You Know Who Doesn't Have The Yalues Of New York? Other New Yorkers: A Cautionary Anecdote Before Election Day

 

Author’s Note: I was reluctant to write this article because it is more personal than many of the ones I tend to write for this column. Nevertheless, it is so on point with the divide that exists between the left and the rest of America that I feel compelled to include it. I have changed the names and even the genders of the people who are involved the incident in question as well as the location it took place in. Everything else is true.

 

As my long-time readers know I’ve lived in New York State all of my adult life and all of it in Queens. Because much of my social circle and my employment is tied to Manhattan, I believe I’ve spent somewhere between a quarter and a third of my life in New York State in New York City proper. And during that time my opinion of the city that never sleeps has pretty much been a constant: it’s a nice place to visit, but even if I could afford to live there, I wouldn’t.

Having spent so much of my life either in Manhattan or Manhattan adjacent I can say with all sincerity New York City might be called ‘the number one city in America” if not on the entire planet but the only thing it is number one is its opinion of itself. I acknowledge and appreciate all of the great cultural landmarks of this city, all of its architecture, all of its history but New York hasn’t been the center of anything for a very long time.

We’ve long since dropped in population behind California, Texas and Florida. We’ve never been the center of entertainment since television took up residence in Hollywood in the 1960s as well as film. We may be the center of finance in America but that pales compared to other nations in Europe and Asia. And it’s telling that so many of the institution that are quintessentially New York – the ballet, the opera, Broadway – have long since passed the point that the average New Yorker – had they any interest – would be able to afford them. New York’s apartments are among the most expensive in the country and most people who live here can’t afford to rent them, much less own them. And needless to say our teams in almost every major league sport haven’t won championships in a very long time.

The only think that New York City  is number one at is it’s disproportionate sense of its place in not only America, but the world. Such is our attitude that while anyone who has lived in New York for even a year knows just how obvious its flaws are, the only people allowed to talk about are themselves New Yorkers. Nothing more sums up our sense of entitlement when Middle America calls us the representation of all that is entitled and elite. “F--- you!” we react. “Only we’re allowed to say what a shithole we are.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never judged the people at Fox News for raging against New York in all its forms. I don’t think they’re qualified to talk about anything else but as native New Yorkers they know of what they speak there. Frankly the fact that Democrats tend to call this hypocrisy shows that they don’t understand New York: that particular double standard is part of being a New Yorker.

Indeed the only greater insincerity I find in my native state is that so many progressives choose to call this state their home and from that perch, judge the rest of the country for being backwards, bigoted and elitist. This is a joke that is something that I’d be shocked that has never come up on SNL or any of the late night comics who broadcast from Manhattan. In this way when  conservatives rail against comics like them for not understanding ‘Real America’ they’re not entirely wrong.

New York is, by almost any standard, a city of elitism and culture. The fact that is become the groundswell for so many ‘progressive movements’ over the last decade strikes me as laughable when it comes to the divide. Occupy Wall Street was, for all intents and purposes, a lot of privileged children playing poor and no doubt they actually stepped over homeless people to do so and never saw the dissonance. So many of the major so-called ‘Justice Democrats’ have tried to run campaigns that by any reasonable nature would be considered out of touch: nothing strikes me as more absurd that Cynthia Nixon campaigning for governor  and trying to get the representation of the ‘Working Families Party’ – a party that is no doubt there only to make Democrats feel good about themselves when they choose to vote for the Democratic candidate who’s invariably listed there. And very little could speaks of entitlement than a bunch of students at Columbia – Columbia! – were not only completely qualified to understand the situation in Middle East but could bring about a peaceful resolution with a student protest. The only thing that was more entitled was their request for amnesty as part of demands: I could hear the chants: “What do we want?”  “Change – and for this march not to appear on our permanent record!”

There’s always been a certain level of elitism in so much of New York, but I never really thought this was reflected in bigotry  - until today.

The last several months I have been engaged in a part-time paid internship at an office job in New York. While I was busy working this afternoon an individual came into the office who I knew vaguely and started having a conversation with the new department head. One of these people was white, one was African-American. Both of them live in New York.

The two were having a jovial conversation and I wasn’t paying any real attention to it. Then one of them said: “You know if it wasn’t for New York City…” The next sentence caught by attention. “Honestly places like Westchester, they’re basically the South.”

I started sweating hearing this as well as the laughing in agreement. The other person said: “If I had the choice I wouldn’t live” well, you don’t need to know but it was a suburb on Long Island. Then the other person chuckled and said about when that individual was in college in Buffalo he experienced something bigoted. (The person transferred to Howard, so I assume they felt safer then.) They then said essentially Long Island might as well be Jim Crow South. Well those weren’t the exact words:   they said Mayberry but that’s the implication. One of them said: “New York City was the only thing holding this state together.”  And at that point I left the room.

Reader it took me nearly five minutes to calm down from that exchange. I had to wait another three for that conversation to end and another three to find the inner strength to restrain myself from not knocking on the door and engaging in an angry exchange. I had little to lose by doing so: my internship will be over in a month and I find it unlikely I will be working in that particular office setting again. But I am civil in public as I usually am in my own writing for this column. (The comments section is a different story but I’ve come to accept that’s the id for this site.)

Now I’ve heard more bigoted things said in my life, not merely on television but in my presence. But few things have ever made me more infuriated – not the stuff I hear on the right wing or the left and very little even on this site. And the reason it did, I now realize, is because it encapsulate in a very real sense the divide that our country faces is not solely on the far right.

Just as a reminder this was said in New York City, a state that has been Democratic so long no Republican presidential candidate in their right mind would campaign here with the hope of carrying the state. (I know what happened Sunday night; few would argue the inaccuracy of my statement.) This is a state that is among the most deep blue in America. The two people speaking no doubt hate Trump with justifiable contempt, voted for Hilary in 2016, Biden in 2020 and will no doubt vote for Harris in 2024. But there are few conversations that could best encapsulate the progressive mindset towards so much of the country that in their opinion if you lived even twenty minutes away from Manhattan you might as well live in Tuscaloosa.

Now I have no doubt that both these people, in their heart of hearts, don’t believe they’re bigots. One of them, as I stated, was African-American and one I should mention was female. Both of them are, no doubt, donors to liberal causes, will contribute to Democratic campaigns and are no doubt convinced that the entire Republican party is an existential threat to the country comparable to climate change. I’m relatively sure that in their heart of hearts they didn’t think they were really being offensive. I know if I’d gone up to them and told them that what they were saying made me uncomfortable, they would apologize. However I’m also aware that they would be sorry for making me feel uncomfortable and not anything that actually said.

It's the laughter that bothers me, the knowing self-aware tone of it that fundamentally troubles me and that I have little doubt will keep me up at night no matter how much I try not to think about it. It will linger past election day, will be there no matter who ends up winning. And why I find at the end of the day,  perhaps as big a symbol of the divide that our nation faces that is far greater than just Republican versus Democrat.

I know these people. Not well, but I’ve had multiple conversations with them. They’re nice, they’re charming, they’re intelligent, they’re clearly educated. They live in a state that has gone Democratic for the last two elections and will definitely keep doing so for the foreseeable future. And they talk about the people who they live with – in  a place they call home not thirty miles from where I was speaking – with the same visceral contempt that I hear from Republicans about immigrants  - or progressives about Trump voters. They’re in the bastion of liberalism, not far from where Hakeem Jeffries and AOC represent Congress, where other Democrats like Mondaire Jones may soon represent. And they think the towns they live in, their neighborhoods are, compared to Manhattan, racist, backwards, conservative. And if they can’t find commonalities with the people who live in the same state as them, if they find them morally lacking, if they find them untrustworthy…well, what hope is there for anyone who lives in any of the other forty-nine states?

