Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
Sunday was a somewhat rainy day but the spirit of solidarity was not dampened as family members and supporters, including General Assembly member Aaron Regunberg and local candidate Jeremy Rix. Noisemakers and even a few costumes were to be found as there was a great deal of spirit within the crowd.
What do Democratic Party Chair Joe McNamara, Justin Katz, the burning of the HMS Gaspee, and a concentration camp have in common? Quite a good deal!
There is a bit of a schoolyard tiff being had out in public today between Joe and Justin where they are trying to see who can be the most bloviating about colonial history in Rhode Island. Joe is having a fit because some outfit called the Gaspee Project is doing typical right wing think tank nonsense and Justin is posturing and preening about how this is all within the heritage of the Gaspee.
Joe is very involved with the annual Gaspee Days celebrations of these events, including marching in the parade every year. He is very dedicated to this image of civic engagement and the role the Gaspee plays in that image, ergo the use of that historical incident to go after him and/or his colleagues is a huge taboo.
As someone who spent five years researching every aspect of the Gaspee incident, I find this spectacle patently offensive and white supremacist, not to mention banal as all hell after communing with the soul of Hannah Arendt.
In 2010, with the help of Drs. Richard and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Ray Rickman, I decided to make a film about the Gaspee and what really happened.
The Gaspee was a revolt by American colonists against English efforts to abolish slavery, plain and simple. The English Parliament had begun to levy a series of taxes on slave trade-related commodities, including rum, molasses, and sugar cane, and slave traders like Moses and John Brown did not like that. As such, they decided to launch a nighttime citizens militia attack against a government tax enforcement agency, the HMS Gaspee. Whereas Joe and thinkers like him look at the Gaspee and think red, white, and blue, I see the same iconography and think of Auschwitz.
The fact that Justin Katz, whose political movement to criminalize abortion uses American abolitionists as a rhetorical device sometimes, does not know this basic element of the history of the abolitionist movement in Rhode Island indicates just how preposterous such analogues truly are. The fact McNamara consistently calls the Gaspee raiders, who were engaging in a vanguard attack on behalf of the Triangle Trade genocide against Africans, patriots and heroes is indicative of what Frantz Fanon described as cognitive dissonance.
On behalf of this cognitive dissonance, in November 2014 Joe premiered a documentary created with the Gaspee Days Committee about the Gaspee, produced after he had seen my film about this topic, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, that totally leaves out the fact this whole incident was all about the enslavement of human beings and treating African people as if they were lower than pig droppings.
So, in closing, I hope we all learned something.
I hope Katz has learned to stop giving praise to slave traders and actually do some basic historical research that goes beyond the tawdry material offered by the Gaspee Days website. But then again, looking at the Gaspee Project’s website and ideology, perhaps he is actually correct, their mission is pretty much in line with the ideology of John Brown.
I hope the general readership has learned that, when the Tea Party does it over taxes that can unfairly target working class people while giving freebies to the rich, Joe and his fellow Democrats call it extremism, but when rich white men who trade in human slaves do it, they are “patriots”.
And I hope we all have understood that part of getting rid of white supremacy is beyond going after random personalities who say boo about people of color and gets into toppling structures such as our Disney-fied colonial history to show the ugly, racist, despicable nature of it all.
This country was founded on two genocides that are inter-connected. The first was the extermination of the Native Americans, begun here in Rhode Island when Roger Williams sold captives taken from the Pequot War out of Boston to Bermuda, which proves that his glory as some kind of freedom fighter is white supremacist garbage.
The second was the genocide against Africa, which was enacted because the refugees from the Pequot War escaped inland and told their fellows to migrate West to escape the wrath and wickedness of the white man. That migration reduced the number of Natives the colonists could enslave, therefore they looked across the Atlantic to the Gold Coast for a fresh supply of human beings.
The Gaspee incident was our Warsaw ghetto uprising. Aaron Briggs, who I profile in my documentary, was the Afro-Indian youth who tried to rebel against the slavery system by trying to testify against the Gaspee raiders in the trial the British set up to figure out what happened.
And the Gaspee raiders were the Nazis who suppressed the uprising and continued the murder.
Some would perhaps say that using an analogue between the Shoah and American slavery is problematic for any number of reasons. Ah, but here’s the rub, Adolf Hitler said in Mein Kampf that his plans for the Final Solution were modeled on the American treatment of people of color.
Those who are curious about further elements of this story can find a good deal of scholarship in Dr. Gerald Horne’s excellent monograph The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America or my film AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE.
Roz and the Rice Cakes is one of the major up-and-coming bands in the Rhode Island music scene of the past decade. Their plaudits include voted BEST LOCAL BAND by the Providence Phoenix Best of 2010 Reader’s Poll, they were winners of the 2012 WBRU Rock Hunt, winners of Best Female Vocalist by Motif Magazine 2012, and were nominated for Providence Phoenix 2012 Best Local Act and Best Female Vocalist.
Composed of keyboardist and vocalist Roz Raskin, bassist Justin Foster, and drummer Casey Belisle, they have a sound that is reminiscent in some ways of the early days of No Doubt, specifically the period when Eric Stefani was still in the band and his younger sister was not the absolute center of attention. But it also has elements not unlike some of the more fluid periods of Dave Matthews Band, a much smoother sound. They write as an artistic statement:
We come together to bring forth new, genre-blasting, rhythmically charged melodies, sounding somewhat like the apocalypse…but having the most fun anyone could ever have doing it. We are constantly manifesting new ideas not only musically, but thinking of ways to engage our awesome listeners.
Raskin recently was nice enough to answer some questions for me regarding their recent national tour. We talked about the open road, events in the news cycle, and plans for the summer.
What was the most interesting part of your tour?
There are a lot of interesting aspects of tour. Meeting new people and bands, seeing old friends, exploring new cities. Every city has a unique music community and each night of tour we get to see a little bit of what music scene is like there first hand.
Any new ideas in terms of where you want to go lyrically or musically come out of visiting different parts of the country?
I think I’m probably way more influenced by the music around me than I even know. There are some truly amazing bands hustling right now, it’s really a great time for the arts in general. People like to say “everything has been done” but I’m not too sure about that.
Do you have any stories of a venue that really impacted how you thought about the rest of the tour, be it funny, moving, or even boring?
