'Black Lives Matter' Really Began in 1955, with Emmitt Till

We first heard of the phrase "black lives matter" some time before the 2016 election. It gained strong momentum, and is now part of the collective lexicon. The idea behind it, though, really began in 1955.

That's when drunk, disgusting crackers lynched Emmitt Till, 14 years old, in Mississippi. Two of them had to stand trial. Twelve other crackers, comprising a token jury, tampered with by the local White Citizens' Council, found them not guilty after an investigation that went way too quick in the wrong jurisdiction. Because Till's mother defied the state of Mississippi and allowed an open casket with the boy's very decomposed body within, and because it was taken back to the Chicago area for viewing prior to burial, the incident became an international cause celebre, much more rare in 1955 than in today's instantaneous display of nearly everything, everywhere.

Till, apparently, had not treated the wife of a Southern racist properly. He had put the money he had paid for something in the general store her husband (one of those accused; the other was his cousin) owned in her hand, not on the counter. Partly because she was beautiful, he also might have made remarks that, quite honestly, should have gotten him a lecture about manners. He was from out of town, of course, just a kid, a bit of a showoff, and liked making his cousins laugh. But they shouldn't have caused his savage beating and gotten him a bullet in the head, which 'uppity blacks' got when they 'stepped out of line'--when they acted as if the unspoken but very real white supremacist code no longer mattered. The woman herself said so, a half-century after she had lied about the incident on the stand, making it look like a possible sexual advance. It took the jury an hour to return the not guilty verdict.

It didn't take the two killers long to spout off. Look magazine (Remember that?), in a notable example of 'checkbook journalism,' paid them to discuss the incident just months after the trial ended. Under our Constitution, of course, they couldn't stand trial for the same crime twice, so they were off the hook. They confessed to the murder, cloaking it in the protection of the Southern way of life.

The book out of which I've taken these facts, The Blood of Emmitt Till, by Timothy Tyson, published three years ago, is an excellent re-creation of the incident, the hoopla surrounding it, the context in which the murder took place (very important factor, one which few know), and, interestingly, the reaction of the national black community afterwards, also largely forgotten. They didn't have 'Black Lives Matter' as a rallying cry, but the intensity and the perseverance with which they pursued their collective, organized protests was impressive and a forerunner of the George Floyd protests.

Mississippi's white folks were running scared. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Brown v. Board, that segregation of schools had to end. All kinds of fear-mongering ensued, particularly that black boys would start dating, dominating, and raping white girls (indeed, the defense attorney made sure to paint the impression of the possibility of rape upon the jury) and mixed-race children would decorate the landscape, reducing society to a bunch of half-breeds. Blacks were also trying to vote, many for the first time, in Mississippi for the first time since Reconstruction. The white world seemed to be coming apart. Blacks seemed to be taking over.

The response was violence and repression and a recommitment of the white supremacist code. Black local leaders turned up dead, sometimes with plenty of witnesses who wouldn't dare testify. Some Blacks simply left town, never to return. The intimidation usually worked. And the local law enforcement officers often looked the other way, if they didn't side with the perpetrators altogether.

The sheriff of the county in which the trial took place greeted the crowded table of black press members thusly: "Mornin', [n-word]s." He tried to write off the murder as a concoction of the  NAACP, a common scapegoat of the time.

But unsung heroes abound:

• Emmitt's uncle, Moses Wright, dared to identify the two assailants, who barged into his home and kidnapped (which they admitted in open court but for which were never tried) Till in the middle of the night; 
• Emmitt's mother, Mamie, who took the train from Chicago to tell the jury the condition of her son's body (and who told Studs Terkel, who interviewed her as part of his book Race, that she forgave his killers, something quite amazing); 
• T.R.M. Howard, famed speaker, who worked the black "underground" to dredge up witnesses to varying degrees of success; 
• Lamar Smith, murdered in broad daylight, with plenty of witnesses, because he dared get absentee ballots for his black brethren; 
• Rev. George Lee, vice-president of the Regional Council on Negro Leadership, also known for his brilliant speaking, gunned down for daring to sue a sheriff for refusing to accept poll tax payments; 
• Amzie Moore, who helped create the RCNL; and 
• Medgar Evers, RCNL program director, who would challenge white supremacy at every turn, become the NAACP's field secretary, and would be murdered himself in 1963.

There were others. But what caught my attention was the degree to which Till's death sparked protests and meetings coast-to-coast, much like George Floyd's has. It wasn't just that Till was from Chicago, which, along with his mother's push, gave the incident national attention; it was the continuation of the disgust and indignation among blacks in the same cities we've watched the recent protests--name the city. Perhaps it was not quite with the same numbers and not in the same way, but certainly with the intensity accompanying Floyd's murder. 

It showed me that such demonstrations, more peaceful perhaps but just as noticeable, have been going on now for 65 years. Rosa Parks, whose refusal to take a back seat in a public bus in Montgomery was the event that sparked the famous bus boycott, said that she thought of Emmitt Till when she did so.

The author, who wrote this after the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, makes his cogent comment:

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious as its robust, covert, and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural, and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom...

The ancient lie remains lethal....White supremacy leaves almost half of all African American children growing up in poverty in a de-industrialized urban wasteland. It abandons the moral and practical truth embodied in Brown v. Board of Education and accepts school resegregation even though it is poisonous to the poor. Internalized white supremacy in the minds of black youth guns down other black youth, who learn from media images of themselves that their lives are worth little enough to pour out in battles over street corners. White supremacy also trembles the hands of some law enforcement officers and vigilantes who seem unable to distinguish between genuine danger and centuries-old phantoms.

Isn't that what's going on right now? Why does a white cop have to kneel on the neck of an already handcuffed black man for nearly nine minutes? What were the phantoms that drove him to do that?

By trying to drain money from the public schools, isn't Betsy DuVos directly contributing to the reversal of Brown? Isn't 45, by saying that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville, VA, are "fine people" encouraging them to spread their hate agenda?

Isn't this yet another reason to throw them out before they do more damage? It's bad enough that the attitudes have yet to subside; it's bad enough that we must revisit them. We have work to do, yet we also have to deal with these fools. 65 years is long enough. Four years of this present gang of hoodlums and wannabes is way too long.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

We've Trapped Ourselves. Stupidity Followed by Misery. Happy Now?

I've told a few people that I'd like to go to the Azores. They look like a nice place. And Portugal, too. Nice people, I'm told. The Portuguese own the Azores.

That was then. Now, maybe not. I might not be able to go anywhere in the EU. I'm an American, and millions of my countrymen have been just plain stupid or stubborn or full of themselves. They have failed to suppress this virus, and now it's spreading again, perhaps out of control.

So the EU, wisely, has said that it might not take any Americans now. Why invite trouble?

And we are trouble. Too many don't know control. Too many don't accept science. Too many listened to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, which chortled that it was all a conspiracy. Looking at it from the standpoint of the EU, how could they do anything else but shut their doors to an ignorant, arrogant people with blinders?

