thenation--2020-07-21--Seriously? John Kasich? What Is the Biden Camp Thinking?

The Associated Press reports that the Joe Biden campaign has reached out to former Ohio governor John Kasich to speak on his behalf at the Democratic National Convention .
Kasich , an anti-abortion , pro-gun Republican , ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 .
When he didn ’ t win , he voted for… John McCain , even though McCain wasn ’ t even on the ballot .
So he speaks for a critical constituency of people who understand that Donald Trump is not fit to be president but can ’ t be bothered to use their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why it ’ s important for Biden and the Democrats to secure Kasich ’ s endorsement .
There are likely 15—maybe 20—white men in Ohio who aren ’ t sure Biden is a moderate enough alternative to the bigoted , authoritarian president who finds the deaths of 140,000 Americans too boring to distract him from his daily routine of retweeting white nationalists and hiding his financial crimes .
Kasich can soothe those voters who are disappointed that Trump is “ not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.
” Sorry , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not think it is a good idea for the Democratic National Convention to feature failed Republicans .
I don ’ t think that having a “ big tent ” means it ’ s necessary to highlight people who would knock down your tentpoles .
I suppose I should get used to it .
Between now and November , the Biden campaign will probably trot out a host of failed Republican presidential candidates and other politicians who have been kicked out of their own party .
Endorsement by people who failed to beat Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taking over their party , and , in some cases , created the dynamics that led to Trump ’ s takeover will be treated as a good thing .
These Republican validators will be uniformly white and overwhelmingly male , and they will bring with them no voting blocs .
None of Biden ’ s Republican endorsers will do any significant work to help Democrats take back the Senate , which is necessary for any Democratic policies to be enacted in a new administration .
Every moment that the DNC wastes on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somebody who wishes John McCain had defeated Barack Obama in 2008 is one less moment for Democratic Senate contenders like Jamie Harrison or Sara Gideon or Mark Kelly or MJ Hegar or Amy McGrath .
In fact , I ’ m starting to feel that all of this crowding of the airspace and fundraising space by Never Trump Republicans is by design .
The best outcome for lifelong Republicans who hate Trump is that Biden wins but is too hobbled by a GOP-controlled Senate to get anything done .
Republicans , even “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ win .
As John Nichols wrote just last week , “ If Biden is elected but Republicans maintain control of the Senate , he will enter office as a lame-duck president.
” That sounds like exactly the kind of “ victory ” lifelong Republicans are after .
My cynicism about the true motives of Republicans like Kasich is earned from a lifetime of watching what Republicans do instead of merely listening to what they say .
Republicans have had numerous opportunities to “ help ” during this century .
They ’ ve had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ party , ” and they ’ ve failed every time .
Where were Never Trump Republicans when their party nominated a two-bit simpleton and his daddy ’ s warmongering pal in 2000 ?
Where were they when people merely asked that all of the votes in Florida be counted ?
Where were they in 2004 when the same forces that later got Trump elected Swiftboated John Kerry ’ s heroic war record ?
Did Never Trump Republicans call for helicopters to be sent to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina ?
How did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when proto-Trump Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president in 2008 ?
Do they still want to see Obama ’ s birth certificate ?
Did the Republicans who now defend the Affordable Care Act in the face of Medicare for All come to that position after the 53rd time House Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare , or was the 54th and final time the straw that broke the camel ’ s back ?
No , I ’ m not done .
I ’ m not done remembering the Republican silence when John Roberts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the proximate cause for Trump ’ s winning the Electoral College .
I can still recall the deafening silence from Republican elected officials and pundits when Mitch McConnell refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing .
I recall begging for Republicans to oppose Brett Kavanaugh when he was merely a partisan operative with a history of lying to Congress , long before he was credibly accused of attempted rape .
None of them did .
Some of us are Never Trumpism , not merely Never Trump .
It would be nice if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I know why some Democrats can ’ t spot the con .
Despite the fact that the base of the Democratic Party consists of people of color and women , there are Democrats who are still waiting for the white working class to come back to them .
One white guy in Cincinnati is worth more to some Democrats than 100 Black guys in Cleveland .
The problem with that logic—well , one problem with it—is that there is no evidence that Kasich is the person to win Ohio for the Democrats .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they shouldn ’ t turn to Kasich ; they should turn to Sherrod Brown , the Democratic senator from Ohio who was last seen beating the absolute bag out of a Trumpy Republican challenger in 2018 .
There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall The Rule of Law Is Being Gutted Because ‘ Moderate ’ Republicans Stayed Silent The Trump Administration Is on a Capital Punishment Killing Spree Brown , according to exit polls , lost with white men in Ohio .
He was trounced , 59-41 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whites without a college degree , 61-38—and whites without a college degree are a fairly important demographic in the Rust Belt .
Did Brown go crying to Kasich to help him out ?
No , he did not .
Instead , he went out there and won women , 60-40 ; Black people , 89-11 ; and 91 percent of the Black woman vote .
Brown turned out the Democratic base , and it was more than enough to win statewide in Ohio .
A Democratic presidential campaign that would give one minute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minute for Brown or former Ohio state senator Nina Turner or , hell , LeBron James is one that wants to win the endorsement of National Review instead of one that wants to win the state of Ohio .
Joe Biden is not going to win white men in Ohio in 2020 .
He ’ s not going to win them nationally , either .
Unless John Kasich has some plan to inspire women and Black people to vote for Biden , neither he nor any Never Trump Republican is going to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The sooner Democrats accept that the uneducated white man is not coming back to the party , the better their chances of defeating Donald Trump .

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The Associated Press reports that the Joe Biden campaign has reached out to former Ohio governor John Kasich to speak on his behalf at the Democratic National Convention. Kasich, an anti-abortion, pro-gun Republican, ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. When he didn’t win, he voted for… John McCain, even though McCain wasn’t even on the ballot. So he speaks for a critical constituency of people who understand that Donald Trump is not fit to be president but can’t be bothered to use their vote to help.
I can see why it’s important for Biden and the Democrats to secure Kasich’s endorsement. There are likely 15—maybe 20—white men in Ohio who aren’t sure Biden is a moderate enough alternative to the bigoted, authoritarian president who finds the deaths of 140,000 Americans too boring to distract him from his daily routine of retweeting white nationalists and hiding his financial crimes. Kasich can soothe those voters who are disappointed that Trump is “not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Sorry, I’m being sarcastic. I do not think it is a good idea for the Democratic National Convention to feature failed Republicans. I don’t think that having a “big tent” means it’s necessary to highlight people who would knock down your tentpoles.
I suppose I should get used to it. Between now and November, the Biden campaign will probably trot out a host of failed Republican presidential candidates and other politicians who have been kicked out of their own party. Endorsement by people who failed to beat Trump, failed to stop Trumpian forces from taking over their party, and, in some cases, created the dynamics that led to Trump’s takeover will be treated as a good thing. These Republican validators will be uniformly white and overwhelmingly male, and they will bring with them no voting blocs.
None of Biden’s Republican endorsers will do any significant work to help Democrats take back the Senate, which is necessary for any Democratic policies to be enacted in a new administration. Every moment that the DNC wastes on the likes of Kasich or Carly Fiorina or somebody who wishes John McCain had defeated Barack Obama in 2008 is one less moment for Democratic Senate contenders like Jamie Harrison or Sara Gideon or Mark Kelly or MJ Hegar or Amy McGrath. Current Issue View our current issue
In fact, I’m starting to feel that all of this crowding of the airspace and fundraising space by Never Trump Republicans is by design. The best outcome for lifelong Republicans who hate Trump is that Biden wins but is too hobbled by a GOP-controlled Senate to get anything done. Republicans, even “former” Republicans, always play to win. As John Nichols wrote just last week, “If Biden is elected but Republicans maintain control of the Senate, he will enter office as a lame-duck president.” That sounds like exactly the kind of “victory” lifelong Republicans are after. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
My cynicism about the true motives of Republicans like Kasich is earned from a lifetime of watching what Republicans do instead of merely listening to what they say. Republicans have had numerous opportunities to “help” during this century. They’ve had numerous opportunities to put “country over party,” and they’ve failed every time.
Where were Never Trump Republicans when their party nominated a two-bit simpleton and his daddy’s warmongering pal in 2000? Where were they when people merely asked that all of the votes in Florida be counted? Where were they in 2004 when the same forces that later got Trump elected Swiftboated John Kerry’s heroic war record? Did Never Trump Republicans call for helicopters to be sent to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? How did these allegedly “good” Republicans react when proto-Trump Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president in 2008? Do they still want to see Obama’s birth certificate? Did the Republicans who now defend the Affordable Care Act in the face of Medicare for All come to that position after the 53rd time House Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare, or was the 54th and final time the straw that broke the camel’s back?
No, I’m not done. I’m not done remembering the Republican silence when John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act, which is the proximate cause for Trump’s winning the Electoral College. I can still recall the deafening silence from Republican elected officials and pundits when Mitch McConnell refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing. I recall begging for Republicans to oppose Brett Kavanaugh when he was merely a partisan operative with a history of lying to Congress, long before he was credibly accused of attempted rape. None of them did.
Some of us are Never Trumpism, not merely Never Trump. It would be nice if the Democratic Party understood the difference.
I know why some Democrats can’t spot the con. Despite the fact that the base of the Democratic Party consists of people of color and women, there are Democrats who are still waiting for the white working class to come back to them. One white guy in Cincinnati is worth more to some Democrats than 100 Black guys in Cleveland.
The problem with that logic—well, one problem with it—is that there is no evidence that Kasich is the person to win Ohio for the Democrats. If Democrats want to win back Ohio, they shouldn’t turn to Kasich; they should turn to Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator from Ohio who was last seen beating the absolute bag out of a Trumpy Republican challenger in 2018. More from Mystal There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall Elie Mystal The Rule of Law Is Being Gutted Because ‘Moderate’ Republicans Stayed Silent Elie Mystal The Trump Administration Is on a Capital Punishment Killing Spree Elie Mystal
Brown, according to exit polls, lost with white men in Ohio. He was trounced, 59-41, in that demographic. He lost whites without a college degree, 61-38—and whites without a college degree are a fairly important demographic in the Rust Belt. Did Brown go crying to Kasich to help him out? No, he did not. Instead, he went out there and won women, 60-40; Black people, 89-11; and 91 percent of the Black woman vote. Brown turned out the Democratic base, and it was more than enough to win statewide in Ohio.
A Democratic presidential campaign that would give one minute of airtime to Kasich over one additional minute for Brown or former Ohio state senator Nina Turner or, hell, LeBron James is one that wants to win the endorsement of National Review instead of one that wants to win the state of Ohio.
Joe Biden is not going to win white men in Ohio in 2020. He’s not going to win them nationally, either. Unless John Kasich has some plan to inspire women and Black people to vote for Biden, neither he nor any Never Trump Republican is going to be all that helpful in the upcoming election. The sooner Democrats accept that the uneducated white man is not coming back to the party, the better their chances of defeating Donald Trump.