I’m very lucky and privileged to say that I have had many great experiences at venues and DIY spaces while touring. One in particular is from this past tour. We played at a venue called Tubecats in Hadley, MA. The space is run by a wonderful person named Van Kolodin who is in a band called WYDEYED. During WYDEYED’s set, they stopped half way through and Van gave a rad speech about how important safe spaces are and how it’s essential for showgoers to look out for each other at shows. If you see something say something kind of thing. I think it’s really progressive and important to combat issues of injustice head on and it was really inspiring to hear that kind of thing at a basement show which in the past had been a typically white male dominated space.
What are your plans in this coming summer regarding performance and recording?
This summer Roz and the Rice Cakes are taking a bit of a show hiatus to write and record a new record. I’ll also we writing and recording my solo music and with my new band HOTT BOYZ (featuring Sarah Greenwell of GYMSHORTS, Kate Jones of the Sugar Honey Iced Tea, and Dylan Block-Harley of Horse-Eyed Men). Definitely excited to have some time to really think and write about this past year of my life and take it what is happening in the world today.
Some of the really classic albums and musicians in American history have come out of periods of political and social excitement, be it Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie during the Great Depression or Bob Dylan and Joan Baez during the 1960s. It seems quite obvious that America over the past 5+ years has been in such a period of social unrest. Did you see anything on the road that indicates we could see artists such as the aforementioned ones emerging soon with some really populist protest music? Do you think Providence could be a place to keep an ear out for such music?
I think more so than ever before, my music has personally become very much connected to socio political movements. A lot of the lyrics I have written in the past year or so have explored ideas of the “other”. I also think that the social unrest you speak of has definitely manifested itself in music, DIY, culture. Art and music always reflects the times. I think one of the more positive recent themes I’m seeing is the idea making spaces safe and inclusive. Folks are sick of feeling unsafe, disrespected, and marginalized at shows and there is a very real effort combat that prejudice and discrimination.
California, the state Gov. Gina Raimondo was visiting for a fundraiser to promote her pension policies, and New York have recently divested from high-risk, high-cost hedge funds like those the Rhode Island fund invests in.
One New York City official in an April 14 Reuters story said of hedge fund managers, “Let them sell their summer homes and jets, and return those fees to their investors.”
The board of the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS) voted to leave blue chip firms such as Brevan Howard and D.E. Shaw after their consultants said they can reach their targeted investment returns with less risky funds. The move by the fund, which had $51.2 billion in assets as of Jan. 31, follows a similar actions by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers), the nation’s largest public pension fund, and public pensions in Illinois. “Hedges have underperformed, costing us millions,” New York City’s Public Advocate Letitia James told board members in prepared remarks… NYCERS had $1.7 billion invested in hedge funds at the end of the second quarter 2015, according to its financial report. That amounted to 2.8 percent of total assets and was the smallest portion of its ‘alternative investments’ portfolio, which included $8.1 billion in private equity.
This begs the question: when will General Treasurer Seth Magaziner do likewise?
To help me parse through this further, Ted Siedle, who is now working on his third forensic audit of the pension, this time dealing with the real estate investment portfolio, sat down with me for an interview. He compared the pension scheme to “nothing Buddy Cianci would have ever dreamed of.”
“My sense is that, from some some comments I have seen attributed to Seth Magaziner, is that he is preparing to distance himself from at least the Governor’s hedge fund gamble with pension assets. So it appears that he is moving from a ‘stay-the-course and incrementally fire poor performing hedge fund managers and replace them with promising hedge fund managers and make the case that the good outweighs the bad’, moving to an approach where he says either he will abandon the hedge fund strategy altogether or, going forward, or he will jettison perhaps half of the hedge funds and keep the remaining.
Siedle added, “But I think he’s making noises like he may make a bolder move to distance himself from the investment strategies that the Governor implemented. I think that Magaziner is heading in a better direction. I am not hearing a clear indication that his predecessor was wrong about anything and his predecessor was wrong… The massive benefit cuts and the massive investment in speculative hedge funds, high-risk high-cost hedge funds and private equity funds, was a foreseeable disaster, it was foreseen by me, I wrote about it before the strategy had been even fully implemented. Warren Buffett warned this was something that should not be done.”
Projected savings from pension cuts could soon be evaporated by poorly performing hedge funds, Siedle said.
“The benefits were cut to save $2 billion over the next twenty years. Within four or five years … the pension’s lost probably about $2 billion. So all of the projected savings have been, I suspect … will have been eliminated by foreseeable losses. So this has been probably the most disastrous investment decision ever made in the history of Rhode Island.”
He said, “So what I would submit a responsible, courageous State Treasurer would do would to be to call out that this was a horrific mistake, but I’m not hearing that. I’m hearing a distancing but not a mature, responsible response.”
To further clarify what Siedle feels about Magaziner’s time on the job, just look to his recent writings for Forbes:
At 31, Magaziner—lacking any meaningful investment experience—somehow convinced voters in 2014 that he could competently oversee the massively underfunded, embattled $7 billion state pension. Talk about chutzpah—a kid whose personal income the year before assuming office was reportedly approximately $5,183 (yet he somehow loaned his campaign $550,000)… Not only has Magaziner failed to follow through on his transparency promises, despite five years of dismal hedge fund performance at the pension he oversees, he remains committed to Governor Raimondo’s secretive, costly deal with Wall Street.
Today on the prompting of Lauren Niedel, the Rhode Island State Representative for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I took a tour of various picket lines featuring striking Verizon workers. The day proved to be very educational in a variety of ways.
Over the past few weeks, I have ridden by Verizon pickets on a regular basis. Here is what happened one day when the marchers protested around a van with scab labor inside parked behind the central branch of the Providence Public Library.
I began the day at a coffee shop where Jobs With Justice’s Mike Araujo came in with his family. We are neighbors and friendly enough that we had a brief chat where he expressed pleasure at the idea of Sanders supporters marching the picket lines with workers, that the movement was using his candidacy as opposed to the other way around. This expresses something that is important to articulate, the fact that there are no disparate protest efforts, there is one movement. It has a long and interesting history here in Rhode Island where it has been called many names but it has always been one, organic, cohesive striving towards social and economic justice.
From the days when Moses Brown began to agitate for the abolition of slavery and when Thomas Dorr began to do the same for poor workers who wanted voting rights, it has existed in a continuity and been called the suffrage movement, the labor movement, the Old and New Left, the black liberation and civil rights struggles, the feminist movement, LGBTQQI rights, ACT-UP, the anti-globalization, anti-GMO organic food farmer markets, #BlackLivesMatter, the environmental and anti-fracking movement, all these and more are part of a whole.
