Category: politics

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politics

From Tahrir Square to Kenosha, Wisconsin

On February 2, 2011, as thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to protest the three-decades-long regime of President Hosni Mubarak, men with swords, whips, clubs, stones, rocks, and pocket knives rode camels and horses into the crowd and throughout the rest of central Cairo, attacking civilians and killing nearly a dozen of them in the process.

The “Battle of the Camel” came after more than a week of protest. In the days and hours before the attack, police began to disappear from the streets of Cairo and armed vigilantes set up checkpoints to ward off potential criminals.

In Tahrir Square, families picnicked, young people played instruments, and protestors chanted anti-Mubarak slogans.

Then the men on camels attacked.

A man riding a camel and wielding a stick rides through a crowd in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt
Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Later, following the fall of Mubarak, twenty-four former government officials were charged with manslaughter and attempted murder for allegedly sending the men on camels into the city and telling them to “kill the protestors if they had to.” An Egyptian court, however, acquitted all of the officials of any wrongdoing and refused the prosecutor’s attempts at an appeal, calling the state’s witnesses unreliable and evidence against the officials weak.

While investigators found that the mounted attackers were ordered into the square by government officials loyal to Mubarak, the camel riders themselves claimed to be “good men” who were trying to safeguard their jobs and reopen Cairo to tourists. “Look at us here,” one of them told a reporter, “we are poor, we have horses and camels to feed, we have no money. But we are good people. You don’t see houses and shops burned or with their windows broken [in our neighborhood].”

Flash forward nine years and move west to the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin. On Sunday evening, August 22nd, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a black man, seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. The shooting occurred in front of Blake’s three children and was also caught on camera by a civilian across the street.

With the United States reeling from video footage of repeated police shootings and killings of unarmed black citizens, the Blake incident set off another storm of protests, lootings, and fires in a yet another American city.

The following day, the governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers (Democrat), ordered 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard to reestablish peace in the city, but that night, hundreds of demonstrators defied the temporary curfew of 8 pm and marched through Kenosha. Police fired tear gas into the crowd, and the protestors responded by throwing water bottles and lighting off fireworks near the line of officers. Someone burned down a furniture store, while others knocked over lampposts. Windows were smashed. Dump trucks burned.

More protests followed. On Tuesday, Gov. Evers requested more National Guard members, and counter-protesters started arriving “to protect the buildings.”

One of those counter-protestors was a 17-year-old boy from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse. Like many of the counter-protestors, Rittenhouse arrived in Kenosha with a gun: an AR-15 style rifle. He would claim in a video taken before the night’s fatal incidents that he was in Kenosha “to protect this business and…part of my job is if somebody’s hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, to protect myself obviously. I’ve also got my med kit.”

Throughout the night, Rittenhouse would be put on camera several times. He was involved in a confrontation between protestors and counter-protestors near a gas station; he claimed to have been pepper-sprayed in the face by a protestor; he was among the people at a car dealership whom were thanked by law enforcement officers for showing up on the streets of the city with rifles and whom received water from the officers as well.

At 11:48 pm, gunshots rang out in Kenosha. Video captured Rittenhouse making a phone call and then fleeing the scene, calling out to someone, “I’ve shot somebody.” As he ran, the crowd started to give chase. Someone in a white shirt caught up to him and threw a weak punch at the side of his head. He fell to the ground, and as members of the crowd came closer, he raised his rifle and began to shoot.

The footage of the event (see link above) clearly captures the damage done by his shots.

The crowd fled, and Rittenhouse stood up and walked quickly towards a line of police officers with his hands up. Despite leaving bodies in the street behind him and the crowd yelling to the officers, “That dude just shot someone right here,” Rittenhouse walked past the police officers and, somehow, was able to sleep in his own bed that night.

In both Tahrir Square and Kenosha, deadly violence came not from protestors seeking a change, but from counter-protestors loyal to the status quo.

Hopefully, Rittenhouse won’t be acquitted of the six criminal charges the state has levied against him, but in a country where the criminal justice system is so obviously rigged against the interests of black America, I’m not sure I have enough hope for that.

Categories
life politics

My Daughter’s Confederate Heritage

On July 18th, 1861, roughly three months after the outbreak of the American Civil War, my daughter’s great-great-great grandfather on her mother’s mother’s side, John Morgan Wages, enlisted in the 6th Regiment of the Arkansas Cavalry at the age of 16 years old to fight on the side of the Confederacy.

