Bad Faith Commentary on Ocasio-Cortez

I generally avoid reading the comments on widely-distributed public posts. The viciousness and stupidity that pop up so quickly are discouraging to me.

Some of it, though, is intentional trolling.

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly named the concentration camps in which our government keeps asylum seekers. Suddenly actual antisemites were pretending deep concern that she was diminishing the horror of the Nazi holocaust. People who would rather see me dead wanted me to denounce AO-C because she said “concentration camp” without CBP gassing people to death en masse.

Now I see this same type of trolling in the comments on an Ocasio-Cortez fundraising post. She notes - accurately - that most Representatives have to spent the majority of their working hours phoning deep-pocket donors, begging for campaign contributions, instead of doing the people’s business, ie actually going to Congressional meetings. She explains that her ability to work on legislation and to skip the phone solicitations in her party’s call center is dependent on small-dollar online donations. She asks that the reader click a link to make one of those donations.

Most of the comments on this post were positive. It’s still Facebook so I have to wonder how many of these people think they are contributing when they reply with some equivalent of “You go, girl” instead of clicking the link and sending $5, but, oh well. It was the trolls that caught my eye.
The clever ones didn’t go directly for her and identify themselves as enemies. One angrily demanded to know why we shou politicians who spend all their time fundraising. When people pointed out that this was EXACTLY THE POINT of AO-C’s post, the troll just kept doubling down. I sincerely hope that nobody is that obtuse. She was intentionally creating a false equivalence between AO-C and establishment politicians at the same time as discouraging participation in the process.

Then there are the people complaining that she is fighting against Joe Biden instead of against Donald Trump. That is transparently false. So I ask, “Who is served by that lie?” The answer is: So many people. Establishment Democrats who don’t want to be accountable for their complicity with monopoly capitalism. Republicans who like seeing their adversaries fighting one another. Foreign adversaries (Russia) who work to disrupt out electoral process. Foreign allies (Israel) who work to obscure their reliance on US military support. The truth is that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has worked hard to support Speaker Pelosi despite her waffling on important issues like immigration, the climate crisis, and the lawless Trump Administration. So have Representatives Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley.

But the aim of trolls is not to challenge our biases. It’s not even to spread lies. The aim of trolls is to make us suspicious and cynical. The aim of trolls is to get us bickering with each other. The aim of trolls is to discourage us.

Don’t give in to trolls.

No Excuses

Six years ago my friend got a phone call from the highly-regarded, “no-excuses” charter school her son attended. He was scheduled to get on a plane the next day with his abuela to spend the summer visiting the country of her birth. The school, though, said that if he did not attend and pass summer school he would have to repeat sixth grade.

His mom canceled his flight. Grandma went without him. He attended summer school and passed. But in late August the school phoned again. This time they said that he would be promoted to seventh grade ONLY IF HE TRANSFERRED to another school!

Why were they so anxious to force him out? What was the character flaw that made him undesirable to that community?

Empathy.

His sin was empathy.

In “no-excuses” schools, children are supposed to keep their eyes on their teacher. When that teacher berates a classmate, the children are not supposed to look at their friend to see how they are taking it. Compliments? Likewise. The same with discussions that have personal subtexts for some kids. All this “focus” was beyond a boy who cared so deeply about his peers. His eyes strayed from his teachers. He checked in constantly with his classmates. He was repeatedly disciplined for it. Now the school administrators made it clear that they wanted him to leave.

He did.

He found a place in a public school downtown, one that values children, not data.

Friday was his graduation. Each senior was called up to receive their diploma by a teacher who knew them well and who said a few words about them. We heard about original research in neuroscience. We heard about leadership on the soccer pitch. We heard about musicianship and mathematical imagination and poetry. We did not hear about anybody’s GPA or their AP exam scores.

When my friend’s son was called to get his diploma his teacher choked up. He wept and said someday he hopes to have a son  with this boy’s empathy.

His empathy.

Six years after being virtually expelled from the first school for empathy, the entire student body of the second - along with their parents and teachers- applauded and roared their approval for him and for his empathy.

