tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76703662173964147102024-03-14T08:57:48.210-07:00In Order of ImportanceJosh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.comBlogger247125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-47845365362097641842019-07-16T20:24:00.002-07:002019-07-16T20:24:14.798-07:00Reading is Resistance: The Man They Wanted Me to Be<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/world-war-iis-poisonous-masculine-legacy/" target="_blank">Click here for the formal review in The Los Angeles Review of Books.</a> <br /><br />I wrote a formal review of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781640091818?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">The Man They Wanted Me to Be</a> here, but, my source material for that review was a lot bigger and a lot messier and, well, not really a review at all. Sexton's book hit a bunch of issues and ideas that I have been thinking about and struggling to write about for several years now. (Not nearly long enough.) That bigger, messier first attempt at assessing Sexton's work ended up interacting much less with the question “Is this a book you should read?” and much more with the question “How does this help me understand toxic masculinity and through that understanding, help me help push the conversation about ending it forward?” Even though that process didn't fit in the format of a book review, I still think I hit on some important ideas through it, ideas that, at least to me, are important enough to make public, even if I don't have the resources at the moment to turn them into something worthy of the scrutiny of an editor and a publication. <br /><br />But, that's what blogs are for, and, oh look, I happen to have my own blog series on my own blog about using books and reading to push the world a little closer to justice. Below is that bigger, messier attempt to better understand toxic masculinity through The Man They Wanted Me to Be and to find a way forward. It has been lightly edited for typos, mistakes, and shitty first draft prose. An edit or two I grabbed from the finished review. (Might also be interesting to other writers to compare the two versions, to see in this longer, messier version, where I'm trying to aim for the prose and construction of a review and where I miss badly.) <br /><br />If it were a virus it would be an epidemic. If it were a foreign country we would be at war. If it were an alien from another planet it would be the villain in a movie. American men are dying and killing. They are suffering and making others suffer with them. Men are letting it happen. We are letting people die and kill. In Jared Yates Sexton's insightful and important book <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781640091818?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making</a>, toxic masculinity is a system of absolute taboos and impossible expectations imposed on men—and through assertions of male power on everyone else--through physical and emotional abuse. Over the last few years—not nearly long enough—I've struggled directly with my own relationship to toxic masculinity and specifically with how to write about it and write at it, in ways that reduce its power. No matter where I start my floundering efforts or what angle I take into the project, I always run up against the same barrier: the men who most need to read about toxic masculinity are the least likely to. I don't know if Sexton has solved that particular problem or if that problem is solvable, but he has made an important contribution to the conversation around toxic masculinity that offers at least a starting point for our recovery from it. <br /><br />The Greatest Generation is toxic masculinity's masculine ideal; they endured The Great Depression, defeated the Nazis and the Japanese Empire in military combat, and provided for their families often (if they were white of course) earning enough to buy a house and a car, feed their family, and take the occasional vacation, from a job in a manly industry like manufacturing. But this veneration of The Greatest Generation is a destructive force, one that hurts those it is supposed to celebrate and now hurts their descendants. <br /><br />One of the tropes of The Greatest Generation is “Dad doesn't talk about the war.” As we learn more about PTSD, it's clear that thousands of American men returned from WWII (and Korea and Vietnam and the First Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq...) with PTSD and lived with it untreated for the rest of their lives. We celebrated their stoic silence as they suffered in silence. Or rather, we watched their attempts to cope with their suffering but refused to see it, interpreting three-martini lunches, late night poker games, spending all Saturday alone in the garage, corporal punishment, and demanding their injured sons “walk it off,” as inherent masculine traits rather than as inadequate coping mechanisms, as living up to an ideal rather than suffering from a mental illness. Toxic masculinity predates The Greatest Generation, but Sexton shows The Greatest Generation gave toxic masculinity a core to metastasize around and the fuel to supercharge its transmission. <br /><br />Sexton argues The Greatest Generation's achievements were weaponized. “If our fathers and grandfathers could survive a depression, ship off to Europe or Asia, and fight the forces of fascism, then we should be capable of conducting civilian lives without complaint.” Sure, your job batters your body and mind so you feel like a crushed can every night, but your grandfather saw his best friend step on a landmine outside of Berlin and he never complained about it. But, of course, it's not enough to suffer in silence; any weakness, any failure, any instant in your life when you are not George C. Scott's General Patton is fundamental proof that you are not a real man like your grandfather. This masculine ideal has always and will always be impossible to achieve, as Sexton summarizes the work of Dr. Joseph Pick, “because gender roles are social constructs and thus impossible to fulfill, the inevitable failure to live up to them can result in psychological damage,” but the lionizing of The Greatest Generation created a specific ideal to fail against, while at the same time many of its members literally passed on their trauma through emotional and physical abuse. <br /><br />Physical and emotional abuse that Sexton himself suffered at the hands of a number of the men in his life. A key part of the book is Sexton's description of this abuse as well was how he struggled to define himself against it and how, ultimately, he embodied many of the traits he tried to resist until he finally hit rock bottom and sought the professional help he needed to begin healing from his trauma. The arc of Sexton's story feels familiar. It is a narrative arch we've seen in dozens of memoirs and movies about addiction, but this is not the appropriation of a popular form. Sexton's story feels like an addiction memoir because toxic masculinity is an addiction. Sexton writes, “It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues every action and thought...Toxic masculinity is a chronic illness, and once we're infected we always carry it with us.” <br /><br />But rather than consuming a substance, toxic masculinity, as addiction, manifests itself in performance, poses and postures of physical endurance, of willingness to engage in or actual violence, in a stoic absence of any emotion, except for anger. “John whipped and beat me when I didn't fulfill my end of the masculine bargain. If I cried, if I complained, if I was sick or if I simply felt short of his expectations, that's when I received punishment.” As children, men learn the poses and postures that get them hit or insulted and the poses and postures that don't and perform those “until there's no performance any more. There's just a man who knows no other way.” The performative nature of toxic masculinity truly hit Sexton in a breakthrough moment with his father. “The life he'd been living all these years had been one where he'd had to carry himself a certain way lest he got shit from his friends and family. Deep down, the person he was didn't look at all like the one he pretended to be.” Toxic masculinity is not something men cling to because they enjoy it; it is imposed on them by the world and their fathers until it is just easier to become that man than the person they might more honestly be, until they are addicted to the performance. /they defend it because, by the time they have their own children, they know of no other way to be. <br /><br />Like many men of his generation, Sexton sought refuge from this process on the blogs and message boards of the young internet. But few, if any of those young men had the emotional tools to protect that refuge from the forces of toxic masculinity that drove them there in the first place. On the internet, no one knew how physically strong you were, if you were an athlete, if you had ever cried at a family reunion or on the playground, but instead of using that anonymity to find value elsewhere, they exploited it to ease their performance of those toxic poses and postures, creating “their own patriarchal reality that not only reinforced the old expectations but superharged them.” Instead of feeling free from expectations, they could not even stand the idea that someone might consider their anonymous online avatars effeminate, and so they used that freedom from physical limitations and consequences to relentlessly verbally one-up each other in a contest that no one could win because it could never end, performing an increasingly extreme toxic masculinity, “punishing the world while laughing to prove they're stronger than humanity,” and becoming the trolls that haunt the internet today. <br /><br />Sexton's ability to perform toxic masculinity gave him access to Trump supporters that few other journalists had. At campaign rallies for Trump, attendees did not see Sexton as a journalist but as another dude and so were open around him in ways they were not for other journalists. Sexton was horrified by the racism, homophobia, and misogyny that he saw and heard at these rallies and his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/opinion/donald-trumps-toxic-masculinity.html" target="_blank">op-ed about his experiences</a> at these rallies brought him to the public eye. The quality of a work of nonfiction, whether it's memoir, journalism, philosophy, cultural criticism, or whatever, is the material it gives its readers to form their own conclusions, whether readers are able to extend their understanding of the world beyond the limits of the book itself. Applying his other insights to his experiences at Trump rallies, we can reach a potentially surprising conclusion; some of that vitriol was performative, spewed by men who did not believe it, or at least not with that intensity, but were afraid their masculinity would be questioned if they didn't. Some, if not many, of Trump's supporters engaged in the same kind of pissing contest that trolls do, where the point was not to actually advance an idea but to prove how tough you, personally, are. To put this another way, there are members of Trump's base, especially men, who don't really believe in him, but feel obligated to attend his rallies, shout his slogans, and even vote for him to prove their masculinity. This is not to absolve them of responsibility for their actions and votes, but to try to define the relationship with toxic masculinity in our search for a solution. <br /><br />Sexton wants to change the world. A perfect review of a book like this would be able to look into the future and see if he has. I don't know if Sexton solves that fundamental problem of audience. I don't know if the men who most need to read it, both for their own health and for the health of society, will read it. But their sons might. Their daughters might. A new football coach might. And they might find a path forward. <br /><br /> The first step is to just stop. Just stop beating your sons when they cry. Stop using feminine and homosexual descriptions as insults. Believe yourself when you feel like something isn't right. Believe yourself when you feel like you are acting or performing something that is not true to you. Preserving toxic masculinity takes work; relentless physical and emotional work that must envelop a child until the man they want you to be is extruded. Just stop. Just fucking stop. And the thing is, masculine men can still have everything they like about traditional masculinity. Throwing hits in hockey. Shooting powerful guns at a gun range. Pushing your body, taking some risks, late night bullshit sessions with your buddies. All of it will still be there, we just won't be able to snatch those activities from other identities who might want to enjoy them or punish our sons if they don't. And we get the ability to opt out. And we get the ability to try other activities, fashions, and experiences. And we get the ability to ask for help. Seeing toxic masculinity as a performance men are addicted to points towards the ideas needed, not just to prevent its transmission, but to enable our recovery from it. There are millions of people who have learned how to manage their addictions. We can take our knowledge of addictions, our awareness of toxic masculinity, and our growing understanding of PTSD and build something much better than we have today. The only thing we give up is the power to control what other people want from life. A power that, in truth, doesn't exist. <br /><br />The Man They Wanted Me to be is limited in scope. It is rooted in Sexton's personal experience and uses that experience to guide what science, research, and other observations he brings into the book. This means the book says very little about how people of color experience toxic masculinity or about the experiences of women and people of other genders and sexualities. Sexton is open about the limits of the book and frequently clarifies when an experience is unique to white men while being careful to never center men and white men in particular as “the real victims of toxic masculinity.” But, in many ways, an important book about toxic masculinity, written by a straight white man, needs to be limited in scope because it needs to be personal. <br /><br />There is a fundamental taboo against sharing anything personal, especially your feelings. In toxic masculinity, men are supposed to be invulnerable and expressing any pain (and even joy) is an act of unacceptable vulnerability. As important as the data is and as insightful as Sexton is with that data, the most important thing he does in <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781640091818?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">The Man They Wanted Me to Be</a> is break that taboo. He shares his alcoholism. He shares his eating disorders. He shares the abuse. He shares his pain. He shares the help he received, including therapy. Ultimately, this book is a permission slip. It says you can explore your own toxic masculinity. You can interrogate the men in your life. You can do the research. And you can get help in the process and that help can include professional help from a therapist or psychologist. And you can share this process with others. Through this process, unlike your father and grandfather and great grandfather who suffered in silence, forced the rest of the family to suffer with them, and passed on the suffering to their descendants, you will become a better human being, a healthier man, and help break the cycle of toxic masculinity. Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-61479473171469650722019-05-22T08:27:00.002-07:002019-05-22T08:27:23.089-07:00Reading is Resistence: Stamped from the Beginning and Why You Should Ignore Republican Arguments About Abortion and Pretty Much Everything Else<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Every now and then you read a book and the world snaps into place. What was confusing and chaotic is clear. You cannot fathom why someone would do or say something like that and suddenly you see it clearly. Your frustration and anger build, as mine has throughout the course of the administration, and especially in the last few weeks as Republicans across the country attack legal abortion, and then a book gives you a direction, gives you an explanation, gives you a technique, gives you, if not a solution, then a place to start. <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781568585987?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America</a> by Ibram X. Kendi did that for me. <br /><br />Kendi's powerful insight is relatively simple: the desire to protect and expand chattel slavery drove the racist ideas that became American white supremacy, not the other way around. To put this another way, slavery came first and those who benefited from it created racist ideas to justify its existence and expansion and defend it against those would abolish or even just restrain it. White supremacy then isn't really an ideology based around core ideas that then inform goals, actions, and priorities, so much as it is a system of power based around protecting and expanding the power of the descendants of slaveholders. (I'll get to how this connects to the recent string of forced-birth legislation.) <br /><br />As a system of power, its ideas do not have to be logical or internally consistent. They don't have to be based in facts. They don't even have to make sense. They just need to provide enough cover to keep the system going. For example, one of the most common racist ideas created to defend slavery was that black people are naturally docile and obedient, that they actually need and love the strict leadership of their masters and that, therefore, freedom is actually bad for them. And when the Civil War started and the Union began to recruit black soldiers, a racist idea was created that black people inherently lack the discipline needed to be effective soldiers. These two ideas are mutually exclusive, but, being an internally coherent logic system was never the point; preserving the system of slavery was and if calling black people docile out of one side of your mouth and calling them undisciplined out of the other helped preserve the system of slavery, you did it. You could do it in the same sentence. <br /><br />One of the questions I had, when I started Kendi was, essentially, “What the fuck is up with the 3/5 compromise? I mean, seriously, fuckin' A.” One the one hand chattel slavery was built on the idea that black people were not really human (sometimes that argument was based on the Bible and sometimes on “science.”) and thus absolutely not deserving of citizenship in any way shape or form. Every other racist idea was drawn from and circled around that core, because it is very difficult for one human being to treat another human being as a slave or to allow such treatment to happen. So, logically, given that chattel slavery rested on the idea that black people were not really human, they should not be counted towards political representation, right? Only if logic is the point. The point was protecting and expanding slavery and counting slaves towards representation did just that by creating an over-representation of slaveholders in Congress. 3/5 was just the most the slaveholding states could get out of the Northern states and still ratify the Constitution. <br /><br />When Richard Nixon succeeded through the Southern Strategy he formally transformed the Republican Party into the party of white supremacy and in doing so, he transformed Republican ideology (which, honestly, was pretty fucking racist, misogynist, theocratic, and autocratic already) into an expression of that system of power. The purpose of the Republican party changed from enacting Republican policies, to expanding and maintaining Republican power. This means the only question Republicans (in power at least) pose when deciding on a strategy or policy or evaluating an idea is “Does this protect or expand the power of the Republican party?” Everything else is irrelevant. <br /><br />So it is not hypocritical for them to oppose every Democrat social spending program that would uplift Americans who are not white men by claiming the federal debt and deficit are existential threats to the economy and then radically increase the debt and deficit when they hold power. The deficit isn't the point, the power is. Nor it is laughably unprofessional for them to spend 6-7 years holding show votes to repeal Obamacare without every actually creating a workable policy replacement. Obamacare as a policy was completely irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was “Obamacare” as a tool to undercut the Democrats and inspire white supremacists to vote. Nor is it preposterously short-sighed and embarrassingly uninformed about the state of the criminal punishment system to respond to the idea that prisoner should have the right to vote with “Do you want the Boston Marathon bomber to vote?” Nor is it 3/5-Compromise level illogical to count inmates who have no connections to and are denied political engagement in the communities where they are detained towards those communities' proportional representation. Does denying prisoners and other people who have been in the criminal punishment system the right to vote protect and expand Republican power? Yes, so say whatever the fuck it takes to keep preventing those votes. Does counting prisoner populations as residents in the districts the prison happens to be in protect and expand Republican power? Given that prisons are often in more white, rural, and Republican spaces and especially given that prison populations are disproportionately drawn from poor, urban, POC and Democratic spaces, hell yeah, you do. <br /><br />Which brings us to the latest assault on abortion rights. Initially, the Republican party, under Nixon, embraced the forced-birth movement as a way to pull Catholic votes away from Democrats. It eventually solidified into a core current in their base, one they leverage to keep people who disagree with them about nearly everything else, checking the “R” box in every election. But at a more fundamental level, at a level beyond turning out the base, it is a way to control women and especially women of color, who, unlike white women, will be less likely to afford illegal abortions. It will trap them in unsafe domestic relationships. It will restrict their economic mobility. It will drain them of the physical, emotional, and financial resources to be politically active. It will kill them. And given that women and especially women of color vote more Democratic than men, controlling women is the goal. <br /><br />The reason why none of these new forced-birth bills have any funding for say, free contraception, sex education, or childcare is that reducing the number of abortions isn't the point: controlling women is. The reason why none of these bills make any medical sense is that medicine has nothing to do with it: controlling women does. The reason no one writing these bills seems to have any understanding of the actual biological processes of birth is that actually giving fucking birth is totally irrelevant to the goal, which is controlling women. These bills don't hold men responsible for their part in unwanted pregnancies, in any way shape or form, not because the bill writers don't understand that men are responsible for unwanted pregnancies, but because they don't care: controlling women is the point. <br /><br />And if this process of proposing logically incoherent, radically ignorant, and wildly unpopular policies looks familiar to you, that's because it is. The Republican party is using the 3/5-Compromise technique again, presenting absurd, nonsensical, and overtly cruel policies so that, in the end, they get as much of that control as they can. <br /><br />Ultimately, until the Republican party separates itself completely from white supremacy (I, for one, am not holding my breath) you don't actually need to listen to single argument a Republican in power makes, because it is not really an argument; it is a rhetorical device employed to preserve a system of power. That's why exposing their hypocrisy doesn't work. That's why refuting their statements with facts doesn't work. That's why showing logical inconsistencies doesn't work. That's why they don't even bat an eye when they line up to call for Al Franken's resignation and then put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. That's why it's all “free speech absolutist” until it comes to people protesting them. That's why it's all “states rights” until a city acts against their racist immigration policy. That's why it's all “fiscal responsibility” until it is time to conceal the damages of your trade policies with subsidies or write a blank check for war. That's why Republicans in certain places can say “Roe vs. Wade is settled law” while watching Republicans in other states explicitly create challenges to Roe vs. Wade as established law. That's why the party of family values and christian evangelicals can elect AND celebrate Donald Trump. And that's why for ever loving fuck's sake, it is not worth it for Democrats in power to court Republican votes or defend the systems and institutions that Republicans have been exploiting for decades. <br /><br />The only meaningful, effective solution to the problem contemporary Republicans in power pose to our nation and the world is to completely remove them from power at every level of government and you don't do that by playing along with their systems of power. You don't do that by working within the legislative, executive, and electoral norms they have been exploiting for decades. And you sure as fuck don't do that by treating the humanity of women and people of color as a negotiable policy. You do that by expanding the electorate, turning them out to vote, and following the leadership of those who have already succeeded at both. <br /><br />It is hard to fight when it feels like you're fighting against chaos. Fuck, it's hard to do anything when it feels like you have no fucking clue why all this fucking shit is happening. And it can be even harder to pull all of that rage into something actionable when you are watching powerful white men threaten the lives of people you love. And Republicans are threatening the lives of people you love. In fact, they have already taken some. And they will take more. Luckily, we still live in a world with <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781568585987?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">Stamped from the Beginning</a>. We still have authors, historians, and thinkers like Kendi who do know why this fucking shit is happening and can explain it to us in a way that snaps all that chaos into focus. And it's not that far from focus to action. Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-69470326236664069372018-12-06T07:51:00.001-08:002018-12-06T07:51:13.271-08:00Reading is Resistance: Lost Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What would you do if you were in a prisoner camp of some kind, cut off from the world, with no way to entertain yourself, nothing to do with the adrenalized energy that can often keep us awake even after the most exhausting days of labor and stress and trauma? How would you pass the time? What would you do to stay sane? How would you feel human when everything around you is designed to make you feel like an object, something discarded, a piece of trash those in power saw fit to “rehabilitate?” Jozef Czapaski and his fellow prisoners in a Soviet War camp organized a lecture series, with each participant sharing something they were passionate and knowledgeable about, something that connected them to the outside world, something that shared the depth of themselves with the compatriots in incarceration. Czapski, a painter by trade, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781681372587?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">chose to lecture</a> on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time" target="_blank">In Search of Lost Time</a> by Marcel Proust. <br /><br />Despite giving the lectures by memory, with no copies of the book or any scholarship of the book to reference (or any books at all), and working from schematics that he created himself in preparation for the lectures, Czapski's presentation is extremely insightful, distilling the very essence of Proust into something that can be communicated verbally to those with no familiarity with the work. I doubt serious scholars of Proust will find anything earth shattering in Czapski's interpretation, but he does an amazing job of bringing the biggest and most important aspects of the book to his listeners. For example, he (correctly I think) describes that famous madeleine as, essentially, a set up or a foreshadowing for the moment the narrator stands on a pair of uneven paving stones and the mystery of memory—and the power that mystery generates—reveals itself to him. He also spends a fair amount of his time on what could be considered the climax of the novel, when, late in the final volume, after years of being out of society, the narrator attends a party with all of his old friends. As I remember it, the scene starts with the narrator feeling as though it is a costume party, and all of these people who were so important to his past, had come dressed up as old people. And then it hits him; they aren't in costume. They had just, like we all do, aged. <br /><br />Czapski identifies something I'd forgotten about this amazing moment: the narrator sees the transience of life, sees mortality, understands at a profoundly emotional level that soon, all of these people will be gone and those who remember them will be gone and there will be essentially nothing left of the people he cared about. But he can do something. He can use his own memory to create something that immortalizes them, not as idealized images, or even as characters in the usual sense of the word, but as flawed, complicated, fascinating, and important people. And through this, after floundering around for years, the narrator discovers his purpose in life, the action that would make his life meaningful. He would save his friends and, through his exploration of memory, give us the tools we need to save ours. And, in an indirect way, give Gzapski the tools to save his own sanity and perhaps his own life. <br /><br />Given the importance of memory in Proust, in some ways a lecture series based entirely on how the speaker remembers Proust might be the highest expression of the book. If memory were perfect it would be meaningless. Everything in our lives would have the same value or at least take up the same space in our brains. As the translator points out in his introduction, forgetting is what makes memory powerful. It would also be a very different presence in our lives if it were controllable, if we only remembered the memories we were specifically looking for and only when we were specifically looking for them. But memory is not perfect and often we cannot control it. The triggers that elicit certain memories are hidden from us until they happen. And it is exactly those undbidden memories that create the most powerful experiences. We are most moved and in many ways most able to learn when something we had completely forgotten comes flooding back as if we were experiencing it again. This is how we are unmoored from linear time. But that doesn't mean memory is completely chaotic or completely unresponsive. <br /><br />One of the things that Czapski notes is that he remembered more and more of the book as he worked with his schematics and as he gave his lectures. The more he looked for Proust in his memory the more he found Proust. What follows is another idea about memory, different from anything directly expressed in Proust (at least as I remember it, though it's probably in there somewhere) but still akin to the madeleine and the uneven paving stones: we store much more than we realize. We don't know how much we know until we really start digging into our own memories. Fascism (and in many ways capitalism) argues that, as individuals, we are simply incapable of grandeur, of excellence, of power, of brilliance, of completeness, and it is only through the state (or through the purchase), only through giving ourselves over to the state, that human greatness is possible. But Czapski and his comrades made a powerful counter-argument in their lecture series. They proved that, even in a situation designed to crush them into a kind of singularity, they all still contained multitudes. And the point is not to admire Czapski and his comrades for their series, though it is admirable, but to realize that you are also capable. You can remember more than you think you can. You know more than you think you know. You are capable of more than you think you are. You could put up a fight in a prison camp. You can fight fascism so there are no more prison camps. <br /><br />As much as the lectures themselves are about Proust and memory, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781681372587?aff=JoshCook" target="_blank">Lost Time</a> is a story about self-care. It is an artifact of survival. It is a statement of defiance. The lesson from <i>Lost Time</i> isn't really one about Proust or <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>, but that being passionate about something is a survival technique. Developing an expertise in something, in anything, is a bulwark against systems of power and powerful individuals who prefer compliance above all, who value those who do what they are told, who find ways to eliminate the asking of questions, because those systems of power cannot take your expertise, they cannot take your knowledge, they cannot take your memory. They can take everything else from you, but they can't get in your mind and excise what you know. That knowledge of furniture restoration, of string theory, of Buffy is yours forever.<br />
<br />
What would you lecture on? And if you can't think of something, there are worse ways to spend a few weekends than developing an expertise in something that interests you. <br /><br />Readers have an extra privilege. The point of books is to encapsulate our humanity in ways that make it easy for us to share with others what makes our lives worth living. Those of us who develop an expertise in books or in a specific book, also develop a constant reminder of what we put in the work for, of why we fight, of what makes life valuable, and also of how we work, how we fight, and how we make life valuable. Czapski is discussing Proust in particular, but his summation of what he believes Proust accomplished is a beautiful summation of what literature aspires to do and what we can achieve or access when we interact with literature: “With his revelatory form, Proust brings a world of ideas, to the reader, a complete vision of life that, by awakening his faculties of thought and feeling, requires the reader to revise his own scale of values.” <br /><br />
This post would have a very different tone if Democrats had not flipped the House of Representatives, if they had not taken back state houses and state legislatures all across the country, and if they had not succeeded with referendums as well. This sense of what we need to do, what we can do when all hope is lost is different when we have been given such tangible and immediate reasons to hope. But you could tell the history of America in the 20th and 21st centuries through the battles we assumed were over. At time of writing, Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan are using their lame-duck sessions to completely undercut the Democratic gains in their states and further disadvantage Democrats in 2020. All of our great victories and all of our great progress has eroded without our constant attention. Our gains were chipped away, our progress diminished, the passions of radical reactionaries loud enough and inconvenient enough to extract concessions from those of us who felt we had better things to do with our time and now we find ourselves in a new version of the early 1900s; African-Americans and many other people of color live in a new Jim Crow, a handful of super-wealthy people control almost the entire economy with nearly everyone else in too precarious personal circumstances to put up much of a fight, and fascism is a threat here and around the world. <br /><br />I have said this in other contexts, but while I think about Czapski and his comrades in a prison camp and I think about the children and families in concentration camps, complete with numbers being written on their arms, today in the United States, I remember that we have the privilege of memory. We are not yet Germany in the 1930s in large part because we can remember Germany in the 1930s. We are pushing back against the rise of white supremacy because we remember Jim Crow and we remember the lynchings. We can remember what happened and actually do something to stop it and to change it. <br /><br />And one election is not going to save the world. We have to see the 2018 mid-terms as the very first step, not just in defeating Donald Trump, but in remaking American society to live up to the promises it made after World War II and to live up to new promises we can make with our new imaginations. We have to take Czapski's lessons about books and reading and maintaining your personhood in an impersonal world, not as just a kind of defense against the dark arts, not just as a barricade against those who would invade our minds, but also as the basis for what we build next, for seeing who we can be in the future and finding a way to get there, and for describing a new and better world and what we'll do to create it. Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-54203493875453806672018-11-09T08:30:00.002-08:002018-11-09T08:30:35.847-08:002018 Midterm Debrief
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Deep breath. We gave ourselves a
chance. We did not end the Trump administration, we did not stop the
rise of fascism in America, and we did not finally, finally, finally
wipe out the lingering Confederacy that the Republican party has
essentially become. Wednesday's firing of Jeff Sessions and
installation of Trump lackey as acting attorney general make that
abundantly clear. (Of course, we couldn't have one fucking day.) But
we gave ourselves a chance. And with the campaign infrastructure we
built over the course of this election, with some of the wins in
governors races, with some of the election reforms passed by
referendum, and with a more advantageous Senate map, we have a chance
to really eradicate this Republican party in 2020. The Republican
party has been building this particular system of power since Richard
Nixon's Southern strategy and it has been successful for decades.
We're not going to erase it in one election, especially when there
are so many structural impediments to the type of change we seek. But
we might be able to do it in in two. Deep breath.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here are my thoughts about what
happened in the mid-terms and where we can go next.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Flipped the House!</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We flipped the house in two distinct
ways. First and foremost, there is a Democratic majority, which means
that (assuming we can make it to January) we have saved Medicare and
Social Security for now, as well as what remains of Obamacare, and prevented
(well, we'll see what happens in the lame duck) more catastrophic tax
cuts. And it also means that there will actually be oversight of this
administration. There will at least be a
chance at confronting and controlling the rampant corruption in the
cabinet. At the very least, it's only a matter of time before Trump's tax returns become public. This was the knife-edge upon which democracy teetered and we
needed to flip the House Democrat, regardless of who those actual
democrats were, in order to keep us from falling completely over into
fascism.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But another flip happened in the House.
