Retracing My Steps

 Readers of my historical novel, Though An Army Come Against Us, often report encountering episodes that are simply too much for them to believe. They set the book down, shaking their heads, and saying to themselves, "Rick, you really went too far this time." Then they google the incident and discover that it is, instead, simply true.

I tell them that my imagination isn't all that good. I tell them that the history of this country can be so dark that I don't need any imagination to conjure up these horrors. And it surprises me because I have spent all my adult life looking into those corners. Some were astonished by the presence of gas chambers at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border crossing that was a model for Hitler's gas chambers. Some were surprised by the coal mine explosions I described in Dawson, New Mexico and Littleton, Alabama, or by the fact that seventy-two of the miners killed in the latter were convicts leased by the company from state and county prisons. One reader hadn't heard about the massacre of striking miners' families in Ludlow, Colorado. Another learned for the first time about the Tulsa Massacre that has been so present lately in popular culture.

But my imagination is really not that good, and even many of the minor details in my fiction are factually and historically correct. Unfortunately my notes are not all that great either, because I am not preparing them for academic publication. I have sources listed in multiple notes in Apple Notes on both my phone and laptop. I have highlighted passages in Kindle from ebooks I read. I have PDFs saved in a folder on my laptop. I have files sent to me from various archivists and librarians. And I have handwritten notes in steno pads and notebooks. Retracing my steps can be a colossal challenge, especially when the information was obscure and hard to find in the first place.

This morning I was writing a Facebook post about the experiences Black soldiers had with racist violence while they were in Europe during the First World War. There is an episode in Though An Army in which Rector Beauchamp, a Black Seminole soldier, is nearly lynched by white soldiers led by two white officers who are jealous that a French girl turns to him to rescue herself from them. But a year and a half after I published this, several years after I wrote those particular pages, and who-knows-how-long after I researched them, I couldn't remember why I thought there were lynchings in the American Expeditionary Force in 1918.

I googled those words and easily found references to the Red Summer of 1919 and to lynchings of returned veterans. It took me about 45 minutes to find a popular magazine article by Professor Chad Williams, and then a note in an article that cited a book he wrote titled Torchbearers of Freedom:African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. That was a familiar title, so I looked in my Kindle library. Success!

Instead of using the Kindle search function I simply scrolled through the passages I had highlighted and there it was. Some Black officers had aroused the envy of white officers over the attentions of some French women so the white men got two truckloads of white enlisted men and ordered them to lynch the Black officers. Moreover the incident had been reported by First Lieutenant Charles Hamilton Houston. Yes, that is the Charles Hamilton Houston. He had been an English professor at Howard before enlisting, but after his wartime experiences he attended Harvard Law School. He returned to Howard as a law professor and trained the entire generation of NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys that included Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

1st Lieutenant Houston

When I read this again this morning I wondered briefly why I left C.H. Houston out of my novel. But I remembered that I still have too many characters. Something like his part in the story and that of an unnamed captain are taken in Though An Army by the historical figure Osceola McKaine who was a captain in France, served in the infantry before the war in the Philippines and Mexico, and was a figure in the movement for Black rights after both the first and second World Wars. In Houston's story, retold by Professor Williams in Torchbearers, the two French women are described as "sporting girls." I chose to remove that characterization and turn them into one young teen who is both confused by the attention of the white officers and in danger of being raped by them. The whole thing reminded me of how it is sometimes when people ask me the specific source of some of these stories and I can't really remember.

It also made me wonder about how Professor Houston had told this story. That was another hour-long rabbit hole. The footnote in Torchbearers cited a series in the Pittsburgh Courier that Houston wrote in 1940 as the U.S. was about to get into another World War. I immediately went to the Library of Congress website because they have digitized huge numbers of newspapers. Nope. After hunting around for who might in fact have it I discovered a Proquest database, but my university alumni privileges don't extend to that. A recent laptop update erased my New York Public Library password, but I found it in one of those steno pads I have piled up and - Yes! - a few minutes later, having scanned through thirteen pages of the Courier on the listed date, I found episode ten of Houston's article, which contained more details. (The story also had to be continued on page 13 of the next issue, but that didn't take as long to get to.)

Then I started wondering again why I left Professor Houston out of my novel, especially since I had an entire short chapter take place in the "Colored" Officers Training Camp at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. And that led me to think about the contemporary souvenir book about that camp that I remembered reading online. Another hour. Not in Google Books. Not in the Library of Congress. Not in Iowa Pathways, although they did have PDFs of newspaper ads for the book. I finally found a link to an "online books page" at University of Pennsylvania Library which led me to a HathiTrust page which was where I am pretty sure I originally read this book however long ago.

