The Protests: Where Do We Go from Here?

On May 25, 2020, a man named George Floyd died of asphyxiation while being sat upon by a Minneapolis police officer. (*) The death of Floyd was video taped and as the horrific images washed around the internet, public outrage bubbled over into a series of protests first in Minneapolis (where the officer's precinct was burned to the ground, along with an unfinished housing project) and then around the country and even around the world.

The protests in some cases have been perfectly peaceful, in other cases there has been violence, confrontation and looting. I thought many of the cops were particularly aggressive exacerbating the confrontations but video images are never as complete as you'd like to think, so I won't go too far down that alley except to suggest that the images of looting and destruction aren't perhaps as obvious as they first appear either. At any rate, whatever your political persuasion, there is plenty of video evidence of....whatever you wanna see.

People say 'this time is different' but I'm old enough now to have heard that phrase a million trillion times and I gotta say, most of this doesn't look all that different to me. What happened to George Floyd happens routinely in America (and everywhere else, for what it's worth) and the reaction to his death does, too. This is hardly the first batch of protests I've seen and generally they fizzle out because people never really understood what they were protesting to begin with. Crowds are motivated by large abstract causes often times based around a single event or image or concept, but as time wears on the abstractions and the imagery fall away from each other and no one can quite articulate what they ever felt. As the paradigms get tangled, the problems and the solutions overlap in a way that isn't clear and could even become unproductive, reinforcing the tangle rather than loosening it.

The wrinkle in this current situation is Covid-19. Ironically the thing we obsessed over for three months and then discarded without a second thought is the real agent of change coming in the form of economic dislocations which haven't taken shape yet. The changes are coming--and don't be fooled by the recent market rally, that is not a sign of recovery but a sign of 'irrational exuberance'. We won't really get the full effect until the fall and then probably into next spring. The fact that this is an election year makes the turmoil even more confusing and the outcome even harder to see coming. (**)

I'm relatively optimistic. There's still enough time before the election that the energy could dissipate, but I suspect...well....this time is different. (Oh shit, I kinda walked right into that) The idea that protests in the street or even real widespread reform are going to end racism....well, no, that's not a function of marches in the street. But it could lead to reforming police departments across the country which would be a great outcome. Would it end violence against black citizens? No...uh....no. Racism and police departments are not synonymous, one does not imply the other, reforming one does not necessarily reform the other. So while race in this paradigm is, I think, a canard, it could still be a useful one.

The difference this time is I'm hearing the correct rhetoric--which ironically almost never happens!--and the energy underneath all of this seems genuine enough that perhaps this could lead to worthwhile change. A few things in the air I'd love to see happen:

1) Outlaw police unions. Absolutely! They should never have been allowed to exist to begin with! The only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples--the good apples don't need unions. (***).

2) Outlaw no-knock raids. If any police force ever does anything like this they better be prepared to walk into court with a wealth of irrefutable evidence that violence or danger to the public was imminent. And they better bring all their body camera footage. (The FBI could still use this technique and while I don't trust the FBI to be perfect and I do trust them to get the fucking address correct!)

3) Reform qualified immunity. This one is a little tougher to pull off because the State has to maintain a monopoly of force, thus its agents can't be truly independent--indeed, you don't want them to be, you want the State to control them and take the blame when they fuck up. Okay. But their agents (re: cops) can still be held to judicial standard in keeping with the sensitivity of their positions. I heard one suggestion that cops should be forced to own malpractice insurance like doctors: I don't think this is realistic to the position of law enforcers as it would give the cops the right to not do their jobs ('Oh, I don't like that neighborhood, I don't care if dispatch wants me to go, I'll pass'). The cops are cops, they're not normal citizens. Making them truly independent is not in keeping with what a police force is: it is a representation of the State, backed by the State, and controlled by the State. Losing that would lose all shape to what police protection actually is.

4) End asset forfeiture. I'm thinking mostly of War on Drugs type bull shit here. Seizing the assets of people accused--not convicted, ACCUSED!--is pure theft (or as Libertarians call it: taxation without representation). Armed goons from the State taking your stuff should never have been the norm.

5) Body cameras. This is a bit of double-edged sword in that if a cop shows video footage of you committing a crime in court, well, you're done, pal. The public defender ain't gonna help you out. And, again, video footage is not always the easiest to interpret. But the cops need to understand that body cameras protect them! Cops need to see body cameras as a means of establishing their credibility and warding off liability. The Cops need to be constantly proving that they are correctly administering their duties and cameras (and other monitoring systems) are the way to do it.

6) More civilian oversight boards. Okay, protesters, this one's on you: you've shown that you're capable every few years of marching in the streets to demand someone else solve your problems, are you ready to show up every Monday morning for a volunteer job of mediating between cops and criminals? Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually get your hands dirty doing the civic work. And, that's right, for little or no money. Do you love your community enough to do this? Because no one else is going to do it--this is not something you slough off on a gov't agency. Civilian oversight is the heart of any worthwhile change we're going to see. (****)

7) How about civilian parole boards that work like jury duty? I imagine a system where each potential parolee has an advocate to make the positive case and an advocate to make the negative case and a civilian panel to 'yea' or 'nay' every one up for parole. This already happens somewhat but the process could cast a wider net and lure more civilians in, which would deepen our understanding of who the real dangerous criminals are and who is ready for another chance at freedom. Again, if the civilians want control, they have to step up and be responsible for these things--and until they do they are at the mercy of politicians and their mouthpieces characterizing the agenda.

8) Keep going on prison reform. It seems to me we should be giving prisoners every opportunity to get out of jail. And, well, really what I'm suggesting here is further punishing the ones that neglect these opportunities. I'm not in favor of getting rid of prisons, I wholeheartedly believe that there are human beings that are too violent to be around other people. But my gut is that prisons contain vastly more than just those violent offenders and that the rest are in danger of becoming worse rather than better. Some sort of testing or something could be used to separate the un-reformable people from those that truly want to return to the outside world.

