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THE WEST WING #105 [5-17] The Supremes Full transcript Written by Deborah Cahn Directed by Jessica Yu. I do not own this in any way, nor do I get anything from the sharing of it.

(MONDAY)

(CROWD OUTSIDE)

DONNA: (on phone) Tommy at Justice. Covitz at Justice. Citizens For a Strong America. Archbishop Gaudio, Archbishop Rummel…

JOSH: What?!

DONNA: Rummel! Of New York. Man of God.

JOSH: I can't hear a damn... Excuse me please. Thank You. How are these people up so early?

DONNA: It's a Supreme Court seat. They had sign-painting parties the second Justice Brady dropped dead. Council sent a new list, said burn the old list.

JOSH: Listen to this. “They cavalierly sacrificed the unborn innocents and beckon, arms akimbo, the reaper, the horseman and the apocalyptic end. Akimbo is a word you wish got used more. There’s someone out there selling “Who Would Jesus Nominate” t-shirts.

DONNA: They’re in Leo’s. They just started.

(OUTSIDE LEO’S OFFICE)

JOSH: You want this?

DONNA: You don't like it?

JOSH: Not really. Sorry I'm late.

LEO: Dem Leadership is in with the President.

JOSH: They giving us more names?

LEO: I'm sure they are.

TOBY: I need the short list by the end of the week.

LEO: Your schedule. Your schedule. Mine. Keep 'em quick. You got 3 judges an hour.

C.J.: Who has Austin Girelli from Connecticut?

TOBY: Me.

C.J.: ACLU called about him. I don't think it'll be a problem, but ask him about that migrant workers thing he wrote.

JOSH: Why isn't Haskins on here?

LEO: Having an affair with his clerk.

MARGARET: Toby - Dubar on line two.

C.J.: Here’s Bernstein. And this is…

TOBY: [on phone] Senator? Yes, Senator. No we're not having a party over the death of a Supreme Court Justice. Well, not a big party.

JOSH: Evelyn Baker Lang?

LEO: Fourth circuit.

JOSH: Isn't she kind of a lefty?

LEO: Yeah

C.J.: Decoy duck. And don’t do it in your office. Do it someplace where the press can see her.

LEO: We want the left flank sufficiently mollified and the right flank sufficiently panicked so as to inspire a little conciliation on all flanks.

JOSH: Lang should do the trick.

TOBY: Put Fred Canterbury down on some list of people we’ll never consider.

C.J.: Baker Lang's just with Josh?

LEO: You want Toby too?

C.J.: It'll look more like we're taking her seriously.

LEO: Toby, Evelyn Baker Lang will be your 8:45 with Josh. Let's go, people. First one to find me a Supreme Court Justice gets a free corned beef sandwich.

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Obviously we're impressed with your record.

TOBY: Your work on the 14th Amendment in particular is the stuff dreams are made of.

JOSH: But before anything else, we want to gauge your interest level. This will certainly be a lifestyle...

LANG: We can just chat

JOSH: I'm sorry?

LANG: I hear you really went to bat for Eric Hayden.

JOSH: I wish we could have gotten him confirmed.

TOBY: Judge Lang, if the President were to...

LANG: Is he still teaching?

JOSH: Eric? Yeah. Umm...again, if we...

LANG: A conservative anchor of the court has just died. A young brilliant thinker who brought the right out of the closet and championed a whole conservative revival. You cannot replace Owen Brady with a woman who overturned a parental consent law. You'd be shish-ka-bob'd and set aflame on the south lawn. Two reporters have... three reporters have walked by since we started. I'm window dressing. That's fine. I'm happy to help. But let's just chat about the weather.

(OUT IN THE HALL)

TOBY: Not bad.

JOSH: That's what we're talking about. Maybe we should put her on the short list.

TOBY: Yeah

JOSH: Okay, who's next? (Donna gives them folders)

TOBY: That’s his.

DONNA: This is…

JOSH: That’s a “no”.

ACT ONE

(DONNA’S DESK)

DONNA: Sign, please.

JOSH: You want to move it so I can see?

DONNA: Not really

JOSH: Why are we apologizing to Ashland?

DONNA: We sent him flowers. Condolence flowers.

JOSH: Condolences?

DONNA: For his death.

JOSH: He's alive.

DONNA: That's what he said.

JOSH: We sent flowers to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on the occasion of his death?

DONNA: They were supposed to go to Justice Brady's family.

JOSH: Get protocol on the phone.

DONNA: They didn't actually....

JOSH: We did this?!

DONNA: It was an honest mistake. Ashland's 80, he's knock knock knocking on ....

JOSH: Who put the order in?

RYAN: Hey guys!

JOSH: You sent a funeral bouquet to the family of the living breathing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

RYAN: No I sent them to the guy who died , Brady.

JOSH: No, actually you didn't.

RYAN: This is terrible. Umm... I really apologize. You know I am a nightmare with details. It's embarrassing. This stuff just leaks out of my head. We should leave the detail work to Donna. She's got the head for it. I'm more of a big picture kind of guy.

JOSH: She's here because she's invaluable. You're here because your uncle's so powerful I can't fire you. Big Picture.

LISA: Hi. Bad time?

JOSH: I'm on my way out.

LISA: Two minutes.

RYAN: Lisa, right? You work for the Judiciary Committee.

LISA: Staff Director.

RYAN: Ryan Pierce, we met at my office.

JOSH: Excuse us.

LISA: Is he the one who flipped the car in Nice?

JOSH: Yeah.

LISA: When do I see names for Brady's seat?

JOSH: Do you want to let the body cool?

LISA: You’re meeting with Barwald, Girelli, Evelyn Baker Lang.

JOSH: Here we go.

LISA: Whose acid trip is that?

JOSH: Just take a breath.

LISA: The committee’s not going to let the balance of the court hurl wildly to the left. You fill Brady's seat with...

JOSH: It's not Brady's seat.

LISA: It's not your Senate.

JOSH: We're just looking at the field.

LISA: Girelli has a fondness for Vicodin and Evelyn Lang is not an option. Save us all some time.

JOSH: We're some democrats over here. We're not going to nominate a born again elk hunter with a tattoo of the confederate flag on his ass.

LISA: Look at Arthur Lopez or Brad Shelton or Mayra Height. You go with Barwald or Lang and the Senate is going to make the next year of your life a living hell. I tell you this as a person who would be your friend if I was a person who looked for different things in friends.

JOSH: We should do this in more often.

LISA: As often as it takes.

(LEO’S OFFICE)

LEO: [on phone] We don't' hate Asians. No we don't. Justice Wong is more valuable to us where he is. Certainly. Thank you sir. [hangs up] Do a drive-by with Sebastian Cho, Massachusetts Supreme.

TOBY: Yeah. You were looking for me?

LEO: You hear about a congressional delegation to the Middle East?

TOBY: Next month.

LEO: It was Jordan and Egypt. Now they want to add Israel and do a day in the territories and meet with this shadow negotiation crew. State's iffy.

TOBY: As they should be. The Prime Minister is going to go through the roof.

LEO: Not to mention the Palestinian authority.

TOBY: I'll look into it.

LEO: Andy's leading the delegation. Is that going to be a...

TOBY: No. I'm on it.

JOSH: President's on his way. What's up?

TOBY: We hate Asians.

JOSH: Okay.

(OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE)

DEBBIE: Ah Rina, how goes it?

RINA: These are today's. And Mr. Ziegler says that the President would want this before their 1:00.

DEBBIE: Oh here, you can put it in his hot little hands yourself.

RINA: Ah, this is for you, sir.

BARTLET: Thank you Lana.

RINA: Uh, thank you sir. (to Debbie) It…

DEBBIE: I hate to do this, but it's Rina, sir.

BARTLET: What?

DEBBIE: The girl in the dress with the flowers.

BARTLET: Just now?

DEBBIE: Yes.

BARTLET: What'd I call her?

DEBBIE: Lana.

BARTLET: Who's Lana?

DEBBIE: I'm guessing an exotic dancer from your spotty youth.

BARTLET: I should apologize. Get her back.

DEBBIE: You asked me yesterday how the schedule gets off the rails.

BARTLET: Yeah.

DEBBIE: This is how.

LEO: Good afternoon, Mr. President.

BARTLET: Hey, we make any friends?

JOSH: Maybe Zimmerly, Shelton.

TOBY: Mehldau.

JOSH: Lang was pretty impressive.

BARTLET: The gal from the 4th? Didn't she strike down some stuff?

JOSH: Parental consent for abortion.

BARTLET: Yeah, that's not going to happen.

LEO: She was a red flag to the bull.

JOSH: Well, it's working. Lisa Wolfe from the judiciary committee showed up today spewing all kinds of threats and admonitions.

LEO: About what?

TOBY: Three dems on the committee called, elated we were considering bold choices.

LEO: If the strategy's working, let's get her in again.

BARTLET: You like Shelton?

JOSH: Yeah. Moderate, insightful, gets it.

BARTLET: Let's meet him. Who else?

JOSH: Helen Waller. Beresford Bannett DC Circuit. Ellis Yaffe. Martha Zell. Uh.. Howard Kagen out of New York.

(TUESDAY)

(C.J.’S OFFICE)

TOBY: What are you doing?

C.J.: Nothing.

TOBY: What?

CAROL: She has a date.

C.J.: And she's getting fired.

TOBY: Evelyn Lang’s coming back in for another red herring performance, 3:00. You don't find that annoying?

C.J.: I'll have Carol march the Times by Lang at three.

TOBY: Brad Shelton's in with the President.

C.J.: We like him.

TOBY: Yeah, we do.

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: E. Bradford Shelton. What's the E for?

SHELTON: Elijah.

BARTLET: That's a burden.

SHELTON: Hence the E.

BARTLET: I hear good things about you from my staff. What did they miss?

SHELTON: My son burned you in effigy.

BARTLET: Did you watch?

SHELTON: I didn't. It was a campus demonstration against American presence in Saudi Arabia. There's a photo in his yearbook. Someone'll dig it up. I thought it would sound better in person than on paper.

BARTLET: I'm not sure it did. Did he burn anybody else?

SHELTON: No, just you.

(HALLWAY)

LANG: Well, I’ve missed you both.

JOSH: We appreciate this.

LANG: I keep running into Brad Shelton in the parking lot. Some say coincidence. I'm not so sure.

JOSH: You have been very patient.

LANG: Well I don't mind. But people wonder why the appellate system is so backed up. We shouldn't let them know this is how I spend my time.

TOBY: Well, if you were less appealing.

LANG: Same to you sir.

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: Affirmative action is going to be back in the next few years. Let's start there.

SHELTON: What do I know about it?

BARTLET: What do you think about it?

SHELTON: I don't know. Not the answer you were looking for?

BARTLET: Not really.

SHELTON: Unnerving isn't it?

BARTLET: Is there another topic you'd be more comfortable with?

SHELTON: Nothing comes to mind.

BARTLET: Perhaps you should make something up.

SHELTON: I'm not trying to be cagey, but I don't position myself on issues and I don't know what I think about a case until I hear it. There are moderates who are called that because they are not activists. And there are moderates who are called that because sometimes they wind up on the left and sometimes on the right.

BARTLET: You think I want someone who’s gonna vote with Ashland?

SHELTON: I think you are looking for somebody who will vote with him now and replace him later.

BARTLET: And that's not you?

SHELTON: Wish it were. He's a giant. But my allegiance to the eccentricities of a case will reliably outweigh my allegiance to any position you might wish I held.

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Let's talk a little bit about what the judiciary committee's concerns would be. We can safely say reproductive rights are gonna come up.

TOBY: They're going to say judicial activism, particularly in drori. How would you address that?

LANG: And you're who?

TOBY: I'm sorry?

LANG: Who are you? We're playing committee.

JOSH: This will be coming from one of the 11 Republicans on there. Mitchell -

LANG: You can only be one.

JOSH: We don't need to -

LANG: If you're Webster, the question is 'Where do you stand on Roe v Wade?'. And the answer is 'Judicial ruling shouldn't be based on personal ideology, mine or anyone else's'. If you're Davies, the question is 'How would you approach a D&X case?' because he's the drum banger on partial birth. And the answer is 'I don't comment on hypotheticals'. If you're Malkin, you're from Virginia, so you ask about my decision in drori. I take you point by point from the doctor to the father to Casey to undue burden to equal protection back to Roe at which point you can't remember the question and I drink my water for a minute while you regroup.

JOSH: Will you excuse us for a second?

(OUT IN THE HALL)

JOSH: I love her. I love her mind. I love her shoes.

TOBY: We march her to five senator's offices and they'll be so scared they'll beg us to put Shelton on the court.

(ROOSEVELT ROOM)

JOSH: Sorry. You were vetted by the FBI when you hit the Federal bench, but if we re-opened an investigation....

LANG: I'm a shill, right? Why would you bother with a background check?

JOSH: Humor us.

TOBY: If there's anything that they didn't find...

LANG: Let's see, umm... in high school I snuck a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover out of the public library and never returned it. In college I got a marijuana plant from my roommate as a birthday present. And in year two of law school I had an abortion. Can I get some water while you regroup?

ACT TWO

JOSH: Okay. Okay.

LANG: I tell you this so you'd be prepared. It might not come up, but if it did, I wouldn't comment.

JOSH: But if they know, it'll be hard.

LANG: Roe v Wade affords me the right to terminate a pregnancy and to do so, free from all restraint or interference of others.

JOSH: A hearing room....

LANG: I'm told I have a right to privacy. I think this would be the sort of thing it's referring to. I also bet like a drunken sailor during my bi-monthly games of Hearts. Do you wanna talk about that?

(C.J.’S OFFICE)

C.J.: An abortion?

TOBY: Of all the gin joints in all the world....

JOSH: Maybe they won't find it.

TOBY: Oh, they'll find it.

JOSH: Yeah, but who's going to bring it up? The committee, they'd look like monsters.

C.J.: They don't have to. Someone leaks it to the tabloid press, it's a feeding frenzy in 12 hours.

JOSH: She says she can handle it.

C.J.: Oh, okay.

TOBY: Well, we need her. She's the cautionary tale. Without her, we may not get Shelton.

C.J.: You been outside today? We don't hand someone to the madding crowd so they can take the heat off some guy from Indiana.

JOSH: The woman is - you should hear her.

C.J.: What? So she IS a serious candidate?

JOSH: She should be.

C.J.: She's going to be on posters under a headline that says 'Wanted for the murder of 15 million American children'.

JOSH: Let's think about this.

C.J.: Let it go.

JOSH: No. Really, nominees live or die by Roe v Wade. We're playing along with the ridiculous notion that the Supreme Court is a single issue body in a way it hasn't been since, I don't know what...

TOBY: Slavery.

JOSH: Exactly. So she had an abortion. Who the hell are we?

C.J.: You think I like this? You keep this up, somone's going to take this to the press and this bright woman's going to be a checkout counter spectacle. Get her out of the building.

(WEDNESDAY)

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: Brad Shelton could work for us. I like him.

LEO: So talk to him this afternoon. He's going to start getting calls.

BARTLET: Who else?

TOBY: Wisnewski’s a good maybe. The majority leader’s really pushing him. And Barkham from the 5th, though he has a question.

JOSH: It's a tax thing. We're looking into it.

BARTLET: You still having a love affair with Evelyn Lang?

JOSH: No. Uh, Robert Brant.

BARTLET: How come?

JOSH: She won't make through vetting.

BARTLET: Why not?

TOBY: She had an abortion.

JOSH: Robert Brandt’s on the 9th circuit state. Stan Yancy's worked with him and says he's always kept his cards -

BARTLET: When did she have an abortion?

JOSH: Law school.

BARTLET: Before or -

C.J.: After '73, it was legal.

BARTLET: We discarding anybody else for legal activities?

TOBY: Not yet.

BARTLET: Tonsillectomy? We down on surfing this year?

C.J.: She'd be publicly eviscerated.

BARTLET: 27 million women voted for me. I think they might had in mind that I was going to protect this particular right.

JOSH: We have plenty –

BARTLET: “I like that guy from Florida with the good hairdo, but I want to retain my right to choose, so I'm voting for what's-his-name, married to Abbey Bartlet.”

TOBY: Sir. They're going to make this about her objectivity.

BARTLET: We promised the committee a short list by Friday. I want her name on it.

LEO: Okay.

STAFF: Thank you, Mr. President. (EXEUNT)

BARTLET: That pisses me off.

LEO: Apparently.

BARTLET: We marched her around here all week. The honor of a place on the short list is the least we could do.

LEO: We’re still going with Brad Shelton? BARTLET: (nods)

(DONNA’S CUBICLE)

RYAN: Filling a seat on the Supremes…heady stuff.

DONNA: Don't call them that.

RYAN: My uncle calls them that. So does the minority leader. So does Henry Clark. You know him? He's on the court.

DONNA: You drop one more name and I'm going to staple your mouth shut.

RYAN: (chuckles)

JOSH: There’ll be hell to pay at Agincourt. I've offended the dauphin.

DONNA: Lisa Wolfe called twice. Senator Webster called regarding E. Lang. “What can you possibly be thinking?” Senator Milbank, regarding Lang. “NO NO NO NO NO.” Bertha McNull, “Not a snow ball's chance in...” oh, that's not about Lang. That's about the highways bill.

JOSH: I need a drink.

DONNA: Sun’s not over the yardarm.

