It’s simple. They love each other.

My Sunday movie was Join or Die. To see it I had to go to a theater and watch with other people. Cinema Detroit is one of two remaining art-house movie organizations in Metro Detroit. The other is Detroit Film Theater, which is quite healthy and celebrating 50 years. It is also attached to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The area has lost two art-house theaters, the Main in Royal Oak (now demolished) and the Maple in West Bloomfield. Even Cinema Detroit has given up its permanent home. It now sponsors movies about twice a month at Planet Ant in Hamtramck. Planet Ant has a variety of other types of programs, including improv theater and standup comedy. I hadn’t been there before and I’ve rarely visited Hamtramck, so this was a bit of an adventure. The hall had seats for perhaps 100 people. I think about 30 people watched the movie. Join or Die is a documentary about the need for citizens to join clubs. It is based on ideas that Robert Putnam has developed over the last fifty years. In the 1970s Italy decentralized its government, less power in Rome and more in the states. This became an ideal time for Putnam and other researchers to study why some state governments did well and others did not. They studied a lot of parameters, including wealth and education. They found the parameter that correlated best was civic engagement. This wasn’t just civic engagement in government, just civic engagement in general. The idea is much older and others have called it social capital. One of those others is Jane Jacobs, a name my friend and debate partner knows – he lent me her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (I wrote about the book here and a documentary about her here). She studied the street scene in American cities and showed the best neighborhoods were the ones that fostered interconnectedness between people. The social capital was what was lost when a neighborhood was destroyed for “urban renewal.” Social capital essentially means we do better when we join a club. Of any kind. Even religious clubs are good – churches provided about half of our civic engagement. Though all are good try to join a club with membership that has a wide variety of people. Unions are good. So are Parent Teacher Associations. We do better personally – those who join a club are about 50% more likely to live longer (I don’t remember the exact nature of this statistic). Being in a club is also a great benefit to the community and the nation, even for the quality of democracy. Back in the US Putnam turned his analysis skills to his homeland. In 1995 he wrote an article he titled Bowling Alone. People were bowling just as much, maybe more, than they were in the 1950s and 60s. But there was a lot less bowling in leagues. That caught the attention of President Bill Clinton, who invited Putnam to do a few presentations. Other people dismissed his conclusion, saying he didn’t look in the right places. So over the next five years he looked in every place he could. All of the studies he found showed the same decline in civic participation. He put all of that into this book Bowling Alone that came out in 2000. An important question Putnam needed to answer in the book is: Why? Why has there been such a dropoff in all aspects of public participation? He uncovered three broad areas that contribute to less public life. The first is television and its successor social media. The second, related to the first, is how hard people have to work to get by and how they don’t want to go to some club in the evening. They would much rather plop in front of the screen. The hard work is related to growing inequality. Which leads us to the third part. There are forces in America that don’t want us in clubs whose existence supports democracy. They promote rugged individuality so that we say we are not joiners. Putnam has been speaking out to get people to join clubs for nearly thirty years. He’s been helped by Pete Buttigieg and Hillary Clinton (both appear in the film). Yet the trend remains downward and the pandemic made things worse by closing a lot of clubs. It’s enough to make a guy lose hope. Putnam went digging again through a lot of different archives. The charts in his book all showed descending lines from 1960. What about before then? Ah. From the late 1800s – America’s Gilded Age when corporate barons reigned supreme – to about 1960, participation in clubs climbed by quite a bit. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. And there are signs that we are doing it again. The movie highlighted several. That does not mean the 1950s were an ideal time, that we should go back to what our society was like then, that we should be sending women back to the kitchen. But to keep our fragile democracy and to move forward people need to form and join clubs. Some of the ideas for clubs may not last. And some will. I read a couple reviews of this movie (IMDb has links). They point to a question not covered in the movie. All groups are beneficial? Even hate groups? Or groups with discriminatory membership rules? I finished the book The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew. The author is Anishinaabe and grew up in northwest Ontario, north of Minnesota. I bought the book while at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. The Indigenous shop featured this book and a few more in addition to the Indigenous tourist art and fine art. If the other books I bought there are any good I’ll discuss them eventually. The story centers around Kinew’s father, Tobasonakwut, frequently referred to in the book as Ndede, which is Ojibwe for daddy. The story begins with the birth of Tobasonakwut in the 1940s, then his time in the residential schools that have been in the Canadian news quite a bit over the last decade due to the graves of children found on many school sites. The purpose of these schools was to “kill the Indian in the child” and replace it with white culture. The one Tobasonakwut was taken to was run by the Catholic Church, as were many of the schools. That means Tobasonakwut was raised by people who did not love him, who frequently abused him. He grew up to be a strong and angry young man. That anger affected the family – Tobasonakwut didn’t know how to love and treated people the way he had been treated. For a while he wrecked relationships and lives. Because of that Kinew also grew up angry and also damaged relationships. Tobasonakwut and Kinew immersed themselves in Anishinaabe culture, the sundances and powwows. And they began to heal. Also during this time various Indigenous movements developed and Tobasonakwut and Kinew were a part of them. The Canadian government officially apologized for the residential schools. The government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Tobasonakwut gave his testimony in Ojibwe. Kinew was offered a job with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and was instrumental in creating documentaries about the schools and Indigenous life. He became known across the country. Tobasonakwut also worked to reconcile with the Catholic Church. He was met halfway (the church didn’t quite give up its superior attitude), enough that Tobasonakwut and a willing Archbishop of Winnepeg conducted an Anishinaabe ceremony declaring they were brothers. They achieved much in advancing acceptance of Indigenous people. There is still a long way to go. The Ndede got cancer. Kinew took a leave of absence from the CBC to learn as much about Anishinaabe culture from his father as he could in the time remaining. Through that he learned what a remarkable man his father was. Ndede had learned how to forgive. As for the title:

