Free Ride

I must say that the latest stunt out of MAGA-dom is inspired, though not in a good way.  Busing and flying immigrants from Florida and Texas to blue states has the optics of a raised middle finger liberals.  Fox and other right-wing news outlets are portraying it that way. Less unhinged sources highlighted the outpouring of kindness toward the new arrivals in communities like Martha’s Vineyard. 

No story is that simple, notwithstanding one’s ideological lens.  We know that the migrants were promised jobs, housing, and gifts at their destination.  Some were misled about these destinations; the Cape Cod contingent thought they were going to Boston.  Others seemed to have known their itinerary in advance and saw an opportunity to travel someplace they wanted to be; one man got off his bus in Chicago and was met by family.

I’m sure each family or individual concerned had their motives for going along.  It does appear that many were deceived.  Outside the MAGA-verse, there have been comparisons to the “reverse Freedom Rides” of the early 1960s.  I thought I knew my Civil Rights Movement history, but I was unaware of them until now.  This bit of near-forgotten right-wing ratfuckery was orchestrated by the New Orleans White Citizens Council as retaliation for the SNCC- and CORE-organized Freedom Rides against racial segregation in the South.  Black families were bused to northern states with the promise of housing and jobs only to discover upon arrival that they had been had.  The campaign subsequently spread to other southern states. 

The idea was to overload social welfare systems up north, point out the imputed hypocrisy of civil rights advocates, and demonstrate to the displaced Black people that they were better off in the segregated South.  Similarly, the ongoing drive to offload Latino migrants onto blue states and sanctuary cities is intended to punish those who have the temerity to view these people as human beings possessing human dignity.  (The immigrants seem to have been indiscriminately targeted; El Paso bused 223 migrants to New York City many of whom were Venezuelan refugees.  Venezuelan-Americans, like Cuban-Americans, tend to favor Republican candidates.  Looks like the GOP successfully alienated a bunch of future voters.)

One key difference between then and now is that the Louisiana legislature refused to fund the 1960 campaign while the Florida legislature appropriated $12 million in support of the current effort.  (Governor Ron DeSantis has pledged to spend every last dollar.)  I am unsure of the cost to Texas taxpayers of Greg Abbott’s mischief, though indications point to private donations. 

One wrinkle is that this caper could actually benefit the receiving communities.  Many of the immigrants may be eligible for Temporary Protected Status.  If granted, those with TPS will be legally able to work.  While I’m not familiar with the labor economics of the various destinations, let’s assume that they are having the same hiring troubles as the rest of the country.  The arrival of the migrants may help alleviate labor shortages in at least some places.

Like all the other wingnut shenanigans of the last six-plus years, the bus-off will be superseded by even barmier escapades.  I’m not sure what they are meant to accomplish.  They’re not “triggering” or “owning” the libs.  All they’re doing is jerking each other off as they become less relevant over time, a development that cannot happen soon enough.

  

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar 

From Within

This week marks six months of confinement for me.  Winter has turned to spring to summer and now to autumn.  From within four walls I’ve watched the world sink into madness.

The worst of it has been the senseless loss of people murdered simply going about their daily lives – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.  Then there are all the other maladies afflicting us at the moment.  The alt-right’s escalating provocations against civil rights protesters has made me increasingly uneasy as the November election draws nigh.  Wildfires are running amok in my part of the country, leaving the air thick with smoke and staining the sky an ominous orange hue.  Then there’s the pandemic, which shows no sign of abating and has already added several more months to my sentence now that my college has decided to stay “remote” through spring semester.

There are all kinds of things I could do outside which carry little or no infection risk, but I feel unmotivated.  Perhaps a more accurate description of my mindset is that I’m suffering an uncharacteristic agoraphobia that has gotten worse with time.  I miss being with others even as I dread any human interaction.  I pass the days in a state of free-floating anxiety.  I’ll doodle around the LMS for a couple hours, grade assignments, answer student emails, and violate the sanctity of my own home each Monday holding my required office hour on Zoom.  I’ve come to detest Zoom nearly as much as I’ve come to hate the phrase “unprecedented times.”

Watching the societal breakdown beyond my front door is my main pastime.  Divisions which seemed intractable before March have morphed into insurmountable fissures.  As events careen into bounded chaos, some verities about contemporary politics are made clearer. 

