All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Eleven angry men.

When you think about the Kavanaugh nomination, you really need to step back and see the full picture. Sure, stopping the nomination is crucial, and it’s perhaps fortunate that he planted the seeds of his own self-destruction decades ago, long before his tenure as a hyperpolitical operative in the Republican Party. (Honestly, the guy is like the Zelig of American conservatism, working on the Star investigation, researching Vince Foster, participating in the “Brooks Brothers Riot” during the Florida recount, and on from there.) But if his nomination fails, they will attempt to fill the slot quite quickly with a much more boring, just as reactionary judge capable of serving multiple decades on the Supreme Court. So … why not just withdraw this troubled judge?

Well, HE seems nice.My guess is that they’re clinging to this one because Kavanaugh has proven to be such a reliable operative, and because he has a freakishly expansive view of executive power and privilege. (He apparently developed that during his stints in the W. Bush administration.) It’s hard to be certain of their reasoning, but their overarching motivations are quite clear. They want this seat and they want it now. The GOP has been working on this project for decades, taking an already conservative  court steadily to the right since Nixon’s days in power. A solid reactionary majority is the right’s insurance policy; it’s their trump card, no pun intended.

Consider the Republican party’s position. They remain, in essence, the party of white men. As this becomes less and less a nation of white men, it is an imperative for them to stave off the inevitable erosion of their voter base. The Senate is not so much of a problem, as a distinctly regional party can dominate that body given that party’s geographic distribution (e.g. Wyoming’s Senate delegation is  equal to California’s, even though the latter state is 70 times the size of the former in terms of population). The hyper-partisan GOP gerrymandering of the House in 2010 has made that body a lot more like the Senate in terms of representation, but that is a short-term solution for them. And the Presidency? They have lost the popular vote in six out of the last seven elections, so they mostly rely on narrow electoral college victories.

The Supreme Court, on the other hand, is the ultimate arbiter of public policy. With a solid reactionary majority, the GOP will be able to defeat progressive policies long after the party can no longer dominate electoral politics. So there’s much at stake in the coming days for those eleven angry white men on the Judiciary Committee …. much more than the problematic optics of the Kavanaugh hearing.

Elections matter, people. We need to take the Court seriously.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

New step.

Huh. Never saw THAT one before. Do that again, Anti Lincoln. Wow. Are you sure that was developed in the 1850s? It looks a little post modern to me.

Ah, readers. Greetings. Here’s a handy tip: You know you have waaaay too much time on your hands when you spend a perfectly good afternoon listening to the antimatter 16th president explain that po-mo was invented by General McClellan. For chrissake … everybody knows it didn’t emerge until the later on in the Grant administration. I’ll tell you, in Anti Lincoln’s tiny mind, history is a total confidence game. If he were the actual Great Emancipator (or Posi-Lincoln, as it were), he would understand the importance of history. Posi-Lincoln loved history more than chicken fricassee. (And he loved chicken fricassee.)

We’re still in songwriting mode over here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York. Every day I pick up my superannuated acoustic guitar and start strumming the five chords I learned as a teenager, hoping to coax another number out of them. How many possible combinations are there? I’m going to find out! Note: if you know the answer to this eternal question, put it in the comments. I’m sure it involves some kind of advanced mathematical calculation that is considerably beyond my ken. Though why I’m always asking Ken to figure stuff out for me I don’t know.

Is that a trombone, man?Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.

The rest is history, folks. You can read all about it right here. Now, back to that new dance step. And a one, and a two …

Political Rants

Second chances.

I come from the land of second chances, so the current Kavanaugh saga has a distinctly familiar ring to it. Mind you, I have not benefited from the level of privilege that Judge K has enjoyed his whole life through, but close enough. I grew up in what was described once as a “rock-ribbed Republican” town in upstate New York, virtually all white residents, lots of professionals and rich folk as well as middle class, borderline working class. It’s the kind of place where you have to fuck up pretty badly before it affects you in any serious way. Underage drinking, drug use, and other low-level criminality were widespread. Arrests were not unheard of, but rare, and the impact of these brushes with the law were almost never life-changing.

Right down the street, in the heart of the city, people of color face a far different reality. Their opportunities for advancement are severely constrained, and when something goes wrong, it’s either life-changing or life-ending. I think about kids like Hector McClain, who at 16 was sent to prison for four years because he failed to stop two other teens from beating a Utica, NY police officer. Here’s an excerpt of a press report about his trial:

As he was sentenced today, McClain acknowledged what he did was wrong. But McClain went on to defend his actions by saying he feared that his friends were going to be hurt by the officer.

“I only did it to make sure they were OK,” McClain said. “If you care about somebody, you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep them safe.” McClain added, “Nobody sees it the way I see it, know what I’m saying?”

Judge Dwyer said he understood McClain’s perspective to an extent, but still pointed out the flaw in McClain’s thinking. “This wasn’t just somebody on the street — this was a police officer,” Dwyer said.

McClain replied, “I’m not saying my actions were right. I know they were wrong. I’m not a dummy … But I’m still going to protect them no matter what.” Then Dwyer interjected, “You could have protected them better by stopping the incident.”

As the sentencing ended, McClain said, “I’ll just change my life around as soon as I get out.”

“You have to learn from your mistakes … so we don’t have to go through this ever again,” Dwyer said.  (Utica Observer-Dispatch, April 1, 2008)

Four years in prison, for a sixteen-year-old African-American kid. No mulligans for him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the track, white teens like me (a generation removed) commit felonies (albeit vacuous ones) in the shelter of their tony homes, where police patrols are tasked with keeping kids like McClain out, not hauling kids like me and Kavanaugh in. Our mistakes tend not to follow us like a malevolent cloud for the rest of our lives. When you couple that with the generations of advantages our families enjoyed – access to remunerative professions, mortgage assistance denied to black families, ingress into neighborhoods from which people of color were barred, and decades of building wealth – you begin to understand apartheid American-style.

Don’t feel sorry for Kavanaugh. Even if he’s held somewhat accountable and denied a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court, he’ll be just fine.

luv u,

jp