Aww, poor John Cleese

Monty Python? Brilliant! A Fish Called Wanda? I larfed and larfed. But this is an accurate portrayal of what John Cleese has come to now.

Yes, John. Learn to be at ease with your own privileged place in society, and stop whining. It’s ruining my enjoyment of your past — I emphasize, past — work.

Take heart in the fact that the Daily Mail will continue to publish your opinions.

How have I not heard of Elaine, Arkansas before?

It was yesterday, just yesterday, I read about the events that occurred there over 100 years ago. I attended respectable public schools, I went to two well-funded undergraduate universities, and I took courses in American history. I come from a blue-collar family with a deep devotion to unions and labor, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, land of the Wobblies, and was informally schooled in union history. I’ve long known who Joe Hill was. But Elaine, Arkansas? What was that about?

Well, as I learned only on 15 November 2021, just by chance, that in 1919 a group of black farmers, sharecroppers, met in a church to organize, form a union, and get better prices for their crops and hard work. Since this was intolerable to the wealthy white landowners who got rich off their labor, and since it was easy to inflame the poor whites in the region against their black neighbors, what followed was four days of slaughter.

When white leaders heard, they reacted with violence. Newspapers reported that white mobs, over four days, chased Black men, women and children, slaughtering them in Elaine and across the green farms and swamps of Phillips County.

All the Black farmers wanted were fair prices, but “that’s like the revolution has occurred because that threatens to shift the entire power structure of the South in the favor of Black farmers,” said Dr. Paul Ortiz, a history professor and director of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

Historians say the massacre claimed five white lives and more than 200 Black lives, though the true number of Black deaths is unknown and some estimates put it much higher.

What? Furthermore, this was one incident in many which occurred over Red Summer, which I’d also never heard about. There were riots all across the Midwest and South, from Chicago, IL down to Port Arthur, TX. White people were rampaging. And I knew nothing about it.

Yesterday was humbling. I had no idea how ignorant I was. Sure, I’d heard of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921, but did not realize it was part of a vast evil wave of vicious, blatant racism.

But how? How could such horrific events by quietly buried?

White newspapers filled their front pages with sensational headlines about a Black uprising, ignoring the economic inequality at the core of the conflict.

As the U.S. has reckoned with its racist past, the 1919 Elaine Massacre — one of the deadliest acts of violence against Black people in American history — has drawn new attention, especially in the years surrounding its 100th anniversary. That year, hundreds of Black people were killed in at least 25 cities across the country, a violent siege today called “Red Summer.”

The cover-up orchestrated by Elaine’s wealthy white landowners and the government, aided by the white-centric reporting of white-owned newspapers, led to a scarcity of information about the massacre.

…

Headlines such as “VICIOUS BLACKS WERE PLANNING GREAT UPRISING” and “NEGROES HAVE BEEN AROUSED BY PROPAGANDA” were atop the front pages of the Arkansas Gazette on Oct. 3, 1919, and Oct. 4, 1919, respectively.

“NEGROES HAD PLOT TO RISE AGAINST WHITES, CHARGED,” read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat on the third day of the massacre.

Surely, the impartial American justice system would levy righteous retribution on the mob? Nope.

Despite the work of the Black press, white newspapers continued to perpetuate their false story. After hundreds of Black people were massacred, no white people were tried in their deaths.

Black people were rounded up, jailed in Helena and tortured until they confessed a role in the deaths of the five white people — part of a legal cover-up concocted by a committee of wealthy white farmers and businessmen appointed by the governor.

In the end, estimates range between 65-75 Black men were sentenced to long-term prison sentences and 12 were sentenced to death. A years-long legal battle fought by the NAACP resulted in two cases, one of which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Moore v. Dempsey) while the other went to the Arkansas Supreme Court. The high courts agreed that the men’s due-process rights had been violated, and none of the 12 were executed.

Now I think of all the black people murdered in recent history, and it’s clear — this is the arc of our history. George Floyd could be murdered by an armed white thug on the most trivial of pretexts, and the press tells us that Floyd was “no angel”. Trayvon Martin can walk out to buy Skittles and come home to be shot to death by a vigilante…and we hear that he was “no angel”, either, and his murderer is acquitted. It’s all the same story, told over and over again, and echoed and reinforced by our incompetent, unprincipled media.

And so it goes.

Today, of course, the Republican party is animated by a fanatical desire to paper over our shame, to keep our kids ignorant of the systematic injustices perpetrated in this country by whiteness and white people for centuries. I also am the beneficiary of the historical crimes that bled black and brown people to give me some relative prosperity, but I have no desire to close my eyes to it — I want to know. It’s the only way we can end this cycle of oppression. All these complaints about CRT are nothing but attempts to blind us to the truth, and keep the hate going.