The first is that so-called post-truth politics have become the norm, at least on the right.  The “base” at this point will uncritically believe any crazy assertion put forth by the President, administration officials, or their pundit toadies.  Some examples from this week alone point up the trend.  There is the claim from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services official Michael Caputo that he received death threats because of his collusion with Trump to suppress information concerning the coronavirus pandemic.  Caputo then doubled down, stating there were left-wing “hit squads” ready to stage an armed insurrection to stop the President’s reelection.  He then advised people to “buy ammunition.” 

Another batshit statement that seems to have originated from a northwestern firefighting official and has since gone viral on Facebook is that “antifa” started the wildfires in Washington and Oregon.  (I’m amazed at how Facebook has gone from being a mindless timesuck for teens and twentysomethings to a mindless timesuck for aging wingnuts.)   

If the origin of the antifa arson rumor is true, it can only erode trust in public safety workers.  Law enforcement seems particularly fertile ground for the QAnon conspiracy fad, though we’ve only had small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clues.  In July, the NYPD union president gave an on-air interview to Fox News with a QAnon coffee mug visible in the background.  Last year a Broward County sheriff’s deputy was photographed greeting Vice President Pence with a QAnon patch visible on his tactical vest.  Another unnerving trend is the appearance of the Punisher logo on tactical police vehicles, no question about the intended message there. 

The juxtaposition of QAnon and other alt-right phenomena with the agencies tasked with keeping us safe is troubling.  Right-wing hysteria over Black Lives Matter and antifa illustrate the true role of policing.  The right has all but conceded that law enforcement’s mission is not about protecting and serving all citizens equally, but to defend the propertied classes and act as an occupying force dedicated to enforcing white hegemony.  

The personality types disproportionately drawn to law enforcement reflect an authoritarian streak as it is.  Some are cruel or indifferent to cruelty.  For instance, I recently had a student who had just gotten out of the military.  She was beginning work on a criminal justice degree with an eye toward joining the local police department after graduation.  During a classroom discussion about Abu Ghraib and the Detainee Treatment Act, I noted that torture is considered an ineffective interrogation technique.  My student countered that her NCOs had taught her differently.  It appears my student and her sergeants had slept through their mandatory Geneva Convention trainings.  It also left me asking myself just what kind of police officer she would be.  I suspect I’ll be reading about her in the news someday.  

The valorization of armed violence is as old as American culture.  To be more specific, it’s armed violence by Christian white males that we glorify.  Let’s consider the attitudes of the police to the rise in vigilantism.   The 17-year-old boy who shot three protestors in Kenosha, killing two, walked unchallenged through a police cordon carrying a semiautomatic weapon.  He seemed to be under the delusion that he was there to assist law enforcement, and the nonchalant attitude of the cops did nothing to dissuade him.  After the shooting he walked away, again unchallenged, got in his car, and calmly drove home to Chicago.   

Part of me wants to make allowances for the Kenosha shooter’s youth.  But what can we say about the motives of his adult defenders?  President Trump claimed the shooter acted in self-defense, never mind that the fact he came armed and was presumably looking for trouble.  Then there’s the legal defense fund started on a “Christian” fundraising platform which has netted nearly $1 million so far.  The soliciting organization is #FightBack.  This lovely band of trolls proclaims their mission is to “fight back for [a] forgotten America,” notwithstanding the high media profile of said forgotten.  

Time for an aside.  It comes as no surprise that Christian groups are rallying to the shooter’s defense.  Christianity of the evangelical Protestant strain is inextricably bound up with the American right.  The various churches may differ in theology, but their shared ideology emphasizes exclusion and punishment to a degree that can be construed as poorly veiled white supremacism.  Considering that the months of protests arose from civil rights abuses against people of color, their support for a killer of protesters causes the veil to slip further.  

Back to the vigilante problem.  As we have seen, law enforcement has no problem turning a blind eye if they use force against their own preferred targets.  And the problem isn’t new.  George Zimmerman’s acquittal of murdering Trayvon Martin foreshadowed much of what we’re currently seeing.  Of course, being white doesn’t afford absolute protection against violations of civil liberties and civil rights by both official and non-official actors.   

The militarized response to the protesters has emboldened the aggressive element always present among the political right.  One example from this week’s news involves an NPR news crew covering the Oregon firefighting effort.  They were run off public land by armed men who did not identify themselves and probably had as much authorization to be near the fire zone as the reporters.  Another example are reports that armed men are setting up unauthorized roadblocks along evacuation routes, potentially endangering evacuees.