thenation--2020-07-21--Investment in Child Care Can’t Wait until There’s a Coronavirus Vaccine

Our economy can not function without child care .
That simple fact has been brought into stark relief by the @ @ @ @ @ forced parents across the country to choose between supporting their family financially and caring for @ @ @ @ @ the Covid-19 economy , you can have a kid or a job , ” wrote @ @ @ @ @ York Times , “ But you can ’ t have both.
” That ’ s @ @ @ @ @ school districts contemplating virtual or partial reopenings in the fall , many of the nation @ @ @ @ @ parents will have to fill gaps in child care .
Already , 13 percent of @ @ @ @ @ either quit a job or cut back their working hours because of a lack of @ @ @ @ @ isn ’ t new .
For years , working families have struggled with the rising @ @ @ @ @ the difficulty of finding licensed providers .
Read the full text of Katrina ’ s @ @ @

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
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Our economy cannot function without child care. That simple fact has been brought into stark relief by the recent pandemic, which has forced parents across the country to choose between supporting their family financially and caring for their children.
“In the Covid-19 economy, you can have a kid or a job,” wrote Deb Perelman in The New York Times, “But you can’t have both.” That’s hardly an exaggeration. With school districts contemplating virtual or partial reopenings in the fall, many of the nation’s 50 million working parents will have to fill gaps in child care. Already, 13 percent of American parents have had to either quit a job or cut back their working hours because of a lack of child care.
This crisis isn’t new. For years, working families have struggled with the rising cost of child care and the difficulty of finding licensed providers.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.


thenation--2020-07-21--We Can Reopen Schools if We Make the City the Classroom

The start of the academic year is just weeks away , and the nationwide debate about reopening schools during the Covid-19 pandemic is still raging .
The Trump administration has called full steam ahead and threatened to slash federal funding to districts that fail to follow suit .
The rationale for reopening schools is rooted not in public health but in politics .
President Trump wants parents to return to the workforce and resuscitate the economy to help him win reelection in November .
This comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns about the dangers of in-person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urge full-time virtual learning to protect the health of their members and students .
Anyone who has spent any time in a public school knows that maintaining social distancing is all but impossible , especially in chronically underfunded schools where staff are in short supply and children are crammed in classrooms that regularly top 30 students .
Before the pandemic , public schools were already asking parents to chip in for toilet paper , paper towels , supplies , and other essentials .
Without funding to retrofit schools with personal protective equipment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and other services , any chance at safely reopening is delusional .
We can not sacrifice students and staff on the altar of educational achievement and economic growth .
Until there is a vaccine , educational instruction should be primarily virtual , supplemented with some physical activities , inspired by existing models of progressive education .
In the spring , teachers and students scrambled to adjust to virtual learning with scant preparation , exposing gaping inequities .
In 2017 , 7 million students , or 14 percent of the school-age population did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The federal government needs to provide every child with a tablet or computer and make critical investments in broadband access .
In the 1960s and ’ 70s , progressive educators such as Paul Goodman , John Bremer , and George Dennison envisioned the city as the classroom .
Goodman advocated to break up urban schools into dozens of mini-storefronts that “ could combine play , serializing , discussion and formal teaching.
” Cities like Philadelphia saw the birth of “ schools without walls.
” Dubbed by Life magazine as “ probably the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” students in the Parkway Program learned in art museums , laboratories , theaters , businesses , newspaper offices , and along the banks of the Schuylkill River .
The only physical space was a rented loft where weekly town hall meetings were held .
“ The schoolroom is the city , the teachers are the city ’ s employees and businessmen , the curriculum is the day-to-day events of the city , ” Life wrote .
Schools : To Open or Not to Open ?
That Is Not the Question .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ governors could allow for classes—in staggered intervals—to be held in parks , streets , churches , stadiums , running tracks , woods , and other spaces .
They could enlist the ranks of the unemployed to assist with logistics .
It was educator John Holt who argued that the “ best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is…the world itself , in the mainstream of adult life.
” At a time when families have been pent up at home for months on end , there are worries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are suffering from what Richard Louv called the nature-deficit disorder , “ a description of the human costs of alienation from nature.
” The antidote is outdoor , experiential learning .
In Germany , there are more than 1,500 forest kindergartens ( Waldkindergarten ) , where children engage in freewheeling play in parks , ponds , meadows , and wetlands in all the elements—heat , rain , and snow .
In the process , they learn self-regulation , critical thinking , risk taking , and empathy .
Over the past few decades , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States in more than 150 nature-based preschools .
The pandemic provides the opportunity for children to engage in project-based learning to safely explore the natural world .
There could be a collaboration between the National Park Service , the United States Fish and Wildlife Service , and local school districts .
In New York City , soon-to-be representative and former principal Jamaal Bowman , whom I have advised on policy , donated to , and campaigned for , and educators are calling on the city to pilot outdoor learning for early childhood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to happen without a multibillion-dollar bailout of public education .
The Senate must pass the $ 3 trillion HEROES Act , which the House of Representatives approved two months ago , to provide immediate relief to families , schools , and communities .
The bill earmarks $ 90 billion for K-12 and higher education .
For months , public schools have been on the front lines , offering meals to poor children and childcare to essential workers .
A mix of virtual and outdoor experiential learning can help them ride through the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students and staff .

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The start of the academic year is just weeks away, and the nationwide debate about reopening schools during the Covid-19 pandemic is still raging. The Trump administration has called full steam ahead and threatened to slash federal funding to districts that fail to follow suit. The rationale for reopening schools is rooted not in public health but in politics. President Trump wants parents to return to the workforce and resuscitate the economy to help him win reelection in November.
This comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns about the dangers of in-person classes and as some teachers’ unions urge full-time virtual learning to protect the health of their members and students. Anyone who has spent any time in a public school knows that maintaining social distancing is all but impossible, especially in chronically underfunded schools where staff are in short supply and children are crammed in classrooms that regularly top 30 students. Before the pandemic, public schools were already asking parents to chip in for toilet paper, paper towels, supplies, and other essentials. Without funding to retrofit schools with personal protective equipment, disinfecting measures, trauma-informed care, nurses, and other services, any chance at safely reopening is delusional.
We cannot sacrifice students and staff on the altar of educational achievement and economic growth. Until there is a vaccine, educational instruction should be primarily virtual, supplemented with some physical activities, inspired by existing models of progressive education. In the spring, teachers and students scrambled to adjust to virtual learning with scant preparation, exposing gaping inequities. In 2017, 7 million students, or 14 percent of the school-age population did not have Internet access at home. The federal government needs to provide every child with a tablet or computer and make critical investments in broadband access.
In the 1960s and ’70s, progressive educators such as Paul Goodman, John Bremer, and George Dennison envisioned the city as the classroom. Goodman advocated to break up urban schools into dozens of mini-storefronts that “could combine play, serializing, discussion and formal teaching.”
Cities like Philadelphia saw the birth of “schools without walls.” Dubbed by Life magazine as “probably the most radical of all current high school experiments,” students in the Parkway Program learned in art museums, laboratories, theaters, businesses, newspaper offices, and along the banks of the Schuylkill River. The only physical space was a rented loft where weekly town hall meetings were held. “The schoolroom is the city, the teachers are the city’s employees and businessmen, the curriculum is the day-to-day events of the city,” Life wrote. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Related Article Schools: To Open or Not to Open? That Is Not the Question. Rhea Boyd
With transmission lower outdoors, mayors and governors could allow for classes—in staggered intervals—to be held in parks, streets, churches, stadiums, running tracks, woods, and other spaces. They could enlist the ranks of the unemployed to assist with logistics. It was educator John Holt who argued that the “best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is…the world itself, in the mainstream of adult life.”
At a time when families have been pent up at home for months on end, there are worries that children’s behavior and development are suffering from what Richard Louv called the nature-deficit disorder, “a description of the human costs of alienation from nature.” The antidote is outdoor, experiential learning. In Germany, there are more than 1,500 forest kindergartens (Waldkindergarten), where children engage in freewheeling play in parks, ponds, meadows, and wetlands in all the elements—heat, rain, and snow. In the process, they learn self-regulation, critical thinking, risk taking, and empathy. Over the past few decades, the model has been adopted across the United States in more than 150 nature-based preschools. The pandemic provides the opportunity for children to engage in project-based learning to safely explore the natural world. There could be a collaboration between the National Park Service, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and local school districts. In New York City, soon-to-be representative and former principal Jamaal Bowman, whom I have advised on policy, donated to, and campaigned for, and educators are calling on the city to pilot outdoor learning for early childhood students.
Little of this can begin to happen without a multibillion-dollar bailout of public education. The Senate must pass the $3 trillion HEROES Act, which the House of Representatives approved two months ago, to provide immediate relief to families, schools, and communities. The bill earmarks $90 billion for K-12 and higher education.
For months, public schools have been on the front lines, offering meals to poor children and childcare to essential workers. A mix of virtual and outdoor experiential learning can help them ride through the pandemic, while maintaining health and safety for students and staff.


thenation--2020-07-22--You’re a Doc, You’ve Got This, but Your Face Shield’s Foggy

uernavaca , orelos—They say that a person can get used to anything , except not eating .
I guess that ’ s true .
After five months of exercising extreme caution as a doctor , it all seems comfortable and easy now compared with those distant days of late February , when the pandemic had just begun to dawn on us all .
Back then , I was getting ready to go to the Mexico City airport to travel to the annual meeting of a group of sexual and reproductive health specialists when a rumor was spreading online that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Mexico .
It swiftly became clear that the rumor was fact .
A colleague , who coordinates training for our loose and vulnerable national network of abortion providers , reported that her husband , an internist at one of Mexico ’ s most exclusive private hospitals , was treating that first Covid case .
Some of us had surgical masks with us .
In the airport , virtually no one used them .
Nor do most people use them today , even as the curve of contagion and death bends continually upward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the seriousness of the threat .
In the leftist circles within which I move , most people believed it was a false flag to control Mexico ’ s poorest and most vulnerable classes .
Soon , though , I would see patients in my own clinic in Morelos with respiratory symptoms who would die before they were tested .
In New York City , people I know and love would be hospitalized .
It was clear that a national emergency was on the horizon , and that , like health workers throughout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the front lines .
The Covid Crisis Reveals the Need to Abolish Abortion Restrictions More in this series With little and conflicting information on how to operate during a fast-arriving crisis , we were all confused .
Some colleagues told us to dress like astronauts , basically to armor up , when seeing patients .
This would prove difficult when even N95 face masks were sold out or resold online for ridiculous prices .
I made do with face masks from the local hardware store , the kind that house painters use .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and yet felt more committed than ever , given the other never-ending health emergency for women who wish to end their pregnancies in a state where it is prohibited .
As Covid took hold , my patients also were afraid .
When they came to appointments , they brought what protective gear they could , simple face masks or cloth bandanas .
We spaced out appointments as much as possible .
My assistants and I used what safeguards we had at our disposal : boots , a double layer of gloves , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with face shields we purchased from the same guy who sells pirated DVDs in the pueblo .
The medical procedures continued , as they had to , even as my breath fogged up my plastic face shield , and I struggled to see what I was doing .
The risk of making a mistake increased , even when conducting this simple outpatient procedure .
Anxiety took hold , and I had to fight the impulse to tear off my uncomfortable and unwieldy gear .
The goggles cut so deeply into my face that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ controlled my fear with deep breathing exercises , which served only to fog up my face shield more .
And yet , everything turned out fine , every time .
I kept waiting for my luck to run out .
That , or an end to the pandemic .
None of this seemed humanly possible , and the working conditions I and the other providers in our network imposed on ourselves seemed similarly inhuman .
Combing my hair became a luxury , so I shaved my head .
I began to dress in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others had recommended .
The time I had used to take care of my hair was now used to suit up .
Today , the challenge for my risky line of work is getting some of my patients used to telemedicine when possible .
While many of my younger patients couldn ’ t be happier at the chance to treat their problems without leaving their room , others don ’ t trust it , especially older women who are used to making eye contact , judging me , and feeling my presence .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ The script I use to start my calls has become second nature : “ My name is Maria Espinoza .
Everything we discuss will be absolutely confidential .
Everything I ask you is with the aim of getting enough information to make a diagnosis that helps me provide you with the best treatment possible .
The main objective of this consultation is to allow you to exercise your rights as a woman .
That ’ s why you should feel free to interrupt me whenever you feel the need to , and so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process .
I ’ m here to listen to you , and you have my complete attention.
” I had always started patient conversations this way , but when the phone is our only link , it has become the key to getting close to the lives of the women I treat , gently .
This crisis within a crisis has taught me that responding to change with agility makes us stronger .
Looking for solutions is what I have always done .
It ’ s what we ’ ve always done , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , neighbors , daughters , sisters , and partners .
The pandemic brought paralysis to my work at the beginning , but it didn ’ t last long .
Women began to knock at my door , as they always have , and always will .
I had to respond .
Fear , commitment , responsibility , propelled me forward .
But above all , the will to live and help other women live .
It is with this will , emanating from every solid beat of my joyful heart , that I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so that the many-colored hands of the earth can build a better future , in spite of the virus .
To do it , we just have to look below and toward the left .
That ’ s where our heart is , and I ’ m grateful to it .
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind , a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind , who from 1982–94 was the magazine ’ s chief political writer and analyst .
This series of dispatches from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , advisers , guests , and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski , and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org .

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
C uernavaca, M orelos—They say that a person can get used to anything, except not eating. I guess that’s true. After five months of exercising extreme caution as a doctor, it all seems comfortable and easy now compared with those distant days of late February, when the pandemic had just begun to dawn on us all.
Back then, I was getting ready to go to the Mexico City airport to travel to the annual meeting of a group of sexual and reproductive health specialists when a rumor was spreading online that the first case of Covid-19 had been documented in Mexico. It swiftly became clear that the rumor was fact. A colleague, who coordinates training for our loose and vulnerable national network of abortion providers, reported that her husband, an internist at one of Mexico’s most exclusive private hospitals, was treating that first Covid case.
Some of us had surgical masks with us. In the airport, virtually no one used them. Nor do most people use them today, even as the curve of contagion and death bends continually upward.
Our group was divided at first on the seriousness of the threat. In the leftist circles within which I move, most people believed it was a false flag to control Mexico’s poorest and most vulnerable classes. Soon, though, I would see patients in my own clinic in Morelos with respiratory symptoms who would die before they were tested. In New York City, people I know and love would be hospitalized. It was clear that a national emergency was on the horizon, and that, like health workers throughout the world, I would be on the front lines. Scenes From a Pandemic Untethered, or The Year of Living Virtually Patricia J. Williams The Art of the Meal Mary Lewis Maybe We Shouldn’t Go Back to Normal Bri M.
With little and conflicting information on how to operate during a fast-arriving crisis, we were all confused. Some colleagues told us to dress like astronauts, basically to armor up, when seeing patients. This would prove difficult when even N95 face masks were sold out or resold online for ridiculous prices. I made do with face masks from the local hardware store, the kind that house painters use.
I was afraid to see my patients, and yet felt more committed than ever, given the other never-ending health emergency for women who wish to end their pregnancies in a state where it is prohibited. As Covid took hold, my patients also were afraid. When they came to appointments, they brought what protective gear they could, simple face masks or cloth bandanas. We spaced out appointments as much as possible. My assistants and I used what safeguards we had at our disposal: boots, a double layer of gloves, hairnets, and surgical gowns, along with face shields we purchased from the same guy who sells pirated DVDs in the pueblo.
The medical procedures continued, as they had to, even as my breath fogged up my plastic face shield, and I struggled to see what I was doing. The risk of making a mistake increased, even when conducting this simple outpatient procedure. Anxiety took hold, and I had to fight the impulse to tear off my uncomfortable and unwieldy gear. The goggles cut so deeply into my face that I sometimes started seeing double. I controlled my fear with deep breathing exercises, which served only to fog up my face shield more. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
And yet, everything turned out fine, every time. I kept waiting for my luck to run out. That, or an end to the pandemic. None of this seemed humanly possible, and the working conditions I and the other providers in our network imposed on ourselves seemed similarly inhuman.
Combing my hair became a luxury, so I shaved my head. I began to dress in an improvised version of that space suit others had recommended. The time I had used to take care of my hair was now used to suit up.
Today, the challenge for my risky line of work is getting some of my patients used to telemedicine when possible. While many of my younger patients couldn’t be happier at the chance to treat their problems without leaving their room, others don’t trust it, especially older women who are used to making eye contact, judging me, and feeling my presence.
Yet telemedicine is a necessity now. The script I use to start my calls has become second nature: “My name is Maria Espinoza. Everything we discuss will be absolutely confidential. Everything I ask you is with the aim of getting enough information to make a diagnosis that helps me provide you with the best treatment possible. The main objective of this consultation is to allow you to exercise your rights as a woman. That’s why you should feel free to interrupt me whenever you feel the need to, and so that you can participate actively in this process. I’m here to listen to you, and you have my complete attention.”
I had always started patient conversations this way, but when the phone is our only link, it has become the key to getting close to the lives of the women I treat, gently.
This crisis within a crisis has taught me that responding to change with agility makes us stronger. Looking for solutions is what I have always done. It’s what we’ve always done, as women, as doctors, mothers, neighbors, daughters, sisters, and partners.
The pandemic brought paralysis to my work at the beginning, but it didn’t last long. Women began to knock at my door, as they always have, and always will. I had to respond. Fear, commitment, responsibility, propelled me forward. But above all, the will to live and help other women live.
It is with this will, emanating from every solid beat of my joyful heart, that I hope that solidarity continues to fortify us, so that the many-colored hands of the earth can build a better future, in spite of the virus. To do it, we just have to look below and toward the left. That’s where our heart is, and I’m grateful to it.
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind, a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who from 1982–94 was the magazine’s chief political writer and analyst. This series of dispatches from Kopkind’s far-flung network of participants, advisers, guests, and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski, and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org.


thenation--2020-07-22--Bernadette Mayer’s ‘Emotional Science Project’

“ Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm , ” wrote Bernadette Mayer , addressing herself in the 1968 poem “ The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.
” “ Nothing outside can cure you but everything ’ s outside , ” she continues .
For the past five decades , Mayer , the author of more than 30 volumes , has marked herself as a cataloguer par excellence of everyday life , attuned to the rhythms of the world and her position as an artist in it .
Steeped in the conceptualism of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boundaries of genre and form to capture life ’ s grand moments and its minute details .
In 1971 , then age 26 , she set out to synthesize such experiences in an artistic investigation of memory by recording the world as she lived it over the course of a single month .
Each day in July 1971 , Mayer shot a roll of 35-millimeter slide film and wrote an exhaustive log of events , impressions , and dreams that together provide a glimpse into her aesthetic and political development as an artist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was financed by the gallerist and patron Holly Solomon and exhibited at Solomon ’ s gallery at 98 Greene Street in New York City in February 1972 .
Encompassing over a thousand three-by-five-inch snapshots arranged in a grid along a single wall , the installation was accompanied by a six-hour tape recording of Mayer reading her written entries to produce a total sensory experience .
Reviewing the exhibition in The Village Voice , the critic A.D. Coleman referred to the project as “ an enormous accumulation of data , ” encapsulating the project @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Over the years , Memory has taken many forms .
A condensed version of the work was exhibited as “ Remembrance ” as part of curator and critic Lucy Lippard ’ s 1973 exhibition of female conceptual artists .
In 1975 , Mayer edited a version of the text , published by North Atlantic Press , without the accompanying color photographs .
It soon went out of print but has since been made available as a PDF through Craig Dworkin ’ s online Eclipse archive .
In 2016 , Memory was restaged as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Foundation , where the photographs were reprinted at a slightly larger size and the audio was made available to viewers on an iPad accompanied by headphones .
In 2017 , Memory was installed at New York ’ s Canada gallery , this time complete with the original photographs and accompanying audio track .
Never having seen an installation in person , I welcomed Siglio Press ’ s handsome hardcover edition of Memory , which combines full-color photographs with Mayer ’ s text in a single volume spanning 300-odd pages .
( The full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can be streamed online through the library at the University of California , San Diego , where her archives are stored . )
Introducing the new edition , she remarks that while Memory appears exhaustive , “ so much is left out : emotions , thoughts , sex , the relationship between poetry and light , storytelling , walking and voyaging to name a few… .
I thought that by using both sound and image , I could include everything .
But so far , that is not so.
” With its barrage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ haphazard , often blurry , dark photographs , Memory syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the unevenness of life ’ s passage—that combination of major joys , minor disasters , and moments that float somewhere in between .
Flitting between the intimate and the impersonal , Memory ’ s combination of photography and written word mimics the flashing , fleeting experience of consciousness .
Within its stream of text and image are spaces of recognition between Mayer and the reader , moments of synchronicity that collapse the decades-long gap between the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aching present and make Memory a hallmark of American conceptualism .
Born in 1945 to a conservative Catholic family in Ridgewood , N.Y. , Mayer grew up a voracious reader .
With her sister Rosemary Mayer , who would be recognized as a pioneering feminist artist , Bernadette Mayer studied Greek and Latin , demonstrating a particular attraction to the ribald verse of Catullus .
After graduating from the New School in 1967 , where she studied with the poet Bill Berkson , she became a fixture on the downtown scene , collaborating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short-lived magazine 0-9 , where she published her poetry as well as early conceptual works by Robert Smithson , Yvonne Rainer , and Adrian Piper .
In the 1970s , living in New England with the poet Lewis Warsh , with whom she raised three children , Mayer collaborated with a number of artists on epistolary correspondences and magazines and cofounded United Artists Press with Warsh , publishing writers such as Hannah Weiner , Robert Creeley , and Alice Notley .
Her early verse , detailing the vicissitudes of everyday living in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the second wave of the New York School with Ted Berrigan , Ron Padgett , and Anne Waldman , the poetic inheritors of Frank O ’ Hara , John Ashbery , and Kenneth Koch .
In 1970 , Mayer was included with these luminaries in the first anthology of the New York School , edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro , the only woman among 27 men .
Her contribution to the anthology speaks to the immediacy of experience she sought to capture : “ The end which comes / is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ held in the air / pausing in its course.
” The thrum of the ordinary was as much of a political concern as an artistic one for Mayer , and throughout Memory , decisive events in the outside world barrel freely alongside internal contemplations .
Reflecting on Memory in a 1989 essay , she writes , “ I must say yes I did think that everyday life was good and important to write down because of our work with the committee for nonviolent action.
” In Memory , remarks on the demands for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Attica Correctional Facility—months before the riot in September 1971—sit next to details of the bohemian activities of Mayer and her then-boyfriend , the filmmaker Ed Bowes .
With Bowes and friends , she records the stray sounds of the city for a film and takes the “ taconic fantasy parkway ” to greener pastures , picking up “ two tabs for sunshine ” to freeze for later enlightenment .
Mayer ’ s style has not infrequently been described as protean ; Memory does little to dispute this label .
Her prose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( “ a red car , top translucent white…a woman in turquoise with white trim ” ) to abstract comparisons ( “ he looks like a memory he looks like a visit in the middle of the night ” ) .
Her photographs , too , veer toward blurry indecipherability but are more often striking in their vivid detail—clothes pinned to a line outside in the sun , bright yellow cabs in traffic seen from a passenger seat , the white sails of a boat against deep blue waves .
These generic observations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around a dinner table and intimate shots of Bowes sitting naked in a bath or curled up in bed , images that convey warmth and familiarity despite their specificity .
In between these vivid , personal encounters , Mayer continually reflects on what can not be captured by word and image , describing , for instance , the “ pink and purple insanity ” of a “ manic sunset ” that remains unreproducible by film or her frustrations with her relationships and her art .
To follow Mayer across this period in her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in equal measure .
Despite its moments of exaltation , her chronicle is cut through with the realities of living as an artist and a woman , harassed by male strangers while carrying her camera and underestimated by her male peers .
Her doubts often pulsate across the text .
“ This notebook ’ s just some step away from a fear , ” she writes on July 29 , “ [ and ] that fear has to do with communication.
” What is perhaps most striking about Memory is its meditative reflection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her photos , Mayer had to wait for them to develop before adding her diaristic texts ; thus writing Memory was always a project of reflection , of rewriting .
The entries for July 20 , double-exposure photographs in which Mayer layers images over each other “ like a correction , ” capture this reflexivity reflection with incredible poignancy , and as the project nears its close , Mayer ’ s text becomes more personal .
“ Feel crumbly lost ridiculous , ” she says in the same entry .
When a friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finishing the project , Mayer reflects that her entries get more vivid and interesting toward the end , attributing this to the fact that “ more began to happen.
” Her last entry concludes , “ To you past structure is backwards , you forget , you remember the past backwards and forget.
” Mayer ’ s influence is palpable .
In its plain-mannered sensibility , her work furnishes a seemingly endless capacity for recognition and self-reflection .
Since the 1970s , she has taught writing workshops to eager students , first at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as director from 1980 to ’ 84 ) in New York City and today on her front porch in upstate New York .
At the Poetry Project , she developed a set of widely circulated writing experiments that reflect her philosophy of morphing conscious experience into creative output .
( Among them , “ Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses ” and “ Write what is a secret .
Then write what is shared.
” ) Often incorporating the Dadaist tradition and Wittgensteinian philosophy , her workshops @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , including Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman , who went on to develop the Language school of poetry , a style characterized by the deconstruction of language to facilitate meaning .
Of all Mayer ’ s works , Memory is the most astonishingly proleptic , appearing to anticipate networks of acquaintances and self-presentation on social media , from the gridded arrangements of Instagram to the Facebook timeline .
Mayer has referred to Memory as an “ emotional science project , ” which gestures to the work ’ s systematic structure and its implied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ served as inspiration for her future projects , including the 1975 work Studying Hunger , for which she kept a journal for 30 days , as recommended by her psychiatrist ( who wrote the introduction for the 1975 publication of Memory ) , and Midwinter Day ( 1982 ) .
The latter , an epic prose poem written in its entirety on December 22 , 1978 , details Mayer ’ s experience as a mother and an artist over the course of a single day .
By stripping motherhood of its sentiment and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of contemporary poets such as Laynie Browne and Hoa Nguyen , as Andrew Epstein notes in a chapter on the “ maternal everyday ” in his 2016 study Attention Equals Life .
Despite critical acclaim , popular affection , and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts , Mayer lives a modest lifestyle in upstate New York , where she moved in 1998 with the poet Phillip Good , after a stroke she had four years earlier .
Last year in a podcast about her financial life in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ still poor.
” “ What I hate is capitalism , ” she said .
“ I always tried to earn a living as a poet .
I know it ’ s stupid , I know it can ’ t be done , but I figured let ’ s do it.
” To contextualize her present challenges with the freewheeling radicalism depicted in Memory is to come to terms with the discrepancy between institutionally proclaimed support of creative life and the material shortcomings of this support .
This discrepancy is only one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a work that most strikingly points to the difference between living and documenting .
Thumbing through the hardbound volume , I found myself nostalgic for the bohemianism of a time I never experienced .
What becomes clear throughout Memory ’ s pages is Mayer ’ s ability to discern moments of grace within the quotidian and her scrupulous attention to the world around her .
“ Nothing outside can cure you , but everything ’ s outside.
” In the book we see several images of Mayer gripping her camera as she photographs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ steadying herself against the flood of her memories .
Her gaze is stolid , strong .
Like her influence , it will be immutable for years to come .

“Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm,” wrote Bernadette Mayer, addressing herself in the 1968 poem “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.” “Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside,” she continues. For the past five decades, Mayer, the author of more than 30 volumes, has marked herself as a cataloguer par excellence of everyday life, attuned to the rhythms of the world and her position as an artist in it. Steeped in the conceptualism of the 1970s, her early work eschewed the boundaries of genre and form to capture life’s grand moments and its minute details. In 1971, then age 26, she set out to synthesize such experiences in an artistic investigation of memory by recording the world as she lived it over the course of a single month. Books in Review Memory By Bernadette Mayer Buy this book
Each day in July 1971, Mayer shot a roll of 35-millimeter slide film and wrote an exhaustive log of events, impressions, and dreams that together provide a glimpse into her aesthetic and political development as an artist. The resulting installation, Memory, was financed by the gallerist and patron Holly Solomon and exhibited at Solomon’s gallery at 98 Greene Street in New York City in February 1972. Encompassing over a thousand three-by-five-inch snapshots arranged in a grid along a single wall, the installation was accompanied by a six-hour tape recording of Mayer reading her written entries to produce a total sensory experience. Reviewing the exhibition in The Village Voice, the critic A.D. Coleman referred to the project as “an enormous accumulation of data,” encapsulating the project’s contemporaneity and its exhaustiveness.
Over the years, Memory has taken many forms. A condensed version of the work was exhibited as “Remembrance” as part of curator and critic Lucy Lippard’s 1973 exhibition of female conceptual artists. In 1975, Mayer edited a version of the text, published by North Atlantic Press, without the accompanying color photographs. It soon went out of print but has since been made available as a PDF through Craig Dworkin’s online Eclipse archive. In 2016, Memory was restaged as an installation at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation, where the photographs were reprinted at a slightly larger size and the audio was made available to viewers on an iPad accompanied by headphones. In 2017, Memory was installed at New York’s Canada gallery, this time complete with the original photographs and accompanying audio track.
Never having seen an installation in person, I welcomed Siglio Press’s handsome hardcover edition of Memory, which combines full-color photographs with Mayer’s text in a single volume spanning 300-odd pages. (The full audio recording of Mayer reading the text can be streamed online through the library at the University of California, San Diego, where her archives are stored.) Introducing the new edition, she remarks that while Memory appears exhaustive, “so much is left out: emotions, thoughts, sex, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking and voyaging to name a few…. I thought that by using both sound and image, I could include everything. But so far, that is not so.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Memory, by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. (Courtesy of Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego)
With its barrage of run-on sentences and its collection of haphazard, often blurry, dark photographs, Memory syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the unevenness of life’s passage—that combination of major joys, minor disasters, and moments that float somewhere in between. Flitting between the intimate and the impersonal, Memory’s combination of photography and written word mimics the flashing, fleeting experience of consciousness. Within its stream of text and image are spaces of recognition between Mayer and the reader, moments of synchronicity that collapse the decades-long gap between the hot July days of 1971 and our aching present and make Memory a hallmark of American conceptualism.
Born in 1945 to a conservative Catholic family in Ridgewood, N.Y., Mayer grew up a voracious reader. With her sister Rosemary Mayer, who would be recognized as a pioneering feminist artist, Bernadette Mayer studied Greek and Latin, demonstrating a particular attraction to the ribald verse of Catullus. After graduating from the New School in 1967, where she studied with the poet Bill Berkson, she became a fixture on the downtown scene, collaborating with Vito Acconci on the influential but short-lived magazine 0-9, where she published her poetry as well as early conceptual works by Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer, and Adrian Piper. In the 1970s, living in New England with the poet Lewis Warsh, with whom she raised three children, Mayer collaborated with a number of artists on epistolary correspondences and magazines and cofounded United Artists Press with Warsh, publishing writers such as Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, and Alice Notley.
Her early verse, detailing the vicissitudes of everyday living in a plainspoken, unaffected style, was placed in the second wave of the New York School with Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, the poetic inheritors of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. In 1970, Mayer was included with these luminaries in the first anthology of the New York School, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, the only woman among 27 men. Her contribution to the anthology speaks to the immediacy of experience she sought to capture: “The end which comes / is not as important as the motion / held in the air / pausing in its course.”
The thrum of the ordinary was as much of a political concern as an artistic one for Mayer, and throughout Memory, decisive events in the outside world barrel freely alongside internal contemplations. Reflecting on Memory in a 1989 essay, she writes, “I must say yes I did think that everyday life was good and important to write down because of our work with the committee for nonviolent action.” In Memory, remarks on the demands for better conditions by prisoners in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility—months before the riot in September 1971—sit next to details of the bohemian activities of Mayer and her then-boyfriend, the filmmaker Ed Bowes. With Bowes and friends, she records the stray sounds of the city for a film and takes the “taconic fantasy parkway” to greener pastures, picking up “two tabs for sunshine” to freeze for later enlightenment.
Mayer’s style has not infrequently been described as protean; Memory does little to dispute this label. Her prose ranges from crystal-clear descriptions of her surroundings (“a red car, top translucent white…a woman in turquoise with white trim”) to abstract comparisons (“he looks like a memory he looks like a visit in the middle of the night”). Her photographs, too, veer toward blurry indecipherability but are more often striking in their vivid detail—clothes pinned to a line outside in the sun, bright yellow cabs in traffic seen from a passenger seat, the white sails of a boat against deep blue waves. These generic observations are situated amid scenes of friends gathered around a dinner table and intimate shots of Bowes sitting naked in a bath or curled up in bed, images that convey warmth and familiarity despite their specificity. In between these vivid, personal encounters, Mayer continually reflects on what cannot be captured by word and image, describing, for instance, the “pink and purple insanity” of a “manic sunset” that remains unreproducible by film or her frustrations with her relationships and her art.
To follow Mayer across this period in her life is to track banalities and joys in equal measure. Despite its moments of exaltation, her chronicle is cut through with the realities of living as an artist and a woman, harassed by male strangers while carrying her camera and underestimated by her male peers. Her doubts often pulsate across the text. “This notebook’s just some step away from a fear,” she writes on July 29, “[and] that fear has to do with communication.”
Memory, by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. (Courtesy of Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego)
What is perhaps most striking about Memory is its meditative reflection on its own creation. After taking her photos, Mayer had to wait for them to develop before adding her diaristic texts; thus writing Memory was always a project of reflection, of rewriting. The entries for July 20, double-exposure photographs in which Mayer layers images over each other “like a correction,” capture this reflexivity reflection with incredible poignancy, and as the project nears its close, Mayer’s text becomes more personal. “Feel crumbly lost ridiculous,” she says in the same entry. When a friend asks if she is glad to be finishing the project, Mayer reflects that her entries get more vivid and interesting toward the end, attributing this to the fact that “more began to happen.” Her last entry concludes, “To you past structure is backwards, you forget, you remember the past backwards and forget.”
Mayer’s influence is palpable. In its plain-mannered sensibility, her work furnishes a seemingly endless capacity for recognition and self-reflection. Since the 1970s, she has taught writing workshops to eager students, first at the Poetry Project (where she served as director from 1980 to ’84) in New York City and today on her front porch in upstate New York. At the Poetry Project, she developed a set of widely circulated writing experiments that reflect her philosophy of morphing conscious experience into creative output. (Among them, “Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses” and “Write what is a secret. Then write what is shared.”) Often incorporating the Dadaist tradition and Wittgensteinian philosophy, her workshops were influential for a number of poets, including Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, who went on to develop the Language school of poetry, a style characterized by the deconstruction of language to facilitate meaning.
Of all Mayer’s works, Memory is the most astonishingly proleptic, appearing to anticipate networks of acquaintances and self-presentation on social media, from the gridded arrangements of Instagram to the Facebook timeline. Mayer has referred to Memory as an “emotional science project,” which gestures to the work’s systematic structure and its implied reproducibility. The self-imposed constraints of Memory served as inspiration for her future projects, including the 1975 work Studying Hunger, for which she kept a journal for 30 days, as recommended by her psychiatrist (who wrote the introduction for the 1975 publication of Memory), and Midwinter Day (1982). The latter, an epic prose poem written in its entirety on December 22, 1978, details Mayer’s experience as a mother and an artist over the course of a single day. By stripping motherhood of its sentiment and mythology, she directly influenced the work of contemporary poets such as Laynie Browne and Hoa Nguyen, as Andrew Epstein notes in a chapter on the “maternal everyday” in his 2016 study Attention Equals Life.
Despite critical acclaim, popular affection, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Mayer lives a modest lifestyle in upstate New York, where she moved in 1998 with the poet Phillip Good, after a stroke she had four years earlier. Last year in a podcast about her financial life in The Organist, she described herself as “still poor.” “What I hate is capitalism,” she said. “I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done, but I figured let’s do it.” To contextualize her present challenges with the freewheeling radicalism depicted in Memory is to come to terms with the discrepancy between institutionally proclaimed support of creative life and the material shortcomings of this support.
This discrepancy is only one of the gaps made evident in Memory, a work that most strikingly points to the difference between living and documenting. Thumbing through the hardbound volume, I found myself nostalgic for the bohemianism of a time I never experienced. What becomes clear throughout Memory’s pages is Mayer’s ability to discern moments of grace within the quotidian and her scrupulous attention to the world around her. “Nothing outside can cure you, but everything’s outside.” In the book we see several images of Mayer gripping her camera as she photographs herself in various mirrors, as if steadying herself against the flood of her memories. Her gaze is stolid, strong. Like her influence, it will be immutable for years to come.


thenation--2020-07-22--George Goehl Talks Deep Canvassing During the Age of Covid

For the past several years , People ’ s Action has worked on innovative campaigns to engage residents in conservative , often rural , parts of the United States about progressive social change .
Their canvassers and activists have worked on issues ranging from health care access to environmental pollution .
In talking with residents of regions of the country such as rural North Carolina—areas too often ignored by other progressive groups—they have helped to reshape local political conversations .
Now , with a method they term “ deep canvassing , ” they are seeking , in the run-up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ national discourse on race relations and immigration .
George Goehl , director of People ’ s Action , talked about this with The Nation earlier this month asha bramsky : Over the last few years , People ’ s Action has invested a lot of time and energy into a strategy called “ deep canvassing.
” In particular , you ’ ve stressed that this is a way to help change the national conversation around race and around immigration , and to help strengthen progressive alliances by talking with people who skew to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same time instinctually trend rightward on race and on immigration .
Can you explain what deep canvassing involves and why you think it ’ s important in this political moment ?
eorge oehl : Deep canvassing is really inviting somebody into a conversation on an issue where they ’ re having conflicted feelings .
And key to it is a form of listening that is not judgmental , and is actually grounded in curiosity , and listening to learn versus to confirm .
Something magical happens in the space of a deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and people are able to go deeper into issues the two people don ’ t agree on , in ways that result in different outcomes .
Fifteen minutes is the average [ length of each ] conversation .
A lot of that other stuff , what we call verbal leafleting , is less than five minutes and there ’ s very little listening .
“ Here ’ s why you need to vote for this person.
” You do your rap , there ’ s little listening .
This , there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country in this type of approach .
SA : How do you pick whose doors you knock on ?
GG : Let me go back , because it may be helpful .
As Trump was ascending , People ’ s Action started having conversations about the need for a more robust role in small-town organizing that was , from its inception , race-conscious , and would work in majority-white areas where people were struggling economically .
Soon after Trump was elected , we built some capacity and went out and had 10,000 conversations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , what they were experiencing , what they were up against .
We worked on those issues and won lots of stuff for people .
In most cases , even though these were majority-white areas , people moved into a multiracial organization context .
It was amazing and profound .
People ’ s Action started having conversations around the country about the need for a robust conversation , with a race-conscious version of where we wanted to move people ; but realizing people ’ s pain and what they were confronting .
Organizing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clean water , fracking .
We ’ ve worked on these issues and won on a lot of stuff .
We started to build relationships , having tougher conversations around race .
But we ’ d encounter people who ’ d gotten very involved , were wearing organizers ’ T-shirts , but would confide , “ Hey , I ’ m all-in , but I can ’ t get with you on immigration.
” It didn ’ t really surprise us ; the people who spearheaded the project had grown up in these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ research : 20 percent of the electorate is cross-pressured on economic and immigration issues .
Liberal on health care , minimum wage , money in politics , but regressive on immigration .
I think a lot of the future of the country depends on how this group of folks makes meaning around immigration and race .
Out of that [ idea ] is what led to us starting to experiment with deep canvassing .
We ran a first test with thousands of conversations with folks in North Carolina , Pennsylvania , and Michigan—Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we would be able to understand who ’ s this working with , who ’ s this not working with .
There were people in those states swinging back and forth and trying to make meaning of the country—a number of Obama-to-Trump counties ; and what are called BOOT Counties , Bush-Obama-Obama-Trump counties .
The three local groups [ working in the states ] were Pennsylvania Stands Up , Down Home North Carolina , and Michigan United .
A good number of canvassers were people of color , or immigrants , or children @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases definitely experienced more resistance , tougher pushback , but also in many cases more transformative conversations .
Because they weren ’ t sharing someone else ’ s but their personal story .
Many times , people at the door would say , “ You know what , I ’ ve never had this type of conversation with an immigrant ; I ’ ve never talked to an immigrant.
” In some cases , it didn ’ t go well .
In some , though , there were a lot of hugs and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states .
Someone would signal they were regressive on immigration .
The more we listened and shared , but never debated , the more people would say , ‘ You know what , I don ’ t know any immigrants ; everything I ’ ve learned about immigrants I learned about on TV.
” You ’ d watch them realize [ during the conversation ] that they didn ’ t know any immigrants .
They ’ d have an aha-moment and you ’ d watch it literally wash over their face .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Oh , there is a villain in this moment American life ; there ’ s a reason my trailer is falling apart , that I don ’ t have health care , that I have three part-time jobs .
There ’ s a villain , but it isn ’ t immigrants.
” Done right , the canvasser doesn ’ t tell people that .
The canvasser creates a space for the person to come to that realization on their own .
SA : What sorts of things happened during that realization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The most conservative white dude would go there .
We ’ d really ask two questions : Help people locate an immigration story in their life—a coworker , a neighbor—and talk about the hardest time in their life , when they really needed help .
Everybody would go there with us ; a big guy , six feet five , in camos , pickup truck out front , they ’ d end up sharing .
Every time .
It ’ s not something even the people closest to them had ever really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sauce here ; I think it ’ s the curiosity and the listening .
Listening to learn .
A radical empathy for folks .
It ’ s not about where you are at now in terms of your worldview but where you ’ re willing to go .
We have to keep room for the still-waking .
It ’ s that mindset that makes it special .
And for the person being canvassed it stands out amid the cancel-culture and the partisanship .
SA : You hired two renowned political scientists , David @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Joshua Kalla , at Yale University—both of whom had previously studied , with the New Conversations Initiative , how one-on-one interactions with people around gay marriage and transgender rights changed public attitudes over time—to study the impact of your deep canvasses .
What did they find ?
Four and a half months after the conversations , there was [ still ] a significant shift in people ’ s worldview and answers to questions around immigration .
Those numbers that are in the report are higher than [ the shift expected from ] a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a media campaign .
And at the same time , we ’ re not naive .
We know people go back to a conservative and racist surround-sound .
We know one conversation isn ’ t forever .
But how do you scale deep canvass conversations to reach way more people and places ?
And what is the additional surround-sound to make the most of this ?
Ideally , these folks come to meetings , have conversations , go through political education , access local media , social media to help create a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : This is all very labor-intensive .
Can you do this sort of organizing work in the middle of a pandemic , with all the restrictions that are in place regarding personal interactions ?
GG : We ’ ve pivoted this canvass to phones , with a whole lot of success .
We ’ re having a 15 percent contact rate—which is high in this day and age , and 85 percent of these are sharing a story of vulnerability with us .
We call folks , ask people how they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generally like , “ I ’ m fine.
” The canvasser says , “ Well , I ’ m not fine.
” Then they say , “ Well , I ’ m not fine either.
” And they open up with us because we ’ ve created for them that space .
We ’ re trying to work out how to create scale through volunteerism .
We need at least 10,000 phone callers .
As organizers , we ’ re good at a few things : building relationships and taking to action in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phones is working .
Our instinct is it ’ s in part because of Covid .
Because people feel isolated , are stuck indoors , want to connect to people .
That ’ s why phones are working .
SA : I know you ’ re operating in very conservative , often very rural , parts of the country .
And when you mentioned earlier the surround-sound of conservative , racist voices , this wasn ’ t an abstract observation , was it ?
My understanding is you ’ re really , on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minds against some very unsavory groups and ideas .
Can you talk about this ?
GG : For the next 20 to 30 years you ’ re going to have a bunch of people , mainly white people , who are going to be experiencing some level of economic decline , amidst changing racial demographics .
If we ’ re not there to help them make meaning of what ’ s happening , someone else will—Donald Trump , Republicans , proud white supremacists .
In areas we ’ re working in , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; we encounter nationalists and white supremacists .
As rough as things are amidst Trumpism , I don ’ t think we ’ ve hit bottom .
We ’ ve got a choice to get in there and do the hard work , or retreat from a lot of communities and let some of the most evil people in the country shape how people will think about the world .
We ’ re in a period of major progress , and also major backlash .
For People ’ s Action , we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transformative strategy for moving people who are conflicted on a set of issues and who are being informed by lots of evil forces , whether they be pro-corporate or racist forces .
It could be applied to so many things .
Let ’ s say in a county where there ’ s a battle over whether we move to a different kind of policing system , or how do we rethink the role of a prosecutor : Deep canvassing is the model you can move in with and have a developed , empathetic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thought about a thing like that .
It ’ ll be a powerful overlay to the organizing in the community .
You can apply it to policing , the Green New Deal , climate change , immigration , Black Lives Matter , and now we ’ re testing how to apply it to elections .
It ’ s not about browbeating , cancel-culture .
Here ’ s the thing : Nobody wants to be told they ’ re wrong .
The current model of politics is “ you ’ re wrong , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re wrong and you ’ re going to suddenly think I ’ m right.
” It doesn ’ t really work .
People are going to be by nature defensive .
SA : Given all that ’ s going on , are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future ?
GG : Here ’ s what I ’ m optimistic about .
We ’ re undergoing a cultural transformation in this country , with a growing number of people saying that much of what we were taught or not taught , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the economy , about masculinity , hasn ’ t helped us .
There ’ s a massive awakening happening , and I think it ’ s beautiful .
And it ’ s a rejection of much of what this country was founded on .
Going through that is going to be a struggle beyond belief .
I think it ’ s going to be painful as hell .
To get to the other end of that , a lot of people are going to get hurt .
Yeah , I ’ m scared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every big area of progress , people who either don ’ t benefit from that progress or simply can ’ t understand it , there will be a backlash .
I think we have to figure out how we extend these moments , like the moment for Black Lives that we ’ re in , and how to mitigate the backlash and be prepared for it .
It ’ s going to be a big part of the next years .

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For the past several years, People’s Action has worked on innovative campaigns to engage residents in conservative, often rural, parts of the United States about progressive social change. Their canvassers and activists have worked on issues ranging from health care access to environmental pollution. In talking with residents of regions of the country such as rural North Carolina—areas too often ignored by other progressive groups—they have helped to reshape local political conversations. Now, with a method they term “deep canvassing,” they are seeking, in the run-up to the November election, to impact the national discourse on race relations and immigration. George Goehl, director of People’s Action, talked about this with The Nation earlier this month
S asha A bramsky: Over the last few years, People’s Action has invested a lot of time and energy into a strategy called “deep canvassing.” In particular, you’ve stressed that this is a way to help change the national conversation around race and around immigration, and to help strengthen progressive alliances by talking with people who skew to the left on economic issues but at the same time instinctually trend rightward on race and on immigration. Can you explain what deep canvassing involves and why you think it’s important in this political moment?
G eorge G oehl: Deep canvassing is really inviting somebody into a conversation on an issue where they’re having conflicted feelings. And key to it is a form of listening that is not judgmental, and is actually grounded in curiosity, and listening to learn versus to confirm.
Something magical happens in the space of a deep canvass conversation. Some trust opens up, and people are able to go deeper into issues the two people don’t agree on, in ways that result in different outcomes. Fifteen minutes is the average [length of each] conversation. A lot of that other stuff, what we call verbal leafleting, is less than five minutes and there’s very little listening. “Here’s why you need to vote for this person.” You do your rap, there’s little listening. This, there are nuggets of what could help heal the country in this type of approach.
SA: How do you pick whose doors you knock on?
GG: Let me go back, because it may be helpful. As Trump was ascending, People’s Action started having conversations about the need for a more robust role in small-town organizing that was, from its inception, race-conscious, and would work in majority-white areas where people were struggling economically. Soon after Trump was elected, we built some capacity and went out and had 10,000 conversations with people, on their front porches, what they were experiencing, what they were up against. We worked on those issues and won lots of stuff for people. In most cases, even though these were majority-white areas, people moved into a multiracial organization context. It was amazing and profound. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
People’s Action started having conversations around the country about the need for a robust conversation, with a race-conscious version of where we wanted to move people; but realizing people’s pain and what they were confronting. Organizing on health care, opioid relief, clean water, fracking. We’ve worked on these issues and won on a lot of stuff. We started to build relationships, having tougher conversations around race. But we’d encounter people who’d gotten very involved, were wearing organizers’ T-shirts, but would confide, “Hey, I’m all-in, but I can’t get with you on immigration.” It didn’t really surprise us; the people who spearheaded the project had grown up in these communities. It lines up with the research: 20 percent of the electorate is cross-pressured on economic and immigration issues. Liberal on health care, minimum wage, money in politics, but regressive on immigration. I think a lot of the future of the country depends on how this group of folks makes meaning around immigration and race. Out of that [idea] is what led to us starting to experiment with deep canvassing. Current Issue View our current issue
We ran a first test with thousands of conversations with folks in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—Republicans, independents, and Democrats. So we would be able to understand who’s this working with, who’s this not working with.
There were people in those states swinging back and forth and trying to make meaning of the country—a number of Obama-to-Trump counties; and what are called BOOT Counties, Bush-Obama-Obama-Trump counties. The three local groups [working in the states] were Pennsylvania Stands Up, Down Home North Carolina, and Michigan United. A good number of canvassers were people of color, or immigrants, or children of immigrants. Those canvassers in some cases definitely experienced more resistance, tougher pushback, but also in many cases more transformative conversations. Because they weren’t sharing someone else’s but their personal story. Many times, people at the door would say, “You know what, I’ve never had this type of conversation with an immigrant; I’ve never talked to an immigrant.” In some cases, it didn’t go well. In some, though, there were a lot of hugs and crying. I canvassed in all three states. Someone would signal they were regressive on immigration. The more we listened and shared, but never debated, the more people would say, ‘You know what, I don’t know any immigrants; everything I’ve learned about immigrants I learned about on TV.” You’d watch them realize [during the conversation] that they didn’t know any immigrants. They’d have an aha-moment and you’d watch it literally wash over their face. They’d realize, on their own, “Oh, there is a villain in this moment American life; there’s a reason my trailer is falling apart, that I don’t have health care, that I have three part-time jobs. There’s a villain, but it isn’t immigrants.” Done right, the canvasser doesn’t tell people that. The canvasser creates a space for the person to come to that realization on their own.
SA: What sorts of things happened during that realization process?
GG: It was fascinating. The most conservative white dude would go there. We’d really ask two questions: Help people locate an immigration story in their life—a coworker, a neighbor—and talk about the hardest time in their life, when they really needed help. Everybody would go there with us; a big guy, six feet five, in camos, pickup truck out front, they’d end up sharing. Every time. It’s not something even the people closest to them had ever really asked. There’s some secret sauce here; I think it’s the curiosity and the listening. Listening to learn. A radical empathy for folks. It’s not about where you are at now in terms of your worldview but where you’re willing to go. We have to keep room for the still-waking. It’s that mindset that makes it special. And for the person being canvassed it stands out amid the cancel-culture and the partisanship.
SA: You hired two renowned political scientists, David Brookman, at UC Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla, at Yale University—both of whom had previously studied, with the New Conversations Initiative, how one-on-one interactions with people around gay marriage and transgender rights changed public attitudes over time—to study the impact of your deep canvasses. What did they find?
Four and a half months after the conversations, there was [still] a significant shift in people’s worldview and answers to questions around immigration. Those numbers that are in the report are higher than [the shift expected from] a traditional persuasion campaign, a traditional canvas, a media campaign. And at the same time, we’re not naive. We know people go back to a conservative and racist surround-sound. We know one conversation isn’t forever. But how do you scale deep canvass conversations to reach way more people and places? And what is the additional surround-sound to make the most of this? Ideally, these folks come to meetings, have conversations, go through political education, access local media, social media to help create a different media environment for people.
SA: This is all very labor-intensive. Can you do this sort of organizing work in the middle of a pandemic, with all the restrictions that are in place regarding personal interactions?
GG: We’ve pivoted this canvass to phones, with a whole lot of success. We’re having a 15 percent contact rate—which is high in this day and age, and 85 percent of these are sharing a story of vulnerability with us. We call folks, ask people how they’re doing amidst Covid. They’re generally like, “I’m fine.” The canvasser says, “Well, I’m not fine.” Then they say, “Well, I’m not fine either.” And they open up with us because we’ve created for them that space. We’re trying to work out how to create scale through volunteerism. We need at least 10,000 phone callers. As organizers, we’re good at a few things: building relationships and taking to action in the streets. But the pivot to phones is working. Our instinct is it’s in part because of Covid. Because people feel isolated, are stuck indoors, want to connect to people. That’s why phones are working.
SA: I know you’re operating in very conservative, often very rural, parts of the country. And when you mentioned earlier the surround-sound of conservative, racist voices, this wasn’t an abstract observation, was it? My understanding is you’re really, on a day-to-day basis competing for hearts and minds against some very unsavory groups and ideas. Can you talk about this?
GG: For the next 20 to 30 years you’re going to have a bunch of people, mainly white people, who are going to be experiencing some level of economic decline, amidst changing racial demographics. If we’re not there to help them make meaning of what’s happening, someone else will—Donald Trump, Republicans, proud white supremacists. In areas we’re working in, we don’t encounter other progressive groups; we encounter nationalists and white supremacists. As rough as things are amidst Trumpism, I don’t think we’ve hit bottom. We’ve got a choice to get in there and do the hard work, or retreat from a lot of communities and let some of the most evil people in the country shape how people will think about the world. We’re in a period of major progress, and also major backlash.
For People’s Action, we’ve decided deep canvassing could be a transformative strategy for moving people who are conflicted on a set of issues and who are being informed by lots of evil forces, whether they be pro-corporate or racist forces. It could be applied to so many things. Let’s say in a county where there’s a battle over whether we move to a different kind of policing system, or how do we rethink the role of a prosecutor: Deep canvassing is the model you can move in with and have a developed, empathetic conversation with folks who’ve never thought about a thing like that. It’ll be a powerful overlay to the organizing in the community. You can apply it to policing, the Green New Deal, climate change, immigration, Black Lives Matter, and now we’re testing how to apply it to elections. It’s not about browbeating, cancel-culture. Here’s the thing: Nobody wants to be told they’re wrong. The current model of politics is “you’re wrong, and I’m going to convince you you’re wrong and you’re going to suddenly think I’m right.” It doesn’t really work. People are going to be by nature defensive.
SA: Given all that’s going on, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
GG: Here’s what I’m optimistic about. We’re undergoing a cultural transformation in this country, with a growing number of people saying that much of what we were taught or not taught, about race, about gender, about the economy, about masculinity, hasn’t helped us. There’s a massive awakening happening, and I think it’s beautiful. And it’s a rejection of much of what this country was founded on. Going through that is going to be a struggle beyond belief. I think it’s going to be painful as hell. To get to the other end of that, a lot of people are going to get hurt. Yeah, I’m scared of that. Because I think for every big area of progress, people who either don’t benefit from that progress or simply can’t understand it, there will be a backlash. I think we have to figure out how we extend these moments, like the moment for Black Lives that we’re in, and how to mitigate the backlash and be prepared for it. It’s going to be a big part of the next years.