Category Archives: Democracy

What I’m Reading. What I’m Thinking.

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It was not natural. And she was the first…
A poet can read. A poet can write.
A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writers of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.
How should there be Black poets in America?

-June Jordan, The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America

This the epigraph to Adrienne Rich’s essay, ‘History Stops for No One’ in her collection, What Is Found There.  I picked this book up again 3 weeks ago to reread days before she died. I can’t stop reading it. You should read it too.

More later.

‘Let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work.’

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Here’s the thing: Nobody hires in August.

I know this fact quite intimately. I had begun my job search in the summer of 2008, before my job was ‘eliminated’ at the end of 2008. I was working in the real estate world then, and contrary to popular narratives, signs of distress were everywhere in 2007. In August 2008, a colleague enlightened me to this universal corporate meme.

So when the new numbers were released from the department of labor that showed zero job growth for the month of August and the unemployment rate held at 9.4, I didn’t flinch.

My expectations were already low.

I’m no politician, just an average, slightly over educated black woman who worked in the very industry that seems to be the lynchpin of the Obama’s job plan and well, a fake psychic.

Here’s me in February 2009:

So this brings me to my current thinking about infrastructure. Infrastructure is more than the physical universe of roads, bridges, schools, power grids, levees, dams, reservoirs, trains, subways. Think of them as veins and vessels within the body. The body cannot live without the mind. Teachers, firefighters, police officers, servicemen and women flow through that universe. So do you and I. And all of us need to be a bit more educated about how we all are connected in this life. How do we individually complement the stimulus package that was just signed? Infrastructure, beyond the jobs and economic stability it can create, includes you, me and a dose of intellectual curiosity.

America is a young nation with old systems in play. All that American ingenuity we’ve been taught about has laid fallow for too long.

Here’s Obama in 2011:

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. (Applause.) It will provide — it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. (Applause.) It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away. (Applause.)

Indeed. This thought process is rooted in simple economics: cash begets demand, demand begets supply, begets higher GDP. This is stimulus for main street. Create an environment so that consumers spend and employers hire. Investment in infrastructure is known by most policy wonks as the speediest metric to mark job growth. It is not unlike the recession of 2000/2001, when everyone looked toward investment in construction starts for housing, to compensate for the epic failure and job losses from internet companies folding. And that housing boom (and inevitable bust) carried the country out of recession of the early aughts. I suppose the logic remains the same here for the American Jobs Act; incentivize the private market (small businesses) to hire more 14 million Americans out of work, put cash in the pockets of those underemployed and overworked Americans so that we spend more and grow the economy.

Construction jobs are like cells dividing, besides the trades that get hired, folks who do work with their hands, it also creates a bureaucracy, a host of support staff to manage the endeavor. It’s not a bad idea…

Which is really to say that while this is effective method to stimulate job growth, it is a terribly old idea. If we’re to presume that everyone in the job market is looking to specialize in masonry, electrical, engineering trades, then he’s definitely on to something. It certainly would require a re-education or refining of capabilities. The ‘jobs’ that this bill will likely create would require a highly specialized labor force, one that seeks transform an erstwhile trader/bookseller that’s been serving up your latte at your local coffee shop for the past six months to rewire a school to support a 4G network.

When we talk of job creation what exactly are we talking about? Continue reading →

dancebreak.

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I don’t know about you, but lately, everything is coming up ’80s for me. 1980s. Bad economy, the ghost of Ronald Reagan, bad banks, doc siders, penny loafers, jelly shoes, skinny jeans, jeggings, acid wash jeggings, jelly bracelets (silly bands), flannel. That stupid article in Psychology Today calling me and mine ugly got me watching a pivotal scene from 1985 classic, The Color Purple. I needed to hear Celie’s declaration of independence, ‘I’m poor, black, I may even be ugly, but dear god, I’m here. I’m here!.’

Cornel West broke up with Obama y’all. On some silly bitch trifle over inauguration tickets and somesuch. He’s spewing some bitterness that makes me wince (translation = deeply uncomfortable) on some old black nationalist anti-semetic line that I hadn’t heard since the last century. I get that you’re sad that he doesn’t call anymore, boo but you ain’t gotta pit folks on some us versus them. Not when it’s the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. And in an odd turn of events, I found myself trolling YouTube for Basia’s 1989 jam. It’s kinda a break up song, right?