Although isolated incidents, they demonstrate entitlement on the part of civilians being allowed to intimidate their fellow citizens with impunity.  The official stance toward the proliferation of paramilitary “patriot” groups resembles that of the German authorities toward the Freikorps immediately following the First World War.  Rather than being sanctioned for their extralegal actions, they are regarded as allies in preserving the existing order.  As we stumble blindly toward the November election, this stance carries the potential of emboldening further violence against vulnerable populations regardless of the outcome at the polls.   

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

After the Guns Fell Silent

The First World War ended a hundred years ago today.

November 11^th is commemorated each year in our country as Veterans Day.  Most of us treat it as just another welcome day off from work or school.  In spite of our cultural fetishization of veterans and the military, however, the origins of the holiday don’t receive much scrutiny.

In Europe, the legacy of the Great War looms large.  I visited London in the summer of 2014 during the commemoration of the war’s centenary and you couldn’t avoid it.  At home, it received sparse notice from a historically oblivious public.

The war and its aftermath have irrevocably changed the course of events in ways which reverberate into the present.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to us, though.  The President traveled all the way to France for the commemoration yet declined to attend a wreath-laying at the Aisne-Marne cemetery at the last minute due to rain.  He also decided not to attend the scheduled Peace Forum summit.  The optics of this in Europe and elsewhere will be undoubtedly negative.

Then again, Mr. Trump’s opt-out is understandable considering how the people back home view that war and the value they place on peace.  World War I took the lives of 53,000 Americans in combat deaths alone not to mention another 63,000 dead from illness but since it rates only a brief mention in the high school history lessons we slept through, it might as well have never happened.

It is not accurate to say that November 11, 1918 marked the end of the fighting.  That was just on the Western Front.  It dragged on for several more years in various theaters in Europe and the Middle East.  The Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Armenians and British and French and Italians all contended for the forlorn remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Russia was wracked by civil war.  Hungary and Bavaria endured first Red, then White Terror.  The Spartacist Uprising was brutally suppressed; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among the victims.  Marauding Freikorps threatened the nascent Weimar Republic.

Even at home things were far from calm.  The 1919 Red Scare, unlike most other periods of national hysteria over exaggerated threats, had some justification.  It also provoked the usual disproportionate official and public response.  The Palmer Raids (instigated after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer’s house was bombed by unknown assailants) were one manifestation.  The mob killing of Wobbly and recently discharged soldier Wesley Everest was another, as were the mass deportations of socialists and anarchists (Emma Goldman being one of them). 

Unsurprisingly, there was an uptick in racial violence as well during 1919’s “Red Summer” in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The Red Scare’s repercussions were felt into the next decade, culminating with the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it would raise its head once more in the 1940s.

So, the end of the First World War was more preface than conclusion.  The unnecessarily punitive conditions placed on Germany fueled popular resentment, while the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy led to the rise of fascism there and elsewhere in Europe. Lurking in the background was the specter of nationalism.

Depending on your political proclivities, nationalism is either a fine thing or it’s deplorable.  The President is a self-proclaimed nationalist.  Many Americans are, though they misappropriate the word “patriot” to describe their nationalism instead.  Right or left, we’re partial to anything which makes a social statement while requiring a minimal investment of time and money.  Thus, wearing a flag lapel pin or slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on a car qualifies one as a patriot. 

The nationalism I am describing is the move toward ethnolinguistic identity which began in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and would challenge the authority of those dynasties ruling multiethnic states.  Such ideas do animate white supremacist and alt-right activism in this country, but probably doesn’t register as strongly with the rest of the American electorate.  It remains very strong in parts of Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. 

This fact became manifest after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  I personally witnessed the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and am still struck by the scope of destruction to both lives and property they brought.  Those conflicts were something of an anomaly, however.  The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian peoples share a common tongue and racial heritage.  Their national identities are instead rooted in their respective historical religious faiths.  That was enough to plunge them into a war that took roughly 140,000 lives and displaced millions.

That conflict was itself informed by the mass population transfers following the Second World War in Eastern Europe.  A beaten Germany was shrunk to two-thirds of its 1914 territory and split into two mutually hostile states.  Eastern Germans were expelled from their homeland after it was annexed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.  Poles were expelled from their homes in the east after their lands in turn were annexed to the Soviet Union (Poland was actually shifted westward from its 1939 footprint).  Italians were driven from Istria by the Yugoslavs.  The Soviets pushed the Finns out of Karelia.  And so forth.  We can chart the border changes and count the numbers of people involved.  The scale of the human suffering caused cannot be measured.

This is the legacy of the “forgotten” World War.  Few Americans know about it, or care.  This does not negate the profound value of the lesson the twentieth century nightmare can teach us, however.  We ignore it at our peril.

