Category Archives: civil rights

time to abolish DHS ?

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I’m editing this in order to add this morning’s statement by the president, which makes his criminal intention transparently clear.

“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.” The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

We now have a federal department whose very name calls up remembrance of Hitler speeches, with their voluminous evocations of blood and soil. Homeland, itself is not a American idiom, not grounded in our traditions, and in the present environment it evokes all our worst memories, all our past sins against decency and fairness: slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, the trail of tears. The department was hurriedly cobbled together in the fevered aftermath of 9/11 with a clear intent to target Muslims (who are to this day stigmatized as terrorists by many of us) and has since been strengthened with each omnibus bill to fund the US military.

Now we are faced with the assertion by acting DHS chief, Chad Wolf, that he has the authority to shut down protests in American cities in open defiance of the Bill of Rights and the Posse Comitatus act of 1978. Acting on a pretext previously exploited by gangster consigliere William Barr, about which Barr bragged at the time, Wolf’s brazen assertion is just the latest claim on the part of our criminal executive to reset established democratic norms. If challenged, we can expect the usual reply of rogue authority: “So, sue me!”

I don’t think it was the intention of either George W. Bush, who presided over the founding of DHS, or Barack Obama, who strengthened it, to unleash anything like the present Stasi-like terror on our city streets, but such has become a perhaps unintended consequence of both their actions. Obama expressed reservations in signing an omnibus defense authorization act allowing indefinite detention of citizens, but he signed it, claiming that if a future executive were to abuse that authority congress could reign it in.

But here we are, a few steps away from martial law during a pandemic our rogue executive, with the willing help of Republicans like the governor of my state, is abetting for all it’s worth in the sacrifice of human lives, on the eve of an election  whose security the senate Republican majority is refusing to protect whilst simultaneously hamstringing the U. S. Postal service in order to suppress the vote. I have received my absentee ballot for the coming Missouri election. My beloved at this writing has not received hers. We have called the board of elections, and the board of elections is blaming the post office. Indeed, we have it on the authority of our mail carrier that an order has come down through the chain of command to slow mail delivery.

I dislike conspiracy theories, but there are as yet no signs that congress or the judiciary will reign in these flagrant abuses of authority, clearly designed to aid in a criminal regime’s effort to perpetuate itself. A new Democrat administration should act to abolish DHS on its first day, a necessary first step towards restoring the rule of law.

the coming terror

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John Lewis is dead. It is to be hoped there will be appropriate national gestures to honor him. A friend posted this memorial photo at Facebook this morning. Somehow—I’m not sure how—it captures the poignancy of the moment, this moment of John Lewis’s death and what may become his enduring legacy. Authorities in Selma may rename the Edmund Pettus bridge for him, but the abomination of institutional racism continues unabated in the land despite the struggle, despite his struggle, the struggle of his lifetime that continues and will continue in spite of attempts to crush it. In that regard it is at least interesting to note that praise for Lewis is now coming from both sides of the political divide.

However, In 1965, in the aftermath of almost universal horror as news reports displayed the casual brutality of the police attack on protestors attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way to Montgomery, a second march was allowed to proceed with the protection of federalized National Guard troops. Not so today, as a fascist federal secret police force now roams city streets in Portland, Oregon carrying on a work of suppression no less sinister than that visited upon Lewis and other protestors during the first “bloody Sunday” march from Selma to Montgomery. It is an irony that shouldn’t be lost on us. It undercuts the claims of rightist political figures such as Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell who have stated publicly how much they loved and respected “John” even going so far as to use his first name, a usage that in itself makes an obscene claim of solidarity with his legacy.

Lewis’s death, and that of C. T. Vivian, his companion in the struggle, both come at a time of terrifying constitutional crisis in the land, a time that exposes deep flaws in our constitutional system. And the terrible irony is that these flaws have been exposed again and again in our history by reformers such as Lewis and Vivian, some of whom have become martyrs, like Eugene Debs and Dr. KIng. But the efforts, the suffering, and the deaths of these martyrs have yet to make headway against the intransigence of the people. I speak of systemic racism, but it was the people who installed our present regime, and it is the people who may very well unleash the full potential of this regime to foment terror in order to ensure its survival. The senate’s refusal to remove the president from office should assure all of us that the congress will not stop the terror. The willingness of the highest court in the land to reauthorize the federal death penalty should assure us all that courts will not stop the terror.

