Many of us may recall a subtle shift in political language that began during the last decade, maybe longer ago now. Prominent members of the Republican Party began to refer to the opposing party as the “Democrat” Party. We had all grown up knowing it as the “Democratic” party, and its candidates as the “Democratic” candidates. Now, to the GOP, they are the “Democrat” candidates . . . or it is the “Democrat” position, and etc. From Republican mouths, the word often sounds as if an epithet is being spit out. For them, it has come to be a term of derision if not of disgust, much more (and less) than the name of an opposition party. No matter: some even in the mainstream media appear to have adopted the term. Continue reading “A Note on Language and Politics”
Whither Racism in the Land of the Free
He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student. Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course. He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts. He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus. This animus was
especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.
I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name. Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me. Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class. The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.
As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading. He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied. That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer. But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario. I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?” And Hal said, “Yes.” I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”
An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility
Dear Mark (if I may):
Recently in a Fox News interview, you said that your company, Facebook, would not fact-check any of the President’s lies, as Twitter has begun to do. You said that, “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Many–likely many millions–of Facebook users are upset, even outraged, at your position, including many of your own employees, especially in the face of the President’s posts inciting law enforcement and other violence against the current nationwide protests of police murders of African-Americans. And it’s not only politicians’ speech that you are allowing to run rampant over the truth and divisiveness. Since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, Facebook and other social media have disseminated nonsensical conspiracy theories that Floyd is not dead, that the police assault on him was faked, and that George Soros was funding the protests around the nation. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility”
The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy
If the impeachment trial of Donald Trump for the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress continues on the path set for it on the first day by Senate Republicans and the President’s defense team, it will constitute the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.
More so than the President’s campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Russians to favor his election. Even more so than the behavior in the impeachment’s own charges against the president: that for his personal political benefit he used the power of his presidency to withhold funds mandated by Congress for Ukraine’s military defense against Russian aggression, in order to extort that country to announce an investigation of a political rival (Joe Biden), and that in unprecedented fashion he obstructed the Congress’s investigation of those events. As such, it will either portend the end of our democracy or so diminish it that it will take generations to repair. Continue reading “The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy”
The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President
That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery. Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019
[Dear Reader: While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it. For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]
Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked. He couldn’t be Jewish, I said. Then an even more shocking thought
occurred to me: Where did the first thought come from? To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state. Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.
Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”
Father’s Day Fever
I was passing through the kitchen one night when my father, alone there, called me over. Then he did something very unusual. Well past the time when I thought such a thing could happen, he pick
ed me off the ground as if I was still a toddler and hugged me close. Then, lips to ear, he asked me a secret. “Tell me,” he said softly, so as not to be overheard elsewhere in the house, “that you will love me no matter what I do.”
I found his words more mystifying even than his lifting me off the floor. I didn’t understand them as foreboding. After all, he was my dad. I remember pausing to try to figure out what he was talking about before I answered him. Nothing came to me, and all I could think of to say was, “Sure I will, Dad.”
I was 10 years old. Continue reading “Father’s Day Fever”
Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’
In a recent email conversation with friends and acquaintances, two conservative correspondents sought to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts by citing facts they believed undermined the accuracy of that consensus.
One tried to debunk the issue with a recent Wall Street Journal reprint of a 1989 news article in which a U.N. environmental official said that rising sea levels could eliminate whole nations if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. Another raised a familiar ‘challenge’ by asking 
how we can explain major weather changes hundreds of years ago before industrialization and the invention of the internal combustion engine.
More substantially they also pointed to the NASA finding in 2015 that the ice sheet in Antarctica is growing rather than shrinking, contradicting other studies that found a loss of ice mass in that region as they have also found in Arctic ice. Continue reading “Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’”
To Impeach or Not to Impeach
This is the question that has pushed to the fore in the wake of the release of the (redacted) Mueller Report last week. Given the array of presidential misconduct described in the Report, the question has given rise to more debate than one might have expected.
The impeachment question does not arise for Congressional Republicans. As with all of the President’s misconduct since he took office, they are largely silent. Only Senator Mitt Romney has condemned the President’s and his campaign’s behavior after reading the Mueller Report. But he misread it to say that Mueller found insufficient evidence to bring charges against the President. That is not the case. Instead, Mueller decided not to reach conclusions about whether obstruction crimes had been committed because of the Department of Justice’s policy not to indict sitting presidents for crimes.
Continue reading “To Impeach or Not to Impeach”
Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report
The much-anticipated (redacted) Mueller Report was released today by the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr. Here are five brief initial observations on it.
I. There is a very important distinction in American law between decisions not to prosecute crimes and whether or not crimes were in fact committed. Decisions not to prosecute potential criminal cases are commonly NOT based on prosecutors’ judgments that the suspects are innocent of crimes. Continue reading “Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report”
The GOP Abandons Democracy
Democracy is a fragile form of government. It consists of humankind’s loftiest principles supported only by rules created and monitored by altogether fallible beings: us. And we have proven over time to be unreliable and inconsistent caretakers of this precious system, at times even setting aside some of its central requirements in the service of very undemocratic impulses.
Both major American political parties have participated in these insults to democracy. We need only recall the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the gaming of Congressional voting districts (gerrymandering) to favor one or the other party. But never has a major party assaulted the premises and requirements of democracy so consistently, deeply and on so broad a front as has the current Republican Party. Continue reading “The GOP Abandons Democracy”