According to his enlistment papers, Morgan was 5’6” tall with fair complexion, blue eyes, and light hair, and prior to enlisting, he worked as a farmer.

Just a year prior, his father, Lemuel Wages, purchased “forty-six acres and twenty four-hundredths of an acre” of public land in Arkansas from the Federal government. While I haven’t found any record of Lemuel or his father, William, owning slaves, I did find a record in the 1810 U.S. Federal Census that Morgan’s great-grandfather, Dawson Wages, owned four slaves back when the family lived in Richland County, South Carolina.

I don’t know if Morgan fought for the Confederacy because he believed in white supremacy, or if he was “defending” his family’s land, or if he was “defending” his family’s property (i.e., slaves), but I do know he served as part of the Company G (the Ouachita Cavalry) and fought “for the Confederacy east of the Mississippi River.” After fighting for a year, he reenlisted in July 1862. 

Three months later, in October 1862, at the Battle of Corinth, a critical rail junction in northern Mississippi, Morgan was either “severely” or “slightly” wounded in the head (a handwritten note says “severely,” but a typed note of the list of casualties from the battle says “wounded slightly”). Morgan is listed as “Absent” on the next two company musters and disappears from the Confederate record after December 1862.

However, his name shows up again in the military record on November 25, 1863, when he enlists in Lewisburg, Arkansas, for a three-year stint as a private with Company B of the 3rd Regiment Arkansas Cavalry, fighting on behalf of the Union. Interestingly enough, the first time his name appears in the record for signing with the Union cavalry, there’s a note that reads, “Have no horse.”

I don’t know why Morgan switched sides, but many went where the wages were (no pun intended). Morgan would stay with the Union regiment for the next year and a half, fighting as part of the Camden Expedition, which was the final campaign against the Confederate Army in Arkansas (and it was wildly unsuccessful). 

In the June of 1865, there’s a remark on Morgan’s record that reads:

Stop for ordinance retained $8.00 + in confinement awaiting sentence of court martial since May 13, 1865. 

I could not find any more information on why he was courtmartialed, but he was mustered out of the regiment on June 30th, 1865. I’m assuming he wasn’t dishonorably discharged because he would collect a pension until his death, and his widow, Alcesta Wages (formerly Brazil), would continue to collect until her death in 1917.

After the war, Morgan made his living as a farmer in the Behestian or Red Hill townships in Ouachita County (according to the 1880 Census, anyway). He and Alcesta would get married in 1870 in Camden, Arkansas, and go on to have nine children (six boys and three girls [two of the latter died before the age of 1]).

I lose track of Morgan after the 1880 Census. Other family-tree researchers have his death listed as April 19th, 1892 in Edmond, West Virginia.

His wife’s grave can be found in the Scotland Presbyterian Cemetery in Scotland, Arkansas, but she’s buried with their son’s wife, not with her husband, so I don’t yet have a reliable record of his death.

All of which is to say that I have proof that my daughter directly owes her life, at least in part, to the slave economy and the fight for white supremacy.

Categories
life politics

What Makes Me White

All of my ancestors, according to my DNA, are from northwestern Europe. Most of them were Irish, a little over a quarter of them were English or Welsh, a little under a fifth of them were French, and about 3% of them were Swedish or Dutch.

But that’s not what makes me white.

Many African peoples, when northwestern Europeans first returned to the mother continent, referred to them not as “white people” or “fair-skinned people,” but as mzungu, which translates as “wanderer.”

So it’s not my skin’s contrast to theirs that makes me white.

My skin’s pigmentation is a product of my evolutionary chain. Its genetic heritage can (currently) be traced back to roughly 7,700 years ago, when at least seven individuals in southern Sweden had two gene variants that “lead to depigmentation, and therefore, pale skin” and a third variant, “which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair.” These gene variants were perhaps naturally selected to maximize vitamin D synthesis in the northern latitudes, where it is harder for the human body to get vitamin D thanks to a decrease of ultra-violet radiation in northern sunlight.

But my ancestors’ evolutionary journey into the northern latitudes does not make me white. If it did, the first northern Europeans to reach central Africa wouldn’t have been called mzungu.

