The Weak Dictator DeSantis

 

I keep thinking I want to write something about Desantis (because he is uniquely awful as a 2024 GOP candidate and as a governor) but it just always feels like there is more Trump news. It's hard for even a dedicated, intentional troll to maintain headlines of any kind when your primary opponent is a) a former president and b) keeps getting indicted and stuff. So, in the midst of avoiding writing yet another damn TrumpWorld post, I thought I'd just catch up with Ron. 

Trump likes to tout that he's rising in the 2024 polls, but it's more the case that DeSantis, his nearest competitor, has fallen and possibly can't get up. The Florida governor's campaign "reset" just saw his campaign manager replaced with his state COS. He fired about a third of his campaign staff, but some campaign aides got jobs working for his state office.  

Some of his aides must have really shown quite the work ethic. His campaign does feel like it's chock-full of hustlers. 

Don't Know Much About History

 

WATCH >> Ron DeSantis defends new curriculum that will teach children how slaves *benefited* from slavery.

"They're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into, into doing things later in life." pic.twitter.com/Ls1wyk3tr4

— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) July 22, 2023

They parlayed: only AFTER SLAVERY ENDED WHICH WAS NOT A GUARANTEE! Generations of unpaid skilled workers labored under the yoke of slavery incapable of seeking other opportunities because they were not treated as people, but property, with little post-slavery option outside of running for it and possible death or recapture. In the meanwhile, they were denied literacy, they were in a segregated church, they had their families sold away from them, they were heritable to other members of their owners' families.  (No, stop everything and read about slave law.)

And they could be abused to within an inch of their lives or past it including sexual abuse. They were used in medical experiments. They were believed to be less capable of pain, a belief that persists in medical practice sometimes even today. They made a straight face in front of white people to preserve their dignity before God and others. 

This Is the Modern GOP

 

The 26 Republicans who refused to denounce white supremacy
1. James Comer
2. Jim Jordan
3. Mike Turner
4. Paul Gosar
5. Virginia Foxx
6. Glenn Grothman
7. Gary Palmer
8. Clay Higgins
9. Pete Sessions
10. Andy Biggs
11. Nancy Mace
12. Jake LaTurner
13. Pat Fallon
14. Byron Donalds pic.twitter.com/mlcvE9rPsM

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 8, 2023

The next time someone hits you with how the Democratic party was a part of segregation or slavery or the Klan some long time ago, here is your answer: the GOP right now can't say "Boo" with respects to their racists. They see calling out white supremacy or the great replacement theory as a trap. Given the easy opportunity to denounce white supremacy, they did not. Given the opportunity to denounce replacement theory they could not. 

Flying at Dusk

 

Chris Hayes on "The 1776 Report:"

It "reads like a sophomore year term paper by Stephen Miller, using images of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln while defending America's founding on slavery." https://t.co/BYdQCTHpxP

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 19, 2021

Let me start first with a joke: 

What is the difference between a cat and the 1776 Project?

A cat will cover its turds with sand. The 1776  Project covers the sands of time with its turds.

I'm not an historian, but the job of history is viewing facts in context, not propaganda. The short work, about a quarter of it plagiarized according to a professor who ran the thing through turnitin.com, seems to be the rejoinder to every Twitter thread conservative pundits lost to actual historians written in the key of "my mother says you're all just jealous." Re-centering white narratives via an apologetics to counter a factual narrative that does not center them and releasing the wad of centrifuged Bircherism on MLK Day feels like the twilight activity of furtive loners with damp hands rather than a dry-eyed reassessment of good historical practices.

If I sound snarky, it's because this project, along with the peculiar "National Garden of American Heroes" nonsense (it's a long list of names leading me to believe the statuary will, perforce, be a collection of action figures in a very big case) is symbolism over substance coming from the sort of people who would take an oath to the flag over an oath to the Constitution. It's re-soldering the heads of decapitated bronzes to mend hurt feelings. The problem with American history isn't slavery or inequality, it demands--it's the people who point out there are problems! 

