The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

America

CDC COVID-19 Community Levels

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My child and I just had an interesting chat about the easing of mask mandates. Her main concern is that it will create an environment of division at her school, where kids are ridiculed if they choose to mask.

I tried my best to reassure her. I hope that staff and admin will do their best to encourage an environment of empathy and mutual understanding.

We all need to do the same.

For me, this starts with giving up my own reflexive attitudes about unmasked people, associating them with right-wing ignorance and such.

The CDC has designated the county where I live as having a “low community level” for COVID. Their guidance for our county is “Wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk.”

It seems to me that those of us who have been saying we “believe in science” and “the CDC is the authority” when it came to immunizations and shots throughout the pandemic, have an obligation to refrain from criticism of folks who follow CDC guidance now by not wearing a mask.

Our household will likely still mask in public for the most part, at least for awhile, as we have a lot of close contact with family members who have compromised immunity. I will refuse to accept anyone giving us grief about that, and you should pray that God will protect you if you are hostile toward my child about it.

But those of us who have been cautious throughout the pandemic, and who framed things largely as a struggle against the ignorance of others, might do well to ease up on judging our neighbors in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to check the community level for your own locale, here’s the tool from the CDC website.

A Call for Chill on the Left

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I have tried. I really have.

I have tried to remember that Biden has been a creep and Harris has been a mass jailer, and that they are the custodians of the capitalist empire, and that we should expect only disappointment and further deterioration under their rule.

But I think that it’s important to bear in mind that an awful lot of people are justifiably relieved this week that we have at least taken a step back from an overtly hateful, intentionally cruel, shockingly inept, and basely corrupt acceleration toward catastrophe.

I have been as snarky and self-righteous as anyone else at times, but can we please give folks a minute or two to catch their breath?

Leftists who are currently spending every waking moment screaming rapist and cop and empire and war criminal and oppressor and liar and pig and such would be smarter to spend at least some of those moments building their unions and organizing around a positive vision for the world. Nobody is listening to a word you’re saying right now.

There is a line between telling truth that needs to be told, and being a pretentious killjoy.

Election 2020 Post-Mortem

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I don’t have a lot to say yet on the technical or political aspects of this year’s Presidential Election. I think that we will learn a lot once data on Hispanic voters can be parsed.

Like many, I am relieved that we will have someone in power who is more competent, better mannered, less buffoonish, and less overtly racist and sexist.

If someone is expecting a Biden Administration to be anything more than that, though, I am afraid that they may be disappointed.

On National Greatness

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Perhaps it is just my own perception, but I’ve noticed that Veterans Day 2020 seems, at least for some, to be more an occasion to celebrate military might than anything else.

To the extent that America is, or ever has been, great, that greatness has derived from the strength of our ideals, not from our nation’s ability to destroy more things or kill more people more efficiently than other nations.

Among ideologies, nationalism seems to me to be among the most childish and ignorant of all. I am sad to witness so much of it.

Preface notwithstanding, here is a post from nine years ago that still expresses the gist of my own personal observance today.

I wish you peace,

The Language of the Birds

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Guggenheim Fellow Anna Badkhen writes about zeitgeist in Philadelphia, collective spirit in the Global North, and what the birds foretell.

We may say we like to be surprised, astonished, but we like to be surprised in a particular way that is expected or suits our projected needs. This is why children like to hear the same stories. Their predictability is something to hold onto. This is why I am rereading the classics, which I first read as a very young child: it is like worrying a rosary or a wave-grooved seashell you keep in your pocket, something familiar for the fingers to run over and over. This is why we read projections for how long the pandemic will last, or who will win the election, or whether the global uprising against racism will prevail: we want to know when those of us who survive can go back to normal. We want to project that normal.

Source: The Paris Review – Blog Archive How to Read the Air – The Paris Review

On the Election of 2020

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Here is the current situation. We have an administration in power that is unprecedented, at least in my lifetime, in its ineptitude, corruption, destructiveness, callousness and hypocrisy. It has proved itself unwilling to conduct its affairs according to the most base standards of decency. It has, by every conceivable measure, made things worse for all of us. Not only has it made things measurably worse, it has created a political climate which will make it inestimably more difficult to begin making them even slightly better, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 elections. It continues to pose serious dangers to the lives, health and well-being of everyone in our society, and across the globe, and especially the most oppressed and vulnerable among us. It is shocking and unconscionable that such an abomination could rise to power in “the greatest democracy” on the Earth.