I know my state; I know we look down on anyone who doesn’t come from ‘around here’. That’s as true if you’re from Pennsylvania or Michigan; hell it’s true if you’re from New Jersey. Maybe all of this is just a New York thing. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe.

Still I can’t help but wonder. What if I’d gone up to them and said, not angrily but calmly that I grew up in the suburbs and still live there? That many of my friends live in the neighborhoods that they just mocked? That I found their remarks not only deeply insulting but offensive to so many people?

Would they have apologized to me and forgotten it the moment I left? Would they have realized the error their ways? Or would they have told me to get a thicker skin?

I want to believe that they’d honor the better angels of their nature. After all, they’re from a blue state. They’re on the right side of history. They’re the good guys.

Right?

 

Stand: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and A Virtually Unknown Sports Activist

 

When the World Series took place in 1918 it did so under multiple clouds. The first was that World War I was going and that baseball had been forced – reluctantly – to have its greatest stars shoulder guns and fight. The owners believed that the 1919 season might very well be wiped out – no one knew that the war would be over by November – and had already shortened their season to end in September. The World Series was going to take place over a short period of time and very likely be the last baseball anyone saw for a while.

Attendance had dropped immensely as a result which dismayed the two teams: the Red Sox and the Cubs. In the era of the reserve clause the World Series share was a major source of income. Upsetting them more was the fact that for the first time baseball was going to diminish the money having made the decision to divide ticket sales for teams that finished anywhere from second to fourth in both leagues. Before the series began, both teams considered staging a strike, demanding more money or they wouldn’t play. The president of the American League Ban Johnson met with the strike leaders and put their strike in the shadow of patriotism with which The National pastime was now connected with. How could they think of letting down the public, especially in a time of war?

The players, led by Harry Hooper of the Red Sox, knew that they couldn’t win this fight. Baseball was always the master of public relations when it came to its image as the national game and to think of money in comparison to that – well, it was practically un-American. The players came out looking like ingrates even though they were in the right.

I mention all of this because during the seventh inning stretch at what was then known as Cubs Field the on-field band chose to use the opportunity to strike up The Star-Spangled Banner. The song, I should mention, wasn’t the national anthem yet: it wouldn’t be adopted as such until 1931. But when it began to play, the spectators began to sing, first only a few, then more and more until by the final note, the entire crowd was singing. And when the final note was played the entire crowd burst into thunderous cheers and applause, no doubt inspired by the national mood. The song was played at every game of the World Series, which the Red Sox won four games to 2 over Chicago. Famously the Red Sox didn’t win another World Series until 2004 and the Cubs, though they would contend frequently over the next quarter of a century, wouldn’t win a World Series until 2016.

Because baseball was associated with the national game – and because the owners never liked to mess with anything that made them sound like that they weren’t an institution rather than a business – the Star Spangled Banner became associated with baseball pretty much from that point forward. And because baseball was the American sport every other league and sport, from football to I suspect high school lacrosse, has been imitated it ever since. That is the deeper story of the connection between the Star-Spangled Banner and professional sports.

I seriously doubt that any of the so-called patriots who condemn any action involving the national anthem as ‘unamerican’  in professional sports know anything about and I seriously doubt that even if they did know, their opinion would change one bit. I also have incredible suspicion that the song was written in the one American war we got our asses kicked in, that it has four verses besides the first one, that it’s set to an English drinking song, or that they even know the words to the anthem. And I’ll be honest during the post-season and World Series year after year I tend not to listen the national anthem. It’s not just that it’s almost inevitably badly sung, no matter which Billboard singer they get to mangle it; it’s that even as patriotic songs go, it’s not a particularly good one. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is a wartime song and sounds like it. Compared to God Bless America or My Country, This of Thee, which are more peaceful and more tuneful, it sounds like – well, like it was written by an attorney rather than a poet or a songwriter. And this is coming from someone for whom it would doesn’t necessarily have the relationship with America that Chris Rock once described in his ‘Never Scared’ special. “For black people America is like the uncle who paid your way through college – but molested you.”

The kindest thing you can say about the national anthem and professional sports – and this is the rare occasion I am loathe to be objective – is that it came during a time when separate but equal was the law of the land, where black people were getting lynched and race riots were considered the faults of the uppity black people. Integration in professional sports was something that was considered unthinkable and probably un-American even by those who went off to fight fascism abroad in World War II.

Jackie Robinson learned that lesson the hard way while serving in the military. He got on a bus and ignored the instructions to move to the back. Transportation had been integrated by the military. The driver either didn’t know or didn’t care. When Robinson refused to do so, he was court-martialed. The jury would acquit him but Robinson never forgot the realization that he was fighting two wars: “one abroad and one against racism at home.” In his autobiography which ended up being published posthumously (he died days before it was published) in his last lines, he made it clear. “When I hear the national anthem, I can not salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in white America. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919 I know I never had it made.”

This last statement is true of every African-American athlete half a century later. And while things have improved immensely for athletes in many ways, particularly in the last twenty years all of them are very aware of the precarious position they are in with white ownership. This case has been made repeatedly but one that I was unfamiliar with both when it happened and until fairly recently was the story of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. It’s unlikely I still would be were it not for the work of the sports documentaries on Showtime.

Until fairly recently Showtime was at least as good as HBO when it came to showing documentary series and they were superior, in my opinion, when it came to those on professional athletes. I saw many fascinating ones over the past few years on sports that don’t normally interest me and people I would have paid no attention to otherwise. I learned the tragic story of Sonny Liston, one of the greatest and most controversial boxers of all time. I saw The Kings the stories of the intertwined fates of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marv Hagler, Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns, interplayed with the history of 1970s and 1980s America. I saw Goliath the story of Wilt Chamberlain, the athlete before he was everything else. And last year came Stand the story of a man who overcame obstacles to become one of the greatest athletes in 1990s basketball – and then was destroyed because of racism and faux outrage twenty years before Colin Kaepernick lived through a similar experience. The difference was, for him, the consequences were far more severe personally and it is only until recently that we’ve begun to realize just how poorly we’ve treated him.

Unlike many of the documentaries involving sports that I’ve watched over the years the events in Stand took place during my lifetime or at least my childhood. I have no memory of them no doubt because I never followed professional basketball seriously then or now and I certainly wouldn’t have known anything about the  saga of a point guard for the Denver Nuggets. The Nuggets themselves were a relatively new team in basketball: they’d been part of the ABA (American Basketball Association) and had joined the NBA when the two leagues merged in 1976. Relatively speaking they’ve enjoyed some success in their history. During the 1980s they were one of the highest scoring teams in basketball, perennially contending for the playoffs but only winning two division titles in the 1980s and never making it to the conference finals. (They didn’t win their first championship until 2023.) They had gone through a period of decline during 1989 and 1991, but that allowed them to make high draft choices. One of them came in 1990.