Which school would you prefer for your child? 

I know my answer.

More DNA Commerce!

AncestryDNA sent me an email today urging me to get the DNA of "my entire biological family" tested. Following the link I got a bold-face question: "How Many DNA Tests Does One Family Need?" along with a question to answer that question: "How many people are in your family?"

A couple of years ago my brother gave me a DNA test kit as a gift. This is a commercial transaction, not a scientific one; AncestryDNA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ancestry LLC, a for-profit entity based in Lehi, Utah. So what was exchanged in this transaction?

AncestryDNA got whatever money my brother gave them along with my entire genome to add to their database of 15 million people.

I got the earth-shattering news that I am an Ashkenazic Jew. (Irony alert: I may have always known that.)

Presumably there are some limits to people's curiosity about their ethnic origins and molecular genealogy companies are concerned about what those limits mean to their bottom lines. Presumably whatever schemes these companies have for monetizing our genomes can be better served with more data from more people. So it makes good sense to me that they would urge us to get tests done on every single member of our families: more short-term payments and more data in their proprietary data bases.

But what exactly are they selling me? Will I learn with scientific certainty that I have my uncle's eyes? (Irony alert: I may have always known that.) Will my brother be a member of a different ethnic group? Will I need to join a synagogue?

I do not want to belittle the benefits of DNA tests for curious adoptees. I don't share their experience and - for them - the more data out there the better. I do want to question the motives of for-profit molecular DNA companies. I do want to question their outsized scientific claims.

The Black Hills Are Not for Sale

I'm guessing that this incident took place in 1982, which means I was thirty-years old, a teacher for eight years, and in my fifth year at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx. The voice of Assistant Principal Irv Goldberg came over the PA, asking all Native American students to report immediately to his office. Kennedy was known as a multinational school. We had African American students, African Caribbean students, and African students. We had Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Ecuadorans. We had Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. We had Italians, Albanians, Irish, and Russians. Lots of Jewish Americans. Our students spoke forty languages. We had a Korean club and a Korean Christian Club. But we were not known for Native Americans. And in any case, why would Irv suddenly need the Native American kids in his office in the middle of the day.

My curiosity overcame me. Despite the fact that I was in the front of my classroom, actively teaching a class, I stuck my head out the door, spotted my colleague Kenny Kaplan, and asked him to cover me while I went downstairs to see what this was about. Irv seemed to know why I was there when I walked in. He explained that our annual ethnic survey -- a federal requirement -- had revealed the presence of five Native American teens. Now the Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington wanted to know how we were supporting them. Irv was convinced that they didn't exist. He was convinced that they had appeared on the survey because some teachers made a mistake on the forms or added them in as another way of showing how they resented doing this paper work.

I wasn't so sure. In those days Kennedy had six thousand students. That is not a typo. I worked in a high school with six thousand students. When you get to those numbers even tiny percentages show up as actual living teenagers. Moreover, it it easy to see the ethnicities you expect to see. Ask Native people who move to New York how they become invisible, becoming Latinos or Asians in the eyes of the people in the street. They see what they expect. We once had a student teacher from New Jersey who complained of discomfort being the only white person in the classroom. Somehow he missed the five, tall, blonde Irish boys in the back row. He saw what he expected. Moreover, I had already been surprised a few years before to discover that a girl who I thought of as African American was also a White Mountain Apache.

So Irv and I waited: he to phone Washington and say it was a mistake, me to see what would happen next. Over the next few minutes the indigenous students of Kennedy arrived; not five of them, seventeen.

What did Mr. Goldberg want? they asked.

I wondered how he would answer this.

Irv started explaining about the Black Hills. If you are under sixty-years old now you may not have heard about United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).  It has now been almost forty years since that decision and it is not much remembered outside of South Dakota, but it was a semi big deal back then. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had illegally seized the Black Hills from the Lakota tribes a hundred years before, in blatant violation of the terms of their treaty. The Black Hills are a natural wonder of water and trees in the arid plains with the added bonus of the Homestake Gold Mine which produced 43 million ounces of gold, or $57 billion dollars. They are holy ground for the Lakota (and the Cheyenne and Arapaho and others) for reasons I will not explore here. The Supreme Court valued the land at $17 million at the time of its seizure. They calculated the interest for 100 years at 5% and awarded over $100 million to the plaintiffs... who promptly refused to accept the money, saying "The Black Hills are not for sale." 