9) More home incarceration and monitoring. I suspect this is the way of the future regardless of the current unrest because this is purely a function of technology. It will be cheaper and easier for everyone involved if most criminals are confined to their homes and monitored remotely (this still would not apply to violent offenders, but most everyone else doesn't really need to go to prison). The downside of this is that judges could become trigger happy if they feel like there's no cost to incarcerating people, they may toss out sentences like candy and we could end up with a massive amount of citizens basically in quarantine and with a long record of petty bullshit. 

10) I'm down with de-funding various police departments. It should be noted here that 'de-funding' doesn't mean getting rid of police departments, rather it means reforming or reconstituting them, which in some locations is probably long over due. But in other locations that may not be useful at all. All this policing stuff is extremely local, so thinking of this as a blanket reform is probably not realistic. Also this is probably the kind of concept that won't find much purchase at first but may continue to percolate for the next few decades, this could become a slow motion reform movement where some communities see it as a salvation and others see it as unnecessary.  

11) I don't really know how to go about reforming this but I think the problem in the courts over the last 40-50 years is plea bargaining. First time offenders are expected to plead guilty and take the punishment rather than arguing their case on its merits. The effect of this over time is devastating: our judicial system is built on precedents and if the precedent is the accused is supposed to accept guilt without a proper defense then no one is doing their jobs. Prosecutors, defenders, judges and juries become agents of paperwork instead of actually building a judicial infrastructure--which is the whole point of that third branch of gov't. This is incredibly slanted against the poor--blacks, especially--who basically abrogate their own defense because that's what they're told to do rather than fighting for justice. This is why we have overcrowded prisons and this is why way too many people are getting serious time (or other ramifications) for mostly petty nonsense that the system shouldn't even worry about. (*****)

12) More cops with less guns. The pandemic had the glimmers of where local police departments should allow themselves to go: more community involvement with the elderly, the infirm, and others that are at the margins of society. Police departments should seek to be proactive in reaching into their communities in a way above and beyond simply apprehending criminals. Local police could be at the vanguard of coordinating civic participation in a way that is not directed at 'bad apple' police officers and doesn't require any guns. When you get into a car accident and you need an officer of the law to fill out the proper legal paperwork, you don't need that guy to have a gun on his hip--how does that help anything? The fact that the police feel the need to show off their deadly force as a means of earning the respect of the community is precisely what the community fucking hates about them! Yes, when guns are the only answer for enforcing the law, that needs to come from agents of the State. But until that force is required, that force needn't be on display.

People suggest that changing the composition of city and police department leadership is crucial and in certain cases I suppose that's true. But that's a largely political observation that I don't have much knowledge of since each police district is going to be distinct. Having more black mayors, for example, is fine with me but I seriously doubt that will change much on its own and since the necessity for these changes is entirely local, just voting for (fill in the stupid partisan bullshit you believe in) across the nation doesn't strike me as of any use at all. I'm fine with change but those changes are local, will be local and must be determined locally, so suggesting that this is necessary everywhere--and will be effective everywhere--is just empty rhetoric.

In a contemporary political sense, I would suggest ending the protests immediately but keeping the peaceful marches going periodically right up to election day. The key is to keep the spirit of the George Floyd protests alive while keeping the chaos to a minimum without being overtly political. When you insert politics you also insert the equal and opposite politics, and now you've got a soup of nonsense rather than a coherent message. The politics will handle itself and if the protests lose their shape, then that's when it becomes a detriment rather than a boon to one's political wants and needs. And I think seeing celebrities and other public intellectual types keeping that fervor alive is better than politicians positioning themselves in relation to it.

As for the election in November, well, I don't see it as nearly as important as most commentators simply because these are city/county/state issues more than national ones. Blaming/crediting the president (or the president wannbe) is just missing the point that the White House doesn't really have much contact with local police forces. But whoever you're voting for, keeping these protests going is probably necessary. 

(*) On March 13, 2020 (the day the Covid-19 lock down began if memory serves), Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed by Louisville police officers during the course of a no-knock raid seeking a drug dealer; police subsequently admitted they had the wrong address. To my mind this is an even more egregious offense but as there is no video evidence (*ahem* that we know of) this hasn't had quite the same impact on the recent protests.

(**) I think it's a bit weird that the Flu Pandemic of 1919 killed huge numbers of people worldwide and affected huge numbers more...and is virtually invisible in the literature of the time. Movies don't mention it, the theater and music of the time don't dwell on it, nor does the poetry or the politics. Just because it's effect is massive does not mean history will properly record it or culture will hold on to it. Indeed, how will the current pandemic appear in the next decade's worth of books, movies and music?

(***) Ditto with teachers unions, they should be next on the chopping block. Let me repeat: the only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples. Or didn't you realize that schools are every bit as racist, self-serving, and ineffective as the police?

(****) Combine this with a 25-30 hour work week and...are you getting more interested? With more and more people working from home cutting down on travel time...this sweetening the deal for you? More gig economy jobs where you set your own hours...ready to give more of that extra time to your community? This is where the nature of work is going which will leave a lot more time for volunteering and other civic participation--and I don't mean marching the streets! I mean actually doing stuff.

(*****) The recent obsession with the 13th amendment, for example, is totally lost on me. The prisons are not the meaningful part of the justice process, they are the last stop of it. That's not the problem--the problem is the first day in court. If you bungle that, you're in trouble. Most of the 13th amendment reexamination seemingly revolves around private (or for-profit) prisons, but again, that isn't the problem at all--and focusing on that is a really unfortunate waste of time. I don't pretend to know how private prisons work but it seems to me that gov't has monopsony power meaning the prison company has no market power whatsoever in the relationship (except the gov'ts naturally move very slow and are at the mercy of sudden changes). The relative ownership of the facility is irrelevant. If the gov't actually ran its own prisons does that somehow guarantee better treatment? That was never true in the past, don't know why it would be in the future. If the prison company was a joint stock company and all the stock was owned by black people, would that make a difference in the life of black prisoners? No, not necessarily. Was life better for black people in America before the advent of private prisons? No. You don't end up in prison because prisons exist, you end up in prison because your lawyer didn't get the job done. And plea bargaining is another way of saying your lawyer didn't get it done. You need to fight the battle in the court, fighting it in the prison is too late. (Incidentally as an side to this footnote: I'm not opposed to prisoners being allowed to work inside of prison if they are fairly compensated, but they should not be forced to work; I believe each citizen's surplus value is their god-given possession until they die, something the gov't should nurture rather than capture)

The Protests: How We Got Here (The manner of protest)

When Martin Luther King was putting together the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, he first went to white churches and implored to them that this was not a matter of race, that it was in fact a matter of economics and that poor whites were suffering alongside blacks and the two communities would do well to join forces. To which the white churches responded....no, it's about race.