Do I want to do this again? Not for these particular sources. I started a document with the links and basic information and I'm calling it Annotations. I don't want to track everything down, but I think that every time I do, I should save the links in that document. My memory only promises to get worse with time.

This is a split group photo from that souvenir Fort Des Moines book. It shows all the Howard University grads at the training camp, the largest group of alums of any college.

Though An Army - Final Chapter

Harlem, NY 1922 

 

“Rector!” welcomed Nessa as the apartment door opened. She sounded as enthusiastic as if she hadn’t seen him in a month. 

“How do you know it’s me?” laughed Rector Beauchamp. “Anybody could come walking in through this unlocked door.” 

 “Were you able to get a day at P.S. 119?” Nessa asked. The school was diagonally across from their apartment on 134th Street and a sometime source of employment. But as she came out of the kitchen and saw him in his work clothes, she knew the answer. 

“Miss Larson said she didn’t need a substitute teacher today,” he explained. “I changed real quick, hurried downtown with Jim Rosco, and was able to get a day loading the S.S. Lafayette on Pier 51.” Rosco was a boarder with their upstairs neighbors, Tony and Ella Stevens. He worked as a longshoreman on the West Side, mostly handling passenger luggage for the French Line. 

“When do you think you’ll be able to get a regular teaching job?” wondered Nessa. 

“My best guess?” asked Rector. “Never.” He had been thinking about this for the better part of a year now, since not long after their arrival in New York City. “I don’t think they want to hire any regular teachers at all, not to mention Negroes. They hang on to those Class 1 licenses like it’s their grandma’s engagement ring. They save so much money by hiring subs, it’s no wonder they won’t give out a regular license.” 

“Sadie got a job over there,” objected Nessa. 

“The cake lady? She taught for five years in North Carolina before she got here, and they still wouldn’t hire her until she got a master’s degree from Columbia. And hired a locution teacher so she could learn to talk like a white woman. And why do you think she sells all those cakes? She got that Class 1 license and she still can’t live on what they pay her.” 

“It sounds to me like you’re giving up,” said Nessa. “Did you even go over there this morning?” 

“Yes, I did, baby.” He paused because he didn’t like her challenging his word this way. He took a deep breath and then went on, “Yes, I did. But I am really thinking about signing on regular on the ships.”

Nessa understood his pause; appreciated his restraint. She waited a moment before going on. “Baby, you have a college diploma.” 

“Yes, I do,” Rector answered. “But not one that they recognize here in New York. Leastways not when it’s held by a Negro.” 

This was something that Nessa understood very well. She had been going downtown with Ella Stevens everyday to clean rich white ladies’ homes and she didn’t like it. Maybe these South Carolina Negroes were used to taking care of white folks, but she was from Boley, Oklahoma and she was a high school graduate. For her it was like anthropological fieldwork, not a career. And she had something to say on this same subject that she hadn’t told Rector about yet. “I went to register at Hunter College today,” she began. 

“That is great news!” smiled Rector. “How did that go?” 

“Not well,” admitted Nessa. “They don’t recognize my diploma.” 

“Don’t recognize it?” He began shaking his head. New York. “Any options?” 

“Actually, the lady there took some time asking about Boley High and the courses I took there. She listed the exact credits I still need to get a New York diploma. And she told me who to speak to at Wadleigh High School if I want to take them now.” 

Rector was thunderstruck. “With a bunch of young girls?” he asked. “You’re a grown woman.” 

“Yes, I am,” said Nessa. “But that is not what’s making me hesitate.” She smiled. 

Rector shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. He shrugged and made a face as if to ask, “What?” 

Nessa smiled a little more broadly. “I’m three weeks late,” she said. 

The puzzled look stayed for another second or two. Then understanding dawned across his face, his jaw dropped, his eyes opened wide, and he rushed to take his wife in his arms. “Baby,” he laughed. “That is the best news! You had to wait all this time to tell me that?” 

“We won’t know for awhile. I could just be late. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I just had to let you know.” 

Rector just said, “That is the best news!” And then, again, “That is the best news!” He hugged her and hugged her. 

Nessa finally pushed herself back a few inches from his tight embrace. “Baby, I have to ask. If it’s a boy, can we name him Ezekiel?” 

He pulled her close again. “Why would you even need to ask?” said Rector Beauchamp. “Of course we willl. Of course our son will be Ezekiel.” Nessa blinked back her tears. “Ezekiel Owalv,” she said, adding the Creek and Seminole word for “prophet.” “Because our children can never forget that they’re native, too.” 

