thenation--2020-06-05--How to Be an Antifascist From Your Couch

This week I started joining right-wing militias again .
It ’ s easy to find a variety of far-right “ patriot ” groups on Facebook , and most don ’ t screen their membership .
I joined as many pages as I could , and monitored them for one thing : Was anyone planning to show up armed to Black Lives Matter protests ?
I also tracked several chats on Discord , a chatting app with text and audio capabilities , focused around “ Boogaloo ” ideology—the loose , mostly white supremacist movement whose most ardent desire is to spark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” is derived from the 1984 breakdance movie sequel Breakin ’ 2 : Electric Boogaloo , and the movement is similarly focused around a sequel—a second civil war . )
My goal there was the same : find out about specific plans and record the gear people said they had .
One Discord group , for example , featured users boasting about their ARs , gunsights , SIG Sauers , and Glocks .
And if any useful information cropped up , I could get in touch with people who would pass it on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Weiss ’ s ‘ How to Fight Anti-Semitism ’ Is Just a Frustrating , Book-Length Op-Ed I use a fake Facebook account , which I ’ ve used dozens of times for this and similar purposes .
The name is false , and the profile is built out with an array of far-right groups , “ patriotic ” interests , and dog-whistle posts designed to maintain plausibility .
I ’ ve made so many accounts on so many apps over the past few years that I have to take care not to lose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kicked into high gear during research for my book on the online far right , infiltrating hate groups isn ’ t just a strange hobby or a journalistic endeavor ; it ’ s antifascism .
While the image that comes to mind when most people think about “ antifa ” is a legion of black-clad militants ready to throw punches , this kind of research is antifascist work too .
In fact , monitoring is integral to antifascist operations .
Antifa is a series of organizing tactics and an ethos , not any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encompasses a variety of ideas , antifa consists of opposing fascist groups by any means available , including , if necessary , violence .
For many antifascists , however , infiltration , monitoring , and research are their primary or sole ways of engaging in antifascism .
Fighting militant fascist groups is a large and complicated endeavor , and while aiming a fist at a Nazi ’ s face can be part of that opposition , it is only one way .
Just as other forms of social activism require a diversity of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who puts together a city budget to defund police forces , the person who attends city council meetings—so too does antifascism .
The research is unglamorous , exhausting , and involves psychologically torturous degrees of deception .
You have to expose yourself to a disgusting mass of racist bile , which takes a grinding toll on the spirit .
It also must be done carefully : Members of far-right groups can and do target activists and their families with death threats , harassment , and even violence .
But the work serves the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ escalation of far-right organizing and defending our communities from their hatred .
Antifascism online comes in a multitude of forms .
Infiltrating far-right groups can help get the details of upcoming fascist marches .
But in other instances , with false identities and nuanced understandings of the tensions between different racist groups , antifascists attempt to derail the far right by creating dissent from within .
The journalist Aaron Gell reported in Medium ’ s GEN magazine that an antifascist operation prevented a sequel to the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involving multiple fake personas and the careful stoking of conflict between paramilitary neo-Nazi groups and the more optics-oriented “ alt-light , ” antifascists culled a planned 2018 march of 1,000 far-rightists down to 20 .
Throwing punches isn ’ t the only way to protect communities : With a lot work and a little luck , you can throw fascists off their game .
Another important tool of the antifascist researcher is the dox—identifying the real people behind fascist pseudonyms .
Last month , an antifascist Twitter account posted documentation that appeared to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in South Carolina , Timothy Manning , was a key organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally .
In a 20-tweet thread , the account , Identify Dixie—a spin on Identity Dixie , a neoconfederate group that describes themselves as the “ true sons of the South ” —meticulously tied Manning to Discord and Twitter posts by “ SCNazi ” and to enthusiastic planning of the 2017 Charlottesville rally .
Online , Manning allegedly referred to “ building showers ” ( i.e.
, gas chambers ) for Jews , used images of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ power.
” Identify Dixie seems to show Manning arranging transportation and accommodation for the marchers who shouted , “ Jews will not replace us !
” in Charlottesville .
All the while , he taught children and coached the girls ’ volleyball team at Pleasant Hill Middle School in Lexington , S.C. One day after the anonymous account posted the damning documentation , the school placed Manning on administrative leave , though Manning denied having Nazi ties .
A further investigation by The State revealed other white supremacist social-media activity by Manning and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quit rather than wait for a reinstatement .
I spoke to the person behind the Identify Dixie Twitter account , who wishes to remain anonymous , about the role of research in antifascism .
“ I feel that knowledge is power .
The distance of being online has always allowed people to feel more comfortable saying and doing things they wouldn ’ t ever think about doing face to face , ” the person told me by Twitter DM .
“ I use that same anonymity to show the extremist online abusers to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kept many from being bad before and I bring that aspect back to their lives.
” The online spaces where fascists congregate are spaces where hatred is open and gleeful .
In the chats I ’ ve monitored , I ’ ve seen countless racial slurs , grisly videos of black people dying , the exchange of racist books and texts , and incitement to violence against Jews .
But when these streams of invective are tied to a face and a name and revealed to neighbors and employers , a social cost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The person behind the Identify Dixie Twitter account told me that since establishing the account in 2019 , they have unmasked three different teachers , a Florida highway patrolman , and an active-duty military officer as being part of neo-Nazi and neoconfederate groups .
Their primary sources are an archived edition of a Facebook vetting group that required would-be neoconfederates to confirm their real name and face before joining Identity Dixie ; and the massive , searchable cache of far-right Discord chats leaked to the leftist media outlet Unicorn Riot .
The rest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ search engines from Google to Bing and Yandex .
Over the course of two years , the activist has outed 30 members of Identity Dixie to their communities .
“ I ’ m a Southerner , ” they told me .
“ It ’ s why I target them mostly , and why their hate is a danger to me and those I love.
” The core of antifa is just that : protecting those you love from hatred .
For those not temperamentally inclined or physically able to hit the streets ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are ways to participate that are no less valuable or radical .
Research and monitoring take fortitude , savvy , deception , and a willingness to engage in obsessive digital scouring , but are necessary work .
This is not terrorism , as the Trump administration claims , but the prevention of terror .
And if you ’ re willing , you too can be an antifascist from your couch .

This week I started joining right-wing militias again. It’s easy to find a variety of far-right “patriot” groups on Facebook, and most don’t screen their membership. I joined as many pages as I could, and monitored them for one thing: Was anyone planning to show up armed to Black Lives Matter protests? I also tracked several chats on Discord, a chatting app with text and audio capabilities, focused around “Boogaloo” ideology—the loose, mostly white supremacist movement whose most ardent desire is to spark a race war. (“Boogaloo” is derived from the 1984 breakdance movie sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and the movement is similarly focused around a sequel—a second civil war.) My goal there was the same: find out about specific plans and record the gear people said they had. One Discord group, for example, featured users boasting about their ARs, gunsights, SIG Sauers, and Glocks. And if any useful information cropped up, I could get in touch with people who would pass it on to activists on the ground. Related Article Bari Weiss’s ‘How to Fight Anti-Semitism’ Is Just a Frustrating, Book-Length Op-Ed Talia Lavin
I use a fake Facebook account, which I’ve used dozens of times for this and similar purposes. The name is false, and the profile is built out with an array of far-right groups, “patriotic” interests, and dog-whistle posts designed to maintain plausibility. I’ve made so many accounts on so many apps over the past few years that I have to take care not to lose track of my pseudonyms. Although it kicked into high gear during research for my book on the online far right, infiltrating hate groups isn’t just a strange hobby or a journalistic endeavor; it’s antifascism.
While the image that comes to mind when most people think about “antifa” is a legion of black-clad militants ready to throw punches, this kind of research is antifascist work too. In fact, monitoring is integral to antifascist operations. Antifa is a series of organizing tactics and an ethos, not any specific organization; while any decentralized group encompasses a variety of ideas, antifa consists of opposing fascist groups by any means available, including, if necessary, violence. For many antifascists, however, infiltration, monitoring, and research are their primary or sole ways of engaging in antifascism. Fighting militant fascist groups is a large and complicated endeavor, and while aiming a fist at a Nazi’s face can be part of that opposition, it is only one way. Just as other forms of social activism require a diversity of tactics—the protester who marches, the planner who puts together a city budget to defund police forces, the person who attends city council meetings—so too does antifascism. The research is unglamorous, exhausting, and involves psychologically torturous degrees of deception. You have to expose yourself to a disgusting mass of racist bile, which takes a grinding toll on the spirit. It also must be done carefully: Members of far-right groups can and do target activists and their families with death threats, harassment, and even violence.
