What place guns should have in a functioning democracy

A week ago I wrote about Nyle DiMarco’s book Deaf Utopia. As part of that I noted he had become a movie producer. So for this week’s Sunday movies I took a look at a couple shows he produced. Both are on Netflix. The first I ventured into was the series Deaf U. The cameras follow several students at Gallaudet University as they do what students do when they’re not in class. I watched one episode and was glad it is only 20 minutes. There’s not a whole lot of story – which is true for most people’s lives. I’m not saying the series is bad. Without the structure of a story the lives of college students don’t interest me. The series is important in that it shows deaf students are like other students except in how they communicate. The movie Audible on Netflix was much more interesting. It is a 40 minute documentary of Amaree a senior on the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf. Being on the team and playing hearing teams was a way for the players to show what they’re capable of doing. Though they had a winning streak of more than 40 games the story opens with a loss. In addition to dealing with the loss they’re also dealing with a teammate who had transferred to a hearing school, couldn’t handle the bullying, and committed suicide. The football coach said his guys are destined for discrimination. Amaree’s father left the family when Amaree lost his hearing to illness at age two. Dad is trying to reestablish a relationship and sees that his son and the team do not skimp on effort. This movie is a good one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. I haven’t done that in seven weeks. I also updated by graphing program to display only the last year. I can see recent peaks and valleys much more clearly. There is a rise in the number of new cases per day from mid October to about Christmas, where there is a peak of 2150. The numbers have dropped since then. Over the last few weeks the peaks have been 1563, 1060, 904, and 585. Deaths per day were 10 and under from early May until the beginning of December. During that month there were many days above 10, though the highest was 15. Since the end of December deaths per day has been back under 10. Steve Inskeep of NPR talked to Jill Lepore and David Blight, two of several historians who submitted a friend of the court brief in the case before the Supreme Court testing the 14th Amendment clause that says an insurrectionist should be banned from the ballot. A summary of what Lepore and Blight said: The originalist theory the conservative Supremes keep claiming as their way of working means the interpretation of the Constitution should be based on what people of the time thought of it. And when the 14th Amendment was debated and approved it was intended to be permanent, not just for the period after the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of government. Yes, the amendment does include the presidency. Yes, what the nasty guy did was insurrection. Arguing otherwise is nitpicking. And this: Inskeep: “Is it wise to disqualify someone that millions of people apparently want to vote for, rather than defeating him at the ballot box, which is the way that many people would think it ought to work?” Lepore: “He was defeated at the ballot box, and he incited an insurrection.” Blight: “We have representative democracy. Fine. But we also have laws. And I don't think in this case, a degree of popular will should be the only question in the enforcement of the Constitution, which is itself quite clear.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported Texas is threatening civil war and the mainstream media doesn’t think it’s a story. Media (at least NPR) have been reporting Gov. Greg Abbott has put razor wire in the Rio Grande. Children got tangled in the wire and drowned. The border patrol sued to be able to remove the razor wire and save the children. The Supreme Court allowed them to do so. Abbott isn’t backing down. Sumner reported what else is going on. MAGA Republicans are celebrating Abbott’s standoff with the border patrol and are calling for secession or civil war. 25 other Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Abbott. Putin’s chief deputy has been urging the civil war as a way to distract from Ukraine.

Despite all this, the story has generated exactly zero articles in The New York Times and scant attention anywhere else in the national media. The national press is allowing Republicans to stoke their fabricated border crisis—right down to threats of civil war—even while those same Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine a solution to issues at the border. How do you avoid reporting on the hypocrisy of the Republican position? Leaving off half the story is a good start.

8ackgr0und No15e of the Kos community asks an important question for those considering civil war or secession they seem to have overlooked: “What are you going to use for your new currency?” Some say the Texas economy is comparable to that of Russia. Have you looked at the ruble lately? How’s your infrastructure? The US is helping people blow up Russia’s stuff. You’ve got oil fields? The US government treats oil fields as military objectives. Mia Maldonado, in an article for the Idaho Capital Sun posted on Kos, reported on discussions with librarians across the state.

According to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association, more than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation.

