Peaceful Regime Change

Haiku du Jour #4

by Arthur Silverman

Donald Thanatos

the mad captain at the helm

rages and thrashes

His crew of thieves

drinking at the high table

their milk mixed with blood

Greed and racism

like doom’s twin winds fill the sails

then crash on the rocks

What are we to do

in the face of such madness

fellow citizens

Resist and refuse

organize and agitate

fight from the high ground

Experience joy

be present in your body

support democrats

Peaceful regime change

not just for Iranians

floats outside our grasp.

I punked out on the WorldPride parade Saturday due to a sketchy weather forecast; ditto for the anti-Trump march and demo Sunday morning.

The skies, however, did clear by noon on Sunday, just in time for the massive, peaceful, outrageous, noon to 10 pm WorldPride 2025 Street Festival in Washington, DC.

The party stretched for nearly a mile along historic Pennsylvania Ave NW, from 9th Street (across from the Justice Department!) to the main concert stage at 3rd Street (where the Capitol itself served as a scenic backdrop).

Have a look:

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…and finally, a few seconds of 2023 RuPaul Drag Race winner Symone belting out the finale of her rousing version of Grace Slick’s 1967 classic White Rabbit. Feed your head!

“With Lincoln, they had a team of rivals. With Trump, you have a team of felons.” — Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley

In an organized crime family, being a made man is the mark of the true initiate.

These seven individuals are made men in a very particular crime family. More than that, they hold perhaps the ultimate credential with their boss, the President of the United States.

All of them committed serious crimes on President Donald Trump’s behalf, including witness tampering, money laundering, lying to the FBI, bank fraud conspiracy, criminal contempt of Congress, and seditious conspiracy to overthrow the federal government.

Each was convicted in court and sentenced to federal prison, yet remained steadfast and loyal. On regaining the Presidency, Donald Trump pardoned all of them. He commuted the sentences of those still incarcerated and ordered them freed.

These men have all made their bones and are still in it bone-deep. Several have roles in Trump’s new administration; the activities of others are well-hidden.

So what are they doing now? What’s out in the open and what’s happening sub rosa?

Most crucially, what if anything are their roles in planning for another insurrection?

The Messianics

Steve Bannon is a skilled provacateur and a self-described populist revolutionary. He has one foot firmly in Trumpworld, where he remains close to the President after serving as his chief strategist and senior counselor. He is also plugged in across the far-right fringe. Bannon’s WarRoom podcast is an essential touchstone.

Bannon served four months in prison last year for refusing to appear before the House select committee investigating January 6. He also pled guilty to felony fraud involving a “Build the Wall” fundraising scam.

Lt. General Michael Thomas Flynn (Ret.) is Trump’s disgraced former National Security Advisor and a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Trump pardoned Flynn for making false statements to the FBI about Flynn’s conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.

Gen. Flynn’s mindset is best described as apocalyptic; he actually pledged an oath to the QAnon conspiracy on July 4, 2020.

Flynn recently said that with Trump back in the White House, “believe me, the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”

According to Wikipedia, Flynn has also become a prominent leader in the Christian nationalist movement, organizing and recruiting for what he characterizes as a spiritual and political war.

Trump just appointed Flynn to a largely honorary post on the Board of Overseers at West Point. His current day job is a little obscure but sounds like consulting.

If, however, things ever degenerate to the point that there is another attempt, this time backed by elements of the military, to forcibly seize power, don’t be surprised to see Gen. Flynn backstage pulling strings.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s former Trade Advisor and current tarriff czar, is the anomaly on this list, having only been convicted of misdemeanors.

Like Steve Bannon, Navarro refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6 Select Committee over his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Navarro was convicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress and served four months in prison.

I refer to him as Trump’s “demolition man” for taking a proverbial chainsaw to the global economy. The only other Trump associates who have wreaked similar havoc in the past 100 days are Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, neither of whom has yet been charged with a crime.

The Sharp End of the Stick

1,583 people were ultimately arrested, and 1,270 convicted, in connection with the violent events at the nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021. All of them were pardoned en masse by Donald Trump.

Only ten individuals were charged and convicted of the most serious charge possible, seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government, the peacetime equivalent of treason. (Four others pled guilty to that charge, bringing the total to 14.)

These were the individuals who planned and coordinated the assault. They had a weapons storehouse, communications infrastructure, and tactical gear. They drilled on military attack formations. They were at the forefront of assaulting the police, forcing their way into the capitol, and desecrating the building.

They were there to stop the orderly transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joseph Biden by any means necessary.

Six of the ten were high-ranking members of the Oath Keepers, including their leader, Stewart Rhodes, along with Kelly Meggs, Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, David Moerschel, and Joseph Hackett.

The other four were Proud Boys, including their founder and leader, Enrique Tarrio, plus Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rell.

Question: Where are these people now and what are they doing? Are any of them, or their pardoned comrades, preparing to be shock troops for the next coup attempt?

The Trickster and the Bagman

After five decades as the GOP’s dark prince of sleaze, dating all the way back to Tricky Dick, Roger Stone is unquestionably a master of the dark arts. Stone, who calls himself a political hit man, is one of Donald Trump’s oldest and closest co-conspirators and confidants, going back more than 30 years.

Like many Trump cronies, Stone also likes to feather his own nest. According to his most recent lobbying disclosure, Stone was just retained to the tune of $600,000 by the fugitive crypto kingpin Roger Ver, who faces a potential life sentence over $48 million in unpaid taxes. By sheer coincidence, Stone’s website The StoneZone now explains, “Why Roger Ver Deserves A Presidential Pardon.”

Paul Manafort has had a checkered career as lobbyist extraordinaire to global despots including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, and the anti-immigrant French politician Marine Le Pen.

He and Roger Stone were joined at the hip as business partners 45 years ago.

Manafort served briefly as chairman of Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. He was indicted the following year on multiple charges arising from his consulting work for the then pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

Donald Trump pardoned Manafort, who was serving an eight-year prison term on multiple charges, in December 2020, in one of the last acts of his first term as President.

As The New York Times reported four months ago:

Four years after receiving a pardon from President Donald J. Trump for crimes related to foreign lobbying, Paul Manafort is again seeking business from political interests abroad.

Mr. Manafort, who led Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign for a few months, has assembled a team of consultants who helped run Mr. Trump’s 2024 effort and is looking to advise campaigns for opposition and far-right political factions in Latin America and Europe, according to documents and interviews.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Rachel Maddow, Manafort may be Trump’s new bagman.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio in science and engineering is essentially a measure of clarity; the strength of the signal being analyzed diminishes as the background noise increases.

Politically speaking, we are drowning in noise right now, with mass deportations, a global tariff crisis, stock markets tanking, alliances crumbling, and government services being slashed and burned.

In calling this “noise,” by no means do I intend to minimize the pain, suffering and dislocation that further metastasize with each passing week. I do, however, have a few basic questions:

• Where is the signal at the center of this evil cacophony?

• Is there a coherent signal at all?

• Coherent or not, is Donald Trump actually in control?

He is in charge, certainly. But actually in control of the chaos being wrought in his name? I think not.

As this becomes more apparent, and as Donald Trump increasingly flails and fails, I wonder if the President could make his last stand as a literal figurehead1, a menacing orange gargoyle lashed to the prow of a marauding pirate sloop.

The mutinous crew steering the ship of state will be very same co-conspirators Trump himself appointed to high office! They’ll battle each other tooth and nail, vie for control of the wheel, and claim their respective rights of pillage.

Reader question #1: “WTF is a ‘metamodern’ coup?”

A discerning reader noticed me dropping a particular turn of phrase in last week’s issue and asked me about it.

“We are witnessing a brazen, live-action hostile takeover of democracy,”
I wrote. “The classic authoritarian playbook is being deployed with predatory zeal and a metamodern twist.”

So what in particular makes this coup attempt metamodern? It’s the seamless integration, into Trumpworld’s fascistic zeitgeist, of a new generation of alienated, high-tech young white men ages 18 to 30. This toxic young manosphere ranges from incel bros and cryptocurrency scammers to extreme martial artists and TikTok influencers.

A somewhat older category that lumps these lumpen together for me is “Sigma male.” My favorite definition: “A Sigma male is someone who wants to be a self-designated "alpha" but doesn't have any friends."

So where do they come from? And how do they keep multiplying without sexual partners? Defying traditional sexual norms, the Sigmas, also referred to as “neomasculines,” are apparently just mindfucking each other.

The “neos” have added a veritable battalion to the ranks of the original “dark MAGA” subculture, who were mainly just unbridled racists and white nationalists, neofascist accelerationists, and “skull mask” groups who appropriated symbols from the Waffen SS.

Reader question #2: “Does Birkenstock actually make shitkickers?”

Also in last week’s issue, in exhorting my fellow Boomer alte kakers to get up off their asses and fight back, I specifically advised them to:

“Downshift the doomscrolling… suppress the chronic ennui… dust off those old combat Birkenstocks… and get fucking busy.”

I was using the term “Combat Birkenstocks” facetiously, but who knew? Not me, apparently. So please put me down for a pair of Birkenstock Bryson boots in a 43 wide. They look fantastic and I’m sure the fit is heavenly. Availability is apparently spotty, but I have seen them listed online, for men and women alike, in black, roast brown, taupe, and a very attractive thyme green leather.

This is more than a bit ironic. Although the Birkenstock companies have been making shoes in Germany since 1744, they have never produced footwear for any military. In fact, the Birkenstock family, unlike some of their major competitors, apparently did no business at all with the Hitler regime during the Nazi era, nor did they employ slave labor at their plants, or gain advantage by “Aryanizing” Jewish-owned shoe factories.

Dr. Birkenstock’s invention of natural-footbed insoles, though, was a popular “homegrown” modification to uncomfortable combat boots, undertaken by enterprising young soldiers on both sides of World War II.

So move over, Doc Martens. The hippies were apparently ahead of their time.

Finally, remember this and do not despair:

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Welcome to the War of 2026

Wake up America! A master plan is unfolding and it doesn't include honoring the results of the next Congressional election.

A concerted attack on American democracy has been unleashed. You and I are the enemy and so far Donald Trump’s side is winning.

