This Week's Funniest Joke

The Funniest Joke 

This week’s funniest joke was told at the Republican National Convention. Mike Pence – who is not generally known as a comedian – told us that only Mr. Trump could save us from the wave of violence that would be brought on by the election of Joe Biden as president. With a straight face, Pence told us that we had to elect Trump as our president if we wanted to be safe from the violence and disorder that a Democratic administration would bring on. What a laugh!

The thing is that Mr. Trump is our president now. The disorder and violence that Pence wants us to fear are happening right now on Mr. Trump’s watch, and we can see that he has no idea what to do about it. He talks about how wonderful the police are, and he ignores the fact that a black man in Kenosha was shot in the back seven times. (In the back seven times! Let that sink in.)  Mr. Trump pretends that the deaths of people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor are collateral damage in a “war” to save our “way of life.” He stirs up people’s fears, inflates his chest, sticks out his chin and “promises” that he will not allow “radicals and anarchists” to endanger our country, but his claims are a joke because he is our president now, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Two Ways to Maintain an Orderly Society

The simple truth is that there are only two ways maintain an orderly society. One is to provide what our Pledge of Allegiance calls “liberty and justice for all,” and the other is to use violent repression of dissent. When we provide liberty and justice for all, we don’t have to worry about civil disorder because no one wants to disrupt a fair and just system. If we don’t provide liberty and justice for all, we can insure social tranquility only by repressing dissent. Stalin and Hitler are the models for that. They had orderly societies, but their peoples paid a dreadful cost. (If you want to know more about this alternative, you can read about the Sicherheitsdienst.)  

If we want to have a just and fair society without resorting to violent repression of dissent, we have to provide “liberty and justice for all.” We cannot have one system of justice for white people and another for black people. We have to work to realize the promise on which our country was founded. We don’t have to achieve perfection all at once. People are patient, and if they can see that we are moving toward a more just and fair society, they will wait. If they can see that their children’s lives will be better than their own lives, they will be patient.

Mr. Trump Has No Idea What to Do

Mr. Trump has shown clearly that he doesn’t understand any of that. If we want to know how Mr. Trump would deal with our country’s disorder and violence, all we have to do is look around. We don’t have to hope that if he were president, he would know what to do. He is president now, and it is obvious that he has no idea what to do. So, Mr. Pence’s claim is a joke, or perhaps it is the punch line to a joke that has been going on since 2017.

To Get Change, Vote for Change

If we elect Mr. Trump on November 3, we can be sure that nothing will change. He will be the same clueless blowhard after the election that he is now. He doesn’t know what to do now, and he won’t know then.

So, wake up! If you want change, vote for change.  Elect Joe Biden!  

Is this all a Coincidence?

 Republicans Campaign on Law and Order

Something is happening in this country. I don’t understand it, but it worries me.  The Republican Convention has just nominated as its candidate for president a well-known fake populist and would-be fascist who is running on a platform of law-and-order. He is trying to scare us into believing that we will be safe only if we elect him to protect us from radicals, communists and dangerous foreigners.  

Violence Springs Up Conveniently

At the same time, very conveniently for him, we have violence and disorder in the streets in widely separated cities in the United States. In Portland, Oregon, peaceful protests and violent ones have been going on for months. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have a neighborhood where public services of many kinds have been suspended because the police won’t go into the area. A bus staffed by volunteers is providing emergency health care, and volunteers from local gangs are patrolling the neighborhood to keep the peace. Meanwhile, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the shooting of yet another Black man by the police has been followed by several nights of violent protests.

This Situation Benefits Only the Far Right

From a radical leftist’s point of view, none of these situations serves any useful purpose.  This is not Russia in 1917. No one expects violent protests in Portland or Kenosha to grow into a revolution in which the national government will be overthrown.

These protests are just as useless from an American progressive’s point of view. No one expects that torching stores in Kenosha or attacking a police station in Portland will hasten the day when we have affordable health care for all, free post-secondary education, a green new deal or plenty of affordable housing.

In fact, the only beneficiary of this situation is the well-known fake populist and would-be fascist who is running for president. The disorder that we are seeing lends  “credibility to [his] otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” It makes it easier for people to believe him when he tells us that we need to elect him in order to be safe.