When I see folks who seem to believe that there's too many books and not enough statues, I get the impression they will burn the former while putting up the latter. The demand for enshrining men and events so as not to get a better look at them is to convert them into a kind of national religion that won't stand for blasphemers. I have never liked the smell of that sort of thing.

I myself don't want to burn the 1776 Project, except to torch it figuratively, hence the snark. I just want to put out there that the Midases who are gilding all these statues have asses' ears. 

As a side note: this is more or less what students in some places are getting right now, anyway.

The 2020 and Beyond Project

After criticizing the "1619 Project," a "New York Times" project exploring slavery's legacy, Pres. Trump says he will sign an executive order establishing commission "to promote patriotic education. It will be called the '1776 Commission.'" https://t.co/JsAo4rBy2e pic.twitter.com/Cw6o7qH994

— ABC News (@ABC) September 17, 2020

The 1619 Project is a work of journalism showing the throughline of race relations from slavery to the present in the US. It's not a curriculum or a hitjob on the American experiment, but rather a reconciling of the parts of history that aren't emphasized and the stories of those who were unstoried. The kneejerk assumption that this counternarrative is meant to indoctrinate rather than supplement the history people already are taught seems to me to be rooted in an ideology that doesn't concern itself with historical facts qua facts, but sees the narrative of history as being about the "winners", as if history was a zero-sum game where one story needs to gain prominence and others need to be denied breath. And if some other story exists, then?

Mike Pompeo is Racist or Dumb or Both.

The @NYTimes’s 1619 Project wants you to believe our country was founded for human bondage. What a dark vision of America’s birth. What a disturbed reading of history. What a slander on our great people. pic.twitter.com/s24rA3C3m8

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) July 16, 2020

I think that there is certainly substance in the idea that the US was founded on the concept of certain unalienable rights, but if we're going to maintain that it's the government's job to protect those rights, it's actually awfully hard to square the ideas of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" with the privations of bondage slavery, which is the actual point of the 1619 Project. The revolution that liberated the colonies didn't liberate enslaved people. The ideals the nation was based on weren't extended to everyone. And Pompeo considers some human rights more worthy of defense than others.

Like private property rights, which is kind of problematic. And religious freedom. It's not funny that those two are particularly favored, or that certain others he considers to be "diluting" those primary rights are not by him specifically enumerated. I think if the United States is capable of noting that human trafficking is a terrible crime in the present moment, and at odds with out highest ideals, then it should be no great hurdle to acknowledge that human beings were sold here and owned here and it was at odds with our highest ideals, and we as a nation didn't live up to them for a good long while, nor have we fully dealt with what proves to be an ongoing struggle for the law to do what it should: protect everyone's unalienable rights.

Where is the slander? Slavery was a fact of life in the early days of this country. It was such a part of our economic beginnings that every schoolchild has been shown, matter-of-factly, a chart showing the "triangular trade" to this hemisphere which included human bodies as a negotiable good. In housing, in income, in benefits, in criminal and social justice, there are still racial disparities that serve as a legacy of this factual history. Not wanting these things to be true isn't erased by denying that history, but by working to fix it in the here and now.

And when he says "our great people", what does he mean by "our"? Who does that include--or exclude?

Pompeo has spoken volumes, but he has, I'm afraid, spoken more to his own ignorance, than to any other purpose.

Keeping the Confederate in Christmas

You know, I like to think of myself as a current events blogger, and so, I guess I'll start with what brought me to this really weird place, which is that Wake Forest cancelled their Christmas parade because people were going to protest the Confederacy floats. 

You can't have Christmas without those Confederacy floats, you know. If Antifa, Yankees in general,  or the revenuers show up, there goes Christmas. You take out the Daughters of the Confederacy and their world-famous pecan pies and Santa Claus and the Baby Jesus will boycott, and you can't have that. You are basically the Grinch that stole Dixie Christmas. (No shade to Christmas in Dixie, which gives shout outs to Chicago and California, and Motown and is basically blameless here. As far as I know.)