On Tuesday, the House took the single biggest step I think any of us
have ever seen in our lifetimes, and perhaps ever in American
history, towards actually looking like the population of America.
There are now Muslims in the House, as there are in America, and
Native Americans in the House, as there are in America, and Latinx in
the House, as there are in America, and refugees in the House, as
there are in America, and there are more women in the House, closer
to the actual number of women in America and more people of color in
the House, closer to the actual number of people of color in America.
The House even got slightly queerer.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There was a time in the not too distant
past when the argument that the Democrat and Republican parties were
essentially the same held water, but, today, all you need is your
eyes to know that is no longer the case. The Democratic Party looks
like America and the Republican party looks like the Confederacy. And
now the House looks more like America.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Flipped Governor's Races, State Houses,
DAs, and Newly Competitive Seats</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The devastation of the 2010 midterm
wasn't really in Congress, but in the states where Republicans were
able to leverage the census year to insulate their power from all but
the most dramatic voter uprisings. 2010, in many ways, ended up being
a culmination of liberal, progressive, and Democratic neglect of
state and municipal politics, a neglect that allowed Republicans to
entrench themselves at all levels of state government and leverage
that entrenchment to create power at the national level they would
not otherwise have secured.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In 2018, Democrats, liberals, and
progressives paid attention to state and local politics and it
showed, with states flipping executive, legislative, and judicial
branches, progressive DAs being elected, and ballot referendums
successfully enacting a number of policies that will make it easier
to elect more Democrats the next time around. It is going to be hard
to know this and even harder to feel this in a meaningful way and
even harder to feel it with the same intensity as we felt the
disappointment in certain losses, but, in this election, we improved
the lives of millions of Americans. We saved lives. I'll say that
again, we literally saved lives.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Furthermore, even in some high profile
losses, the Democrats showed the power of a run-everywhere strategy.
An energetic campaign, especially one that draws on both national
resources and local volunteer energy, like Abrams (who at time of
writing still hasn't officially lost), Gillum (who at time of writing
might actually have won), and O'Rourke, can create victories
elsewhere. We can confidently attribute two flipped seats in the
House to O'Rourke's campaign and maybe two more to Abrams. I think
it's also fair to say that the enthusiasm for Gillum probably gave a
boost to Prop 4 in Florida. Run everywhere is effective even if you
can't win everywhere.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And the thing is: Independents,
Democrats, liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, even some
Republicans, and others want to save their fucking country from
Donald Trump and his brand of white nationalist fascism so why not
give all of those people the opportunity to do so by giving them
campaigns to work on. When the energy is there you can create
positive results beyond winning a specific seat this specific year.
And now, in 2020 when the demographics will be even more advantageous
for Democrats, there will be thousands of experienced campaign
volunteers in every single state ready to take the lessons they
learned in this election and apply them to the next one.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>American Society is Center-Left</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The majority of Americans voted for
Democratic governors. The majority of Americans voted for Democrats
in the House of Representatives. The majority of Americans voted for
Democrats in the Senate. Progressive values won races all over the
country, including in red states, in the form of referendums and
ballot initiatives. Medicare was expanded. Voting rights expanded.
Minimum wages raised. Gerrymandering ended. Marijuana legalized.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When you add it all up, you get a
population that is (essentially and, of course, not uniformly)
politically center-left. You get a population that, in general,
supports the social contract of the New Deal, wants to lower its
insane incarceration rate, and wants competitive elections, all of
which are core Democrat and center-left policies and ideologies. Why
red states consistently elect representatives that specifically, even
aggressively, oppose the policies the people themselves support is
one of the great mysteries of American politics (if you ask me, it's
a heady mix of good old fashioned American racism with Republican
identity politics, but that's a post for a different time) but it
still contributes to the same conclusion: by and large the American
people want Democratic policies even if they don't always vote for
Democratic representation.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>The Polls Are Alright</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the most part, the election looked
like we expected it to look. Of course, there were some surprises
both for the Democrats and for the Republicans, but, by and large,
the results reflected what pollsters and history suggested: the
Democrats would take the House and make gains in other places, while
the Republicans would hold the Senate and maintain control in others.
For some reason, we seem to treat polls as though they are
predictions, when they are really just educated guesses that are
useful for assessing political strategies and interesting to interact
with in the same way sports statistics are interesting to interact
with.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When Donald Trump won the Presidential
election, defying all of the prevailing predictions, we reacted as if
the very act of polling was somehow invalidated and perhaps even
fraudulent. This is another example of jumping to a conclusion in a
moment of trauma to find an explanation (any explanation!) for what
the fuck just happened. And just like the whole narrative of the
white working class and just like the narrative of the flaws of
Hilary Clinton's campaign, once every vote was counted (more on
this soon), once we got the full story we realized that, in fact,
Trump's campaign threaded that handful of a percent needle he needed
to win. Literally tens of thousands of votes in three states.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Oh, and there was a sophisticated
foreign-lead misinformation and manipulation campaign that
(allegedly) coordinated with the Trump campaign itself to boost his
campaign. Almost by definition a
this-crazy-shit-has-never-happened-before event isn't going to be
factored into 538's latest projections.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Polls are not perfect and never will
be, and really, aren't supposed to be. They are impressions. They are
guesses. They are spectra. They are one of the many different kinds
of tools campaigns can use to strategize and people can use to
understand our country and our politics. 2016 was an aberration
because shit happened that had never fucking happened before. And
that's not the fault of polls and pollsters. That's the fault of
criminals who defrauded and conspired to defraud the United States.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Results Before All the Votes Are
Counted</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At time of writing, the odds that
Andrew Gillum actually won the governor's race in Florida continue to
rise. A recount for Florida's senate seat is all but guaranteed and a
recount for the governor's race in Georgia also looks increasingly
likely. As the denser, more populated districts with more mail-in and
absentee ballots to process continue to work through their ballots,
more and more votes for Democrats are added to the totals. It's
looking like the number of flipped seats in the House will land
closer to 40 than to 30. And two of the three Big Emotional
Disappointments on election night, might actually turn out to be Big
Significant Victories.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Will that change the narrative that
Tuesday was an overall disappointing performance for the Democrats?
Even if they eventually hold on to the Senate seat in Florida? Even
as all those Democratic votes in California keep getting piled on top
of the totals?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of course not. Once a narrative sticks,
even if it is based on data that is eventually proven inaccurate it
is almost impossible to change it. It gets even harder when that
incorrect narrative benefits those in power (Republicans) and/or fits
neatly into pre-existing narratives (the mainstream media idea that
there is something fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party).
Just like in 2016, when we called the election and drew conclusions
from it before seeing exactly how many more votes Clinton received
than Trump and before seeing how razor-thin his margins in the
rust-belt were and before seeing the actual composition of his
voters, we are likely to continue to discuss Tuesday's election is if
it were something far less impressive than it was.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There is, of course, an easy way to fix
this: do not release the results until all the votes have been
counted. Honestly, it should be a law.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>We Built the Tools, We Learned the
Tricks, On to 2020</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hundreds of thousands of Americans
learned, over the course of this summer, the amount of and the kind
of work it takes to win elections in this country. Hundreds of
thousands of us have learned to canvas, to call, to text, and to
organize. Democrats had to develop unprecedented capacities to absorb
and deploy volunteers. Progressive think tanks pioneered new data
driven fundraising initiatives, developed new Get Out the Vote
techniques, and found new ways to tell their story. They found ways
to replace Super PAC money with volunteer energy. (For example, I
was one of a mass of volunteers who did remote data entry for the
O'Rourke campaign.)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But we also know where we need to do
more work. We need to start registering voters now for 2020 and be
willing to spend the money and time to get them all through the
registration process. <a href="https://www.spreadthevote.org/" target="_blank">We need to have the resources to respond to new Republican suppression tactics.</a> We need to be
in high schools now, because today's 16-year-olds are 2020's
18-year-olds. We need to give all those thousands upon thousands of
volunteers opportunities to keep contributing to the world they want
to see. We need to start organizing ballot initiatives that drive
Democrat voters to the polls.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And we need to keep fighting now to
even get to January. Rick Scott is calling the counting of every vote
in Florida fraud. The President is moving to end the Mueller
investigation. And I haven't checked the internet in a few minutes so
who knows what's being cooked up for the lame duck session.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But I am not exhausted. I am not
overwhelmed. I am not deterred. Perhaps the most important thing we
learned on November 6 was the work is worth it. Small donations,
grassroots organizing, and thousands of volunteers engaging with an
aware public can overcome Super-PACs, gerrymandering, and other
structural impediments to Democracy.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The work is worth it. Deep breath. On to the next
fight.</div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-23239457061014282842018-10-22T21:15:00.001-07:002018-10-22T21:15:32.662-07:00Why You Should Canvas
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There are four weekend days left before
the election that, to me at least, will decide whether we will
continue our slide into fascism or not. You should use at least one
of those days to canvas for a Democrat somewhere. It could be in a
swing district like ME-02, but it could also be for a sure thing,
(like Elizabeth Warren) or a long shot (like Jay Gonzales).
Door-to-door, person-to-person canvasing has been <a href="https://www.ecanvasser.com/blog/political-canvassing-techniques/" target="_blank">shown to be themost effective way to turn out votes</a> for your candidate and if you
don't like what the Republicans have been doing with their power, the
best thing you can do is turnout votes for Democrats. But, canvassing
is one of those activities where you get out almost as much as you
put in, and whatever value you bring to the campaign, you get back in
other ways. So, here are some reasons why you should canvas—on top
of the whole defending the country against white nationalist
misogynist fascism thing of course—for yourself, followed by a few observations from my last turfs.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>A Good Walk</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I know this sounds like one of the
hokey things recruiters will tack on at the end of a pitch, but
seriously, canvassing is walking and you, you're not walking enough.
Walking is good for you. Being outside is good for you and you're not
outside enough either. Well, here you go: a good walk outside. For me anyway there are few activities as
fulfilling as walking through a new landscape and canvassing is
inherently that.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>A Look Inside a Campaign</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Politics is almost a parodoxical
combination of the simple and the complex. You vote and a candidate
wins. (Or you don't vote and a candidate wins without any input from you.) In nearly
every instance you will have a choice between a Republican and a
Democrat and in an even higher percentage of instances even when you
have other choices, you're only meaningful choice will be between a
Republican and a Democrat. (Except for you folks in Maine, who now
have <a href="https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rcv.html" target="_blank">ranked-choice voting!</a>) And most of us already knew which one we
were going to choose, because we've been making the same choice for
years. Simple.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But getting more people to vote for
your candidate is a massively complex challenge that involves
volunteer management, workflow, data collection, data processing,
writing, editing, graphic design, coding, polling, fundraising,
financial management, and more with dozens, hundreds, or even
thousands of people. When you canvas, you get a peek at all of that.
You get to see what's on the walls of the offices, how many people
are working, and what kind of snacks they have. From whose doors you
knock on and where those doors are and the script and talking points you're given, you can get a sense of the
campaign's strategy, of how big their canvassing effort is, and of
who they think they can turn out on election day and how they think they can be turned out.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you're at all interested in the
mechanics of elections and politics (and you really
should be) canvassing is a great way to get a glimpse of that
machinery.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Get Out of Your Bubble, But Not in the
Stupid Fucking Soft-Focus NYT Piece Set in a Hardscrabble Bar in
Northern Kentucky Bullshit Way (Not that I Have Anything Against Said Bar & Its Kindred Bars.)</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By the last two weekends of the
election, you will most likely be knocking on Democratic doors (at
least suggested by the campaign's data), but that doesn't mean you'll
only be talking to like-minded people. In fact, there's a good chance
you'll end up talking to one of the (for me and probably for you)
strangest animals on the planet: the semi-aware American
sometimes-voter. Like, dude, this isn't Bill Clinton era political
triangulation, this is children in fucking cages, this is the most
corrupt administration we have ever seen, this is a President
obviously aligned or at the very least amenable to some of the most
repressive regimes in the world, including one was the villain in, like, half the action movies in the 80s. This is an obvious partisan hitman on the
Supreme Court. This is someone who at the very least had a drinking problem in his life that he refuses to confront but is probably also a serial sexual assaulter. This is lying from the Oval Office at an unprecedented
rate. This is a Republican party who's only policy commitment is
keeping itself in power by any means necessary. (And they give themselves bonus points when they get to hurt people they don't like along the way.) How the fuck are you
lukewarm about any of this? I can kind of understand devotees to the
cult of Fox News and though I don't understand why you would ever
feel this way, I at least understand why white supremacists are
supporting the Republican party. Same goes for all those fucking
asshole misogynist men who felt seen and spoken for by Grassley's,
Graham's, and Kavanaugh's temper tantrums. I don't understand what
the fuck is wrong with you, but I understand how being such a piece
of shit would lead you to certain actions. But to see all of that and
still think, “I just don't know?” Or, worse, to see all of that
and think, “Meh?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What this tells me is that contemporary
mainstream political journalism has failed--at a level far worse than I imagined--in its primary goal of
informing citizens on the state of political power in our country. In
order to project some strange definition of “balance,” mainstream
media has downplayed the threat the contemporary Republican party
poses to America, while overemphasizing the flaws in the Democratic
party. I mean, the few times I was able to discuss specific issues
with people while canvassing they wanted to talk about health care,
so we did. OK. Fine. In Maine, I saw an a Bruce Poliquin ad arguing
that he was in favor of protecting patients with preexisting
conditions, despite voting to repeal the ACA with no replacement
legislation to protect the patients repealing the ACA would leave
vulnerable. And this isn't isolated. Somehow, Republicans around the
country are trying to run on fucking healthcare. They believe they
can get away with this because they know our political journalism
will not be able to respond.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A current in this failure is how “get
out of your bubble” was leveraged by the right to mean, “Let
another white guy from the Midwest talk at you.” Somehow, our media
has allowed the right to control the debate on connecting and
listening to other perspectives to somehow only mean that all
liberals have a responsibility to listen to a specific range of
conservatives. (And if we don't listen in the exact right way
and do exactly what they ask of us no matter how damaging it might be
to other populations it's our fault, not theirs if they help elect Trump and Trump-like Republicans.) Somehow, the
media has helped create another one-way street in which certain white
men get to talk at the rest of us as much of they want and
without any meaningful responsibility for their own actions. Which is
really tragic, because there are lots of different ways to get out of
your bubble. It doesn't just mean talking to your political opposite.
It doesn't just mean listening to someone who doesn't believe you are
fully human. It doesn't just mean another fluff piece on Rust Bowl
Trump voters. There are lots of different types of people you can
meet and perspectives you can interact with once you're there.
Political belief is a spectrum, in terms of policy and intensity and
it is always good to find ways to talk to people on different parts
of both spectra.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Canvassing might be the easiest way to do that.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>They're All Crooks! </b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A corollary to the “Meh,” voter is
the “They're all crooks!” voter. It is undeniable that the
Democratic party has its flaws and that it is influenced by its
donors. It is also true, that there have been times in our recent
political memory (Bill Clinton's triangulation and Al Gore's
subsequent campaign) where there wasn't much to distinguish between
public statements and no small amount of enacted legislation. (Again,
Bill Clinton era crime bill & welfare reform and some
post 9/11 security state stuff. Oh yeah, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) It is also true that there have been
corrupt Democrats and that there will certainly be corrupt Democrats
in the future, but there is nothing in modern memory anywhere close
to what Trump and the Republicans are doing. This, of course, goes
back to how “balanced” journalism works. There's a negative story
about a Republican being a fucking fascist, well, run a negative
story about a Democrat and present them as equal in scale even if
they are not even remotely of equal scale.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I should also note, that this is a
consequence of “horse race journalism” as much as it is of
“balanced” journalism. In terms of what a journalist does, it
shouldn't fucking matter whether Republicans claiming to protect
preexisting conditions is an effective election strategy because it's
a fucking lie. But, instead, the various policies and positions of
both parties are presented neutrally, as being equally valid
arguments conducted in equally valid ways and the only thing of
interest is which one ends up more popular. So voters, especially
voters who don't dive deeper than the headlines, come away with the
sense that the two parties are both equally bad and so why bother. In
fact, one person I talked to was visibly angry that both campaigns
were “bothering” him, so he was going to vote independent. Of
course, HIS name wasn't the name I had on my list, which brings me to
my next observation...</div>
<b>
</b><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<b>
</b><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Special Report for the Department of
Shocking but Not Surprising</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Holy shit there are still a lot of men
who will not hesitate to speak for their wives. The last house I
stopped at yesterday a man, roughly my age (38) saw my button and
said, “We're Republicans here,” which was especially interesting
because the woman's name I had on my list was, according the
state registration information, a registered Democrat. For all I
know, that person had honestly changed her mind at some point in her
life and just hadn't bothered to update her registration. That is, of
course, a “perfectly rational explanation.” But, much more
likely, this guy is a fucking Republican so his family is fucking
Republican and that's fucking it. There are a lot of forces, both
historic and contemporary that have created Trump's 38-42% approval
rating, but a big chunk of it has to be men who believe it is their
right to speak for their household and Donald Trump is overtly
protecting, shit, even celebrating, that power. (Should also note that
“shocked but not surprised” is perhaps my most common emotion in
2018.) (I should also note that if you're not planning on voting at the moment, maybe you could just to deal this asshole a loss. You know the smugness liberals are accused of having? This fucker oozed it, but with that extra dose of 'I can't be smug because I'm a Republican' smugness. Wouldn't you like to ruin his day?)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>It's All Rigged</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One of the more interesting responses
was someone who told me he never votes because it's all rigged.
Canvassing really isn't the time for a long conversation about
anything, so I wasn't able to drill down to what he actually meant,
as that could mean anything from a version of “They're all crooks,”
above to, “the Illuminati controls the world.” I bring him up
only because, later I realized I should have said to him, “I'm not
here to convince you, but, just ask yourself, who wins because you
don't vote?” Seems like a pretty good question for anyone thinking
of sitting this election out to answer for themselves.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Rays of Hope</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My lists the past two Sundays were of
infrequent voters; people who had not voted in the last few elections
or in the last few midterm elections. This included Democrats,
Undeclared voters, Independents, and some Republicans. This means
that the campaign has the resources to go after unknowns, to expand
its potential base, and to reach votes the Democrats haven't reached
in the last couple of election cycles. And a good number of people I
actually talked to are voting Democrat! Like, a little over a third
of the people I actually talked to. Sure, that's maybe 10 people, but
if you all canvas on at least one of the remaining four weekend days,
that hundreds or even thousands of Democrat voters. I don't know if that's
enough, but it's either do something or don't.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Canvasing Links (Because you're definitely going to canvas now.)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://events.mobilizeamerica.io/goldenforcongress/event/20602/" target="_blank">For Jared Golden in my hometown ofLewiston, ME</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WnJBhwJBdONKhMnipirSYBTDP6TbnnSziL_z-XrTe3s/edit#heading=h.nkygn0y6lsqo" target="_blank">All Swing District Canvassing from theBoston Area</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://jay4ma.com/volunteer/" target="_blank">Canvas for Democrat candidate for MAgovernor Jay Gonzalez</a> (Because, last I checked, Charlie Baker was still fine being a member of a misogynist white nationalist fascist party.) </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://swingleft.org/" target="_blank">Swing Left National</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://votesaveamerica.com/" target="_blank">Vote Save America</a> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://thelastweekend.org/" target="_blank">Last Weekend</a></div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-78380233343983681272018-09-27T21:39:00.001-07:002018-09-27T21:39:43.754-07:00Your Hero Opportunity
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Most of the time, it's hard to know the
real value of what you do. For most of us, we know that
whatever we did today was good enough or at least not bad enough that
we kept our jobs for another day, that our marriages stayed together
another day, that we got the kids back and forth to school, and as
important is it is to do all of those things, it's hard to know
exactly whether what we said was good or just good enough, whether
what we did was right or just not so wrong someone would say
something about it. With the exception of professions like nurses,
doctors, EMTs, soldiers, fire fighters, pilots, and a few others and
very rare cases like car accidents and natural disasters, we can only
guess at whether or not what we did was the best thing we could have
done.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And, that's fine. For me, one of the
primary skills we need to develop to live fulfilling lives is a base
level of comfort with ambiguity. Honestly, I'd go even further and
say some of the most destructive forces in human society, fascism,
racism, theocracy, are based in creating a false sense of certainty.
They are supported by and destructive because they create these
certainties upon which people then live their lives, regardless of
the consequences or impacts their actions may have on others.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Which is a long way to say that
ambiguity is not a problem and not something I routinely try to
remove from my life and my writing.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There is no ambiguity here. There is no
doubt. Even in this postmodern, post-structuralist, deconstructed
world, there is a right thing to do.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We've all wondered, in various lexicons
and with various fantastic or realistic scaffolding, what we would do
if we were put in a life and death situation, if we were given a
dramatic choice, if we were called on to be a hero.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There may not be an actual ticking time
bomb, their may not be flames or car chases or dearly beloveds
dangling from cliffs, but this is your life or death moment, this is
your hero opportunity and what you must do is clear.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
You must vote Democrat in every race
this election. If you always vote Democrat, if you always vote
Republican, if you mix it up, if you vote third party, if you don't
vote, if you've never voted before, the right thing for you to do,
the heroic thing for you to do is vote for every Democrat on your
ballot.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you're reading this, odds are you
already planning on doing that. I don't know if I have the eloquence
and insight to breakthrough to those of you who are not already
planning to vote Democrat this fall, but you can't succeed if you
don't try. That said, I know there are some of you who will never
vote Democrat, who will always vote Republican, and this is the part
where I'm supposed to say that I respect you and that we're supposed
to find common ground, but I don't, there is no meaningful common ground, and
though I will applaud those of you who undertake the long and
difficult personal journey away from this current incarnation of
Republicanism, right now your votes are literally tearing families
apart, literally destroying our system of government, literally
traumatizing millions of your friends, neighbors, and family members,
and literally killing people and if Fox News is protecting you from
that truth my little blog post isn't going to bust in.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So I'm going to focus on three types of
people who might not vote for Democrats in November.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>I Oppose the Two-Party System</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
How much has voting third-party or
abstaining from elections done to diminish the power of the two-party
system over the last twenty years or so? How many Green Party members
are there in Congress? Governors? State legislatures?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Listen the two-party system is
undemocratic, has pushed American policy far to the right of the
American public actually believes, and fundamentally stifles the
conversation around policy and legislation, but how does helping
Republicans maintain power, despite the fact that most Americans do
not support the Republican agenda, push us towards a multi-party
system? In fact, because Republicans are actually disenfranchising
voters, specifically progressive voters, on top of everything else,
empowering Republicans by voting third-party or abstaining from
voting actually hinders our ability to transition to a multi-party
system.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you really want to begin diminishing
the power of the two-party system, vote for very Democrat on your
ballot and then do whatever you can in your state to reform your
elections to include ranked choice voting or instant run-off
elections. It is a popular idea, it won on the ballot in Maine, and
it is the first step in breaking through the two-party system.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>The Democrats Are Whores to [Insert
Special Interest Here]</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With the exception of radical
conspiracy theorists, you're also probably right. Contemporary
politics is a money game and in contemporary American capitalism very
few good people have the kind of money it takes to influence
politics. Look behind your favorite Democrat politician and there's
probably at least one really bad corporation or industry (probably
pharma) donating to them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But does that put them on par with what
Republicans do? Really? Does the fact that many (but not all!)
Democrats take money from problematic corporations really mean that
the Trump administration is acceptable? Is your ideological purity
worth all of this collateral damage?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Furthermore, as above, how does helping
Republicans remain in power by voting third-party or abstaining from
voting help get money out of politics? Do you see any Republicans at
any level advocating for campaign finance reform? Cause I don't.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So, vote for every Democrat on your
ballot this Fall and help get money out of politics by donating to
politicians that reject corporate and PAC donations and pushing for
campaign finance reform in your state.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>I Don't Care</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Someone you love does.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The most important voters in America
are nonvoters, those who are eligible, but don't. There are lots of
reasons for this, many of which come from structural impediments to
voting (many of which are intentional) so I'm not really talking to
those who are logistically prevented from voting (but let me break in
here to say, do whatever you can. Lyft will take you to the polls,
Get out the Vote organizations will get you there, coordinate with
your boss, your coworkers whatever, because, honestly, you might not
get another chance to vote.).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whatever reason you have for not
caring, whether it's that feel as though your vote doesn't matter, or
that no politicians represent you specifically, or whatever is fine
and I'm not going to try to argue against that idea. I don't know
what matters to you so I have no idea how to make you care.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Someone you love cares. Someone you
love was traumatized by what happened yesterday in the Kavanaugh
hearing. Someone you love was traumatized when the Access Hollywood
tape didn't end Trump's campaign. Someone you love is terrified
because they emigrated here recently or are first generation or just
happen to have a Hispanic sounding name and there is a real chance
ICE could sweep them up. Someone you love is scared of the uptick in
hate crimes, someone you love is scared of LGBT information being
scrubbed from federal websites, someone you love is scared their
asthma will become unmanageable if the air quality regulations are
eliminated, someone you love is scared of dying from an illegal
abortion. Someone you love has gained weight and lost sleep and felt
a pit with sharp edges in their stomachs for what feels like forever
and someone you love will never be the same again the way our
grandparents who lived through the Great Depression would keep old junk in
their basements because they could never quite shake the fear of
bread lines.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Maybe politics doesn't actually affect
you. Maybe you have good reasons to not care. Maybe those reasons are
good enough for whatever logistical challenges you face to voting to
count as a hassle.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Fine. Whatever.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But you are not the only person in your
life. If you're not going to vote Democrat for yourself, vote
Democrat for someone you love. And let's put a rational self-interest
spin on this too. If Republicans hold on to the House and Senate,
someone you love will look up from weeping and ask you if you voted
yesterday and your relationship with them will never be the same if
you say, “no.” Shit, vote Democrat for someone I love. I mean, if
it really and truly doesn't matter to you, why not make my
grandmother's day?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Your Opportunity</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So this is your opportunity to be a
hero. I won't say we're lucky to have this opportunity and I won't
say we should be thankful our opportunity is so easy to capitalize
on, but here it is. Our chance to do something great.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://vote.gov/" target="_blank">Will you be a hero?</a> </div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-55108340794825125262018-09-10T20:29:00.000-07:002018-09-10T20:29:17.630-07:00Turinng the NHL Into a Two-Tier League
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For fun, let's
imagine restructuring the NHL into two-tiers, sort of like
professional soccer leagues around the world. There would be a
Premier League (or Prince of Wales division, see what I did there.)
and a Second League (or Adams division). Reorganizing the league this
way would greatly reduce the number of “meaningless games” during
the regular season and reduce the value of “tanking,” while
producing more potentially exciting games and more interesting
interactions between the teams, and, give the league a structure for
incorporating all the expansion they're desperate to do. You'll see
how all of that could happen as I get in to the details.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
First, some basics.
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
36
teams, 18 in the Prince of Wales Division and 18 in the Adams
Division. Each division would be divided into an East and West
conference of 9 teams each. (This will also work just fine with a 32
team league, though the playoff structure would have to be redone.)
Only the teams in the Prince of Wales (or Adams, doesn't really
matter to me what the premier division is called) will be eligible to
compete for the Stanley Cup (more on the playoff structure soon). (Obviously, the Adams division will have it's own playoffs, again more on that later.) All the teams will play every
other team in the league at least once, but no team will play any
team in the other division more than twice. (With the extra game
being for “natural rivalries” between teams in different
divisions, say, going from this year, Calgary and Edmonton.) In
theory, once this is in place, you could keep adding teams as much as
you want. Just keep the PoW at 18 and stick as many expansion teams
as you want the Adams division and adjust the playoff structure
accordingly. In theory, you could even add another tier if you
wanted to.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The draft lottery
would work essentially the same as it does now, with the entire
league drafting together, so the last place team in the Adams would
have the best chance at the first pick. Trades could also happen
between divisions (more on that later.) Every team makes the playoffs
within its division with one exception (more on that later). There
will be a system of relegation and promotion (more on that later).