Their coup clock started ticking well before Trump’s re-election six months ago. And it’s certainly reasonable to wonder whether their target date for an actual assumption of national governing authority is going to be the aftermath of the mid-term Congressional elections on November 3, 2026. That’s 18 months away.

We are witnessing a brazen, live-action hostile takeover of democracy. The classic authoritarian playbook is being deployed with predatory zeal and a metamodern twist.

There is absolutely method in their madness. They are systematically attacking the very institutions most capable of holding them accountable.

Within the bureaucracy, specific leaders of the military and intelligence services are being pinpoint targeted. Meanwhile, coordinated pressure campaigns and offensives are being undertaken across civic America’s elite institutions, whether research universities, large law firms, scientific authorities, or the news media.

Speaking of the media, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see where this may be heading. MSNBC is being spun off by its parent company. The corporate home of Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell et al. may be up for grabs.

And how about Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers or SNL? How untouchable will they be in a year or two, when CBS and NBC have pressing corporate regulatory issues pending before *this* Administration?

After all, it wasn't that long ago when John Mitchell, the attorney general of the United States, personally warned the Washington Post that its publisher, Katherine Graham, “gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer” if she kept pushing the Watergate story. Nixon himself specifically referenced the Post Corporation’s pending license renewals for several profitable television stations it owned in Florida, which required FCC approval.

So it goes around and it comes around. What are we going to do about it?

Calling All Boomers to One Last Rodeo

Do you still believe in magic, somewhere deep in your tarnished and disappointed soul? Do you occasionally, unexpectedly, savor pleasurable emotions of peace, love and understanding?

Then what are you waiting for, fellow Boomers? Our grandchildren’s futures are being fucked with! It’s time to stand up and be counted again!

Relatively speaking, we retired folk are likelier to have a little time on our hands, or maybe a small amount of money to offer.

Not only that, but as Joseph Campbell showed, there are reasons why indigenous peoples across time and place have revered the wisdom of their elders.

So anyway, it’s time to downshift the doomscrolling and suppress the chronic ennui. Dust off those old combat Birkenstocks and get fucking busy.

Seriously, what are we waiting for? It’s what my religious friends call doing the lord’s work. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

FWIW my personal recommendations for investing your hard-earned time and money are moveon.org, swingleft.org and indivisible.org, who are all organizing on democracy’s front lines.

The View From Left Field: A Brief Detour to Transylvania

My most basic question about transexuality is simply whether or not I consider myself a member of that tribe.

It's a close call but I think not. I’m not there… but I can see there from here. And besides, what a fucking binary question!

I'm not a diehard CIS dude either, if I ever was. It's complicated, as psychosexual things tend to be. I have roots. I have shoots. I’m a horny fucking old boomer goat. That's me in a nutshell.

I have a hunch I'm not the only one experimenting and re-experimenting with gender late in life, when men aren’t even supposed to be able to get it up, let alone do anything with it.

Back Despite Popular Demand

Dear Readers: I have come back out of retirement. Thanks for your continued readership and support. -Art

Dear Readers: RealityReport is back for another run. Stay tuned… Art

Dear Readers:

If you checked out my last newsletter, you may have wondered why you were seeing a poem — a seven-stanza haiku in point of fact — rather than my usual trenchant political blather.

As it turns out, this abrupt format change wasn’t a passing fancy but rather a harbinger. I have decided to abandon the pontification racket entirely and return to the more personal work I’ve been developing since lockdown. This will be the final realityreport.us for awhile.

I do intend to resume publishing here. Please let me know — by commenting at the end of this post or contacting me directly — if you would like to remain on my personal mailing list. I am grateful for your readership and hope you will continue to follow my work.

— Art

Haiku du Jour

Prostrate if not prone
victory thru surrender
eluding me now

the algorhythm
leading edge to bleeding edge
is trending somehow

Nothing left to do
destination up ahead
unattainable

though empty and numb
the pursuit of advantage
beckons with a smile

Side by side we sit
like two wounded animals
licking at our scars­­

death by increment
overdose of solitude
natural causes

you say finally
the end of the beginning
I think this must be.

Note to Readers: I was in the 7th grade in Cleveland, Ohio when JFK was assassinated in 1963. When National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State in 1970, I was just down the road at Ohio University.

In other words, the music of the 1960s was literally the soundtrack of my adolescence and young adulthood, which makes it the most important music of my life. I hope you’ll enjoy revisiting a few highlights with me.

My Generation, The Who (1965)

It was early media-hype culture clash, circa 1964. Youth riots in English beach towns, pitting scooter-loving Mods against motorcycle Rockers! It also gave Pete Townshend the inspiration for this iconic hit on The Who’s first album.

For What It’s Worth, Buffalo Springfield (1966)

This powerful antiwar anthem helped stir up opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, which President Lyndon Johnson was rapidly escalating.

[Vocalist Stephen Stills and guitarist Neil Young subsequently joined another band.]

Somebody to Love, Jefferson Airplane (1966)

The Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Janis Joplin. Carlos Santana. Sly Stone.

All of them soon-to-be-legendary but as-yet-unknown San Francisco musicians, laboring at the dawn of the psychedelic 1960s.

Vocalist Grace Slick and the band shot quickly to stardom on the strength of Somebody to Love and the rest of Airplane’s second album Surrealistic Pillow, a name their friend Jerry Garcia suggested.

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Respect, Aretha Franklin (1967)

24-year-old Aretha Franklin took Otis Redding’s hit record Respect, shook it upside down and made it her own. No longer was it Otis singing the song, insisting that his woman take better care of him, the breadwinner.

No way! Aretha Franklin had her own money, thank you very much, and if you’d like to see any of it, you better be able to spell r-e-s-p-e-c-t, which was a musical innovation she added to the tune, as was the “Sock It to Me” refrain.

Manic Depression, Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

According to the American Heritage dictionary, a supernova is “a rare celestial phenomenon involving the explosion of a star and resulting in an extremely bright, short-lived object that emits vast amounts of energy.” In other words, Jimi Hendrix.

Monterey, Eric Burdon and The Animals (1968)

The most underrated music festival of the ‘60s took place two hours south of San Francisco and two years before Woodstock. The 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival is lovingly recalled in this masterpiece by Eric Burdon, himself one of the decade’s most underappreciated performers.

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Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones (1968).

Please allow him to introduce himself.

Woodstock, Joni Mitchell (1969)

She missed going onstage herself due to a travel snafu, so Joni Mitchell transmuted disappointment into art with her customary genius.

Stand, Sly and the Family Stone (1969)

I struggled over using this particular video but it’s just so fucking poignant. Sly Stone is high as a kite here and it shows. At times he can barely sing or play.

But by sheer force of talent, charisma and will — and a boost from the Family Stone band and backup singers — his grit and spirit manage to shine through.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron (1969)

I’ll never forget an afternoon I spent interviewing and smoking a fat joint with Gil Scott-Heron in San Francisco in 1977. What a talent! And what a sweet, modest man. A godfather of spoken word poetry and a key progenitor of hip-hop.

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Let It Be, Beatles (1970)

If you haven’t already seen Peter Jackson’s documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” then you simply must. That is all.

Instant Karma, John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Instant Karma was the first recording by one of the former Fab Four (although George did sit in on the recording session). It was produced in the midst of the Beatles protracted break-up and issued just before the release of Let It Be, their final album.

The single sold more than a million copies in the US alone. “Who in the world do you think you are? A superstar? Well right you are!”

Southern Man, Neil Young and Crazy Horse (1971)

Nearly 40 years after the song’s original release, Young’s intense passion still resonates in this blistering solo takedown of America’s unfinished legacy of racism. Recorded at Carnegie Hall.

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), Marvin Gaye (1971)

In 1972, Richard Nixon was going to be re-elected President over Democratic challenger George McGovern. Watergate crimes were being hatched. The Vietnam war raged, as did the war against Mother Earth prophesied ten years earlier by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. So what did we do in 1972? We lamented. We listened to this song. And then we fought on into the next generation, just as Marvin Gaye would have us do today.

Dear readers: You may have noticed this newsletter has been gone for the better part of a year. I am happy to report I had a fruitful sabbatical, so to speak. But I’m back now, metaphorically tanned, rested and ready, so let’s get back into it.

Some good news: I'm feeling quite encouraged at the way MAGAworld keeps overplaying its hand. They’re shooting their wad prematurely and in counterproductive strategic directions.

Crusading against child labor laws. Defunding public libraries. Taking Medicaid away from millions of families. Blocking student loan forgiveness. Keeping rape victims from receiving emergency contraception. Booting out elected representatives. And that’s just one day’s worth from Rachel Maddow!

It’s like the bad guys just can't help themselves. When you give radical authoritarians a taste of power they’re going to start agitating and straining at the bit. It’s not even to achieve a particular policy objective; their goal is simply to foster an ongoing climate of fear.

The MAGAsphere’s stock in trade is attracting angry white people already near the edge, then prodding and riling them further. It’s pathology as a conscious strategy.

Well, fascists gonna do what fascists gonna do, same as it ever was. But the thing is, for all of America’s faults — and they are legion — we are still essentially a freedom-loving, live-and-let-live people. Democratic ideals have been imprinted on our consciousness for 250 years now.

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While we often fail to live up to these ideals, we nonetheless continue to stumble forward toward that more perfect union invoked in the very first sentence of our Constitution.

So no, the United States is not ripe for an authoritarian takeover. The insurgent right’s fundamental misreading of the American people will ultimately consign MAGA to the proverbial dustbin of history.

And yes, I realize we are in a very difficult place. Tensions are high; we continue to find ourselves under attack on multiple fronts. Obviously, continued progress isn’t going to happen by itself. It’s going to take a generation of vigilant effort minimum to flush this particular poison from our body politic. PS: Meanwhile, our planetary body is starting to scream in pain.

So please don’t confuse me with the gender-neutral equivalent of a Pollyanna. We must fight with every peaceful means at our disposal. We must defend ourselves against the forces of darkness yet keep moving toward the light.

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I believe we will. I have the atheist’s equivalent of faith.

But given the craziness spewing from the far-right, we progressives need to be asking ourselves a strategic question:

Is fire best fought with fire?

