kottke.org posts about USA
![screencaps of Jamelle Bouie with quotes from the block quote below](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/race-racism-fiction.jpg)
No surprise that Jamelle Bouie’s short videos are as interesting and informative as his NY Times columns. In a recent TikTok video (mirrored on Instagram), Bouie recommended a book called Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields and nutshelled the premise:
The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.
The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.
What “Center” Is That, Exactly? A.R. Moxon on the continuing pleas from political “centrists” for the Democratic Party to find common ground with a party dedicated to extremist white Christian nationalism and whose party members joyously brandish MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at party conventions.
It must be a center that exists between two points one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW, and I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don’t appear in between. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn’t live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.
So maybe “the center” isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of “us,” and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.
Maybe “the center” is just whatever no-man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.
I think it might be that.
Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.
Moxon is echoing Rebecca Solnit here, who wrote On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway back in November 2020.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed this piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom: People Hate on the D.M.V. But It’s Great.
The D.M.V. is a beacon of equality in this country. Celebrate the place where you can watch a celebrity fill out the same forms that you do. We should revel in the fact that there is no express lane for beautiful, rich people to renew their licenses. When you sit in those hard chairs waiting for your number to appear on a screen, you should be delighted that no one else is sitting in a cushier chair. Look around that room and see your fellow Americans, the huddled masses, gathered at the feet of a woman asking for the paperwork to be a law-abiding citizen.
She also adds that “The D.M.V. is one of the few places where privileged people β especially privileged white people β will ever encounter a woman of color with unquestionable authority.”
Long-time readers of the site know what I’m gonna reference next: Tom Junod’s 2012 piece in Esquire about lines at amusement parks and the advent of “Flash Passes” that help you skip the line:
It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways β perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom. There’s only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they’ve been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can’t help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven’t paid enough β that the $100 or so that you’ve ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.
There’s no Flash Pass at the DMV. See also Our Unpleasant Privatized Reality.
Today’s piece by Heather Cox Richardson takes the form of a hopeful history lesson on how sometimes democracy happens in fits and starts.
At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.
In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.
The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.
And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.
Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and it’s a good one. First of all: BeyoncΓ©. But also: “freedom” is a great theme for Harris. For too long Republicans have defined what that word means in America and now’s the time for Democrats to assert their vision. From the ad:
The freedom not just to get by but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law.
I think a lot about this 2018 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Buttigieg (when he was still mayor of South Bend, Indiana) in which he offers his thoughts on recasting “concepts that conservatives have traditionally ‘owned’ β like freedom, family, and patriotism β in more progressive terms”.
You’ll hear me talk all the time about freedom. Because I think there is a failure on our side if we allow conservatives to monopolize the idea of freedom - especially now that they’ve produced an authoritarian president. But what actually gives people freedom in their lives? The most profound freedoms of my everyday existence have been safeguarded by progressive policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who I choose, for one, but also the freedom that comes with paved roads and stop lights. Freedom from some obscure regulation is so much more abstract. But that’s the freedom that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge β but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
To which I added:
Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind.
Compare that to the “freedoms” that Republicans are pushing for in Project 2025 β and have been pressing on Americans even before that:
There is the freedom to control β to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit β to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor β to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace β to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
The Declaration of Independence stated our fledgling nation’s assertion that people are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It’s pretty clear which of the two parties’ interpretations of freedom hews closer to that assertion.
![a layout from the book 'All About U.S.'](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/all-about-us-book.jpg)
Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski wrote an illustrated a new book called All About U.S. (Bookshop), which features a look into the lives of 50 kids from the US, one from each state. From the website:
All About U.S. is a non-fiction children’s book, featuring 50 real kids from each state in the United States. The goal of this book is to create an authentic portrait of the country, showcasing the diversity of its people and the vastness of its natural landscapes.
We conducted over 100 hours of interviews, received 20 hours of home tour footage and hundreds of photographs, to create the illustrations and short stories about each family.
It sounds like they worked hard at finding kids from all kinds of different backgrounds (especially with just 50 slots to fill):
- Families who live in a variety of dwellings, from houseboats and yurts to farms, Native reservations, and Air Force bases
- Children with adoptive families, stepfamilies, single-parent families, two moms or dads, and those who live with their grandparents
- Children living with health conditions such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy
- Families from a range of social, religious, and economic backgrounds
This looks like a fantastic book β you can read more about it on the website or pre-order from Amazon or Bookshop.