What makes me white is the Atlantic slave trade, the belief by a population that would come to define themselves as white that they were more significant, more deserving, more…human than those they defined as not-white.

Race requires racism to exist. It is the excuse the powerful use to justify their power to themselves. It allows them to normalize for themselves their dominance over an entire population.

The first central Africans to see northern Europeans saw a people who were lost, people who were aimlessly moving across the land.

The northern Europeans, on the other hand, saw the central Africans as slaves to be used, as resources to be plucked up and burnt out. The difference in skin pigmentation did not create that difference in power. 

My skin doesn’t make me white. My DNA doesn’t make me white.

The need to justify my population’s social and institutional domination over cohabiting populations makes me white.

“You have to dominate,” my white President told the nation’s governors. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.”

Fuck. That. Guy.

Black Lives Matter.

Categories
politics

Removing a Video from Facebook is Not Censorship

A friend messaged me recently to discuss Plandemic, the 26-minute video that went viral last week due to its conspiracy mongering. My friend didn’t want to discuss the video, per se — he said he knows the idea that “the coronavirus was planned by billionaires to enforce worldwide vaccinations” is nuts — but he was concerned about major social-media companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo preventing people from watching it. 

In a free country, he argued, all ideas — even (and especially) bad ones — should be out in the open for debate and discussion. 

He didn’t get any argument from me, but he did get it (not directly) from the social-media companies. Travis Andrews spoke to them for The Washington Post and learned the companies took the video down because it violated their terms of service. While the legal language is different for each company, the gist is the same: the companies reserve the right to remove a video if it spreads harmful and misleading health information to the public. 

Of course, they weren’t quick enough. Before Facebook could remove the video, it was viewed over 1.8 million times and shared over 150,000 times.

This was not the first viral video to be taken down for violating “community guidelines” around harmful and misleading health information. This NBC News report, for example, focuses on videos by doctors who “downplayed the risk of coronavirus and asserted that stay-at-home measures were unnecessary. They also promoted a conspiracy theory that doctors were falsely attributing unrelated deaths to COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus.” These videos have been watched more than 9 million times. As Matt Taibbi reported, the videos provoked the American Academy of Emergency Physicians and American College of Emergency Physicians to issue a joint statement condemning the videos.

Taibbi’s article, The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here, explores the issue of coronavirus censorship in detail, connecting several dots, including WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, and Tom Brady’s Deflategate, to make this point:

[T]he functional impact…is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

In general, I agree with my friend and with Matt Taibbi. The first donation I ever made as an adult was to the American Civil Liberties Union, and I’ve long told my students that when it comes to the First Amendment, I’m an extremist. 

At the same time, I have no problem with these private companies taking down misleading and harmful videos. Among other things, the First Amendment recognizes the right of Americans to be free from governmental interference of speech, but it doesn’t compel corporations or individuals to follow the same rules. Removing these videos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. does not violate the rights of these citizens. It may reduce the impact of their ideas, but it does not stop them from having or expressing them.

With today’s technology (and access to the computers in public libraries), every individual in the United States is able to record their thoughts, develop their arguments, or post their memes to the Internet, where every node is (by design) equally accessible.

While blocking access to the major social-media networks limits the potential audience, it doesn’t cause any more harm than when someone had a great idea in pre-Industrial Europe and could only post a pamphlet on the door of his local church: Martin Luther’s 95 theses went viral, and he didn’t even have a blue checkmark to help him out.

So yes, while I adamantly support the right of all Americans (all people, really) to express their opinions without fear of retribution from their government(s), I also support the right of private companies to determine their own terms of service (in accordance with their government’s laws). 

The danger is not YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter preventing someone from sharing ideas on their social networks, nor is it the political and social condemnation that comes from airing one’s minority opinions in public (such is life); instead, the danger is a government that silences its critics.

On that front, things don’t look so rosy. 

According to Reporters Sans Borders (RSF), the United States ranks 45th in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, mainly due to “Trump-era hostility.” One item RSF highlights is the placement of an American journalist on the U.S. government’s “kill list.” Another is the U.S. government’s prosecution of whistleblowers. A third condemns the U.S. government’s seizure of a journalist’s phone and email records going back several years. 

If YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter prevent an individual from using their services, that’s their right, but when the U.S. government is the one doing the censoring, then that’s the loss of our right, and we ought to do something about it.

