20 Things You Can Do To Strengthen Democracy

by Max Sirak

Timothy_Snyder_at_YES_2014July 4th makes me think about freedom. I'm not alone in this. Most people in the US get together with their friends and families, get drunk, eat meat, and watch or set off fireworks. This is what we're supposed to do to honor the United States as a sovereign nation and ourselves as sovereign individuals.

However, recently I haven't had the will to buy in. Last year I expressed as much in my column. I wrote about a speech Fredrick Douglas gave in 1852 and ended my essay with, "You're a slave. Now wake the fuck up and do something about it."

One of my colleagues, Katalin Balog, left a comment. "Lovely," she said, "I'll start doing something right away." Katalin's comment struck me and stuck. Usually after painting a dark and damning picture of our collective predicament, I like to offer actions we can take to counter.

But I couldn't think of any.

Now, 54 weeks later, with the help of a history professor, I'd like to correct my missteps. Better late than never, right?

Definition Of Terms

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale. He has a permanent fellowship in Vienna at the Institute of Human Sciences and serves on the Committee on Conscience for the US Holocaust Museum. Earlier this year Snyder wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.

In his book, Professor Snyder defines tyranny as "the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit."

This is a broad definition. It doesn't play favorites with where the threats to democracy come from. It could be a sitting president, an oligarchy, global business interests, or any other entity. All that matters is the desire to increase and consolidate power through the subversion of the rules.

There's no need to point fingers or name names. I don't care about where you perceive the dangers. I'm here to offer you 20 ways to support democracy when you feel it's threatened.

But first we need to talk about inevitability, disenchantment, and eternity.

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The Pit: Pt 2

by Christopher Bacas

Z-28The boss' daughter, Cherie, came with a warning label. A coworker, who babbled endlessly about evil Ayatollah Khomeini and our hostages, told me:

"She's a piece of work. Just let her take whatever she wants and stay the fuck outta her way."

One night, twenty minutes before closing, a woman's head appeared above the swinging doors. Under swollen lids, her dark eyes licked out.

"I'm Cherie Lasalle"

Her voice was low and slightly raspy.

"Yes, Miss Lasalle"

She walked behind the counter with a tray holding two plates.

"You new here?"

"Yes, Miss Lasalle"

"Is there any chicken?"

"No, Miss."

"Well, shit! When did you sell it?"

"A while ago. They only put a couple on the pit"

"That's stupid! Don't you sell more than that?"

While I served the last customers and tallied their bills, Cherie dodged around me piling up meat and side dishes, then dotted the tray with small boats of sauce and butter. I had to turn sideways so she could totter everything past me on stiletto heels. She sat at a booth in the back. A few minutes later a tall man arrived. He craned his neck and after seeing her, walked back. Her boyfriend was an Iranian student, Marwan Aref. They drove matching IROC Z-28s. Her Texas plate read: "CHERIE-L", his: "MAR-ONE". While the pair canoodled and giggled incessantly, I carried the 6 foot cutting board to the sink for scrubbing, cleaned and replaced all serving utensils and pans, then mopped the floor with scalding water and industrial degreasers. Rick and I usually smoked a joint after he locked the doors; not tonight.

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Black Marriage Unshackled

Tanisha C. Ford in The Feminist Wire:

BookBound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

TWH: There is a long legacy of racial discrimination that originated during slavery, which hardened as slavery was codified in the law. The rigidity began during in the colonial era as it became increasingly imperative to define slavery as a permanent, inheritable condition, to lock in a self-reproducing workforce. Laws were passed that restricted the intimate relationships of free blacks and defined slaves’ status based on their mothers’ status (partus sequitur ventrem) to ensure that slave owners maintained control over the reproduction of the enslaved. Marriage rights normally granted free couples control over women’s sexuality and labor and parental rights over children. But in order to perpetuate the status of slaves as laboring bodies and further the expansion of capital fueling the global market, those rights had to be denied to slaves. The property rights of enslavers were given the greatest priority. But race, and not just slavery, established the basis for denigrating intimate bonds. African Americans, regardless of status—Northern or Southern, free or slave—faced harsh reprisals from racist ideas and practices that impinged on their intimate relationships. This was because of the growing bifurcation of freedom being associated with whiteness and blackness with servitude, especially during the antebellum decades.