Andrea Pitzer, who wrote about about the history of concentration camps in her 2017 book One Long Night, has a piece in Scientific American about the historical parallels between Trump’s desire to expel as many as 20 million people from the country and previous concentration camps.
Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide β the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention β draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.
For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.
Again, this stuff is all right out in the open β no reading between the lines required.
In a well-researched piece for the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes about the “network of well-funded far-right activists” who are making plans for Trump’s second term. It’s more than just Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation β and as his first term showed, it’s not necessarily about what Trump himself wants, it’s that the chaos that surrounds him creates opportunities for these ultra-conservatives to wreck havoc on the freedoms enjoyed by Americans.
I can’t decide which of the plans in these three excerpts is most terrifying:
Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.
The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”
Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You don’t even need to be a scholar of authoritarianism to recognize where this is going β it’s not like they are being secretive about it.
Yesterday I posted about The Terrifying Project 2025, the conservative plan to reshape America in the event of Trump’s victory in November. Marisa Kabas wrote a great one-sentence summary of the project:
Project 2025 is conservatives’ vision for an American society that’s a result of gutting all the gains made by the civil rights, abortion rights, LGBTIA+ rights, voting rights and environmental rights movements in order to establish an authoritarian government run by loyalists committed to serving a white, Christian nationalist agenda.
What I like about that description is that the authors of the plan wouldn’t really disagree with it. The plan’s uncomplicated & proud sincerity in wanting to roll back all the rights fought for in this country since the 1950s is what makes it so alarming.
From Timothy Snyder again, this time on what lessons we can draw on to prevent America’s collapse into fascism.
4. Big business should support democracy. In the Germany of the 1930s, business leaders were not necessarily enthusiastic about Hitler as a person. But they associated democracy with labor unions and wanted to break them. Seeing Hitler as an instrument of their own profit, business leaders enabled the Nazi regime. This was, in the end, very bad for business. Although the circumstances today are different, the general lesson is the same: whether they like it or not, business leaders bear responsibility for whether a republic endures or is destroyed.
I loved his succinct conclusion:
It’s simple: recalling history, we act in the present, for a future that can and will be much better.
![Do Not Obey In Advance](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/do-not-obey.jpg)
Historian and scholar Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny and this amazing piece about the fascism of Trump and the conservative movement, wrote about a crucial difference in how the media are covering Biden versus how they cover Trump.
It should seem odd that media calls to step down were not first directed to Trump. If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? (The Philadelphia Inquirer did). I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn’t have cared, and he wouldn’t have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.
“Do not obey in advance” is Snyder’s very first lesson from his 20 Lessons from the 20th Century about fighting authoritarianism:
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
Note: Illustration by the awesome Chris Piascik.
From Heather Cox Richardson, writing on the night of the debate, a reminder of just how bad Trump’s performance was, a shambolic spectacle that was met with shrugs because that’s what we expect of him:
In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.
Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned β both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes β this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale β and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Richardson also quotes Monique Pressley’s debate night tweet, which is perhaps the most crisp and concise summary of the whole thing:
The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.
Maybe this is just me, but I immediately thought of Allen Iverson’s response to a question about practice from the media:
Listen, we talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game. We talking about practice. Not a game, not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man.
While he might be fine at blustering his way through debates (practice), Trump, famously, was bad at being president and actually didn’t like the job (the game). Like, we don’t have to imagine how Trump would perform as president because he did the job, poorly & ruinously, for four years. Biden has logged 3.5 years as president and has been very productive on behalf of the American people. We can directly compare them! And their teams! Politics & governance is a team sport, and Trump’s team is a flaming dumpster fire. So let’s stop talking about practice (and the media’s horse race coverage) and start focusing on the game.
Rebecca Solnit: Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race β providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
I’ve been watching this play out over the last few weeks and whatever the media (especially the NY Times) and pundits are doing here is much more alarming to me than Biden’s poor debate performance. Especially considering:
Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
*hair-tearing-out sounds*
Heather Cox Richardson writing last night for her Letters from an American newsletter:
Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.
It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
This is a profound change to our fundamental law β an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
But this extraordinary power grab does not mean President Joe Biden can do as he wishes. As legal commentator Asha Rangappa pointed out, the court gave itself the power to determine which actions can be prosecuted and which cannot by making itself the final arbiter of what is “official” and what is not. Thus any action a president takes is subject to review by the Supreme Court, and it is reasonable to assume that this particular court would not give a Democrat the same leeway it would give Trump.
