Our Weekly Discontents: August 17, 2020

I hate Mondays (and so does everyone else because we live in hell!)

Hey, everybody! Welcome to the fourth installment of Our Weekly Discontents, the handy roundup in which each member of our little collective here shares what we’ve written, worked on, or otherwise agonized about over the past week. I’m Kim Kelly, the voice of Be The Spark, and I’ll be your charming host for this edition.

I’ll be straight with you: last week was hard. That’s not exactly unusual given the current state of things, wherein every hour brings fresh horrors and Dante’s vision of hell has begun to look like a tempting vacation destination (I’m a Sixth Circle gal myself). But even in the interesting times in which we’ve been cursed to wander, some evils are still extraordinary, and August 12th marked the third anniversary of one of them: the deadly white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA that claimed Heather Heyer’s life and damaged so many others.

Like many people who were there that day, I’m still pretty fucked up about it. Some, like Tay Washington, are still dealing with lasting injuries from the attack; others have been left to fend for themselves through a fog of PTSD. So much has changed since that day, and so much has gotten worse—but I’m still holding onto hope that things will get better. Projects like this one are a part of that.

Politicians won’t save us; the power of the collective, of solidarity, and of fed-up, liberation-minded people who give a shit is all we can count on to get us through this nightmare. Thanks for being on our team.

Be The Spark

As you may have suspected, this week I wrote about what it’s like looking back at A12 three years later. It’s funny what your brain chooses to remember about traumatic events; specific colors and sounds and feelings that pop up unannounced years later, without warning or consideration for your daily schedule, when can fuck your whole day up. For me, turquoise will never look the same, and seeing the word “Charlottesville” in the news is never a passive experience. (Craven Democrat politicians keep it out of your goddamn mouth challenge).

Foreign Exchanges

Hey friends, it’s Derek again. I guess by its nature there’s always something going on at Foreign Exchanges, but this week it seemed like there were even more things to talk about than usual. The week’s biggest international story was Thursday’s announcement of a new diplomatic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, negotiated by master diplomat Donald Trump. You can read my thoughts on the deal over at FX, in posts from Thursday and Friday (that one is subscriber only), but the upshot is that everybody involved gets to claim a big win while the Palestinians take the loss.

But there were other big stories to cover. There was the embarrassing UN Security Council vote on Friday that saw a US resolution to extend an arms embargo against Iran win all of two votes—one from the US and the other from the Dominican Republic. There were the ongoing protests in Belarus that broke out in the wake of President Alexander Lukashenko’s disputed claim of a landslide victory in last Sunday’s presidential election. Protests in Bolivia are heating up, as are tensions between Greece and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean. And that’s still just scratching the surface.

I was also very honored to be joined by University of Florida’s Terje Østebø in this week’s FX podcast, to discuss Ethiopian politics. We talked about the origins of the Ethiopian “ethnic federalist” system and the effects of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to replace it with a more Ethiopian sense of national identity. Go check it out and please consider signing up for FX’s free email list!

Discourse Blog

Jack Crosbie at Discourse Blog here again. After a strange doldrum period during the height of the pandemic, the general election news cycle is really starting to kick into high gear, so we’re expecting to be pretty busy for the next few weeks covering conventions, campaigns and debates. That said, we’ll always have time for some blogs and essays about the general absurdity of being alive right now. This week, Sam Grasso wrote an ode to the post office, as well as a deranged blog about her pandemic Google searches. I wrote about Kamala Harris, twice, but mostly about how political accountability can’t wait until after the election. Caitlin Schneider took us across LA and the country in a search to find an actual Joe Biden bumper sticker, and Paul Blest dissected the Florida Democratic party’s unholy grasp over national politics (it sucks). And Rafi Schwartz closed us out with a news wrap up like no other, as usual. Like every week, we’ve got an open Office Hours thread every Tuesday, so stop by and chat.

Welcome to Hell World

This week’s Hell World features an interview with Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch (check out his Sh!tpost podcast) about the imminent arrival of the first QAnon supporter in Congress.

It’s really heartbreaking. The way that a lot of the influencers in the community operate in their very nature is by isolating people from their surroundings, like friends and family who might share real news sources that would debunk it. And when people become isolated, especially during quarantine when they’re lonely, this is fuel on the fire. People I’ve known in my personal life have plugged into this stuff. I’ve tried to talk to a few of them, but part of the problem is there’s not really a tried and true way to de-radicalize people off conspiracy theories. There's plenty of stuff out there on how to de-radicalize people from hate. I cover the far right a lot, and there’s tons of resources for getting people out of nationalism or the anti-immigrant movement, just disproving their hateful biases through exposure and that sort of thing. But with conspiracy theories, because a lot of them build and build on each other, there’s not a lot to do to get people off of this stuff. It ends up being a very long process, even if it does ever work. 

This week I also sent out to paid subscribers an interview with Parick Hruby in which I tried to figure out what the fuck is going on with college football right now. Hruby is a dogged advocate for reforming college sports and eliminating the abusive concept of amateurism that prevents athletes from accessing labor rights that most of the rest of us enjoy.

Look, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars fighting athletes being able to exercise the basic rights under the “amateur system” that most of us take for granted and that most of us have a right to as American citizens. To be able to negotiate for compensation for example. The college sports industry has been fighting that in court for decades. They are in Congress right now trying to get weasels like Marco Rubio to pass legislation that would effectively make amateurism a matter of federal law and would prevent college athletes from being able to make money off their image and likeness, which is their inherent property. 

This extraordinarily angry and righteous piece from an anonymous postal worker has gone viral in the past few days as the plot against the Postal Service continues apace. Read it if you haven’t yet.

Air Gordon pt. 2

I’m silent for the second week in a row because this apartment move is still sucking up most of my allotted mental space, and what’s left over has gone toward freelance work like my recent NYT profile of Secret Machines, the ’00s alt-rock band about to release their first new album since 2008. Secret Machines were the favorite band of a lot of favorite bands, but they weren’t an easy sell for the industry; as their drummer Josh Garza put it to me, they were too weird for mainstream listeners, and too mainstream for weird listeners. You could probably diagnose a lot of careers that way, but they did have this genuine moment where it seemed like they were about to break out, before a lot of things happened.

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future

Nothing new this week on Perspectives - I’m busily writing podcast scripts on the Mesolithic and the earliest farmers for Tides of History - but I’ll have something entirely different from my usual fare of essays and prehistory posts coming shortly, on how to read ad synthesize large amounts of specialist books and articles quickly. In the meantime, check out this piece from several weeks ago on the extinct species of archaic humans with whom we shared the planet until very recently, or this one on the ongoing crisis of American political legitimacy.

BORDER/LINES

The new public charge rule—a policy designed to screw over low-income would-be immigrants—has gone through quite the odyssey. The first leaked drafts started making headlines less than a month into the Trump administration, and since the rule was formally announced last year, it has gone from published to enjoined nationally to enjoined in just one state to implemented nationally to enjoined nationally again to enjoined in three states. For last week’s BORDER/LINES, we tried to untangle this mess, up through the most recent narrowing of a national injunction that bizarrely left a federal immigration regulation active in every state except New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. We delved into the history of public charge as a concept, and took a look at what’s likely to happen going forward, particularly in the context of a still-uncontrolled pandemic during which many immigrants fear seeking care.

We also took a look at a report that the administration is expelling migrant children without an asylum hearing after they’ve tested negative for COVID-19, despite the fact that the justification for the policy is ostensibly to prevent the introduction of the disease to the country, the possibility that U.S. citizens and permanent residents could also be turned away at the borders, and the bad faith, completely absurd argument that Kamala Harris is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Cruel and Usual

This week, I wrote about how the NYPD, for all its intimidation and violence, is actually pretty bad at doing the work of, you know, policing. You may have seen the story about how the NYPD used facial recognition technology to track down a Black Lives Matter protester earlier this week, then 50 (FIFTY!) cops camped out at his apartment for five hours. However, he knew his rights and didn’t come out of his apartment, so the cops eventually gave up and went home—not because they didn’t have anything to arrest him for*, but because they didn’t bother getting an arrest warrant.

* Debatable he committed a crime, but he eventually did get arrested and charged, so I’ll be generous here.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

Last week, I wrote about zombies and class, through the lens of Korean contemporary classic Train to Busan. This week will be about, well, that’s a good question. I’m once again reading Shirley Jackson, so it might be about The Haunting of Hill House. Or it might be about the mythology and realities of creative writing MFAs, a topic I’ve been mulling for a while. Or maybe I’ll buy a new video game between now and Tuesday. All kinds of things could happen. What I can promise you is that there will be more Calvin and Hobbes, and that you should sign up.

Wars of Future Past

For this fortnight’s edition of Wars of Future Past, I took a look at the hard limits of covering breaking news about disasters a couple continents away, and what I try to do to avoid anything Friedman-esque. Beyond that, I talk about a summer story of tide pool foraging in California, and what a broader understanding of early state formation can tell us about the conditions under which people revert from state-tracked work to immediate subsistence. It’s hardly a war story, but I think we cannot really understand the present crisis without grasping how the wartime apparatus can co-exist with people scrounging for a free meal of starfish.

The Insurgents

This week we’re joined by Nate and Riley from TRASHFUTURE, who let us know how the intrepid truth-tellers in the British press are holding Boris Johnson’s Conservative government to account for their bumbling Coronavirus response that has resulted in tens of thousands of otherwise preventable deaths. I mean, surely that’s what they’ve been doing. Right? Hello?

It’s an interesting discussion that touches on how media in the UK protects the interests of the wealthy and powerful and draws parallels between the relentless 5-year campaign of constant demonization of Jeremy Corbyn with the way Bernie Sanders has been treated by media outlets in the United States. Is it even possible for any left populist movement to succeed when it’s a certainty that powerful media institutions will be working ceaselessly to destroy it? Honestly, it’s not looking good.

Also, Rob and Jordan pitch the DNC on their ideas for the coming National Convention (hint: heavy on the celebs, light on dumb crap like “policy"or “solutions”).

no love in fear

End domestic prevalence of the national anthem.