That's pretty much the basics.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let's get into the
weeds.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>EXPANSION</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let's start hashing
things out by getting the League up to 36 teams and dividing them
into the two divisions. The league has 31 teams at the moment, so
we'll need five more to get there. Here are the cities that I think
should get teams: Seattle (since it seams like they're going to get
one anyway), Quebec City and Hartford (since they already had teams),
Hamilton (since there has been some momentum around a team in
Hamilton for years now, but for some reason we care about what the
Sabers think), and...</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
a team owned by the
NHL located in some city that wins some crazy-ass year long
competition. Does Montreal have room for a second team? (Maybe.) Does
Boston? (No.) Could somewhere small, but with hockey history like
Saskatoon (birth place of Gordie Howe) make a case? Is there another
Las Vegas hiding somewhere? (Branson?) PEI? Madison? A team shared by the
Dakotas? Lake Superior? New England? And if, after some reasonable
amount of time (5 years, let's say), that city, can't support an NHL hockey team, well, they just hold the contest
again. The operations of the team would be independent of the NHL,
but the NHL could potentially use it as a kind of ambassador team.
Moving it around North America (or beyond), and trying out new
things (ticket packages, carbon neutral arenas, municipal stakes a la
the Green Bay Packers). Maybe this makes it hard to keep top talent
and compete, but, well somebody's got to be last and if somebody's
got to be last it might as well be a team that is also doing
interesting things for the game of hockey.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Once we have all the
teams we'll need to divide them into the two divisions. So, the PoW
division would be composed of the original 6, plus the next 12 teams
with the highest total of regulation and overtime wins over the last,
say, five seasons. Yes, this means that an undeserving team or two
might get bumped for an original-6 team that's had a bad run of late,
but I honestly can't imagine starting out with any number of
original six teams without a shot at the Stanley Cup. If they play
their way into regulation after the league has been reorganized,
well, that's on them. (Every redemption story, starts with a fall.)
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The long term wins
total, as opposed to say, the end of season ranking, is a way to
reward long term success and prevent a good franchise that just
happens to be going through a rebuilding year or two from being relegated
and a bad franchise that happens to get a few good bounces down the
stretch from being promoted.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
With the divisions
and conferences set, the regular season plays as it does now, with
the scheduling exception described above. Oh, and while I've got you:
3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win, 1 point
for an overtime loss, and...1.5 points for a shootout win.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<b>
</b><div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>PLAYOFFS</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The first thing one
might object to, to this current structure is there isn't really a
playoff race. Every team will end up in some form of playoff, either
for the Stanley Cup or whatever the Adams division trophy is called.
(The Kenora Cup, perhaps.) The only thing the regular season will
decide, in terms of the specific season, is the seeding going into
the playoffs. But that seeding will be significant and whether a
franchise is safely in the PoW or in jeopardy of being relegated will
be determined by their seeding. Let's see how that works.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
First of all, the
top seeds in the Adams East & West conferences will play the 9<sup>th</sup>
seeds in the PoW East & West conferences in a one game playoff.
We could have both games played on the same day, maybe a Sunday, one
in the afternoon and one in the evening. This essentially creates a
hockey holiday, in which pretty much all hockey fans are watching
both games and both games are absolutely vital for both teams. Think
of how much money the bars in Canada would make on this day. Think of
the parties. Think of how much fun that would be, to be with a group
of neutrals and just pick a team to root for. Think of the parties
the winning teams' fans throw. Think of the parties the losing teams'
fans throw! The NHL could even throw a whole bunch of weird and
awkward ceremonies all over the place and it would still be about as
much fun as you can possibly have as a hockey fan.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The winners of these
one-game playoffs, face the 8<sup>th</sup> seeds in the PoW East and
West conferences in a best of five series. The winner of that series
enters the official Stanley Cup Playoffs as the 8<sup>th</sup> seed.
Depending on the situation, what happens in those playoff games and
in that series, could have huge implications for the teams involved,
but I'll get into the more when I get to relegation and promotion.
And then it's a regular 8 team playoff. 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7 and so
forth.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I want to point out
one other benefit to this playoff structure: ta da! We have created a
bye-week at the end of the season for seeds 1-7. One of the things no
one really acknowledges about the Stanley Cup Playoffs is that, often, it's
the good team that happens to be healthiest that wins. A bye-week
doesn't solve all of the health problems that can impact the results
of the playoffs but it mitigates them, at least a little bit. Every
1-7 team will have a week to give their legs a chance to rest, to
recover from small injuries, to get their goalies off their feet a
little bit. And since there will be hockey going on during that time,
it's not like it would be dead time for the league or the fans.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And how about the
difference between the 7<sup>th</sup> seed and the 8<sup>th</sup>
seed? Significant games indeed.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Most of the new
significance, though, will come from the relegation and promotion
system, so let's do that now.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>RELEGATION AND
PROMOTION</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
First of all, the
Stanley cup winner is protected from relegation for two years.
(Success should be rewarded.) Conference champs will be protected for
one year. (So, you know, they can finally all touch the conference
trophies.)</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
If an Adams Division
team wins its way into the Stanley playoffs, it is promoted to PoW
and the 9<sup>th</sup> seed of the PoW is relegated to the Adams. Now
the difference between the 8<sup>th</sup> and 9<sup>th</sup> seed in
the PoW conferences is massive. Furthermore, in the Adams division, the
difference between 1 & 2 is huge, as 2 doesn't even get a shot at promotion. But wait, there's more.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As above, the
Stanley Cup winner is protected from relegation for two years. So
they are not eligible for relegation, even if they end up 9<sup>th</sup>
in their conference, and even if they lose that one game playoff. If
that happens, the 8<sup>th</sup> seed is made eligible for
relegation. If they lose that subsequent playoff series, they are
relegated instead. So, if a Stanley Cup winner struggles at the
beginning of the season, the significance between 7 & 8 is huge
(on top of the significance of the by-week), as the 8<sup>th</sup>
seed could become eligible for relegation. But, also from above, it
is possible for a PoW conference to have two teams protected from
relegation in the same season; the Stanley Cup champ from two seasons
ago, and the conference champion from the preceding season.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
What happens if
they're both terrible? And the 1 seed from the Adams beats them both.
We can't have that team play the 7<sup>th</sup> place team to settle
the relegation issue, as that would wreck the playoff structure. So
in that (most likely) rare case, if the Adams team wins more total
playoff games than the 7<sup>th </sup> seed PoW team, they are
promoted and the 7<sup>th</sup> PoW team is relegated. This means,
that not only is difference between 6 & 7 significant, but, we
could find ourselves with two playoff series where 4-1 is
significantly different from 4-0. We could also see (again highly
unlikely) a conference final in which the winner is protected from
relegation for one year and goes on to the Stanley Cup finals and the
loser is relegated.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
So, now, through this system two-tiered system, there is a huge difference between the 9th and 8th place teams in the PoW, as moving up to 8th most of the time protects you from being relegated, and there is a huge difference between 8th and 7th because the 7th place team dodges that extra playoff series and is even more likely to be safe from relegation than the 8th seed, and, in rare years when two protected teams are bad, the difference between 7th and 6th is now everything. <br /><br /><div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the Adams
division, teams that would normally be churning through their season
without a shot at either the playoffs or the top draft choice, will
have something to play for as the difference between 2<sup>nd</sup>
and 1<sup>st</sup> will also be huge. The 2<sup>nd</sup> place team, settles for playing for the Kenora Cup (look it up!) and the first place team gets
a shot at promotion.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The primary goal of
this reorganization of the NHL is the create more meaningful games
over the course of the season and the playoffs, and so we could see a
last week of the season or even last day of the season, in which
massive rewards are played for, and playoff wins that are significant
even in playoff series losses. Sure, there might still be some
tanking, but that would only be at the bottom of the Adams division.
And you know what, that's fine. They're the bottom of the Adams
division.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As you can see,
promotion is actually pretty difficult to achieve. You could have a
team do well for several seasons, and just choke in the one-game
playoff. Likewise, you could have a team hanging out in 9<sup>th</sup>
place for awhile, getting saved from relegation over and over again
by 8<sup>th</sup> place teams. Or who knows what else could happen?
So, I'm also totally on board with the idea of a semi-regular
reassessment of the tiers, maybe every five or six years, in which
some quorum of significant members of the league (owners, managers,
coaches, players, scouts, journalists, etc.) get together and,
through some formalized and transparent process, consider promoting
and relegating teams outside of this structure.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>TRADES AND THE
SALARY CAP</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the most part,
trades and the salary cap would work in the exact same way they do
now. (However that is.) There would be trade deadlines and trades could happen across divisions. Free agency would work the
same way, though, of course, Adams division teams would have a
tougher time signing top name players, but, for the most part, things
would look the same. But I would introduce one wrinkle, specifically
around “rental” players.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A “rental”
period would be open sometime after the formal trade deadline, but,
only trades between the divisions would be allowed. This would give
PoW teams a chance to stock up for the playoffs AND give good players
stuck on Adams division teams an extra chance to end up in the
playoffs. But let's add another wrinkle. PoW would be able to include
“cash considerations” in their trade, however, that cash paid to
the Adams division team would count against their cap for the year.
(Who knows, maybe that's how it works already. I certainly don't
understand all the cap rules and well, I'm not going to look it up.)
But it will be different for the Adams team.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Adams team would
tag that as cap-free salary and as long as they apply it to players
salaries it is excluded from cap considerations until it is “spent.”
Here's how that would work. Say a PoW team sends a prospect and $10
million in cash to an Adams team. The Adams team could then use that
money to bump up the salary of a youngish top-pair defenseman
approaching the end of his contract by $5 million a year for two
years. Or if they think they can play themselves into promotion with
one big free agent signing, they can pay someone an extra $10 million
the next year without any cap consequences. You could actually see a
smart GM in the Adams division, draft well for a couple of years,
make a couple of “rental” trades every year for a few years and
end up with enough cap free salary to build a promotion team in one
off-season. The important thing about this, is it
provides a way for Adams divisions teams to compensate for the
natural disadvantage they have in signing free agents.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It should also be
noted, “rental” players wouldn't just be for teams looking to
stock up for a serious Cup run. It could also be for teams trying to
jump up to 8, 7, or 6. More teams would have motivations to make some
kind of play near the end of the season to protect their place in the
PoW and so more of these deals would happen, redistributing a fair
amount of wealth downward.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Furthermore, the
fact that inter-division trading exists and that there will be some
incentive for Adams division teams to trade their players in rental
deals, means that Adams division players, along with playing for the
success of their teams, will also, essentially, always be trying out
for the PoW division. Even if your particular team doesn't have the
combined talent to do anything more than languish in the bottom of
the division, you don't have to. You can play your way into the PoW
division and perhaps right on to a Stanley Cup contender.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>ADAMS DIVISION
PLAYOFFS</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Adams division
will also have a playoffs, which, I think, will be great for
everyone. More hockey, with more significance. Maybe there's a fan
base somewhere that just needs to see playoff hockey to get excited.
Maybe there's a player who will thrive in that environment but never
gets the chance because he's on a shitty team. The NHL is good at
trophies, so why not have another. (The Kenora Cup. I made up this
whole thing, so I can name the trophy.)</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Kenora Cup
playoff structure will be the inverse of the Stanley Cup playoff. If
the number one seed in the division plays its way into the Stanley
Cup playoffs (one-game playoff, plus best of five series) it has
essentially moved out of the Adams division, meaning that its
conference will now have eight teams in it and a good old fashioned
8-team playoff will start. If the number one seed does not advance
into the Stanley Cup playoffs, the 8<sup>th</sup> and 9<sup>th</sup>
seeds in the conference will play a best of five series to become the
8<sup>th</sup> seed and then we'll be back to the regular 8 team
playoff structure.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>CONCLUSION OF SORTS</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And there you have
it. More significant games. More playoff hockey. More story lines.
New rivalries. More fan bases will have the opportunity to celebrate
a kind of success. Better teams will play each other more often. More
games with playoff implications would happen. There'd probably be
more trades at the deadline. And the league can keep adding teams as
long as they want without potentially compromising any of that. And
we get a hockey holiday. It may be an impossible dream, but it's a
good dream.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Also, 3 points for a
regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win, 1 point for an overtime
loss, 1.5 points for a shootout win. Think about it.
</div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-75959664647045511632018-04-30T11:19:00.000-07:002018-04-30T11:19:27.113-07:00Sean Spicer at BEAThe Trump administration's first, definitive step towards authoritarianism was so quick, so small, so...stupid, that I think most of us missed it. Maybe we were still reeling from Trump's “American Carnage” inauguration speech or from the images of this obvious con artist standing next to President Obama or from the failure to trigger any of the constitutional mechanisms that would have prevented his inauguration or from the fact of his presidency at all or from the trauma of election night. Maybe we were thinking about how stupid we were to send money to Jill Stein for that recount. Maybe we were expecting the administration to at least try to pretend for an entire fucking day that this was going to be a real presidency with a real President. Maybe we were thinking about the Women's March, or planning our activism, or maybe, we were just expecting something else, something bigger, something more calculated, something closer to the Muslim ban, or at least something less...stupid. <br /><br />On January 21, 2017, Sean Spicer, in his first official act as Press Secretary for the President of the United States of America, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/01/21/sean-spicer-donald-trump-inauguration-crowd-bts.cnn">lied to our fucking faces</a>. He lied about an objective truth. He lied about what we could see with our fucking eyes. He lied not for some kind diplomatic or strategic reason, not in an attempt to keep us safe from some kind of threat, or to forward some kind of policy they believed justified being dishonest with the American public. He lied to assuage the ego of a narcissist. <br /><br />And nothing happened. He and the administration were criticized in the press of course, mocked in certain corners of the media, but no one involved in that obvious, profoundly stupid lie suffered any negative consequences. One of them is still president and one of them is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. <br /><br />In some ways, the inaugural crowd-size lie was a test. Would Congressional Republicans let the President obviously lie to the American people? Would Congressional Republicans allow the institution of the Presidency and the institution of Congress be radically diminished as institutions of society and governance? Would Congressional Republicans do anything more than pay the occasional lip service to the idea of objective truth and rule of law? If they are not willing to stand up to the administration over matters of arithmetic, and say, demand Sean Spicer resign or demand the President issue a retraction, or censure the President, or ask if someone who is willing to lie to the American people about what the American people just saw with their own eyes should have nuclear codes, would they be willing to stand up to lies with more ambiguity or lies that help them advance their agenda? <br /><br />We, of course, know the answer to all of these questions. Sean Spicer tested Congress and Republicans with an obvious lie and they failed the test. Sean Spicer was told to lie to the American public and he did, without batting an eyelash. And in doing so, Sean Spicer is directly complicit in the current existential threat to American democracy. <br /><br />Now he wants to “set the record straight” with a new book. Which, to me, translates to, “now I want to make a ton of money on being directly complicit in the current existential threat to American democracy, while trying to extract myself from the dumpster fire that is the Trump administration by claiming I had 'concerns' or that I 'voiced objections.'” Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has regrets, everyone does things they wish they hadn't done. I think we can accept that and accept that you don't get a fucking take-backsie on abetting the rise of fascism. I mean, it's not like there was any ambiguity here. If Spicer truly believed that lying to the American people is bad (and yes, I understand that spin is a Press Secretary's job) he would have refused to call Trump's inauguration the largest in history and then would have either resigned or been fired if Trump pressed him on it. Instead, he said it, stayed at his job, kept lying to the public, and now Aunt Lydia archetype Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies with breathtaking ease. <br /><br />Obviously, don't buy Sean Spicer's book. But, if you're reading this blog, I doubt you were planning on it anyway. So why am I spending my time on Sean Spicer when I could be doing, well, anything else? <br /><br />Sean Spicer is going to kick off promotion for his cynical-money-grab-masquerading-as-a-redemption-tour at <a href="http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/en/Sessions/61499/Spotlight-on-Sean-Spicer">Book Expo America</a>, the annual gathering of the publishing industry. Or, to put this another way: a fascist collaborator is going to shill his book at BEA. <br /><br />Here is what I would like to see happen. BEA should drop him from the programming. (Maybe send event director Brien McDonald an email to that effect. brien@reedpop.com) They should issue a statement that they were wrong to invite him or to accept Regnery's proposal for the above delineated reasons and they should give that space to an author from a marginalized community or a community directly impacted by the Trump administration. Sean Spicer's presence does not “welcome a conservative perspective,” or “reflect a commitment to free speech,” or whatever other bullshit defense they'll offer for giving a platform to someone who assisted the rise of fascism by lying to the American people. Short of that, (which I honestly don't think will happen) I think booksellers, publishers, authors, readers, and everyone else in the book world at BEA, should come together and empty the trade show floor during his event. Ideally, the meeting rooms should be empty, the booths should be empty, the other signings happening at the same time should stop, and the ABA lounge should be empty. (Ideally, this should be an ABA-endorsed practice, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.) If you're an author who is scheduled to sign during his event, you should demand to be rescheduled. If you have a competing event on a different stage, you should demand to be rescheduled. (Maybe that would help increase the chances of option 1 happening.) The silence that descends upon the floor as Spicer's event starts should be the loudest statement made at BEA. Short of that, his specific event should be empty. Not only should every single seat set out for an audience be empty, but there also shouldn't be any journalists covering his event either. Sean Spicer does not deserve our attention. Perhaps, if we can't do that, it's best to make sure enough willing people attend to shout him down, so he never actually gets to pretend he should make money off of his complicity. What would twenty plus people shouting “How big was the crowd?!” throughout his event accomplish? <br /><br />I'm going to be honest. I'm not an organizer, so I don't have the skills to help facilitate any of that. So far, the best I've come up with is that booksellers should gather at the entrances to the floor during his event, but there are also workshops going on, and meetings with publishers and an event called “Publicist speed dating” which I'm even signed up for. <br /><br />At the very least, I don't want the book world to just shrug its shoulders. It's one thing for a fascist collaborator to try to make money by writing a book, and it's one thing for a publisher to try to make money by publishing that book, (And Regnery is a primary actor in the great conservative con) but it's something else entirely for that publisher and that fascist collaborator to center that book at the industry's biggest event and it's something else entirely for the industry to let that fascist collaborator use its platform. The book world might not be able to stop this, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it. <br /><br />So, if you're reading this and you are an organizer and you'd like to help, reach out to me in the comments or on twitter (@InOrderofImport) and let's see if we can make something happen. Reach out even if you're not an organizer but hope something organized can be pulled together. If you're reading this and you're attending BEA in some capacity, maybe publicly commit to leaving the floor during Spicer's event and to convincing your friends and colleagues to join you. We don't have to commit to some huge, well-organized gesture to make a point. (Would #BEAEmptyFloor be useful?) At the very least commit to not attending his event and to convincing your friends and colleagues to join you as well. If we can't de-platform him, maybe we can at least de-audience him. (#LonelySpicey?) <br /><br />There are times when I think we've got this. That the barricades are stressed but holding. That the blue wave will hit in November and crass survivalism will force Republicans to finally untether themselves from Trump. There are times when I think we'll use this trauma to break through longstanding barriers to true social, political, and economic progress, and in a decade or so, we'll end up with universal healthcare, an end to mass incarceration, a meaningful climate change strategy, massive campaign finance and corruption reform and, I don't know, maybe even a livable wage. There are other times when I think Republicans are going to roll out some kind of October surprise, they'll martial voter suppression forces and techniques in ways we are not preparing for, and their existing gerrymandering will protect them enough for them to consolidate power and finish their decades long process of turning America into a neo-feudalist state run by wealthy white oligarchs. <br /><br />But the former won't happen on its own. And if the later is going to happen, well, then it will happen despite our best efforts. In the grand scheme of things, de-platforming Sean Spicer from a publishing industry event will be a relatively small victory. But all big victories are made up of small victories, just like all big lies are made up of small lies. And if there's a choice between doing nothing and failing and doing something and failing, I'm going to do something.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-23584576606438708982018-03-28T07:46:00.000-07:002018-03-28T08:45:49.279-07:00And Now I Own (1/9 of 1/2 of) a Bookstore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2rgOit2Y-ljLA2wHWQaaGH1GIg5aqE4yyBxkvr3WDcJvp72_e0MOU9g_bye095HykBqEeRDdhoSrSi9BJz_g3MQ-ECtVdIsRB3uepYp0CwZRXBHFUtSBggteX3iVknMwgGNp15M6DVlI/s1600/PorterSquareBook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="590" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2rgOit2Y-ljLA2wHWQaaGH1GIg5aqE4yyBxkvr3WDcJvp72_e0MOU9g_bye095HykBqEeRDdhoSrSi9BJz_g3MQ-ECtVdIsRB3uepYp0CwZRXBHFUtSBggteX3iVknMwgGNp15M6DVlI/s320/PorterSquareBook.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I could never save enough from my wages to buy Porter Square Books. Thanks to abysmal failure that is Republican economic policy that demolished the American middle class, I'm not sure even the nine employees involved in the <a href="http://bookweb.org/news/porter-square-books-owners-enter-succession-agreement-employees-103581">recent purchase</a> combined could have put together enough capital to secure a small business loan on just what we could save from our pay. There would have been options of course when it came time for David and Dina to retire. There's crowdsourcing (which I imagine would have been successful). And some of us might have partners and other family members who would be willing to help and maybe there would be some applicable government loans available for small businesses, but, on our salaries and wages alone it would never have been possible. <br />
<br />
This is, in part, because bookstores, especially new bookstores, are relatively expensive to buy, even more especially in relation to their profit margin. Books are expensive, you don't really finance the purchase of an entire store the way bookstores finance purchases of books from publishers, and the profit margins of even successful bookstores mean that business loans of any significant size will take a long time to pay off. (I remember the day when the founders of PSB finally had the liens taken off of their personal homes and they would have gotten credit from publishers for their initial inventory.) But, really, as above, the Republican economic model has guaranteed most Americans have much less buying power than they used to, more of that is spent on housing, healthcare and education than it used to, and the economy is subject to recessions in ways it wasn't before we put one of those classic Hollywood conservatives in the White House. Honestly, I don't know if there is any industry in America where the wages are high enough for an employee to save up to buy the business they've spent their lives working for. <br />
<br />
From about 1998 (or maybe even 1996) to about 2011 or 2012, independent bookstores were struggling for survival. There were a couple of times, especially around the recessions of 2001 and 2008, when it looked like independent bookstores were going to vanish completely. The wage stagnation above hurt book sales and put downward pressure on the price of books (meaning that books aren't really priced high enough to support all the people working to produce and sell them), a problem only exacerbated by the recessions. The deep discounting at first Borders and Barnes and Noble and later Amazon hurt independent bookstores even more. That Amazon was able finance predatory pricing through stock sales, tax avoidance, atrocious labor practices, straight-up losing money for a decade, and pressure on vendors while improving and developing their sales infrastructure, including Prime and their ebooks monopoly, only put independent bookstores at a greater disadvantage. But, many of us figured that shit out. <br />
<br />
So for many stores, the long term problem they face is no longer survival but succession. Given the desire to keep independent bookstores open in general and guarantee that one's own community has an independent bookstore, and the basic economic reality above, how do bookstore owners make sure their stores pass on to committed, talented, and capable new owners? How do they make sure they don't end up just hoping for an angel investor to come in from the tech or finance worlds? <br />
<br />
Even though David and Dina aren't retiring any time soon, they wanted a plan for succession. They didn't want to find themselves just hoping the right person could come along to make sure Porter Square Books stayed open and vibrant in Porter Square. They wanted to make sure that the committed, talented, and capable people who were already contributing to the store's success would be able to buy the store when they retired. Their solution is actually pretty simple and replicable. (more on that later.) Essentially, they loaned nine management-level booksellers the money to buy 50% of the store (at the value Dina and David originally purchased it for) and we will pay back that loan on a ten-year schedule from the profits we are now entitled to as partial owners. In some ways it's kind of like a car loan from the dealership. You get to drive the car home, even though you still owe most of its cost to the dealer itself. This deal is structured to have as little impact on our taxes as possible and, if the bookstore does well over those years, should leave us with a little extra cash after the loan payment. The financial needs of a bookstore (or any retail) in an economy in which the majority of sales happen in one quarter and the general fragility and fluctuation of yearly profits, make it essentially impossible to commit the level of cash in salaries and wages necessary for an employee to save up to purchase a store, but by redistributing the profit when it's there at the end, David and Dina can pass that money on without risking the cash-flow and stability of the store itself. And by creating what is essentially a low-interest small business loan with favorable terms they made the purchase affordable, given projected profits. <br />
<br />
I should note, this isn't just altruism on David and Dina's part. Sure, they take home a dramatically lower percentage of the yearly profits and forfeit some of the money an outright sale would generate, but, they also save themselves the cost of retraining management-level employees and protect a substantial amount of the bookstore's institutional knowledge. They saw in their years since buying the store, a staff with a...uh...unique set of skills that contributed to the store's profitability and they found a way to protect that set of skills that keeps the store financially secure in both the short and long term. Furthermore, a big part of how independent bookstores succeed is through the relationships booksellers develop with readers over time. Any time a long term bookseller leaves, for whatever reason, and is replaced, it takes some time for the store to make up the sales lost because that particular bookseller isn't there any more to talk to particular readers. By giving us a financial reason to stay, David and Dina have saved themselves the cost of staff turnover and protected institutional knowledge and by connecting those finances to store profitability they have given us an extra reason to work for the success of the store. It's hard to know anything like this for sure, but there is a chance that, even with their generosity, they might make out ahead in the end. I know, it's a shocking, perhaps even revolutionary economic idea that if you invest in the people who generate the profit for your business in a way that also communicates how you value them, they will continue to generate profit for you instead of leaving in three years for the first available promotion at another business. Why, you could almost create and sustain an entire middle class on that principle. <br />
<br />
Not every bookstore will be able to ensure succession this way. The current owners would have to be clear enough from debt that they could afford to redistribute a percentage of the profits. There has to be enough appropriate employees to bear whatever new tax burden might be created. The store also needs to be profitable enough so those profits can cover the loan. Of course, there are also lots of different ways to apply the idea of “low-interest loan paid off through a share of the profits.” You could sell a quarter instead of a half of the store. You could change the time frame of the loan. You could create optional escrow accounts for all employees almost like a store based social security. You could do a similar loan-profit-repayment but for the full value of the store when you retire. <br />
<br />
But, looking at the bigger world for a moment, imagine if, instead of building a fucking personal space program and continuing to avoid taxes, Jeff Bezos established a similar profit sharing model for Amazon workers at the management level. Sure, he founded Amazon and lead it to it's present behemouthness, but eventually he is going to retire as well. Why not transition it to a partial worker-owned business? (Well, we know the answer to that: it's stock value would tank because, even though more people would make more money, it's quarterly profit margin would end up shrinking, but more on that later.) Imagine if the Waltons did that. Imagine if the Koch brothers did that. Imagine if Bill Gates did that. Imagine if we had a business model that understood and respected all the contributions made by all employees at all levels and not one that saw non-ownership, non-executive staff as just expensive overhead. Imagine if our business decisions were guided, at least in part, by relationships with the community as a whole. Imagine if quarterly profits were, I don't know, just one part of how we assess a business's success. Imagine if the primary question of business (both large and small) was “How do we continue to have a positive impact on our community while making a profit?” instead of “How can we make as much money as possible as quickly as possible and stash it in the Cayman Islands so future generations never ever ever get a chance to enjoy the social progress lead by large scale federal investment in infrastructure, research and development, and a financial safety net that gave us the opportunity to make all of this money today, and wouldn't be cool if I got to Mars before that Musk guy did so I could somehow trademark or patent or claim ownership over the idea of colonization and teraforming before any legal precedents are set, making me even more like the 'mayor' of one of those late 1800s company towns, yeah, Bezosville Mars with Oxygen Prime?” Sorry, got a little lost there. <br />
<br />
The point is, the biggest challenges of our economy, from wage stagnation, to the rising cost of living, to climate change, to the damage done to minds and bodies by decades of 40-60 hour work weeks, are only challenges because certain powerful aspects of our economy have prioritized short-term personal profit over everything. (More on this soon.) Once you open up the goals to include say, long-term health of the business, or maintaining your quality of service to your community, or whatever it is, a lot more options for how to run the business, and how to solve problems like retaining talent and succession open up. <br />
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Stepping even further from there book world, there is this weird idea that gets repeated a lot. In some ways, it's the basis for our entire economy and now (thank you Republicans) large swaths of our government and society. It's one of those ideas that can be casually expressed in conversation and just as casually accepted. It often goes something like this, “Hey, man, people are just really selfish and there's nothing you can do about that.” Of course, there is some truth to that. I have been selfish in my life, as have you, and pretty much everyone else. But if you take a step back and look at how people interact with each other, it's pretty clear that, for the most part, selfishness isn't what drives the vast majority of us the majority of the time. From independent bookstores, to Little Leagues, to parades, to acts of generosity after every single tragedy, to the fact that almost no one shoplifts, it's clear that people, even though we can all be selfish at times, are driven by community. David and Dina's succession plan is just another example of this fundamental fact of human life. The vast majority of us, the vast majority of time, want to have good relationships with the people around us (even the strangers) and are perfectly willing to take home less personal profit to do so. I bring this up because the idea that “everyone is greedy and selfish” is a very convenient idea if you, in fact, are greedy and selfish and don't want anyone to get in your way. Too often, we let a lot of bad shit happen in our economy and our world because we have been convinced, despite the evidence we experience every single day, that humans are inherently greedy. Listen to who says this and when. Don't accept it. <br />
