The good news is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said yesterday that the military would not be involved in the election.
The bad news is that the question had to be asked.
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2020
They lied constantly, we know that. And if you want to see a partial this, this AP fact check is pretty good, although I think they go a littleeasy ony them in places.
But I did want to share this, which I think gets to the central contradiction of the Trump election pitch. If Biden is even halfway adept at debating him one on one, he’ll grind him on this:
Is US great again or dystopian? GOP says both
The Republican National Convention begged this question: Why are President Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters describing the state of his union as a hellscape?
It was perhaps the central paradox for voters wondering what to believe in the rhetoric, because it defied logic to believe it all. Are Americans living in a dystopia or in an America made great again by Trump?
Four years ago, candidate Trump promised that if he won, “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”
Now? “I’ve never seen our streets go this bad so quickly,” Pat Lynch, representing tens of thousands of New York police officers, told the GOP proceedings. “We are staring down the barrel of a public safety disaster.” He said this in remarks singing Trump’s praises.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a former New York mayor, spoke of years of “carnage” and violence rising now, and implored, “Mr. President, make our nation safe again.”
All of the convention’s apocalyptic rhetoric was in service of bashing Trump challenger Joe Biden, Democratic mayors and national Democrats both in and out of office as being soft on violence and anarchy. Yet the landscape of lawlessness they described is Trump’s America now.
Hyperbole suffused the proceedings, both when Trump and his supporters hailed his record and when they denounced the other side. Outright falsehoods were heard every night on the social justice protests, the coronavirus, the economy and Biden’s agenda.
The New York Times, which famously said on Thursday the Trump had bent the presidency to his will:
Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him, said the aides, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal conversations.
And state media responds:
Once upon a time, I trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT). I wanted the training; never sought a job. The director of the county’s emergency medical services taught the class. In between lessons, he sometimes told war stories involving bars and alcohol. And weapons.
A couple of bars on the rough side of town we easily identified: places where on any Saturday night drivers might see ambulances and police cars out front with lights flashing. People got shot there. Men who frequented bars where people regularly got shot carried concealed handguns for defense in case some other drunk tried to shoot them. You know, because they had a right to defend themselves. The founders left an IQ requirement out of the 2nd Amendment.
This week in Kenosha, Wisc., a 17-year-old suspect caught on video killed two and wounded one with an AR-style semiautomatic rifle during street protests over the police shooting there of Jacob Blake. What prompted the first killing is unclear. A second man in pursuit of the suspect was killed trying to disarm the alleged shooter. Another pursuer — who may have had a weapon himself — was wounded. Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois resident, possessed the weapon illegally in Wisconsin. He took it upon himself to join local “militia” members on the streets of Kenosha. They took it upon themselves to come armed to patrol other people’s property because some protesters had turned to vandalism and arson. A few others carried weapons in support of peaceful protesters.
Events in Kenosha brought back those EMT war stories. That the U.S. has more firearms per capita than any other country is old news. But combine that with Rambo fantasies, open-carry policies, and street protests involving property destruction and you don’t need alcohol for things to go horribly wrong.
The Washington Post Editorial Board calls out the mayhem from this week:
There is no excuse and no justification for the kind of bedlam that has followed peaceful protests in Kenosha with street skirmishes, looting, burning and other destruction to businesses and buildings. Such needless violence — which unfortunately has accompanied some protests in other cities this summer as the country was racked by the killing of George Floyd — undermines instead of advances any cause. It must be unambiguously condemned.
It does not, however, give license to people to try to take matters — indeed, the law — into their own hands.
Tuesday’s tragic loss of lives brings into stark relief the dangers that are posed as armed militia-style groups and their sympathizers increasingly show up at protests and other political events. Experts who have tracked vigilante activity have warned about the volatile combination of powerful weapons in untrained hands at fraught political moments. Yet police in Kenosha seemingly encouraged armed civilians by thanking them for being there and handing out bottles of water, and Police Chief Daniel Miskinis seemed to blame the victims for their own deaths because they were on the streets after curfew. He went on to defend the militia groups as civilians out to protect property and “exercise their constitutional right.” Never mind they were also out on the streets after curfew. That conservative commentators such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter defended the teen with ridiculous remarks came as no surprise, but why was it so hard for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) to finally acknowledge to NPR that vigilantism shouldn’t be tolerated?