Enjoy your day off, everyone.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

For the Bible Tells Me So

The Trump Administration’s policy of separating detained “illegals” from their children apparently now has the endorsement of The Man Upstairs.

In a speech late last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited Romans 13: 1-3 as justification for the detention policy.  Actually, Sessions quoted the Apostle Paul out of context.  Paul did enjoin Christians to obey the temporal authorities as they would the spiritual; but he tells them to welcome strangers as well.

The Bible is notoriously open to interpretation.  In the various news stories about Sessions’ speech, we’re reminded that the same passages were used to justify slavery in the United States and that the Lutheran clergy drew upon them to instruct Germans to acquiesce to Nazi policies.  Normally, Godwin’s Law would make me hesitant to mention the latter fact.  However, the passive role of churches in 1930s Germany has received considerable attention from contemporary historians and so bears special mention here.  Given the xenophobic bent of our own Christian Right, the invocation of Romans 13 in this controversy is unsurprising.

Donald Trump’s appeal to religious conservatives is, well, puzzling.  As Bill Maher once described him, Trump is the world’s “least godly man.”  He’s dishonest, crass, profane, proud to the point of hubris, unkind, uncharitable, and bigoted.  Then again, maybe that’s why he’s appealing.  Some of the angriest, most resentful people I’ve known have been evangelical Protestants who proclaimed their faith in Blue-Eyed Jesus at every opportunity.  These folks are livid at the social changes of the past few decades and would love to see the calendar turned back to 1955 with everything that that implies.

Evangelicals have a particularly strong authoritarian streak which turns to the Scriptures for justification even while cloaking it in the Christian message of love and forgiveness.  An uncle used to like to quote Isaiah 1:18 to me.  “Come now; let us reason together,” it begins.  (Lyndon Johnson also liked to quote this particular phrase to his political opponents.)  “Though your sins be of scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”  So far, so good; this sounds like the Message I recall from Sunday School.

But let’s remember that this is the vengeful God of the Israelites speaking and not Jesus of Nazareth.  The next verses are downright chilling, for you are given no alternative.  “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land / But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword…”  Yikes!

I always wondered why my uncle always left the second part out.  It spoke so strongly to his conservative values, and he was a gun-loving, pickup driving, blue collar Nixon and Reagan man.  A kickass line like that should have appealed to his overbearing, my-way-or-the-highway nature more than its namby-pamby preamble.

For the denizens of Walmart-like megachurches, the thought of an action hero God is undoubtedly a selling point.  (An impromptu Google search tells me that there are actually action hero movies and comics marketed to Christians.)   Their resort to fantasy is understandable, since their fictional conception of a God-fearing U.S.A. is dissolving like a wet tissue.  Media chimeras such as the “War on Christmas” help them maintain a relentless sense of grievance.  And the presence of people with darker complexions speaking a language other than English is a reminder the country has changed and is changing still.  Tie all these factors—authoritarianism, revealed religion, an aversion to change, and xenophobia—and Mr. Sessions’ claim sounds convincing.

The White House is standing by its man, despite the President’s recent complaints about Sessions.  Sarah Sanders, when confronted with the Attorney General’s remarks at a press conference, retorted that “it is very biblical to enforce the law.”  (Well, she is a preacher’s daughter after all.) 

At least on this issue, the administration is presenting a unified front.  But Sessions' and Sanders’ pronouncements ring hollow when we hear of nursing mothers being separated from their babies, children being herded en masse into cells, and families being unable to ascertain the whereabouts of detained relatives.  We are witnessing an appalling lack of empathy for the less fortunate, and I have a sinking feeling that there is a dead silence on that subject these days in our houses of worship.  If so it’s a damning commentary on our society’s character.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heritage? Or Hate?

We’re told the victors write history.  This was not the case with the American Civil War.

But first, a digression.  I lived and worked in the Southeast during much of my twenties and early thirties, beginning with a stint in Alabama immediately following college.  It was an adventure for a West Coast boy, living an hour’s drive from the nearest freeway.  The slower pace of life aside, I quickly adjusted to my surroundings.

I remember a sense of trepidation in the weeks preceding my move.  I’d never been to Alabama or anyplace else in the South.  The civil rights upheavals of the 1960s were then recent events in our collective memory and I envisioned burning crosses and police dogs lunging at protestors.