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So, now I own a part of a bookstore. In terms of my day-to-day life and work, this doesn't have a huge impact. I was already selling as many books as I could not just because it made sure the payroll was met, but because I think selling books is important to my community. I'll still push readers towards challenging works, works in translation, works from under-represented identities and communities and I'll still help you find the perfect airplane read (which is <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781590173466?aff=JoshCook">The Long Ships</a>, though in a conversation with another bookseller, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781908276421?aff=JoshCook">Signs Preceding the End of the World</a> is actually a pretty solid airplane read, you just have to read it again a week later for the full impact.) or wordless picture book, or YA novel with a lot of feelings (like <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062382801?aff=JoshCook">The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue</a> and <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780618863358?aff=JoshCook">Dairy Queen</a>) or, you know, “just a good read,” (uhh, can you tell me any more, no, OK, umm, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143034902?aff=JoshCook">Shadow of the Wind</a>, I guess). But now I get to do that with, essentially, a pension fund, (one that is probably a lot more stable than anything in the stock market) the opportunity to eventually help shape the bookstore around a new vision (if it needs reshaping), and a model for making sure PSB endures when it's my turn to retire. </div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-38184956999179473522018-02-07T07:34:00.002-08:002018-02-07T07:34:31.588-08:00Are Independent Bookstores Recession Proof?In 2017, sales were up at independent bookstores. Again. More stores are opening than closing. More stores are finding new owners or new locations. Stores are thinking less about survival and more about succession. It's damn near impossible to leave Winter Institute, the annual educational, social, and celebratory conference for booksellers without feeling rejuvenated, without feeling that the best days are yet to come, without feeling as though this network of passionate, creative, thoughtful, intelligent, and empathetic people is invincible, without feeling as though books in general and the role booksellers play specifically, is saving the world. This isn't just the afterglow of a great party (though it certainly is some of that). The sales and growth numbers don't lie. And beyond the numbers, bookstores are taking active roles in their communities in new and important ways while working on improving the flaws and weaknesses (whitenesses) in their own industry. There are data; emotional, anecdotal, and numerical that suggest independent bookselling has never been as strong as it is today and is only going to get stronger for the foreseeable future.<br /><br />But.<br /><br />Furthermore, bookstores are uniquely positioned to combat the rise of American fascism. Everything about Trump and the Republican party; the disregard of science, the fundamental lack of curiosity, the fundamental lack of empathy, the pathological lying, the fear of the other, the use of rhetorical tricks to avoid actually defending their terrible fucking ideas, the fragmentation of society, and the deferral to authority is combated in some way by books and literature and reading and the people who connect those books to the readers in their community. Even beyond books, bookstores offer the safe community space, the ability to be quiet for a minute, the chance to know that humans have been through worse and survived because you can look at the books from that time, that can rejuvenate one's energy for the struggle. And that's before considering the active work that independent bookstores are doing in the community. With reading series, author events, book clubs, and displays, independent bookstores are both nodes of resistance against Trump in particular and loci for the general strengthening of our social and civic institutions. We now know what happens when we drift away from the type of community independent bookstores support. It's hard to imagine us going backwards any time soon.<br /><br />But.<div>
<br />Furthermore, it isn't just Trump and this particular incarnation of fascism. Even before Trump the lies of late-capitalism like the promise of convenience at all costs, the seduction of low prices, the safety and primacy of the nuclear family unit, were starting to erode. People who had been raised on screens were turning to books to escape them. The ebook revolution that was supposed to be the end of bookstores didn't happen. The algorithms that were supposed to remove all the guesswork of buying books were shown to be woefully inadequate. Even as it seems like all shopping is moving online, more and more people are re-discovering the value of talking to a human being before spending their money. Or maybe not spending their money. Because that's the other thing about bookstores that is something of an antidote to the emotional grinder of late-capitalism: it's OK if you don't buy a book every time you browse, every time you meet for coffee, even every time you get recommendations or conversations from booksellers. Maybe it's part of why no one makes a lot of money in books, but in a bookstore you are a human being who might buy a book, not always and only a potential purchase that must be “off-ramped” or “funneled” and “captured.” Which is not to say we don't need to sell you books, but that there is always more to your interaction at a bookstore than the purchase. As the crimes of Amazon continue apace, as the country and young people in particular become more progressive politically and more critical of late-capitalism, and as we continue to rediscover the value of community beyond our nuclear family and beyond our circle of friends, independent bookstores are poised to capitalize on those changes in ways maybe no other industry (except for maybe craft brewing) can.<br /><br />But.<br /><br />Furthermore, something changed when Borders closed. Before that it was easy, despite all the other closures, to assume that there would always be bookstores. Sure, maybe indie bookstores wouldn't survive, but there would always be Barnes & Noble and Borders if we need a present on the way to the party. But then Borders wasn't. And then it was clear that if something wasn't done, bricks and mortar bookselling would die. Borders owed publishers millions of dollars when it finally went bankrupt and I've always wondered what the landscape of bookselling would look like if publishers had spread that credit around to the hundreds of independent bookstores that were struggling with the predatory pricing of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon, who were trying to change their model to adapt to online sales and who just needed to get to the next holiday season or the one after that to make those changes and be newly sustainable. I don't think I'm alone in asking that question. I think a lot of people with power at publishers asked that question. So the relationship between independent bookstores and publishers changed and publishers in general started to see independent bookstores not just as one, rather small, sales channel, but as partners in the grand project of books and literature. Independent bookstores drive discovery. Independent bookstores incubate writers. Independent bookstores support the small and independent publishers that often incubate writers and publishing professionals. Independent bookstores celebrate risk. Independent bookstores sustain the conversation around books. And independent bookstores create sales that end up at Amazon. When Borders revealed that a world without bookstores was possible, publishers changed their relationship in real and tangible ways, to treat independent bookstores like partners, making the entire industry more sustainable.<br /><br />But.<br /><br />Furthermore, we're really fucking good at selling books now. There might have been a time when all a bookstore needed to thrive was a halfway decent buyer and the right neighborhood. But that won't fly anymore. We need to offer our community and our customers more than what they can find online. And we do. All the time. Both in person and online. Sure not every store has had to make the same adaptations to our economic reality and no store is perfect, but I'm pretty confident that you could walk into damn near any independent bookstore in the country and walk out with a book you didn't know you needed. Taken together, just about everything points to an industry that has figured out how to thrive.<br /><br />But.<br /><br />But books are not rent. They are not healthcare. They are not student loans that are immune to bankruptcy. They are not car payments or gas money. As vital as they are to many of us, they are still not as vital as food. I've seen others try to inject a note of caution in all this optimism around growing sales, because, maybe those sales are only growing because the economy is. Though, for all the reasons stated above, I don't think it's just general economic growth behind the growth of independent bookstores, when the economy collapses next, who will have enough money after dealing with the necessities to buy books? Who will cut down on their coffee? Their beer? Who will drop Netflix? Who will find ways to trim their phone bill, their gas bill, their electricity bill? Some will. Many will. Enough to continue the growth we've seen over the last few years? Enough to sustain the level we've reached through this growth? Enough to sustain a viable industry through to the recovery? Are independent bookstores recession proof?<br /><br />I don't have an answer to this question. The recessions of 2001 and 2008 took their toll, but bookstores were able to survive. And we're stronger now than we were then, but every recession is different and, maybe I'm just being cynical, I think the next one is likely to be catastrophic. (I mean what happens when almost an entire generation gets slammed with double-digit unemployment AND cannot disburse a bunch of their debt through bankruptcy? How does an economy recover from that?) Could we survive that? <br /><br />I like to offer answers in these posts, not as some kind of final say on the topic, but as a starting point for further conversation, with the assumption that by discussing said offered answer we can find our way to a better one. But, perhaps it's best to conclude this with a different question, one that contains the optimism I think we all rightly feel with a rational concern for what we could face. So...</div>
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<br />How do we make independent bookstores recession proof?</div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-10420290345530583452018-02-01T08:07:00.000-08:002018-02-01T08:07:12.092-08:00Reading is Resistance: Translation as Transhumance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781558614444?aff=JoshCook">Translation as Transhumance.</a> That second word in the title. “Transhumance.” It seduced me from the moment I saw a picture of the cover on Twitter. I tried to deduce what “transhumance” meant from its component parts but I was wrong and only more invested in the book. I eventually reviewed it for the <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/words-that-speak-of-what-is-human-on-mireille-gansels-translation-as-transhumance/">Los Angeles Review of Books</a>, but found Gansell's memoir of her vocation as a translator had a much bigger impact on me than could be communicated in a review. It gave me new language for describing my relationship with works in translation. It gave me a new perspective on American English and an insight into its potential power. And, of course, because we read with our daily lives, it illuminated the political power of translation in the face of our growing fascism. <br />
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At some point in my bookselling career, I read one of those articles that talks about how little work in translation Americans read, how many Americans can go through their entire education and almost entire lives without reading a book written in another language. As a bookseller, I saw this as an opportunity to do some good in the world, to use my place in the community to move the needle a bit, and to help, in my own very small way, broaden the spectrum of reading for the American public. So, I committed to reading more translation, reading translation with more intention, and recommending more books in translation both through <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/taxonomy/term/127">staff picks</a> and in conversations.<br />
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In doing so, I learned of the joy of being baffled. It is a strange joy, one that you rarely encounter in your daily life, but one that is important nonetheless. Perhaps it is a joy unique to art, unique to moments we enter with intention. It happens in moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the book, absolutely no idea how to interpret an idea or image or sentence, when I am thrown off the train of my own thoughts. Most of the time we read to understand, but there is real power in reading when you can't. Because when you encounter something another person made that is unfathomable to you, you also encounter the fact that you, as a person, are capable of creating the unfathomable. You are shifted and in the parallax between your new perspective and your standard perspective an entire world opens up. Gansel approaches this unsettling opening of perspective in a number of different ways over the course of her book, but saying a work “...allows us to see the familiar in the foreign, the foreign in the familiar, and thus to create a sanctuary where you are no longer foreign but someone who is learning.” is the best articulation I've read of reading works in translation. By baffling us, we are reminded that we spend our lives as students of the world.<br />
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In some ways, it can be easy to understand that sense of being baffled, that sense of being unsettled, that encounter with the unfathomable as an abstract, intellectual experience, one more relevant to the mechanisms of understanding, than understanding itself. Because it is an experience of intellectual difficulty, we're tempted to put it in the same mental space as the papers we wrote in college and distant from the political and emotional experiences of out daily lives. But that is to miss one point of being baffled and being unsettled. Or, as Gansel puts it: “I remember clearly how, one morning as the snows were melting, as I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand from the other. That was probably my most essential lesson in translation.” Empathy, that building block of community and society, is rooted in the ability to displace your self, to de-center your self, to know at a fundamental level, that, from a different perspective, you are the other. Reading works in translation, especially those that are unfathomable to you, might be the easiest way to create that displacement and confront your own otherness. <br />
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And once you start seeing the otherness in yourself, once you begin to imagine how you might look to those who are not conditioned by their culture to understand you, it becomes easier to see the complexity and humanity that drive your decisions, in the decisions of other people. When you internalize how you can be misunderstood, your relationship to what and who you don't understand changes. By displacing your self, you create a new space or new perspective in which it is easier to see the humanity, see the universality in the actions of other people, even if you don't understand them. Through interaction with, even celebration of, that which makes us different, that which does not cross cultures or languages, we strengthen our understanding of what does. <br />
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But, at an almost more practical level, translation is an exchange of ideas across cultures. It opens up the possibilities for how you might solve a problem or describe an experience by showing you how others solve that problem and describe that experience, often in ways and in terms you never would have imagined. It is a constant conversation about all of the options we have for being human beings on this planet; which means, it is also a constant conversation about how some systems of power, some forces in society, and some people want to limit the options you have for being a human being. Even if the different options for living that you're reading about don't feel political, are concerned more with topics that don't seem to have direct applications, it introduces you to the idea of imagining a problem from a totally different perspective. It gives you the option of at least trying to consider a problem without all of your cultural baggage lashed to your answers. Asking how someone from China or Nigeria or Iran or Mexico might solve a problem, inherently creates the idea that the American way isn't the only way and (gasp!) might not even be the best way. <br />
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Fascism, in whatever form it takes, including the one Republicans in power are working directly towards, is rooted in homogeneity, in an erasing of difference and a reduction of the scope of human life to a small set of beliefs, actions, and thoughts. Even when it is practiced at a relatively tepid level, it is based in the idea that everyone should think and believe the same things and limit themselves to essentially the same behaviors, even if it is impractical to force them to. Ultimately, contemporary Republicans (or at least those in power) think everyone should be Republican, not even in an ideological sense, but in an identity sense, in a daily lived what they wear what they eat what music they listen to way, and, barring that, they will do everything they can to ensure that only Republicans are in power. To put this a slightly different way: the primary goal of the Republican party is to ensure that only Republican solutions are adopted. <br />
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Reading in translation is, essentially, an inoculation against this virus-like homogeneity, against the idea that there is one right way to be human, against the idea that you and those like you have a monopoly on ideal humanity. With our eyes open, looking at the world, watching people do different things, solve problems in different ways, think different thoughts, and take different joys, it is obvious that homogeneity is a fraud, that fascism is a lie, and that all those who fight for it, in whatever incarnation they fight for, do so out of fear that whatever their identity is, isn't as right as they claim. But that fear is still powerful. That illusion of safety and security that homogeneity promises is still compelling. The false equivalency of sameness with community is still alluring. <br />
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Finally, as we all know from Orwell, how we think is guided, in large part, by the language we use to think with. This is why so much effort, both in good and bad faith, is put into the terms we surround political ideas with. Often, controlling how we label something, like “pro-life” for example or “fiscal conservative,” or even more recently “chain-migration” goes a long way in advancing or hindering an agenda regardless of that agenda's merit. Language and rhetoric can be used to further or hinder a cause without actually making a point about what that cause is or what that cause would do. Furthermore, history adheres to language, allowing words to carry significance and implication that have nothing to do with the idea under consideration, but can greatly impact how we react to and understand an idea or a person. There is a reason why it was effective to refer to Hilary Clinton as “shrill.” The act of translation is a direct interaction, perhaps even confrontation with that limiting force of language. By pulling meaning from one language with one set of assumptions and one set of limits on thought into another language with a different set of assumptions and a different set of limits on thought, the translator makes us aware of these mechanisms, introduces us to the limits of our own thought, and deepens our own relationship with how language functions and how we use language to converse, argue, dictate, and think. And by developing that awareness, by building the particular skills needed to make sense of words from another culture, you also develop the skills to see through propaganda and to understand the mechanism behind an act of bad faith rhetoric and to counter it. <br />
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Ultimately, fascism has a grammar. It has a system of speaking that emphasizes fear and division and curtails curiosity and exploration. It displaces the context of the discussion so somehow, instead of arguing about the merits of an idea, you're arguing about your own patriotism or how much you value your heritage. The hyper-awareness of the mechanisms of language that comes from immersing yourself in a work whose ideas came from a different grammar also gives you the tools to see and dissect the grammar of fascism. To borrow another classic image from literature, fascism is the man behind the curtain. Reading works in translation isn't going to suddenly empower you to tear down the systems of power threatening our society, but it will give you the ability to see the curtain protecting those systems from scrutiny. And seeing the curtain is the first step in tearing it down. <br />
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<i>Translation as Transhumance</i> is one of those books that gets bigger the more I think about it. Even for this piece, as the core ideas have expanded as I've worked on them, I've had to discard my thoughts about the potential power of our international American English, the relationship between a language and a nation, the power translation has to dissolve political borders, and Gansel's own direct use of translation as a political act. (That last part I at least discussed in the review linked above.) Every time I took a step, the distance I could travel increased. Every time I got to the top of a mountain, I saw a higher mountain ahead of me. Every opened door revealed another room filled with more doors to open. For me, literature is an act of potential. It is an ongoing testament to humanity's potential to grow, to change, and to improve and to the joy of improvement, change, and growth. <i>Translation as Transhumance</i> is a change to celebrate all of it, both in the type of reading it pushes us towards and the beauty it contains within itself.<br />
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<a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781558614444?aff=JoshCook">Buy Translation as Transhumance from IndieBound or your local independent bookstore</a>.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-47596232091949044652018-01-05T08:16:00.001-08:002018-01-05T08:16:18.762-08:00Three Paths from the 2018 ElectionDespite voter suppression in key states, a massive, unprecedented misinformation and propaganda campaign orchestrated by a foreign power in favor of and quite likely in coordination with the Trump Campaign, a mainstream media that perpetuated false equivalences and fed oxygen to what amounted to conspiracy theories, a mainstream media narrative driven, in large part, by misogynist men now accused of sexual harassment and/or assault, a thirty or so year smear campaign by the Republican party, an apathetic citizenry that had long ago mostly given up on the political process, culturally entrenched partisan identities, and, of course, systemic sexism and racism; despite all that almost three million more Americans voted for Hilary Clinton than Donald Trump. That is the story of the presidential election of 2016. Anyone who tries to spin some idea about the white working class (whoever they are) or the flaws of Hilary Clinton (which exist) or anything else is an apologist for a flaw in our constitution that benefited one party over another, trying to justify the actions and very existence of the Trump administration as legitimate, and/or hiding from a simple fact: a lot of Americans were manipulated into making a mistake.<br /><br />In discussions about the future of this country over the last year, I've had one overriding, organizing principle: we will know the health of American democracy in 2018. For most voters conned into voting for Trump or staying home, it will be their first chance to make amends for their mistake. For most Americans who didn't vote as part of a general practice, it will be their first chance after learning just how fragile our democracy is. For most Democrats and liberals, it will be their first chance to get a tangible result from their new anger and organizing energy.<br /><br />And there are some good signs. Democrats are flipping seats all over the country in special elections. Doug Jones's win in Alabama proves that, under the right circumstances, Democratic organizing can overcome voter suppression in even the reddest of states. Furthermore, historically, legislative power tends to shift away from the party of the President in the first mid-term election. In short, there are some reasons to believe that, for all the long lasting damage the Republican party and Donald Trump have done, American democracy isn't over yet. <br /><br />But we won't know for sure until we get the results from the 2018 mid-term elections. There are a number of different ways it might shake out and we need to be prepared for as many of them as possible. Here are the three that I see and what I think we should do if they come to pass.<br /><br /><br /><b>One or Both of the Chambers of Congress Flips</b><br />What we do next will depend in large part on which chamber flips (most likely the House) and by how much, but regardless, the first order of business (if it hasn't happened already) is to impeach and remove Donald Trump (and hopefully Mike Pence) from the presidency. If the swing is big enough, if Trump's toxicity is revealed to be strong enough, I bet some not insignificant number of Republican Senators will vote for removal. And the swing could be plenty big enough to scare whatever Republicans remain right off the Trump train. Paul Ryan doesn't appear particularly up for an actual election battle. Ted Cruz doesn't have many allies in, well, life and there is a lot of energy around getting him out. I think we can wonder about Jeff Flake's seat and John McCain's seat and I don't think Romney taking Hatch's seat is an absolute guarantee. There are also a few hundred-thousand new voters in Florida from Puerto Rico and I can't imagine a lot of those votes going to Republicans. Given how there really isn't much evidence for courage of convictions in Congressional Republicans at the moment, how many of them would actually stick up for Trump once it was definitely proven that doing so threatens their power? Even if there aren't enough votes for removal, Democrats need to make the formal effort, if for no other reason than to have receipts for 2020. <br /><br />After that it depends on who is president, and what the actual composition of Congress is. There are two bipartisan fixes to some of the mistakes in the ACA that seem like an easy place to start if that hasn't happened already. (Two bills that were theoretically promised in return for Susan Collins' vote on the tax bill.) Same goes for a clean DREAM act and a reauthorization or restart of CHIP if it also hasn't passed. (Of course, this is assuming those bipartisan bills and apparent commitments stay that way, which, there is real reason to doubt that Republicans would maintain their support for these bills if they would be passed by a Democratic Congress.) It looks like Congress will also have to ensure that the upcoming census is both fully funded and fairly run, which might be the most important under-the-radar issue of the moment. And then there's the recent tax bill that Democrats should at least try to do something about. We could also, I don't know, start passing legislation to prevent this from happening again by requiring all presidential candidates to publish their taxes before the election or formalizing the norms around conflicts of interest or creating some kind of election review process. There is only so much Congress can do, especially if Trump or another Republican is President, but I think there are lots of small places where steps can be made to solve some of the problems created by the Trump Presidency. <br /><br />And then, it's gear up for 2020, not just for the presidential election, but for state and local elections. A big part of why we're in such a catastrophic mess right now is that Republicans in 2010 weaponized redistricting to disenfranchise American voters because Republican policies cannot win on merit in the marketplace of ideas. (This redistricting also aided the takeover of the Republican party by its radical right-wing by protecting fringe candidates who won in low-turnout primaries.) Big state-level wins in 2020 will allow Democrats to reform our redistricting procedure so Red Map strategies can never happen again. <br /><br /><b>Republicans Control Both Chambers in a Relatively Close Vote</b><br />Through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and, well voter decision, despite everything Republicans (you know, the ones who supported a fucking child molester) and Donald Trump (you know, the fucking serial sexual assaulter) have done to this country, they retain power. The cultural and systemic racism is too entrenched, the electoral system is too rigged to favor a rural minority, Russian misinformation muddies the waters, the inertia of voter apathy is strong enough to keep people home, and the mainstream media doesn't take the lessons of 2016 to heart. The rage and energy and organizing we've seen since November 2016 just isn't strong enough to overcome the structural flaws of the Constitution, racism of so many white people, and authoritarianism of the contemporary Republican party. I have been holding out hope for American democracy. Especially with the Democrat wave of special elections, I am hoping that the election of Trump is essentially an extreme stress test and that the actual majority of American citizens will assert themselves. But, it might not happen. The vast majority of Americans might not be able to overcome the fact that the framers of the Constitution did not foresee massive population concentration in urban centers. <br /><br />If that happens, I think the blue states need to explore how best to take care of their residents. Even if the majority of Americans vote for a Democrat and even if Democrats pick up a ton of seats, Republicans will act like the election is a mandate in their favor because they always act like everything is a mandate in their favor. They will say it is a ringing endorsement of everything they and Trump have ever done despite what all the other evidence shows and then they will finally finish destroying the New Deal and returning America to the capitalist feudalism they love so fucking much. State attorneys general will need to explore and pursue legal action to ensure that their residents receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits they have been paying into their entire working lives. States will also need to explore how to replace federal spending in a way that doesn't overburden their residents with new taxes. Blue states already pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending so there is a chance they can simply transfer some of the tax cuts the Republicans will ram through Congress to their own budgets, especially those blue states (New York, Massachusetts) that have significant financial sectors. There might also be a general willingness in blue states to pay higher state taxes if people know the money will go to programs they believe in.<br /><br />Furthermore, the blue states should find a way to band together to provide universal healthcare to their residents. Most of the American people live in blue states and most of the American economy is in blue states. California alone is a larger economy that most countries. A joint effort by the blue states should have more than enough population and economic clout to provide universal health care in some form. I mean, they'd be way bigger than Canada and Canada can do it. If they're able to significantly recoup much of the extra funding flowing to the federal government, they can probably offer free higher education too and maybe fund a transition to renewable energy. Maybe even subsidize childcare while they're at it. <br /><br />Unfortunately, this is likely to create an even wider gulf between blue states and red states and it's hard to know exactly how wide that gulf will get. Will we see another great migration? How tense will the relationship between the states get? How much poorer will the red states get if Republicans at the federal level successfully remove the social safety net? And how will red state Republicans use federal power to punish blue states? Let me be clear about this: I think this would be a tragedy and I think the poor and vulnerable in red states would bear the brunt of this tragedy. But at some point, you have to give people the policies they vote for. Democrats and liberals from blue states and blue cities can't keep protecting everyone else from Republicans if we want American democracy to survive the Trump administration.<br /><br />Also, if this happens, you can leave. I don't like the idea of leaving because the Americans most negatively impacted by this bullshit don't have the privilege of leaving, and a brain, money, and energy drain is likely to leave the less powerful even more vulnerable. For all it's flaws, I think the American project is still worth fighting for and I think, despite Trump, there is some evidence that we are relatively close to some major humanitarian and cultural breakthroughs. But I am not you. I am not responsible for your family and your well-being. I don't know what resources you have or don't have. I don't know what a fulfilling life means to you. I also don't know if I could lead a fulfilling life in that America. America was founded by people who had the privilege of leaving their home countries for a better life and if I'm not going to condemn those immigrants, I'm not going to condemn you.<br /><br /><b>Republicans Control both Chambers of Congress Despite Getting 40%ish or Less of the Vote</b><br />Because of gerrymandering and because of the likely unprecedented voter turnout in Democrat leaning and heavily populated districts, it is entirely possible that Republicans will narrowly hold on to a majority of seats in both chambers, while getting historically blown out in total vote count. Given the distribution of population, it is entirely possible for 60% or more of the vote to go to Democrats without control of either chamber shifting. If that happens, as above, Republicans will act like it's a mandate in their favor even though it is a clear statement of opposition. Paul Ryan will look us directly in the eyes and say it's clear the American people support his platform. He might even believe that.<br /><br />If that happens, we march on Washington, D.C. and occupy it until Trump or Pence or whoever ends up being the President (it would still be a Republican) is removed from office and somehow replaced with a Democrat. We turn that momentum, we turn that energy, we turn that organizing power directly on Republicans in Congress. We bring proof of the popular will directly to those who are trying to crush it. If you can't make it to D.C. go to the closest Republican office. Hell, go to the closest Republican Congress person's house. <br /><br />You might say that looks like a coup, but, well, yeah, it does, but so does a radical authoritarian minority acting like it has a mandate. But here's the thing. It will be clear to Republicans from that result that gerrymandering can only protect them for so much longer. Depending on how the state races hash out, it could signal the end of their state level power and their ability to gerrymander themselves to victory through 2020 and beyond. It reveals the farce of their claims to any legitimacy. And then they will make sure no fair and free election ever happens again. If this happens in 2018 and we don't take to the streets, I don't think there will be a legitimate 2020.<br /><br />And the tools are already there. If #BlackLivesMatter, the Women's March, Run for Something, Indivisible, Swing Left, MoveOn, ActBlue, and even Our Revolution and organizations directly affiliated with the Democratic Party, picked a date, we could easily fill the streets. <br /><br />Would this mass protest work? I have no idea. Congressional Republicans are just fine ignoring the will of the people. I think many of them are also just fine with fascism as long as it's their fascism. I don't know if, when you look at the long arc of human history and governance, liberal democracy progressing towards a truly humanist system of power is actually just a fluke of the last 50 or so years and we are now reverting back to our more standard feudalism. But I do know that if democracy is going to die in America I want to make sure we go down fighting.<br /><br />Want to help that first path happen? Send a little money to <a href="https://swingleft.org/district-funds">Swing Left's district funds</a>. This money will go to whichever Democrat ends up winning the primary, giving them an immediate boost in resources.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-80936918627908828882017-12-18T08:03:00.000-08:002017-12-18T08:03:33.596-08:00Reading is Resistance: On Tyranny and the Anti-Trump Cottage IndustryThe United States of 2017 is not Germany of the 1930s. Our recent martial traumas do not include a humiliating defeat from a bordering long-time adversary. Our economy is not in free fall. We are not subject to destructive sanctions. Our status on the world stage is different. We have technology that allows for the quick organizing of opposition and the spreading of information, as well as an information technology infrastructure that is difficult to control. Even with the massive wealth disparity, as a population, we have more money. Democracy itself is an older, more developed system of government.<br />
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There are many reasons why the United States might avoid the rise of fascism in this country when Germany did not, but perhaps the biggest one is that Hitler already happened. We can correlate the strategies with the outcomes. We can compare what Hitler (and Stalin and Mussolini and Franco) did with what the Trump administration is doing. Unlike the Germans of the 1930s, we can say, “Oh, this is the same thing that Hitler did to discredit the press.” Of course, some people are refusing to believe the signs and, of course, some people are quite comfortable with the rise of fascism in America if that fascism embodies white supremacism and/or narcissistic capitalism and/or a theocracy based in their Christianity, but they do that in opposition to what is obvious to the rest of us. In short, we are prepared to prevent a Hitler in this country in ways the Germans simply could not have been.<br />