There is no historical or legal precedent for this decision.
As I’ve noted before, Richardson’s book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America is an excellent way to get yourself up to speed on the origins of this decades-long project by the Republicans to subvert American democracy. From a review of the book by Virginia Heffernan:
She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus β with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion β held sway.
But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.
I don’t even know what to say about this. From Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (starting on page 68):
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
And her closing:
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Jesus. With fear for our democracy, I dissent. I wish I knew what else to say or think about this, but Jesus.
Gareth Fearn writing for the London Review of Books about the student protests on US campuses: Liberalism without Accountability.
This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media.
Under such circumstances, pitching tents, raising placards and demanding divestment are really quite mild-mannered responses. That they have been met, in many US universities, with militarised policing reflects the fragility of liberalism β in the face of the growing hegemony of the conservative right as well as its own inability to offer a future even to Ivy League college students, let alone the less privileged.
An officer “accidentally” fired his weapon during an NYPD raid on a student-occupied building at Columbia University on Tuesday. Apparently, he mistook his gun for a flashlight. You may be wondering: how could this happen? Well, like this. From a 2014 article in the Denver Post:
![an illustration of a gun with a flashlight mounted on it, showing a second trigger for the light right under the first trigger](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/flashlight-gun.jpg)
Ronny Flanagan took pride in his record as a police officer in Plano, Texas. He had an incident-free career. He took safety training regularly. He was known at the range as a very good shot.
Yet he killed a man when he was simply trying to press a flashlight switch mounted beneath the trigger on his pistol.
In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.
“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”
Jeeeeesus Christ this is the most American shit ever. First of all: guns, guns, guns!! We love ‘em! Don’t forget the complete militarization of the police (they’ve got tanks!), which happens in tinpot countries where leaders fear the citizenry. Those gun flashlights were initially developed for the Navy SEALs and now city cops wield them around students.
And then. And then! There’s the completely genius idea of PUTTING A SECOND TRIGGER ON A GUN β I wish I had letters more uppercase than uppercase for this next part β RIGHT BELOW THE FIRST TRIGGER!!!!!!! 1
You know, the one that propels a projectile out of the weapon at deadly speeds!?
You’re familiar with those doors where the handle makes it seem like a pull but you actually have to push it? They’re called Norman doors, the canonical example of bad design. These flashlight guns are like Norman doors that kill people. W T Actual Fuck. (via @ygalanter.bsky.social)
This is a teenager is an interactive data visualization by Alvin Chang about a group of American teenagers that have been tracked in a longitudinal study since 1997 (they are around 40 years old now). The video version of the visualization is embedded above.
A year from now, in 1998, a researcher named Vincent Felitti will publish a paper that drastically changes the way we think about these kids β and their childhood.
The research will show that these childhood stressors and traumas β called Adverse Childhood Experiences β have a lifelong effect on our health, relationships, happiness, financial security, and pretty much everything else that we value. It will kickstart decades of research that shows that our childhood experiences shape our adulthood far more than we ever thought.
This is a good companion to a recent post, End-Stage Poverty Is Killing People in Safety Net-Free America.
Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty by Dr. Lindsay Ryan is a great/upsetting piece about how the poverty many Americans are subjected to in America is killing them. Many people die here in the world’s richest country not because they are sick but because they are poor and our systems of government, justice, business, and health care don’t do enough to help them (or, more cynically and perhaps truthfully, actively work against helping them).
This is one of those pieces where I want to quote every single paragraph, but I’ll start with this one (bold mine):
Safety-net hospitals and clinics care for a population heavily skewed toward the poor, recent immigrants and people of color. The budgets of these places are forever tight. And anyone who works in them could tell you that illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this phrase since I read it: “Illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.”
Medical textbooks usually don’t discuss fixing your patient’s housing. They seldom include making sure your patient has enough food and some way to get to a clinic. But textbooks miss what my med students don’t: that people die for lack of these basics.
People struggle to keep wounds clean. Their medications get stolen. They sicken from poor diet, undervaccination and repeated psychological trauma. Forced to focus on short-term survival and often lacking cellphones, they miss appointments for everything from Pap smears to chemotherapy. They fall ill in myriad ways β and fall through the cracks in just as many.
You should read the whole thing yourself (NY Times gift link). Her argument about the need to expand/shift the definition of what healthcare is (e.g. housing is healthcare) reminds me of this more progressive idea of freedom.