I did not know, because I am Northeast Philadelphia born and bred, that Confederate Christmas was a thing. I had no idea that a rich Christmas lost and found cause thing was going on.  This eerily intrigues me.  A revanchist memory capped with holly and ivy and associated with family and religion and good works might blot out the dark truth at the core of that society--if no one ever pointed out that it came to no good and the fight wasn't noble at all. It was beastly. As a nation, we should be looking back in horror, not with mistletoe and eggnog. What the entire fuck?

Anyway, we are still living with inequality born out of the enshrinement of racism that is still respected by jusqu'au bouters who believe that toppling bronze monuments raised in the 1950s and 1960s that celebrate a war of treason in defense of slavery over 150 years since Appomattox is somehow too soon.  

I have never felt like I had a war against Christmas (this is not a real thing, but people may have been conditioned to believe by umpty-gazillion movies or tv shows where Christmas had to be "saved" for some reason followed by Fox News conditioning) even if I have a war against Bad Christmas Muzak (which IMHO amounts to psyops against retail workers, thanks!) But making Christmas a signifying thing about a bloody Civil War?

I just don't know you guys. That's kind of weird. Maybe more "Peace on earth goodwill to men" and less "brother against brother" is how I think of Christmas? But I guess happy holidays anyway. 

Cindy Hyde-Smith is Unreconstructed

There is a part of me that wants to understand the politics of the Deep South and how it would create a Confederate-signifying politician along the lines of Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith--why it might not occur to her that strongly advocating, for example, on behalf of Confederate vets and monuments there-of, wasn't necessarily a great look.

There is another part of me that entirely gets it, having lived the last forty-six years. I am not too young to know Reagan launched his candidacy for president against a gentle evangelist of the New South in Neshoba County just this close to Philadephia, Mississippi. And he extolled "state's rights"--which I guess and assume to this day means the rights of Brian Kemp to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Georgians and invalidate some number of votes and turn people aside from easily voting because of voting machines that were not available for a value of available that means installed in an accessible voting location.

If someone was looking to capture the South on behalf of the one-time party of Lincoln, Reagan sorted out the means so to do. And Cindy Hyde-Smith, having come up in a segregated private high school (and sent her kid to one), knew exactly the footsteps to follow in: if Reagan was once a Democrat whose party had left him, she, a former Democrat, understood that the Democratic Party had also left her (as in, we would not still have an unreconstructed Confederate, I guess).

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Well, Georgia still has me upset, and Florida could make anyone lose their rest, and as for Mississippi?

Goddamn! There are lines for absentee ballots, for a runoff, which is amazing to see.

"Mississippi Voters Wait in Line to Vote Absentee for Senate" by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via NYT https://t.co/JRH9sSwfn6

— Hellen Gehris (@hellengehr) November 24, 2018

Mississippi, look forward, not back.

Peggy Noonan: "Shonda"

It's a shame, Peggy Noonan asserts, that the National Cathedral doesn't choose to continue celebrating the people who rebelled against the US government in favor of slavery because they were pretty great...gentiles or something. Because when the Civil War was finished, we supposedly fixed racism.

I think she might be missing a few chapters here. Like Jim Crow and segregation and stuff. But I really feel uncomfortable about her slipping "shande" in here. (It just doesn't feel like her word to use--it's a shame people held slaves and were ready to tear a country apart over it. It's a shame--but the way Yiddish uses "shande" is different.)

White Supremacist apologia is just weird. But she just made it weirder. Confederates being killed or willing to be killed didn't make them right. It made them just as wrong, but traitors. We need to abandon the hagiography of the lost cause. They were wrong. They stay wrong. Their privations on the way to being defeated did not sanctify their cause, because the cause of enslavement is always wrong. We can do away with the monuments to their wrongness, and just read in history books that they lost and were wrong.

It would more than suffice.

The Civil War Should be About Gay Marriage Now, For Reasons

Strangely Blogged has never awarded any prizes for stupid, because, in a way, I cover the politics front, stupid is my beat. But I am breaking down and awarding the "Stupidest of the Day" award to Wisconsin's own Glenn Grothman, Bryan Fischer doppelganger and all-around schnook, who provided the actually dumbest protestation against marriage equality imaginable--because the Civil War, that's why.

