It's only words...

It's only words...

So Mother Jones has reported that the EEOC has "paused" investigating complaints from workers who were targeted based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Georgetown law professor Brian Wolfman is quoted in the article as calling the move "troubling."

Okay, besides the obvious offense of the action itself, I have two real issues here.

First off, we must stop referring to such orders as a "pause." That's a damned official lie. A "pause" without a time frame or a context for a resumption is not a "pause." It's a total stop. They are putting an absolute end to enforcing protections against workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and we should not by our language let them get away with even hinting otherwise.

Well, yes, okay, if you're actually quoting an official statement, use "pause" - but put it in quotes followed immediately by noting that it is a lie.

The more important point, however, comes from Prof. Wolfman's quote.

Because NO, DAMMIT, NO! Stop using terms like "troubling" or "concerning" or "worrisome."

This order and its ilk are legally, ethically, morally, outrageous, not just "troubling." They are based on and are despicable lies, not just "concerning." They are the words and actions of scum-sucking, bottom-feeding bigots swimming in a noxious swill of hatred, fear, ignorance, and self-loathing, not merely "worrisome."

We should never, ever, let the bigots, bozos, and bosses determine the terms of the "debate" - which I shouldn't even call that because it implies two sides each trying to present honest arguments and there is only one such side here and it sure as hell ain't them and I only use it for the lack of a decent alternative - and that includes acquiescing to transparently vapid terms and outright lies like "pause."

Another example of how we screw this up is when we report on Tweetie-pie's executive orders with phrases saying he "ordered" this or "suspended" that or "fired" (or "removed") the other - many of which actions he had no authority to do. We usually know he doesn't have the power, we even say he doesn't have the power. So why in hell do we headline it as if he did? And why do we tolerate media expressing it that way? Headlines frame the issue and so the discussion. So it should always be he "tried to" or "moved to" or, better, "falsely claimed the authority to."

Why do I go on about this? Because the words we use matter! Not just what we say, but how we say what we say matters!

This is not a new notion. The older among us may recall Newt Gingrich's 1990 GOPer memo called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," in which he listed specific words to be used by GOPper candidates to describe themselves (such as "opportunity," "truth," and "success") and others to describe their opponents ("decay," "failure," and "corruption" being three).¹

Those with somewhat shorter memories may recall all the buzz around linguist George Lakoff's 2004 essay "Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse," which brought the concept "framing" into the mainstream of lefty thought, though it seems and sadly, more as a fad than an on-going practice. (Unlike the reactionaries, who appear to still be using the Newtwit's list.)

Even now there is continuing research into framing as a psychological concept (see here and here, for example), exploring how the way something is phrased, how it is presented, affects how it is perceived, research (and advertising practice) of which we seem to take no notice. There was a time - and here I'm harkening back to Gene Debs - when the left clearly knew how to speak in the cadences and language of those we addressed; the workers, the oppressed, the outsiders, all those denied justice. Somehow, over the decades, that faded away and while there are still those who have that skill, either naturally or by training, too many prefer the cool tones of dignified exchange to the moving power of emotive words and I cringe hearing Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries delivering the latest Democratic Party statement with the passion and urgency of a high-school debate.²

We are not talking about plunging into raging fury here; we're not discussing shouting, screaming, and screeching. We are talking about language, about passion in words to express "the fierce urgency of now." Maybe Schumer and Jeffries can't do it; maybe they feel it is "unbefitting their position." In that case, they should find someone who can do it and put that person before the cameras or at least join them on stage to follow up what they say.

Because how we say what we say matters! It always did, but perhaps now more than ever. Because, contrary to what we have heard and been told, we are not "on the precipice" of a Constitutional crisis, we are in one. Thia is not a time for temperance in tone or equanimity in expression.

This concern with language is not a new one for me; it goes at least as far back as the early '70s, when in a newsletter I edited for a local peace group (I called it "Lotus," of course) I wrote an essay on the topic in which I expressed what is still my bottom-line rule of effective communication: "What you say is not as important as what the other person hears."

In the early '80s, I ran for public office on a third-party ticket three times. Afterwards, I gave a talk on "Lessons Learned," among which was the observation that while the major parties could rely on a commonality of understanding to make their empty slogans sound like detailed programs, the left too often piled our language with references and phrases with meanings clear to those already convinced but like an alien - like UFO alien - language to others, and so made our detailed programs sound like empty or even incomprehensible slogans. That lead me to giving the advice to "Avoid buzzwords!" I tried to make the point by recalling the occasion when I learned after a debate that someone in the audience had said I had the ability "to make the most radical proposals sound like a voice of sweet moderation." It was clear what I said, but how I said it mattered.

I note this not to pat myself on the back - okay, maybe a little - but to make the point that this has been a topic of concern across the years from a variety of people and we still still still keep making the same mistakes of addressing issues by accepting the right-wing terms of debate.

We have to stop. We have to stop. We have to stop thinking that if we just quietly explain the facts with charts and numbers and graphs and court briefs but without the instant impact of art and the poetic passion of words that we will somehow take back what is being taken from us, much less make actual gains. We need to re-learn the message that, as I have written many times in some form, this one from 1991,

[t]he movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not. We didn't build a movement against the Indochina War by harping on "the shortcomings of both sides" but by blasting it for what it was, a monstrously immoral and evil enterprise which should be halted immediately. We didn't built movements for civil rights, women's equality, or a cleaner environment by worrying about how we'd be received by the bigots, sexists, or greedy corporate bosses - or how we'd "look" or who we'd "turn off" if we labeled the discriminators and despoilers for what they were.

I’ve gone on too long. So I’ll wrap up by saying that, in sum:

Words matter.
How we say what we say matters.
Never let your opponent frame the debate.
Passion and substance are not mutually exclusive - but while substance informs, it takes passion to make a movement.
Speak the truth.

And carry it on.

¹ There are various similar forms of the list. Two others are here and here. Remember that "turnabout is fair play."

² I still say one of the mistakes the Harris campaign made is that it started with a message of hope for and enthusiasm about the future only to fall back into the arms of the party establishment with its thudding, unmoving, message of "We're not Trump."

Issues and Emotions

Issues and Emotions

It’s hard to know why certain issues just strike you more than others. Why does issue A move you to tears or frustration or rage or pain or (often) all four while issue B just does not have the same effect, even as you know it really is just as important, impacts just as many people just as deeply?

Even as I write that, I find myself supposing it’s in a way a good thing: Caring about every issue, every problem, every reality, that deserves care to the degree such care is deserved would, I suspect, be emotionally paralyzing or worse. So we each need to devote most of our available energy to the issues that move us and trust in others to take up the slack on what parts of the rest move them.

My inability to do that lead me to a place where I couldn’t function politically. Every call to action was as urgent as every other call, every cry for aid was as important as every other cry for aid, every plea for my attention and time was as important as every other plea, and I suspect you know where this is going: I burned out. Totally. After I burned out of political action - twice, in fact, with the recovery from the second still in progress - I committed myself to the idea (which I now advise to others) that what matters is not how much you are doing, but are you doing what you can.

And yet I remain a little ashamed of my failure to do more on the causes I believe in. My whole purpose in being here is to try to accomplish at least a little of that “doing.”

Which is a very roundabout introduction to the rest of this blathering.