When I linked to a recent NY Times article about rewilding golf courses, I pulled out this startling fact: “The United States has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations.” Nathan Yau of FlowingData found that that is indeed true but wondered where all of the golf courses were actually located. (A: typically not in cities where the McDonald’s are concentrated).
![a map of the distribution of golf courses and McDonald's in the US](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/golf-vs-mcdonalds-maps.jpg)
This makes more sense now. You can have a golf course in an area where there aren’t that many people, because people will travel to play golf. Few people are going to travel specifically for McDonald’s.
If we compare the two, you see the McDonald’s city concentrations, and golf fills the in-between spaces.
Back in 2015, as the New Horizons probe was approaching Pluto, NASA posted an illustration of the dwarf planet’s orbital timeline:
![an orbital timeline of Pluto's orbit around the Sun](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/pluto-year-orbit.jpg)
A short piece on Vox then noted:
The entire history of the United States has unfolded in the time it’s taken Pluto to orbit the Sun once.
And that’s still true! But just barely. Pluto takes 247.94 Earth years to orbit the Sun. According to my calculations, the Plutonian year that started on July 4, 1776 will end this year on June 12, 2024 (give or take a few hours).
This is a map of how people in different geographic regions of the US refer to athletic footwear, courtesy of Josh Katz, author of Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk and co-creator of that NY Times dialect quiz that went viral 10 years ago.
![a map of the USA indicating which terms people use for athletic shoes](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/sneakers-tennis-gym-shoes.jpg)
Growing up in northern Wisconsin, we said “tennis shoes” or “tennies” most of the time (even though very little actual tennis was being played) and “gym shoes” less often. I hadn’t really heard of “sneakers” as a kid and never used it. (Shoes for sneaking? Huh?) My kids were born in NYC and they give me shit every time I tell them to put their tennies on. π€·ββοΈ
What do you call athletic shoes? Tennies? Sneakers? Kicks? Trainers? Gym shoes? Some other weird thing? (via @dens)
Like many of you, I read the news of a single person killing at least 18 people in Lewiston, Maine yesterday, which comes on the heels of many, many other mass shootings over the past four years. While these are outrageous and horrifying events, they aren’t surprising or shocking in any way in a country where more than 33,000 people die from gun violence each year.
America is a stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of gun violence. We’ll keep waking up, stuck in the same reality of oppression, carnage, and ruined lives until we can figure out how to effect meaningful change. I’ve collected some articles here about America’s dysfunctional relationship with guns, most of which I’ve shared before. Change is possible β there are good reasons to control the ownership of guns and control has a high likelihood of success β but how will our country find the political will to make it happen?
An armed society is not a free society:
Arendt offers two points that are salient to our thinking about guns: for one, they insert a hierarchy of some kind, but fundamental nonetheless, and thereby undermine equality. But furthermore, guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name β that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.
This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly β not make any sudden, unexpected moves β and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.
We’re sacrificing America’s children to “our great god Gun”:
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains β “besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily β sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Roger Ebert on the media’s coverage of mass shootings:
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
Jill Lepore on the United States of Guns:
There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.
The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.
A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths:
The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it’s not easy to do. The process is detailed in David Kopel’s landmark study on Japanese gun control, published in the 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, still cited as current. (Kopel, no left-wing loony, is a member of the National Rifle Association and once wrote in National Review that looser gun control laws could have stopped Adolf Hitler.)
To get a gun in Japan, first, you have to attend an all-day class and pass a written test, which are held only once per month. You also must take and pass a shooting range class. Then, head over to a hospital for a mental test and drug test (Japan is unusual in that potential gun owners must affirmatively prove their mental fitness), which you’ll file with the police. Finally, pass a rigorous background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups, and you will be the proud new owner of your shotgun or air rifle. Just don’t forget to provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. And remember to have the police inspect the gun once per year and to re-take the class and exam every three years.
Australia’s gun laws stopped mass shootings and reduced homicides, study finds:
From 1979 to 1996, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths was rising at 2.1% per year. Since then, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths has been declining by 1.4%, with the researchers concluding there was no evidence of murderers moving to other methods, and that the same was true for suicide.
The average decline in total firearm deaths accelerated significantly, from a 3% decline annually before the reforms to a 5% decline afterwards, the study found.
In the 18 years to 1996, Australia experienced 13 fatal mass shootings in which 104 victims were killed and at least another 52 were wounded. There have been no fatal mass shootings since that time, with the study defining a mass shooting as having at least five victims.