People who think that it's more important to express their rights than to stay alive and healthy. People who think that this is some kind of plot. Well, it is. It's a plot fomented upon them by their government, which simply does not care about them.

That's the tough part. That's the part that they don't get. The national government doesn't care. They think 'government' is one big entity. They were never taught that in school.

But neither did they listen. They cruised through, cynically, having been told by their parents, mostly, that none of that mattered much, that all politicians were corrupt or liars, that the fix was in. They sat, mostly politely, while the teacher told them stuff that they didn't believe or didn't think mattered, got grades that were good enough, and went on quietly. But they didn't care.

They're the ones who voted for 45, the person who validated their intellectual laziness. They wore Make America Great Again t-shirts, indeed still wear them, without having any idea what it meant or how it happened. Now he's behind 14 points in one poll. He can rally, of course; circumstances may arise to make him appear necessary to more people for a little while, and that timing could carry him to another election. But he has a long way to go now.

Go ahead, call it 'kung flu.' Add racism to your ignorance. And the people shouting in approval? They'll get sick, too.

Religion teaches us to have compassion for others, to stand ready to help them in need. But that assumes that something's happened to them that they didn't see coming and that they couldn't help. That didn't happen here. The virus has been amongst us for four months now, and we had a chance to suppress it.

But without national guidance and leadership, the states were left on their own. Even then, the above stupid, stubborn, mindless people took to the streets, mostly their state capitols, and brought guns and dumb, misspelled posters. They whined about not having a haircut, about not having sports.

And, in the end, they got their way. Faced with massive unemployment, the states reopened. People got haircuts. The PGA Tour restarted, but within one week, three golfers got sick and several have now pulled out. The baseball season says it will begin training camps July 1, then the season on July 24, taking up 60 games. That's a full month away. Want to bet how long it takes before they have to shutter up again?

Too many don't get it. Let me repeat: This is real. The virus hasn't gone away. When it gets the chance, it takes it. Magical thinking doesn't remove it. 45's wishes didn't come true. He has largely given up. Now he wants to curtail testing so the bad numbers won't be so bad. That's a recipe for disaster, a strategy for losers.

Texas, which never took the virus very seriously, has now told people to stay in place because the virus is spreading too fast and the hospitals will be overrun--just like New York's was three months ago. I know someone who had a serious accident, non-viral, near Austin. She was one of the last to get into her hospital before it had to be shut down, saving beds in anticipation of the virus. Mostly bed-ridden, nobody can visit her. She's no better off than someone who's going to get the virus.

Andrew Cuomo, New York's governor, was tough, unlike the one in Texas who got a head-start on it and instead pretended it was no big deal; in fact, his lieutenant governor suggested that old people could die to save the economy. Cuomo's people, confronted with thousands of body bags right away, paid attention, and the virus has subsided there. Now it's thinking about quarantining people from inside the country, people coming from states where the virus is surging, until it's sure they're okay. Several New England states are already doing so, according to the Boston Globe. If you travel to Massachusetts, for instance, you'd better be ready to hunker down for 14 days, regardless of what it'll cost you.

I predict this will happen elsewhere. I predict we will become more insular, not less. The virus is now random. We've trapped ourselves. Europe is laughing at us. We used to be the model of the world. I guess we still are, in a way: Us, and Brazil, and Belarus, and a few other countries filled with autocratic rulers who think just saying tough things will be enough. That didn't stop members of 45's staff from getting sick during the past few days, nor a couple of Secret Service members.

The governor of Florida, someone with that very same attitude, now has trouble on his hands. Other states have said they're going to quarantine his state's citizens because the rate of infection there has hit an all-time high. Even he is wearing a mask now. Even he gets it--two months too late.

I have no compassion for those who ignored the warnings. I pity them. They will get very sick. Some will die. But they were warned. Information was not lacking. They listened to someone who only cared about whether they would vote for him. And they probably still will. If they get to the polls.

This economy could have recovered by now, if we would have had the determination to face the virus for what it was and stare it down. Now, with only jawboning from the top, half-efforts and half-commitments have backfired. Now, we are headed for a genuine, full-bore depression. The economy can't sustain itself for much longer. Too many are out of work.

Then came Black Lives Matter, as necessary as it was. Thousands in major cities took to the streets. Some had masks. Some didn't. Milwaukee County's infection rate is now up again. We will see how high it goes.

The wreckage has ramped up. For heaven's sake, wear a mask wherever you go now. The holiday, however brief, has ended. You roll the dice now. You aren't in control. Neither is your governor, at least not in Wisconsin, because its state Supreme Court put a temporary adjustment of rights in front of people's lives. That decision will look worse now by the day. The governor is helpless.

Stupidity followed by misery: People can be that way, sure. Really, I wouldn't care. I miss the theater, miss baseball, miss the movie house and the bookstore, but I can live without them. But if my food supply line is interrupted by this nonsense, someone's going to hear about it. And someone will have to watch it happen.

Real trouble is just around the corner. This will be a long, tough summer.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Checks and Balances: The "Invisible Constitution" at Work

Our political and governmental system works because of a built-in supply of safeguards so that no one gets too much power. Collectively, it's called checks and balances.

Today, it's under threat because of 45. He doesn't care about that, doesn't care about respecting that or anything or anyone else. He wants what he wants and doesn't see why he shouldn't get it.

Exactly the wrong person to have power. Or, the right one, if the republic survives him, for that way, we know how far it can be stretched before it breaks. That's an important if, and we have November to find out whether we can. Four more years of that may be too much.

In the meantime, how are we doing amidst the angst? How is the system hanging in there?

45 has proven, as I have said, that the system is a continuum. Power tries, and tries again, to get its way, and he is the embodiment of raw, naked power, power for its own sake. It doesn't have to quit the first time around. It can keep finding a weak spot and intrude there.

An important, penetrating article by George Packer in the Atlantic magazine a couple of months ago showed what can happen when a person seeking absolute power attacks a stolid, governmentally-established group of agencies. 45's trashing of the State Department's career people, not the least of which are ambassadors not there for purely political reasons--often, gifts for large campaign contributions, and both political parties are at fault there--in the wake of his impeachment investigations is an excellent example. His abuse of Andrew McCabe, the Deputy Director of the FBI, by using his wife as a cat's paw, is another.

By doing so, Packer points out, 45 sent a message to career governmental employees: You may be next. Get with the program. Which is: serve 45 primarily and only. Don't concern yourselves with ethics and rules. Many are still there, trying to keep their heads down until Biden is elected. But if they're wrong, expect many, many resignations in 2021. Expect that the 'deep state' will turn in 45's favor, and anyone seeking services will have to prove loyalty--only to him, not the country. That is scary stuff.

The Attorney General, Bill Barr, is 45's right-hand man. His "unitary presidency" philosophy fits right into 45's plan: As long as I'm president, I can do whatever I want. I may pay for it later, but I can always use the convenient excuse that I was the president, I had to do extraordinary things, so I'll probably skate. Tough job, you know?