So Assistant Principal Goldberg took down the name and tribal affiliation of every student in his office. I remember Mohawks and Senecas, Navajos and Apaches, two Lakota, one Cherokee, but my memory may be shaky. He explained that they needed to register their own votes on this question: land or money. They took this very seriously. Nobody questioned why the opinion of a Mohawk from New York was required about a land case in South Dakota. One by one they said: our land is not for sale. The sole exception was an 11th-grade girl, the Cherokee. Irv said thanks and they left.

He and I began discussing the significance of what we had just seen and heard but we didn't get far because we were disturbed by angry teenagers in the hall. "How could you do that?" "What did your grandparents teach you?" We waited quietly, trying to hear.

A few moments later they all came back in, looking somber. The Cherokee girl asked if she could change her vote. Irv said he hadn't phoned it in yet. She told him the land was more important than the money.

It is two generations later, now, and I hear that there are young Lakota who are reconsidering this question. The value of the award passed a billion dollars in 2011. The Lakota are far from the major metropolitan areas and haven't cashed in on the casino boom. Their reservations are among the poorest places in America.  But every time I think about the Black Hills I remember those teens in the Bronx - also among the poorest places in America - who said "Our land is not for sale."

The Nostalgia of White Flight

My high school classmates were back on my Facebook feed this morning, whooping it up about our rebel youth. The last time I wrote about this they were obsessing about our antiwar activism and about a rather tasteless performance some of us engaged in for a high school "battle of the bands." This time they revived a conversation from two-and-a-half years ago, which was originally started by the news of the death of our attorney from a 1968 freedom-of-speech suit against our principal. That thread devolved into nostalgia about the humorous newspaper for which the editors were suspended, then reminiscences about favorite teachers, and -- finally, because that principal, many teachers, and lots of parents left Newark for the suburb we lived in -- idylls about both our home town and the Weequahic section that so many of them lived in before moving.

Yes. The nostalgia of white flight.

When Chris Christie declared his candidacy for Presidency of the United States, he did it in the gymnasium of our high school. He graduated ten years after we did. His speech was an encomium to white flight. He made it synonymous with the American dream, saying:

I'm here in Livingston because all those years ago, my mother and father became the first of either of their families to leave the city of Newark to come here and make this home for us.

He spoke about his dad working days in the Breyer's ice cream plant and attending Rutgers at night. He added:

My parents moved to Livingston and they moved to Livingston to make this part of their fulfillment of their dream. Of their version of the American dream. 

He didn't mention that this move came immediately after the Newark rebellion of 1967. He didn't have to. His audience understands that without even thinking.

Chris Christie's high school buddy is best-selling author Harlan Coben. Coben, too, was born in Newark. His parents, too, fled to Livingston. I have read only a few of his dozens of popular mysteries, but what they all had in common was Livingston-as-utopia.

When I look at my high school yearbook I see 625 (give or take) white faces. I remember a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl. In the class that followed me there were two (2!) African American students, the first ever to attend the school. This was no accident and I remember speaking about this intentional segregation at the time. I remember adult neighbors, angry at my dad for refusing to pledge never to sell to a non-white family. But I also know that my parents moved to that town. I know that they made that choice.

A lot of the classmates waxing sentimental about our youthful rebellions brag about their parents liberality and even leftism. Some of those parents were activists in the unions. Some of them were members of socialist organizations. But they all left Newark for all-white Livingston. They describe the Weequahic section of Newark in the forties and fifties (when it was the home of celebrated novelist Philip Roth) as "Jewish" and "liberal." Yet all these "liberals" and "leftists" fled for an all-white suburb. It begs the question what those words mean.