On the other side of the political aisle, we have a party which is so desperate to stave off any fundamental change that they have nominated a doddering, glib, gaffe-ridden career politician, notorious as a puppet of the insurance industry, with a sordid history which includes multiple, credible complaints of sexual assault.

It appears, two weeks out from the Presidential Election of 2020, that the Biden/Harris ticket may prevail, although many of us have the uncomfortable sense that we may have seen this movie before.

The frantic exhortations about this being “the most important election in history” might have some validity, except for the fact that the Democrats offer nothing as an alternative to Trump other than a return to everything that got us into this mess to begin with. For many decades now, up until this very moment, they have paid lip service to everyday working people, while attending to the whims of their corporate lords and masters. They have ignored each and every one of the most urgent problems that we face, from murderous cops to the public health crisis to looming economic disaster to a climate emergency that poses the prospects of near-term extinction for our species (along with much of the rest of life on this planet).

So, it is fine, I suppose, for people to encourage us to vote for this garbage as a temporary respite from outright fascism. But it is dishonest, and sickening, for them to ask us to place any other hope in a Biden Presidency, or in the party that he leads.

I have spent most of my life as a political activist. I volunteered on my first campaign as a teenager, when a friend of our family ran for State’s Attorney in the county where I grew up. I was a “Yellow Dog Democrat” for more than 30 years, always voting a straight punch in the general election. I’ve marched, and I’ve donated, and I’ve phone banked, and I’ve walked precincts and I’ve organized. I’ve drank the Kool Aid, and I’ve served it up. I’ve been a jubilant winner on election night, and a dejected loser.

We have come to the point where there’s not enough Kool Aid on the planet to make any of this palatable, and there can be no jubilee in sight.

So, where might we find any glimmer of hope in all of this madness?

For me, any path forward falls outside of the realm of electoral politics. Although I cannot find it in my heart to discourage a vote for Biden from my friends who live in states which will be legitimately contested, I absolutely refuse to place any faith in him or his party to lead us into the light, either in the weeks to come, or in the imaginable future.

We have to find the way ourselves, and we have to start by looking in the right direction. That direction is not right, nor left, nor forward, nor upward nor onward.

It is inward.

Chris Hedges Sums It Up

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This is a rather long read, and not a lot of fun, but I think that Hedges (as usual) describes the moment well.

Captain America and SkullsThe most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once acknowledge the bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair. And we will only do this through faith, the faith that the good draws to it the good, that all acts that nurture and protect life have an intrinsic power, even if the empirical evidence shows that things are getting worse.

Source: Chris Hedges: The Politics of Cultural Despair – scheerpost.com

K-E-double-L-O-double-good.

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The Other Kellogg: Ella Eaton – Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” at The Paris Review, reminded me about cold cereal’s early history as a health food.

I’m ashamed to say that I had never heard of Ella Eaton.

In the Kellogg story there was one person in particular devoted to getting food right—not the flamboyant, egocentric John, nor the embittered, entrepreneurial William, but Ella Eaton Kellogg, John’s wife, one of the most overlooked but most important names in the ever-twisting story of America’s relationship with food.

Read More: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/08/11/the-other-kellogg-ella-eaton/

Thoughts on the Rule of Law

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If it weren’t so infuriating, it would be laughable when people talk about the law, and the sanctity of the law, and the rule of law, with regard to immigration. We have long since abandoned the rule of law in this country.

Let’s also not fool ourselves about “equality under the law.” Our entire legal framework, institutions and code have been established by a ruling class to protect their own interests.

To pretend otherwise is a cruel, macabre, sickening joke.

Lest We Forget: W.E.B. Du Bois

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This was originally written for Learnist. Sadly, that site is no longer online, so I’ll be republishing some of the articles here.

In the first of this series honoring American heroes unknown to many Americans, we remember the great philosopher and freedom fighter W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP.

Du Bois’ Early Life in Massachusetts

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, less than three years after the end of the American Civil War. His mother’s grandfather was a slave named Tom Burghardt, who served in the Continental Army during the War of Independence and gained his freedom. Du Bois’ father’s grandfather was a French-American slave owner.

Du Bois’ father left him and his mother when the child was only two years old. They moved into her parent’s home for awhile, and she worked to support herself and her son until she suffered a stroke when Du Bois was in his early teens. She passed from this life when Du Bois was only seventeen years old.

