Talking Past Each Other

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“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” Cool Hand Luke. “I’m so glad I would kiss the captain’s feet . . . now my child can actually play in the park.” Eukeysha Gregory, after the arrest of 120 gang members in the “largest gang takedown” in New York City history.

In a speech a friend sent me, conservative writer Heather MacDonald excoriated the Black Lives Matter movement for “the current frenzy against the police” and the ensuing rise in urban crime, calling it a smokescreen to evade the “taboo topic” and “uncomfortable truth” of black-on-black crime. Since Macdonald can be a poster woman for the unapologetic right – opposing food stamps and welfare, minimizing campus rape, defending religious profiling and torture – I was reflexively prepared to dismiss her arguments.

But I can’t.

Yes, there’s much to disagree with. She paints with a broad brush, simplifying and vilifying a complex movement. And she ignores the personal experiences of a legal system riddled with racial injustice described by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy).

So who’s right? For Eukeysha Gregory, black-on-black crime is not a taboo subject. Nor was it for my late friend, Charity Hicks, who witnessed “a generation of young [Detroit] men so marginalized they would kill you without thinking about it.”

If we talk only to those with whom we agree, we end up choosing sides and standing in judgment above the fray. Our political purity is intact, although our neighborhoods may be burning. If we really want solutions, we need to open our minds and our hearts.

 

The Terrible Tyranny of Tastelessness

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Should a man be held accountable for the actions of his valet? This 19th-century question is hardly one I expected to be asking in the 21st – until I read Anthony Senecal’s Facebook rants, in which, among other things, he called for the president and first lady to be dragged from the “white mosque” and hanged. Senecal, who was recently the subject of a bizarrely fawning profile in The New York Times, was Donald Trump’s butler at Mar-a-Lago for years; and many of his Facebook themes – demonizing Muslims, Obama’s citizenship, incendiary language, racism – resonate with the boss's campaign.

Trump’s spokeswoman disavowed Senecal’s “horrible statements,” saying he “has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for years” – apparently overlooking that, at Trump’s insistence, he gives daily tours at the mansion and serves as its unofficial historian. Trump has yet to tweet on the matter.

These revelations came simultaneously with news that George Zimmerman will auction off his Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol. What he advertises as “a piece of American History” is the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin in 2012.

In the war against political correctness, the pendulum has swung way too far; it’s time to reflect on what gave rise to the movement in the first place. It began as an effort to address the offensive stereotyping long endured by minorities and the powerless. Whatever its excesses, it arose out of respect and empathy, two traits now in short supply. It is, as Jeeves, a wiser, more civil butler, understood, a matter of good taste.

The Klanbake Convention

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Thinking of traveling to Cleveland in July, I did a little research on that city’s first Republican convention and the election that followed. The three-day event took place in June 1924 and produced the first-ballot nomination of Calvin Coolidge, who had succeeded to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding less than a year before. It was the first Republican convention at which women had equal representation, and the only hint of disgruntlement was the defection of Senator Robert LaFollette, who ran – and won almost 5 million votes – as a third-party Progressive.

In contrast to the civil Republican convention, its Democratic counterpart in New York’s Madison Square Garden was a disaster. It required 16 days and 103 ballots to nominate the little-known-nor-long-remembered John W. Davis. The preconvention favorites, Al Smith and William Gibbs McAdoo, bowed out after a stalemate driven largely by the power of Ku Klux Klan, which had resurfaced as a vehicle for white working-class anxieties over the perceived threats posed by immigrants, African Americans, and the growing political power of Catholics and Jews.

1924 presidential election

After knocking off Smith, the Catholic governor of New York who had denounced lynching and racial violence, thousands of hooded Klansmen – including hundreds of delegates – held a rally at which a speaker denounced the "clownvention in Jew York," while the crowd hanged Smith in effigy and set fire to a cross.

That was the “Klanbake” convention, and surely such a thing could never happen today.

Coolidge was elected easily – although he failed to carry a single southern state.

 

American Soul

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With Donald Trump, who is the sort of demagogue the founders feared, now the leader of the Republican Party, it’s time to examine our “exceptional” credentials. And it’s not just Trump who reveals a country at odds with its self-image. In New York, the Democratic Assembly Speaker is on his way to prison, with the Republican Senate leader close behind. In Chicago, a judge pronounced the former Speaker of the House a “serial child molester.” In two new books, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the authors describe a nation with the highest rate of incarceration in a world that includes Russia, China and Iran; where one of every three native-born black men will go to jail; where three times as many mentally ill people are in prison as in a hospital; where economic disparity and voter repression proceed unabated.

I’m happy that Trump will be the nominee. Not just because the singularly repugnant Ted Cruz has departed, at least for now. Not because I think Trump will be trounced in November, because I fear he won’t. But because the overarching American myth on which we have been nourished for generations is unraveling before our eyes – and it should, for while it may have reflected our aspirations, it does not describe our reality.

We now have a candidate who appeals to the basest parts of our national character, and if that doesn’t galvanize the rest of us to get involved, I don’t know what will.

“Let’s Do the Numbers”

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From a talk this week by David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee and former British Foreign Secretary:

  • 20 million refugees have fled their country in fear of persecution for racial, ethnic or political reasons.
  • 40 million people are internally displaced within their country.
  • 200+ million migrants have left their country in search of a better life.
  • 1% of all refugees went home last year.
  • 17 years is the average duration of exile.
  • 86% of refugees and displaced people are in poor countries.

With states collapsing, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, the increase in horrendous violence and disrespect for humanitarian law, and “the absence of legal routes to hope and dignity,” this is a crisis no wall can contain. Globalization isn’t just a political policy, it’s an international reality; and “America First” code language is not the answer – particularly if you consider these numbers from Steve Phillips’ Brown is the New Black:

  • In the last 50 years, people of color have increased from 12% to 37% of the U.S. population.
  • Latinos have grown from 9 million to 54 million; Asians from 2 million to 18 million.
  • Our population increases by 8,000 people a day, 90% of whom are non-white.

Clearly these are unsettling numbers for the dwindling white majority – even if they are a fulfillment of America’s self-image: a melting pot; a nation of immigrants; a land where all men are created equal and anyone can grow up to be president. Maybe it’s a cause for celebration instead of fear. And it seems a good time to recognize how much we have in common with the rest of the world.

Anzac Day

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One-hundred-one years ago today began the Gallipoli campaign, a devastating eight-month battle that produced over half-a-million casualties and yet remains the defining national myth for both sides: Turkey and Australia and New Zealand. Such is war, a time of carnage and valor – and the central reality of human history. “If we were to take any random hundred-year period within the last five thousand years,” writes Caroline Alexander in the introduction to her new translation of the Iliad, “we would find on average ninety-four of that hundred to have been occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more regions of the globe.”

By chance, I was reading her words when an old friend sent me “My Vietnam Song,” his 46-year journey home from Vietnam, where he had arrived as a Marine 2nd lieutenant not long after his college roommate had been killed. It’s a moving story of his struggle to understand himself and make sense of his war, a poignant antidote to today’s reflexive “Thank you for your service,” five words he never heard. Achilles would understand, writes Alexander. Far from “glorifying war’s destructive violence,” the Iliad “makes explicit the tragic cost of such glory, even to the greatest warrior.”

“I am tired and sick of War,” said William Tecumseh Sherman, a warrior who scorched the earth from Atlanta to the sea. “Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

And it endures.

Trading Up

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The $20 bill just got more valuable, not, to be sure, as a measure of exchange, but in its intangible value for America – because yesterday Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that a likeness of Harriet Tubman will replace that of Andrew Jackson on the bill’s face. An escaped slave who was cruelly beaten as a child, Tubman returned frequently to the South and guided so many slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad that William Lloyd Garrison dubbed her “Moses.” During the Civil War she became a Union spy and an armed scout, leading an expedition that freed over 700 slaves. Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, was considered one of its greatest in the history books of my youth. But his star has rightly dimmed, particularly because of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma along the deadly “Trail of Tears,” one of the saddest, most shameful events in our history.

There will, no doubt, be cries of political correctness, as we replace a white man, both president and general, with a black woman – laments that, in our efforts to conform to multi-cultural demands, we are rewriting our history.

Well, good for us. We are recognizing a part of our history we have too long ignored. We are honoring a woman of courage, faith and accomplishment who dedicated her life to equal rights and women’s suffrage. And maybe we are insisting, in a small way, that our money reflect our values.

Patriots’ Day

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As a one-time American history teacher, I wrestled with the deficiencies of textbooks, which are as much the product of Texas politics as historical scholarship and challenge teachers to breathe life into dull prose and dead people. In fairness, the text is hard to put together. When I was in school, ours ended with the Korean Conflict, traced the westward movement of Europeans across the continent, and relied on documents written by educated white men. Quite a bit has happened since then, including an array of tools enabling historians to uncover the long-stifled voices of marginalized peoples. Such changes have not sat well with everyone. In the recent tiff over Advanced Placement history standards, for example, some school boards, and the Republican National Committee, demanded changes in textbooks to extol patriotism and “American exceptionalism” and to show America in a more positive light – what we used to call propaganda.

Which brings me to newly unearthed histories at two of America’s most prominent universities: Georgetown’s sale of 272 slaves to plantations in the Deep South to raise operating funds and Harvard’s embrace of a eugenics movement that promoted racial purity and the forced sterilization of those who, in the words of U.S. Chief Justice – and Harvard pillar – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “sap the strength of the State.”

Shouldn’t the historian’s role be to uncover and confront the truth of our past, however painful, as Georgetown, and, I hope, Harvard, is doing, rather than airbrush it? True patriotism can’t be built on lies.

Grace, ‘The Final Chapter’

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Winston Moseley died last week. He was 81 and had spent the last 51 years in prison for killing Kitty Genovese the night of March 13, 1964 in Queens, N.Y. It was a murder that seared America. Dozens of people heard Kitty’s screams but “didn’t want to get involved,” a response now known as the “Genovese syndrome,” which led to the adoption of 911. The original reports are in dispute, but not the horrific rape and murder (and not necessarily in that order) nor the hours-long agony of the 28-year-old woman. Kitty’s brother Bill was 16, and the murder of the sister he adored affected every aspect of his life. Not wanting to be an 'apathetic bystander,' he enlisted in the Marines out of high school and lost his legs in Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand what happened that night in Queens, always seeking closure.

Yesterday his search came to an extraordinary end, which I lift verbatim from The New York Times.

To the Editor:

With Winston Moseley’s death comes, maybe, the final chapter in the tragic story of the events of the early morning of Friday, March 13, 1964.

08LkittyWeb-blog427As my mother would have wished, my family’s “better angels” do now express our condolences to the Moseley family, most especially to the Rev. Steven Moseley, one of Winston’s sons, a man of faith, love and courage, who struggled in his formative years with a stain and dilemma undeservedly forced onto his being.

May the spirit, in whom I believe that Kitty, and now Winston, reside, help resolve the eternal question: What do we owe to all our fellow beings? This is a question that each human being must strive to answer, one moment at a time. Let us join with the hope of shared egalitarian equanimity.

William J. Genovese

Washington, Conn.

Tip of the Volcano

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Iceland is magical place. Unknown

Geologically, it’s the youngest country on Earth: its newest volcanic island erupted from the ocean in the mid-1960s. It’s a land filled with raging waterfalls and bubbling roadside hot springs, which together create a nation powered almost solely by renewable energy. The Althingi, founded in 930, is the oldest national parliament in the world; and its wonderfully named poet and political leader, Snorri Sturluson, was murdered in 1241 by the King of Norway to make way for Iceland’s annexation.

A normally conservative people, with the world’s highest literacy rate, Icelanders fell hard for privatization in the early 1990s. They went on a debt-fueled spending spree, as their per capita wealth exploded and the country’s three banks became casinos for foreign money. In 2008 the banks defaulted and the economy collapsed. Icelanders kicked out their government, let the banks fail, indicted the bankers and handed out mortgage relief. It worked. The country recovered, presumably sobered.

Yesterday, Iceland’s prime minister resigned, the first victim of the Panama Papers – and certainly not the last.

The just-released numbers are staggering: 214,000 offshore accounts; 14,000 clients; over 200 countries and territories (not bad, as there are only 196 countries in the world); “leaders” from every walk of life; 11.5 million documents; 2.6 terabytes of data. Putin’s favorite cellist is worth $100 million, and FIFA is back in the news.

The 1% – or 0.1% – is not an American exception but a worldwide disgrace, uncovered by the kind of investigative journalism that has become an endangered species.

I think Bernie’s on to something.

Trust the Young

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I’m just not feeling the Bern. It’s probably an age thing. The young are flocking to Sanders’ revolution. They want to change the world . . . or so I’m told. At my age, it’s hard just summoning the energy to try and tweak it. Back in the 1960s when we didn’t trust anybody over 30, we too set out to change the world. But along the way we gave up or we gave in or we dropped out. The world changed, but not because it bent to our will. Still, I read with hope that today’s 18-29-year-olds are among those who most disdain Trump – and most strongly support Sanders.

I’m not yet ready to join them. For one thing, I believe in the power of a free – and fair – marketplace to effect change. Not the one where corporate cartels – too big to fail and too entrenched to regulate – ride roughshod over the common good, but the one where start-up businesses breathe new life into their neighborhoods; where impact investing is a powerful social, environmental and economic tool; where young entrepreneurs bring their creativity and passion to Detroit, intent on making not just a fortune but a difference. Will they stay? Will the dig in? Will they hold onto their visions? With the young, you never know. But it's exciting.

The young are the future, and they have historically been the forerunners of change. Though I’m not ready to join them on Bernie’s bandwagon, I support their journeys, and I look to them to lead the way.

Magic Carpet Bombing

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Scott Atran, a French-American anthropologist who lives in Paris, is a thoughtful and challenging expert on terrorism, who argues in “ISIS is a revolution,” that “we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.” Michael Jetter, a German-born, US-educated economist who teaches in Medellín, Colombia, has found that “media attention devoted to terrorism actively encourages future attacks.”

Atran contends that, however brutal and repugnant ISIS is to us and most Muslims, it speaks directly to people who “yearn for the revival of a Muslim Caliphate and the end to a nation-state order the Great Powers invented and imposed” and who long “for something in their history, in their traditions, with their heroes and their morals” – in other words, marginalized people seeking a homeland. This is not the first quest for a homeland in the region, and it has fired adherents around the world “in the service of some indomitable moral and spiritual force” – and created “the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force” since WWII.

Jetter found that “one additional NYT article [increases] the number of attacks in the following week by 11 to 15 percent.”

Together, the studies suggest we: (1) rethink strategies, such as the “tired call to shore up the broken nation-state system;” (2) recognize that bellicosity, fear mongering and sensationalism play into ISIS’ hands; and (3) realize that retreating into Fortress America makes the world – and America – a more dangerous place. Finally, the authors’ multinational perspectives underscore how our xenophobic fears keep us from understanding a world in which borders are increasingly outdated.

I am grateful to friends who sent both articles.

Holy Smokes

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Friday’s post brought quite a reaction, particularly after my social-media consultant (who in real life is my daughter Annie) spent $50.00 to “boost” the post on my blog’s Facebook page. I’m not exactly sure where the money went, or why, as I’m challenged in these matters, but measured solely by “cost per insult” we definitely got good value. Things started out well. Some people agreed with me, others didn’t. It seemed that a civil conversation might actually break out. “I respect your views but do not agree,” wrote Adelina Clonts in a decided understatement. “I’m glad [Obama] has someone who thinks of him respectfully. Thank you for sharing your view.”

“I’ve read all the entries since mine,” wrote Joann Williams, “and am pleased that dialogue was taking place.”

Which turned out to be the red flag in front of the bull. “You’re a moron,” responded Matt Wargny, and we were off. As the disputants turned on each other with escalating and expletive-laced ferocity, I seemed to fade into the background.

“That’s probably not a bad thing,” said Annie. “But you are still the cause of their vitriol.”

As the process took on a life of its own, and more and more Obama denigrators joined in, it started to feel like a Trump rally – although Annie assured me I wasn’t in any immediate danger: “Nah, they just want to hear themselves talk.”

Facebook has a Compassion Team to make personal interactions “more human, and more humane.” Maybe they’ll launch a political arm.