The 'system' isn't racist. The 'system' is ruthlessly economic and wants everyone to be productive and make money. In fact, the 'system' cannot abide those that don't produce, so having a chunk of population off to the separate-but-equal side that doesn't participate in the larger economy is anathema to the 'system'. Which is why (I contend) that expanded industrial production of WWII demanded that blacks (among others) must participate in the economy in order to reach economic efficiency (which is the inborn desire of any economic system). Blacks must no longer be seen as separate and must in fact actually become equal because anything less makes no sense to the 'system'. MLK saw that black workers needed the buses to get to work and that polite society must honor that simple necessity. And he put it to the test. 

Transportation issues, too, were at the heart of Plessy v Ferguson (1896): separate but equal would imply, in that case, that railroad companies would now need to have a Blacks-only 1st class railroad car for every trip even though hardly any blacks at the time would've been able to afford a ticket. A railroad company carrying around an extra empty car could be ruinously expensive and is at best utterly useless. But the Culture of the South at the time demanded that blacks and whites remain separate. This is bad business but if the customer base makes demands, the corporations are obliged to supply. 

Plessy v Ferguson (1896) reminds us that the working class has the power to bend the Supreme Court and the corporate structures to their demands and at this point the working class demand was still decidedly white. Was it the 'system' that imposed separate but equal? No, this is a warping of the 'system'. It was the People, the illogical People who chose wastefulness and animosity over integrated forms of travel because social change is a hard thing to endure. Seeing someone else prosper gives the feeling of losing ground, even if that isn't the case. And in 1955, MLK was right: the economic circumstances were just as disadvantageous for the whites as it was for the blacks. But that was true in 1896 and the white people bungled justice then, too. In both cases the State, the corporations and the wealthy allowed this injustice to take place because another Civil War would've been worse (for them) than just letting poor people fight each other. 

MLK, echoing Gandhi (who became enlightened when he, like Homer Plessy, was thrown out of a 1st class train compartment in 1895), ushers in a wave of peaceful protests building on the legal victories of Thurgood Marshall before the war and the beloved stardom of Jackie Robinson after the war. He was adamant that the movement be peaceful and (even more to the point) legal. The point was to show that black people were citizens deserving of Constitutional protection and cultural assimilation just like everyone else and that it was their birthright. The notion of separate but equal was never real because it never applied to anyone else--there was no one to be equal to! Brown v Board of Education (1954) stamps this out judicially and even puts forth pronouncements for how it is to spread (namely "at all deliberate speed"). Again, the 'system' is ready to move on from segregation and embrace full economic efficiency, it is the Culture that drags its feet because social change must be forced.

The example of the Civil Rights movement forms the template of ongoing complaints of all stripes for the rest of the 20th century (re: the peaceful righteous fight is co-opted and re-purposed for everyone else's uses). From here the culture of protest takes over in America and, to my mind, has an entirely counter-intuitive effect: it makes people think they're rising up in the streets when increasingly they're just blowing off some steam. They congratulate themselves on speaking truth to power when really they've been given a place to stand and rigid rules of conduct and are mostly just harmlessly absorbed. Protests rarely lead to violence, indeed they are rarely even worth mentioning as they have become so ingrained in the civic culture. Protests have replaced parades: people are getting together to complain rather than celebrate, but the effect isn't wildly different. MLK was fighting for something, most people since have just been trying to look like they're fighting for something.

The turmoil of the 1960s begins an era where the white middle class was tearing itself apart and had no need whatsoever for the poor whites. They would rather magnanimously grant freedom to African-Americans than deal with the white underclass, which is now even more beholden to keeping black people down as a means of deluding themselves into feeling like they are living the American dream, that they are doing things right, that they are in God's good graces, etc. 

For the wealthy 'race' is an illusion. They don't need to pretend to be superior to blacks--they have more money in the bank, which is the only superiority they ever needed. The enlightened whites have discarded 'race', thus they want to treat blacks and other whites the same. This works for the wealthy because since they are in better economic standing (the only thing that matters), everyone else is naturally kinda all the same anyway. 

But to the poor whites, they see their world steadily eroding because they can't keep up with the pace of advancing technology and social change. Poor blacks have increasingly imbibed their suffering as race-related and while that may well be true, it is ultimately secondary to what they need to be doing: namely, accumulating capital to escape the misery of economic impoverishment. As the wealthy grow ever-wealthier, they grow further away from the others of their society, while the poor are continually getting pushed together and the racial differences that used to separate them are no longer honored in polite society.

Blacks are not victimized by the 'system', they are victimized by those keeping them from being a part of the 'system'. Blaming the 'system' is missing the true danger, it is the barriers to joining the 'system' that bedevils them. Separate but equal was not the 'system', it was the absence of 'system'. Homer Plessy bought his ticket for the 'system' and was denied; Rosa Parks bought a ticket for the 'system' and was taken to jail.  

The 'system' is color blind--it is completely blind. But we don't experience the 'system' in our day to day lives, we experience each other in what we call 'culture'. But we live in a multiplicity of paradigms with a range of metaphors, tastes and social signals. You might find it easy to know which side you're on, but how to represent that and/or aid your chosen group is not at all plain to see.

With the outgrowth of social media and smart phones in the early 2000s, the culture is now primed on a granular level. This could be dangerous, riotous, but more often than not is petty and minimal and burns out quickly. Social media has a more insidious effect--creepy because it is inside of our homes rather than out there in the streets--but at its best it does at least suggest that the 'bad apples' can be singled out. At its worst, though, it is a replay of the Cultural Revolution: each citizen is now a petty tyrant and the People are a mass of judges, juries and executioners. 

