September 4, 1957: Elizabeth Eckford, "The Little Rock Nine"
As someone who may have smashed a tennis racquet or two, I have an insight into the demons that have tormented the likes of Serena Williams and Andre Agassi. It has zero to do with social injustice, but it sure makes for a convenient distraction from accountability.
I believe some people are turning Serena Williams into a martyr for vicarious reasons: blaming their own demons on some distant social injustice. There have been clear cases throughout history of toxic sexism, plenty to choose from. There are blatant examples of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia in our lifetime. Knee-jerking any and every dispute into a sexist, racist or xenophobic cause is emotionally unintelligent.
Defending the angst of an ego-bruised, multi-millionaire athlete as if we were reliving the suffering endured by Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock or Rosa Parks in Montgomery is in itself toxic. Serena Williams’ could not hold a candle to a brave black girl one September morning back in 1957, as she carried her schoolbooks through an angry white mob. A mob that needed an entire national guard to stop a girl armed with only a notebook. An amazing grace of courage so that Serena Williams could one day make millions of dollars and hobnob with the top 1% of the world.
When the US Republican Party embraced the racially inconvenienced and outraged Southern Democrats in the 1960’s, little did we know that the great party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan was selling its soul for thirty pieces of silver. It was slow cooking, but it finally boiled over in 2016. Trump’s democratic coup became transparent within minutes of his election: his was the 5th cancellation of the popular vote in US history.
But unlike the previous ones, Trump’s electoral college victory saw an unprecedented number of cancelled popular votes: more than 2.8 million. By comparison, the previous highest cancellation was in 2000, with less than 0.5 million votes eliminated by the electoral college. It finally made a lot of Americans take notice after November of 2016: what is this thing called the Electoral College? And more importantly, why does it seem to favor a party riddled with racism and xenophobia?
Those questions should have been asked a long time ago. You would figure that after the Civil War - a bloodbath that claimed the most American lives of any war to date - SOMEONE would have said, “Hey, has everyone forgotten that this Electoral College thing is directly based on slavery math??“
Ah, the irony of defeat. The South actually benefited from the Electoral College math, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when their former slaves went from counting as 3/5 human to being whole. “Three-fifths human”. Let that sink in for a moment. The founders of our enlightened democracy had signed their names on one of humanity’s most influential documents, a majestic declaration that did not stutter when it stated the following words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That all men are created equal. Perhaps Napoleon & Snowball the pigs snuck into Independence Hall one fateful summer night, and upon the freshly inked declaration scribbled the words, “but some are only three-fifths human”. Or perhaps this was to be a paradoxical experiment in democracy. One worthy of inspiring Erwin Schrödinger to come up with one of quantum physics most famous thought experiments: “Schrödinger’s Cat”.In a Schrödinger Democracy, it is possible for ALL men to be created equal, while SOME are simultaneously only three-fifths equal.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, having lost their Schrödinger Way of Life, the South figured out a way to disenfranchise blacks for the next one-hundred years. With defeats like these who needs victories.
One-hundred years later puts us in 1965, the year after the last of the Civil Rights Acts was signed and sealed by the federal government. What was supposed to be the beginning of a brave new post-Schrödinger Democracy turned out to be, apparently, the year America ceased to be great. It was the year a political mass exodus began, when those who hated the slave-freeing Republican Party now had a new party to hate: the Black-enfranchisingDemocratic Party.
The mother of all ironies is that the party that did so much for this country, one that four-score and seven years after the birth of our nation called out the illegitimate use of the word “freedom” in our Declaration of Independence, was the same party that in 2016 set us back to 1963.
Mystery solved. We now know what that doggone, dog-whistled year was when America was last great. In a surreal back-to-dystopia twist, Nineteen Sixty-Three was to be the last year when discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin was a God-given right.
Let thisnowbe self-evident, as we move on and try to make sense of this fine clusterfuck we’ve gotten ourselves into: that what could otherwise be a universal beacon of true greatness on earth, our American Democracy’s tragic flaw boils down to the dumbest of all human fears - the boogeyman of skin color.
It’s hard to judge the distance between brink and precipice - it’s not what we do best as humans. Which brings many of us to our current state of discomfort: how far or how close are we? Either way, here’s a little trail of breadcrumbs our founders left for us. It almost immediately follows their aforementioned words of wisdom that all men are created equal:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...”
Almost forty years ago, the British psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd released its masterpiece titled "The Wall". The double-album rock opera has proven ageless already, and will very likely remain the conscience of a generation for decades to come. It was not just the music, and it was not just the words. The Wall is a work of art that transcended music as entertainment. It was to be one of the world's most powerful anti-war statements. A sobering rock-lullaby that for ninety-five minutes transforms us to witnesses of humanity's worst enemy: itself.
Almost forty years later, the world seems to have forgotten the pain from totalitarian destruction, from fascism and delusions of racial supremacy. Today, not-so-small segments of so-called developed nations revisit that dark past with nostalgia, emboldened and empowered, as if it was a movement that had simply become a sleeper cell for a generation or two.
It is not the mere fact that destructive sleeper cells can lie dormant for so long that is disturbing. It is the realization that a single man can rise to power, and with a dog-whistling code awaken the hate. Every major war has a post-war dream. "The war to end all wars". This anxiety was best expressed by Pink Floyd on their last studio album, released in 1982, titled "The Final Cut":
"Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified, Is it for this that daddy died? Was it you? Was it me? Did I watch too much T.V.? Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes? If it wasn't for the Nips Being so good at building ships The yards would still be open on the Clyde And it can't be much fun for them Beneath the Rising Sun With all their kids committing suicide. What have we done, Maggie what have we done? What have we done, to England... Should we shout? Should we scream, "What happened to the post war dream?" Oh Maggie! Maggie what did we do??" - The Post War Dream
Almost forty years later, well over sixty million Americans are asking themselves the same question, like a broken record... Oh America! America what did we do??
"For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!” — From "The War Prayer", by Mark Twain
Half of us hate the other half. We blame the other half for almost everything that is “wrong” with our country, whatever that means to us. If the other half was struck down by lightning, our lives would be instantly cured of all problems. Considering ISIS is no more than 20,000 people, hating 165 million Americans must require a hell of a lot more energy.
When politicians and their followers say, "the American people", they mean roughly half of a nation. When half of Americans say "make America great again", they mean, give me back my America. When the other half of America says "not my president", they mean, give me back my America... will the real America please stand up?
The unhinged extremes of "conservatives" and "liberals" were never opposite each other: they were always side by side. Think of a protest, where obnoxiously loud, heated exchanges take place. The extremes always find each other, with a mission to destroy the other. They blow up the ground they stand on, creating the Grand Canyon of democracy. The moderate watch from the safe distance of their respective cliff edges, polarized by the unchallenged belief that a force much greater than themselves created the canyon.
As long as both mainstreams continue to enable their unhinged extremes, the insanity will continue. The pendulum will swing every four to eight years. The policies will be done, then undone. Then done and undone all over again.
"Half" is not a victory. We don't do half patriotism, half pride, half intelligence, half compassion, half jobs. No real leader would ever disrespect half a nation. Many of our forty-five leaders consistently showed us that they either never understood half our nation, or worse, chose the half they could profit from the most. The day a politician says, and more importantly means, "half of you have placed your trust in me, and you are getting your wish... but the other half does not like or trust me: they are a huge priority for me" is the day democracy will no longer be abused by the schizophrenia of nations.
It's not that Cincinnati is better than any other place on the planet. Every place has its greatness, and uniqueness. It's that every place deserves to be homaged. This is my tribute to the Queen City.
Credits: Drone Images by Third Eye Aerial, Steven Madow, and Phil Armstrong. Black & White Photography by Joe Yanes. Music & Lyrics by Leonard Cohen. Music performed by Jeff Gutt.
Compiled / Edited by Joe Yanes & The Daily Presence. A not for profit, not compensated production. For any questions, comments, please contact yanesjm@yahoo.com.
Patchogue (NY) resident James Klein, a registered Republican and a Navy veteran, hangs the American flag upside down outside his home on Friday, Jan. 20, 2017.
Martin Scorsese's "Silence" is a brutal story of persecution. Going back to the early 1600s, Silence tells the haunting story of the first Christian missionaries in Japan. Not for the faint of heart, the film portrays inhumanity to an extreme that makes you wonder if the universe is simply not better off without us.