God damn it, I’m 64 years old and the media has succeeded in keeping me in the dark almost my entire life.

Steve Bannon is just plain weird…or he’s America’s Rasputin

I guess corrupt old cronies of the Trump administration can’t simply fade away, they have to constantly pop up in the news, over and over again. But at least I learned something new to me: Steve Bannon is one of those creepy fanatical Catholics? Yikes. I thought he was just a garden-variety fascist, but apparently he has a philosophical ethos.

Bannon’s philosophy has been written about quite a bit, including by yours truly [Heather Digby Parton], because it is extremely radical and very, very weird. It’s all wacky mysticism mixed with antediluvian, pre-enlightenment, authoritarianism posing as nationalism based upon the writings of an obscure French writer named René Guénon from the early 20th century and the teachings of one of his followers (and Mussolini adviser) Julius Evola. The school of thought is called “Traditionalism” and it is like no tradition you’ve ever heard of. But Bannon is not alone with this philosophy. It’s held by members of far-right leaders’ inner circles throughout Europe and in places like Brazil and Russia. If there is an intellectual rationale for Trumpism beyond the Dear Leader cult of personality, this “traditionalism” is it.

No, I do not want to know more. But Digby gives a couple of sources, and like a doomed character in a horror movie, I can’t resist the urge to go down into the dark basement alone. So here’s one.

From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family’s distinctly traditionalist Catholicism and he tended to view current events against the broad sweep of history. In 1984, after Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, Bannon’s parents became Tridentine Catholics, and he eventually followed. Though hardly a moralizing social conservative, he objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture. “We shouldn’t be running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he once told me. When he was a naval officer in the late 1970s, Bannon, a voracious autodidact, embarked upon what he described as “a systematic study of the world’s religions” that he carried on for more than a decade. Taking up the Roman Catholic history first instilled in him at his Catholic military high school, he moved on to Christian mysticism and from there to Eastern metaphysics. (In the Navy, he briefly practiced Zen Buddhism before wending his way back to Catholicism.)

Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-​­century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”

No. Enough. Stop. Wait…what’s that creepy figure crawling out of the television set?

Bannon acknowledges affinities with the philosophies of Julius Evola and Dugin in relation to his conservative vision for world politics. Like them, Bannon believes in an Eurasian Christian empire led by “the church militant” that will reform religious, economic, political and social foundations around the world. Such views underlie his speech about conservative Christianity as a bulwark against liberalism at the Vatican in 2014, and it’s no coincidence that Bannon has been integral to the establishment of the conservative Catholic Dignitatis Humanae Institute in an 800-year-old monastery.

All of this should give pause. These appropriations of the Middle Ages by figures like Dugin and Bannon pose an odd reversal of the problem of calling things we don’t like “medieval.” Yet these appropriations are equally misleading and even more dangerous. The resulting racist, xenophobic, misogynist, “traditionalist” construction of the Middle Ages is pervasive in conservative spheres. This ideology is now not only Dugin’s construction but also the view that informs many right-wing thinkers like Putin, Bannon and Trump.

No more, please. I’m going to have nightmares about Catholic fanatics under the bed.

It’s a little bit difficult to sort out exactly what Bannon does believe since he’s definitely a populist and nationalist. Mostly, it seems, he’s a sort of spiritualist, like the Russian Rasputin. According to Green, Bannon’s most important influences are René Guénon, a French writer whose 1929 book “The Crisis of the Modern World” stated that everything started to go to hell in 1312 when the Knights Templar were destroyed; and Julius Evola, an Italian writer whose 1934 book, “Revolt Against the Modern World,” influenced Mussolini. Interestingly, that book was also a seminal work for the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s most influential ideologue, and the man who once called Steve Bannon his ideological soulmate.

Alexandra Nemtsova at the Daily Beast reported:

According to Alexander Verkhovsky, director of Russian SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO monitoring ultra-nationalist groups, “Dugin is talking about creating some new cross-cultural nation of anti-Atlantic, traditional ideology—his theory often sounds like a pretty fascist approach. He said and wrote a lot, calling for a war in Ukraine; many Russian nationalists who listened or read Dugin’s texts actually joined the insurgencies in Ukraine afterward.”

I don’t think Bannon looks quite strong and healthy enough to put up as much of a fight as Rasputin, but you never know. He could be like Jason, or Michael Myers, impossible to kill.

“This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil,” Yusupov wrote. “There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates always provides a good start to the day

Even if it is a little depressing. Here he comments on a book by Tony Judt.