My housemate and I were on our way to have Christmas dinner with her family. They are MAGA, not so deep red that we can’t maintain family contact, but still, yeah. So there’s always a little bit of tension for us in such events. Usually, I think, more for me, in that I’m more intensely political than she is and she is so devoted to family that she can forgive almost anything. She can be angry, frustrated, irritated, and feel sorry for them - but still, in the end, forgiving.

But after a major and I expect rupturing blowout with a brother (who would not be at the dinner) who called me a “terrorist-loving anti-semite” for daring to suggest that Gaza was more complicated than his view of evil Palestinians all of who want to murder all Jews on the one side and thoroughly good Israelis on the other - with the label extended to her when she tried to express what I said even more gently than I already had - I’m sure her radar for conflict was already on high alert.

Anyway, on the way there I told her that for the sake of family peace I could let a lot of stuff go, including the anticipated gloating over the election, but there were two issues I could not, would not, let pass: the slaughter in Gaza and transgender rights.

So as it turned out, dinner went well with no gloating to speak of, it was about 9pm, people were chilling out, that somehow-a-classic Christmas movie “Die Hard” was on the TV, and someone said something about trans people. It (somewhat surprisingly) wasn’t hostile, but knowing how rapidly MAGA conversations can spin into wilder and wilder territory, my companion took advantage of the time to say “It’s getting late. We should get going.” Crisis averted, but I did have a real sense of relief when we got to her car.

Which just brings me around again to the start: Why those two issues? What makes them more important to me than other ones? Why did I know I couldn’t let either pass even at the cost of a family disruption? Why do they move me more than other issues, other crises?

After all, what about abortion rights? The rise of Christian nationalism? Poverty and economic inequality? Voter suppression? What about the fact that as of the day I write this, 16 wars are going on in the world which together have killed about 150,000 people since the start of 2024 - not including another 17 "low-intensity" conflicts with an additional nearly 10,000 killed.*

And, I mean, seriously, you could make a case that the single most important issue facing the world today is climate change. Unless emergency action is taken, climate change - global warming, whichever, it’s the same thing, to-may-to, to-mah-to as the old song has it - will cause deeper, longer-lasting, and more widespread damage to more people than anything else except for nuclear war, and while that’s an ever-present risk, short of a major, major, major miscalculation on Ukraine, the likelihood appears for now on the low side.

Meanwhile, climate change is real, is now, is every day and worsening and we face a clearly possible future of floods and fires, droughts and deluges, famines, more intense storms, areas becoming literally too hot for human survival, resource wars, unknowable numbers of climate refugees, rising seas, dramatically altered weather patterns, and more, all impacting literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

I know all that. I can talk on an at least reasonably well-informed level on the science involved and in fact have in previous years on other forums posted a good number of times about just that. So it’s neither a matter of being unaware or unconcerned.

Butt it doesn’t bring me to tears. Trans rights does.** Gaza does. Why, I don’t know. I can come up with reasons they are important in general and important to me in particular, sure - but that doesn’t answer the question at hand. Being reminded of the Christmas dinner prompted me to wonder about that “why” to, frankly, no useful end and ultimately I had to say, well, they just do because that’s the way people are: different things touch us differently.

What matters now is that I find them so emotionally overwhelming that I have found it almost impossible to write about them here. Admittedly, I’ve not been particularly regular in posting, but even so, I don’t think I’ve posted about Gaza in just about a year and I think my only post about trans rights was as part of the “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back” effort in early December.

And that lack violates why I’m even here at all.

In the first half of the ‘90s, I published a little newsletter consciously modeled on I. F. Stone’s Weekly (which by the time I became aware of it had become the Bi-Weekly and if you don’t know who Izzy Stone was, damn well look him up). In the first issue of my newsletter, which was called Lotus (of course it was), I tried to explain my intent by starting with a story of a friend who said she envied my comfort at giving speeches, to which I responded by saying I envied her gregariousness, which gave her skills at door-to-door petitioning. “I don’t think she believed me,” I wrote.

But, I noted, I meant it. We all have skills we can use in movements for justice and none are greater or “more important” than others and the issue isn’t what skills you have but are you using them.

Some, like my friend, are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute. My dream for Lotus is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceed mine. Something that helps.

Not long after, I received what was intended as a friendly critique saying I was limiting my audience by being so upfront with my opinions and, let it be said, judgments. I replied by saying that Lotus was built on advocacy.

Its audience is indeed those who in a broad and general way agree with its point of view. Its aim is to rouse and inspire, to provide background and analysis intended to put a context to ethical judgments and thereby spur action. In other words, “something that helps.”

That has always been my goal in every forum in which I’ve engaged, whether blogging, YouTube, the platform formerly known as Twitter, public access TV, of late including Substack, or wherever else: to be of use to the overall struggle for justice.

And I perpetually wonder if I’m doing any good.

And at this point I don’t even know if there was a through-line, a coherent thread, in this meandering mess. I just know I have trouble forgiving myself for having contributed so little over this past year-plus to the causes that now mean the most to me and have to figure out how best to correct that. One possibility is to reframe my vision for what I publish from essay-length commentary with multiple data links (which I used to turn out on a reasonably-regular basis) back how it started, with a greater number of short but informational news items. We’ll see.

Because caring less is not an option.

*"Killed" here means "battle-related deaths (military and civilian) as well as civilians intentionally targeted" and so does not include deaths from such causes as lack of food or clean water or health care, which often account for three times (or more) as many dead as direct combat - meaning that 150,000 killed could be more like 600,000 (unless those others are somehow less dead) and maybe another 40,000 dead in those “low-intensity” wars.

**Do? Does? I think of it as a singular, as a group noun, so, yeah, “does.”

An oldie, not a goodie

As a follow-on to the previous post, I felt this one worth repeating.

It's the last of a series of pieces I posted in another forum in the wake of the 2016 elections. The first of the three, noting the line "Every nation gets the government it deserves," bitterly declared

We do not deserve to be a free people.

We don't care about being a free people. Too many of us care too little about the effect we and our decisions have on others.

Too many of us are too easily taken in by a line of patter and bilge that appeals to the worst in us, the basest of our fears and the deepest our prejudices, too easily taken in no matter how transparently vacuous that patter and bilge is. That is, too many of us, not to put too fine a point on it, are racist, sexist, xenophobic, ignorant, know-nothing mouth-breathers.

The second noted some victories achieved, some gems within the ashes, and declared the necessity of carrying on the fight as best we can. It ended with this:

Silence is not an option; acquiescence is not an answer.

We have to vote, petition, and lobby, yes, but we have to do more, we have to be insistent, noisy, disrespectful, rude, we have to fill the streets and perhaps the jails and who knows - I don't expect it, I don't predict it, but I accept the possibility of it - perhaps even fill the camps.

Which lead to this, a slightly re-written version of the original (to correct what otherwise would be anachronisms), offered here at a time which genuinely feels worse, more threatening, than before.

-—

And yet and yet and yet - despite the victories, despite the progress over the course of decades, we now face the continuing advances of the reactionaries, marked by GOPper control of the White House, the Congress, and through that the Supreme Court, along with a majority of state legislatures.