Categories
politics

Biden & The Second Bill of Rights

Back before the midterm elections in November 2018, the former Obama speechwriter and now political podcaster, Jon Favreau, released a 15-episode arc on the history and future of the Democratic party. In the ninth episode of the series, he presented “The Second Bill of Rights,” a “bold, progressive agenda” that he believes would be supported by any self-professed Democrat.

I wrote a blog post about the episode if you’re interested in some of the details, but Favreau’s Second Bill of Rights looks like this:

  • The right to a job.
  • The right to a fair and living wage.
  • The right to exist regardless of one’s ability to work.
  • The right to an education that supports the improvement of one’s lot, regardless of age or income.
  • The right to the best possible healthcare.
  • The right to form a union that advocates for the value of one’s labor.
  • The right to participate in a fair and balanced economy.

With Vice-President Biden as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, I think it makes sense to compare his policy proposals against the “bold, progressive agenda” that Favreau discovered in his survey.

The Right to a Job

Democrats generally agree that every American who wants a job should be guaranteed one through a program inspired by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Managed locally, the program idealized by Democrats would create jobs in “the Care Economy: care for community, care for people, and care for planet.”

During the primary season, Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed a job guarantee, Senators Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand, and Harris co-sponsored a bill in the Senate to create a Job Guarantee pilot program, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal resolution, which is supported by virtually all progressive Democrats and calls for “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”

Vice-President Biden, however, does not support a job guarantee. He told the Washington Post: “As automation continues to grow, it’s possible that down the line we may need to guarantee a job for every American, but we are not there.”

The Right to a Fair & Living Wage

In 2016, the official platform of the Democratic Party included the following:

We should raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over time and index it, give all Americans the ability to join a union regardless of where they work, and create new ways for workers to have power in the economy so every worker can earn at least $15 an hour. … We also support creating one fair wage for all workers by ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and people with disabilities.

While the platform will be revised during the 2020 convention (however it happens during “these uncertain times“), we can rest assured it will include some kind of call for a fair and living wage.

A researcher at M.I.T. put together a Living Wage Calculator that “estimates the cost of food, child care, health care (both insurance premiums and typical health care costs), housing, transportation and other necessities,” and breaks it down further by state and county, since a living wage in Rutland County, Vermont won’t be the same as a living wage in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City.

Vice-President Biden agrees with virtually every other Democrat on this issue. His administration would work to “increase the federal minimum wage to $15 across the country,” but he goes further by supporting “indexing the minimum wage to the median hourly wage” rather than inflation. This would link “the minimum wage to overall conditions in the labor market rather than to the general level of prices” and help reduce America’s income-inequality gap.

The Right to Exist Regardless of One’s Ability to Work

Favreau’s survey found that most Democrats support subsidizing income to provide “a foundation of security under a vast majority of Americans,” first through expanding access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and then through the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Interestingly, one of the first major politicians to support a guaranteed minimum income was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who in 1972 proposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) as a way to replace the benefits of another federal program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was designed to help children whose families had low or no income. Despite passing the House, FAP didn’t make it through the Senate, thanks to an alliance between a group of conservative Democrats and Republicans.

In 1974, Congress passed the EITC, “a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples, particularly those with children.” In tax year 2019, the EITC benefit maxed out at $6,557 for a family with three or more children, provided the family makes less than $55,952 (married, filing jointly).

The thing about the EITC, however, is that the beneficiary has to have at least $1 of earned income (pensions and unemployment don’t count); in other words, they have to work. With a Universal Basic Income policy, every citizen, regardless of their ability to work, is provided with a minimum income that allows them to, in the words of Andrew Yang, UBI’s most visible promoter this primary season, “pick their heads up and plan for the future.”

Vice-President Biden does not support a Universal Basic Income, telling the Post, “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity, your self-respect, and your place in the community. … We must build a future that puts work first.”

The Right to an Education, Regardless of Age or Income

In 2016, Senator Sanders changed the conversation around education in the country by proposing a “College for All” policy that would guarantee tuition and debt-free public colleges, universities, and trade schools to all. He took the policy further by calling for the canceling of all student-loan debt and expanding the federal government’s coverage of non-tuition costs (books, fees, etc.) by expanding Pell grants, tripling Work-Study programs, and more.