The MLK model of peaceful protest is probably dead. From here the cancel culture will mature and take root.

So far in my reckoning I've basically only dealt with the richest of rich and poorest of poor. This makes up roughly zilch percentage of the population, but establishes the visual template seen by the vastly larger middle class. The middle class watches this all play out on their media screens and they choose sides and they go forth in righteous indignation. Race is just a detail but by now this has created a schism within white rhetoric causing people to choose sides, generally based around either preserving the past or looking to the future. Some of the wealthy may enjoy the new middle class war, some may hate it; some rich are unaffected by it, some rich are in great peril. Some poor folks may be encouraged by the turmoil they see in the streets, some may be horrified by it. Some will see the looting as an unfortunate by-product of so much chaos, some will see it as the point all along. Some will become enlightened to the crimes of local police, some will see those police as more important than ever! These may be entirely different groups of people that think they've chosen the same thing. And they don't understand that they're now in opposition to each other. And a lot of the people who think they disagree with each other may be working side by side, while some who see each other as enemies will be doing all the same shit.

We exist in a multiplicity of paradigms and when a variety of paradigms converge, no one really knows what's going on any more. All of life becomes inchoate and the active people aren't really doing anything while the inactive people may have far more influence than they realize. This is, I believe, what is living in our television sets and smart phones right now.

According to Wikipedia, the violence of the past two weeks is pretty much evenly split: protesters injuring cops, cops injuring protesters, protesters injuring each other at a pretty similar clip. Some cities are perfectly peaceful, some are experiencing all kinds of wanton destruction. Some people just want to fuck shit up, some people truly want to be heard, some people want to publicly grieve, some want to express their anger, some want to keep others from expressing anything at all. And they're all doing what they're doing in the same place at the same time. The tangle of desires and motivations and plans of action threaten to be merely a meaningless jumble. 

As for the 'system', all it wants is money. No Lives have ever mattered to the 'system' because the 'system' is going to outlive us all and therefore does not need us as much as we need it. And the only differentiation it makes between us is the money in our pockets--not the kindness in our hearts, not the color of our skin, not the sweat of our brows. It'll take black money and yellow money and red money and white money, too. (It'll take stolen money, inherited money, gambled money, criminal money, found money....) When your ability to make money has been eclipsed, that's when rioting in the streets becomes the only answer. 

Lives matter to other lives. We should be taking care of each other. The 'system' will help us stay healthy, it will help educate our children and it'll help us feed ourselves and have fun. It isn't going to give our lives worth because that's not what it does. We have to do that for ourselves and each other and if we don't no one else will. The 'system' is built for those who help themselves and the enemies of the 'system' are those that attempt to keep others out. Homer Plessy knew that in 1896...and the Supreme Court buckled under the weight of apartheid instead of doing its job. MLK knew that in 1955....and the white churches blew their opportunity to be on the right side of history. 

Right now, the 'system' is trying to repair itself from the corona virus lock downs. The 'system' will be going through a major overhaul in the next 12 months or so and these protests are about (hopefully) positively positioning the Culture to get it right this time. I don't think things are different, I think the Culture has evolved to where they always should've been: namely by realizing that the problem isn't the 'system', it is the lack of 'system'.

The Protests: How We Got Here (A selection of American history)

Many years ago while killing time in the basement of a college library, I saw a graph in a giant book of gov't data. The graph always stayed with me (though I have no clue how to find it again now): it ran from 1870-1930 and showed a perfect inverse relationship between the price of cotton and the lynchings of black people. When the price of cotton was up, lynchings were down and when the price of cotton was not good, then the target minority of American society became terrorized even more than usual.

That chart still sums up well in my mind the nature of life for black people in America to this day. When times are good, they're given a little more room to breathe, when times are bad black folks are made to suffer the worst of it. The unequal lives of blacks in America is cultural and at the heart of it, I'd say that's what these ongoing protests are about: cultural togetherness. But beware: the pointless nonsense of politics (which is not gov't, by the way) always lurks in American culture and how the citizenry interprets what it sees varies wildly.

I've recently developed a whole new understanding of the importance of separating church from state in the early days of the Republic. The church was largely where the anti-British revolutionary fervor came from because of the inborn fear that the Church of England would seek to dominate religious expression in the colonies. But once the Revolution was won, the fears of Anglicization were assuaged and the Republic was in place, it was necessary for the founding fathers to cut that shit off in a hurry. By separating the church in a bold and public fashion, it removed all hint that the churches were being oppressed, thus their message of oppression was now neutered and the gains of the white colonists would not be mingled with ongoing talk of the abolition of slavery. The abolitionist movement in the early 19th century largely existed among the church-y types, who were now free (eh, free-ish) to keep the revolutionary fervor going but in a decidedly watered down context, where every church was free to interpret the ills of slavery in their own way rather than in a singular voice. By removing the gov't from church oversight, it set the churches against each other and kept a unified message from ringing out from the pulpits.

Legally speaking, slavery was a bargain the North were stuck with since before the Revolution (*) so they had to continue to endure it. The economic downturn of the 1830s and the great territorial expansion that followed war with Mexico in the 1840s kept the politics of the North engaged in other areas but slavery steadily pulled at the fabric of the nation. To my mind it was the Dred Scott decision (1857) that finally broke the whole system because the judiciary could no longer figure out how to incorporate slavery into the legal structure any more. It just didn't make sense, it spooked the population, the fugitive slave laws weakened northern governors and the component of slave labor infiltrates all markets making them at the very least unrealistic. Slavery had to go because by this point it pervaded the lives of people who didn't care about slavery--that's when social change becomes unavoidable.

Civil War...Emancipation Proclamation...Lincoln is assassinated...the Reconstruction....