Araujo often talks about how labor is like the Catholic Church, once you are a worker you are in forever, and while I loathe the tendency to equate politics with religion by default because it fails to say that the movement uses religion, as in the case of the Quakers, Malcolm X, or Liberation Theology, he is correct in more than one way. Like the Catholic Church, the movement also has an existence reaching farther back in time than to the life of Karl Marx or whatever persona can be selected from history because, at its core, it is not an individualist movement, it depends on diversity and multiplicity of the masses and in that sense today was, in my mind, indicative of its vibrancy.
According to the Providence Water Supply website, “there are approximately 20,000…[lead] lines still in existence in the Providence Water system.” The Water Supply Board’s website includes an interactive map of lead water pipes in the city. The red dots are lead lines and blue are other materials.
It is difficult to discern from this figure how many residents and businesses in Providence are therefore consuming water from lead water lines due to the varied nature of occupancy at a given address in the city. According to Water Supply website 60.85 million gallons are used per day.
Customers are not facing the immediate danger of lead poisoning similar to Flint. The disaster in Flint happened because a chemical was added to the water that leached lead from the pipes and solder, infusing the water with lead that would otherwise not have been present. This chemical was added to the water supply because, in an effort to save money, the government had switched the water supply from the much cleaner Detroit Water and Sewage supply system to the much dirtier Flint river, a waterway that was polluted over decades by industrial and automotive factories that were built up alongside its banks. If this chemical had not been added to the Flint river water supply, the plumbing system in the municipality, still including lead pipes and solder, would not have poisoned the population. Providence, like many other municipalities, regularly flushes its plumbing systems via fire hydrants to prevent concentration of lead from accumulating.
Recently, the Associated Press issued a report on Providence’s aging water infrastructure:
An analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data by The Associated Press found that Providence’s drinking water system was one of the largest in the country to exceed a federal lead standard since 2013. It has gone over the limit six times since 2010 after testing samples of the tap water used by about 300,000 people in Providence and the surrounding cities of Cranston, Johnston and North Providence.
This is akin to what Rhode Island’s Future reported several months ago when this news was carried in The Guardian.
The crisis in Flint, Michigan has reignited a national conversation about lead plumbing and safety, a discussion that includes the water system of Providence. We decided to take a deeper look at this issue and outline first the parameters and then the solutions possible to this issue.
It would seem at this juncture two things have happened that are worth contemplating following the victory of Bernie Sanders in the Rhode Island primary on April 26, 2016. Allow me to perhaps utilize a historical materialist perspective here and offer an objective summation of what I think has happened.
First, Sanders has mobilized a mass of people that have fundamentally been radicalized away from consensus neoliberal politics, even if they have a huge level of variety in their own political visions. It is worth remembering here also that, unlike notable sheep dog candidacies like Jackson, Kucinich, and Dean, we are dealing with an election that is not a referendum on a Republican presidency but a Democratic one. When Jackson ran it was against Reagan. Kucinich and Dean were against the W. Bush presidency. This election, despite the efforts of the mainstream media to say otherwise, is in reality a referendum on the failure of the Obama administration in a fashion similar to how 2008 was a repudiation of Bush. And considering that The Atlantic was recently floating the as a potential Vice President Governor Raimondo, it also seems an obvious rebuke to the Democrats as a whole.
The reason Sanders has done so well and lasted this long is to be attributed to a populist rejection of neoclassical economics, something also to be seen in the Trump constituency. For instance, both sides of the populist upsurge reject various manifestations of these economic doctrines, be it Common Core education policy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Monsanto and genetically modified food, the Pentagon eating up over half of the federal discretionary budget, the rigged nature of the primary system, the Federal Reserve, or any number of other elements of post-Cold War politics. Bob Plain was onto something recently when he asked if there is common ground between the two. I would in fact argue that, excepting the extremists in both constituencies that are absolutist in nature, something I referred to in a previous piece here, there is possibility for an anti-war/anti-austerity united front from below to be formed after this election between the Sanders and Trump supporters. Such a coalition could take on things in the community hated by both groups, such as the union-busting Wal-Mart that chases every small business out of a town.
That the Democrats have not cut Sanders off already is demonstrative of a false impression they have about being able to channel this into votes for Clinton, perhaps reinforced by the promise from Sanders he will support Clinton. I highly doubt these folks are that easily swayed, hence the development of a new term, “Bernie or Bust”, and a response that demonizes those who refuse to vote for the Queen of Chaos. I have already been brow-beaten by some who tell me that women’s rights are not important to me because I refuse to vote for Clinton. But then again, Clinton has shown women’s rights are not important to her with the support she has shown for those blessed souls in the Saudi monarchy. Sheikh, Sheikh, Sheikh señora, Sheikh your oil pipeline!
Second, despite the pleas of the Sanders supporters, he has absolutely zero chance of getting the nomination. When Obama beat Hillary, it was a public and frankly hilarious spat between two of the running dogs of capital. Those two personally hate each other but they both have the same masters at Goldman Sachs, hence why the Obama Justice Department has refused to prosecute Clinton over the e-mail scandal.
For those who are unclear still, Clinton committed a series of crimes by using this email server that were far more egregious and illegal than those she and Obama claimed were committed by Manning, Assange, Snowden, and so many other whistleblowers they have prosecuted and ruined over the past eight years. The highest crime in a moral universe was obviously in the text of the emails with their plans for Libya and Syria. But in the immoral universe we occupy, it was the lack of moral cause. Snowden and Manning blew whistles about illegal and immoral behavior by the United States government while Assange published materials as a press agency in the name of his Libertarian philosophy that informs his morality. Even if one disagrees with the motivation, it remains irrefutable that they did it for moral reasons.
By contrast, Clinton risked exposing intelligence to genuine security threats in the name of either petty convenience regarding a BlackBerry, something I find dubious as her official explanation, or perhaps, in my own view, so to avoid creating a paper trail akin to the Nixon tapes that would document her criminal behavior in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. That is a very immoral cause in comparison to the aforementioned heroes of our generation. Obama is protecting her and she knows this very well, hence her relative level of self assurance in this campaign.
So what I want to suggest is something rather unorthodox but also the only way Sanders and Jill Stein would get into the White House. Sanders needs to drop out of the race after the super-delegate count is reached by Clinton and become Stein’s Vice Presidential candidate. The Greens have already made such overtures to Sanders, including a recent invitation for Sanders to collaborate with Stein on her presidential campaign webpage and another invitation from the Green Party to Sanders supporters emphasizing that there is a Green welcome mat waiting for them to join the campaign.
