#it's a literal business model at this point for white men to pander to us to sell records/gain fandom

[andsheoverthinks]

as a black woman i need black women to stop freaking out and acting crazy every time a man says something nice about black women like it's a collective win. take off the goggles and kick that fucker off his undeserved pedestal. come on, we're better than this.

[radbrowndads]

My mamoo passed away last week. When my friends and co-workers asked who I lost, I called him “my uncle”, but in English, he’d be more accurately described as my “first cousin once-removed” or my mother’s cousin. I have been devastated to lose him. Some folks not familiar with the culture I was raised with probably read this and think: "I’m not even that close to my first cousins, so why is he grieving about his Mom’s cousin?" As with all of my work, I am incredibly loathe to explain things that are inherent to my perspective or attempt to validate my world view as the child of Muslim immigrants.

But I think the reason I grieve my mamoo is important. And I want people to know the reason. I also want my family, who for better or worse all share Facebook as a common platform, to understand what he meant to me.

The crux of the importance is in that word, mamoo. "Mother’s brother."

In Urdu and in practice, we never distinguished between my mother’s actual brother and my mother’s cousin, nor my father’s sister and my father’s cousin. All were the same. And family comes with things like loyalty, respect, and unconditional love. It also comes with drama and arguments. But family is there for you.

Now like any family, you are closer to some branches and less to others. For whatever reason, this mamoo and his three other siblings has always been very close to our branch. Every single one of my mother’s four cousins has been deeply present throughout my life. They were (and are!) older than my parents and all but one were born in British India, in Panipat, before Partition.

Somehow, losing him, especially so suddenly, made me (and my sister Zainab, who independently came to the same conclusion) realize something — the culture of my mother’s family (and probably my father’s too) is seeped through with a refugee’s loss of home. My mother and everyone younger than her only knew Pakistan, but they inherited this trauma of their parents losing self, of losing home, of giving up what we knew to go to a new homeland and not by choice. And they passed that down to us. I��ve written about why this Partition means a lot previously here (https://www.buzzfeed.com/ahmedaliak…/not-quite-eat-pray-love). But even still I did not realize that how deeply these lessons penetrated my consciousness until I lost my mamoo.

My mamoo was a child when that happened. I can't even bear to think of all the young children whose lives ICE has ruined, but while mamoo and family would never be able to return home to India, the family stayed together at least. And he and his siblings have been a living link to that past we were inculcated with. My grandfather died when I was two, so my mamoo was the oldest man on my mother’s side that I regularly spent any time with. I hesitate to say he was like my grandfather, because that wasn’t the relationship at all and it feels pandering to American sensibilities of what familial love is. But still, whether he knew it or not, he was one of the most important elder men in my family and I see his influence on many in our generation. The loss was not just of a beloved family member — but of another pillar that was holding the family together, despite us dispersing throughout the world and away from Panipat.

Now, I want to point out that I have not personally experienced any suffering from this sort of “refugee” mindset, as it might imply to some. I have immense social and economic privilege as the children of two doctors and I have everything I could have ever asked for. But I do have this feeling that our culture, our family, our love for another may be eroded over time away from home. My grandparents worried that time in Pakistan would erode the culture from Panipat. And I worry that time here will erode some of the good that I learned from Pakistani culture. There is no strict value to this change, but when I talk with outsiders about my family, they remark that they admire how close we are. How much we are there for each other. And I never want to lose that.

On a personal level, there were many things I admired about my mamoo. He was present at every function he could be, no matter how far. Despite living in Pakistan and the UK, he visited my dying mother an incredible amount of times with his wife, my mami-jaan, who we also lost a few years back. I would often wake up from the deep sadness of knowing you’re going to lose a parent to see that yes, once again, Lutfi mamoo and Anwar Mami had came. I would ask him…. “Did you come from Pakistan?” not believing he had made the trip again, just to sit with his younger sister. And inevitably, he had. He made it seem like it was nothing at all, that to be there for us in our time of need was as easy as breathing. Mashallah. I wish to be like that in my family’s lives one day.