TCF: The Civil War is such a critical turning point in the book, and you chronicle this history in important new ways.

TWH: Yes, the war provided the first context in which fugitive slaves could start to formalize their relationships and gain legal standing. Missionaries and Army officials began to marry slaves “under the flag”—under U.S. authority, to stabilize the growing fugitive population and to prepare them for citizenship. Hence, it was in the context of the war that African Americans were encouraged, and sometimes coerced, to create formal, monogamous, marriages with legal standing. African Americans always reinforced the importance of their families in their encounters with the outside agents. This became especially pronounced after black men were allowed to enlist in the Army. African Americans from the beginning of the war perceived the war to be, and treated it as, a war for their liberation. The federal government came to understand that in order to encourage more men to enlist, they had to offer them protection for their wives and children and the only way to do that was to free them, to give legal recognition to their marriages and all the privileges that accompanied those new rights.

More here.

Victor Hugo’s powerful, poignant last words

Christopher Hooton in The Independent:

Victor-hugoThe Frenchman was a poet, artist and novelist by the age of 30 and also contributed The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to the literary canon, but he is remembered as a politician or even a saint as much as he is a man of words. He was a fierce human rights activist and, after being elected to France's National Assembly in 1848, dissented from conservatives and called for universal suffrage, free education for all children, and an end to poverty. He became such an icon and champion of the poor in France that on his 80th birthday on 27 June, 1881 paraders marched past his house, where he was sat at a window, for six hours. Avenue d'Eylau on which Hugo lived was the next day changed to Avenue Victor-Hugo, and the story goes that all future letters sent to the author were addressed: "To Mister Victor, In his avenue, Paris".

Hugo would only live four more years but was an activist to the end, requesting a pauper's funeral (though he was awarded a state funeral by decree of President Jules Grévy) and saying in his five-line will: "I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I want to be buried in their hearse. I refuse [funeral] orations of all churches. I beg a prayer to all souls. I believe in God."

More here.

Was Neoliberal Overreach Inevitable?

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Simon Wren-Lewis over at his site Mainly Macro:

In June 2017 a member of the hard left of the Labour party, reviled by the right and centre for his association with left wing leaders and movements around the world and for his anti-nuclear views, in a few short weeks went from one of the most unpopular party leaders ever to achieving the highest vote share for his party since Tony Blair was leader. While this unexpected turn of events was in part the result of mistakes by, and inadequacies of, the Conservative Prime Minister, there is no doubt that many Labour voters were attracted by a programme that unashamedly increased the size of the state.
Contrast this with the United States. A Republican congress seems intent on passing into law a bill that combines taking away health insurance from a large number of citizens with tax cuts for the very rich. Let me quote a series of tweets from Paul Krugman:

“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. Losing health insurance — especially if you're older, low-income, and unhealthy, which are precisely the people hit — is a nightmare. And more than 20 million would face that nightmare. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a tax cut. That cut is a lot of money, but because the 1% are already rich, it raises their after-tax income only 2 percent — hardly life-changing. So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they'll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”

Or to put it another way, 200,000 more deaths over the next ten years for a marginal increase in the after tax income of the 1%. This is no anachronism created by a Trump presidency, but an inevitable consequence of Republican control of Congress and the White House.
Although these two events appear to be in complete contrast, I think they are part of (in the US) and a consequence of (in the UK) a common process, which I will call neoliberal overreach. Why neoliberal? Why overreach?
More here.

Myths of Globalization: Noam Chomsky and Ha-Joon Chang in Conversation

2017_0622noam (1)

By C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Noam, are globalization and capitalism different?