But the work serves the sole purpose of antifa: preventing the escalation of far-right organizing and defending our communities from their hatred.
Antifascism online comes in a multitude of forms. Infiltrating far-right groups can help get the details of upcoming fascist marches. But in other instances, with false identities and nuanced understandings of the tensions between different racist groups, antifascists attempt to derail the far right by creating dissent from within. The journalist Aaron Gell reported in Medium’s GEN magazine that an antifascist operation prevented a sequel to the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Through a scheme involving multiple fake personas and the careful stoking of conflict between paramilitary neo-Nazi groups and the more optics-oriented “alt-light,” antifascists culled a planned 2018 march of 1,000 far-rightists down to 20. Throwing punches isn’t the only way to protect communities: With a lot work and a little luck, you can throw fascists off their game. 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
Another important tool of the antifascist researcher is the dox—identifying the real people behind fascist pseudonyms. Last month, an antifascist Twitter account posted documentation that appeared to show that a middle-school social studies teacher in South Carolina, Timothy Manning, was a key organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In a 20-tweet thread, the account, Identify Dixie—a spin on Identity Dixie, a neoconfederate group that describes themselves as the “true sons of the South”—meticulously tied Manning to Discord and Twitter posts by “SCNazi” and to enthusiastic planning of the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Online, Manning allegedly referred to “building showers” (i.e., gas chambers) for Jews, used images of SS iconography, and deplored “kike power.” Identify Dixie seems to show Manning arranging transportation and accommodation for the marchers who shouted, “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. All the while, he taught children and coached the girls’ volleyball team at Pleasant Hill Middle School in Lexington, S.C. One day after the anonymous account posted the damning documentation, the school placed Manning on administrative leave, though Manning denied having Nazi ties. A further investigation by The State revealed other white supremacist social-media activity by Manning and his father. Last week, Manning quit rather than wait for a reinstatement.
I spoke to the person behind the Identify Dixie Twitter account, who wishes to remain anonymous, about the role of research in antifascism. “I feel that knowledge is power. The distance of being online has always allowed people to feel more comfortable saying and doing things they wouldn’t ever think about doing face to face,” the person told me by Twitter DM. “I use that same anonymity to show the extremist online abusers to their community. I feel community shame kept many from being bad before and I bring that aspect back to their lives.” Current Issue View our current issue
The online spaces where fascists congregate are spaces where hatred is open and gleeful. In the chats I’ve monitored, I’ve seen countless racial slurs, grisly videos of black people dying, the exchange of racist books and texts, and incitement to violence against Jews. But when these streams of invective are tied to a face and a name and revealed to neighbors and employers, a social cost is reimposed on such racist behavior.
The person behind the Identify Dixie Twitter account told me that since establishing the account in 2019, they have unmasked three different teachers, a Florida highway patrolman, and an active-duty military officer as being part of neo-Nazi and neoconfederate groups. Their primary sources are an archived edition of a Facebook vetting group that required would-be neoconfederates to confirm their real name and face before joining Identity Dixie; and the massive, searchable cache of far-right Discord chats leaked to the leftist media outlet Unicorn Riot. The rest is careful cross-referencing on social media and search engines from Google to Bing and Yandex. Over the course of two years, the activist has outed 30 members of Identity Dixie to their communities.
“I’m a Southerner,” they told me. “It’s why I target them mostly, and why their hate is a danger to me and those I love.”
The core of antifa is just that: protecting those you love from hatred. For those not temperamentally inclined or physically able to hit the streets (or to hit Nazis), there are ways to participate that are no less valuable or radical. Research and monitoring take fortitude, savvy, deception, and a willingness to engage in obsessive digital scouring, but are necessary work. This is not terrorism, as the Trump administration claims, but the prevention of terror. And if you’re willing, you too can be an antifascist from your couch.


Don’t Stop Organizing

In the summer of 1995 , when I was 18 , I started visiting Tent City , a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in Northeast Philadelphia .
About 40 families had taken up residence in tents , shacks , and other makeshift structures .
Among them were people of various races , ages , and sexual orientations , all homeless and fighting for the right to live .
Tent City was set up by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union ( KWRU ) , a grassroots organization of poor and homeless people and a chapter of the National Welfare Rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ areas of the country , homelessness in Philadelphia , a city battered by decades of deindustrialization , job loss , and cuts in affordable housing , had become endemic .
Although they were still living in what had once been the center of the Northeast industrial corridor , many in Philly , especially the residents of Kensington , had been reduced to two main sources of income : welfare and drugs .
A teenager might have stood better odds of going to jail or being shot than of graduating from Kensington High .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the area had to break the law simply to survive .
Police brutality was rampant .
Federal and municipal welfare systems were being stripped of funds that were funneled instead into the private sector .
City officials assured those of us who protested that there was simply too much need and not enough resources .
Even the local paper accused us of engaging in “ homeless hype ” —being too disruptive in our public demonstrations and acts of mutual solidarity—when the people of Kensington really needed peace and quiet , law and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , there were an estimated 27,000 homeless people in the city and 39,000 abandoned houses .
In that small Tent City lot , poor people were exposing the city ’ s claim of scarcity as a myth .
Families who moved there with close to nothing were quick to discover American abundance .
Residents shared their food stamps , while individuals , community groups , and religious congregations all made donations .
Soon , the abundance was such that hundreds of hungry families started turning out every week to be fed with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than another encampment on the margins of American life .
It was a center of political life for Philadelphia ’ s poor , as well as a strategic organizing base for sustenance and protest .
In the winter , as rats the size of cats arrived , the encampment moved to an abandoned Catholic church , a project the KWRU labeled “ the new Underground Railroad.
” Just as enslaved people once had to break the law to bust out of the system of slavery , poor and homeless people needed a growing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think about Tent City often in these pandemic days of spiraling poverty and inequality , as protesters in cities across the country question the legitimacy of a system that devalues life , especially black lives , native lives , immigrant lives , and the lives of the poor .
Unemployment is now at 41 million and so at Great Depression levels ; the shantytowns that spread across the country in the worst years of the 1930s should remind us that mass homelessness exists just on the other side of mass unemployment .
Last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on eviction began to expire and , in my childhood hometown , Milwaukee , Wis. , upward of 40,000 eviction notices are poised to be sent out .
Meanwhile , the government has blundered through a string of “ relief ” packages that have injected trillions of dollars into Wall Street while excluding millions of people from even the most basic stopgap protections .
In the midst of federal incompetence and outright abandonment , staggering numbers of Americans , children included , are desperate for support and real relief .
This society has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ syndrome : We look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit .
The wreckage of this pandemic moment is a bitter reminder of this affliction , as well as a signpost suggesting how we must emerge from this crisis as a just and more equitable nation .
With a possible depression ahead and more social unrest on the rise , isn ’ t it time to stop vindicating the wealthiest people in this country and look instead to leadership from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before Covid-19 even hit and already organizing and protesting ?
Here ’ s a story from a long-ago moment that ’ s still relevant .
Two months before his assassination in 1968 , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Chicago , to enlist the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization ( NWRO ) —the predecessor to the National Union of my day—into the Poor People ’ s Campaign .
As he walked into a conference room at a downtown Chicago YMCA , Dr. King encountered more than 30 welfare rights leaders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an exceedingly large table .
One of his advisers later noted that the women ’ s reception of the Southern civil rights leader was a “ grand piece of psychological warfare.
” Representing more than 30,000 welfare-receiving , dues-paying members , they had not come to passively listen to the famed leader .
They wanted to know his position on the recent passage of anti-welfare legislation and quickly made that clear , pelting him with questions .
Dr. King felt out of his element .
Eventually , Johnnie Tillmon , the national chairwoman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ You know , Dr. King , ” she said , “ if you don ’ t know about these questions , you should just say you don ’ t know and then we could go on with this meeting.
” To this , King replied , “ We don ’ t know anything about welfare .
We are here to learn.
” That day , King would learn much about the long struggle those women had waged for dignity in the workplace and the home .
They taught him that programs of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and that the welfare system of the mid–20th century , much like our own , was structured as a public charity that callously differentiated between the “ deserving ” and “ undeserving ” poor .
They introduced him to policy proposals that were generations ahead of their time , including a demand for a Guaranteed Adequate Annual Income , or what many now call a Universal Basic Income ( UBI ) .
Four months into the Covid-19 crisis , with this country already afloat on a sea of inequality that would have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a sea change in public opinion may be underway when it comes to what ’ s necessary and possible .