But honestly, if we’re talking 1980s to 1990, this was the penultimate break up songs of all break up songs:

I’m also told that the Rapture is scheduled for this Saturday. And like any self respecting, skeptical and musical loving nerd, I queued up Blondie *and* KRS-One’s cover:

I’m just glad we got a soundtrack for this stuff. But really, I love everyone’s hair and the soft focus lenses, and the reverse grip of heartache. This is how I will want to remember the world before it all ends.

on, wisconsin!

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America’s new Bellwether State, remains in a detente:

Senate Democrats remained in hiding in Illinois, preventing the chamber from taking up a budget bill that includes provisions they view as an attack on public sector unions. And Assembly Democrats began a marathon session of debate on the bill, promising to offer more than 100 amendments in an apparent stalling tactic.

This fight is spreading to other states with Republican governors. Indiana State Democrats walked out of session yesterday because of a similar bill up for consideration in that state. If you haven’t seen this segment from the Rachel Maddow Show on history of the labor movement in Wisconsin, and its effect on what we come to commonly expect as rights for workers, you should do so now.

The next [labor] movement is now underway.

 

now you are free…

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One Tuesday afternoon in 1981, while Taslin and I played with what I remember were Barbies, cutting old socks making them into sweater dresses, we heard a wail from the top floor of our apartment building on Teutonia Avenue. I never heard anyone cry like that before. Taslin’s mother ran down the stairs to our apartment and into the arms of my mother, weeping. Anwar Sadat had been killed. I was seven years old. Taslin was five. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I recall, involved me watching Taslin’s mother balled tight on our sofa watching the news, video montages of Sadat’s life. Sadat shaking hands with Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter ran on a continuous loop. What Taslin’s mother told me of Sadat was that she had hoped with the changes he was making, she’d be able to go home someday. She wanted Taslin, who was born in America, to someday return to the country of her forebearers, and if she chose to, live as a free and modern woman there as she would here.

Watching these developments in Egypt today, I’m surprised to find how invested I had been in their story all along. The live feed from Al Jazeera’s YouTube channel ran video of Liberation (Tahrir) Square’s jubilant masses, and I couldn’t stop my tears.  Tomorrow, the real work of rebuilding a nation begins. And from this distance, many questions remain in terms of how this process will actually work. The Egyptian military who has acted as an arbiter between the protesters and the now fallen regime throughout these eighteen days (even protecting protesters from the Basij-like throngs/mobs of men last week) assumes control over the nation. No one is certain of what this may mean for the Egyptian people just yet and hopefully, this transitional period will maintain its peaceful nature.

Again, Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech runs like a tape in my head since the developments in Tunisia last month, and now today in Egypt:

Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere… So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power: You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

It was prescient then. Delivered just a week before the Iranian elections, and subsequent revolution, it was a signal to me that a new era was forthcoming. It’s worth a re-read today.

Tomorrow, we’ll be watching Algeria.

speaking of real talk…

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Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

While it seems like ages ago (as we’re all transfixed on natural disasters and the revolutions in the Middle East) I haven’t stopped thinking about the State of the Union Address:

What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea -– the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny… The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age. And now it’s our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there. The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do — what America does better than anyone else — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.

The tone of the speech was mature, thoughtful, absent of detailed description of policy initiatives, but a clear lecture of Real Talk. In many ways, I felt like this conversation is about two years late. Sure, better late than never…

And not to sound too arrogant or self promoting, but some of the themes Obama covered reminded me of a blog post I wrote nearly two years ago. Some background: I used to work in one industry and now I am doggedly trying to secure sound employment in another. This is a personal choice, privileged in some ways yet, dare I say, brutally difficult.

I also feel it’s premature to declare the recession over. Yes, the Dow is trading at 12,000, a high we last saw in June 2008, but job growth/creation has not matched that enthusiasm. 9.4% unemployment still holds, and if we count the ‘underemployed’, those with a smattering of temporary, part time and freelance jobs, more than likely uninsured, that rate doubles. If you’re a woman or man of color, god help you. The private sector may be hiring, but it remains unclear what those jobs are. There are some of us in this economy grinding to find work in our respective fields with nil to marginal success. Some of those jobs were eliminated and if we’re to be honest here, those jobs aren’t going to come back. Some of us will have to retrain, learn new skills to be competitive with a generation of new jobs that are hyper-specific to trade and skill. Continue reading →

same, same. but different.

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Thinking about Saturday’s shooting in Tuscon, I remembered an Adam Gopnik piece from the 2007 New Yorker in the wake of the Virgina Tech Shooting. It’s worth a re-read as we uncover ‘facts’ and salacious details about the psyche and life of the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner. While we’re all trying to find space to engage in discussions about gun laws, mental illness, and political criticism (discourse versus rhetoric versus vitriol versus sedition), the excerpt noted below was particularly resonant for me:

If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

via Shootings : The New Yorker.