A question circulating online asks: Why is murder an appropriate response to property damage, but property damage isn’t an appropriate response to murder?
Conservatives are lining up behind the former to turn Rittenhouse into a 2nd Amendment folk hero. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern summarizes the pretzel logic:
If civilians try to seize a weapon from a gunman who just shot somebody in the head, that gunman has a right to shoot them. If this theory were legally correct—thankfully, it isn’t—then a person who tries to grab a mass shooter’s gun may be legally killed by the shooter himself.
Stern notes how quickly the narrative embraced by Carlson and Coulter takes hold:
After Jacob Blake’s shooting, conservative media hunted for evidence that might exonerate the officer, fixating on the presence of a knife in Blake’s car. After Rittenhouse shot three protesters, the right hunted for evidence that might exonerate the shooter, settling on the fantasy that those protesters were the real vigilantes who got what was coming to them. The lesson here is simple: A white man with a gun is innocent until proved guilty; his victims are guilty until proved innocent.
This morning here in the Cesspool of Sin, militia types from South Carolina plan to arrive with Confederate battle flags for the “Grand Flagging of Asheville.” Posts and accounts since removed by Facebook suggests they will bring weapons to defend themselves from nonexistent rioters tearing up the city. No doubt they are only coming from out of state (like the alleged Kenosha shooter) to patriotically defend property belonging to they know not whom. But they want everyone to know they are not racists. “We defend AMERICN HISTORY … we stand united in the defense of our culture!” That would be the brief, ignominious, traitorous history of the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America.
I could direct them to a few bars in Upstate South Carolina where they would be more than welcome. But this much is likely true: This will get much worse before November.
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Now that’s inspirational.
Enjoy your weekend everyone!
When President Trump gave a speech to a group of sheriffs in Tampa late last month, his decision to travel forceda large contingent of Secret Service agents to head to a state that was then battling one of the worst coronavirus surges in the nation.
Even before Air Force One touched down on July 31, the fallout was apparent: Five Secret Service agents already on the ground had to be replaced after one tested positive for the coronavirus and the others working in proximity were presumed to be infected, according to people familiar with the situation.
The previously unreported episode is one of a series of examples of how Trump’s insistence on traveling and holding campaign-style events amid the pandemic has heightened the risks for the people who safeguard his life, intensifying the strain on the Secret Service.
In the past two months, dozens of Secret Service agents who worked to ensure the security of the president and Vice President Pence at public events have been sickened or sidelined because they were in direct contact with infected people, according to multiple people familiar with the episodes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incidents.
Despite that, Trump has continued to hold large gatherings — most dramatically at the White House on Thursday night, when he delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention before a crowd of 1,500 people seated closely together on the South Lawn, with few masks in sight. The vast majority were not tested for the coronavirus ahead of time.
Trump’s actions rebuff the scientific consensus that the best way to tamp down the spread of the virus is to avoid large gatherings and close quarters. Critics say his refusal to abide by those guidelines is imposing unnecessary risks on Secret Service staffers, who have no choice in whether to accompany the president.
He literally cares about nothing but himself.
Meanwhile, get a load of the latest from the FDA:
The head of the Food and Drug Administration ousted its top spokeswoman from her position on Friday in an urgent bid to restore the tarnished credibility of the agency after he made erroneous claims that overstated the benefits of plasma treatments for Covid-19 at a news conference with President Trump.
The decision came just a day after the F.D.A.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, terminated the contract of a public relations consultant who had advised the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, to correct his misleading claims that 35 out of 100 Covid-19 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.”
The removals come at a moment when the agency, which will be making critical decisions about whether to approve coronavirus vaccines and treatments, is struggling to salvage its reputation as a neutral scientific arbiter.
The ousted spokeswoman, Emily Miller, had little experience in health care. She had spent years working in Washington for Republicans, including the former Texas Congressman Tom DeLay and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and as a journalist for One America News, the conservative cable network. She was in her agency post for just 11 days.
“This is a low moment for the F.D.A. in at least a generation,” Daniel Carpenter,a professor at Harvard University who studies the agency, said of Dr. Hahn’s failure to control the public message about the plasma authorization. “This was a major self-inflicted wound.”
It’s unclear exactly what she may have had to do with the decision or why she was let go. But she’s clearly a piece of work:
The decision to hire Ms. Miller as the agency’s top spokeswoman was seen as puzzling by outside observers, given that she had little experience in health care. On May 30, Ms. Miller tweeted, “Remember coronavirus?”
The F.D.A. had been considering allowing the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19 on an emergency basis, but last week The New York Times reported that the decision had been delayed after top health officials Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci intervened and expressed concern that the available evidence on the effectiveness of the treatment was too weak. F.D.A. officials argued that although the data was preliminary and needed continued analysis as more patients are treated, plasma still met the agency’s standard for emergency use authorization.
On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump tweeted that the “deep state” at the F.D.A. was slowing drug development. Late that night, the White House press secretary tweeted that the president would have a news conference the next day “concerning a major therapeutic breakthrough.”
The announcement should have been a rare win for the F.D.A., which for months had fended off criticism of its track record on the pandemic, and questions about the independence of Dr. Hahn, who was previously pressured by Mr. Trump to authorize malaria drugs that turned out to be ineffective for Covid-19 and carried risks of harmful side effects. But last weekend, finally, the agency could reveal some legitimate good news: convalescent plasma, the antibody-rich plasma donated by Covid-19 survivors, showed promise for a subset of patients when given early.
The announcement, made at the White House on Sunday, has instead spurred a week of recriminations, anger and mistrust between the F.D.A. and H.H.S. The officials’ statements Sunday cast nuanced and preliminary data as “a very historic breakthrough,” as Mr. Trump put it. The exaggerated statements drew criticism from scientists and at least three former agency commissioners.
Within the F.D.A. and H.H.S., officials have offered conflicting accounts for how a single misleading statistic — that plasma led to a 35 percent reduction in deaths — appeared in the remarks of Mr. Trump, Dr. Hahn and Alex. M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary. It was also unclear why Dr. Hahn, a longtime cancer doctor, and Mr. Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive, did not themselves catch the overstated statistic. No randomized trials have found a survival benefit for convalescent plasma. The 35 percent number referred to a tiny subset of patients, and was a relative comparison between two groups, not an absolute reduction in deaths.
At a speech at the convention on Thursday evening, the president again overstated what’s known about the benefits of plasma, promising it “will save thousands and thousands of lives.”
Missteps by the F.D.A., a federal agency that has long prided itself on its scientific independence, have heightened concerns that the American public may not be willing to take a vaccine approved by the agency, particularly if the decision is seen as having been made under pressure from Mr. Trump.
Is there even one aspect of the pandemic response this administration has handled well?
The brilliant Alexandra Petri gets the central contradiction of Trump’s campaign message perfectly:
If you think things are bad now under Donald Trump, vote for Donald Trump, who will fix things. The chaos will continue unless you vote for Donald Trump, who will bring needed change by serving another term as president.
Any bad things happening now were sent by Joe Biden, from the future. Do not be fooled by the fact that they are happening in the present, when Donald Trump is president. They are not happening now; they are a preview of what will happen when Joe Biden is president.
Joe Biden wants to destroy the suburbs; he wants, also, to put America’s great workers into houses and basements, where he will force unwanted government assistance on them. Joe Biden has controlled all of government for the past 47 years but, confusingly, he has never gotten through any of the radical policies he really wanted — until now, when he assuredly will. His first act will be to get rid of hamburgers and make cows illegal.
Joe Biden is 40 feet tall, made of wood, hollow and filled with socialists. Joe Biden is also a puppet whose strings are pulled by China, and he would be a pushover to them, unlike Donald Trump, whom John Bolton remembered telling Chinese President Xi Jinping to “go ahead” building concentration camps for Uighurs because it was “exactly the right thing to do.” Joe Biden wants to defund the police, which is why he is advocating not defunding the police.
Most of all, Joe Biden wants to destroy America’s greatness. (Greatness is what we have right now, under Donald Trump, but also don’t have yet, but will definitely have in the future.) Joe Biden will never create jobs, the way Donald Trump has, by first presiding over the loss of millions of them.
Under Donald Trump, America has never been safer. It has also never been more dangerous. We must elect Donald Trump to make us safe again, which he has already made us, never more than we are now, although we also aren’t, and won’t be, unless we elect him! If you see.
Donald Trump supports law and order, except the Hatch Act, which he doesn’t think Americans care about. He was briefly impeached, but it was a big misunderstanding and doesn’t indicate anything about his respect for rule of law, which is absolute. Also, impeachment is illegal (not many people know this), so the most respectful thing is to resist it and call it illegitimate. The fact that impeachment seems to be included in the Constitution is another paradox from the Joe Biden timeline, to be ignored.
Donald Trump is a crusader against nepotism, corruption and the abuse of power for personal gain, wherever it may lurk. The fact that four of the main speechmakers on the four nights of the convention were his children was simply because they were literally the best people in America. He despises people who profit from public office, and the times when he has urged people to stay at Trump properties were just because he gives and gives without thinking of himself. We will see his tax returns very soon.
Elect him and nobody will be canceled, except those of whom Donald Trump disapproves, but that is okay because they did something bad. He is not racist and his appeals contain no dog whistles, but you are racist for thinking so.
In conclusion, Donald Trump has accomplished more than any other president, ever, in his single term, including some accomplishments that did not even happen during his term, like his landmark achievement, the Veterans Choice Bill, passed in 2014 under President Barack Obama. There is no pandemic to speak of, or to put on a mask for; if there ever was one, it was someone else’s fault; also, Joe Biden did not take it seriously, unlike Donald Trump, who does, and is continuing to, at his large unmasked gatherings of supporters breathing and shouting together. Donald Trump does not look at America and see thousands of people needlessly dying and millions losing their jobs — this is what Joe Biden sees. Donald Trump sees greatness!
Donald Trump has made America great again, and he will make it great again, again, if reelected, but right now, Joe Biden and the Democrats are ruining America and filling it with chaos. So don’t you think it’s time for a change?
Bravo.
Somebody’s going to need to eat his feelings with a triple scoop tonight:
President Trump’s Thursday night convention speech making the case for his reelection was lower-rated than his challenger Joe Biden’s speech one week ago, according to overnight Nielsen ratings.
About 21.6 million viewers watched coverage of Trump’s RNC address across nine cable and broadcast networks, down from 23.6 million viewers who watched Biden’s DNC address on the same nine networks.
The totals may fluctuate slightly when final numbers are released later in the day, but Biden clearly edged out Trump.
The Democratic convention was also higher-rated than the Republican convention overall when the audience for all four days is tallied up.Biden’s campaign celebrated the overnight ratings win — and embraced it as a potential way to get under Trump’s skin.(Trump insists he doesn’t watch much TV despite years of evidence to the contrary )
The president’s ratings obsession is well-documented. He has tweeted about ratings hundreds of times, often inaccurately. He raised the subject as recently as Friday morning, when he tweeted, “Great Ratings & Reviews Last Night. Thank you!”He did not share any immediate reaction when the initial viewership figures showed him trailing Biden.
If history is any guide, he may tout Fox News Channel’s ratings instead of the overall results. Fox News had by far the biggest audience of any channel on Thursday night, with upwards of 9 million viewers.
Or he’ll call the ratings fake news. Either way, it shows that many non-Fox viewers are tired of the freak show. And by the way, the convention was dull as dishwater. We’ve heard it all before. If you’re not a fan, you turn the station.
It’s a moment that encapsulates what amounted to a week of gaslighting on Covid-19 by Trump and the Republican convention — an attempt to make America think that a president who had so clearly failed was in fact a victory for the US.
Experts, and the data, tell a very different story than what Trump tried to suggest.
For one, Trump’s performance on Covid-19 really has been a disaster. When the coronavirus first reached America, Trump was slow to react, instead suggesting that the virus would suddenly disappear “like a miracle.” Once states began locking down, Trump pushed them to reopen too early and too quickly — to “LIBERATE” themselves from economic calamity. His administration was slow to expand the US’s testing capacity, instead punting the issue to local, state, and private actors. As his administration suggested people wear masks in public, Trump said it was a personal choice, refused to wear a mask himself, and claimed people wear masks to spite him. Instead of offering calm, collected messaging during a crisis, Trump was erratic — at one point musing about people injecting bleach to treat Covid-19.
The result: America stands out as the one developed country, with the possible exception of Spain, that not only failed to prevent a massive coronavirus outbreak when it first arrived in the spring, but has continued to struggle deep into the summer. So while many other developed nations, from Germany to South Korea, see their lives inch back to normal, America continues to see high numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.