In the face of such continuing advances, in the face of the sexism, racism, xeno- and transphobia, and more that have been revealed by and justified in this and previous campaigns, revelations that have not lead to their being rejected but to their being embraced and even celebrated, in the face of the sheer enormity of the task before us, we must face the fact that for the foreseeable future, for as far out as at least I can imagine, that all our efforts may - and I am stealing something from William Rivers Pitt here - all our efforts may come to nothing.

We are down to the ethic of total opposition [he wrote], and as lonely as that estate may be, it is what we have, and we owe it to those who have suffered beyond our comprehension to continue as we began.

I refuse to concede defeat in any way, shape or form. Yet I must consider the possibility that all efforts will come to naught.

Pitt reminded us of a scene in "The Lion in Winter." As Geoffrey, John, and Richard await their executioners, Richard demands that they face the end with strength. Geoffrey scoffs at him, saying "You fool. As if it matters how a man falls."

Richard's reply is telling: "When the fall is all that's left, it matters."

Even at our lowest moments, even when we just want to give up, pack it in, and move to a commune or to Canada - or to a commune in Canada - we have to remember that even in failing, the manner in which we fail matters. Even in falling, the manner in which we fall matters. It matters, that is, it matters for the future; for the longer term than we perceive, it matters whether our failure is marked by despair or by defiance.

Henry David Thoreau, in his classic essay "On Civil Disobedience," wrote:

I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name - if ten honest men only - ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

Of course he did not mean, as some seeking to dismiss him have, that such an act would mean the instant end of slavery. Rather, he meant that a seed would have been planted that would eventually, ineluctably, lead to slavery's demise. "What is once well done is done forever" because even if it failed to stop slavery at once, the manner of failing mattered.

None of what we do is for nothing. Because immediate victory is not the only end worth achieving; what can be won now is not the only cause worth fighting for; even being able to see victory in the future is not the only reason for keeping up the struggle. It is also, even if only, for ourselves, for our own integrity. A member of the anti-Stalinist Russian group Memorial, founded by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Sakharov, said

I do what I do because I owe it to my family, to the victims of my country's injustices, and for my own honor.

Or as Wendell Berry put it,

[p]rotest that endures is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

Or perhaps you would find the most telling version comes from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

We owe it to others; we owe it to the victims, who have suffered more than we can know; we owe it to the victims who in the days to come will suffer more than we can know; we owe it to ourselves; we are honor-bound, even when we feel discouraged, especially when we feel discouraged, we are honor-bound by justice to carry on as best as we can.

So for now and for the future, the issue, I say to you (and to myself, for that matter), is not "What can I do?" It's "Am I doing what I can?" Perhaps that only amounts to a little, to what can seem so trifling as to not matter, but matter it does.

We are each of us as individuals called, required by what is right, required by the call of justice, to do what we can. No one can expect more of us - but we should expect nothing less of ourselves.

And if despite all, we fail? Then we fail. When Dylan Thomas's father was old, the poet felt the old man, so energetic in his younger days, had given up on life and was just passively waiting to die. Saddened and distressed, Thomas cried out to his father

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We do live in a darkening time, a time being marked not by failure to advance but rather by the cold prospect of failure to hold on to the little that has been gained, a time not of standing still but of sliding backwards. So yes, we may fail - or at least seem to because true victory (and getting Kamala Harris elected would not have been such a victory) is far enough off that we will not be able to see its approach.

While I think that unlikely (the title of my blog, after all, includes the phrase "surviving a dark time"), I have to admit that such failure is possible. But that possibility makes it even more important that we do not go gentle into that good night but that we rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

I hope to see you in the legislatures, in the courtrooms, in the school board meetings, in the community groups - and yes, in the streets and even the prisons.

Carry it on.

Now what?

Welcome to Jon Swift Roundup 2024 readers! Please feel free to offer any comments or feedback and check out any of my other posts.

Two notes: The George Will quote was from his syndicated column for January 2, 1995, and was "'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal." (For those who don't know, Will is what passes for an intellectual on the right.)

And the "another post" mentioned at the end is here.

In the wake of losing an election, some consideration of why your side lost, that is, doing a postmortem, is an entirely reasonable idea.¹

Assuming, that is, the desire is actual analysis and it's done right.

Neither of which we got. No actual analysis and what was done wasn't even done right. So let me start this by laying out my own bias, my own analysis of the "why," admittedly a limited one.

I think the Harris campaign made three significant mistakes. First, she didn't separate herself from Biden on Gaza.² Doing so would surely have cost her some votes but just as surely gained her a good number more.

Second, she began with a message of what could be summarized as "hope and the future" only to turn her back on her base, preferring to vainly seek votes among those all but mythical "moderate" GOPpers and the all too real 1% by campaigning with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban instead of with UAW President Shawn Fain or other labor and progressive leaders.

Third, the last weeks of the campaign revolved almost entirely around "I'm not Trump." (Which was, interestingly, the same mistake made in 2016.) A legitimate stand, particularly in the face of the genuine threat to democracy, but nowhere near adequate standing alone, because people are almost always going to vote on immediate concerns as opposed to future hypotheticals, even likely ones.

None of that, of course, was raised in postmortems from the corporate media, political big heads, or consultant coterie. Except, that is, to brush by them in their haste to get to the REAL problem.

Oh, no, they cried almost in unison, the result was all because Kamala Harris was way, way too much into "identity politics," in particular in support of transgender folks who, to hear them say it (but not openly) really are kinda weird and who everybody hates and who we should not only throw under the bus, we should back over the corpse a couple of times to be sure.

Dan Moynihan at Can We Still Govern brings us a New York Times tetrarchy:

- There is Bari Weiss, denouncing "running on extraordinarily niche issues that you find on college campuses and in gender studies departments." Forgetting that, as a married lesbian, just a generation ago she and her rights would have been such a "niche issue."

- There is Bret Stephens, insisting that "today’s left increasingly stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms." Because regarding basic human rights as worthy of respect is "bizarre."

- And there's Nicholas Kristof, assuring us that Democrats can only compete if they “focus more on minimum wages and child care than pronouns and purity." As if dwelling on "pronouns and purity" described her practice rather than his paranoia.

- And of course, there is Maureen Dowd, smirking the right-wig mantra "woke is broke" and charging

progressives failed to realize that women can be worried both about reproductive rights and their "daughters compet[ing] fairly on the playing field."³

As if loss of reproductive health care was an equal worry to the hypothetical possibility of facing a trans girl on the other school's team.

In the course of this, she approvingly quoted James Carville and Rahm Emanuel and actually called Michael Dukakis an "avatar of elitism," a title that fits her far better.

On top of that, Dowd got extra exposure from Mika Brzezinski of Joe Scarborough's MSNBC morning program, who read the entire thing on-air the day after it was published. Scarborough, for his part,

went on a wildly transphobic rant on [the day after the election] against “men who transition after puberty competing against young girls,” saying that opposing trans-inclusive athletic policies is “not a hard call.”

In other words, it was a buncha damn, comfortable, secure, rich, white people saying that the rights of vulnerable people which are of no benefit to them are therefore unworthy of consideration.

But of course it wasn't just the media elite, the sneering also came from inside the Democratic Party itself.

As I think folks have heard, there was New York Rep. Tom Suozzi declaring the party must “stop pandering to the far left” on trans rights. “I don’t want to discriminate, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports," he said, adding "Democrats should be saying that.” Which means, of course, that he does want to discriminate.