Specifically, do you believe that America’s economic, social and political reality is so irredeemable, so racist and corrupt, so fundamentally flawed, that it needs to be torn out root and branch and replaced with something better?

If your answer is yes then you, my friend, are a revolutionary, and you can see where I’m going with this. MAGAworld’s mirror-image is not a good look for you… or for our future as a species.

Please keep that in mind as we enter the 2024 election cycle.

I’m talking to you, my climate activist friends. You, my LGBTQIA peeps. And you, my Brown and Black sisters and brothers. Especially as the election nears, refrain wherever possible from attacking and undermining Democrats, who for better or worse (and it’s generally better) are all that stand between us and a world of shit.

The same applies in reverse to my more moderate and mainstream friends and colleagues. Support the trans community in particular, and LGBTQ rights in general. Give people their pronouns of choice. Stand with immigrants and refugees. Be an anti-racist.

Don’t follow the far-right down fake populist rabbit holes. Which brings me to…

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End Note: The Sad Case of Bill Maher

I confess: Bill Maher is one of my guilty pleasures. But I just can’t go on like this any more. Bill’s bitter-bullshit to brilliant-bits ratio is deteriorating before my eyes.

I haven’t completely tuned out Real Time yet, but I can feel it coming. My current compromise is to listen only to the opening monolog on the audio podcast… and sometimes to New Rules.

Why bother at all? Maher is still one of the most exquisitely talented satirists in the business. He has an all-star team of writers, and he still makes me laugh as hard as anyone does, week in and week out.

What I studiously avoid now are the interview and panel segments that make up the interior 3/4 of his show. That’s where Bill is most likely to jump the shark, mount his anti-woke hobby horse, and rage with sympathetic guests over insufferable college students, harping feminists and whiny progressives.

It’s not that Bill’s critique of left activism is totally off-target. It’s not, and we ought to challenge authoritarianism on our own side as well. But somewhere along the way, Maher has crossed the line from crusty curmudgeon to misanthropic misogynist. He’s giving us Boomers a bad name in his senescence.

That’s all for now. I promise to be back to you sooner than last time. In the meantime, if you like what you see, please comment, share and subscribe right now!

Readers: I’m back after a brief interregnum, untanned but otherwise rested and ready. If this is your first time, welcome. Please subscribe; it’s free. And all of you, please share with your friends. There’s a button for that and It really helps. - Art

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#RealMenWatchHandmaids

Hulu created this chilling 30-second “Morning in America” parody, which aired on Fox during the 2019 Super Bowl at a cost of $5.2 million. The ad promotes the then-upcoming third season of The Handmaid’s Tale. (This video also includes a related 60-second trailer.)

The Handmaid’s Tale

Only one-third of the viewers of this fantastic television series are men.1 If you’re not among them, bro (and I wasn’t until recently) it’s time to man-up and get busy. Borrow a friend’s Hulu password if you don’t have one.

Why?

• Margaret Atwood’s brilliant novel justly ranks alongside 1984 and Brave New World as classics of dystopian fiction

• It’s fucking great television (94% score on Rotten Tomatoes)

• A chilling view of a theofascist, woman-hating America

• Hits very close to home, especially right now

• Seasons one thru four are streaming; season five premieres 9/142

Bottom line: Support your sisters. An added fringe benefit is that women will prefer the new you.

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Post-Roe Advisory: Wear condoms in red states unless you're trying to make a baby. Your dick will barely notice and it might keep your partner out of prison.

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May I Have a Word?

The “Defund the Police” campaign was a political and policy disaster. Do we really want to go there again?

Don’t get me wrong: “Defund” was a brilliant short-term rallying cry. It helped mobilize tens of thousands of outraged Americans in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

But from my perspective as a retired professional sloganeer, the key to understanding both the initial success and the ultimate failure of the “Defund the Police” campaign is that it wasn’t fundamentally about criminal justice policy at all.

The word “Defund” was really a linguistic stand-in for “Fuck” — as in “Fuck the Police!”

This was a genius backdoor campaign tactic. It inspired angry crowds to shake their fists and shout it out repeatedly, giving voice to their rage in front of the world’s news cameras and microphones. “Fuck the Police” was the underlying meaning — the obscenity obscured behind a policy prescription.

And the media ate it up. “Defund the Police” saturated mainstream media coverage, something that simply could not have happened if the protesters were dropping actual F-bombs and their campaign sign was an extended middle finger.

It was a hall-of-fame activist slogan… and the award goes to the Black Vision Collective of Minneapolis, a self-described “Black-led, Queer and Trans Centered Organization,” which coined the phrase.

And then of course it boomeranged and bit us hard in the ass. What a surprise! It turns out that vanishingly few Americans actually want to eliminate their hometown police departments! But that’s what the damn word means.

Meanwhile, progressive allies working toward real-world solutions in the criminal justice space were left sputtering, “They don’t really mean defund, they mean reform.”

And good luck with that! The definitional battle has been won and not by our team. Republicans are still milking that slogan two years later; watch for it to reappear as the November campaigns heat up.

Takeaway message: When your enemies love your slogan, and your allies hate it, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your marketing strategy.

Which brings me the long way around to “Abortion on Demand.”

Permit me to grossly oversimplify. (For a more nuanced reading of the history, try Eliza Berman’s review of Katha Pollitt’s landmark 2014 book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.)

Unlike “Defund the Police,” “Abortion on Demand” isn’t a contemporary coinage. The phrase goes back 50 years to the time of Roe v. Wade. It marks the demarcation line between pragmatists who argue that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” versus those who want the primary emphasis on women’s agency and control over their own bodies.

The most current iteration is “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology!” Its main proponent is Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, who are certainly more in the “fuck you” mode, as in “Fuck the Patriarchy.”

But this linguistic ship also sailed, a long time ago actually, and the only ones who enjoy the phrase “Abortion on Demand” any more are Republicans, because it polls so well as an epithet.

And so it goes.

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Lesser-Known DC Landmarks | “The Barbie Pond”

An ever-evolving display of Barbie and Ken dolls has adorned the tiny front yard at 1454.5 Q Street NW for nearly a decade.

The Barbie Pond on Avenue Q, as it’s formally known, has been proudly “lowering Logan Circle property values since 2014.” A recent offering — and obvious retort to Florida Gov. DeSantis — featured protesters in their summer finery carrying tiny signs reading “gay,” “bi,” “trans” and “straight.” The themes are not always so overtly political but they are all absolutely gay af, which is kind of the same thing. Check out the Pond’s Instagram account.

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Artifact | “The Dick Stays in the Pic”

It was a full-page Wall Street Journal ad I made for The Nature Conservancy 22 years ago, back in the day when I was an agency creative director.

“The Call of the Wild… and Those Who Answered It”

First came a brief thank-you note from the Conservancy’s CEO, followed by the real money shot:

Six columns of small type listing 180 individuals, institutions and corporations that had donated the first $430 million in a $1 billion campaign “to permanently protect 200 entire functioning ecosystems — along with the plants and animals they support — throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific.”3

“You have to airbrush the penis” was the word from TNC’s fundraising department when they saw our final draft of the ad. A top executive was worried they would get complaints about Bison Erectus from some superdonors who were religious conservatives.

The marketing team argued conversely that the penis was just the thing to make Journal readers pause and maybe even read the damn ad. This controversy rose all the way to the full TNC board of trustees, who ultimately voted yes: The dick stays in the picture.4

Recommended | Free by Florence Welch

Free by Florence + The Machine is a single from the band’s new album Dance Fever, their first in four years. The video was shot in Kyiv with the participation of Ukrainian artists and crew shortly before bombs started falling. As Florence Welch sings: “Is this how it is? Is this how it’s always been? To exist in the face of suffering and death and somehow still keep singing?”

An excellent question, dear reader. Be well, stay safe, keep singing, and *please* get involved in the midterms ASAP. Visit SwingLeft and enter your zip code to see where your efforts could have the greatest immediate impact on specific winnable campaigns.

-Art

“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.” — Walter Isaacson, prominent author, journalist and biographer of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They’re still being passed around: the music and the ideas.” — Bob Dylan (1992)

Whether remembered with hazy reverence on the left, or fear and loathing on the right,

the 1960s remain our political and cultural touchstone, either a high-water mark in social progress or the low tide of anarchy and depravity, depending on your point of view.

Personally I’m a high-water guy. And while, of course, the sixties literally began on January 1, 1960, I nominate as opening day Friday, November 23, 1963, the day the gunfire in Dallas jump-started a generation.

The ‘60s were off and running: JFK assassinated. Freedom Summer marchers murdered. Malcom X assassinated. MLK assassinated. RFK assassinated. America destroying Vietnam beyond Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams.

And rising up in opposition to this culture of death is, miraculously, a full-blown, unprecedented youth counterculture.

Be Here Now - Published 10/12/71

According to The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Be Here Now: The Transformation of Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D into Baba Ram Dass, is “the seminal counterculture text.” It has sold more than two million copies.

Or, as GQ Magazine puts it : “Be Here Now was a fixture on every bona fide hippie bookshelf in the 1970s.”

Richard Alpert was a wunderkind psychologist who taught at Stanford and Berkeley before heading east in 1961 with faculty appointments to four different departments at Harvard.

But as fate would have it, Alpert and his equally brilliant colleague Timothy Leary managed to obtain from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals a legal supply of purified magic mushrooms, and thus began the infamous 1962 Harvard Psilocybin study.

The researchers ingested the psychedelics themselves, and also provided the drug to students at Harvard’s Divinity School to study its efficacy as a tool for spiritual enlightenment. Despite having secured prior approval from the university, Alpert and Leary were both fired when their exploits became front-page news.

They regrouped as a nonprofit institute, in a mansion nestled on a 2,300-acre estate in upstate New York, bankrolled by an heir to the Mellon fortune. The two researchers continued experimenting there, this time with LSD-25, another Sandoz compound, which the CIA had been testing as a possible tool for mind control. [You can’t make this shit up!]