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We are the worst in the world and no matter how much Trump struts around saying he did a perfect job it won’t change that fact. He is responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Rick Perlstein on “the backlash”:
I was awakened, early on May 29, by a reporter asking what I thought about the president’s latest tweet; that was how I first learned the most powerful man in the world had just said of the nationwide disturbances breaking out over the police murder of George Floyd, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” It portended a busy week.
I am a historian best known for a book on how Richard Nixon became president by exploiting white Americans’ racial panic after the fourth straight summer of urban riots. And so a parade of reporters, podcasters and editors came calling: Was the same thing going to happen again? After all, Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about drawing the parallel: during the 2016 campaign borrowing a famous Nixonism, “The Silent Majority Stands With Trump”; these days constantly tweeting “LAW AND ORDER!” whenever the spirit moves him.
I repeated a basic observation: When chaos is everywhere, voters tend to reward politicians who promise calm — which is what Nixon seemed credibly to do in 1968. But campaigning for congressional candidates in 1970, Nixon responded to metastasizing disorder under his watch with frenzied rhetoric about “thugs and hooligans.” His even more frenzied vice president, Spiro Agnew, said the thugs and hooligans received “fawning approval” from Democratic elected officials. Meanwhile, Senator Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine, gave a soothing election-eve address pointing out how this rhetoric was exacerbating America’s divisions — much in the way Joe Biden points this out now. Then, in the congressional races of that year, voters rewarded Democrats with overwhelming victories. I concluded, “When disorder is all around them, voters tend to blame the person in charge — and, sometimes, punish those who exploit the disorder for political gain.”
I described the ways the then and the now radically diverge. In the 1960s, the racial backlash followed an unprecedented flurry of civil rights and antipoverty legislation, championed by a liberal president. Because that legislation only seemed to be followed by more anarchy, it was all too easy for millions of white voters to conclude that liberalism was to blame. No such dynamic obtains now. Indeed, on June 10, The New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy reported that in the previous two weeks, “support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years.”
I heard a refrain in return, especially after “Defund the Police” became a key movement slogan: Just you wait. Former ’60s radicals especially, their caution born of the dashed hopes of those years, almost hectored me. Militants were handing Trump just the battering ram he required for victory. Imagine the ads! Which indeed soon came forth. In one, a terrified old lady, armed intruder at her door, picks up the phone in a panic: “You have reached 911. I’m sorry that there is no one here to answer your emergency call.”
I responded that none of this was working. In early July, a Monmouth poll found that 77 percent of voters thought “defund the police” just meant reforming how the police did their job; Biden, meanwhile, opened up a commanding lead. I pointed to other nonparallels: all those damning cellphone videos of unprovoked police brutality; the cheering trend of increased police accountability; strikingly empathetic media coverage of the protesters’ grievances, in contrast to the 1960s, when establishment institutions trusted the police implicitly.
Indeed, the dynamic of protest had been evolving in ways precisely opposite to that of the 1960s. Then, undisciplined rage broke out in the slums, and for many whites this seemed to come from nowhere (hadn’t we just passed all those civil rights laws?). Now, violent disturbances begin downtown, and everybody knows where they are coming from because of the work of a determined political movement that, building unbroken for over a decade, has increased the proportion of Americans who consider racial discrimination a “big problem” — from half in 2015 to 76 percent today. And Biden’s lead continued to grow.
A week after the original call, I finally arrived at what, for a historian, might seem an unusual conclusion: It was time to stop talking about history. It was only taking us further from understanding the present. I wrote an angry tweet of my own, an open letter to reporters refusing further interview requests. I should have tried something more kind. I should have recommended a book.
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It was published, ironically, the very year I wished journalists would stop asking me about. After the second large summer riot of 1967, in Newark, Garry Wills got a call from his editor at Esquire asking him to look into officials’ preparations for the next riots. Wills traveled the country, visiting police headquarters, National Guard armories and the workshops of entrepreneurs hard at work on a new generation of so-called nonlethal weapons. (“Foam your rioters, pepper them, festoon them in long swaths of chewing gum.”) The piece that resulted was a standout masterpiece in an era of magazine masterpieces. What followed stood out even more: Wills began interviewing Black militants theorizing about how to turn the uprisings into actual military campaigns, and armed white vigilantes determined to kill them if they tried.