JOSH: C.J.'s right.

DONNA: Usually. You want a Black Eyed Susan?

JOSH: Is that a drink?

DONNA: It's a cookie. My mom sent them.

JOSH: No -- Yes.

DONNA: Peanut butter with a chocolate kiss.

JOSH: They’re cat people? [holding up cookie tin]

DONNA: No they're not.

JOSH: These theirs?

DONNA: Shadrach and Meschach.

JOSH: Two cats, they’re cat people.

DONNA: For years they only had one, but he died over Christmas.

JOSH: This is a dry cookie.

DONNA: After what was deemed an appropriate mourning period, they went to get a new one. And my mother liked the abyssinian and my father liked the gray. And they claim that after 39 years of marriage, they’ve outgrown compromise, so they got both. It doesn't make them cat people. The house doesn't smell. Do I have crumbs?

(TOBY’S OFFICE)

JOSH: They pick one. They pick one! That's how we get Evie Lang. And not as a decoy. We put her on the court.

TOBY: Hi.

JOSH: The Chief Justice says he wouldn't step down because the President wouldn't be able to fill his seat with another liberal lion. She's the liberal lion. Ashland resigns, she takes his seat, okay? And we offer the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee the opportunity to hand-pick a conservative for Brady's seat. We put 'em both up.

TOBY: I’m ordering mu-shu. You want some?

JOSH: Listen to me.

TOBY: No.

JOSH: I'm serious.

TOBY: And then we got what, after we hand the Republicans a seat on the Supreme Court with a red bow on top?

JOSH: We have a balanced court. They can't let Brady's seat go to a liberal. So let them keep it. Meanwhile, we name the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the nation's history. I'm taking it to the President.

TOBY: No you're not. Do not go in there.

(HALLWAY)

JOSH: Trip him.

TOBY: Ashland is 82. We may have an opportunity to put two people on this bench. That's two seats we fill with Democrats.

JOSH: Moderates.

TOBY: What do you care how moderate they are? Two is twice as many as one.

(OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE)

JOSH: Can I get in there?

DEBBIE: No, just a minute.

TOBY: We don't need him.

JOSH: Not moderate, mediocre.

TOBY: What, Shelton’s not bright enough for you?

JOSH: I want more than bright. If we had a bench full of moderates in ’54, 'Separate but Equal' would still be on the books, and this place would still have two sets of drinking fountains.

TOBY: Moderate means temperate. It means responsible. It means thoughtful.

JOSH: It means cautious. It means unimaginative.

TOBY: It means being more concerned about making decisions than making history.

DEBBIE: Indoor voices please.

JOSH: Is that really the biggest tragedy in the world? That we nominated somebody who made an impression instead of some second rate crowd pleaser?

TOBY: The ability to see tow sides of an argument is not the hallmark of an inferior intellect.

DEBBIE: Toby!

JOSH: What about the vast arenas of debate a moderate won't even address? A mind like Lang's?

DEBBIE: Josh!

JOSH: Let them pick a conservative with a mind like like Justice Brady had.

DEBBIE: Josh!

JOSH: You can hate his positions, but he was a visionary. He blew the whole thing open. He changed the whole argument.

DEBBIE: (sprays water in Josh’s face) The President will see you now.

BARTLET: And you?

TOBY: I think they're going to pick a young, spry, conservative ideologue who's going to camp out in that seat for 45 years.

JOSH: Fine. Two voices are articulating the debate at either end of the spectrum.

BARTLET: Filling another seat on the court may be the only lasting thing I do in this office. Shelton's a great choice. He'll make us proud. And if Ashland resigns in a year, we’ve got a stack of great options. We can't give it away.

JOSH: Mr. President, the first woman in that chair.

TOBY: We go out on some limb here and alienate the Senate, they'll tread water for three years, and we get nobody. The next guy gets to fill Brady's seat.

BARTLET: Take it to Ashland. See what he says.

TOBY: How’d you come up with it?

JOSH: What?

TOBY: The swap-a-dee-doo.

JOSH: There was.... Donna's mom... I thought it up in the shower.

(JUSTICE ASHLAND’S OFFICE)

ASHLAND: Who let them in?

TOBY: Sorry to disturb you, sir.

ASHLAND: Carrier pigeons. Oh -- your flowers. Yeah, we like them.

JOSH: I'm dreadfully sorry about that, sir.

ASHLAND: Oh for God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. Brady was your age. Eat your greens.

TOBY: He was a great man.

ASHLAND: He was a selfish bastard.

JOSH: You told the President you hope to be replaced by a liberal with the same level conviction that you brought to the chair.

ASHLAND: That sounds like something I'd say.

TOBY: Sir, are you familiar with Evelyn Baker Lang?

ASHLAND: Miss Lang. You've met with her?

JOSH: Yes sir.

ASHLAND: How are you going to get her past the pit bulls? They're not going to like the notion of Miss Lang in Owen Brady's seat.

JOSH: For your seat, if - if - you were to resign, she'd be Chief.

ASHLAND: My seat? What about Brady's?

TOBY: We'd allow the Judiciary Committee to choose someone. A conservative.

JOSH: Would you consider stepping down under those circumstances?

ASHLAND: Sure.

JOSH: We think it might be a viable option.

ASHLAND: Go ahead, see who they pick of their favorite sons. See what segregationist, anti-miscegenationist, Isaiah-quoting, gay-bashing bastard they come up with. Jed Bartlet from New Hampshire had an idea. Uh-oh.

ACT THREE

(THURSDAY, LISA WOLFE’S OFFICE)

LISA: No, I cut this because what he's implying is illegal. Take it back out. [to Josh] Three times in one week. In some cultures we'd be married.

JOSH: Chilling.

LISA: Is it Shelton?

JOSH: He's the front runner.

LISA: Good, are we done?

JOSH: Mind if I shut the door?

LISA: No.

JOSH: How are you doing?

LISA: Ah, super!

JOSH: Feeling good?

LISA: I got a meeting in 4 minutes.

JOSH: I'm going to float an idea here that even I can't believe I'm mentioning and my colleagues definitely can't believe I'm mentioning, and the President would probably prefer I drop completely and if I find it in the Washington Post tomorrow morning, I'll march straight out to the Press Room and tell them the idea came from you. It'll embarrass the crap out of your boss and you'll be on Hotjobs by nightfall.

[THE WHITE HOUSE. TOBY’S OFFICE]

TOBY: There's someone in my office.

RINA: I thought it was your ex-wife.

TOBY: You didn’t want to warn me about that?

RINA: You asked her to come in.

ANDREA: She's cute.

TOBY: Late some night, our eyes’ll meet over the maritime commission report. We'll be at the Justice of the Peace before dawn. You want to talk about this dog and pony show you're attending in Gaza?

ANDREA: Not really. Bradford Shelton.

TOBY: He's on the list. You're not going to Gaza.

ANDREA: I still don't want to talk about it.

TOBY: You're not attending peace talks with a bunch of Israelis and Palestinians who don't work for the Israeli or Palestinian governments.

ANDREA: They may generate some useful ideas.

TOBY: The ideas already exist. The problem is getting the recognized parties to stick to the plan.

ANDREA: So we sit with our hands folded?

TOBY: We asked them for democracy. We should maintain some scrap of respect for the guys who are democratically elected.

ANDREA: If you're really interested in peace, you negotiate with anyone. You negotiate with the mailman.

TOBY: Thanks for tee-ing that up. The mailman can't deliver.

ANDREA: We'll see.

TOBY: No, we won't see. You're jeopardizing this country's relationship with the Likud party and with the Palestinian authority, and it is not an option.

ANDREA: Is that all you've got? There’s no “and what about the kids?”

TOBY: Did something happen?

ANDREA: I'm going away for two weeks.

TOBY: Will they be...?

ANDREA: At my mothers...

TOBY: Good.

ANDREA: Would you have asked?

TOBY: I figured your mother’s, which is apparently....

ANDREA: You say you want to be involved. It doesn't come with an embossed invitation. You involve yourself or you don't.

TOBY: The President would like to remind you that this is a fact-finding mission. Please make it clear to any parties that you meet with that you are not empowered to negotiate for the United States.

[OUTSIDE C.J.’S OFFICE]

JOSH: Is she in there?

CAROL: Hang on. She's getting off.... [C.J. laughs loudly through the door] the phone.... [into speaker phone] you want Josh?

C.J.: Lord knows I do! Josh Lyman as I live and breathe! You want a cookie? They're from Donna's mother.

JOSH: I spoke to Lisa Wolfe.

C.J.: What did she say?

JOSH: I don't want to talk about it. I'm hiding from Toby.

C.J.: [giggles] Nothing. You're hiding. It's funny.

JOSH: It's not funny.

TOBY: Hey

C.J.: [laughs] see? It is.

JOSH: I gotta go.

TOBY: What's going on?

JOSH: C.J. has the giggles.

C.J.: It's your deal. I find it elating.

TOBY: She stoned?

C.J.: I'm fine. I just didn't get enough sleep.

JOSH: You were with Ranger Rick weren't you?

C.J.: Josh spoke to Lisa Wolfe.

TOBY: She give you a name?

JOSH: You are a faithless wench.

TOBY: What's the name?

JOSH: Christopher Mulready. Wait for it....

TOBY: Christopher MULREADY????!!!!

JOSH: There it is.

C.J.: He’s not the....

TOBY: American's Democrats - The triumphant of Socialism.

JOSH: He doesn't like the name.

TOBY: The man wrote a book that flushes the entire doctrine of un-enumerated rights down the -

C.J.: Toilet.

TOBY: …garbage disposal. No right to use a condom. No right to get an abortion, certainly. No protection from electronic searches. No substantive due process.

C.J.: He's what, 48?

JOSH: I know.

C.J.: The left's going to blow a gasket!

TOBY: No separation of church and state.

JOSH: We got problems on the right too. Kogan, Howard, Tondello. They can't vote for a Mulready. Their constituencies are too moderate.

TOBY: Get another name.

JOSH: That is the name.

TOBY: There are other....

JOSH: This is the deal. He's what Evelyn Lang is to them. We nominate the patron saint of a woman's right to choose for Chief Justice. We ask them to ignore an incredibly rich piece of her personal history. We take the name they give us.

TOBY: This isn't going to work.

JOSH: Yeah.

TOBY: It isn't.

[JOSH'S OFFICE]

TOBY: If --- if we were going to try this, what would be the plan?

JOSH: We give the President and Leo the name. We bring Christopher Mulready in. We bring Lang back in, hopefully the two of them woo the pants off the President. And he agrees to the deal without noticing he's standing in the gaze of history, pantless.

TOBY: I'll talk to him.

JOSH: You don't have to talk to him.

TOBY: You have been on about this. It sounds more plausible coming from me. What are you gonna do about the committee?

JOSH: Lisa Wolfe’s gonna take it to the Chairman.

TOBY: I mean the Democrats. I need to get Senator Pierce on board or you get nobody. What are you going to do about Pierce?

RYAN: (singing)'Won't you stay... just a little big longer... '

DONNA: Stop.

TOBY: I thought you were firing him?

JOSH: If wishing made it so. Donna! Send in Elvis.

RYAN: What's up?

JOSH: Come on in, take a load off. I was a little, ah, brusque with you before. I'm sorry about that.

RYAN: Okay.

JOSH Your feelings a little hurt?

RYAN: Not at all

JOSH: Really? Why not?

RYAN: Would this be easier if they were?

JOSH: I said I was going to fire you if it wasn't for....

RYAN: Are you? Firing me?

JOSH: No.

RYAN: Then there's a “sticks and stones” thing that comes to mind.

[OUTSIDE OVAL OFFICE]

TOBY: Finishing a call. I spoke to Andy.

LEO: Anything?

TOBY: No. The National Security Caucus is sponsoring the delegation. We could talk to them.

LEO: We'll deal with it next week. Don't worry about it.

TOBY: We got a name for Brady's seat.

LEO: Somebody workable?

DEBBIE: You can go in now.

LEO: Thank you.

(OVAL OFFICE)

BARTLET: MULREADY!

TOBY: That's the name.

BARTLET: No! Are you out of your bloody mind?

TOBY: Let's sit down and talk about this.

BARTLET: The last time I heard Christopher Mulready's name it was in conjunction with a treatise over the rights of incorporation, and some sort of baloney about the stranglehold the EPA has placed on the endangered species list…

ACT FOUR

(THURSDAY)

[DONNA’S CUBICLE]

JOSH: Ryan in here yet?

DONNA: Not yet.

CHARLIE: Chris Mulready?

JOSH: Yeah

CHARLIE: Dissented on minority set asides. Struck down hate crime legislation. Went after miranda rights. Feeling pretty good about that?

JOSH: It's not a perfect plan. I'm the first to admit.

CHARLIE: The President wants to reiterate, he’s not spending more than five minutes with this clown.

C.J.: The press room is clear. Carol is going to babysit the filing shop. But keep an eye out for roving reporters.

CHARLIE: You're in on this too?

JOSH: We got Lang coming in to meet the President at 7. Christopher Mulready is at 8. The press can't see him. We need a clear shot from the Roosevelt room to the Oval.

DONNA: He's on the short list?

JOSH: He is if she is. We may get both.

DONNA: Oh my god. You're putting my mother's cats on the Supreme Court.

C.J.: You're what?

JOSH: It's just an experiment. She’s on sentry. We’re good.

TOBY: Hi.

JOSH: Don't ever tell anyone that story.

TOBY: We all settled?

C.J.: Lefty’s got the goods. Rocko got the call. Stinky's on lookout.

DONNA Hey!

RYAN: Shall we?

JOSH: Your uncle’s here?

C.J.: Knock 'em dead. Pierce’ll never buy it, will he?

TOBY: Nope.

RYAN: Remember, he's all bark. Just let him holler and wear himself out. He's got the strength. You've got the endurance. Here. [hands over bottle of scotch]. Use it wisely and for God's sake, don't try to keep up. You're way out of your league.

JOSH: Not necessary. Thank you.

(MURAL ROOM)

SENATOR PIERCE: Good to see you, Josh.

JOSH: Senator Pierce, thank you so much for stopping in.

RYAN: Josh was pretty impressed with your floor speech on Tuesday.

PIERCE: Josh can kiss up all on his own. Get back to work.

RYAN: Yell if you need anything.

PIERCE: My nephew behaving?

JOSH: He's a… treat.

PIERCE: Well, he better be. Bugged me for two years to get him a job in this place.

JOSH: Really?

PIERCE: Watch yourself, he's a lean and hungry type. Have someone taste your food.

JOSH: Ryan?

PIERCE: So! Craziest rumor you ever heard running around the committee.

JOSH: Oh, yeah?

PIERCE: Charlie Felson says you want to put Chris Mulready on the Supreme Court. I said anybody who tries is going to find himself in a closed session with myself, the minority leader, and the business end of a two-by-four.

JOSH: You know, we got a 21year old Glenlivet knocking around here. Can I get you a drink?

[DEBBIE'S OFFICE]

C.J.: Lang still in there?

DEBBIE: Oh, she's a big hit.

C.J.: She has to leave. Her evil twin Skippy is on his way.

DEBBIE: I did our secret wrap-it-up sign, which is, I knock and say 'The deputy NSA needs to talk about Japan' and he said 'you talk to him, you've been there' which is true. But it makes me think he's forgotten it's a secret sign.

C.J.: How about "Excuse me Mr. President we need to move on"?

DEBBIE: If you want the job, you're going to have to work on your typing.

[ROOSEVELT ROOM]

TOBY: Apologies. He's running behind schedule.

MULREADY: I imagine that happens. You want to tell me what I'm doing here?

TOBY: Oh, just a hello.

MULREADY: I'm not being impeached?

TOBY: No.

MULREADY: This isn’t a not-particularly-subtle form of intimidation about the gays in the workplace case?

TOBY: That would be illegal.

MULREADY: My point exactly.

TOBY: The President will explain....any minute now.

MULREADY: Hm.

TOBY: But since you mention it, I read your article on Bellington, and I may be out on the fringe here, but I - I don't see how a family values conservative justifies denying committed couples access to the benefits of state sanctioned monogamy.

MULREADY: Homosexual couples.

TOBY: Couples. A couple is a couple.

[C.J.'S OFFICE]

JOSH: Hi.

C.J.: How was Ryan's uncle?

JOSH: He's a blast. Come meet him.

C.J.: He's still here? Oh my God! You're drunk!

JOSH: I think I just promised him a pork barrel roads project on an omnibus bill that doesn't exist. Don't try and keep up. He's got a wooden – a hollow leg. He drinks a lot.

[ROOSEVELT ROOM]

TOBY: It's an equal protection violation.

MULREADY: Homosexuals are not a suspect class.

TOBY: D.O.M.A. denies access.

MULREADY: No.

TOBY: To over 1,000 federal protections.

MULREADY: To what?

TOBY: Survivor benefits under Social Security.

MULREADY: $255.00? I'll write you a check.

TOBY: Hospital decision making.

MULREADY: So talk about power of attorney, not marriage. Besides, the fact that D.O.M.A. doesn't restrict access to marriage.

TOBY: Of course it restricts access. It restricts full faith and credit.

MULREADY: So, Vermont gets to steer nationwide marriage legislation? Vermont?

LANG: Well, this is a sight to see! One of the more unlikely meetings in the history of the Bartlet White House.

MULREADY: It's good to see you, Evie.

