Zeitgeist Spam

Death of a Glacier - it won't be the last (from Slate; hat tip Richard Lopez)

How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead?

The end of a famous Icelandic glacier is just the beginning.

By JANE C. HU

JULY 24, 201912:15 PM

 

The former site of Okjökull, now known as simply Ok.

Rice University

The unraveling story of climate change is one of loss: shrinking coastlines, fading habitats, disappearing biodiversity. Many of these changes happen subtly and slowly, so the enormous scale of loss is difficult to process in real time. But the final result can be stark. Consider the case of Okjökull, a former glacier in western Iceland. For centuries, it was there. Now it isn’t.

Thanks to a crew of dedicated glaciologists, Iceland has especially extensive records of its glaciers, amounting to more than 80 years of annual measurements. Those records are disheartening. Over the past 20 years, in particular, warmer summers have shrunk and thinned the country’s glaciers. Oddur Sigurðsson, one of the country’s leading glaciologists, declared Okjökull dead in 2014, though it likely expired before then. Jökull is the Icelandic word for glacier or ice cap, and so Okjökull had the jökull part of its name stripped. It’s now known as just Ok.

Rice University anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer both study Icelandic culture and were surprised that the story of Okjökull didn’t catch on beyond Iceland when it happened. “There was just one small news piece in English-language news, and no international coverage,” says Howe. “I was disturbed and intrigued by this story of this little glacier that had been destroyed with little fanfare.” So in 2018, the researchers produced a documentary about the mountain called Not Ok.

In their ethnographic research and in the interviews they conducted for the film, Howe and Boyer noticed that death was a recurring trope. “Toward the end of the process, we realized that Ok deserves some kind of memorial to its passing,” says Howe. “We did some research and saw that there were no monuments to former glaciers anywhere else in the world, and it seemed like an important symbolic and political statement to make about the radically transforming environment around the world.”

So Howe and Boyer put together a proposal to memorialize Okjökull with a plaque. The process took about year and “culminated in a phone call where we had to ask the owner of a part of the mountain whether it would be OK to place this plaque on his property, essentially,” says Howe. In August, the anthropologists, Sigurðsson, and interested members of the public will hike to a point on Ok and affix the plaque to one of its rocks. The inscription was written in Icelandic by author and poet Andri Snær Magnason, and includes a translation into English:

A letter to the future

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you will know if we did it.

August 2019

415 ppm CO2

Ok is the first, but almost certainly not the last—in Iceland, or elsewhere. Iceland has more than 400 glaciers, and, as the plaque says, experts predict they could all disappear by 2200. According to a 2017 paper, the European Alps have lost 54 percent of ice area since 1850, Bolivian glaciers have lost nearly half of their mass in the past 50 years, and glaciers in the Himalayas and Canada are also quickly losing ice. All glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana have shrunk in area since 1966, and side-by-side shots of their recession are striking. But when does a glacier go from receding to dead?

According to Sigurðsson, he declared Okjökull dead because it had become too thin to qualify as a glacier. “A glacier must be thick enough to move by its own weight,” he says. If a glacier becomes too thin, “the glacier will stop moving and will be declared a dead glacier.” Though Ok is touted as the first Icelandic glacier to lose its designation as a glacier, “there are many cases on the verge of being a glacier or not being a glacier.”

Sigurðsson made the call by photographs he’d taken since 2003, and by sight. “It was far too thin to be able to move,” he said. If checking by sight, there are telltale signs of a moving glacier: crevices, which form as moving ice cracks and fractures, and turbid (or opaque) water beneath the surface of the ice, which is a sign that the glacier is picking up sediment from the rock below.

When does a glacier go from receding to dead?

There are also other methods glaciologists might use to determine the movement (or lack thereof) of a glacier, says Tom Neumann, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. While the first glaciologists measured movement with old-school methods, like placing a rock on the ice and checking back on it months later, scientists now have fancier methods. Over the past two decades, researchers have used GPS to track the movement of poles drilled into the ice, and now, glaciologists might also use satellite data, which allows them to see the movement of specific features over time, like distinct bands of darker ice. Software can also be automated to track specific shapes or patterns in photographs to get a big-picture view of how a glacier flows over the course of weeks, days, or years.

 

Neumann says he’s never declared a glacier dead and doesn’t know of anyone in the field who specializes in presiding over glacial death, but he offered up the same definition of a glacier that Sigurðsson did: It forms by snow falling from the sky being compressed over time to form ice, and it must move. He agrees that the ice on Ok looks far too thin to be moving and says that the geometry of the mountain could play a role in its early demise. Ok has a relatively gradual rise, so gravity does very little to help any ice on its surface flow downhill. “On a steeply sloping glacier, the ice has got to get pretty thin before it’ll stop flowing,” he says. That means that small glaciers in relatively flat locations could be more likely to “die” than similarly sized ones on steep slopes: Glaciers on flatter surfaces have less help from gravity to move them downhill.

 

And those smaller glaciers are certainly dying as well, according to Sigurðsson. Though Okjökull is the first well-known glacier to lose its status, Sigurðsson says that from his observations since the year 2000, he’s tracked 56 glaciers that have ceased to be. Okjökull is more noteworthy, though, because of its ubiquity in Icelandic culture. “The name Ok appears in the sagas written in the 13^thand 14^th centuries, so we’ve known this mountain by name for eight centuries,” he says. “Most kids [in Iceland] knew that glacier by name, and it was very obviously visible from inhabited areas; it was a marker in the landscape.”

Though the reality of melting glaciers is grim, Howe and Boyer hope that the plaque dedication will serve as an invitation to take action to downscale our environmental impact. (FYI: Even if we completely stop carbon emissions now, scientists estimate the planet will continue to warm for decades—enough time to melt many more glaciers.) “A memorial isn’t for the dead. It’s for the living—it’s to come together after a loss,” says Boyer. “We know this is the first monument to a glacier that melted because of human-induced changes to the environment, but we hope it’s not the last. We hope it’s an inspiration to others around the world to create meaningful historical records and markers.” 