So last Friday night (done at the end of the work week so the headlines wouldn't be as noticeable), Barr tried, with 45's blessing, to fire Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, known for its fierce independence and respect for the rule of law, and replace him with a golfing buddy. This ham-handed, corrupted act was badly botched. Barr still figured he could get away with it.

He figured that because he's the Attorney General, the president can do whatever he wants, see above. If it happens to be bad timing, so be it. There's no power that can supersede him, anyhow. Which is the point, and obviously, Berman would see that. He would go quietly.

But that thinking, in some circles, is still lazy and bullying--note that a New York Times Magazine article said that Barr was a high school bully--so far outside of protocol that under different circumstances, it would be astonishing to see if anybody would try it. Berman didn't get a letter, didn't get a phone call, didn't get even a text message. He learned about it through the press, which wasn't sleeping all that much.

Berman responded by saying that he'd received no such notice and wasn't going anywhere. He would be staying at his desk, thank you very much, until replaced by proper process, which would be nomination and approval by the Senate.

That, on the surface, couldn't have sounded all that horrible to Barr and 45. The Senate is controlled by Republicans, the same set of cowards nearly all of whom refused to see enough wrong with what 45 had already done in Ukraine to ignore the substantial impeachment accusation that the House Democrats had brought to them. This would be a rubber stamp, just a matter of time, and a few well-placed tweets would hurry it along. They'd be rolling their eyes, but they could get it done.

Consider also that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, has become supposedly as malleable a toady as could be. Never mind that five years ago, he was as trashing of 45 as he was respectful of Joe Biden. That, apparently, must have been a lie, or pair of lies. He must not have meant either. Thus, without principles, he can be manipulated easily. In other words, that check and balance no longer exists.

Oh, but it does. What Laurence Tribe calls "the invisible Constitution" has ground its wheels, however rusty they may be. You see, Graham is in hot water back home. He's in a tight race for re-election, against a black guy, no less. Has South Carolina had a black Senator since Reconstruction? I haven't looked that up. I don't need to. If there is a list, it's awfully short.

So a rubber stamp upon a violation of protocol this blatant would be pretty tough to gloss over, pretty tough to spin. Graham does have a principle, just one, but that's all he needs: Survival. Graham refused to consider 45's replacement. He'd have to get another one. That would take time. That would be messy.

That left Berman with an opening. He said he'd step down immediately if his replacement were his deputy, Audrey Strauss. Why was that important? Because another check and balance, the independence of the judiciary, could be preserved, at least for the moment. And an investigation could go on unimpeded.

That investigation included one of Rudy Giuliani, the henchman of the Ukraine matter, the silent, slippery, completely unethical operator who's getting ready with some kind of smear against Joe Biden (which I have no knowledge about, but you can count on it). 45 is, if nothing else, shamelessly transparent. He wanted Berman out of the way to keep the investigation of Giuliani, and others, from gaining too much public notice in the same way that he wanted a Ukrainian investigation of Joe Biden, however ridiculous, to gain public notice--to deflect attention from himself so he could go on committing egregious violations of public trust, and smear a prospective, now nearly nominated, opponent.

Now he can't do that, at least at the moment, by using that as an excuse. Berman got his deal. Now Giuliani might be hung out to dry. If that's likely, 45 will absolve himself of Giuliani fairly soon with a I-have-no-idea-where-he-is kind of comment, designed to convince us that he has nothing do with him, when in fact he has everything to do with him. That's why you can't see him right now.

The "invisible Constitution" of political survival wins, therefore, for now. You can bet that 45 will try again, once he sees an opening. He probes endlessly. He tried with the Supreme Court, too, but he has a problem: He doesn't control that. He can't fire the members and he's only been able to appoint two of them. They serve for life, and sometimes they don't vote the way he wants them to. Granted, Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 86 and looks as if she could wither away at any minute. But she hasn't, her mind works just fine, and the center holds.

The Court proved that twice last week. First, in a 'stunning' decision which shouldn't be all that stunning, it decided that gays couldn't be fired simply for being gay, which makes perfect sense to those doing some genuine thinking. Not only that, but the vote was 6-3, with a 45 appointee, Neil Gorsuch, actually crossing over and reading the plain language, as textualists insist upon doing, of the law being challenged. He didn't legislate by judicial fiat, as conservatives disingenuously accuse liberals of doing, and in fact deflect attention so they can do it themselves. Instead, Gorsuch utilized consistency and principle. Good for him. Good for our system.

Then it ruled, 5-4, that the 700,000 DREAMers could remain in the U.S. because of what Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, said was an "arbitrary and capricious" attempt to get rid of them. "Arbitrary and capricious" means with no legal reason, which means that 45 can't do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it just because he wants to do it: an imperial reasoning. Roberts left 45 with an opening to try again, when he can come back with a reason grounded in the law, not in racist whim. In doing so, he stuck a finger in the eye of the unitary presidency: Another check and balance. In the meantime, if any of those DREAMers happen to be 18 and citizens, they'd be wise to vote for Joe Biden.

So how are we doing? Well, things are holding up, barely. But we can't take it for granted. 45 will wear down any borders or guardrails that are left with another four years to do so. It's all that more incumbent that he be thrown out, decency be restored, and straining of the system reduced. The "invisible Constitution" works, and so does the one we actually utilize, but they aren't fool-proof. Respect can be restored to its former level, but only by us. Let's hope we do so in November.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Tearing Down Statues: Revisionism or High-Minded Vandalism?

Which statues should be torn down? Which should be kept?

Tough call. There happens to be a statue in Washington, DC, not far from where I used to live, and a very similar statue in Boston, depicting Lincoln 'freeing the slaves,' with a freed slave kneeling in front of him, supplicating in gratitude. Lincoln extends his hand toward him in, well, the attitude is questionable. Some say it welcomes. Some say it's condescending.

Is this still appropriate? It was built in 1876. Should it, and others, be torn down and merely statues to Lincoln built in their place? Or will some other statue be more appropriate?

The DC statue is in Lincoln Park, about 13 blocks due east of the Capitol. It was dedicated with the help of a speech by ex-slave and widely known speaker Frederick Douglass. "My white fellow citizens," said Douglass, who also lived for a while in DC, "You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. Despise not the humble offering we this day unveil, for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose." (This taken from Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, reviewed in this space)

Aha, you might say. The prostrate depiction of the freed slave really is appropriate. That's not exactly what I said in a letter to the editor. I was responding to an article about what might be considered outdated statues in Washington, written by a black correspondent who was not the least prostrate, but quite edgy about the submissive, excessively grateful image that the statue indicated about blacks. Those articles were written in 2013, when he had a black president who downplayed his blackness amidst a Tea Party reaction against him. I wrote that the statue was built to indicate, and celebrate, that Lincoln freed the slaves--which will always be true, regardless. The black man, supposedly, is supposed to be rising up from being captive, not engaging in docile bootlicking.

