This may explain why so many people are willing to vote for Trump

"He had struggled hard to climb out of the world of a poor plumber’s fifth son, to make it to a salary of $70,000 a year with a company that built oil rigs, to a third and at-last-right wife, and to a home he loved that was now wrecked. At the entrance gate to the middle class, he felt he’d been slapped in the face.  For progressive movements from the 1960s on — in support of blacks, women, sexual minorities, immigrants, refugees — the federal government was, he believed, a giant ticket-dispensing machine in an era in which the economy was visiting on middle-class and blue-collar white men the sorts of punishment once more commonly reserved for blacks. Democrats were, he was convinced, continuing to make the government into an instrument of his own marginalization — and media liberals were now ridiculing people like him as ignorant, backward rednecks.  Culturally, demographically, economically, and now environmentally, he felt ever more like a stranger in his own land.

It mattered little to him that Donald Trump would not reduce the big government he so fervently wanted cut, or that The Donald was soft on the pro-life, pro-marriage positions he valued, or that he hadn’t uttered a peep about the national debt. None of it mattered because Trump, he felt, would switch off that marginalization machine and restore the honor of his kind of people, of himself.  Mike knew that liberals favored care for the environment far more than Republicans, Tea Partiers, or Donald Trump.  Yet, despite his lost home in a despoiled land, like others of his older white neighbors back at the Bayou and here in the Basin, Mike was foursquare for Trump; that’s how deeply his pride was injured and a measure of just how much that injury galled him." -- Arlie Hochschild 2016 Strangers in Their Own Land:  Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Stand or sit? It's Up to You. But as Black Folk, What Does The Star-Spangled Banner Mean To You?

Just avoided an argument Saturday night about Colin Kaepernick's protest.  I'm fascinated at how quick "mainstream" Americans are to attack athletes of color over social justice protests.  I didn't see Kap's protest, but I read about it.  I stand/sit with him.

The Star-Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key is quite a doozy.  Key had been captured by a group of Colonial Marines.  These were runaway slaves that had joined with the British.

"The Marines were a battalion of runaway slaves who joined with the British Royal Army in exchange for their freedom. The Marines were not only a terrifying example of what slaves would do if given the chance, but also a repudiation of the white superiority that men like Key were so invested in.

All of these ideas and concepts came together around Aug. 24, 1815, at the Battle of Bladensburg, where Key, who was serving as a lieutenant at the time, ran into a battalion of Colonial Marines. His troops were taken to the woodshed by the very black folks he disdained, and he fled back to his home in Georgetown to lick his wounds. The British troops, emboldened by their victory in Bladensburg, then marched into Washington, D.C., burning the Library of Congress, the Capitol Building and the White House. You can imagine that Key was very much in his feelings seeing black soldiers trampling on the city he so desperately loved."

In September of 1815, Key was on a British vessel pleading for the release of his friend Dr. William Beans.  This is when he observed the battle of Fort McHenry.  This was the night when he wrote the SSB.  The third verse, which we don't often sing, has this line..."Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.  No refuge could safe the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave".  Loosely translated, Key was saying the slave blood would wash away British blood from our shores.  The SSB is basically a diss track to black people.

Civil rights and equal treatment has kinda been a diss track to blacks.  Kap works in an environment where most of his co-workers are black, but the bosses are white.  He and his co-workers sacrifice their bodies for the glory and accolades from their bosses and fans (who also happen to be majority white).  I'm glad to see more and more athletes being socially conscious.  And he seems to really understand the theory behind what he is doing.

http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/colin-kaepernicks-national-anthem-protest-w436704

http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2016/07/star-spangled-bigotry-the-hidden-racist-history-of-the-national-anthem/

https://vimeo.com/166881889

The GOP Should Die, But Probably Won't

The title of my post might seem aggressive, but not much more so than the conclusion of Avik Roy.  Roy is one of the GOP's leading lights on healthcare policy and (of course) an opponent of "Obamacare", in addition to being an editor at Forbes (no liberal rag, that).  Below is the first quote that I find amazing to read from a conservative:

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

 Here is the second:

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

These two quotes taken together, when added to the ascent of Donald Trump to be the GOP's nominee for president, and the support of significant portions of that party's establishment, are why I come to the conclusion that the GOP as a party should die.  A party that has chosen as its standard bearer a man who has espoused racist, xenophobic and misogynistic views for the entirety of race for the presidential nomination in a country built by immigrants, much less one that is currently becoming browner with each passing year is unfit to lead it.  Whatever validity conservatism as a movement might have, whether it be in the fiscal realm or the values realm, is completely undermined by the choice of a presidential candidate who both in his business dealings and in his treatment of marriage as an institution has demonstrated no respect at all for those aspects of conservatism throughout his life.

Having discussed the "should" of my title, I shift now to the "won't".  While the GOP since George W. Bush has failed to re-take the White House (and will likely fail yet again despite the weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate), absent a shift in the electorate not seen in at least a decade, the GOP will control the governor's mansion and state legislatures in 23 states.  Those of you who follow such things in the news will not be surprised to find a high degree of overlap between these 23 states and those who have passed laws restricting the access of people of color to the ballot box with Voter ID laws or opted not to expand Medicaid access for their poorer citizens.  In both cases, those impacted by such laws are as likely (if not more than likely) to be people of color.  So as much as we might rail against the latest offense Trump's mouth has perpetrated against a minority group or other marginalized group in American society, in a significant portion of this country, the GOP view of how a state should be run is accepted by the voting public.