thenation--2020-12-16--Casting a Historic Vote in Georgia

Casting a Historic Vote in Georgia

On Sunday night , Deborah González began to sense the gravity of what she was about to do on Monday at noon .
She had been asked to stay at a hotel in the state capitol , along with five other of the state ’ s electors to the Electoral College who live outside Atlanta .
Security was provided— “ They did not want to take any chances , with all the protests.
” On Monday morning , they traveled from the hotel to the State Capitol Building , accompanied by an armed escort .
They entered the building from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seen .
Inside , the cavernous 19th century Neoclassical building was occupied by the 16 electors , members of the media , Democratic Party volunteers , and a group of Republican “ electors ” who assembled behind closed doors to show their support for Donald Trump—a symbolic move without consequence .
Stacey Abrams , who has seen recognition in recent weeks for her leadership during the last several years in registering and mobilizing tens of thousands of new Georgia voters , presided over the session of Democratic Party electors .
When it came @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Vice President–elect Kamala Harris , “ It was so moving , I had to fight back tears , ” she said .
“ I was so honored to vote for the first woman vice president.
” But Georgia ’ s backing a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992 wasn ’ t the only milestone passed that day .
González herself was breaking new ground , after being elected in a December 1 runoff as the district attorney for the Western Judicial Circuit .
She became the first Latina to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the first Puerto Rican woman in US history .
Time for Optimism , or More Despair ?
We Still Don ’ t Know .
She won the seat—which covers Athens-Clarke County , home of the University of Georgia ( UGA ) , and Oconee County—after prevailing in a federal voting rights lawsuit that went all the way to Georgia ’ s Supreme Court .
It was a noteworthy result in a year when the state , and the nation , witnessed an incessant series of election lawsuits , most of them spurious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year for the attorney of more than two decades , who in a 2017 special election became only the second Latina elected to the Georgia state legislature .
Her term ended a year later , after losing her bid for reelection .
When she got the call in late February from Nikema Williams , chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Georgia , asking if she would consider serving as one of the state ’ s electors , she didn ’ t know if she was going to be able to run for office @ @ @ @ @ @ @ District Attorney Ken Mauldin retired in early February , the clock started ticking .
Under the provisions of a 2018 law , a replacement chosen by Governor Brian Kemp could stay in office until the next statewide election—in this case , 2022—as long as that replacement was chosen within six months of the next election , on November 3 .
González became interested in running for such a position in part because of her experience serving on the state legislature ’ s judicial committee ; she was also a member of a criminal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Caucus of State Legislators .
So she attempted to qualify for the seat .
Secretary of State Raffensperger rejected her bid , citing the 2018 law—and effectively canceling any election to replace Mauldin , who had been in office for 20 years , come November .
So González , along with four voters , sued Kemp and Raffensperger , alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated .
“ The Georgia Constitution says district attorneys should be elected every four years , ” said Bruce Brown , who represented González .
“ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be zealously guarded against encroachment .
The right to vote will be taken away unless protected 24/7 .
“ In this case , ” he continued , “ the legislature tried to give the governor power to take away the right to vote for district attorney every four years.
” Brown , who has spent years in federal court sparring with the state over voting rights , said it “ takes a lot of guts to challenge the governor and the secretary of state .
If you ’ re going to do this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” But González prevailed , in the district court , Georgia ’ s Supreme Court , and the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit .
One of the final paragraphs in the 11th Circuit decision , citing another case , read , “ No right is more precious in a free country ’ than the right to vote.
” That decision was written by Elizabeth L. Branch , who in 2017 was appointed to the federal court by President Trump .
The path to the November 3 election included other obstacles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Raffensperger ’ s office sent 16,000 absentee ballots to voters listing the interim district attorney , a prosecutor under Mauldin , as the “ incumbent , ” giving him a potential advantage .
González asked the local board of elections to print new ballots , but her request was denied .
“ If Ms. Gonzalez has a problem with it , she can take it to court , which will keep us out of the problem , ” vice chairperson of the Board of Elections Charles Knapper said during the meeting , according @ @ @ @ @ @ @ & Black .
On Election Day , González bested her opponents , but with 48.3 percent of the vote , forcing a December 1 runoff under Georgia law .
For several days after , the Athens–Clark County Board of Elections broadcast the wrong date for the runoff .
Finally , on December 1 , she won—by 866 votes .
Now , one of her first challenges , she said , involves “ building bridges , ” particularly since Oconee voters favored her opponent .
Oconee , a county of slightly less than 40,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and conservative .
“ There ’ s a resistance to change from people who do not recognize that change is necessary , ” she said , adding that she means “ people who are racist.
” The issues she wants to focus on include “ juvenile court , and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.
” The night of her triumph , Luis A. Miranda Jr.—father of Hamilton author Lin Manuel Miranda and board chair of Latino Victory—tweeted , “ first Puerto Rican DA !
” Latino Victory is “ trying to change the dynamic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the US population but only hold 1 percent of political power at the local and state level , said president Nathalie Rayes .
Her group supported González ’ s campaign with volunteers and , using its PAC , with donations , Rayes said , adding that González “ was able to overcome ” many barriers .
On Monday at noon , González felt “ the weight of the moment ” as she and her 15 Electoral College colleagues cast their votes .
“ We knew we were making history , ” she said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in that room .
”

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On Sunday night, Deborah González began to sense the gravity of what she was about to do on Monday at noon. She had been asked to stay at a hotel in the state capitol, along with five other of the state’s electors to the Electoral College who live outside Atlanta. Security was provided—“They did not want to take any chances, with all the protests.”
On Monday morning, they traveled from the hotel to the State Capitol Building, accompanied by an armed escort. They entered the building from a side entrance, to avoid being seen. Inside, the cavernous 19th century Neoclassical building was occupied by the 16 electors, members of the media, Democratic Party volunteers, and a group of Republican “electors” who assembled behind closed doors to show their support for Donald Trump—a symbolic move without consequence.
Stacey Abrams, who has seen recognition in recent weeks for her leadership during the last several years in registering and mobilizing tens of thousands of new Georgia voters, presided over the session of Democratic Party electors. When it came time for González to cast her vote for Vice President–elect Kamala Harris, “It was so moving, I had to fight back tears,” she said. “I was so honored to vote for the first woman vice president.”
But Georgia’s backing a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992 wasn’t the only milestone passed that day. González herself was breaking new ground, after being elected in a December 1 runoff as the district attorney for the Western Judicial Circuit. She became the first Latina to hold the office in state history, and the first Puerto Rican woman in US history. The runoffs Time for Optimism, or More Despair? We Still Don’t Know. Joan Walsh
She won the seat—which covers Athens-Clarke County, home of the University of Georgia (UGA), and Oconee County—after prevailing in a federal voting rights lawsuit that went all the way to Georgia’s Supreme Court. It was a noteworthy result in a year when the state, and the nation, witnessed an incessant series of election lawsuits, most of them spurious.