But the journalist wasn't without a point. It's all in how you look at it. It's been nearly a century and a half since it went up. Maybe it's time to reconsider it. I found another comment, flat out accusing it of white supremacy, written for the blog Medium in 2017 by a Hispanic gentleman, no less. "What are we going to do about it?" he asked.

It isn't as if a statue to a black person is lacking in the area. Steps away, at the other end of the small park, is a statue dedicated to Mary MacLeod Bethune, the famous black educator, with a moving quote from her etched on it. So not only did someone think a statue of a black person was appropriate, a statue of a black woman was built, too.

And it isn't as if Lincoln doesn't have an enormous, famous, massive monument built to honor him elsewhere in the city, one that thousands visit each year, virus notwithstanding. If you take the Lincoln Park statue down, though, and take down the one in Boston, and wherever else such a statue appears, is that the best thing? Should there be no reminder that there was a slave status from which black people had to be rescued?

You could say, as I do about statues of old Confederates, that history books can't and won't ever forget that there was a Civil War, so the names of the most important of the traitors--Lee, Jackson, Davis and the like--will always be in someone's memory. Except their status now is enhanced by statues and likenesses, like on Stone Mountain, as I wrote not long ago.

Is it right, then, that slavery be forgotten, or at least not visibly noted, except in history books, in which it will have to be? Or will that fade there, too? As time moves on, what shall we best remember, and what is it best to forget?

It's been reported that in San Francisco, people have torn down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union Army to it final surrender of the Confederates. Did Grant own slaves? Yes, exactly one, because he married into it. He freed it before the war began. Is that a bit too purist? I think so. If it's torn down in San Francisco, would it be torn down, too, in Galena, Illinois, where Grant's from?

There is, too, a statue of Father Junipero Serra, under whose guidance a great number of Spanish Catholic missions were built in the 1700s. But they were built with lots and lots of Native slaves, conquered and subjugated by the Spanish. I have no qualms about taking his statue down, as it was.

So, too, was that of Christopher Columbus, the European discoverer of North America that sparked settlement thereof (as opposed to the Scandinavian Vikings, who came much sooner but whose legacy had to be discovered by others). But Columbus captured Natives as slaves, and hundreds of them died of disease and starvation on the way back from the New World. Many of them died on board Spanish ships, and were thrown off. That is subjugation, and I've had a different view of him since knowing that.

He, like Cortez, was a conquistador, and a butcher in the name of an insatiable religion--insatiable for gold. We should rethink him as a 'founder', so to speak, of our nation, since he never did actually land here. His actions spurred others to embark on discovery, yes, but in what name and why? Is that something to be proud of?

If we go down this road far enough, we will find something wrong with everyone--including Washington, commander of the Continental Army and our first president, who had plenty of slaves and also freed them (protesters in Portland, OR, have already torn down a statue of him); Jefferson, major author of the Declaration of Independence, who had six children by one of them; and Madison, the Father of the Constitution, whose house was full of slaves. There are monuments to them and well-kept former homes of theirs in Virginia. Do we now let them go to seed? Burn them down?

And how about the Museum of Natural History in New York taking down a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, up on horseback and flanked by a Native and a Black person (I now capitalize 'black' in terms of that usage because the Associated Press has pledged to do so)? The statue is supposed to celebrate his environmental activities, but on horseback, he's 'above' the two minority people. That feels a bit awkward, taking it into present-day context.

I like that move. Someone can always recommission, and resculpt, another statue of T.R., New York's former governor, if it's deemed that important. Right? Why do we need the two minorities in there? Is it a comment about how he 'helped' them? If so, it's a stretch. And is it different than the aforementioned Lincoln Park statue, which specifically addressed an act far more earth-shattering?

It's not as if I want all statues of previous-day achievers torn down. But I do think we should reconsider them. It's very much about time. If it causes some empty space, then so be it. If it causes different, more appropriate statues to be built, so be that, too. Tomorrow's another day. We can remake purposefully.

Everybody should feel better upon happening upon a statue of a person deemed important to the country. But I'm not sure Washington should be taken down. Like the country itself, he had great courage but was flawed. I don't think that should be ignored. We need to deal with all of our history, not just selected parts of it. A reminder of that isn't all bad.

Yet, some revision of what public art we are forced to see daily is a way of saying that the country is changing and so is awareness. And the country will be a majority of minorities within another 40 years, as demographics tell us. There's nothing we can do about it. 45's wall, even if it would work, is too late.

This will pass as will other aspects of this upheaval. What it should leave in its place is a rethinking of who we are and what we want to tell the world about who we were. The two are closely related. Said author William Faulkner, "History isn't dead. It isn't even past." No, it isn't. There's a lot more to who we've been than who we now are. The only greater wonder is who we will be--and that is yet to be determined.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Let's Not Overlook It: Colin Kaepernick Won Over Cowardly Owners

45's 'winning' got stopped by Colin Kaepernick. It took a while, but it happened.

Roger Goodell, almost in a moment of BTW, said it the other day: He deserves a genuine tryout, not one that's been conjured for him, but a real one, and an invite to a training camp. It might be a mere afterthought, but making it had some importance.

Kaepernick, if you remember, became the victim of the largest pile-on-after-the-whistle ever when he chose to take a knee during the national anthem in what he called a protest against police violence against black people--which, as you know, became a national protest that's still happening in some places. A few fellow NFL players joined him, but having started it, he became the focal point.

He found himself not playing much, then not at all, a pariah in the league for doing nothing more than expressing himself silently. Owners, kneeling prostrate themselves in front of 45, who twisted the protest to mean something against the troops (which is wasn't) but who of course got the lion's share of the attention in the days in which his credibility was a little greater than it is now, figured they had to clamp down on the expression. So they issued public statements to that effect. And stayed away from allowing Kaepernick, who has considerable skills--he personally wiped out the Packers in a playoff game not long ago, and came extremely close to winning the Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers--from trying out for their teams in free agency. It was an effective a conspiracy of silence as has ever been foisted upon any competent player, a collusion that bested anything 45 did with the Russians.

Consider also that 45 added great bluster to all this to make him look less than patriotic, when in fact the ability and willingness to protest unfairness is exactly what makes an American patriotic. But 45 intimidated the NFL owners, wimps all, and kept them from allowing Kaepernick to their training camps for three years. Excellent athlete that he is, those three years might have been the peak time that he could have contributed to some team, what with experience added onto his abilities.

The owners, of course, circled their wagons. They made a big point out of saying that each team was, in fact, privately owned, and they could make up the rules about team conduct as they wished. Never mind that they're private about the same way that Facebook is private--that is, in name only. Their success is tied to their millions of followers, and they want to have as many of them buy team merchandise as possible; excuse me, but that's not very private. Their main TV ad has had the following phrase: "Football is family." You might also consider that in most cases, the blackmail of public financing of their stadiums was necessary to keep these teams in their places.

But when 45 said that the protest was really all about the flag and the troops--mindless nonsense and gaslighting for which he is known--the owners kowtowed to that thinking and shrank into their respective corners. That was that. Nobody could register a protest without asking someone, or without hedging, in a way that was so vague as to be nearly meaningless. Never mind that it was a brief sideshow at best, that once done, the game would be underway and the gesture largely forgotten, like many protests elsewhere, remembered only as an expression of the right to protest.