Somewhere nearby a neighbor cranked up a Victrola. The trumpet and trombone notes of the opening bars were unmistakable, “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” It was the most popular recording in Harlem that year. Already embracing, Nessa and Rector began to dance along. But the juxtaposition of sad and happy news gave the song a different meaning. Rector would give up teaching, Nessa college; but there would be a new baby. Nessa’s Daddy was gone, but perhaps she would have a son. The world as it was had taken so much from them, but there was still promise of a world to be. They were still living. They were still standing. They could still continue the struggle. 

So Nessa began to sing along with Ethel Waters. And now the song had stopped being a story about a disappointed lover. Today it had turned into a story about entire peoples and about that promise, the promise of a world to be: “There’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea From now on there’ll be a change in me My walk will be different, my talk and my name Nothing about me’s going to be the same.” 

When the record ended, Nessa wanted to say something more about Ezekiel, her Daddy. But the elevated train was going up Eighth Avenue, just down the block, and it drowned out all conversation with its loud clatter. Today, though, even the rattle of the IRT had taken on a new meaning: He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live again?” And I said, “Lord God, only You know.” There was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. So the Lord God said to the bones, “Here! I bring breath into you and you will live! The breath entered them and they came to life, a vast multitude. 

And so it was.

I Despair

 

This morning I watched a short video posted by the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance on Twitter. A naturalist took readings from a spring in the woods near the stables, compared the electrical conductivity of that water with Tibbet’s Brook and Van Cortlandt Lake, showed caddisfly larva, and discussed the significance of these findings.

While he was streaming, someone insisted on repeatedly posting comments complaining about the fact that he was masked and objecting to Darwin, apparently because only Darwinists believe in aerosol spread of COVID-19!?

Checking the spring this morning.

I checked the bio of the critic. He is a Trumpist from Austin, Texas.

We are 1500 miles away. 

We are still running borough coronavirus positivity rates around 10%.

Austin is still struggling to get power and water restored after last week’s storm.

But this man felt the need to tune in to a talk about freshwater springs in Bronx parks and object to our masking.

I despair for the future of humanity.

Embracing Our Ignorance

I read a story yesterday in The Atlantic about how COVID-19 interacts with our immune systems. It opened with some humor about the complexity of our immune systems, and used that as a refrain throughout the article, but it nevertheless attempted to explain how the immune system works as if it were well understood! I want to explore why I think that - despite our immense knowledge - our physiology is not well understood. In fact I want to suggest that the rapid pace at which we are accumulating knowledge of biology is evidence, instead, of how much more we have to learn. And I want to make some observations about what this should mean for K-12 teaching of biology, where I have some experience.

Let’s take a minute to think about T-cells. My first memory of even hearing the phrase “T-cell” was in 1981 when AIDS was first being described and discussed. Articles in popular magazines like Discover and Science 80 called the new disease T-lymphotrophic virus and they were supplemented with imaginative descriptions of the human immune system. In communities where AIDS was a concern (as opposed to a hysterical panic) there was a lot of discussion about T-cell counts. But how old was knowledge of those T-cells? Not very.

The “T” stands for their source in the thymus, a small organ in front of your heart, and it is intended to distinguish them from B-cells, also small lymph cells, but arising instead in bone marrow. Less than thirty years earlier, the great Johns Hopkins pathologist Arnold Rice Rich (father of poet Adrienne Rich) who wrote the book on TB (really, Pathogenesis of Tuberculosis, 1000 pages) said “literally nothing of importance is known” of small lymphocytes and added that this was “one of the most humiliating and disgraceful gaps in all medical knowledge. By 1964, scientists had figured out that those lymphocytes had something to do with an immune system but hadn’t differentiated them into the many types students are now required to memorize with the aid of flash cards. They hadn’t yet divided them into B and T. In fact, they actually thought the thymus was a vestigial organ. As late as 1971, just ten years before I started hearing popular disquisitions on T-cells, medical dictionaries were still saying that the function of the thymus was “obscure.” That is definitely what I was taught when I took high school biology in 1967.

The Australian physician and scientist Jacques F.A.P. Miller spent the 60’s discovering its function, but his work had difficulty gaining acceptance. His politest critics merely accused him of “complicating things.” In 1968 when he presented evidence that T (thymus-originating) and B (bone-marrow-originating) were two kinds of lymph cells he was publicly reminded, in front of a auditorium full of immunologists) that B and T were the first and last letters of the word bullshit. By the 1980’s the receptors by which B-cells recognized foreign cells were mostly understood. Only in the 2000’s were T-cell receptors understood. Moreover, T-cells were broken down into distinctive subtypes: Cytotoxic, Killer, Helper, Memory, Regulatory, Gamma Delta, and Mucosal. (More memorization, more flash cards) This January, researchers in Wales happily publicized their discovery of a new type of Killer T-cell!