Downstairs just now I noticed that a poster welcoming refugees still hangs in my front window. Passing my front door I noticed the Black Lives Matter sign I share with my neighbor. Some days ago when protests were beginning along my street I welcomed them. I have absolutely no fear of protestors; I would join them if I could. On the night I speak of I opened my front door and waved at groups of them. But I fear the terror and chaos a deranged president with ambitions to be a dictator may unleash on the rest of us as he continues to confront reports of his failure to cope with the pandemic and his falling poll numbers. I fear that terror because the signs of its emergence are becoming plainer each day. I do not know whether we will be able to hold an election this fall. Last post I quoted George Will, but I did not mention his most ominous paragraph, which is this one:

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

“National decline,” says will? “and worse can be confidently expected.”

The desk where I write now sports my two modern stoic medallions. Memento mori reminds me that death stalks me. When I look down the staircase where I fell only last year I sometimes wonder “Will it be here?” These more or less grisly thoughts are my companions these days, but they background a concern that I should like not to die just yet. Off and on during my adult life I have felt that I was living towards some high point in my country’s history. That’s the real dream of liberalism, a word I still use to describe myself, a word I have never believed could be abused beyond efficacy by its detractors or its adherents. I believe in what Richard Rorty called liberal hope.

My own liberal hope is grounded in Christian humanism, unlike Rorty’s, which was grounded in an atheism for which he made an eloquent lifelong defense. But if you read Rorty you will realize that his version of liberal hope does not invalidate mine. Christian humanism gives me my final vocabulary, a term I learned from Rorty. But Rorty’s final vocabulary is the history of Western philosophy. We can agree to disagree. My own liberalism contains the naive hope that my country might one day come to resemble the kingdom of heaven, of which the writer of Hebrews remained confident in the face of disconfirming data because she could “see Jesus.” In a time when even Jesus has been almost entirely coopted into Rightist idolatry, it is difficult to envision the Prince of Peace.  I now have a lifetime’s experience of confrontation with that idolatry, which is presently enjoying a cultural ascendancy I cannot recall ever having observed before.

Twelve years ago my beloved and I stood in a line outside the Edward Jones center waiting to be admitted to a rally in support of Barack Obama. We fell into conversation with a family from Oklahoma, young farmers they were with a couple of children, bright, educated. They were passionate as we were about this young man who promised to be a transformational president. Here is something I wrote about Obama back then.

Obama reminds me how it felt to make one with my sisters and brothers and students and colleagues in the marches of the sixties, how it felt to sing “We Shall Overcome” in those days when we lost a lot of fights, but won some too. Obama reminds me what it was like to win (even when we lost), what “Glory, Hallelujah!” meant to us then and how it almost became the national anthem. He reminds me what it was like to love my country when I loved my country with a passion that’s perhaps only possible when one is young. We’ve lost a lot of fights recently, but Obama gives me hope that we might still win a big one or two before what for me will be the end.

I’ve lived another twelve years now, long enough to have weathered my own personal disillusion with Obama. His fatal flaw was a desire for bipartisan governance, which we now know that Republicans conspired from the beginning to deny him, but he remains for me chief among modern presidents as exemplar of liberal hope.

I should like not to die before his portrait goes up on the White House wall.

What is to be done?

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Politics comprises, or ought to comprise, serious human attempts to answer Chernyshevsky’s famous question, political because Chernyshevsky was political but also because Lenin used the question as the title of a 1901 book. I raise it now because my country has chosen a vicious demagogue as its next president. All of us who opposed him will need a time of venting or of grief—indeed I take the determined efforts I am reading here and there to find solace in the putative strength of American institutions as manifestations of denial, one of the stages of the same. But after the venting and the depression, the question demands an answer.

When I wrote about Trump last summer I had not yet taken seriously the possibility that he might actually be elected, but as the campaign wore on (and particularly after observing the apparent strength of his support in rural Missouri on a recent trip to the Ozarks) I began to take seriously the fear that continued to gnaw around the edges of my consciousness. I remain afraid. Next year I will be eighty, and I have to say that I had not thought to spend my old age engaged in political activism. But we don’t choose our choices.

As I look back through my observations about Trump in my last post I’m surprised at my own prescience; not that I claim any special gift of or for it. But I left my remarks with a question about why large numbers of Americans were supporting Trump when that support meant “harm to those who differ from us, hatred and destructive public policies that promulgate hatred of the most vulnerable among us, reversal of the access to public life achieved by women and minorities over the past fifty to sixty years, restoration of white supremacy and patriarchy.” “Perhaps,” I speculated, “these are the means to making America great again envisioned by Trump and his followers.” And “[if] so,” my question was, “how did a substantial number of Americans come to think these things, to wish these things?”

I now have more insight into the complexity of my question than I did last May, but I neither have nor wish a definitive answer, particularly not an answer that that might incline me to blame some demographic or other group for the debacle. Racism, xenophobia, white nationalism, and misogyny are all part of the mix, but Trump’s election does not represent a triumph of these things either as actions or as moral sentiments. Yes, they remain part of the complex intentionality that characterizes the American right and the alt-right the world over, but it’s too easy simply to blame these bugbears for my political party’s losses in this week’s election.

That those losses were substantially our own fault is now obvious. Clinton, much as I admire her, was the wrong candidate. Democrats nominated her for the wrong reason. It was her turn, we thought—surely the country would agree. And the naïveté of our early euphoria carried us through the election season as we continued to believe in our own invincibility, denying disconfirming polls and the convictions of our most progressive colleagues, until the trend began to establish itself in the early election returns and we discovered the enormity of our error. Still, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and unless we Democrats wish to confirm the image the right has of us standing in a circle and shooting at each other, we’ll get over ourselves and get busy thinking our way out of the box we have put ourselves in.

I’m attracted to Bernie Sanders’ call for those of us on the left to find ways of working with the right where we have commonalities of interest but to oppose the odious proposals and policies that are bound to come with all the vigor we can muster. We fucking fight! as Aaron Sorkin said in a letter to his daughters, adding “there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.” But beyond the need to resist, we liberals need to recognize that we have lost the friendship of many in the working class because we are elitists. It does no good for us to claim that those others have been turned against us by a rightist elite committed to a vile and exploitative economic ideology, just as it will do us no good to gloat as Trump fails to bring back the coal and steel and auto industries with their well paying jobs.

What we need to realize, I believe, is that all of us Americans who occupy present positions in our country’s declining middle class have a common interest in finding and supporting some form of restorative politics, some way to restore what we have lost to globalization for the future’s sake, and some humane ways of dealing with the present precarity of Americans who, through no fault of their own, find themselves part of a burgeoning congeries of economic and social waste, consigned to the fringes of society as unproductive and useless. Folks on the right need to realize that displaced working class folk, of whatever ethnicity, are an important reason why they will now be called on to govern the country.

Perhaps the rightist elite will try to fulfill its economic promises to the working class. But I think it more likely that Trump and his followers will engage in large scale public scapegoating that will entail stepping up and publicizing the program of deportation of undocumented immigrants the Obama administration has more or less tried to hide and instituting a new program of repression targeting Muslims and shutting down the refugee program. These actions can be undertaken quickly and offered up by way of saying to the Trump base, ‘See, what I’m doing for you.’ I’m sure that Mexico will not pay for Trump’s wall, but I’m almost equally sure the Republican congress will find the money to build it.

If these things materialize the left will be drawn into more and more forceful resistance. What is beginning now in the streets will continue. The Dakota pipeline protest will continue and intensify. Protest politics will loom large in Trump’s America. Perhaps a new occupy movement will emerge, perhaps new leaders. The Black Lives Matter movement will enlarge, and these efforts will trigger retaliation in the name of law and order from our new president who apparently has never met a slight he didn’t hate. And of course if Trump pursues the foreign policy agenda he has threatened we could easily be drawn into larger and more costly military adventures abroad that in turn could engender more protests here at home.

To reiterate, I believe Trump will seek to implement policy changes he can achieve quickly and on his own, or with quick and dirty legislation, at first—since the economic changes he is promising will for the most part require the long term. Before that will come the cabinet appointments. The judicial appointments will likely come later, but all Trump’s appointments are likely to engender protests from the left unless Trump learns some moderation he has not so far exhibited. I think protest is necessary, especially in the short term, but I think the long term calls for a number of kinds and levels of organizing and reaching out to the working class folks with whom we Democrats have lost touch in the attempt to build a new progressive coalition.

I think this necessity requires cleaning the Democratic house. The present hierarchy needs to step aside. Its day is over, and the time has come for new leadership. Robert Reich has called for this, and I think he is right. I think new leadership will come from the progressive wing of the party, perhaps led by somebody we don’t yet see; but we need to be looking for that new leader. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will be harbingers of new leadership, and for a while will function as leaders of the progressive movement within the party. But the new leadership we need will come from a younger generation, I believe: if not from millennials, at least from their parents. In the interim we all have work to do. Part of that necessary work is reaching out to disaffected working class voters, seeking an alliance based on our shared interest in social justice (perhaps without using the term).

For myself, I’m going to do some specific things. For the past several years I’ve been active in union organizing. The destruction of the trade union movement, a process in which both political parties have been complicit, has done more to shred the fabric of our society than any other single thing, I believe, because it destroyed political connections between disparate social groups and pitted public and private sector union members against one another. This year I’m not working for the union because I was left out of the bargaining unit at Saint Louis University when we won the union election and because I retired at the end of last academic year. But I’m going to find a way to be active in the union movement again, perhaps in the fight for fifteen along with my friends at McDonald’s and my colleagues in the home health care industry and my former colleagues among contingent faculty or perhaps in some other way. I’m also going to continue to support my beloved’s role in the League of Women Voters and write this blog and work on behalf of my church’s social justice mission and support the Saint Louis Urban Debate League that seeks to enhance the public school experience of our inner city youth, etc., etc.

These things are good works that need doing. I can do them, will do them: and whatever else I find I can turn my hand to that pits community against demagoguery and division.

secure in our persons

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Between the years of 1969 and 1972 I had a brief love-hate relationship with a 1959 Porsche. The model on the right is from 1958 and somewhat cleaner than the car I owned, but in all other respects that’s my car. Also during those years I commuted back and forth four days a week from Durham, N. C., where I lived, to Fort Bragg, N. C., where I was attached to a branch of North Carolina State University.

My work was in the evenings. Usually I finished teaching at 9:30 and drove back to Durham after that. I didn’t drive the Porsche much because it wasn’t entirely dependable and I had visions of being stranded in the dark on the lonely farm road between Spring Lake and Lillington. But on one particular night, when circumstance had dictated that I drive the Porsche, I had an interesting encounter.

Somewhere on that dark stretch of road I mention, full of curves and declivities that could fill up with fog and make for chancy driving, especially in an old vehicle with a six-volt electrical system, I noticed that a car behind me kept moving up uncomfortably close to my rear bumper and then falling back. At some point I began to move over as far as I could to the right edge of the road (which had no shoulders) and blink my lights to invite the car to pass, but to no avail.

Finally I saw a flashing blue light and pulled off the road onto a grassy patch. After I showed the policeman my bona fides, I was asked what I was doing on the road at night. And though I had every right to be where I was and knew I had broken no law, I explained politely that I worked at NCSU Ft. Bragg and was on my way home to Durham after an evening of teaching my classes.

The policeman then told me that he had stopped me because I seemed to be driving erratically, weaving about on the road, and he had feared I might be drowsy. Both he and I knew that I had only been weaving about because his intrusive headlights had alarmed me, but I thanked him for the warning nevertheless. He returned my bona fides, reminding me to be careful, and allowed me to go on my way.

I had been profiled. I was driving a strange foreign car on a N. C. farm road at night where I didn’t belong. I don’t know what that young police officer thought he would find in my car, but he was surprised not to find it and a bit chagrined, I thought. These days I would likely have been ordered to get out of my car, perhaps required to submit to a search. That was then.

XXX

The dog days finally arrived in St. Louis last week as the streets of Ferguson cooled down. Sunday’s Post Dispatch carried a full page ad from the National Association of Police Organizations expressing support for Officer Darren Wilson and portraying police nationwide as suffering public servants intent upon the protection of citizens and grief stricken that “a life was cut short in this case.” It’s a well-crafted letter, but its claim of solidarity with the motto “To Serve and Protect” rings false to me in light of the spectacle we have witnessed in this city. To my mind the militarized and provocative police response to citizen outrage over the killing of Michael Brown is of a piece with the killing, itself; and both are cases which display the disturbing fact that citizen control of police has become a mere myth. Police are out of control, and the law protects them.

To be sure there were looters among the protesters. Shots were fired. Molotov cocktails were thrown. Some journalists abused their freedom. But most arrests were for procedural violations, mouthing off at police, stepping off a sidewalk, failure to move rapidly when ordered to do so by police. A few carefully crafted photo ops showing Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway patrol hugging protesters hardly weigh in the balance existentially, however much they may have done from a public relations standpoint. In spite of the change on the ground after Governor Nixon replaced local police with the Highway patrol, what we have seen in this city, and what we continued to see as protests continued, is far more correctly characterized by a statement from a Los Angeles police officer quoted in Daily Kos several days ago [emphasis added].

Regardless of what happened with Mike Brown, in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not the cops, but the people they stop, who can prevent detentions from turning into tragedies. […]

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

Much has been written about the lack of transparency in official responses to the shooting of Michael Brown, but lack of transparency is hardly the issue when Ferguson police have seemed inclined to shield Oficer Wilson and to portray Michael Brown as a criminal. And in the final analysis whether Brown was armed, how many times he was shot, whether his hands were up, indeed all the aspects of this miscarriage of justice that “shock the conscience,” will carry little, if any, weight in law. For present law is so skewed in favor of police power as to make it well-nigh impossible to hold a police officer accouuntable for injuring or killing a citizen, no matter how egregious the officer’s conduct may have been.

The stern likelihood is that there will be no justice for Michael Brown. The probability is that Officer Wilson, who (as the Post Dispatch pointed out in an early editorial) is being given all the benefit of the due process his actions denied Michael Brown, will be found to have acted within established guidelines for police conduct. What actually happened in the Brown/Wilson confrontation may remain in dispute. And even if clear and irrefutable evidence emerges that Wilson shot Brown after Brown had made a gesture of surrender, a court would only have to find that Wilson had a “reasonable perception of being threatened with bodily harm” in order to exonerate him.

Even if the officer made a mistake in shooting, that will not be enough to support criminal charges so long as his mistake was reasonable — a determination in which the officer will receive some benefit of the doubt because of the split-second judgments that he had to make.

Or again:

Experts on police shootings say the investigation, including the grand jury deliberations, will focus on whether Wilson had a reasonable perception of being threatened with bodily harm. The experts say it does not matter how many bullets Wilson fired. Police are trained to shoot at the center of mass and stop the threat.

The Supreme Court established the reasonable expectation standard in the 1989 Graham v. Connor decision, denying redress under the fourteenth Amendment to a diabetic victim of police brutality who had been assaulted in a situation where he had committed no crime, had sustained multiple injuries including a broken foot, and then had been unceremoniously dumped in his front yard by police when they could find no crime to charge him with. The court also narrowed the fourth amendment protection in this case requiring that the defendant prove that police had injured him “maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm,” in effect requiring proof of premeditation, a standard so high as to render citizen redress almost impossible. The consequence of this deplorable decision has been to give police carte blanche to abuse citizens. And of course the most egregious abuse this decision has fostered has fallen upon members of socially marginalized groups, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill, the elderly.

Nevertheless it appears that there is popular support for the standard. St Louis Police shot and killed Kajieme Powell a few days ago, an apparently mentally ill man who behaved erratically, brandished a knife, and called out to police to kill him. Acording to a witness, “The man was agitated and animated. He said, ‘Kill me!’ They didn’t have any alternative.” Nobody seems to be questioning that assessment. Police killed the man, declared the incident to be suicide by cop, and that was that. The Supreme Court’s mapulation of law regarding the bill of rights over the past half century or more now allows police to kill citizens even when police behavior “shocks the conscience.” And with a handy citizen witness whose conscience was not shocked by the Powell shooting, everything seems perfectly copacetic. (See James Boyd White, Justice as Translation, 103ff., re “shocks the conscience”).

Senator Claire McKaskill intends to conduct hearings into the police militarization that was on display in Ferguson over the past few weeks. We should all support those hearings. But unless Congress and the courts act to restrict police power to conduct searches and seizures, there’s very little hope of changing the culture of policing or the relationship between police and citizens. Here’s the fourth amendment.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Long before the appearance of privacy issues that inform most popular concern over the fourth amendment these days, citizens of this country were no longer secure in our persons. And after all is said and done about the many economic, societal, and historical injustices that may have combined to produce the spectacle we have witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri over the past several weeks, it is the loss of the right to be secure in our persons that ought to disturb us the most.