The book collecting it all, “The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon,” was published around the same time as the report of the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon Johnson had convened to understand the riots. Each arrived independently at the same controlling metaphor. As the Kerner Report put it, “Our nation is moving toward two societies.” But where the Kerner Report was can-do American, an optimistic utilitarian tool kit of recommended policy responses, Wills, the former Jesuit seminarian, a scholar of sin by training, went a different way: He drilled down into what happens to human souls when neighbors begin seeing neighbors as expendable Others.
A Black minister in Detroit, among the most prominent in the city, patiently explained that Black genocide was the establishment’s ultimate aim, and “if the Black man is fighting genocide, he goes out in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to kill all the white men I can today, because he’s going to kill me by tonight.’ … We will be prepared.” As Northern cities achieved Black majorities, his goal was to kick out all the whites. One of his rival militants found this foolhardy — the new Black nation must be established instead in the rural South. (He claimed to be laying the diplomatic groundwork to make this happen, noting that resistance from white Americans could be checked via “the deterrent effect of Chinese nuclear subs in the Gulf of Mexico.”)
At a Chrysler plant, Wills asked an executive what possible use a vehicle designed for hunting guerrillas in Vietnam could serve in an American city. The man responded, “We had our car walk over a ’53 Chevy for the promotion film, and it just crunched it underfoot.” What’s more, the vehicle’s occupants would be armed with new “Stoner guns” that, Wills reported after testing one on the range, could easily lift a man’s head off. The executive noted that this posed a certain tactical disadvantage: Bullets aimed at a building harboring a sniper “might go through several walls and hit innocent people in other rooms. But we’ve solved that problem” with a special bullet, still classified by the miltiary, that demolished walls entirely. Wills added that “the government is still trying to decide whether the Stoner gun should be adopted in Vietnam. The Detroit police have decided”: They wanted 100.
But Wills’s true interest was in people, in all their harrowing contradictions, not hardware — for instance, the officers he rode along with. “The last three policemen to be killed here were surprised before they could get at their weapons — and in each case, it was by a Negro assailant,” a police official said to him. “Well, you know that’s going to make the others pretty fast in getting their guns out.” Wills reflects on how the “constant rub against hostility, a steady prickle of danger, forms spiritual calluses.” He told of the solutions on offer from the notorious police commissioner of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, fielding 125 sharpshooters training to shoot from helicopters, “teams turned loose to hunt,” Wills observes. Then he describes bringing Rizzo news of the Stoner gun, which he hadn’t heard of: “As I described it, his eyes lit up.”
You look at today’s Warrior Cops on your iPhone screen and naturally want to draw parallels. Parallels, too, to a Black militant rally Wills recounts in a racially tense city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in which he describes a “traffic jam” of competing cameras aimed by police officers and activists (one Black militant has mounted his on a rifle stock), “each side trying to win an engagement by filming it from the ‘proper’ vantage point, bumping lenses in the crush.”
But I’m tired of historical parallels. The mind leaps so readily to them, in part because they’re comforting: a defense against the strangeness of both past and present, keeping us from more clearly seeing either. What is called “parallel” is often only human nature. Or American nature — the whole 401 years since 1619. But history is process, not parallels; 2020 cannot be 1968, because 1968 already happened, both conditioning what happened after and making what happened after impossible to understand in the same way. And for each alleged parallel there may be several counterexamples that do not even rhyme. One that struck me in particular is the night-and-day difference between militant movements saturated with knuckleheaded machismo (“charged with a sexual atmosphere of the subconscious,” Wills observes) and the adamantly feminist and frequently women-led Black Lives Matter formations, or the white mothers willingly eating tear gas in Portland.
Rick then exhorts journalists to go out and do what Wills did and talk to people, try to put together what this all means in today’s context, 2020, not 1968.
I suspect someone will do it although it’shard to know if thatsomeone will have the observational and analytical skill of Gary Wills. But it’s important.
I confess that in June I too jumped to the conclusion that there would be a terrible backlash to the looting I saw in my own town and others. Not the protests, but the looting. But it didn’t develop and I think it’s because of what Nate Silver surmises (which I wrote about in my previous post.) That is that Donald Trump’s inflammatory, racist rhetoric is more frightening and outrageous to most people than the sight of big protests and violent uprisings in reaction to police abuse.
Trump is right out of 1968, even down to his weird 1968 Dep for men hairstyle. Plenty of his cult members are too. But most of us are living in 2020 and we aren’t looking to repeat the past. In fact, that’s the whole point.