Noam Chomsky: If by "globalization" we mean international integration, then it long pre-dates capitalism. The silk roads dating back to the pre-Christian era were an extensive form of globalization. The rise of industrial state capitalism has changed the scale and character of globalization, and there have been further changes along the way as the global economy has been reshaped by those whom Adam Smith called "the masters of mankind," pursuing their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people."

There have been quite substantial changes during the recent period of neoliberal globalization, since the late 1970s, with Reagan and Thatcher the iconic figures — though the policies vary only slightly as administrations change. Transnational corporations are the driving force, and their political power largely shapes state policy in their interests.

During these years, supported by the policies of the states they largely dominate, transnational corporations have increasingly constructed global value chains (GVCs) in which the "lead firm" outsources production through intricate global networks that it establishes and controls. A standard illustration is Apple, the world's biggest company. Its iPhone is designed in the US. Parts from many suppliers in the US and East Asia are assembled mostly in China in factories owned by the huge Taiwanese firm Foxconn. Apple's profit is estimated to be about 10 times that of Foxconn, while value added and profit in China, where workers toil under miserable conditions, is slight. Apple then sets up an office in Ireland so as to evade US taxes — and has recently been fined $14 billion by the EU in back taxes.

More here.

Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past

Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

ScreenHunter_2745 Jul. 08 23.01Although there are many counterintuitive ideas in quantum theory, the idea that influences can travel backwards in time (from the future to the past) is generally not one of them. However, recently some physicists have been looking into this idea, called "retrocausality," because it can potentially resolve some long-standing puzzles in quantum physics. In particular, if retrocausality is allowed, then the famous Bell tests can be interpreted as evidence for retrocausality and not for action-at-a-distance—a result that Einstein and others skeptical of that "spooky" property may have appreciated.

In a new paper published in Proceedings of The Royal Society A, Matthew S. Leifer at Chapman University and Matthew F. Pusey at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have lent new theoretical support for the argument that, if certain reasonable-sounding assumptions are made, then must be retrocausal.

First, to clarify what retrocausality is and isn't: It does not mean that signals can be communicated from the future to the past—such signaling would be forbidden even in a retrocausal due to thermodynamic reasons. Instead, retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.

In the original Bell tests, physicists assumed that retrocausal influences could not happen. Consequently, in order to explain their observations that distant particles seem to immediately know what measurement is being made on the other, the only viable explanation was action-at-a-distance. That is, the particles are somehow influencing each other even when separated by large distances, in ways that cannot be explained by any known mechanism. But by allowing for the possibility that the measurement setting for one particle can retrocausally influence the behavior of the other particle, there is no need for action-at-a-distance—only retrocausal influence.

More here.

‘Hemming Flames’ by Patricia Colleen Murphy

Hemming-flamesAdrianne Kalfapoulou at the Quarterly Conversation:

With “Losing our Milk Teeth,” the opening poem of Patricia Colleen Murphy’s award-winning collection, Hemming Flames, the author announces from the outset that we’re in for a thrilling ride—thrilling as in thriller as much as the acute pleasure of reading masterful poems. Hemming Flames is by turns terrifying, uncanny, and sometimes lunatic, in the ways lunacy charts (if it does chart anything) the unpredictable and uncanny. There is also a wry and blunt humor here, a consciousness latching onto what will carry it through the traumas of an imploding family.

These poems’ tonal registers, their pitch and directness, make for a “hard to put down” read more characteristic of novels than most poetry collections. In “Losing our Milk Teeth” the father will say, “pass the mother/fucking peas. And, could you//try not to murder yourself/ in front of the children.” Ritual matter-of-factness is turned into ritual high drama, as Murphy parodies a type of family-gathering etiquette meant to tame demons that can go wildly out of control. But there is so much more here as Murphy mines her family’s unraveling; she is also telling us something about the subversive and redemptive possibilities of language. Or as she puts it in “The Princess of Creeping,” “no one can say I did not live a long time/ in the danger theater, where the play begins/ with all the dolls behaving perfectly.”

more here.