I needn’t have worried.  Everyone I met was nice.  Folks you didn’t know would wave to you as you passed on the road.  Perfect strangers would greet you with a smile.  Store clerks would strike up conversations if no other customers were waiting.  When I left three years later, I found I missed the place and the people.  I still experience the occasional pang of nostalgia, though I couldn’t imagine wanting to live there again.

Their pleasantness notwithstanding, there was plenty of support for certain stereotypes of rural Southerners and their sensibilities.  Confederate flags appeared everywhere you looked, flown from private homes and public buildings and adorning the back windows of pickups.  Monuments to Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee occupied more than a few town squares and main streets, not to mention those dedicated to lesser champions of the Lost Cause. 

When people did mention it, they faithfully described it as the War between the States.  Oftentimes they would take pains to make sure you understood that the conflict concerned the South’s defense of the sacred principle of states’ rights and not the unsavory reasons given by outsiders.  And, to punctuate the public relations effort in furtherance of an image of a benign Confederacy, T-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the Battle Flag and the slogan, “Heritage, not Hate.”

The events of the past few days have made me think hard about this particular conceit.  The Confederate flag has been brandished as a symbol of white nationalism and resistance to equal rights for people of color at least since the middle of the last century.  Since the November election, the fringe right and its white nationalist comrades have been emboldened to raise the movement's public profile.  This week’s tragedy in Charlottesville was foreshadowed by the increased media attention right-wing agitators have received since Donald Trump’s election and the semi-respectability such attention confers.

The angry young men with their bulged-eyed shouts of “White Power!” we see on TV are interspersed with the occasional calm, soothing talking head telling us that they’re not really racists.  They’re just standing up for their rights as European Americans in the same way African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans have.  They just want their own civil rights.  And the Confederate paraphernalia?  That’s heritage, not hate.

None of this would be comment worthy if it wasn’t for this point of view resonating among mainstream whites.  Over the past months I’ve heard veiled approval from acquaintances not just for Trump but for the increasingly high-profile opinions of media figures belonging to the fringe and “alt” right.  The gist of their attitude is that while some of the agitators are rough around the edges, they’re saying what has to be said in the face of political correctness.  

Such low key murmurs of approval among ordinary people surely have not gone unnoticed.  The public pronouncements of our leaders haven't done much to discourage, either.  The President’s bizarre and muddled initial response to the violence at this week’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville can be interpreted as further license by the extremists.

But by now we’ve become desensitized to expressions of extremism.  James Fields, the man who drove his car into the counter-protestors in Charlottesville, openly expressed Nazi sympathies in high school.  They were probably dismissed as drivel from an attention-seeking misfit, but in this case Fields’ thoughts eventually had awful consequences.   

However, most loudmouthed jerks don’t end up committing violent acts on this scale, and murdering whackjobs like James Fields are mercifully rare.  It’s the quiet, well-spoken apologists, the “heritage-not-hate” contingent, who present the greater threat long term. 

Their task is made all the easier because of our collective amnesia.  Memorials to Confederate leaders and the Confederate dead saturate the South a century and a half after the guns fell silent.  Public school history textbooks treat Jefferson Davis as the near moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. 

Ditto for Robert E. Lee versus Ulysses Grant.  As recently as the 1980s, a school district in Texas seriously considered adopting a high school history text which insinuated that the slaves were content with their lot.  (Which sounds a lot like claims we’ve heard lately from the far right that African Americans were better off as slaves.)  The subtext that the Confederacy and all it stood for was not all that bad and perhaps good or even noble permeates prevalent views on race and of race relations.

The implications of the current discourse are unsettling.  Charlottesville will fade from memory as time moves on and other, newer tragedies befall us.  But the attitudes which are gradually polarizing the public will have lasting and possibly dire consequences if we don’t craft a compelling counternarrative. 

Because in addition to failing to define a viable alternative to the economic immiseration of the neoliberal epoch, the progressive left is quickly losing what may be its last best opportunity to convince the white mainstream that racial equality is in its best interest.  The lesson from Charlottesville is that time is short. 

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

The Algiers Motel Incident: Part 3 - The Aftermath

Public awareness of Algiers Motel Incident emerged slowly. 

By July 29^th, Congressman John Conyers’ office had been informed of the killings and the Detroit Free Press had interviewed at least some of the people present.  By the 31^st it was common knowledge.

The nature of the survivors’ escape had a lot to do with the confusion.  The two older men present, Charles Moore and Robert Greene, went separate ways.  Moore claimed he left in his car to drive home while Greene, not wanting to risk further police contact by breaking curfew, holed up in the motel’s front office.  The younger men scattered, while Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy stayed put in their room.

