A grievously belated and utterly impoverished response

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote another article about Moscow Mitch declaring he will make bad things happen if Democrats eliminate the filibuster. It took Mitch only a week to go from “scorched earth” to “nuclear winter” to describe the severity of what he will unleash on the Senate. Mitch is also saying stuff like the filibuster has no racial history (until the last decade the filibuster was almost exclusively used to protect Jim Crow laws). That’s been keeping his staff busy walking back his comments. And all his shrieking seems to be doing is stiffening the spines of many Democrats. Commenter Mutare Paradigm summed up what many are thinking about Mitch’s antics.

His threat is basically: I’ll ground Senate business to a halt if you don’t let me continue grinding Senate business to a halt.

It seems every time I read the tweets of Ben Franklin I want to quote a bunch, even though they usually are depressing. So I only read them occasionally. But last night I was done with what I wanted to do for the day and wasn’t quite ready to turn off the computer and go to bed. So scrolled through his feed. This is what still interests me today. One:

The GOP is against gun control because a significant part of their big picture strategy relies on their supporters being as heavily armed as possible. Capitol attack proves they are perfectly happy to use political violence.

Two:

The fact that republicans want as few people voting, and as many people armed, as possible speaks volumes about where things are headed big picture. And they want us to hate the idea of guns to the point we stay unarmed entirely

Three, responding to a tweet saying the goal of supremacists is a white ethnostate:

I respectfully disagree. I think it’s apartheid states. The tension and polarization must be preserved to keep the nationalists in power despite their lack of policies that help people. A permanent enemy is needed. More of a West Bank and Gaza model.

Four, responding to a tweet about low prospects for a commission to investigate the insurrection because of GOP refusal to agree:

This is a total failure of the government to execute the most basic tasks of law and order, of self-defense, of accountability to one of the worst crimes in our lifetime. the government didn't prevent the attack, they didn't respond to the attack, they didn't arrest all the people who did the attack, and now they won't investigate the attack. this behavior isn't just incompetent, it's complicit.

Five, replying to an observation that when the GOP is in power they never make progress on problems they claim are so dire:

Yes, the GOP actually needs their base to be as miserable and angry as possible to direct that anger onto the dems. In fact, I am pretty sure they actively try to achieve it. They have no interest in solving the problems they capitalize on, in fact I think they make them worse.

Neal Pomea tweeted a response with a drawing that sums up the GOP position well. I’ve seen it described this way before. Six:

I expect climate collapse to kill several billion people but this will happen over generations. The earth is not going to become unlivable in a matter of years. It will be a long, slow collapse and we’re in beginning. It will be possible for elite to survive this for generations. They’re gonna hop from a series of geographical “lifeboats” that will get smaller and smaller each time, relying on technology to sustain them. We’ll probably see, before the end of lives, private cities built for the rich specifically to ride out the collapse. ... I think a lot of what we're seeing, from the global rise in authoritarianism to the effort to make the pandemic here worse by Trump, ties into what is largely an ecofascist agenda. And we can't begin to address it without acknowledging it's happening.

Seven:

In my opinion it is more likely than not that the intelligence agencies are aligned with Trump, not against him, which neatly explains how he was able to live a lifelong crime spree with impunity, enter office despite ties to foreign powers, kill 500k, without intervention.

Model Daughters tweeted:

How do you capture a people without a fight? The same way you capture many creatures. Illusion. As long as there is some belief that they they are not captured, and the cage doesn't look like a cage, they will walk right in or even stand there while you erect it around them. "Smoke masks alarm pheromones which include various chemicals, e.g., isopentyl acetate that are released by guard bees" (Wikipedia) While the hive is under the illusion of safety they'll ignore you as you trap them. If people in a binary power structure believe one power is a villain while the other is fighting that villain, they will allow themselves to be trapped while boo'ing the villain and cheering those they believe are fighting for them even if victories are false. Illusion.

After reading about the Great Migration, in which 5½ million black people fled the Jim Crow South, and after enjoying the story, I came across this: Yaa Gyasi wrote the novel Homegoing which is about the long lasting effects of the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, she wrote in an article for The Guardian, the rise in sales, which happened last summer during Black Lives Matter protests, is bittersweet. Yeah, the sales and money are great. But rising sales also means black people have been murdered and white people are doing a “listening and learning” thing.

Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the first time when I was a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully and perfectly formed that it filled me with something close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom how a novel could pierce right through the heart of me and find the inarticulable wound. ... While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. The Bluest Eye was published 51 years ago. ... So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow in order to improve their condition, but they don’t really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave it on the shelf. What pleasure, what deepening, could there be in “reading” like that? To enter the world of fiction with such a tainted mission is to doom the novel or short story to fail you on its most essential levels. I’ve published two books during particularly fraught election years and the general tenor of many of the Q&A sessions has been one I would describe as a frenzied search for answers or absolution. There’s so much slippage between “please tell me what I’m doing wrong” and “please tell me that I’ve done nothing wrong”. The suddenness and intensity of the desperation to be seen as being “good” run completely counter to how deeply entrenched, how very old the problems are. There is a reason that Homegoing covers 300 years, and even that was only but the shallowest dip into a bottomless pool. A summer of reading cannot fix this. Some may want to call the events of June 2020 a “racial reckoning,” but in a country in which there was a civil war and a civil rights movement 100 years apart, at some point it would be useful to ask how long a reckoning need take. When, if ever, will we have reckoned?