Du Bois attended an integrated public school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, growing up alongside white classmates in a community that would have been considered “tolerant” for that time. Later in life, Du Bois would write of the racism that was a part of his daily life as a child, despite living in a place that wasn’t formally segregated.

His sharp intellect was apparent to his teachers, and he was encouraged to pursue a higher education. Du Bois would be the first African American to earn a Doctorate from Harvard.

First Experiences in the South

It was during his four years of study from 1885 through 1888 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that Du Bois first witnessed and experienced Southern Racism. Formal segregation was the law and lynchings of African Americans were commonplace. In fact, between 1880 and 1930, more than 2000 black men, women, and children were killed by lynch mobs.

A less courageous man might never again have ventured to the South after graduation from Fisk, but Du Bois would return to teach at Atlanta University in 1897.

Address to the Nations of the World

In 1900 Du Bois gave the closing address at the First Pan African Congress held in London.

He began: “In the metropolis of the modern world, in this the closing year of the nineteenth century, there has been assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”

He appealed to all people and all nations: “Let the world take no backward step in that slow but sure progress which has successively refused to let the spirit of class, of caste, of privilege, or of birth, debar from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness a striving human soul.”

Break with Booker T. Washington: The Niagara Movement

After the brutal lynching of Sam Holt in Atlanta in 1899, Du Bois was moved to increasing activism, having grown frustrated with the capitulation of the most well-known and popular African American leader of the time, Booker T. Washington.

Du Bois called for a meeting of black leaders to be held at Niagara Falls, New York. The meeting was eventually held on the Canadian side of the Falls, after being denied accommodations in white hotels on the American side.

They drafted a manifesto that included the following declaration. “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave…”

The Souls of Black Folk

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published one of his most influential works, The Souls of Black Folk. It included 14 essays, each chapter beginning with a poetic quote.

A major theme of the book was the dual nature of consciousness for Black Americans.

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

“The history of the American Negro,” wrote Du Bois, “is the history of this strife.”

You can read the entire book for free at Project Gutenberg.

The NAACP and The Crisis Magazine

In the wake of the horrific race riots in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, a bi-racial alliance was formed that would become the NAACP.

Founded on the principles expressed by the Niagara Movement, the NAACP’s main goal was to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of the United States and to eliminate race prejudice.

Du Bois founded The Crisis magazine as the premier crusading voice for civil rights. The official magazine of the NAACP, it is now one of the oldest black periodicals in the nation.

The NAACP continues to be a “multiracial army of ordinary women and men from every walk of life, race and class–united to awaken the consciousness of a people and a nation.”

The Harlem Renaissance

In the 1920s and 30s, Harlem became the center of a “spiritual coming of age” ushering in a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity.

In addition to reporting and advocacy, The Crisis became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, as Du Bois published works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and other African American literary figures.

Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance in this video from History.com.

Leftist Politics, Peace Activism and Government Repression

Like many great Americans who upheld the ideals of peace, freedom and universal brotherhood, Du Bois became a target for the FBI and McCarthyism.

A longtime activist against imperial warfare, in 1950 Du Bois became chairman of the Peace Information Center, formed to promote the Stockholm Appeal which demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons.

The Justice department required that the Peace Information Center register with the federal government as an “agent of a foreign state.” Du Bois refused and was put to trial. Though the case was dismissed, the government confiscated Du Bois’s passport, holding it for the next eight years.

Du Bois had run for the United States Senate from New York in 1950 on the ticket of the American Labor Party, a group which had split from the Socialist Party of America. His belief that racism around the world was primarily a function of capitalism would eventually lead him to join the Communist Party in the early 1960s, at the age of 93. He reasoned that the Communist ideal was to build a world “whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part.”

Du Bois’ Death in Ghana and Enduring Legacy

In October of 1961, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to work on an encyclopedia of the African diaspora to be called the Encyclopedia Africana. The United States government refused to renew his passport in 1963, so he became a citizen of Ghana, where he died at the age of 95.

By coincidence, the March on Washington was held on August 28, 1963, the day after his death. Although Du Bois did not live to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, these landmark pieces of legislation codified into the law of the land much of what Du Bois had struggled for his entire life.

His legacy endures today in the work of historians such as Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, in The Crisis magazine, in the ongoing efforts of the NAACP, and in the struggles of people everywhere who strive for a more just and peaceful world.