It's stayed that way. Kaepernick declared free agency in 2017, and the owners froze him out. He filed a grievance with the NFL, which caused a settlement out of court; an admission, without publicity, that he had been wronged. The freeze-out has continued until, faced with a prospective player revolt upon George Floyd's murder, commissioner Roger Goodell said first, that players could in fact 'take a knee' upon the playing of the national anthem--since members of Congress were among the thousands doing so now--and, following up by a few days, that he hoped somebody would give Kaepernick an honest-to-goodness tryout. The first did not automatically mean the second, so Goodell had to spell that out. By doing both, he stuck a finger in 45's eye.

Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has replied by typically doubling down on the old ways, saying that if anyone wore the Cowboys uniform, they wouldn't play if they knelt. We'll see if he holds to that thinking after a number of teams allow their players to do so.

So Kaepernick won't be getting a tryout with Dallas soon. That's okay. If he gains a tryout and gains a spot on a team, that will be the icing on the cake. But he turns 33 in November, and he may be past his prime. He has the coronavirus to deal with, too.

As a passer, he was always mechanical and erratic. But he could go on hot streaks and move a team as well as anyone. And his physical strength and running ability gave him a dynamic that nobody else could match. As a starter, he was always a risk and needed a great team around him. As a backup, he'd be exactly the kind of guy who would make any coach, and offensive unit, feel better. He could jump into the middle of a game and his team wouldn't lose that much.

For now, though, he has regained a status relative to anyone else who might want to be on an NFL team. He has weathered the storm. He has faced down a stupid, narrow, ridiculous president and the cowardly owners who chose to follow his lead. The final victory is his. Ironically, he owes it to the death of someone he never met and never knew, but that adds to the legacy of George Floyd.

If Kaepernick chooses to try out, I'll be cheering for him perhaps more than for the success of the Packers, who drafted a quarterback out of college to eventually replace Aaron Rodgers (so we won't be seeing Colin in green-and-gold, either). If he fails, so did the league by denying an excellent talent more chances to play. Psychically, Kaepernick is playing with their money.

But let's not ignore that part of this upheaval, too. Maybe it'll be no more than cosmetic, but a corner has been turned. The next player to protest something will be allowed to do so, no questions asked. Our country, at least symbolically, is a little freer for that, too.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

How Do We Give College Kids the Guts?

Nadine Strossen is, in the end, trying to help kids.

Strossen, Professor of Law at New York University, former president of the ACLU, and defender of civil rights, recently wrote a book entitled Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. Easier said than done, of course. She's right, though.

She makes an excellent case for saying that "hate speech" laws, which have been contemplated here and passed mainly in other countries, would do more harm than good for a number of reasons:

• That they in fact do not curb the speech they propose to curb;
• That violations of them result in more attention paid to the speech they wish to curb;
• That the words of particular restrictions can be turned on their head to actually help the people it's supposed to restrict;
• That violations of them result in more attention paid to those who make such speech; and
• Their enforceability is often subject to arbitrariousness that tends to defeat their original purpose.

She takes some deep analysis, with interesting international comparisons (because their devotion and tradition of free speech do not match ours), about how such bars to speech can harm the original purpose and overreach creates absurd restrictions. Her case is sound, though: Despite the emergence of 'hate speech' by particularly right-wing, alt-right groups and individuals, and strong, emotional reactions by minorities which have often resulted in university officials either backing away or resigning, the best solution is, in fact, to let the speech happen.

That doesn't necessarily mean that nothing should be done, though in some situations, simply walking away is probably for the best. Remaining above the fray does work sometimes, and removes what the speakers want the most: To be challenged and to shout back.

But what happens when people, especially college students, are genuinely offended by the speech? What good does it do to try to ignore what can't be ignored?

The greater question is: Whose responsibility is it to counteract what the 'hate speaker' is saying? Is it the college administration? Will that do it, or will that make the situation worse because in the end, they're forcing someone to shut up?

Strossen's commentary is roughly equivalent to that of another book I reviewed in this space more than a year ago: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation of Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. They come at the problem much more directly than she does, but the bottom line is: If you're insulted, don't go running to the president of your university. Stand up to your torturers yourself. You'll feel better if you do.

But how? Even Strossen admits that the first time she was confronted with what she believed to be outrageous, right-wing banter, she was stunned into silence. And it's easy to do; it's happened to me and I would gather many others. It took her a while to gather herself and consider alternative responses. By then, the moment had passed.

Nobody gets coached in what to do in those circumstances. At least, I've never had it, and I hung around the NEA for quite some time. There was education in what such people should say, to be sure, but how to respond at that moment is the point, and there was nothing that came close to that, largely because it has to be in a context that's unknown. Fighting the intrusion of right-wing nonsense became a major thrust of the NEA, and still is, as I'm sure it is with other groups that wish to combat it.

I think that's vital nowadays, now that 45's minions feel empowered to spread misinformation, lies and innuendoes. But the courage to stand up to it is enormous, because the attitudes with which such baloney is spread is often accompanied with bullying and the surety of religiosity behind it. When you don't own those attitudes, it's hard to bring yourself forward at the right moment. It's hard to act macho when that isn't your inclination.

Besides, confrontation may be a trap. Some of these people are coached well in turning what one may think are opposing phrases into empty nostrums. Stephen Miller is a good example. He's easily hateable, but it isn't easy to take him on. He interrupts, gets louder, and smears endlessly: It's the alt-right's M.O. No logic matters to him. It takes someone like CNN's Jake Tapper to stare him down and do what he did on his turf: Throw him out. But most of us don't get that opportunity.

Instead, says Strossen, it might be a good idea to create your own learning opportunities, have your own gatherings, and let people know that ideas of peace, sharing, and empowerment through cooperation still exist and are actually preferred. That takes work, time, and caring, but might be more rewarding. Then you get the advantage of message preparation and arrangement. You may get resistance from these twisted people, but you own the stage.

It may be the best way to demonstrate to college kids on how to organize and at least partly satisfy their need to even the scales. But there's no easy way out. This challenge is real and it will be diminished only with vigilance. Stability can be restored, but largely with determination and the willingness to get it wrong and make some mistakes so you can get it right.

More of this is proving to be necessary. We can no longer assume that a consensus of political mores and actions are evident. The alt-right is getting louder and crazier, and will continue for some time to come, regardless of the results of the 2020 elections (that, too, is an assumption we have to get used to). Merely walking away from anger and imbalance is proving to be inadequate. They can't be the only voices in the room--name the room.

It will take years to bring this back to a place of equilibrium. We saw it coming but didn't take it seriously until it was too late and we had the wrong person in ultimate power. Now it will take that much more work to put it to some semblance of rest. If it isn't done, we are all at risk, even those who don't think so.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

There They Go. And Here We Are.