Leaving the theater, I experienced a revelation of sorts. It suddenly dawned on me that stories about religious, ethnic, or political persecution are all trying to convey the exact same message: persecution exists because the powerful minority will always posses a consuming fear of the powerless majority.
I decided to read-up a bit on the subject of human fear, as it should be clear by now that politics is more about the management of fear than anything else it claims to be. The simple conclusion was that fear is the most basic, but ultimately most toxic of human instincts. It brands itself from early life as our protector-in-chief, a survival of the fittest superhero of sorts. Yet as honorable as mere survival can be, and as useful to evolution as it has been, fear often reaches dysfunctional overload when unchecked. We are coded to take even the hint of a minor threat and entertain worst-case scenarios in the kangaroo courts of our mind. When it comes to fear, sense has no voice in our decision making process. When it comes to fear, alternative reality makes as much sense as we need it to make.
Every generation since the dawn of man has witnessed the tragic impact of irrational fear. Ours is no exception, so it's best not to fall prey to nostalgic distortions. There is no way to sugarcoat it: fear, unchecked by either reason or faith, makes cowards out of mere mortals.
Teddy Roosevelt, one of the great conservative presidents of the United States, best summed up the power of caution over fear with his famous maxim, "speak softly, carry a big stick". Such was the quiet strength of our leadership, one that was instrumental decades later in the defeat of boisterous Nazi Germany. Yet somewhere along the way we seem to have lost the lesson. America has apparently stumbled into a leadership tinkering with dystopian antics. A leadership that could now be summed up by an unbecoming speak loudly, spread a big fear.
Much has been written in recent days about the parallels between our latest brand of leadership and Nazi Germany. The superficial similarities arguably exist, except for one important detail: Germany imploded during the Great Depression, America grew stronger. Germany devolved practically overnight from Weimar Republic to Banana Republic. The foundation-less Republik was no match for the strength of our checks and balances, making current comparisons premature. Besides, we have plenty of swept-under-the-rug issues that have plagued us for many generations. Never mind the dark specter of an American dictator. Worrying about a Nazi fate only clouds very real and unsolved problems. The kind of problems that will likely be the real undoing of the great American experience, such as our alarming rate of incarceration (US DOJ and Interpol statistics), murder rate by firearms (FBI stats), and real unemployment (US Dept of labor and Census Bureau). None of these problems have anything to do with ISIS, and although they are complicated by illegal immigration they will not go away if we stopped ALL immigration.
That being said, our mighty checks and balances today are about to be tested like never before, much to the concern and contempt of half a nation. But consider the following: the other half, the one who ushered in this chapter of American history, held the exact same contempt for the previous leader. They fell back on the same kind of Naziesque warnings: Obama was a dictator that was hellbent on destroying America. It was a contempt driven by fear (much like the current contempt), and there was not enough consolation our checks and balances could provide.
There is no doubt in my mind that one of the two sides of this dysfunctional marriage we call America is closer to the truth. A mediocre accomplishment, as almost-truths always are.
As I watched Silence in my own distressed silence, one particular word kept recurring in the story: apostasy. Apostasy is "the formal disaffiliation from, or renunciation of a religion by a person". Apostasy, it seems, is also what lurks in the shadows of America’s Heartland. A Heartland with a vindicated mandate to cleanse our "formerly great" nation from fear-inducing ethnicities and non-Christian religions. A Heartland who will no longer remain in silence. A silence, disturbed. A disturbance that now haunts those who call themselves The Resistance. A resistance that will swing the pendulum of democracy back within the next four years, so we can get up and do it all over again.
Until then, those of us obsessed with making sense of it all might finally understand the words of America's subway prophets: "Fools, said I, you do not know: silence like a cancer grows..."
***
SPOILER ALERT on the video below.
Do not watch if you've never watched "House of Cards"
AND you intend to do so. Oh an also it's NSFW.
"Silence Disturbed"
A Videoblog by the Daily Presence-Joey
Video editing by Joey. Scenes from House of Cards. Song performed by "Disturbed", music and words by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.
Like Rex Tillerson, my father was an Exxon lifelong career man. When he retired from Exxon he became an industry consultant. In the mid 90's he and I worked together on a series of international oil companies projects, collaborating with major consultants including McKinsey, Accenture, and PA Consulting (UK). Contrary to popular belief, Exxon and most of the major oil companies have been spending significant time and resources on cleaner, alternative energy. My father collaborated with one or two universities, with a minor assist from my part, on studies involving the impact of improved engine efficiency, the gloomy future of oil prices, and the end of the oil industry as we know it.
Towards the end of the 90's, Accenture asked for our help on a project in Russia (Samara), not far from the Caspian Sea. Rex Tillerson was VP of Exxon's operations in the region at the time, Exxon Ventures CIS. We met with Tillerson on one occasion, he struck me as a straight-shooter. The culture at Exxon, one I experienced by osmosis at home growing up, has always been strongly pro-science. There was an exception during the administration of Lee Raymond (1993-2005), when Exxon took a skeptical approach to climate change. In 2006 Exxon changed leadership and self-corrected. The new CEO declared there was no question that human activity was the source of CO2 emissions, one of the leading causes of detrimental climate change. That new CEO was Rex Tillerson.
Now, I'm not going to go out on a limb for a politician. I don't know if Tillerson will do the right thing as Secretary of State, politically or otherwise. I really don't know if he has any skeletons in his closet, though I'm fairly certain he was picked by Trump-Bannon for his Russian stripes. Either way, it's not my turn to watch him. For those whose job it is to watch him, Tillerson's confirmation was not among the most bipartisan. That honor belonged to Gen. James Mattis, a true warrior and principled anti-torture dissenter amidst a lair of scorched earth high-anxieters. What has been said about Tillerson by his opponents is that his climate change position has made him a respected foe.
For his part, unlike Mattis and Tillerson, President Trump has already demonstrated he lacks character and wisdom. Unfortunately for the majority of our country we’re stuck with him for at least four years. Unless he places us in clear and present danger, beyond the shadow of constitutional doubt, for the next four years we will be testing the structural strength of our mighty constitution. After all, what the Founders giveth the Founders can taketh. Don't hold your breath though, Donald Trump has mastered the "art of the deal": riding lawyers to a legal netherworld, a sanctuary of entitlement where you can turn six bankruptcies and 3,500 lawsuits into profitable exit strategies. Having said that, and in the meantime: just like Obama supporters pleaded with the opposing view to at least try and find common ground, perhaps a taste of the same medicine is now in order.
For those of us who have lived long enough to see a few U.S. presidential cycles, and a few global recessional ones, the pattern is getting predictable. What isn't predictable, and therefore a threat to freedom and democracy as we know it, is irrational fear. Fear moves us in unpredictable ways, we don't like the unknown. So we adopt convictions through trial and tribulation as our road map. Then we set off on our journey according to our map, justifying our choices by seeking confirmation that we are on the right path. That confirmation bias is what makes us prey to the preachers of half-truths. It also distorts reality beyond recognition, creating fictitious alternate universes where no common ground exists.
Thankfully for the fate of our planet, common ground is all we've got. It's the ground where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Atheists already coexist peacefully. Where rational conservatives and rational liberals currently work together productively. It's the ground where blacks, whites, and browns befriend and reproduce. Where straights and gays create art together without prejudice. It is the ground where Tillerson met with Obama multiple times, to plead his case on sanctions that carried unintended consequences. Where General Mattis was appointed by Barack Obama as Commander of the U.S. Central Command. It is, when all other ground has been scorched by the lords of war, the only ground that matters. Everything else is fear-based distortion of the weak-minded. It is the dancing in the dark of foes and fools.
To my oil industry phobic friends on the far-left: it seems to me that peer-reviewed science journals are as inconvenient to you as they are to the far right. Have you two met? Perhaps you can do dinner sometime.
To my climate change denier friends on the far-right: How well do you know our new Secretary of State? You should reach out to him sometime and ask him where he gets his "fake, tree-hugging science".
Has it ever occurred to both of you far-siders that it is getting more difficult to tell the two of you apart? In the words of another Donald, albeit a more poetic one:
“What a tangled web we weave, go 'round with circumstance.
Someone show me how to tell the dancer from the dance”.
Don Henley / The Eagles (1973)
…
From Clear and Present Danger: (1994) "The Old Potomac Two-Step"