“In the Civil War, some 600,000 people died in a country that was much less populated than that today, and it was a much more religious country,” the lawmaker said. “I think a lot of people who died fighting in that war felt they died fighting for a religious cause — you know, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and all that.”

As former slave states debate whether to remove the Confederate battle flag from government buildings, Grothman said Union troops would find the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling “particularly offensive” to their religious beliefs.

“I think it would shock those people who died in that war to find out the constitutional amendment which was ratified kind of as a culmination of their great efforts and their great deaths would be, 150 years later, a little less than 150 years later, used by these five robed, arrogant, robed people to take this constitutional amendment and say that that constitutional amendment that was drafted after the Civil War was in fact an amendment designed to say that same-sex marriage had to be legal,” Grothman said.

The All-American Girl Without Citizenship

Alecia Pennington, the young woman in the video posted above, has no way to document that she is a US citizen.  That's because it's the way her parents want it. This really sounds an awful lot to me like part of the very creepy "stay-at-home-girls" movement, where a girl is basically a part of her father's household and under his will until she is "given" in marriage to a suitable man. It's basically like Saudi Arabia without the veil. Without the ability to prove her citizenship, Alecia can't drive, vote, get a job or live a normal adult life. Her parents' exercise of their religion has basically left her like a guest-worker with a stolen passport in her own country--a slave to their intentions.

I was shocked to read that this kind of identification abuse is not that rare, and is viewed by some parents as being within their rights, because they view their children as property. That same kind of "ownership mentality" is revealed in anti-vaxxer parents (I would not be surprised if there was some considerable overlap, there). This is a prime example, though, of where so-called "religious freedom" has to stop--when the exercise actually impairs another person's freedom. It also shows how distrust of government in such "off-the-grid" households creates a disconnect from participation in the world--how "American" is it to raise children who can't prove they really are Americans?

Not Understanding Boko Haram

One can't help but notice a discrepancy between the attention paid to the attacks in Paris that have led to the deaths of 17, to the blaze of terror that has led to the slaying of up to 2000 people in Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram. I'm guilty enough of failing to address the attacks that have levelled Baga and caused havoc in several other towns over the weekend.

The problem is complexity. The Paris story regarding the murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine and others has a familiarity and scale that I can grasp. The issues regarding deciding what to print and publish versus the reality that there are people who would very much like to curtail that freedom absolutely and remove that ability to choose how one uses ones voice is something I can find a fast position with. The scale of the tragedy is not dissimilar to mass shootings that have occurred here in the States, or in Canada or Australia recently. France, as with the US, is a majority Christian and white nation, where the Enlightenment traditions regarding freedom of speech, religion, and the press, have coincided with a history of colonialism that I feel competent to address in the microcosm.

The enormity of the scale of the Boko Haram attacks, (about which no true numbers can be found, because the people on scene have simply despaired of counting all the bodies, and because the government of Nigeria does not seem interested in the real numbers), is orders of magnitude greater, and coexistent with a more profound history of colonialism and without our little Western era of Enlightenment. In fact, Boko Haram, in name, is saying that Western Education--our Enlightenment concepts of science, liberalism, freedom, are forbidden.

Malala Yousefzai Wins Nobel Prize

She is the youngest winner of the prize, and she's basically a boss. Her co-winner, Kailash Satyarthi, has helped save tens of thousands of children from a life of slavery and exploitation. His long-time advocacy against child labor in favor of children's education as a way out of poverty is complementary to Yousefzai's example. I think these choices are very fitting, because it needs to be understood that the best way to create a space for peace in the future is to make safe spaces for children to become the people they are meant to be--to know something about the world they will grow up to help create and to be free to make the best of it.