Before stepping back to reflect on the larger significance of this minutiae - the forest in which these leaf aphids reside - let’s think a little more about their discovery, naming, and classification. B- and T-cells are lymphocytes, two of at least three kinds of cells found in lymph, a fluid that circulates through the body in separate system from blood. Lymphocytes are one of at least five types of leukocytes, or white blood cells. While red cells (then called “corpuscles”) were noticed with fascination by the first microscopists in the 17th century when they turned their lenses on blood (Anton von Leeuwenhoek produced the first drawings in 1695) it wasn’t until a century later that a British surgeon noticed small transparent cells among the larger red ones. He accurately guessed that they came from the lymph system. Their appearance was described in 1843, but it wasn’t until the 1870’s that new staining techniques allowed scientists to see their structure. That work was done by Paul Ehrlich, who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Medicine. It still didn’t allow anyone to know their function, or how they performed that function, or how very many kinds there were. The color “white” refers not to the cells themselves but to how they appear overall when blood is allowed to separate into different layers, whether through settling or centrifuging.

What does all this mean? For me a couple of observations emerge. One is the redundancy of biological systems. I reread the material above and note, for example, the existence of NK (Natural Killer) Cells, NKT (Natural Killer T) cells, and Cytotoxic T cells: different varieties of lymphocytes with similar abilities to destroy other cells. But these aren’t completely distinct categories, they overlap in their mechanisms and origins. I think that makes their redundancies different than redundancies created by engineers, such as fail-safe mechanisms or, say, drop-down menus coexisting with keyboard shortcuts. I will boldly say that immune mechanisms in particular have to evolve rapidly to keep up with rapidly-evolving viruses and that every single element of what we understand to be a system is under selective pressures. And the results of that evolution aren’t always good as we see with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in which one or another component of the immune system attacks our bodies and makes us sick instead of healthy. So treating this as if we can somehow “understand how it works” may not be a good intellectual model. Thinking of it as an ecosystem - all elements interacting with all other elements - may be a better model. I will return to this idea later.

Second, look at how resistant people were to recognizing the existence of T-cells. Look at how resistant they were to the idea that their ignorance about the function of the thymus didn’t mean it was vestigial! That resistance to new fact is especially notable when compared to how quick they are to add new classes of T-cells now that their existence is recognized. As a teacher, it is another reminder of how shallow the practice of memorizing all these names is by contrast with learning something about how these discoveries were made instead of pretending that lots of facts equals understanding.

Third, the rapid pace of new knowledge about this field suggests that we still have a lot to learn. If we were anywhere near a complete understanding of immunology, the pace of discovery would have slowed considerably. And the absolute astonishment about how COVID-19 works should humble everybody.

I want to write more about this, especially about biochemistry, the nervous system, and our microbial biota, but I will save all that for another day.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and the Trump Death Cult

Kristi Noem of South Dakota, more than any other state governor, has made a personal brand out of her refusal to implement public health measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is a quick timeline of her insistence on "personal freedom," which is the death cultists' byword on why they won't protect themselves or anyone else.

In mid April the United States was reaching an early peak of 30,000 new coronavirus cases each day. (I say "early peak" because new daily diagnoses subsequently declined. We are now seeing about 200,000 new diagnoses each day.) Things here in New York were especially bad: we get a lot of travelers from around the country and world, we live really close together, and doctors had figured out very little about treating severe cases. The entire country was losing about 2,000 people every day. About half of them were here in New York! In South Dakota at that time, though, nobody was dying on an average day and they were diagnosing about 125 cases daily. 

Perhaps as important, President Donald Trump had been downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic since early February.  In fact, he said it would be over by April with the advent of warm weather. When various states began ordering schools and businesses to close, Trump jabbered about reopening by Easter, which was April 12 this year. He also absolutely refused to mask in public. On April 15 he was still pressuring the states to end the school and business closings. What did Governor Noem have to say? "I believe in our freedoms." She implemented no mandatory public health measures: no closures, no mask mandates.

In May, Governor Noem decided it was a good idea to demand that the Oglala and Cheyenne River Lakota take down the highway checkpoints they were using to try and reduce the spread of coronavirus on their reservations. She made a public show of issuing a 48-hour order to stop checking traffic and insuring that outsiders keep going. Cheyenne River Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier declined to take them down and wrote her to ask her if there had actually been any complaints by motorists. Oglala Sioux Tribal President Julian Bear Runner pointed out that the checkpoints wouldn't be necessary if she had implemented any kind of shut downs. In the end, she never actually took the tribes to court at all.

