Trümpland über alles

Wondering – now it appears it might not be such a joke after all – what a president Trümp would look like?

Just a taste, but in headlines, this is what just his campaign for the GOP nomination is looking like (a lot of these articles are from this week):

Trump’s rallies are full of protesters, shouting, and sometimes even violence

Trump’s name takes new meaning as racist taunt

White nationalist group makes robocalls supporting Trump

Former KKK grand wizard David Duke says voting against Trump is treason to your heritage


Here's a thoughtful question:

Is Donald Trump a fascist?

(opinions differ ... )

Donald Trump is an actual fascist

I know fascists; Donald Trump is no fascist

(although the article does say "Trump's xenophobic rhetoric, his demagoguery, and his populist appeals to citizens' economic anxieties certainly borrow from the fascist playbook.")

What does the GOP think of all this? Are they as alarmed as those on the left? (Does it matter?) Tough to say.

Establishment GOP now shifting to Trump

GOP establishment bashes Chris Christie for endorsing Trump

Of course, everyone talks smack about their rivals, but this alarm bell ringing Kasich ad isn't especially out of line.

Well, maybe Kasich is kind of reasonable? Maybe voters will wise up and he will get the nomination, and if the GOP takes the White House, it won't be totally awful? Not likely, but regardless, a reality check:

Kasich defunds Planned Parenthood in Ohio


Alright, well whatever ... this is all just drama. News networks have sold out and it's all about ratings. It's all about ad sales. It's all clickbait.  And probably no one is taking the KKK seriously.  We are waaaay past that (except for police killing black men). Right?

Wrong.

Trump breathing life into America's dying white supremacist movement

Trump’s America arrives: 3 muslims shot execution style in Indiana

(there are many articles on this incident from more "legitimate" news sources, but this is in my opinion the most apt headline)

3 stabbed at KKK gathering in CA, including one with flagpole

Southern Poverty Law Center intelligence report: amid year of lethal violence, extremist groups expanded ranks in 2015

^ this is a whole series of articles, among them:
The year in hate and extremism


How did we get here???

This is SO DUMB, IT CANNOT POSSIBLY BE REALLY HAPPENING. TELL ME THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.


By now you are probably anxious to read something intelligent about this grim situation, so try this:
Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone: How America made Trump unstoppable

"A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go."

Go ahead and scream.


I'll leave you with this:

Donald Trump will always be a short fingered vulgarian

America's Next Top Diplomat

Before reading this blog post, I humbly ask that you watch the video of Donald Trümp's Nevada caucus victory speech.  Keep a barf bag nearby, or pretend it's an SNL skit. Whatever gets you through it, but unlike republican caucus goers, remember not to vote (or raise your hand, or walk out the door with your unsubmitted voter registration .. or whatever it is people do at those things).

Here is the video.

Made it?  Ok. Kind of reminds me of a victory version of this:

If we can fast forward to a day in the future, when Trümp has had his fill of xenophobic followers cheering for him in arenas and has retired from politics (fingers crossed we see that day, and soon), maybe when our country has indeed become a better place (not the type of "great" place that keeps immigrants out with a wall), this is pretty fucking funny. This is great satire. It's all air: there's no shape to this speech, no indication that he's ever read a newspaper or that he's qualified to run a bingo match, let alone a whole country. Someone gave this man a microphone and he said "Vote for me! Trümp! And we'll have a great country - we'll win! Thanks voters! We're winning! Thanks immigrants; I hate you! And you voted for me anyway. Yay! Win! Win! Win!" and everyone cheered! They listened. They were captivated. His income is higher than most countries.

The Donald (not a person; a corporation, thus the ability to paralyze voters with his speech) has said that it's just interviewers who ask him questions about policy - voters don't care.  He is absolutely right. No one is looking to him for substance. They are just looking for a charismatic dad to tell them it's ok they hate Muslims - so does everyone else at the Trump rally! Maybe everybody everywhere! What a relief. So tiring, walking on eggshells about it. Yay! Winning!

I think we're in real danger here, both of taking Trümp far too seriously and of not taking him seriously enough. (As a candidate / as a threat to international diplomacy.) We give him substantially more air time than any other candidate. This is our fault - we're legitimizing him, his fans, his wealth, his fame, by giving him almost as much press as the Kardashians.




I did just say that. I said it.

But what's a more apt comparison? Does Kim K even speak? I've got no idea .. her lips could be glued together.  But it's impossible not to know her.  What does she do? No clue. Fame is now earned for nothing - why not the presidency? He won't play White House unsupervised.. the Kochs write all our legislation at this point, our petulant senate won't show up to work unless they get to oppose the black man on everything; they've made a mockery out of government.  So rises a mockery of a candidate. He's a caricature that breathes. He is yelling from a podium, with hamster hair, "My words mean nothing! You'll all just vote for me anyway!" And the crowd swells with relief! No one is going to ask them to understand politics. They don't even mind being called dumb. It's like a tailgate party.

Are we really doing this? Guys, this is real life, not reality TV. Or have they merged? can't keep track of who owns what.

Who could take this guy seriously? But we must. Laugh at home, put your brain in before entering a voting booth. He should not be where he is. This is far from ok.

People are sounding warnings here and there, but no one's really listening. Well, nobody but the Germans.

Joe's dead phone

campus racism part 3: "I'm not racist but ... "

… nothing good ever follows that sentence. It’s solidly reemerged as a trope in the American cultural lexicon. I’ve been hearing / seeing it a lot. (I say seeing, because so much of the social fabric of America now unfolds over social media, and also because in face to face conversation, people seem to behave better.)

A few weeks ago, I was going to write a lengthy follow up piece to my post about white student unions, but so many other things (mostly shootings; also an uprising in anti-Muslim sentiment) have stolen my attention since I first began composing my thoughts about this new uprising of racism, all my ideas got eclipsed by distressing and immediate events that call for as much examination and which have faded from the spotlight in rapid succession. It’s good that we have all developed short attention spans, because it allows us to process shock and outrage in a quick compressed cycle and move on before another stunner hits the news. Back to it though, a summary of my philosophy on the matter: the Black Lives Matter movement, and before BLM the election of Barack Obama, have provoked an enormous racist backlash. Obvious. There’s a great book about the concept of backlash against social momentum, and though it’s about responses to female progress, I have stolen the term and applied it to social movements of all types. Social progress is hard earned and demands a fight. Demands it, absolutely. I do not use that word sloppily. But what happens when you fight? Someone fights back. Privilege fighting back, pushing against a movement for equality, is a backlash.  It is predictable, like a tide. Two steps forward, one step back (although when economic inequality grows, social progress erodes along with it ... a whole nother can of worms).

I was going to write about Amazon’s dumb retort to suggestions that they should remove (contextually appropriate but offensive to the unaware) subway ads for The Man in the High Castle; I was going to talk about a New York Times article about campus racism culture (if there’s rape culture, I’m going to call it if I haven’t already: there also is racism culture) that with some words changed, might have been mistaken for a fluffy human interest piece about siblings squabbling over TV time (I don’t know where that article is. Probably I read it in a fumed state of mind.) … but as I said, too many other things have grabbed my attention, and I could not follow up on any of those tiny tree branches.  So off they go into the wind. American culture needs a therapist.

Worth noting is that I read an article proposing that the white student unions were largely the work of one or a group of trolls. It's pretty flippant. I don’t know if that’s the truth, but it’s worrying even if so, and there are plenty of signs that racists are mobilizing whether more hate groups exist in real space or are just growing conceptually. I have removed the schools’ contact info from that post. I had written a few in California to inquire about their response to having a white student union forming, and none responded. In the letters I framed my concern something like this: although I am not a student at their school(s), the influence of students on the community around them is an important one. And I believe this. Student dialogue is important. This is where a lot of great thinkers and great writers (and great observers of human behavior and cultural trends) develop their communication skills. I was implying, additionally, that colleges have a connection to the rest of their culture and are not just elite institutions where rich kids talk about nothing.

Also I’ve rubbernecked, like a car accident, a number of social media conversations about Black Lives Matter and am always stunned by people openly expressing their hostility towards the movement, unaware or unperturbed by the frequency of police executions of people of color in this country (or possibly: unaware of their inner racist).

Further, I’m going to go right ahead and blame Donald Trump’s presidential bid for smoking out all the latent bigots.

And I guess that sums up the icing on what I would have written in the past month, if I'd had any philosophizing in me.

campus racism part 2: white student unions

See PART ONE.

This, which is occurring right now in 2015, national student "white rights" organizing is very troubling. It can't possibly lead anywhere good.

I'm sure this does not represent all of them, and I'm sure also the list will grow and grow, but for now here (below) is a list of American and Canadian colleges and universities that have "white student unions" (that I was able to discover easily - they are networking like a fraternal organization on Facebook).  Most of them are copy/pasting their mission statements from UCLA's, which someone has worded very carefully if not stolen from a minority student union text (but in the context of expressing "white rights" – which historically have not suffered systemic oppression – the tone of the statement is clear, the organization is obviously meant to be provocative, and the page contains obvious white supremacist interaction, as well as objections from international students and students of color).

See what Wikipedia has to say about the White Student Union.

Example mission statement posted below.

Meanwhile, write to the dean's office of some schools with white student unions and ask how they intend to address the threat these organizations imply to students of color.  (Many universities have several dean's offices corresponding to school of business, school of arts and sciences, etc .. generally I have picked the one that best corresponds to the liberal arts campus, or when possible, a direct link to student affairs)

(update Dec 24/15 - I am excising the contact info - see "campus racism part 3" for explanation, but what follows is the original list of schools that I posted)

UCLA, UC Berkeley, Penn State, U of Illinois, Georgia State U, Tarrant County College, Ohio State, Princeton, University of Western Ontario, Florida International University, U of Central Florida, University of Florida, Loyola Chicago, Washington State U, Rutgers, University of Cincinnati, University of Missouri (Mizzou), NYU, Umass Amherst (boo!), Stanford, U of Minnesota, McMaster University, NC State, University of Arkansas, UT Austin, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Occidental College, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, Texas Southern University, University of British Columbia, CSU Fullerton.


*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT CONDONE THIS CONTENT* - SAMPLE WSU STATEMENT (I have just copy/pasted this, removing a repeated paragraph, but the emphasis is mine):

We welcome students of European descent (and allies) to follow and contribute to the ____ White Student Union. We were inspired by the new White Student Union at UCLA and hope that our initiative will move our brothers and sisters across the country to do the same.European-American students on college campuses face unique and immediate challenges that are ignored or even actively denied in today's cultural climate.We unapologetically provide a safe space for white students to air their true feelings about the future of our nation, discuss and reflect on the lessons laid down for us by our great European writers, philosophers, and artists, and develop a positive program to restore the pioneering will and greatness of our unique and virtuous people.
We affirm the dignity and ancestry of our proud people who have gifted the world with countless works of beauty, science, and wisdom, and are committed to promoting a dialogue and political resistance that will secure a future for our posterity and spirit.
At the same time, we do not wish to denigrate or harm any other group or ethnicity.
We condemn the cowardly campaigns of moral subjugation and propaganda that seek to instill self-hatred and surrender within European-American youth and justify the continued invasion and degradation of the lands, institutions, and cultural heritage that is rightly ours.
We seek to honor our past while promoting a positive, peaceful vision of the future; one in which every ethnic group has the right to organize and represent themselves and their interests.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to be sick ...

campus racism - what year is this?

Campus racism has gotten out of control. UCLA and UC Berkeley (and Penn State and others) now have "White Student Union"...
Posted by Laverne Shirley on Sunday, November 22, 2015

Cinema PTSD

Great movies I can't bear to watch a second time:

Morvern Callar

No Country For Old Men

Maria Full of Grace

Network

Dancer in the Dark

American History X

The Deer Hunter

The Piano

Life is Beautiful

Manhunter

Reservoir Dogs

Taxi Driver

The Professional 

Monster

Panic

Boys Don't Cry