Michael Clark made his way to a phone booth to call Carl Cooper’s folks, informing them their son was dead.  Roderick Davis and Larry Reid were arrested in the adjacent city of Hamtramck for violating the curfew order.  James Sortor and Lee Forsythe arrived safely to the Cooper house, where they corroborated Michael’s story.

The first published eyewitness accounts were all over the map.  Greene told reporters Warrant Officer Ted Thomas was the main shooter.  As the story developed Patrolmen Ronald August and Robert Paille, likely in an effort to simultaneously ease their consciences and cover their asses. went to their superiors and gave formal statements.  Paille pointed to David Senak as the instigator of the raid and subsequent killings.

The police and prosecutor’s office investigators then sought out the other witnesses.  Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy were so shaken by their ordeal—Juli suffered a head wound requiring seven stitches as well as a concussion—that representatives from Conyers’ office acted as intermediaries to arrange the meeting with the investigators. 

The prosecutor’s staff, all of them white men, made a show of intimidating the witnesses during the interviews to the point where the identifications of the culprits were less than certain.

At this point another witness came into the mix.  It was a woman named Lawanda Schettler, who lived near the Algiers Motel annex.  Mrs. Schettler was sitting in her car across the street from the annex.  She saw two black males with either rifles or shotguns walk past two white girls sitting on the porch steps.  The girls seemed frightened and skittered away. 

The men entered the annex.  Mrs. Schlatter heard angry shouts, then gunshots.  She hurriedly drove away, not seeing what happened afterward.

Schettler’s account left open the possibility that Carl Cooper died at the hands of someone other than the police.  However, there was no corroboration.  Also, Mrs. Schettler had been drinking that night and had in fact been on a beer run when she stopped in front of the motel.  (It seems the authorities enforced the curfew selectively.  Mrs. Schettler, who was white, was not so rule conscious as to have stayed indoors.  What’s more, she had planned to purchase her adult beverage from the very kind of unlicensed “blind pig” which had been Ground Zero for the 12^th Street uprising.)

Even more damningly for Schettler’s account, her husband, who had a reputation as a neighborhood law and order type and a couple of citizen’s arrests to his credit, was later quoted on the record as saying he was sick of liberals whining about civil rights.   For their part, the police hinted that maybe Carl had a “contract” out on him, but nothing came of the story in the end and the raiders remained the focus of media scrutiny.

Robert Greene’s accusation of WO Thomas was another account convenient for the police and their accused officers.  So was security guard Melvin Dismukes’ participation in the raid.  In his book, John Hersey mocked Thomas’ desire to avoid blame while not implicating the cops.  Thomas admitted later he was unsure during the multiple questionings he was subjected to exactly who he was giving evidence for.  Nevertheless, after several lineups of police officers Thomas and another Guardsman present at the Algiers that night, PFC Wayne Henson, identified David Senak and Ronald August as the officers who beat the prisoners and fired their weapons.

While Wayne County prosecutors dithered over charging Senak, August, and Paille, they wasted no time bringing charges against Dismukes for assaulting James Sortor and Michael Clark.  Dismukes’ exact role in the incident, like those of everyone else involved, is unclear.  He was the only civilian and the only identified African-American in the raiding party, which probably factored into the decision to charge him first.

Dismukes’ story has become even more tangled in the present and has been recently subjected to a large dose of spin.  A trailer for the newly released dramatization of the Algiers Motel Incident, Detroit, portrays Dismukes (played by John Boyega) undergoing a hostile police interrogation after the shooting.  An extended version features Melvin Dismukes himself discussing his treatment by the police and how he had wanted to clear his name from the start.  The film also claims the first two victims died before he entered the annex, which is unlikely given the commonly accepted timeline of events.

As for avoiding the consequences, he needn’t have worried.  The all-white jury deliberated a scant 13 minutes before pronouncing Dismukes not guilty.

But was he innocent?  Kathryn Bigelow’s telling of it makes it seem so.  As a matter of fact, she makes him out to be the unsung hero of that long night and a protector of the victims into the bargain.  (In one scene, Melvin even whispers to one of the youths, “I need you to survive the night.”  Very moving.  Very dramatic.  And probably bullshit.) 

Dismukes undeniably had a hard time of it in the years following the incident, experiencing death threats against him and his family.  But his decision to join the raiding party and his presence in the annex even after it was no longer needed do not balance his pleas of guiltlessness.