Alpert said he tripped more than 400 times. Somehow, he also found time to co-discover, edit, and publish, for the first time the in the West, the 14th-century Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Entranced by the eastern approach to human consciousness, Alpert moved to India in 1967 and immersed himself in yoga, meditation, Hinduism and Buddhism. After six months in the Himalayas he returned to the West and wrote Be Here Now, named for an admonishment from his spiritual mentor.

Richard Alpert had been reborn as Ram Dass, “Servant of God.”

Be Here Now was a 416-page illustrated guide that introduced America’s rebellious youth to the full panoply of Eastern spiritual practices — yoga, massage, mindfulness, meditation, karma, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads — work that would occupy him for the rest of his long life as a spiritual teacher and prophet of love.

Love love love. All you need is love. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

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Be All You Can Be - Premiered 1/1/1981

The US Army didn’t need a catchy recruitment slogan prior to 1973. It had done just fine with the draft, aka mandatory conscription, ever since 1917.

“I Want You For U.S. Army,” accompanied by Uncle Sam’s accusatory finger, was all they had to say, through two world wars and beyond.

Vietnam was another story entirely; America’s youth had begun to just say no in record numbers. By June 1973 — more than 575,000 Vietnam-era draft resisters later — the US ended mandatory conscription.

But the transition to an all-volunteer force was a tad rocky, to put it mildly. During the remainder of the 1970s alone, the army cycled through three different recruitment slogans, none of which was attracting sufficient volunteers… even in peacetime.

So AW Ayer, the Army’s advertising agency, went back to the drawing board and this time they struck paydirt. Their basic insight was both simple and brilliant:

Don’t put the stress on serving your country, let alone killing anybody. You have to make it about them individually, the recruits. Show them what’s in it for them. Offer them personal growth along with future well-paying careers.

The resulting slogan was “Be All You Can Be.”

“You’re reaching deep inside you,” intones the soundtrack vocal, “for things you’ve never known.”

Remind you of something? It was the perfect blend of 1960s counterculture and 1970s human potential movement.

“Be All You Can Be” was an instant hit when it started airing in 1981. Recruitment metrics went off the charts. It remained the Army’s slogan for 20 years and was eventually elected to the Advertising Hall of Fame.

“Be Here Now,” on the other hand, was RIP.

And thus was the hippie generation’s universal invocation to prayer transformed into Gen X’s ur-military slogan. It took all of ten years. Capitalism was much slower then.

These first “Be All You Can Be” spots aired on national TV during college football bowl games over New Year’s Day weekend in 1981, three weeks before the inauguration of President-Elect Ronald Reagan.

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Just Do It - Shouted 1/17/77; Repurposed 7/1/88

Even the US Army can’t claim to have given the ultimate middle finger to the prostrate corpse of the 1960s. That dubious honor belongs to a sneaker company. Here is the true story.

Dan Wieden, co-founder of Nike’s upstart ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, recounts the “Just Do It” origin story in the 2009 documentary Art & Copy. It seems that Wieden got his inspiration in 1988 from the very last words shouted a decade earlier by the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore, who, like Wieden, was originally an Oregonian.

Hooded and strapped into a padded chair, and just before being executed by a five-man Utah firing squad, as he had specifically requested, Gilmore’s exact final words were, “Let’s do it.”

Wieden, exercising a bit of artistic license, juiced it up into Nike’s famous slogan.

The first iteration was gentle enough: A folksy network television spot featuring a beloved San Francisco character, the 80-year-old ultra marathoner Walt Stack (who was, incidentally, a retired bricklayer’s hod carrier and a lifelong communist).

Nike’s first “Just Do It” ad from 1988, featuring Walt Stack on the Golden Gate bridge

A gentle enough message, yes? But over time, as American society has changed, so has the subtext, to something more along the lines of “Just Do It: I don’t care what your excuse is.” Or even, “Just Do It because I said so!”

To my ear, at least, this slogan has acquired some vaguely fascistic baggage. It’s the assertion of the internal (or external) authoritarian command voice. So perfectly appropriate to our current day! Now that’s a slogan with legs.

And that’s the way it is.

To thank you for reading all the way to the end, here’s an inspiring example of Peak Sixties, Be Here Now energy.

It’s the great keyboardist and vocalist Billy Preston (the ‘Fifth Beatle’ during their last year as a group), shown here in a rare 1973 performance of his hit, “That’s the Way God Planned It.” Preston also recorded and toured with Little Richard, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Sly Stone, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, among others.

You may recall him performing this very song with an all-star backing band at the famous 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden. This more intimate version features Preston with an outstanding quartet. It was apparently recorded on the fly in a local studio in front of a small live audience. He takes them to church, a few video glitches notwithstanding.

Enjoy and Namaste! -Art

The epithet “premature antifascist”

was coined by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the early 1940s to discredit US soldiers and other Americans who had actively opposed Nazism “too soon” — i.e. before the US officially entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

That label was specifically applied to some 3,000 US progressives who joined the newly-formed Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went to Spain to fight on the side of democracy in the brutal 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. More than 1,000 of them died.

Franco’s murderous fascist rebels prevailed (with major assists from Hitler and Mussolini) in what was effectively the first skirmish of World War Two.

The brilliant classics professor Bernard Knox, founding director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, nearly died of wounds suffered in Spain as part of the Lincoln Brigade, before joining the US Army and serving as a liaison to French and later Italian resistance fighters throughout the war.

As Knox told the Los Angeles Times in 2001:

Premature antifascist was an FBI code word for Communist. It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before), they enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was the signal to assign them to noncombat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotions they deserved.

Once bureaucratically stamped, this official mark of shame followed these people into their postwar lives and careers, no matter that they had served their country honorably and often valiantly in battle. Premature antifascist was thus the immediate precursor of the loyalty oaths, Hollywood blacklist, House Unamerican Activities Committee, and other effluvia of McCarthyism.

What a difference 80 years makes. In contrast to America’s official neutrality in the Spanish Civil War — and our decidedly checkered record of military interventions before and since — the US today seems firmly committed to democracy in Ukraine, providing billions of public dollars in aid, along with advanced weaponry, training, intelligence data, and diplomatic and political cover.

There is even a contemporary version of the Lincoln Brigades. More than 4,000 Americans are volunteering with Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, most of them US combat veterans.

Meanwhile, back in the USA

I sketch this brief history because the cancer of creeping fascism isn’t just looming again in Europe, but also mounting an unprecedented threat to the American body politic.

Although still in a larval state, it has already found a willing host and absorbed one of our two major political parties. Now it’s boring deep into our electoral system and attempting to metastasize.

Trump’s ultraMAGA fanatics are America’s new “premature profascists.” Eight decades later the shoe is on the other foot. We’re the ones under attack and the enemy is within.

The related term protofascism is defined as “the direct predecessor ideologies that influenced and formed the basis of [European] fascism.”

Or better yet, this updated definition from Urban Dictionary:

Protofascism is the earliest form of a fascist ideology, marked by an obviously amoral leader, with delusions of grandeur, performing illegal or unconstitutional acts, constantly lying, and spreading propaganda.

A protofascist movement will exhibit the hallmarks of a cult, including head-spinning denial of obvious and easily-proven facts, gaslighting, obstruction of justice, and extreme whataboutism psychosis.

Sound familiar?

For those of you with strong stomachs, and who wish to voyage to the belly of the beast, I recommend listening directly to Steve Bannon’s insufferable, influential, and widely distributed War Room broadcasts and podcasts.

I just spent a week visiting that vomitorium, and it’s not for nothing that Media Matters awarded Bannon the dubious title of “Misinformer of the Year” in 2021. [Note: John Whitehouse, Justin Horowitz, Madeline Peltz and the rest of the Media Matters crew deserve combat pay and many mental health days off for the service they provide to American democracy.]

Bannon’s podcasts are a nonstop gusher of vile, dangerous lunacy by “Stephen K” and his rotating crew of pols, pundits, and purported experts, including multiple disgraced officials of the previous Administration. The whole affair is shot through with outright lies, topped with a sprinkling of irrelevant factoids and misleading statistics.

Bannon said the quiet part out loud in a 2018 interview with journalist and author Michael Lewis:

Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

You are certainly succeeding at that, Stephen K. We are just five months away from the Congressional midterm elections and the parade of superfluous bullshit is both distracting and unyielding, leaving precious little space to even bring up serious issues, let alone speak the truth persuasively.

This is what passes for political process these days.

My remaining faith is predicated on the notion that they have gone a little too far, too soon. The American people are going to smell a rat and leave the Senate in Democratic hands, our losses in the House somewhat manageable, and downballot results on the mend.

If that happens, we get two more years to fight off this festering infection. If not, the Demolition Derby of Democracy begins.

On that optimistic note, I truly hope that you and yours are doing well and staying safe.

— Art

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Axis: Bold as Love

My son has a poster on the wall of his college dorm room. It’s the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s second album, Axis: Bold as Love, released in 1967.1

A few student friends were over visiting my son at his dorm several nights ago, when one of them, a young woman of East Indian descent, announced that she was so triggered and offended by the Hindu-themed imagery of the album cover art, its cultural disrespect and racist appropriation of religious iconography, that she was tempted to just tear it off the wall! She demanded its removal and an apology from my son.

I won’t impinge any further on his privacy, or theirs, but my own initial reaction was frankly WTF is this young woman’s problem? Is she really accusing Jimi Hendrix of racism?

Yes, the imagery does invoke Lord Vishnu, but it’s rooted in what looks to me like pure intentions, an homage in the same aesthetic and spiritual vein as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released six months earlier, or Donovan’s contemporaneous musical imagery, or George Harrison’s for that matter.

Anyway, no sooner had I tied these sentiments and rationalizations into a neat liberal bow, than I dipped into Google, hoping for a bit of backstory to back myself up. Instead what I found was an article by the conspiracy enthusiast and, apparently, music journalist David Metzger, writing in 2018 in his online zine, Dangerous Minds. Under the headline Jimi Hendrix REALLY HATED his album covers Metzger encapsulates the true story of the controversial Axis cover art thusly:

“And then there was the cover for Axis: Bold As Love.

“Roger Law made a painting of the band based on a photo-portrait from Karl Ferris and that image was superimposed over a mass-produced religious poster. Hendrix and the Experience were depicted as incarnations of Vishnu, something many Hindus found insulting.