From The Onion, ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens:
At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
But America is not Australia or Japan. Dan Hodges said on Twitter a few years ago:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.
This can’t be the last word on guns in America. We have to do better than this for our children and everyone else whose lives are torn apart by guns. But right now, we are failing them miserably, and Hodges’ words ring with the awful truth that all those lives and our diminished freedom & equality are somehow worth it to the United States as a society.
![the models for American Gothic standing next to the Grant Wood painting](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/american-gothic-models.jpg)
For the New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new book, Steven Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is β and Isn’t (Bookshop.org), which makes the case that what we typically think of as rural America or “real America” is a mirage.
A piercing, unsentimental new book, “The Lies of the Land” (Chicago), by the historian Steven Conn, takes the long view. Wistful talk of “real America” aside, Conn, who teaches at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this, Conn writes, because many of us β urban and rural, on the left and the right β “don’t quite want it to be true.”
For one thing, the predominant rural population in what is now the United States was coercively removed and eliminated by the federal government:
Settlers styled themselves as pioneers who had won their land with their bare hands. This is how it went in “Little House on the Prairie,” with the frontier family racing ahead of the law to seize Indian property. (“Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve” would have been a more accurate title, the literary scholar Frances W. Kaye has archly suggested.) Yet in the end land ownership came, directly or indirectly, from the state. The Homestead Act of 1862, along with its successors, gridded up and gave away an area the size of Pakistan. And although homesteading sounds like a relic from the sepia-toned past, its most active period came, the historian Sara Gregg has pointed out, in the twentieth century. The final homesteader got his land in 1988.
1988! The very next paragraph:
One irony is that β after Indigenous towns β it’s the havens of the East Coast ‘elite, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which have the deepest roots. Most bastions of “real America” are, by contrast, relatively new. Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin served as mayor, really is a small town in a farming area. But most of its farms were created by a New Deal campaign to relocate struggling farmers from the Upper Midwest. (Hence Palin’s “you betcha” accent, similar to the Minnesota ones in the film “Fargo.”) Palin’s proud patch of “real America,” in other words, was courtesy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This is one of those pieces I could quote every other paragraph so I’m gonna stop there.
![the book cover for Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/democracy-awakening.jpg)
This is a great overview and review by Teri Kanefield of Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, Democracy Awakening.
She opens with: “America is at a crossroads.”
But crossroads aren’t new. We’ve been at them before.
She shows how this moment is part of an ongoing struggle between a small group of white people who think that America was founded on principles of white supremacy and should remain that way, and the rest of us.
Throughout US history, the white supremacists have seized power and implemented minority rule: secession, Jim Crow & anti-immigration laws. Then the majority pushes back: the Civil War & Reconstruction, The New Deal.
The current GOP is a backlash against Brown v Board of Education (the Supreme Court case that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional.)
Richardson traces in detail how that backlash happened, and how today’s backlash echoes the language and attitudes of the Confederacy.
She shows Nixon and others tied taxes to “redistributing wealth” to “undeserving” people as a way to get lower income racists aboard an economic agenda that hurt them.
I really have to make time to read this book!
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research recently conducted a poll asking Americans about their religious beliefs and found that about 30% of American adults are non-religious (which they refer to as “the nones”, presumably after the book by Ryan Burge).
The decades-long rise of the nones β a diverse, hard-to-summarize group β is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it.
In U.S. religion today, “the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,” said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of “The Nones,” a book on the phenomenon.
The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” They’re the “spiritual but not religious,” and those who are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nones’ vast diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:
They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion.
But a dislike of organized religion among the nonreligious doesn’t necessarily translate into atheism or agnosticism: 43% of “the nones” say they believe in God.
The Atlantic has an adapted excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, Democracy Awakening: The Origins of the Socialist Slur. It begins:
For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus” β the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure β was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for “undeserving” Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. The government’s defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.
![the book cover for Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson](/https/kottke.org/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/democracy-awakening.jpg)
Heather Cox Richardson, author of the excellent Letters from an American newsletter, has a new book out today about the health of American democracy: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. From Virginia Heffernan’s review of the book in the Washington Post:
She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus β with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion β held sway.
But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.
Heffernan calls this first part of Richardson’s book “the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard”. I’m in the midst of two other books right now (The Vaster Wilds & The Mountain in the Sea) but I might have to make room for a third.
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