In June, Governor Noem was still talking about "freedom." She said that more freedom is the answer. While her talking points had previously included a reliance on science and data, on June 8 she warned against "blind reliance on insufficient modeling"!? By that time the worst of the initial stage of the pandemic in New York was past. The 7-day average showed that we were still losing seventy friends, neighbors, and relatives each day. But that was a dramatic improvement over the thousand a day in April. Nationally, the death toll passed 110,000 and President Trump was still promising that the virus was "going away."

But the July 4th holiday was coming. Trump was not only promising that it was going to go away, but claiming that if it weren't for "fake news" everybody would know that it already was. And he was itching to start up those rallies that feed his ego so much. The first rally since March was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 20. His staff ran around the arena removing the "Don't Sit Here" stickers that the venue had put on seats at the request of the local government in order to create social distance. Most of the people who attended followed the President's lead by refusing to mask. In his immediate entourage, both Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate, and Kimberley Guilfoyle, the Fox News personality (and Trump's son's girlfriend) apparently contracted COVID at the rally. Cain subsequently passed away from the illness. Coronavirus rates in the Tulsa area tripled in the weeks after. 

So starting the in-person rallies back up was a big opportunity for Governor Noem to demonstrate her loyalty to the President and his fans. She wanted Trump to appear at Mt. Rushmore for an Independence Day fireworks show. In interviews she acknowledged that when she first brought it up he told her how much he loved Mt. Rushmore and wondered aloud how he could get his face on it. When she realized that he wasn't kidding she had artists make a model that included him alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. By July 4th, New York's closures and mask regulations had further pushed deaths down to 25 a day. The country as a whole was still climbing to new peak of 70,000 cases a day, but South Dakota was only contributing 50 of them. And the average daily death rate there was still zero.

Sturgis was coming. If you have no connection with American motorcycle culture you may not know about the annual bikers gathering in the Black Hills during the first week of August. It has been going on since the late 1930's and every summer for the last few decades roughly half a million motorcyclists descend on the town of 6,000 for drinking, touring, racing, parading, and other revelry. Some people in town really didn't see how bringing in people from other places could possibly be a good idea during a pandemic. The local businesses who profit from the rally clearly thought the lucrative benefits outweighed any health risks. Governor Noem loudly supported them and it turns out that lots of regular attendees agreed with her about freedom, COVID, Trump, and social distancing. Close to 500,000 riders showed up. South Dakota was by then averaging 80 new cases of coronavirus a day and had inched up to a daily average of 2 deaths. I have no idea if any riders hurt each other during the bacchanalia (I can guess) but I do know that one woman was knocked unconscious and stripped of her jeans by a buffalo when she got too close to a calf. I am not making this up.

But COVID wasn't going to make a grand entrance during the week of the rally. The incubation period of the virus (and the lag before serious symptoms) guarantees that. Everybody got to convince themselves that they were right to be unafraid... at least for a few weeks. By September 8, Fox News was reporting that - of the 1.4 million cases during August - 20% were a direct result of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally! New York State was by now down to ten deaths a day. South Dakota was averaging 236 new daily cases (up almost 300% from a month before) but zero deaths. And Governor Kristi Noem loudly denounced the Fox News story as "fiction."

In retrospect it should be obvious where this is going. Phrases like "tempting fate" come to the tongue. But the coming trajectory was clear to epidemiologists months before. By late October South Dakota had become a center for the nation's explosive growth. The state was experiencing 731 new cases a day and averaging six deaths. By comparison, New York, with a population 22 times larger was down twenty daily deaths. Another way of looking at this is to note that twice as many people live in the 34 square miles of Manhattan as in the 77,000 square miles of South Dakota. This is significant because it highlights the difficulty of social distancing in New York. It highlights the extreme ease a virus finds in spreading among a population of 48,000 per square mile as compared to a population of 11 per square mile. But we had just reopened our schools on split schedules to keep numbers down. Broadway was still shuttered and we were still requiring people to wear masks. Governor Noem hadn't budged in her opposition.

On October 20 she boldly claimed "We follow the science" while scientists and physicians begged her to implement mandatory public health measures. In vain. She boasted of South Dakota's total death rate (yes, she did) of only 37 per 100,000 making invidious comparison with New York's 171 per 100,000. She was comparing her state, which was still experiencing its first wave in the fall, with the state that had born the brunt of the pandemic back in the spring, when the disease was poorly understood and doctors in our hospitals were effectively practicing evidence-free medicine, trying to make up treatments while the ERs (and morgues!) were overflowing. Either she didn't know or she didn't care. 

Do I feel good about the fact that the South Dakota death rate she boasted about just a month ago is now 84 per 100,000? I do not. But that is a 227% increase during a time when New York only suffered a 2% increase. We are indeed suffering here. We are back up to averaging 30 deaths a day here. But so is South Dakota, and that is in a population 4% our size, smaller than the Bronx. And what does she say? She says she won't mandate masks just "to make people feel good." Just to make people feel good? How about to keep people alive.