“Hendrix hated it, feeling that its appropriation of Hindu symbolism was disrespectful and questioning why his own Native American heritage did not supply the motif.

“An exasperated Jimi told the press that ‘the three of us have nothing to do with what’s on the Axis cover.’” (It’s worth noting that this cover art is still banned in Malaysia.)

And to that I say… Oops… Never mind…

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But then there’s this…

Carlos Santana recorded Abraxas, his own legendary second album, in 1970 at the tender age of 23, younger even than Hendrix, who had just turned 25 when Axis: Bold as Love was released three years previously.

[And let’s just stipulate up front that Santana and Hendrix are two of the six-string titans standing astride the Mount Olympus of rock and roll.]2

Santana chose the title “Abraxas” from the Herman Hesse novel Demian, a story about Jungian individuation and the concept of duality. In the novel Hesse writes:

“We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas…”

Santana also personally selected the cover art: Annunication, a 1961 canvas by the psychedelic surrealist Mati Klarwein, a French-German artist who created the piece shortly after immigrating to New York. The painting is Klarwein’s interpretation of the New Testament story of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to tell her she’s going to give birth to Jesus.

In Klarwein’s Annunciation, however, the Virgin Mary is proud, black and naked, lounging languidly on a divan in an enchanted forest. The Archangel Gabriel, meanwhile, is awfully androgynous (and equally nude). S/he is indeed coming down from the heavens to deliver the Good News, but perched provocatively athwart a giant conga drum that seems headed for trouble!

As journalist Jacob Shelton tells it, CBS Records executives initially refused to distribute the album with a naked woman on the cover, regardless of artistic intent. If they were also concerned by the (historically accurate) prospect of a Black Virgin Mary, they kept that fact to themselves.

A large sticker featuring Time magazine’s glowing album review was affixed over Mary’s nakedness for the original release. But by the time Abraxas rocketed to #1 on the Billboard charts, cooler heads had apparently prevailed and Mother Mary was once again in all her glory.

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So What’s the Difference?

Objectively speaking, the Abraxas cover art is way more brazen an appropriation of Christian imagery and iconography than whatever offense Axis’s cover might cause some devout Hindus. (And that’s not even considering the use of naked female flesh to move merchandise.)

Why, then, did my kid’s friends side with the objecting Hindu student, and suggest that my son apologize and remove the offending artwork? Would the reaction have been the same if a White Christian student had expressed concern over the appropriation of Christian imagery in Abraxas?

I think not, and that opens up a whole can of worms about cancel culture and cultural appropriation that I’ll leave for another time.

But speaking for myself, I side with the album covers, both of them. The Abraxas cover is obviously the superior work aesthetically, and I do appreciate Jimi Hendrix’s anger at how his record label dealt with him as an artist.

But there is an awful lot of territory between “disrespectful” and “heretical.” And historically, when fundamentalists of any stripe start speaking of heresy, be they Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Jew, Magapublican or Massively Woke, it too often ends up in depressingly similar fashion, to wit:

John Lennon was murdered on 8 December 1980 by Mark David Chapman, a devout Christian who said he still nursed a grudge over Lennon declaring that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" in 1966, exacerbated by two of his post-Beatles songs, "God" and "Imagine.”3

Charlie Hebdo anyone?

- Art

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Santana previews Black Magic Woman at Tanglewood just before the release of Abraxas

Jimi Hendrix’s electrifying rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock

You have to give the MAGApublicans credit for one thing: They understand audacious marketing.

Take “grooming,” currently #1 on the GOP’s Top 10 Wedge Issues chart. As 538.com’s Kaleigh Rogers recently reported:

• “Fox News host Laura Ingraham included a segment on her show last month where she claimed public schools have become “grooming centers” where “sexual brainwashing” takes place.

• “Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted that the Democrats are the party of “grooming and transitioning children.”

• “Last week, One America News host Chanel Rion even called President Joe Biden “the groomer-in-chief.”

Don’t even get me started on Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay law, just one among several dozen current anti-LGBTQ legislative initiatives in at least 19 different states (several of them involving Senator #LadyGraham of South Carolina).

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And then there’s Tucker Carlson’s stupefying homoerotic video montage, aka the promo trailer for his new “documentary” The End of Men.

It goes without saying that one can — indeed one must — ridicule Tucker’s testicle-tanning schtick, but he does have his finger on something essential: Kids may be the wedge issue, but at a deeper level, this whole manufactured controversy is really about what it means to be a man.

Carlson says American men are both literally and metaphorically going soft; he points out that serum testosterone levels in American men have been declining about 1% annually since the 1980s.

However, according to the National Institutes of Health, Mexican-American men have the highest testosterone levels among all US men. By your standards, Tucker, isn’t this an argument for increased immigration across the southern border?

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All kidding aside, a consistent throughline links attacks on trans youth; opposition to teaching racism as part of US history; undermining teacher unions; and campaigns to give conservative “parental rights” activists de facto veto power over local public-school curricula.

We are facing a frightening and unprecedented national insurgency composed of the political far right, religious fundamentalists, white nationalists, and revanchist elements among the traditional ruling classes.

Perhaps the missile gap of the 1950s has indeed morphed into the testosterone gap of the 2020s. That’s no reason to empower the fascistic youth indoctrination techniques of pre-World War Two Europe.

Creeping fascism is on a 21-month game clock and half-time is just 200 days away.

When the whistle blows on November 8, 2024, and regardless of who wins that day’s Presidential election, far-right conspirators intend to launch open civil warfare in the United States.

It’s estimated that some 20% of the American electorate verges on Q-Anon level adherence to the doctrines of MAGApublicanism. A far smaller, yet still uncomfortably large number of die-hard insurrectionists and white nationalists is also in play, contemplating, and planning to execute, acts of domestic terrorism.

Our best chance to fight back is just 200 days away. The Congressional midterm elections this November 8 mark the half-time of Biden’s Presidency, and will largely write the political playbook for its last two years.

We have to keep Democrats in control of at least one House of Congress and begin to shore up our share of elected representation at the state and local levels.

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Are you someone who is angry and frustrated by the illusion that progress is only happening at a snail’s pace in the Biden Administration? Have you given up on being more involved? Is bitching to friends your primary form of social activism? Please! Take a chill pill and get with the fucking program because what’s the alternative?

Here’s what we have to look forward to if we lose the House and Senate in November:

• Whatever your progressive issue of choice, a MAGApublican majority in the next Congress is going to start kicking our ass on day one.

• Forget about making forward progress politically; we’ll be stymied and overwhelmingly on the defensive. You think things were bad under Trump? This next crew is going to be even meaner… and smarter.

• Our allies within the federal government, and sympathetic nonprofits with government-sourced contracts, will be facing systematic audits, terminations of funding, unending investigative hearings, disciplinary proceedings and even prosecutions.

I can at least understand why the smattering of progressives who consider themselves “revolutionaries” are less than enthusiastic and committed Democrats. They truly believe the only way forward for society as a whole is for the inherent contradictions of late-stage capitalism to foment a systemic breakdown. But unless you fit into that deluded demographic you have no excuse to stay uninvolved over the next 28 weeks.

Yes, you are going to see some temporary backtracking on principles by our side. You may notice some creepy conciliatory gestures and even possibly a loathsome compromise or two. Don’t give up. And don’t start badmouthing our own team.

Focus your animus on the other side. Even if you have to grit your teeth to vote for the asshole with a D next to their name, do it with pride! It’s your minimal civic responsibility.

If you care a little more, find a bit of money to donate or volunteer some time with groups like SwingLeft and MoveOn, which have a track record of activating voters in the places it most matters.

And be thankful we're not Ukranians. 

- Art

Inside my ‘63 Meatmobile

There were five distinct socioeconomic classes in the neighborhood where I grew up on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio in the 1950s and ‘60s. Generally speaking, and in ascending order, families were either Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs.

Of course there were people, White and Black, who owned no car at all and had to ride the bus to get where they were going, but I don't recall being aware of that as a child.

There were also Fords, to be sure, if you were Christian, but Jews in those postwar years didn't much traffic in products manufactured by Adolph Hitler's pal Henry. There were also admittedly Chryslers, but those didn't really register in my imagination except for rare top-of-the-line New Yorkers and Imperials.

Foreign cars? When I was a kid that meant a VW Beetle, which was even more verboten among my people than a Ford.

Our family were base-model Chevrolet folk, firmly situated on the lower-middle rungs of the class ladder.

My father Manny ran a small kosher meat market with his brother Isadore and their brother-in-law Max. Dad always kept a layer of clean butcher paper in the trunk of our brand new beige 1963 Chevy Bel Air, which was both work car and family car.

Several days a week, he would get up at 4 am and drive across the city to the kosher slaughterhouse. There he would choose a couple of their best hanging "fours of beef," whole, skinned forequarters of a ritually-slaughtered cow, minus head, hoof and innards. These he would hoist onto his back, then into the Bel Air’s trunk, and return across the city to the butcher shop. After a cup of coffee with Max and Issie, they would open for business at 7 am and start breaking down the fours of beef into steaks, chops, roasts, and ground chuck.

That Bel Air was the car my older brother Bob drove me downtown in to see the Beatles live at Cleveland Stadium in 1965, when I was 14. It’s the car I learned to drive in when I got my own license two years later. I drove and drove and drove that Chevrolet, delivering meat to customers, my guitar and amplifier to band practices, and girlfriends out on dates. It was still our family car when I left Ohio for good and headed to the West Coast at age 22.

I never saw that damn car again, or my dad, who died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 57. I still think of him whenever I see one of those fine old Chevys on the road.

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Remembering Eric Boehlert

A longtime colleague and friend of mine was killed last Monday when his bicycle was struck by a suburban commuter train in New Jersey. Eric Boehlert was so young, about the same age as my father when he passed. That’s a crushing thing. My heart goes out to Eric’s family.

Those of us in the progressive media world of course knew Eric for his pioneering work with Media Matters. Over more than a decade he — along with David Brock and colleagues — built up from scratch an influential, state-of-the art, 24/365, media tracker, right-wing lie detector, and castigator of lazy and venal journalism.