Justice remained elusive for the victims and their families.  Senak, Paille, and Dismukes were charged with conspiracy, charges which were ultimately dismissed.  The U.S. Attorney’s office then brought their own conspiracy charges against the three defendants in the aborted state trial, as well as bringing charges against August.  Two years and a change of venue later, all four men were acquitted. 

Paille’s confession to shooting Fred Temple was tossed because the officer hadn’t been first read his Miranda rights, so he was never prosecuted.   In the end, the only participant in the raid ever to actually go to trial for murder was Ronald August for shooting Auburey Pollard.  Predictably, he was found not guilty.  In the end, the only convictions handed down in the Algiers Motel Incident were from a mock court convened by civil rights activists.  The four “defendants” were sentenced to death.

If it was common today for law enforcement officers who kill black citizens in the absence of a credible threat to be convicted, the Algiers Motel Incident would be a distasteful memory of a less enlightened time.  Instead, it’s a bitter example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same.  What is even more chilling than the fact that the motel murders happened is that David Senak was found to have shot and killed two other men the previous day for which he was never held to account.

The reasons are pretty clear to anyone who has even casually followed the news for the last five decades.  The raiders’ evasion of justice in 1969 was no different than that of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for his shooting of Michael Brown.  The consensus among middle class whites then as now was that the victims weren’t victims at all.  If they had been conducting themselves lawfully, they would never have attracted police attention.  No one entertained the notion that Carl Cooper’s crime was poor judgment by firing the starter pistol, while the others were guilty by their association with Carl.

It didn’t help the prosecution that the survivors of the incident had led less than stellar personal lives.  The Detroit Free Press lamented in December 1968 that while the police officers and Mr. Dismukes had yet to go to trial, their victims had been arrested and convicted of myriad offenses.  Lee Forsythe, who had been afraid of Carl Cooper’s starter pistol, received a 20-year sentence for the armed robbery of a furniture store.  (The take: $190.)  Karen Molloy and Juli Hysell were each placed on probation and fined for soliciting and prostitution.  Michael Clark and James Sortor also compiled police records along the way.

Considering people’s tendency in such cases to conflate an individual’s behavior on other occasions with their deserts of abuse during the incident in question, it’s unsurprising nothing was achieved in the end.  The consequences for the members of the raiding party were mixed.  

For Melvin Dismukes, this meant threats and verbal abuse over the years.  He continued in his security career, ultimately working for the Detroit Pistons.  

Ronald August remained with the Detroit police until he quit in 1977.  

Theodore Thomas receded into the obscurity of private life, working for Stanley Door in Flint until his retirement.  His 2007 obituary mentioned his service in the U.S. Air Force and the Michigan National Guard, his widow, his five children, 13 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.  There was, of course, no mention of his part in the Algiers Motel Incident.

Robert Paille left the police and worked at various jobs.

And what of that heroic defender of law and morality, David “Snake” Senak?  He, too, left the police and operated a construction business for a number of years.  He lives in a small town upstate, where he serves on a local zoning appeals board.  He’s also active on Facebook, where he posts about his grandkids and his faith.  (It always seems that some of the worst people are also the most overtly religious.)  All in all, a nice, bucolic life with nary a care.

If they ever think (or thought) back to that night in July 1967, I wonder if any of the raiding party ever experienced any true regrets over their actions.  Dismukes considers himself as much a victim as the people he helped detain and abuse in the motel annex.   Thomas was torn between his duty to report what he saw and his loyalty to the system.  Paille and August only came forward about the raid to soften the blow of the consequences that never befell them. 

The first two men, while their actions and omissions cause us to question the orientation of their moral compass, were caught up in circumstances beyond their control.  The latter two were run of the mill products of American law enforcement culture and its ingrained racial and socioeconomic prejudices.  At some point, they should have said no and did not.

Given what’s known of his record, David Senak is in a category of his own.  A violent, misanthropic man placed in a position of authority is a recipe for disaster.  His actions have been duplicated in various forms over the years albeit less brutally and in a less calculated manner.  The as yet unlearned lesson of the Algiers Motel Incident and the untold number of police shootings before and since is that as long as societal mores effectively sanction such killings, they are doomed to continue. 

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar 

The Algiers Motel Incident: Part 2 - Three Dead

Inside the Algiers Motel manor house annex, Carl Cooper, Michael Clark, and Lee Forsythe had been listening to music with Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy.  A sudden gunshot from outside broke a window, causing the occupants of the annex to retreat to what they thought was safety. 

What happened next is rife with conflicting statements and conjecture, as the aftermath of traumatic events inevitably are.  The ad hoc team led by the cops stormed into the annex.  The first casualty was Carl Cooper, who was shot dead in a first-floor room even though he was checked in to a third-floor room. 

