars) presented themselves as a popular alternative to the Sadducees, the party of the priests.

When the Romans razed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Temple worship could no longer continue.  The religious life of the Judeans could only exist in the study and prayer that had been initiated by the teachers associated with the Sanhedrin.  Later, when the Romans crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, most Judean Jews were killed, exiled or sold into slavery.  The only way to retain a religious identity as a people was to embrace the literature and scholarship of the rabbis.  And – of course – to replace the Temple sacrifices with synagogue worship.

Which raises some very serious questions for me.  If our identity as Jewish people was based on our liturgy and our Torah scholarship, with yearning for Jerusalem mainly notional, what happened when the political Zionism of the 19^th century succeeded and Jews around the world were able to actually have a State of Israel?  Were we to scrap twenty-five hundred years of culture and religious thought and replace it with the Kingdom of David?  I meet people whose entire sense of Jewish identity seems to revolve around the twin poles of victimhood (the Nazi Holocaust) and invincibility (the myth of the IDF.)  These people seem to know nothing whatever of Jewish thought.  And all they know of our history is the tragedies: the pogroms, the expulsions, the blood libels.  They apparently think that these past tragedies not only excuse any horrors the State of Israel commits now, but actually sanctify them!

The Talmud tells us (Shabbat 31a) that a non-Jew once asked Rabbi Hillel to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one leg.  Hillel told him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah.  The rest is commentary; go and learn it.”  Am I seriously supposed to embrace the triumphalist, “might-makes-right” ideology that justifies the mass murder of Gazans as a viable replacement for the ethics of Hillel?

This new religion takes as its holy objects Galil assault rifles, Delilah cruise missiles, Jericho ICBM’s, and Sa’ar warships.  It is an apparently secular religion with no form of worship other than shooting.  And you can see the icons of this worship in this country every time a TV writer insists on including an ass-kicking Mossad agent in some irrelevant place, like an NCIS office.  You can see it when teenaged American Jewish boys wear their IDF t-shirts.

But – apparently not to be outdone – the Jewish “religious” right has now decided it is time to rebuild the Temple!  Never mind the fact that this involves razing the third holiest mosque in Islam: why would we listen to Hillel on this subject if not on any other?  I think the outrage this bizarre project inspires in Muslims (along with all sane people) may, in fact, be a large part of the point.

There is more, though.  The Temple worship required the sacrifice of large numbers of animals: cattle, sheep, goats, birds.  It must have resembled a slaughter-house, with blood running through the courtyards and the smell of shit everywhere.  Long before the destruction of the First Temple, around 740 BCE, the prophet Isaiah preached:

“What need have I of all your sacrifices?”

says the Lord.

“I am sated with burnt offerings of rams,

and suet of fatlings,

and blood of bulls;

and I have no delight

in lambs and he-goats…”

“Cease to do evil;

Learn to do good.

Devote yourselves to justice;

Aid the wronged.

Uphold the rights of the orphan;

Defend the cause of the widow.”  (Isaiah 1:11, 17)

The prophet Hosea, who lived in the northern kingdom around the same time as Isaiah was even more explicit:

I desire goodness, not sacrifice;

obedience to God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)

And the prophet Amos:

If you offer Me burnt offerings – or your meal offerings –

I will not accept them;

I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings…

But let justice well up like water,

Righteousness like an unfailing stream.  (Amos 5:22, 24)

Nevertheless, these modern “Torah Jews” are fixated on the mitzvot that we cannot perform without a Temple.  They are fixated on recreating the garments that priests must wear to perform sacrifices.  I am too personally repelled by the thinking behind this to repeat it, but you can find their rationales on their website.  They are busily engaged in creating the hardware for all this butchery: altar, knives, curtains, lamps, etc.

I realize as I write this that I shouldn’t be surprised.  A people who can accept the deaths of two thousand Gazans as not quite sufficient retribution for the unrelated murder of three Israeli teens is certainly not going to be deterred by the substitution of animal slaughter for prayer.  It is a death cult already.  Why not make this explicit?

I started writing this by referring to the Pu’ukohola Heiau on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is still used by Native Hawaiians today.  They aren’t sacrificing their enemies, there, though.  They are offering stones and leaves and prayers.  The Chiricahua Apache – like the Judeans in the days of Nebuchadnezzar – were taken captive and held for decades hundreds of miles from their homeland.  They managed to preserve their identity with worship, most importantly the ceremony in which Changing Woman temporarily inhabits the bodies of teenaged girls.  I mention this as a reminder that the Jewish experience of exile and captivity is not unique in the history of the world.  Neither is our experience of genocide.  They are no excuse for us to become Nebuchadnezzars or Pharaohs or Hitlers.

In some very important ways I have no standing to make these observations.  I do not attend synagogue or participate regularly in minyan.  I do not bentsch tefillin or wear tzitzit or eat kosher.  I do not believe in a Creator.  But I truly wish somebody with the standing to criticize these people would do so.  We regularly hear requests from non-Muslims that Muslim leaders denounce the ISILs and al Qaedas as not representing true Islam.  We regularly hear Muslim leaders making exactly those denunciations, at least those of us who are listening hear it.  Where then, are the denunciations of the death cult of militaristic Zionism as “not true Judaism”?  Where – especially – are the rabbinic denunciations of the death cult that wants to restore animal sacrifice to the har ha-Bayit as “not true Judaism”?  I am waiting.

Eneh

In looking for an early 20th century photo of Apache girls dancing at their na'í'ees I discovered this haunting photo.  I am not the only one to notice it.  A reverse image search on Google reveals that it has been used many times, often without identifying the subject beyond "Apache girl" or -- tellingly -- "Apache maiden."  That is a phrase that fits with a whole ugly genre of art featuring wistful Native American girls in buckskins, primarily meant for a male, white gaze... a subject for another day.  But I am a white American man and, whatever my critique, I am susceptible to this stuff, too.

The sources that identify the image rely on the hand-lettered captioning inscribed on the negative, which tell us that the photo is of a Chiricahua Apache named Hattie Tom.  The photo is credited to a photographer named F.A. Rinehart in Omaha, Nebraska in 1899, but may have been taken by his assistant Adolph Muhr.

Frank Rinehart was a studio photographer who did a set of over 500 portraits of the Native Americans who came to the "Indian Congress," one of the attractions at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the Omaha World Fair of 1898.  He (or Muhr) took them with an 8x10 format, glass-negative camera.  In their time they were distinguished for being portrait work instead of distanced ethnographic pictures or soft-focus, elegiac romance like those of Edward S. Curtis.

My father-in-law passed away over twenty years ago, so it must have been sometime in the early 90's that we went together to see an exhibit of the photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts at the Studio Museum of Harlem.  Roberts operated a studio in Columbia, South Carolina in the 20's and 30's so these pictures represented a rich source of insight into the African American middle class of that place and time.  The curator's cards accompanying the photographs -- as I remember them -- discussed the formal composition of the work as well.  So these photographs were presented in two ways: as art and as sociological documentation.

But they were something very different for my father-in-law, who grew up in the area and went to high school and college in Columbia in the late twenties and early thirties.  For him, these were family snapshots.  He recognized people he had known, acquaintances he remembered.  And he wasn't the only museum goer that day who was having that experience.  People started recognizing each other in the galleries, not from their own faces, but from their shared reactions to the portraits in the exhibit.

I saw this a few years later visiting another photography exhibit at California State Fullerton.  My close friend, Professor Jeffrey Brody had given cameras to Vietnamese-American students and asked them to take photos of their families and community.  Once again, the images could be read at three levels: as formal art, as sociology, and as family memory.  Once again I walked the gallery and heard people chuckling about Grandma and about Uncle So-and-So.

Which all conditions my view of this photo of Hattie Tom.  Whose great-grandma is she?  Why was she an exhibit at a World's Fair?  How did she feel about it and what does her family say about it when they see that photo now?

The path to tracing her life is her identification as Chiricahua, a band that was at the time still prisoners of the United States Army.  I found a book, From Fort Marion to Fort Sill by Alicia Delgadillo  which documents the individuals who were imprisoned along with Geronimo after his surrender in 1886.  In that book I found Hettie Tom, born in 1886.  Her Apache name was Eneh, and she was the daughter of Coshey and Bedazishu, also known as "Chiricahua Tom."  Here is a Frank Rinehart photo of the three of them together at the Omaha World's Fair.

Bedazishu is in his US Army uniform.  Yes, Chiricahua Tom was an Army scout, stationed at Fort Apache.  He was one of the Chiricahua scouts who tracked Geronimo and induced him to surrender.  He was one of the soldiers who was thanked for his service by a grateful nation by being imprisoned along with Geronimo for decades after the surrender, first at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama and later at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  Yes, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this story, the Apache scouts who brought Geronimo in were locked up as a thank-you.  And, yes, that means that Hettie Tom was a prisoner of war from approximately the time of her birth, despite the fact that her father was an honored soldier of the US Army who served again once he arrived at Fort Sill!

If you are doing your arithmetic, you will have noticed that Hettie Tom was thirteen years old when she was exhibited at the World's Fair.  As to descendants, the tragedy continues.  At fifteen Hettie arrived at Fort Sill and married an older Chiricahua boy, Clement Nahgodleda who had been a student at the Carlisle Indian School.  But they both died at the fort in the smallpox epidemic of 1901.  So did Hettie's mom.  So did all her nieces and nephews, children of her brother Yahnaki (Horace Tom.)  So did her brother Sago.

I suppose that once we have a photograph we can repurpose it in any way we want.  In June I wrote about a test shot for a zombie film that was circulating on the internet as a Trump supporter who was beaten by Trump opponents.  In December of 2014 I wrote about a picture of a militia in Mali that was being touted as Nigerian women fighting back against Boko Haram... 1600 miles away!

I was tricked by that second one and only caught on because I found the photograph so engaging that I wanted to know more.  I was tricked by the first one, even though it was touted by people I disagree with politically, and even though -- once you know what you are looking at -- it doesn't look anything like a photo of a woman who has just been assaulted.  So I am not one to chide people about seeing what they are told to see in a photograph; I have been guilty of that too often.

In this case I remain haunted.  This is a girl who could have been one of my ninth graders.  She looks directly at the viewer.  I don't know what to say to her.

 

No Disappointment

Early yesterday afternoon Judy showed me a video about Hunkpapa Lakota youth running across America to protest a pipeline crossing the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota.  I was really interested in their insistence on having their voices heard, in their view of water (min wiconi, water is life) and in their use of social media to publicize real world activism.  Continuing to follow the links from article to article and to their own Facebook page I discovered that they would be here in New York -- at Union Square Park -- in an hour and a half!

My only hesitation about joining them was my recent experiences with running to Manhattan to join an event I looked forward to.  Hōkūleʻa is a double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe that native Hawaiians have been sailing for forty years as a means of reclaiming traditional culture and knowledge.  For the past few years they have been circumnavigating the globe and I was really looking forward to visiting the boat when it arrived here.  Prophet and I went downtown to North Cove, near the World Financial Center, on a day they said would be an open house.  No luck.  The security guards told me everybody was across the river in Jersey City.  So much for that.

So I had some reservations this time, too.  But Sundays in August mean less traffic and more chance of finding street parking, so... what the hell, right?  We parked on 16th Street near Seventh Avenue and walked across to Union Square.  There was no immediate sign of Hunkpapa runners, so we checked through the whole park.  There were Hare Krishnas chanting and drumming.  There were Muslims offering free Q'urans as the "solution" to homosexuality(!)  There was a man advising everyone that Jesus would save them.   There were hundreds (HUNDREDS!) of hipsters of every race and nationality.  And there were people and dogs who wanted to meet Prophet, along with more who looked at him as if he had no business in the park.

There was also a cluster of people my age and older with a Veterans for Peace flag, hanging around and waiting for something.  That group was the closest I could see to what I was looking for, so I found a shady spot behind the Hare Krishnas where we could watch for a while to see if anybody turned up.  The actress Shailene Woodley ("Divergent") did, which was a good sign because the Rezpect our Water Facebook page had videos of her supporting the runners.  But after half and hour there were very few more people and no Lakota runners.

Union Square does have a dog run, so Prophet and I went in.  He made the rounds, introducing himself to all the other dogs and their people.  He found a water bowl and drank from that.  He found a bath and drank from that, too.  He went to break up a fight, but concluded that those dogs were playing.  He shook off an overly-aggressive dog, then smiled at him and licked his face.  The crowd waiting for the runners had grown to maybe twenty by now and they were making welcome signs.  It was 90° and sunny and I decided it was time to take Prophet and return to the Bronx.

Four hours later things finally jumped off.  The runners arrived.  Everybody chanted and ran the circumference of the park.  Rosario Dawson spoke.  I know all this because they went live on Facebook.  Even if I had known what time they were arriving I wouldn't have stayed because, well, four hours.  If I had known the right time in the beginning I might have gone.  It looked like a high-energy demo and I remain impressed with the persistence of the Standing Rock youth.

I could choose to be bummed by going down there for nothing.  I could choose to be bummed about missing what I wanted to see.  But, somehow, excursions with Prophet do not disappoint.  We still got to walk around downtown.  We still got to meet new dogs in the park.  We still got to meet children and adults who wanted to admire him and pet him.  He still got his photo taken by total strangers who never asked permission.  The day before we had to kill an hour in Hudson River Park while Judy was at a Transfiguration service.  It was the same fun: dog park, meeting people on the walk, high stimulus levels, Prophet showing his ability to cope with the whole range of personalities and conveyances (strollers, skate boards, bicycles).  Frankly, we had an equally good time on that day back in June, also in Hudson River Park, when we missed the voyaging canoe.

I know that I can make my own narrative for any day.  I can make my own fun, even when things don't go as planned.  But I find all that so much easier when I'm with Prophet.  There is no disappointment when we're together.

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.