One of the reasons I post on this blog ao infreqently is that my standards for my own writing are so restrictive as to be paralyzing. So many would-be posts bubble up, only to fail to fully materialize, or the window of their relevance closes before they can. If I could give myself permission to just write without worrying about how tightly composed it is, this might actually become a blog rather than an archive of occasional articles.
So I’m trying something new starting today. A new kind of post (for me) where I’ll basically just vomit up whatever’s really pressing against my consciousness: crazy observations, responses to political garbage, philosophical meanderings, down whatever trail the Hunter leads…
Liz Cheney, Trump, and Liberal Alarmism
This is one of those things I’m talking about after the moment has passed, especially post-election, but I gotta get it out. Democrats and liberal media were up in arms over Trump’s supposedly violent statements toward Liz Cheney, in which he said her usual warhawk orientation would be different if the guns (presumably those of enemy soldiers) were pointed at her.
She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
The context was Cheney’s penchant for supporting U.S. wars abroad, like her father before her. And context aside, these words in themselves do not constitute a threat. The guns in question are not held by Trump himself or any of his proxies. There is no plan here, no order, nothing. It is hypothetical because of course Liz Cheney would never see a battlefield, hyperbolic, and in total disregard for the establishment’s rules of decorum, as is Trump’s well-worn style.
Listen. I’m old enough to remember — it was only 16 years ago! — when George W. Bush and his ilk were public enemies for the liberal establishment. That he’s somehow managed to launder that image and retire as some more reasonable elder statesman who paints mediocre pictures in his spare time does not change the fact he — and main man Dick — are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from a war waged under false pretenses. Or their responsibility for the economic crash of 2008 and the annihilation of generations of Black wealth. It was popular back then to cast Bush as a moron, and so the thinking was that it was Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rove and whoever else pulling his strings.
As far as Liz goes, the apple doesn’t fall far, and somehow, we’re supposed to forget her family’s war profiteering legacy because she stands guard at the Right Gate to defend the establishment, which apparently has grown so big (coalition is the word they use) that Bernie Sanders guards the Left Gate? And pundits are still confused as to why an antiestablishment firestarter like Trump resonated with so many?
About Those Slavery Texts
When I first read the story about these racist mass texts telling Black people all over the country to report to the nearest plantation…can I be real with y’all for a minute?
I cracked up laughing. I’m laughing now.
There were a few reasons for this. First was that this was so obviously a trolling of epic proportions that no serious person could actually think… Well, more on that in a minute.
Second, I’m sure whatever clever little roach thought this up is sitting somewhere all smug and self-satisfied at the outrage. He or they won the minute this became a national story. And I’m not gonna give him the satisfaction.
Third, it was so asinine that it triggered some juvenile funny bone, and I just couldn’t help myself.
Also funny, but in the sobering sense that black and white people functionally live on separate planets, is this bit from a CNN article:
Attorneys general in Washington, DC, Virginia, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland have condemned the messages and urged those who feel under threat to contact law enforcement.
Bruh. What? Do otherwise (presumably) intelligent people shit their brains out when it comes to the police? Absent a recent protest about another execution of a Black person by a cop, or forgetting the mass mobilizations of 4 years ago, or forgetting or perhaps somehow never knowing what even the National Law Enforcement Museum admits on their website, that the origin of the modern US police is in the practice of slave catching? In what bizarro world would a Black person in the United States of America, fearing being forced into slavery, turn to the very institution which enforced it and has since presided over a regime of Black oppression and murder for generations? What the fuck are these people even saying?
But here’s the thing that all the coverage of this story seems to miss, which is far more ominous and far more important. This person or people, with presumably far fewer resources than the Trump campaign (if we take them at their word they they weren’t involved), were able to send targeted communications to a large number of people, knowing their names and racial identities.
The real story here is about data. Who has access to it and what they can do with it. I suspect this was an exploitation of the same infrastructure that brought us all the election campaign texts. At some point I gave the wrong person or entity my name and phone number, and that, paired with my recent history of holding my nose while voting for Democrats, opened me up to the most aggressive, relentless, spammy text assault I’ve ever experienced. Just how many people have my information? And whose job is to identify and protect my data from bad actors?
I can imagine a scenario in which some unsuspecting Black voters, participating in some phone survey or exit poll, had their name, race, and contact info logged in some database somewhere, for political spam purposes, and then that database — likely with less security than the many large companies experiencing data breaches of late — was somehow compromised and the Clever Roach found their opportunity to troll a bunch of Black people, the FBI, the media, the NAACP, and everyone else up in arms about this dumb shit. The timing is likely not a coincidence.
And the Kids Are Not Alright
That all said, the most damage done — as much by those continuing to give the story air as the original troll — seems to have been to young people, who through a combination of social media virality (and the related capitalization on outrage and fear) their own lack of digital literacy, and what seems to be a deep sense of fatalism and powerlessness, came to believe that the reinstitution of slavery — without a country-collapsing war — is even a possibility.
What it also signifies is a failure of public education, our mass media, and popular culture, at least insofar as it applies to adequate representations of history. From To Kill a Mockingbird, to 12 Years a Slave, many of us, and perhaps young people especially, have internalized this false narrative in which millions of Black people were brutally enslaved and mostly accepted their plight without resistance. Disarmed with this version of history, one might reasonably assume that were it not for the infinite good will and impeccable morality of the white people in the northern states, that we would’ve been enslaved for another fifty years. That we, today, by a shift in our good fortunes, a depletion of that good white will, or the rise of a fascist president, might be enslaved again. Without resistance.
In this version of history there were a few outliers — hell, maybe only one by the name of Harriet Tubman — but the rest of us by and large accepted our fate. They probably haven’t heard the names of Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey, or understand that resistance was actually not the exclusive province of a handful of radicals, but a deeply embedded praxis that took any number of forms. Forms that echo into the present: the resistance inherent to carving out dignified lives under siege in the imperial core from forces social, political, and economic. Finding joy, creating art, shaping culture, making worlds. It reminds me that in their bid to render young people as fungible sites of social reproduction, schools have foreclosed on their horizons of possibility: where a return to slavery is more feasible than a thriving life.
So for all that — all that — I say to the Clever Roach: bring your white van to my block, homey, and…let’s see how you feel when the guns are trained on your face.
Now that’s a threat. It’s also a mother fucking promise.