Chris Jackson was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, one of three sons in a single parent household. He lived in poverty and constantly had poor nutrition. He missed fourth grade, was later placed in special education classes and it wasn’t until 17 that he was diagnosed with a moderate form of Tourette’s. Somehow he became a basketball prodigy at Gulfport High School. He was named Mississippi Mr. Basketball in 1987 and 1988. He was signed by LSU. He set the scoring record for a freshman, then broke it the same year, setting records for most points  by a freshman. The following year he produced similar numbers and tied his career high for three-pointers. Before his junior year he declared for the draft and was selected third. He was a teammate his second year with Shaquille O’Neal and later he took it personally when O’Neal broke the records he set as LSU, something O’Neal remarks on with ruefulness in the documentary

He was named to the all-rookie second team in 1991, then struggled the following year due to issues with a medication he’d been wrongly prescribed to treat his Tourette’s. The next year he got back into shape and was named Most Improved Player. Listening to his contemporaries and his peers, he is described in awe as this relatively small man who was suffering from Tourette’s absolutely destroying guys twice his size as a point guard. One observer says he was “Steph Curry before he was Steph Curry” and Curry himself says he could not have done what Jackson did.

During the 1993 season Jackson had converted to Islam, something that puzzled more people than it upset. No one in Denver cared who he worshiped as long as he performed on the court – something that he was doing with incredible skill. In the 1993-1994 season the Nuggets had their first winning season in five years, managed to come from a two game to nothing deficit to upset the first place Supersonics and nearly did the same thing against the Utah Jazz before the lost in the second round. The next year they finished .500 but still qualified for the playoffs. (They were swept by the Spurs.) The 1995-1996 season was a rebuilding year but the highpoint came when they played the 1995-96 Bulls who were on their way to a 72-10 season. One of those ten losses came against the Nuggets when Abdul-Rauf scored 32 points against the Bulls. Steve Kerr tried to guard him that night and freely tells the camera had no chance against him that night.

Around that time, however, Abdul-Rauf began to undergo the wrong kind of scrutiny for what was a private decision that got turned into something that led to him being ‘cheated out of his career’. Abdul-Rauf makes it clear that he’d begun to read the writings of such leftist thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and learned about ‘American exceptionalism.” My readers know I have issues with both these men as scholars but Abdul-Rauf makes it very clear in Stand that his interpretation is milder than most current day progressives and even most African-Americans. And when you consider the American flag, as I mentioned, has a different implication for African-Americans then white ones his actions are understandable.

During the 1995-96 season when everyone was saluting the flag, Abdul-Rauf was sitting on the sidelines. That’s all he was doing, not doing a Black Power salute or taking a knee. He did so for somewhere between four to six months to the indifference of his teammates, the attendees both in Denver and on the road, and most importantly the NBA. His teammates and coach said that he told them what was he doing and that they were fine with it – ‘it was no big deal’. And it very likely would have remained one were it not for the interference and bullying of a Denver talk radio host.

A broadcaster for Denver’s KBPI radio station is shown saying simply: “I don’t like him.”  The broadcaster (whose name is mentioned but who no one in the documentary mentions by name) says he went to a game and noticed Abdul-Rauf not standing for the National Anthem. He evokes the usual patriotic cliches “my father fought in World War II” and basically decided to broadcast this fact to his audience. His continued discussion of it on talk radio led to it being picked up by cable and national news (a big deal because partisan networks like Fox News and MSNBC didn’t exist yet). Eventually they went to interview him about why Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem.

In the interview we see, which goes Abdul-Rauf says went on for twenty minutes, he speaks in a completely calm tone, lucidly and intellectually. He gives a full and measured response. But in what was clearly a hack job done by the entire national media, the only clips that ended up playing were ones where he said the flag was a symbol of oppression and that the United States had a long history of tyranny. This is a position, for the record, that a black man in white America would have a hard time disagreeing with and considering Jackson/Abdul-Rauf’s upbringing, it’s an understandable one. But nuance has never been the strong suit of network news and eventually Abdul-Rauf became a polarizing figure.

We see a series of talking heads and it should come as no surprise that all of the people who express the greatest vehemence are white fans (male) and that African-American superstars, among them Charles Barkley and Mike Tyson, offer complete support. Shaquille O’Neal is shown in the present wishing that he’d gone out of his way to support his former teammate because he has two sisters who practice Islam.

Abdul-Rauf described what happened next. He showed up on March 12, 1996 for a home game and was called in by his coach who was clearly upset – at the league, not him. He told him about what had happened, that he was indefinitely suspended until he agreed to stand for the anthem and that the team wanted him to leave the stadium immediately, without dressing for the game or even talking to his teammates. Abdul-Rauf was stunned. When his agent was sent the reasons for the suspension, he knew it was bullshit because the code of conduct he’d supposedly broken was so archaic the union never even negotiated it.

Abdul-Rauf is very clear about the racism involved in this decision, though he does so subtly. He points out that the league never liked the fact that his agent, who was a close friend of his, was also African-American. He points out the hypocrisy of the fact that African-Americans, despite being a majority of the talent in the NBA, have almost no representation in management or the front office. This was under scrutiny at the time as well. Famously in 1987 Al Campanis had come on Ted Koppel to mark the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut and had said that he thought “black people didn’t have the necessities” to have positions in management. The NBA no doubt didn’t want those questions asked either.

And the racism, which the broadcaster denies, was very clear at the time. Four employees of KBI went to a Colorado mosque and were charged with misdemeanors for playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on bugle and trumpet. (One wonders if they even checked to see if this was even a mosque Abdul-Rauf frequented or whether they thought they all looked alike.) It’s worth remembering that in the 1990s Colorado was essentially as deeply conservative as its neighbors Wyoming and Utah. With the exception of LBJ’s landslide in 1964 and Clinton’s victory in 1992, it had been solidly Republican for almost the entire twentieth century, even going for Republican for the last two of FDR’s electoral landslides. (Indeed it went for Bob Dole in 1996 and didn’t become solidly Democratic until Obama’s win in 2008.) Much of Colorado’s politics and fan base was heavily white, even in Denver and as we see in footage later on, Abdul-Rauf is seen being heavily booed at home when the suspension was lifted. Eventually he worked out a compromise with the league where he would stand during the playing of the anthem but could close his eyes, look downward and silently recited prayer. For the fans, it changed nothing and from that moment on he was a marked man.

The following season after having had one of the biggest seasons of his career so far, Abdul Rauf was traded to Sacramento Kings for basically nothing. He played 75 games the next year and averaged 28.4 points a game  but the next year he didn’t start a single game. and one of the greatest players in the league was for all intents and purposes blacklisted. The NBA denies to this day that is what they did but the players and his friends know that it was happened. He ended up signing with a Turkish basketball league but left before finishing the season. He didn’t play for the 1999-2000 season and then signed with the Vancouver Grizzlies in August of 2000. He managed to get through the season intact but then September 11^th put the final nail in his coffin.

In December of 2001, he was interviewed on HBO’s Real Sports. I have no doubt the only reason he was talked too was because they wanted to talk to both a Muslim athlete and a controversial figure. In his interview, where he was unaccompanied he stated that he thought the attacks on the Twin Towers were an inside job and that Israel might have been responsible. It’s telling that there are now many people – including professional athletes like Aaron Rodgers – who spout conspiracy theories on cable news and are treated not only justly but with authority and Abdul-Rauf’s career in the NBA was torpedoed after that broadcast.

And it is worth noting he faced far worse consequences then just being professionally blackballed. He bought a mansion with his earnings for his family in Necaise, Mississippi in 1992. In 2001, it was burned to the ground. Investigators determined there was arson and the FBI investigated. The KKK and white nationalists have always had a heavy presence in Mississippi to this day and some were suspected but no one was charged. A teammate of Abdul-Rauf points out the hypocrisy: “Mahmud never said to burn down the house but the Klan did burn his house down.” Abdul-Rauf moved to Florida.