I admit this is going against almost every rule in the playbook involving the politics of both the Green Party and the Democratic Socialists. The Greens are in the midst of their own primary schedule in seventeen different states. The Democrats are in the midst of a similar situation in all fifty (for those of you who missed this point, there is no independent Democratic Socialist party in America, it is a progressive caucus of the Democratic Party). The only thing that can make Sanders reach the White House is getting out of this failing Democratic Party and embrace the future, a third party candidacy. Even The Donald agrees with me! This could be YUGE!
I say the future because it is quite obvious that, should the Sanders supporters not be placated properly, they could split the Democrats in two and create the prospect for a genuine third party. This dynamic is also at play with Trump, though the genuine third party option for the Right is far more fragmented and it is difficult to envision the Trump followers all joining the Libertarian Party as the Sanders people might join the Greens. Nevertheless, the failure of Sanders opens up the possibility of, after a century of state-enforced consolidation, the collapse of the duopoly system in America. That is something I am far more enthusiastic about and yearn for than Bernie Sanders hands down. If votes for the Green Party were to take progressive votes away from the Democrats, a common element of the Nader baiter agenda, the fact is that an elected Green would stand up for working class values more reliably than a Democrat that could be bought by the special interest lobby class in Washington.
So Sanders should seriously consider this option of becoming a Green vice president and therefore undermining the identity politics dynamic of Hillary Clinton’s neoliberal corporatized feminism. Whereas the Democrats would be as intransigent to a Sanders Democratic administration as the Republicans have been in the past eight years, the Greens have the infrastructure to get elected at the 2018 midterms to make the Sanders agenda a reality. When FDR got his Keynesian programs passed in the New Deal, it was because he had the Solid South in his coalition. And thirty years later, LBJ’s similar programs were scuttled precisely because that coalition had been fractured by the civil rights movement and the rise of Barry Goldwater. The Greens are the coalition Sanders needs to make his presidency not just a symbolic gesture wherein the Congress, who are bought and paid for by Wall Street, scuttles his efforts.
Think that is a bit utopian? Not as utopian as the idea that Sanders will be nominated at the convention!
With no recent public polling about the April 26 Democratic presidential primary election in the Ocean State, Rhode Islanders don’t really know if we will vote for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. So I spent the weekend traveling the state and asking the question.
I asked 23 people between a beach in Narragansett and a housing project in Pawtucket, with stops at several grocery and hardware stores in between. Each is included on the video below. For comparison, the Brown Taubman Center poll asks just more than 400 Rhode Islanders to get a more scientific estimate.
48 percent said Bernie Sanders, 22 percent said Hillary Clinton and 30 percent were undecided or plan to vote for neither of them.
More on the primary:
A Bernie Sanders rally on the steps of the State House drew more than 200 people – and focused not only on why Sanders is the best choice to be the next president, but also on how to keep the political revolution he launched alive long after election day.
“A lot has been made of the overwhelming support for Bernie among young people,” said Providence Rep. Aaron Regunberg. “And, as one of the youngest members of this General Assembly, I’ve found much of that discourse pretty condescending. You know, I hear ‘these kids, they don’t know how the real world works, they’re naive, when they grow up a little they’ll understand how pie-in-the-sky this Bernie guy is.’ And I don’t know about the young people here today but I am not taking that anymore.”
Regunberg, whose impassioned sermon electrified the crowd, continued:
“As I see it our generation is maybe the most realistic and the least naive of any I can think of. We’re the generation that has grown up with the crushing knowledge that our lives will be shaped in the coming decades by climate catastrophe.
“We’re the generation that graduated to an economy that offered fewer jobs and greater serfdom to our student loans. We’re the first generation that has seen, even under the first African American president, that our black and brown brothers and sisters continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, continued to be mowed down in the streets with their hands up. We’re the first generation that saw in almost 400 years just how much damage an unregulated Wall Street can cause, that has seen how appallingly false the credo that privatization and free trade and austerity are the answers to, rather than the causes of, our appalling levels of inequality.
“And I say this sadly as an elected democrat we’re the generation that ha watched as too often our party gives into and sometimes joins republicans in supporting this toxic agenda. So, no, we’re not naive. But we understand that this system, in many ways, is broken and we need bold change, we need systemic reform, we need – I’ll say it – a political revolution. That’s not unrealistic thinking, that’s our reality.”
North Kingstown state Senator Jim Sheehan, who previously endorsed Sanders, also touched on the topics of youth and revolution.
“You know, it’s been said that politicians look to the next election but statesmen look to the next generation,” Sheehan said. “Take a look around you right now. This is the next generation right here today. And Bernie Sanders represents you.”
Sheehan added, “You could say that Bernie is something of a unicorn in a cesspool of dishonesty. Bernie courageously speaks truth to power, particularly the power of the political and economic establishment. And he is there with us, the people, on important issues. The American dream is our birthright as Americans and if our government is no longer going to fight for the American dream for every American than it must change it’s way and we are going to change it’s leadership to Bernie Sanders.
His support, he said, proves Sanders is appealing to a diverse group of voters.
“I am not known in this building behind me as a progressive Democrat on all issues,” Sheehan said. “So what drew me here today? Well, it’s not a $225,000 speaking fee, I can tell you that right now. I am not getting paid to be here right now, this is a labor of love… My wife said ‘You gotta look past the label.’ People like to label in our country. ‘Democratic Socialist’, they said. ‘Don’t look at Bernie. Democratic Socialist!’ As if it were a four-letter word. Well, when you look past labels, you see the real people behind them. When you get to know them as a person and the issues that Bernie cares about deeply, you come to a quite different conclusion. Bernie is a great man, a good man, an honest man, and as I stand before the Independent Man, he is an independent-minded man.”
During his speech, Regunberg reminded everyone that Bernie Sanders’ political revolution must move forward, even if his candidacy doesn’t.
“The work that we are doing today,” Regunberg said, “the door knocking and canvassing leading up the leading up to the primary, the votes that we’ll be casting on April 26, that is all an important part of this movement but it can’t be the end of this movement. The presidency is an important position, but whoever has it with Washington the way it is right now if we want real change we need to put in the work to achieve it at the state and the local level. We need your voices in this building. I need your voices in this building.”