It’s been quite a year for the attorney of more than two decades, who in a 2017 special election became only the second Latina elected to the Georgia state legislature. Her term ended a year later, after losing her bid for reelection. When she got the call in late February from Nikema Williams, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, asking if she would consider serving as one of the state’s electors, she didn’t know if she was going to be able to run for office again.
That’s because when District Attorney Ken Mauldin retired in early February, the clock started ticking. Under the provisions of a 2018 law, a replacement chosen by Governor Brian Kemp could stay in office until the next statewide election—in this case, 2022—as long as that replacement was chosen within six months of the next election, on November 3. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Current Issue View our current issue
González became interested in running for such a position in part because of her experience serving on the state legislature’s judicial committee; she was also a member of a criminal justice task force of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators. So she attempted to qualify for the seat. Secretary of State Raffensperger rejected her bid, citing the 2018 law—and effectively canceling any election to replace Mauldin, who had been in office for 20 years, come November. So González, along with four voters, sued Kemp and Raffensperger, alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated.
“The Georgia Constitution says district attorneys should be elected every four years,” said Bruce Brown, who represented González. “The franchise…wherever it is granted, has to be zealously guarded against encroachment. The right to vote will be taken away unless protected 24/7.
“In this case,” he continued, “the legislature tried to give the governor power to take away the right to vote for district attorney every four years.”
Brown, who has spent years in federal court sparring with the state over voting rights, said it “takes a lot of guts to challenge the governor and the secretary of state. If you’re going to do this, it’s a heavy lift.”
But González prevailed, in the district court, Georgia’s Supreme Court, and the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. One of the final paragraphs in the 11th Circuit decision, citing another case, read, “No right is more precious in a free country’ than the right to vote.” That decision was written by Elizabeth L. Branch, who in 2017 was appointed to the federal court by President Trump.
The path to the November 3 election included other obstacles, however. In early October, Raffensperger’s office sent 16,000 absentee ballots to voters listing the interim district attorney, a prosecutor under Mauldin, as the “incumbent,” giving him a potential advantage. González asked the local board of elections to print new ballots, but her request was denied. “If Ms. Gonzalez has a problem with it, she can take it to court, which will keep us out of the problem,” vice chairperson of the Board of Elections Charles Knapper said during the meeting, according to the UGA newspaper, The Red & Black.
On Election Day, González bested her opponents, but with 48.3 percent of the vote, forcing a December 1 runoff under Georgia law. For several days after, the Athens–Clarke County Board of Elections broadcast the wrong date for the runoff.
Finally, on December 1, she won—by 866 votes. Now, one of her first challenges, she said, involves “building bridges,” particularly since Oconee voters favored her opponent. Oconee, a county of slightly less than 40,000, is nearly 90 percent white, and conservative. “There’s a resistance to change from people who do not recognize that change is necessary,” she said, adding that she means “people who are racist.”
The issues she wants to focus on include “juvenile court, and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.”
The night of her triumph, Luis A. Miranda Jr.—father of Hamilton author Lin Manuel Miranda and board chair of Latino Victory—tweeted, “first Puerto Rican female DA!” Latino Victory is “trying to change the dynamic” where Latinos are 18 percent of the US population but only hold 1 percent of political power at the local and state level, said president Nathalie Rayes. Her group supported González’s campaign with volunteers and, using its PAC, with donations, Rayes said, adding that González “was able to overcome” many barriers.
On Monday at noon, González felt “the weight of the moment” as she and her 15 Electoral College colleagues cast their votes. “We knew we were making history,” she said. “There was such a reverence in that room.”


thenation--2020-12-16--Lost Voices, Muffled Histories, Piano Notes: The Poetry of Thulani Davis

Darting through these poems is an answer to a question , posed by multiple and overlapping waves of Black artists : How do you account for the dynamism at the heart of Black expression , and its centrality to the wider culture it ’ s been forced to resist ?
To phrase the question this way invokes the figure of the fighter : not the pedant or the philistine , but the militant , advancing swiftly across a field of possibilities .
As a writer , Thulani Davis has adopted an array of canny tactics .
Journalist , librettist , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , poet : these are her many roles , gathered over a lifetime of collaboration and productive flux .
In this book the identities are braided into a single ethos ; Nothing but the Music marries poetry and struggle , and presents their reciprocity as essential to style : Note the stray strand of dialogue , the wobble of “ who ” and “ what , ” the powerful unseen “ people , ” and the “ riot ” slashing through .
This is a mind which bears the imprint of revolutions in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ avant-garde ” is fiercely bolted to both its meanings .
Born in Hampton , Va. , in 1949 , Davis passed through the successive crucibles of the civil rights movement , Black Power , the New Left , feminism , and the striking bohemian ferment of San Francisco and New York from the ’ 70s on , all of which have their marks on her multifarious practice .
But the above lines , from “ Back Stage Drama ( for Miami ) , ” take place in the time before or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capture a performance , the poem unfurls within a glamorous seclusion .
“ They all like to hang out , ” read the first two lines .
“ Thinking is rather grim to them.
” But thinking hacks its way in—advances and invades—inflecting the whole scene and establishing its limits .
Angola , riots , people we ’ ve never seen : There ’ s a vivid , thrashing world beyond the comforts of this drama , the world that “ backstage ” retreats from and seeks to guard against , but for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is an excerpt from Nothing but the Music out now from Blank Forms .
These are backstage poems .
By which I mean that they issue from a place of sophisticated doubleness , slung between intimate complication and the blast of political life .
The realms clash and melt in music , and especially in Black music—which is not the subject of this book so much as its ultimate horizon .
Jazz , punk , R & B : Black performance here figures as an intricate , varied practice as well as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collapses and expands the subjectivity that consumes it .
“ Working in new / forms , stepping / outside tradition is / like taking a solo , ” opens “ For Ishmael Houston-Jones.
” Most of these pieces were directly inspired by shows—by Henry Threadgill , Cecil Taylor , Art Ensemble of Chicago , or a horn-player on the street—and are followed by a date and place .
This little annotation slits the poem open ; the world comes trickling in .
It ’ s a reminder , too , that this particular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conducted interviews while on staff at the Village Voice , such that the Black music was not just a private pleasure but planted at the front of her life , its breaking news .
1980 , 122nd Street , New York ; December 16 , 1987—the latitude and longitude of a critical sensibility .
That sensibility is pitched against a backdrop of thrilling , roaring history , full of bold questions , difficult answers , ambivalent heroes , and eclipsed hopes .
In the 1960s , Larry Neal ’ s dream for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ un-alienated expression , one aligned—reunited—with what was happening in the street .
The Black feminism that followed deepened and broadened that understanding , as it grasped at what June Jordan called the “ the intimate face of universal struggle.
” Davis ’ s work as a poet is driven by both of these impulses : that art should be fastened to politics , and politics to the texture of life .
The result is a marvelous and subtle warping of our sense of social scale .
“ this is not about romance & @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrible command performance of the facts , ” she writes in her tribute to Cecil Taylor .
These poems dilate and contract , working to convey affection and wryness , about the People in the abstract and the people on the block : The tone slides into , and out of , an elaborately mediated anguish , all the more poignant for its manifestation as an invisible set of sounds : Al Green , Teddy Pendergrass , and the nattering dominance of the radio , which lets you simply “ tune in ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a riot in LA.
” The end of “ It ’ s Time for the Rhythm Revue ” is marked by the words , “ 1992 , Brooklyn , NY ” —the year , but not the city , of the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King .
The event crash-landed into public consciousness but is refracted in this poem through the prisms of humor and denial .
The LA riots do not figure here as some flabbergasting rupture .
They are expressions of a people moving , in harmony @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place on a wrenching continuum , which includes Black song and dance .
Nothing but the Music , then , is a coy title .
It pretends to bracket the whole world only to assert the capaciousness of what Davis ’ s late husband , the jazz musician Joseph Jarman , referred to as Great Black Music .
There is nothing but the music because that music is fiercely and irrefutably expansive , a quality painfully thrust upon it by the experience of history .
Everything is the music : struggle , bafflement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these things precipitate is the music , too .
Hence the voluptuous shift in register that is a hallmark of these poems .
“ Bad Brains , a Band ” takes the legendary DC punks as a prompt to trace the outlines of gender and class .
The piece swings from “ the idea they think must scare people to death ” to the melancholy observation that “ he wanted to buy me a Bentley / because he didn ’ t want to be black.
” And it is something like this melancholy—not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aesthetic inheritance—that animates “ Mecca Flats 1907.
” This poem in many ways exemplifies the themes that flow through this collection .
The Mecca Flats was a famous apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago .
Originally built as lodgings for wealthy visitors to the 1892 World ’ s Columbian Exposition , it was converted into apartments before being razed in 1952 , over the protestations of the black people who lived there .
“ Mecca Flat Blues , ” the song by James Louis Blythe , had established the building ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ art , its salacious verses making news in its day ; Gwendolyn Brooks ’ s In the Mecca ( 1968 ) would fortify that place .
In the Mecca marked Brooks ’ s entrée into the Black Arts Movement ; the building itself served as , among other things , a microcosm for the complications of the Black Power to which she had just dedicated her work .
These legacies surge through Davis ’ s poem , too , which is stalked and amplified by lost voices , macabre images , muffled histories @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marks a physical location and the Black music that enlivens it , drawing into its forcefield a host of spiritual resources .
These propel this particular writer , and tell the story of her people , who have always lived on “ the south side of anywhere / That ’ s blue .
”

Darting through these poems is an answer to a question, posed by multiple and overlapping waves of Black artists: How do you account for the dynamism at the heart of Black expression, and its centrality to the wider culture it’s been forced to resist? To phrase the question this way invokes the figure of the fighter: not the pedant or the philistine, but the militant, advancing swiftly across a field of possibilities. As a writer, Thulani Davis has adopted an array of canny tactics. Journalist, librettist, novelist, historian, performer, memoirist, poet: these are her many roles, gathered over a lifetime of collaboration and productive flux. In this book the identities are braided into a single ethos; Nothing but the Music marries poetry and struggle, and presents their reciprocity as essential to style:
“That’s just like Angola,” Terri chimed,
“Sometimes it’s not who but what, sometimes not what but who.”
I’m trying to talk to these people about this race riot—
someone is walking on the bar
and everyone of us belongs even now to Miami,
to people we have never seen.
Note the stray strand of dialogue, the wobble of “who” and “what,” the powerful unseen “people,” and the “riot” slashing through. This is a mind which bears the imprint of revolutions in art and politics, someone for whom the “avant-garde” is fiercely bolted to both its meanings. Born in Hampton, Va., in 1949, Davis passed through the successive crucibles of the civil rights movement, Black Power, the New Left, feminism, and the striking bohemian ferment of San Francisco and New York from the ’70s on, all of which have their marks on her multifarious practice. But the above lines, from “Back Stage Drama (for Miami),” take place in the time before or after the spectacle onstage; rather than capture a performance, the poem unfurls within a glamorous seclusion. “They all like to hang out,” read the first two lines. “Thinking is rather grim to them.” But thinking hacks its way in—advances and invades—inflecting the whole scene and establishing its limits. Angola, riots, people we’ve never seen: There’s a vivid, thrashing world beyond the comforts of this drama, the world that “backstage” retreats from and seeks to guard against, but for which it must finally prepare. This is an excerpt from Nothing but the Music out now from Blank Forms.
These are backstage poems. By which I mean that they issue from a place of sophisticated doubleness, slung between intimate complication and the blast of political life. The realms clash and melt in music, and especially in Black music—which is not the subject of this book so much as its ultimate horizon. Jazz, punk, R&B: Black performance here figures as an intricate, varied practice as well as a thrumming psychic rhythm, something that both collapses and expands the subjectivity that consumes it. “Working in new / forms, stepping / outside tradition is / like taking a solo,” opens “For Ishmael Houston-Jones.” Most of these pieces were directly inspired by shows—by Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor, Art Ensemble of Chicago, or a horn-player on the street—and are followed by a date and place. This little annotation slits the poem open; the world comes trickling in. It’s a reminder, too, that this particular poet for many years composed write-ups and conducted interviews while on staff at the Village Voice, such that the Black music was not just a private pleasure but planted at the front of her life, its breaking news. 1980, 122nd Street, New York; December 16, 1987—the latitude and longitude of a critical sensibility. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
That sensibility is pitched against a backdrop of thrilling, roaring history, full of bold questions, difficult answers, ambivalent heroes, and eclipsed hopes. In the 1960s, Larry Neal’s dream for the Black Arts Movement was to produce an un-alienated expression, one aligned—reunited—with what was happening in the street. The Black feminism that followed deepened and broadened that understanding, as it grasped at what June Jordan called the “the intimate face of universal struggle.” Davis’s work as a poet is driven by both of these impulses: that art should be fastened to politics, and politics to the texture of life. The result is a marvelous and subtle warping of our sense of social scale. “this is not about romance & dream / it’s about a terrible command performance of the facts,” she writes in her tribute to Cecil Taylor. These poems dilate and contract, working to convey affection and wryness, about the People in the abstract and the people on the block:
I know there’s only minutes left
have to tune in
find out if it’s a riot in LA
or if we can still dance
to Teddy Pendergrass
& songs we hummed before
they made love stories
called “Damage”
Al Green is crying,
Aw baby, did you mean that? was the jury hung in LA?
did they acquit somebody in LA?
will we burn it down on Saturday
or dance to the Rhythm Revue
the not too distant past
when we thought we’d live on?