Eric gave the lie, day in and day out, to the myth of alleged liberal bias in the media, a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. He consistently countered right-wing lies with actual researched facts, another thankless endeavor.

So let’s all say it: Thank you Eric. You were a first responder for democracy.

And more important, let’s each recommit to continuing our own work toward that goal.

Eric and I crossed paths professionally a number of times back in the day, mostly around net neutrality issues and assorted Fox News perfidies. Recently, as I planned to launch RealityReport here on the Substack platform, I reached out to Eric for advice (his hugely successful newsletter PressRun is featured as a best practices scenario for aspiring Substack publishers).

Eric was, as always, generous with his time and continued to give me great advice; our last email exchange was just four days before his death. Rest in peace, brother.

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The elegant, mind-bending complexity of life is brilliantly revealed in this danceable music video. It’s far more miraculous than “pro-life” fundamentalists will ever know. Please watch.

Ontogeny vs Cosmology

I don’t have religious faith but I do have a scientific theory of the universe, including our likely ultimate demise as a species, how to avoid it, and a possible Plan B should we fuck things up beyond redemption.

Homo sapiens has been around for roughly 300,000 years and that's just a blink of an eye relatively speaking; earth's first multicellular animals date back some 800 million years!

After all this time, are we really going to be the ones to bring down the curtain on this whole humanity thing, simply because we can't learn to live with each other?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Obviously you and I care a great deal about this. But does the universe itself ultimately give a damn one way or the other? Not so much.

Here’s my theory, a product of near-total scientific ignorance coupled with considerable paranoid thinking:

Think of an egg. A chicken egg. An embryo safely develops inside its thin protective shell, which contains, on its underside, a layer of nutrients to support the bird’s growth and development until it’s ready to hatch.

The chick’s constant pecking for sustenance eventually weakens the shell until it cracks open. Time to live or die. That’s ontogeny in a nutshell (er, egg shell).

I believe that a similar phenomenon operates at the planetary level.

Our earth is protected, and life made possible, by the existence of a thin atmospheric layer that keeps deadly ultraviolet radiation out, holds critical oxygen in, regulates temperature within acceptable limits, and fosters the existence of liquid surface water.

Are we grateful for nature’s services? Hell no! Like ravenous chicks in overdrive, we’re hacking away at our protective shell like there was no tomorrow… and someday there won’t be.

If and when that day comes, whether through climate catastrophe or thermonuclear war, Mother Nature won’t even send a condolence card.

Now the good news: The jury is still out on humanity’s future. Our people and our planet are stronger and more resilient than you think. Many, many things are getting better and better even as some others get worse and worse.

Hope does spring eternal… and it is springtime. So be well, be safe, practice loving kindness and keep on fighting for what’s right, because there is no Plan B.

— Art

I need you right now. I mean right now. I don't mean tomorrow. I mean right now.

Remember those lyrics from the Animals’ 1964 release Boom Boom? How about their immortal version of House of the Rising Sun that same year?1

No? Let’s widen the lens a bit. Even if Eric Burdon never floated your boat, if you were alive between 1946 and 1981 I’m looking at you, fellow Boomers and GenXers. Because the irreducible fact of the matter is that our country needs us, and needs *us* in particular, right the fuck now.

No, we’re not being bombed and massacred like Ukrainians but our democracy is under attack just the same, not by outside enemies but from inside our own house.

Clocks are ticking; alarms are ringing. You can feel it in your bones. America’s historic forces of darkness — from White supremacists and warmongers to Christian absolutists and neofascists — are marching in lockstep as never before in our lifetime.

Authoritarian extremists now have operational control of one of our two major political parties, and they are openly and methodically laying the groundwork to once again attempt to literally seizure political power in the United States, from the county courthouse to the White House, beginning with this November’s midterm election in just over 200 days, and culminating in two years at our next Presidential election.

And oddly enough this all goes back to when we were young.

If the hot-button issues congressional Republicans are running on this year sound familiar, it’s because they are.

Critical race theory, transexual children and political wokeness are simply this year’s version of [take your pick] dirty hippies, draft dodgers, bra burners, pot smokers, baby killers, rapists, welfare queens, feminazis, Willie Horton, illegal immigrants, the homosexual agenda, Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, to name but a few.

This brand of gutter politics based on race, gender and lifestyle arose precisely in reaction to the social progress of the 1960s and ‘70s, as did the cast of characters orchestrating these attacks. And they are still obsessed with destroying what’s left of the counterculture of our youth.

Paul Manafort and Roger Stone helped revolutionize sleazy Republican dirty tricks in the 1970s. They’ve been highly compensated purveyors of GOP slime for almost 50 years since, and lobbyists for a rogue’s gallery of murderous foreign dictators.

If their names seem familiar today, it’s due to their current supporting roles as accomplices (and criminal defendants) in Donald Trump’s crimes.

Manafort and Stone’s long-ago business partner Lee Atwater (pictured at right in the photo) rose to the greatest heights of the three.

A bare-knuckled political operative in the Reagan White House, it was Atwater who crafted the Willie Horton attack on Michael Dukakis as manager of George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988. Atwater then became chairman of the Republican National Committee, before dying suddenly at the age of 40 in 1991.

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And then there’s Newt. Unlike those other avatars of smash-mouth politics, Newt Gingrich stoked the flames of resentment against the 1960s and ‘70s from within Congress itself for 20 more years. As Wikipedia delicately puts it:

“Political scientists have credited Newt Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining democratic norms in the United States and hastening political polarization and partisanship.”

Gingrich made his motivations explicit in an interview with The New York Times in November 1994, as he was ascending to Speaker of the House and promulgating his infamous Contract With America.

“There are profound things that went wrong, starting with the Great Society and the counterculture, and until we address them head on we’re going to have these problems,” Gingrich said.

He denounced President Bill Clinton as “a very smart, very clever tactician whose core system of activity is a combination of counterculture and McGovern.” Speaking to what he thought was a private session with lobbyists, Gingrich said his campaign strategy was to portray Clinton Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans.”

So there you have it: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich as the Four Whores2 of the Apocalypse, laying waste to the ideals of a generation, with Steve Bannon, their bastard3 offspring, now trying to push things much, much further.

I don’t know about you but it pisses me off royally.

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So what happens to us now? Do you feel anxious, angry, depressed, overwhelmed and powerless at times?

As Joan Baez famously said: “Action is the antidote to despair.”

Somehow, we need to snap out of our collective malaise, stop doomscrolling and bitching on social media, roll up our sleeves and get to work. We can’t let these motherfuckers prevail!

Let’s start with what NOT to do. I’m all in with @MalcolmNance on this one. The next eight months are not the time for shitting on Democrats, complaining about Biden, or obsessing over any particular policy issue, no matter how righteous, if it further endangers the Democrats’ slim path to maintaining at least partial control of Congress for the last two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

On a more positive note, let me propose two alternative courses of action for whatever energies you can contribute to the cause:

• Choose an organization you trust and invest some of your faith, time and money, ideally a group with a track record of actually activating voters in the places where it will matter the most. For my money, such as it is, that’s SwingLeft, MoveOn or the new, Boomer-and-GenX-specific Third Act. SwingLeft in particular lets you simply enter a zip code and find effective ways to donate, volunteer in person or remotely, and stay up to date. If you are fortunate enough to live in an all-blue enclave, you can pick the nearest swing state or congressional district and focus your efforts there.

• And by all means, become a Mary Kay for peace and justice! You are an influencer with the folks you know; reach out and influence them until it hurts. Reconnect with past and present friends, family and colleagues. If they are sympathetic, register and activate them as well. Multi-level marketing works!4

If enough of us will do this, we absolutely can keep Congress blue in November and keep creeping authoritarianism at bay. And always remember:

The world has mourned three icons of spirituality and global activism in less than three months.

First, Archbishop Desmond Tutu died on the day after Christmas at age 90.

On January 15 we honored the birth of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would have been 93.

A week later, we lost the renowned Zen master and lifelong peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, 95, the father of mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.

These three men were friends as well as contemporaries; all were heroes of human social progress in the 20th century. In recognition of this, Thích Nhất Hạnh was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; Rev. King and Archbishop Tutu were both awarded that singular honor.

But for some reason it is the Archbishop — freedom fighter, spiritual healer, and passionate advocate of universal human rights, for everyone from Palestinians to LGBTQ — whom I haven’t been able to get out of my mind.

As BBC South Africa correspondent @nomsa_maseko put it in her moving, three-minute tribute to Tutu:

“He was first and foremost a priest, not a politician, but for the best part of half a century he was the face of reconciliation and South Africa’s moral compass.”1

Tutu was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1984 for decades of nonviolent but unyielding civil disobedience in the jaws of the brutal apartheid regime.

Later, at Nelson Mandela’s request, he became the architect and chair of the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which publicly laid bare in gruesome detail the racist horrors perpetuated under White colonial rule.

Yet somehow, despite decades of struggle against evils almost beyond comprehension, a common thread in the obituaries celebrating Tutu’s life was his unfailing playfulness, sense of humor, and yes, joyfulness.

As he himself said:

“We are meant to live with joy. Not that life will be easy or painless [but] we can turn our faces to the wind and accept that this is the storm we must pass through.

“Discovering more joy does not, I'm sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak [but] we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

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These words come from The Book of Joy,2 the fruit of five days of intensive private talks between Archbishop Tutu and his close friend Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, on the occasion of the latter’s 80th birthday in 2015.

Despite being frail, and already ailing, Tutu had traveled from South Africa to the Tibetan’s home-in-exile in Dharamsala, India for what would be their last time together.

Ironically, South Africa’s post-liberation government had refused the Dalai Lama permission to travel to Cape Town for Tutu’s own 80th birthday following vociferous complaints from China, South Africa’s chief trading partner (and the occupier of Tibet). The Archbishop was furious with his own government over this capitulation and let it be known in no uncertain terms.

This was neither the first nor the last time Tutu would berate the democratic regime he himself had helped bring to power. That same BBC tribute includes footage of an unforgettable tirade against corruption in the ruling African National Congress, delivered from the pulpit:

“I am warning you. I am warning you that we will pray, as we prayed for the downfall of the apartheid government, we will pray for the downfall of a government that misrepresents us.”