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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And So It Goes ... (hat tip K)

From the Ridgecrest Quake

Animated slides show how the quake permanently jolted a huge block of earth along the fault away from the other. Here, the image shows how one block of ground slid past the other in the Ridgecrest earthquake. https://t.co/P7AKfmReIe (@SotisValkan / Google Earth / DigitalGlobe) pic.twitter.com/YopQ76PLJP

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 22, 2019

Re House Res 246, which equates criticism of Israel's genocidal anti-Palestinian policies (which happen to be against international law) and BDS (which is perfectly legal and not in the least antisemitic) with delegitimitization, which is utter bullshit

To: Representatives Blumenauer, Carson (IN), Dingell, García (IL), Grijalva, Jayapal, Lee (CA), Massie, McCollum, Moore, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pingree, Pocan, Rush, Tlaib, Watson and Coleman, the only reps who voted no to this stupid, cowardly and murderous resolution, thank you. Each of you may or may not be a psycho in other ways but you got this one right.

To the rest of you, you have yet more blood on your hands. 

And to anyone tempted to say I hate Israel, Israel has as much right to exist as any other country. Parse that how you will. 

Same old same old ...

America's red scare is back. And it's racially tinged Kate Aronoff

Condemnation of Democratic congresswomen is xenophobic, dangerous and flat-out false

Mon 22 Jul 2019 08.14 EDTLast modified on Mon 22 Jul 2019 09.47 EDT for the Guardian

 Rashida Tlaib, part of ‘the Squad’ of progressive Democrats. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

The Republican party has come out swinging against socialism – a strategy sure to be a mainstay of its 2020 campaigns. “Our opposition to our socialist colleagues,” the Wyoming senator Liz Cheney claimed, referring to the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, “has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race. It has to do with the content of their policies. They are wrong when they attempt to impose the fraud of socialism on the American people. They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government.”

It’s a bold line coming from the daughter of a man, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, who did more to centralize power in the executive branch than perhaps any other public official in living memory. It’s also a bald-faced lie. Cheney’s diatribe against socialism – like Trump’s racist railing against the same group of progressive freshman congresswomen to “go back” to where they “originally came from” – has a long legacy in American history: it’s called red baiting.

And this round is no less xenophobic than those before it. When New York legislators voted to suspend five socialist state assembly members in 1920, they did so on the grounds that they were “enemy aliens” who had been “elected on a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States”.

The first red scare – well before the more well-known McCarthyism of the 1950s and 1960s – saw hundreds of real and suspected leftists deported under the Immigration Act of 1918. It also fueled the revived popularity of the antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with one well-circulated version replacing “Jews” with “bolsheviki”. Unsurprisingly, many of the most prolific anti-communists were also committed segregationists who violently fought black-led labor and civil rights organizing in the south, accusing members of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of being dupes for the Comintern. Nearly two decades before brutally suppressing Martin Luther King’s campaign to integrate Birmingham’s business district, the commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, cut his teeth by waging war on communists in the same city.

Throughout American history, attacks on so-called radicals have fit hand-in-glove with racist and anti-immigrant politics. The message – whether to Jewish anarchists, CIO unionists or (hardly socialist) Barack Obama – has never been subtle: you don’t belong here.

The idea behind red-baiting has always been that there’s something inherently foreign to the US about the left – that despite the longtime presence of socialism in America it’s some toxic import, whether from the Soviet Union or elsewhere. And the CIA and FBI have spared no expense in violently suppressing socialists at home and abroad, from the killing of the Black Panther party’s Fred Hampton in Chicago to the overthrow of the democratically elected leftwing government of Chile’s Salvador Allende.

Given all their appeals to patriotism, what ironically seems so dangerous to red-baiting elites about socialism here is the threat that too many Americans will come together – across race, religion, immigration status, gender and more – and recognize their shared interest in taking power back from the 1%. For similar reasons – as the historian Robin DG Kelly has noted – steel executives stoked racism among white workers, to keep them from joining together with black co-workers to fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Consciously or not, Trump and the Republicans’ fear of socialism and “the Squad” is also their fear of a multiracial democracy that would end theirs and their rich friends’ stranglehold over politics.

“In our diverse society,” as Ian Haney López and Heather McGhee have written, “racism has been the plutocrats’ scythe, cutting down social solidarity to harvest obscene wealth and power.” Whether in busting unionsor gutting welfare programs, elites in both parties have maintained and expanded their control through a strategy of divide-and-conquer – of pitting the 99% against itself. The Squad are now a few of the many Americans calling bullshit, and the 1% is terrified.

Whatever lies the GOP throws out to try to cloud that fact, the kind of democratic socialism being voiced by politicians like Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib isn’t any closer to the Soviet Union than our republic is to ancient Rome’s. The goal is straightforward: orient society around protecting human and planetary wellbeing, not the endless accumulation of corporate profits.

Tens of millions of people remain uninsured while insurance and pharmaceutical executives rake in record profits, all as fossil fuel CEOs continue to get trillions of dollars’ worth of state subsidies to extract and sell resources that could soon make the earth uninhabitable. You don’t need to have read all three volumes of Marx’s Capital to understand that this economy’s priorities are out of whack. You don’t need to be a registered Democrat, either: 52% of Republicans support Medicare for All, and 64%support a Green New Deal, compared with 81% of voters overall. From there, recognizing that an undocumented immigrant has more in common with an out-of-work coalminer than either of them do with Donald Trump isn’t too far a jump.

If the GOP wants to stake its electoral chances on red-baiting politicians’ seedy plots to give people free healthcare and a livable planet, so be it: there are more of us than there are of them.

[JBR note: This article, which is basically pretty good, gets off to a bad start. The subhead calls the "socialist" label "the squad" has been tarred with "flat-out false." Why is it important to emphasize that? It is false, sadly (AOC, you made me sad when you said democratic socialism was nothing like socialism and that you weren't a socialist ... you share the same old phobia as every other "patriotic" USAmerican) (I don't). But why say so? What would be wrong with them being socialist? God knows we could use a little sanity in this country, and socialism is the beginning of it.