The tone slides into, and out of, an elaborately mediated anguish, all the more poignant for its manifestation as an invisible set of sounds: Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, and the nattering dominance of the radio, which lets you simply “tune in” to “find out if it’s a riot in LA.” The end of “It’s Time for the Rhythm Revue” is marked by the words, “1992, Brooklyn, NY”—the year, but not the city, of the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King. The event crash-landed into public consciousness but is refracted in this poem through the prisms of humor and denial. The LA riots do not figure here as some flabbergasting rupture. They are expressions of a people moving, in harmony and under fire: They take their place on a wrenching continuum, which includes Black song and dance.
Nothing but the Music, then, is a coy title. It pretends to bracket the whole world only to assert the capaciousness of what Davis’s late husband, the jazz musician Joseph Jarman, referred to as Great Black Music. There is nothing but the music because that music is fiercely and irrefutably expansive, a quality painfully thrust upon it by the experience of history. Everything is the music: struggle, bafflement, war, love. The pain these things precipitate is the music, too. Hence the voluptuous shift in register that is a hallmark of these poems. “Bad Brains, a Band” takes the legendary DC punks as a prompt to trace the outlines of gender and class. The piece swings from “the idea they think must scare people to death” to the melancholy observation that “he wanted to buy me a Bentley / because he didn’t want to be black.” And it is something like this melancholy—not as a private indulgence but as an aesthetic inheritance—that animates “Mecca Flats 1907.” This poem in many ways exemplifies the themes that flow through this collection. The Mecca Flats was a famous apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Originally built as lodgings for wealthy visitors to the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition, it was converted into apartments before being razed in 1952, over the protestations of the black people who lived there. “Mecca Flat Blues,” the song by James Louis Blythe, had established the building’s place within the symbolism of Black art, its salacious verses making news in its day; Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968) would fortify that place. In the Mecca marked Brooks’s entrée into the Black Arts Movement; the building itself served as, among other things, a microcosm for the complications of the Black Power to which she had just dedicated her work. These legacies surge through Davis’s poem, too, which is stalked and amplified by lost voices, macabre images, muffled histories, and piano notes. The poem marks a physical location and the Black music that enlivens it, drawing into its forcefield a host of spiritual resources. These propel this particular writer, and tell the story of her people, who have always lived on “the south side of anywhere / That’s blue.”


thenation--2020-12-16--Talk Radio: Democrats Can’t Win if They Don’t Play

“ Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump ?
” asks the headline in The New York Times shortly after the election .
Weirdly , that article—and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election—lacked even a single mention of the roughly 1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner , no matter how remote or rural , of America .
As a 2008 Pew Research poll found , 16 percent of Americans got their general election-year information about presidential candidates from talk radio , a percentage that had held constant for eight years at that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Internet over the same period .
Talk radio gave Lindsay Graham the edge to hold his seat in South Carolina—defeating Jaime Harrison ’ s advertising—with 16 radio stations covering the Palmetto state .
And in that flood of coverage , there was not one progressive voice speaking to the white community .
Graham bet national and local talk-radio hosts would back him , and he was right , a reality that polling seems to have missed .
The takeaway ?
Radio works .
In 2000 and 2016 , Rush Limbaugh and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bush and Trump in office , along with thousands of state and local Republican candidates all across America .
Good talk show hosts know their job isn ’ t to find or interview “ good guests ” ; it ’ s to build a trust relationship with their audience , cemented over years , caller after caller , day after day .
Truly effective hosts like Limbaugh and Michael Savage talk to their listeners as if they ’ re close and trusted friends .
This is a dynamic unavailable to podcasting or television @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without live listener interaction .
And campaign advertising doesn ’ t hold a candle to its persuasive power .
Republicans know this and value the full three-hour show praising a politician far more than even dozens of one-minute paid advertisements .
The power of talk radio doesn ’ t come from the information it conveys ; believing that is the number-one mistake beginner hosts make .
At its most effective , listening to a talk host ’ s show should be like picking up the phone to talk with someone you know and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become as familiar as a childhood friend .
While Democrats spend over a billion dollars on paid advertising every two years , and several billion every four years , Republicans use this model of long-term trusting relationships to get out the vote for the GOP .
They know the truth of the old advertising saying , “ Nothing beats word-of-mouth.
” And a recent Neilson survey supports that adage when it found that 92 percent of consumers “ believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.
” In 2016 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boost he needed to put him in the White House .
The hosts loved him and promoted him relentlessly .
The same goes for George W. Bush .
And why ?
Every weekday , all across America , people get into their cars and drive to or from work listening to the radio ; as the nation ’ s largest statistics organization , Statista , notes , “ During an average week in September 2020 , radio reached 90.9 percent of all American men aged between 35 and 64 years of age.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ audience for the talk version of radio , according to the Radio Advertising Bureau , is 65.4 percent male to 34.6 percent female .
And listenership is overwhelmingly white .
On the left , Bernie Sanders stands out for how well he understands the power of talk radio .
But that ’ s rare for politicians on the left .
The ones who understand it best are Republicans—like Donald Trump , George W. Bush , Dave Brat , Scott Brown , and Newt Gingrich .
“ Wherever I went on Bernie ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there were people who ’ d shout out , ‘ Brunch With Bernie ’ or otherwise reference hearing him on your show , ” Representative Ro Khanna , cochair of Bernie ’ s 2020 campaign , told me on my program during the 2020 presidential primary .
“ Literally everywhere we went.
” In 2014 , the second-most-powerful person in the House of Representatives was majority leader Eric Cantor , representing Virginia ’ s seventh district .
Dave Brat was an obscure college teacher .
Cantor spent over $ 5 million to ensure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 200,000 .
Cantor ’ s campaign was managed by experienced GOP professionals who ’ d made him one of the most powerful politicians in America ; Brat ’ s was managed by a 23-year-old political neophyte .
Brat had the support of both national and local Virginia talk show hosts ; Cantor lost them when the Tea Party threw in with Brat .
And the Tea Party and conservative talk radio were so tied-at-the-hip that Politico ’ s investigation that year into their coordinated messages and shared funding sources was titled “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few months later Hillary Clinton acknowledged the power of talk radio to fuel grassroots populism , noting with one New Hampshire example that Republicans “ would rather threaten the livelihoods of those 164,000 jobs than stand up to the tea party and talk radio.
” Cantor was the first House majority leader to lose a primary election since the position was created in 1899 , and it wasn ’ t even close : Brat beat the incumbent by a 12-point margin .
Meanwhile , the reason Obamacare doesn ’ t have a public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 1 million-plus that Joe Lieberman took from the insurance industry ; if Scott Brown hadn ’ t taken Ted Kennedy ’ s seat in the Senate , Lieberman ’ s threat would have become inconsequential .
And talk radio helped put Scott Brown in the US Senate , with 18 right-wing talk stations across Massachusetts—and not a single progressive station in his state .
Politico noted , “ During Scott Brown ’ s underdog campaign for Senate in a 2010 special election , his aides noticed clusters of donations totaling $ 15,000- @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the other side of the country at odd times of day.
” Conservative hosts were promoting him coast to coast , long after the East Coast had gone to bed .
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades .
In 1994 , when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives , he understood the power of talk radio .
“ For the first 100 days of the congressional session , ” writes Randy Bobbit in his book Us Against Them , “ talk radio hosts broadcast live @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk radio throng outgrew the working spaces available , Gingrich allowed some hosts to work in the extra space in his office.
” George W. Bush repeatedly invited talk-radio hosts to broadcast from the White House ; Trump has continued this Republican tradition .
And when Mitch McConnell was thinking about letting the Senate consider a minor “ red flag ” gun control law , he first ran it by the most influential talk-radio host in Kentucky .
Small wonder McConnell steamrolled Amy McGrath .
Combine this with right-wing billionaires ’ funding of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ steady source of research and preformed opinion for conservative talkers—and you have a potent combination to influence local elections , something totally lacking on the Democratic side .
There is literally no American population center of even minimal consequence without right-wing talk radio , and most cities have multiple right-wing talk stations .
Even worse , entirely below Democrats ’ radar , conservative Spanish-language programming is exploding across Texas and Florida , where Trump picked up breathtaking Hispanic margins in 2020 .
If Republicans had to lease just the English-language conservative airtime nationwide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 5 billion a year ; instead , they get it free , subsidized by advertising , giant right-leaning radio station monopolies , and , as documented by Politico , right-wing billionaires and their foundations .
Progressives , on the other hand , have large stations in a handful of cities , but across the entirety of most red and swing states , the only way to hear progressive talk radio is with a SiriusXM satellite account .
If Democrats want to effectively counter the relentless spread of hard-right ideology in America , talk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strategy—but the good news is , there are a number of ways to get there : • Put together a “ talk-radio task force ” to create a national progressive talk-radio strategy .
And forget about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine or the Personal Attack Rule ; they ’ re long gone .
While President Ronald Reagan stopped enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine , it was taken off the books altogether by President Barack Obama .
Government should not be dictating content ; this is on us to make progressive talk radio work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advertising sponsorship networks of progressive companies as enthusiastic about Democrats as the multimillionaire My Pillow guy , Mike Lindell , is about the GOP .
• Help newbie hosts learn how to do great , high-impact talk radio .
Talkers magazine has an annual conference , and a monthly publication .
A decade ago , I wrote a piece on how to do compelling talk radio and recently reprised it for podcasters .
• Pass legislation to bring back radio and TV station ownership caps that were initially scaled back by a directive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the 1996 Telecommunications Act that mandated a series of death-by-a-thousand-cuts FCC rule changes .
( When I started in radio in 1967 in Lansing , Mich. , every station in town was locally and independently owned ; today there ’ s only one .
This is bad for local communities , the economy , and our political discourse . )
• Expand legislative support and FCC rules to promote low-power FM ( which the big stations and networks hate and lobby against ) , so local entrepreneurs can jump-start radio stations without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars .
These stations often act as springboards to ownership or management of larger or multiple stations , as has happened with progressive radio here in Portland , Ore. ; our local LPFM progressive station has recently partnered with a second station across the Columbia River in Vancouver , Wash. , increasing their reach and helping turn Vancouver blue .
• Show up on progressive talk radio wherever and whenever possible ; take the medium seriously .
DNC Chair Tom Perez and Representatives Ro Khanna , Pramila Jayapal , and Mark Pocan regularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s questions like Bernie did all those years ago ; Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden drop by with regular legislative updates .
• Build a “ farm team ” from the ground up : Every Democratic politician should take responsibility for helping create progressive talk radio in their own district or state ; assign a staffer to the radio beat and show up on those stations when they go on the air .
Local hosts are a vital part of the talk-radio ecosystem that Republicans have nurtured for decades ; today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ farm team ” of hundreds of up-and-coming conservative talkers .
Democrats should be supporting and/or building the same—in both English and Spanish .
• Encourage the wealthiest Democratic donors to consider buying a radio network ; there are three large ones ( with 400+ stations ) and dozens of smaller ones ( with 25+ stations ) around the country , and there ’ s always something for sale .
When iHeartRadio ( formerly Clear Channel ) —which reaches every nook and cranny of America with over 850 stations in 153 markets—went up for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1 billion , I wrote an open letter to Tom Steyer encouraging him to become a media mogul .
It was apparently out of his reach , but may not be for others .
Radio engages , persuades , and informs—and , when done right , builds trust .
And the first rule of politics is that trust wins elections .
In politics , just a few points usually decides winners and losers—and talk radio has reliably delivered that incremental edge to the GOP for three decades .
Democrats must get into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ goes , “ You can ’ t win if you don ’ t play .
”

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“Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump?” asks the headline in The New York Times shortly after the election. Weirdly, that article—and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election—lacked even a single mention of the roughly 1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner, no matter how remote or rural, of America.
As a 2008 Pew Research poll found, 16 percent of Americans got their general election-year information about presidential candidates from talk radio, a percentage that had held constant for eight years at that point, despite the explosive growth of the Internet over the same period. Looking for last-minute holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your list.
Talk radio gave Lindsay Graham the edge to hold his seat in South Carolina—defeating Jaime Harrison’s advertising—with 16 radio stations covering the Palmetto state. And in that flood of coverage, there was not one progressive voice speaking to the white community. Graham bet national and local talk-radio hosts would back him, and he was right, a reality that polling seems to have missed.
The takeaway? Radio works. In 2000 and 2016, Rush Limbaugh and his national and local right-wing colleagues helped put Bush and Trump in office, along with thousands of state and local Republican candidates all across America. Talk Radio Can Mike Huckabee Reinvent Conservative Talk Radio? Ben Adler
How Talk Radio Works
Good talk show hosts know their job isn’t to find or interview “good guests”; it’s to build a trust relationship with their audience, cemented over years, caller after caller, day after day. Truly effective hosts like Limbaugh and Michael Savage talk to their listeners as if they’re close and trusted friends.
This is a dynamic unavailable to podcasting or television, as it is impossible to replicate without live listener interaction. And campaign advertising doesn’t hold a candle to its persuasive power. Republicans know this and value the full three-hour show praising a politician far more than even dozens of one-minute paid advertisements.
The power of talk radio doesn’t come from the information it conveys; believing that is the number-one mistake beginner hosts make. At its most effective, listening to a talk host’s show should be like picking up the phone to talk with someone you know and care about, someone who’s become as familiar as a childhood friend.
While Democrats spend over a billion dollars on paid advertising every two years, and several billion every four years, Republicans use this model of long-term trusting relationships to get out the vote for the GOP. They know the truth of the old advertising saying, “Nothing beats word-of-mouth.” And a recent Neilson survey supports that adage when it found that 92 percent of consumers “believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.” 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
In 2016, right-wing talk radio gave Donald Trump the boost he needed to put him in the White House. The hosts loved him and promoted him relentlessly. The same goes for George W. Bush. And why? Every weekday, all across America, people get into their cars and drive to or from work listening to the radio; as the nation’s largest statistics organization, Statista, notes, “During an average week in September 2020, radio reached 90.9 percent of all American men aged between 35 and 64 years of age.” It also reaches women, but the audience for the talk version of radio, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, is 65.4 percent male to 34.6 percent female. And listenership is overwhelmingly white.
Some Politicians Understand its Power
On the left, Bernie Sanders stands out for how well he understands the power of talk radio. But that’s rare for politicians on the left. The ones who understand it best are Republicans—like Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Dave Brat, Scott Brown, and Newt Gingrich. “Wherever I went on Bernie’s behalf, everywhere in the country, there were people who’d shout out, ‘Brunch With Bernie’ or otherwise reference hearing him on your show,” Representative Ro Khanna, cochair of Bernie’s 2020 campaign, told me on my program during the 2020 presidential primary. “Literally everywhere we went.”
In 2014, the second-most-powerful person in the House of Representatives was majority leader Eric Cantor, representing Virginia’s seventh district. Dave Brat was an obscure college teacher. Cantor spent over $5 million to ensure his primary reelection; Brat spent only $200,000. Cantor’s campaign was managed by experienced GOP professionals who’d made him one of the most powerful politicians in America; Brat’s was managed by a 23-year-old political neophyte.
Brat had the support of both national and local Virginia talk show hosts; Cantor lost them when the Tea Party threw in with Brat. And the Tea Party and conservative talk radio were so tied-at-the-hip that Politico’s investigation that year into their coordinated messages and shared funding sources was titled “The Tea Party Radio Network.”
A few months later Hillary Clinton acknowledged the power of talk radio to fuel grassroots populism, noting with one New Hampshire example that Republicans “would rather threaten the livelihoods of those 164,000 jobs than stand up to the tea party and talk radio.”
Cantor was the first House majority leader to lose a primary election since the position was created in 1899, and it wasn’t even close: Brat beat the incumbent by a 12-point margin.
Meanwhile, the reason Obamacare doesn’t have a public option provision wasn’t just the $1 million-plus that Joe Lieberman took from the insurance industry; if Scott Brown hadn’t taken Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate, Lieberman’s threat would have become inconsequential. Current Issue View our current issue
And talk radio helped put Scott Brown in the US Senate, with 18 right-wing talk stations across Massachusetts—and not a single progressive station in his state. Politico noted, “During Scott Brown’s underdog campaign for Senate in a 2010 special election, his aides noticed clusters of donations totaling $15,000-$20,000 coming in from communities on the other side of the country at odd times of day.” Conservative hosts were promoting him coast to coast, long after the East Coast had gone to bed.
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades. In 1994, when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives, he understood the power of talk radio. “For the first 100 days of the congressional session,” writes Randy Bobbit in his book Us Against Them, “talk radio hosts broadcast live from the capitol building…. When the talk radio throng outgrew the working spaces available, Gingrich allowed some hosts to work in the extra space in his office.” George W. Bush repeatedly invited talk-radio hosts to broadcast from the White House; Trump has continued this Republican tradition. And when Mitch McConnell was thinking about letting the Senate consider a minor “red flag” gun control law, he first ran it by the most influential talk-radio host in Kentucky. Small wonder McConnell steamrolled Amy McGrath.
Combine this with right-wing billionaires’ funding of conservative state–based think tanks across the nation—a steady source of research and preformed opinion for conservative talkers—and you have a potent combination to influence local elections, something totally lacking on the Democratic side. There is literally no American population center of even minimal consequence without right-wing talk radio, and most cities have multiple right-wing talk stations.
Even worse, entirely below Democrats’ radar, conservative Spanish-language programming is exploding across Texas and Florida, where Trump picked up breathtaking Hispanic margins in 2020.
If Republicans had to lease just the English-language conservative airtime nationwide, it would cost them over $5 billion a year; instead, they get it free, subsidized by advertising, giant right-leaning radio station monopolies, and, as documented by Politico, right-wing billionaires and their foundations.
Progressives, on the other hand, have large stations in a handful of cities, but across the entirety of most red and swing states, the only way to hear progressive talk radio is with a SiriusXM satellite account.
It’s Past Time to Act
If Democrats want to effectively counter the relentless spread of hard-right ideology in America, talk radio has to be part of that strategy—but the good news is, there are a number of ways to get there:
Put together a “talk-radio task force” to create a national progressive talk-radio strategy. And forget about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine or the Personal Attack Rule; they’re long gone. While President Ronald Reagan stopped enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine, it was taken off the books altogether by President Barack Obama. Government should not be dictating content; this is on us to make progressive talk radio work in the marketplace.
Build paid advertising sponsorship networks of progressive companies as enthusiastic about Democrats as the multimillionaire My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell, is about the GOP.
Help newbie hosts learn how to do great, high-impact talk radio. Talkers magazine has an annual conference, and a monthly publication. A decade ago, I wrote a piece on how to do compelling talk radio and recently reprised it for podcasters.
Pass legislation to bring back radio and TV station ownership caps that were initially scaled back by a directive to the FCC from Reagan in 1986 and the 1996 Telecommunications Act that mandated a series of death-by-a-thousand-cuts FCC rule changes. (When I started in radio in 1967 in Lansing, Mich., every station in town was locally and independently owned; today there’s only one. This is bad for local communities, the economy, and our political discourse.)
Expand legislative support and FCC rules to promote low-power FM (which the big stations and networks hate and lobby against), so local entrepreneurs can jump-start radio stations without having to raise or borrow millions of dollars. These stations often act as springboards to ownership or management of larger or multiple stations, as has happened with progressive radio here in Portland, Ore.; our local LPFM progressive station has recently partnered with a second station across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Wash., increasing their reach and helping turn Vancouver blue.
Show up on progressive talk radio wherever and whenever possible; take the medium seriously. DNC Chair Tom Perez and Representatives Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and Mark Pocan regularly drop into my show to take listener’s questions like Bernie did all those years ago; Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden drop by with regular legislative updates.
Build a “farm team” from the ground up: Every Democratic politician should take responsibility for helping create progressive talk radio in their own district or state; assign a staffer to the radio beat and show up on those stations when they go on the air. Local hosts are a vital part of the talk-radio ecosystem that Republicans have nurtured for decades; today, conservative talk radio has a “farm team” of hundreds of up-and-coming conservative talkers. Democrats should be supporting and/or building the same—in both English and Spanish.
Encourage the wealthiest Democratic donors to consider buying a radio network; there are three large ones (with 400+ stations) and dozens of smaller ones (with 25+ stations) around the country, and there’s always something for sale. When iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel)—which reaches every nook and cranny of America with over 850 stations in 153 markets—went up for sale last year at just over $1 billion, I wrote an open letter to Tom Steyer encouraging him to become a media mogul. It was apparently out of his reach, but may not be for others.
Radio engages, persuades, and informs—and, when done right, builds trust. And the first rule of politics is that trust wins elections. In politics, just a few points usually decides winners and losers—and talk radio has reliably delivered that incremental edge to the GOP for three decades. Democrats must get into the talk-radio game. As the old saying goes, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”


thenation--2020-12-16--The Most Vital Transition Is Ours

The Most Vital Transition Is Ours

nn rbor , ich.—We ’ re at a historical pause far deeper than the interregnum between Trump and Biden .
Amid planetary warming , the pandemic has forced us to slow down if not to stop in our tracks .
Locked in , I read a lot .
So when JoAnn Wypijewski , author of a terrific new book about gender , sex , and silences , What We Don ’ t Talk About When We Talk About # MeToo , asked for a dispatch on the pandemic and Michigan from my experience this year , it was books I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about pandemics then .
At the end of the 1790s , Charles Brockden Brown wrote Arthur Mervyn ; Or , Memoirs of the Year 1793 .
It tells the tale of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the context of merchant capitalism .
While the “ founding fathers ” evacuated the diseased capital city , Absalom Jones and Richard Allen , formerly enslaved men , nursed the sick and buried the dead .
They were “ essential workers ” of the day , the “ heroes.
” From their deeds the AME @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that resulted from that year , unless you accept the installation of the Cult of Reason and the revolutionary calendar in France .
Otherwise in the USA that year , the Fugitive Slave Act made it a crime to help a slave escape to freedom , and cotton mill owners found the small hands of compliant children to be profitable resources .
Slave labor and child labor went together as a new mode of production , industrial capitalism , spun bonds of global servitude .
What I Learned Moving Cross-Country Twice in 4 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What Shall We Birth ?
Good Times and End Times on 26th and Folsom More in this series On Michigan—so much in the news , so divorced from history—I asked a friend ( he ’ s in his 80s ) what I should read .
With the libraries closed , he went to his garage and picked a couple of volumes .
The first , Michigan : A Guide to the Wolverine State , was compiled by workers of the Writers ’ Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression .
These @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says , were “ forgotten men—slightly frayed and sometimes hungry.
” They had pencil stubs and wastepaper to record what they learned .
“ Thinly clothed and with belts pulled in , ” they were without cars and “ thumbed their way to their rendezvous with their source materials.
” What is a Michigander ?
The worker/writers hitchhiking and writing with pencil stubs in the mid-1930s couldn ’ t really tell .
Michigan consists of two peninsulas amid the Great Lakes and is without uniform statewide geographic characteristics .
If the WPA guide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ below , it was bold in another radical sense , its materialist periodization of history .
This matters for us today .
The land was taken , stolen , over a cask of rum .
“ The dignity of the savage , ” write these frayed , forgotten men , “ was shaken by the white man ’ s most potent bargaining asset ” —booze—and “ the rape of the Michigan forests was on.
” The joists and rafters , the posts and beams of the big Midwest cities were composed of Michigan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vast fortunes .
Meanwhile , wood lodged deep in the cultural consciousness , evoked by the Mackinaw plaid shirt and the smell of a fireplace .
The economy based on wood went , and the state ’ s next economy “ for contribution , exploitation , and , perhaps , error was in its minerals.
” I like that choice of words , “ perhaps , error.
” The material basis of capitalist dynamics , or its human and ecological catastrophes called “ investment/development , ” was first in the fur trade , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , fourth in automobiles .
We can see aspects of these different property regimes stretching from the communal life of indigenous folk in the 17th century to the lumber camps for the expropriation of the forests of the 19th century to the boarding houses of remote mining towns to the massive mechanics of the auto assembly line in Dearborn , River Rouge , Detroit in the 20th century .
The working-class composition in each of these periods was different as far as the work was concerned ( trappers , lumberjacks , hard rock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was also different as far as its reproduction was concerned : In the 17th century bands of indigenous Ojibway and Potawatomi ; in the 18th century colonial settlers from New York and New England ; migrants from Scandinavia , Ireland , and southern and Slavic Europe in the 19th century ; African Americans in the Great Migration from the South in the 20th .
Just as one period was replaced rather than destroyed by another , so it was with the composition of the Michiganders .
After these constellations of the labor market @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and ideas may persist .
What ’ s left over is Hemingway ’ s subject .
My friend ’ s second recommendation was Ernest Hemingway ’ s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories .
During the summers of his first 20 years ( 1899–1920 ) , this son of a Chicago doctor vacationed in Michigan ’ s north woods .
His Nick Adams stories , published in 1938 , tell about it .
These coming-of-age tales were part of my own adolescent reading back in the 1950s .
One of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I thought , taught me about sex , though 66 years later the stories are a testament to growing up with the privileges and silences of a white man during successive recompositions of capitalist relations .
Prison , the hobo jungle , the woods , the prize ring , are the locations where lost , wandering , traumatized people meet in transition times .
In “ The Light of the World , ” a couple of guys thrown out of a bar go down to the train station waiting room , “ five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in , and six white men and four Indians.
” Two of the women argue about who slept with the champion African American boxer Jack Johnson .
“ The Doctor and the Doctor ’ s Wife ” contrasts views on private property of white man and Ojibway : Nick Adams learns a way of love , and why not to kill a rival , from an Ojibway woman .
His neighbors called her “ skunk.
” Hemingway ’ s style works by what the characters don ’ t talk about .
The woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She breaks his heart .
Suddenly , the famous declarative reticence of the prose bursts with seeds of possibility .
In the last story , “ Fathers and Sons , ” he writes : Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs , flat belly , hard little breasts , well holding arms , quick searching tongue , the flat eyes , the good taste of mouth , then uncomfortably , tightly , sweetly , moistly , lovely , tightly , achingly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , never-to-endingly , suddenly ended , the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight , only it was daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly .
So that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not kill the sweetgrass smell , the smoke smell and that other like a fresh cased marten skin .
The cascade of adverbs falls into a disappearing world .
The tragedy of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in the lazy slang of the present , that it was not sustainable , not transparent , not resilient .
But pay attention to what he says .
Skunk , marten , beaver , wolverine : These are creatures from that first period of Michigan history , that early phase .
Even now , they ’ re not quite finished off .
Anishinabekwe botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the fragrance of sweetgrass in her scientific and spiritual book , Braiding Sweetgrass : Yes , that would be the commons .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , not ravage yet again in the sequence of error : That is what Hemingway ’ s love-making was trying to get at .
Talk about “ what we don ’ t talk about ” !
Hemingway had a geological reference for orgasm , “ the earth moves.
” Actually , he violates the known laws of physics when he writes , “ time having stopped and he felt the earth move… ” You find that in For Whom the Bell Tolls , his novel of “ premature anti-Fascism , ” as he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insecurity I learned from the mystery of such phrases and later learned to mock them .
As yet another catastrophe looms , a new era is laboring to birth some world that might avert it .
This is the vital interregnum .
A couple musty treasures from a friend ’ s garage spark remembrance in the flat Zoom time of pandemic .
What new composition of our “ we ” can make the earth move ?
We start by talking it .
The soulful descendants of Richard Allen , Absalom Jones , Prudence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with belts pulled in , ” have something to say .
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 .

This article appears in the January 25/February 1, 2021 issue.
A nn A rbor, M ich.—We’re at a historical pause far deeper than the interregnum between Trump and Biden. Amid planetary warming, the pandemic has forced us to slow down if not to stop in our tracks.
Locked in, I read a lot. So when JoAnn Wypijewski, author of a terrific new book about gender, sex, and silences, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo, asked for a dispatch on the pandemic and Michigan from my experience this year, it was books I had to write about.
First, about pandemics then.
At the end of the 1790s, Charles Brockden Brown wrote Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. It tells the tale of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the context of merchant capitalism. While the “founding fathers” evacuated the diseased capital city, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, formerly enslaved men, nursed the sick and buried the dead. They were “essential workers” of the day, the “heroes.” From their deeds the AME church was formed, the chief good that resulted from that year, unless you accept the installation of the Cult of Reason and the revolutionary calendar in France. Otherwise in the USA that year, the Fugitive Slave Act made it a crime to help a slave escape to freedom, and cotton mill owners found the small hands of compliant children to be profitable resources. Slave labor and child labor went together as a new mode of production, industrial capitalism, spun bonds of global servitude. 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.
On Michigan—so much in the news, so divorced from history—I asked a friend (he’s in his 80s) what I should read. With the libraries closed, he went to his garage and picked a couple of volumes. The first, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, was compiled by workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. These writers, the book’s introduction says, were “forgotten men—slightly frayed and sometimes hungry.” They had pencil stubs and wastepaper to record what they learned. “Thinly clothed and with belts pulled in,” they were without cars and “thumbed their way to their rendezvous with their source materials.”
What is a Michigander? The worker/writers hitchhiking and writing with pencil stubs in the mid-1930s couldn’t really tell. Michigan consists of two peninsulas amid the Great Lakes and is without uniform statewide geographic characteristics. If the WPA guide was only lightly touched by history from below, it was bold in another radical sense, its materialist periodization of history. This matters for us today.
The land was taken, stolen, over a cask of rum. “The dignity of the savage,” write these frayed, forgotten men, “was shaken by the white man’s most potent bargaining asset”—booze—and “the rape of the Michigan forests was on.” The joists and rafters, the posts and beams of the big Midwest cities were composed of Michigan lumber, from which timber barons amassed vast fortunes. Meanwhile, wood lodged deep in the cultural consciousness, evoked by the Mackinaw plaid shirt and the smell of a fireplace. The economy based on wood went, and the state’s next economy “for contribution, exploitation, and, perhaps, error was in its minerals.” I like that choice of words, “perhaps, error.” 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Current Issue View our current issue
The material basis of capitalist dynamics, or its human and ecological catastrophes called “investment/development,” was first in the fur trade, then in timber, third in minerals, fourth in automobiles. We can see aspects of these different property regimes stretching from the communal life of indigenous folk in the 17th century to the lumber camps for the expropriation of the forests of the 19th century to the boarding houses of remote mining towns to the massive mechanics of the auto assembly line in Dearborn, River Rouge, Detroit in the 20th century.
The working-class composition in each of these periods was different as far as the work was concerned (trappers, lumberjacks, hard rock miners, auto workers). It was also different as far as its reproduction was concerned: In the 17th century bands of indigenous Ojibway and Potawatomi; in the 18th century colonial settlers from New York and New England; migrants from Scandinavia, Ireland, and southern and Slavic Europe in the 19th century; African Americans in the Great Migration from the South in the 20th. Just as one period was replaced rather than destroyed by another, so it was with the composition of the Michiganders. After these constellations of the labor market pass away, their experience as culture and ideas may persist. What’s left over is Hemingway’s subject.
My friend’s second recommendation was Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. During the summers of his first 20 years (1899–1920), this son of a Chicago doctor vacationed in Michigan’s north woods. His Nick Adams stories, published in 1938, tell about it. These coming-of-age tales were part of my own adolescent reading back in the 1950s. One of them, “Up in Michigan,” I thought, taught me about sex, though 66 years later the stories are a testament to growing up with the privileges and silences of a white man during successive recompositions of capitalist relations. Prison, the hobo jungle, the woods, the prize ring, are the locations where lost, wandering, traumatized people meet in transition times.
In “The Light of the World,” a couple of guys thrown out of a bar go down to the train station waiting room, “five whores waiting for the train to come in, and six white men and four Indians.” Two of the women argue about who slept with the champion African American boxer Jack Johnson. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” contrasts views on private property of white man and Ojibway:
“Well, Doc,” [the Ojibway hired hand] said, “that’s a nice lot of timber you’ve stolen.” “Don’t talk that way, Dick,” the doctor said. “It’s driftwood.”
Nick Adams learns a way of love, and why not to kill a rival, from an Ojibway woman. His neighbors called her “skunk.” Hemingway’s style works by what the characters don’t talk about. The woman’s name is Prudence Mitchell. She breaks his heart. Suddenly, the famous declarative reticence of the prose bursts with seeds of possibility. In the last story, “Fathers and Sons,” he writes:
Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it was daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly. So that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not kill the sweetgrass smell, the smoke smell and that other like a fresh cased marten skin.
The cascade of adverbs falls into a disappearing world. The tragedy of this intersectional intercourse was, to express it in the lazy slang of the present, that it was not sustainable, not transparent, not resilient. But pay attention to what he says.
Skunk, marten, beaver, wolverine: These are creatures from that first period of Michigan history, that early phase. Even now, they’re not quite finished off. Anishinabekwe botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the fragrance of sweetgrass in her scientific and spiritual book, Braiding Sweetgrass:
Its scientific name is Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
Yes, that would be the commons. The earth to share, with delight, not ravage yet again in the sequence of error: That is what Hemingway’s love-making was trying to get at. Talk about “what we don’t talk about”!
Hemingway had a geological reference for orgasm, “the earth moves.” Actually, he violates the known laws of physics when he writes, “time having stopped and he felt the earth move…” You find that in For Whom the Bell Tolls, his novel of “premature anti-Fascism,” as he’d later say. In adolescent insecurity I learned from the mystery of such phrases and later learned to mock them.
As yet another catastrophe looms, a new era is laboring to birth some world that might avert it. This is the vital interregnum. A couple musty treasures from a friend’s garage spark remembrance in the flat Zoom time of pandemic. What new composition of our “we” can make the earth move? We start by talking it. The soulful descendants of Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Prudence Mitchell, and those forgotten, “with belts pulled in,” have something to say.
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.