Obviously the Archbishop — who enjoyed being called Arch — had a very particular understanding of living joyfully.

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It’s hard to do justice to The Book of Joy, whose 450 pages range widely across spirituality, psychology, ethics and politics, from the Christian, Buddhist and secular perspectives alike.

The book posits “Eight Pillars of Joy” as the essential foundation upon which a joyous life may be constructed, even and especially in the midst of hardship and struggle:

Perspective, humility, humor, acceptance3, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity

There is just one obstacle standing in the way. Oops: 14 obstacles:

Fear, stress and anxiety; frustration and anger4; sadness and grief; despair; loneliness; envy; suffering and adversity; illness and the fear of death.

Lord knows I’m no Desmond Tutu, nor I suspect are you. But neither are we facing invasion and imminent death. All of us here would certainly benefit from a little more time cultivating Column A and a lot less dwelling in Column B.

In that sprit, here, from 1969, are 33 minutes of direct connection to the root of joy. Simply lay down, close your eyes and turn it up loud. What can I say? It works for me.

[This is an updated post]

Critical Race Theory & Transgender Wars

Republican strategists are promoting Glenn Youngkin’s recent winning gubernatorial campaign in Virginia as a template for the upcoming Congressional midterms this November.

They view Youngkin’s success in triangulating between middle-of-the-road suburbanites and rabid Trumpists as somehow translatable to purplish US House and Senate campaigns. But there’s more going on here than meets the eye, and neither Youngkin nor his candidacy are likely to be successfully emulated elsewhere in 2022.

First, however, allow me a diversion. I promise to circle back to the alleged Youngkin Effect, but what really grabbed my attention in Virginia, and continues to have me stewing, are two specific below-the-belt, culture-war explosions that detonated in the run-up to Election Day in the Commonwealth.

Bottom line: Both sets of fireworks fizzled … and that has important implications for Democrats in this critical year for democracy.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY: WTF HAPPENED?

There is nothing new about critical race theory, of course; it was developed in the 1970s by some of the country’s leading African-American legal scholars, academics and activists. Nor are these marginal concepts. It’s no exaggeration to say that similar intellectual constructs undergird an entire constellation of civil rights litigation, legislation and governance that has advanced in the five decades since.1

Cut to now. After 50 years slumbering in academic obscurity, the phrase “CRT” suddenly bursts into view as the right’s preferred new shorthand for racism. What happened? It apparently started less than two years ago and reached a crescendo during the Virginia campaign.

Journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells provides an excellent look in The New Yorker at the 18-month deployment cycle that birthed “War on CRT” as a political issue, from its inception by a lone right-wing activist; to Tucker Carlson, Mark Meadows and eventually Trump himself; to an executive order targeting federal diversity trainings and a spate of copycat laws in GOP states; and, finally, to the Youngkin gubernatorial campaign this past summer and fall, providing the first real opportunity in the country to test the issue’s actual electoral appeal.

The candidate himself went all-in, pledging repeatedly to “ban critical race theory on Day One.” Youngkin also proposed, at a series of “Parents Matter” campaign events around the state, that public school students in Virginia should learn the whitewashed “Project 1776” curriculum championed by Donald Trump.2

Finally, a week before Election Day, Youngkin released a blistering attack ad against his opponent Terry McAuliffe, resurrecting an old battle over the teaching of Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved” in Virginia schools. [Thus hitting both the race and gender hot buttons with one shot!]

But let me repeat, the bottom line is that it didn’t really work. Youngkin did win, yet it’s pretty clear from the data (stay tuned for details) that neither racebaiting nor genderbashing carried the day.

One last point: It’s a good thing I’m not teaching one of those non-existent high school classes devoted to Critical Race Theory. I’d be fired in a heartbeat. I’d ask my students one simple question: Why does the skin color of African Americans range across an entire gamut of darker hues? And the answer is - wait for it - several centuries of mass rape of enslaved Black women by White overseers and slaveowners, including some of our founding fathers.

We won’t be truly free until most of us, at least, can hold that truth to be self-evident, just as so many Germans today have been taught to fully appreciate the horrors buried in their past.

TRANSGENDER WARS: THE TOILET GRIFT

Simply tampering with men’s and women’s traditional sex roles tends to trigger a potent backlash, particularly among men, out on the farther reaches of the Republican right.

But actually questioning the nature of gender identity itself? That brings out a whole new level of crazy. The sheer existence of transexuality as a phenomenon seems to make MAGA heads explode. Whether dudes or dads, it’s apparently too direct an affront to their own fragile masculinities.

Vilifying transexuals and indeed bashing all sexual minorities isn’t just considered sport by Team Insurgency. It has been emerging as a favorite below-the-belt campaign tactic since before Donald Trump’s election.

To recap: In 2016, after the city of Charlotte, North Carolina passed an ordinance allowing transgender people to use restrooms according to their own gender identity, the State of North Carolina enacted superseding legislation declaring that people may only use public toilets matching the gender listed on their birth certificates. Other Red states soon followed suit.

Later that year, in the final months of his administration, President Barack Obama issued a federal directive to all publicly-funded schools in the US, effectively reinstating the Charlotte rule and making it national in scope. Since then, more than a dozen GOP-controlled states have sued in Federal courts to overturn this decision. They want to enforce their damn toilet laws.

Here in Virginia, and once again during the peak of the Youngkin campaign — can you imagine that? — high school toilets suddenly became a viral sensation and a national news story, thanks to the Great Loudoun County Tranny Toilet Fraud.

If attacks on Critical Race Theory can at least be said to have a flimsy connection to reality, the same cannot be said for the alleged transgender rape of a female high school student at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the affluent outer suburbs of Washington DC.

Loudoun and neighboring Fairfax counties were ground zero in the GOP campaign for Youngkin, home to tens of thousands of suburban moms who deserted Donald Trump en masse for Joe Biden in 2020, and whom Youngkin needed to win back.

Only after the dust had settled on Youngkin’s win did the full story emerge. The alleged transexual boy-in-a-skirt rapist turned out to be the victim’s boyfriend. They previously had consensual sexual encounters in that very school bathroom, which she had picked out as a location for their tryst.

By that time the damage was done. There were even calls for the entire Loudoun school board to resign. “You are so concerned with pushing race and gender that you sacrificed our children,” Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County GOP Women’s Club, accused board members.

What’s doubly obscene about the accusation of transexual predators in high school bathrooms is not just that it’s totally false, a damnable lie, a forgery, but it’s actually the reverse that is tragically, literally true.

Those good, middle-class Christian Trumpists suffer nothing.

BLACK AND TRANS, R.I.P.

It is trans youth themselves who are being condemned by the thousand, thrown out of their homes by judgmental, Fundamentalist-inspired parents, far too often winding up on the streets of America’s larger cities, selling their bodies for survival and subject to predation, assault, addiction … and murder.

Of course, violence against trans people is happening across the board, but it hits one community harder than any other. According to a 2018 report by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, 80 percent of all gender-nonconforming murder victims in the United States were transgender people of color; 70 percent were black transwomen.3

Walking through Dupont Circle in 2019, I happened across the aftermath of a protest and memorial ceremony making just this point. The memorial’s attendees had left behind a startling emotional tableau. Red roses were scattered around the central fountain, along with paper plaques bearing the names and death dates of murdered Black transwomen from across the United States.

Two recent DC victims were literally being mourned that day by family and friends. Ashanti Carmon, 27, a homeless transgender sex worker, had been killed in March 2019. Zoe Spears, 23, was shot to death in the same DC neighborhood three months later by a different killer. The two women were friends.

Whether it’s Critical Race Theory or Transgender Warfare, it seems the twin evils of racism and gender violence are often intertwined. That’s one reason the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund has just filed an amicus brief with the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals in the case of a transgender Florida student challenging that state’s school bathroom law. Good for them.

BACK TO THE ALLEGED “YOUNGKIN EFFECT”

I said earlier that contrary to GOP hopes, Glenn Youngkin’s victorious Virginia campaign is unlikely to be successfully replicated in the next election.

In the first place, Youngkin the candidate was sui generis. He is quite literally a candidate of, by and for the one percent — the former chief executive of the Carlyle Group, for Chrissake4 — a global wheeler dealer at the pinnacle of the private equity markets and an intimate of international corporate financiers. His wealth is such that he was willing to forfeit more than $100 million in accrued stock options to retire early and turn his attention to elected high office.

Other Carlyle partners have included former president George H.W. Bush, former British prime minister John Major and former secretary of state James Baker III. The firm’s clients at the time, just in the Middle East, included the Saudi royal family, Saddam Hussein’s family and even Osama bin Laden's half-brother, who was actually attending a Carlyle event in Washington on 9/11 and had to be quietly spirited out of the country — despite all US air traffic being grounded — allegedly via special dispensation from President Bush 43 himself.

In terms of personality, Glenn Youngkin is no Gordon Gekko. He’s blue blood, smooth as silk, understated, soothing and reasonable. In addition to his ruling-class pedigree, indeed because of it, candidate Youngkin also had an excellent, you might even say a special relationship with Donald Trump.

The two men apparently made a deal to be mutually supportive from a distance. In a first for The Donald, Trump endorsed Youngkin and then noticeably stayed the hell out of the way. Unlike other candidates who were beneficiaries of 45’s love, Youngkin alone was empowered to do the Trump Two-Step, embracing and avoiding Orange Satan as circumstances dictated.

My personal belief is that Trump, who regularly spoke with Youngkin during the campaign, was dazzled and coddled into staying quiet by a true master of the deal. You have to question whether any of the current crop of 2022 House and Senate hopefuls have what it takes to keep The Donald on a short leash where his presence will be inconvenient.

Finally, it should also come as no surprise that Youngkin — an enormously successful manager of corporate deals on behalf of the world’s richest men and institutions — was able to recruit, manage and execute an extremely effective, sophisticated campaign on his own behalf. They treaded lightly where needed, played the Donald card where appropriate, and relentlessly pounded with artillery when required. It was a near-flawless display.5

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

The bad news: There’s not much we can do about underhanded and fraudulent political attacks based on race and gender. They are immune to facts, and the people propagating them are utterly shameless.