The rally featured teachers, Teamsters, feminists, environmentalists, queer and LGBT people – and all sorts of people that are being called to the populist upsurge in this country ignited by Sanders. The imperative after the primary, speakers said, is to implement the Sanders’ agenda.
Ray Rickman, the head of Stages of Freedom and a former member of the General Assembly, offered tough criticism and some sage advice for Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, who recently announced severe fiscal problems in the Capital City.
“So he’s trying to signal to us bankruptcy might be required,” Rickman said. “I think it’s inappropriate.”
Rickman isn’t confident Elorza can handle the task. “He doesn’t have the fiscal understanding or experience to manage this problem nor does his administration,” he said. “It is so obvious that they don’t have the ability to tackle this.”
“First thing he should do is assemble a group of people,” Rickman said. “I don’t know if it’s 15 or 20, but he needs to get some financial advice… He has to take responsibility. I think he should get a group of people in place that understand municipal finance.”
Rickman said property taxes can fairly be raised on those with the largest lots in the city.
“The more land you have, the lower your taxes,” he said. “So if you’re on the East Side and you have three lots, they charge you less money, no matter how valuable your land is… There are twenty people, very, very rich people with very big pieces of land and they don’t pay the tax that they would pay if they had a piece of land 1/3 of the size.”
Rickman said bold new ideas are necessary.
“I think you have to examine the whole ball of wax before you start deciding what to do,” he said. “We have scores…[of] millionaires on the East Side of Providence… Could we get a fund for Providence?”
For more of Rickman’s insights, click to listen to the audio below.
After several months of fruitless negotiations, unionized workers at Verizon have decided to go on strike. Sources indicate that, due to the training of non-union labor over the period of negotiations, this could be a long strike.
IBEW Local 2323 said the following via FaceBook:
After waiting all day for Verizon reach out to the Union in an effort to avoid a work stoppage, they have responded they have nothing for us. Verizon has nothing for your hard work, sacrifice, and dedication to this corporation that off the fruits of your labor have been able to make profits of $1.5 billion dollars over the last 18 months.
Our Unity is our Strength!
Our picket lines will be set up tomorrow morning at 6:00 a.m.
We will continue to cover this story as it develops.
The candidacy of Donald Trump, somewhat despite and somewhat because of his ridiculous mugging and antics, strikes me as one of the greatest cartoons presented to the American public in some time. Perhaps this is due to my own Oscar the Grouch skepticism as an 85-year-old woman trapped in the prison of a 30-year-old man’s body, complete with an attraction to Billie Holiday and Douglas Fairbanks and disgust at any music produced in this century, but I think this man is a fascinating and very public example of the ruling class getting exactly what they asked for.
At the outset, let me be clear, I find his racism, sexism, xenophobia, and personal history of union busting repellent. But I also find any Sanders supporter who says they are going to hold their nose and vote for Clinton to protect us from the Donald slightly more problematic. The former First Lady has more gallons of blood spilled from racist imperial violence on the cuticle of her pinky finger than Trump does on both hands. Her pillaging of Haiti and Libya alone is the stuff of a bacchanal that would make the Marquis de Sade blanch.
Well-intended hyperventilating pwogwessives, to quote Alexander Cockburn, have already been having a fit whenever I point this out. But it is not my fault that my sense of morality and decency stands when I am dealing with Democrats as strongly as it does when I deal with Republicans. In reality it is just a case of moral hypocrisy on the part of Democrats who are so high on their horse about corporatized neoliberal feminism they are delusional enough to think the woman who decimated welfare, said you can be a feminist and anti-choice at the same time, pigeonholed black children as super-predators, and supported lunatics who sodomized Muammar Gaddafi with a knife is anywhere near Eleanor Roosevelt.
Wake up, kids, she is in fact much closer to Eva Braun than you realize. And just to be clear, I am voting for a woman in this election because I am a feminist, it just so happens that Jill Stein is a medical doctor, a parent, and a gentle person who has one of those funny things I heard my priest call a soul when I was in Catholic school way back in the twentieth century.
No, what I find so hilarious about Trump is how his campaign is tearing the Republicans apart. The Democrats are fundamentally and forever hijacked by the business class through this ridiculous super-delegate system. The Republicans are not because they always were intending to remain the party of the businessman, the parliamentary equivalent of a country club soiree that bars the entrance of minorities, women, and poor people. In that sense, they never saw any reason to hijack their party the way the Democrats did.
But then something pretty ridiculous happened. They re-branded themselves as a populist party by way of the astro-turfed Tea Party movement, the whole Ron Paul revolutionary cadre, and a few other steps that, in the short term, allowed them to be intransigent in the face of Obama. This was not unlike when Barry Goldwater did the same thing in 1964, setting the stage for the Southern Strategy that gave us the Nixon presidency and all the abominations that went with it. But the key difference, which they obviously did not grasp, was the fact that white privilege and the Cold War did not work in the same way it did in 1964. When Goldwater was campaigning, he was courting the white supremacist that did not want to de-segregate schools and the hawks that wanted to drop an atomic bomb on the Vietnamese. But under Obama, what exactly was there to do but peck at the periphery of a system that was already unjustly tilted away from not just minorities but everyone who is poor? What the Republicans did not do, probably due to an anti-Communism that has become general stupidity, is think in the vulgar Marxist terms of class warfare and understand the populists they flooded their ranks with were in fact not gunning for black people as much as rich people.
Take for example the classic Republican talking point about “entitlements” and all that anti-social safety net stuff. Once you get past the certainly racist shell, you actually find at the soft center not a criticism based on race as much as class, an argument for economic fairness and equal opportunities for all Americans. These talking points are framed by the Republicans to target black and brown people, but if you replace the phenotype descriptor with an economic one, change it to entitlements for bankers, you have the main talking points of the Sanders campaign and Occupy Wall Street! This is not to suggest that these people are not prone to white supremacy, they have those tendencies, but the tendencies come from despair and misunderstanding class warfare. They have been indoctrinated to believe in race war rather than class war. But the economic downturn is very quickly making the delusions of white supremacy loose their realness, the feeling that the dream is tenable. The Matrix has ceased to prove to be convincing to them.
How do I know this? Simple.
For years the myth of white supremacy was class mobility, the idea that a white person could go through education, get a good job, and live a middle class lifestyle. While this was occurring, black and brown people were doomed to their apartheid status of barely-subsisting poverty, having as their horizon maybe ascending to the management of a fast food restaurant if they were lucky and a municipal or state job if they were blessed. But now that delusion is all over.