And here we come back to the graph I mentioned above. During the period between the Civil War and World War II life is okay for black people in the good economic years and utterly terrifying in the bad years. In the post-Civil War economy 'good' periods and 'bad' periods were more pronounced than ever before (this is the large scale introduction of boom-and-bust into American economic cycles). Existing largely at the bottom of the economic scale, they would've felt the bad years worse than everybody else while feeling the good years the least. After the Civil War the North is more interested in controlling the political and economic paradigm shifts (such as the Credit Mobilier Scandal of 1872) than it is in properly enforcing the re-born Constitution in the South. It is the newly freed slaves that bear the brunt of that inattention, for though they were the bedrock of the new changes in American politics and culture, once the slaves were freed they no longer served any political purpose. The 'system' is newly re-built with a 'culture' that is not welcoming to the newly freed blacks.

During this time we see the birth of Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes and the steady extension of Jim Crow laws specifically aimed at keeping blacks from voting and otherwise participating in the culture. One could point out that the subsequent sharecropper system (pretty much the only option for most of the freed slaves in the south) and the work farm prison structure were at least somewhat egalitarian in that whites would've been forced into these structures just as blacks were. This suggests that the social 'demonization' (for lack of a better term) is of the poor rather than any specific group of the poor while the legislation suggests that it  is specifically designed to keep blacks in a state of permanent poverty. The State is reinforcing the Culture and while this is entirely un-Constitutional, the favored classes are cool with letting this slide as long as they are untouched by those living at the bottom of the scale. But we see quickly: the scourge of slavery has been replaced by the scourge of poverty.

So when the Supreme Court delivers Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the under girding laws and social mores are in place such that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' must've seemed an elegant legal remedy as opposed to the twisted logic necessary for the Dred Scott Decision some four decades (what Lincoln might've referred to as 'two score') earlier. Thinking the black people could be free within their pocket of the law is something that smart people probably patted themselves on the back for because it gives the appearance that the wretched underclass possesses the chance to grow on their own....except that it doesn't. In fact, it reinforces the inability of that underclass to participate in the larger society, while allowing the leisure classes to think they've done a good thing.

And again we come back to the aforementioned graph: in good times blacks may have luxuriated in their separateness, free from the attacks of aggressive mobs of people who felt themselves left out of the prosperity of the larger economy; but in the bad times, there was only, as Ida B. Wells famously suggested, the Winchester rifle separating black people from that collective (misplaced) anger. 'Separate but equal' was never equal and, actually, never even separate because the deprived population was always available as a target minority when times were bad--a circumstance willingly allowed by politicians who would rather feed Christians to lions than take any of the blame for a bad economy.

It is easy to paint this arrangement in the most harrowing of Biblical terms. But there is one thing still offered to the black population of USA: the economy. Economic growth lifts all boats--which is a phrase that ignores that all boats will still maintain the same relation to each other, such that when the poorest people are richer, they are still the poorest. But within the segregationist framework of the post-Reconstruction USA, there is still economic growth that allows for a hint of social mobility. So in the early 20th century there is the establishment of the NAACP and the faint stirrings of change in the form of the legal fund that finally found some success in the 1930s. Notice the fight for black people to be included in polite society with access to proper legal remedies and the larger economy takes decades of finding legal loopholes.

I've been watching films of the 1930s lately and one thing I've noticed is the seeming explosion of ethnic voices: Greta Garbo, Adolphe Menjou, Charles Boyer, Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Bela Lugosi, just to mention a few. The pre-code years of cinema were a place where people who had largely been left out of the upper crust were able to find a footing and popularity in the American culture. (Morris Dickstein reinforces this observation in the novels, poetry and theater of the time, as well, in his book Dancing in the Dark) However, this clearly does not include black people. Sure, there are a handful of notable Hollywood titles with prominent black characters (Imitation of Life, for example), but blacks are certainly not a part of the new inclusion that Italians, Jews and other Europeans experience. Part of the reason would've been Plessy v Ferguson: since the movie theaters were segregated, it meant that blacks got their own movies, so there were 'race pictures' and other representations of art just for them. (**) White society didn't have to do anything for black people because they had their own 'equal' culture.

I bring this up to mention one of the few black images I've noticed so far from this time: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). There is one telling montage of this white man's descent into the horrors of work farm life: shots of men staring off in despair inter cut such that the white men and black men are equal in their despair. A moment of 'equality' that is actually quite the inverse: the white man's despair is that he is now equal to a black man. The black despair is normal, the white despair is horrific and that they are equal is the chill meant to run down your spine. And though we are to feel the injustice the white protagonist feels, it isn't meant to transfer to the blacks; indeed, the blacks are there to show just how horrible life can be even for whites. This is a specific image in a specific film but couldn't this have extended to how white Americans generally felt during the Great Depression of the 1930s?

December 7, 1941: the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. The next day Congress declared war on Japan and in the spring of 1942 began building up the military (***). In order to do this USA had to vastly increase the production of electricity (namely by damming every river west of the Mississippi for hydroelectric power).

I mention this because it is my contention that once the power is created, it is not turned off. And the subsequent economic growth after WWII came from this excess industrial production and that the social changes of the Civil Rights era were necessitated by this change in the supply of electricity. (Changes in the means of production yield changes in the relations of society...or something like that)

Soon after the war, Major League Baseball integrates with the appearance of Jackie Robinson in 1947. I would suggest the reason for integrating baseball earlier than pretty much everything else in America was purely economic. During the war baseball's biggest stars went off to fight in Europe and in their absence the Negro Leagues actually became quite popular. While the Negro Leagues weren't the only game in town, for a while there they were the best. After the war, when the white stars came back home, they were still struggling at the box office compared to the Negro Leagues. Black stars had been born, black talent had been identified and the white audiences didn't mind coming to their games. Major League Baseball was in crisis and the only solution was integration. The audience demanded the best talent and for the first time Major League Baseball was obliged to give it to them, as opposed to just the best white talent.

Even though the African-American community between the Civil War and WWII wasn't allowed to do much, it still managed to produce a number of fascinating writers, activists and artists; I would suggest this is due to the overwhelming economic growth in the late 19th century, which would've provided opportunities even to the lowest on the social scale. But Jackie Robinson was the first true black celebrity, the first to be able to shine in his chosen field in front of a nationwide audience. all because the economic opportunities in the black community were finally allowing for the ability to compete with white society: the price of cotton was no longer the key to social existence.



(*) In short: the North needed the Revolution, the South did not. The colonies were not able to develop their own international trade pacts because England held a monopoly on all colonial production. This hampered the northern colonies, which more or less produced all the same stuff England did; but this was no hindrance to the southern colonies that produced a variety of goods otherwise unavailable in England. If the northern colonies revolt and are successful, then they are just surrounded on all sides by still-British colonies (recall that the War of 1812 just a few decades later is a war with Canada, a group the northern colonies were unable to convince to join their revolutionary effort). The northern colonies needed allies, they needed the southern colonies to come along. The northern colonies had steadily removed slavery and disliked the practice but they needed the southern colonies, so they agreed to keep slavery in place.

(**) As a 21st century movie nerd, I ask the question: where are those race pictures now? Hardly any of them survive--for there surely must've been a lot more than are currently available. We've gotten loving restorations of Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, but where are the restorations of Oscar Micheaux and....well, I don't know any others (Micheaux being the exception that proves the rule)? What exactly did that parallel (separate but certainly not equal) representation of black entertainment look like? And where is it now?

(***) Which never stopped.

A modest proposal to African-Americans

In the midst of the George Floyd protests, one of the recurring images is the forcible removal of statues of Confederate commemoration all across America. These statues have been slowly disappearing over the last ten years or so and recently this process has been sped up. (Good)

Allow me to suggest: African-American groups (the NAACP, for example, or perhaps a new group dedicated to this mission) should be buying these statues and preserving them. A site should be founded where all of these statues can be collected in a large open-air display where people can gather to remember what has past in American culture. Plaques could be laid noting not only the history of these mutinous awful people but of the statues themselves, a lot of which would bear the names George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in whose honor they would have come to reside at this new museum. 

Ending slavery is just as much a part of America's history as slavery itself. And if African-Americans control this reminiscence, it can become the cornerstone of their contribution to ending the scourge of forced labor all over the world as well as here in our homeland. Imagine annual Juneteenth and Independence Day pilgrimages to this site where African-Americans can gather and remember not only what was lost but how instrumental their community was in eradicating the evils and surviving the hardships. Let the outdoor display be a long walk up to an African-American history museum, a row of vanquished enemies before seeing the displays on Frederick Douglass and Howard Thurman and Alain Locke and Harriett Tubman.  

Yes, I realize a shame museum is perhaps a negative realization, a negative actualization, but history demands shining a light on the worst of our behaviors just as much as our best (USA is perhaps the world's leader in both!). For African-Americans it would show that they were a part of this community all along, even through the centuries when they weren't allowed to participate. And it would be a reminder that this land of the free was never free and it would give embodied examples of the people who fought to keep it un-free.

And, yes, at first undoubtedly you would have protests: White Lives Matter banners would appear, perhaps even angry white hands trying to destroy these statues or lay waste to the site. I think pretty quickly that would melt away and if not, the irony of a police department forced to protect these monuments would be telling--every protest would simply reaffirm the museum's mission. Would this movement become a new strain of white supremacy in America? If so, I think it would only be the pale gasp of a pathetic and desperate few who would quickly and clearly be outed.

You could start with that statue of King Leopold II recently toppled in Belgium because that man enslaved more people than all the American presidents combined. And Christopher Columbus, who discovered a world of people and immediately enslaved them (and if it arrives headless, well headless it should stay). As a student of history I believe it is important to remember all of the past, even the bad shit--and perhaps the bad shit most of all! 

I understand the urge to destroy the parts of history no one likes, but that's not how you learn from history. Don't cancel the past. If these relics inspire anger now, they will inspire pride in the future. If this sounds like a collection of failure, it will be a collection of successes to future generations.

Just a thought.

Covid-19 (The re-opening)

A while back I wrote that June 5 would be the day when we could re-examine our nationwide condition vis-a-vis Covid-19. Okay, that was yesterday, so where are we? Uh....we still don't know, but I think we've more or less given up on caring about the coronavirus for now and--who knows?--perhaps that is a step forward.

I heard the other day that in the USA we have performed 19 million Covid-19 tests so far. In a nation of 320 million people that has been enduring this virus for at least 12 weeks now, 19 million tests is barely a beginning. Until we do the tests--and keep doing them--we'll never know what's really going on.

I think we can easily say by now who the most at-risk citizens are: the elderly (especially those in group care facilities) and people with preexisting respiratory conditions. I haven't seen any evidence that we've properly locked down those facilities, though I think we have learned to not make them worse, which is a start. And we can probably predict, too, who the most likely spreaders are through contact tracing, so perhaps we can delude ourselves into thinking that testing doesn't matter. But I would still suggest that testing is all that matters.

Bill Gates is willing to pony up gajillions of dollars ($750 million was the figure I recently read) to get going on a vaccine. That's great, I'm all for it. But where are the benefactors for testing? The gov't (namely in the form of Food and Drug Administration) is too stupid to get of its own way, so we can't rely on the State to do what is right (or even obvious). But why haven't the billionaires stepped up to pave the way for the testing? Only testing will tell us how this thing spreads, how far it has spread, how much further it is likely to spread and how much we can expect future outbreaks. Without continued testing we'll never really know how the virus works or what it does once inside the body or which areas of the world are safer and which are more at risk.

The peak of death seems to have long passed, perhaps even the peak of the spread. And the fear we exhibited early on has given way to impatience. Somewhere around three weeks ago, I'd say, people started going back to their lives. We still don't have restaurants and bars or large gatherings, which seem destined to return to full scale only with a vaccine. But the rapidly rising unemployment has begun going back in the right direction and generally being out and about seems back to something like normal.

But make no mistake, we haven't learned anything yet. We don't know terribly much more than we did 12 weeks ago, we've just collectively decided we don't much care any more. We've decided that 'flattening the curve', which seemed like the only way to save civilization 10 weeks ago, is no longer important, we've moved on from it as easily we've moved on from the Tiger King phenomenon of oh so many weeks ago. But I'd say on June 6, flattening the curve is still the way to go until the vaccine arrives (a wide variety of reports, but it seems like by the fall we'll have...something). The virus is coming to get each and every one of us, perhaps fatally....that hasn't changed. 