More surprising to some, there was Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, offering "I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” rather unsubtly patting himself on the back for his supposedly courageous expression of transphobia.

Fortunately, there has been pushback from other Congressional Democrats against these and other trimmers⁴ who are dipping their toe in the waters to see how far they can distance themselves from trans rights without political cost (or better yet, with political praise).

Related to which we now have Jonathan Larsen of The Fucking News reporting that the DNC's search for a new party chair is being defined by people screeching that the party has become too "woke"⁵ and demanding it must "return" to the "center" because they "don’t want to be the freak show party" and do want a party chair "who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day” and I guess women and people of color need not apply for inclusion - unless, I suppose, if they drive trucks (The image of the "guy" "truck driver" came up more than once.⁶)

It appears that's truer than not, since one DNC member described the field of potential chairs as “White Guy Winter,” with the list essentially empty of women or non-white people but including, deity help us, Rahm Emanuel.

All of which goes to raise the point I really wanted to get to. This sort of "we've gone too far" tut-tutting and hand-wringing is neither new nor actually about tans folks except as they serve as the target du jour.

It is, rather, part of an overall effort by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, the I suppose you could call it legacy party, to find someone, something, some force, to blame for election losses that does not involve, that actively avoids, looking at the campaign itself, looking at the idea that maybe it was the party apparatus that screwed up.

Indeed, it's hard to find any analysis from any such quarter that does not praise the Harris-Walz campaign with terms like "great job" and "no mistakes" while dismissing critiques out it of hand as unproductive or even destructive finger-pointing - while busily pointing destructive fingers at anyone convenient, particularly the vulnerable population of trans folks still struggling for basic recognition of their rights, indeed of their existence. (I say that knowing much the same could be said of a good number of other vulnerable populations; it's just that this time it's trans folks.)

Same as it ever was: After 2016, the same "blame anybody else" game got played. There, the blamed included third party voters, sexism, Russian interference, James Comey re-opening the email-investigation, millennials, and even Bernie Sanders - but not, oh no of course not, the party or the Clinton campaign.

This time it's "wokeness" and trans people, but the real point is the same in each case: to protect the power and position of a party hierarchy more dedicated to their prestige and perks than public benefit and committed to "winning" as a concept rather than as a program of progress.

It other words, it was intended then and is again now to smack down the influence of the actually progressive wing of the party by reasserting the control of the institutional party apparatus.

Which means - coming to the blunt bottom line - that it's time to realize, we have to realize, that the Democrats are not on our side, not on the side of doing what is right and just, not on the side of progress rather than stasis.

Some individual Democrats, yes. The party itself, no, and all the talk about "moving to the center" is about just that: stasis. It's about not advocating anything that does not already have wide support, about following, never leading, about, bluntly, being damn cowards. And doing it even as both public polling and election results on ballot questions says that on a number of those untouchable "too left" issues (including trans rights) the public is already there.

Okay. After all that, you'd think I'm chock full of idea about what to do now.

I'm not.

I'm just sure the one thing we need to do is not give up. To keep going. To seek comfort and find strength in community and, as others have noted, that community is out there and may even be next door.

So we have to, each of us in whatever way we can, just keep going. Just persist. Just be stubborn. If that's too much, then just survive. But like the man in the movie said, "Never give up! Never surrender!" Or, if you prefer a musical reference, "Rejoice, rejoice/We have no choice/But to carry on."

Because it can get better. And comparing ourselves to the 1900 that George Will said the conservatives' goal is to recreate, we have come so far as to astonish the most stoic among us. Even within our own lifetimes we have seen changes to be celebrated and worth building on. And, romantic that I am, I still believe in the line about the moral arc of the universe.

However - and I know it's hard to hear but yes, it's true - it will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better. Which brings me to something else. But that's for another post.

¹Chess grandmaster and one-time world champion Jose Raul Capablanca once said "I have learned more from each of my defeats than I have from all of my victories.”

²Early in her campaign, I thought Harris, who expressions on the need for humanitarian aid was more intense than Biden's, was trying to distance herself from him without openly breaking from the administration of which she was still part. The same issue faced Hubert Humphrey in 1968 over the Indochina War. He finally, "tight-lipped and grim," made the break. She never did, which raises the very real possibility that she didn't separate from him because she never wanted to. However, that doesn't change the judgment that not doing so cost her a good number of votes.

³Recent studies challenge that "concern." One, from 2021 from the Center for American Progress, shows no impact on girls' participation in sports from allowing trans girls to join those teams. Another, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2024, found that "physical performance of nonathletic trans people who have undergone GAHT for at least 2 years approaches that of cisgender controls." Finally, in October the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study saying that at least by some measures, transwomen athletes may be at a disadvantage as compared to ciswomen.

⁴"Trimmer" (referring to trimming the sails of a ship) was a term used in labor struggles to refer to those whose support for worker rights shrank as soon as things got tough.

⁵The next time anyone complains about anything being "woke," tell them the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" and ask them why they think that's a bad thing.

⁶You know the saying about generals always planning to fight the previous war? It appears the Dems will go after the "bros," planning to fight the previous election.

Another comment worth repeating

On July 23, the estimable Erin Reed posted a piece about a recent column by NYT columnist David Leonhardt in which he proposed that Kamala Harris should be a trimmer on gender rights in order to appear more "moderate."

I replied in a comment which I thought was worth repeating; this is (a very slightly edited and expanded version of) it:

Two points need to be noted about Leonhardt's political, uh, "advice."

One is that it is not driven by either real conviction or the merits of the case but by an underlying attitude of "Well, this doesn't matter to ME, therefore it shouldn't matter to anyone else other than a few flakes who don't count."

Perhaps more to the point, though, is that it presents a line of argument that's been used at some point or another against every liberal, every Democrat, every progressive, every radical, every individual anywhere on the entire left half of the US political spectrum, one that says your arguments must not be couched in the words of conviction or conscience, the words of justice or moral necessity, but rather must be framed by fear, fear of what "they" might say about it, what nasty name "they" might call you.

In fact, unless what you propose is overwhelmingly popular (and even if it is), if "they" can say something nasty, it's likely best not only to not mention it at all, but to openly attack it.

It's a far too common practice that at times has been called "duck and cover" (and if you know what that means without checking, you are older than you look), of politically curling into a defensive position. But I prefer my own name for it: "preemptive capitulation," surrendering before the battle has even been joined.

That is exactly what Leonhardt has proposed Harris do on gender rights: don't mention it and when asked, hold it as far away from you as you can get away with. And I guarantee you there will be a good number of "old hands" among the political jibber-jabberers and the consultant coterie who will regard that as wise counsel.

At moments like this I can't help but draw a comparison to the right-wingers, who, when they are called on their latest lizard-brain inanity will double- and triple-down and after a round or three the media gets bored with asking and the issue fades from the headlines and then from memory. It's sitzfleisch as political strategy¹ while we, when pressed, usually act like we're playing rapid transit², rushing from one mumbled evasion and backtrack to another. I still have memories from a few decades ago of pollsters telling people that their problem with Democrats was less what they stood for than that they didn't seem to stand for anything.

Personally, I'm tired of it. This doesn't mean we don't pay attention to how we say things; in fact, one of my all-time favorite compliments was when after a debate I learned that someone in the audience said I had the ability "to make the most radical positions sound like a voice of sweet moderation." So yeah, I paid attention to how I said things, but there was never any doubt about what it was I was saying. What it does mean is that we should speak the truth as we understand it and when challenged on what we have said, Don't. Back. Down.