And this article is also a little too hopeful at the end, especially the last two paragraphs. There have always been more of us than of them, and it's never mattered. Power knows how to hold on to power. Whether by

• policing - cops are just loving the chance to go batshit violent against whoever they want, as can easily be seen by a) their alliances with the far right to go after the so-called left, people of color, etc; b) their social media presence to which many articles attest - or by
• election fixing - certainly you remember Georgia 2018 where Brian Kemp was in charge of overseeing the election he "won", and that's only one example of many - or by
• "news" outlets like Fox and popular propagandists like Ingraham and Hannity and Carlson (each of whom could have worked for the Völkischer Beobachter without changing much) - etc etc
• not to mention the irony of USXtian hatred of socialism, after all, early Xtians were proud "primitive communists,

it doesn't matter how many of "us" there are ...

But I share it because it's basically right, that the right - everywhere - and even the Democrats (who are theoretically not on the right tho we all know, we know ...) - are calling on old tropes ...]

With the Noose Around My Neck 137

This being the case — and as we are, ourselves, infused with chance — if we see faces everywhere, how can we not give credence to the impulse to see voices in every letter? Letters that meander, more or less together, and reappear in the brevity of an outline that quickly dissolves into noise. As if by chance. It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. And then there is the function of the bicycle:

 

            Under the skin the body is an over-heated factory,

            and outside,

            the invalid shines,

            glows,

            from every burst pore,

 

the Magician is pointing toward Jupiter with one hand while the other points to Earth. The Magician has access to all four Earth elements with the ability to draw down a fifth, and sometimes a sixth element from the planet he is pointing towards. Cover their faces with equal amounts of the following dried ingredients:  Fennel seeds, pine needles, rose petals, mugwort, basil, white sage, red sandalwood powder, perique tobacco, and marijuana.  These ingredients qualm negative thoughts, shift gears for transformation, and also invoke prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, happiness, honesty, peace of mind,

 

            like most people

             ghosts want

            listeners,

 

            there are

            trains circling below the icy waters,

   

            a guy who looks just like

            Picasso wears a hat with roses,

            he has shoes aglow with little lights,

 

            Picasso & Rosa Luxemburg converse,

 

            when the earth shakes bulbs drop from the chandeliers,

 

            in the cold air fingers burn & stretch,

 

            steps with blue messages are everywhere,

            blue tambourine blue nails blue poppy seeds blue powdered hair,

 

            as Walt Whitman might have put it,

            what is in me is in you, too.

 

So I worked with scientists to develop some imaginary polymers (with real properties) that might plausibly lie at the heart of some culturally influential texts. My goal was to see if I could read the writing of chemicals in my own body. What else was inside me? I started to think about sequencing my microbiome as part of making a larger inventory. I took seriously the proposition that chemicals and microbes constitute forms of metabolic writing. Hormones are sequential sentences in cascading anatomical stories. Consequently, the prose poem became the dominant form in the book. I also liked how the prose poem, as a low-key, ostensibly innocuous, or “formless” form, suggests the subtle ways in which many of the chemicals I tested myself for affect the body: endocrine disruptors, or hormone mimics, intervene in metabolic processes precisely because of their inconspicuousness. To contrast with the prose poems, I also employed lineation in a number of sections, eee gee

 

            My sweat

            My sweat.

 

So I tested my blood and urine for the following chemicals:

 

• Phthalates,
• PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls),
• PFCs (perfluorinated chemicals),
• OCPs (organochlorine pesticides),
• OPIMs (organophosphate insecticide metabolites),
• PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons),
• HBCDs/PBDEs (flame retardants),
• Triclosan (antibacterial additive),
• Parabens,
• BPA (bisphenol A),
• and 31 heavy metals.

 

The book includes graphs and charts displaying chemical concentrations in my blood and urine, along with a diagram of my most common metabolic pathways, and an unrooted phylogenetic tree depicting the relationship between bacterial species found in my gut. There are microscope images of my blood, urine, sweat, and hair (the excretory pathways some of these chemicals take from my body) as well as photographs of the experimental processes I undertook. I also decided to include a series of “specimen reports” that reflect on some of my experiences performing the tests and acquiring the results. While I did experience wonder at the complex agency of these substances and organisms in my body, I wasn’t prepared for the mental health effects of discovering flame retardants, heavy metals, internationally banned chemicals, and microbes associated with inflammation and illness. But I couldn’t get past the way his narrative ended, a man on a bike pulling his leashed dog into the path of a London bus. We are a kind country, a good country. “I don’t want to know what Trump tweeted,” a friend writes. She gets sick otherwise. The concentration camp sits at the edge of the skull, blurred out image that pulses like a torn back toe-nail. One end of the mind is outrage, the other still sees morning clouds on the mountain, hears the shama thrush trilling, the saw booming from the shed out back, no wonder

 

            doctor i no can stop shitting

            you me give drug for stop shitting, no wonder

 

            doctor i no can stop saying ouch ouch

            you me give drug for stop saying ouch ouch, no wonder

 

            doctor i no can stop talk in head

                        when want go sleep

            you me give drug for stop talk in head

                        and go sleep

 

i keep hearing Eric Garner gasp as he was being murdered,

 

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

            i can’t breathe

           

It’s been four years and 364 days since his murder, by the way. Which is to say, with Sean Bonney,

 

            for “I love you” say fuck the police / for

            “the fires of heaven” say fuck the police, don’t say

            “recruitment” don’t say “trotsky” say fuck the police

            for “alarm clock” say fuck the police

                                                              for “my morning commute” for

            “electoral system” for “endless solar wind” say fuck the police

            don’t say “I have lost understanding of my visions” don’t say

            “that much maligned human faculty” don’t say

            “suicided by society” say fuck the police / for “the movement

            of the heavenly spheres” say fuck the police / for

            “the moon’s bright globe” for “the fairy mab” say

            fuck the police / don’t say “direct debit” don’t say “join the party”

            say “you are sleeping for the boss” and then say fuck the police

            don’t say “evening rush-hour” say fuck the police / don’t say

            “here are the steps I’ve taken to find work” say fuck the police

            don’t say “tall skinny latté” say fuck the police / for

            “the earth’s gravitational pull” say fuck the police / for

            “make it new” say fuck the police

                                                              all other words are buried there

            all other words are spoken there / don’t say “spare change”

            say fuck the police / don’t say “happy new year” say fuck the police

            perhaps say “rewrite the calendar” but after that, immediately

            after that say fuck the police / for “philosopher’s stone” for

            “royal wedding” for “the work of transmutation” for “love

            of beauty” say fuck the police / don’t say “here is my new poem”

            say fuck the police

                         say no justice no peace and then say fuck the police

 

Which is to say, “Why do you assume that your toothache corresponds to the fact / that you hold your cheek.” “There most certainly exist entirely determined actions, / ideas about / another person sensing pain.”

 

            Well, of course red exists,

            and you are bound to see it,

 

            an increase in pressure on my eyes

            produces red images.

 

It’s unclear whether I really have artistic ambitions. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, of course, why not and who cares, my art is becoming a space for large-scale installations, as a rule, with an eye to a certain socio-political topicality. And so it’s time to be marginal

 

            i’m sure, yes, marginal

 

Which is to say that if an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably. But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions. If an animal is inescapably shocked once, and then the second time she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn’t dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn’t an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than just being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can then drag her off of it. If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. If an animal is shocked, their children lie

 

            strapped to their beds with leather.

            Clamps & screws are applied

            to straighten their crooked limbs.

            Chin-straps, head-braces, leg-splints

            to teach them to sit up straight.

            Steel corsets for their bent backs

            & caved-in chests.

            On metal crutches, they slip & fall

            on fresh-scoured floors of stone.

            Rubber hoses protrude from nostrils & ears.

            Everything reeks of soap.

            Strength is obedience.

            Joy is submission.

            Firmness is goodness.

            They pee in their beds every night,

            they get twenty strokes of the cane every morning,

            they pee in their beds every night.

            At long marble tables, their faces tum, white

            towards Frau Schultz who brings them a pail of potato soup.

            From the oleograph on the wall,

            King Ludwig’s sensitive features

            look down upon them.

 

No wonder, then, as Bataille notes in The Accursed Share: above all they [and by they he means we] have acquired the strange faculty of sobbing and bursting into laughter. The notice or notation or excess of notation that marks the material irruption of our presence to ourselves is, in these cases, given in/as sound: a scar, a rivet, or the mark of a rivet or being riveted which is the mark, in its turn, of something Lacan would call an irreducible “dehiscence at the very heart of the organism,” an interinanimation of bridge and chasm. Think here of the character Obeuse, visually represented by a shaded circle. Each page of the collection contains a cryptic scene involving Obeuse. Then “MiLLiONS OF OBEUSES THEMSELVES DiSAPPEARED,” and the single shaded circle that we begin with turns at last into a line — so the researchers used a special smart macrofiber material to create a slider-crank mechanism — which was attached to the knee due to the knee joint’s large range of motion. Due to the continuous back-and-forth the material encounters when the wearer walks, every time the knee flexes, the device bends and generates 1.6 microwatts. And now,

 

            Everybody is hiccupping in secret.
            An unusually intense something-or-other hic-hics in the throat.
            I have heard of throat surgery.
            Some throats have been slashed.
            Others have been treated to solid bamboo ...
            They might come up with a long list of names one day.

 

We are the earth, the moony earth. The War went on for a long time. I might as well be a byproduct of other people’s conversation. What to fix? How to fix? That’s not a fishing boat, it’s a giraffe. Only two out of ten construction workers die in Abu Dhabi, the rest simply fail to have their visas renewed; they are bagged, tagged and placed on the next available flight back to wherever they came from. My father explains that an official from the Municipality inspected the building last week and ordered all the partitions torn down in accordance with new planning regulations. The sun reaches its peak and a kitten climbs to the top of a small dune in the half-empty parking lot and spends an hour trying to shit, but can’t. Really, there is so much pleasure in this book. I was in such a warm buzzy space reading it, especially after watching a seagull stand on top of another seagull. But there were military jets flying back and forth over the coast from Eglin Air Force Base, one of the largest bombing and training ranges in the US. The jets were the same color as the pelicans. The “shoes” in it are our relationship. O Sappho! She is not olive, but more like a dream-coal. Light up. Light up. It’s light out the window, 2am. “Like 50 familiar postures in the dark ... Run here. We will save your life” — “But now more corridor and hallway have walked into our lives. Now the whistling is less playful and the barbed wire is overcrowded too” — “All friendships have dead people in them” — it seems crazy, right? That ppl wd elect a hamster president, that there are happy bears with chainsaws in the forest, those animatronics things can break! So begins I forget which one of the Duino Elegies. That openness is a space inhabited by elves or something. Glory to the creative breath, glory to the travelling stars. Oh, pure tension! But if I cry out, who in the orders of the angels will listen to me? Blessed are you born of Orpheus, the severe judge. I mean, Warren Kanders didn’t earn his place as vice chair of the board at the Whitney Museum of American Art through his good taste, people. He has used some of his estimated $700 million to make tax-deductible donations to support exhibitions there. What successful enterprise has made this generosity aka artwashing possible? Thanks to the collective, years-long effort of activists, students, and reporters to bring everyday brutality to light, we could tell you quite a lot about Kanders’s company Safariland, which does a brisk trade supplying batons, handcuffs, holsters, and body armor to police and security forces including the IDF and the NYPD. But let’s talk about the tear gas. Supposedly nonlethal, it can kill and has killed people, like Layla al-Ghandour, an eight-month-old baby who died last year in Gaza after tear gas inhalation; Osman Abubakir, a sixty-two-year-old man who choked to death in February of this year in Khartoum, Sudan; and the thirty-seven people in the back of a police van in Cairo in 2013. After it was trialed on the battlefields of World War I, tear gas was outlawed for military use in 1925. That same year, Federal Laboratories, a company now owned by Safariland, manufactured the first tear gas police batons for use against civilians. “The use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world,” proclaims the 1925 Geneva Protocol. But tear gas remains legal to use in peacetime, by governments on their own citizens. Which says something about governments, doesn’t it? Remember that NY Times photo from last November of a woman at the border wall in Tijuana gripping the arms of two little girls in diapers as all three flee a plume of tear gas streaking from a launched canister? US Customs and Border Protection — whose goons are currently overseeing concentration camps across the country — purchased that tear gas from Safariland. Kanders’s thriving company also made the news a few years ago: it supplied tear gas and other counterinsurgency equipment to the uniformed assholes tasked with suppressing the collective response to the murders of Freddie Gray and Mike Brown, its tear gas was launched at water protectors at Standing Rock, after which the company was sued by a protester because a canister mutilated her left arm. Safariland also made the tear gas used to disperse and defeat a 2018 May Day anti-austerity protest in Puerto Rico. We know this because many people — reporters, activists, inhabitants of Palestine and Ferguson picking up empty tear gas canisters looking for a corporate logo — wanted us to know, and made it possible for us to know. After a Hyperallergic article revealed Kanders’s connection to the teargassing at the border, there was an open letter from the Whitney’s staff (signed by just one of the Biennial’s two curators) demanding, among other things, that leadership “consider asking for Warren Kanders’ resignation.” Whitney director Adam Weinberg replied with a plea for civility and kindness, whatever those terms means in this context besides hush hush he’s got money, people. Kanders himself insists that his products are nonlethal, that he doesn’t throw the grenades himself, that riots are dangerous and bad anyway, and that he knows all this because he spends a lot of time with five-oh. Dude. A letter demanding Kanders’s removal was signed by over 120 critics, scholars, and theorists, and was then sent to artists. Of the participants in the Biennial, the majority of whose works have some quote unquote political valence, only about two-thirds signed. Some of the artists who didn’t sign were nevertheless outraged when their quote unquote radicality was thrown into question. But that’s ok. Plastic straws are great again. Brad Parscale, the president’s re-election campaign manager, tweeted out a link Thursday to buy Trump-branded straws from the Trump campaign store. Why? Because “liberal paper straws don’t work.” The pack of 10 sells for $15, coming out to a cost of $1.50 a straw. And these aren’t just any plastic straws; these are “laser engraved.” By Friday afternoon, they were sold out. In less sanctimonious cultures, children are taught methods to deworm themselves early. Spoonfuls of castor oil or papaya seeds are a weekly protocol. So are herbs like neem or fennel after meals. All these are lethal to parasites. In other words, in the days of hot Cheetos, long dance rehearsals, and very little water consumption but lots of Capri Sun, the scent of cloves stands out. Cloves contain a volatile oil called eugenol that dissolves the casing around parasite eggs so that the herbs that kill them can do their job. Black Walnut Hull is the third herb in the triumvirate of most parasite cleansing concoctions. Though cloves kill the eggs and the wormwood kills the living parasites in the body, Black Walnut Hull hauls both the eggs and the dead worms out of the body through the bowel. That’s the kind of love this was/is, the kind that externalizes what’s dormant inside, puts it where it must be witnessed and can no longer be denied. In other words, even robots can write poems, like

 

            you

  

 

               are

   

                        inscribed

                             in the

                              lines on the

                       ceiling

   

                         you

  

            are

   

                inscribed in

                        the depths

                of

                        the

                  storm

 

            because you are a sweet-smelling diamond architecture

 

                        an empty shell
                        clothes cast off
                        autumn evening

           

            youre right.

            “all right.

            you’re right.

            okay, fine.

            “okay, fine.

            yes, right here.

            no, not right now.

            “no, not right now.

            “talk to me right now.

            please talk to me right now.

            i’ll talk to you right now.

            “i’ll talk to you right now.

            “you need to talk to me now.

            today i feel different than a lettuce

            now i feel not unlike a sufferable heater during a sustenance

            now, i feel like an unmeet topography

            like an all-time causeway because of a sickness

            so i feel not unlike a travelling broiler

            like a jackal

            today i’m feeling close to an audacity

            also i’m feeling close to a nulled tomorrow

            not unlike a pistachio

            now and again, a cloven-hoofed chimera beneath a juicer

            because of a rotor

            kind of like a commode

            like a coyote before a terminus

            like a philosopher

            now i feel kind of like a lousiest foundation without a pre-emption

            so i feel like a thalamic empiricism across a fecundity

            i’m feeling like a multidecade groove on a neophyte

            at the moment like a nondenominational vanity

            now, i’m feeling like an ocher malediction because of a nebula

            now and again, i feel not unlike a presence

            now, i feel like a bad-mannered iteration against a quintet

            um, a flat-rate tarantula

            today i feel different than a marriage splat

            now i’m feeling like a magnet

            but i feel not unlike a supplication

            also i’m feeling close to a squashing destination instead of a pigtail

            like a two-dimensional calling without a collation

            now, i’m feeling like a gambit

            but a tucked vacation

            so i feel kind of like a nonthreatening exhaustion during a reverie

            a repent calculus across a cranberry

            also, i’m feeling like a painterly dashboard at a flora

            so i’m feeling like a glisten

            well, i feel kind of like an oceanographic plausibility

            now i’m feeling like a braid aperture

            so, a grooved requirement

            well, like a clothbound bison with a pelvis

            close to a caravan

            um, like a polarity

            now and again, i feel like a thronged fastness during a half-life

            i mean, not unlike a swift-footed compulsion instead of an endowment

            so a darkness

            kind of like a palette

            like a hippocampus

            like a plating

            a songful perspicacity

            also i feel not unlike an equinoctial snapshot

            like a nearsighted tenderness

            i think i feel kind of like a seizure

            at the moment a darkness

            so, i feel different than a birdfeeder

            a bull’s-eye

            now and again, i feel like a fast-flying hypnosis

            above a movie

            now i’m feeling close to a regression

            inside an inclemency

            i feel different than a half-moon

            at the moment, i’m feeling like a granite

            at the moment i feel kind of like a lanky infiltration

            like a medallion without a vulture

            now, i feel like phlegm

            like a canted casting across a nimbus

            like a longed-for detritus during a serum

            now i feel not unlike a localized untruth

            now i feel not unlike a worthless transformer

            um, an eggplant

            like a haptic variety

            today a veiled absence with a forwardness

            now a creature

            now i’m feeling like an extrasensory suite

            today a dialectal pruning under a sabre

            well, i feel not unlike a colon

            so i feel kind of like a chiefest concertina

            like an industrialized conductivity

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                        “Any style of life

                        is prim

 

                        The faery is rosy

                        of glow”

 

Structurally, the letters in the first poem correspond to those in the second — it’s a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. That means “L” is encoded as “R,” “I” is encoded as “O,” and so on. Each of the cipher’s letter pairings representing a DNA codon and an amino acid. For example, in the cipher, “N” equals “H” and a codon (eye eee ATG), while “H” equals “N” and an amino acid. With the first poem enciphered in Gs, As, Ts and Cs, it’s then inserted into the genome of bacteria that can outlive humans. But this isn't just a random message. Instead, it sets in motion two things: The bacteria glow red, and they produce protein. And when deciphered, the protein's amino acid string reads as the second line of the poem. Oh, and the reason for it glowing red? It's a “self-reflective fulfillment,” a reference to the poem it’s writing, and its faery’s “rosy glow.” The lifeform involved here is Deinococcus radiodurans. It was first described in the ‘50s, when it survived what was then thought to be a life-obliterating dose of radiation. Although that's its most famous quality -— its species name is Latin for “radiation surviving”; its genus translates as “terrible berry” — D. radiodurans has many skills. It’s fine taking an acid bath, for one. It’s also adept at dealing with dehydration, extreme cold, and it can survive in a vacuum. In ideal conditions, it’s biologically immortal. But D. radiodurans’ ability to look after itself, to repair its DNA, has proved a problem. Bök has run two experiments, both of which have failed,

 

            light grey whiteness of fog against invisible ridge

 

            towhee standing on grape stake fence across from it

 

            expressed in translation events as long as we think

[Note: Sources: Román Antopolsky, Haunted House; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Antonin Artaud, quoted in D&G’s Anti-Oedipus (trs. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane); CA Conrad, “THE MAGICIAN TAROT CARD: We Must Understand Our Creativity Is An Organ, A Vital One”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 12 Jul 019, and “(Soma)tic Poetry Ritual & Resulting Poem: You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis”, at Diode, vol.7 no.1; JBR; Jerome Rothenberg, “Autobiography 1977 The First One Hundred”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 15 Jul 019; JBR; Adam Dickinson, “Too much information”, at Jacket2, 12 Jul 019; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Yellow cards”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 15 Jul 019; JBR; Ernst Jandl, “consultation” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in Jandl’s Reft and Light; JBR; Eric Garner; JBR; Sean Bonney, “ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme”, at Abandoned Buildings, 31 Dec 014 (a 21^st-century masterpiece); JBR; Pavel Arsenev, various, in “Pavel Arsenev: Poetry and Prose: Translated by the Cement Collective”, at Arcade, n.d.; JBR; Anne Boyer, “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock”, at Arcade, n.d.; JBR; Gunnar Harding, Starnberger See (tr. Anselm Hollo), in in Spirit v.4 nos.2-3, Spring-Summer 1979; JBR; Georges Bataille, and Fred Moten, quoted in Michael Cross, “Surplus Pt. 6”, at Jacket2, 17 Jul 019; JBR; Kelly Liu, and Paul Colinet, Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse, quoted in Liu’s “Transfigurations/abstractions”, at Jacket2, 16 Jul 019; JBR; “Harvesting energy from the human knee”, at Science Daily, 17 Jul 019 (see Fei Gao, Gaoyu Liu, Brendon Lik-Hang Chung, Hugo Hung-Tin Chan, Wei-Hsin Liao. “Macro fiber composite-based energy harvester for human knee.” Applied Physics Letters, 2019; 115 (3): 033901 DOI: 10.1063/1.5098962); JBR; Zeyar Lynn, “Each stands up & introduces herself”, “Sabulous blank”, (tr. ko ko thett), at Granta 138; Ian McMillan, That’s Not a Fishing Boat, It’s a Giraffe: Responses to Austerity, seen in “John’s Favourite Poetry Pamphlets of 2019 so far”, at London Review Bookshop, Jul 019; André Naffis-Sahely, “Vanishing Act”, “The Return”, Infidelity”, at Five Dials; Nick Sturm, “Utopia: Review”, at Tender Buttons Press, 13 Sept 018 (on Bernadette Mayer, Utopia) ; Anne Waldman, “Not a Male Pseudonym: Author’s Note”, at Tender Buttons Press, 11 Sept 018; Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, quoted in Anthony Reed, “The Bourgeois and the Boulevard”, at Commune 3; Gary Sullivan, “That a Hamster Could Be President”, in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf; JBR; Jordan Davis, “Disney Vengeance”, in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf; blurb for Bill Henson, Principio Erat (with signed print) A, at Photobookstore; JBR; Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, “The Tear Gas Biennial”, at Artforum, 17 Jul 019 (Michael Rakowitz was the first artist to drop out. To their credit, Black Finlayson and Haslett had informed the Whitney of their non-participation before publishing this. Now Eddie Arroyo, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin have also dropped out); JBR; Nicholas Wu, “‘Liberal paper straws don’t work’: Trump campaign starts selling plastic drinking straws”, at USA Today, 19 Jul 019 (hat tip K); Harmony Holiday, “An Artist’s Guide to Herbs: Cloves”, at BOMB, 19 Jul 019; JBR; poems included in Yisela Alvarez Trentini, “Computer Generated Poetry Will Knock Your Socks Off”, at Medium, 21 Mar 017, and a long series of (modified) computer-generated tweets from feelings.js; Christian Bök, and Aaron Souppouris, quoted in Souppouris’s “The prose at the end of the universe”, at Engadget, 30 Dec 015 (re Bök’s Xenotext); Stephen Ratcliffe, “7.21”, at Temporality, 21 Jul 019]

To quote Sean Bonney, fuck the police

Los Angeles police spied on anti-Trump protesters

Case is one of several across the US of police targeting anti-Trump and anti-fascist groups with monitoring and criminal trials

Sam Levin in Los Angeles for the Guardian

Fri 19 Jul 2019 18.09 EDTLast modified on Fri 19 Jul 2019 21.45 EDT

 

 People march as they participate in the ‘#NoMuslimBanEver’ rally in Los Angeles in October 2017. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

The Los Angeles police department has revealed in court that it infiltrated an activist group planning anti-Trump protests, in the latest case of US law enforcement spying on leftwing organizers.

A confidential informant working with the LAPD secretly recorded multiple meetings of a group called Refuse Fascism in 2017, according to newly disclosed police documents. The LAPD transcripts, first reported by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by the Guardian, were submitted in a criminal case against activists who blocked a California freeway during an anti-Trump demonstration.

Police equipped an informant with a hidden recording device and had the individual attend Refuse Fascism gatherings at a local church “in an attempt to elicit information regarding the closure” of the freeway and to express interest in being involved “in any such future activities”, police wrote.

Miguel Antonio, one of the activists who was monitored and recorded by the informant, and then subsequently charged with misdemeanors for shutting down the freeway, told the Guardian on Friday that he would not let the surveillance stop him from organizing.

“We’re not scared. We’re not going to back down in the face of repression,” the 28-year-old said, adding that this kind of spying was meant to discourage activists. “You’re in a church, and you’re meeting about organizing a peaceful protest, and you’re running the risk of being charged with conspiracy or these petty crimes.”

The LA case is one of several across the country of law enforcement aggressively targeting anti-Trump and anti-fascist groups with monitoring and criminal trials.

In Sacramento, police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue cases against leftwing activists, including seeking charges against anti-fascist protesters who were stabbed at a white supremacist rally. In Berkeley, police collaborated with a violent pro-Trump demonstrator to prosecute a leftwing group last year, and there have been similar controversies in Washington DC, Oregon and other states.

The LAPD surveillance was particularly striking given that there was documented evidence of violence involving far-right groups in southern California around the same time, and that those white supremacist organizations do pose a serious threat, said Mike German, a former FBI agent and expert on local extremist groups.

“This case seems to fall into a pattern of police agencies viewing anti-fascist organizing as terrorism, while overlooking the far more deadly and frequent violence perpetrated by white supremacists and other far-right militants,” he said.

LAPD did not conduct a similar spying operation on far-right groups while it targeted Refuse Fascism, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In a [JBR: bullshit] statement released late Friday, LAPD said the agency’s chief, Michel Moore, had “ordered a top-to-bottom review to determine whether the department’s stringent requirements for the use of confidential informants were followed”.

The department was “steadfastly committed to constitutional policing”, and would “take all necessary and appropriate steps to investigate any potential concerns raised”, the statement added. [JBR: yeah, right. I'm 68. I moved to LA in 1960, and stayed til 1987. Ergo, this has been going on my whole life.]

The city attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the activists, declined to comment.

On 27 September 2017, Antonio and a group of activists shut down a freeway in downtown LA to protest Trump, one year after his election. After they were arrested, LAPD sent the informant, who has not been identified, to monitor the group’s meetings at the Echo Park United Methodist Church.

During an 11 October meeting, the informant approached Antonio and said, “Are we gonna do like any freeway things again…or major things like that?”, according to a transcript of a secret recording.

“I’m not sure,” Antonio responded.

The informant then said he was interested in joining future activities: “I thought the freeway thing was pretty good.”

Antonio then explained to the informant his thinking behind disrupting people’s morning commutes and raising awareness about Trump’s attacks on Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants and others.

The informant attended multiple meetings after that and coordinated with an LAPD detective. In one case, police noted in a write-up that one of the activists was caught on the recording making a joke about the president, saying, “That’s an awfully hot coffeepot, should I drop it on Donald Trump?”

Antonio was eventually charged with several misdemeanors, including obstructing public movement on a highway, failure to disperse from an unlawful assembly and failure to comply with a law enforcement order. A jury recently deadlocked in the case, and a new trial is scheduled to begin later this month.

Damon Alimouri, Antonio’s lawyer, said the LAPD surveillance was “unjust and outrageous”, adding that he suspected this type of spying was likely to escalate across the country. [JBR: Likely? Spying on the quote unquote left in order to further the right is standard operating procedure. And has been since the 19th century. Ask, e.g., every labor movement or antiwar movement or antiracist movement or pro-women's movement etc etc etc ever.]

“The further left that younger people go, we will continue to see law enforcement infiltrating these groups secretly,” he said, adding, “To a certain extent, it might intimidate some, and I think that’s the intention of the LAPD.”

Frank Wulf, the pastor of the church where the LAPD was conducting the surveillance, said it was “offensive” for police to “infiltrate a group whose purposes are clearly non-violent”.

“The government is interfering with the rights of protest in America,” he said, adding that he worried about a chilling effect: “You never know if the person sitting next to you is a police informant or not.”

By permitting this type of surveillance, the LAPD also appeared to be violating its own standards meant to protect against unconstitutional monitoring, said Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

“The target for them was a group organizing in a church where there was no indication of any criminal activity that was afoot,” he said, adding, “What this story demonstrates is that the agency is frankly rogue.”

News of the infiltration was a reminder that the politically motivated surveillance that was common decades earlier in the US has not stopped, said Antonio, who also organizes with a group called the Revolution Club.

He said that freeway demonstrations were meant to inspire people to get involved in organizing and remind them that the threats on people’s rights are urgent – and that they can’t wait until 2020.

“There are concentration camps at the border, they are stripping women’s rights to control their body, they are threatening war with Iran and they are destroying the planet,” he said. “We want people to act.”

Sohrab Hura

A Honduran child plays near train tracks in Arriaga, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, October 2018. (from the 2nd Annual Latin American Foto Festival, no photographer named, reposted from Hyperallergic))

Yes, Trump is a racist, and so are ALL his supporters, and so are ALL who remain silent, etc (reposting a portion of Anne Branigan's "Trump Says Racist Nonsense Because He Means It and Because He Knows He Can Win on It"The Root

 

 

Donald Trump, in a series of tweets from Sunday night well into Monday morning, doubled down on his racist, xenophobic criticism of four Democratic congresswomen, Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. After calling on the congresswomen to go back to their countries and fix them, Trump followed up his attack by demanding an apology—making abundantly clear his belief that challenging these women is an effective campaign strategy.

 

[...]

 

Trump stayed on the topic for most of Monday morning, extensively quoting Republican Senator (and favorite GOP foot servant) Lindsey Graham, who said the congresswomen’s proposed policies—policies that include confronting climate change, closing down migrant child detention camps, and increasing the minimum wage—will “destroy the country.”

As I write, members of the political punditry are debating (and no doubt, will continue to debate) whether what Trump has to say about sitting members of Congress is racist racist or just racist lite. And at this point, litigating his personal racism, and those of his supporters, feels both inconsequential and redundant, especially when Trump himself has made one fact very clear: He thinks he can win on racist rhetoric in 2020, and he thinks this because he has actually done it.

The timing of his attack feels important here: shortly after all four freshmen Congresswomen testified about the dehumanizing, barbaric conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their presence at the border, and refusal to whitewash what they saw, brought new scrutiny to the practice of detaining children and families. The news cycle, even briefly, had shifted its focus to the dangerous cruelty of our detention practices. Trump may not be particularly good at anything, but he knows how to play the hits, and he’s particularly good at pouncing when there’s already blood in water: members of the freshman congresswomen’s own party—most notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—had publicly singled them out for being insufficiently loyal to the party line. The way it all played out was almost as predictable as it was shameful. 

Some may be tempted to speculate that all his anti-immigrant, explicitly racist speech is an elaborate distraction from other matters on the horizon: former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony for instance. This is a mistake. If Trump is erratic in other respects, racist speech and racist policy is something he’s been consistent on, as a candidate, as a president, and before that, as a private citizen.

What’s remarkable is just how effective that specific messaging has been. Take one study from 2018 (h/t Vox), part of a larger body of research that points to racial attitudes being a primary driver of Trump’s successful election campaign.

In this study, researchers paid particular attention to people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, before switching to Trump in 2016:

“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”

Tapping into this rhetoric was his lightning in the bottle. He said the quiet part loud, and people roared in response. As Vox explains, Trump was able to make the 2016 election about race in a way previous GOP candidates did not:

Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

The results of this racist speech were not limited to the presidential race—research published earlier this year finds racial resentment became a down-ballot issue, impacting local races.

From the Pacific Standard:

“[Political scientists Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale] found a clear pattern of “relatively liberal voters defecting to Republican candidates up and down the ticket when they harbor racial animus.” This effect was extremely similar for Senate, congressional, and presidential races...

“Voters in the hyper-polarized era are well-equipped at assessing candidate ideological positions, and choosing candidates that are closer to their ideological preferences,” the two write in the journal Electoral Studies. But high levels of racial animus, stoked by Trump, led some white voters “to be less likely to vote for Democratic candidates” even when the Democratic candidates’ ideological positions resembled that of the voter.

In fact, racial resentment among white voters is so powerful that those voters will elect leaders who tap into that animus, even risking their own health to do so. (One uninsured man quoted in a recent Boston Globe article told one researcher, “no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” He was dying of liver disease.)

The rhetoric—and the line of thinking that accompanies it—is more pernicious than many are willing to admit, including many of the political reporters tasked with covering this story, and many liberals who imagine themselves to be anti-Trump.

If Trump wants to tout that these congresswomen are “unpopular and unrepresentative,” it falls within the same line of attack that Pelosi herself has directed at the junior reps, whose policies and support she has undermined in an attempt to support more moderate Democratic politicians. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who first reported Pelosi’s snide comments about the progressive group, pointed the finger at Ocasio-Cortez for the mess in a recent piece, titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” To many, Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib are most emblematic of everything Trump isn’t: progressive values, and political agendas that center constituencies Trump voters would prefer to have pushed to the margins, if not out of the country entirely. That the likes of Pelosi and Dowd appear to feel threatened by this, too, is telling. [JBR: before you get your undies in a bundle, just ask yourself why so many POC didn't vote for Dems in 2016. Hmmm ...]

The question of citizenship—and upon whom those sacred rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are conferred—has been up for debate since the founding of the country. The impulse to tell American-born and naturalized representatives to “go back” emerges from the same wellspring as the drive to close our nations’ borders against a certain kind of migrant: one that is black, brown, low-income, or Muslim (it is worth repeating, over and over again that Donald Trump and the GOP have shown no such qualms about immigration from Norway or Ireland).

He has targeted the powerless—migrant families with nowhere else to turn—as well as powerful progressives, in this most recent case, women whose power was conferred to them by the districts they represent. In drumming up his attacks on both (in rhetoric and policy), Trump is reverting back to a tried-and-true pattern of escalation that has been his M.O. since he announced his presidency. Except now, as a sitting president with three years under his belt and a looming election, he has to take the fight even further.