What bothers me about Chris Hedges and his recent writing is not so much his moralizing, though he is prone to that, as much as his inability to articulate that all his doom-saying about where white people are going to end up in the next few years due to class warfare is exactly where black and brown people have been living for the past several centuries in America. It is not that there are no jobs for white people, it is that management of a fast food restaurant is becoming their horizon also. The privatizing of municipal, state, and federal jobs by neoliberal capital has made that blessed job even more unlikely for white people. The Liberal dream was that white supremacy would collapse and we would all be free. The neoliberal nightmare is that white supremacy is collapsing and we all are being made to live in apartheid, but, rather than an apartheid of ethnicity, an apartheid of class.
Doubt me on this? Just take a look at the financial investments of the Bushes and the Clintons. One of the major things they are now putting their money into is private water sources. They are doing this because they know climate change is going to seriously imperil our water supplies and make us live in a society not unlike the nightmares of MAD MAX. They are quite cognizant of this and so are investing to protect the well-being of their children and grandchildren. The recent apathy and lack of action towards the water supply in Flint, Michigan was a test run of the wider apathy that they hope will occur when we all have a compromised water supply.
And so Trump, the union-busting, casino-franchising, loudmouth Looney Toon who cannot be stopped, has become the symbol of a great portion of our country’s class warfare anxieties. He is rude, crude, oafish and obscene. But his base is the working people that will prove to be essential when we make the decision, to quote Rosa Luxemburg, between socialism and barbarism.
And we already know Clinton favors the latter. All you need to look at are her investments.
“They do not know it, but they are doing it.” -Karl Marx
It is close to midnight on April 1, 2016 and I have just returned from the most vibrant Marxist gathering in Rhode Island that I have been to in years, a veritable hothouse of discussion about overcoming exploitation and the reign of terror capital inflicts on us in the hope of a better world. There were people talking about not just running but perhaps winning in elections that would shatter the duopoly system to its core.
Was I at the latest onanism session of the Trotskyites? A kiss-and-tell party of Stalinists? Maybe the Wobbly prom? No, in fact it was a Libertarian Party get-together!
Writing about libertarians breaks down into roughly two classes. You have either the antagonistic representations of the party as a bunch of dumb nativist yokels who commit unsightly acts with their mothers or the type of neoconservative Hegelianism, exemplified by Francis Fukyama and Christopher Hitchens, that says the American Revolution is the best show in town, ergo imperialism is great. The only person to my mind who even came close to ever grasping at the fact that there is something more to Libertarians was the late great Alexander Cockburn. He said in a 2002 speech:
In that sense I decided to use the Libertarian Party soiree this April Fool’s Day to float the idea of building Vote Pacts and, using my anthropological and sociological training, to develop a kind of glossary of Libertarian language to help translate their views into a grammar Marxists can understand. Yet to consider myself as an outside observer would be a fatal flaw. They were warm, well-intentioned folk who I agree with on 70% of the issues and, when you interrogate the other 30%, you realize they might actually agree with you!
But to really hash through this, we need to articulate a new understanding of class warfare, Liberalism as a philosophy, who its successors are, and why John McAfee, the obvious rock star of the Libertarian Party presidential debate that was broadcast on Fox Business News, was either high as a kite or full of piping-hot crap when he said some of the most gallingly silly things imaginable.
The night took place at the Brewed Awakenings Coffee House in Warwick on Bald Hill Road, a locally-owned franchised business that has as much resemblance to a house as I have to Maria Callas. Pat Ford, Party chair and self-described recovering neoconservative, reserved the business meeting room with a plasma big screen television and surround sound system that was packed to the gills. Obviously much-missed from the affair was Bob Healey, the multiple-times candidate who recently died unexpectedly.
The Libertarian Party, at least in Rhode Island, could be described as the populist party of the working poor small business owner, the guy who is either burnt out by the corporatism of the Democrats or disgusted by the cartoonish social conservatism of the Republicans. They are the types who call themselves “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. But one can also put forward a very coherent point, based on the recent scholarship of Fredric Jameson, that the small business owner experiences their own form of exploitation due to the fact they do not actually own the means of production used in their labor.
Take for example my cobbler on Post Road in Warwick. The other day I went to get a shoe repaired and he had in his store, rather prominently displayed, a Trump t-shirt. Trump functions in the Republican realm the same way Sanders does in the Democratic realm and has absolutely terrified Wall Street because they cannot bribe him. Trump functions as the sheepdog for the Republicans in the way Sanders does the Democrats, taking votes away from a Libertarian Party that advocates for the small business owner. My cobbler may own the machine that is used to buff my shoes but, when the belt breaks on that machine, he does not own the supply factory producing the replacement belt. The exploitation he experiences from big capital is just as brutal as that of a worker in a factory making the shoes for low wages, it is just different in appearance. To own the means of production is to own the entire supply chain and network of transportation that brings the supplies from one point to another in the way a Rockefeller owned the oil wells, the drilling machinery, the railroads, and the dispensaries, ergo the equation of a small business owner with the Gilded Age capitalists is absurd. This is not to say that small businesses are incapable of abuses, they are quite prone to it, and to claim that ending their exploitation of workers through unionization is nullified would be equally absurd, particularly in regards to franchises owned by mega-corporations such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds. But it is equally absurd to deny that Marx was not concerned with tavern owners as much as with Rockefellers and that his lifetime collaborator, Engels, owned a factory in Manchester that was never the site of a notable union drive. When I talk with union activists these days, they are less inclined to unionize Ann and Hope than Wal-Mart.
The debate was moderated by John Stossel, the Ayn Rand acolyte with a populist knack and featured as candidates Gov. Gary Johnson, the obvious moderate that the Libertarians feel like they can bring to their disenchanted Republican friends as a viable alternative, Austin Petersen, the obvious conservative that the Libertarians feel like they can bring home to mom and dad, and John McAfee, the obvious liberal that the Libertarians know for certain they can bring to their drug dealer.
I found Petersen the most repulsive, perhaps due to the combination of his cocksure swagger combined with a blatant pandering to the Christian fascist element that wants to have us pledge allegiance to a crucifix draped in red, white, and blue and wanted to do nothing more than shove him in a locker and steal his lunch money.
Gary Johnson did nothing for me, particularly when he went down a utopian path saying he wanted to somehow outlaw bigotry while failing to expropriate the expropriators that are the source of chauvinism.