Ideas that only a few years ago would have been considered unimaginable like universal health care , guaranteed affordable housing , and debt relief are now breaking into the mainstream .
Don ’ t think , however , that such policy positions , like the idea of a UBI , have materialized on Capitol Hill and in Beltway think tanks out of thin air .
They are , at least in part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ educating , and organizing led by the poor themselves .
Those of us in the welfare rights movement always saw our work as the kindling for a wildfire of organizing by the poor and dispossessed .
Our projects of survival , like Tent City , were not just about housing and feeding people .
They were also about securing the lives of those committed to building the kind of movement necessary to transform society .
Projects organized around immediate needs also became bases of operation for policy analysis and future plans .
Such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to rally the larger society , as the ranks of the poor grew around us , to create lasting change for them .
Perhaps it should be no surprise , then , that this novel pandemic has already galvanized bold collective action on the part of the poor and the vulnerable .
For every sparsely attended “ reopen ” protest at a state Capitol by armed members of Donald Trump ’ s base , hundreds of new mutual-aid networks , ad-hoc tenant associations , and wildcat strike funds have been organized for those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meanwhile , thousands of protesters have taken over streets in cities all across the country resisting racism and inequality .
Entire communities that are out of work and losing income are taking life-saving action that is also at times , and by necessity , in contradiction to the law .
Despite recent media images of vandalism , today ’ s protest movement features countless acts that add up to projects for survival .
In April and May , millions did not pay rent , echoing that most basic of economic principles : Those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t pay .
Indeed , such rent strikes and other protests speak to an essential demand for temporary relief in the midst of a crisis of unparalleled proportions , but they also signal potential new directions for millions of people who , if offered a political home that articulates their desperate needs and demands , might , against great odds , begin to find common cause .
If this crisis is opening up new possibilities for organizing among the poor , however , the same is true for the rich .
Since mid-March @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the United States have jumped by $ 434 billion , or 15 percent .
In the CARES Act that Congress passed , legislators slipped in a tax break of $ 135 billion for 43,000 of the country ’ s wealthiest business owners .
( And , of course , you need to add this to the unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the poor to the very rich that happened via the $ 1.5 trillion Trump tax cut of 2017 . )
This pandemic has already been very profitable for a very few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ benefit from a long-term organizing campaign of the rich that has included crushing the labor movement , consolidating industry , financializing the economy , and what one historian has dubbed a decades-long “ tax strike.
” By now , of course , the story of widening inequality in this country has become a familiar one , but that doesn ’ t make it any less shocking .
In 1983 , median household wealth in the United States was $ 84,000 .
Thirty-seven years of growing inequality later , it sits at $ 82,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comparison , the total wealth of the Forbes 400 was $ 92 billion in 1982 .
Now , it ’ s $ 2.89 trillion .
Behind this staggering and rapid accumulation of wealth rests a deep and abiding belief in recent decades that the rich are the engine of the American economy and so the deepest source of societal well-being .
In this Covid-19 crisis , evidence abounds that such a faith , which emerged full-blown during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s , remains , for now , bipartisan and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its spirit exactly , managing to direct most of its money to Wall Street and hundreds of millions more to the police , while leaving millions of workers lacking paid sick leave and the uninsured , the homeless , undocumented immigrants , and many more in the lurch .
While the HEROES Act , recently passed by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives , offers improvements on this , many of which are guaranteed not to make it through the Senate , there are once again striking windfalls for the rich @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2,000 pages is funding for lobbyists , mortgage servicers , and private insurance companies .
It does nothing to prohibit the corporate mergers that have produced bigger and more powerful monopolies in other moments of crisis in the recent past .
It extends COBRA , a federal program that enables workers to temporarily keep health coverage on their own dime after their employment ends , and again directs vast sums of money to the private insurance industry , instead of expanding Medicaid and guaranteeing health care during the most devastating public health crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state and local level , politicians on both sides of the aisle have refused to touch the wealth of the rich , even as they have decried their budget shortfalls , while managing this crisis largely via the playbook of austerity and readying themselves for social unrest .
New York state , for instance , passed a budget that will cut $ 300 million from public hospitals but increase funding for the police .
Likewise , the Washington State Legislature has been lauded for the bipartisanship it demonstrated recently in putting through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have legislators chosen to tax their wealthiest residents , nor let up on policing and other forms of control .
And Washington is home to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos , at present the two richest people on the face of the earth .
Of course , the workers who are actually keeping the nation afloat will suffer the most from such cuts .
They may now be called “ essential , ” but they continue , as ever , to be treated as expendable appendages of the economy .
I recently wrote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Destroy American Society From the Top Down.
” The answer remains painfully simple : This country courts destruction as long as the rich are allowed to organize society around their lives and needs .
From my first moments working at Tent City through my 25 years of grassroots organizing , I ’ ve come to see that inverting that subtitle in a positive fashion is crucial to our survival as a nation .
Any true revival of American society depends on collective action by those most impacted by injustice and by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ follow their lead .
From the abolitionism of the pre–Civil War era to the labor movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond , people on the receiving end of injustice have done best when they didn ’ t wait to be saved but , out of necessity , took heroic action themselves .
When the Kensington Welfare Rights Union declared that we were building a “ new Underground Railroad ” in Philadelphia in the 1990s , we were doing more than just invoking a powerful chapter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slavery .
We were implicitly challenging the dominant notion of who the agents of change in our society should be .
We recognized , even then , that in the lessons Americans were taught about that history , enslaved people were often conspicuously missing in action from the story of abolition .
We saw in that Underground Railroad a way for slaves to escape the grips of the system that was oppressing them , something far larger than just a physical pathway to freedom .
We imagined it as a significant political project @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one way the poor and enslaved of another era struck the first blows against a brutal and inhumane system .
Today , there is a freedom railroad rumbling underground , all around us .
It has stops in the Amazon warehouses and the fast-food restaurants where low-wage workers are organizing for better wages and conditions ; in immigrant communities that are protecting themselves against ICE raids in the midst of stay-at-home orders ; in cities where people are winning moratoriums on water and utility shut-offs ; in housing developments and hospitals where thousands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are human rights .
You can hear it in the recent slogan— “ Stay in place , stay alive , organize , and don ’ t believe the lies ” —of the Poor People ’ s Campaign that I cochair , which has called for noncooperation with decisions to recklessly reopen states for business , putting the poor and sick most directly in harm ’ s way .
You can see it in the tens of thousands of people protesting across the country , refusing to be subdued by years of racism and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ full justice and the right for all of us , but especially repressed black lives , to survive and thrive .
In a moment from hell , there is only one meaningful way to revive American society : from the bottom up .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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In the summer of 1995, when I was 18, I started visiting Tent City, a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in Northeast Philadelphia. About 40 families had taken up residence in tents, shacks, and other makeshift structures. Among them were people of various races, ages, and sexual orientations, all homeless and fighting for the right to live.
Tent City was set up by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), a grassroots organization of poor and homeless people and a chapter of the National Welfare Rights Union. As in so many other areas of the country, homelessness in Philadelphia, a city battered by decades of deindustrialization, job loss, and cuts in affordable housing, had become endemic. Although they were still living in what had once been the center of the Northeast industrial corridor, many in Philly, especially the residents of Kensington, had been reduced to two main sources of income: welfare and drugs. A teenager might have stood better odds of going to jail or being shot than of graduating from Kensington High. More than 40 percent of the population in the area had to break the law simply to survive. Police brutality was rampant.
Federal and municipal welfare systems were being stripped of funds that were funneled instead into the private sector. City officials assured those of us who protested that there was simply too much need and not enough resources. Even the local paper accused us of engaging in “homeless hype”—being too disruptive in our public demonstrations and acts of mutual solidarity—when the people of Kensington really needed peace and quiet, law and order. At that time, however, there were an estimated 27,000 homeless people in the city and 39,000 abandoned houses.
In that small Tent City lot, poor people were exposing the city’s claim of scarcity as a myth. Families who moved there with close to nothing were quick to discover American abundance. Residents shared their food stamps, while individuals, community groups, and religious congregations all made donations. Soon, the abundance was such that hundreds of hungry families started turning out every week to be fed with the surplus food. 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
Tent City became more than another encampment on the margins of American life. It was a center of political life for Philadelphia’s poor, as well as a strategic organizing base for sustenance and protest. In the winter, as rats the size of cats arrived, the encampment moved to an abandoned Catholic church, a project the KWRU labeled “the new Underground Railroad.” Just as enslaved people once had to break the law to bust out of the system of slavery, poor and homeless people needed a growing civil disobedience movement to survive.
I think about Tent City often in these pandemic days of spiraling poverty and inequality, as protesters in cities across the country question the legitimacy of a system that devalues life, especially black lives, native lives, immigrant lives, and the lives of the poor. Unemployment is now at 41 million and so at Great Depression levels; the shantytowns that spread across the country in the worst years of the 1930s should remind us that mass homelessness exists just on the other side of mass unemployment.
Last week, for instance, Covid-19 moratoriums on eviction began to expire and, in my childhood hometown, Milwaukee, Wis., upward of 40,000 eviction notices are poised to be sent out. Meanwhile, the government has blundered through a string of “relief” packages that have injected trillions of dollars into Wall Street while excluding millions of people from even the most basic stopgap protections. In the midst of federal incompetence and outright abandonment, staggering numbers of Americans, children included, are desperate for support and real relief. Current Issue View our current issue
This society has long suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: We look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit. The wreckage of this pandemic moment is a bitter reminder of this affliction, as well as a signpost suggesting how we must emerge from this crisis as a just and more equitable nation. With a possible depression ahead and more social unrest on the rise, isn’t it time to stop vindicating the wealthiest people in this country and look instead to leadership from those who were living in a depression before Covid-19 even hit and already organizing and protesting?
The Poor Organizing the Poor
Here’s a story from a long-ago moment that’s still relevant. Two months before his assassination in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Chicago, to enlist the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)—the predecessor to the National Union of my day—into the Poor People’s Campaign. As he walked into a conference room at a downtown Chicago YMCA, Dr. King encountered more than 30 welfare rights leaders seated strategically on the other side of an exceedingly large table. One of his advisers later noted that the women’s reception of the Southern civil rights leader was a “grand piece of psychological warfare.”
Representing more than 30,000 welfare-receiving, dues-paying members, they had not come to passively listen to the famed leader. They wanted to know his position on the recent passage of anti-welfare legislation and quickly made that clear, pelting him with questions. Dr. King felt out of his element. Eventually, Johnnie Tillmon, the national chairwoman of the NWRO, stepped in. “You know, Dr. King,” she said, “if you don’t know about these questions, you should just say you don’t know and then we could go on with this meeting.”
To this, King replied, “We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.”
That day, King would learn much about the long struggle those women had waged for dignity in the workplace and the home. They taught him that programs of social uplift should be a permanent right and that the welfare system of the mid–20th century, much like our own, was structured as a public charity that callously differentiated between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. They introduced him to policy proposals that were generations ahead of their time, including a demand for a Guaranteed Adequate Annual Income, or what many now call a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Four months into the Covid-19 crisis, with this country already afloat on a sea of inequality that would have been unimaginable even to those women in 1968, a sea change in public opinion may be underway when it comes to what’s necessary and possible. Ideas that only a few years ago would have been considered unimaginable like universal health care, guaranteed affordable housing, and debt relief are now breaking into the mainstream. Don’t think, however, that such policy positions, like the idea of a UBI, have materialized on Capitol Hill and in Beltway think tanks out of thin air. They are, at least in part, the result of long-term agitating, educating, and organizing led by the poor themselves.
Those of us in the welfare rights movement always saw our work as the kindling for a wildfire of organizing by the poor and dispossessed. Our projects of survival, like Tent City, were not just about housing and feeding people. They were also about securing the lives of those committed to building the kind of movement necessary to transform society. Projects organized around immediate needs also became bases of operation for policy analysis and future plans.
Such projects, however, were beachheads meant to rally the larger society, as the ranks of the poor grew around us, to create lasting change for them. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that this novel pandemic has already galvanized bold collective action on the part of the poor and the vulnerable. For every sparsely attended “reopen” protest at a state Capitol by armed members of Donald Trump’s base, hundreds of new mutual-aid networks, ad-hoc tenant associations, and wildcat strike funds have been organized for those at the base of this society. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters have taken over streets in cities all across the country resisting racism and inequality.
Entire communities that are out of work and losing income are taking life-saving action that is also at times, and by necessity, in contradiction to the law. Despite recent media images of vandalism, today’s protest movement features countless acts that add up to projects for survival.
In April and May, millions did not pay rent, echoing that most basic of economic principles: Those who can’t pay won’t pay. Indeed, such rent strikes and other protests speak to an essential demand for temporary relief in the midst of a crisis of unparalleled proportions, but they also signal potential new directions for millions of people who, if offered a political home that articulates their desperate needs and demands, might, against great odds, begin to find common cause.
The Rich Organizing the Rich
If this crisis is opening up new possibilities for organizing among the poor, however, the same is true for the rich. Since mid-March, the fortunes of the 600-plus billionaires in the United States have jumped by $434 billion, or 15 percent. In the CARES Act that Congress passed, legislators slipped in a tax break of $135 billion for 43,000 of the country’s wealthiest business owners. (And, of course, you need to add this to the unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the poor to the very rich that happened via the $1.5 trillion Trump tax cut of 2017.)
This pandemic has already been very profitable for a very few. It should be seen as one benefit from a long-term organizing campaign of the rich that has included crushing the labor movement, consolidating industry, financializing the economy, and what one historian has dubbed a decades-long “tax strike.” By now, of course, the story of widening inequality in this country has become a familiar one, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. In 1983, median household wealth in the United States was $84,000. Thirty-seven years of growing inequality later, it sits at $82,000. Meanwhile, as a point of comparison, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 was $92 billion in 1982. Now, it’s $2.89 trillion.
Behind this staggering and rapid accumulation of wealth rests a deep and abiding belief in recent decades that the rich are the engine of the American economy and so the deepest source of societal well-being. In this Covid-19 crisis, evidence abounds that such a faith, which emerged full-blown during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, remains, for now, bipartisan and largely unshaken. The CARES Act caught its spirit exactly, managing to direct most of its money to Wall Street and hundreds of millions more to the police, while leaving millions of workers lacking paid sick leave and the uninsured, the homeless, undocumented immigrants, and many more in the lurch.
While the HEROES Act, recently passed by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, offers improvements on this, many of which are guaranteed not to make it through the Senate, there are once again striking windfalls for the rich embedded in the bill. Within its 2,000 pages is funding for lobbyists, mortgage servicers, and private insurance companies. It does nothing to prohibit the corporate mergers that have produced bigger and more powerful monopolies in other moments of crisis in the recent past. It extends COBRA, a federal program that enables workers to temporarily keep health coverage on their own dime after their employment ends, and again directs vast sums of money to the private insurance industry, instead of expanding Medicaid and guaranteeing health care during the most devastating public health crisis in a century.
Meanwhile, at the state and local level, politicians on both sides of the aisle have refused to touch the wealth of the rich, even as they have decried their budget shortfalls, while managing this crisis largely via the playbook of austerity and readying themselves for social unrest. New York state, for instance, passed a budget that will cut $300 million from public hospitals but increase funding for the police. Likewise, the Washington State Legislature has been lauded for the bipartisanship it demonstrated recently in putting through deep budget cuts. In no case have legislators chosen to tax their wealthiest residents, nor let up on policing and other forms of control. And Washington is home to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, at present the two richest people on the face of the earth.
Of course, the workers who are actually keeping the nation afloat will suffer the most from such cuts. They may now be called “essential,” but they continue, as ever, to be treated as expendable appendages of the economy.
How to Revive American Society
I recently wrote a piece with the subtitle “How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down.” The answer remains painfully simple: This country courts destruction as long as the rich are allowed to organize society around their lives and needs.
From my first moments working at Tent City through my 25 years of grassroots organizing, I’ve come to see that inverting that subtitle in a positive fashion is crucial to our survival as a nation. Any true revival of American society depends on collective action by those most impacted by injustice and by the willingness of the rest of society to follow their lead. From the abolitionism of the pre–Civil War era to the labor movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond, people on the receiving end of injustice have done best when they didn’t wait to be saved but, out of necessity, took heroic action themselves.
When the Kensington Welfare Rights Union declared that we were building a “new Underground Railroad” in Philadelphia in the 1990s, we were doing more than just invoking a powerful chapter in the history of the abolition of slavery. We were implicitly challenging the dominant notion of who the agents of change in our society should be. We recognized, even then, that in the lessons Americans were taught about that history, enslaved people were often conspicuously missing in action from the story of abolition. We saw in that Underground Railroad a way for slaves to escape the grips of the system that was oppressing them, something far larger than just a physical pathway to freedom. We imagined it as a significant political project of the past exactly because it was one way the poor and enslaved of another era struck the first blows against a brutal and inhumane system.
Today, there is a freedom railroad rumbling underground, all around us. It has stops in the Amazon warehouses and the fast-food restaurants where low-wage workers are organizing for better wages and conditions; in immigrant communities that are protecting themselves against ICE raids in the midst of stay-at-home orders; in cities where people are winning moratoriums on water and utility shut-offs; in housing developments and hospitals where thousands are insisting that housing and health care are human rights.
You can hear it in the recent slogan—“Stay in place, stay alive, organize, and don’t believe the lies”—of the Poor People’s Campaign that I cochair, which has called for noncooperation with decisions to recklessly reopen states for business, putting the poor and sick most directly in harm’s way. You can see it in the tens of thousands of people protesting across the country, refusing to be subdued by years of racism and police violence, people who are demanding full justice and the right for all of us, but especially repressed black lives, to survive and thrive.
In a moment from hell, there is only one meaningful way to revive American society: from the bottom up.


thenation--2020-06-05--The Missing Element for Police Accountability: Political Will

In the midst of a historic , nationwide uprising following the police lynching of George Floyd , and after a weekend of outsize police aggression against protests across the country , the NYPD suddenly found itself on its knees .
On Sunday , Deputy Inspector Vincent Tavalaro and several other officers were pictured taking a knee with protesters in Queens .
Elected officials across the city and state followed suit with streams of public statements and social media salvos condemning the brutality .
But the posturing and rhetoric of police and elected officials in New York stands in stark contrast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through-line that connects police brutality to the lack of political will to hold officers accountable and the elected officials who seek to avoid doing the hard things required to protect their black and brown constituents from police terror .
In the wake of George Floyd ’ s killing , a number of reforms have been put forward : The NAACP has called on Minneapolis to ban police from using the type of restraint that was used to kill Floyd ; a Colorado bill would ban choke holds and require all police to wear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ senators is pushing to end the military-to-police pipeline that has funneled military-grade equipment to departments across the country ; and politicians from the local to the national level are calling to defund or radically transform police departments .
In New York , our organization , the Working Families Party , is fighting to repeal 50-a—a law that protects police misconduct records from public view .
But none of this stands a chance if politicians continue to do what they ’ ve done for decades : issue statements about police violence but kill any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Last week alone , numerous videos went viral of outrageous actions from police officers directed at protesters in New York City .
On Friday , an officer was filmed shoving a woman so hard she fell to the ground and hit her head .
Social media reports the woman suffered a seizure as a result and required medical attention .
And on Saturday , in an action that could have had fatal consequences , two NYPD SUVs plowed into a group of protesters .
As troubling as these events are , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and over-policing are standard operating procedures for a police department whose massive budget was permitted ( by a Democratic mayor and Democrat-controlled City Council ) to surpass those of the Departments of Health , Homeless Services , Housing Preservation and Development , and Youth and Community Development .
‘ Starve the Beast ’ : A Q & A With Alex S. Vitale on Defunding the Police The inconvenient truth for kneeling NYPD officers and outraged elected officials is this : Condemning an egregious and barbaric murder somewhere else is far easier than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change in your own backyard .
When it comes to addressing police violence and accountability , city and state elected officials have not only fallen down on the job ; they ’ ve directly fed the beast of over-policing and mass incarceration , putting black and brown New Yorkers directly in harm ’ s way .
In 2019 , New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ’ s MTA decided to crack down on fare evasion , hiring 500 additional officers to patrol the subway , at a cost of $ 249 million per year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the predictable results of the surge in aggressively tracking people who avoided the $ 2.75 fare were “ reports of riders—particularly black riders—being tackled and tased over the cost of a subway ride.
” Before the uprising , 2020 brought more of the same .
January kicked off with elected officials and other bad actors leading a propaganda campaign to roll back historic bail reform legislation , which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felony charges .
The rollback , championed by both Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in jail for pretrial detention while there are few signs of the Covid-19 pandemic slowing down .
While the coronavirus tore through New York ’ s prisons , black and brown New Yorkers on the outside weren ’ t spared from the twin dragons of racist policing practices and the pandemic .
Thirty-five of the 40 people arrested in May on social distancing violations were black .
One confrontation , captured on camera , saw an officer use a stun gun to arrest a man .
The response of Mayor de Blasio , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first mayoral bid , has been particularly disappointing .
Saturday evening , he offered a defense of the officers who used their SUVs to simulate a monster truck rally by driving into a group of protesters .
De Blasio went out of his way to reach into the minds of the officers behind the wheel , essentially telling the public the officers had no choice because the potentially fatal encounter “ was created by a group of protesters blocking and surrounding a police vehicle.
” The mayor lauded the department ’ s restraint @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back this apologism for NYPD violence , but de Blasio ’ s tepid words come in stark contrast to his tweets following the horrific lynching of George Floyd .
“ This nation has devalued the lives of Black men for centuries , ” de Blasio tweeted on May 28 .
“ It has to end .
And it will only end when there are consequences for those who do wrong .
These officers need to be charged immediately.
” The mayor ’ s rhetoric is out of touch with the reality in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the New York City Police Department to fire Daniel Pantaleo for the on-camera killing of Eric Garner .
The contrast in statements and actions underscores what ’ s missing in the conversation about police accountability or the oft-dreaded talk of reform : political will .
There can be no police accountability that protects black and brown communities without it .
However , like all things , political will begins with the demands of the people .
It includes not retaining politicians like de Blasio who run on one thing and fail to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ feet to the fire when the messaging machine insists on “ accountability ” measures that do not work .
In previous years , outfitting officers with body cameras and anti-bias training used to pass as significant .
Today , we know that body cameras do not curb violent behavior by police and often double as low-quality snuff films of those killed by officers .
We know that despite sinking millions into anti-bias training , the effectiveness of those trainings is also questionable , though they are dubbed a “ best practice.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Minneapolis , but we know the best practice to curb police violence is to reduce the number of interactions people have with police .
Political will means pushing elected officials from the moment they declare intentions to run .
We need to push candidates not to take money from police unions , and to move candidates away from language centering police reform and toward language of overhaul .
There is no reason youth programs , education , mental health services , and affordable housing are consistently on the budget chopping block , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We have all the evidence we need that divesting in policing and investing in community initiatives like violence interruption programs is the way forward .
Now we need elected officials with the political will to make it happen .

This article appears in the June 29/July 6, 2020 issue.
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In the midst of a historic, nationwide uprising following the police lynching of George Floyd, and after a weekend of outsize police aggression against protests across the country, the NYPD suddenly found itself on its knees. On Sunday, Deputy Inspector Vincent Tavalaro and several other officers were pictured taking a knee with protesters in Queens. Elected officials across the city and state followed suit with streams of public statements and social media salvos condemning the brutality.
But the posturing and rhetoric of police and elected officials in New York stands in stark contrast to their actions. There is a through-line that connects police brutality to the lack of political will to hold officers accountable and the elected officials who seek to avoid doing the hard things required to protect their black and brown constituents from police terror.
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, a number of reforms have been put forward: The NAACP has called on Minneapolis to ban police from using the type of restraint that was used to kill Floyd; a Colorado bill would ban choke holds and require all police to wear body cameras; a bipartisan group of senators is pushing to end the military-to-police pipeline that has funneled military-grade equipment to departments across the country; and politicians from the local to the national level are calling to defund or radically transform police departments. In New York, our organization, the Working Families Party, is fighting to repeal 50-a—a law that protects police misconduct records from public view. But none of this stands a chance if politicians continue to do what they’ve done for decades: issue statements about police violence but kill any legislation that would threaten the status quo.
Last week alone, numerous videos went viral of outrageous actions from police officers directed at protesters in New York City. On Friday, an officer was filmed shoving a woman so hard she fell to the ground and hit her head. Social media reports the woman suffered a seizure as a result and required medical attention. And on Saturday, in an action that could have had fatal consequences, two NYPD SUVs plowed into a group of protesters. As troubling as these events are, they are not aberrations. Brutality, militarism, and over-policing are standard operating procedures for a police department whose massive budget was permitted (by a Democratic mayor and Democrat-controlled City Council) to surpass those of the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development. 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 Read Next ‘Starve the Beast’: A Q&A With Alex S. Vitale on Defunding the Police Zachary Siegel
The inconvenient truth for kneeling NYPD officers and outraged elected officials is this: Condemning an egregious and barbaric murder somewhere else is far easier than finding the political will to actually enact change in your own backyard. When it comes to addressing police violence and accountability, city and state elected officials have not only fallen down on the job; they’ve directly fed the beast of over-policing and mass incarceration, putting black and brown New Yorkers directly in harm’s way.
In 2019, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s MTA decided to crack down on fare evasion, hiring 500 additional officers to patrol the subway, at a cost of $249 million per year. As The New Republic reported, the predictable results of the surge in aggressively tracking people who avoided the $2.75 fare were “reports of riders—particularly black riders—being tackled and tased over the cost of a subway ride.”
Before the uprising, 2020 brought more of the same. January kicked off with elected officials and other bad actors leading a propaganda campaign to roll back historic bail reform legislation, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felony charges. The rollback, championed by both Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, will see more New Yorkers stuck in jail for pretrial detention while there are few signs of the Covid-19 pandemic slowing down. Current Issue View our current issue
While the coronavirus tore through New York’s prisons, black and brown New Yorkers on the outside weren’t spared from the twin dragons of racist policing practices and the pandemic. Thirty-five of the 40 people arrested in May on social distancing violations were black. One confrontation, captured on camera, saw an officer use a stun gun to arrest a man.
The response of Mayor de Blasio, who famously ran against stop-and-frisk in his first mayoral bid, has been particularly disappointing. Saturday evening, he offered a defense of the officers who used their SUVs to simulate a monster truck rally by driving into a group of protesters. De Blasio went out of his way to reach into the minds of the officers behind the wheel, essentially telling the public the officers had no choice because the potentially fatal encounter “was created by a group of protesters blocking and surrounding a police vehicle.” The mayor lauded the department’s restraint.
He has since attempted to walk back this apologism for NYPD violence, but de Blasio’s tepid words come in stark contrast to his tweets following the horrific lynching of George Floyd. “This nation has devalued the lives of Black men for centuries,” de Blasio tweeted on May 28. “It has to end. And it will only end when there are consequences for those who do wrong. These officers need to be charged immediately.”
The mayor’s rhetoric is out of touch with the reality in his own city: It took five years for the New York City Police Department to fire Daniel Pantaleo for the on-camera killing of Eric Garner.
The contrast in statements and actions underscores what’s missing in the conversation about police accountability or the oft-dreaded talk of reform: political will. There can be no police accountability that protects black and brown communities without it. However, like all things, political will begins with the demands of the people. It includes not retaining politicians like de Blasio who run on one thing and fail to deliver. It includes holding elected officials’ feet to the fire when the messaging machine insists on “accountability” measures that do not work. In previous years, outfitting officers with body cameras and anti-bias training used to pass as significant. Today, we know that body cameras do not curb violent behavior by police and often double as low-quality snuff films of those killed by officers. We know that despite sinking millions into anti-bias training, the effectiveness of those trainings is also questionable, though they are dubbed a “best practice.” All of these best practices were implemented in Minneapolis, but we know the best practice to curb police violence is to reduce the number of interactions people have with police.
Political will means pushing elected officials from the moment they declare intentions to run. We need to push candidates not to take money from police unions, and to move candidates away from language centering police reform and toward language of overhaul. There is no reason youth programs, education, mental health services, and affordable housing are consistently on the budget chopping block, while the police defend their bloated budgets. We have all the evidence we need that divesting in policing and investing in community initiatives like violence interruption programs is the way forward. Now we need elected officials with the political will to make it happen.


thenation--2020-06-08--The Twisted Legacy of Alfred Jarry’s Monsters

The 1896 premiere of Ubu Roi in Paris was a violent affair .
Alfred Jarry , the 23-year-old playwright , planted friends in the audience to pick fights and holler obscenities .
Brawls began when Père Ubu—sometimes translated as “ King Turd ” —strutted onto the stage wielding a toilet brush as his scepter .
Ubu uttered the first word , “ Merdre , ” and the crowd erupted .
The play came to a halt for 15 minutes .
One theatergoer described the night as “ five acts of shrieking and gesticulating by utterly grotesque puppets that created the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” W.B .
Yeats , who attended the premiere , wrote that Jarry ’ s absurdist debut hailed the end of one era and the beginning of another : “ After all our subtle colour…what more is possible ?
After us , the Savage God.
” Jarry may not be a household name outside France , but depending on whom you ask , he ’ s either the last Symbolist or the first modernist writer .
André Breton , the father of Surrealism , who coined the term “ black humor ” in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wrote that Jarry annihilated the difference between life and art .
A parody of Macbeth , Ubu Roi amounts to a scatological schoolboy prank staged as high art .
Today Ubu Roi is one of the most frequently produced plays not written by Shakespeare , and the shit king ’ s role is often cast with stand-ins for conservative politicians—including , in several recent essays and productions , Donald Trump .
An exhibition of Jarry ’ s work at the Morgan Library and Museum , “ Alfred Jarry : The Carnival of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ introduces an American audience to this critical bridge figure among the early 20th century avant-garde .
It ’ s the French writer ’ s first major museum exhibition , and it presents a remarkable array of his books , magazines , and prints alongside art by his friends , his acolytes , and artists he influenced , including Henri Rousseau , Paul Gauguin , Pierre Bonnard , Dora Maar , Pablo Picasso , and Joan Miró .
Jarry ’ s impact is far reaching .
’ Pataphysics : A Useless Guide , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jarry ’ s network of influence , including the impressions he left on Oulipo , punk rock , Net art , and science fiction .
However , the exhibition mostly restricts its focus to 20th century books , paintings , and works on paper .
The crux of Jarry ’ s sprawling influence is an imaginary science he named “ pataphysics , ” which combined his love of paradox , farce , and absurdity with an aesthetics derived from medieval monsters and puppet theater .
He put pataphysics forth as a tonic for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and dominated by bourgeois tastes .
The musician and theorist Paul Miller , known as DJ Spooky , writes in the exhibition ’ s catalog that Jarry represents our “ urge toward creative chaos , toward a rational irrationality.
” Over time , though , pataphysics may have turned to poison .
As the exhibition hurtles toward the 21st century , it reveals that artists have mostly failed to keep up with the strange and lawless world Jarry and his cultists imagined .
Its grotesque conduct became more real and less satirical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story of how the physical world became pataphysical is too imprecise and tangled to lay on a single figure , even one as complicated as Jarry .
Among Jarry ’ s many fascinations were monsters , marionettes , religious icons , and Épinal prints , a colorful form of 19th century mass production .
His monsters are his most fabulous works .
“ Usually the word ‘ monster ’ signifies some sort of unaccustomed harmonizing of dissonant elements , ” Jarry wrote .
“ I call ‘ monster ’ every original inexhaustible beauty.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1873 .
A precocious and insolent student , he and his schoolmates jousted with their teacher Félix-Frederic Hébert—a petty and pompous man , boring and ill-prepared for his own syllabus—and made him the subject of several lampooning plays .
Jarry expanded Hébert ’ s vulgarity and girth and transformed him into Père Ubu , who Jarry said represented “ everything in the world that is grotesque.
” Ubu would prove to be Jarry ’ s most inexhaustible monster .
Jarry was peripatetic , but after arriving in Paris at 17 , he kept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he had stuffed after they died .
At night he held court at Symbolist salons run by Stephane Mallarmé , Rachilde , and her husband , Alfred Vallette , where Jarry sang songs from his play and staged early versions with marionettes .
He adopted his character ’ s mannerisms , enunciating words one syllable at a time and adopting the royal “ we.
” On one occasion , he enticed several men to join a black-magic ritual , only to trick them into handling his feces .
Even before the play was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of young Jarry and Père Ubu .
Jarry ’ s obsessions were infectious .
He met Rousseau in 1894 before visiting Pont-Aven , where he learned to drink from Gauguin , recently returned from Tahiti .
Gauguin was on the cusp of fame , but Rousseau remained an outsider .
Jarry borrowed Gauguin ’ s tools to make woodcuts and was perhaps the only critic who took Rousseau seriously when his painting La Guerre was first exhibited in May 1894 .
The Musée d ’ Orsay lent the masterpiece to the Morgan ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alongside the only lithograph Rousseau ever made : an incredible print of La Guerre on orange paper , published as a foldout in Jarry ’ s first journal , L ’ Ymagier , which he started that year with Remy de Gourmont .
L ’ Ymagier collected medieval etchings , 20th century prints , and contemporary woodcuts by artists like Rousseau and Gauguin , illuminated by commentary .
His other books and magazines from this time , including an early play , César-Antéchrist , also weaved media that were popular at different times @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same way .
L ’ Ymagier ran for only five issues , but Jarry developed these techniques in subsequent magazines and books .
When Ubu Roi was banned after its second night , Jarry and Bonnard , inspired by popular almanacs , published a book of Ubu drawings and wisdom and created a set of marionettes to continue performing the play .