I had never read so merciless a book. Tony had no use for pieties—no tolerance for invocations of a “Good War” or the “Greatest Generation.” Power reigns in Postwar, often in brutal ways. Tony writes of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to Poland only to be asked, “Why have you come back?” He introduced me to intellectuals, such as François Furet, forced to reckon not just with Stalin’s crimes but with a discrediting of a “Grand Narrative” of history itself. “All the lives lost, and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction,” Tony writes of this reckoning, were “just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.” Early in Postwar, Tony quotes the observations of a journalist covering the ethnic cleansings that characterized postwar Europe. The journalist self-satisfyingly claims that history will “exact a terrible retribution.” But, Tony tells us, history “exacted no such retribution.” No righteous, God-ordained price was to be paid for this crime against humanity. The arc of history did not magically bend. It was bent, even broken, by those with power.

That resonates with me, too. There is no trajectory of history in evolution, either, just a story we tell ourselves after the fact. There’s nothing but chance and a directionless, generation-by-generation stumbling, with no goal but survival, and afterwards the survivors pat themselves on the back and pretend it was destiny that they made it.

It’s also why I have no sympathy for Pinkerisms. It’s all retrospective coronations all the way down, self-defeating reassurances from the so-far successful that the status quo will carry us forward into a glorious future. It never works that way. Every advancement is the product of a battle by those who say “Not good enough!” and who strive to do better.

And sometimes the better don’t make it anyway.

The pandemic is not over, you know

If you’d like to have nightmares, Christopher Stolarski has written up an account of his month of treatment for COVID-19. He was young and healthy, so he survived, but it sounds hellish.

Get vaccinated.

I’d also say, “wear a mask,” but I guess that ship has sailed. We require them at the university and in the hospital, but outside of those places, I never see anyone else wearing them anymore. Does anyone know how to read a graph?

The incident in the night with the onions

Curious. I got up at a ridiculous hour again this morning, and cautiously walked into the kitchen. Why cautiously? Because our cat likes to leave us little presents, like a puddle of puke or a dead mouse. I flicked on the light and saw…onions. Onions on the floor, onions on the countertop, onions on the stove, onions in pots. The source was obvious — we had a mesh bag of onions hanging from a hook — and the material cause was clear — the mesh was slit wide open, from the knot at the top to the bottom of the bag. It was no longer a bag, but more of a useless mesh sheet. But how? Who, or what, committed the act of bagicide that liberated all these onions?

My first suspect is the evil cat, except that she has heretofore exhibited an irrational fear of the stove and the kitchen counters. The criminal mind is a superstitious mind, and she is definitely the kind of super-villain you’d find in a Batman comic book. But the bag was neatly slit, not raggedly torn, as a beast would do.

Also near the bag was a butcher block of knives that I’d sharpened to a razor edge yesterday. They must have played a role, somehow.

My keen deductive mind is forced to conclude that the cat, while practicing to overcome her fear of kitchen appliances, has learned to wield a knife and slash viciously at objects in her environment. That may seem unlikely, but when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth*. I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on her now. First the onions, then the master, you know.

*By the way, I detest that dictum — it’s typical Holmesian illogical BS. You can never eliminate all the impossibilities, you can never even know all the alternatives. What if it’s something I didn’t even think of?

Isn’t Sunday supposed to be a day of rest?

It never is.

Today I

  • Assembled an exam I’ll hand out to one class tomorrow
  • Put together a bank of practice problems for another
  • Graded a bunch of papers…which I can’t post yet (I’ve learned that putting up intermediate, incomplete results prompts squawks of protest from the remaining students, who fear I lost their work)
  • Got my lecture notes for class tomorrow together
  • Posted the presentation for the class on Canvas
  • Bought some supplies for this week’s lab
  • Didn’t take a nap
  • Neglected FtB’s Sunday social backchannel gathering
  • Drank 2 cups of coffee and a quart of Diet Dr Pepper
  • Sharpened the kitchen knives
  • Made soup, it’s simmering right now
  • Maybe I’ll get to bed at a reasonable hour and sleep through the night (ha ha)

Tomorrow, Spring semester advising continues on top of the usual workload.

Hey, this week is busy, but next week is only a half week, and there’ll be no lab! I’m going to need that to make it to the end of the term.

Every time this guy opens his mouth, he proves how wrong I can be

Once upon a time, I thought David Silverman was a good guy — a bit aggressive, maybe, with a few weird ideas, but heck, he was going on Fox News to fight the good fight, and he proudly declared himself a feminist. Then he got caught coercing sex from young women, was fired, and now…

I look at him now and wonder how bad a judge of character am I? How did I miss the warning signs? He’s an object lesson in how vulnerable we all are to believing what we want to believe.

By the way, on just the objective facts of the case, Rittenhouse is a gun freak who traveled out-of-state to drop in on a protest and murder a couple of people with a high-powered rifle. He is a murderer. He killed with intent. He’s also probably going to walk because our justice system is a joke, and he got a lunatic as a judge.