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That is the thesis of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780804190114?aff=JoshCook">On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century</a>, and, in many ways, of the study of history itself. By knowing how Hitler came to power, by studying the failures of people, not just in Germany but around Europe and, even in the United States (haven't forgotten you, you America First assholes), we can avoid those failures and prevent that rise of power today. As a document, <i>On Tyranny</i> is a pretty handy tool. You can read it straight through, use it as a starting point for greater research, build your life around it, or even just leave it in your bathroom as a constant reminder of what is at stake and what you can do about it. It's the kind of little book that can be life changing in big ways and small ways. I would go so far as to say, even if we do prevent the rise of fascism in the United States, there's a lot in this little book about just living a fully engaged life. (Implying that living a fully engaged life is a barrier against fascism, which has merit. I do wonder about the weight of sadness Trump supporters constantly carry with them.) <br />
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But that isn't what I really want to talk about. As important as it is to build anti-fascism into our identities through books about fascism, <i>On Tyranny</i> connects to another trend in America since the 2016 election, one that has been driving me fucking nuts, and one that speaks more to the reaction of Republicans today than any thread of human history.<br />
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Publishing is (for many good reasons) a slow industry. It takes a long time to make a book and so it inherently takes a long time to respond to trends and social changes. (Which is also often a good thing.) Publishing is also (for less good reasons) an under-capitalized industry. Books are expensive to produce and under-priced (if you've got all day, I am more than happy to talk about that), which means that publishers often don't have a lot of financial flexibility. This leads to a lot of different practices, but it also means that it is very difficult for publishing to respond in a timely manner to current events, even when they know that response could ultimately be profitable. (Sure, while we're talking about books being under-priced, I'd be happy to explain why the industry could easily churn out a million adult coloring books in, like, six months.)<br />
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And yet, within months an entire cottage industry of anti-Trump and resistance literature, like <i>On Tyranny</i>, sprung up. My publisher Melville House (which has <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194851?aff=JoshCook">some experience</a> in this) crashed an <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612196596?aff=JoshCook">anthology</a> of responses to the election, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612197036?aff=JoshCook">a history of antifa</a>, and a <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612197050?aff=JoshCook">book about impeachment</a> and <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612196954?aff=JoshCook">has more on the way</a>. Their book on impeachment wasn't even <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780674983793?aff=JoshCook">the only one that came out this Fall</a>. There were so many of these books coming out that PSB had a rotating activism/resistance display that was extremely popular with our customers. This really isn't about publishing, but as I saw these books piled on our new nonfiction table, as I thought of the energy it takes to move the wheels in publishing, and as I connected that energy to other events in the world, like thousands of us stupidly throwing money at Jill Stein's recount, an idea emerged that really stuck in my fucking craw.<br />
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Why the fuck were any Republicans actively supporting the Trump administration? Americans are so desperate for any kind of resistance to Trump, especially from Republicans, that even mostly meaningless gestures, like Jeff Flakes's, inspire rounds of praise. I mean, imagine if Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain, all of whom pride themselves on their independence and don't particularly need the Republican party establishment to maintain their power, formed a new party right after the election. Or, if not right after the election, some time after it became clear the Russia meddled in our election and that an investigation of the Trump campaign was underway. Or at any point in the year, when the Trump administration did something terrible. <br />
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First of all, they would be swamped with applications from Republican strategists, pundits, and staffers. (You know, all the Republicans that are on MSNBC.) I think they would also see other people in Congress (Jeff Flake most likely) join them or at least express sympathy for their cause. They would probably have also been joined by a number of other anti-Trump Republicans, like Ana Navarro, Evan McMullin, and potentially even Mitt Romney. I know I would have called Mass Governor Charlie Baker to let him know he had a new option. But even if just those three in Congress switched, they would immediately become the three most powerful people in Washington as the Republicans would be unable to accomplish anything without them. Sure, Mitch McConnell would almost certainly retaliate by removing them from their committees and refusing to bring any of their bills to the floor but nothing he could do would make their votes any less valuable. <br />
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And how they would be praised! Doing this would have pretty much sewn up <i>Time</i>'s People of the Year. The entire right-of-center world be talk endlessly about “a new path for conservatism” or something. And think of the <i>New York Times</i> profiles! They'd have to establish a special pension just for copy editors rendered only able to think in synonyms for “brave” and “principled.” <br />
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But most importantly, their new party would have been drowning in money. Not just from those who might eventually join said party, but, well, from everyone who has been donating in special elections, donating to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and other organizations actively fighting against the Trump administration, and buying copies of <i>On Tyranny</i> and all of those other books in that anti-Trump cottage industry. The American people have been and for the most part still are desperate to spend money to oppose Trump and a Republican splinter party could have raked in a fuckton of it.<br />
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And here's what sticks in my craw. They didn't. Not only did they not form a new political party, they didn't even leave the party to become independents. Not only did they not become independents, but they rubber stamped all of Trump's cabinet nominees, even those who were obviously unqualified and obviously crony appointments. (And they continue to rubber stamp catastrophically unqualified nominees in a way that will cost taxpayers for decades to come. Looking at you unqualified federal judge who is going to get every single one of his decisions appealed.) But they didn't just rubber stamp his appointments, they let their colleagues drag their feet in investigating the election, they did nothing about his raft of toxic executive orders, and they only responded with any amount of courage on anything after massive, sustained, almost unprecedented push back from their constituents.<br />
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I mean, if we still have a democracy at the end of this, someone is going to have to lead whatever is left of the Republican party and there are a half dozen or so people who could have grabbed that role. (Who could still grab that role!) It would be so easy and yet they didn't do it. And this is one of the things that keeps me up at night. Not a single fucking one of them did a single meaningful fucking thing. The power was there for the taking. The money was there for the taking. If publishing can turn on a dime and create a whole cottage industry, politicians whose organizations are designed to respond to the whims of the people should have been able to also turn on a dime and capitalize on this opportunity. Shit, if the founders of this new party published a “statement of principles” or something as a book, that would have been the bestselling book in 2017. By a wide margin. <br />
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I'm a lefty, so to me, this reveals the fundamental rot at the center of the Republican party. To me, this reveals how decades of coded racism, rhetorical judo, fact-denial, and crony capitalism has rendered even those Republicans ostensibly independent from their party, unable to understand and respond to Trump's threat to America. To me, this fits right into the progress of the Republican Party into a cash cow for con artists scamming old people, authoritarians, theocrats, and narcissistic capitalists. That not a single fucking one of them took this opportunity, to me, is just proof that the process that started with McCarthyism and picked up steam with Nixon's Southern Strategy is reaching an end point. But you can write that off as just anti-Republican bias if you want.<br />
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But even if you do, you can't deny one major fact. The American people are so hungry for anti-Trump action that even a slow-moving, under-capitalized industry like publishing can respond quickly to that trend and churn out books like <i>On Tyranny</i>. At the very least we have to ask ourselves why politicians in general and Republicans in particular have not.<br />
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I generally like the wrap these pieces up in a way that connects reading to resistance, to show how the act of reading in general and reading specific books give us the tools to fight against the rise of fascism. But this piece is really more about the book industry than the act of reading itself. And the book industry is kinda strange. On the one hand, it is driven by storytelling, by perhaps the fundamental human trait. On the other hand, the contemporary American book industry is relatively new, developing in and around WWII when a perfect storm of lowering material cost, universal literacy, and unprecedented economic growth created an entirely different type of demand than books had ever had. Even then, you'd probably have to argue that publishing is almost entirely different now than it was after WWII, late capitalism having threshed what had been hundreds of publishers into a concentrated handful of tiny fragments of massive other non-book corporations, surrounded by dozens of small presses doing much of the cultural labor. Furthermore, it's hard to know exactly how much of a direct short-term impact book culture and thus the book industry actually has on American society. Sure, many of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows and movies started as books and, sure, I would argue the recent growth in great television comes from television applying the storytelling techniques of books and novels, but, all too often, the wider popular culture doesn't know about the bookish origins of their favorite movies and shows and isn't familiar enough with contemporary print storytelling to identify its influence on TV and movies. And, of course, we've all see those dire statistics about who reads books, who buys books, and how many books are read and bought each year.<br />
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Regardless, books are fundamental to culture even if their impact isn't always visible, and the health of the industry and what comes out of it says something about American culture. I don't think publishing has ever made a clearer statement. The American people want leaders to fight Trump and they are willing to pay for even the illusion of that fight.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-46272854522647239362017-12-01T08:47:00.002-08:002017-12-18T07:19:04.802-08:00A Unified Theory of Twin PeaksThis is going to be kind of a crazy statement, but puzzling out the madness in Twin Peaks: The Return and fitting it into Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me is relaxing compared to puzzling out the madness of our world and trying to fit a life of activism and art around the demands of our capitalist society. <br />
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Part of the fun of Twin Peaks, and similar works of art, is that, by leaving so much ambiguous, by not drawing connections between all of the different events and images, by leaving questions unanswered, Lynch and co invite, even encourage, us to fill in the gaps on our own, to come to our own conclusions, and to fight about those conclusions with the passion of things that are really important to you in the moment, but bear no long term consequences. <br />
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So, here is my “Unified Theory of Twin Peaks,” written mostly to give me a way to keep thinking about Twin Peaks and as a way to think about something that is meaningful, but not in the same way as <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2017/09/thoughts-on-antifa.html">thinking about antia</a> or <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/search/label/Reading%20is%20Resistance">the literature of resistance</a> or the novel or other art I'm working, drawing from both series, the movie, and both of Mark Frost's accompanying novels. My theory won't answer every question about the world, but I think that is actually part of its strength, that it “explains” things while preserving that Lynchian ambiguity. For a big example, it won't necessarily explain the ending of The Return (though it implies a theory), but it might provide some avenues for consideration. (And also, stay tuned for a Stranger Things cameo.)<br />
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Here goes.<br />
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There has always been a spirit world existing alongside our own world that sometimes interacts with us. Our spiritual, magical, and religious traditions are evidence of that interaction. Those traditions were, in large part, collections of techniques we used to get that world to help us in some way and to protect us from those aspects of that other world that would harm us. We asked the spirit world for rain and for good harvests and for easy births. We asked the spirit world to keep disease away from us and our animals and to protect us from the attacks of our enemies. Because that world follows different rules than our own, our interpretations of that world flow from our own specific cultures and belief systems. (In Twin Peaks, drawing from Hawk, this other world is described as The Black Lodge and The White Lodge.) As humans got better at technology, we relied less and less on the spirit world to contribute to the success of our endeavors. Why sacrifice a perfectly good goat to a fickle spirit when you can just use fertilizer, crop rotation, and pesticides to ensure a good crop? Or, to put this another way; before modern hygiene we needed beings from the spirit world to protect us from bacteria and viruses. Afterwards, we didn't. A border that had kept relatively thin by constant exchange, got thicker and thicker until, by the early 20th century or so, the only meaningful interaction between our world and the spirit world most of us experienced was in dreams. <br />
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Splitting the atom changed all that. The nuclear tests traumatized the border, both creating a new permeability and distorting the nature of that permeability. (I could probably make up some fun quasi-multidimensional physics to “explain” why that would be, but this post is already long enough.) Furthermore, we still continued to interpret our interactions with the spirit world through our current world view. Therefore, all the UFO sightings and alien sightings (which were fundamental to the founding of The Blue Rose Project) weren't beings from outer space but entities that slipped through the new holes in the border between our world and the spirit world. Because we were looking outward to space at the time, we interpreted them as coming from space. <br />
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This fundamental act of trauma on the place, coalesced a force of trauma in the spirit world into its own independent entity: BOB. I think we could make the case that BOB is actually an aspect of Joudy that was broken off by the nuclear explosion and that's why, unlike say The Fireman, The Woodsmen, or the various dopplegangers, tulpas, and homunculi, he needs a human host to exist in our world. Perhaps Joudy had a plan for BOB, perhaps BOB was always something Joudy had prepared and was just waiting for a moment when the border between the two worlds was vulnerable to send him in, but given how localized BOB ended up becoming, I don't suspect that was the case. However powerful Joudy actually is, I suspect that, like us in our world, Joudy was also just trying to figure out what it meant to split the atom.<br />
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Obviously, the government was watching the test very closely. “Blue Rose,” is the name of the ongoing investigation into the strange phenomena that followed the nuclear blast, especially those phenomena that we originally suspected to be extraterrestrial. (In a way, they were.) From the Secret History of Twin Peaks, we get the longer arc of the story of The Blue Rose project, and specifically it's relation to longtime Twin Peaks resident Douglas Milford, but nothing in that necessarily contradicts my theory.<br />
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This traumatized border doesn't exist in a vacuum. The border has always been thinner at some places than others such as Twin Peaks, specifically the cave with the map in the mountains and the Ghost Wood Forest. This is one reason why so many strange things happen in Twin Peaks and might even be why BOB eventually found its way there. Perhaps being that close to the spirit world made BOB more powerful. This thin barrier had other impacts on Twin Peaks as well, most notably with Douglas Milford, Margaret Coulson (the Log Lady), and The Great Northern. We might also be able to conclude that the trauma of the nuclear test actually punched a hole through the barrier, at the circle of trees that Cooper uses to enter the Black Lodge. From The Return, we can assume that Las Vegas (which as Atomic City makes perfect sense), Buckthorn, South Dakota, The Dutchman's Lodge, and maybe even Odessa, TX were older nodes of interaction between the worlds. And, we can also assume that so was New York, because there's clearly a portal in the glass box. Perhaps also Buenos Aries as that's where Philip Jeffries disappears from. <br />
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Everyone in both worlds had to figure out the new relationship. The reason why it often looks as though characters are just wandering around in a new space is because that's exactly what they are doing. The spirit world continued to evolve and change even after we stopped interacting with it, so the figures we would expect from our traditions have also changed. This is on top of the trauma created by the nuclear blast. Entities in the spirit world have new and shifting responsibilities and powers and a big part of Twin Peaks is less about people figuring this shit out and more about entities of the spirit world, like The Arm, The Evolution of the Arm, The Fireman, and The Woodsmen, figuring it out. <br />
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Finally, it's clear that, though the story of Laura Palmer was the center of gravity, this isn't just her story. She ends up being a linchpin for the events we see, but, especially in The Return, you get the sense that there is a lot more happening out in the world in relation to these forces than what we see. For example, from The Final Dossier we learn that Philip Jeffries might still have been pursuing Blue Rose investigations with Ray Monroe, so what's up with that? There's also the monster that comes out of the glass box in New York. As far as I've seen, it's still out there. And how was The Double able to set up such a massive crime syndicate? In some ways, the Twin Peaks story was never about people so much as it was about forces and spaces. <br />
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Obviously, this doesn't specifically explain everything: why the green glove? What's up with owls? Where was Major Briggs? Where is Philip Jefferies? What was the deal with the Woodsmen? But it provides a structural explanation: the border between the spirit world and our world was totally fucked, a fundamental evil traveled to the wrong world, and everybody who is good is trying to figure out a way to stop it. Laura Palmer was clearly one attempt to stop BOB. So were all the efforts to reach Agent Cooper. So was, I think, the Log Lady. Some of the things that might seem random are really just attempts by the forces of the spirit world to deal with BOB that don't go anywhere. To put this another way: Twin Peaks is a story about brainstorming solutions to a traumatic problem. <br />
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Two things I like about this “unified theory.” First, it doesn't exclude further exploration and explanation. Even if we assume this explains the overall state of the world, we can still ask questions about, say, electricity or Chet Desmond, or sheriff Harry Truman and we can still come to different answers that are consistent with this world. In many ways, this unified theory simply gives a structure for answering and exploring these other questions. Second, it opens the world up to further exploration, even if Lynch is done working within it. Imagining Philip Jeffries as a kind of Constantine in the spirit world? Have at it. Web comic following the reincarnated Log Lady (or the Log itself using the death of its caretaker to create a new human host body for itself)? Yes please. An anthology collection of stories imagining other stuff coming out of that weird box in New York? Why not? What are the Chalfons up to? Somehow Diane gets back and teams up with Tammy to shred the patriarch? Obviously that's a thing that should happen. I'm sure one of you could come up with something. If we can have dozens of novels, comics, and video games set in the Star Wars universe (some of them quite good, many of them at the very least fun and enjoyable) why can't we have something similar from the Twin Peaks universe? <br />
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Secondly, it also preserves the possibility that the ending was actually a fairly traditional, if obscured, dramatic twist ending. Like this: What we have been watching was not the interaction between the spirit world and our world, but JUST THE SPIRIT WORLD. Why should we assume that this other world is radically different from ours? Wouldn't it make as much sense if it were just slightly off, if it were an uncanny valley version of our world? I mean, did we see any other animals at all besides owls. There's a lot of talk of the “pine weasel” in season 2, but do we ever seen one in real life? Does anyone have a pet? Do we ever see a dog? Isn't that really weird? So, when Cooper wakes up as “Richard,” he has actually passed through a border (in the basement in the Great Northern) into our world. Rather than one of us going into the spirit world to solve one of our problems, an agent of the spirit world has come into ours to solve one of theirs. So the ending is actually an agent of the spirit world (which would have no problem with a dead guy in the living) using a human equivalent (the older Laura Palmer) to finally solve the problem of BOB in its world and maybe succeeding or maybe failing.<br />
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Or something else entirely. Storytelling often relies on a series of assumptions that make sure the plot moves towards a satisfying conclusion. The villains always have bad aim, the hero never catches malaria, and the crazy plan works exactly the way it is supposed even the parts that only have, like a 1% chance of success. But in Twin Peaks, it seems to me like David Lynch has jettisoned those assumptions and essentially shown us a “slice of life,” story with everyone just trying to figure shit out, at a point in time when shit was getting really weird. Which creates a very different kind of satisfaction, when we got to that final scream, one based not on closure, but on potential. <br />
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<b>Bonus Stranger Things Tie-In</b><br />
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Let's set the Twin Peaks and Stranger Things in the same world, shall we?<br />
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So, obviously, the Upside Down is the spirit world in Twin Peaks. It doesn't look like the “spirit world,” because access to it is not through one of the existing permeable borders that has been shaped by human thought and culture. In essence, the Upside Down, is what the spirit world looks like when it's appearance is not shaped by a transfer of culture facilitated by older, longer used portals. Because a new gate was just ripped in a random location, we can enter the spirit world as it is, and beings of the spirit world can escape it without adopting a mediated form. It is, of course, also possible that the spirit world has geography just our world does, even if it operates in a different way, and the Upside Down is just in a different “place” in the spirit world than The Black Lodge. (I still prefer to think of the Shadow Monster as being Joudy's true form.) If we go with the “they're also just trying to figure shit out” theory from above, then we could be watching just another version of the spirit world figuring out how to handle its traumatized border. Maybe some beings in it feel as though the nuclear bomb was a direct attack and the opening of the gate was an opportunity for a counter attack. Perhaps there are those in the spirit world who want power over our world again. Perhaps the spirit world is becoming a dangerous place to live and some of its residents are thinking of immigrating.<br />
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But, because I'm having fun, I want to take this imagined world one step further, obviously by extrapolating from recent research into the neurology of meditation.<br />
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From above, before science solved most of the day-to-day problems of survival, humans got help from the spirit world. We interacted with the spirit world through spells and rituals. Essentially spells and rituals consisted of specific words said and/or bodily movements taken and repeated in specifically delineated intervals. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't and when washing our hands kept us from dying with more consistency than performing spells, we stopped performing spells.<br />
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Meditation (the repetition of certain words and phrases in a certain bodily position at specifically delineated intervals) produces special kinds of brain waves (theta waves) not seen in daily life. (Knitting can as well, which is, yep, specific bodily movements repeated in specifically delineated intervals.) Therefore, it wasn't the words or movements or even the sacrifices of the spells or rituals that made contact with the spirit world and leveraged its help, but the special brain waves the spells or rituals created. <br />
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Eleven doesn't need meditation, spells, or rituals, to engage the brain waves that interact with the spirit world. Thanks to super science, she can just engage them. That's why she can “travel” to listen in on conversations, find people from pictures, throw people around, tear open a gate, close a gate, and interact directly with the beings from the spirit world. Whatever Papa and the other scientists did to her brain, turned her, literally, into a mage.</div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-72258238417784711822017-11-13T22:14:00.002-08:002017-11-14T06:30:30.065-08:00A Little Ditty 'Bout Joe & Rachel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It has been a long time since my hometown of Lewiston, Maine has had a bookstore, so when <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CourtneyQuietCity/">Quiet City Books</a> opened a few years ago, I was extremely excited. Lewiston is one of those New England mill towns that has been rebuilding and redeveloping and still struggling for decades and the ability to support a bookstore would at least imply that some of that long process of transitioning from a factory economy into whatever comes next is beginning to take. (Lewiston also now has great craft beer. Maybe a “craft beer and local bookstores are the pioneer plants for a local economy” post should be in the works.) <br />
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It took me a couple of years, but I was finally able to get to Quiet City. It sells almost exclusively used books, though it also sells books by local authors on consignment. Wanting Lewiston to have a bookstore, I did some shopping there. I bought a book of poetry by a <a href="http://blog.chrisrobley.com/">friend of mine</a>, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400079742?aff=JoshCook">The Keep</a> by Jennifer Egan, a mystery by Rex Stout (that I left in Maine for my mom), <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780441018864?aff=JoshCook">The House of Suns</a> by Alistair Reynolds (because there is something fun about buying mass market sci fi at a used bookstore) and then a book I had never heard of by a someone I had never heard of but it was poetry and it was in translation. So, you know, by internet law I had to buy it. <br />
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It was <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781585674015?aff=JoshCook">Le Contre-Ciel</a> by Rene Daumal. Daumal was a French poet roughly contemporary with the Surrealists who experimented with radical negation (including intense experimentation with drugs) as a kind of course through non-being into true being. Daumal also became a staunch critic of Breton and the Surrealists, seeing them as unwilling (or unable) to actually produce works drawn from experimentation with their principles, which makes him A-OK in my book. (Dada or GFTO.) It was also, as I discovered later, inscribed on the inside of the front cover.<br />
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Think, for a second, what it would mean to give a book of radical, experimental self-negation to your boyfriend, to say to him “You are my heart,” and to sign it “Love.” There are many reasons to give a book to someone you love and many messages you can convey. You can use a book to describe your feelings about them or your feelings about the relationship. You can reference a shared experience or memory. You can encapsulate your hopes. But you can also open yourself up and say to someone “This is important to me, this is a part of who I am, this is something you need to know in order to know me.” Sharing a part of yourself in this way puts you in a very vulnerable position. It is a risk even when you've been with someone for a while and no matter what the book is. A powerful, beautiful risk. And Rachel took it. Daumal died young, probably in part because of his experiments with drugs, and he wrote formally experimental poetry that sought to erase the self and the self of being to reach some grander truth in a new verdant void, and he didn't abide Breton's bullshit and Rachel wrote “You are my heart,” in it and gave it to Joe. She had to be telling him something important about her. <br />
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There are some other possibilities of course. Rachel and Joe could have talked about the book prior to the gifting. They could have talked about poetry. Maybe Joe was really into Breton and the Surrealists and Rachel wanted to show him what else was happening in and around that movement. Or perhaps he was really into Rimbaud or Genet and Rachel wanted to show him a lesser known French poet who also lived an extreme life. But do you inscribe “You are my heart,” when you are continuing a conversation about poetry? I supposes it's possible, but, most likely, to my schmaltzy book-heart, only after you've inscribed several other books with "You are my heart" in English and this had become something of a standard inscription from Rachel to Joe.<br />
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Regardless, this leads us to the next big question: How much of a piece of shit is Joe, right? Unless he's dead. If he's dead and the book was sold off as part of his estate then he's not a piece of shit. (Or, rather, this particular bit of his personal narrative doesn't prove he is a piece of shit.) Sure, they probably broke up, and maybe even the break up was Rachel's fault, and maybe he got rid of the book with everything else that reminded him of her as we sometimes must purge ourselves of the ephemera of painful relationships, but, I don't know. Something about the phrasing and the book itself suggests to me, at least, that Joe is, at best, a piece of shit who just didn't understand how beautiful and powerful this gift was and, at worst, a piece of shit who was intimidated that his girlfriend knew more obscure French poetry than he did and rather than using it as an opportunity to grow, he read a handful of pages, dismissed Daumal as derivative of the poets he assumes he introduced to Rachel, (Trust me, Joe, Rachel heard of Artaud and Cesaire, she just choose not to interrupt you.) and got rid of the book on the sly. <br />
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Of course, there is no way for me to know for sure what went down between Joe and Rachel, but they still left traces of their story on this book. Rachel imbued the book with her love and gave it to Joe and then something happened. If nothing else, we know Rachel loved this book. There is something about holding a book you know someone else loved. As much as we spend our time and attention on screens we are still bodies interacting with space and objects and those interactions leave traces. For all of the other advances made by the book as technology, its ability to retain and transmit these interactions will be the hardest (if it's possible at all) to replicate digitally. Gift inscriptions. Notes in the margins. Underlined passages. Receipts, postcards, pictures, notes used as bookmarks and left behind. The discoloration the oils from skin causes on the paper. Setting an old book down on its spine and seeing where it opens. And even if the traces don't provide anything close to a full story, they still tell you that someone else held this book before you did, they still ground you in a past, and connect you to other readers and other people in the future.<br />
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And not only that, but these traces are then scattered throughout the book world to be stumbled into randomly. And that randomness becomes part of the story. Maybe this connects to our time as hunter/gatherers when any good fortune was treated as a gift from the gods because it was the difference between life and death or maybe this doesn't have any psychological or rational explanation but there is something to seeing a book cover that “just grabs you,” and there is something about a song coming on the radio at the right moment and there is something about buying a book for some reason you don't quite remember and discovering it has information you need to know or tells a story you need to hear. We are storytelling animals and odds are pretty fucking good that not a single one of us is living a life that fits into the storytelling structures we prefer, but then there are these moments when it finally does feel like a narrator taking control and putting the right thing in front of you. These moments of connection can be motivation for the next chapter in your life.<br />
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A new chapter in the story of Joe and Rachel is now, "Josh randomly found the book in Quiet City and spent way too fucking long trying to figure out the shit that went down between Joe and Rachel." And just to add another level, the first poem in the book features short stanzas in verse followed by a kind of tangential exegesis in italicized prose, which (again randomly) speaks to one of my current poetic projects. At this point, it's too early in my reading of the book and in my work on this project to know what, if anything, is transferred from one to the other, but, through this book, at this moment, it feels like I fell through the floor but landed in the secret chamber like a hero in a story. And then some day, I'll die, and this book will go somewhere, with the inscription and, at the very least, the bookmark I've added to it and through this object the saga of Joe and Rachel will continue. </div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-31338765531188342142017-10-17T20:59:00.000-07:002017-10-19T07:06:44.554-07:00An Open Letter to Male Rugby Players<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I remember heading down to a basement
in one of the buildings just off campus, maybe still a little
dehydrated from the game, definitely still a little sore from the game. We
played drinking games and sang songs. The drinking games were played
by all types and groups of college students, but the songs were just
for us, secret songs known only to rugby players. (Maybe a few known only to St. Mike's ruggers.) The drinking games,
the nicknames, the songs, the rituals; all of these are why the rugby
team felt more like a community than a team, why rugby players form
lifelong connections with their teammates. I've played a lot of
different sports and for a lot of different teams and none of them
forged the connection like the rugby team and a big part of that
connection was the drinking, the rituals, the nicknames, and the
songs.</div>
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Some of those songs depict sexual assault.</div>
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In isolation, no one could take those
songs seriously. They are sung in a very specific
context. The violence is ridiculous, even cartoonish, and most of it
is designed to explicitly test the bounds of taste, to be vulgar for
vulgarity's sake, to be something you would never, ever say in public, to be more like a secret handshake that declares
membership in a club than anything else. But they are not sung in
isolation.
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They are sung in the world where a man
can brag about sexual assault and still be elected President of the
United States; a world where powerful men can abuse women for decades
and face no consequences; a world in which, as #MeToo has
shown (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/metoos?source=feed_text&story_id=10211161042721963">here</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23metoo&src=tyah">here</a>),
virtually every woman in America has faced some form of harassment
and/or assault.