That's the message for Kamala Harris and for all of us: If you've changed your mind about something, say so, say "I was wrong about that." Own it. But if you haven't, own that, too. Don't. Back. Down.

¹"Sitzfleisch" is German for "sitting flesh." See my "Rules for Right-wingers," specifically #20.
²Rapid transit is a form of chess where each player has five seconds per move.

061 The Erickson Report for September 8 to 21

 

The Erickson Report for September 8 to 21

Good News

    - "Angels" protect lgbtq+ celebrants

    - Federal court blocks part of Florida's "Stop WOKE Act"

    - 9th Circuit Court upholds ban on "conversion therapy" for minors

 

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages

    - Clown: Carroll Independent School District

    - Clown: Rep. Mike Johnson

    - Outrage: Mississippi to take student debt relief as income

 

RIP

    - Mikhail Gorbachev

    - Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Some observations on the war in Ukraine

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30, Page Five: A Longer Look: Julian Assange Closer to Being Extradited

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30, Page Five: A Longer Look: Julian Assange Closer to Being Extradited

Okay, this is something I keep meaning to talk about, keep thinking to include but for one reason or another keep not doing. This time I'm doing it. It's time for A Longer Look.

On March 14, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom rejected the request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to appeal an earlier decision permitting his extradition to the United States, where he faces espionage charges and up to 175 years in prison for publishing classified documents that exposed war crimes.

There is one more option, which is the hope that UK Home Secretary Priti Patel will decline to authorize the extradition. The hope is probably a vain one since three years ago, the then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid was the one who greenlighted the extradition in the first place.

This business actually dates back to Bush administration, through Obama and Tweetie-pie up to today. For well over a decade the US government has been out to destroy Julian Assange and through that to destroy WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing what governments across the world don't want their citizens to know.

The reason for this long campaign is because WikiLeaks dared to release hidden information that was embarrassing to US foreign and military policy, most particularly release in 2010 of what was called the Iraq War Logs, which documented numerous US war crimes including killing of unarmed civilians and torture of Iraqi prisoners. Something that drew particular attention was a video taken from a US helicopter gunship showing its crew shooting down a group of civilians including two journalists, a video that became known by the title "Collateral Murder." Look it up; you can still find it on YouTube.

The problem, of course, was that by prosecuting Assange or WiiLeaks for release of classified information the government risked involving outfits like the Washington "Post" and New York "Times," which published stories based on those documents - in some cases in consultation with WikiLeaks. That, the government was not prepared to do.

That doesn't mean they wouldn't try to find a way around it. I still recall Eric Holder, The Amazing Mr. O's Attorney General, stating that the DOJ would find something with which to charge Assange even if they had to change the laws in order to do it. (And so much for the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws.)

During the Obama administration (Remember how they came into office pledging a new birth of transparency only to imprison more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined?) the idea was floated to relabel WikiLeaks as an “information broker,” something to be declared as entirely separate from journalism and publishing and therefore not deserving of any special First Amendment protection available to the news media. That didn't fly because how then do you separate WikiLeaks from any news aggregator such as, for example, Google News or Yahoo! News.

The Tweetie-pie gang was a little more creative. They got a provision inserted into the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2018 which called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service," a term invented for the occasion by Mike Pompeo, Tweetie-pie's CIA director and Secretary of State and a label subsequently used in proposals from the CIA and the Orange Wig Stand himself to kidnap or kill Assange, then taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Julian Assange

This, by the way, is why Chelsea Manning for several months was held in solitary confinement - torture under international law - by the US military and denied treatment and care for her gender dysphoria: It was an attempt to emotionally or psychologically break her so she would testify against Assange in a charge of conspiracy to release classified documents.

You see, the issue of freedom of the press still hung over the case, but conspiracy - nicknamed "the prosecutor's darling" - was a way around that. But to make it work, they needed Manning's testimony. Because if she initiated contact with WikiLeaks by providing the documents, the government has no case. But if she'd testify that he actually talked her talked her into giving up the information, then two people were involved and ta-da! it's a conspiracy.

That this was the intent became even clearer when not long after her court-martial sentence of 35 years in prison was commuted after seven years - still more time in prison than any other whistleblower in US history - she was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about her dealings with Assange. She spent two months in prison for contempt of court for refusing - and immediately upon her release she was called before another grand jury on the same thing. She again refused and was imprisoned, this time for 10 months plus accumulating $256,000 in fines.

Chelsea Manning

But while it appears the government has given up on trying to break Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is for the moment still free, the government has been able to pretty much cripple WikiLeaks' ability to act. That can be seen from its website by the drying up of new releases since around 2017, with only one release in over two years, that one about two right-wing hate groups in Spain.

This case has sparked on-going concern from press freedom and human rights groups around the world who warn that prosecution of Assange would have far-reaching impacts on journalists and publishers who dare to challenge powerful governments by exposing their secrets.

For example, in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists stated that the US's prosecution of Assange would set "a deeply harmful legal precedent that would allow the prosecution of reporters for news gathering activities" and called on the DOJ drop both the extradition request and charges against Assange.

Meanwhile, Julia Hall, Amnesty International's deputy research director for Europe called the UK Supreme Court ruling "a blow to justice" and said "the US should immediately drop the charges against Julian Assange."

She noted the lower court ruling the UK Supreme Court overturned had recognized that extradition could present a threat to Assange's life or mental health, a risk the Supreme Court airily dismissed based on breezy US assurances that "don't worry, he'll be fine", which Hall dismissed as "empty promises." Considering the US's record of CIA black sites, Gitmo, along with the conditions to be found in almost any US prison, not to mention the treatment inflicted on Chelsea Manning in pursuit of this case and that the US government has a been pursuing Assange for a dozen years across three presidents, the description "empty promises" is extremely hard to deny.

Reporters Without Borders said it was "deeply disappointed" by the court decision and called on the Home Office to refuse extradition and release Assange without further delay.

So why have you heard so little about this? Why has this case not been bigger news? Well, for one reason, major media outlets are convinced that whatever is done to Assange and WikiLeaks will be carefully defined in such a way that it won't affect powerful interests like them. Put more bluntly, they figure they're safe so they don't care what happens to him. "He was useful when he was around, but if he's not, well, so it goes." It's the "He's not really a journalist, so the idea of a free press doesn't apply to him" dodge.

Which is actually quite astonishing, because a key part of what Assange is accused of amounts to working with Manning to conceal her identity, that is, remain anonymous to avoid being caught and prosecuted. But if that is criminal, those outlets are equally at risk. Consider the screen shot from a page of the New York "Times" website: nyt.com/tips. It openly invites people to send tips and information to the "Times" and goes on to discuss ways for the tipster to remain anonymous, including SecureDrop, a system set up by the "Times" for just that purpose.

Screenshot of nyt.com/tips

Which really means that the major media's essential ignoring of this case is based less on "He's not really a journalist" and more on "We're too powerful, they don't dare come after us."

Which may be true of the publishers but not of their reporters, without which the publishers can't get the scoops that bring in the eyes and ears of the public: After the government lost the famous Pentagon Papers case against the NY "Times," the government tried to go after reporter Neil Sheehan on exactly the same charge Assange now faces, using exactly the same "It's a conspiracy!" argument, but failed to get an indictment.

