James Baldwin (1924-2024)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential figures in American literary life and a prominent public intellectual who was not hesitant to speak harsh truths.

He attacked a persistent myth held by many people, that if only Black people adopted the values and behavior of white people, then their situation would improve. What sticks most in my mind is this passage from The Fire Next Time, where Baldwin captured the absurdity of this expectation.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need or want. . . . There is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate.

Black people are not as impressed with the virtues of whites as whites are, and see little need to emulate them. After all, the whites were the ones who brought Blacks over as slaves and kept them in abject servitude and poverty for generations. Lynchings, beatings, and being set upon by dogs and buffeted by water from fire hoses are all things that are within living memory of Black people. Given this history, to ask blacks to adopt white behavior as role models for virtuousness seems presumptuous, to put it mildly.

The Daily Show on the search for Harris’s running mate

Serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) made a weird assertion to a group of Black journalists that Kamala Harris had always claimed that she was Indian until recently when she suddenly became Black.

It should be noted that Harris attended Howard University, a flagship university of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and while there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first (and possibly biggest) sorority of Black women. She has been a proud and visible member of it ever since. The idea that she is a Jenny-Come-Lately to being Black is being greeted with hoots of derision.

Alpha Kappa Alpha is a historic African American sorority, founded on the campus of Howard University, Harris’ alma mater. It was the first Black sorority of its kind, and is a part of the “Divine Nine,” a group of Black Pan-Hellenic organizations.

Members of Alpha Kappa Alpha and other groups in the Divine Nine have already rallied to support Harris’ bid for the presidency, networking and organizing to raise millions upon millions of dollars for her campaign. Harris is also a frequent presence at high-profile events, including Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.’s biennial convention earlier this month.

The sorority has been a critical source of support and sisterhood not just for Harris, but for the 360,000 some women across the US and the world that make up its ranks. AKA members are political leaders, civil rights activists, literary icons and scientists, and the sorority’s cultural impact has deep, wide-reaching roots.

“When you become a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, you become a member for life,” Danette Anthony Reed, international president and CEO of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. told CNN.

Ronny Chieng discusses the search process as well as SSACFT’s weird comment about Harris’s ethnicity.

On what basis should we vote?

(Pearls Before Swine)

That cartoon reminded me of a discussion I had a long, long, time ago, when I was in graduate school, with a fellow student about voting. He said that each of us should vote based on our own narrow interests because that is the way that the democratic system works best. If each of us thought only of our own interests when voting, then the results would reflect the outcomes that the general population wants, whereas if we voted on the basis of what we think might be better for other people, then the results get skewed because we do not really know what other people actually want and are merely guessing, we only know for sure what we want.

I did not agree with him then but had to acknowledge that it was an interesting argument with a certain logic, the kind that geeky physicists would come up with.
[Read more…]

The Thunderdome that wasn’t

Ever since Joe Biden’s poor debate performance on June 27th, political observers started what looked like a deathwatch, waiting to see if he would drop out of the race. Some of them (like me) were hoping that he might quit because with him as he presumptive nominee, the presidential race looked like a slow-motion train wreck, with the crash occurring on election day, and the only chance, however slim, of avoiding it would be to have a different nominee. But I was not hopeful that it would occur because Biden kept insisting that he was in the race to stay.

Some in the media may have had other reasons to have Biden drop out. They were excitedly speculating that if he did, there would be a knockdown, drag out competition for the nomination among all the Democratic hopefuls that would end up with a contested convention, with heated conflicts inside the convention hall and possibly protests and clashes outside, where the result would not be known until the end. This was sometimes referred to in typical media hyperbolic fashion as a ‘Thunderdome’ event. It would be Chicago 1968 all over again. Even if it was not as violent as back then, it would still be a ratings bonanza for the media, allowing for breathless minute-by-minute updates as people tuned in to all the drama. The GOP would also benefit because even though they felt confident about beating Biden, a bruising convention fight would leave the eventual nominee damaged.
[Read more…]

Trump’s outreach to Black journalists does not go well

He attended the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. It started out poorly and did not get better.

During a contentious and chaotic panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday, Donald Trump parroted disinformation about immigration and abortion, questioned Kamala Harris’s race and accused a panel moderator, Rachel Scott – the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News – of being “rude” and presenting a “nasty question” when she asked him: “Why should Black voters trust you?”

Another report said:
[Read more…]

William Calley, mass murderer of My Lai, dies

The Associated Press reported today that the US army officer who became the face of one of the many atrocities that took place during the Vietnam war died in April at the age of 80.