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There are other songs. Sing those
instead.</div>
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Don't get me wrong. I know rugby songs
seems like a pretty small part of the problem of misogyny, but, given
that I'm speaking to a group of men some of us, whether we know it or
not, are occasional or serial harassers, some of us, whether we know
it or not, are occasional or serial assaulters, and some of us, (and
again I have to say this) whether we know it or not, are Weinsteins,
Cosbys, and Trumps. Furthermore, a lot of those songs are sung on
college campuses where sexual assault is an epidemic. We all learned that behavior somewhere. Odds are, we
probably learned it long before our first rugby match, but that doesn't absolve
those later forces and behaviors and rituals that reinforce, support, and apologize for those crimes.</div>
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Because the permission to depict
cartoonish sexual violence against women as meaningless and the permission to put
your hands on your co-worker's shoulders and press down in a way that
shows her how much stronger and how much bigger you are than she is
come from the same place: the belief that women are not fully human.
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There are other songs. Sing those
instead.</div>
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It has been fifteen years since I sang
songs in a basement, so perhaps this has changed. Other circumstances have prevented me from playing rugby since then. Perhaps these songs
are no longer sung. Perhaps, one by one, in team after team across
the country, someone stepped forward, said something, started a
conversation, had a meeting, and excised those songs from their
repertoire. If that is the case, then it is time to step forward and
lead, because we desperately need male leaders and male voices. Share
your process with the school newspaper or the town newspaper. Put a
statement on your website. Offer to meet with other teams to help
them start their own conversations. Organize a league-wide training. Bring that training to other sports. Use our professional and social
networks to steer other men away from harassment and assault. And—I
know you had some great times with them, I know they were there in
the rucks, in the goal line stands, walking you back to your dorm—don't let the men who abuse
women leverage those networks for personal or professional gain. You
don't have to hire them. You don't have to give their name to your
boss. You don't have to connect them with your friend in the Chicago
office. </div>
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This also could have been a passive process. Perhaps you're on a team that never sang those songs. Perhaps they just fell out of fashion as things just kind of fall out of fashion. Make a statement anyway. Share how you don't miss them. Start a newsletter and send those other songs around. Confront the history. Be public and explicit. And then, if you think you've done all you can around this particular aspect of misogynist culture, find another one and work on that.</div>
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We talk a big fucking game about how rugby prepares us for
life, how rugby prepares us to lead, how strong our community is. Time to back that talk
up. Time to show the strength our community by leading other men. Time to collect our own.</div>
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There are other songs. Sing those
instead.
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At the very least, if you still sing them, have a team meeting
to talk about these songs. You'll probably find a few guys were just
mouthing the words the whole time because the songs made them uncomfortable but they were afraid to say something.
There's a chance that they were uncomfortable because they were
sexually assaulted in their lives. Maybe that's why that one guy
quit.
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Whatever decision you come to, the
conversation at the meeting is important. I mean, there's a
difference between vulgarity and violence just like there's a
difference between a dirty song and a sexist song and maybe you guys
will be able to hash that out. Maybe you'll get to how big, strong
men use their bodies in the world in ways that threaten and oppress
women, often explicitly because we are not thinking about our size
and strength. (I mean, if you have the bodily control to keep your feet in the ruck, you can move in a way that doesn't crowd into the space of the women you work with.) Who knows where your conversation will go, but it has
to happen.
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I know it seems like a small change, a
change so small as to almost be pointless. One aspect, of one part,
of one sub-culture. How many men would this really impact? A few
thousand? Maybe a few tens of thousands? Why bother, right? All big
change is just a bunch of small changes stacked on top of each until
some critical mass is reached. More importantly, big policy changes
can only do so much. Misogyny is an aspect of our
laws and our policies and how those laws and policies are applied,
but it is also, perhaps in greater part, an aspect of those behaviors
that laws and policies can't reach. You can't really pass a law about
how close we stand to our coworkers in the break room, about how many
times we can ask a woman on a date after she says “no,” about
physical contact we can pretend was an accident, was friendly, was just joking around. Fixing it at the
government level will only accomplish so much if we don't fix it at
the personal level, at the water-cooler level, at the work
party-level, at the rugby party in the basement level.</div>
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There are other songs. Sing those
instead.
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The strength of the rugby community
presents us with an opportunity to do the real work, to make a real
difference. It is a strength to be honest with each other. A strength
to be honest with ourselves. If you've already done this, a strength
to take your good work public and lead other men. The strength to
demonstrate a different kind of masculinity. The strength to show what "strength" and "toughness" and "masculinity" can be next.</div>
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And, I have to ask: if getting rid of a
handful of stupid, silly songs no one is supposed to take seriously
tears the community apart, how strong was that community to begin with?
</div>
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What exactly does this cost you? There
are other songs. Write new songs. Sing those instead.</div>
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<b>As rugby players respond, I will update this post with corrections, stories, strategies, and whatever else moves the conversation forward. </b></div>
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<b>Biographic Note: </b>For those who don't know me, I played for three and a half seasons at Saint Michael's College in Vermont during a time when (at least I think so) our program took some big steps forward in terms of quality of play. I was in the pack, starting out as a prop, then a flanker, and playing eight my senior year. Though I was forwards captain my senior year and felt I was a member of my team's community, I was also, slightly set apart. For example, I refused to participate in any hazing. If I didn't want to be in a boat race I wasn't. (Often I did.) If I didn't want to sing a song, I didn't. (Often I did.) My nickname was "The Prophet." I tried to play a few times after college, but I could never get the logistics to work out. The teams in the Boston area all practiced in places that were extremely difficult to get to and I ended up working second shift at my job meaning making practices would have been tough even if they were convenient to get to. I now work Saturdays and, as you all know, Saturday is rugby day. I'm sharing this because I want to be honest about how relatively thin my connection to rugby has become. I could be wrong about those songs. I want to be wrong about those songs. So, I invite responses and corrections. If we have excised that bit of misogyny from our culture, we should share how we did it. We should lead by example.</div>
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<b>UPDATES:</b></div>
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<b>RESOURCES: </b></div>
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Other athletes are stepping up and taking leadership roles. For those of you who are more active players, check out <a href="http://www.athletesforimpact.com/">Athletes for Impact</a>.<br />
<br />
Another friend of mine shared <a href="http://www.menaspeacemakers.org/">MAP</a> on her timeline. They also run offer a free <a href="http://www.menaspeacemakers.org/coachingforchange/">Coaching for Change</a> online course.</div>
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Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-65815645601441977422017-09-26T08:11:00.001-07:002017-09-26T08:16:30.401-07:00Reading is Resistance: Letters to MemoryYou read as who you are now. Sure, you read with your accumulated knowledge of literature, with your awareness of the arc of human history, with your long term identity, but you also read with how you slept last night, how shitty your commute was, how great it was to catch up with a friend you haven't seen in awhile, whatever you ate, whatever you just saw on Twitter, whatever you feel right now. You read with your mind and your self, but you also read with your needs. And no matter when they were written or what they are about, it is amazing how often books sfill your today needs.<br />
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<a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566894876?aff=JoshCook">Letters to Memory</a> was completed in 2015. It has nothing to do with Trump or our current political moment. It doesn't connect the racism that allowed Yamashita and her Japanese-American family to be imprisoned in a concentration camp during WWII to the racism behind Trump's attempted Muslim bans, nor does it compare the story of her family packing up their homes and their lives at the start of WWII to the terrorist raids by ICE on human beings just trying to make a decent living today. It's not about the dangers of isolationism. It's not about how America so often rejects the exact forces that make it a unique place in the world. It's not about living in conflict with fascism. <br />
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And yet, <i>Letters to Memory</i> is about American racism, it is about one part of a community turning on another part, it is about how one navigates a system that has decided they are lesser human beings, and it is about the stories we tell about ourselves and our nation. I argue elsewhere that <a href="http://con-text.co/post/163379378152/disgovernance-and-resistance">resistance is a life-style in the same way that being a reader is a lifestyle</a> and when you bring those two together, you read to find the material of resistance. You read with what you need now. <br />
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In many ways, we are in this dumpster fire of situation, because of a narrative crisis. Part of the reason why Donald Trump garnered 63 million votes is because 63 million, mostly white people, mostly white men, have accepted without critique or question or thought a particular narrative of America, one in which a secure, well-paying job came from just playing by the rules, in which they receive respect without having to give respect, and in which their preferences are treated like policies. As the world slowly revealed the narrative to be a delusion propped and propagated by their powerful brethren they were utterly unprepared, incapable, and/or unwilling to write a new one for themselves. A white man at the end of a narrative arc that includes genocide, slavery, misogyny, imperialism, Jim Crow, and other forms of exploitation is a very different person than a white man at the end of a narrative arc that includes hard work, independence, and the pioneer spirit and frontier ethic. How could transitioning from the later to the former not hurt? And there was Donald Trump; a true believer only too happy to prostrate himself before dead gods and shout their fear into the only emotion their white dads let them feel: anger. There is a way to bring those two arcs together but most of us can't or won't do it. White men could not tell a new story of themselves in this world and so they chose to destroy the world.<br />
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The supreme irony of this narrative crisis is that, until very recently, white men were the only people allowed to have responsibility over their own narrative. Their heroes were enshrined as national heroes, the character traits they valued (and/or imagined) in themselves were considered the fundamental values of our society, the ideas they thought were most important were the ideas most celebrated and most taught in our education system. White men should have no problem helping redefine “America” for our new world because they were the ones who defined “America,” in the first place. On the other hand, this fundamental inability to create a narrative makes perfect sense, because they never believed in created narratives. To the white men writing it and the white men today believing it, “American History,” was not, “A narrative created by those in power to reflect and serve their interests,” but American History. No quotations marks. No questions. An objective entity of knowledge like the laws of thermodynamics. <br />
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Though she never says it in this way, when reading in our current environment, <i>Letters to Memory</i> is a call to a very personal, but still very powerful activism. “America” is a desperately imprecise concept and many people have extorted a lot of money and killed many others through how they have manipulated it. All of us, in one form or another and in varying potencies, carry those poisonous Americas within us. But “America,” is the shingling, not the house, it is the tent, not the people beneath it, the poster for the carnival, not the carnival. What Yamishita does in <i>Letters to Memory</i> is construct, on her own terms, the personal history usually obscured by the drapery of “America.” And what she has done, you can do. You might not have the archives that Yamashita has, but you must have something. There's a drawer in your parents' house. There's a chest in the attic. There's the local library. There's your own memory. <br />
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And what you can do, you can share. Listen, you and I both know the white men who are the problem aren't going to read <i>Letters to Memory</i>. Pretty much every aspect of why they are the problem can be extended into a reason why they aren't going to read <i>Letters to Memory</i>. But some of them might know you and might stumble into the idea of conversing with your history to build a new personal narrative by reading or conversing with you. Every honestly created new personal narrative creates language that other people can apply to their own lives, which could eventually spread to the men who are the problem. Or to men who are leaning either into the problem or away from the problem and just need the right push to be not part of the problem. And then, of course, there will be future generations of white men, and though they continue to diminish in terms of demographic power, the rise of the “alt-right,” shows we can't just assume the passage of time will guarantee more just white men. Or, as Yamashita herself says (emphasis in original):<br />
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I have asked myself why the family saved these letters. You might say that they were historians, that they knew the value of their stories, this proof of their thoughts and actions in unjust and difficult times. History is proffered to the future. <i>This is what we did. Do not forget us. Please forgive us</i>.</blockquote>
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Listen, I don't know what's going to save us from descending into fascism. I have no fucking idea what I'm going to do if Congress doesn't flip in 2018. Honestly, once climate change really gets going (if it hasn't already) and we start experiencing actual material scarcity, I don't know if anything can save us from descending into some form of nationalist fascism. But I do know I love to read and write and I do know that <i>Letters to Memory</i> is a work of genius (like watching a Polaroid develop so slowly you start remembering lines of poetry while figures solidify), a groundbreaking exploration and example of how we can build a sense of self through interaction with our pasts and I do know that you should read it even if you're not intending to extract material for resistance from it. And I also know that, in the absence of certainty it is still better to try than to do nothing and there is always value in creating something even if that value is only felt when you are creating and even if the only person it changes in the process is you. If nothing else, when future generations ask if you fought, you'll have a receipt. Or,<br />
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You may wonder at the obvious, but I have had no normal definition for this project except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand.</blockquote>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-62045118958141358842017-09-13T20:04:00.003-07:002017-09-13T20:04:51.656-07:00I Hotel and the Canon of Massive Postmodern Novels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I create canons in my head (you all do that, too, right? Build <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2015/07/joshs-just-for-hell-of-it-shred-your.html">hypothetical syllabi</a> as a way to organize all the books that are special to you?) I have a category for the great Massive Postmodern Novels, that particular type of doorstops of stylistic experimentation, paranoia, bombastic imagery, and existential unease written in the late 20th and early 21st century. Given that you can draw a pretty straight line from some of my all-time favorite books (<i>Don Quioxte</i>, <i>The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, A Gentleman</i>, and, of course, my good friend and yours, <i>Ulysses</i>) to the Massive Postmodern Novel, and that I generally like a challenge in my reading, it makes sense that I would have an affinity for this sub-genre. And I doubt my personal canon is all that different from other fans of the genre. I think there would be broad agreement that, if we're working in trinities, the holy trinity of Massive Postmodern Novel would probably be something like <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>, <i>Infinite Jest</i>, and <i>Underworld</i>. But, really, who needs trinities? <br />
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With re-issues of her books <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566894852?aff=JoshCook">Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</a>, <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566894845?aff=JoshCook">Brazil-Maru</a>, & <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566894869?aff=JoshCook">Tropic of Orange</a> and a <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566894876?aff=JoshCook">new book</a> exploring her personal history including her family's internment during WWII, (which is stunning and brilliant. More on that in a Reading is Resistance post later) I think it is now time to elevate Karen Tei Yamashita's <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566892391?aff=JoshCook">I Hotel</a> to that pantheon of great massive postmodern novels. It has everything those other great novels have. Like <i>Life: A User's Manual</i> (which would probably be in my top five of massive post-modern novel), it uses a building, rather than a series of events or the arc of a character's life, as its center of gravity; like <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> and <i>Underworld</i>, it uses its center of gravity to explore a rapidly changing society, and the political and cultural conflicts such change creates and/or is driven by; like <i>Infinite Jest</i> and much other postmodern literature, it experiments with the format and style of storytelling with sections formatted as comics, plays, film scripts, philosophy, textual representations of dance and jazz performances, and more. Finally, like nearly all of postmodernism, <i>I Hotel</i> also explores how meaning is made, directly concerning itself with not just telling a meaningful story, but exploring how stories become meaningful. And, as should be obvious by now, its massive. And it's brilliant.<br />
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I think there are a lot of reasons why postmodernism lent itself to these massive novels and exploring those reasons a bit will, I think, only heighten our sense of the importance of <i>I Hotel</i>. <br />
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Without conventions of plot and character, authors can explore just about anything; they can delve into ideas, they can play with images, they can follow digressions. They are allowed to fall into the black hole of human consciousness and root around for a while. (Sometimes is seems like about half of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> is just Pynchon seeing how far he can push an image.) That stylistic freedom also allowed writers to include experiments in form, style, and content in addition to the main plot of their book. To put this another way: a massive amount of exploration is possible when you are no longer beholden to move the plot or character development from point A to point B and some writers put as much of that exploration into single works as they could. <br />
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Furthermore, after WWII, artists found themselves, very suddenly, with an entirely different world than was known, experienced, and explored by even just the previous generation. 1927 and 1947 might well have been different planets (at least in the industrialized world) and the same for 1947 and 1987. The nuclear age. The age of mass communication, mass media, and mass entertainment. Electricity in nearly every American house. The shrinking of the globe through advances in transportation. Not only did writers find themselves with a freedom to explore longstanding universal aspects of the human condition in totally new ways, they also found themselves with entirely new human experiences to try and wrap their minds around and then present to the public. And, of course, the technology and economics of writing and publishing massive works changed. Especially in the postwar boom in the United States, publishers could afford to publish 900+ page books and many readers could afford to buy them. <br />
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One of those new conditions, at least for the authors of the books I mentioned in my trinity, was that, with the atom bomb and the Cold War, white dudes found themselves existentially vulnerable to distant powers fundamentally indifferent to their personhood. <br />
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In some ways, the massive post modern novel (as it has been generally discussed at least) is the story of white men discovering and processing the kind of vulnerability everyone else dealt with forever. This isn't “I might get killed in battle,” or the “I might be killed by the elements” that men have fetishized over the years, but the “I might be just minding my own business and have my life ended or destroyed,” kind of vulnerability that creates a persistent sense of dread that enshrouds nearly everyone else's lives. With the earlier conflicts, ma dudes felt an inherent element of agency in the risk that surrounded their stories and themselves. If they died in the wilderness, it was because they went into the wilderness and if they died in battle, it was because they went to war, and if they were assassinated by their government, it was because they were revolutionaries. Even the randomness of dying from disease you can at least partition into forces beyond humanity. But with the nuclear bomb, the Cold War, and the paranoia from the Red Scare forward, ma dudes found themselves in a world where another human could cause their meaningless death, where the mistake of another dude could kill them, where they had no agency whatsoever in the vulnerability that surrounded them. Person-driven impersonal death was something new to them. Essentially, they found themselves in an entirely new environment of personhood at the exact same moment when they were also free to write about that new environment without any stylistic or material limitations. There is a reason why DeLillo constantly returns to the image of Lenny Bruce screaming “We're all gonna die,” during his stand-up sets during the Cuban Missile Crisis in Underworld. <br />
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Narrative and economic freedom plus a slow-motion apocalypse following WWII and <i>Ulysses</i> plus a new world of technology is bound to produce a trend of doorstops. <br />
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Everyone experienced that radically changing world, not just the white people who had control and access to those changes but, those changes meant different things and felt differently to people outside the hegemony. (I mean, in terms of daily, personal, emotional experience, how different is the dread of being beaten to death because someone thought you looked at a white girl for too long from the dread of wondering if Russia would launch a nuclear attack?) For example, The Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R looked a lot different to those living within the United States who did not benefit from those freedoms capitalism was supposed to enshrine. Despite the atrocities committed by the U.S.S.R and communist China, you can see why there would still be appeal to the idea of an international union of those oppressed by colonial and capitalist systems for those who were still essentially experiencing colonialism. WWII made a certain kind of democracy safe for a certain population of people (I might have to add “for a certain amount of time” but our descent into fascism isn't certain yet), but if you were not a beneficiary of kind of democracy or a member of that certain population, the conflict you faced was not between “communism and capitalism” or “communism and democracy” or even “fascism and democracy,” but, quite often, between “racist and colonial systems of power and your own life and the lives of those you love.” Perhaps this is one reason the massive postmodern novel tended to be written by white dudes: that mode of expression just fit their experiences in way that it did not necessarily fit the experiences of other people. (Makes me wonder what would come from an examination of the differences between Baldwin's essays and Wallace's essays.) <br />
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<i>I Hotel</i> hits every aspect of the massive post-modern novel; the massiveness (600+ pages but at a large trim size), the stylistic experimentation, the presence of the Cold War and its attendant paranoia, the interaction with new technology, the referencing and re-mixing of existing myths and works of literature, and even an exploration of that new Cold War vulnerability, but it hits all of those aspects from a different perspective than Pynchon, Wallace, and Delillo. It's also, just like these other three books, a lot funnier than you would expect and far more heartfelt than a lot of readers expect from postmodernism. There are love stories. There are family stories. And, just like the others, there are stories of regular people trying to figure their shit out in this crazy ass world.<br />
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But that different perspective makes <i>I Hotel</i> especially important as Yamashita writes from a long standing awareness of that environment of personhood. Which is also, probably why the politics of <i>I Hotel</i>, unlike the swirling diffuse explorations in <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>, <i>Infinite Jest</i>, and <i>Underworld,</i> are direct and overt. <i>I Hotel</i> explores the Civil Rights movement directly from the Asian American perspective, depicting the intellectual exploration and activism of various Asian-Americans (a term she also explores) and their allies in San Francisco in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Where ma dudes approached politics obliquely or through strange lenses and situations, Yamashita interacted with it head on. Which, of course, is part of why <i>I Hotel</i> belongs in this canon. For as much, as the 20th century was defined, for certain populations, by new technology and Cold War paranoia, for many other people those currents were subplots in the story about the fight for Civil Rights. <i>I Hotel</i> is intellectual and stylistic free play with the other major story of the 20th century besides Cold War paranoia and technological advancement beyond the human spirit: the postwar fight for Civil Rights.<br />
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Finally, one of the defining techniques of postmodernism is significance through juxtaposition. Whether it is through painting a soup can, remixing a song, or creating a pastiche through references, part of what made and makes postmodernism important is it's ability to bring disparate images, ideas, and experiences together to reveal underlying similarities and create new meaning. In many ways, <i>I Hotel</i>'s fundamental technique is juxtaposition. Not only does she put different styles next to each other, and different life experiences next to each other, she also frequently juxtaposes other materials with her original work. In one particularly effective passage, Yamashita frames the story of a young, revolutionary couple as the woman dies of cancer with passages from Ferdinand Marcos's declaration of martial law in the Philippines and excerpts from an interview with Imelda Marcos. Cancer as an easy metaphor is completely re-appropriated into something that speaks to the internal tension of scales of injustice, to be blessed and burdened with a body while being blessed and burdened with a revolution, to know you are just one person living one life while also knowing that everyone is just one person living one life. Through this Yamashita is able to question and confront some of the stereotypes of “revolutionaries” without apologizing for the consequences of devoting your life to “revolution,” whatever that is. <br />
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When done well, juxtaposition as a literary technique turns a work into a sort of apartment building. Through the coincidence of place, with every incident being a story in and of itself, apartment buildings juxtapose the lives of strangers, creating a space that speaks to the shared experience of being a human being. By making juxtaposition a central technique around a central image of itself, and by setting those juxtapositions within the Civil Rights and revolutionary movements of the late 20th century Yamashita creates one more powerful juxtaposition, a juxtaposition sorely lacking from the other books in my canon, that speaks to a much broader human experience than is represented in ma dudes' great works, and that, potentially, paints a different way forward, both in terms of society and in terms of whatever follows postmodernism: vulnerability and power. There is probably a way to describe <i>I Hotel </i>as the story of the fraught love affair between vulnerability and power.<br />
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Canons are strange things. For most of our history they have been weapons, tools to assert the dominance of a certain type of expression by a certain type of person and hide everything else from the public view. They have been soldiers for hegemony. But at the same time, there is value in sorting, organizing, and even classifying human creation. There are too many brilliant, worthwhile books for any one person to read them all, so we must create tools that help us choose what work of genius to read next. Canons can be tools for the moment of selection. Furthermore, though I think there is value in reading as diversely as possible as an individual, I think there is also value in widely shared books that can act as cultural touchstones, books that, when we meet new people, we can be fairly confident they've read or are at least aware so we have something of substance to talk about. <br />
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That our current canon is so skewed by white supremacy and misogyny does not mean there is no value in an “American canon” or, even better, “American canons,” but that we must continue the process of rebuilding our national, mainstream, literary culture to better reflect the diversity of identity, style, and expression actually produced by our culture. A lot of this work has already happened and continues to happen and we have already seen great changes in what is considered “American Literature.” But the work continues. I hope elevating Yamashita's <i>I Hotel</i> can be part of that work. Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-64588957093521719012017-09-01T07:56:00.003-07:002017-09-01T07:56:50.870-07:00Thoughts on Antifa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There were a lot of antifa at the <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2017/08/triumph-in-boston-thoughts-on-rally.html">rally in Boston</a> a couple of weekends ago. I saw them as I walked from the T station to the meeting place for the march to the Common, while walking through the march itself, and once we got to the Common and learned that the Nazis had left under police escort over an hour earlier. The debate around how those on the left (and, really, in the middle) should respond to the violence on the right and the inherent violence of white supremacy started long before Charlottesville. In it's current incarnation, it probably began with Richard Spencer getting punched and with the violent conflicts in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Berkeley_protests">Berkeley</a> that started on February 1, 2017. But that debate was given a different significance and a different urgency when Nazis murdered Heather Heyer with a car in Charlottesville. Mentally preparing myself for what might happen if I met Nazis in Boston and seeing so many antifa in the crowd, galvanized my thinking about the debate. I haven't come to any ultimate moral clarity (if such a thing is possible) but I feel I at least have the issue organized a bit more in my own head and I hope that laying (some of) those organized thoughts out in a piece like this, will provide a base from which the conversation can continue in a way that doesn't weaken our collective resolve to fight Nazis. (More on that at the end.)<br /><br />I also want to emphasize that these are just my thoughts, and though they come from some experience with activism and a life of political engagement, they are just my thoughts from my perspective. Furthermore, this isn't a broad consideration of antifa history, tactics, definitions, and goals. If you want a fuller explanation and exploration of antifa, pick up Mark Bray's excellent <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612197036?aff=JoshCook">The Antifa Handbook</a> at your local independent bookstore.<br /><br /><b>Antifa at Protests Makes Me Feel Safer</b><br />Whether it's a party or a protest, a large group of people in a relatively confined space has the potential for chaos and violence. Maybe it's someone in the crowd being a jerk, maybe it's a police officer overreacting, maybe it's an outside agitator being aggressive, but a peaceful protest can turn into a dangerous riot quickly. On our way to the rally, I was nervous because I expected a lot of marchers and counter-protesters would be relatively inexperienced, Maybe this was their first rally or their second rally after the Women's March or the Science Rally, or whatever. (For me, it had been well over a decade since I'd been to any protest or rally with the potential for conflict.) It is always great to welcome new people to activism, but there is a level of danger, when there are new people in, well, any activity. (I'm suddenly reminded of floor hockey in gym class.) With big crowds in volatile situations, sometimes inexperience can be just as dangerous as malice.<br /><br />But antifa know what they're doing in crisis and confrontational moments in protests. They won't panic. They won't start running all over the place. They won't create a stampede. Knowing there would be a lot of people vastly more experienced with protests than I was, along with those who are newer, greatly reassured me. <br /><br />Furthermore, had there been conflict, antifa would have born the brunt of it, allowing the rest of us to get away. Their tactics tend involve coordinated group movement and standing in place and they often attend rallies with the understanding or plan that they will get arrested at some point or at least engage on some level with either the Nazis or the police. This not only creates a physical barrier between elements of chaos and potential violence and those who are not prepared to engage with chaos and violence, it also creates an organizing principle. So, I knew that, if things got crazy and I no longer wanted to be engaged in whatever was happening, all I had to do was spot where the antifa were gathering and go away from them.<br /><br />Whatever your ultimate decision about antifa and their tactics, they make protests and rallies safer for everyone else, even when they are not putting themselves between violent white supremacists and you. Furthermore, also remember that, whether you agree with their specific tactics or not, like those who sat at lunch counters during the Civil Rights movement and occupied factories during the Labor movement, antifa are choosing to risk their bodies so you don't have to. <br /><br /><b>Scale Matters</b><br />White Supremacy is a genocidal belief structure. Whether it is the overt genocide of the Holocaust or of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere or the reserved genocide of slavery in America (in which a white person always reserved the right to kill a black person even when he did not exercise that right), white supremacy believes in genocide. We forget that far less than a century ago, the KKK practiced ethnic cleansing through lynching and radical terrorism through violence and destruction. They hung people from trees. They beat them. They threatened them. They burned churches. They murdered allies who came down to help in the struggle for Civil Rights. Those extreme acts of violence are not a consequence of white supremacy, they are not an accident of white supremacy, they are not drawn from fanatical interpretations of white supremacy, they are not fringe white supremacy. They are white supremacy. In direct contrast, the violence of antifa, to date, has all been non-lethal and all been confined to direct conflicts with fascists who came to fight. Antifa have not gathered at Richard Spencer's house. They have not dragged David Duke through the streets. They have not burned down white supremacist churches. Do I really need to say that a street fight is different from a mob dragging a black man out of his house and lynching him? <br /><br />Even the fake images and sensationalized reporting used to paint antifa as inherently violent essentially reveal the opposite when scale is considered. Take, for example, the images used after the Boston anti-white supremacy rally. One was of a man standing in formation holding a pole with a nail in it, an image actually from a protest in Dover, England. Another was of a young woman sitting down holding a sign that said “All My Heroes Kill Cops,” an image that is at least four years old. Or, to put this another way, after the images of a horde of torch-bearing (a clear reference to lynching) white supremacists attacking a small group of anti-racist protesters on the Friday night of Charlottesville, including hitting them with their torches, the violence of the radical left is supposedly proved by pictures of people just fucking standing there. Whatever the message of the images themselves, there is a difference in scale between hitting someone with a torch and just fucking standing there.<br /><br />However, you feel about the violence around antifa, flattening the scale ultimately helps fascism by creating this false of idea of equal opposing forces. It allows you to say, “Sure, Republicans have an ideological connection to the KKK, but you could argue the Democrats have an ideological connection to antifa” as if that were in any way a balanced statement. I mean, let's try it this way: “Sure, Republicans have an ideological connection to Nazis, but Democrats have an ideological connection to people who fight Nazis.” Or, let's look at this issue using the current phrasing: Is it OK to punch a Nazi? When we reframe this question so scale is considered it becomes: Is it OK to cause brief physical discomfort with little (but not zero) risk of permanent harm to someone who believes they are allowed to kill Jews and people of color?<br /><br /><b>The Double-Standard</b><br />This flattening of scale contributes to the double-standard in our discourse that allows Republicans, conservatives, the radical right wing, and other reactionaries to get away with bad arguments and bad actions. Whenever anyone on the left goes too far (or anyone who can be convincingly associated with the left whether they're antifa, black bloc, or whatever) as seems to have happened in Berkeley more recently, it inherently threatens the entire legitimacy of whatever spectrum they can be associated with and yet somehow Republicans and Conservatives don't have to fear that same delegitimizing from Dylan Root, Cliven Bundy, or Richard Spencer. This double-standard is especially ironic given that there is a pretty straight line between small-government conservativism and Cliven Bundy's radical anti-government actions and between Nixon's Southern strategy and the overtly racist policies of the Reagan/Bush era and today's white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.<br /><br />I think we can attribute part of this double-standard to the success of the myth of liberal bias. Because liberals and democrats have been inherently motivated to prove their lack of bias, they are much quicker to condemn and critique those on their side, whether those condemnations are warranted or not. For a recent example of the impact this drive has on policy look at deportations under Obama. In many ways, I'm sure he felt he had to “compensate” for the Dream Act so as not to appear, I don't know, too caring for the lives of the less fortunate or “too liberal,” so deportations increased dramatically during his administration. (Not that that changed Republican perceptions or arguments about him, but more on Republican argumentation later. Actually, more on Republican argumentation right now.) <br /><br />I think the other part comes from the fact that much (if not all) of the right doesn't actually give a fuck about debate, dialog, argument, and consensus, and will say or do whatever it takes to achieve their policy goals. If they want to cut spending on the poor, they'll talk about being fiscally conservative. If they want to increase military spending, they'll talk about national security. If they want to cut taxes on the rich, they'll talk about <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16219906/paul-ryans-postcard-tax-return">simplifying the tax code</a>. If they want to disenfranchise minority and other likely democratic voters, they'll talk about voter fraud. To put this another way, Republicans and conservatives only care about being in power and will make whatever argument they think will get them there, whereas Democrats and liberals have at least some commitment to a coherent worldview and are thus limited in what they can argue and assert by, you know, responding to the actual world. This raises an important question for those who argue that dialog and discourse are the only legitimate way to engage with contemporary white supremacy: what evidence do you have that the right, let alone the radical right, actually cares about dialog and discourse?<br /><br />When you gang up on someone and kick them when they are down, that is assault, not self-defense, whether you're wearing all black or festooned in white supremacy symbols, but, again, when we compare violent acts against violent acts a difference in scale is obvious. In Charlottesville, four white men (some with sticks or poles) beat one black man in a police parking garage for minutes, badly bloodying him. In Berkeley most recently, we saw three-to-five men swinging their fists at one man on the ground and a much larger group, some with shields and maybe a few other weapons, pushing two Trump supporters (one of which might have used pepper spray first) out of the street and knocking them down, with one man (not the one with the pepper spray) getting kicked while he was down. From the best that I can tell from the reporting, neither resulted in any significant injury. And, unlike Charlottesville, they were aberrations during an otherwise peaceful protest (you know, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/media/2017/08/what-the-media-got-wrong-about-last-weekends-protests-in-berkeley/">according to the guy who filmed one of them</a>) that was intentionally distorted by those on the right and sensationalized by the mainstream media because, well, that's what the mainstream media does. Both absolutely constitute assault, but assault on a different scale than was committed by the white supremacists. Furthermore, quoting from the Los Angeles Times:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Police, and in some cases other counter-protesters, stepped in to halt the violence or escort the victims away from the area.“</blockquote>