Okay, even leaving all that "can't touch this" corporate attitude aside, you'd think the progressive left would keep pushing it - or even the libertarian right, usually on the correct side when it comes to things like press freedom. Well, some on the left did try - heck I've at least mentioned the case more than 20 times over the years - but the major voices of what passes for the left in the US these days, the faux-progressives, those whose progressive and radical proposals expand and contract with the ideas prominent in current intra-Democratic Party debates, have fallen largely silent. And frankly, we can even pinpoint when that happened. And why.

When Wikileaks released documents embarrassing to the Bush administration, when it released footage useful in opposing the Iraq War, Wikileaks was the hero.

But as soon as Wikileaks first released documents embarrassing to Barack Obama's administration, those faux-progressives started to attack it and stood by silently as the Amazing Mr. O tried to bankrupt WikiLeaks by blocking its access to donations and desperately searched for a way to imprison Assange.

The final break came when WikiLeaks invoked the unforgivable curse in 2016 by releasing emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, emails showing that during the primaries, her campaign and the DNC had colluded to the detriment of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Well, that was it, criticize the Democratic presidential nominee, and Assange and Wikileaks instantly became part of some anti-American cabal.

Indeed, on one of the and possibly the biggest of the faux-progressive sites, DailyKos, Assange became routinely described by the homophobic term "Putin's butt-boy" with the frequent addendum that he always has been about, that WikiLeaks has always been about, pushing pro-Russian, anti-American propaganda, probably under the direction of the Kremlin.

The fact that this also amounted to an admission that they had been useful idiots during the time they had celebrated WikiLeaks was, naturally, passed over without comment.

This case is something that I have let slide too long and which too much of the supposedly progressive left have simply ignored or even dismissed. That silence can't be allowed to continue. The case against Julian Assange presents a genuine threat to journalism as a principle. This silence must stop. The case should be dropped. Julian Assange should be freed.

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30

 

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30

Good News: Relief for the USPS
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/08/usps-senate-biden/

Ukraine: "The War Drags On"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeH5rVUgios
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/10/2085119/-Ukraine-update-A-war-on-the-concept-of-civilization-itself
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22967674/russia-ukraine-no-fly-zone-limited-nuclear-war
https://twitter.com/MMazarr/status/1501688603042361346
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/03/no-fly-zone-test/363099/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-europe-congress-058c8b72b81044f861b30b7ceb500a15
https://www.politico.eu/article/zelenskyy-peace-talks-russia-realistic-accept-compromise-nato/

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
Clowns:
    DC "truckers convoy"
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/11/2085314/-D-C-freedom-truckers-threaten-to-abuse-911-system-if-Washingtonians-don-t-stop-flipping-them-off
    US Senate
    https://www.aol.com/news/u-senate-approves-bill-daylight-184244252-204613821.html

Outrage:
    Illegitimate "state secrets privilege" used to conceal torture and spying
    https://freedom.press/news/supreme-court-entrenches-state-secrets-privilege-dealing-a-blow-to-accountability/
    https://www.aclu.org/other/background-state-secrets-privilege
    http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/04/must-read.html

Julian Assange closer to being extradited
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/14/uk-top-court-rejects-assanges-request-appeal-extradition-decision
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/06/13/worlds-most-powerful-imprison-julian-assange-his-virtues-not-his-vices
https://rsf.org/en/news/uk-home-secretary-gives-green-light-extradite-julian-assange-us
https://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/06/wikileaks.investigation/index.html
https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2010/12/once-more-into-breach.html
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/assange-kidnapping-wikileaks-cia-senate/
https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-inside-the-ci-as-secret-war-plans-against-wiki-leaks-090057786.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2010/12/once-more-into-leak.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/06/245-news-on-chelsea-manning-and-julian.html
https://rsf.org/en/news/uk-rsf-calls-home-office-block-assange-extradition-following-supreme-court-refusal-consider-appeal
https://freedom.press/news/appeals-court-says-that-nixons-attempt-to-prosecute-pentagon-papers-reporter-must-stay-secret-50-years-later/

034 The Erickson Report for March 25 to April 7, Page 3: Asking for a favor

034 The Erickson Report for March 25 to April 7, Page 3: Asking for a favor

I'm going to ask a favor. A really big favor. I don't know if anyone will respond and I don't know, ultimately it might not matter one way or the other. But for the next few minutes I'm going to get personal with you, as personal as you ever have and  probably as personal as you will ever see me again in this show.

I have found it hard to do the past few of these shows. I've had to make myself do them, push myself through them. To be clear: It's not the being on camera part, it's not that, it's the prep work, the background, the following the news, the assembling of sources, the editing different bits into a coherent story, the gathering of the graphics, the laying out what goes where when and for how long, all the prep work that goes on before we get to camera.

It's not that I don't want to do it, it's that, well, I don't want to do it. It feels overwhelming, too much. I know it's only every two weeks, but it still feels overwhelming.

I have two reasons, better yet two explanations for this. One is that I am approaching the one-year anniversary of the sudden death of my wife, who went from complaining about an upset stomach to, well, dead in about 11 hours. And this being a year ago it was of course during the first surge of the pandemic, a time when I couldn't be with her in the ambulance, I couldn't even be with her in the ER.

Donna was, as the song says, the wind beneath my wings. She bore me up. And I've realized in the time since that I lost not only my heart that night but my spirit. I've dropped out of things that I was involved for the sake of focusing on making my way through the days.

This was the thing I didn't give up, didn't drop. I did for a while - which I think was natural - but the thing is I almost didn't come back at all. But I did. And I keep trying.

But there's another thing, a second thing, now. It's related to a phrase I made up to describe a feeling. Well, sort of made up. I’ve heard others use it but I know I used it before I heard it from anyone else, so even if I didn’t originate it, I still made it up for myself.

Anyway, the phrase is “The world is too much with me.”

The world is too much with me. It describes those times when I become aware. Truly aware. Emotionally, viscerally, consciously aware of the level of pain in the world around me, aware of the suffering, the loss, the despair, the desperation, the bloodshed, bigotry, the mindless hatreds persisting for generations over differences that in the long run of history don’t even rise to the level of petty. Aware that somewhere in the world, right at this very moment, someone in Yemen is dying of malnutrition with US acquiescence, someone is being brutalized by the Myanmar military, someone is being dragged to a "re-education" prison in China for the crime of being Uyghur, some Asian-American in the US is hoping to finish their grocery shopping without being sneered at, spit on, or attacked; that at this very moment, someone, somewhere, is being tortured, that 21 million people around the world are suffering with COVID, that despite the gains that have been made, nearly 10% of the entire population of the world lives in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1.90 a day and over two-fifths survive on no more than $5.50 a day - and everywhere, everywhere, there are the tears of the suffering and the tears of the mourners except for the dry empty eyes that have no tears left to cry.

Most of the time I intellectualize. I know the numbers, the policies, and the politics; I rant and rave and denounce and decry. But I intellectualize. The rants are based in morality, the denunciations drawn from logic, but still there is an emotional distance, an emotional insulation if you will, between that and the rawness of the physical reality, and both the anger and the hope that lies behind it are driven less by passion than by principle.