He was funny and loving and giving. You could be stuffed full of food and he would still literally stick his hand down your throat with food. My father was never much of a feeder in that way, so I never stopped being tickled watching this grown man lovingly present his entire khandan with nawallas to choke down at every meal. Until I was his next target of affection and I had to find a way to fend him off.

Once, he fed me the most delicious nihari of my life…. And immediately I fell unbearably sick with food poisoning, as did my sisters. But I recovered. And he served nihari again. I told him I wouldn’t eat it a second time, but he insisted… he said the sheermal we had eaten the nihari with was stamped on by the shopkeepers feet. "Just don’t eat the sheermal." So I happily ate it again, sans sheermal, only to be poisoned again. My sisters smartly avoided the second serving. I survived, but when I returned five years later, he served us nihari again and this time, despite his legendary insistence, I had learned to say no (he blamed the sheermal again). But my father did not, and he was the victim for the third iteration of this dangerous nihari. I had never him sweat like that. But I laughed at Lutfi mamu’s belief in our stomachs ability to persevere and his belief in showing love through food. It was, after all, the best damn nihari ever. I don’t regret eating it twice.

Before Facebook was ubiquitous, I’d get completely random Skype calls from him. I always found it a bit strange, since the older generation rarely called me at that age. And even more interesting, he’d often be calling in bed, against a generic white painted wall. And I’d ask him if he was calling from Lahore, his home. And no, he’d be calling me from Zanzibar or somewhere else in East Africa his business took him. I didn’t even know his job took him there! But he called me to ask how I was doing, to update me on his life, to connect us. As a lot of Pakistanis know, oldest children are valued and when you’re a younger sibling, you can sometimes feel ignored. But I never felt that way with my mamu. Those calls were such intensely memorable experiences of an elder treating me as if I was worthy. That I was valuable to him. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but it stayed with me, that he decided I was worth calling.

I am better at reflecting on the dead than the living. But I would remiss also to not mention his four daughters who have always treated us with a lot of love and affection as well, a legacy they got from both their parents. And of course, I can’t forget to eulogize his wife, Anwar Mami, who I have such fond memories watching cricket and cooking pullao with. I remember she was very impressed I had taken the effort to learn the family dish and I don’t believe my cooking deserved the level of praise she gave me. But that’s just the way she was with me.

Back to the original thrust of this: Lutfi Mamu was not the first person to die recently. We have lost so many elders in the past few years, including Mamu’s older sister, Khalida Khala, who I don’t believe I wrote anything about because it felt so freakish as well, that one day my beloved Khala could be there, and then be gone to a medical complication. And the same with Mami jaan who died to a long battle with cancer, as did my mother and Nuzhat Usmani’s husband Salahuddin Khalu. And then, of course, things repeat themselves. And Lutfi mamu died to a complication, to a battle with recovery.

And I realize that these things are not freakish, they are not strange. They are the norm. It happened to my parents and they felt the loss of Panipat and it will happen to us and we will feel the loss of Pakistan. One day my generation and I will look around and we will be carrying the torch of the legacy of the family. For better or for worse, we all took something from our family. I don’t know that I valorize any family value besides loving the fuck out of your family, besides being there for people who need you, besides loving to share food. A lot of other stuff is negotiable and I don’t want to say that I think inherently being an Usmani is good.

But being a family who loves each other. Where a cousin’s child can grieve his mamoo, to feel truly and bitterly lost at losing another model of Usmanihood, of family, of loving…. That is what I believe we should hold on to. Because it’s easy to transition to new ways of living, of nuclear families and of individual needs over those of the many. But for me, that way lies a deep, painful loss. I don’t want to let that happen. Because ammi, my mamoo, my mami jaan, my khala, and all the others we lost would be intensely pissed to know that the family is not together. And a week in London with the family has me confident that we can make it work, but it requires humility and sacrifice. It requires calls from Zanzibar and force feeding nihari that makes you shit out your face and your ass because it comes with a moment of bliss.

After my mamoo’s funeral, I saw my niece Laila play with her cousins, who are my mom’s cousins grandchildren. And I hope in thirty years, when they all grow up, they’re still connected. Because we did the fucking work and made the calls.