<br />Unlike in Charlottesville, both on Friday and on Saturday, other people, including those on the left, stepped in to stop the violence. Where were those “very fine people” people on the right in Charlottesville? (When antifa cross the line other antifa stop them. When fascists cross the line, antifa stop them.) But once again, the “antifa are just as bad” has gained new traction, because the left is held responsible for giving the right anything to distort, while the right is not held responsible for their distortions.<br /><br />To put this another way, the liberal resistance must be perfect in all of its actions and any flaws or mistakes are seen as fundamental expressions of the failings of the ideology itself or reasons to undercut it from the middle, while the conservative, right wing resistance to President Obama was allowed to lynch him in effigy, lie about his birth certificate, and attribute all kinds of horrible flaws to him without any justification, shatter longstanding Senate norms, without delegitimizing conservative and Republican ideology. Antifa must be perfect in their ideas and actions in order to be legitimate, while Republicans can fuck up all the time, have Dylan Roots, Cliven Bundys, and Timothy McVeighs swimming around on their fringes and suffer no consequences in terms of the debate or policy whatsoever. <br /><br /><b>How Many More Traumatized Bodies Do You Need to See?</b><br />One the tenets of the nonviolent civil disobedience is that, the violent response of police to people walking on a bridge or sitting at a lunch counter reveals the violence inherent in the system to those who would not otherwise see it. Furthermore, the images of those traumatized bodies have an emotional impact on those who otherwise don't feel they have something at stake in the conflict. (Though, Sontag at least thinks it's a bit more complicated than that.) For the modern Civil Rights movement, I think there is clear evidence that those images of traumatized bodies helped shift mainstream public opinion in favor of civil rights and away from racist and segregationist polices. (Others might argue that the nonviolence would not have been effective on its own and that the various race riots and other violence or threats of violence played at the very least a supporting role, but I don't know nearly enough about the subject to comment.) Even more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement was greatly strengthened by the dissemination of images and videos of traumatized black bodies. <br /><br />It is true, that images convey emotional impact, and it is true that our ability to quickly share images influences policy debates, but, at the same time, what would we have actually learned about violence, whose mind would have actually been changed, what more just policy could have come about if Cornell West got the shit beat out of him? How many more traumatized black bodies do we need to see to know that the KKK is bad? Do you have the right to demand other people take a beating to preserve our own sense of moral purity?<br /><br /><b>So Much More to be Said & Nothing More to Be Said</b><br />I've left a lot out of this post, even of my own thoughts. There is a ton of historic context around radical left wing activism, radical right wing terrorism, the codifying of racism in American policy, and the authoritarian tendencies in the Republican party. There are arguments around how we would perceive American white supremacists and fascists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/08/16/what-if-western-media-covered-americas-white-tribalism-the-same-way-it-covers-other-nations/?utm_term=.25565a2b5815">if they were foreigners</a>, around the tension between protecting lives now while continuing to lay groundwork for more lasting progress, and around the nuance of particular weapons and particular physical acts. I also haven't spent any time on the idea that there is no antifa when there is no imminent threat of fascism and that the easiest way to get rid of antifa is to show up at counter-protests yourself and vote Democrat in the next few elections.<div>
<br />I honestly, despite all the above words, still don't know exactly what I believe the ultimate ethics are of antifa as a tactic. I think ganging up on someone and kicking them when they're down is wrong. (Pretty sure most antifa think that as well.) I also think, personally, as a white dude, if I'm in a situation in which a Nazi is attacking a person of color, I have a responsibility to intervene and in some way put my body between the Nazi and whoever he is attacking and what happens after that, I don't know. </div>
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<br />But despite all the nuance, despite all the disagreement, despite the different ethical frameworks, we all agree that every human life has value and that, though we need to continue to have these debates about the methods of the resistance, both as effective tactics and as moral acts, we cannot let those debates drive us apart. We cannot let our front be divided, we cannot let Nazis slip through the cracks back into open society, and we cannot let this president, his family, and the Republican party use white supremacy or anything else to turn this country towards fascism. And even if you believe all violence is wrong, even if you believe antifa are hurting the fight against white supremacy and fascism in America, even if those black masks and organized young people scare you, remember there is one absolute unquenstionable difference between antifa and Nazis. Nazis are Nazis, while antifa are people who fight Nazis. Remember what you call the people who fought Nazis the first time around? <br /><br />Like my work? <a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=6943700">Support me on Patreon</a>.</div>
Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-28068271971129103672017-08-23T08:07:00.003-07:002017-08-23T08:32:34.793-07:00Triumph in Boston: Thoughts on the Rally Against White Supremacy<div>
<b>Triumph</b></div>
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Saturday's counter-protest (including the march and the rally that started at the Common) was an absolute, unequivocal, unqualified victory against racism and fascism. The numbers were staggering. And, it's important to note, a lot of college students, who swell the city's population during the school year and tend to be more liberal, weren't back in the city yet. The image was unambiguous: 30-40,000 counter-protests to 40-50 huddling in the bandstand despite the several hundred foot buffer the Boston police gave them in the surrounding area. (2017's relentless effort to produce metaphors of itself continued when a small group of loud-mouthed overconfident men were granted vastly more land in proportion to their population than a much larger more diverse group.) In fact, they packed up before most of us even got there. It took us two and a half hours to march about two miles from the Reggie Lewis Center to the Common and by the time we got there, the Nazis were long gone, having been escorted out for their own safety in police vehicles. It had to be humiliating and discouraging. <br />
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Perhaps even more importantly, early on the organizers tried to distance themselves from the Nazis at Charlottesville. Over and over again (because the media kept talking to them) the organizers pretended this was about “free speech” and that most of the speakers had at the very least ties to or demonstrated sympathies to white supremacy and white supremacist organizations was just, you know, a coincidence. Furthermore, unlike the “free speech” rally in Charlottesville, from the pictures I saw, the attendees in Boston didn't bring any overt symbols of white supremacy. I later learned that organizers actively discouraged attendees from bring such symbols. Furthermore, there had been statements earlier in the week that members of the KKK in Massachusetts were going to attend, but, as with the other symbols, if they did, they were too scared or too ashamed to show themselves. That, of course, is the point of these counterprotests. There is absolutely no redeeming value to white supremacy and anyone who harbors any shred of it in their souls should be too ashamed of themselves or afraid of the consequences to display it in public. And it looks like, at least to some degree <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/america-first-rallies-canceled-because-protests-work">it worked</a>. (Just going to pause here and throw in a “Fuck yeah, Boston!”)<br />
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But the biggest long-term victory came in the form of scare quotes. We are in this place right now, in large part because of how successful the radical right has been of controlling the media narrative. Whether it's the early framing of Trump's electoral college victory as rooted in “economic anxiety” or the long term myth of the liberal media, much of the responsibility for the destruction now being wrought by the Trump administration lays squarely with the media who kowtowed for decades to intimidation and manipulation on the right. But on Saturday, they began referring to the white supremacist rally as a “free speech” rally. Those scare quotes are short hand for “so-called.” For months and months (maybe years and years) white supremacists and fascists have been using <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2017/08/reading-is-resistance-on-free-speech.html">the rhetorical technique</a> of throwing the debate away from their reprehensible opinions to the nuance of free expression and, in doing so, have been able to continue to create platforms for recruitment and radicalization. But, by Saturday, the mainstream media were no longer having it. The media did not give them the benefit of the doubt. If the right wants to hold another “free speech” rally, rather than the left having to prove it is a thinly veiled white supremacy rally, the right will have to prove it's not. That is a huge victory, and as the Trump administration continues to unravel (and as Trump himself continues to unravel) inherent skepticism from the main mainstream media of right wing rallies, protests, and responses to the Mueller investigation or articles of impeachment or the 25th amendment or even specific steps by cities, states, and NGOs to counter the white supremacist policies coming out of the justice department, will go a long way in the helping the struggle.<br />
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<b>Radical Fire</b><br />
One of my first observations, as I walked from Roxbury Crossing towards the Reggie Lewis Center and while I thought back to the list of speakers at both rallies, was just how much more radical the organizers of these counter-protests were than many of the attendees. Along with antifa (more about them in another post), the place was just lousy with socialists, prison reform and abolition activists, indigenous rights activists, and Black Lives Matter activists. The speakers before the march itself were spitting fire that I doubt a lot of the attendees had heard before. <br />
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But that is, of course, how movements always start and how movements are always sustained. As much as moderates and mainstreamers like to argue for incremental change and cautious reform, almost none of those changes or those reforms would happen without the engine of radicalism organizing and fighting for so much more. The status quo only changes through immense force (whether activist, technological advance, or other) and immense force generally doesn't start with moderates. I mean, it is telling that Black Lives Matter and various Socialist organizations and not, say, the Democratic National Committee organized a protest against Nazis. But there were certainly, plenty of Democrats in the crowd.<br />
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I like to think of it as a pot of boiling water. The change that bubbles to the surface, whatever form it takes, is fueled by the radical fire on the bottom. Whether it's overtime pay, weekends, clean air, free public education, curb cuts in sidewalks, Social Security, or any other now obvious reform that makes your life better, you can thank the radicals of our past for fighting against the status quo and putting their jobs, bodies, even lives on the line for what they believed in. <br />
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Because, when you really start to drill down into what radicals on the left fight for, and what more moderate people believe is just and good for the world, the difference isn't really so great. As one of the socialist speakers put it, sure there might be differences in specific policy, there might be disagreements over nuances of theory, but when you're fighting Nazis you want to present the widest possible front. So when you start asking (or repeating) questions about socialism, Black Lives Matter, prison abolition, reparations, guaranteed minimum income or any other policy or idea that is considered “radical” I urge you to take a few minutes and research the roots and reasons for it. Is the idea of reparations today any more radical to us than the idea of the weekend was when it first proposed? Is the idea of a guaranteed minimum income really that radically different from Social Security or welfare? It is amazing how many policies you can agree on and how much change you can enact when you realize we're all starting from the idea that all human beings are valuable.<br />
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<b>Why Boston Was Safe</b><br />
When I was talking to people before the march, I told them I was 83% certain it was going to be perfectly safe. Not the strongest percentage when we're talking about physical safety, but still, pretty safe. And the reasons for my assessment were born out.<br />
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First and foremost, these men are cowards. They are perfectly happy to bang their shields and swing their sticks and shout their nonsense and attack people when they have such a numerical advantage that not a single one of them assumes any meaningful risk of harm. But, despite how vital the First Amendment is to freedom or whatever, not a single one of them was brave enough to stand within a hundred feet of the crowd of protesters and make their case. Now, I'm not saying their fear was unreasonable, but I am saying that Nazis are cowards and that, from what I saw, not a single white supremacist in Boston on Saturday displayed a fraction of the courage showed by UVA students and counter-protesters in Charlottesville. I want you to really internalize this point and think about what it means, especially when I discuss antifa later: when the left outnumbers the right in contentious and confrontational rallies, said rallies are much more likely to be safe. If the numbers are roughly even (as in Berkley and Charlottesville on the Saturday) or if there are more white supremacists (as in Charlottesville on the Friday night) there is a much greater chance of violence. That it was about 400 counter-protesters to every white supremacist meant that there was no meaningful risk of harm. <br />
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Second, every year Boston hosts at least two events that require managing tens of thousands of people: the Boston Marathon and the Fourth of July, so the city and the police force have long institutional knowledge for dealing with crowds. As boring as it might be, crowd control logistics play a big part in whether or not protests are safe. Where you put barriers, how far apart they are, how many officers you have and where you put them, are all boring, technical details that can have huge impacts on whether or not a protest is safe. You can see the value of police experience with logistics because of the stark contrast between Boston on Saturday and Phoenix on Tuesday. If I'm being very generous, I suspect the sudden use of tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls, and flash-bang grenades by the Phoenix police came from the goal of keeping the counter-protesters and the Trump rally attendees separate, but the police were simply not prepared. I'm sure many of them will believe that tear-gassing a crowd of ten thousand plus peaceful protesters who had been standing in the heat for hours and hours was the safest option, but, they were either totally unprepared or totally unwilling to actively manage the crowd exiting the rally. Their lack of crowd control experience created an extremely dangerous situation and we are very lucky no one was seriously hurt either directly by the police (all of those "non-lethal" weapons can be very dangerous to the elderly, the very young, and people with specific conditions like asthma or allergies to any of the ingredients in the chemical weapons) or in the chaos created when tear gas suddenly shows up and thousands of people start running. (My less generous interpretation is that the same thing happens whenever tear gas is deployed. A few things were thrown at police in body armor, helmets, and riot shields, so they overreacted.)<br />
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But, on the police side, at least as importantly was that it was made clear, at least from my interpretation, that the police were willing to arrest the white supremacists as well. It matters that the white supremacists were told they were not welcome. I know it sounds weird to say that committed to arresting people who commit crimes was important, but Charlottesville got so dangerous because the police did not intervene in situations when the white supremacists were assaulting people. We don't know what would have happened if violence had erupted, if the Boston police force would have stuck to their statement and arrested people on both sides or if they would have done what police departments usually do and just arrest the nearest black person to the incident, but the fact that they gave that impression was important.<br />
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Finally, Massachusetts has strict gun control and prohibits open-carry. I don't care what you say about the Second Amendment, carrying a fucking assault rifle in a public place in general, and to a protest specifically, is a fucking threat. It is a confrontation. It is a tactical act of intimidation. It is an assault on free speech. It is an act of violence. Furthermore, we know whose side the men playing soldier are on. As overwhelming numbers bolster Nazi confidence for violence, so does knowing they essentially have a militia armed to the fucking teeth ready to step in and “act as peacekeepers” or “protect free speech” if it looks like those who oppose white supremacy might have the upper hand. Furthermore, just at an emotional and psychological level, a bunch of dudes walking around with fucking assault rifles inherently raises the stress level, and thus greatly raises the odds that adrenaline overrides clear thinking. Which means that perhaps the easiest way for cities to prevent violence, at all significant levels, at their protests is to ban open carry at them. Because, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the First Amendment (you know, what this is supposedly all about) has no meaning when the Second Amendment is given free rein.<br />
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<b>Final Takeaway: Saturday Kicked Ass But This is Far from Over</b><br />
There are a few images that will stick in my mind from Saturday's march. The “Ruck Neo-Nazis” sign from the Rugby Players Against Racism group. The live-action demonstration of intersectionality as, along with the more generic condemnations of racism and white supremacy, there were signs for Black Lives Matter, refugee rights, immigrant rights, prison reform, LGBTQ rights, and dozens of other groups and ideas threatened by white supremacy. People swing dancing in the empty street to the music from the marching band. The number of Porter Square Books customers I saw in the crowd. (Good job, team!) The strange energy when we finally got to the Common and thousands of people who had geared themselves up to drive Nazis from their fucking city found themselves with beautiful free Saturday afternoon in Boston. But the image that hit me the hardest was a middle-aged to older black woman, who had climbed up the side of a dumpster to get a better view, filming the march with her phone, saying over and over again, “Thank you. Thank you all.” <br />
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But it's important to note: white supremacy is the idea that white people have the right to do whatever the fuck they want. This fight is far from over. And though they may not use “free speech” rallies as a cover for recruitment events going forward, the most radical and most dangerous of them will certainly apply lessons from Saturday. There were reports of people taking pictures of DSA women to dox them later. I definitely saw two white men, walking perpendicular through the march filming people. Maybe they were innocently documenting a historic event, but I got a weird vibe from them, and it is just as likely they were recording the faces of the “enemy.” White supremacists see themselves in a war and they will take the lessons of this defeat and apply them to their next actions. Furthermore, because of the white supremacists in the federal government, like Jeff Sessions, our resources for fighting this specific kind of terrorism are being greatly curtailed. I am so lifted up from Saturday's march, but I am also profoundly afraid at what will happen next. <br />
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Boston is a weird place. Despite being the cradle of the abolitionist movement, it is still profoundly racist. And whether that racism reflects itself in busing policy, gentrification, school funding, or the n-word, it is still something we will struggle with. But Boston made a statement on Saturday: white supremacy is not welcome here. Maybe it wasn't the bravest statement. Maybe it wasn't the most enlightening statement. Maybe there can be further discussion about how to make these statements. But it was an absolutely necessary statement and because Boston made it, it will be easier for other cities (like Phoenix) and other places to make their own version of it.<br />
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P.S. There were a ton of antifa at the counter-protest on Saturday and seeing them helped galvanize my thinking about antifa. Look for those thoughts later this week or next week.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-31453531518039731382017-08-16T08:28:00.000-07:002017-08-16T08:28:00.767-07:00Reading is Resistance: On Free Speech & NazisAs of writing there is a rally planned by a bunch of white men for Saturday on Boston Common and, as of writing, the supposed theme of this rally is <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/08/15/who-boston-free-speech-coalition-behind-saturday-rally/eRrE4qpFSBKC4pD8T1iHjI/story.html?event=event12">“free speech,”</a> and I guess it will be just coincidence or something that only white men and maybe a few white women will attend this rally. As a bookseller and a writer, the idea of free speech is not just important to me, it is vital to who I am. Protecting and providing access to ideas I disagree with is one of the fundamental responsibilities of being a bookseller and the ability to express whatever is in my mind in whatever manner I see fit, whether other people like it or not, is fundamental to being a writer. Furthermore, there is power in being around ideas that make you uncomfortable, that challenge your world view, that you disagree with and, both as a bookseller and as an author, I do feel it is also my responsibility to make sure everyone has the opportunity to be uncomfortable. But (so no one has to be nervous while I build my argument) the First Amendment right to free expression does not, in any way shape or form, apply to Nazism or white supremacy. <br /><br />As with so much of the reaction to what's happening this piece will be a little raw and I can't promise the best structure or that I have considered and accounted for all possible counter arguments or implications of my argument. Furthermore, in terms of a bookseller's specific role in how and what information and opinions are accessible in their communities, I will honestly say that I still feel a tension between the authors around the edges of this movement and with those who might be considered enablers of this movement (Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reily immediately spring to mind), who don't explicitly talk about white supremacy, who I, personally, wouldn't want to stock on my shelves and that responsibility to get whatever book a reader wants for them, without any judgment. There is a point where the debate becomes more nuanced, when the arguments around free speech and bookselling become more fraught and when we'll be faced with either/or decisions without an obvious answer (and I'm not counting the "do I need to make this money" as part of this nuanced point because, well, I don't believe that money has any real relevance whatsoever to this issue) and I'll be honest right now, that I don't explore that point in this post. Even in a brain dump like this, I just don't have it all settled in my head enough to share. <div>
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A lot of you who read this will already agree with me, and if you've been following this issue, you'll see a number of familiar points, some of which have been made far more eloquently than I ever could by cartoons and other images and tweets. As a white dude, I see it is as my responsibility to talk to other white dudes and as writer I see it as my responsibility to create prose that might pull someone back from the edge, refine another white dude's understanding of what they are doing in the world, tweak an attempted-ally's behavior, or, at the very least, add the privilege of my voice to existing arguments. Finally, I also recognize that, historically, the types of ideas and expressions that are censored by the government have been those that I would consider protected under the First Amendment. Most of the time, when the government (or whoever) seeks to restrict expression, their goals have been to either silence dissent or police sexuality. With all of that said, I'll say this again: The First Amendment right to free expression does not, in any way, shape or form, apply to Nazism or white supremacy. <br /><br />I think it's important to start by exploring exactly why the First Amendment and the right to free expression is important. Then I'm going to talk about the types of speech we already restrict. Finally, I'm (hopefully) going to pull that all together into something coherent. Finally, (for real this time, sorry for all the preambles) I should probably reiterate that this post (and really all my other posts, tweets, etc) reflect only my opinion. OK.<br /><br />On a political level, there is inherent value in allowing for competing, disagreeing, divergent, even mutually opposed ideas to be expressed freely and without restraint. Debate, discourse, conversation, are the laboratories of human political, social, and artistic ideas. Allowing dissenting views to be expressed leads to better policy and creates the opportunity for consensus in a way that is simply not possible when ideas are restricted by the government. Furthermore, there is value to interacting with ideas you disagree with even if you don't reach consensus. Not only is your idea strengthened and your understanding of it deepened through your defense of it, you are able to see the nuance that makes the opposing idea legitimate and perhaps adjust your own assumptions and assessments of the idea, even if you don't agree with it. In theory, something positive could come from debating the value of an idea I agree with, like a federally administered minimum income, with a “small-government” republican even if we never reach a consensus or agreement. <br /><br />Free expression is also vital to a society, because, ultimately, humans are communication animals. Our lives are defined by what, how, and who we communicate with. It is absolutely vital to our personhood that we be able to express ourselves. (Hang on to that word, “personhood.”) Not being able to express who you are is fundamentally identical to not being able to be who you are.<br /><br />But, even with that, American jurisprudence, and well, basic common sense acknowledge that you can't say always say whatever you want whenever you want. Shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is, of course, the go-to example, because when you shout “fire” in a crowded theater, you risk causing a panic that leads to physical harm or death. (It should also be said, that even if everyone knows there is no fire, you still interrupt the experience the audience and your asshole ass should be thrown out even if maybe it shouldn't be arrested.) But you can also can't tell lies about someone that hurts them. Depending on the person, you also can't even share true things (like, say, a sex tape) if sharing that true thing causes them harm. You also can't call someone up in the middle of the night and threaten to kill them. You also can't (I'll throw in a “technically” here, because dudes get away with it all the time) tweet rape threats at people. Another classic ethical formulation is “You have the right to swing your fist right up until it hits my nose,” and we, as a society, have decided that some speech counts as hitting a nose. <br /><br />First, and many other people, usually people of color, have said this better than I have, but I'll put it in here anyway: there is no consensus between the idea “I am a person” and the idea “No, you're not.” There is no middle ground. There is no compromise. There is no negotiation. There is no chance to grow through debate between these two ideas, because one of them assumes the other doesn't actually have personhood to grow. Nothing the whole free exchange of ideas thing is supposed to do can happen between “I am a person” and “No, you're not.”<br /><br />But more importantly, white supremacy is a death threat. As clear, as distinct, as dangerous, and as damaging as calling someone on the phone and threatening to kill them. Holding a Confederate flag is no different from standing outside the home of a person of color and dragging your thumb across your throat. The fundamental idea of white supremacy, no matter how apologizers and adjacents try to soften or mitigate it, is that white people have the right to kill other people. Naziism was based on the idea that white Germans had the right to kill Jews, Romany, homosexuals, and others. The Confederacy was based on the idea that white people had the right to kill black people. Every Nazi flag is a death threat. Every Confederate flag is a death threat. Every Confederate monument is a death threat. Every school, street, park, highway, whatever, named in honor of a Confederate general, soldier, politician, or hero is a reminder to all people of color that a whole lot of white people still want the right to kill them. The n-word out of the mouth of a white person is a death threat. Every racial slur out of the mouth of a white person is a death threat. And death threats are not protected by the First Amendment.<br /><br />The debate over white supremacy is over. There is a reason why there are no statues of Hitler in Germany, why Mein Kampf was banned until very recently, why Nazi symbols are only in museums. No one gains anything from white supremacy's presence in our marketplace of ideas. And it's presence is a constant, relentless threat to well-being and lives of millions of Americans. If you want to argue that Nazis and other white supremacists have the right to express their white supremacy you need to look a person of color in the eyes and tell them they don't have the right to feel safe in their own country. If you can do that, well, then I guess I'm done exchanging ideas with you. <br /><div>
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One final point on the legitimacy of the white supremacist free speech argument: do you really believe they would permit criticism of their white power if they took over our government? Do you really believe they would encourage a vigorous exchange of opinions in a free marketplace of ideas? Do you really believe a black person would be able to express themselves freely under David Duke? Of course, not. Protests would be outlawed the next day, monuments to people of color would be torn down, and every MLK street, school, and park would be renamed. They'd confiscate every history book, defund every college they accused of “indoctrinating” the youth, and arrest every activist of color they got their hands on. Because this has never, not for one second, actually been about free speech, and those who repeat that argument have (at best) been conned. Every argument about the sanctity of free speech is (at best) a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of building ideas in a society, but is far, far more often, a simple smoke screen to give them a chance to recruit more sad, scared, and angry white men to their hateful cause. </div>
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Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-23756247865811406662017-08-10T19:29:00.003-07:002017-08-11T06:53:09.074-07:00There is a Story Here: On the Book of Disquiet <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is a story here. I know it doesn't look like a story, that it doesn't have the plot you expect from a story or the characters you expect from a story or the relationships you expect from a story or the arc of events you expect from a story, but I assure you it is a story. It is a story about the course of consciousness, the nature of thought, the self's consideration of the self, the existence of the brain in the world. It is a story about figuring shit out, about our inability to figure shit out, about the mechanisms of understanding both the grand abstract concepts that drive art and philosophy and the bullshit your boss does in the office, and it is a story about the limitations of those mechanisms, the gears of the mechanisms, the grease of those mechanisms. <br />