You looked at them in National Geographic this month. You wonder how they've made it that long.

And they still matter, in a way. They're the World War II generation. Some photos of them were published in the magazine this month--a survivor of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); a survivor of the death camps in Europe; someone who hit the beach at Normandy. And others.

Remember, they got through the '30s, too: The depression and long lines for bread and jobs. They had to make sacrifices and learn, again and again, that sharing matters and selfishness is the way to oblivion. My mom did it without a dad, and had two younger siblings. It cost her a chance for college, at least at the time. She's still with us, about two months from her 96th birthday.

That they still go on remains a reminder of their toughness, which many of us can't get within half the galaxy of equalling. I don't know what the hell I would have done.

Then they made damn sure their kids wouldn't have to go through it. So many of them went to college on their parents' backs and pocketbooks (like me). They gave up the route to appreciation so the country wouldn't have to go through such hardship again.

You wonder: How did they do that? Could we have done that? Or is it that they did what they had to do in circumstances we here couldn't imagine--but might be about to experience?

It worked for a long time. We gained tremendous prosperity. But now the virus has hit and we scratch at each other. Wait, though: It's about to get worse.

The virus is coming back. The vaccine won't get here in time. Supply lines are bound to get short or non-existent. We're going to have to either share like we've never shared before, or fight each other over scarcity. The test looms.

The person elected as our leader, which he isn't and doesn't want to be, won't care. He doesn't care now, to be sure. All he wants is to guppy enough followers to enjoy the high life of the White House for another four years, building up his personal wealth at our expense. He'll be treated like royalty, which he's doing his best to mimic. He'll complain about some hardship or another in order to gain empathy and victimitis, which he might be the best at.

We had a president with a real hardship to overcome: FDR and his polio. He didn't do everything right, but he was a good example of a good example. Americans saw him standing there, standing at all, and figured that they could do something with two good legs.

There was racism, and it was deep and systemic, too. Jim Crow was well underway. But veterans of all colors came back from the war and saw the injustice and hypocrisy. My dad did. He stood up for four black stewards (they were often cast in that role), who manned the machine guns (where enemy planes would aim first) on deck during attacks on that destroyer escort. The ship's commander felt he had to exclude them from the decommissioning party in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1946, in order to make it happen at all; the hall's management had insisted. Dad found out and got in his face, all 20 years old of him, and told him off. "They put it on the line like everybody else," he said, though he used a few other choice words to his commander that sailors are used to.

When I learned that, it was inspirational. It was a major reason I moved within the NEA to a very high level. Human and civil rights were plenty to stand up for. They still are today. They will be tomorrow.

They saved the world, not once but twice: Not only in the short run, but in the long run. They saved it from fascists in the '40s, then pivoted for the long war against communism. Those results were mixed, but it could have been much, much worse. The year Dad retired, 1991, is the year the Soviet Union collapsed.

It spilled over into my generation, where results weren't so clear-cut, commitment not so complete. We don't get involved in the wars now, we just watch them. We're still trying that strategy but we can't expect success if we fight wars the public hasn't really committed to. We hold off the bad guys without beating them so we linger endlessly, dangling in overreach. The internal rot of that is only now starting to reveal itself.

And here we still sit, with Black Lives Matter, with dead black people who shouldn't have died. But the street marchers are young now, and energetic, and devoted. I hope they understand the long struggle ahead. But they carry the legacy of the World War II generation with them.

Dad, who was the youngest member of his ship, is still amongst us. Lord knows how long he has, too, moving in toward 94. But he has a son who continued down his path, and a grandson in the National Guard.

There are far fewer of them now. If you happen to see one or know one, whether they actually wore a uniform or not, thank them for doing their best to make the country a good place, a place worth building, a place millions still wish to call home, however desperately they try to make it here.

I happen to think we, the ones of my generation, bloated with middle class comfort, blew our chances to make it even better (more on that elsewhere) by using power, not influence, the surer guide of behavior. But we still have a slot here and there, a little crease, to leave the next generation with something to grasp. Whether it happens or not will still be a matter of attitude and action. This November may be our last chance to overcome cynicism and nihilism, the destroyers of civilization, the denyers of what our forebears promised.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

NASCAR and the Confederate Flags: A Turning Point

I remember it now. Funny how some things bring other things back.

It was in the latter part of the '90s, probably 1997, though I'd have to look it up to determine exactly when. Don't think it matters now.

I was in Atlanta for the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association. The NEA-RA takes four days, but there are several days of meetings of splinter groups before it, and anyone who's 'with it' sees the need to be there for at least some of that time.

I was just getting into the culture. It was my third RA. It would eventually lead me to just about the top rung, taking me with it culturally and politically. I went there with great enthusiasm.

A bunch of us hung out together then, and someone drove there from Wisconsin. We thus decided to go to Stone Mountain Park, not far east of the city. I don't think any of us were ready for the celebration presented nightly.

I was stunned at what I saw: A glorification of the old Confederacy. It seemed so out of place to me, from Wisconsin. Carved on the side of a mountain were portraits of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, all riding on horses. And of course, Confederate flags everywhere.

When the 'lasershow' commenced, it got worse. Not only were the troika given to riding off into the next challenge, scenes from NASCAR were superimposed on the mountainside as well. The two were co-mixed: Enthusiasm about one led one to be enthusiastic about the other, I guess.

I thought NASCAR was just about stock car racing. I guess I was wrong. It was about preserving the Old South, the one where everyone knew their place, the one where good old boys could come, wave their Confederate flags, and pretend things were the way they used to be.

WEAC, the Wisconsin NEA affiliate, had its own newsletter during the time of the RA. I volunteered an analysis of what I'd just saw to be printed within it. I don't recall the precise verbiage I lent to the event, but my criticism of it was scathing. I was offended not just for myself, but for the black people who had to put up with it. It felt so outdated, so much of an anachronism. I wondered why Georgia was clinging to something like that.

Like anything, though, once it gets started, it achieves a momentum of its own. Once it starts making money--a whole bunch of money--it becomes its own cash cow and ending it becomes unthinkable. Thus are old, bad ideas perpetuated.

Underneath it all, I knew that it was drawing literally millions of onlookers, though. Of course, that had included myself, who would have rejected it had I known. But they had my money. I felt stupid.

The display is still there, carved into that mountain. Until the virus hit, it had still been holding nightly 'lasertoon' shows, as I called it derisively in the newsletter. It's still there, just like Confederate statues strewn throughout the South, like the names of Confederate generals for U.S. Army training sites.

Word is that that had happened because the country was in a hurry to establish those sites to get ready for World War I, for which it was woefully unprepared. So, they gave the naming rights to the states, which, of course, attached those of old Confederates, so that Jim Crow would never be lost and the glory of the 'lost cause' would always be preserved.

But that was a hundred years ago. The Civil War was already over a half-century. The country appeared to be moving on. Just like some of the Southern states put a Confederate flag back onto their state flags upon the announcement of Brown v. Board in 1954, to keep a dying concept alive.