I only want to make a few more points. One is about narcissism. When President Trump was asked in mid-September if he was afraid of getting coronavirus at his rallies he answered, “I’m on a stage, it’s very far away, so I’m not at all concerned.” As everybody knows he was helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital for treatment only two weeks later. He repeatedly stated that the US was "rounding a corner" at precisely the moment that the national case numbers began climbing again after a late summer drop. In the weeks before his electoral defeat in early November he kept complaining that the press was only reporting on this calamity to make him look bad. "You won't hear a word about it after the election." That is untrue because every day is worse than the day before now. We are now averaging 200,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths every day: a 67% increase over two weeks ago in both categories. Trump is used to bullshitting his way out of personal problems. He clearly believes that a global pandemic is only a problem because it makes him look bad. He has not shown an ounce of empathy for the sick, for the dying, or for the mourners. And Governor Kristi Noem has shown no leadership in public health, just a desire to look as tough as the fake tough guy in the White House so that she can be considered for her party's nomination in four years.

Second, I want to stop and remember that - for all the low numbers South Dakota reported in the late spring and summer - one of the largest early COVID outbreaks in the entire country was at Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls. 1098 workers at their pork processing plant were diagnosed with coronavirus in April! Why didn't that set off alarm bells? I have to wonder if it wasn't because most of those workers were members of what the company referred to as the plant's "large immigrant population." That company spokesperson said, “Living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family.” We have already alluded to Noem's colonial approach to the original people of South Dakota. I suggest that she has the same attitude toward the newest arrivals.

Finally I need to say why I take the time to air my irritation toward the governor of one of America's least populous states. South Dakota has only one Representative, but the same two Senators as California or Texas or Florida or New York. They have an outsized influence on the Senate, which has stonewalled progress in any area of governance since the election of Barack Obama awakened the nightmares of the white supremacists. And what I wrote above about her being her party's nominee in 2024? It's a real possibility. I don't want to forget one detail of her irresponsibility if and when that happens

The Maduro Regime Suppresses the Left

 This morning's New York Times reports on the violent repression of the Venezuelan left by the Maduro regime. The popular socialist radio personality José Carmelo Bislick was abducted and murdered in August, apparently for criticizing corruption by local party leaders. Socialist TV personality Osvaldo Rivero is receiving death threats for saying the same things on a national scale. Jose Pinto of the left Tupamaros Party was jailed on trumped-up murder charges. Isabel Uzcateguí of the Communist Party was detained repeatedly and threatened with death. There are more examples of the same thing. So why does the US left still defend Nicolás Maduro's violent, crony-capitalist government? 

First, anti-imperialists in the US have a long history of confusing the need to oppose intervention with the desire to lionize the subjects of that intervention. Authoritarian leaders shouldn't become our heroes just because American monopoly capital doesn't like them. Yes, the United States has waged economic warfare on Venezuela for years and under both political parties. The current sanctions began with an executive order by President Obama in 2015. Trump accelerated this with threats of invasion after Juan Guaidó declared himself President in 2019. Some of this was Trump's blah-blah: John Bolton writes that Trump bizarrely claimed that Venezuela is "part of the United States" and that invading the country would be "cool." But he also derided Guaidó as "weak" and a "kid," comparing him unfavorably with the "tough" Maduro. And there was no invasion. But it is also clear that Senate leaders like Marco Rubio really wanted one and that the CIA was recruiting Venezuela's neighboring states to do the job. So the imperialist threats were real.  But we also saw American leftists go beyond resisting attacks on Venezuela to defending Maduro.

Second, Venezuela has become a sort of bogeyman to the American right. Yesterday the official GOP Twitter account retweeted a weird claim by one of Trump's attorneys that the US election was stolen by software designed by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez! To my knowledge, Chávez never had any particular expertise in coding. Oh, also, he died in 2013. When Bernie Sanders was a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination his opponents seemed to think that yelling "Venezuela!" was an argument against a Green New Deal, student debt forgiveness, and a $15 minimum wage. In September and October the GOP's entire election strategy in Florida seems to have been yelling "Venezuela!" at - of all unlikely targets - Joe Biden. So I suppose it's not a stretch for actual leftists to think it must be an unintentional compliment. Maybe not true of centrist Democrats, but definitely for "real" ones.