Responsibility for Carl’s death was never established, though he was felled by a shotgun blast in which the shot was consistent with the type of shotgun then carried by the Detroit police.  No one in the raiding party ever admitted to being the first to enter, claiming Carl was already dead when they arrived.

The group advanced into the building, rounded up the occupants, and moved them into a downstairs corridor.  The officers lined them against the wall and struck each in turn, demanding to know who had fired the shots and where the gun was. 

Pulling Roderick Davis from his brace position along the wall, a patrolman threw a knife to the floor and ordered Roderick to pick it up.  Understandably wanting to avoid being shot by the police in “self defense,” Roderick refused.  After beating Roderick, they moved on to Michael with the same result followed by Lee. 

It got uglier pretty fast.  Patrolman Senak was enraged that Juli and Karen, two white women, were socializing with black men.  Senak forcibly stripped the two, and shouted abuse at them: “Why you got to fuck them?" he demanded.  "What’s wrong with us, you n----r lovers?”

Senak then decided to ratchet up the terror.  Roderick Davis was pulled away from the wall and hustled into a nearby room.  National Guard Warrant Officer Ted Thomas went with them.

After shutting the door Senak ordered Roderick to lie face down on the floor.  Senak fired his weapon into a wall, then winked at Thomas.  Thomas stepped out of the room.  A patrolman asked him if Senak had killed Roderick, and Thomas said yes.  Michael Clark was led into the room next and told to lie on the floor.  Depending on the account, either Thomas or Senak fired into the ceiling.  Returning to the corridor, Senak bragged, “I killed them two motherfuckers!”

At this point the girls urged their companions to tell the officers where the gun was, and told the officers that its owner, Carl, was already dead.  According to later court testimony this was about twenty minutes after the police and soldiers had entered the annex.  Challenged as to why it took her or anyone else so long to mention the pistol and its late owner, Juli Hysell responded simply that they were scared.

That’s reasonable enough.  Patrolman Senak was not appeased, however, and asked who wanted to go into the room next.  Naturally, there were no volunteers.  Patrolman Ronald August was handed a shotgun, and he then pulled Auburey Pollard from the line.  They started toward the room where Roderick and Michael had been taken, when WO Thomas, not wanting to give away the game, said to go to a different room.

Accounts differed as to whether August actually knew what had just happened was a game.  Thomas, whose trial testimony established much of what occurred in the annex, recalled that Senak said something to August as he handed him the weapon but wasn’t certain whether Senak had made the situation clear.  In any case, Thomas went with August and Auburey into the room.  Thomas saw August fire his weapon and Auburey crumple to the floor dead. 

Although Thomas testified he was frightened by the shooting, other witnesses have him leaving the room grinning.  “That n----r didn’t even kick!” he crowed.  That said, Thomas would testify he decided to take his team and leave the motel at that point, telling Senak that what the police was doing inside was their business and not his or his men’s.  Using renewed gunfire on the street as an excuse, most of the raiding party hastily left.

Except Thomas ended up staying after all.  We next find him in a room with Patrolman August, Juli, and Karen.  One of the patrolman in the annex asked Thomas and security guard Melvin Dismukes to escort the girls, who were injured and mostly unclothed, to their room in the main hotel building next door, where they were told to stay put until curfew ended at 5:30.

As for the remaining prisoners in the annex, the police, their own curfew notwithstanding, ran them off with the threat that if they stayed they too would be killed.  They were led out past Auburey Pollard’s lifeless body; up to this point, the youths had thought the execution game was simply a sick joke.  Told to run for their lives, they did.  A couple of them ran several miles away from the Algiers without shoes.

Fred Temple, however, wasn’t afforded the chance to escape.  Patrolman Robert Paille shot him dead, allegedly in a struggle over Paille’s gun. 

None of the deaths at the Algiers Motel were reported to Detroit police homicide detectives by the patrolmen, despite this being required by regulation.  Instead, it was the motel’s own private security who found Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred Temple and contacted the authorities.  

The coroner’s office removed the bodies in the early morning hours of July 26th, but the detectives called to the scene decided that with sporadic gunfire still going on in the street it wasn’t safe to stay.  A knife was found in the annex, but no firearms or expended cartridges.

That morning, the news media were told by the police only that the boys had been killed in an exchange of fire between snipers and themselves.  It would be several more days before hints of what had actually taken place began to surface.

Next: The Aftermath

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar