The 1619 Project: The Informational Grounding We Need

As a former history teacher, I was obviously interested in The 1619 Project, put forth by the New York Times. It purports to tell the real story about slavery and its legacy.

It spares nothing, including its attitude. You can just feel the anger, controlled anger but real anger, flying right off the page.

The timing is significant. 1619 marked the 400th year after slavery first came to our shores and grabbed ahold of our culture like a strangler. It got here, as the collection of essays points out, even before the Pilgrims did.

The job of the essays is to blow up the moderation with which slavery has been considered and taught. There are people who are considered deeply famous in our midst, who have monuments devoted to them in Washington, DC, who do not fare particularly well: Jefferson and Lincoln, to name two in particular.

But the thing is, there are no exaggerations. There is no hype. What is revealed within the project's pages is the honest truth. It's just truth that makes us uncomfortable--and if you read it (just access it on Google),  you will be.

Many things are simply repeated, like the conditions of slavery and their utter dehumanization. Those things have been written elsewhere.

But what the Project does is present them as one flowing process. It indicts the North as much as the South in perpetuating and establishing a co-dependent relationship with slavery. Put simply, the North needed slavery to produce, at increasing rates, the raw cotton it would need to operate its mills and weave it into cloth and clothing. Yes, there were anti-slavery societies that sprung up, but economics beat out morality until the inevitable war emerged. But that took two and a half centuries of abuse, dehumanization and devastation to a whole people based solely on their color.

The authors don't just want you to feel ashamed of all that. They want you to feel ashamed enough, thoroughly ashamed, even and especially if you had nothing to do with it. They want you to walk around with it, to feel it deeply. They're sitting across the table, pointing at you, and saying firmly: Feel this.

A whole country, one that would become the world's richest and by far the most productive, operated and flourished based on the intentional captivity of millions of people who were doing nothing else than trying to carve out their lives successfully. Then they were stolen from their family and friends, never to see them again.

Think about that. Plenty of us got upset when Lady Gaga's dogs were stolen from her walker. That was bad and wicked enough. What about this?

Nearly two million, by reasonable estimates, never made it to dry land again, either. They died below decks and, because there was nowhere to bury them, were fed to the sea, to the sharks that, wrote Richard Hofstadter long ago, would often follow the slave ships, knowing that a handy, easy meal would soon arrive.

We all want to look away, or to look at it briefly but not absorb its full meaning. We all want to assume that, in these modern days, we wouldn't lower ourselves to participate in this barbarity. But we fool ourselves. Technological improvements have nothing to do with moral development, or the lack of it. The latter is a much heavier lift.

There is plenty more that has been written, and will be written, about this. I'd just like to recommend a few books that you might read, if you already haven't:

• The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin (really, anything he wrote)
• Collective Poems of Langston Hughes (again, anything by him)
• The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (she also has a treasure troft of marvelous books)
• Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
• The Blood of Emmett Till, by Timothy B. Tyson
• Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David Blight
• Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

That should get you started. That should also take you a while. Happy reading. May it be meaningful.

We are at the end of another Black History Month, and some of us, at least, have emerged with a greater awareness and appreciation of where we are in terms of race relations and the enormous distance we still have to go. We should feel shame, yes, but with greater and deeper knowledge, we can also ground ourselves for better and deeper conversations. The 1619 Project wants to do that. Be sure to read that, too.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Three days until a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Imagination: More Important Than Knowledge? Republicans Know This Well.

I had it up in my classroom for a while in a poster. I had forgotten all about it.

But I saw it again in another blog: Imagination is more important than knowledge. The quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, who should have known. He was known for not saying much, so if he said anything, it was best to pay attention.

Republicans certainly have. They've concocted, not only recently but through the years, a number of fantasies that they're still clinging to. And their followers have immersed themselves in these imaginative fictions.

Let me point a few of them out:

• Trickle-down economics. Not the oldest one, but the one which has defined them in terms of policy. It's the signature of Reaganism, which has kept America from getting better, creating huge gaps of economic inequalities. It's the idea that if you give business owners bigger tax breaks, they'll automatically put their savings back into their businesses, hire more workers, and raise salaries. No, they didn't. They bought more stock and made that money expand for themselves. They doubled down on their selfishness. If that wasn't so, why did the economy nearly fall apart in 2008-09? Why do business owners continue to insist that a minimum wage of $7.50 is enough, that somehow that will carry people through the pandemic? Through anything at all?
• Transgenderism is a fluke, a construct. Guard your public bathrooms. Remember that scare tactic? You know, transgenderism is for male perverts who want to see women in their underwear. Where are the examples now? Any reports out there? No. I haven't seen any. But the fear created has its own lasting force; imagination basks in fear. If it happened in one place, it can happen everywhere.
• Unions ruin America. This one is the oldest that I know of that endures until today. It began after World War II, when the country was producing at full force, when we were about to enter an unequalled era of dominance. Republicans waited until they had the numbers, then struck back against the unions that had organized during the Great Depression, when they were truly needed, and the right to organize and strike were established. They passed Taft-Hartley, which created another damning phrase, right to work, which is in itself a lie and a deception. Yet, it floated into our lexicon and remains there today. It got put there to protect businessmen. The rest of the one-two punch, trickle-down economics, is listed above.
• Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11. No definitive connection was ever established. That's because there wasn't one. But this was heaped into the same cauldron of lies as weapons of mass destruction, another play upon our imaginations. Not that there never were any, but that only the bad guys had them, were about to use them again, and so Hussein had to be wiped out. Bush-43 and his Voldemort, Dick Cheney, used that phraseology many times in the run-up to the unnecessary war, but 43 did not use it in his war message. That's because he knew there weren't any, at least not there. We're still in Iraq. Our people are still getting killed. It's much easier to get into wars than get out of them.
• The pandemic is a hoax. Masks are unnecessary. So are vaccines. Okay, but there are, as of last night, 512,000 reasons why that's nonsense. And nobody, not one, person who has been vaccinated so far has even gotten sick, not to mention dying. Word to the wise: Follow the science. Get your shot or shots. Survive. Rekindle hope. Move toward herd immunity.
• The 2020 election was rigged. Fake ballots were imported. There were "irregularities," which is a phrase implying, but never proving, things that might have happened. One more time: The Georgia Secretary of State, who voted for the losing candidate, said that, indeed, fake ballots were invented using names of dead people. Out of five million ballots, exactly two--not two million, not even two thousand or two hundred, but two--were discovered. No Secretary of State in any other state, investigated or not, reported anything else. It was a lie, the Big Lie (not that the above aren't small), that's still being forwarded by people who are too scared to admit otherwise because people overall are too scared to admit otherwise, because--well, you'd have to ask them. It will be rolled out again this weekend, when the losing president will explain his loss by claiming he got screwed.

All this baloney is still being clung to. All this is based on imagination and the fears that are engendered because of them. Millions upon millions buy in. Yes, it is possible that mass hysteria can still reign, even now in the 21st Century. Clear-headed people need to step up and deny it at every turn.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Four days until a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

He's Not Kidding: The Work Continues. For Us, Too.

Terseness tells. When the Supreme Court ruled that the previous president couldn't hide his tax returns anymore, the District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Cyrus Vance Jr. (son of the late Secretary of State), tweeted, "The work continues."

Lots can be interpreted from that. Like, Thanks much. We're knee deep in stuff now. Or, we still don't know everything, but thanks for letting us find out.

Above all, it means that nothing is final yet. What has to be accomplished is still very much out there. The final result is months away.

That can be said for causes for which liberalism have been known for some time: The work continues. Joe Biden's election sure didn't conclude them. And knowing which side's positions have won is undetermined. Maybe one side has edged ahead, but it's too soon to tell. In the meantime, one poll says that 73 percent of Republicans still think (and probably will always think) that the Biden's election was fraudulent.

Up against that Big Lie, many others have been added. But it hasn't stopped the advance of liberalism, and won't. 

I'm sure you've seen yard signs put out by liberals and progressives, declaring that "In this house:"

• Love Wins
• Black Lives Matter
• Women's Rights Are Human Rights
• Diversity Is Respected
• Immigrants Are Welcome

Things like that. Things that should be recognized by everybody, but clearly aren't. Had these not been issues, the attack of January 6 would not have happened. Irrational fear would not have won out. But then, the last president wouldn't have been elected, and even if he had, we wouldn't have had to wait several days to know for sure that he had lost his re-election try.

I think other yard signs should say things like:

    In This World:

• Gay People Don't Spread It
• Don't Worry: It Doesn't Rub Off
• What Makes You So Special?
• What Are You So Scared Of?
• Blue Lives Don't Matter: 1/6 Proved It
• 500,000 Reasons to Wear Masks
• Without Guns, We're All Free
• Respect Works For All of Us
• Your Religion Belongs Only to You
• The Christian Right Is Neither (I've actually seen this one)

That would take a bigger sign. Maybe even a bigger yard. But it might spark a franker and more revealing conversation that would get people thinking a little more deeply. We need that now more than ever. 

People want to stop thinking about serious issues. They want to stop being serious, period, or return to some thoroughly imagined time in which nobody needed to be serious. If you take any part of any speech that the previous president made since his declaration of candidacy in 2015, it has one thread, one theme: Nothing is that serious. It's all kind of a joke, in fact. So leave it all to me--I'll handle it. "Only I can fix."

Without serious thought in a democracy, though, without serious conversation, you waste your advantage as a citizen every bit as much as you would by not voting or voting for the wrong reason. It might not seem that important, since there are so many of us, but all those thoughts equal public opinion, which is horribly split and so many have sadly based their thinking on misinformation, deception, and lies.

Worse: The truth has caught up with The Big Lie, and the latter hasn't been eradicated yet. If that day is coming, it's still a long way off. So it still stands repeating;

• The election was not fraudulent. 
• The counting in every state was thorough. 
• Nobody sneaked extra votes ashore.
• The number of votes in question were never enough to change the results in any state.
• Representatives of both major political parties watched the counting take place exactly so no claims of fraud could be made. 
• The tabulations were verified by members of both parties within their states. 
• Some verifications were made by those who voted for the person who didn't win.
• It was safer, and fairer, than many other elections have been, if not all.
• Joe Biden won 81 million popular votes and 306 electoral votes, definitively and verifiably, to win the election. The previous president won 74 million popular votes and 232 electoral votes, definitively and verifiably. He lost.

Each one would make a decent yard sign. At least, they're decent talking points just in case you get caught in a discussion with someone who remains obsessed with The Big Lie. Yes, apparently, you have to remain informed about this to keep tamping down snarky non-facts. Too many of those who did not win won't accept it. They can't get past it.

Do not accept it from anyone. Do not turn and walk away, at least not until you've set the record straight. Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the previous president's top lapdogs, again tried to foghorn the nonsense in a Congressional committee meeting yesterday, and Gerry Connolly of Virginia had to, once again, stand up to him and told him he wouldn't be lectured by someone claiming a fraudulent election that didn't happen.

So we all can and in fact must say, at least right now, the same thing Cyrus Vance, Jr. says, succinctly and honestly: The work continues. Remaining vigilant about the integrity of democracy is endless effort. The deceivers must be shouted down.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Six days to a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

It Was Just Jaywalking. We Thought. Really That Serious?

Early Spring, 1972, was pretty much like all early springs in Wisconsin; on the calendar only. It was cold and damp and cloudy and not much fun. The trees hadn't budded yet. The dirty snow had very recently melted.

So when a frat brother called me and said he was flying into Milwaukee instead of Appleton (where we attended college) and wanted to know if I wanted to hang out for a while before he took a bus north, I jumped at the opportunity.