But I am not interested in interrogating our parents. I am not even interested in tarnishing our memories of them, so many already gone. I am interested in asking what kind of "liberal" are you in 2019 if you cannot see any of this? I know all of you oppose Trump. I know all of you oppose "hatred" and "racism." But we grew up in a place that institutionalized white supremacy by establishing itself as a separate municipality, with separate taxes for separate schools. So many dads of my childhood friends went to Newark every day to enrich themselves, some with liquor stores, some with real estate, some with less egregious forms of cockroach capitalism. So many moms of my childhood friends had "help": women who rode the bus from Newark everyday to work in the homes of essentially middle-class families, families who could afford to act like gentry because the women who cleaned for them were systematically denied other opportunities!

This is why I am so suspicious of people who think that socialism will solve other social problems, especially white supremacy. I don't believe you actually care about it. I don't believe you even see it.

Why do you call him Prophet?

Prophet at about 5 weeks

Prophet hadn't been living in our house four days before we noticed that his endless diarrhea required attention. Our vet, the gifted Dr. Angelo Rosado, did some imaging and diagnosed intussusception, a condition in which a section of the intestine folds into an adjacent section. He told us that he could do the surgery, but that there was a chance that the sections had fused together, in which case he would need to close Prophet up and send him to a specialist. His advice was that we just take Prophet directly to the specialist, and he recommended one in Brooklyn: 20 miles and (in the unlikely event of no traffic) 45 minutes away from our home in the Bronx.

Judy was resolute. But I never thought of myself as that person who provides expensive medical care to a pet. Moreover, we simply didn't have the money. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was something we had to do. Apparently the finance industry understands this very well, because a loan was not hard to secure.

Visiting hours at VERG

The surgeons, regular vets, and techs at the hospital were terrific, as Dr. Rosado told us. He had to stay there in Brooklyn for days of post-op observation, but we drove over daily to visit. It is hard to describe Prophet's excitement when he was brought into the examining rooms where we were allowed to hang out with him.  I knew - in a way - that we had bonded with him during our visits with him and his siblings before he was old enough to be weaned and leave his mom. I knew that we had become close during those first few days at home. But every day at the hospital he flew over and leaped into our arms. You don't think German Shepherds are lap dogs? I can tell you that Prophet was as a puppy. I can tell you that he still is today with so many of the people he loves... and that dog loves a bunch of people.

It took a long time to pay off that loan, but I never regretted it. We shared adventures in the White Mountains and in local parks, in lakes, rivers and in Long Island Sound. He had a habit of introducing himself to every new dog and every new pers

Crossing a stream on a log

on. He never started a fight and never backed down from one: with dogs (even multiple dogs), with skunks, with the local coyotes. He learned eventually to take my cues about whether we were going to say hi to people or chase wildlife.

So when he suddenly (suddenly!) turned up lame and Dr. Rosado diagnosed a rupture of his cruciate ligament I didn't hesitate about care, even though it meant another loan. I was relieved to learn this is typically a predisposition in dogs, not a sudden injury, like in people. Prophet doesn't play basketball, but he does have the habit of running down near-vertical rock faces. It also turned out the the insurance we purchased for him actually reimbursed us for part of the surgery. This time Dr. Rosado sent us to an orthopedist in New Jersey. (Only 17 miles and 30 minutes without traffic.) Again, the care was superb and the orthopedist had several surgical options, choosing the best one for Prophet's particular leg geometry.

Working out on the treadmill

What was a question for me was physical therapy. A close friend had recently had an ACL tear repaired and his PT was cut off by the insurance company as soon as they concluded that he could walk again. If he was getting shorted, what did it mean that we were providing this care for our dog? I swallowed that question and just concluded that I wouldn't broadcast the news all over Facebook. This time we had to go to the East Side of Manhattan, 12 miles, but usually forty-five minutes.

Cold laser treatment, with protective eyewear

Prophet loved physical therapy. He treated it as his personal day spa. I will back up here and say that he learned polite leash walking early on, but that he has never mastered it in the vicinity of his vet's office. As soon as we get nearby he begins tugging and lunging to get there to see all his friends: the vets, the techs, the receptionists. No amount of poking and prodding, shots or rectal thermometers, have ever discouraged his enthusiasm for that place or those people.