Part of it is being the target of legislator and public ire. Another part of it is perhaps having to deal with unworkable demands. Put the challenged book in an “adults only” section? What if the library is a single room? Yeah, the legislature is considering reducing the amounts parents could sue a library for noncompliance from $2500 to $250, but there are also legal fees likely above $1000. And that is a significant impact for a rural library. Add that to the increased stress and librarians are looking for jobs in other states or are considering changing professions. DebtorsPrison of the Kos community runs the online bookstore The Literate Lizard. They also write a weekly column of the latest nonfiction book releases. I don’t think I’ve read the column before, though I did this week. A couple of the book descriptions (I haven’t, of course, read the actual books) caught my attention.

One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain. As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision—a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography.

We are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed

I hadn’t realized the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan had matinee performances. I took advantage of that this afternoon to see their current production Human Error. Yeah, the audience was other retired people, a good size crowd. The story opens with Madelyn and Keenan, a mixed race couple and quite liberal, meeting their fertility doctor. He has bad news – their embryo was implanted in the wrong uterus. That uterus belongs to Heather, who is married to Jim. She can’t imagine how anyone can be unchurched. He appears onstage in a bright read Ohio State sweatshirt and insists on showing Keenan his guns. Keenan works as a comedy analyst at rival University of Michigan. Can the two couples tolerate each other long enough for the baby to be born? The most important argument is over abortion, quite important to the story. Heather declares she is carrying the baby to term for Madelyn because she is pro-life. She is sure Madelyn, who must be pro-choice (and is), would have aborted the baby the moment the error was explained. Madelyn, even though she is pro-choice, denies she would have aborted. Heather doesn’t believe her. All five actors – the two couples and the doofus doctor – do a fine job. See a review here. The show is only 85 minutes and runs for one more week. And the ending is quite satisfying and not at all what I expected. I listened to the latest Gaslit Nation episode this evening. Nearly all of the 35 minutes is Sarah Kendzior playing the audiobook of her reading one chapter of her latest book They Knew. A transcript of the episode is here. When she wrote it in 2021 there was some talk of a national divorce. Kendzior is frustrated that now that chapter looks like prophesy as the talk gets louder. Recently I had written about Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting off splitting red states from blue states. MTG isn’t the only voice. Kendzior starts by saying she is against a national divorce. She explains why. The call is a conspiracy for kleptocracts to exploit us for political and financial gain. Yeah, I could stop right there. On one side are those who believe they deserve more and that Democrats are keeping them from what’s rightfully theirs. On the other are those who believe people living under Republican legislatures deserve what they get. Neither is true. Both sides are attempts to create monocultures out of a multifaceted nation. No state is all red or all blue. And in many red states the citizens are suffering under a Republican Party that has created one party minority rule in defiance of the wishes of the majority. That was done through gerrymandering and voter suppression (given fresh power when some of the Voting Rights Act was gutted). It is difficult to regain rights when the mechanism to protect them – voting – is harmed. The lie that any state is deeply red or deeply blue is repeated enough that people believe it true – and believe it has always been true. They push the lie that the differences are ancient and the conflict is destiny, that differences cannot be reconciled. This is why there is a push to demonize Critical Race Theory. It has been divorced from its original meaning (I probably wrote about it two years ago) and is now a blanket term to hold whatever concepts they want to demonize. The goal is to carve up America into oligarch fiefdoms. Liberals may enjoy that – for a while. But there is still an oligarch in charge. And conservative fiefdoms will not not tolerate letting liberal ones exist for very long and will want to exploit the resources. This is happening because the US government is corrupt. Both Republicans and Democrats are being funded by foreign agents. Some may be American citizens, but their loyalties are elsewhere. And citizenship no longer matters since in November 2021 the Federal Election Commission said foreigners may fund US referendum campaigns.

There are a multitude of Americas, as one would expect in a country this large and diverse. But we are no longer unified by ideals. Instead, we are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed. We share that pain and take it out on each other while disregarding each other's humanity, and being acclimatized by algorithms to do so. The new Civil War is fought on the internet where lies and memes spur exhausted people to hate each other; where troll farms can make AstroTurf rallies; where threats have been normalized and kindness is labeled virtue signaling.