The People led us into the lockdown and the People have led us out. Are the People better educated now? (Doesn't seem like it, they're just less fearful, not exactly the same thing) Are we just luckier now? (Warmer weather and months of better habits have helped, but for how long?) Will the people be smart enough to go back into lockdown when the coronavirus is resurgent? (Uhh....I dunno) Testing would answer all these questions but no one seems to mind being ignorant for now.

Okay, I can live with that. Frankly, quarantining only brought improvements to my life, so I can't complain if everyone else is ready to seek out the 'new normal'. But until we get testing, regular testing, constant testing, we won't really know what this thing is. Oh well, hopefully it doesn't matter.

Digital Citizenship

Might as well go right to the beginning, huh? I'm talking about a whole new interface of citizenship and it would begin with the birth certificate.

At birth each American child (*) would be issued a birth certificate (name of child, date of birth, gender of child (**), names of parents, names of legal guardians, place of birth, height and weight, and the name of the person that completed the certificate itself). Immediately with this comes a Tax Id # (ugh, currently we call these Social Security numbers but I'd get rid of that), the establishment of an account with the Federal Reserve, automatic registration with e-Verify and the Census Bureau, and an individual dedicated email address with 1TB of storage. Your email address (in tandem with a second private email address) becomes the core of who you are, your interface with everyone you meet for the rest of your life.

Social Security? Well, my impossible dream here is that Congress will create individual retirement accounts (IRA), that are actually capitalized rather than this leaky slush fund of IOU's that Congress has been pissing away for decades called Social Security. Obviously this is probably not possible--there's no actual money there, so unless Congress were to imagine IOU's as actual currency (I suppose this could be possible but probably not very healthy), we're going to be stuck with this scheme of stealing from young workers to pay retirees even though it is embarrassingly crass and inefficient simply because the 'do-gooders' of our society have upheld it as 'helping the poor'--even though that's precisely the opposite of what happens. (smh) Social Security is the worst thing that ever happened to American workers, especially the poorest of them, but good luck finding a politician that would (or even could) truly explain what a waste of capital it is and how incredibly detrimental to the lives of the working poor Social Security has been. Phasing it out can begin once a new system has been constructed.

E-verify? Newborn babies are cited for work status? Yes and they'll stay registered as such until retirement. Labor statistics that are 100% accurate and up to the minute are vital. Data is everything in our world now and our society would be best served by having as much of it at its disposal as possible. Unemployment isn't simply something you register for when you are out of a job, it is something that is tracked from birth to retirement and your relative job status is a means of determining your relative taxation rate (positive or negative). In times of emergency (such as we have now seen), this could be a method of making quick payments/loans/etc to individual citizens. Also, this becomes a mechanism for tracking each person's vaccinations and health status.

Census Bureau? Yeah, this would require a vast expansion of the budget of the current Bureau (though not necessarily its reach), every single day rather than once per decade, but it needs to happen anyway and the Census Bureau is the perfect place for it. Why? Because the Bureau is uniquely focused on the citizenry and nothing else, is insanely dedicated to privacy and has absolutely zero reek of politics (because heretofore it has been so fucking basic as to be un-sexy even to the conniving-est of deep staters). Collecting specific data on each individual citizen would be massive amounts of data entry but the raw general data could then be farmed out to other institutions and corporations for actual analysis. The Census Bureau does one single task as quietly as possible, then disperses the general data--no specifics--to others for practical value. How does it do this? Simply removing names, tax IDs and birthdates (to be replaced by age) in any data disbursement. Massive amounts of demographic data becomes available without impinging on the privacy of a single person. And this data could be disbursed weekly or at least monthly.

The Federal Reserve? The Fed would honor each registration of birth with $40,000 worth of brand new 18-year bonds, that would mature on the newborn's 18th birthday. Four bonds of $10,000 would be in your account: one for education, one for health, one for housing and transportation, the other just for being born. And they could be spent, here's how: when one takes on an educational opportunity, for example, one pays by crediting a portion of their Education bond to that teacher/institution; if the institution charges $150 then $150 of that 18-year bond would then be credited to that institution and they would collect when that bond matures. Wouldn't the interest payments eat that capital away? No. There is no interest, there is simply the principal to be paid at a future date. Why would any institution want to work this way? Because when you have a massive population of people giving a $150 of future earnings at a time, then the institution itself becomes capitalized through this debt obligation and as more institutions take on this form, then an entire market based on the transfer of future bond obligations is born. This capitalizes the debt market for education without punishing each individual student with massive debt obligations. Don't get me wrong: this wouldn't pay for one's entire education but at least the first $10,000 could be accounted for and spent more wisely (and if you're pleased with your level of education, good for you, keep the cash when the bond matures).

Now by the time you turn 18 your entire education bond will likely be used up. Oh well, you got the first $10k for free and by wisely apportioning your share, you maximized its value while doing your part to create and capitalize a whole new market for education. And if you decided to ditch education at an earlier age, then more of that $10k cashes out to you on your 18th birthday. Not necessarily the wisest option....or maybe it is...I dunno, it's up to you.

Giving every citizen $40,000? Seriously? Yeah. Hell, I think it would be cheaper than what we have now! By setting up each citizens with $40,000 in the form of 18-year bonds, the Fed knows to the penny how these funds are traveling through society and it gives each citizen an enormous amount of control over their choices. This favors 1) the bold who master their opportunities and 2) the plodding masses that just keep doing it the right way day after day, because even to them they will eventually accrue a good chunk of change.