The good news: These offensive campaign tactics in Virginia turned out to be marginal at best in changing voters’ minds, contrary to much of the immediate post-election media commentary.6 Voters who really care about these issues were already committed Trump supporters.

If it persuades a few white suburban moms on the fringes, then so much the better for the GOP, but at this point, the real purpose of the race and culture uprisings is to keep throwing red meat to the base the Bannonites built. Their White supremacist and fundamentalist Christian advance brigades need to be kept perpetually alienated, angry, and motivated, if you want them on call when and where they’re needed.

In other words, and of course every district is different and your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, the data seem to be saying that Democrats pay an insignificant additional political cost for being progressive on race and gender issues. What’s more, the energy, commitment and passion of our own activated base will more than compensate. Doing the right thing in this case also happens to be the smart thing.

Don’t chase these particular Republican rabbits.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE: THE LAY OF THE LAND

We are not living in a state of emergency. Really. Happy New Year! But there is plenty cause for concern and plenty need for action.

We have less than a year to right this ship. If Democrats lose control of the Senate a year from now, the final two years of the Biden Administration are going to be a real shit show. Forget about the House. We are going to lose the House. The only question is by how much, and of course, we still need to fight tooth and nail everywhere to keep those losses to a bare minimum.

But we absolutely can prevail in the Senate. According to the latest SwingLeft predictions, 28 of the 34 seats up next year essentially belong to the party now holding them. There are just six states in play; Democrats need to win at least half of them to preserve the current 50/50 status quo, with VP Kamala Harris as tiebreaker.

Of those six states, three feature Democrats at risk of losing their seats. These must be defended:

• Arizona, where first-term Senator Mark Kelly, former astronaut and the husband of former Senator Gabby Giffords, is running for a full six-year term.

• Georgia, where new Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock eked out a victory last year in a special election and must now defend that seat again.

• Nevada, where Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto is running for re-election and seeking a second term.

Three other states are considered flippable:

• North Carolina, an open seat thanks to Republican Richard Burr’s retirement. The Democratic nominee will be chosen in a May 17 primary.

• Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey’s retirement offers a great opportunity to pick up a seat. That nominee with also be chosen May 17.

• Wisconsin, where the vulnerable and villainous Republican Ron Johnson is seeking re-election in a state Biden won. The primary isn’t until August 9.

Here is an idea if you really, really want to do something positive and concrete: Adopt one of these states! Don’t ignore your own backyard, but plan your summer vacation in one of these essential swing states and donate some vacay days to the Democratic Senate candidate. They will gladly put you to work. Even if you can’t do that, you can absolutely phone bank and write letters remotely across state lines. Volunteer! 7

A NEW YEARS WISHLIST FOR MY FRIENDS

For advocates of direct action:

• Make an explicit commitment to nonviolence

• Avoid incendiary language unless it is your intention to incite

• Try not to give the other side cheap, effective ammunition with which to attack you

• Be wary of agitation. People are already agitated.

• Be metaphorically and substantively in the other side’s face, but hopefully not physically

And here’s something for my establishment Democratic politician friends:

FINALLY, A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT WOKE FUNDAMENTALISM8

Living in a woke state, both politically and spiritually, is something I aspire to (and consistently fail at).

Being truly woke to me means being fully conscious, alive and aware. The very idea of oppressing a fellow human being from such a place is unthinkable, since the essence of enlightenment is, as they say, compassion for all living things.

Yet even the most enlightened visions have a tendency in human hands to calcify, turn into doctrine, or harden into dogma. And so it gives me no pleasure to note the symptoms of a woke fundamentalism that have taken root on our side.

I’m talking about hierarchical categories of virtue and sin… specific nomenclature that must be respected … a demand for conformity … a crime of apostasy… the casting out of those who violate taboos … and low to zero tolerance for deviations.

On the other hand, moderate Democrats parroting right-wing talking points is equally ugly, if not more so. Let me say it yet again: If our Democratic base voters are not energized and activated, we lose! End of story. Have a happy and healthy 2022!

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NOTES

It might not look like it at first glance, but last week was exactly what we needed… and far more than the legislative sausage-making and post-election finger-wagging that dominated the media narrative.

In fact, what we just witnessed was a damn master class in charceuterie, immediately followed by a large helping of lessons-that-better-be-learned.

Let's take a quick minute and smell a few roses. Don’t worry, the stench of current reality will still be there when we return.

Here is the week that was:

Our Democratic Congress just passed, and President Biden will soon sign into law, more than a trillion dollars of infrastructure investments. They are overwhelmingly popular, well-paid, union-job creating, middle- and working-class stimulating, environmentally sustaining … and poverty-reducing!

These massive public-works projects, on a scale not seen since the 1970s, will soon begin flowing into all 50 states, and will you look at that, into all 435 Congressional districts, just in time for the mid-term elections.

But wait, it gets better! A majority of sitting Republican Senators voted against the infrastructure package. So did nearly every Republican in the House of Representatives. Each one of them who is running for re-election next year will be hounded relentlessly to justify their opposition to popular job-creating programs and small business opportunities in their own districts and states. Did I mention that these programs are incredibly popular with voters of all political stripes?

For the Rs, this is like voting against mom and apple pie. They hate it. And if, a year from now, and assuming passage of a decent Build Back Better plan, Congressional Democrats do somehow manage to prevail … if we can at least keep the Senate in Democratic hands against such long historic odds … here’s who, besides the Big Dog himself, I will credit:

Hosannas to Madam Speaker …

• Nancy Pelosi effectively whipped, not just the Democratic side of the House, but the Republicans’ as well, ultimately staging a denouement that even enabled six principled Democratic opposition members to cast their no votes without endangering final passage.

• This, in turn, was only possible because Pelosi somehow wound up with the votes of 13 relatively-principled Republicans in her pocket, folks who were no doubt promised hellish recriminations for apostasy from their own side of the aisle, courtesy of Team Battlestar GOP.

… and Kudos to Pramila Jayapal

• The Progressive Caucus under the leadership of Rep. Jayapal shrewdly demonstrated flexibility alongside adherence to principle. Stop giving them shit! They are playing the inside/outside game damn well, far better than their flat-footed moderate colleagues.

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  ---

And what did our side do to celebrate this remarkable, indeed historic, legislative accomplishment?

Bitch, bitch, bitch. Blame, blame, blame. Blah. Blah. Blah. All of which was cheered on and pundited to death by our media intelligentsia, who ought to know better but just can’t seem to help themselves.

Yes, it would it have been better if the infrastructure package could have passed back in October. It would also have been better if Build Back Better hadn’t been stymied and watered down, bit by frustrating bit.

And it would really have been better if our electoral margin in the Senate was more than zero, or in this case, two zeros named Manchin and Synema.

[The BBB situation is especially worrisome; the next few weeks will decide whether Democrats end the year celebrating a unified victory, or sputtering toward an acrimonious and ominous Festivus.]

That said, and from where I sit, this blizzard of moderate Democrats blaming progressives, the Squad and the Woking Dead for the delayed passage of the infrastructure package, thus permitting an electoral defeat in Virginia, is completely bogus reasoning. Moderate Democrats and the party elite actually owe Woken Ds a big high-five. Now sit down and be friends.

Here’s why. Thanks to the “intransigence” of progressives, aka their October display of a spine, if and when a decent BBB plan is appended to the existing package — to say nothing of action on voting rights — Democrats of all stripes will legitimately be loud, proud and positively motivated going into 2022. We’ll have delivered the goods! We might actually keep control of the Senate and be able to stymie the fascists for at least two more years.

There is, of course, nothing positive about the Republican takeover of Virginia in last week's election. That said, Terry McCauliffe as a candidate was, sorry to say, a lackluster old white guy who ran a lackluster campaign. He really was, as someone said, “the last of the Clintonites.” And he did utter the single stupidest sentence into a microphone of any major US politician this season.

But here’s the bottom line: In a perenially low-turnout election year, it was the Republicans who had the most energy. You could just feel it. It was all negative energy, of course, comprising fear, insecurity, and hatred of the other, but energetic it nonetheless was. Their base was activated; ours, not so much. I actually walked precincts for the Democratic ticket in Northern Virginia on Election day, and I wasn’t enthused.

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This raises a crucial question for next year: Who among Democrats is most capable of bringing to the table the kind of energy and commitment we need to be victorious in the 2022 mid-term Congressional campaigns? It’s obviously African Americans … and young climate activists. The very communities that a strong Build Back Better package will attract.

So don’t yell about wokeness, my moderate Democratic friends. Wake up yourselves. (And you, my friends on the activist left, need to be more accountable too. We can’t win without the cis straight White vote either! More on that next time.)

Just know this: If Democrats devolve in the coming year into an internecine turf war of Bread & Butter versus Race & Gender, we will be playing into the Republican’s hands … and our democracy will pay a steep price.

Our job now is to cook up a B&B+R&G combo platter, so to speak, a menu that the majority of voting Americans will find preferable in 12 short months… and that everyone on our side will at least be able to stomach. Can we do that? I don’t know, but I certainly hope so.

We have a long, intense and frustrating 12 months ahead of us politically, and there is plenty of blame and responsibility to go around. Can we please just stipulate to that and move on? Or are we really going to enact the cliche of the Democratic circular firing squad?

If we don't get our progressive shit together pronto, things will take a big turn for the worse in America when the next Congress convenes in January 2023.

The Republicans aren’t even hiding their odious plans. Or rather, they’re hiding it all in plain sight and basically getting away with it.

By next fall, we will no doubt be drowning in malevolent memes and vicious reality-type programming of questionable provenance, stirring up resentments and stoking conflicts, and appearing on all available platforms through a lavishly-funded and subterranean virtual insurrectionist network.

Is that a little dark? Sorry. But it’s not a conspiracy theory, just a close reading of the tea leaves.

The small cabal of far-right billionaire zealots who own and manage these networks, along with their cadres of financial cutouts, campaign consultants and security contractors, are already busy at work, writing budgets, drawing storyboards, crunching algorithms, and seeking collaborators for next year’s above- and below-the-belt campaigns. We had better be ready.

PS: I wonder what Steve Bannon is really up to besides building his brand and trying to keep his ass out of prison.

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