Still , Jarry ’ s influence skipped a generation .
He had a habit of isolating friends , aided by his fondness for pranks and penchant for booze .
Ubu Roi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Symbolist theater , and although he wrote often , his books made little money .
By 1900 , few of Jarry ’ s colleagues were willing to produce or publish his work , and he spent his final years dodging debts .
When he couldn ’ t afford absinthe , he drank ether instead , and he died from tuberculosis in 1907 , leaving behind a trilogy of plays featuring Ubu and his family , a collection of writings on theater , and several fantastical novels .
The most influential of which , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pataphysician , was published in 1911 and reads like both a heroic epic and a scientific treatise , giving it the quality of a fable .
It was mostly ignored outside of a few circles .
The Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire , Jarry ’ s drinking companion and one true disciple , wrote that it was the most significant book published that year ; as it happens , Apollinaire also published his own first book of poetry , illustrated by woodcuts of medieval beasts .
Picasso , a friend of Apollinaire , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Picasso memorized passages of Ubu Roi , claimed his pet owls descended from Jarry ’ s , and purchased the writer ’ s papers and Bulldog revolver after his death .
Faustroll announces the imaginary science Jarry named pataphysics , an influential French cultural export , despite the fact that it eludes definition .
In Faustroll , Jarry offers a series of vague principles : Pataphysics is the investigation of exceptions to the rule .
It deals in specifics rather than the general .
It is as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his riveting biography , Alfred Jarry : A Pataphysical Life , that with pataphysics , Jarry suggests “ theories should be valued for their originality , independently of meaning or efficacy.
” Apollinaire brought pataphysics to Dada in the 1920s ( Tristan Tzara owned a rare edition of Faustroll ) and then to Surrealism , in which artists were inspired by Jarry ’ s exploration of paradox .
Rachilde , the author of Monsieur Vénus and once Jarry ’ s close friend , called him “ the precursor of all the buffoons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Several such buffoons , including Miró and Max Ernst , were early members of the Collège de ’ Pataphysique , founded in 1948 , which introduced Jarry to artists and writers like Marcel Duchamp , Georges Perec , Umberto Eco , and Italo Calvino .
Jarry ’ s ideas inspired poststructuralist philosophers , especially Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard .
Gilles Deleuze wrote that pataphysics “ opened the way to phenomenology ” and that Jarry was “ an unrecognized precursor to Heidegger.
” Pataphysics grew out of Jarry ’ s studies under Henri @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Friedrich Nietzsche .
Though Faustroll described Jarry ’ s “ science of imaginary solutions , ” he considered Ubu the first pataphysician .
Like a freakish trickster figure , Ubu is a bumbling superman who ruled by his id and overturned everything stable .
Despite Jarry ’ s intention to give the world a poetic science , pataphysics was , by design , completely untethered .
And with Jarry ’ s death , Père Ubu took on a life of his own .
One of the most unsettling things about reading Ubu @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shocking moments are .
The most controversial part in 1896 was the word merdre .
But other aspects of the play take on new resonance .
Ubu plots with his wife , farts , and exacts taxes on “ phynance ” ( Ubu-speak for bourgeois income ) .
A favorable reviewer in the Mercure de France wrote , “ A cruel glutton , a mastodon of selfishness and vanity , a self-important swine inflated with stupidity and stuffed with presumption , this epic marionette…symbolizes the apotheosis of the belly and the triumph of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t invent the petty tyrant , but Ubu is a clear archetype of the rogue and despicable leader .
Ubu was an everyman , but his crude specter ’ s presence can be recognized in so many public figures today—Trump , Boris Johnson , Viktor Orbán , Jair Bolsonaro—which suggests the acuity of Jarry ’ s invention .
Jarry made his art out of monsters , and part of his significance lies in how clearly he understood the timelessness of their motives , tics , and impulses .
Jarry , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delighted to see Ubu surpassed by real-life conditions , and the thread between Ubu ’ s world and ours is present , if occluded .
However , the Morgan show does not fully unpack his influence .
Examining how Jarry influenced both art and life requires tracing where the less savory bits led , even ( or especially ) if not under an Ubuesque banner of liberal satire .
Part of what “ The Carnival of Being ” does—and it feels as though by accident—is reveal how , over time , pataphysics has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The exhibition is lucid in showing how Jarry synthesized Symbolism , naive painting , and lowbrow art ; how along with Gauguin , Bonnard , and Félix Vallotton , Jarry revolutionized woodcuts ; how he threw open the door for European modernism ; and even how , after Jarry ’ s death , Ubu took on an artistic life of his own .
But after taking us near to the wild heart of Jarry ’ s genius , it becomes clear just how much his influence in art today lingers as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a small but scattershot array of visual artists who depicted Ubu or called themselves pataphysicians .
Some of these are marvelous and significant : A book of drawings and essays on theater by Antonin Artaud shows how closely he studied Jarry .
William Kentridge used Ubu ’ s bodily horrors as a nightmarish allegory to pillory apartheid .
But there ’ s a reason David Hockney , the inimitable master of style , was reluctant to design a 1966 revival of Ubu Roi at London ’ s Royal Court Theatre : He couldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ painting of Ubu and his family is childish and crude but has none of their energy .
A full reading of the writer ’ s impact is lost in the mythology of Jarry the prankster and pataphysician .
With “ The Futurist Manifesto , ” Jarry ’ s friend F.T .
Marinetti was inspired by Jarry ’ s contempt for the public to rouse fascist riots in Italy , and Peter Handke ’ s most famous play involves actors insulting the audience .
Are these not equally indebted to Jarry and Ubu ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ enfant terrible and an alcoholic who shot at pedestrians with a pistol .
The Morgan ’ s only mention of his elaborate misogyny is a brief label noting an automatic machine he designed to beat women .
It ’ s an awful idea but hardly an original one and surely not independent of meaning or efficacy .
Parsing Jarry ’ s politics from his play may miss the point of his literature , which was to collapse the distances between art and life , performance and impropriety , tragedy and absurdity .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pole or the other ; it fuses them .

The 1896 premiere of Ubu Roi in Paris was a violent affair. Alfred Jarry, the 23-year-old playwright, planted friends in the audience to pick fights and holler obscenities. Brawls began when Père Ubu—sometimes translated as “King Turd”—strutted onto the stage wielding a toilet brush as his scepter. Ubu uttered the first word, “Merdre,” and the crowd erupted. The play came to a halt for 15 minutes. One theatergoer described the night as “five acts of shrieking and gesticulating by utterly grotesque puppets that created the impression of some sort of hallucinatory vision.” W.B. Yeats, who attended the premiere, wrote that Jarry’s absurdist debut hailed the end of one era and the beginning of another: “After all our subtle colour…what more is possible? After us, the Savage God.”
Jarry may not be a household name outside France, but depending on whom you ask, he’s either the last Symbolist or the first modernist writer. André Breton, the father of Surrealism, who coined the term “black humor” in a 1940 anthology on Jarry and others, wrote that Jarry annihilated the difference between life and art. A parody of Macbeth, Ubu Roi amounts to a scatological schoolboy prank staged as high art. Today Ubu Roi is one of the most frequently produced plays not written by Shakespeare, and the shit king’s role is often cast with stand-ins for conservative politicians—including, in several recent essays and productions, Donald Trump.
An exhibition of Jarry’s work at the Morgan Library and Museum, “Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being,” now viewable online, introduces an American audience to this critical bridge figure among the early 20th century avant-garde. It’s the French writer’s first major museum exhibition, and it presents a remarkable array of his books, magazines, and prints alongside art by his friends, his acolytes, and artists he influenced, including Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Dora Maar, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró. Jarry’s impact is far reaching. ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide, a 275-page book by Andrew Hugill, catalogs Jarry’s network of influence, including the impressions he left on Oulipo, punk rock, Net art, and science fiction. However, the exhibition mostly restricts its focus to 20th century books, paintings, and works on paper.
The crux of Jarry’s sprawling influence is an imaginary science he named “pataphysics,” which combined his love of paradox, farce, and absurdity with an aesthetics derived from medieval monsters and puppet theater. He put pataphysics forth as a tonic for a culture he considered staid, stagnant, and dominated by bourgeois tastes. The musician and theorist Paul Miller, known as DJ Spooky, writes in the exhibition’s catalog that Jarry represents our “urge toward creative chaos, toward a rational irrationality.” Over time, though, pataphysics may have turned to poison. As the exhibition hurtles toward the 21st century, it reveals that artists have mostly failed to keep up with the strange and lawless world Jarry and his cultists imagined. Its grotesque conduct became more real and less satirical. At the same time, the story of how the physical world became pataphysical is too imprecise and tangled to lay on a single figure, even one as complicated as Jarry. 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
Among Jarry’s many fascinations were monsters, marionettes, religious icons, and Épinal prints, a colorful form of 19th century mass production. His monsters are his most fabulous works. “Usually the word ‘monster’ signifies some sort of unaccustomed harmonizing of dissonant elements,” Jarry wrote. “I call ‘monster’ every original inexhaustible beauty.”