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The thing is, unlike most stories, we all experience this story every day. We all think about the shit that happened to us and we all think about the best way to think about the shit that happened to us, and sometimes we come to conclusions and sometimes we don't and sometimes we come to different conclusions later that make those first conclusions look really fucking stupid. This is a story about how we are and how we become meaningful. But to see <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811226936&aff=JoshCook">The Book of Disquiet</a> as a story, to see it as distinct from a fictional diary or collection of disconnected musings you need to learn to read it as a story.<br />
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Not all books can or should be read in the same way. This is one of those ideas that sounds strange, but once put into context, is almost obvious. You would read a collection of poetry differently than you would read the next installment in your favorite fantasy epic; you would pay attention to different details, keep different types of information at the forefront of your mind as you read, and react to your own reactions differently. You read a collection of essays differently from a collection of short stories, a work of literature differently from a work of entertainment, a work you have some doubts about differently from a work your best friend swears by. Furthermore, you can even read the same book differently, depending on the context. For example, you read a book differently when you read it for a class or for a book club from when you read it for fun. Some books, the books I often consider the greatest books, need to be read differently from every other book, and one of their responsibilities and one of the definers of their greatness is that they teach you how to read themselves. So <i>The Book of Disquiet</i>, rather than starting with some kind of introductory passage that would try to frame this as a collection of diary entries or, at least, as a collection of distinct units, begins with a story. A story about how the “author” came to meet “Vicente Guedes,” the “writer” of everything else that will follow. Furthermore, the opening image of the first “entry” is of a “hidden orchestra” and a “symphony” or, to put it another way, of a particular type of human expression in which a series of distinct acts come together to create a unified experience. <br />
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This is a story because, directly and indirectly, through confronting the concept and through atmosphere created by the prose, the book returns again and again to one particular idea, and explores how that idea describes the narrator's experience with the world. The narrator may not change, the events may not change, the rising and falling action we associate with a plot might not happen, but the nature of this idea changes and does go through the rising and falling action we associate with a plot. In a way, the book feels almost like someone worrying at a loose tooth, but that is a story. There is conflict, there is tension (will the tooth fall out?), and ultimately, there is resolution. The concept, of course, is disquiet. Disquiet is a mercurial idea, and the narrator rolls it around in his hands, bending and stretching into different shapes, but, if I had to define it in some kind of, uh, definite way, I'd say that Pessoa's disquiet is the parallax created by the separation between existence and observation, from the fact that observing what happens and how you feel about it is distinct from what actually happens and what you feel about what actually happens. Disquiet names the perpetual <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/10/what-is-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle">Heisenberg uncertainty principle</a> that is an inherent aspect of consciousness itself. There is a synapse between us and the world and disquiet is the emotion we feel when we think about that synapse. <br />
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This is a story about disquiet in the exact same way that <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812969641&aff=JoshCook">In Search of Lost Time</a> is a story about memory. The difference, of course, is in the angle of approach. Proust takes the long way (perhaps, the absolute longest way), showing the accumulation of memory over the course of a life and how the force of memory guides and shapes a life as a way to consider the ideas that describe memory. It is a long, slow build up that climaxes when a small moment triggers the emotional experience of what the fact of having memory means. It takes Proust thousands of pages to set up this climax because memory is a book with thousands of pages. (I, for one, think it's worth it.) Pessoa just goes right at it, his narrator confronting the idea directly and rarely with any kind of “real world” connection. In a way, this makes <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811226936&aff=JoshCook">The Book of Disquiet</a> read more like a work of philosophy or even of literary criticism (there is a lot about the act of writing in here as well), but, in a way, you can arrange any good work of philosophy into a story about an idea if you want to.<br />
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But, just because this is a story doesn't mean you need to read it as a story. Along with teaching you how to read themselves, great books also support multiple reading methods, giving readers the power to find their own best experience with the text. You could also read <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811226936&aff=JoshCook">The Book of Disquiet</a> as a devotional or a book of hours. You could keep it at your bedside to read upon waking or before going to sleep. You could read it front to back like a story, or you could wander through it. I think you could also get tremendous value out of it, even if you never finish it, even if you just keep circling back to the passages that most resonated with you. <i>The Book of Disquiet</i> is a story, but it is a story that gives your the freedom to read it as though it is not. <br />
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I've dogeared hundreds of passages. I have had my breath taken away hundreds of times. The primary motivation for writing this post wasn't necessarily the argument that the <i>The Book of Disquiet</i> is a story (though I think it is and I think that argument gave me the chance to have some interesting thoughts about how we read and what we consider a “story”), but that when I experience this kind of brilliance in a book I want to write about it. But I didn't want to just essentially string of bunch of blurbs together and call it a post. There can be a kind of diminishing return when you gush about a book. At some point you don't really add to your argument and at another point people can start getting suspicious and at a similar point you can set expectations so high a first impression of disappointment will follow them throughout the rest of the book. <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811226936&aff=JoshCook">The Book of Disquiet</a> is a masterpiece, a cornerstone of much twentieth-century fiction, an often perplexing but also delightful book, and as much as it deserves praise, as much as it deserves blurbs and handsells, it deserves essays more.<br />
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Like my bookish writing? <a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=6943700">Support my work on Patreon</a>. Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-78411259105522098092017-07-30T20:24:00.000-07:002017-07-30T20:24:56.289-07:00Launching a Patreon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I like to joke that I have two full time jobs and neither one of them pays very much. (You know, the kind of joke when laughter always seems to be right on the edge of tears. That kind.) I'm a bookseller at an independent bookstore and a writer. I could talk for a long time about how and why our contemporary economy acts the way it does, why it values what it values, and why, say, our nation's greatest primary care doctors make less money than mediocre investment bankers, but that would be a very long way to say that, among many other valuable professions and vocations, the structure of our formal economy does not pay booksellers and writers very well. This presents one set of challenges when you're 24 and getting your shit together, but an entirely different set of challenges when you're 37 and trying to figure out how to sustain and protect the shit you got together. I have been both privileged and lucky to actually <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/book/9781612194271">publish a book</a> with a <a href="https://www.mhpbooks.com/">fantastic small press</a>, to work for a <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/">store</a> that values me and understands the financial limitations of working in a bookstore, and to have a partner that is willing to work at less satisfying but higher paying jobs to make up the gap. I have been very fortunate, but the result of that fortune doesn't include a retirement fund, much flexibility or long term stability and it doesn't provide contingency options if something drastic happens in my life, either bad (drastically changing housing costs) or good (my partner who is also an artist and really and <a href="https://twitter.com/ScoginsBitch">truly kicks ass</a> gets an opportunity to work in the arts, crafts, in a brewery, or something that doesn't make up the gap). Since it is important to ask for what you need, even if you might not get it, I am launching a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=6943700">Patreon</a> and asking for your support. <br /><br />You'll support my writing, including my blog posts here, essays, criticism, poetry and stories published elsewhere (like this recent <a href="http://con-text.co/post/163379378152/disgovernance-and-resistance">piece on resistance and The Curfew</a>), as well as the works that will (I hope) become my future books and any other projects, performances, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/136716240217664/?acontext=%7B%22action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22dashboard%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22calendar_tab_event%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%22%7B%5C%22dashboard_filter%5C%22%3A%5C%22upcoming%5C%22%7D%22%7D]%2C%22ref%22%3A2%2C%22source%22%3A2%7D">events</a> I might write, organize, and contribute to. <br /><br />You'll also support my work as a bookseller where I've made a commitment to advocate for small and independent presses, works in translation, experimental works, works that make people uncomfortable, works that challenge readers, works that are entertaining but don't have the publicity budget to get in front of your eyes; in short, the great books being written and published that deserve to be read and loved by readers but that don't get in front of readers any other way. In my time at PSB, <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/taxonomy/term/127">I've advocated</a> for authors like Valeria Luiselli, Renee Gladman, Victor LaValle, Kevin Young, Patricia Lockwood, Mary Rueffle, Yuri Herrera, Maggie Nelson, Robin Coste Lewis, Ananda Devi, Bhanu Kapil and a whole bunch of other authors you should be reading right now. <br /><br />So what do patrons get as a thank you? All patrons will get access to capsule reviews of pretty much <a href="https://www.librarything.com/catalog/prophetandmistress&tag=josh&collection=-1">every book I read</a>. (I'll make the first few public to give you a sense of what those reviews will look like.) Once I reach my goal of $500 a month, patrons at $5 a month and up will get an exclusive newsletter with longer considerations on books, politics, and the world as well as first looks at my writing projects slated for publication. (Scroll back through this blog to get a sense of what you might get in a newsletter.) Patrons at $10 a month and up will also get one personalized book recommendation a month. Yep, once a month, these patrons will be able to message me with what they're looking to read and/or give and get a personal recommendation. If you don't live in the metro-Cambridge area it's the closest you can get to visiting me at the store. (In some ways, it'll be even better, because I'll have the chance to do a little research.) Finally, patrons at $20 will get all that other stuff plus the occasional free book from my (sadly) finite shelves.<br /><br />Thank you in advance if you end up becoming a patron, but also, thank you if you read my blog and other work, and also thank you if you read my book, and extra special thank you if you recommend it to other people. If you're one of my publishing friends, thank you for all the books you've sent me over the years and for helping bring new books into the world, even though publishing doesn't pay well either. If you're one of my bookseller friends, thank you for all of the work you do helping to keep a vital aspect of human culture afloat in our economy. If you're one of my writer friends, thank you for continuing to write. It often feels like we're shouting into a void, but we are not. <br /><br />Finally, I understand, for whatever reason, you might not want to become my patron. That's cool. There is no shortage of people doing great work who deserve your support in some form or another. You can't ask if you're not ready to accept “No.” (And as a writer who still gets way more rejections than acceptances, I've built up a pretty thick skin.) But if books are important to you and writing is important to you, then even if you decide not to support me, go out to an independent bookstore (or visit one online) ask for a recommendation from the bookseller and buy a book by someone you've never heard of. Do this once a month. Do this once a quarter. Do this every year for your cool friend's birthday. Do this at whatever capacity you can. Writing a book is a series of small acts stacked on top of each other, one word at a time, and keeping the book world thriving works the same way; small acts, spread out among readers, adding fuel to one of the fundamental engines of human culture. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=6943700">Support my Patreon here</a>.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-24691538864157323222017-07-23T19:32:00.000-07:002017-07-23T19:42:54.497-07:00Reading is Resistance: Take This Cup from Me Performance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In some ways, it was an idle thought, a passing observation, an idea that would be pretty obvious to just about anyone who was looking, but still, it caught in my brain as these things sometimes do. Pretty much since I first encountered Cesar Vallejo in an anthology edited by Clayton Eshelman called <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781932360745&aff=JoshCook">Conductors of the Pit</a>, I knew I wanted to write a book about him. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to focus on just ten poems and call the book “10 Poems by Vallejo” even though I had (have) no idea what form or angle the book might take. Finding myself in between projects, I started typing up the ten poems I'd selected, including “Spain, Take this Cup from Me.” Said idle thought passed through my mind; there were some interesting and potentially enlightening parallels between the Spanish Civil War Vallejo wrote about and our current resistance to the Trump administration (and the notes of our own civil war playing in the background). I started thinking about how we could use Vallejo's poem to explore our own political turmoil. And, I wrote this post on Facebook: <br />
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Writerly, readerly friends, especially poets or those poetic inclinations. I'm kicking around a project that might become an event or might become something else (anthology, chapbook, who knows.) It involves rewriting a poem about and inspired by the Spanish Civil War by the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. So, if you're a fan of Vallejo and fighting fascists and might be interested in participating, comment or send me a message. Right now, I'm just gauging interest. Thanks. </blockquote>
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And writerly, readerly friends responded. I'm still a little blown away, but, then again, Vallejo kicks serious ass. The first result was a translation and response event called <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/late-night-poetry-lab-july-19">Take This Cup from Me</a>, in The Late Night Poetry Lab reading series the bookstore hosts at Aeronaut brewing. <br />
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Throughout the event, a slideshow juxtaposing images from the Spanish Civil War and the political turmoil of the last year or so, played. What struck me about these juxtaposed images was the similarities and differences in the energies of the people in the pictures. There was a vibrancy in most of the images from both eras. Even if that volume of energy was driven by anger as it was at Trump rallies, there was a volume to the emotions that was thrilling. But there was something different in the eyes of the people in the images that were clearly from later in the Spanish Civil War. I was paying attention to too many other moving parts (like getting the slideshow to actually work) to really identify what I saw in those eyes; maybe a kind of exhausted defiance, maybe just exhaustion, maybe something else entirely, but it is clear something happens to people over the course of a long struggle. And, I suspect, regardless of what happens with Trump himself, we're going to find out what it is.<br />
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The main event of the evening was what I called a cascading line by line translation. Reading one line at a time, the poem was performed first in the original Spanish and then in three different English translations, Eshelman, Gerard Malanga, and an original translation made for the event by Maria Jose Gimenez and Anna Rosenwong. This let us hear some of the different ways Vallejo's Spanish could be rendered in our English and it was fascinating. Sometimes the differences were subtle, some of the differences were drawn from the strangeness and complexity of Vallejo's vocabulary and imagery, and some were, in the moment at least, inexplicable to me. More than a few times I had to remind myself to focus on the line I was about to read rather than the differences in the lines I'd just heard.<br />
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The cascading line by line translation was followed by a number of responses to Vallejo's piece. A poem by Epi Arias was performed in both Spanish and English. Then, I performed my original line-by-line response to Eshelman's translation (posted below). <br />
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Perhaps my favorite part of the event was that, through <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/search/book?searchfor=christopher+boucher&aff=JoshCook">Chris Boucher</a>, I was able to connect with Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who recently translated some works by <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781598534986&aff=JoshCook">Kerouac</a>, and get my response translated into Quebecois French. I grew up in Lewiston, a French-Canadian mill town in Maine, and, though I have plenty of Quebecois heritage (including a great uncle who played hockey against/with Maurice Richard once) I don't feel as though I have a particularly strong connection to it. Getting my poem translated into Quebecois interacted with the theme of the event and strengthened this connection for me. Furthermore, it was fascinating to hear my work in another language. Even without being able to speak French (Quebecois or otherwise), it was clear that this translation brought out an anger, that, in the English original, was under the surface and between the lines. What was a kind of exasperated frustration, a long sustained, “Guys, seriously, come on,” became a glorious spittle-flecked rant, a kind of linguistically hallucinogenic “These fucking guys!” (There was also something truly beautiful about listening to this angry Quebecois poem echoing around a bar.)<br />
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But that is, of course, the power of translation. Translating a work from one language to another, in essence creates an entirely new work that is in direct conversation with the original, highlighting and illuminating aspects of the ideas in the original that its original language was unable to express. In many ways, our ability to express ourselves in words is fundamentally limited by the language we use, a language (any and every language) that simply cannot contain and transmit all of our complexities. Every time the idea is translated into another language a different aspect of it is revealed. Which leads me to a kind of Borgesian idea; that the only truly complete thought is one that has been translated into every human language that has ever or will ever be spoken.<br />
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Next Alyeda Morales read an original response in Spanish and did a fantastic job. Not speaking Spanish, I only understood the occasional word here and there. (OK, that occasional word was “gringo.”) Which got me thinking. I, personally, love hearing people speak languages I don't know. Maybe it's because, as a writer I have an inherent interest in language, maybe it's because I like to try to figure out what people are saying, or maybe it's because, as a poet, I'm interested in the mechanics of the sound of language. Regardless of why, one of my favorite parts of living in a city is listening to conversations in languages I don't understand. (Which makes me wonder what a sociological study examining how people react to overhearing a foreign language would reveal.)<br />
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Given that there was so much Spanish in this performance and a little Quebecois, for me, and many other audiences members, this was a musical event as much as it was a poetry event, an experience of the sound of the human voice as much as it was an experience of the spoken word. Which meant having singer-songwriter <a href="https://jddebris.bandcamp.com/">JD Debris</a> close the night with his song “Vallejo,” (which he tweaked specifically for the event) was a perfect way to end the performance.<br />
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Because it was Vallejo's words that started this whole project, I concluded the event by reading this excerpt from Vallejo's essay “The Great Cultural Lessons of the Spanish Civil War” from <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/%209780819574848&aff=JoshCook">The Selected Writings of Cesar Vallejo</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
But the jurisdiction of thought has its
revenge. If the protest cries out loud and clear, and the expression
of combat in the flesh truly explodes against the coagulated powers
of the economy, then the timeless inflection of an idea from a
speech, article, message, or manifestation could be a petard that
falls into the guts of the people and explodes into certain
incontrovertible outcomes on the day we least expect it. It's by
thinking and constructing, without expecting immediate explosive
miracles from their present work, and by devoting the maximum
spiritual strength and dignity necessary for the social
interpretation of contemporary problems...that [intellectuals]
exercise influence and have a bearing on the ulterior process of
history. And it's especially important for the intellectual to
translate the popular aspirations in the most authentic and direct
way, worrying less about the immediate...effect on their actions and
more about their resonance and efficiency in the social dialectic,
since the latter, in the long run, laughs off hurdles of all kinds,
including economic ones, when a social leap is ripe for the taking.<br />
And...I've decided that, among other
goods the Spanish people's victory over fascism will bring is proof
to foreign intellectuals that, although creating an intrinsically
revolutionary work in the silence and seclusion of a study is a
beautiful and transcendent act, creation is even more revolutionary
when it's done in the heat of battle by pulling it from life's
hottest and deepest pits.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
At time of writing (which, given the pace of our times should be an assumed phrase), Donald Trump is reportedly considering finding a way to fire Robert Mueller, pardoning everyone in his family, and pardoning himself. At the same time, for reasons that really and truly only seem to be a personal vendetta Mitch McConnell has against President Obama, Republicans are trying to destroy the contemporary American healthcare system. A process that started with Nixon's Southern Strategy and intensified under the politicizing of radical Christianity, has culminated in a national, mainstream party enacting and supporting the transformation of the United States of America back into a malignant and overt white supremacist nation. I don't know what the fuck is going to happen next. I mean, we all know how the Spanish Civil War turned out. I don't know if events, acts, and moments like these really help. Well, I know they help me. I know they helped the other performers and I know they helped at least some of the people who attended. And I know that we must fight, both using established techniques and flailing about the vastness of human experience for something that might break through.<br />
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Finally, though it can be easy to dismiss poetry performances, acts of art, and other experiments with expressing dissent as impractical or silly, or as alienating to some other population one hopes to ally with politically in 2018, though it can be easy to point to a translation event at a bar and ask how that could possibly influence Senator Susan Collins or whichever other Republican we're hoping might actually act with a modicum of human decency, we need to remember that acts of poetry, acts of art, acts of creative life aren't just acts of resistance or examples of the fight; art, poetry, and creative life are also what we're fighting for.<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
USA, Take This Cup from Me</div>
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<br /></div>
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White dudes of the USA,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if the USA falls—Hey, it could
happen—</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if her torch</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
falls upon your fraternal scaffolding
secured,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
in a necktie, by waning logistic
highways;</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
white dudes, what harvested the
corporeality of grounds!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
how it feels to bear water for the
first time!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
how obvious the tassels of your
confidence!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
how to recuperate without sick days!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
White dudes of the USA, mother</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
USA reveals the army you concealed from
yourself;</div>
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her others once beyond your barbutes</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
she appears as mother and teacher,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
training and strength, reside in the
muscle fiber,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
chamber and hammer and competence,
white dudes;</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
she arms all soldiers, they remember!</div>
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<br /></div>
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If she falls—Hey, it could happen—if
the USA</div>
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falls, from the homestead upon,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
white dudes, how could you possibly
win!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
how by tomorrow you will be yesterday!</div>
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how your atrophied muscles tremble from
others' typical gravity</div>
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how the fraternal network smally
betrays, the crumbs of the crumbs!</div>
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How the little league will laugh</div>
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at mocking marionettes made from your
filament enhancements!</div>
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How your auxiliary attachments will be
distributed</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
one way or another and abdicating
leaves fewer scars!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
White dudes,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
sons of soldiers, meanwhile,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
ready or not, for with or without you,
the USA is changing</div>
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her gaze into phallus agnostic eyes,</div>
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body cameras, riots, and people.</div>
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Ready or not, for she</div>
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awokens catastrophically, knowing just</div>
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what to do, and she has in her hands</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the legal case, arguing away,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the case, the one with the provisions,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the case, our argument for!</div>
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<br /></div>
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Ready or not, I tell you,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
ready or not the white between the
print, the whisper</div>
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of being and the strong reveille of the
monuments, and even</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
that of your chambers, which walk with
two stones!</div>
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Ready or waiting, and if</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the torch comes down,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if the barbutes shrink, if it is lunch,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if seams occupy the balance of our
logistic highways,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if there is potent creaking in the
executive joints,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if I am late,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if they do not regard you, if the
barricaded ears</div>
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starve you, if mother</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
USA falls—Hey, it could happen—</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
let go, white dudes of the world, let
go of entitled!...</div>
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Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670366217396414710.post-49081058704569441072017-06-28T06:42:00.001-07:002017-06-28T06:42:36.152-07:00Buses & IDs: A Different Strategy for Democrats in 2018<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I tend to believe the idea of Democrats as weak, disorganized, unstructured, plagued with infighting, etc., is an idea that comes more from how we cover the horse race of politics and how successful Republicans are at framing discourse than any actual weakness, disorganization, infighting, etc., that exists within the party. To put this another way, respect for nuanced debate and difference of opinion within a shared goal or identity can look like all of those things when compared to an authoritarian party that sets much of the public conversation through ruthless repetition of bullshit while pundits, journalists, other media professionals, and many other Americans try to find a different answer for the success of terrible Republican policies besides “America is racist.” Which is not to say that the Democrats are perfect or always have good strategies. I, for one, attribute an amount of Obama's success in 2008, and specifically the success of his coattails in bringing other Democrats along with him to Howard Dean's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dean#Fifty-state_strategy">fifty-state strategy</a> and that the hyper focus on specific districts was part of why Democrats lost Obama voters to Trump in 2016.<br /><br />I think the Democrat strategy for 2018 is still very much taking shape and it is still early to have fully synthesized the results of this recent round of special elections into a coherent strategy, but I have one idea that I haven't seen floating anywhere else that I think will help them break gerrymandered districts, mitigate the impact of voter suppression, and at least flip the House and perhaps even take the Senate.<br /><br />That idea: Charter buses and shuttles to run from college campuses and minority community centers to the correct polling locations on election day and assume the costs of getting whatever ID is required to vote in whatever state for those who cannot afford it. Elections, it seems, have become a turnout a game one way to get likely Democrat voters to turn out is get them registered and drive them to the polls.<br /><br />There is some argument that Democrats should continue to reach out to moderate Republican voters, that there is something active Democrats can do that will pull back voters who switched from Obama to Trump or capture centrists and moderates who sat out 2016, that a series of measured and moderate policies and messages will capture those moderate Republicans who are put off by some of what's happening in their party. It's an idea that sounds reasonable. That said, if Trump admitting to serial sexual assault, flaunting the norms around conflict of interest, golfing every fucking weekend, pathologically lying about everything, inadvertently or intentionally leaking state secrets and intelligence, all while being under investigation for what would be the single greatest political crime in our nation's history won't convince a “moderate” Republican to defect for an election cycle or two, what “centrist” policy would? Trump is doing damage that will take decades to undo if it can ever be undone. Why would we have to make any other argument to convince someone to abandon the Republican party at this point?<br /><br />And it's not like Congressional Republicans have acted much better. For reasons I still don't understand, they have rushed and rubber-stamped every single one of Trump's atrocious nominees for cabinet positions, while dragging their feet (at best) on the Russia investigation. They are also, again for reasons I simply cannot understand, rushing to pass objectively disastrous and historically unpopular legislation. If the Senate bill manages to pass and Trumpcare becomes law, sure, you'll probably want to run a bunch of ads in every district about it, but, again, if the past sixish months haven't convinced Republicans to defect, some kind of middle ground economic policy isn't going to do it.<br /><br />The lesson from Georgia is simple: All that matters to a critical mass of Republicans is that they vote Republican. In Georgia-6, Republicans had a significant registration advantage, one created intentionally to guarantee a Republican victory, and, despite everything else, Republicans showed up and voted for the Republican. Maybe I'm must being cynical, but I suspect, unless actual collusion between Putin and the Trump campaign is proved at a criminal court level and Republican Congressional complicity is proved at a criminal court level (and even then), Republicans will show up in 2018 and vote Republican. And when they do, the current gerrymandered, small state preferring, and voter suppressed system will deliver them victories. <br /><br />And so, instead of spending money on ads that attempt to reach out to disaffected Republican voters, instead of developing a platform that tries to lure them into the Democrat fold for a cycle or two, Democrats, at a national party level, should leverage their Super PAC money, partner with existing voter rights organizations or build their own, and foot the bill for driving college students and minority voters back and forth to the polls while helping people surmount the barriers to voting tactically built by Republicans to suppress likely Democratic voters. (I'm a bit of a radical, but I'd go so far as to say if someone has the desire and means to move from a safe blue district to a swing district for a year, these organizations should help them sort out their registration and transportation as well.) <br /><br />One might argue that Republicans would turn around and accuse Democrats of packing the polls, of voter fraud, of all sorts of electoral malfeasance. Which is true. Republicans would lose their minds over this. They'd try and pass legislation to stop it. They might even file lawsuits. They'd spend hundreds of hours on Fox News talking about how George Soros is stealing the election. My response: THEY ALREADY FUCKING DO THAT SHIT. FUCK 'EM. Republicans already accuse Democrats of everything they can think of and all without any proof whatsoever, all so they can pass legislation that gives then a major turnout advantage. Remember those thousands of voters who were supposedly <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/14/fact-check-no-evidence-busing-voters-new-hampshire/97896228/">bused into New Hampshire from Massachusetts</a>? Of course not, because they don't exist. Frankly, (and this is probably why the Democratic National Committee isn't going to hire me any time soon) I don't give a fuck what Republican party leaders, pundits, and members of Congress say or think about anything because (and this is a fact I haven't seen discussed enough) they sure as shit don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks. They lied about WMDs in Iraq, they lied about Obamacare (and Republican leadership didn't do a whole lot to quell the birther nonsense), they lied and continue to lie about voter fraud, they broke the Senate and then lied about breaking the Senate, and if the Democrats do bus likely Democrat voters to the polls and do defray the cost of Republican voter suppression tactics Republicans will lie about that too, and if Democrats don't do anything to increase their turnout in 2018 the Republicans will lie about that too, because, and I can't stress this enough, at the party level Republicans don't give a fuck about anything other than electing Republicans. <br /><br />I, like many Americans, believe our nation is stronger when there is political debate, when we discuss the actual policies affecting Americans, when all sides of the debate share the common goal of making America a better place, and when voters can switch allegiance from time to time as the political landscape changes, and I, like many Americans, also know there aren't any angels in politics, that at best we have people with good intentions trying to solve impossible problems, that Democrats make mistakes, that Democrats listen to their donors, that good policy can come from compromise, and that it is important to find some level of consensus for major policy changes, but Democrats didn't spew shit about death panels, Democrats didn't clog up the Senate with filibusters, Democrats didn't steal a Supreme Court seat for a serial sexual assaulter who publicly mocked a disabled journalist, and Democrats aren't covering up America's greatest scandal, so if we can't have debate, then I believe our nation is stronger when it is not run by white supremacist kleptocrats. And I think one way to boot Trump out of power is to bus college students and minority voters to the polls and pay for otherwise prohibitive voter IDs.Josh Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00525329381764185393noreply@blogger.com0