EDIT: i keep editing this to add clarification, but i think at this point i need a new comment.

one, i am sure there are buzurgon i have forgotten to name. one major one i forgot is rehmat amma, who was truly and absolutely the legacy of my nani on this earth during my lifetime. and i am sorry if i have forgotten others, but i pray that all of their souls are at ease

two, one of the bitter contradictions about having a huge, closely knit family is that deep layers of sweet familiarity and love are also marked by constant, repetitive cycles of loss and death. it’s a hard, but i think ultimately useful perspective to have on life. death is ever-present, for each of us, and whether you turn to god for explanation or you use the loss to find balance, i believe it is useful to know that life is short and it ends and it ends and it ends. I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for anything.

[politicaltheatre]

The Boy In The Bubble, pt.1

If you’re of a certain age, you might just remember a TV movie starring John Travolta, “The Boy In The Plastic Bubble”. Travolta was only TV famous then, not yet movie famous, and the bubble wasn’t literally a bubble, it was all of the plastic suits and rooms and boxes on gurneys that protected Travolta’s character and his broken immune system from the always sunny yet lethal outside world.

It was an innocent story from an innocent time. Of course, no one at that time thought of it as being particularly innocent. In the mid to late 1970s, America was still dealing with the fallout from the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the sexual revolution, spiritual curiosity and psychological awakening, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement.

We dealt with none of it well.

Far from learning any actually helpful lessons from the carnage of Southeast Asia, American foreign policy switched from supporting dictators and death squads there to doing so in Central and South America. Those working for Nixon who didn’t end up going to jail, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, only learned the lesson that next time, whatever they did, they just shouldn’t get caught. That, for them, was Nixon’s only sin.

Meanwhile, whites were fleeing to the suburbs and the cities they left were burning. The religious cults that people fled to for emotional support either fleeced their flocks or convinced them to kill themselves - sometimes both. In the cities and suburbia, depraved serial killers suddenly seemed to be everywhere and spreading like a plague. Children were no longer safe playing outside at night. Worst of all, the decades long threat of nuclear war was rapidly becoming matched by the growing fear of nuclear power and nuclear meltdowns.

All this, and the pandemic that would come to be known as AIDS wasn’t yet even on anyone’s radar. That would come a few years later, about the same time we learned not to trust non-prescription drugs like Tylenol without tamper-proof lids.

And yet, it was a much more innocent time. Perhaps this is because we knew less. We didn’t yet know what we didn’t know, and what our leaders knew, they generally didn’t share. Not that we knew, or even thought to ask. Nixon and the Pentagon Papers destroyed our faith in government, but even then we chose not to seek answers we didn’t want to know.

There’s a lot of willful ignorance now, too, but it has more to do with the corruptions of consumerism and tribalism. Thanks to the internet and mobile devices, we have the ability to learn what our leaders once hid and got away with hiding, and to do with speed that 40 years ago seemed like science fiction.

Sadly, that same technology has allowed us to have what we want when we want it, right down to a reflection of our own, narrow, self-serving political beliefs and the fantasies we require to hide from what we don’t want to know or even see.

We aren’t challenged, we don’t have to be, and to make matters worse we have externalized so much of our collective memory that we each know just about nothing that doesn’t reflect those same narrow, self-serving interests.

We fetishize our ignorance, embracing it as an affectation, something restoring us to and maintaining us in the perceived safety of pre-adolescence. If anyone comes along showing us rational proof that we are wrong, we dismiss them because we can and continue until we absolutely can’t.

If nothing else, this helps explain our current economy and with it our current politics.

We jump from one short term solution to another, from one passion to another. Our collective speculative interest raises the fortunes of politicians as if they were stocks on Wall Street, reducing them to flavors of the week, almost all fading just as quickly as they rise.

To win, a politician needs a hook, something to elicit strong emotions. It must be bold or reckless, or even violent. To sustain that success, a politician needs to keep delivering. What they deliver seems to matter less than the how and the when.