He was born in Laval in 1873. A precocious and insolent student, he and his schoolmates jousted with their teacher Félix-Frederic Hébert—a petty and pompous man, boring and ill-prepared for his own syllabus—and made him the subject of several lampooning plays. Jarry expanded Hébert’s vulgarity and girth and transformed him into Père Ubu, who Jarry said represented “everything in the world that is grotesque.” Ubu would prove to be Jarry’s most inexhaustible monster.
Jarry was peripatetic, but after arriving in Paris at 17, he kept an apartment with two owls, which he had stuffed after they died. At night he held court at Symbolist salons run by Stephane Mallarmé, Rachilde, and her husband, Alfred Vallette, where Jarry sang songs from his play and staged early versions with marionettes. He adopted his character’s mannerisms, enunciating words one syllable at a time and adopting the royal “we.” On one occasion, he enticed several men to join a black-magic ritual, only to trick them into handling his feces. Even before the play was staged, every artist in Paris knew of young Jarry and Père Ubu.
Jarry’s obsessions were infectious. He met Rousseau in 1894 before visiting Pont-Aven, where he learned to drink from Gauguin, recently returned from Tahiti. Gauguin was on the cusp of fame, but Rousseau remained an outsider. Jarry borrowed Gauguin’s tools to make woodcuts and was perhaps the only critic who took Rousseau seriously when his painting La Guerre was first exhibited in May 1894. The Musée d’Orsay lent the masterpiece to the Morgan’s exhibition, and it was placed alongside the only lithograph Rousseau ever made: an incredible print of La Guerre on orange paper, published as a foldout in Jarry’s first journal, L’Ymagier, which he started that year with Remy de Gourmont. L’Ymagier collected medieval etchings, 20th century prints, and contemporary woodcuts by artists like Rousseau and Gauguin, illuminated by commentary. His other books and magazines from this time, including an early play, César-Antéchrist, also weaved media that were popular at different times, and Jarry played with typography the same way. L’Ymagier ran for only five issues, but Jarry developed these techniques in subsequent magazines and books. When Ubu Roi was banned after its second night, Jarry and Bonnard, inspired by popular almanacs, published a book of Ubu drawings and wisdom and created a set of marionettes to continue performing the play.
Still, Jarry’s influence skipped a generation. He had a habit of isolating friends, aided by his fondness for pranks and penchant for booze. Ubu Roi nearly bankrupted the Oeuvre, the famed Symbolist theater, and although he wrote often, his books made little money. By 1900, few of Jarry’s colleagues were willing to produce or publish his work, and he spent his final years dodging debts. When he couldn’t afford absinthe, he drank ether instead, and he died from tuberculosis in 1907, leaving behind a trilogy of plays featuring Ubu and his family, a collection of writings on theater, and several fantastical novels. The most influential, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, was published in 1911 and reads like both a heroic epic and a scientific treatise, giving it the quality of a fable. It was mostly ignored outside of a few circles. The Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry’s drinking companion and one true disciple, wrote that it was the most significant book published that year; as it happens, Apollinaire also published his own first book of poetry, illustrated by woodcuts of medieval beasts. Picasso, a friend of Apollinaire, was enamored of Jarry’s public character; Picasso memorized passages of Ubu Roi, claimed his pet owls descended from Jarry’s, and purchased the writer’s papers and Bulldog revolver after his death.
Faustroll announces the imaginary science Jarry named pataphysics, an influential French cultural export, despite the fact that it eludes definition. In Faustroll, Jarry offers a series of vague principles: Pataphysics is the investigation of exceptions to the rule. It deals in specifics rather than the general. It is as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics is beyond physics. Alastair Brotchie writes in his riveting biography, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life, that with pataphysics, Jarry suggests “theories should be valued for their originality, independently of meaning or efficacy.” Apollinaire brought pataphysics to Dada in the 1920s (Tristan Tzara owned a rare edition of Faustroll) and then to Surrealism, in which artists were inspired by Jarry’s exploration of paradox. Rachilde, the author of Monsieur Vénus and once Jarry’s close friend, called him “the precursor of all the buffoons of the present-day world of letters.” Several such buffoons, including Miró and Max Ernst, were early members of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, founded in 1948, which introduced Jarry to artists and writers like Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec, Umberto Eco, and Italo Calvino. Jarry’s ideas inspired poststructuralist philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze wrote that pataphysics “opened the way to phenomenology” and that Jarry was “an unrecognized precursor to Heidegger.”
Alfred Jarry’s L’Ymagier (Paris, 1894–96). (Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum)
Pataphysics grew out of Jarry’s studies under Henri Bergson—a philosopher of perception and time—and reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. Though Faustroll described Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions,” he considered Ubu the first pataphysician. Like a freakish trickster figure, Ubu is a bumbling superman who ruled by his id and overturned everything stable. Despite Jarry’s intention to give the world a poetic science, pataphysics was, by design, completely untethered. And with Jarry’s death, Père Ubu took on a life of his own.
One of the most unsettling things about reading Ubu Roi today is just how unremarkable its shocking moments are. The most controversial part in 1896 was the word merdre. But other aspects of the play take on new resonance. Ubu plots with his wife, farts, and exacts taxes on “phynance” (Ubu-speak for bourgeois income). A favorable reviewer in the Mercure de France wrote, “A cruel glutton, a mastodon of selfishness and vanity, a self-important swine inflated with stupidity and stuffed with presumption, this epic marionette…symbolizes the apotheosis of the belly and the triumph of the snout in human history.” Jarry didn’t invent the petty tyrant, but Ubu is a clear archetype of the rogue and despicable leader. Ubu was an everyman, but his crude specter’s presence can be recognized in so many public figures today—Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro—which suggests the acuity of Jarry’s invention. Jarry made his art out of monsters, and part of his significance lies in how clearly he understood the timelessness of their motives, tics, and impulses. Jarry, who reveled in irony, may have been delighted to see Ubu surpassed by real-life conditions, and the thread between Ubu’s world and ours is present, if occluded. However, the Morgan show does not fully unpack his influence. Examining how Jarry influenced both art and life requires tracing where the less savory bits led, even (or especially) if not under an Ubuesque banner of liberal satire.
Part of what “The Carnival of Being” does—and it feels as though by accident—is reveal how, over time, pataphysics has become an excuse rather than a principle. The exhibition is lucid in showing how Jarry synthesized Symbolism, naive painting, and lowbrow art; how along with Gauguin, Bonnard, and Félix Vallotton, Jarry revolutionized woodcuts; how he threw open the door for European modernism; and even how, after Jarry’s death, Ubu took on an artistic life of his own. But after taking us near to the wild heart of Jarry’s genius, it becomes clear just how much his influence in art today lingers as a feeble spirit.
The exhibition ends with a small but scattershot array of visual artists who depicted Ubu or called themselves pataphysicians. Some of these are marvelous and significant: A book of drawings and essays on theater by Antonin Artaud shows how closely he studied Jarry. William Kentridge used Ubu’s bodily horrors as a nightmarish allegory to pillory apartheid. But there’s a reason David Hockney, the inimitable master of style, was reluctant to design a 1966 revival of Ubu Roi at London’s Royal Court Theatre: He couldn’t make it work. His painting of Ubu and his family is childish and crude but has none of their energy.
A full reading of the writer’s impact is lost in the mythology of Jarry the prankster and pataphysician. With “The Futurist Manifesto,” Jarry’s friend F.T. Marinetti was inspired by Jarry’s contempt for the public to rouse fascist riots in Italy, and Peter Handke’s most famous play involves actors insulting the audience. Are these not equally indebted to Jarry and Ubu? Jarry was vibrant but anguished, an enfant terrible and an alcoholic who shot at pedestrians with a pistol. The Morgan’s only mention of his elaborate misogyny is a brief label noting an automatic machine he designed to beat women. It’s an awful idea but hardly an original one and surely not independent of meaning or efficacy. Parsing Jarry’s politics from his play may miss the point of his literature, which was to collapse the distances between art and life, performance and impropriety, tragedy and absurdity. But annihilating distance doesn’t negate one pole or the other; it fuses them.