For the 2020 election, Senator Warren showed support for such a policy by offering a plan very similar to Bernie’s, canceling student-loan debt for 95% of Americans and making two- and four-year public colleges free for all Americans.

When Favreau conducted his survey in 2018, he learned that most Democrats support “providing every individual — if they have the ability — with a free college education, and erasing the economically-crippling burden of a generation’s worth of student-loan debt.”

Vice-President Biden holds a more conservative position on higher education than Senators Sanders and Warren, but he does take strides towards the Democratic consensus.

The Vice President’s proposal would provide “two years of community college or other high-quality training program without debt for any hard-working individual looking to learn and improve their skills to keep up with the changing nature of work.” In addition, he would “make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000.”

When it comes to the student-loan-debt crisis, he would expand the income-based repayment program to limit student loan payments to 5% of a person’s discretionary income, and those making less than $25,000/year would not have to make any payments on their balance or accrue interest on their loans. If a person made 20 years worth of on-time payments, their loan would be 100% forgiven. In addition, he promises to strengthen the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to make it actually work.

The Right to the Best Possible Healthcare

Polls routinely demonstrate that healthcare is the most important issue for American voters. According to a Politico/Harvard School of Public Health survey taken a month before COVID-19 dominated the country’s attention, the two top issues for American voters of all parties were lowering the cost of health care and lowering prescription drug prices.

Democrats are divided on the best way to achieve these goals. Senators Sanders, Warren, and others support some version of “Medicare for All,” where the goal is to provide universal healthcare for all Americans. In fact, according to the Politico/Harvard survey linked above, 71% of Democrats and 53% of all Americans support “changing the health care system so that all Americans would get health insurance from Medicare.”

Contrary to the desires of more than two-thirds of all Democrats, Vice-President Biden does not support universal, single-payer healthcare. 

Instead, he calls for giving Americans a choice between private insurance companies and a public health-insurance option similar to Medicare. His plan also calls for capping the amount of a family’s contribution to the costs of health insurance to 8.5% of their income and increasing the size of the tax credits to provide “more generous coverage, with lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.”

Unfortunately, all the public option does is “compete against private insurers in our current broken, market-based system, ultimately perpetuating the unequal coverage, underinsurance, and prohibitive out-of-pocket costs we see today.” It reinforces the notion that healthcare is not a human right, but a profit-generating enterprise that capitalists ought to have access to.

When it comes to lowering prescription drug costs, Vice-President Biden’s plan allows the government to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies, opens the border for individuals to purchase drugs from other countries, limits launch prices on drugs with no competitors, locks drug-price increases to the inflation rate, and improves the supply of generic drugs to the market.

Vice-President Biden’s plan supports women by expanding access to contraception, protecting the constitutional right to an abortion, restoring Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and rescinding the gag rule that prevents foreign aid from going to organizations that provide information on abortion services.

The Right to Form a Union that Advocates for the Value of One’s Labor

Favreau’s survey of the Democrats found that a majority of the party supports “making it easier for workers to form a union, penalizing employers who fire the workers who try to start a union, and revoking the ‘right to work’ laws that weaken unions in several of our united states.”

According to Tara Golshan, a political reporter at Vox, while Senators Warren, Sanders, and Harris focused their union messages on “an increasingly progressive working class that didn’t see a champion in either Trump or Clinton in 2016,” Vice-President Biden’s strategy involves winning back the white-union households that voted for President Trump in 2016.

The Vice President’s proposal, which his campaign titles “The Biden Plan for Strengthening Worker Organizing, Collective Bargaining, and Unions,” calls for holding executives personally accountable for interfering with organization efforts and violating labor laws, preventing federal dollars from flowing to corporations that engage in union busting, and penalizing companies that negotiate in bad faith.

The Vice President’s plan also seeks to make it easier for workers to unionize and provides a federal guarantee for public-sector employees to bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions, which several states actively forbid from them doing.

Finally, he promises to create a Cabinet-level working group that focuses solely on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining.

There’s more to the Vice President’s plan, and his campaign proposals are positive on the face of it, but the Vice President has also hosted fundraisers with anti-union lobbyists and supported NAFTA and other union-damaging trade deals. In addition, his paradigm of a union family better fits the unions of his youth (white, working class men) rather the unions of today; in 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that “65.4 percent of workers age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color.”