And John McAfee was this night’s reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson, loaded up with hilarious stories of the open road and just as hypocritical. What disgusts me with McAfee is simple. He was apt to talk about cutting spending by abolishing various federal departments. But he did not dare talk about ending the massive handout Microsoft gets annually from the federal, state, and municipal governments for the purchase of software licenses of an operating system that has been the bane of human existence for decades. Why? Simply put, if all these governments tomorrow were to transition to a Linux freeware system, as some countries in Europe have done, that would mean these Windows users would suddenly no longer be vulnerable to viruses that have made McAfee a mint for decades. Putting it another way, McAfee does not like government freebies unless they are coming his way. I give him props for having the guts to stand up to the FBI recently and promise to help crack the all-important I-Phone without having to compromise the privacy of so many of us. But such a transparent lack of integrity is pretty stupid.
After the debate, Pat Ford introduced various luminaries in the national party and gave me the floor to explain the Vote Pact idea. A few people were slightly skeptical because Bob Healey had failed to take the Governor’s office. But I emphasized to them two things. First, it is abundantly clear that the Raimondo administration has been a warmer cooler disaster and they know very well that she lost many votes to the Cool Moose. Second, the Vote Pact relies on an old principle, basic school yard peer pressure. People were less-inclined to vote for Healey because they did not have the affirmation of a friend saying that voting for a third party was acceptable. The Vote Pact creates a kind of peer pressure that is key for this kind of (seemingly) risky decision making of going against the grain.
In my view, the Libertarians at their best are the actual successors of classical English Liberalism. Their opposition to unions and support of freedom is absolutely in line with the ideology of James and John Stuart Mill. But the reality is that they are stuck in a nineteenth century ideological time warp.
Just as the Liberals of the 1800’s, the Libertarians either do not grasp how problematic their positions actually are or they are being charlatans in the name of the banking class. Their self-proclaimed World’s Smallest Political Quiz in terms of personal issues is perfect and on economic issues could be a disaster if left to just a slogan.
In terms of “corporate welfare”, that could very well mean big banks. Or it could mean Food Stamps, which is a Welfare program that is giving money to food corporations in some instances and farmers markets in others. That’s a tough nut to crack.
Privatizing Social Security is informed by the fact that retirees are subjected to economic terrorism due to political machinations around COLAs and other issues related to inflation, perhaps best represented by a report by the always-fantastic Dan McGowan. But the privatizing of the pension system in Rhode Island has not stopped terrorizing retirees, it has hurt them further. The substitution of a state-controlled trust fund that administers these benefits for high-risk, high-cost 401 (k)’s invested in hedge funds is a distinct possibility that would be created by a refusal of regulation in the market. What we need instead is perhaps a decentralization of Social Security that gives greater autonomy to state offices to administer benefits while guarding against the Wall Street effort to invest the fund in high-risk financial devices.
The replacement of government health agencies with charity was proven to be a disaster in the 1980’s by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Catholic hospitals in Greenwich Village and San Francisco refused to take in gay men and trans patients and treated their lovers and friends like garbage for fifteen years. The bravery of groups like ACT-UP was necessary because Ronald Reagan was showing the world what America without properly-funded federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control was truly capable of, namely apathy in the face of disaster. This issue is simple. The reality is that the First Amendment forbids mandatory association with anyone and protects people who claim their religion hinders them from helping certain parties. The only thing that protects the marginalized from further marginalization is the law. One needs only look to the writings of Michel Foucault to understand how ostracism of the sick happens.
The idea of cutting taxes and government spending by 50% or more sounds like a great start to an anti-imperialist position to me. We know that the Pentagon, the greatest recipient of taxpayer-funded freebies, ate up 54% of the discretionary spending budget in 2015 while veterans got 6%. Liberal anti-imperialism is not a new thing either, this country used to be the home of a gigantic and quite Liberal Anti-Imperialist League that featured everyone from Jane Adams to Mark Twain to Andrew Carnegie. The Libertarians are still holding true to this, hence the isolationism of Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com and the recent pivot into isolationism by Donald Trump.
Now this is not to say I have delusions of perfection with the Libertarians either. I think their inability to shake off the racists stems back to their inability to understand what guns mean to black and brown people. For whites, it is all about safety and security. But the machismo of American gun culture, from what I am told by my African friends, does not bring to mind the pioneer spirit, it reminds them of the Fugitive Slave Act that deputized automatically all white men as agents of the state to recapture and return escaped Africans under penalty of law to the South. That is a major stumbling block the Libertarians need to overcome somehow.
After the debate, a guy was kind enough to give me a ride home. Over the night, we had talked about a variety of topics and he was amazed to find out that I am in favor of a variety of ideas he agrees with, including decentralization. He said he learned a lot from me and wanted to keep in touch. Then he told me the one that really blew my mind, saying that when I was explaining the Vote Pact thing I should have really laid into the corporations and corporate welfare, something I had chosen not to do so to keep the crowd with me.
Say what? Doth mine ears decieveth me or did I just hear one of the most coherent arguments for anti-capitalism made by one of the irredeemable heretics that the Left has been pigeonholing and antagonizing for years? The work of writers like Dr. Gary Chartier, endorsed wholeheartedly by the late Cockburn, is indicative of a logic informing this.
Another world is possible…
In theory, I think the idea of a 6-10 Boulevard has the potential to be a great project. However, knowing very well how capital in Rhode Island, particularly based around real estate interests in Providence, functions in a way that subverts all good ideas to benefit the rich and disenfranchise the poor, I would like to suggest to legislative steps that need to be taken so to prevent some major issues. To be absolutely clear, I have no ill will towards anyone involved in these efforts and wish them all the best in their efforts, I just also wish the best for the vast majority of people who will be effected by this project if it is actualized. I totally believe these two things are not exclusive and that a synthesis of the two is quite tenable.
The notion of critical support is a posture which advocates for a cause while also suggesting positive adjustments that can benefit the majority. I want to see a 6-10 Boulevard that helps the many while not giving comfort to those who have failed the black and brown communities on the West End. Gore Vidal once quipped that we have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor. I hope this roadway might invert that dynamic.
From February to July 2016 the Providence Public Library is hosting an ongoing series of exhibits and events that toys with the notion of temporality and time. Called Portals, it engages in speculation while examining the past. On April 4 they will open their digital audio exhibit Providence 2050-Visualizing Tomorrow with a reception at 5:30 followed by a 6:30 discussion.