Ndede had explained that there are four layers of meaning to these words. They are from the perspective of the creator, as though God himself were singing to you. The first meaning of “I am the reason you walk” is “I have created you and therefore you walk.” The second meaning is “I am your motivation.” The third meaning is “I am the spark inside you called love, which animates you and allows you to live by the Anishinaabe values of kiizhewaatiziwin.” The fourth and final meaning is “I am the destination at the end of your life that you are walking toward.”

It’s a beautiful and amazing story. I highly recommend it. A few years ago this book was a part of Canada Reads, a program that tries to get the whole nation to read and discuss the same book. From that height we descend to the depths. Yesterday, Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Speaker Johnson has two weeks to fund the government to avoid a shutdown. Chuck Schumer in the Senate says he needs a week to get any bill through his chamber. So Johnson really has only a week. Last week Johnson pulled a funding bill because he couldn’t get enough Republicans to vote for it. This week he brought the same bill back. It includes a racist provision that demands proof of citizenship before being allowed to register to vote. Democrats in the House won’t vote for it. Democrats in the Senate will remove it, which will require time to reconcile with the House. But Johnson can’t get enough Republicans to approve the bill with the racist language and can’t get approval without it. Of course, the nasty guy is in the background demanding the racist language be included. Johnson could take it out and let Democrats bail him out. Again. And again weaken his standing in his caucus. And on Monday Sumner reported that the nasty guy can’t admit he lost his debate with Harris. So Republicans, eager to please him, are calling for an investigation into the debate. They even say they have a whistleblower, though can’t decide whether he is dead or alive (though likely never existed). They want to investigate important issues – at least as important as those around the Biden impeachment scandals that never produced evidence. They claim ABC, who ran the event, had given Harris the questions ahead of time (no, she simply prepared well). They claim Harris wore a wire in her earrings. They claim ABC was biased towards Harris because they didn’t fact-check her while they did him. Thus ABC should lose its license.

Trump’s real problem is that he’s a loser who never wants to admit he lost. That was true in 2020, and it’s still true today. To cover up his losing, Trump employs a three-part plan: insist in advance that his opponents will cheat, claim to have won no matter how badly he lost, and then spread conspiracy theories about why he lost.

And out of the depths. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple good quotes. The first is from Christopher Kane of the Washington Blade who did the “first-ever interview by a LGBTQ newspaper with a sitting President of the United States.”

Through to today, Biden said, “most of the openly gay people that have worked with me, that I’ve worked with, the one advantage they have is they tend to have more courage than most people have.” “No, I’m serious,” he added, “I think you guys underestimate that.” The president has spoken publicly about his deep respect and admiration for LGBTQ people, including the trans community, and trans youth, whom he has repeatedly said are some of the bravest people he knows. A record-breaking number of LGBTQ officials are serving in appointed positions throughout the Biden-Harris administration. Among them are Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet member; Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender appointee in history, who serves as assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the first out White House communications director and press secretary, Ben LaBolt and Karine Jean-Pierre; and 11 federal judges (the same number of LGBTQ judicial nominees who were confirmed during the Obama-Biden administration’s two terms).

I had to go read the whole Washington Blade article. It’s a great one. Mostly, it is about Biden discussing the importance of the many LGBTQ initiatives he accomplished during his term, and a few that didn’t get done. This is a good quote:

“My dad used to say that everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity,” the president said, recalling a story he has shared before about a time when, as a teenager, he was surprised by the sight of two men kissing in downtown Wilmington, Del., and his father responded, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”

Back to the roundup. Kev quoted Paul Krugman of the New York Times writing about small cities, like Springfield, Ohio.

I’ve written before about the problem of regions left behind by the 21st-century economy, a problem that is common to many wealthy nations. Decline in parts of the former East Germany has fed right-wing extremism in ways that resemble the rise of Trumpism in some depressed parts of our country. There are, however, some small cities that have managed to buck the trend; and in quite a few cases immigrants have been central to their revival. Springfield, with its community of (legal!) Haitian migrants is one example. Other examples include my hometown, Utica, N.Y., buoyed by refugees from Bosnia and Myanmar; Springdale, Ark., which has attracted people from various places including the Marshall Islands; and many others. [...] Why do immigrants move to some small cities? Partly in response to housing costs that were, at least until recently, relatively low (as they tend to be in declining cities). In some instances, they also move to take advantage of jobs that some native-born Americans, for whatever reasons, are reluctant to do. In Springdale, the home of Tyson Foods, these are often jobs in poultry plants. In Springfield, which, The Times reported, has seen “a boom in manufacturing and warehouse jobs,” employers suggest that some young native-born adults shun “entry-level, rote work.”

In the comments are several good cartoons. One is about the woman who started the rumor of Haitians in Springfield eating pets and now admits it is false and regrets the story that grew up around it and the trouble it created. Garthtoons show a man and woman talking:

Man: Wait. So you’re saying I don’t need to proclaim my stance on breaking news within moments of it happening and can wait to get all the facts before proselytizing on social media? Woman: I know, it’s a radical idea.

ayiti libre! Posted a cartoon by Mackay showing a Haitian family dressed in Ukrainian outfits trying to file an asylum claim. Attached to that tweet is one by nawè who wants us to notice who gets labeled “immigrants” and who gets labeled “refugees.” Deborah Kleinhomer posted a cartoon by Joel Pett with the caption, “Diabolical undocumented-immigrant voting schemes.” A man says to his wife, who is holding an infant, “Let’s abandon our families, blow all our money, risk our lives, sneak into the U.S., then commit a crime that will get us sent back!” A cartoon posted by Trumpton contrasts statements by the nasty guy:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump 2016 "(Biden and Harris’s) rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country" Trump 2024

And a cartoon by Peter Steiner of a boy talking to his teacher. “The dog ate my book report, and an immigrant ate the dog. But I have a concept for a book report.” Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a photo showing two pickup trucks, one sleek, the other quite beefy. The caption says, “The same make, model, and color. Thirty years apart.”