Third, Venezuela has continued to masquerade as socialist. Even with the profound disparities of wealth between favored cadres and every other Venezuelan, even with the legalization of the black market, the Maduro regime has been able to rely on socialist support by claiming that they, too, are socialists... at least until recently. I suppose it's easier for socialists in the US - who are completely unaffected by the corruption, failures, and violence of the regime - to believe these claims. And both at home and abroad Maduro can blame all those failures on imperialist sanctions. The fact is that under Chávez the Venezuelan economy never broke its reliance on oil while prices hovered around $100 a barrel. They plummeted with the Obama Administration's embrace of shale and are currently about $36 a barrel. But, no, those are inconvenient facts... for everybody, both supporters and opponents of Maduro. In any case, American leftists may think Venezuela is "imperfect" but they seem reluctant to recognize that it is no longer socialist at all.

Fourth, the expose of Maduro's attack on the left was published in the New York Times, that tireless apologist for imperialism. Why should anybody believe it? This is the newspaper that defended last year's military coup in against President Evo Morales in Bolivia, saying that the difference between a "popular uprising" and a coup is "blurry." This is the newspaper that less than two weeks ago described Bolivia's reception of Morales's return as "wary" after his party overwhelmingly won the elections... again. This is the newspaper that claimed the US opposed the 2009 military coup in Honduras. That coup installed President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother was convicted a year ago by a Manhattan jury of running tons of cocaine into the United States. That coup resulted in a soaring crime rate that has fueled the unprecedented flight of Hondurans across Mexico asking for sanctuary in the US. And Hillary Clinton publicly acknowledged her support for that coup in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices. I could go on. So it's easy for people who don't want to accept the truth of Maduro's antidemocratic violence to dismiss today's article as one more piece of pro-imperialist disinformation. And, frankly, there is a strong whiff of schadenfreude in that article. I, for one, would rather read about it elsewhere.

What about NACLA Report, the progressive journal on Latin America? Would that be an acceptable source. I did not find a discussion of repressive violence against the left, but I found this discussion of racist police violence in Venezuela from this summer. It reveals that nearly a third of homicides in Venezuela are committed by state security agencies. It reveals that Venezuela's police kill as many people as Brazil's: a country with a population seven times larger. It reveals that the victims of this police violence are overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly poor, and overwhelmingly Native and Black. So, while the Venezuelan regime can hypocritically denounce the US for the murder of George Floyd, neither the Venezuelan government not the Venezuelan opposition can honestly say that Black Lives Matter to them.

My friend Ingrid was murdered in Colombia by FARC in 1999. The American right cried crocodile tears because they could use the death of an Indigenous human rights activist as a bludgeon against the left. The left was largely silent. In fact all I remember hearing from Democracy Now! was the FARC's initial denial. I have no interest in defending people who denominate themselves "socialists" or "leftists" if their actions are corrupt and anti-human. You can oppose US intervention in Venezuela and Nicaragua without pretending that Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega are people's heroes... or even decent human beings.

 I was thinking again this morning about times when two people say the exact same things but mean something very different by them. Sometimes it’s because of the ambiguity of language. But sometimes it’s because of fundamentally different values.

The first time I noticed it was probably in the early ’70’s. Animal rights activists used to have a table on Central Park West, on the corner by the American Museum of Natural History. They had informational literature opposing animal experimentation, and they were protesting the practice in the museum’s labs. I stopped one day, curious because two men were screaming at each other. But I quickly realized that I couldn’t tell which side of the issue either of them was on, because they were both shouting: “What if they were doing these experiments on humans!”

This wasn’t about ambiguity of language at all. This was clearly about values. One man (I don’t know which) intended those words to mean “The atrocity of the experiments is clear if you wouldn’t want them done on you.” The other was arguing “We need the knowledge from those experiments and it’s better to do them on rats than on people.” But what they both were saying was: “What if they were doing these experiments on humans!”

I have heard this sort of clash of values over many years in the high schools. A teacher and a student are shouting at one another, sometimes to the amusement of the rest of the class, sometimes to their consternation, but usually both. The best option is first to get the student somewhere else, to calm them down a little, while the teacher gets back to the rest of the class. Then you can talk to each of them later, out of the white-hot forge of a classroom with an audience of thirty-some other teens. More often than not, each blames the other, but usually they both make the same argument, that teachers and students are not equal.

“She is the child, I am the adult,” says the teacher. But what he means is that teens owe unquestioning deference, respect, and obedience to their elders.

“He is the adult, I am the child,” says the student. But what she means is that teens can be forgiven for immature behavior like losing their tempers and shouting, but teachers should have outgrown all that.

This is clearly not a productive line of conversation. As a principal I only ever called it to the faculty’s attention in the absence of an actual argument. In the heat of the conflict, it was always better to skip this as an irreconcilable difference and get to the specifics instead. Then it was always possible to ask them to step into one another’s shoes. You ask the teen to imagine themselves trying to manage an entire class. You ask the teacher to imagine themselves being called out in front of a roomful of their peers.