Abdul-Rauf played with many international teams for the rest of his career, including in Russia and Japan. And he is still very gifted as an athlete in his fifties. He currently plays for the BIG3 basketball league, a league founded by Ice Cube in 2017 and he still plays today and pretty well: at age 49, he was among the leaders in field goal percentage.

Abdul-Rauf has every right to be enraged by what happened to him: the parallels between him and Colin Kaepernick are unmistakable. But I consider what happened to him more outrageous because his actions were not only private but unnoticed by the league for much of the initial period it was happening. Abdul-Rauf was never outspoken the way many of todays professional athletes are and he never spoke with the militancy of other Black Muslims, not just Louis Farrakhan or Muhammed Ali but other polarizing racial figures of the time such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Abdul-Rauf had opinions but they were his own and he makes it clear, even now, that they are solely his own and he never tried to preach to anyone at the time.

The racism is, if anything, more blatant then it was in the days of Fox News and talk radio not only because it’s very clear this was the white administration coming down on a Black Islam athlete who they considered ‘uppity’ though compared to his contemporaries like Barkley and Dennis Rodman, he wasn’t even close to their level of outrageousness. It’s equally clear that economics were involved: Denver was never as a big market team as New York or Chicago and it’s likely the league felt freer to stomp on Abdul-Rauf with impunity because he wasn’t Jordan or Ewing even though he was clearly as good as them at his profession. Had his career been even ten years later,  when social media was in full swing, it’s likely he could have survived this; had it happened today, he’d probably be a bigger celebrity for what he said off the court then on. But the perfect storm of events torpedoed his career and did far more damage to his life than any athlete today.

I’m impressed by Abdul-Rauf the way that I am by the measure of other athletes such as Jackie Robinson or Ali and infinitely more than some of the so-called ‘activists’ today. Abdul-Rauf didn’t know he was doing anything controversial at the time but when the going got tough he stood firm to his principles. And it’s clear even today that he still has them. One of the last images of Abdul-Rauf is him in attendance of an NBA game while the National Anthem is being played. While everyone else is standing and singing, he's looking downward with his eyes closed and chanting silently. He does so the same way he did when the whole controversy started – with no one in the stadium seeming angry or even noticing. He has made peace with what has happened to him and he has never compromised. He continues to make his stand.

Lioness Returns For An Action-Packed - And Thought-Provoking - Second Season

 

 

You might well have seen the teaser for Season 2 of Lioness Taylor Sheridan’s exceptional CIA drama that airs on Paramount Plus and Showtime and where the first two episodes dropping of how streaming and cable nearly simultaneously. The major highlight is Zoe Saldana’s Jo looking at a potential new recruit and asking over and over: “Do you love your country?” When the recruit responds: “I’m serving my country right now!” Jo says simply “Your country needs more.”

At this point I suspect Jo has made a similar pitch to every recruit she’s had for the Lioness program, one that we learned is trained for the sole purpose of using female soldiers in long term espionage programs with the sole purpose of killing Islamic terrorists. We saw what that entailed when things went badly in the teaser of Season 1 and we saw a ‘good’ outcome at the end of the season. Looking at that I’m beginning to wonder if Jo is making the pitch as much to her new recruit but to herself.

Saldana was exceptional in Season 1 playing the head of a CIA-Military covert ops training program, not just for her exceptional power but because we see a woman who has learned to turn her humanity off and become a soldier every time she goes to work. Her husband  Neal (well played by the subtle Dave Annable) has been more understanding of it then he should, her children, particularly her oldest less so. And she clearly has convinced herself that her purpose for all the sacrifices she has made for serving her country are being done purely for her family. The problem is, and it’s increasingly clear in Season 2, is that Jo is having increasing trouble accepting that while she loves her country, it is at best going to be a one-sided love and that at the end of the day, the people who represent in elected office are going to give nothing in return.

This is the clear in the opening episode when Jo is called into the Situation Room along with two of her superiors, Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) and their superior Bryon Westfield (Michael Kelly, now promoted to series regular) A Congresswoman from Texas has been abducted  by a Mexican cartel. The agency knows they can find her and get her out clean. They are told in so uncertain terms by the Secretary of State (played by an unusually cold and unemotional Morgan Freeman) that they want it to be messy. They believe that China is behind this and that geo-political forces are in play and after its over, they want to send a message. The President (who is as of yet unseen) in an election year and the last thing he wants is to be seen as soft on terror. Speaking as though they don’t even see Joe; an undersecretary says casually: “Put a lioness on the ground.” Joe barely holds it together telling them , correctly, that a lioness is training for assassination. The Secretary of State, who is also African-American, doesn’t even look at her when he says: “Well, when you kill him could you possibly grab his f---ing phone?” Jo asks for three months and is told she can have three weeks.  Kaitlyn and Westfield are political enough to make it clear that it can be done and all but haul Joe out of the room. Joe can barely raise objections before she’s told that she has to lead a mission to rescue the Congresswoman and that she doesn’t even have the benefit of her team to do it. It’s telling that Joe, who spent much of Season 1 projecting authority in the face of any objections from her team, basically just nods and gets her kit.

She’s understandably pissed that she finds she has to work with Kyle, the cowboy agent who basically spent all of Season 1 pissing on the authority that Joe clearly represented. Thad Luckinbill (also promoted to regular) is just as loathsome as ever but I’m beginning to think that he may be more attuned to reality than Joe is willing to be. I believe there’s a chance that long ago he realized the kind of master he’s serving and that he knows that the longer he does his job, the more likely it is he’ll end up in an unmarked grave with no record of him in the files and a star on the front of the CIA as the only representation of everything he’s done in ‘service of his country’. Much of Season 1 is an extended action sequence with the Mexican cartel in hot pursuit, firing on them non-stop and he’s trying as calmly as possible to find a way to escape. That escape route turns out to be driving the car into a riverbank where the drop isn’t clear to their eyes in the sky and neither is the depth of the river. They’re basically being forced to hope they can avoid being blown apart by the cartel in the hope they don’t die in an explosion or drown as an escape route. When Joe shouts out to him during this: “If we survive like this, remind me to kick your ass,” Kyle says in something very close to seriousness: “I hope we live long enough for you to get the chance.”

And if that’s the typical day at the office, it’s understandable why Kyle can barely work up the energy to go through the motions coming to a federal crime scene or treat anyone around him, including Joe, with respect. Why bother with all the trappings of civilization when you know very well you might drown in a car as happens to one of the soldiers at the end of the episode? Kyle knows this and has accepted that when compared to the mission his life is meaningless. So when Joe tries to take a swing at him after they survive, there is a certain hypocrisy considering we know in the second episode she’s going to basically ask another soldier to do the exact same thing and just as likely not come back alive.

Joe shouts that: “I have a family”, and Kyle’s response is very telling: “I think should call them.” By this point Joe has managed to survive the mission, has debriefed the Congresswoman (who now knows that her family was killed when she was abducted) has promised her revenge, consoled one of the soldiers who went into battle with her about the loss of comrade (Sheridan himself) and then gotten into an argument and fight with Kyle. Only then does she remember she hasn’t called her family and she turns her humanity back on, assuring them that everything is fine. The problem is Neal has been watching the news and even though his wife’s face was blurred out he saw the aftermath – and so did Joe’s daughter. Joe knows that she’s not going to be home that long and will no doubt soon be training another woman to sacrifice her humanity and possibly her life on a mission that is on an accelerated timetable and is beyond the parameters of what the team can do. Yet there’s no question in her mind what master she’s going to serve.

Though she has yet to appear on the show in the first two episodes Layla De Olivera, who played Cruz in the first season, is still listed as a series regular. How she’ll end up back in the storyline is hard to say: at the end of the mission she resigned from the Lioness program in no uncertain terms and made it very clear that she considered not only Jo but everything she’d made her do as a monster. As I’ve written previous articles about Lioness there are parallels to Homeland in the characters of both Joe and Kaitlyn to the relationship between Carrie and Saul throughout the latter series. Having watched the brilliant work of De Olivera, it’s clear her parallel can be found in Peter Quinn, the agent who had the clearest moral quandaries about the horrible things he had to do in the name of the agency. Repeatedly during his first two seasons as a regular Quinn made it very clear that he wanted out of the agency and that he had no use for the kinds of actions Carrie and his superiors were willing to do. “Is there no line you won’t cross?” he actually shouted at her at one point. Cruz is clearly the conscience of this series as we saw in her relationship with Aaliyah and how Joe had to play on her love of country to get her to do something horrible. It says a lot for the show that while Cruz’s innocence was forever lost in the first season of Lioness her soul remained intact and her final exchange with Joe when the mission was ‘successfully completed’ made it very clear that she had no use for the kind of narrow view of the world that Joe did. She walked away with the integrity that none of the other characters on the show have and I can’t wait to see how the two meet up again. Cruz will not fall for the same speech that Jo gives the new recruit.

Lioness is, as I mentioned in an article I wrote last week, a surprisingly subtle and nuanced show about the War On Terror then we’ve gotten in twenty-two years.  The action sequences may remind you of Jack Bauer, but this is not 24 and while the comparison to Homeland is a viable one, it looks at politics in a more radical way than the Showtime series. With Joe as it lead character, it shows a team leader who in a world that is all gray, increasingly preaches a narrative of black and white not because she believes but because it’s the only thing holding her nebulous grip on work together. It shows an incredible group of actors, not only as the soldiers and agents but as the superiors, people like Kaitlyn and Westfield who have more of the picture then their agents do but never enough to know if they’re doing the right thing. It shows politicians who have less regard for the people who do the horrible things in their name and how the solders pick up on this an act accordingly. And it shows in its character of Errol, Kaitlyn’s husband, a man who may very well know the entire picture better than anyone in Lioness and is at the end of the day, as controlled by events as anyone else. (I look forward to see of Martin Donovan.)

The question asked in the teaser by Joe: “Do you love your country?” is no doubt the theme of Season of Lioness. Just as important is another question that Neil asks his wife: “Are you okay?” Joe was asked that repeatedly by both her husband and Kaitlyn over and over Season 1 and she kept saying neutrally “I’m fine,” when we know she’s anything but. We saw the consequences of it on not only Joe but her family and yet she refused to take a desk job she was offered by Kaitlyn even though it might be the best thing for her family and herself. We know Joe’s answer to the first question is always going to trump honestly answering the second but she never bothered to ask the second to Cruz last season and there’s no sign she asks the question of anyone else on her team. At some point Joe is going to take a look at the mirror. And when she does, she may finally have to give a different answer to the question she keeps asking.

My score: 4.5 stars.

Dexter Retrospective: The Hunt for the Ice Truck Killer

 

 

As I mentioned in my previous article Dexter the show is based on Jeff Lindsay’s novels but  the only one the series followed directly was the first Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Even then it differentiated from the source material in a huge way. While much of the hunt for the Ice Truck Killer and the revelation of who he eventually is very much covers the same groundwork as Lindsay’s book the end result is very different: not only does the killer survive and in fact end up being part of all the novels that follow but Maria LaGuerta learns the truth about Dexter’s identity and ends up becoming his victim in order to protect his secret.

Anyone who knows the original series is well aware that Philips and his writers decided to deviate from that ending severely; much as fans of the show may have rooted for LaGuerta to die from the start, she doesn’t end up doing so until the end of Season 7. And I’m inclined to think that for the series this was probably the right call. It was tough enough to root for a serial killer as your protagonist even on a cable drama in 2006.

 Television would eventually have series where characters would do far worse things – Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones were just a few years down the road and both series would be ranked among the greatest of all time. But the narrative of Dexter Morgan was that he had a code and that he would not break it. If he were to do so and murder a colleague at the end of the first season, I doubt the show would have had as long a lifespan as it did. The writers would start to test the boundaries of how much we could root for Dexter as early as Season 2 and even then it continued to hedge its bets. The show always worked better when Dexter was trying to realize his human aspects of himself; to turn him into a man who would violate his code to protect himself and his loved ones would have been too much for the first season of any show, even by the standards of the rapidly changing world of television in the 2000s.

But that doesn’t make what happened in the first season one of the more sublime acts of TV during that period. I remember watching the show vividly during its first year as Dexter tried to deal with the reality that the Ice Truck Killer was clearly committing his murders to impress and learn about Dexter more than anything else. And in order for its revelation about how not only the Ice Truck Killer was but how he was hiding in plain sight, the show played a very delicate game with us during the first eight episodes which I’m going to focus on here.

One of the subtler reasons that the first four seasons of Dexter are considered the best of the entire series may be that in all four the monster of the series has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.(I’ll try to avoid spoilers in case I cover future seasons.) In Season 2  The ‘Bay Harbor Butcher’ has been under the nose of Miami Metro the whole time, in Season 4 Trinity has been a pillar of the community for 30 years and might very well not have been caught if not for outside events and while the eventual killer of Season 3 is one of the more disappointing ones of the entire series, it’s far less significant then the fact that during the same period Dexter has essentially become friends with the real monster of the show – and is so fooled by him that he doesn’t realize it until the season is almost over.  But in Season 1, perhaps because it is closer to the book the show plays its subtlest trick and reveals who the Ice Truck Killer is well before Dexter himself figures it out. In a sense the killer is the equal of Dexter Morgan because he knows him better than Dexter knows himself – and is essentially committing the murders to lead Dexter to him.

We meet the killer right around the time Dexter is beginning to think he might exposed, though we’re not aware of it for a while. Tony Tucci is the process of being put back together by a prosthetic specialist who we know as Rudy Cooper (Christian Camargo). It is essential the viewer not become suspicious of Rudy as late as possible so the writers go out of their way to make Rudy seem like a basically good guy.

It becomes clear, eventually, that Rudy’s plan is to date Deb for the sole purpose of getting close to her brother. In hindsight it can be painful to watch Jennifer Carpenter throughout her relationship with Rudy: it’s clear very quickly that Deb is falling head over heels with Rudy and there’s a certain joyful innocence to her throughout the relationship that is forever taken from her in this relationship. She’ll experience happiness again in later seasons and her heart will slowly rebuild (only to be repeatedly shattered). But the scarring she takes from her relationship with Rudy only scabs over and never really heals. She’ll never trust as easily again for the rest of this series and the profanities that proliferate her speech will take on an edge with everyone we don’t see in Season 1.

And what makes it heartbreaking is that every emotion she feels towards Rudy and what follows is genuine, including her jealousy when Rudy begins to try and get closer to Dexter. It’s understandable considering what is implied in the flashbacks: Dexter took up all of Harry’s time as a child so Deb spent much of her life under the shadow of her adopted brother. Her relationship with Rudy, along with her new position in Miami Metro, is the first real thing she’s had to herself and in both cases Dexter seems to be hanging over it.  As Dexter has been by nature holding himself at a distance from everybody his whole life, he has a lot of trouble seeing this as things keep going.

The Ice Truck Killer is clearly testing Dexter: in one episode he leaves a corpse of someone Dexter killed the night before after Dexter disposed of the body. It’s interesting watching Hall during this episode as for the first time he can see the walls closing in and realizes he’s going to have to disappear.  He actually prepares to do so when he realizes he’s being toyed with and ends up covering up his crime. But it does make him aware that he has an expiration date.

This becomes clear in the following episode when the person who is suspected of being the Ice Truck Killer Neil Perry is brought in for questioning along with a younger killer Dexter stalked before sparing his life when he learned the truth. The young man had killed the man who raped him and he thought Dexter was there to the same. In this episode Dexter recognizes that his inaction led to another teenager’s death and is about to bring justice when the young man is caught. After Perry confesses (despite Dexter’s doubts) he goes to see the juvenile and learns the truth – the sexual assault he suffered gave him a permanent case of PTSD and he committed both murders in an effort to feel something, neither of which did anything. Dexter realizes that and decides to make an effort to reach out later on – only to find he killed himself.

The story of Neil Perry also shows that there is more to LaGuerta then meets the eye. Acting on a hunch she soon realizes that Perry is such a wannabe who hacked the Miami firewall to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. However when she goes to Matthews to warn him of this, he chooses to wave her off. Matthews bears a personal grudge to LaGuerta (she slept with him to get her initial promotion) and has an arrogance that comes with being in power. LaGuerta will try going to him before she goes over to the public – and she ends up paying the price.

By this point Dexter is convinced that the Ice Truck Killer is still out there and in act of desperation makes a post on Craig’s List. And in what is the first great twist the series will pay off at the end of the eighth episode we see Rudy Cooper answer the post with the words: “Don’t worry. Some day we’ll share a cold one” before walking into the freezer in his basement. I remember watching this back in 2006 and being absolutely stunned in a way I hadn’t been by any television show since the ‘Walkabout’ episode of Lost revealed that John Locke had been in a wheelchair before he came to the island.

The series then starts to peel back Rudy’s motives for everything. In the next episode Dexter receives a notice that his birth father has died. At first he thinks it’s a joke, especially because he’s never heard of the man. Eventually he and Rita (the two have just consummated their relationship) end up taking a trip out there to look at the man’s estate, if only to clean it up. Deb has learned about this as well, and when she confides in Rudy that night, he convinces her to drive out to help him. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet,” he tells the unusually clueless Dexter when they shake hands.

Eventually Dexter realizes that the man has been living under an assumed name and was an ex-con. He begins to suspect that the man, who supposedly died of a heart attack, may very well have been given a lethal overdose of insulin. While he’s there he runs bloodwork which confirms the man is his biological father – and when Deb learns about it she is hurt beyond words. But that betrayal becomes the least shocking thing Dexter learns that day. He has a flashback of a day as a child he had an accident and needed a blood transfusion. Dexter has a rare blood type and Harry went out of his way to find the donor. Afterwards Dexter is drawing a thank you card for the man and when Harry tries to fob him off Dexter says, ‘that’s normal right?” Harry says he’ll make sure the man gets the card – and we see in his belongings that the ex-con is still holding it. By this point we suspect that Rudy was the man who killed Dexter’s biological father and at the end of the episode we see him killing the neighbor who might be able to identify him.

In the next episode the Ice Truck Killer reveals why he’s been doing everything. Miami Metro is called to a room and they find it completely soaked in blood. Dexter goes into it, convinced that he’s going to get another friendly message – and he is completely unprepared for what happens. He is flooded with memories of himself as a young boy, a woman saying, “Close your eyes”, the sound of a chainsaw and himself crying, bathed in blood. He collapsed into it and manages to stagger out. He tries to convince everybody it’s just low blood sugar but he stays out of the room and lets Masuka and the lab boys do the work. For the first time Dexter is truly scared.

Eventually it becomes clear that all of this blood came from the victims of the Ice Truck killer and that he essentially painted the room with it. The room is 103 and there are two other references to it in the room. There’s clearly a message in it but no one knows what it is.

While this is going on Angel, still suffering from receiving divorce papers, has gone to a nightclub to drown his sorrows. While he’s there he meets a hooker with an amputee – who has her nails down in the way we saw fingertips set to Miami Metro. The hooker tells him she met a john who had a fetish like this several months ago. Acting on a hunch he asks Masuka about it and he leads him to Rudy Cooper. While his questions are vague enough to not stir the average man, Rudy can feel the noose the tightening. The episode ends with Angel being stabbed and nearly mortally wounded. That same night Dexter (thanks to the help of Rudy) goes back to the motel room and it is there he learns the truth about himself.

It’s fascinating to watch Hall in the last few episodes of Season 1. Dexter has apparently managed to carry himself with a mask that makes him seem detached from the rest of society but no one questions. When he learns the truth about his existence – that he saw his mother butchered by a chainsaw, that he spent days bathed in blood before he was rescue – it shakes him in a way he’s never been before. For the first time we hear the term ‘Dark Passenger’ – Dexter’s term for the force in him that has driven him towards violence and blood his whole life. The show will make references to it for much of the series (until in the post-Philips era, it ends up dismissing the idea) and for Dexter, it exclaims why he does what he does.

At this point he goes to Camilla, who we haven’t seen since the Pilot. This episode confirms what we’ve already suspected – Camilla knew Harry Morgan and has known both Dexter and Deb from childhood. (Now I do hope we end up seeing some version of her in Original Sin. And its clear she knows far more about Dexter’s circumstances than she’s telling. She deflects Dexter about where the files on him are and tries to get him to let it go. But  by this time the Ice Truck Killer has not only struck again (the prostitute Angel found in the previous episode) and Dexter knows this isn’t his problem any more.

So he goes to the microfiche and goes through almost every crime scene that happened in 1973. And eventually he finds what he’s looking for: a massacre that took place in a warehouse that left four dead. It took place on October 3 – 10/3. When Dexter goes to see Camilla he actually seems betrayed for the first time in the series. And its justifiable – not only did Harry lie to him his entire life about what happened to him and how he found him, but he went out of his way to make sure that there was no police report filed about a missing child being there. Camilla once again tries to paper over the cracks  and paint Harry in the best light but she knows more than she’s telling – though we won’t find out about the details until Season 2.

With all of these distractions going on Dexter is also trying to figure out who attacked Angel. It’s not until he realizes the connection between the bloody lip Angel gave him and the one Rudy has that he realizes there’s something darker about him. By this point Rudy has made it clear he’s going to propose to Deb and Dexter goes out of his way to make sure Deb’s safe – but even then he doesn’t know the darker truth.

Then Masuka, proving for the first time his incredible ability beneath the filthy mouth, tells Dexter he has figured out the victim was an amputee and the connection she has not just to Angel but to Rudy. But by this point it’s too late to do anything – Deb has succumbed to the lure to see Rudy on his yacht to accept his proposal. And when the two share a toast of champagne Rudy drops all the pretenses he’s had not only with her but for the entire series so far.

When the episode ends we see Dexter in a full-blown state of panic, knowing his sister is in the hands of Miami Metro’s most notorious serial killer. He doesn’t yet know why Rudy Cooper has done all of this to bring his past to light but it’s clear he has a dream for them – and it is does not involve Deb. It’s the first of a series of exceptional cliffhangers that will end the penultimate episode of almost every season from here until the ending, most of which are more significant not so much for the life in jeopardy but for what it will mean for Dexter’s continued freedom.

In the next article I will deal with the revelations of the Ice Truck Killer’s true identity and what its ramifications will be for the rest of the series going forward.

 

 

 

Lessons Learned From Years Among the Left Or Why Being A Moderate Is Somehow Worse Than Being MAGA

 

I’ve been called a lot of names on this site by people who claim to be on the side of righteousness but the strangest insult by far I ever received was when I was called a moderate.

In days of old moderate and centrist was the ideal position and I think it is the only rational one for any elected official to take. It’s one of the ones that is most reliable with a democracy and I was baffled why that was why, in the minds of this person, as bad if not worse then being a MAGA extremist. Then in the last few days I read an article by a leftist publication in which they said, in all sincerity, that when any politician moves to the center they are, in fact, actually moving to the right.

This is the oddest reasoning I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard some pretty odd ones over the years. Not only does it go against how geometry and geography work, but by that rationale if Bernie Sanders or AOC ever won the Presidency and started to compromise to get their agenda passed, they would be moving closer to Donald Trump by doing so. 

But having spent  a lot of time on this blog, other publications both conservative and progressive and with my own knowledge of history over the years I came to a realization that this mindset perfectly encapsulates why I loathe everything the left has come to stand for. To be clear I also hate everything the far right stands for but I hate them for a completely different reason, one that the left themselves is aware of but can’t seem to make the obvious connection when it comes to their relative unpopularity in the American and world political system. I shouldn’t entirely be surprised by this: for all the intelligence that leftist writers and intellectuals have, they seem incapable of making the leaps as to why their almost always morally and legally right principles have never led them to the same place in the party system that the far right has always been able to find with ones that are morally, legally and ethically bankrupt.

Election day is a week away and I’ve already read more than my share about it over the last year.  And I need to assure a certain group of people something. Not the ones that really need to hear it; if I’ve learned anything the last few years it’s that they are impervious to hearing anything that does not align completely with how they view the world. No, this article is for the rest of us: the ones who are afraid of what might happen on election day but are willing to do something about it and far more than the loudest voices on this site will ever be willing to do and won’t commit to even now.

But to get to that point, I have to explain some fundamental flaws about the leftist thinking that is prevalent on this site and others. I’d be worried about offending them but by this point I know that offense is there go to reaction for anything that resembles dissent from their bubbles.  As I said, this article isn’t for them.

 

1.       The left has not learned a single new thing to say in two hundred years.

When The 1619 Project came out five years ago, it was polarizing along party lines. In truth the only original thing about it was that it was written by an African-American woman. Nothing in her argument had not been made a dozen times before over the last two hundred years and there was certainly nothing new.

William Lloyd Garrison had been writing about the evils of slavery and how it was responsible for the moral rot of the Republic in his very first issue of The Liberator in 1830. From the start he believed that slavery was so deep in the republic that the Constitution itself was immoral and no elected official who swore an oath to it was trusted to solve the problem. To him, in order to rid America of slavery if that meant dissolving the union or ripping up the Constitution that was fine with him. And he didn’t think politics could solve what he consider a moral issue. He has no real idea of how it could be solved beyond a nebulous idea of non-violent resistance and right up to the Civil War he refused to take the threats of secession seriously, even joking about it as late as November of 1860.

Since then every generation has some version that comes around to these conclusions, the only difference being that they are African American. We’ve had Marcus Garvey, we had James Baldwin, we’ve had it expressed more militantly by the Huey Newtons and Bobby Seales’s. In my lifetime Howard Zinn’s said the same thing and we also had Ta-Nahisi Coates say it. And yet none of them have any solutions as to how this society of white supremacy can be fixed nor if we can or even should move pass it.  Their anger is justifiable and completely understandable, no question. But you’d think after two hundred years they’d at least be willing to acknowledge that there have at least been some improvements for African-Americans since, well, 1619.  But there is little acknowledgement of that fact here nor any suggestion as to how we can bridge the divide. Of course bridging the divide is not something that the left has ever been interested in – but I’ll get to that.

 

2.      Nearly every major progressive leap forward in American society has been done despite the work of activists, rather then because of it.

When Lincoln finally managed to get the 13^th Amendment through Congress  - something I’m well aware that people like Ava Duvernay are still on the fence on that it was a good thing – he did so almost entirely without the help of Radical Republicans when it came to writing the bill. Men like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were left on the outside because Lincoln knew their views were so radical that if he tried to get their version through Congress it would not pass or be ratified.

When Bob LaFollette, one of the most progressive Senators in history came to Congress Theodore Roosevelt, arguably are more progressive President, granted him an audience about a commerce bill. LaFollette responded by lecturing him that his bill was too weak and that he should throw his weight behind his stronger bill. When TR pointed out that bill would never get through Congress LaFollette made it very clear that passage of his bill was not his primary concern. Thus began a more than a quarter of a century career where some of the most progressive legislation to that point in America’s history was passed and LaFollette constantly biovating in Congress that these bills, by necessity built by compromise, were not good enough.

When FDR managed to get the first part of the New Deal through Congress he was accused by his enemies of enacting the 1932 Socialist Party platform. The perennial standard-bearer for the Socialists Norman Thomas was infuriated by the idea. “FDR did not carry the socialist platform through Congress unless he did so on a stretcher.”

When Hilary Clinton was campaigning for the Presidency in 2008 she was greeted with controversy when she said: “John Lewis may have marched for the Voting Rights Act but it took a President to sign it.” Now I’m far from Hilary’s biggest fan (readers of this column know this) but she was right. All the marching in the world would have meant nothing if LBJ wasn’t able to muster the votes to get it passed. Lewis himself made this clear every time he advocated for the renewal of it.

There’s always been the disconnect between the loudest activists between what change should come and what can be gotten. Elected officials by definition have to be pragmatists and they can’t afford the luxury of purity that activists advocate for.  It’s frustrating to see that these intellectuals still can’t grasp that basic function of how government works. Yet when Pramila Jaypal, a Justice Democrat, managed a compromise to get part of Biden’s infrastructure bill through Congress she was vilified on this blog by prominent leftists for compromising. There seems to be a belief among progressives of the so called ‘Green Lantern’ theory of Presidents, that they can just pass legislation with the sheer power of their mind regardless of checks and balances. You’d think that they’d comprehend that a President is not a superhero or that at the very least, this is a mirror version of the Grand Unitary Theory of the executive that they spent decades reviling Dick Cheney and other conservatives for. But such is not the case.

Even now there’s still an attitude of younger leftists against what democracy is. While The Nation endorsed Kamala Harris for President,  a recent article  by the ‘interns’ (no doubt endorsed by the editorial staff) contradicted it by saying that not only could they not support this endorsement, they didn’t believe in voting at all. Their fundamental issue with Harris involved the situation in the Middle East and they remained steadfast that no President nor any electoral action would make a difference. They advocated instead further activism, including marching to convince universities to divest from Israel (something that only a single minor liberal arts  college in Washington has agreed to do since the marches on campuses has begun) and doing little more than talking about the Middle East whenever you can. How this will lead to the kind of change in the Middle East that can only be done through international diplomacy and convincing all parties to go along with it – something that can only be done through government pressure – is not something that has occurred to these staffers.

 This shows that the left has not changed its approach on dealing with complex issues since the times of the abolitionists. The great societal problems are purely moral ones and should be solved entirely on those matters, regardless of economic, political or any other considerations by all parties. This is a simplistic way of thinking for people who are, more often then not, educated and well-read and who you would think would know the world doesn’t work based solely on morality. Yet after two hundred years, they seem convinced morality is the only principle that should guide the leaders of society. That it never is and never will be does nothing to convince them of their certainty that’s how it should be.

 

3.      The left has never wanted to build a coalition and seems happy when they push away people they could win over.

 

The rhetoric of Garrison and other abolitionists was so harsh that it very likely pushed away more people then it won over. Prior to 1830 there were several anti-slavery societies in the South. By 1837 there were none.

The 1960s was ‘the highpoint’ of the left’s influence. And to be clear, it amounted to nothing more than marching in the street, chanting and not caring who they offended. Polling has shown that a combination of the violence in the street in the leadup to the 1968 election as well as the rigid belief that Hubert Humphrey, one of the most progressive Senators in history, was as bad as Nixon, was enough to give a narrow margin of the election to Nixon. Their marching in the street indirectly led to the Vietnam War lasting another six years as well as the beginning of the conservative movement that we still feel the effects of today.

And as far as I know none of the leftists from that period ever seemed to learn a lesson from it: as far as they were concerned the people didn’t hear what they were saying. The idea that they heard and saw what they were saying – and were horrified by it – has either never occurred to them and more importantly, proven to them that the system was broken.

Even that would be forgivable if they ever had some kind of concrete plan as to what they wanted. But their own chants demonstrated that they didn’t have any idea. “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!”   Left out of either is how and what kind of change you want, which the left could either never agree on it or even come up with a way to implement it. And the implied threat in the latter question is “Or else.” I don’t deny their rage or even the justification. But it was dissent as means with no real end.

And in half a century the activists have taken full flower and there is still no concrete plan behind it. All of the marches – against globalism, against racist police, Occupy Wall Street, all of the recent college outcry – is shouting in the wind and not caring if it drives people against your cause. Even that would be one thing if you had a concrete plan how to realize it. But no one on the left does. They’re supposed to be the smart ones but they still can’t seem to get that politics is the only way to get these changes made. But they think its beneath them even now.

 

4.      The left spends so much of its energy coming up with academic terms for the state of the world and none on how to realize it.

The left has constantly felt itself above politics. So they spend an enormous amount of time and energy writing about how the political system has failed and how democracy doesn’t work. They will tell you that all of the freedoms we enjoy in America aren’t actual freedoms without telling you what real freedom is. They’ll tell you all the ways our democracy is broken but never even suggest that there’s a way to fix it or even if there’s a better system in America or anywhere on Earth. They argue that not only do we not have real values in America but that the values we claim to have aren’t actually ones because they’re born in a corrupt system (Garrison again). And they have become increasingly inflexible when it comes to even arguing that there are flaws in their position, even writing that to even consider pushing against the left is unacceptable.

And when you consider all of this the only conclusion I have been able to reach is practically inevitable: the left does not  care about any of the things it advocates for beyond the academic sense of the word.

That is, to be clear,  why I hate the right. When their position in America became untenable they started to work to find a way to rig the system. That meant coming up with all of the think tanks and institutions the left loves to rag on: The Heritage Foundation, the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the Federalist Society, the Tea Party, all of those things that have led to them to take over the Republican Party.

But if I hate the right for what they have done, I hate the left for what they haven’t done. They have been laying this pattern out for us mere mortals for the last decade as to the corruption of our system. So the obvious question I have for progressives is: why didn’t you do the same thing? You clearly have no more regard for democracy then the right was and it did cut both ways. And as you love to tell us, you’re smarter than us.

So where’s your Cato Institute, where’s your Fox News, your society for establishing leftist judges and progressive candidates? You had the same amount of time to do as the right did, why didn’t you do it? And why are you only telling us now after it’s apparently too late to do anything to stem or even reverse the tide?

The answer is simple. For the last half-century, you were doing…nothing. Oh you wrote a lot of books, and you got a lot of academic jobs and you went to work for The Nation and Harper’s. But when it comes to rigging the political system the way the right did, you get a mark of absent. Indeed giving the voter turnout rates between 1972 and 2004 most of you weren’t even bothering to vote.  You love to remind us about Jesse Helms saying the fewer people vote, the more Republicans win. So why didn’t you get on your horse and vote for Democrats?

And it’s clear to me reading this site as to why: you really don’t care. Not just about all of the progressive issues you advocate for, but really whether the larger issues of our nation – including our democracy – survive. If you did, you would swallow your tongue and vote for Democrat official up and down the  ticket every day for the rest of your lives. But even now, you remain very adamant that both parties are essentially the same.

Honestly it’s that attitude that makes me wonder if all of your objections to the Trump administration were academic too. Oh I remember your outrage; how unhappy you all were and how upset many of you still are…or claim to be. But I figured having someone who was as close to the fascist dictator you’ve spent decades warning was coming would relieve you of the blindness that both parties are the same. I thought everything that happened in 2020 and after the election would relieve you of that.

But you apparently had a shorter memory than the GOP did about Trump given how quickly you went back to not only complaining about everything Biden was doing and your rant that there was no difference between the two parties. I don’t know how many articles I read in the lead up to the 2022 midterms about the apparent dissolution of the Union into not just two countries but eight when the red wave materialized.  Honestly some of you seemed to be looking forward to the end of our country. Hell, maybe some of you still are.

And that’s why I question your commitment to anything. I think for many of you, you’re just dilletantes who just write endless articles about how miserable the country is so you can bathe in the glow of your adoring sycophants. You don’t want to solve the problems of this country because that would involve getting involved in the political process. Which involve compromising (blech) pragmatism (horrors) and worse of all, voting (how dare you!)

And I know you have no commitment to this because you have no interest in hearing any dissent certainly not from me. Whenever I ask the question of how or what you should do, I am ignored or called a racist or a monster. This comes when I advocate for such apparent radical concepts as free speech and a free press, a working two party system and participation in the electoral process. You’ve made it very clear that none of these things are on your agenda and that the only opinions you want to hear are those in your own echo chamber.  Yes the conservatives squashed dissent but they have a political party to get their agenda across. You don’t have that – and it must really bug you to be the smartest people in the room and have only yourselves acknowledge your brilliance rather than those peons in the establishment.

This will no doubt come across as more of a polemic and be judged in certain circles as a rant. Perhaps it is. But it is borne out of the frustration of years of listening to people on this site angry at the world as it is but unwilling to do more than sit at their computers or use their phones to express their outrage – or worse, have convinced themselves that is change.

And that frustration is built on the biggest problem I have with the left: the almost academic detachment you seem to have from everything that’s happening. If we’ve learned anything from the last eight years (something I’m not convinced many of the writers on this site or other publications have) it’s that indifference is not something our society can afford. Not now and clearly not ever.  Engagement in the electoral process may seem insignificant compared to the massive problems we have but it is the only real power we have.  And minor as it may seem, it has more potential power than a thousand articles saying the system needs changing.  Activism and lecturing may be therapeutic for millions but alone they do nothing. Only through the slow, pragmatic process of democracy can America stand. Our problems won’t be solved by non-participation or leaving the country and by doing either, you do a disservice to all the people who will be afflicted when the tyranny you foresee coming occurs.

So the way I see it those of you on the left, you have two choices. You can swallow whatever doubts you have about Kamala Harris or the Democrats as a party, go to your local polling place and vote. Or you can do what you’ve done so often: do nothing and complain regardless of what happens on election day. I know what I’m going to that day and while I won’t pretend I’m a hundred percent sure of what will happen, I know that regardless my conscience will be clear because I did everything I could. I won’t tell you what to do even though I’m pretty sure you know by now. But I’ll be able to look myself the mirror the next day and for the next four years, come what may. I honestly don’t know how you could do the latter and do the same going forward but if I’ve learned one thing from spending so much time with you on this site, you prefer being told  you’ve done the right thing to ever doing anything to make it a reality.