It’s quantity over quality. In short term thinking, quantity will do. You offer options and the enabling audience takes what they want to suit their own short term interests. Everything else is just a cost of doing business. It’s transactional, pure and simple.

Quality demands more from an audience. It answers the rarely asked question of what the audience actually needs rather than what it simply wants. There’s a very good reason that question is rare. Its answer demands a stronger, lengthier commitment, one that requires many to sacrifice what they want for a greater good.

If perfect is the enemy of good, in politics it’s the enemy of winning.

Deliver a clear, rational plan to solve the country’s long term problems and you should be elected; do so without entertaining, without pandering to the basic emotions and short term interest of your audience, and you might as well be one of those brilliant but cancelled shows lost to the Netflix algorithm.

Case in point, Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Senator made a few missteps in her now ended campaign for president, but the further she got the more those errors were dictated by things beyond her control.

The one getting the most press, and deservedly so, is sexism. Of course, sexism played a part in her candidacy’s failure, and that of the other five women who ran (Tulsi Gabbard’s zombie of a campaign was over almost as soon as it started).

So much of our culture, starting with our economy, is built on an imbalance of power. Today’s relationship between employer and employee is little changed from that of the feudal master and apprentice.

In this model of behavior, the apprentice starts out having no power, exchanging time in servitude for an education in a craft. The master, possessing the resource of knowledge which he may share as he chooses, may exploit his apprentice however he pleases.

In the short term, this works for both of them. The master is served and the apprentice learns. An imbalance of power, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely. The more the apprentice learns, the less of an imbalance there is and the more difficult it becomes to exploit him.

To maintain his power, the master has two choices: enable the apprentice so that he may himself become a master and then find a new apprentice to replace him, or abuse the apprentice so that he will be forced to stay as and where he is. The more the master abuses the apprentice, the more the apprentice wants to leave and the more effort must be made to keep him where and as he is, and so the cycle repeats until the apprentice revolts against the master, removing him one way or another.

For decades now, the backlash against unions as well as civil and women’s rights has attempted to maintain an economic underclass, to push men and women back where and as they are supposed to be. This has not been some grand conspiracy. It is just what happens when a group that has had it good finds itself in decline, or merely in competition.

Sadly, this backlash has to a great extent succeeded. Union membership has fallen, partly because union leadership has become disconnected from those they serve and partly because laws have gutted their ability to fight. Civil and women’s rights have never been stronger, but members of those groups face racism and homophobia and sexism transmitted like a virulent plague by bots and trolls hiding behind the perceived safety of anonymity.

For someone representing a group that has been abused and exploited because it was different enough and acceptable enough to be abused and exploited, the challenge of campaigning for office let alone winning an election is daunting. They do from a position of weakness defined by the same imbalance of power that underlies the very culture and economy in which they run.

So, how else can we expect the candidacy of someone on the wrong side of that imbalance to end?

True, Barack Obama won twice, but his victories were an outlier. He was the right, inspiring campaigner at the right economic catastrophe of a time going up against Republicans who failed to show either economic competence or empathy when it was most needed. Had it not been for the idiotic deregulation of banking that helped John McCain and Mitt Romney’s most important campaign contributors, Obama may have faced far stiffer competition both times. He might even have lost.

Obama was helped, too, by changes in our culture. Black, male presidents had already been portrayed as competent, empathic heroes in popular films and television shows. All he had to do was inhabit the role, and he did so as if those earlier films and shows had been written specifically with him in mind. If only he had their script writers.

He arrived with a mandate for change, and yet in his two terms Obama just about gave it all away. Part of that was because even as “the most powerful man on the planet” he was still on the wrong side of an imbalance of power. An unscrupulous Republican-led Congress obstructed him at every turn, nakedly serving the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else and daring him to call them on it.

He never really did. Perhaps this was because, as a follower of The Chicago School and “Clinton” Democrat, he simply agreed with many of the Republican’s “business friendly” policies. Mostly, though, it was because of the color of his skin, which those same Republicans and their business friends exploited to stir up fear and hatred in communities facing decline, ones looking for an other to blame.

What’s odd is that Obama won in many of those regions, even as congressional Republicans shifted their party further and further towards the naked racism and scapegoating of Donald Trump. Those people, the ones who voted for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, really did seem to want change, and perhaps still do.

Could Warren have won in those regions? Possibly. Campaigning as a woman meant that she, too, had to curb her sharp edges the way Obama did, and for a while that seemed to be working. But then it didn’t.

That, ultimately, had less to do with being a woman and more to do with being a brand.

Bernie Sanders is a brand. So is Joe Biden. The difference between them and the twenty-something candidates they have so far beaten has been name recognition. You might be thinking, “What do you mean, ‘name recognition’? Everybody knows who Elizabeth Warren is by now!”, and to an extent you’d be right. But you’d also be wrong.

What the Bernie and Biden brands have going for them is longevity. Brand loyalty is built on habit, and people having a good feeling about a brand for a long time is an enormous advantage. It’s incumbency by another name.

The Bernie brand has been around for four years and it remains strong, in no small part because it has big ideas that require no detail whatsoever. Ask any die-hard Bernie fan to describe his Medicare For All plan in any kind of detail, and the vast, vast majority won’t be able to. It would be great if they could. It would be great if they even took the time and effort to look it up. Few do.  

So few people do, in fact, that the insurance lobby has gotten away with painting it as irresponsibly expensive - it isn’t - and even aired a commercial during the South Carolina debate in which they claimed that it would raise already expensive insurance premiums. Medicare For All doesn’t even have premiums! Aside from one article published just last week in the New York Times, no one in the media even caught on. That should embarrassing all of us.

Still, the Bernie brand is strong. He represents a fantasy of what our country could and should be for a growing percentage of the population. That he may not be able to achieve his campaign promises is beside the point. That is, it’s beside the point for enough of his fans - the real fans, not the possibly Russian and/or alt right Bernie Bots - that they don’t want to hear about it.

That, naturally, hurt Warren. The cold, hard reality of what we must do for each other has long been her brand. That means details, and details mean quality, which requires long term thinking on the part of an audience, which means good luck back in the Senate.

Too late, she tried to pivot to place herself as the sensible choice halfway between Sanders and Biden, but sensible isn’t a choice voters like to have to make, and Biden’s brand has proven to be just as strong as Sanders’.

Biden’s strengths both match and mirror those of Sanders. His name recognition was so great that before he even announced he was the frontrunner. He was a popular vice president, endearingly known for gaffes, not policy. The details of his past are not pretty, not if you were on the wrong side of that imbalance of power.

His current power, however, rests in fantasy, one equal and opposite to that of Sanders in one very specific way: Joe Biden is the “safe” choice, promising to return us to a happier past.

In his case, it’s life before Trump, which is quite a fantasy to have when you consider just how bad things were under Obama. This is because life under Obama was ruled not by him but by his nemeses in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who together pushed the imbalance of power in the country almost all the way back to the time before unions or civil rights or women’s rights really took hold.

It was their effort, along with their friends in business and in the right wing media, that paved the way for Donald J. Trump to take Movement Conservatism and make it his own. They, of course, were just building on the work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who rode the Bush family brand back into the White House and rode American credibility and the American economy right into the ground.

They were as responsible as anyone for the election of Barack Obama. That was the America we wanted to leave behind. Now, we have something far worse.

The idea of going backwards to something better is a terrible brand to have for Democrats. It’s one built on fear. It’s one built on short term, transactional thinking. Biden’s solution to our growing health care problems is to slap a patch on it, to tweak it here and there. He, too, doesn’t have any details, but he isn’t offering them because it’s an advantage not to. We want fantasy, we want that protective bubble, and the fantasy he’s selling of leaving this toxic world behind is plenty.

For now.

Biden currently has momentum and it may well be enough to secure the nomination before the party convention this summer. If he does, expect Sanders to endorse him and campaign with him in order to rid the country of the one thing they both agree it needs to lose: Donald Trump.

Do not, however, expect a campaign filled with details. The fantasy, writ large with big, bold messaging and one main theme, is all you will get. It may be all  want, especially if he succeeds.

Then what?

- Daniel Ward