LANG: You too, Chris. I came to say goodbye. I wish I had a camera.

MULREADY: Mr. Ziegler was trying to convince me that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

LANG: Oh, D.O.M.A.? He was trying to convince you?

TOBY: What?

LANG: He doesn't need convincing.

TOBY: I wasn't doing it because...

LANG: He was yanking your chain. He would never uphold D.O.M.A. He may not love the idea of gay marriage, but he hates congressional overreaching, and Congress doesn't have the power to legislate marriage. The issue isn't privacy.

MULREADY: Or equal protection.

LANG: It's enumerated powers. He'll have an easier time knocking down D.O.M.A. than I will.

MULREADY: Lack of imagination on your part, if I may be so bold.

TOBY: You were yanking my chain?

MULREADY: You called me in for a meeting with a Democratic president in the middle of the night. Are you really going to give me crap about yanking your chain?

LANG: Josh Lyman is gesticulating wildly.

TOBY: Excuse me.

[HALLWAY]

TOBY: Where's the Senator?

JOSH: He's in with C.J.. He got me a little drunk.

TOBY: Is he leaving?

JOSH: I think he's getting C.J. a little drunk. How's it going?

TOBY: He's striking down gay marriage bans and she's defending him and they're as thick as thieves and he's a fan of chain yanking.

JOSH: She's defending him?

TOBY: Down is down, down is up.

LANG: I am not... no I am not rewriting Article 1. What I am saying is that a gun free school zone...

MULREADY: Is not a federal issue. In Lopez…

LANG: Lopez overturned 50 years of precedent.

MULREADY: Too bad, they ruled a plain text reading of the commerce clause, does not afford Congress...

LANG: A plain text reading of the Constitution values a “negro” at three-fifths of a man.

MULREADY: Hence the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

LANG: Oh, generous. Thank you.

MULREADY: The relationship between guns and schools and interstate commerce is... is...

LANG: You don't think that the quality of education has a direct affect on the economic...

[DEBBIE'S OFFICE]

TOBY: Is he?

DEBBIE: Waiting to meet a man you're holding hostage in the Roosevelt room.

(MURAL ROOM)

C.J. AND PIERCE: Oh and while the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown, the courtroom was adjourned, no verdict was returned…

JOSH: Ok... ok.... Everyone needs to put down their glasses and pay attention.

[OVAL OFFICE]

BARTLET: You like him.

TOBY: I hate him. I hate him, but he's brilliant. And the two of the them together, they’re fighting like cats and dogs, but it works.

[MURAL ROOM]

PIERCE: You couldn't find a single warm-blooded centrist to put on the court?

JOSH: We've got centrists. We've got six of them plus two staunch conservatives plus Justice Ashland. The one clarion voice articulating a liberal vision. He's going to go and then what?

[OVAL OFFICE]

BARTLET: Well, send him in....

TOBY: Sir…

BARTLET: I said I'll listen to him, Toby. That's going to have to do it.

[HALLWAY]

DONNA: Toby.

TOBY: What?

DONNA: Nothing's happening.

TOBY: Hang on.

DONNA: That's him?

TOBY: Yeah.

DONNA: No tail. No cloven hooves.

[OVAL OFFICE]

DEBBIE: Judge Mulready.

BARTLET: Thanks for coming in.

MULREADY: It's an honor sir.

BARTLET: Please. I understand that you and Judge Lang had a bit of a knock-down-drag-out.

MULREADY: She wants to federalize law enforcement.

BARTLET: Yeah.

MULREADY: I thought it was hasty.

BARTLET: Not your brand of judge?

MULREADY: Quite the opposite. I haven't had that much fun in months.

BARTLET: Really? ��

MULREADY: Use her, if you can. I'm not sure what all this is about. I suppose a number of people are placated by a glimpse of someone like her or someone like me in these halls. I'm most certainly here for that. But if there’s anyway that you can use her…

BARTLET: It's unlikely.

MULREADY: Who's at the top of the list? ... If I leaked it, would they believe me?

BARTLET: Brad Shelton.

MULREADY: Really?

BARTLET: You don't like him?

MULREADY: He's a fine jurist. And in the event that Carmine, Lafayette, Hoyt, Clarke and Brannaghan all drop dead, the center will still be well tended.

BARTLET: You want another Brady?

MULREADY: Sure, just like you'd like another Ashland - who wouldn't? The court was at its best when Brady was fighting Ashland.

BARTLET: Plenty of good law written by the voices of moderation.

MULREADY: Who writes the extraordinary dissent? The one man minority opinion whose time hasn't come, but 20 years later some circuit court clerk digs it up at three in the morning. Brennan railing against censorship. Harlan's Jeremiad on Jim Crowe.

BARTLET: Maybe you, some day?

MULREADY: They can't put me on the court, just like you can't put Evelyn Lang on the court. It's Sheltons from here on in.

BARTLET: There are 4,000 protestors outside this building worried about who's going to land in that seat. We can't afford to alienate all of them. MULREADY: We all have our roles to play sir. Yours is to nominate someone who doesn't alienate people.

(FRIDAY)

(PRESS ROOM)

JOSH: Where's Toby?

C.J.: Can you see this? [pointing to spot on her blouse]

JOSH: Yeah.

C.J.: It's water, it'll dry.

JOSH: Okay.

TOBY: Ready?

[on the TV in background...]

REPORTER ... have gathered around..... Ashland having served 32 years on the United States Supreme Court, 12 of them as Chief will officially announce his retirement in just a moment.

ASHLAND: (at podium, on TV) Henry Staub retired, and I received a phone call, you were probably learning to walk. It's been an honor to pause in Henry Staub's chair, a joy to spend...

C.J.: (to Bartlet) He’ll take three questions at the most, and then we’re off .

LANG:[to Lang] you ready? [Lang is engrossed in Ashland's announcement] [To C.J.] That's a yes.

MULREADY: So, why a racial preference and not an economic one?

CHARLIE: Because affirmative action’s about a legacy of racial oppression.

MULREADY: It’s about compromising admissions standards.

CHARLIE: That's bull….excuse me. It's about leveling the playing field after 300 years of…

MULREADY: See, this is where the liberal argument goes off the rails. You get stuck in the past. Now you wanna comeback at me with grading is based on past performance, but admission should be based on potential on how a candidate may thrive with this sort of opportunity. And studies show that affirmative action admits have a higher predisposition to contribute to society.

CHARLIE: Hang on, I gotta write this down.

BARTLET: Ah-ah-ah. Hand it over. [to Evelyn] Toby has a daughter, Molly, 10 months old. She's a looker and very bright. And someday he'd like to give her this copy of the 14th Amendment signed by the first woman to ever hold this job.

LANG: Have you got a...

TOBY: Oh... [hands her a pen] Would you mind adding that title?

LANG: That's a bit premature, isn't it?

BARTLET: No.

TOBY: Thank you.

C.J.: Mr. President.

BARTLET: Shall we? [at the podium]

C.J.: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

BARTLET: The honorable Christopher Mulready, nominee for Associate Justice - United States Supreme Court. The honorable Evelyn Baker Lang, nominee for Chief Justice - United States Supreme Court. I look forward to taking your questions.

THE END

#The West Wing #the supremes #west wing supremes #west wing transcript #west wing script #evelyn baker lang #president bartlet #i love her mind i love her shoes

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regalgorgon · 5 years ago

Text

The people that are siding with the authorities here and blaming the protesters for the rioters and being overall racist need to crack open their history books. I’m sorry the public school system failed you. If my family reads this and gets offended? I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And I’m disappointed that I have to explain why anarchy is important for the historic change you so adamantly are against.

BPOC (black people of color) have had to fought for their rights since the day they were born in America. Never has a day gone by where they have felt safe. This is something they should be talking about- but you’re not listening. Many of you are color blind and tone deaf because of your own feelings. How dare anyone paint the white man in any light beyond benevolent and good? How dare anyone identify themselves as anything other than a human being? You have a lofty dream, one that is often misplaced to absolve your guilt. You are talking over and invalidating the very lives who have to even say that they matter; that Black Lives Matter. Now this isn’t say no other life matters. That’s not what that is saying. And immediately responding with All Lives Matter just proves how ignorant you are, and there is zero excuse for it in this day and age. It is not up to me to educate you on why that is such a dumb thing to say. Saying a group of people matter does not erase that everyone else matters. Just that they still have to still fight for their life to mean something. Be happy you don’t need a movement for this. And it’s at this point where pictures won’t change your mind, nor an analogy. Just know you’re siding with the racists on this one, even if you don’t see race. And often enough, it’s white people that say they don’t see color and that it’s them, not you, that are causing the problem. Which is a whole other can of worms that I’m too angry and exhausted to educate you on as it’s not my job.

Moving on to what I can educate you on.

Many of you are disgusted by anarchy and rioters. Sure, I am too. To an extent. What do you think the American Revolution was? The American Civil War? Unrest at a government that kept failing them and taking advantage of them. See anything familiar? Our history books paints the United States of America as this benevolent country full of free will and freedom of religion. Many of you forget that, and that’s just sad. You prefer your bipartisan politics and to call anyone you don’t agree with whatever opposite your party is as though that’s suppose to be some amazing, cool comeback. No, it’s just inflammatory. It does nothing to the discussion like.. at all. Tell me when has it ever changed anyone’s mind when you did? Never? I thought so.

If you don’t remember what the American Revolution was, let me remind you how it started. Open your history books to the

Boston Massacre (Colonial resistance that led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men- sound familiar? Like the police shooting on riots? People are actually being hurt and one’s in critical condition in case you’re stuck in your Facebook bubble and CNN while ignoring everything else),

the Boston Tea Party (December 1773, when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor- you know, people using another group of people’s struggles to mask their identities so they can get away with it like cowards),

and the Intolerable or Coercive Acts (designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts- I really hope I don’t to explain the real life parallels with this one).

Hey I guess those field trips weren’t just a waste of your money after all. So does this mean you were with the Brits on this one? Because that’s the side you’re choosing. You’re choosing the side that’s against governmental and systemic change. But let’s move on.

The American Civil War. You know, the north vs. the south. The Union vs. the Confederate. All because of slaves. I sure hope the public educate system didn’t fail you so much you don’t know who the first and last slaves in America were. The very same people being shot and killed by authority in the streets. The ones that still have to fight to be seen as people worthy to live. People worthy of equality. The fact white men have had to give equality and basic human rights in the first place was intolerable as it is for everyone in this country to just live freely (you know, much like how other countries have worked and still worked that you condemn). But the job isn’t done. Guess who won that war? I’ll give you a hint: not the dumb fucking flag you still see to this day. And if you’re mad you’re being called a racist for flying it, kind of consider why being for-slavery is a little fucking racist and admit you’re wrong.

Moving on to Segregation. The most recent act of anarchy in this country to give these men and women their rights to just live free with basic HUMAN rights, and not being shot down in the street like a rabid animal for no reason. And you know what? Rosa Parks sitting in that bus was considered a hostile action by the authorities then. The sit-ins? Considered anarchy and hostility. The mere thought of existing was offensive and made white people unsettled.

And all it took was one man’s murder to make people see that peace still would get their people killed. But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s death changed America did it not?

Historically, America has seen gatherings and the unified force of only white-passing people to be considered acceptable. You love to watch movies about the Italian Mafia. About the Irish and Romani (gypsies, for people that can only remember or designate a group of people by their derogatory slur). You romanticize them and compare them. But you fail to forget this country’s history with them, and why they had to organize in the first fucking place.

You forget that the very founding fathers and people of this country fought against their government time and time again. And the one time black people did peacefully protest, despite all the violence displayed against them, they still were attacked and criticized. And some did become violent, but they were the loud minority while peace was the ultimate goal.

You all talk about being a true American. You’re not a true American if you agree with all the past civil unrest and anarchy and wars that made America the one you grew up with and will grow old with, but not what’s happening right now. What’s happening right now is tame compared to what our history has gone through. So why do you only want to see one side? The side that benefits your blindness and inability to want change? There is so much more to say, but I’m tired. I��m angry. And I’m upset with any of you that think they know what being an American is and take pride in your false ideology because it only benefits you. You see violence because that’s ALL you want to see. And all you want to believe. When there are people peacefully assembling and are still being attacked by authority and profiled. You want to only see the times the police are nice, and the times when the rioters are the ones causing trouble. You don’t want to see the people that desperately want change that stop them and discourage it and are standing or marching peacefully and suddenly become attacked and their rights destroyed.

What side are you on?

#black lives matter #blm #police brutality #anarchy

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orenonahaichigoda · 5 years ago

Text

I had a rough day, and came to a realisation. I will say a bit about my own experience, and then, after having to lay the groundwork of explaining 400 things about Japan because American schools and media think the whole world is the US, Western Europe, and places to blow up, making explaining necessary, will tie it to Ichigo, or at least how I portray him.

I'm Post Dankai Juniors, growing up in Japan. So's Kubo, actually. The boundaries of this Japanese generation are roughly '75 to '85, Yutori, the following generation that's always translated and localised as Millennial, pretty solidly set as beginning at '86. These things are always fuzzy because you can't vivisect living brains and find the part that likes char siu buns and the part that likes jazz fusion. I *majored* in Social Science. You'll have teachers who say "it is absolute that we date people who are similar to us because we're all actually narcists." (It *might* be because they're like our beloved family or community. Narcistic Personality is not universal) But it really just is fuzzy, and that teacher/book author is an idiot. Anyway, Yutori is always translated as Millennial. I don't know the end boundary. Post Dankai Juniors covers almost totally a debated throe for Germanic nations (I know Britain, Germany, and Nederland use the same generations as America, and their languages are Germanic) because of how fuzzy it all is, though.

Anyway, so since coming to the US, my interactions with other Asians, again, how is this defined when China, Mongolia, Japan all border Russia and West Asia includes Jordan and Saudi Arabia, South Asia is India's area, Southeast Asia is Laos, Thailand's area, I mean, find the Arabic kanji. I don't think Thailand even uses soy sauce. What the heck IS Asia, really? (Or "Middle East" when half of that's Africa and the other half shares plate with Europe? )

Anyway, my experience with Asians that are Boomer ages tends to be people who immigrated as adults, who more identity with a generation like "Dankai" or "Sirake." My experiences with Latinos older than me... I've never actually asked if the generational labels are even the same.

The thing about that is that when the name is the same, it means enough cultural traits are shared.

My biggest experience with people who grew up under the term "Boomer" are Black and white.

I've noticed a unifying trait.

If they're something oppressed (Black, gay), their attitude tends to be"it is mandatory to stand up for *my* demograph...but kicking the person behind me on the ladder in the teeth is wholesome, pure, and fun."

Outing me to large groups and saying I "speak Asian" seem to be the most common two. Calling me "Chinese" long after I've cleared this up for them is a close third.

I mean, don't get me wrong--my experience with Italian Americans past GI generation has been that now acquiring the "white" label, just like biphobic/aphobic/transphobic cisgays, they're more often staunch priveledge defenders than cishet people of Anglo descent! And it's just as true for X and Y as it is for Boomer (for the latter, one need only look at NYC destroyer and trump defender Giuliani) I actually don't really identify with my Italian side at all because I was kinda locked out of making any meaningful connection.

But back to my point that even in so-leftist-it's-almost-not-America Bay Area, Boomers are still like this!

The kind of stuff that flows out a X/Y TERF's mouth, or the mouth of an X/Y person with a Confederate flag on his wall, American-raised Boomers say with ease regardless of their alignment! It's banananas.

(Please note that I also just have not met a whole lot of Native Americans, period, nor enough people significantly older than me from any one place in Africa, that was an omission of lacking data, not intended as erasure)

How I tie it to Ichigo--

So Kubo avoids specifying birth years for anyone.

When I see something like this, I generally assume date of publication, as do most people in most fandoms (which of course gets screwy when you have something endlessly rebooted like Superman or Batman or something eternally unchanging like Detective Conan)

Anyway, the first Bleach something published was the comic in '01.

I generally assume it was supposed to be the start of a new school year, as Ichigo doesn't know many of his classmates until at least the first test scores come out. So it's probably April or something.

If Ichigo was 15 then, he'd also be Post Dankai Juniors, just barely. If Ichigo TURNED 15 shortly after, during his adventure, he'd be undebatably Millennial.

Now, there is still something up with Dankai and Sirake. PM Abe is the latter, b. 1954. A lot of his age-peers are behind him. This is the guy who supports remilitarisation and was caught funding a private militarist/fascist high(?) school that teaches that people from countries Japan conquered during its brief phase of trying to beat colonial Europe are less than dogs.

Now, I left there as a teen. Clinton was US president. Scandals still got people kicked out of public office in Japan. I hadn't figured or come out yet. Sure, I got bullied for being mixed, but kids will pick if you like different singers than the "cool" ones. They'll pick based on what's in your lunch. That data is sausage.

I'm not 100% sure what Ichigo would face day-to-day sociopolitically as he grew up/aged. I haven't had living family since'95 there, and friendships don't get deep enough to ever last distance until at least high school. For me, adulthood.

But I've kept/caught up enough (you try keeping up in the South before the internet was more than ten University sites!) that I know he'd face fascists (c'mon, the guy takes on a martial law government to save a new friend--that's anarchist, he just doesn't seem anarchist in his own world. He only fights humans in defence) I'm not sure how he'd feel about the JSDF, but he only fought the sinigami's war out of feeling like it was his responsibility because the adults around him kinda made it so. I super don't see him being for *starting* wars. In a human war, I see him actually being like Sugihara Chiune, a historical figure who died when I was a kid who I majorly admire. He worked at a Japanese embassy in Nazi territory, and when the embassy was evacuated,he continued throwing passports to Jewish people to go to Japan from the train he was departing on,and is hidden from Americans in the same spirit that Martin Luther King is...pulled the teeth out of. (PS, speaking of,go Google Steven Kiyosi Kuromiya)

Also, Ichigo's whole schtick is defending those worse off than him. He's not someone I see defending Yamato Japanese priveledge. Heck, I could see him joining Uchinanchu efforts to get Parliament and the US base to leave them alone. I can easily see him sticking up for a Filipino domestic worker he met thirty seconds ago.

To this end, I think regardless of what he is, he'd have a large rub with Japan's equivalents of Boomers.

Not to mention that Abe supporters tend to be very sexist and queerphobic, which isn't even homegrown but imported from Américanisation. I mean, there were female warriors--assasins, which is what Yoruichi and Soi-Fon are styled after, and go look at some Ukiyoe, like Utagawa Kitamaro. Quite a few artists in the 200-ish years of the Edo period depicted life in the queer districts. I've also had people posit that Noh might've been a welcoming draw for trans people the same way drag was all over the US in the twentieth century and still is in rural areas, where there's less cisgay gatekeeping. But this isn't something I can reasonably research without access to plenty of older and not well known dusty documents, and lots of time, and I live in the US many years now. And do you know how much round trip airfare alone is!? Also, the language changed so much and I can't read anything before Meiji without dropping words. Rukia, Byakuya, Yoruichi all have made for TV old-sounding Japanese like period dramas. Actual 18th Century Japanese would be unintelligible to the unspecialised.

So this stuff isn't really native, but Abe and a lot of people his age support all these -isms.

I super don't see Ichigo being happy about this.

(I also feel like Issin's old enough to remember before these -isms, but that's my own thing. In my project, he was in those districts, but that's me)

At the same time, I'm still writing this through my own lens. Also, not still being there, I just don't have enough data on Yutori in adulthood, or the grown Yutori lens. Honestly, even most other immigrants I meet are older than that. Or older than that and their adorable three year old children. So I have no clue.

In the early 2000s, I got myself from the South to CA and began to reconnect, but began to is the key phrase. I can tell you right now that Abe is as much of a second phase of Nakasone as trump is of Nakasone's buddy Regean. But what shifted when, I can't say. I'm not entirely sure how Koizumi ran the ship, as it were. I know some things, but not enough to say.

But whenever things shifted however, and whichever year Ichigo was born, I just cannot imagine him being any more on board with current events than really anyone in my area not born between 1946-1964 and raised in America.

I feel like he'd probably be too tired or self-effacing to fight for himself, but he'd take on, loud and proud, any bigotry against *others.*

I...also can't really say I'm much different, except my joints are held together by the power of wishes, so I'm more like "get the victim to safety" than "give the attacker plenty of regret." So, I can only do anything in limited ways.

Ichigo is also entirely fuelled by the power of love. Lost his ability to protect and feels like his sinigami friends ditched him? Mondo depressed, however much he wants no one to notice--which most do a great job of ignoring! Everyone in his world turned against him for a guy who has attacked people close to him? Terrified, and murder can now be an answer. (Fullbring Arc)

I was going somewhere with that. I've forgotten, but I'll leave it.

But anyway, I feel like he really only comes close to fighting for himself when others are taken away from him in a way that's also wronging them.

So yeah, I super don't see him happy with current events or Sirake gen.

I'm not sure how much I see him fighting for himself as mixed panromantic grey-ace. I mean, we know he fights people who are about to punch his face in for his looks, but what else can you reasonably do at that point? Get your head bashed in? I'm not sure how much I see him fighting hateful words pointed at him versus resigning himself to "people are the worst." I mean, when he talks about being picked on, he kinda seems resigned, or at least like it's a fact, like shoes being for outside or something.

I guess I tied it to Ichigo a lot better than I thought!

But also, the struggle against people born just after the war is not just you, and not just America. It's a major problem.

And it's likely that Ichigo would agree.

#out of body #musings #baby boomers #generation x #millennials #Japanese generations #Japanese politics #queerphobia #colonialism #moritomo gakuen scandal #sugihara chiune #japanese history #yoruichi shihouin #edo period

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goodnewsjamaica · 6 years ago

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In new memoir, a Jamaican-American girl comes of age in Anchorage

New Post has been published on https://goodnewsjamaica.com/world-view/in-new-memoir-a-jamaican-american-girl-comes-of-age-in-anchorage/

In new memoir, a Jamaican-American girl comes of age in Anchorage

Patrice Gopo, formerly Patrice Harduar, grew up in Anchorage as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. In her beautifully written, insightful and ultimately loving memoir in the form of essays, she takes readers on her journey across the world and into the social and racial issues of our time.

Anchorage in the 1980s and ’90s was nowhere near as diverse as it has become, and Patrice and her sister grew up living in a largely white world. Their parents, moreover, as Jamaica immigrants of African and Indian descent, had little experience of black American culture.

Gopo writes, in the context of eating flavorful tamarind balls, “My family’s presence in Alaska was a mixture of flavors too. Jamaican roots and an American life. While my parents adapted to mountain hikes in the frosty air and summers spent fishing for salmon, our home often featured the customs and foods from the early years of their lives — the years when they first met each other in the breezy, salt-scented air of their island home. As we lived the multi-faceted existence of Jamaican American, we were tamarind balls — not fully one flavor, not fully another, but two distinct parts coexisting in my family’s unique form.”

In one essay, “Caught in the Year of O. J. Simpson and Huckleberry Finn,” Gopo recalls squirming in her seat as her high school English class—in which she was the only brown-skinned person — read about Huck and Jim, with the n-word used over 200 times. “I interpreted my classmates’ curious stares to mean that when they read about Jim, they must be thinking about me. . . .Years later I would learn that the book I read in high school is considered antiracist. A satirical account of the evils of the era. A story meant to make a mockery of slavery. In tenth grade I retained none of this. All I remember is the longing to finish the unit and move on.” At the same time, everyone at school was following the O. J. trial, and the racial component of what to believe about guilt or innocence loomed large and confusing in her mind. “How could I offer an opinion that might remind others how I, in fact, was not like the rest?”

Gopo’s parents — a banker turned educator and a nurse — provided a solid middle-class life for their two girls, and after high school Gopo went off to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a degree in chemical engineering. It was at college that she found both a group of African-American friends to belong to and more acquaintance with racism.

In the year after college, Gopo chose to serve as a missionary English teacher in an “African country I care about and so choose not to name.” In “Washing Dishes in the Family of God” she tells of working with white missionaries. “So in this life — and in this kitchen too — I straddle two worlds. Not outsider. Not insider. Instead, other.”

On one occasion during the trip, Gopo writes, she volunteers, “Is there something I can do to help?” and is shown into a kitchen piled with dirty dishes. This is who she is — someone who serves others as part of her faith, the same as serving God. The others in the home are celebrating in the other room; she is washing dishes. When another person comes into the kitchen, it’s not to pick up a dishcloth to dry but to make a joke: “It’s like you’re our slave.”

It’s painfully clear from this essay how this encounter (and too many others) reverberates through Gopo’s later life. In the years to come, she writes, “when my mind wanders during a dull sermon or when I startle awake in the predawn hours of night . . . I will return to washing and stacking those plates. I will loiter over the memory of this kitchen and dream of ten — no, of one hundred — different statements to spout in response.”

Gopo spent the following year working a soulless job at Eastman Kodak, then went to graduate school for master’s degrees in business administration and public policy, with a goal of working in community development. On a 10-week assignment to South Africa to teach women about starting small businesses as a way out of poverty, she met a man from Zimbabwe.

Today, her family — the man from Zimbabwe and their two daughters — live in Charlotte, North Carolina, a community they chose sight-unseen from a magazine article she read, “Top 10 Cites for African Americans.” Although they gave serious thought to returning to Alaska, “Charlotte seemed like a place filled with opportunity for our black family, a city exploding with a bounty of opportunities.”

In her final essays, Gopo explores some of the contradictions they found in their new American home — Confederate flags still flying, fear induced by the church murder in nearby Charleston, Gopo’s nervousness as her husband drives off alone. “Please, my love, keep your hands on the wheel, your registration close. Keep your speed under the limit and go straight home.”

In this time of racial strife, immigration politics, and general divisiveness in our country, “All the Colors We Will See” is a very welcome addition to the open-hearted discussion we all should be having. Gopo does not try to tell us how to live; she simply shows us how it has been for her to be herself — a person of intelligence and faith, an “other” who is finding her way. Her sensitive but direct questioning and her eloquent prose make this book a joy to read.

By: Patrice Gopo

Original Article Found Here

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#All Colors We Will See #Anchorage #Essays #memoir

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moodboardinthecloud · 4 years ago

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Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream

Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream Sep 21, 2020

https://www.outsideonline.com/2416929/out-there-nobody-can-hear-you-scream

Two years ago, Latria Graham wrote an essay about the challenges of being Black in the outdoors. Countless readers reached out to her, asking for advice on how to stay safe in places where nonwhite people aren’t always welcome. She didn't write back, because she had no idea what to say. In the aftermath of a revolutionary spring and summer, she responds.

In the spring of 2019, right before I leave for my writing residency in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, my mama tries to give me a gun. A Ruger P89DC that used to belong to my daddy, it’s one of the few things she kept after his death. Even though she doesn't know how to use it, she knows that I do. She’s just had back surgery, and she’s in no shape to come and get me if something goes wrong up in those mountains, so she tries to give me this. I turn the gun over in my hand. It’s a little dusty and sorely out of use. The metal sends a chill up my arm.

Even though it is legal for me to have a gun, I cannot tell if, as a Black woman, I’d be safer with or without it. Back in 2016, I watched the aftermath of Philando Castile’s killing as it was streamed on Facebook Live by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds. Castile was shot five times at close range by a police officer during a routine traffic stop, when he went to reach for his license, registration, and permit to carry a gun. His four-year-old daughter watched him die from the back seat. In his case, having the proper paperwork didn’t matter.

I’ll be in the Smokies for six weeks in early spring, the park’s quiet season, staying in a cabin on my own. My local contact list will be short: the other writer who had been awarded the residency, our mentor, maybe a couple of park employees. If something happens to me, there will likely be no witnesses, no one to stream my last moments. When my mother isn’t looking, I make sure the safety is on, and then I put the gun back where she got it. I leave my fate to the universe.

Before I back out of our driveway, my mama insists on saying a protective blessing over me. She has probably said some version of this prayer over my body as long as I’ve been able to explore on my own.

In 2018, I wrote an article for this magazine titled “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” about my family’s relationship to nature and the stereotypes and obstacles to access that Black people face in the outdoors. As a journalist, that piece opened doors for me, like the residency in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

It also inspired people to write me.

Two years later, the messages still find me on almost every social media platform: Twitter, Instagram, even LinkedIn. They come through my Gmail. Most of them sound the same—they thank me for writing the article and tell me how much it meant to them to see a facet of the Black experience represented in a major outdoor magazine. They express apprehension about venturing into new places and ask for my advice on recreating outside of their perceived safety zone. They ask what they can do to protect themselves in case they wind up in a hostile environment.

Folks have their desires and dreams tied up in the sentences they send me. They want to make room for the hope that I cautiously decided to write about in 2018.

Back then, as a realist, I didn’t want my essay’s ending to sound too optimistic. But I still strayed from talking about individual discrimination in the parks, often perpetrated by white visitors, like the woman who recently told an Asian American family that they “can’t be in this country” as they finished their hike near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, this past Fourth of July. Or the now famous “BBQ Becky” who called the police on two Black men at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, in 2018, for using a charcoal grill in a non-charcoal-grill-designated area. Nor did I mention that when I venture into new spaces, I am always doing the math: noting the lengths of dirt roads so I know how far I have to run if I need help, taking stock of my gas gauge to ensure I have enough to get away.

I have been the target of death threats since 2015, when I started writing about race. I wasn’t sure if magazine readers were ready for that level of candid conversation, so in 2018 I left that tidbit out.

There are risks to being Black in the outdoors; I am simply willing to assume them. And that’s why I struggle to answer the senders of these messages, because I don’t have any tips to protect them. Instead I invoke magical thinking, pretending that if I don’t hit the reply button, the communication didn’t happen. Sometimes technology helps: when I let the message requests sit unaccepted in Instagram, the app deletes them after four weeks.

I deem myself a coward. I know I am a coward.

There are two messages that still haunt me.

The first is an e-mail from a woman who wanted to know what she and her brown-skinned husband should do if they encounter another campground with a Confederate flag hanging in the check-in office. She described to me a night of unease, of worrying if they and their daughter would be safe. I filed her e-mail so deep in my folders that I don’t even think I can find it anymore. I was dying to forget that I had no salve for her suffering.

The second was even more personal. It came via Facebook Messenger, from a woman named Tish. In it she says: “I came across a read of yours when I was searching African Americans and camping. I want to rent an RV and go with my family. I live in Anderson S.C. Had a daughter that also attended SCGSAH. Is there a campground you recommend that is not too far and yes where I would feel comfortable? Thank you.”

The signaling in it, of tying me to her daughter, examining my background enough to offhandedly reference the South Carolina arts high school I attended and saying, Please, my daughter is similar to you.

I leave her message in the unread folder.

These women have families, and they too are trying to pray a blessing over the ones they love while leaving room for them to play, grow, and learn—the same things their white peers want for their offspring. In their letters, they hang some of their hopes for a better America on me, on any advice I might be able to share.

I haven’t written back because I haven’t had any good advice to offer, and that is what troubles me. These letters have been a sore spot, festering, unwilling to heal.

Now, in the summer of 2020, there are bodies hanging from trees again, and that has motivated me to pick up my pen. Our country is trying to figure out what to do about racial injustice and systemic brutality against Black people. It’s time to tell those who wrote to me what I know.

Dear Tish, Alex, Susan, and everyone else:

I want to apologize for the delayed reply. It took a long time to gather my thoughts. When I wrote that article back in 2018, I was light on the risks and violence and heavy-handed on hope. I come to you now as a woman who insists we must be heavy-handed on both if we are to survive.

I write to you in the middle of the night, with the only light on the entire street emanating from my headlamp. Here in upstate South Carolina, we are in the midst of a regional blackout. My time outdoors has taught me how to sit with the darkness—how to be equipped for it. Over the years, I have found ways to work within it, or perhaps in spite of it. If there’s anything I can do, maybe it’s help you become more comfortable with the darkness, too.

But before I tell you any more, I want you to understand that you and I are more than our pain. We are more than the human-rights moment we are fighting for.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the Outside article changed my life. People paid me for speaking gigs and writing workshops. They put me on planes and flew me across the country to talk about equity, inclusion, and accountability. I know the statistics, the history, the arguments that organizations give about why they have no need to change. I call them on it.

I have to apologize for not being prepared for the heaviness of this mantle at the time. I have to admit my hesitation back then to call white supremacy and racism by their names. The unraveling of this country in the summer of 2020 has forced me to reckon with my actions, my place in the natural world, and the fact that as a Black woman writer in America, I am tasked with telling you a terrible truth: I am so sorry. I have nothing of merit to offer you as protection.

I am reluctant to inform you that while I can challenge white people to make the outdoors a nonhostile, equitable space where you can be your authentic selves, when the violence of white supremacy turns its eyes toward you, there’s nothing I can give you to protect yourself from its gaze and dehumanization.

I do not wish to ask you to have to be brave in the face of inequality. This nation’s diminished moral capacity for seeing Black people as human beings is not our fault. Their perception of you isn’t your problem—it’s theirs, the direct result of the manifest-destiny and “anybody can become anything in America” narratives they have bought into. We are made to suffer so they can slake their guilt. I want you to be unapologetically yourselves.

I check with my fellow Black outdoor friends, and they say they’ve gotten your e-mail and messages, too. They also waffle on what to say, telling y’all to carry pepper spray or dress in a nonthreatening way. I am troubled about instructing people who have already been socially policed to death—to literal, functional death—to change the way they walk, talk, dress, or take up space in order to seem less threatening to those who are uncomfortable with seeing our brown skin.

The Great Smoky Mountains (Photo: Kennedi Carter)

I have no talisman that can shield you from the white imagination. The incantation “I’m calling the police” will be less potent coming from your mouth, and will not work in the same way. In the end, your utterance could backfire, causing you more pain.

I want to tell you to make sure you know wilderness first aid, to carry the ten essentials, to practice leave no trace, so no one has any right to bother you as you enjoy your day. I want to tell you to make sure you know what it means not to need, to be so prepared that you never have to ask for a shred, scrap, or ribbon of compassion from anybody.

But that is misanthropic—maybe, at its core, inhumane.

I resist the urge to pass on to you the instinct my Black foremothers ingrained in me to make ourselves small before the denizens of this land. I have watched this scenario play out since I was a child: my father, a tall 50-year-old man with big hands, being called “boy” by some white person and playing along, willing to let them believe that they have more power than he does, even though I have watched him pin down a 400-pound hog on his own. I have seen my mother shrink behind her steering wheel, pulled over for going five miles above the speed limit on her way to her mom’s house. She taught me and my brother the rules early: only speak when spoken to, do not ask questions, do not make eye contact, do not get out of the car, keep your hands on the wheel, comply, comply, comply, even if it costs you your agency. Never, ever show your fear. Cry in the driveway when you get to your destination alive. Those traffic stops could’ve ended very differently. The corpses of Samuel DuBose, Maurice Gordon, Walter Scott, and Rayshard Brooks prove that.

I will not pass on these generational curses; they were ways of compensating for anti-Black thinking. They should never have been your burden.

It would be easy to tell you to always be aware of your surroundings, to never let your guard down, to be prepared to hit record in case you run into an Amy Cooper or if a white man points an AR-15 at you and your friends as you take a break from riding your motorcycles, hoping to make the most of a sunny almost-summer day in Virginia.

These moments—tied to a phone, always tensed in fear—are not what time in nature is supposed to be. Yet the videos seem to be the only way America at large believes us. It took an eight-minute-and-forty-six-second snuff film for the masses to wake up and challenge the unjust system our people have had to navigate for more than 400 years. They are killing us for mundane things—running, like Ahmaud Arbery; playing in the park, like Tamir Rice. They’ve always killed us for unexceptional reasons. But now the entire country gets to watch life leak away from Black bodies in high definition.

I started writing this on the eve of what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday. The police broke into her home while she was sleeping and killed her. I write to you during a global pandemic, during a time when COVID-19 has had disproportionate impact on Black and brown communities. I conclude my thoughts during what should have been the summer before Tamir Rice’s senior year of high school. All the old protective mechanisms and safety nets Black people created for ourselves aren’t working anymore. Sometimes compliance is not enough. Sometimes they kill you anyway.

Having grown up in the Deep South, I have long been aware of the threat of racial violence, of its symbolism. In middle school, many of my peers wore the Dixie Outfitters T-shirts that were in vogue in that part of the country during the late nineties. The shirts often featured collages of the Confederate flag, puppies, and shotguns on the front, with slogans like “Stand and Fight for Southern Rights” and “Preserving Southern Heritage Since 1861” printed on the back.

I was 11 years old, and these kids—and their commitment to a symbol from a long-lost war—signaled that they believed I shouldn’t be in the same classroom with them, that I didn’t belong in their world.

But that was nothing compared with the routine brutality perpetrated upon Black people in my home state. In 2010, years before the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, there was the killing of Anthony Hill. Gregory Collins, a white worker at a local poultry plant not far from my family farm, shot and killed Hill, his Black coworker. He dragged Hill’s body behind his pickup truck for ten miles along the highways near my grandmother’s house, leaving a trail of blood and tendons. Abandoned on the road, the corpse was found with a single gunshot wound to the head and a rope tied around what remained of the body. Collins was sentenced for manslaughter. Five years ago, a radicalized white supremacist murdered nine Black parishioners as they prayed in Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. South Carolina is one of three states that still does not have a hate-crime law.

All the old protective mechanisms and safety nets Black people created for ourselves aren’t working anymore. Sometimes compliance is not enough. Sometimes they will kill you anyway.

Before my writing residency, I did not own a range map. Traditionally, these are used to depict plant and animal habitats and indicate where certain species thrive. Ranges are often defined by climate, food sources, water availability, the presence of predators, and a species’s ability to adapt.

My friend J. Drew Lanham taught me I could apply this sort of logic to myself. A Black ornithologist and professor of wildlife ecology, he was unfazed by what happened to birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park—he’s had his own encounters with white people who can’t understand why he might be standing in a field with binoculars in his hand. Several years ago he wrote a piece for Orion magazine called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher.”

“Carry your binoculars—and three forms of identification—at all times,” he wrote. “You’ll need the binoculars to pick that tufted duck out of the flock of scaup and ring-necks. You’ll need the photo ID to convince the cops, FBI, Homeland Security, and the flashlight-toting security guard that you’re not a terrorist or escaped convict.” Drew frequently checks the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate-group map and the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” map and overlays them. The blank spaces are those he might travel to.

I never thought to lay out the data like that until the day I went to Abrams Creek.

Three weeks into my residency, I made an early-afternoon visit to the national-park archives. I needed to know what information they had on Black people. I left with one sheet of paper—a slave schedule that listed the age, sex, and race (“black” or “mulatto”) of bodies held in captivity. There were no names. There were no pictures. I remember chiding myself for believing there might be.

Emotionally wrought and with a couple of hours of sunlight ahead of me, I decided to go for a drive to clear my mind. I came to the Smokies with dreams of writing about the natural world. I wanted to talk about the enigmatic Walker sisters, the park’s brook trout restoration efforts, and the groundbreaking agreement that the National Park Service reached with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians about their right to sustainably harvest the edible sochan plant on their ancestral lands. My Blackness, and curiosity about the Black people living in this region, was not at the front of my mind. I naively figured I would learn about them in the historical panels of the visitor’s center, along with the former white inhabitants and the Cherokee. I thought there would be a book or a guide about them.

There was nothing.

Vacations are meant to be methods of escapism. Believing this idyllic wilderness to be free of struggle, of complicated emotions, allows visitors to enjoy their day hikes. Many tourists to Great Smoky Mountains National Park see what they believe it has always been: rainbow-emitting waterfalls, cathedrals of green, carpets of yellow trillium in the spring. The majority never venture more than a couple of miles off the main road. They haven’t trained their eyes to look for the overgrown homesites of the park’s former inhabitants through the thick underbrush. Using the park as a side trip from the popular tourist destinations like Dollywood and Ripley’s Believe it or Not, they aren’t hiking the trails that pass by cemeteries where entire communities of white, enslaved, and emancipated people lived, loved, worked, died, and were buried, some, without ever being paid a living wage. Slavery here was arguably more intimate. An owner had four slaves, not 400. But it happened.

There is a revisionist fantasy that Americans cling to about the people in this region of North Carolina and Tennessee: that they were dirt-poor, struggled to survive, and wrestled the mountains into submission with their own brute strength. In reality, many families hired their sharecropping neighbors, along with Black convicts on chain gangs, to do the hard labor for them.

These corrections of history aren’t conversations most people are interested in having.

After a fruitless stop at Fontana Dam, the site of a former African American settlement where I find precious little to see, I try to navigate back to where I’m staying. Cell service is spotty. My phone’s GPS takes me on a new route along the edge of the park, through Happy Valley, which you can assume from the moniker is less than happy.

Early spring in the mountains is not as beautiful as you might believe. The trees are bare, and you can see the Confederate and Gadsden flags, the latter with their coiled rattlesnakes, flapping in the wind, so they do not take you by surprise. At home after home, I see flag after flag. The banners tell me that down in this valley I am on my own, as do the corpses of Jonathan A. Ferrell and Renisha McBride, Black people who knocked on the doors of white homeowners asking for help and were shot in response.

In the middle of this drive back to the part of the park where I belong, I round a corner to see a man burning a big pile of lumber, the flames taller than my car.

I am convinced that pyrophobia is embedded in my genes. The Ku Klux Klan was notorious for cross burnings and a willingness to torch homes. The fire over my shoulder is large enough to burn up any evidence that I ever existed. There is a man standing in his yard wearing a baseball cap and holding a drink, watching me as my white rental car creeps by. I want to ask him how to get out of here. I think of my mama’s frantic phone calls going straight to voice mail. I stay in the car.

Farther down the road, another man is burning a big pile of lumber. I know it’s just coincidence, that these bundles of timber were stacked before I set off down this path, but the symbolism unnerves me.

I round a bend and a familiar sign appears—a national-park placard with the words “Abrams Creek Campground Ranger Station” in white letters. Believing some fresh air might settle my stomach and strengthen my nerves, I decide to enter that section of the park. The road I drive is the border between someone’s property and the park. Uneven, it forces me to go slowly.

The dog is at my car before I recognize what is happening. It materializes as a strawberry blond streak bumping up against my driver-side door. Tall enough to reach my face, it is gnashing at my side mirror, trying to bite my reflection.

I’m not scared of dogs, but this one, with its explicit hostility, gives me pause.

Before emancipation, dogs hunted runaway slaves by scent, often maiming the quarry to keep them in place until their owner could arrive. During the civil rights movement, dogs were weaponized by police. In the modern era, use of K-9 units to intimidate and attack is so common that police have referred to Black people as “dog biscuits.”

I force myself to keep driving.

When I reach the ranger station, the building is dark: closed for the season. I see a trail inviting me to walk between two shortleaf pines, but I decline. There is something in me that is more wound up than it has a right to be. No one knows my whereabouts. Despite making up 13 percent of the population, more than 30 percent of all missing persons in the U.S. in 2019 were Black. A significant portion of these cases are never covered by the news. The chances of me disappearing without a mention are higher than I’d like.

There are three cars in the little gravel parking lot. A pair of men, both bigger than me, are illegally flying drones around the clearing, and there is palpable apprehension around my presence. They don’t acknowledge me, and I can’t think of what I’m supposed to say to convince them I’m not a threat. I have no idea who the third car belongs to—they are somewhere in my periphery, real and not real, an ancillary portion of my calculation.

I take photos of the clearing, including the cars, just in case I don’t make it out. It is the only thing I know to do.

I run my odds. No one in an official capacity to enforce the rules, no cell service to call for help, little knowledge of the area. I leave. Later, my residency mentor gently suggests that maybe I don’t visit that section of the park alone anymore.

A favorite spot in the Smokies (Photo: Kennedi Carter)

Ipromise that there are parts of this park, and by extension the outdoors as a whole, that make visiting worth it. Time in nature is integral to my physical, spiritual, and mental health. I chase the radiant moments, because as a person who struggles with chronic depression, the times I am enthusiastically happy are few and far between. Most of them happen outside.

I relish the moments right before sunrise up at Purchase Knob in the North Carolina section of the Smokies. The world is quiet, my mind is still, and the birds, chattering to one another, do not mind my presence. I believe this is what Eden must have been like. I still live for the nights where I sink into my sleeping pad while I cowboy-camp, with nothing in or above my head except the stars. I believe in the healing power of hiking, the days when I am strong, capable, at home in my body.

The fear, on some level, will always exist. I say this to myself all the time: I know you’re scared. Do it anyway.

Toward the end of my writing residency, the road to Clingmans Dome opens. At 6,643 feet, Clingmans is the highest point in Tennessee and in the park. About two days before I’m scheduled to leave, I go to see what this peak holds for me.

There is a paved trail leading to the observatory at the summit. It isn’t long, just steep. Maybe it’s the elevation; I have to do the hike 20 steps at a time, putting one foot in front of the other until I get to 20, then starting over again. I catch my breath in ragged clips, and there are moments when I can feel my heartbeat throbbing in my fingertips. I’d planned to be at the top for sunset, but I realize the sun might be gone when I get there. I continue anyhow. I’m slow but stubborn.

If there’s anything I appreciate about the crucible we’re living in, it’s the role of social media in creating a place for us when others won’t. We’re no longer waiting for outdoors companies to find the budget for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. With the creation of a hashtag, a social media movement, suddenly we are hyper-visible, proud, and unyielding.

As I make my way up the ramp toward its intersection with the Appalachian Trail, I think about Will Robinson (@akunahikes on Instagram), the first documented African American man to complete the triple crown of hiking: the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Trails. I understand that I’m following in Robinson’s footsteps, and those of other Black explorers like writer Rahawa Haile (@rahawahaile) and long-haul hiker Daniel White (@theblackalachian)—people who passed this way while completing their AT through-hikes and whom I now call friends, thanks to the internet. I smile and think of them as the trail meets the pavement, and stop for a moment. We have all seen this junction.

Their stories, videos, and photographs tell me what they know of the world I’m still learning to navigate. They are the adventurers I’ve been rooting for since the very beginning, and now I know they’re also rooting for me.

It’s our turn to wish for good things for you.

We’re no longer waiting for outdoors companies to find the budget for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. With the creation of a hashtag, a social media movement, suddenly we are hypervisible, proud, and unyielding.

When I get to the summit the world is tinged in blue, and with minimal cloud cover I can see the borders of seven states. There is nothing around me now but heaven. I’m grateful I didn’t quit.

My daddy had a saying that I hated as a child: “The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” It’s a quote by NFL coach Vince Lombardi, who during the fifties and sixties refused to give in to the racial pressures of the time and segregate his Green Bay Packers. It took me decades to understand what those two were trying to tell me, but standing at the top of Clingmans Dome, I get it. The trick is that there is no trick. You learn to eat fire by eating fire.

But none of us has to do it alone.

America is a vast place, and we often feel isolated because of its geography. But there are organizations around the country that have our backs: Black Outside, Inc., Color Outside, WeGotNext, Outdoor Afro, Black Folks Camp Too, Blackpackers, Melanin Base Camp, and others.

The honest discussions must happen now. I acknowledge that I am the descendant of enslaved people—folks who someone else kidnapped from their homeland and held captive in this one.

We were more than bodies then.

We are more than bodies now.

We have survived fierce things.

My ancestors survived genocide, the centuries-long hostage situation they were born into, and the tortures that followed when they called for freedom and equality. They witnessed murder. They endured as their wages and dreams were taken from them by systemic policies and physical force. And yet, because of their drive to survive, I am here.

I stand in the stream of a legacy started by my ancestors and populated by present-day Black trailblazers like outdoors journalist James Edward Mills, environmental-justice activist Teresa Baker, and conservationists Audrey and Frank Peterman. Remembering them—their struggles and triumphs—allows me to center myself in this scenery, as part of this landscape, and claim it as my history. This might be the closest thing to reparations that this country, founded on lofty ideals from morally bankrupt slaveholders, will ever give me.

I promised you at the beginning that I would be candid about the violence and even-keeled about the hope. I still have hope—I consider it essential for navigating these spaces, for being critical of America. I wouldn’t be this way if I didn’t know there was a better day coming for this country.

Even when hope doesn’t reside within me—those days happen, too—I know that it is safely in the hands of fellow Black adventurers to hold until I am ready to reclaim my share of it. I pray almost unceasingly for your ability to understand how powerful you are. If you weren’t, they wouldn’t be trying to keep you out, to make sure they keep the beauty and understanding of this vast world to themselves. If we weren’t rewriting the story about who belongs in these places, they wouldn’t be so focused on silencing us with their physical intimidation and calls for murder.

The more we see, the more we document, the more we share, the better we can empower those who come after us. I’ve learned during all my years of historical research that even when white guilt, complacency, and intentional neglect try to erase our presence, there is always a trace. Now there are hundreds of us, if not thousands, intent on blazing a trail.

It is true: I cannot protect you. But there is one thing I can continue to do: let you know that you are not alone in doing this big, monumental thing. You deserve a life of adventure, of joy, of enlightenment. The outdoors are part of our inheritance. So I will keep writing, posting photos, and doing my own signaling. For every new place I visit, and the old ones I return to, my message to you is that you belong here, too.

Latria Graham is a journalist and fifth-generation farmer living in South Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Bicycling, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Backpacker, The Guardian, Southern Living, and other local and national outlets. You can find more of her work at LatriaGraham.com.

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sumukhcomedy · 4 years ago

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Race, American Style

I watched none of the Democratic National Convention. I had no plans to watch any of the Republican National Convention. But when I saw that Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron had speeches, I felt that I needed to watch these on YouTube. Why? In the case of Haley, she is clearly the most prominent Indian-American currently within the Republican Party and once in the Trump Administration. In Cameron’s case, he is the Attorney General whose office has been flooded not just by me but by so many others with calls to prosecute the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. To me, if I’ve been contacting this man’s office, I might as well see what he has to say. If Nikki Haley holds a shared experience to me as an Indian-American, I should see what she has to say. As our country is embroiled in racial issues, it’s worth it to see what the people of color with the most power in this administration that disregards and insults people of color have to say. Ultimately, it’s of course so that I can be critical of what they have to say because what they have to say is far more dangerous for my experience than perhaps the Trump administration themselves.

Haley’s speech, much like I presume many of the speeches at the Republican National Convention will be, was just coded with language of fear and opposition understandably so to the Democratic Party and Joe Biden. She frequently referenced the fear of socialism taking over the United States, the “strength” of this administration, of America being first even within the United Nations, and consistently referred to China as “communist China” while directly connecting them to COVID-19. It was a speech where, as usual, America and this administration does not take any blame or responsibility for what is happening within the country or to Americans. The country is still the best and the strongest and is putting other countries in their place. Not voting for Trump will make us weaker and, as a result, we should fear some sort of takeover from Iran, North Korea, “communist China,” or Nancy Pelosi as a result.

What stood out from Haley’s speech is, of course, her need to address racism. A person of color on this platform cannot possibly avoid it. She states that “America is not a racist country.” She discusses experiencing discrimination and growing up in a small Southern town. While valuable to have that perspective, she provides really no background to her experiences while simply stating that we aren’t a “racist country,” which begs the question as to how Ambassador Haley even defines racism. She deflects the issue of Black Lives Matter to discussing Black small business owners, Black police officers, and Black people being killed in their neighborhoods. This type of speech proves that Haley continues the basic disregard by the Republican Party of what Black Lives Matter is even about. Rather than discuss police brutality, they’d rather discuss the destruction of property. Rather than discuss police accountability, they’d rather discuss the good police officers or the Black police officers. Rather than discuss why Black people feel threatened by the police rather than protected by them, they would rather discuss general killings of Black people. Haley does a fantastic job of talking about racial issues by completely avoiding them.

She states that she’s blessed to live in America and that we all should be. She also gives an example of her role as Governor of South Carolina and the removal of a “divisive symbol” following the shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. I find it funny that she can’t even say the Confederate Flag and that is likely because Haley still may have misgivings over even doing such a widely-praised act.

Attorney General Cameron’s speech only continued such absurdity. Breonna Taylor’s death is the reason Attorney General Cameron was brought to this stage and yet he creates no real discussion on it. Cameron is once again welcome to share his story but he’s also in too deep into the perspective of this administration and today’s Republican Party. His speech had nothing to do with addressing the issues of Black Lives Matter. It continued to point the blame at supposed people being lawless and harped on Biden’s various quotes on Black people and the Republican Party (which is an acceptable criticism because Biden is and has terrible quotes on Black issues). Cameron claims Biden has a “trail of discredited ideas and offensive statements” which is humorous if only because the exact same thing could be said of the man he is telling us to vote for. He consistently brings up “cancel culture” (as did Haley), that skin color should not dictate your political leanings, and that mob rule should not reign supreme. He also likes bringing Abraham Lincoln up a lot just because Lincoln happened to be a Republican and Lincoln loved black people because he freed them, right?!? It’s good to have knowledge on American history but not to distort it and use it in a highly irrelevant context 160 years later.

Cameron’s speech made me sad if only because it drew out the true indication of the man we all are trying to get justice for Breonna Taylor from and it seems clear that justice will never come. Cameron’s speech is inspiring if you are a kindergartener dealing with race. It doesn’t deal with the realities that growing up in racism and being an adult in this nation dealing with racism actually feel like. Cameron lives in some sort of idealistic world in which he is free and unequivocally equal. The reality is that he’s gotten to the Republican National Convention simply because he is a young Black face that the party needs, he has spurned the public majority’s desire for justice in a case of police brutality, and he will continue on this path within the party for his own personal and political gain.

The reason I watched Haley and Cameron’s speeches is not because I find any inspiration from them. It’s because others will. So many white people in this country, whether you want to believe it or not, have never met a Black person or an Indian person. Even if they have, they certainly haven’t interacted with them at a level of any depth. The only interaction they may have is through people like Nikki Haley and Daniel Cameron. These are people that are reinforcing their perspectives on race. These are people creating their understanding of how racism exists in America. And people like Haley and Cameron are telling them that it doesn’t exist. They are telling them that we are all equal. They are subtly telling them that others of the same skin color as them are lazy or ungrateful or complaining or out to get you for who you really are. They are allowing you to be comfortable with being racist. And, because of that, their speeches comfort a certain realm of the masses to make my and so many other people of color’s lives much more fearful.

Look, I have a life of comfort comparatively to so many other Americans. I don’t have to speak to any topics of race. In fact, it is more of a potential detriment than a benefit for me to do so in these current times. But by remaining quiet, I would allow the kind of perspectives that Haley and Cameron have to persist. And because I have that comfort I feel I have to speak on it for those who do not have such similar comfort. Haley and Cameron’s perspectives on race are idealistic but they do not live in any sense of reality and they certainly live in some realm of another universe once “cancel culture” starts getting mentioned.

As much as we have a battle on racial discrimination and injustice in this country, we also have a battle with those of our own race who support perspectives and administrations that encourage that. We have a battle dealing with the Nikki Haleys and the Daniel Camerons. It’s fine to be a Republican for whatever reason but to do so at the sacrifice of justice and equality for others is a whole other realm of Republican I can’t connect with. And for Haley and Cameron to do that all while claiming they have a “forward-thinking” mindset is an insult to people of color – and those people of color unfortunately are the ones that will have to deal most with white people’s reaction to Haley’s and Cameron’s words.

#nikki haley #daniel cameron #breonna taylor #justice for breonna taylor #black lives matter #blm #republican national convention #rnc #joe biden #democratic national convention #dnc

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reaganyouth · 7 years ago

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Biggest tax reform, since when Reagan was in office in '86. The corporations are given the biggest breaks,along with individuals with such an obscene amount of wealth that their happiness is watching their interest grow. Spreading the wealth can not happen when the vast majority of those wealthy individuals are the type that show up to their broker's office to sign documents wearing a coat that goodwill wouldn't even have he balls to sell, because they're that cheap,and yes I saw that with my own eyes when I was a municipal bond broker for a time ( I've worked a variety of jobs, but the only time I'm happy is when I play my guitar ). Trickle down economics is the biggest crock of bullshit that was told to the people by Reagan and now Trump is doing the same thing, but he isn't pretending that the richest in America are going to spread the wealth. Not one red cent will trickle down from the rich to help the economy for the hard working people of the United States of America.

It's often been said that "backbone of America" are the small businesses, the mom and pop stores, which are disappearing at an alarming rate. This tax overhaul will only marginalize the "backbone of America" until they are gone and only corporations run our capitalist society until we have no choice but either a coke or pepsi when we would all could use a third choice, like fresh squeezed orange juice, not a Dr. Pepper.

We have a president who flaunts his ignorance, backing them up with statements that provoke schism, not unity and they just happened to have gone hand and hand with social media which came out of the former Soviet Union, not the deep south or Chicago or Oakland. Solely put forth to divide by wreaking havoc with American's emotions, and the news out;lets which are controlled by the 1% of 1% that do not want unity, just divide and conquer. On one side you have Angela Davis pumping her fist in the air and on the flip side a confederate flag with a caption "This is history, not racism". Are we not all created equal and if we , as a people, refuse to become misguided by provocative images with simplistic arguments that has divided us as a nation. We need to rise above this schism.

And I don't know about any of you but I am sure I am not the only one who found himself at odds with friends, some who are life long friends, that make you realize that you will forever be looking at your life long friend sideways from now on, and all because he just had to say that Haitians aren't doing well because they're lazy and stupid. Yes that was his answer to my question "What do you think of the Clinton foundation stealing all those donations that were meant for a people decimated by a earthquake that killed some 200,000 people".Those who donated to a nation that is one of my country's closet neighbors didn't need to line the pockets of career politicians didn't mean anything to him, but saying something so flat out racist because it's so easy to pop shit on the internet means everything. What can I say except i am disappointed,saddened and yeah, he blocked me, but his wife didn't block me so can still spy on my fb page, like that scenario hasn't happened before to me.

My country has a leader that wants the rich to keep getting richer while the poor can go fuck themselves, and the middle class keep losing while corporate America keeps winning and can anyone believe that trickle down economics work? When someone worth half of billion dollars won't spend money on a new coat, do you really believe he's going to do more with his money than just watch the interest on his bond and stock portfolio grow. No, he will not allow one red cent to trickle down to help rebuild the economy.

When is enough going to be enough? When we stop seeing only minor differences between the beautifully diverse people that make up America's population that get blown out of proportion that it becomes the focal point of America's political scam. Republicans and Democrats are the same shit, taking money from "special interest groups' that do not help the majority of the the people that make up my country that has always been great in my eyes, and listening to the President say "I'll make America great again", but for exactly who? That 1% of !% that have more money then the rest of my country's population combined.

If anyone has some thoughtful, informative comments,please enlighten us. As for those others who just want to pop shit by posting nothing but low brow non sense that reek of hate speech, can you try and do something different; HAVE SOMETHING POSITIVE TO PUT FORTH SO WE CAN HOPEFULLY HAVE A CHANCE AT UNITY, AND NOT THAT SCHISM THAT HAS SOME AMERICANS AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS.

Peace unto us all, Paul Cripple

#reaganyouth #tax #trump

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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PATTERSON HOOD has been leading the Drive-By Truckers — a country-rock band with a hip-hop attitude — for more than two decades. Along the way, the Alabama native has become, in song and in prose, one of the sharpest observers of Southern culture and society since C. Vann Woodward, W. J. Cash, and the Southern novelists he read as a kid.

The Truckers’ latest album, 2016’s American Band, was widely hailed as one of the year’s best and as the group’s most directly political: its songs took on the killing of Trayvon Martin, the worship of the Confederate flag, the nation’s madness for handguns, and the role of the band’s native region in the whole mess. Hood, like fellow Trucker Mike Cooley, grew up near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and his father, David Hood, is the longtime bassist for the R&B studio’s famous rhythm section.

For many years based in Athens, Georgia, Hood moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2015. The Drive-By Truckers have just launched a US tour that brings them to Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre on February 9.

SCOTT TIMBERG: Let me start at the obvious place. In your writing, you often look at the South, at the complexity of the region’s history. And there’s a whole bunch of writers who’ve done this before: Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. I’m just wondering what, if anything, these people have meant for you?

PATTERSON HOOD: I probably first became aware of that type of thing, as a genre of literature, when I was assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. That was the first book I was forced to read at school that I actually loved and connected with. I fell in love with it, and the character of Atticus Finch reminded me of a very beloved relative of mine, who was kind of like a second father to me — so I really connected hard with that. And then later, in high school or in college, I read Faulkner a bit … I was too young to really get it. But it was a short story, “Barn Burning,” that I first read, and that was a good entry point, because I totally dug it, and got it, although I don’t think I would have been ready to read As I Lay Dying or anything. I love reading. I’m a fanatical reader.

And that goes back to childhood for you?

Maybe off and on. I remember times in childhood when I read a lot. I loved Old Yeller as a child — I really loved that book. And like everyone, I read Charlotte’s Web, although I don’t think I liked it as a kid. I read it to my son, actually, a couple of years ago, and fell in love with it. But I don’t think as a kid I was able to get past the fact that it was romanticizing a fucking spider. I have arachnophobia, so it was a bit of a leap on that one. So yeah, I went through periods of reading and not reading, I guess because it reminded me too much of school, and I hated school and everything about school at that time. I had to get past rebelling against it in order to enjoy it.

Yeah, I think a lot of us, especially boys, go through that phase, even if they become serious readers later. So when you were reading Harper Lee and the Faulkner story, and maybe some other stuff, what did you respond to, what made you want to go back to it, besides the fact that it was about the part of the country you live in? Did you feel it helped you make sense of the South?

Yeah, I probably just responded to the dialect, because that’s the way my people talked. And I responded to some of the manners — you know, the manners that everybody had, even the villains, who were these kind of ignorant, white trash, really terrible people in To Kill a Mockingbird. They still had a certain amount of decorum about them. When they weren’t spitting in Atticus’s face, there was still a certain amount of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” involved. And that was beat into me as a kid, you know.

So even though terrible things were happening, in a way, you felt like you were home?

Sure, sure. And I had a similar thing with R.E.M., early R.E.M., I fell in love with them really early. About two weeks before Murmur came out, I got turned on to Chronic Town, and in the press in those days, people talked about, “Oh, you can’t understand the lyrics, you can’t decipher what he’s saying.” But these things tended to be colloquialisms, which I could decipher. There’s a song by a side project called The Golden Palominos, and I remember reading a review by someone who couldn’t decipher what Stipe kept saying, like the hook. And it’s “fixin’ to go” — that’s all he’s saying is “fixin’ to go,” he’s fixin’ to go!

Of course, there’s more to being Southern than just a manner of speech. When did you get a sense that a key element of Southern literature was the question of race? How did Southern literature change the way you understood black people or the racial rift in the region?

Yeah, I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t aware of race, and the South’s role in that story. I don’t think there was ever a point in my life that I wasn’t, at some level, aware of it, because of what my dad did. He made his living playing on Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett records, when they literally weren’t allowed to go out to dinner with him, and so he brought that home, you know — the anger over that came home with him. And we’d see George Wallace on the television screen and my dad would just start frothing at the mouth. But we have family members who I’m sure voted for Wallace, and whom I love dearly.

So there was always that disconnect. I was also aware of the generation gap, of the ’60s, the cultural revolution that was playing out in my family too. My parents came of age in the ’60s, and my dad smoked pot, and rode a motorcycle, and had a beard and long hair, and my mom wore go-go boots and hot pants … And I spent an enormous amount of time with my grandparents and my great-uncle, who were from the Depression generation. And so I kind of viewed the counter-culture, the culture clash, from a front-row seat as I was growing up, and I think that’s probably part of my attraction to dualities in my writing and the stuff I do.

It sounds like you didn’t need Harper Lee to show you that race was an obsession in the South — you were seeing and living that every day.

Absolutely. And it’s funny, because I haven’t read the other book of hers that came out. I own it, and I plan to — it’s really just a matter of time … I’m aware of its flaws, but I do want to read it, because I’m interested in that. I’ve actually written a piece, a song that kind of deals with that, because when a New York Times critic actually reviewed the book, it was the week after I moved to Portland. I read that piece in The New York Times, and I literally broke down and cried. I got so upset at Atticus Finch. I got really, really mad for a couple of days.

And then I had this epiphany that it’s absolutely right, that it was important. I believe that she was of sound mind in deciding to put that out, because I think it was important — not to disillusion everybody of their hero, or to make everybody that named their kid Atticus wince — but because that’s how it was. That is the truth.

We’re talking about the fact that Atticus, who’d been this hero of racial justice, became sort of a segregationist, a racist …

It made me mad and upset, but once I got past that, it totally rang true to me.

In the ’30s he was defending this man who was wrongly accused. It offended him on a human level that Tom Robinson was accused of a rape he obviously didn’t commit, but that don’t mean Calpurnia could sit at the table with Atticus at dinnertime. That’s a different line. When African Americans were demanding equality, that crossed a different line, and all of a sudden Harper Lee saw her father, her beloved father figure — who to her represented the side of right and justice — all of a sudden she saw him as a hypocrite. And she wrote this thing first, in anger, and then she went back and wrote, from the view of her childhood, the book that everyone knows and loves.

That rang so true to me, and I wrote a song that, at this point, has never been recorded. I’m still hoping to do something with it. It’s called “At a Safe Distance.” When you look a little closer, not at a safe distance, you tend to see things that aren’t so pleasant — you see the cracks. It really rang true to me; I wish it didn’t.

I guess you could say this about all literature, but it seems that, more than any other, Southern literature is based on history. I wonder if you ever went back and read any Southern history, journalism about the South, about the Civil Rights movement, or any of that? You’re kind of born into the middle of the Civil Rights era — ’64, right?

1964, yeah. I was born either at the last moment of the Baby Boom, or at the first moment of Generation X. I’m right on the cusp, as was my mother, who was born the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which is the official start of the Baby Boom. Her birthday’s August 5, so with the time change, she was probably born about the exact moment that the Baby Boom started.

So yeah, all of that fascinates me. I’m obsessed with the Robert Caro books on Lyndon B. Johnson, which goes back to the duality thing, because he was the ultimate dual president. I mean, he was the best and the worst, and sometimes at the exact same moment. Sometimes he would say the worst thing possible when doing something amazing, and vice versa. He could be surprisingly eloquent as he’s just fucking you. He’s a never-ending source of fascination to me, and the fact that such a gifted writer has literally spent 50 years of his life chronicling this guy — I get off on that too. I’ve read all four books that have appeared so far, and I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth and final one.

Was Johnson a sort of Texas racist who grew up and saw racial reality? Or was he an opportunist?

He was all of the above. Caro’s take on it, I think, is that he is all those things, and more, at the exact same time.

When people say, “Oh, he didn’t really mean that — he just did the Civil Rights thing because he knew it would be good for his historical legacy.” Well, sure, he knew it would be good for his legacy, but he very well knew that it meant the South wouldn’t vote Democrat again for 50 years, which it hasn’t. It was the beginning of the great migration of Southern Democrats to the GOP. And when he did those things, he purposefully fucked over people who had helped him his entire career.

And yet, he was absolutely a Jim Crow guy for most of his career. And all of those things coexisted within him at the same time, and I think all along. He did have some awakenings at a young age, he did know extreme poverty, and he taught at a school that was pretty much all Latino students. And I think he was very moved by their plight, and he took that with him forever. And yet he was willing to put that in a box and not deal with it for many, many years, building a career as the LBJ that the Kennedys hated so much.

Your dad’s music, and the music you play with the Truckers, it’s all grounded in the blues and R&B. And the Truckers were founded, in some ways, as an homage to hip-hop …

Sure, sure. Though none of us would have tried to rap. But we were immersed in it. I really responded to how hip-hop seemed to be telling you the news — what was going on right now. Modern-day country was more about retro things. I wanted to sing about what was happening now, but in a country style.

Did any of this lead you into African-American literature, especially essays, from the South or elsewhere?

I got into it really late, really recently. Through reading Ta-Nehisi Coates I tried to learn more about James Baldwin, and then I Am Not Your Negro came out last year, which was so amazing. There are so many books; I’ve only scratched the surface. I can spend the rest of my life reading every day, and not even read a fraction of the things I’m really interested in.

Anything you’ve gone back to and loved the second time?

I love Mark Twain. I made it a point to reread Huckleberry Finn at a much older age, after loving it as a kid. Reading it in my 40s was great. What a remarkable piece of work. I do like reading the classics. I was turned on to Hemingway really late. I responded to the style — it’s like the opposite of Faulkner, whom I also love. Instead of long sentences, reall short, concise ones. I respond to both forms. Hemingway’s stories are so devastating; there’s no way to improve them. I loved A Farewell to Arms. I stumbled upon it accidentally. I was at my in-laws’ house and may’ve been sick, was cooped up, it was a rainy day. They had the book; I picked it up, read the first chapter, and couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing in like a day and a half.

Your old bandmate, Jason Isbell, is reputed to be a very literary cat. Did you guys turn each other on to books and writers when you were in the Truckers together?

We probably have more since we quit playing together. When we were playing together, we were in the eye of the storm. That was a crazy time. He turned me onto Peter Matthiessen, a trilogy of books that he rewrote as one book, Shadow Country, set in Florida in the Everglades, post–Civil War, when they were first settling that part of the country. It was kind of the last frontier. All of these outlaws that had been put out of business in the West being ended up down there. It was riveting — and one of Jason’s favorite books. He’s very well read, and a great writer in his own right.

Your last record, American Band, was your most explicitly topical. You wrote about racial violence and social tensions that were exploding around you. Did your reading of essayists, novelists, or anything else help shape that album?

I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me when I was in the midst of writing that record. I had already written “What It Means,” and I was going through a period of questioning: Did I have a right to write such a thing? Reading his book, I kept asking, “What can I do?” Maybe this is a small part of what I can do. Maybe there does need to be a goofy white dude, in a rock ’n’ roll band, with the following that it has, that can say Black Lives Matter. Maybe that is important. I didn’t write that song from the perspective of a black man being shot by police — I wrote it from the perspective of a goofy white dude, like me. Seeing this happening around me and saying, “This is wrong. Why are we at this place in 2017? Why is this still a thing?” And unfortunately, the song doesn’t have answers, it’s just questions. But at least questioning is a start, a beginning.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

The post All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patterson Hood appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2nwKRsu

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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riyasen2019writer-blog · 6 years ago

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Another A Fairy Tale Love Story - Mighty Ru-Rin And Also The Enchantress

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Every year is the perfect reading year for King, and 2007 was no different. On the contrary, the author says that 2007 was even juicier. Before getting to his list, he reminds us that all of these books are nevertheless for sale and can be purchased, which enables you to get some fresh new entertainment, while also helping a writer put food on the table, because when King himself says, i found eat exceedingly.

The euro would be a bit below the Ough.S dollar and the yen. Reported on Credit Agricole Investment & Corporate Bank in a note, there raised a gigantic question in the euro's repair of recent progression.

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It additionally reported that the president will visit American solders who were wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq in the US facility in Landstahl. Again, maybe another press conference where we can hear more apologies about precisely how America defeated Hitler or that we are sorry for damages we created during WWI and WWII?

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To be sure, such action previously present fight against terror could be wholly unjustified, counterproductive, and insane. That being said, I'm concerned that him and i may have mislaid our ability to make hard - even brutal - moral choices necessary to beat the malevolent forces which have insinuated themselves in over 60 close to. Do we have the need to obtain the job done, or are we lost our way?

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The euro was a bit under what the Ough.S dollar and the yen. Depending on Credit Agricole Investment & Corporate Bank in a note, there raised a gigantic question on the euro's repair off recent progression.

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politics, opinion and editorial, history, news, news and society, religion

Hello family member. Let me introduce myself. I'm Laveta and i totally love this full name. Drawing is something I won't give down. My wife and I have a home South Dakota. Production and planning is how he makes money.

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thecoroutfitters · 7 years ago

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Last week’s altercation in Charlottesville, Virginia has dominated the news all week long. Democrats, the media and even some Republicans have attacked the president mercilessly over his comments about the attack, faulting him over not condemning white supremacists in particular.

There’s absolutely no question at all, based upon the video evidence, that both sides went there spoiling for a fight.

While they still attack Trump for his statement, they have also publiclly stated that both sides were at fault, mentioning that the Antifa people showed up with body armor, helmets and clubs. If that isn’t being ready for violence, what is?

Nevertheless, both sides drew blood, gained a lot of media attention and made themselves to look much bigger than they really are.

One could easily think that these two groups represent the majority of the people on both the left and the right, when in reality they are both fringe groups. Sadly, a woman paid with her life for that perception to be made. If you ask me, it was a poor bargain.

What Was Behind This?

As more and more information comes out about last week’s riot, it’s looking more and more like a setup. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, considering that so many of the violent protests that have happened since Donald Trump won the election have been staged. But the difference in this case, is that it appears that it was staged by both side, not just the progressive-liberal left.

My guess is that the Antifa thugs were there at the behest of the liberals, as they are funded by George Soros. Soros, Obama and the Clintons are all in bed together, working to destroy the country and prepare it for the socialist takeover of a one-world government. This is not the first time they’ve sent agitators into an area to stir up trouble, even if it is the first time they’ve had an open clash of this magnitude with the alt-right white supremacists.

But I wonder who paid the alt-right to attend? Was this actually a grass-roots event, sponsored by Neo-Nazis and the KKK? Or could it be that there is someone in the shadows, who is funding these groups as well? The fact that they were imported for the event, like the Antifa group was, is highly suspicious.

But what’s even more suspicious is the actions of the police, or maybe I should say their lack of action. There was very little police intervention at all, even though the event had been planned months in advance and there were police on-site. Yet the police didn’t even follow the car of the killer as he fled the scene.

This is because the police had received an order to stand down from the mayor, over their objections. Michael Singer, the mayor, is a Democrat.

According to a whistleblower on the police force, the reason why the police were told to stand down was for the purpose of igniting a race war. Such a war, if it were to occur, would be disastrous for our nation. Not only would it cause even more racial division than the race-baiters have already caused, but countless innocent lives would be lost.

Civil wars, tend to have more civilian casualties, not only because the fighters are civilians themselves, but because more innocent bystanders end up being hurt, due to the fighters’ overall lack of military training.

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Even so, it looks like Obama and others have been trying to push the country to such a war for several years now. The fiery rhetoric during Obama’s presidency, coupled with his outspoken support of groups like Black Lives Matter, has only emboldened such groups to take more and more action, including the killing of police officers.

What Caused the Demonstration?

The original demonstration by the alt-right was over the planned removal of a statue dedicated to General Robert E. Lee, a Confederate Civil War hero.

This is only the latest in a string of situations, where the left has demanded the removal of similar statues, much like they have demanded the elimination of the supposed Confederate Flag.

According to those on the political left, these statues are symbols of hate and slavery, because they symbolize the Confederacy.

Since the Confederate states separated from the Union over slavery causing the Civil War, anything having to do with the Confederacy is about hatred and slavery to them.

But to the people of the South, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery; it was about freedom and self-determination. They call it “The War of Northern Aggression.”

As states, they had decided to separate from the Union over differences, high amongst which was slavery.

To them, General Lee isn’t a hero because of slavery, but because he stood up to what they saw as a tyrannical government, much like George Washington stood up to the tyrannical government of King George the Third.

Nevertheless, seems like progressive liberals want to erase the Civil War from American history. Rather than look at it as a victory over slavery, they prefer to just look at the slavery. Apparently the fact that our ancestors took on this difficult issue and fought to bring it to an end doesn’t matter. All that matters is that slavery existed in the early days of the USA.

Actually, according to those on the left, the only slavery that has existed is the American slavery of Black Africans. Slavery of whites doesn’t matter. Slavery of women as sex slaves by ISIS doesn’t matter. Even the slavery of the entire people of Israel by the Egyptians, a well-documented historic fact, doesn’t matter. Only our own history of slavery, even though we defeated it.

Actually, the United States was the second country in the world to make slavery illegal, with only England preceding us. As with many civil rights issues, we have been a people to combat bigotry, hatred, prejudice and discrimination. It hasn’t been an easy battle, but it has been a battle we have fought.

Yet those on the left would rather forget the victory and concentrate on the reason it was necessary. For this reason, they want to erase slavery and the Civil War from history.

The efforts to remove statues of General Lee and other leaders in the south are part of this effort. Apparently in the left’s collective mind, if those symbols of the Confederacy can be removed, all remembrance of that slavery can go away.

But Lee wasn’t even a slave owner. He fought as part of the Confederate Army because he was a Virginian. As such, he was fighting for his state, in defense of state rights. He didn’t agree with slavery any more than we do today; but Virginia was his home, so he fought on their behalf.

Taking down his statue, because others in the south owned slaves, is declaring him guilty of their sins; something that our laws do not allow. But then, since when have Democrats ever cared about obeying the law? The only time they pay attention to the law is when they can use it to their benefit.

So What if We Remove all the Statues?

The alt-right protesters were there protesting the removal of Lee’s statue. While I personally think that their torch-lit march was not the best way of doing this, reminiscing back to the KKK, the First Amendment guarantees them the right to peaceful demonstration. As long as it remained peaceful, they were well within their rights. But then Antifa showed up and showed up read for war.

Ultimately, neither side accomplished anything constructive. All they did was garner a lot of media attention and make things worse. Both sides are to blame, just as President Trump said.

But what if they hadn’t protested? What if we allow the left to have their way and remove any statue they deem offensive? What then?

First of all, the more we allowed this, the more the left would demand. Their appetite for getting their way is insatiable. Removing every offensive statue in the country wouldn’t solve anything. All it would do is eliminate reminders of our nation’s history.

On the larger issue, that of rewriting history; that should never be allowed. The saying, “Those who forget the lessons of history are destined to repeat them” is true. We must remember our past and the grave error of slavery. If we don’t, we are setting our country up for failure. It may take a generation or more, but our descendants will end up making the same mistakes that our ancestors made.

Is that what we want? Is that what anyone wants? Can anything good actually come out of erasing our country’s history? No it can’t. We can’t afford the risk of what would happen, if we do.

I’m not a fan of our national guilt complex, but I will say this for it: as long as we recognize the errors of our past, they will help keep us from making those errors again. We need to remember our history of slavery; not to honor it, but to be reminded of how wrong it was.

Should we forget, I fear what we might do to our fellow man.

This article has been written by Bill White for Survivopedia.

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

Mr. Phillips had just engaged in a new form of consumer activism, one that is rewriting the rules of online advertising. In the past month and a half, thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on what you might call “hate news” — a toxic mix of lies, white-supremacist content and bullying that can inspire attacks on Muslims, gay people, women, African-Americans and others.

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

Continue reading the main story

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life.”

He said that he noticed something had gone wrong with internet ads in November when, just out of curiosity, he visited Breitbart News. Like Mr. Phillips, he was gobsmacked by what he found there. His version of Breitbart was plastered with the logos of Silicon Valley brands that courted tech-savvy, pro-diversity millennials. “I couldn’t believe that these progressive companies were paying Breitbart News,” he said.

So he created a Twitter account called Sleeping Giants that would allow him and his fellow activists to anonymously interact with advertisers. Then they sent screenshots to companies like Chase, SoFi and Audi to prove that their ads appeared next to offensive content. Within hours, they received their first response, and they realized that they had stumbled across a potentially powerful tactic.

“We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars,” reads the Sleeping Giants profile. “Many companies don’t even know it’s happening. It’s time to tell them.” They say it’s not about taking away Breitbart’s right to free speech, but about giving consumers and advertisers control over where their money goes. The group’s Twitter page offers a simple set of instructions to anyone who wants to follow suit. Step 1: “Go to Breitbart and take a screenshot of an ad next to some of their content.” Step 2: “Tweet the screenshot to the company with a polite, nonoffensive note.”

The activists’ back-and-forth with companies reveals a fog of confusion surrounding online advertising. Many organizations have no idea that their ads may end up next to content they find abhorrent.

You might blame this — in part — on robots. According to the research firm eMarketer, American companies are now spending more than $22 billion a year on “programmatic ads,” the kind of advertising that is bought with little human oversight. Joshua Zeitz, vice president of corporate communications at the ad-tech company AppNexus, explained to me how this automated ad buying works. When you click on a link, “in less than a second, a call goes out, and algorithms and automated software bid in an auction to put their advertisement up on your page,” he said. “So maybe the Nabisco algorithm wants to put an ad up there; so does Macy’s and so does Honda.” The algorithm that places the highest bid wins the chance to appear on your screen.

Programmatic ads can also follow individuals around the internet, based on their browsing history, as happened with Mr. Philips. A single targeted ad could cost just a fraction of a penny, but the pennies add up to a billion-dollar industry.

Even when ad placements are automated, companies still have the power to control whether neo-Nazis or fake news hucksters profit. In fact, it’s actually rather simple for companies to impose ethical policies, according to Mr. Zeitz. Indeed, his own company (which handles programmatic advertising for other organizations) recently decided to get out ahead of the issue by removing Breitbart News from its advertising marketplace. “We’re not banning them because they’re alt-right or conservative. We banned them from our marketplace because they violate our hate speech policy, which prohibits ad serving on sites that incite violence and discrimination against minority groups.” (Breitbart has said that it condemns racism and bigotry “in any form.”)

He pointed out that brand-name companies had already figured out how to keep their ads from flowing onto porn sites, because “you really don’t want your ad for a breakfast cereal next to a hard-core pornographic video,” and so “there are tools in place that allow companies to control where their ads go.” A company can block a specific site like Breitbart News from its ad buy. Or it might pick a “white list” of sites that align with its values.

Continue reading the main story

But to do that, companies would have to forgo the sites designed to deliver exactly what they want — a big audience for little cost. In November, NPR reporters interviewed Jestin Coler about his fake-news empire. Mr. Coler and his team stage-crafted their sites to look like local newspapers and then planted fantastical headlines and fictional stories that attracted more than a million views. Though the news was fake, the ads were real. Mr. Coler wouldn’t tell the reporters exactly how much he made off advertising, but he intimated that his revenues ranged between $10,000 and $30,000 a month.

Such “entrepreneurs” have an outsize influence on our political sphere. BuzzFeed News reported that, during the last three months of the election, hoax stories outperformed real ones on social media. Thanks to people enthusiastically sharing pro-Trump headlines cooked up by clickbait farms, in the bizarro-world of online advertising, the fake can be more profitable than the real.

Ezra Englebardt, an advertising strategist, joined the Sleeping Giants campaign because he believes it creates much-needed transparency in the online advertising world. When lots of people share photos of the ads that they’re seeing on their own screens, it becomes possible to get some sense of where the ad dollars go, he said.

Still, the post-truth reality makes it difficult to measure the scope of the problem. Breitbart’s editor in chief told Bloomberg that despite these bans, his company “continues to experience exceptional growth.” However, public Twitter communications and news accounts prove that advertisers are indeed fleeing the site.

More important, the screenshot activists are forcing companies to pick a side. After pressure from consumers, Kellogg’s became one of the first big brands to announce that it would remove its ads from Breitbart News. In retaliation, Breitbart called for a boycott, and the cereal brand seems to have suffered from the uproar on social media. At the same time, it received lots of good press for taking its stand; in early December, many consumers announced that they would reward the company by making all-Kellogg’s donations to soup kitchens.

I expected that other companies would want to trumpet their own Breitbart departures. It seemed an easy win for corporate P.R. to distance itself from Klan-rally-like riffs like this one — “every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence, every telegraph pole in the South should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag.” (Telegraph poles!?)

But when I reached out to several organizations that seemed to have joined the ban, they didn’t want to talk about it. A bank and a nonprofit group did not respond to my queries. Two companies — 3M and Zappos — declined to talk about the matter. A Patagonia spokeswoman said that her company did not advertise on white-supremacist sites — but she would not comment on the screenshots that activists had sent to Patagonia in early December showing the company’s logo on Breitbart’s Facebook page. Warby Parker was the most forthcoming; a representative pointed me to a statement that thanked a Twitter activist for inspiring its own ban on Breitbart.

In the behavior of some of these companies, you can detect the way our norms have already shifted. In the old normal, it would have cost little to stand up against neo-Nazi slogans. But in the new normal, doing so might involve angering key players in the White House, including the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who has hired the former editor of Breitbart as his senior adviser. Mr. Trump recently proved the damage he could do to a company by criticizing Lockheed Martin on Twitter; soon after, its stocks prices tumbled.

Continue reading the main story

Still, a new consumer movement is rising, and activists believe that where votes failed, wallets may prevail. This struggle is about much more than ads on Breitbart News — it’s about using corporations as shields to protect vulnerable people from bullying and hate crimes.

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Nicholas Reville, a board member of the Participatory Culture Foundation who has worked with the Sleeping Giants, pointed out that businesses benefited from embracing diversity: “You have to be inclusionary if you’re going to try to sell to a very large audience.” And he pointed out that consumer activism might be especially effective because so many people feel they have no other way to express their opposition to Trump-ian values.

The founder of Sleeping Giants agreed. “It’s scary to say it, but maybe companies will have to be the standard-bearers for morals right now,” he said. He added that most corporations embrace policies (on paper at least) that prohibit racist bullying and sexual intimidation. Even if President Trump flouts these rules, corporations may continue to uphold them. “We’ve all seen employee handbooks where they have codes of behavior,” he said. “Maybe that’s all we have to fall back on now.”

#trump #donald j #media #news #fake news

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nakediconoclast · 4 years ago

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I have a question.

There is no disrespect intended. A couple of years ago I asked much the same question.

What will qualify as an actionable infringement of our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

California, New York and Washington D.C., have basically made ownership of firearms illegal ala the U.K. Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey are not far behind. Several other states are pushing hard to pass new gun control laws; Washington, Oregon, New Hampshire and others. The Affordable Care Act is the law of the land and is adding personnel to the current criminal investigative arm of the IRS. The U.N. small arms treaty is on the table for the Senate to ratify. The Department of Homeland Security seems to be building an ever larger "defense" force via the TSA. The Evironmental Protection Agency is growing more powerful each year and shutting down the infrastructure of the U.S.A. to "protect us" from ourselves. Numerous presidential orders and directives are on the books providing for the imposition of martial law at the slightest whim. Police forces have become and are becoming more and more belligerent, firing first and asking questions later. On top of that agreements have been made with foreign countries to send in troops when requested.

My list could go on and on.

I've never been much of an "in the trenches" kind of fighter. Mostly I've been a "nose to the grind stone" kind of guy. It wasn't until I found the internet and voices such as yours that I started to see the writing on the wall.

You've often stated that the restorationists must not create another Ft. Sumter, we must not be the first to fire. I read a brief description of the events that led to the battle. It was by no means an in depth study. Based on the description the situation was a no win for South Carolina and the Confederate states. A Union attachment had taken over the fort and was fortifying their position. South Carolina had seceded from the Union and was now part of another country. They could not allow foreign troops on their soil. South Carolina demanded the Union troops remove themselves. Thereafter, it could be argued that the Union brought about the start of the war. In any case they would have been starved out or fired upon.

No secessions have occured, however, the United States is currently under a state of siege. The blues (statists) and reds (restorationists) are fortifying their positions. The reds won't make the first strike because we want to hold the high ground. We're the good guys.

The blues don't want to strike first. But why? In my opinion they don't want to strike first not because they want to be in the right, in their opinion they are in the right, but because they just don't feel ready yet. They haven't degraded us enough, yet. They're still afraid for the same reason that the Japanese did not want to strike the mainland. Behind every blade of grass will be an American with and prepared to use a firearm. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its' own.

Updated 7/21/2020: The blues have struck, but the reds have yet to respond. It seems that they have developed a game plan. Small skirmishes are developing. Do we have to wait for the next Presidential election? Win or lose in the Presidentials the blues will not stop. If the blues lose anarchy will accelerate immediately. If the blues win they may postpone for a year or two, but they will strike again. Do the reds have to wait for our loved ones to be raped and murdered and our property destroyed before action is taken?

That brings me back to my question. What will qualify as an actionable offense? Must we wait for the blues to be ready to strike? For if they are ready then that means that, at the very least, tens of millions of Americans will be killed in the first battles. Tens of millions more will be relocated to camps which will not be able to support them and will lead to the updated version of the WW2 ovens.

If it comes to a shooting war, a true civil war, it will be from behind blades of grass. At least at first, there will not be organized resistance.

After a triggering action I suggest that it will start with the internet shut down. Then electric grids will be shut down one after another over a period of a few hours or days. Then martial law will be declared and the executive and presidential orders will be put into affect.

When will this happen? I don't know. Federal elections have not counted for anything for decades. There are still some flag officers that have to be run out of the military and replaced. The marine corp has to be eliminated or thoroughly demoralized. A few more voices have to be silenced. Maybe they're waiting for you to finally meet your maker because you're such a thorn. In any case who is to determine that that was the incident; that was the action that has crossed the line? There is no one leader to say now is the time. One could say the passage of the ACA was the line. That may yet prove to be true. Usually war starts for the smallest reasons. Who will be the one to say? And even if there is a one will he be heard?

No one is ever truly ready for war.

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gibsongirlselections · 4 years ago

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Considering My Nazi Reparations

My great grandfather was a slave. He died on May 7, 1943 alongside most of his loved ones in the Sobibor concentration camp, about 120 miles from Warsaw. I’ve been thinking a lot about reparations.

One son and his family escaped years earlier to America. Ernst and Julinka arrived with no special skills, and proved to be imperfect people, with their marriage falling apart not long after arrival in New York. About the best we can say is they brought their five-year-old son with them. My father. He naturalized as a teen, making me the first native born American in the family and later, the first to get an advanced degree. Immigrants, we get the job done, right?

Through a happenstance discussion with a former German diplomat, I learned of a technical change in German law dealing with the loss of citizenship under Nazi persecution that may mean I am a German citizen by birth, transmitted through my father. The adjudication process is complex and success not assured, but as the diplomat said, “We cannot undo the past. We cannot raise the dead. But we can offer you this, citizenship, something we hold dear.” A reparation.

Nazi reparations, with well over $60 billion paid out, are the gold standard, and fall into three broad categories.

The first leg of reparation was early financial support to the Israel, now ended. By 1956 Germany was supplying over 87 percent of Israel’s state revenue.

The second leg is direct payments to survivors. There are multiple programs, established through the ongoing NGO-like Claims Conference, for payments to elderly survivors, those needing medical care, payments to children taken from their parents, payments to victims of medical experiments, claims for looted art, and more. The payments vary, but are modest, thousands of dollars, symbolic not life-changing. As one head of the Claims Conference said, “It has never been about the money. It was always about recognition.”

These payments are directed at those who directly suffered. Though payments continue for the life of the victim, they are not given to later generations (though in some cases surviving spouses continue to be paid). I have no claim to Holocaust money. Reparations went to the living individuals harmed, not to the generations removed. My extended family got nothing; they were all dead.

The final leg of German reparations is what might be called atonement. For me, the possibility of being extended German citizenship makes for a small part of all that. Germany’s postwar Constitution outlawed hate symbols, specifically the swastika. In 1952 Germany officially apologized for Nazi crimes. The explicit story of WWII is taught in schools, and memorials and museums expose the horrors of the Third Reich. Modern Germans know their history.

Another important element of Nazi reparations is much of the money comes from direct perpetrators of the crimes. French and Swiss banks had held funds deposited by murdered Jews. After the war the banks tried to keep the money, but were instead forced to pay it into reparation accounts. Life insurance companies which refused to pay beneficiaries on the specious ground that premiums were not kept current while policyholders were in concentration camps were made to contribute.

Hundreds of German and Austrian companies that employed slave laborers paid up. It was an uneven process; in 1999, class action lawsuits against slave users Deutsche Bank, Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, and Opel failed, though the German government and industrial groups agreed separately to compensate former slaves. The amounts were small, in the thousands of dollars.

And so we come to America, where BLM and others are demanding reparations for slavery. Unlike the Nazi system, as well as the reparations the U.S. paid to Japanese-American internees (payments went to survivors and a very limited number of descendants) and to victims of horrid syphilis experiments at Tuskegee University (payments went to survivors, spouses, and children), financial reparations are envisioned on a broad scale, as wide as paying something to most of the 37 million African Americans now living in America. The majority who believe they are descendants of slaves do so based on family lore; how many can documentarily connect back 400 years to a slave without a last name?

The scale of slavery reparations and the amount of time passed since enslavement also means unlike Germany, 100 percent of America’s reparations would be paid out of general Federal taxes collected from, among others, descendants of slaves themselves. Does anything say “white supremacy” clearer than forcing modern African Americans to pay for their own reparations? For the rest of us fully unconnected to slavery, the money taken has about as much meaning as a spoonful of hot spit. Divided among so many, it is like figuring how many inches of interstate highway your taxes paid for. Modern reparations are as separated from the reality of ownership and of being owned as four centuries will allow. If reparations are symbolic, these would be near meaningless.

There isn’t space here to discuss the reparations inherent in the Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society, trillions spent, as well as existing racial preferences in federal contracting, affirmative action, job quotas, and educational admissions. Never mind the massive practical problems of raising additional reparations money and creating a distribution system for payments. Nor is there room to enlarge the story as it needs to be and ask what amends are owed by Arab, African, and European slavers, never mind the European textile manufacturers who profited mightily from cheap cotton. Few are ready to talk about the Portuguese slave trade which sent forced laborers into the cane fields of the Caribbean and South America to profit in part American sugar refiners and rum makers. Less than five percent of African slaves went to the U.S. Slavery was a massive interconnected global system.

In reality reparations for slavery will need to be of the atonal kind we see in Germany. Much of this is already hard on the ground. We have the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. America’s commitment to free speech makes it unlikely hate symbols, such as the Confederate flag, will ever be banned outright (the Supreme Court consistently refuses to create a “hate speech” carve out in the 1A) but clearly a cultural corner has been turned which will see those symbols have less and less place in mainstream society.

An apology is overdue; just words of course, but words are sometimes all we have. President Reagan apologized to Japanese-American internees in 1988. Bill Clinton in 1997 apologized to the people affected by government medical experiments conducted at Tuskegee University in the 1930s. Though nine states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, have formally apologized for slavery, during the Obama administration the House and Senate passed bipartisan resolutions of apology but failed to reconcile the two versions. Obama, a coward when courage called, chose not to apologize without that political support.

So the question is: does BLM want to move forward or remain in the past? Financial reparations at this point accomplish nothing. They do not compensate the victims, they do not punish the slavers, they would be in any amount too little too late, an almost shallow act. The form reparations must take, atonement, is partially underway and will someday include a formal apology. The problem is that such actions are meant to provide closure, an endpoint to allow a new starting point. One never forgets the past, the dead are always with us and we build memorials and tell their stories to ensure that, but we accept some sort of ending to empower the living to shoulder the responsibility of going on.

Will BLM do that, or is there still political fodder in ensuring slavery remains a scab to be picked as necessary, crisscrossing the same lines like a figure skater, to be blamed for everything from COVID deaths to low SAT scores, to forever remain a collar? Are people ready to stop being victims, responsibility of their fate outside their control? Reparations carries with it an agreement to heal; the line is never forget, not never forgive.

It will be a long time before I hear whether I qualify for German citizenship. Nothing will replace an extended family I will never know, nothing will displace the dark spaces inside my complex father, but I am anxious to see what does change if I become a German citizen. So I’ve been thinking a lot about reparations.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

The post Considering My Nazi Reparations appeared first on The American Conservative.

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‘Yes we exist’ – Black fans eye NASCAR’s work to diversify – Examiner Online

Kevin Johnson became enamored with NASCAR as a kid through clips on “ Wide World of Sports,” decades before billion-dollar broadcast deals when auto racing shared precious air time with barrel jumping and demolition derby.

Raised in the South Bronx, Johnson considered himself “a closet NASCAR fan,” without a friend or family member who truly shared his interest in catching the latest race.

“As you can imagine,” Johnson said, “there just simply weren’t a lot of people receptive to the sport given its history.”

Johnson recalled staying in his Temple University dorm during the massive blizzard that wreaked havoc on the East Coast in 1979 to watch the Daytona 500, broadcast live in its entirety for the first time. His roommate was stuck elsewhere because of the weather, leaving Johnson alone with the TV.

“Nobody knew,” Johnson said, laughing. “As a Black person in an urban area, it wasn’t acceptable. I wasn’t really out there. But that love continued to this day.”

The 61-year-old Johnson, who has retired to Miami, shares his passion for the sport with a Black NASCAR Fans group on Facebook. The group’s bio says: “Yes we exist.”

The fans share favorite race memories, photos of their collectibles and, yes, stories of the historically uneasy relationship NASCAR has had with the Black community.

Johnson has been called racist slurs at the track, felt queasy at the sight of the Confederate flag and often wondered if the good-ol’-boy Southern attitudes seeped in the sport would ever fade.

The catalyst for change has come for the U.S. with the death of George Floydin the custody of Minneapolis police. Not long after that, driver Bubba Wallace shoved NASCAR toward the overdue step of banning the Confederate flag, for decades a waving, nylon symbol to Blacks that they were not welcome in NASCAR Nation.

FILE – In this June 10, 2020, file photo, driver Bubba Wallace waits for the start of a NASCAR Cup Series auto race in Martinsville, Va. Some Black NASCAR fans have felt uncomfortable at the track. They’re worried about hearing racial slurs or feeling unwelcome from a predominantly white fan base. The catalyst for change has come. Bubba Wallace prodded NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag last month. There is hope the ban opens the doors to more fans. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

The thought of facing the flag and the potential of alcohol-fueled anger from its staunchest defenders has kept many Black fans away and made the ones who did come watch their step. Johnson said banning the flag will make NASCAR “more inviting.”

“We need to get more people, encourage more people of color to come and enjoy what goes on around race weekend,” added Brad Daugherty, the lone Black team owner in NASCAR.

According to NASCAR, the latest demographics show an overwhelmingly white fan base — 75% — but the multicultural slice of 25% has climbed from 20% in 2011. Black fans make up 9% of the total.

The sight of Black fans lined against the Talladega fence to cheer for Wallace a day after a noose was found in his stall was a heartening moment for NASCAR. But earning the trust of a new generation of fans extends beyond “if you ban it, they will come.” NASCAR and its tracks need bolder attempts at ticket and community outreach programs, much in the way baseball, the NHL and the NBA celebrate pride or ethnic-themed nights.

Minorities may not necessarily become the dominant demographic for the stock car series, but they can certainly grab a larger share of the marketplace.

“I think the challenge for NASCAR is this: they spent a lot of time and money over the years building up a specific brand that centered on Confederate flag-waving Southern white folks as their target market, and aligned themselves with business partners and politicians who also found symmetry with this demographic group,” said Joshua Newman, a Florida State professor and author of “Sport, Spectacle, and NASCAR Nation: Consumption and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism.”

“This worked well to create a very specific NASCAR culture, a spectacle of celebrity politicians, military flyovers, conservative symbolism, an all-white driver line-up — for many years, but not always — and grandstands filled with predominantly white consumer fans,” Newman said. “It was unique in the North American sports landscape for its racial homogeneity and pronounced affiliations with one political party.”

But cultural politics can change and NASCAR’s boom has faded. To Newman, that means NASCAR limited its growth potential and now must find a solution.

Could Wallace, who f inished second in the 2018 Daytona 500, engage new fans if he won a checkered flag or two driving for an underfunded team? Would a diversity program that places more drivers in the Cup Series — where Wallace is the only Black driver — broaden exposure and create fans of all genders, ethnicities and backgrounds?

NASCAR has worked on building awareness among multicultural audiences for years, including Latino-focused efforts at Auto Club Speedway in California. Last year, NASCAR and the Urban Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas teamed with a local youth group to bring a group of Black children to the race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The Drive for Diversity program dates to 2004 and a separate effort to work with key minority business and community leaders started three years later.

“If people look at the sport and see the stars of the sport are representative of different groups, I think it’s just another step toward making the sport feel more open to a larger audience of folks,” Drive for Diversity director Jusan Hamilton said. “If people look at the sport and feel that it’s open, that in turn will help make more folks be interested in coming to the sport.”

The few Black drivers who came before Wallace have heard that hopefulness before only to often end up discouraged at the frayed bond between NASCAR and minorities.

“It’s time to realize it’s a new day,” said Bill Lester, who made 145 career NASCAR starts from 1999-2006. “Not all the race car drivers happen to be white. There are people of color. There are women out there who want to race.”

Lester said he believes NASCAR President Steve Phelps, who tearfully told Wallace about the noose in the garage, and veteran executive Brandon Thompson can provoke tangible culture change within the sport.

“There’s a willingness to listen and engage that NASCAR has that I don’t believe they were sincere about earlier,” Lester said.

Still, Wallace is one of just a handful of non-white drivers. Daniel Suarez is Mexican and Aric Almirola is of Cuban descent. Kyle Larson, who is half Asian, was fired in April for using a racial slur.

NASCAR met this month with the Rev. Greg Drumwright, who organized members of his ministry to make the trip to Talladega to support Wallace. Drumwright said he and his group planned to attend other races, too, and he posted a series of encouraging interactions on his Twitter feed from the All-Star race at Bristol on Wednesday.

FILE – In this June 3, 2020, file photo, Rev. Greg Drumwright, right, greets people at the memorial site for Greg Floyd in Minneapolis. Drumwright, a minister at the Citadel Church & Campus Ministries, helped organize a group of Black fans to attend the NASCAR race at Talladega and support driver Bubba Wallace. Drumwright now hopes he can become an advocate of change for NASCAR. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

“We don’t want window dressing,” Drumwright said. “This is a national dialogue.”

Toni Addison, her husband and three children of Newark, Delaware, have never attended a NASCAR race. They drive by Dover International Speedway on race weekends and catch a glimpse of the carnival-type atmosphere at the track and wondered if they’d feel welcomed.

“It sounds like something we’d be interested in,” Addison said. “But guess I couldn’t wear my Black Live Matter shirt or my Barack Obama shirt to that. I’m a (Dallas) Cowboys fan. It’s kind of like a Cowboys fan doesn’t go into the Eagles stadium, at least not with all the Cowboys gear on.”

She’s become one of Wallace’s newest fans (“I didn’t even know there was a Black NASCAR driver”) and watched him slap hands with fans at Talladega, but acknowledged “fear may keep me away from that.”

“My impression of it is they’re mostly Trump supporters, Confederate flag supporters,” the 51-year-old Addison said. “I don’t know how comfortable I would feel fitting in.”

She could talk to fans like Johnson who, while hurt by the slurs, generally have a great time on race day and want all fans to draw the same enjoyment from the sport he has for more than 40 years.

One memory rises about the rest: Johnson and his wife, Julie, attended a meet-and-greet at Atlanta Motor Speedway with Hall of Fame driver Tony Stewart in the mid-2000s. The couple were fervent supporters of Smoke, who asked a group of fans in a suite if they had any questions for him.

Julie stepped up from the back and told Stewart, “As probably your only Black female fan, I really don’t have a question, I just want a hug.”

Stewart smiled and her invited her up for a big hug and later sent over several autographed photos.

It’s the kind of moment that can make a fan forever — from any walk of life.

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