Joyce in Court and The Ulysses Trials

1952Colm Tóibín at The Guardian:

In October 1899, James Joyce, aged 17, attended all three days of the trial in Dublin of Samuel Childs for the brutal murder of his brother. This allowed him later to stitch references to the case throughout his novel Ulysses, including a moment when his protagonist Leopold Bloom and others are on their way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Glasnevin cemetery and pass Bengal Terrace, where the murder occurred: “Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.” When one man says: “That is where Childs was murdered … The last house,” Simon Dedalus replies: “So it is … A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.”

This, as Adrian Hardiman writes in his fascinating, painstaking book on Joyce and the law, “is the first mention in Ulysses of the Childs murder case. In one way or another the case or its protagonists are referred to more than 20 times in the text, sometimes very plainly, at other times obscurely. The case thus emerges as just one of the numerous threads, often submerged but constantly recurring, that form the fabric of the novel.”

Hardiman takes us through a number of law cases that are referred to in this way in Ulysses with such clarity and vivid use of detail that it is easy to imagine how they preoccupied the characters as they wandered in Dublin on 16 June 1904.

more here.

The Statement of Stella Maberly

The Statement of Stella  MaberlyMichael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) — better known by his pen name F. Anstey — once ranked among England’s most celebrated writers. Never heard of him, you say? Well, you know his novels, or at least the central ideas that drive their plots. Before turning to “The Statement of Stella Maberly,” Anstey’s neglected tour de force of psychological horror, let me tell you about some of his more characteristic work, his humorous fantasies.

In 1882, Anstey— only in his mid-20s — published his first novel, “Vice Versa.” In it, the stout, conventional businessman Mr. Bultitude and his 14-year-old son Dick discover that an ancient talisman has inadvertently caused them to exchange bodies. Most of the action involves Mr. Bultitude and his horrible experiences at a boys’ boarding school, as he tries desperately to undo the transformation. Dick, however, would really prefer to let things stand: After all, he now possesses the money, leisure and opportunity to indulge every boyish whim. The result is one of Victorian England’s great comic classics, the source for several later topsy-turvy novels, plays and movies, most notably “Freaky Friday.”

The 1960s sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie ” derives, in part, from Anstey’s “The Brass Bottle” (1900), in which a well-meaning “Jinnee”— an elderly fellow named Fakrash — causes all sorts of mischief and havoc in the life of hapless architect Horace Ventimore.

more here.

Saturday Poem

Even Though

A = pi r squared

even if a body
continues to fall
32 feet per second

which I hope

it will continue to do
nevertheless
after careful calculation

and by grace of algebra

I am persuaded that
if truth is a number
not only is it never

in the back of the book

but it never comes out even
ends in a fraction
cannot be rounded off.

Approximation
was the first art.
It is the only science.
.

by John Stone
from In All This Rain
Louisiana State University Press, 1980
.

LHC Physicists Unveil a Charming New Particle

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

LargePhysicists using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have discovered a new kind of heavy particle, they announced this week at a conference in Venice.

The particle, known as Xi-cc++ (pronounced “Ksī-CC plus-plus”), is composed of three smaller elementary particles called quarks—specifically, one lighter-weight “up” quark like those found in protons and neutrons as well as two “charm” quarks, which are a heavier and more exotic variety. (The designations “up” and “charm” are two of the six “flavors” physicists assigned to quarks based on the particles’ varying masses and charges.) The Standard Model of particle physics predicts Xi-cc++ and many other possible particles with various configurations of the six known flavors of quarks. But until now such “doubly charmed” particles had eluded conclusive detection. Further studies of the new particle—and other members of the doubly charmed particle family—could reinforce the Standard Model or lead to new vistas in particle physics. Either way, the new particle could be a tool to unlock a deeper understanding of the fundamental “strong” force that binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons, which in turn form atoms—as well as planets, stars, galaxies and people.

Any particle made of quarks is called a hadron. The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), slams these particles together in search of new particles and interactions. Hadrons fall into two broad families: mesons, exotic particles with one quark and one antiquark; and baryons, particles composed of three quarks. The new Xi-cc++ particle is a baryon. But due to its doubly charmed nature it is almost four times heavier than more familiar baryons such as protons and neutrons, which are made up entirely of light quarks rather than heavy ones. “Finding a doubly heavy quark baryon is of great interest, as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics [QCD]—the theory that describes the strong [force], one of the four fundamental forces,” LHCb spokesperson Giovanni Passaleva said in a statement. “Such particles will thus help us improve the predictive power of our theories.”

More here.

The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny

Douglas Preston in The New York Times:

DonnorCertain stories in American history carry archetypal power, and the dark majesty of the Donner catastrophe is one of them. In the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors stumbled out of the Sierra Nevada, the Donner story seized the American imagination and has never let go, generating a vast but unreliable historical record burdened with exaggeration, lies, melodrama and prurient disgust. Cannibalism was the prime reason the story lodged itself in our national psyche; but more than that, the fate of the Donner party was a denial, a violent repudiation, of the myth of Manifest Destiny: Here were a group of westward pioneers, the very picture of courage, resourcefulness and pluck, who ended up reduced to a level of squalor and barbarism almost beyond words.

The saga began in April 1846 when a prosperous band of emigrants left Springfield, Ill., heading for new lives in Alta California, then part of Mexico. At the Little Sandy River in Wyoming, 87 souls under the leadership of George Donner made a fateful decision: to follow the Hastings Cutoff, a new shortcut championed by a mountebank named Lansford Hastings. The cutoff routed them southward of the established trail, through the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, where they were forced to build a road, suffered terribly from thirst and lost many oxen. Discipline broke down: One man was murdered for his gold; another had killed in self-defense and was banished; and a third, unable to walk, was left behind to die. By the time the emigrants reached the foothills of the Sierra in late October, they were fatally behind schedule, demoralized and already starving. Not far from the pass, an apocalyptic blizzard descended on them. The next morning, Keseberg wrote, “All I could see was snow everywhere. I shouted at the top of my voice. Suddenly, here and there, all about me, heads popped up through the snow. The scene was not unlike what one might imagine at the resurrection, when people rise up out of the earth.” But it was anything but a resurrection. Fifty-nine people in the vanguard were forced to take refuge near Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), while the rest of the party, consisting of 22, was snowbound in a meadow six miles back. There most of them remained for months, as storm after storm piled up about 20 feet of snow, burying their rough cabins, lean-tos and crude shelters. In these filthy hovels they starved and began to die and eventually ate the dead — cooking flesh and organs, cracking bones for marrow, boiling them for grease, and processing them down into nubbins.

More here.

An extract from “The Lovers: A Novel” by Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar in the Indian Quarterly:

IndianQuarterly-copyWhen Ehsaan was young, that is to say the age I myself was when first I met him, he had gone to Tunisia for his doctoral research. In nearby Algeria, revolution had caught fire. It was said that Ehsaan had travelled to Algeria and fought in the war against the French. Had he? No one knew for certain. I never got the chance to ask him and, years later, sitting in a restaurant on Broadway, when I asked his widow that question, she quietly said, “I don’t know.” I had liked her honesty, especially when I pressed her to explain why Ehsaan had chosen to stay in the US and not return to Pakistan when his studies were over.

She laughed and said, In Pakistan the women wore the hijab. Here they showed their legs.

The very first time I had gone to Ehsaan’s office, to get my enrolment form signed for the class he was teaching, I had seen on his wall the framed poster of The Battle of Algiers. I had watched the film, when I was in my teens, in Pragati Maidan in Delhi. The poster’s background showed grainy black and white warren-like homes in the qasba, and leaning into the frame from the sides were the Algerian Ali La Pointe on the left, and, on the right, the French military colonel Mathieu.

The film’s director Gillo Pontecorvo had sought out Ehsaan when making the film. Pontecorvo had arrived in Algeria with his screenplay, but accidentally left it on the top of a car. Parts of the screenplay soon appeared in a right-wing paper. So Pontecorvo had recast the story, basing it upon interviews with revolutionaries: “a fiction written under the dictatorship of facts.”

More here.