What is Going On?

Is this all a coincidence? Did violence break out in Kenosha by chance just at the right moment to give support to the Republican candidate?  Is it likely that violence in Portland has been sustained for months without some kind of outside support or encouragement? Should we believe that the police have spontaneously on their own refused for months to carry out their duties in Minneapolis? Is it likely that all of these things are happening concurrently by chance, or is something more sinister going on? Is violence being promoted by far-right groups in order to give the Republican candidate a chance to be elected?

I wish I knew the answer.

Vote for Joe Biden to Save the World Order

 A Foreign Policy Emergency

We need to elect Joe Biden as president in November in order to save the world order that includes the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. That world order has haltingly and imperfectly helped us to avoid destroying our entire civilization in war as we came close to doing in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Not much was said about foreign policy during the Democratic Convention that ended last night, and that is unfortunate because we have a foreign policy emergency that is just is serious as the domestic emergencies that Biden, Obama, Harris and others spoke about during the convention.

We Almost Destroyed Our World

President Trump is trying to take us back to the world order that led to the First and Second World Wars. His “America first” foreign policy is intended to free us from the constraints of international cooperation and international organizations. He wants to take us back to the Nineteenth Century world of national autonomy and bilateral treaties. To our eternal sorrow, we know how that world ended. In 1914, it exploded in a war in which more than 16 million people died, and the major European nations were all effectively bankrupted.

At the end of that war, an attempt was made to create a better international order, but the attempt failed in part because the United States failed to support it. After a twenty-year truce, hostilities resumed with greatly improved military technology. In World War Two, more 60 million people died; many of the world’s cities were reduced to rubble; and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We Created International Institutions

When World War Two ended in 1945, the world’s leaders looked at each other in horror, and they said to themselves, “We can never do that again.” Under the leadership of the United States, they created today’s world order with the United Nations at its center. That world order is far from perfect. It did not prevent the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the current, seemingly endless conflicts in the Middle East, but that order is all that stands between us and the destruction of our world. We should not abandon our international institutions because of their weakness. We should improve and strengthen them, and if we do, we may someday have a world in which peace and not war is the norm. We cannot go back to the world of 1914 because we know how it ended.

Biden Supports Our International Institutions

Joe Biden will restore American support for the international institutions that preserve our world.  Biden is no one’s idea of a “peace candidate.” In 2002, he voted to authorize President Bush to use military action in Iraq, but Biden understands why the United States must support the international institutions of today’s world order. He will restore America’s leadership in that order.

It is no exaggeration to say that a vote for Joe Biden is a vote to save the world. So, in November, vote as if our lives depended on because they do.

Language, Respect and Humanity

Words Matter

Half a century ago, the women’s movement taught us that words can express respect or disrespect and that it was important to use words that expressed respect. Women insisted that they should be referred to as “women,” and not as “girls,” or “chicks.” Moreover, women showed us that the use of disrespectful and degrading language not only signals disrespect, it leads to disrespect. Using words like “girls” to refer to grown women leads us to think of them as childlike, although in truth, they are not. A word like “lady” may also be problematic because it situates a woman in a hierarchical relationship with men. A woman is a “lady” in relation to a “gentleman” who does things like opening doors for her because she is weak and needs protection.

Women also taught us to avoid the “generic masculine” pronouns in speech and writing because the idea that women in a group should be subsumed under masculine pronouns was degrading to women. Our use of language has changed because of what we have learned from women, and our actual treatment of women is slowly catching up with our linguistic usage.

Men Can Also Be Degraded

The lesson that we have learned from women may be applied in other areas where degrading language is still used. One of those is the use of “male” in place of “man” or “boy.” This usage grew out of American racism. Not long ago, black men were routinely addressed and referred to as “boys” in ordinary conversation and in official settings like police reports. Black people objected to this usage, but the police were reluctant to call black men “men” and in addition, they didn’t know what to do when they arrested or pursued a young black person who was indeed a boy and not a man. At what age did it become obligatory to call a black person a “man?” They solved the problem by replacing both “man” and “boy” with the term “male,” and once they started using “male,” they broadened its usage to include white men and boys as well. The use of “male” gradually spread from police reports to other official settings, and from there it passed into popular usage.

This is unfortunate because this use of “male” is dehumanizing. A man is person, a member of society. A man has rights and obligations. A man is worthy of respect or condemnation. A boy is a human child. He has a right to be protected and cared for. Men and boys stand in relationships to their parents, their siblings, their friends, their employers and their fellow citizens. And of course, they stand in relationships to women, who are entitled to demand respect and equal treatment from men.

In contrast, a male is simply a masculine member of a certain species. We speak of male animals, but we don’t ordinarily speak of “male humans.” A male has neither rights nor obligations. A male is not a person.

Let us Not Use Degrading Language

You might object and say, “Don’t be absurd. A man does not lose his status as a human being merely because we call him a ‘male,’” but we learned from women that the way we talk about people matters. Women rightly insisted that getting rid of the generic masculine mattered. They rightly demanded not to be called “girls.” They taught us that respectful and equal treatment required the use of respectful and egalitarian language.  Calling men and boys “males” robs them of their humanity. Let us not do that. Let us use language in respectful ways for all members of our society.

Mass Incarceration and the Racial Wealth and Income Gaps

Broad-Based Policies to Reduce the Racial Wealth and Income Gaps

I recently published a piece in this blog in which I suggested that the income and wealth gaps between Black and White people could be reduced by policies that provided non-cash income to a broad swath of our population. Specifically, I mentioned a tax-supported, national health insurance program, free post-secondary education and changes in housing policy to encourage the development of affordable housing.

My argument was that such policies would do two things. First, they would reduce the importance of the income gap directly by providing people with non-cash income in the form of services. Second, such policies would reduce the financial burdens that poor and working-class Americans bear and thus make it easier for them to build wealth. Since Black people are more likely than White people to be poor or working class, Black people would on average benefit more than White people, and the wealth gap would be reduced.

The Importance of Mass Incarceration

In response to my blog piece, a colleague sent me an email in which he said,

Fair housing, universal healthcare, and equal hiring practices are great initiatives that we should work on. Mass incarceration and the after effects of having a prison record can unfortunately undermine some of these worthy initiatives. Tough to get a job, get a student loan, acquire housing if you have been incarcerated. Mass incarceration is systemic racism disguised as "law and order.”

My colleague is obviously correct. Mass incarceration inflicts grievous damage on Black people in our country. Using current incarceration rates, studies have shown that approximately, one-third of Black men will probably be imprisoned at some time in their lives.  How many imprisoned people would that be? Well, there are about 47 million Black people in our country, which means that there are approximately 23.5 million Black men, and if one-third of them go to prison at some time in their lives, about 7.8 million people will be imprisoned.

That is a big number, but it does not include all of the people affected by mass incarceration. Some of those men will have families. They will have wives (partners?) and children. Let us assume that half of the imprisoned men have families with two children.  That would give us 3.9 million families and 11.7 million wives and children in those families. Adding in the men themselves, we get a total of 19.5 million people or about 42% of the Black population of the United States whose economic prospects are damaged by the policy of mass incarceration. We cannot rely very heavily on these numbers because our assumptions may not be exactly correct, but the general point is clear: a very large share of the Black population of this country will have its economic prospects damaged by our practice of mass incarceration.

Broad-based Policies Can Still Help

Such people might still be helped by the policies that I proposed. If the families of incarcerated men had tax-supported health care and affordable housing, the economic damage inflicted by mass incarceration would be reduced, and if a child of an incarcerated man had access to free post-secondary education, he or she would be more likely to overcome the barriers imposed by the poverty that was caused in part by mass incarceration.

We Must Also Eliminate Mass Incarceration

Nevertheless, my colleague is correct. The effect of my proposals would be reduced for such people because their poverty would make it much harder for them to accumulate wealth. Their poverty would be alleviated, but it would not be eliminated. Thus, we can conclude that a broad attack on the income and wealth gaps between the races should include both the kinds of policies that I have recommended and the elimination or reduction of mass incarceration.