There’s our knee jerk responses to these mass shootings: the naming of the perpetrator (he inevitably has three -John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald– now this kid Jared Lee Loughner), the narrative of the ‘loner’, the mental defect or illness that motivates one to murder, the very definition of nihilism. This feels routine. We hope (swear) it will never happen again. It always does. And it always will. In reading the piecemeal narratives on Loughner today in Mother Jones, a friend’s view of the shooter’s motivation was curious:

Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. “More chaos, maybe,” he says. “I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what’s happening. He wants all of that.” Tierney thinks that Loughner’s mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: “He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there’s no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: ‘Another Saturday, going to go get groceries’—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in.”

A lot of us (me included) looked to assign blame to the far right and Tea Party for inciting this kind of violence on a Member of Congress. But now, I have to take a step back. Our conversations about these matters have reached a complexity that requires mature reasoning, and a news cycle that moves slower than 140 characters or less.

what narcissism means to me…

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Once I got through my haze of disappointment with my home state of Wisconsin over Feingold’s defeat, I began reading this interesting take on the psyche of the American voter in this week’s New York Magazine. Senior winnows the electorate’s binary options through the prism of child psychology, noting that ‘We are thinking in fanciful, binary choices. Obama and his government must save us; he and his government must disappear. Neither option is especially real.’

Senior continues:

When children act this way, we say they’re simply acting like children. But when adults behave with this same paradoxical mixture of self-importance and insecurity, we call it something else: narcissism. By definition, narcissists are impatient, vainglorious, easily insulted, and aggrieved; they’d never dream of making sacrifices on anyone else’s behalf, unless it simultaneously advanced an agenda of their own.

But the fact is, everyone is capable of narcissism in times of crisis. It’s a very typical response to feeling out of control—especially if you’ve had plenty of control before (or at least the illusion of it), and especially if you still have some means to express your dissatisfaction. And control has been a defining theme of this election cycle. With record unemployment and foreclosure rates, everyone across the system is feeling deeply disempowered. As Obama recently said at a fund-raiser (and was immediately criticized for it afterward), “We’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”

Similarly, one could argue that, if the conditions are right, an entire culture can plunge into narcissistic behavior. In fact, we’ve been here before. In The Culture of Narcissism, the 1979 classic about the spread and normalization of self-absorption in the United States, historian Christopher Lasch suggested that seventies rebellion culture was at once the result of too many constraints and too few. On the one hand, people felt powerless in the face of a changing economy and the expanding impersonal complexity of the modern world, a world that “made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.” At the same time, a sexual revolution was taking place, the mass media was replacing the church and the family as the main source of culture and values, and Madison Avenue was “undermining the horrors of indebtedness”—all of which gave people a sense of lawlessness and dizzying personal freedom.

The result, in other words, was a culture where people felt the same paradoxical combination experienced by angry children: powerlessness and a destructive, deceptive sense of might.

Although others may have explored these themes during this election cycle, this passage resonates with me deeply. The narrative in our politics has been distilled into comic book actors, and certainly our political leaders, Obama included, have played to these fantasies. Continue reading →

bookmarks. equinox edition.

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Jon Stewart, I swear to god…

I especially love that they’re dubbing this Rally to Restore Sanity, the Million Moderate March.  My friends and I have discussed it at Brunch, and I just don’t think I can miss this one. There’s some interesting side-eye commentary from the left. However, I don’t completely agree with Greenwald’s conclusion here. The likelihood that I’ll crown Stewart leader of the ‘moderate movement’ is insulting to rational, discerning adults. But I also didn’t feel comfortable with Stewart equalizing criticism of the Bush Administration’s policies of torture and Iraq invasion with the batshit crazy conservative movement response to Obama’s very existence. Yet, I also see that this is why I’m the target demographic for this ‘rally’. And if I want to abandon this cause, I’ve got options.

Other items of interest:

  • Team PostBourgie are about as thoughtful and circumspect as they come. This week’s episode centers around fallout of DC mayor’s race and Inez Sainz accusations of sexual harassment.
  • You may have missed this gem of episode from Everynone as featured NYC’s Radiolab:
  • I can’t stop listening to these gorgeous tracks (here, note the lovely video made by the YouTube user, and here) by Cinematic Orchestra featuring Patrick Watson.