Rehab was different. He calmed down and blissed out immediately. He learned how to walk in the
underwater treadmill without any problem. (Peanut butter helped keep him focused) The cold laser seemed to be a heightened form of personal worship, like belly rubs or grooming.

Hiking by Eastchester Bay in the Bronx

And there was no question that it helped. I started to wonder whether I hadn't seen signs of the ligament tear before it actually ruptured, without fully understanding what I was seeing. He seemed stronger than ever. We were warned that about half of dogs with CL tears will develop one in the opposite leg within a year. I watched closely but didn't see anything. We were also warned that the surgical site itself is vulnerable to arthritis. We looked for that, too. But everything was good. The adventures resumed and continued.

I know that the lives of dogs are accelerated when compared with ours. I know that fact can be painful for us. Prophet's friends who have walked on are too many. When Harry, a boxer, passed, his owner left the neighborhood for good. When Doon died his owner stayed in his apartment for over a year. Blanca's human is still mourning quietly although she continues with her work. I didn't go directly to these dark thoughts when Prophet developed a wobble and a drag in his gait. I didn't think about this even when he turned around quickly and fell on his ass. I certainly didn't worry when he got an arthritis diagnosis and a prescription for anti-inflammatories.

But the meds didn't seem to help. And the radiologist said that his arthritis was too minor to account for the symptoms. And the vet said "degenerative myelopathy," a condition like Lou Gehrig's, a condition without a treatment, a condition that would lead to no hind leg control at all, then no body control at all. That's when I started imagining a future without my friend. Thats when my sun started to fade.

The vet said there was not much to be done. Reading suggested that physical therapy might slow the progress of Prophet's degeneration. So we went back to see the rehab vet. We borrowed money again. The specialist confirmed the diagnosis and performed a DNA test which was ambiguous. But the therapy? Well, the therapy helped a lot. And I don't mean by stopping the deterioration. Prophet has actually improved since we got the diagnosis in September. He is not cured. (There will be no cure.) But he can turn without falling, which he could not do when he first went to PT. He can jump into the car, with some hesitation, but without a full minute of thought. And the wobble in his step is occasional, not regular.

So I am glad we are getting him this therapy. He, of course, still loves it and loves the people who provide it. He loves the daily massage and passive range of motion exercises that I give him. But there is another piece.

Prophet is not worried. He doesn't obsess over what the future will bring. He walks out happily to each new day's adventure - wildlife, friends, rocks, creeks - without concern about how long he will be able to. I owe him the physical care we provide. But I also owe him the happiness he brings to me. I have to enjoy each day with him as much as he enjoys each day with me. And I am trying. That is why his name is Prophet. That is why he is our prophet.

The Federal Trough

My dad (z"l) was always cynical about people who claimed to be opposed to federal aid programs. He noticed that what they really opposed was federal aid to people other than themselves. He had a colorful way of describing this phenomenon, too. He said all of us are like pigs with our snouts in the federal trough. Once in a while, though, each of us picks our head up, looks around, and comments disgustedly, "What a bunch of pigs!"

I was reminded of this by a news item on the radio this morning. The President is headed to New Orleans to address a convention of Farm Bureaus as his government shutdown enters its fourth week. How does this affect farmers, who have been among his strong supporters?

• The US Department of Agriculture can't process loan subsidies that farmers use to finance their seed for the next planting. In many places, that should be two to three weeks away.
• The USDA is no longer sending out emergency checks for the losses farmers are suffering from the President's trade war with China.
• Nobody at the State Department is processing requests for H2A visas for temporary agricultural workers to enter the country.

It is not schadenfreude to notice that all of us are dependent on one another and that we negotiate our mutual needs through government. I can differ with the specifics of agricultural policy while still realizing that we need one if we want to eat. But it is important to note: People who pretend to support market-driven decisions and individualism really only believe in those things when it comes to others.