These kleptocrats gain power because when they tested their limits no one who is supposed to have power intervened. Civic obligation crumbles. If oligarchs partition America what happens to St. Louis? This is where Kendzior lives. The city is politically blue, demographically black. It will be declared the enemy of whoever takes over Missouri. Illinois won’t want it because of its poverty and crime. Secession means friends and family will live in other countries where we may not be allowed to visit. The military will be replaced by mercenaries who will act with brutal impunity on who used to be fellow citizens. Basic infrastructure will be privatized by the most corrupt actors (a process already underway, but will accelerate under the shock of partition). Everything will go to the highest bidders. The most vulnerable people will suffer even more. Necessities will become luxuries. The American dream becomes the American ghost. People say that other people get what they deserve. But we don’t deserve this. And our younger generations certainly don’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger – the Governator – has been using his celebrity and tough guy image to try to influence his conservative fans through a series of videos where he talks to the camera. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos discussed the latest and (so far) longest at 12 minutes. First Arnold talks about his recent visit to Auschwitz, describing what went on there. Then he says this is where fascism ends. This is what happens when people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs. He talks about growing up in Austria where his parents’ generation were all traumatized and broken by WWII, some of them suffering because they fell for a horrible loser ideology. Then he said:

Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more out of life. And they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just joined because everyone else was doing it. In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined. They were all broken in the same way. That's the bottom line here. I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself with the flag of hate, I want you to know where that path ends. I want you to see very clearly in front of you, in your minds. Because throughout history, hate is always been the easy path, the path of least resistance. It's easy to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better ourselves. Right? But let me be clear. You will not find success in the end of this rope. You will not find fulfillment or happiness because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while, but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels. It breaks you. It's the path of the weak. And that's why there has never been a successful movement based on hate.

I had concluded that a great deal of what is going on in the world is people needing to show they are superior to others and doing that by “mak[ing] other lives worse.” That drives all of Republican policy. I am glad someone else has come to the same conclusion. Arnold says pulling away from fascism is hard work. One must give up old ways of thinking and maybe even friends. These are weak beliefs one is getting rid of. But doing that work makes one strong.

Freedom to oppress. Freedom from oppression.

I don’t read the New York Times, and I’m not tempted to pay for a subscription to get behind its paywall. I also don’t trust their coverage based on what I read in Daily Kos. However, my friend and debate partner, who is originally from the Big Apple, does subscribe and does read it regularly. The NYT is known as the paper of record for its lack of bias and its balanced reporting. Because of that it is used as a source for a variety of topics by members of Congress. That is important. A couple days ago I got an email from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (the organization was formed before society paid much attention to Bisexual and Transgender, back when Queer was considered a slur before it was reclaimed as a badge of honor). GLAAD does such things as monitor TV, movies, and print publications (whatever “print” means these days). They protest defamatory portrayals of our community and they present Media Awards each year to those TV shows and movies with the most positive portrayals. I’m on GLAAD’s email list, though I’m not a financial supporter. The email urged me to sign an open latter to the Times demanding they stop giving voice to people who mischaracterize and harm transgender people. Most of these voices are through opinion pieces, which don’t have the same requirements of accuracy. I read the letter and added my name. There are many important LGBTQ people and many celebrities who also signed. The letter listed demands, including no longer giving voice to anti-trans bigots and their hateful misinformation and hiring a few trans people to guide the paper’s coverage. I forwarded the GLAAD email to my friend, saying this is why I don’t trust the Times. We had lunch together to day. As part of our discussion of many things he said he saw my email and marked it for later reading. He also was surprised that the Times would allow such misuse of its impartiality, though he said he doesn’t read all of the Times. My friend wondered if I have any examples of this biased portrayal of trans people. Marissa Higgins of Kos provides an example. JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books (which I read and saw the movies too), has become notorious for being a transphobe. Rowling reasons that she is defending women. Higgins replies that trans women are women. The people women need defending from are men. Much of Higgins post is about an opinion piece by Pamela Paul, a Times op-ed columnist, who defended Rowling’s transphobia. I won’t go into every one of Higgins’ rebuttals to what Paul wrote, though it is good reading for those who want to understand transgender people. I will note that it matters because this is not the only transphobic opinion piece in the Times. And because they appear in the Times they are given an air of impartiality (when they clearly are not) and transphobic lawmakers are able to say, “See! The Times agrees that trans people are dangerous!” That gives cover to anti-trans laws they propose and pass. And that leads to harm and death of trans people. Higgins also provides a link to the letter and includes a response from the Times, which essentially says they stand by their reporting. Which increases my mistrust of the Times. Dartagnan of the Kos community what would be involved in blue (or red) states seceding from the country. He references the article These Disunited States by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Dartagnan begins by noting many of the reasons why the two sides may not want to live together, though the reasons come down to: Freedom to one group means freedom to oppress. Freedom for the other group means freedom from oppression. There are disagreements over gun availability and what to do with militia groups. Over being “woke” or “anti-woke” – whether we should acknowledge our oppression of targeted groups to stop being oppressive or ban acknowledging that oppression so that it can be perpetuated. Over whether America is a “Christian” nation that gives conservative Christians control of national laws. Over whether abortion is a right and women have control over their own bodies. Over whether the Supreme Court can rule from on high without considering a justice’s own ethics. Over whether rich people are taxed fairly and poor people are offered a meaningful social safety net. Over who gets a good quality education. Over who is allowed access to affordable health care. Over whether workers are left to the oppression of bosses. Over whether we should do something about climate change. I’m sure there are many other issues Dartagnan (and I) left out. Dartagnan wrote:

Given the seemingly implacable divisions that already exist in this country, it’s not particularly apocalyptic anymore to imagine a point where the majority populations in “blue” states simply refuse to bow to this court’s edicts and opt to go it alone.

Add to that the conservative introduction of violent intimidation and sense that they were ordained to rule. Because of all that America is already essentially binational, with two sharply opposed communities under one federal government in which each thinks the other poses a mortal threat to the country. If Congress remains divided after the 2024 election, no matter which party takes the White House states that are predominantly the other party may begin discussions of secession – amicable separation – and begin collaboration with other like-minded states. Since red and blue states are somewhat intermingled there won’t be a clear division as there was in the Civil War. There would also be a great deal of political migration. And violence. Perhaps the danger could be lessened with the federal government changed to handle the military and national infrastructure and leaving everything else to the states. However, most Democrats see the federal government as the most practical way of redressing injustice and protecting minorities. And most Republicans want the federal government to be the enforcer of oppression. There would be issues to work out – how to handle Social Security, national health, the distribution of energy, maintaining infrastructure, and how to keep the military from being used by one side against the other. Conservatives vow to step up their oppression and are doing so in Texas and Florida. They are showing exactly what they intend to do if they win the presidency. Splitting the country is an extremely unpleasant thought. But it is better to think about it now rather than when it is too late. Lean McElrath, quoting and linking to an article in the Daily Beast, tweeted:

“DeSantis Now Says Teachers Are Shelving Books to Make Him Look Bad” The only thing worse than a bully is a whining bully who plays victim. Oh, wait, that’s the entire current Republican Party. For a group who adhere to a belief “traditional” white culture is supreme, Republicans repeatedly reveal they see themselves as victimized weaklings. I’m as white as one can be by ancestral or aesthetic metrics and find it pathetic. I can only imagine how non-white people feel. “We’re white, cis, heterosexual men. We created the bestest most important strongest culture on earth and must defend it until death!” But also: “We’re being defeated and made to look bad by all those other mean icky people so they must be attacked! Waaaaah waaah waaah!” You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to be a bigot, at least have some dignity.

Rob Rogers tweeted a cartoon of Ron DeathSantis writing “Don’t Say Gay!” at the front of a classroom and a black student asking, “Governor DeSantis, were you born a bigot or is that a lifestyle choice?” Jesse Duquette tweeted a cartoon of Goldwater (I think) of the 1960s saying “States’ Rights,” Nixon in the 70s saying, “Southern Strategy,” Reagan in the 80s saying, “Welfare Queens,” and DeathSantis in the 2020s saying “Woke.” The caption says, “Different code, same Klan.”