He took a bus from the airport to the station downtown. That was exciting enough for me, a guy from Grafton, living about half an hour north. Going downtown was a special deal. There had to be a good reason. Mom let me borrow the car, as worn out and unexciting though it was.

In those days, downtown Milwaukee was still pretty attractive. There were department stores and plenty of good restaurants. It was fun just to walk around in the middle of the day.

As I recall, there wasn't a whole lot of traffic. After I picked up Bill at the bus station, we parked somewhere near Wisconsin Avenue. We got out and started walking eastward, toward Lake Michigan.

He was a good buddy. From Massachusetts, he had a great personality and was a good-looking guy. The women normally flocked nearby. His angst was normally picking one out of several who were interested. Otherwise, he was  a leader in my fraternity, too, and a member of the track team. His humor was pixieish and he laughed easily. To me, he was more of a friend than just a frat brother. I was pleased he had called and looked forward to the day. We were about the enter the third of three tri-mesters in our junior years.

We walked up "the ave," as we called it here, looking for crossing traffic but not particularly worried whether we were crossing when "Walk" flashed. Someone was watching, though.

It might have been 6th or 5th; somewhere in there. Suddenly, just as we crossed over, we heard "Hey!"

Crossing the street, heading right for us, was a big, black cop (his color would otherwise be absolutely irrelevant, but see below) with a deep baritone voice that could probably be heard in Cudahy. He approached us quickly. "Didn't you notice the 'Don't Walk' light at the corner?" he fairly shouted.

Bill, quick on his feet, offered that he was from Massachusetts (as if they lacked stoplights there). "Uh, I'm from out of town, too," I offered. There were no stoplights in Grafton at the time, so it wasn't exactly a lie. Neither excuse rang genuine. "We didn't know it was that big of a deal," I said.

"We have a jaywalking ordinance which is very strictly enforced," he said. "I could take you both to the station right now."

I remember thinking, Really? Is this that serious? But wisely decided not to get into that kind of lose-only philosophical discussion. Technically, he was right. Technically, at least, we were screwed. Getting arrested and being booked wouldn't make our day much fun.

We apologized humbly and promised to obey the signals from now on. He let us off. We breathed again. I remember thinking, Thank God. Nice way to treat a buddy: Get him thrown in the slammer. I looked back a block onward; he was still watching us. We were being good boys.

Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he was frustrated about watching a lot of jaywalking. Maybe he'd had it up to here with it. Maybe he just wanted to scare us. He seemed pretty touchy. That's something that it didn't seem smart to dicker with: a touchy cop.

It was a time of many protests like today, and leftist groups were the darlings of the ultra-liberal media back then, so he might have been thinking that we were radicals (though neither of us had very long hair) who found it chic to defy authority. I, for one, had marched down the main street of Appleton two years before, protesting the invasion of Cambodia. But this wasn't the time to make some kind of fairly irrelevant, purposeful stand. Besides, I didn't know any lawyers. And he meant business. Defiance wasn't wise.

That incident came back to me as I watched a guy--a black guy--in Orange County, California, approached by two policemen--both white--in another jaywalking incident. A phone camera showed the situation quickly deteriorating, a scuffle ensuing, and the poor guy getting shot to death. Over jaywalking.

And I thought, again: Really? Is this that serious? Before approaching, one of the policemen was heard mentioning that it wasn't that big of a deal, that maybe something should be said and that should be it. But the other insisted upon stopping the guy and confronting him.

Seemed to me that the black guy got touchy with the white cop who leaned on him a little too hard, in which case it escalated to issues about manhood and/or race--probably not expressed as such, but hot buttons are never far away in such situations--and the white cop got pretty touchy, too. Then the other white cop who really just wanted to move on got pulled in because he needed to back up his partner--the cops' code. They ended up sprawled on the sidewalk. Suddenly, the black fellow apparently but unsuccessfully reached for one of their guns and--Blam! Blam!

Forty-nine years after my jaywalking incident, the world has intensified considerably. If Bill and I had been black and the policeman who stopped us had been white, things might have turned out differently. It's not as if police killings of blacks hadn't taken place back then, either. 

This is not to say that all police in Milwaukee, where I live, have been or would have been unfair in their treatments of young people, whether people of color or not, but such incidents were reported. The death of Daniel Bell, a young black man, highly suspicious, took place in 1957, On the other hand, my late godfather spent his career as a Milwaukee policeman. He wasn't involved in that, but I never asked him for any details about any of his work, either.

Neither do I think the specific place or city matters. Defund the police? No. Absurd, especially now with all the guns around. Redirect the funding? That might work. Something has to change.

Bill and I joked about the incident for a couple of months. Then he took his sometime, sort of girl friend, Maura, out on Lake Winnebago after a party thrown by a couple of other frat brothers. They had apparently broken up but she was with him that night. He was crazy about her, and she was gorgeous. Whenever she saw me on campus, she would sing my name as if to open an opera. It was both embarrassing and fun. I always laughed.

I'm sure he wanted to get back together again. They went out in a canoe, though, and never returned. Their bodies were recovered a few days later. It stunned the otherwise small, idyllic campus; for many, it was the first time that kind of early death had touched them. I missed him for a long time. But the memory of jaywalking in Milwaukee brings a smile now.

Like Joe Biden says, the smile eventually comes before the tears. It just takes time. That's all that's left for the family of the poor guy in Orange County, too. How unnecessary.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Seven days until a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Death Matters in That Lives Once Did

CBS Sunday Morning isn't usually a place that acknowledges death that much. It tries to shine fair light on the living and what many have accomplished, or even that accomplishment isn't always the point to life.

This Sunday, though, it caught itself in a rare place. It publicized death in a way that acknowledges life--that is, how people are remembered. Or if.

Some time ago, someone--the show didn't say who--unearthed the tombstones of black citizens of Washington, DC and used them, hundreds of them, as shoreline barriers from a river that flowed along his property in Virginia. A Republican state legislator and his wife bought the property and, while wandering it, found the tombstones along the riverbank.

They learned that the tombstones were taken from the Columbian Harmony Cemetery. The Democratic governor was alerted and $5M was appropriated toward finding the graves and reattaching the tombstones. Some will never be found. The overwhelming number of the unattached gravestones belong to black people.

Another way in which Black Lives Matter, or mattered: That is, so do Black deaths. "I had a horror of dying alone," wrote a Civil War soldier to his mother. "Just that someone might see me die." He did, in battle, wishing that his death be noted because, for a moment at least, so would his life.

That all those Black lives were deemed insignificant enough to rob their recognition for someone's need for breakwater, with waves washing up against them for decades, thus slowly robbing us and their descendants of simply knowing they once existed, is not only an embarrassment but a type of genocide. The selfish, racist idiot didn't want to get a couple of trucks to dump huge rocks along there (I've seen it done when Lake Michigan's shoreline suddenly expanded in the 1980s, which you know it will again, threatened by climate change, and that's scary enough), so he figured that those Black people wouldn't be missed, I guess. Besides, theft is cheap. That's another dimension of inhumanity.

A less evident, but no less significant, unmarked death, noted the show, went stubbornly untraced until recently as well. This guy was Hispanic, named Hernandez. His corpse was found in Florida, in a one-man tent, along a walking trail. He had no ID, no markings, nothing from which anyone could immediately figure out who he was.

Turns out more than four thousand people share that fate, all told. But with help from authorities and of course the internet, Hernandez's college roommate recognized him. He had a habit, he said, of being friendly then not friendly, depending on the day. He was a computer programming wizard.

Do they do that on purpose? Do they consider themselves so meaningless that nobody should go to much trouble to get rid of them? Their corpses are still there. They must be disposed of, if you want to look at it that way. Even the birds that feast on carrion leave the bones. Someone should account for them. "I'm nobody, who are you?" wrote Emily Dickinson. "Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us, don't tell!"

Such a shame: Every interaction has great potential. That's why the pandemic is such a tragedy: Think of the opportunities to make friends, to correct mistakes, to celebrate good events, that have been squandered, beyond the lives lost. 

That people have been dying faster than they can be normally disposed of emphasizes the futility of dealing with a pandemic that has gone out of control. Vaccines have that saving grace, above all. We can't stop reductions in population, but we feel better about putting the remains where they belong, about recognizing that they once were here, about that basic dignity. All that takes time and care. We feel diminished when we can't give that, when we can't slow down for a minute to observe a life lived.

The New York Times is known for its obituary section. Some of the most interesting stories it has in its Sunday paper is of people whose lives were incredibly interesting, often behind the immediate scenes. Just yesterday, the Times ran a story about the late singer James Brown's set-up guy, the guy who paved the way for his appearances, who was part of his act.

He didn't have the musical talent, but he had talent for making someone else's talent matter. He was disciplined and insisted all others be the same. "It's all about the look," he would say.

Another was a mathematician who merged his studies with physics in a way that someone like me can't reach in fathomability yet leaves one with a sense of marvel. He dressed, and lived, it said, with a certain degree of flair; there was more to him than just numbers and equations. I turned the page with a thought: I wish I could have met him.

Nowadays, though, any meeting has an aura of impending danger. Just the other day, a lady in the grocery store (of course she was masked) asked me to reach up to a high shelf and get a package she couldn't. I did so, and thought about giving some self-deprecating comment. But I remembered not to do so, to keep each other from standing in front of one another for long, lest germs be spread. Then I got quite sad for a moment. 

There was no time to create a friendship, even if I wasn't looking for one. It could have been a moment for a humorous comment, though, maybe to improve someone's day. But the virus discourages that. Damn. We wander everywhere, still at least slightly scared, knowing that moments like that can't happen. That's damaging, too.

Maybe that will be a gift of the pandemic, for us to understand that time has been stolen from us and it can't be replaced: We're all headed to the same fate. Maybe people will travel more. Maybe they will reconnect with relatives and friends and stop putting it off. 

Maybe that will cause people to be nicer to each other,  to stop hardening positions, if only for a minute at a time. It's a place to start again. Considering death, life is what matters.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Nine days to a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Has Democracy Run Its Course?

Anne Applebaum and her husband threw two parties, twenty years apart: one in 1999, one in 2019.. What's happened in-between charts the crumbling of liberal societies.

Applebaum's new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, is a short work that bears much attention. It brings perspective and foreboding to the West, which of course includes the United States--which is a significant part of her analysis.

But most importantly, Applebaum provides perspective. As usual, we here in the U.S. tend to treat what's happened to us, particularly if it's bad, as something of a one-off and an exception to the "exceptional" label that we so quickly self-apply. And once again, that label has proven to be nonsense.

Authoritarianism began elsewhere before it got here, and has manifested itself in more places than most people have probably kept track: Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and Spain, to cite examples that she's most familiar with. And what happened that led up to those developments have closely mimicked what's happened here.

When you embrace authoritarianism, you reject democracy, which relies on agreement of facts and willingness to exchange ideas in the marketplace. You prefer that someone tells you what they believe is the truth and either respect or allow (little difference) references to someone else's information as, as in the now-common parlance, "fake news (which in fact more often than not, what the authority figure tells you is exactly fake)."

We have had democracy much longer than any of the abovementioned countries. So why has it also become just as fragile as it has overseas?

A bunch of reasons, Applebaum says. She interviewed Karen Stenner, an Australian political scientist, who has done much work on authoritarianism. Authoritarians aren't conservatives, she says; the latter want change to slow down, while the former resist any change at all. They seek phraseologies and hot button slogans that fit their worldviews.

Immigration, therefore, especially happening fast and with no apparent end in sight, takes strong action (another identifying characteristic) to hold back: Thus the wall, now partially built, during the last presidential administration. Such a contraption, regardless of whether it actually works, addresses the hyper-nationalism that authoritarianism invokes.

Much of the rest of the appeal can be summarized under simplifying matters. The world is too much with many of us; no one can debate that. Most of us adjust by absorbing what he believe we can and organize ourselves around that. But authoritarians reject all of it and project victimization instead. Although I won't generalize and call all of them authoritarians, it's like what you see on Facebook sometimes when someone looks up and publishes what things used to cost when the baby boomers were kids--as if we could magically revert to that time and have our present salaries with prices from 50 years ago. 

The craving of nostalgia is a gateway to such attitudes: Don't you wish it could still be like the way it used to be? Except the mind often chooses to forget the bad parts and only remembers the good ones.

Racism, which is to say white supremacy, is a large part of that thinking, whether the authoritarians want to admit it or not. Mingling the races is always hard work. And based on the last few years, it's clear that attitudes haven't come nearly as far as many once thought.

But a frightening new development has reared itself: Violence as a deterrent to racial harmony. When the previous president responded to the hatred and a murder committed in Charlottesville in Spring, 2017 by saying that there were very good people on both sides, that unleashed a permissiveness that hasn't been seen before.

None of this is new. Lynchings have swept the country at times, hitting every part of it. But all those waves have subsided. This has come as close to overcoming us as anything else has ever done.

And events like well-publicized trials have also had their effects. (O. J. Simpson?) One that Applebaum brings up took place in France, another country that is faced with oncoming authoritarianism and is trying to head it off. Applebaum reaches back to 1896, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer, was convicted for passing secrets to the then-hated Germans, who had won the Franco-Prussian War and seized a major chunk of France a quarter-century before.

The trial unearthed hyper-nationalist and reactionary attitudes and severe polarization. The country was, said Applebaum, "split right down the middle." Dreyfus was convicted, although he was later proved innocent and released 11 years later. But like here, today, 

• What constituted the "truth" came highly into question;
• Reliance on provable science to prove Dreyfus' innocence was discounted; and
• His Jewishness came under severe prejudice, making a fair trial nearly impossible.

All that echoes until today. Marine Le Pen, a right-wing activist and former presidential candidate, is once again sending out feelers about running against president French President Emmanuel Macron, who has begun to tailor some of his former liberal policies to reduce the resistance. France has even deeper issues with Muslims than we do, post 9/11; recall a couple of massacres.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden tries to prove that, if you really do consider people first instead of yourself, democracy can accomplish plenty and relieve much suffering. If splintering Republicans still refuse to accept their losses, cut them, and retreat from an abyss of authoritarianism, if they continue to disrespect the normal behaviorist guardrails that keeps the checks and balances in effect, a balance of interests is unsustainable.

Winning, and the power that comes with it, cannot be its own goal. There must be something behind it that's worth cherishing, something that can rise above the pettiness and polarization that lead to violence. If not, democracy will fail. So will this nation. So will the world.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Eleven days to a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Lurching Through the Endless Days

Lurching through the endless days

I walk the street, reliably smug

Behind my mask and anonymity

When what I need is a hug

And reassurance that my humanity

Is seen and felt and recognized

Instead of endlessly paralyzed

By virus and helplessness:

A gesture of selflessness

Done even without name.

We all wander lame

When what we need

Could be to acknowledge

That we are too frail

To claim that holy grail

In pretense that we deserve it,

Such nonsense that conserves it

Behind a wasteful pride

Long since decried

By loving things, not people

Because it's an easy peephole

That dodges what are your needings--

Confirmation that no one can

Disturb the proceedings toward salvation

Of a worn-out nation:

Instead of enduring the bleedings

Of one day into the next,

No difference between them.

The essence of boredom pecks

And prevents us from seeing them

As things of separate existence;

We're left with subsistence.

They say you can see the horizon

So I'll watch as normalcy tries on

A new reality. Just like before?

Exhaustion, nothing more.

February, 2021