In a world where too many children are exposed to the horrors of war, abuse, and grinding poverty and labor, and are not well-enough exposed to a good education, sometimes not even good nutrition or basic sanitation,  I realize that the failure to give them a reasonable hope of a good future is what condemns them to a fearful life and people in developed nations to fear what they might become. Because even without a good education, children learn from what they see. If exposed to ignorance and hopelessness and superstition and hate--that's what they will know.

And that is what they will practice.

But the answer to combatting all that is so simple--books and pens and paper and attention and a dialog that gets opened up between a developing mind and everything that might be possible.  Here's to two very good examples of people working towards heading future generations in the right direction. You are doing it right.

George Will Just Seems Extra-Insufferable Lately

I've commented on George Will before, but usually having to do with climate change--his denialism, for a supposedly smart person, is tiresome in its sheer repetitive belief that science somehow works like politics does. But to be pretty honest, on any forum he's been on, he has a habit of talking down as if he's a guy who knows things, so listen to his plausible bullshit, okay?

I think of it as "Willsplaining" for obvious reasons.

So I shrugged off his kind of "Hey, kid president, get off my White House lawn"  column of a few weeks back because--why yes, I did think it was pretty insulting to basically call the president childish, but on the other hand, I don't yet know what it's like to have a president who is younger than me, and I guess that might feel weird, huh? I mean, if Marco Rubio became president, he'd still be a whole year and a half older than me.  Maybe that is kind of a mindscrew. Who is this punk who uses the slang and has smoked the marijuana and thinks he is the boss of the country anyway, the whippersnapper? It's a generation gap thing. Maybe Will can't, like, relate.

But this thing here about putting down hashtag activism is pretty awkward in more than a few ways:

CHRIS WALLACE: I want to turn back to the kidnapping, the terrible kidnapping of these Nigerian schoolgirls in the little bit of time we have left in this segment. Because this week Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai joined the Bring Back Our Girls movement. More than 2 million people have now tweeted the hash tag. And George, I'm just curious. Because I'm not saying I was that familiar with this phenomenon. It's even got a name, #activism. And I'm curious what you make of it. Do you think that this is significant and helpful? And can make progress? Or do you think it's really about helping the people who tweet the hash tag feel better about themselves? 

GEORGE WILL: Exactly that. It's an exercise in self-esteem. I do not know how adults stand there facing a camera and say, bring back our girls. Are these barbarians in the wild of Nigeria are supposed to check their Twitter accounts and say, oh, Michelle Obama is very crossed with us, we better change our behavior. 

WALLACE: It's trending on Twitter. 

WILL: Power is the ability to achieve intended effects. And this is not intended to have any effect on the real world. It's a little bit like environmentalism has become. But the incandescent light bulb becomes the enemy. It has no effect whatever on the planet, but it makes people feel good about themselves.

I Don't Have a Charitable Light for This, Glenn Greenwald.

When I consult even my most cynical side, and I have a very cynical side, there is still no part of me that thinks wanting to intervene on the behalf of a couple hundred adolescent women who might otherwise be sold into the very worst of slavery (because what, after all, does anyone suppose the market is for adolescent girls?) could be anything but appropriately intentioned.

I think a lot of non-interventionism is founded in the sense that nations can and should be responsible to settle their own shit as a kind of test of whether they've earned the stripes of their sovereignty, but it is also true that in the absence of law, atrocities occur. I can't buy an argument that what happens to these young ladies, because it isn't happening in my country, doesn't affect me at all. Those girls palpably affect me. They could be my own daughters, and were they, I would scour the earth and burn the obstacles between myself and my blood. That is not some idealistic sterile "Next Western Intervention". That is a human convention at work under the assertion that the selling of flesh and blood young women into a life of rape is disgusting. We might not be able to recover all the girls ever sold into bondage by barbarous straits, but we can do something, maybe, I hope, about these.

Although as an aside, I am not keen on the allegation that that our US State Dept had a duty to preempt anything of this sort. That, I think, is the real invitation to get things wrong. But now that we have this group of terrorists and kidnappers in an admitted wide scale plot, I am greatly in favor of sparing them in no regard in the hopes of recovering these lost girls.