On March 16, 1968, Calley led American soldiers of the Charlie Company on a mission to confront a crack outfit of Vietcong enemies. Instead, over several hours, the soldiers killed 504 unresisting civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community.

The men were angry: Two days earlier, a booby trap had killed a sergeant, blinded a GI and wounded several others while Charlie Company was on patrol.

Soldiers eventually testified to the U.S. Army investigating commission that the murders began soon after Calley led Charlie Company’s first platoon into My Lai that morning. Some were bayoneted to death. Families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with hand grenades. Other civilians slaughtered in a drainage ditch. Women and girls were gang-raped.
[Read more…]

Progressives push back against Shapiro for vice-president

The Democratic party has said that they will hold a virtual roll call of all the delegates before August 7th, before the national convention that starts on August 19th, to finalize their presidential nominee. The original reason for the August 7th deadline was because Ohio requires parties to identify their nominees by that date in order to be on the ballot in November. Ohio governor Mike DeWine had extended that deadline to cover the Democratic convention dates but it looks like the party has decided to abide by that date anyway. While there is no requirement that a vice-presidential pick also be made by then, the Harris campaign has said that they will have one maybe even earlier, within the next week, and so the campaigns for different candidates are gaining steam.
[Read more…]

Jon Stewart on the past week’s events

The Daily Show was off the past week when all the excitement around the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris transition was taking place and so there was a lot for Jon Stewart to catch up on when he got back yesterday. He was in full form, mugging for the cameras as he described the events and how Republicans are flailing in their attempts to suddenly find a way to attack Harris other than to point out that (surprise!) she is a woman and a person of color.

He also says that there is a simple way for Republicans to address their complaint that it is unfair for the Democratic party to have Harris replace Biden as the nominee at this late stage: “You can replace your old guy too!”

Michael Moore weighs in on the election

The documentarian gained credibility when he predicted early on in 2016, at a time when opinion polls showed Hillary Clinton coasting to victory, that there were serious warning signs that serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) would defeat her unless she changed her strategy towards the rust belt states and campaign more aggressively there. She did not and lost. In 2022, he predicted that the so-called ‘red wave’ that opinion polls were predicting that Republicans sweep the mid-term elections at national, state, and local levels would not happen and that Democrats would do very well. That turned out to be accurate too.

He does not pay much attention to horse-race opinion polls as to who people will vote for but does pay attention to surveys of what people care about. That, and somehow having an ear close to the ground, makes him someone who should be listened to.

He is now saying that Democrats have an opportunity to crush Republicans in the coming elections because the majority of voters agree with them on almost all major issues but that they must not make the mistake of alienating their strongest supporters. He makes four points that Harris and the Democrats must pay attention to to prevent their supporters from staying home.
[Read more…]

John Oliver on JD Vance and the couch

Oliver’s weekly show ,em>Last Week Tonight starts out with a monologue on contemporary events followed by a long in-depth segment. It is only the latter that HBO puts out on YouTube a few days after the Sunday show is aired. Apparently he had a lot of fun in his monologue last week talking about Vance and the cushion.

I found this clip of it.

It will likely be taken down soon and we will have to be satisfied with this summary.

John Oliver checked in on the US presidential race and the state of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Sunday evening. The Last Week Tonight host ripped into JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and “Great Lakes Ron DeSantis”, who is not polling well with anyone.

The Ohio senator “sucks so much”, said Oliver, that the internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a bestselling book to “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir”.

That is not in Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, Oliver emphasized, “but I think the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked. “If you ask me to play two truths and a lie with this man, before he’d even open his mouth, I’d shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ Because I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.”

“He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes,” Oliver continued. “If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because JD Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, ‘Yeah that sounds right.’”

Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’s decision to factcheck the tweet with a headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news site later removed the article with the explanation that the story didn’t meet its “standard editing process”.

“No shit it didn’t, because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. “And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say ‘JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch’ definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”

Oliver’s staff, he revealed, tried to contact the Vance campaign this week; when asked by phone if he ever had sex with a couch, the spokesperson hung up, “which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it”? Oliver laughed.

“Who knows where this is going?” he mused. “The news is moving so fast right now – the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Kamala’s VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But … until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that JD Vance fucked a couch.”

I wish that clip were freely available.

People are likely to ask Vance about the couch until he or his spokesperson explicitly denies it. Either way, it is not a good look for him.