Saturday Night Live did a memorable sketch back in the ‘80’s about nuclear reactor with a melting core. This was several years after Three Mile Island but a few years before Chernobyl so I guess we knew enough to understand it but we’re still prepared to chuckle. Ed Asner played a grizzled veteran engineer who knew every inch of the power plant. The SNL ensemble played the young graduates who were taking over upon his retirement. His last words before leaving them in charge were: “You can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor.”

Maybe you saw this. Maybe not. I’ll spoil the joke by explaining it. In the face of crisis, with the core melting, the ambiguity of his words emerges as they argue about how to save the lives of all the people for many miles around. Does that mean “No amount of water is too much; flood the reactor”? Or does it mean “Be careful, too much water is dangerous”? 

Around the same time that sketch was broadcast, many of the preschoolers my daughter’s age were testing for Hunter College Elementary School. My memory is that the only admissions point was kindergarten and that they accepted the top forty applicants from Manhattan and the Bronx. I just now glanced at their website and I see that they are still admitting new pupils only to kindergarten, fifty of them, all from Manhattan. I had some interest in the school for my daughter, but zero intention of allowing her to be subjected to a standardized test at that age. I knew a couple of children who were accepted and attended. I knew more than a few, some of them exceptionally bright, who were turned down. I also knew that most parents in the boroughs had no idea that this opportunity even existed. Many of their children were, of course, very gifted. Who knows how they would have done on a test written by people from a totally different social background?

Every single child in my daughter’s preschool took that test, except her. Not one of them was admitted. One dad, though, took his little girl’s rejection extremely hard. We were talking about it and he was angry, disappointed, and skeptical, too. I wanted to reassure him that it wasn’t the end of his daughter’s opportunities and that it wasn’t a reflection on her abilities or potential. I was about to say, “I find it easy to imagine that forty children from the entire boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx could score higher than my daughter on some standard test on any given day.” I meant that there are a lot of four-year olds in a population of over 2.5 million people, that standard tests don’t measure what they purport to, and that, in any case, anyone can have a bad day.

But before I could get those (I thought) reassuring words out, he said to me, “I find it hard to imagine that there could be forty children in Manhattan and the Bronx who could score higher than my K.” 

All I could do was silently wonder what he saw in her that nobody else did. She was a reasonably bright, articulate, and curious child, but she certainly had not distinguished herself intellectually from her classmates during preschool. Their cohort is now approaching forty-years old. She still hasn’t. What could I have said, then, that would have reassured that dad?

But the example of one message meaning two things that is always strongest in my memory was an experience I had at Giants Stadium in the fall of 2001. It was just weeks after the attacks on the twin towers. Things were sombre all over and being at a football game at all felt so strange. I was with my friend G. who had gotten the tickets. 

Some time in the second quarter I noticed that he kept turning around angrily. I asked what’s up and he said some asshole behind him was throwing peanut shells at his head. Sure enough, there was a row of drunken bozos yukking it up. I should mention here that only three days earlier I had broken up a gang fight between the Bloods and the Jamaicans in the street near Monroe High School in the Bronx, initially by myself because the Bloods had staged a distraction inside the building. My feeling was that I was not going to be intimidated by what I thought of as a crew of suburban lawn-chair salesmen.

 I just told them to knock it off. In the wake of 9/11 I was going to add, “With everything that’s going on in the world, you really want to throw peanut shells?” 

But once again, before I could get those words out of my mouth, the loudest yukker asked me, “With everything that’s going on in the world, you really care about a few peanut shells?” 

I wasn’t quite speechless. I did reply, “Yes, I do. Knock it off.” And the shelling did stop. But I was, nevertheless, astonished. It’s hard today, in the midst of severe national division, to recreate the feeling of nineteen years ago when so many people felt that we were in something together. (It’s odd, too, given the fact that COVID-19 has killed a hundred times as many Americans as those hijackers did.) But I remember people saying that nothing would ever be the same, that we would never take each other for granted. I guess they were also saying, though, that we would never again allow ourselves to get preoccupied with minutia. I guess those drunks thought chucking peanut shells at a stranger was minutia.

There is a lesson buried in here. For now, these are just morning memories.

Afterword on memory: I would have sworn that the Giants played the Steelers that Sunday. I would have sworn the game went into overtime. A quick look at the Giants schedule for 2001 tells me that they never played the Steelers that season and that no game went into overtime. The schedule tells me that we must have been at an October 7 game against Washington, when the score was tied 9-9 after three quarters. I’m still pretty certain about the rest of it.