To its credit, the Vice President’s plan virtually mirrors Senator Sanders’ “Workplace Democracy” plan. Unfortunately, with his historic support of NAFTA and TPP, the Vice President’s reliability on worker protections is still up for debate.

The Right to Participate in a Fair and Balanced Economy

The Democratic party, according to Favreau’s survey, supports “reversing the consolidation of financial power by strengthening and aggressively enforcing federal anti-trust and consumer protection laws.” The party grew this sense of consciousness through the Occupy Wall Street campaign, which popularized the phrase, “We are the 99%.”

Senator Sanders picked up the mantle of this movement in 2016 (having carried it since  entering politics in the 1970s), spreading its message far and wide and bringing to the modern consciousness such concepts as “the billionaire class”. In addition, Senator Sanders incredible ability to stay on message with this topic ensured that everyone who heard him speak between 2016 and 2020 now understood (and agreed) with the basic premise that the goal of America’s policies seems to be “a race to the bottom,” where the jobs that still exist in this country are lower paying with fewer benefits and fewer protections against environmental degradation and workplace dangers, all for the benefit of the capitalists.

The Vice President union-focused policy detailed above is the closest the presumptive nominee gets to discussing “a fair and balanced economy.”

The difference between Vice-President Biden and the progressive agenda is that the Vice President does not vilify the billionaire class, nor does he see Wall Street as working against the interests of Main Street.

He agrees that there are some bad actors, and his proposal calls for holding them personally accountable for acting in bad faith, but he neglects to connect the interests of the billionaire class with the government’s obstructions to progressive action. Put simply, the Vice President is not, in Bernie’s words, ready to “take on corporate America or Wall Street.”

Biden & The Second Bill of Rights

By comparing Vice-President Biden’s “Vision for America” with Favreau’s survey of what members of the Democratic party broadly support, we’ve discovered that the Vice President is exactly where many of us on the left suspected: ready to take incremental steps that, generally speaking, maintain the status quo while also trying to do some good.

His policies align with his message: a vote for Vice President Biden is a vote to return to President Obama’s America. Unfortunately, President Obama’s America does not align with my personal vision for what the country ought to be. Come November, I’ll hold my nose and “Vote Blue No Matter Who” because I agree with every other sensible American that President Trump has to be removed from office, but I wish more Americans recognized that we need to be making a lot more than incremental progress if we’re to survive the environmental, economic, and health-related cataclysms still to come.

Categories
life politics religion & atheism

The Evil One(s) Behind COVID-19

In her classic work, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman shows how people who lived during the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which struck on All Saint’s Day and did particular damage to Lisbon’s many churches, considered the natural disaster to be a true manifestation of evil. Nowadays, we tend to equate evil with human cruelty and earthquakes with plate tectonics, but there are still vestiges of this 18th century way of thinking among us.

We see it in the lessons of the Presidential Cabinet’s Bible study leader who believes the COVID-19 pandemic is a divine punishment for America’s sins of godlessness, environmentalism, homosexuality, and depravity. But we also see it in the widespread urge to scapegoat Asian-Americans for what the President of the United States has repeatedly called “the Chinese Flu,” as well as the spread of conspiracy theories that hold half-a-dozen people or groups accountable for the pandemic, from the financier George Soros to the Democratic Party to 5G technology to the Chinese government to Bill Gates to the Rothschild family.

This need to find a “guilty” party is as old as the species itself, finding its origin in our species’ proclivity to see agency behind every natural phenomena. In his book, The Natural History of Religion, the philosopher David Hume wrote, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.”

Evolutionarily speaking, this instinctual urge to imagine what caused certain phenomena has benefitted us. It allows us to detect the difference between the wind’s rustling of the grass and a predator’s stealthy movement through the plains, but even more, it allows us to see elements of the natural world as being in possession of agency — or as Daniel Dennett, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, puts it in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, we adopt the intentional stance when it comes to describing and predicting the behavior of others.

The intentional stance is the ability to treat animate objects in the world as being “agents with limited beliefs, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires.” Some theorists call this the “theory of mind” — i.e., the belief that other creatures (including other humans) have a mind, which allows us to then imagine what that mind might believe about the world and what it might want, which in turn allows us to manipulate the other’s mind towards our own ends. Lying is an example of this: we imagine that the other person’s mind has a certain belief about the world, a belief we don’t want them to have for whatever reason, and so we give them false information to manipulate their belief and accomplish our own goal; but so is our relationships with our dogs: we imagine our dogs have minds that love us and are loyal to us, and so we act as if that is true.