And yes, the anger is driven by hope. As I wrote some years ago,

[e]ven many professional grouches (like me) are actually unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the inexplicable, indefensible, yet utterly unshakable conviction that things not only can be but must be better than they are.

The wind beneath my wings

But sometimes, just sometimes, I am aware and that "unshakable" conviction gets shaken. The experience is something like the almost-cliché one of looking at a clear night sky and feeling how small you are compared to the universe. Except without the panache and without the awe. Just with the overwhelming. The feeling is not inspiring. It’s debilitating.

I hope I offend no one by relating it to a description of, a hypothesis about, autism. I have heard it suggested that autism can be understood as a breakdown of the brain’s ability to filter sensory input, so the child is overwhelmed with information, unable to determine what information reaching the brain is more worthy of attention than any another information.

We filter all the time, we couldn’t get by if we didn’t. For example, and this is a question I've used in talking to people about meditation, what is your left little toe feeling right now? If you pay attention, you can sense it, feel it in your sock or your slipper or against the rug or whatever- but until you paid attention to it, you were unaware of it. But that sensory input, those nerve impulses, were reaching your brain the whole time. Your brain just knew they were unimportant and so you ignored them at the level of awareness.

It's the same as the experience I imagine almost every one of us has had of being startled by a noise - only to realize that it was actually because the furnace or the refrigerator turned off, had stopped making a noise. The sound had reached our ears which alerted our brain to it the entire time but we dismissed it from conscious awareness until a sudden change indicated something that might require our attention.

How would you, how would any of us, function if we were trying to consciously deal with every bit of sensory input our brain is receiving at any given moment - everything seen, everything heard, everything felt, smelled, tasted? We couldn’t. We'd be overwhelmed. And we well might, as autistic children often do, focus almost obsessively on some object or some simple activity in a desperate attempt to establish some order, some sense of control.

It’s something - a little something - like that for me. And please understand, I am not equating my dark times with autism, I'm only using that hypothesis about it to illustrate what I'm trying to explain. Which is that at times like this I tend to withdraw to, to retreat to, and focus on, computer games, crossword puzzles, sci-fi reruns, and books on science history. That is, to things that don’t involve dealing with the “real,” the present, on-going, events-unfolding, world.

Understand, this is not a feeling that there is only suffering, pain, and death in this life. It is not some sort of hip existential angst about the dark hand of fate. Even at such times I know there is beauty, happiness, even joy; that people fall in love, make love, are loved; that children play and laugh; that friends embrace; that there is learning, growth, discovery; that at this very instant, someone, somewhere, is being amazed by a leaf or a star or the antics of an animal or what they see through a microscope.

So it is not despair in the usually understood sense of the term. It is, rather and again, an overwhelming, a debilitating, sense of, awareness of, the totality of the pain that others are suffering, a sense of the sheer enormity of the task before us. The sheer weight of "so much needs to be done." It just doesn’t seem possible to do it. It’s not despair in the sense that it seems there is nothing good but it is a sort of hopelessness in the sense of it seeming impossible to have an adequate response to what there is that is bad. And from that bad emerge the cries for help, the calls for justice, the demands to do something, and every cry, every call, every demand, seems as worthy of respect and response as every other. Every issue seems as worthy of being addressed as any other. Every bit of related news seems as worthy of being covered as any other. The result is that I feel paralyzed, exhausted, and doing things like doing this show seem so irrelevantly small in the face of what there is to do, so idiotically pointless, that I struggle to find the energy to do it.

Which is doubly unfortunate because it can become a reinforcing cycle: It seems pointless so it doesn't get done and that just emphasizes the pointlessness so it's even less likely to get done and so on - which just undermines my ability to do here what I want to do, what I want to contribute.

During another low period, just about three years ago, I quoted something from the very first issue of the print version of "Lotus," which was a newsletter I published for a couple of years in the 1990s.

Quoting:

Some [folks] are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute.

My dream for "Lotus" is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceeds mine. Something that helps.

That also was and is the idea of this show. To be something that helps. And when I hit a low like this, I truly can't help but wonder if it does and it seems to small and insignificant as to wonder what is the point of doing it.

So this is the favor. If you think what is done here is worth doing, if you find it helps in some way, if it informs or inspires or just keeps your spirits up, drop me a line at whoviating@aol.com.

Even as I say that, I feel that I shouldn't, that it will seem like I'm just fishing for compliments and that in any event there's no reason for you to have to deal with my moods.

But if you do, thank you.

032 The Erickson Report for February 25 to March 10, Page 4: "Good News, but"

032 The Erickson Report for February 25 to March 10, Page 3: "Good News, but"

Next, not so much Good News as just something that made me smile.

David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who has become a leading voice for gun control, has announced a new venture: He is starting a pillow company, apparently to be called "Good Pillow," to go into direct competition with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, the Tweetie-pie acolyte, election fraud conspiracy nut, and all-around right wing flake.

Hogg promises the pillows will be union-made and the company will support progressive causes while employing ex-prisoners and others trying to get their lives in gear.

It remains to be seen if and how this will come to pass - a lot of start-ups fail even before a product hits the stores - but the vision of it did make me smile.

What didn't make me smile was the reaction among some of his colleagues. Here comes that asterisk.

In a tweeted statement, March for Our Lives announced that Hogg, a founding member of the group, was taking a leave of absence as a board member “to take some time for himself to reflect and recommit to the mission,” which sounds way too much like a parent saying to a naughty child "Go to your room and think about what you've done and come back when you're ready to recommit to the family" to think of it any other way.

The fact that another founder, Cameron Kasky, called Hogg's planned company "a grift" certainly does nothing to change that impression. And the search for purity continues.

As a footnote: Mike Lindingaling has trouble on another front: Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest makers of voting machines in the US, has sued him, charging that he defamed the company with his accusations that it had rigged the 2020 election for President Biden. Dominion is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages.

This is another case of we'll see how this goes, but I do admit to finding it pleasant to see one of the purveyors of paranoia facing the chance of consequences for his littany of lies.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

We end this time with one last quick look at the election to note not only that according to one analysis, the Democrats may have done about as good as they might and the predictions of large gains were more a matter of over-optimism than facts on the ground but more importantly that, as Jim Hightower points out, for all the hand-wringing about down-ballot losses 2020 was hardly a debacle and for progressives in particular, it was not all that bad a year.

For one thing, there are about a dozen more progressives in Congress than there were before, making it harder for the establishment Democratic Party to continue its long practice of sidelining progressive proposals - not that they won't continue to try.

Progressives also won hundreds of local offices including, significantly, a number of races for sheriffs, district attorneys, and other criminal justice positions, including across the south.

It's an illustration of the growing - slowly growing but growing - progressive prosecutor movement, taking criminal justice reform, a publicly-popular and, 2020 showed, election-winning program, directly to the nuts and bolts of the system.

Not only in not so unexpected areas as California, but, the New York Times reports, in cities and counties in Geogia, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and Ohio, overcoming the predictable resistance from police unions.

So we should, plagerizing Joe Hill, not mourn but organize. Think of 2020 as one of the 101 blows in the old parable of the stonemason. And carry it on.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Eight: More unsatisfactory picks for Blahden administration

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Eight: More unsatisfactory picks for Blahden administration

Last time I said the emerging trend of who Joe Blahden wants in his administration is not encouraging.