Unfortunately, this does not favor those with horrible parents. Would it be possible for parents to squander their children's fortunes? Yes, it would. I'm not opposed to the idea of money-savvy parents investing that $40,000 better than in the form of 18-year bonds, so taking that initial investment from the Fed and increasing it through some other method of investment is a win-win for everybody...when it is successful. But those parents that foolishly waste their children's capital would find themselves in a brand new form of public shaming--possibly even prison--so they better choose wisely or face social ostracism that will be hard to outgrow. Children are still at the mercy of their parents. We can only have faith that parents will be wise enough to make forward-thinking decisions for their children. (And, truth be told: it'll only be the second generation of parents, that is those that were born into this system that would really understand it, so it'll take 30 years for this to really sink in...hmmm, I probably shouldn't have said that...)

Until you're 18, you are still a "Child". After 18 you become an "Adult" ("worker" would be more apt but probably not as politically palatable). That doesn't mean that Children wouldn't be allowed to work, indeed I'd rather see high schools and community colleges, in particular, take on a lot more internships, apprenticeships and job training that would literally involve sending students out into the world instead of languishing in schools. (***) And since their labor would be entirely tax deductible (indeed negative taxation would allow them to accrue credits whenever they get out into the world and start producing), it would allow them to actually start banking savings before they turn 18.

Your Federal Reserve account, too, could be a method for forced savings--reserve requirements extended to individual citizens just as they are for banks and financial institutions--that would give the Fed a blueprint of which people should be required to save money and which would be encouraged to spend more. More people would be making more and saving more and producing more.

The basics of your birth certificate form the basis of your digital citizenship. From here an entire dashboard of interaction can be crafted that can monitor your health, your finances, your vaccinations, your taxes, your job history, your educational accomplishments,your prison record, your registered vehicles, even your social media standing, etc. Where does this dashboard come from? Well you'd see all of it but in fact it would be a series of discrete pieces of info provided by each representative agency. For example, when applying for a passport, the State Department could issue one immediately if your info is up to date and the relative info they would need would be available to them--but nothing else. And the info that you see in your dashboard relating to your passport would come from the State Department, but not your educational accomplishments, that piece of data would come from another agency. The two agencies are contributing to your one single dashboard but they'd be ignorant of each other's contributions. You'd see it all but no single agency (except the overall webmaster) would have access to any more than the piece they have contributed.

In your digital citizenship the information you possess about yourself would be entirely in your control. For example, you might not want to share your health info with a total stranger...unless that total stranger is a paramedic charged with saving your life; you might give that guy a little more access to your data even if he is a total stranger. Or when going into a job interview, you would want to give them complete access (temporarily) to your entire educational history or you may want to share a bit of your financial background to show that you are a responsible citizen...or maybe you wouldn't, the choice is yours.

Or how about a method of verification where the gov't can project that your data is up to date without actually revealing said data. For example, you would be required by law to update your dashboard once a year--that is, check in with the Census Bureau that you are in fact still alive and that your work/tax status (and perhaps an medical questionnaire) and your contact info is up to date. The period of your check in would be the 90 days from the 1st of the month before your birthday month to the end of the month after your birthday month. (Ex: your birthday is August 16, you would have from July 1 to September 30 to check in) This would register you to vote, confirm that your tax schedule is correct, serve as your annual registration of house, auto, boat, etc. and whatever else you need done. It is reasonable for the gov't to expect you to confirm your existence once a year, considering the convenience of citizenship, this is not a high price to pay. But doesn't everyone pay taxes on April 15? Not any more, everyone would pay on rolling basis that's based on your birthday.

So, say you're applying to rent an apartment, the potential landlord can check your dashboard, where he would see nothing of pertinent value--except that the gov't can confirm that you are up to date. The gov't does not reveal your tax ID# but it can confirm that you have one and that is properly active.

Yeah, I know: the civil libertarians have been warning you against this for eons. I get it, I'm creeped out by all of it, too. But this isn't a function of gov't, it is a function of technology. And the technology exists to streamline all of our interactions with the gov't in such a way that the gov't can actually be helpful to us! (Ain't never heard a civil libertarian say that before, have you?)

Our possibilities as workers are too important to leave to a rickety system that exposes us to more harm than good. The danger of this system is identity theft--which already happens. And the danger of that does not come from the gov't (all the 'identity' there is to thieve is info the gov't already has), it comes from our fellow citizens. We need the gov't to have the reach to protect us from each other and to be the guarantor of contracts that is the gov't's mission.

Only when the gov't creates a system that protects our identities while allowing us to have them, can we have true liberty and true connection with our homeland. And gives heaping helpings of analyzable data for the gov't and culture to improve our lives without sacrificing anyone's identity. Will it be expensive? At first but in the long run it'll create efficiencies that will save future generations gajillions of dollars while protecting their Constitutional rights.



(*) This is all about citizenship. Non-citizenship is entirely separate. Non-citizens can be absorbed into this system in other ways, but they would not be receiving all the perks of citizenship because they are citizens of another nation. This is a function of gov't: the Constitution of the United States does not apply to non-citizens. There is a movement afoot to discard terms like 'alien' or 'legal/illegal' in favor of 'citizen' or 'non-citizen'---YES! This is a good move. It puts the language firmly in the legal context rather than the cultural one (which is begging for willful misuse).

(**) Yup I'm already getting hot button on the first step. I believe birth gender of the child should be recorded so as to compile data on potential future births. That is, how many baby-making females exist in the country at any given moment. Data is vital, ladies and gentlemen, for the health and well-being of the Republic itself. Again, though, this information would strictly be generalized and never specified, so as to spot larger trends without implicating any given individual. And in the individual's daily life, he/she would be free to 'identify' as he/she however one likes.

(***) Yeah, I should probably admit up front: I kinda hate schools. I think the problem with education is we keep thinking of it in terms of 'schools', which is a horrible way to think of how people learn. Schools want you to believe that the only learning you do is in schools--which is not merely patently false but the opposite of what any good school should be teaching. I think breaking students and teachers away from each other (I'll return to this) is the next great step in education. Say it with me: Education is about learning, it's not about teaching; education is about learning, it's not about teaching; education is about learning, it's not about teaching; etc. ad infinitum until it finally sinks in. Education is a demand problem, not a supply problem: until you want to be educated, you ain't learning shit. The relative supply of education is as wide as the universe but until you demand it, your wants and needs will just be stars in the sky.