That desperation dies hard. It produced 45. It's trying hard to keep white supremacy. But NASCAR has jumped the shark: It has banned the display of Confederate flags at its events. We'll see about the pushback, because you know there will be some.

You know people will try to sneak in flags, and try to get around the ruling somehow. That's what they did almost immediately after Brown v. Board was handed down; city councils and school boards shaved off edges of the ruling and dared the federal government to come after them.

Eisenhower did in Little Rock in 1957. No president, fortunately, was needed for NASCAR to do the right thing. There is no 'heritage to be preserved' here, no 'tradition' to be maintained. A columnist for the very Republican Arkansas Democrat-Gazette tried for years to sustain the memory of the 'Southern gentleman' embodied somehow in the persona of Robert E. Lee by writing a torturously long and gooey editorial on his birthday (celebrated, still, in three states officially, including Arkansas, every year, the same week as Martin Luther King Day, a coincidence not lost on anyone). He kept saying that Lee had that "certain something" that distinguished him in a sense from others of his kind.

Why yes, he did. He betrayed his country and his army, somehow believing that the maintenance of his state's slave status was more important, believing that a category of humanity deserved to be captured into forced labor for their whole lives, just because they could be. That columnist's pandering sounded more detached from reality each year I lived in Arkansas.

It's all old and tired and stupid now, just like the monuments to notable Confederates--notable because they have a monument, not because they did anything for the country except to try to ruin it. Down deep inside, those striving to keep those monuments know it, too. They can resist the ravages of time only so long.

NASCAR has joined the NFL in separating white supremacy from sports participation and fandom. It has stripped some of 45's most important attachments. He can complain, and you know he will, but time has passed him by, too.

That's why several notable Republicans are crossing over now. They see the waste of energy he represents. He, like Stone Mountain, is just not worth the trouble anymore. NASCAR figured that out. So did they.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

He'll Be in Tulsa on the 20th, and You Know Why

45 will be in Tulsa on Friday, June 20. Of course he will. And you know why.

Never mind that it was supposed to happen on Juneteenth Day, the day on which the slaves in Texas finally got the word that the Civil War had ended and that they were free. Never mind that it's the 99th passage (hardly an anniversary) of the rioting in Tulsa in which as many as 300 blacks were killed, mostly out of meanness, prejudice, and spite, with units of the Oklahoma National Guard actively taking part and no local official taking any action to restore order and calm until after the damage had been done.

Those are exactly the reasons he's going to blather his endless supply of phony nostrums and innuendoes, as if he's never done so before. He'll be a victim again. He'll make white folks, or perhaps those white folks who bother to listen, victims again.

That he postponed the rally a day, bowing to massive political pressure, doesn't excuse it in the least. The point is that he was quite willing to conduct the rally on that day in the first place is yet another example of his utter callousness and bullying. He is not removed from blame. He continues to be diminished in his shamelessness.

You see, this monster pivots upon anything unusual that's happened and tries to make it look like he's been involved with it in some mysterious but positive way. It's what he did with the death of George Floyd the other day, for instance, saying that Floyd would be smiling down at us because the economy had improved, based on erroneous unemployment statistics that have since been proven to be premature and incomplete. Unemployment has gone up in the last month, not down.

But 45 attempted to connect Floyd with something he says he's responsible for, when in fact, like all else connected to the coronavirus, the state governors are responsible for it, having 'opened up' their states' businesses to varying degrees. And, as we have learned, it hasn't worked so far. Not only that, but new outbreaks of the virus are already evident.

The connection is ridiculous, but so is 45, in any conceivable way. But that doesn't stop him, and it certainly won't stop him in Tulsa next week.

Count on him to bring back Joe Biden's unfortunate faux pas of saying that any black person who supports 45 "isn't black." Though Biden apologized for that remark, 45 will bring it back as if he's said it yesterday.

With Stephen Miller, his chief apologist, writing a speech about race relations, it will be filled with catch-phrases and deceptions. You will have to listen carefully, just in case 45 plans on following any of it (which he might not; he goes off script regularly, in which case it'll make just as little sense). Remember, Miller is the author of the policy that has created the awful situation at the border. He considers himself a guardian of the white race. He believes 'making America great again' means that whites must control everything, or at least have an attitude that they should.

He will also comment upon the coronavirus as if his government, which has taken no responsibility for curbing the threat--he said it himself--has been winning over it all along. Never mind that if he had taken the strong step of shutting the country down in February, he could have prevented tens of thousands of the more than 114,000 deaths that have occurred so far. Never mind that if he had done so, many of the dull-headed people who have put their rights up front would have listened to him and significantly slowed down the advance of the virus.

He will say that many more lives would have been lost had he personally not intervened, when in fact he did absolutely the least that could have been done. Taking credit for that is the worst kind of shambling, the worst possible stance that anyone, not the least of which is our supposed national leader (he certainly isn't), could take.

He is beyond disgusting. He is a useless placeholder, even a dangerous one. Having people sign a waiver guaranteeing no lawsuits upon getting sick is a monument to first, the stupidity of those who wlll attend; and second, the utter fecklessness, the utter cowardice, of his approach. Whatever I do, he keeps saying, there will be lawyers who can cover for me. He did it when he got impeached, didn't he? He's done it to the women he slept with, didn't he? He's done with his tax returns, right?

There will be a few surprises, too, but that's the gist of what's going to happen. He will invite people to die to hear him. That is the ultimate, ridiculous place that Americans have gone. It will take a long time and deep reckoning to come back from this. This is a mess that will not clean up easily.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Yes, He Would. George Floyd Would Be Happy.

George Floyd would be happy today. So 45's right. I have to give him that.

The reason has nothing to do with the economy, which is 45's twisted, conjured analysis. Look at what's happened.

His horrible death at the hands of police officers, uncalled for and litigious, has sparked sixteen days of mostly peaceful protests so far. There will be more. The violence has just about completely subsided, too. Hundreds of cities have been affected, far more than anything that happened in the '60s, as much as anything that happened during the Vietnam War.

The death of one man did this. He would be amazed, I would guess. And happy that his life meant something. No, he's not exactly a hero. He was picked up for passing a counterfeit $20 bill, a local and federal crime. Whether he was actually guilty is, of course, something we'll never know, now that he's dead at the hands of the people who were merely charged with getting him into custody.

Nevertheless, he is dead at the hands of police. He couldn't possibly have posed a threat to the four of them. There is no reasonable excuse for it. What couldn't have been shown until this kind of thing, which was clearly coming if not here then elsewhere, is how tired people have gotten of it all--the overkill, the foolish overemphasis on force, the misreading of what order really is.

45's reaction, to call out the military, has been derided and condemned and demonstrated to be a horrible example of overreach. The White House now looks like an armed camp, a prime example of the cowardice by which this president operates. It reveals his inadequacy. His photo-op at the nearby Episcopal church has been derided as incredibly phony and pandering.