I haven't had much reason to change that view. For one thing, I said that perhaps the worst potential pick was deficit hawk Bruce Reed for director of the Office of Management and Budget, calling his appointing someone like that to direct OMB in the midst of an economy-wrecking pandemic is just insane.

Well, Biden didn't nominate him. He nominated Neera Tanden - who was an assistant to Reed in the Clinton administration. Described as a Clinton loyalist with a penchant for demonizing progressives, Tanden supports something called "Medicare for America," a corporate-friendly alternative to Medicare for All and she has a history of supporting cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

He has picked Brian Deese as the director of the National Economic Council, a position which doesn't require confirmation. Deese is managing director and global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, the world’s largest financial backer for fossil fuel projects. Environmental activits have been trying to years to get Blackrock to divest from such projects. Desse's job has been to counteract them. Now he heads the National Economic Council.

I really have to wonder just how deep is Blahden's commitment to battling climate change. His climate plan is certainly a dramatic improvement on what we've seen from the federal government to date, improvement enough to get support from various environmental activists, but the real issue isn't if it's better but if it's good enough. I would say that anyone who pointedly refuses, as Blahden and Harris have both done, refuses to oppose fracking - the whole point of which is to continue reliance on fossil fuels - is not sufficiently serious. The pick of Deese only adds to those doubts.

As do reports that fossil fuel friendly Ernest Moniz, a supporter of nuclear power, is the leading contender for Secretary of Energy and Heidi Heitkamp, who has aligned herself with corporate agribusiness and fossil fuel interests, is top of the list for Secretary of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, Mike Morell is on the shortlist to head the CIA. Morell is an aggressive defender of the agency's use of torture and drone strikes and dismisses reports of civilian casualties from such strikes as propaganda.

It's bad enough the Sen. Ron Wyden calls such a nomination "a non-starter."

There is a bright spot: Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, has been tapped to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. While not a health professional, he does have administrative experience and an overall progressive record - and he has expressed support for Medicare for All. Which makes him a rather surprising choice, since Blahden's health care plan only calls for creating a so-called public option limited to low-income people, which makes it more of a tweak to Medicaid than any real expansion of access to health care.

We'll see who moves: Blahden or Becerra.

026 The Erickson Report for November 25 to December 8, Page 3: A last thought

The Erickson Report for November 25 to December 8, Page 3: A last thought

Okay, I have just a minute left,  just enough time to get to one of those pieces of news I skipped to tell the Thanksgiving story.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll from mid-November, over half of all Republicans believe Tweetie-pie "rightfully won" the US election but that it was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud, while a Monmouth University Poll from the same time frame said that 32% of all voters and 77% of GOPpers say Blahden only won due to fraud.

Listen Up, people! Getting Blahden into the White House does not mean it's over and we have to be prepared for that. Ronald Reagan came into office with less than 51% of the vote and claimed a mandate. George Bush the Lesser came into office off a 530-vote win in one state and claimed a mandate despite losing the popular vote. Tweetie-pie came into office claiming a mandate despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million.

It is vital that Joe Blahden come into office claiming a mandate! But I greatly fear that instead he will come into office pledging to make nice with Fishface McConnell. That will not work. So I fear that, as always, we are on our own.

Thoughts on Bernie's withdrawal

[A significant part of what follows is drawn from some things I have written before. I brought them together to express my feelings at this moment.]

The man himself

So just three days after I wrote that Bernie Sanders should not drop out, he did. And so it goes.

Actually, what he did was pretty similar to what I was thinking I would do, having accepting the reality that the nomination was beyond reach: suspend the campaign, continue with the primaries, continue to gather delegates, and use that to exercise some power in the Platform Committee and use that in turn to move the Party and how it approaches the people.  The difference is that while I would have stopped campaigning, I just wouldn't have announced I was doing it, answering any "dropping out" questions with some version of "My intent is to continue to address the issues I have addressed all along and we'll see what happens."

The truth is, although I have long acknowledged that my political heart is more in "on the streets" action than electoral campaigns, his withdrawal still hurts. It's a sad moment, especially because there was a time not that long ago, just a touch over six weeks ago, in fact, when it seemed possible he could get the nomination. So yeah, even though I knew that was no longer in reach, a formal end to the campaign still makes me blue.

But. That just raises the question I touched on in that previous post: What now? Because let it be clear that as I said then, this is not the end. It must not be the end. As someone notable said in 1980 at the end of a different presidential campaign,

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Because as he himself has said, this is not about Bernie Sanders. Even his own campaign slogan declared it: "Not me. Us." This is about, again in his phrase, political revolution.

This is about change. This is about changing the nature and the structure of political, social, and economic power in our country, in our society.

It is about racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual equality and freedom. It is about the economy, about an economy for the many, not the few, for the workers, not the bosses, banks, and billionaires. It is about education. It is about health care. It is about housing. It is about the environment and the climate. It is about peace.

It is about justice.

Justice, as I put it nearly 40 years ago, in its truest sense: economic, social, and political. It is about a justice that rejects the ascendancy of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, of profits over people. It is about a justice that centers on the preciousness of life and will fight to maintain and even expand that preciousness. It is about a justice that affirms and embraces the right of every human being to a decent life free of hunger, fear, and oppression.

It is about, in the end, revolution.

So while his quitting the race is a real loss, especially when early on it looked truly possible, it's not about Bernie Sanders and it's also in exactly the same sense not about elections. It's not even about voting. It's about the process of change. Voting is a part of that process, which is why, in a sense, for the moment, it was about Bernie Sanders because he has been the vehicle, using electoral politics, to push for that change.

But now, at this point, how do we proceed from here? I have to tell you something: Tweets and Facebook posts and the rest are not gonna cut it. Period. Oh, they can be great for circulating ideas, for passing on information, for keeping each others' spirits up, for organizing, but they themselves will not change anything. Oh, sure, they can affect little bits here and there; they can embarrass a restaurant into changing a policy or an individual store into apologizing for something, and I'm sure someone could come up with some more significant example of a more significant effect, but change the fundamental nature of power in the US? Not a chance.

Way, way, back in the dreaded '60s, I said something along the lines of "the system can withstand any number of people just saying 'No' to that system. That won't change anything. We have to do "No," we have to act on our beliefs."

It's still true. We need to act on our beliefs. If we are going to see the kind of change we talk about, if we are going to see that political revolution, if we are going to change the nature of power in this country, we have to act. We can't just talk - have to act. And we can't just vote - we have to act. We can't even just campaign for a favored candidate, even though, yes, that is a form of action, but it is not near enough. We have to act outside of and beyond electoral politics. We have to be in public, in the streets, even filling the streets, in the jails, even filling the jails.

We have to be loud, noisy, disruptive, but most of all creative; we have to be impolite, rude, to power; and we have to not care what they call us - because they will call us all sorts of things - but keep on going anyway.

I know I haven't offered any concrete proposals, proposed any specific actions, which is because I don't have any to offer. What I want to press home is, the whole point of this is to press home, that if we actually believe in this political revolution, if we actually want to see, in that wonderful Biblical phrase that Martin Luther King quoted in his I Have a Dream speech, if we want to see "justice rolling down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream," if we actually believe what we say, then now is the time, now is the moment, to look beyond the primaries, beyond the convention, beyond November, beyond political candidates, beyond voting, and ask ourselves "What now? And what then?"