Opponents of democracy
by Tom Sullivan
GOP leaders are asleep at the switch or worse, Joe Scarborough accuses, as forensic evidence piles up that Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB spy, and his employees in Russian military intelligence agency continue “coordinating attacks” on U.S. democracy. In this morning’s Washington Post, Scarborough writes:
Imagine that U.S. military leaders spent most of 1941 warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic Party of a coming Pearl Harbor attack. Then imagine history’s harsh judgment against FDR’s party had it ignored those concerns, voted against efforts to fortify the Pacific fleet and plotted the firing of generals who were working to expose the looming Japanese threat. Historians would have rightly savaged these politicians as traitors to their country.
Since 2017, Republicans have put party ahead of country to protect a “buffoon,” Scarborough scolds. Gary Trudeau more graphically suggests a spineless GOP is well on its way towards putting its collective head where the sun never shines.
But the truth of it is the GOP has simply made a foreign adversary an ally in its own attacks on democracy. The headlines may hail from Washington, D.C., but the fighting is out in the provinces. The Post’s Editorial Board rolls out the map to highlight the battle in North Carolina “where African Americans’ voting rights have been under siege.”
At issue this morning is the state’s laws regarding felons voting. By law here, felons regain voting rights automatically once their sentences are complete, including parole and probation. But the rules are not well publicized and in a state where African Americans make up a “hugely disproportionate share of convicted felons,” some find themselves tripped up by the ambiguity. Auditors found 441 ballots improperly cast by felons in 2016. Most state prosecutors refrained from bringing charges, finding no intent to commit a crime:
Not so in Alamance County, a small locality in the Piedmont where a dozen individuals convicted of felonies, nine of them African Americans, cast votes. There, the Republican district attorney, Pat Nadolski, has gone forward with prosecutions that reflect his own lack of judgment while reminding the nation of North Carolina’s recent poisonous racial history.
But the truth of it is targeting African American felons is but one skirmish in GOP attacks on democracy in the states. If there is an election-rigging ploy North Carolina Republican legislators have not tried, they haven’t thought of it yet. In 2016, the Post reminds readers, a federal court struck down the omnibus voting law that targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision.” Overnight, the GOP-led legislature expanded its proposed 2013 voting bill from a handful of pages to over 50 following the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision that removed the state from federal preclearance oversight.
A version of the strict voter ID law the Supreme Court declined to reinstate in 2017 will appear on the ballot this fall as a proposed constitutional amendment among a set of 6. Drawing from the plot of Jack Reacher, in which a sniper kills 5 people at random to hide fact that one is not random, Republicans have submitted 6 amendments to conceal that the real goal is passage of voter ID. The others are honey for the conservative base or more moves to consolidate power.
The party is also manipulating ballot order for the state Supreme Court race this fall and modifying party identification rules it already modified to favor its judicial candidates. “If at first you cheat to rig an election and succeed; try, try again,” declares an editorial from WRAL.
North Carolina joins Michigan, Wisconsin, and other GOP-controlled states in the contest for which legislature can whipsaw its voters more.
Two former Democratic state House members were present at a fundraiser here on Saturday. Both women lost their seats after being “double-bunked” by GOP redistricting in 2011. In one case at least, just moving the line over a few streets was enough. Regular readers may recall that I voted in the 2016 primary in NC-10, only to be back in NC-11 by November. Thanks to that surgical gerrymandering, the line has flipped back and forth over my house since 2011.
Attacks on democracy continue not just from without, but from within.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
– Rhymes with: “deadpan”. Then again, that could describe any film directed by the idiosyncratic Jim Jarmusch. As far as Kafkaesque westerns go, you could do worse than this 1995 offering. Johnny Depp plays mild-mannered accountant and city slicker William Blake (yes, I know) who travels West by train to the rustic town of Machine, where he has accepted a job. Or so he assumes. Getting shooed out of his would-be employer’s office at gunpoint (a great cameo by Robert Mitchum) turns out to be the least of his problems, which rapidly escalate. Soon, he’s a reluctant fugitive on the lam. Once he crosses paths with a semi-mystic Native American named Nobody (the wonderful Gary Farmer), his journey takes on a mythical ethos. Surreal, darkly funny, and poetic. Robby Mueller’s B&W photography is stunning.
(Shout! Factory Select) – The chief reason I geeked out over this “two-fer” was Farewell My Lovely, one of a handful of films directed by renowned 1960s photographer/TV ad creator Dick Richards. The 1975 crime drama is an atmospheric remake of the 1944 film noir Murder My Sweet (both adapted from the same Raymond Chandler novel). Robert Mitchum is at his world-weary best as detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a paroled convict (Jack O’Halloran) to track down his girlfriend, who has made herself scarce since he went to the joint. Per usual, Marlowe finds himself in a tangled web of corruption and deceit. Also featuring Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, and the late great Harry Dean Stanton.
(Criterion Collection) – The late great Divine chews up major scenery as Dawn Davenport, a “good girl gone bad” …in the worst ways imaginable. Parents be cautioned: if your teenage daughter demands cha-cha heels for Christmas…for God’s sake, humor her–or there will be hell to pay. Even by his own mondo bizzaro standards, “czar of bad taste” John Waters has seldom topped the utter depravity of this mordantly hilarious 1974 entry. That said, our “reality” continues to catch up with his once-satirical, hyperreal vision of an American society completely driven by narcissism, an unhealthy obsession with the cult of celebrity, and self-aggrandizement at any cost. A trash classic.
(Vinegar Syndrome) –A diminutive, parasitic alien (who seems to have a particular delectation for NYC club kids, models and performance artists) lands on an East Village rooftop and starts mainlining off the limbic systems of junkies and sex addicts…right at the moment that they, you know…reach the maximum peak of pleasure center stimulation (I suppose that makes the alien a dopamine junkie?). Just don’t think about the science too hard. The main attraction here is the inventive photography and the fascinatingly bizarre performance (or non-performance) by (co-screen writer) Anne Carlisle, who tackles two roles-a female fashion model who becomes the alien’s primary host, and a male model. Director Slava Zsukerman co-wrote the electronic music score. 
(Severin Films Limited Edition) – This stark and affecting cautionary tale debuted on the BBC in 1984, later airing in the U.S. on TBS. Director Mick Jackson delivers an uncompromising realism that makes The Day After (the U.S. TV film from the previous year) look like a Teletubbies episode. It’s a speculative narrative that takes a medium sized city (Sheffield) and depicts what would likely happen to its populace during and after a nuclear strike, in graphic detail. While this is a dramatization, the intent is not to “entertain” you in any sense of the word. The message is simple and direct-nothing good comes out of a nuclear conflict. It’s a living, breathing Hell for all concerned-and anyone “lucky” enough to survive will soon wish they were fucking dead.
(BFI box set; Region “B”) – If you’ve been looking for a convenient excuse to invest in a multi-region Blu-ray player, look no further than this magnificent box set from the British Film Institute. In 1958, taking their cues from the Italian neorealists and Cahiers du Cinema crowd, director Tony Richardson, writer John Osborne, and producer Harry Saltzman founded Woodfall Films, an indie production studio that aimed to shake up the staid UK movie industry by creating what would come to be known as the British New Wave. The studio’s oeuvre was initially pigeonholed as “angry young man” or “kitchen sink” films, but there was more diversity in style and content than that labeling would infer, as this 8-film collection demonstrates.