Martin Bashir Said a Bad, Bad Thing, Then Left

Apparently, one of the ways to be too controversial for MSNBC is to imply that Sarah Palin should eat shit, no matter how many people may have said this to themselves, privately or among friends, one time or another. I don't believe Martin Bashir literally meant that she should eat shit. I'm reasonably sure that when he tried to describe the brutal and dehumanizing conditions that would result in a slaveholder thinking nothing of bidding one of the people he owned to defecate in the mouth of another, who had previously been lashed and had salt and pickle rubbled into his wounds, he was trying to paint a picture. He was attempting to show a side of slavery so incredible and appalling that the realization that it was not comparable to the national debt at all would descend with crystal clarity.

The point was that no one should ever be compelled to eat shit, and that it should have been unthinkable that this happened to any human being--that by not comprehending that the enormity of such degradation, occurring to millions of people, over centuries, was nothing like people maybe having to pay a little more taxes--Sarah Palin was shrugging off that reality. She was, figuratively, if you will, shitting on the memory of people who died in chains, or from the lash, or were hunted down with dogs. She was belittling the suffering of families uprooted and torn apart, people kept in ignorance and shame, people whose existence from birth was one of bondage, hard labor, and pain.

He could have done it differently, but the thing he missed entirely is realizing that it's a mistake to try to penetrate that kind of lack of empathy at all. By trying to, momentarily, have her make the mental step into that place, where she was subject to Darby's Dose, he made her a victim.

She doesn't need his help to feel victimized. And she can't use the insight. All his "lesson" did was make many people mad at him. So he had to resign. This should serve as a good demonstration of how not to address a foolish thing said by someone whose business is saying those things. His business is not saying foolish things--or even wise things in a foolish way. Yes--that does sound like there are two sets of standards. It is what it is.

Two quick ones about the Massey mine disaster,

The first is a Tweet from a spokestool from ALEC,



(h/t to The Political Carnival.)

So, let me get this straight, a widow recently bereaved decides to sue a company that is notorious for safety violations and this goof says, "Oh, it's 'free money'."

Sorry, um, I'm counting the loss of a life-partner and breadwinner as a "price paid". I don't actually see that as "free". And I would bet that hardly anyone would choose a big payday at the risk of their beloved. That is simply cold-blooded. But that is very revealing in terms of the way some pro-corporate minds work. In his mental ledger, the death of the worker is more of a nuisance to his employer than to his spouse, since Massey now has to replace him and bother will all this paperwork--let alone deal with with some legal nonsense. Implied: "She should take whatever the going rate for dead husbands is and stop haggling!"




Another story is this piece on Don Blankenship from Businessweek that has one detail about his dealings with a former housekeeper that only reinforces my impression that he has an "ownership" mentality towards people in his employ.

Blankenship, his opponents and supporters agree, simply has to get his way. Nothing illustrates this better than his fight with a maid earning $8.86 an hour. In 2001, Deborah May started working for Mate Creek Security, a company "related to Massey Energy," according to court documents. When Mate Creek assigned her to work for Blankenship, according to the documents, May cleaned his three-story home, shopped, and did laundry. By 2005 she was also cleaning a bus, two cabins, and a mansion in Kentucky. She received one 30 cents hourly raise. After Blankenship said she would also have to care for a "German police dog," according to the documents, she quit.

In November 2005, May applied for unemployment benefits, saying she was forced to leave the job. The state denied her claim, concluding she quit for no reason. In June 2008, West Virginia's top court reversed the state's denial of benefits. Two of the court's justices said "the unrefuted evidence" showed that Blankenship "physically grabbed" the maid, threw food after she brought back the wrong fast-food order, and tore a tie rack and coat hanger out of a closet after she forgot to leave the hanger out for his coat. "This shocking conduct" showed May was in effect fired because she felt compelled to quit, the justices said. They said the conduct was "reminiscent of slavery and is an affront to common decency."

Perfectly disgraceful. But it does reveal a disrespect for persons, and a unique sense of his relationship to people "beneath" him.