Humans are not the only animals who adopt the intentional stance — some mother birds will pretend to have a broken wing in order to distract a predator from attacking the fledgelings in her nest; other creatures use fantastic displays to convince potential partners of their fitness and health, regardless of their actual fitness and health; dogs and monkeys will bluff others to get access to a preferred toy; etc. — but humans are the undeniable masters of it.

The entire social fabric of us naked apes comes from our expert ability to adopt the intentional stance. “We experience the world,” Dennett writes, “as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.”

He continues, “So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate.” Dennett and other researchers postulate that the religious impulse of human beings has its origins in this urge: “Much as our ancestors would have loved to predict the weather by figuring out what it wanted and what beliefs it harbored about them, it simply didn’t work.”

As the COVID-19 virus winds its way through the human species, our urge to provide it with an intentional stance remains — except now that we’re guided by an understanding of viruses as “teetering on the boundaries of what is considered life”, we’re far too sophisticated to give COVID-19 an intentional stance, thus we channel our urge towards the creation of conspiracy theories that allow us to establish some kind of power and control over what is, quite naturally, an uncontrollable situation.

The historical post mortem of the COVID-19 pandemic will surely find fault in the behaviors, decisions, and indecisions of hundreds of government officials all throughout the world, not to mention the willful ignorance of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens and the malicious intentions of dozens of self-serving capitalists and authoritarians, but it will not be able to name a single agent or group of agents as the primary cause of COVID-19, for indeed, its cause is not some evil one who wishes to do us harm, but evolution itself — the mindless, intention-less process by which the living and “the teetering on living” reproduce and survive.

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politics

Endorsing Bernie

I voted for Senator Sanders in the Vermont Democratic Primary on Tuesday, as I said I would. I didn’t need to — I would have and could have voted for Senator Warren, had Sen. Sanders not been on the ticket — but…Bernie is my homeboy. I may have been born in Sen. Warren’s Massachusetts, but I built my family in Sen. Sanders’ Vermont.

My hope is for Sen. Sanders to get the nomination and for him to announce his cabinet before the general election. I’d like to see Senator Warren on that cabinet as the Secretary of the Treasury, and I’d like President Sanders to seek her advice in all matters economic.

Working together, President Sanders and Secretary Warren could become an indomitable force in the nation’s economic reality, re-channeling the flow of American money so it points away from those rich in capital and towards those who live paycheck to paycheck and/or are indigent.

Despite wanting to see her as Secretary of the Treasury, I have no doubt Senator Warren would have made a great American President. She has been and will continue to be an inspiration to thousands of little boys and girls who will someday serve in our government and go to work each day dedicated to doing the right thing.

I don’t yet know who I want Sen. Sanders to pick as his Vice President. Electoral politics plays too great a role (I’m told) for me to pretend at a viable strategy, but I suspect it will be a woman of color from the South. Stacey Abrams, the first black woman in United States history to receive a major party’s nomination for governor, seems to be mentioned the most, but she also lost her election in Georgia (a fact she credibly disputes) and has never served at the Federal level.

In 2018, Sen. Sanders endorsed Abrams in the race for governor. By virtue of that endorsement (and from what little I’ve seen of her), I choose to trust her. Should Sen. Sanders select Abrams to become his nominee for vice president, I will trust he went to work that day dedicated to doing the right thing.

As for the other positions on his cabinet, I don’t yet have any favorites.

But the point I’m rambling to make is this: if Sen. Sanders wins the nomination, the best way to live up to the ethos of his “Not Me. Us.” campaign would be to show voters exactly who “Us” would be.

The Democrats should not run a single person against President Trump. They should run a whole slate of highly qualified civil servants, people who have been in government long enough to understand how it works and who have the motivation to make it work for the majority of Americans.

The Bernie campaign is not about nominating Bernie. It’s about empowering ourselves to rescue the democratic ideals of the American experiment from the world-darkening maw of billionaire capitalism. Sen. Warren’s endorsement of Sen. Sanders could help us accomplish that, but so could the efforts of all those passionate people who worked on her campaign.

Because it’s never been about Bernie. It’s only ever about us.