Meet the participants, enjoy a signature cocktail, and participate in a conversation with some of our interviewees where we’ll explore two main themes that emerged from the interviews:
Innovation: Providence as a place to take risks
Inclusion: Providence as a place that celebrates social justice
Motif Magazine‘s newest issue features its annual music awards ballot and local activists were not impressed by its resemblance to tapioca pudding. Here’s what one voice had to say:
The Motif nominations list is emblematic of something that is at play in the Providence scene, a type of gentrification in the musical world that closely mirrors the physical gentrification of Providence’s historic black neighborhoods that hipsters play a roll in. I tried to be fair and tabulate the ethnicity of the entire nominee spread but stopped when, to paraphrase Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, I was blinded by the white. I mean for heaven’s sake the Reggae nominations this year were a veritable Caucasian invasion! It would be improper not to note that the Choral Act nominations do feature multi-ethnic groups like the Prism of Praise Community Gospel Choir and the Chorus of Westerly and I do give Motif credit where credit is due. Also I am quite pleased to see the Native American Eastern Medicine Singers nominated. But this is not the definition of multiculturalism or diversity in any sane sense, particularly when there was a minority of people of color in the DJ category.
Looking at the nominations spread in the magazine, one reads the following:
Nominees are mathematically selected from suggestions by booking at over 85 local venues plus local record labels, radio stations, and 17 of our Motif music writers.
I will admit that RI Future is a pretty vanilla outfit. But this sort of rubric is simply absurd. At a time when a film biography of NWA was a major hit last year, this is unforgivable and indicative of a kind of cultural banality that portends a future for Providence I want nothing to do with. There are those who will respond with the fact there is a hip-hop act category, but even there, only two acts nominated are actually people of color. I like Sage Francis as well as the next guy but, considering I was seeing him play a decade ago, I think that he has plenty of exposure and attention already.
The plain fact is that Motif does not seem to understand, based on their criteria for nominations, where black and brown people go to see their music performed. The churches and community centers, along with neighborhood clubs like those in South Providence, across the state are historically the sites of their entertainment. When I was a teenager, the great achievement for your buddy’s rock band was to play at The Living Room or Lupo’s. But for people of color, it is singing as an act at one of these aforementioned venues. People of color do not look for the same type of validation white performers do because of the long history of Jim Crow apartheid in Rhode Island. For example, Rudy Cheeks is apt to talk with folks about how he vividly remembers the old Stadium theater, now home of Lupo’s, used to have segregated seating wherein black and brown people were expected to sit in the balcony. That cultural heritage has a long-lasting legacy that Rhode Island has never properly grappled with. As such, polling these venues, intentionally or not, reflects a historic trend of segregation that has not been deleted from our society.
This is not an isolated incident, recently through the grape vine I heard of something eerily similar going down at Firehouse 13, located at the northernmost point of South Providence and just adjacent to the West End. Apparently there were parties at the venue prone to a condescending and exclusionary attitude towards certain local artists of color, demonstrative of a gentrification mentality that is well-known to stem from white artists and venues that do not understand the needs their neighbors.
This lack of connection to the community, if not outright hostility, is a real issue that we need to be mindful of as white people. The current socio-political coordinates indicate a coming opportunity for an inter-ethnic united front that would push back against this sad, strange world. Yet the alternative, white supremacy, comes in both blatant antagonism, personified by the Trump fans, but also the less-obvious kinds, defined by ignorant or antagonizing whites, including people who tend to browbeat black voters for not voting for Sanders. That might be a rather painful fact for the Sanders crowd to consider, but remember these words from Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Birmingham jail:
…I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. [Emphasis added]
Considering that American politics this year is a huge punk rock concert, what happens in the music scene is especially important to what happens outside it.
Prof. Joel Quirk of the Political Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa came to the Brown Center for Slavery and Justice to lecture on the problematic nature of the anti-sex worker “abolitionist” efforts and the fictitious nature of its alleged global solidarity. This lecture featured a Q & A afterwards and is approximately 70 minutes.
Created by our friends at Infowar Productions, a European Left outlet with no connection to that raving madman Alex Jones, this picture was created as an anti-austerity piece that repudiates the policies of the European Bank. However, with slight modification it can easily apply to the behavior of our own banking system, particularly since the Wall Street banks are controlling both agendas.
The Matthewson Street Theater will be holding presentations of Antigone directed by Kira Hawkridge, Out Loud Theatre’s Artistic Director and URI alumnus, on March 25 and 26. In a time when we find ourselves in a world akin to that of Sophocles’ nightmares, it is worth seeking this story out. The director says the following:
The immediacy of the action and the longevity of the internal struggle of these two opposing forces is so visceral. We watch as both Antigone and Creon rail against the laws of morality and the laws of man. As they both navigate through fate, family, and their own faith. For me – this is a universal story of what it means to find your strength when the world believes you have none. What could be more relevant for creating a “public voice” than that?
The play is about, at least on the surface, the complicated legal battle between Antigone and King Creon over burial rites for her departed brother. Yet it also grapples with notions of civil disobedience and how one is supposed to ethically grapple with questions regarding the Other, the enemy who we would rather have desecrated than give respect. And in days when xenophobia and racism seem to be on the rise again, along with a hearty dose of misogyny, the art of the protest, glorified in this play, will prove to be one of the final tools of democracy in our society.
The reactions are coming in and word has it that Trinity Repertory’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is a hit. With a few weeks left to see the show, it is worthwhile here to consider its meaning.
Obviously it begins with a book, the classic novel by the recently-deceased Harper Lee. As made clear last year with the release of her sequel volume Go Set a Watchman, she continues to hold many millions enchanted by her semi-autobiographical story of a small town lawyer who defends a black man in the 1930’s south in a trial that holds up to the lens the inner logic of racism, all witnessed through the eyes of his daughter and her best friend (a stand-in for that old southern belle Truman Capote). Though she denied it for decades, many felt that the plot was a re-imagining of the infamous Scottsboro boys trial from around the same time. I am not certain either way, particularly considering how the text eschews anything remotely akin to the Old Left notion of class solidarity against racism in exchange for some middle class Liberal ideology.
Yet despite those points, the story is still important precisely because it serves as a stark reminder of why Liberalism’s effort at desegregation without liberation, Gregory Peck instead of Malcolm X, has led us to the funerals of Trayvon and so many other successors of Tom Robinson. As an effort to update the text, the stars have included breakaway monologues narrating their own modern struggles with issues stemming from the text. Yet until we find a way to embrace liberation, it seems like no update is necessary.