It has been far and away overriden by the demonstrators. As a commentator said on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show this morning, "GPS," America has displayed itself as a cultural power, if no longer a political one. Floyd's death has sparked protests in cities around the globe, including Australia and Capetown, South Africa. It's an awesome display of compassion and empathy.

In an act far delayed, the Marines have banned displays of Confederate flags at their bases. Virginia's governor has ordered a Confederate statue to be torn down. And the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, has admitted that its condemnation of 'taking a knee' to protest police brutality at the start of games was a mistake (though nothing said about its main displayer, Colin Kaepernick, who deserves a real chance to get onto an NFL roster--except this admission may be, perhaps, an implied release of the shackles behind that).

Protestors have painted two blocks of 16th Street in Washington, DC, with the message BLACK LIVES MATTER. We'll see how long that's allowed to stay before 45, in a loss of temper, has it painted over. But it's there right now, this very day.

Small, very white towns in Wisconsin have turned out in displays of solidarity: McFarland, near Madison; Hayward, up north quite some way; and Shawano, about an hour west of Green Bay, as well as nearby Milwaukee suburbs like Wauwatosa, Shorewood and Whitefish Bay. Someone wrote a commentary in the Washington Post, printed Friday, about their small town in Colorado, near Telluride--which is pretty rural--which also had a march. A recent map shown by the New York Times shows clearly that this was not a bailiwick of the large cities alone. 

The best thing that I have seen, though, is that younger people have taken the lead. The baby boomers, the Vietnam protest generation, have claimed ownership of liberalism and protest movements. But we, too, are getting old and tired. The younger adults are picking up the slack.

We left them with something, then. Hooray. And they are not backing off. Sixteen days now. That's amazing.

George Floyd, rest his soul, would have been pleased. He will live on. Bet he never expected to.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

The Religious Right's Right Guy

Brett Kavanaugh wanted this case bad. It shows in his opinion.

The state of California's governor, Gavin Newsom, has restricted church attendance to 100 people, or 25% of its congregation, whatever is less, to keep people from getting too close to each other during this coronavirus epidemic. Religious groups challenged that on constitutional grounds, saying that it's an unfair violation of their right to worship.

That went all the way to the Supreme Court. It had to be quick-expressed, because cases usually take one or two years to get there. As it was, the decision was made at night, which is nearly as rare.

Chief Justice John Roberts crossed over and voted with the progressives to uphold Newsom's declaration. That should tell you something, too.

It says that four Supreme Court justices can't figure out that there's more than one way to worship at a church service than to be there personally. That's true, lots of people know it, and if they don't it's time to get tuned in.

Okay, maybe I'm wrong about that. But my congregation, Immanuel Presbyterian in Milwaukee, has pivoted and managed a virtual service quite nicely. It tapes the service earlier in the week, and you can Zoom it whenever you wish. In fact, anybody can; it isn't reserved just for members.

There are a recording crew, the organist, the paster and assistant pastor, and one or two singers or musicians there to provide the normal music. And that's it. They're working on a live stream, but aren't there yet.

It's a decent replacement. No, it isn't the same. And the church's session has decided to follow science guidelines to determine when to re-open. Nobody's in that much of a hurry, as long as we have an outlet to worship. Why endanger someone? Makes zero sense.

Yes, it might take a while. But in its wisdom, the session is not allowing other people's anxiousness and/or stupidity to overwhelm its sense of safety. Yes, there's a cost to all this, but what's the cost to the body in losing members to illness, perhaps to death? Is anybody doing anybody any favors?

But no. Practicality doesn't matter to nearly half the Supreme Court. Apparently, churches have the right to afflict their members with a terrible disease. The Constitution doesn't say you can be stupid, but they're squeezing it in there somewhere.

Kavanaugh thinks it's First Amendment stuff. He thinks that churches are equal to all other businesses when it comes to opening themselves back up to the public. "What California needs is a compelling justification of distinguishing between (i) religious worship services and (ii) the litany of other secular businesses that are not subject to an occupant cap," he wrote in his dissenting opinion.

Okay, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a judge. But I can read, and I can use some logic. Here's what I see to be a "compelling justification" to put limits on church attendance:

• Time. When you shop at Target (for instance), you can be there for an hour or five minutes, and the less the better. In church, in order to get the whole benefit, you have to stick around for the sermon. That leaves you there for the better part of an hour: Nobody goes to church for a five-minute service (Though in my former Catholic days, good old Father Reuter used to do mid-week Requiem masses in 17 or 18 minutes, sans sermon, bless his heart.) The longer you're there, the more likely getting sick will be.
• Movement. At Target, by its very nature, you have to move around to pick up the products. By that very nature, you're not likely to get sick because you can see who's coming up to you and can keep the six-foot social distancing. (I have been very careful to do so whenever possible. And, of course, wear a mask.) In church, it's not socially acceptable to move around during the service, unless one is required to get up to get communion. People can sit close to you and, again, give you the disease.
• Coordination. To 'go the church,' you have to be there at a certain time, which maximizes your possible closeness to others. When you go to Target, you might be better off to go at times when it's not crowded. (And, in fact, some franchises have carved out times for seniors to go so they're not hindered by large crowds, like Whole Foods, of which I have availed myself. Know what? Works nice, and they make you wear a mask, too.)

I'm guessing that at this point, you're probably thinking: Okay, well, the least of us can figure that out. Yeah, I know. But Kavanaugh wants Newsom to spell out that very obvious stuff--and, lacking that, he should lose the case.

Really? C'mon, Brett, you might be thinking. You have to be kidding.

Nope, because he has to try to save religion from any kind of regulation whatsoever. Remember, he's been put there by 45 to reassure the religious right base that God protects drunks, little children, and the United States of America. He's a religious extremist. It only stands to reason. He's the religious right's right guy.

There is no middle ground for Kavanaugh's position, nor can there ever be. He can't bring himself to a place of balance, which is where Newsom wants to go. If he did what he did with Christine Blasey Ford early in his life, he had no control over his emotions or attitudes, and has had to seal that behavior off with an iron will. He had to be given permission to cut loose with insults and tears in the second half of his Senate testimony. He did, because it was hiding there all along, creating a pathetic spectacle.

It's not unlike addictive behavior. He cannot relent just a little: There be demons. To meet the demands of his ambitions, he had to become a captive of the religious right. That's why he was a perfect researcher for Ken Starr to find dirt on Bill Clinton and an advocate of putting the most prurient details in print: He had to show the world that he could rise above it and had achieved a higher moral position. It was about expiation of his own sins, as much as it was about Clinton's.

Expect more of this, unless Kavanaugh has a St. Paul moment and abruptly changes course. (You never know. It's a lifetime appointment, remember.)

If you're still wondering what the battle about Kavanaugh was about, though, wonder no more. It was about much more than women's rights, though it was certainly about that, too. 45 wasn't about to back off as long as he had the numbers--much like the way Bush-41 stuck with Clarence Thomas in spite of the row caused by Anita Hill. It was a win for him, plain and simple, and the 'winning' continues where it's likely to do the greatest damage, whether it makes any sense or not.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark