Vigilance & Resistance

These were the best by-words I was able to leave my students near the end of last year before the narcissistic buffoon was inaugurated before a crowd no bigger than his hands.

Since then, too many things to begin to comment here. And I still can't bring myself to tweeting or even facebooking. From Trump, there are astounding measures and declarations three times a day.

But I'll leave compiling the facts in view of using them against this travesty to others.

We must be active, stay safe, if possible, and protect our sisters and brothers whose nationality, skin color, sexuality, or lawful ideas put them at risk of harassment, arrest, torture, deportation, and worse. I've just signed on to this open letter, for example, to demonstrate the academic community's opposition to these repressive and discriminatory measures.

And, while I'm here, I will commend Texas Congressman Filemon Vela for his fortitude and expert use of language at all its possible levels.

Aleppo: the Heartbreak

We hear about it day in and day out. If we listen. A people martyred. A cosmopolitan jewel of civilization laid to ruin. I just shut off NPR when I hear a report including a poet still holed out among the trapped and still barely alive. I shut the radio off when I heard him say something like "I'll write against the destruction of my city…"

Meanwhile, the press, the buzz, the discussions seem poised to let oil production (i.e. Capital) dictate every moral compromise imaginable. Russia, U.S., China: How will these three big oafs carve up the world in the next decade?

Meanwhile, the top 1% must be elated: Wall Street is having orgasm after orgasm.

Mom & the Sioux People

The victory, which any right-minded person would hope holds, of the Standing Rock tribe over the corporations building the Dakota Access Pipeline is something to cheer in these bleak days for the U.S. Let's hope that it leads to scrapping the project altogether, since there's no way to realize it without crossing the Missouri River somewhere.

Can't help remembering how our mother, who had plenty else to think about keeping a household with four kids together, abidingly and nearly silently lent support throughout her life to the Sioux Nation. She knew that the people white conquerers, ravenous commerce & Capital had shafted the most were the Native people. Her donations were perhaps not much, but they were tokens of her consciousness of that fact. We miss you, Mom.

Fidel et Ali

The death of Fidel Castro conjures up the memories of nearly a lifetime for nearly everyone. And for dissident leftists everywhere, the brutality that comes with dictatorship – no matter how congenial the ideology behind it. But when I see the jubilation of all those pale-faced denizens of Little Cuba, I have to credit Fidel for all the revolution brought to the poorest of the poor on the island nation. Part of the exercise in reminiscence has brought me back to Muhammad Ali and his courageous resistance against the "good old American values" of war and racism. We all knew his quip regarding the Vietcong and name-calling to justify his draft resistance, I'd never heard this poem he read in 1971 on RTÉ.

Trumpland "diversifies"

In naming Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, Donald J. Trump is guaranteeing that secular U.S. education further declines, producing even more citizens with deficient learning to make reasoned choices for their future. As the NYT reports, DeVos is a militant advocate of vouchers for private and prochial schools, loves charter schools, and has "tried to strip teacher unions of their influence." And, of course, she has the time to do it, since she's married to the heir to the Amway fortune.

Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, Trump is putting Nikki Haley up for U.N. ambassador. The South Carolina governor has virtually no international experience except if the fact that she's the daughter of immigrants.

But the Groper-in-Chief has diversified his rollout of cabinet choices at the level of gender. And the forces of the politically correct will toil to suppress any criticism, based on the mere fact of Haley and DeVos's sex.

Tim Wise to his 12-year-old daughter

One of the millions of expressions of the sadness people all over the country feel, but one that maps out once again the work to be done. Dry your tears, little one.

No Justice: No Peace

Nice job! Fifty years after Medgar Evers, we've now got Trayvon Martin killed with the killer free. So much for the "post-racist America" charade. –At least The New York Times has something on its front page this morning to comfort me about being from Oakland. –Oh, and Happy 14 juillet, France. Although you aren't much better on the social justice agenda. –What a world. "Humans."